Windows continues to be a world where, out of the box, people set up their boxen with everyone at administrator privelege levels.
Microsoft has given up trying to change this culture. Too many programmers assume the users has administrator privileges, and too many users assume they have to run as administrator.
Instead, Longhorn will limit "administrator" access on a per-application basis, and only the apps that the user explicitly authorizes can change system settings. Any unauthorized apps may think they're changing system settings, but are actually running in a sandbox.
Morse code was created for the purpose of sending text over REALLY low bandwidth. Cell phones were created to talk to people. The idea of entering text with a numeric keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
Personally, I just don't understand the appeal of text messaging. Maybe that marks me as an old fogey (27), but I just don't need my tendonitis to get any worse, TYVM.
For several years a number of us have been anticipating the emergence of a Software Labor Union. The argument has not been whether it will emerge but what form it will take. The conditions for forming technology unions have never been better.
I actually have to disagree with the article's initial assumption, that software workers will inevitably unionize.
The primary and necessary condition for a labor union to form is that it becomes easier for the company to replace a worker than to appease them. (In this case, I'm considering total cost of replacement, to include training a new worker to do the job) This leads to a whole new working dynamic: The company can pay dirt wages, because if the worker complains, they are replaced, hence the necessity for a union. If the worker is difficult to replace, they will do better bargaining on their own than collectively. This simple comparison (cost of replacement versus cost of appeasement) defines the distinction between white collar workers and blue collar workers. In other words, between skilled and unskilled labor.
Technology workers have always classically been skilled workers. Not just anyone can work a computer and get it to do what they want. Software, in particular, is a field which requires skilled workers. Not only is the potential pool of software workers significantly smaller than the general population, but the cost of replacement is much higher due to the specialization going on in the industry. A SQL programmer is not going to easily be able to fill a kernel programming job, for example.
In this case, for technology workers, the unionization argument is based more on the idea that worker supply exceeds demand. This idea holds water on the surface. Just look at all those poor folks out there whose jobs got outsourced who have been on unemployment for ten years and have nine kids to feed, and the big bad corporation just turned them out on their ear. These people are, frankly, the bottom of the barrel. Oh, I won't claim that the supply of people who want to be in software isn't high. But the demand for good developers far exceeds its supply. One hardly needs to look beyond the salaries for that information.
So is anybody going to unionize? Sure, eventually. Eventually, the "blue-collar" technology jobs will be automated to the point that a trained monkey can do it (or a trained SQL script), and you'll see the demand for web administrators and BOFH's go down. But software, in general terms, will always be moving forward; once a problem is solved, then the good developers move on to more complex problems, ad infinitum. As with any quality knowledge worker, a quality software worker will always be expensive to replace, and will always do better to bargain individually than together with potentially inferior co-workers.
The only place that this might not hold is in the games industry, where the amount of supply is so incredibly overinflated by the "coolness" factor of working in games that companies can (and do) treat their programmers as dispensible. I suspect that this condition is only temporary, however, and these conditions will come more in line with the rest of the industry as potential workers learn more about the conditions, and the pool of people willing to get shat upon dries up.
Software will always require skilled knowledge workers. In software, you never solve the same problem, or go through the same motions twice. Nobody in software writes the same algorithm day in and day out. Or at least, if they do, they're seriously shooting their productivity in the head by missing the automation opportunities. Every day presents new challenges built on the results of the previous day's challenges, and replacing a worker is lethal to that process. Good software workers will always be skilled knowledge workers, will never be interchangable, will never benefit from bargaining collectively versus individually, and therefore, will not unionize.
I discovered an awesome feature on my phone, in between the text messaging and e-mail and bluetooth and credit card and camera. It gives me the ability to hold a multimedia (voice only) conversation with another person. All I have to do is punch in some kind of locator code (similar to an IP address), and I can actually *speak* to the person.
It's amazing all of the nifty things they can pack into cell phones these days.
Parent has by far the best point made on this story. Semantic differences and ownership jokes aside, what you call the directory means absolutely nothing, except where it breaks syntax or otherwise complicates using the computer. Spaces in pathnames do exactly that, by breaking command-line syntax -- A problem both for power users and developers.
When I set up Win2k boxes these days, I run a registry script to change the locations of all of the "special" Windows folders. Program files are in C:\PF, and user profiles are in C:\DS.
This not only allows me to remove the spaces, but also improves security. How much malware do you know that actually use the %PROGRAMFILES% environment variable instead of just dumping stuff into "C:\Program Files"?
The downside is that there's a LOT of software out there that does the same, and inevitably I find that I've got a "Documents and Settings" or "Program Files" folder on my drive where the latest dumb installer assumed the folders would be.
Look in the registry under HKU\$user\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersio n\Explorer\Shell Folders
Now your WinXP supports an IPv6 stack, including IPv4 tunnel and bridge interfaces.
All Microsoft network-aware apps also support IPv6. If there are Windows programs out there that don't support it, then it's because of a lazy programmer.
Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts
This is probably the line that's causing the most knee-jerks. Everything else in the article is just so much marketing bullspeak, and can be safely ignored by anyone who knows what they're talking about.
Maybe he's talking about linux in particular, though I doubt it. Perhaps he's picked up on the "interoperability" problems caused because I can't install a slackware package on my Mandrake machine, and I can't put a RedHat RPM into a knoppix install, and this is a problem because grandma only knows that she has "linux" on the box, and that stuff written for linux should work on linux. But that's another can of worms.
What I think he's talking about, however, is a variation on the age-old problem of feature creep. Where I work as a software tester, when we write out a test plan, we have to build a matrix of all possible inputs, and either test each one, or justify why certain ones don't need to be tested. Obviously, the amount of work that goes into testing depends largely on the size of this matrix. Every time you add a feature with N inputs to the product, your matrix grows by a factor of N, growing exponentially. The time required to get a reasonably complete integration test suite is a very significant consideration for a product's time to market.
Somebody else in this thread commented that gimp can load/save in a large number of different formats (23, I think?). Does it have a complete test suite that verifies, on each build, that each format converts successfully to each other format? When people code plugins to add a new format, do they necessarily add the (24*23)/2 new entries to this integration test matrix? How many cases go untested?
Microsoft, historically, has tended to go to the opposite extreme, removing interoperability between versions of the same software (Office, Visual Studio, etc), but any responsible tester will be aware of the problem, and any responsible program manager will seek to limit feature creep, if they ever want to be able to ship the code. And being a business, a product is only useful to a company like Microsoft when it ships.
Of course, if this is indeed his point, I don't know what business it has in an essay about interoperability. Increased "interoperability" necessarily creates the kind of problem I'm describing, and is most certainly not unique to any particular license or development methodology. I'm probably completely wrong in my supposition. Bill's mail is probably in its entirety, like I said before, marketing bullspeak.
Anybody who's been to college knows that it's not a proper screwdriver without at least equal parts vodka and oj. 100 proof, if possible. Anything less is, like I said, weak.
Literacy... So *that's* it. I knew there had to be a reason that thousands of people per year keep trying to boat, swim, and even drive the 70 miles to the U.S.
Until they defend all of other amendments (such as the second and tenth) as vigorously as they defend the first and fourth, they are nothing more than a shill for the left.
The A.C.L.U. certainly feels that data privacy is an extremely important issue
Really, does this come as a surprise to anyone? Let's see, they're a giant organization with a board and a headquarters... All they need is a stock ticker or the authority to tax to become what they fight against.
I have always applauded the ACLU for its stand on first amendment rights, but they've never had any of my money for lack of consistency. Until they defend all of other amendments (such as the second and tenth) as vigorously as they defend the first and fourth.
I guess the big question is, who is going to stop them... or how far can they go before somebody does?
Have faith in capitalism. It's $0.75 this year, and, aside from slashdotters, nobody cares. It'll be $1.25 next year, and a few more people will notice. After that, it'll be $2.50, then $5, and maybe $10, and people will grumble and bitch, but they'll pay if they want domains on the internet. Eventually, people will get sick of it, and stop buying domains. How far will they go? As far as the market will bear.
Has anyone considered that this tax might actually be a good thing? The first people discouraged by rising prices in domains are the squatters who sit on domains for no purpose other than to tie up the name.
ICANN can raise these fees without repercussions because they have a monopoly on the internet. How do we limit their power? Create something new. Something that takes the place of the current DNS scheme, and leaves the greedy monopolists grasping for power. You want something to limit ICANN's power? So go out and innovate it.
Sure, it's been ruled to be legal... But the practice of advertising your competitors' trademarks is still a really sleazy thing to do.
Companies that do this fall in the same category for me as people that advertise via direct mail and spam. If I entered Geico into the search engine, then I wanted to read about Geico. Period. Marketing that inserts itself where I haven't invited it is invasive, and earns my ire.
You can't entirely blame AOL, no matter how desirable it may be.
The practice started on usenet back when every byte of bandwidth was precious, and on IRC chat where the real-time nature led to the desire to minimize latency in order to keep up.
I don't follow usenet anymore, so I can't say whether the practice continues there. On the IRC network and channels that I manage, we have developed a culture of grammar and spelling pedants that laughs off the channel those who insist on greeting with "wassup how r u???". Sadly, we are greatly in the minority among all IRC locales.
Obviously from there, the trend continued almost immediately to IM devices, where the same constraints apply. I am disappointed (though not surprised) to hear that it has found its way into corporate e-mail, where there aren't such constraints.
I suppose it's only a matter of time before I see it at my company. The idiots and lazy users arrayed against those of us who still value the written word are powerful indeed.
Hmm... Problem caused by idiots on the internet? Well, I guess you can blame AOL, then.
Re:It's only strange to the Slashdot crowd...
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 1
It won't be too many more years before the mechanic has to be a computer programmer just to diagnose problems in today's newest computerized cars.
I'm just waiting for the day that I have to install ZoneAlarm on my Toyota because it might catch a virus from a toll transponder.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows continues to be a world where, out of the box, people set up their boxen with everyone at administrator privelege levels.
Microsoft has given up trying to change this culture. Too many programmers assume the users has administrator privileges, and too many users assume they have to run as administrator.
Instead, Longhorn will limit "administrator" access on a per-application basis, and only the apps that the user explicitly authorizes can change system settings. Any unauthorized apps may think they're changing system settings, but are actually running in a sandbox.
Morse code was created for the purpose of sending text over REALLY low bandwidth. Cell phones were created to talk to people. The idea of entering text with a numeric keypad was a wart they hung on the side of the phone when they realized that a full keyboard wouldn't work.
Personally, I just don't understand the appeal of text messaging. Maybe that marks me as an old fogey (27), but I just don't need my tendonitis to get any worse, TYVM.
For several years a number of us have been anticipating the emergence of a Software Labor Union. The argument has not been whether it will emerge but what form it will take. The conditions for forming technology unions have never been better.
I actually have to disagree with the article's initial assumption, that software workers will inevitably unionize.
The primary and necessary condition for a labor union to form is that it becomes easier for the company to replace a worker than to appease them. (In this case, I'm considering total cost of replacement, to include training a new worker to do the job) This leads to a whole new working dynamic: The company can pay dirt wages, because if the worker complains, they are replaced, hence the necessity for a union. If the worker is difficult to replace, they will do better bargaining on their own than collectively. This simple comparison (cost of replacement versus cost of appeasement) defines the distinction between white collar workers and blue collar workers. In other words, between skilled and unskilled labor.
Technology workers have always classically been skilled workers. Not just anyone can work a computer and get it to do what they want. Software, in particular, is a field which requires skilled workers. Not only is the potential pool of software workers significantly smaller than the general population, but the cost of replacement is much higher due to the specialization going on in the industry. A SQL programmer is not going to easily be able to fill a kernel programming job, for example.
In this case, for technology workers, the unionization argument is based more on the idea that worker supply exceeds demand. This idea holds water on the surface. Just look at all those poor folks out there whose jobs got outsourced who have been on unemployment for ten years and have nine kids to feed, and the big bad corporation just turned them out on their ear. These people are, frankly, the bottom of the barrel. Oh, I won't claim that the supply of people who want to be in software isn't high. But the demand for good developers far exceeds its supply. One hardly needs to look beyond the salaries for that information.
So is anybody going to unionize? Sure, eventually. Eventually, the "blue-collar" technology jobs will be automated to the point that a trained monkey can do it (or a trained SQL script), and you'll see the demand for web administrators and BOFH's go down. But software, in general terms, will always be moving forward; once a problem is solved, then the good developers move on to more complex problems, ad infinitum. As with any quality knowledge worker, a quality software worker will always be expensive to replace, and will always do better to bargain individually than together with potentially inferior co-workers.
The only place that this might not hold is in the games industry, where the amount of supply is so incredibly overinflated by the "coolness" factor of working in games that companies can (and do) treat their programmers as dispensible. I suspect that this condition is only temporary, however, and these conditions will come more in line with the rest of the industry as potential workers learn more about the conditions, and the pool of people willing to get shat upon dries up.
Software will always require skilled knowledge workers. In software, you never solve the same problem, or go through the same motions twice. Nobody in software writes the same algorithm day in and day out. Or at least, if they do, they're seriously shooting their productivity in the head by missing the automation opportunities. Every day presents new challenges built on the results of the previous day's challenges, and replacing a worker is lethal to that process. Good software workers will always be skilled knowledge workers, will never be interchangable, will never benefit from bargaining collectively versus individually, and therefore, will not unionize.
I discovered an awesome feature on my phone, in between the text messaging and e-mail and bluetooth and credit card and camera. It gives me the ability to hold a multimedia (voice only) conversation with another person. All I have to do is punch in some kind of locator code (similar to an IP address), and I can actually *speak* to the person.
It's amazing all of the nifty things they can pack into cell phones these days.
Parent has by far the best point made on this story. Semantic differences and ownership jokes aside, what you call the directory means absolutely nothing, except where it breaks syntax or otherwise complicates using the computer. Spaces in pathnames do exactly that, by breaking command-line syntax -- A problem both for power users and developers.
o n\Explorer\Shell Folders
When I set up Win2k boxes these days, I run a registry script to change the locations of all of the "special" Windows folders. Program files are in C:\PF, and user profiles are in C:\DS.
This not only allows me to remove the spaces, but also improves security. How much malware do you know that actually use the %PROGRAMFILES% environment variable instead of just dumping stuff into "C:\Program Files"?
The downside is that there's a LOT of software out there that does the same, and inevitably I find that I've got a "Documents and Settings" or "Program Files" folder on my drive where the latest dumb installer assumed the folders would be.
Look in the registry under HKU\$user\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersi
No idea if it works in XP, though.
On any Windows XP box:
C:\>ipv6 install
Now your WinXP supports an IPv6 stack, including IPv4 tunnel and bridge interfaces.
All Microsoft network-aware apps also support IPv6. If there are Windows programs out there that don't support it, then it's because of a lazy programmer.
Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts
This is probably the line that's causing the most knee-jerks. Everything else in the article is just so much marketing bullspeak, and can be safely ignored by anyone who knows what they're talking about.
Maybe he's talking about linux in particular, though I doubt it. Perhaps he's picked up on the "interoperability" problems caused because I can't install a slackware package on my Mandrake machine, and I can't put a RedHat RPM into a knoppix install, and this is a problem because grandma only knows that she has "linux" on the box, and that stuff written for linux should work on linux. But that's another can of worms.
What I think he's talking about, however, is a variation on the age-old problem of feature creep. Where I work as a software tester, when we write out a test plan, we have to build a matrix of all possible inputs, and either test each one, or justify why certain ones don't need to be tested. Obviously, the amount of work that goes into testing depends largely on the size of this matrix. Every time you add a feature with N inputs to the product, your matrix grows by a factor of N, growing exponentially. The time required to get a reasonably complete integration test suite is a very significant consideration for a product's time to market.
Somebody else in this thread commented that gimp can load/save in a large number of different formats (23, I think?). Does it have a complete test suite that verifies, on each build, that each format converts successfully to each other format? When people code plugins to add a new format, do they necessarily add the (24*23)/2 new entries to this integration test matrix? How many cases go untested?
Microsoft, historically, has tended to go to the opposite extreme, removing interoperability between versions of the same software (Office, Visual Studio, etc), but any responsible tester will be aware of the problem, and any responsible program manager will seek to limit feature creep, if they ever want to be able to ship the code. And being a business, a product is only useful to a company like Microsoft when it ships.
Of course, if this is indeed his point, I don't know what business it has in an essay about interoperability. Increased "interoperability" necessarily creates the kind of problem I'm describing, and is most certainly not unique to any particular license or development methodology. I'm probably completely wrong in my supposition. Bill's mail is probably in its entirety, like I said before, marketing bullspeak.
That pun was weak. Funny, but weak.
Anybody who's been to college knows that it's not a proper screwdriver without at least equal parts vodka and oj. 100 proof, if possible. Anything less is, like I said, weak.
Literacy... So *that's* it. I knew there had to be a reason that thousands of people per year keep trying to boat, swim, and even drive the 70 miles to the U.S.
Make spam illegal, that is the only real way to stop it.
Yeah, cause that worked so well with prohibition, the war on drugs, anti-smoking legislation, and copyright lawsuits.
Until they defend all of other amendments (such as the second and tenth) as vigorously as they defend the first and fourth, they are nothing more than a shill for the left.
The A.C.L.U. certainly feels that data privacy is an extremely important issue
Really, does this come as a surprise to anyone? Let's see, they're a giant organization with a board and a headquarters... All they need is a stock ticker or the authority to tax to become what they fight against.
I have always applauded the ACLU for its stand on first amendment rights, but they've never had any of my money for lack of consistency. Until they defend all of other amendments (such as the second and tenth) as vigorously as they defend the first and fourth.
I guess the big question is, who is going to stop them... or how far can they go before somebody does?
Have faith in capitalism. It's $0.75 this year, and, aside from slashdotters, nobody cares. It'll be $1.25 next year, and a few more people will notice. After that, it'll be $2.50, then $5, and maybe $10, and people will grumble and bitch, but they'll pay if they want domains on the internet. Eventually, people will get sick of it, and stop buying domains. How far will they go? As far as the market will bear.
Has anyone considered that this tax might actually be a good thing? The first people discouraged by rising prices in domains are the squatters who sit on domains for no purpose other than to tie up the name.
ICANN can raise these fees without repercussions because they have a monopoly on the internet. How do we limit their power? Create something new. Something that takes the place of the current DNS scheme, and leaves the greedy monopolists grasping for power. You want something to limit ICANN's power? So go out and innovate it.
If I "just want to read about Geico" than I wouldn't really be looking at the ad section of Google anyway.
I don't really look at spam either. It's not a question of whether they should be allowed to do it -- that's just capitalism.
All I'm saying is that if a company tries to screw with my search like this, I won't respect them in the morning.
Three down, thousands of skript kiddies to go.
Sure, it's been ruled to be legal... But the practice of advertising your competitors' trademarks is still a really sleazy thing to do.
Companies that do this fall in the same category for me as people that advertise via direct mail and spam. If I entered Geico into the search engine, then I wanted to read about Geico. Period. Marketing that inserts itself where I haven't invited it is invasive, and earns my ire.
You can't entirely blame AOL, no matter how desirable it may be.
The practice started on usenet back when every byte of bandwidth was precious, and on IRC chat where the real-time nature led to the desire to minimize latency in order to keep up.
I don't follow usenet anymore, so I can't say whether the practice continues there. On the IRC network and channels that I manage, we have developed a culture of grammar and spelling pedants that laughs off the channel those who insist on greeting with "wassup how r u???". Sadly, we are greatly in the minority among all IRC locales.
Obviously from there, the trend continued almost immediately to IM devices, where the same constraints apply. I am disappointed (though not surprised) to hear that it has found its way into corporate e-mail, where there aren't such constraints.
I suppose it's only a matter of time before I see it at my company. The idiots and lazy users arrayed against those of us who still value the written word are powerful indeed.
Hmm... Problem caused by idiots on the internet? Well, I guess you can blame AOL, then.
It won't be too many more years before the mechanic has to be a computer programmer just to diagnose problems in today's newest computerized cars.
I'm just waiting for the day that I have to install ZoneAlarm on my Toyota because it might catch a virus from a toll transponder.