I already have the debugger. I need the debugging symbols for the shared library, since I think its a contributing factor. If I knew that the problem was in the shared library, I wouldn't need the debugging symbols. However, I am not omniscient (most developers aren't, you know).
And why would i need to elevate my privileges if i just want to install an app for myself ? For what I know, only OSX provides this feature but with all those installers out there, i sure hope it's gonna stay that way.
Unfortunately, this means that the user has to make sure that each individual application is updated once a new version of a shared library comes out (unless the application uses only those libraries which are distributed with OSX. The system makes it easier to install applications but harder to maintain them, since you have to keep track of shared libraries as well as applications. Also, if an application uses a vulnerable version of a shared library, but the developer hasn't updated it, you're stuck with a security hole. On Windows or Linux, updating the shared library would update all the applications that link to it.
Admin rights means risk of compromise, leading to leaked passwords, attack vectors from within your intranet, DDOS. Things that can break the entire network.
This is an argument for having the developers machines on a separate subnet from the production machines. It is not an argument for locking down individual workstations. Consider this: Google does not place any restrictions on the software its developers run. They are even free to choose their own operating system. Yet, because they've managed to properly structure their network, they don't fear a compromised developer machine leaking secrets.
I'm not saying that you should give your employees the same freedom that Google does (though, I'm sure your employees would thank you if you did). I am saying that having developer machines in a position where they can DDOS the network or leak production data is an indication of a poorly structured network. Locking down the end terminals only masks this vulnerability; it does not remedy it.
Yeah, that works right up until the same restriction that keeps you from installing Steam or Starcraft keeps me from installing the debug version of a library to debug a tricky issue. Then the "sensible" restrictions have caused a significant delay in the bugfix because I have to spend time convincing a reluctant admin to install the necessary things on my machine rather than going ahead and fixing the bug myself.
They tend to download whatever they feel like downloading onto production servers.
Generalize much? Here's a hint: if your developers are needing to download stuff onto production servers in order to put fixes into place, their development environments aren't matching production. Perhaps you should look into that before you complain about developers ignoring best practices regarding "Enterprise Standards" (whatever those are).
Most developers I have dealt with do not draw much distinction between a dev environment and a prod environment.
And why should they? After all, the development and production environments should be as close to identical as possible, correct? If they're not, debugging becomes much more difficult. Developers are human, just like everyone else. If the rules make it impossible (or very difficult) for them to do their jobs, they will ignore the rules in order to get work done.
Only the true development professionals that I have worked with understand how structure helps them and the enterprise, rather than viewing "rules" as an enemy in the way of their ability to get the job done.
If your developers are seeing your rules as an enemy, its because the rules are getting in the way of them being able to accomplish something. No person likes to have jump through arbitrary hoops in order to complete everyday tasks. However, most everyone can agree that some rules are necessary to keep people from bumping into one another. Perhaps if the developers on your end had an explanation of why the rules are necessary, they'd respect them more and circumvent them less.
Returning to pre 9/11 screening where you could have walked on board with a bag full of hand grenades is not an option.
Can you substantiate that? Can you point to an example of any single person walking onto an aircraft with a bag full of grenades? In case you haven't noticed, grenades are very much metallic. They would set off metal detectors, and their distinct shape would be easily marked on X-Ray machines, regardless of whether the time is before or after Sept. 11 2001. In case you don't remember, we still had airline security before 9/11. What we didn't have was a ridiculous, bureaucratic centralized security infrastructure that does nothing but suck down tax dollars and give us nothing in return (at least nothing we didn't already have before 9/11).
Forgetting what is in your pocket is not the same as knowing what is in your pocket, and knowing that you expect to be meeting your 27 virgins.
First, its 72 virgins, not 27. Second, the point the parent was making wasn't that knife was somehow "safe". No, the point being made was that the TSA is no better (on average) than the system we had before 9/11. The people doing the screening are all the same - its only their paychecks that have changed. As pointed out above, the real improvement in security has resulted from the flying public feeling empowered enough to take down potential hijackers, even at the cost of potential injury to themselves. If the parent poster's friend had pulled out that knife, he would have been tackled the moment someone saw it. Before 9/11, he probably wouldn't have elicited much comment. Its that difference that makes us safer today, not any security theater put into place by desperate politicians.
If its a single occurance (meaning a very rare comment) then it wouldn't be very difficult to hide it at all, especially if you are the one who programs the entire algorithm start to finish.
Who says it has to be a single comment? Perhaps you could make so that, if the comment starts with 'a', it routes to an alternate destination that's randomized based on the contents of the comment. That would be hell to debug, since the program would end up producing different outputs from the same input.
Airlines don't write Air Traffic Control code. That's the FAA's job. The luggage routing software that routes your bag to Boston when you're going to New York is the airline's responsibility.
Also, there's no guarantee that "mission critical" implies readable or documented. Arguably, the reason the FAA is having so much trouble introducing a new flight control system is that the old one is so poorly documented, porting it to newer hardware is extremely difficult.
There may not be enough mechanically inclined people to make fix-it-yourself cars viable (though, the kit car industry may disagree). This does not prevent me from mourning the loss of an engine from a major automaker that was compatible with the fix-it-yourself mentality.
For maintenance, yes. For tweaking, no. Sure, you can change the oil and replace worn out parts, and do other things that the manufacturer allows you to do. However, if you want to modify your engine in a way that was not explicitly sanctioned by the manufacturer, its becoming ever more difficult to do so. Its as if our engines are becoming like iPods - closed, tightly controlled devices that actively designed to discourage modification and experimentation. I, for one, don't think that's a good future.
Not necessarily. These engines are used in a lot of industrial applications (like priming pumps for large chemical plants, generators, etc.), and so customers who were using engines for those applications went ahead and bought as many as they'd likely need for an indefinite amount of time. The spike in purchases is an artifact everyone buying a supply of engines to tide themselves until they can switch to a new manufacturer. If GM had continued to produce these engines, they'd have waited until their existing engines wore out before ordering replacements.
All the parts are still there, but, increasingly they're being controlled by a central engine computer. Unless you have the hardware to read data from and write data to that computer, the number of adjustments you can make is limited, since things that used to be controlled by screws and bolts (like valve timing, for example) are now controlled by register values.
Not everyone likes to work on their own cars, but, for those who do, having a standard engine design like the GM big block (or the GM small block, for that matter) has been a boon. The fact that the basic mechanics of the engine have changed little since the '70s means that the engine is great for learning the basic principles of engine mechanics. Put another way, the GM big block was the Unix of V-8 engines.
As one of the replies to a sibling post states, the perjury penalty is only for falsely saying that you're the copyright owner or a representative of the copyright owner. In this case, the company sending the DMCA notices was a representative of the copyright owner.
If it is the case, then the manager has to make that clear to the developers at the beginning of the project. Having a manager that pretends that the project is doable is worse than not having one at all.
That's a solution for low skill factory jobs, where there is little communication needed, and the work can be efficiently divided amongst many workers with little overhead. Programming is not such a job. Adding more workers to a late project usually only makes it later, since the new workers have to be trained in and the need of coordinating amongst more people adds overhead and slows development more.
Fred Brooks elucidates this concept with much more detail in The Mythical Man Month.
Oh yeah, "lessor of two evils" and all that. Who was it around here who first said "The lessor of two evils is still evil"?
The lesser of two evils is still evil, but it is also lesser. What's the alternative, voting for Cthulu? As long as we're going to elect evil, we may as well elect the greatest evil of all, right?
That would be the case if these laptop manufacturers were also developing their own batteries. Other than Sony, they're not. They buy battery cells from companies whose sole purpose is to make batteries, put plastic packaging on them and sell them to you as part of the laptop. These same battery manufacturers sell to the tool market as well. If these batteries were really so expensive batteries for power tools would cost more than they do.
Price discrimination (e.g. market segmentation) may be good for the producer, but its not good for the consumer. As I learned a long time ago in Econ 101, perfect price discrimination leads to the producer getting all of the economic surplus, leaving the consumer with none. I don't know about you, but, as a consumer, I like being able to capture some of the value surplus in my transactions.
Seriously. The Constitution spells out that Congress controls the purse strings. They allocate the money. If it requires the approval of other scientists, then congress chooses those scientists. It starts and ends with congress.
No it doesn't. The legislative branch passes the laws, but the executive branch executes the law. In this case, the legislature (Congress) passes a law allocating money for a general end (e.g. scientific research). The specific allocations of that money are made by executive branch agencies (e.g. NSF, DARPA, etc.). While Congress may be dominated by politicians, the executive branch has significant numbers of civil service employees who would presumably be resistant to the sort of blatant power grabs you are are describing.
If by spectacular, you mean spectacularly bad, then yes. For a game that purports to portray "modern warfare" with a semblance of realism, how does allowing for infinite sprint
make sense? How does a knife take out a riot shield, when even a submachine-gun barely dents it? What of the dual wielded shotguns?
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
As another commenter pointed out above, copyright only becomes necessary when it is easy and cheap to copy works. For the vast majority of the 10,000+ year timescale you mention, copying was very difficult. Before written language, poets would spend their entire lives reciting and memorizing epics. Before the printing press, monks would spend years creating a single book. After the printing press came along, and made copying text easy and (relatively cheap) copyright soon followed.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
There is abuse yes. I'm not going to deny the existence of patent trolls, and I do think the current penalties for downloading penalties are excessive. However, that's an argument for reform, not abolition. And, lets not forget that the open-source licenses that we like so much (like Creative Commons, and the GPL) only gain teeth from copyright law. If copyrights didn't exist, all work would be public domain. People could copy your effort without recourse, even when the only thing you want is attribution.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is.
The difference is exclusivity. If I have a pizza, and I give it to you, then I either go without pizza, or I have to go and buy or make one for myself. If I copy my CD and give it to you, then both you and I have, in a fundamental sense, the same CD. Lawmakers realized that intellectual property has value. If it didn't, we wouldn't want it. However, the lack of exclusivity means that intellectual property doesn't have the same level of natural protection as physical property. Therefore, copyright is a way to bring a limited form of exclusivity to intellectual property, so that creators can capture some of the value that would normally be taken by the distributors.
Books and other written matter created before printing presses are basically uncopyable anyway, since copying them would require one to sit down and copy the work by hand. Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of the population was illiterate, and you have an environment where copying a text is extremely difficult and can only be accomplished by a specialized set of people. In essence, you have an early version of DRM.
but three that stand out for me are Nixon, LBJ (for the Goldwater ad alone) and W, excuse me for missing anyone, recovering from long weekend.
Okay, I know you're recovering from the long weekend and all that, but really? You could have chosen any dictator that ruled with an iron fist, from Ivan the Terrible to Robert Mugabe, but you chose... Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush? I'm not saying that they were necessarily nice people, but they're not even close to the top of the list when it comes to ruling by fear.
PS: I'm really going to have to disagree with you regarding Lyndon Johnson. Yes, he got us deeply entrenched in Vietnam. But, he also got us Medicare, and Medicaid, greatly extending the social safety net for those who are worst off in society - the poor and the elderly.
You know what? I'd be far more comfortable with a fellow Slashdotter running the world than I would with the average politician. At least the random Slashdotter understands the way technology works and inherent limitations that crop up when trying to regulate the Internet. The average politician does not understand that, and so they push through bad laws that end up causing more problems than they solve.
Slashdot Mirror
I already have the debugger. I need the debugging symbols for the shared library, since I think its a contributing factor. If I knew that the problem was in the shared library, I wouldn't need the debugging symbols. However, I am not omniscient (most developers aren't, you know).
And why would i need to elevate my privileges if i just want to install an app for myself ?
For what I know, only OSX provides this feature but with all those installers out there, i sure hope it's gonna stay that way.
Unfortunately, this means that the user has to make sure that each individual application is updated once a new version of a shared library comes out (unless the application uses only those libraries which are distributed with OSX. The system makes it easier to install applications but harder to maintain them, since you have to keep track of shared libraries as well as applications. Also, if an application uses a vulnerable version of a shared library, but the developer hasn't updated it, you're stuck with a security hole. On Windows or Linux, updating the shared library would update all the applications that link to it.
Admin rights means risk of compromise, leading to leaked passwords, attack vectors from within your intranet, DDOS. Things that can break the entire network.
This is an argument for having the developers machines on a separate subnet from the production machines. It is not an argument for locking down individual workstations. Consider this: Google does not place any restrictions on the software its developers run. They are even free to choose their own operating system. Yet, because they've managed to properly structure their network, they don't fear a compromised developer machine leaking secrets.
I'm not saying that you should give your employees the same freedom that Google does (though, I'm sure your employees would thank you if you did). I am saying that having developer machines in a position where they can DDOS the network or leak production data is an indication of a poorly structured network. Locking down the end terminals only masks this vulnerability; it does not remedy it.
Yeah, that works right up until the same restriction that keeps you from installing Steam or Starcraft keeps me from installing the debug version of a library to debug a tricky issue. Then the "sensible" restrictions have caused a significant delay in the bugfix because I have to spend time convincing a reluctant admin to install the necessary things on my machine rather than going ahead and fixing the bug myself.
They tend to download whatever they feel like downloading onto production servers.
Generalize much? Here's a hint: if your developers are needing to download stuff onto production servers in order to put fixes into place, their development environments aren't matching production. Perhaps you should look into that before you complain about developers ignoring best practices regarding "Enterprise Standards" (whatever those are).
Most developers I have dealt with do not draw much distinction between a dev environment and a prod environment.
And why should they? After all, the development and production environments should be as close to identical as possible, correct? If they're not, debugging becomes much more difficult. Developers are human, just like everyone else. If the rules make it impossible (or very difficult) for them to do their jobs, they will ignore the rules in order to get work done.
Only the true development professionals that I have worked with understand how structure helps them and the enterprise, rather than viewing "rules" as an enemy in the way of their ability to get the job done.
If your developers are seeing your rules as an enemy, its because the rules are getting in the way of them being able to accomplish something. No person likes to have jump through arbitrary hoops in order to complete everyday tasks. However, most everyone can agree that some rules are necessary to keep people from bumping into one another. Perhaps if the developers on your end had an explanation of why the rules are necessary, they'd respect them more and circumvent them less.
Returning to pre 9/11 screening where you could have walked on board with a bag full of hand grenades is not an option.
Can you substantiate that? Can you point to an example of any single person walking onto an aircraft with a bag full of grenades? In case you haven't noticed, grenades are very much metallic. They would set off metal detectors, and their distinct shape would be easily marked on X-Ray machines, regardless of whether the time is before or after Sept. 11 2001. In case you don't remember, we still had airline security before 9/11. What we didn't have was a ridiculous, bureaucratic centralized security infrastructure that does nothing but suck down tax dollars and give us nothing in return (at least nothing we didn't already have before 9/11).
Forgetting what is in your pocket is not the same as knowing what is in your pocket, and knowing that you expect to be meeting your 27 virgins.
First, its 72 virgins, not 27. Second, the point the parent was making wasn't that knife was somehow "safe". No, the point being made was that the TSA is no better (on average) than the system we had before 9/11. The people doing the screening are all the same - its only their paychecks that have changed. As pointed out above, the real improvement in security has resulted from the flying public feeling empowered enough to take down potential hijackers, even at the cost of potential injury to themselves. If the parent poster's friend had pulled out that knife, he would have been tackled the moment someone saw it. Before 9/11, he probably wouldn't have elicited much comment. Its that difference that makes us safer today, not any security theater put into place by desperate politicians.
Who says it has to be a single comment? Perhaps you could make so that, if the comment starts with 'a', it routes to an alternate destination that's randomized based on the contents of the comment. That would be hell to debug, since the program would end up producing different outputs from the same input.
Airlines don't write Air Traffic Control code. That's the FAA's job. The luggage routing software that routes your bag to Boston when you're going to New York is the airline's responsibility.
Also, there's no guarantee that "mission critical" implies readable or documented. Arguably, the reason the FAA is having so much trouble introducing a new flight control system is that the old one is so poorly documented, porting it to newer hardware is extremely difficult.
There may not be enough mechanically inclined people to make fix-it-yourself cars viable (though, the kit car industry may disagree). This does not prevent me from mourning the loss of an engine from a major automaker that was compatible with the fix-it-yourself mentality.
For maintenance, yes. For tweaking, no. Sure, you can change the oil and replace worn out parts, and do other things that the manufacturer allows you to do. However, if you want to modify your engine in a way that was not explicitly sanctioned by the manufacturer, its becoming ever more difficult to do so. Its as if our engines are becoming like iPods - closed, tightly controlled devices that actively designed to discourage modification and experimentation. I, for one, don't think that's a good future.
Not necessarily. These engines are used in a lot of industrial applications (like priming pumps for large chemical plants, generators, etc.), and so customers who were using engines for those applications went ahead and bought as many as they'd likely need for an indefinite amount of time. The spike in purchases is an artifact everyone buying a supply of engines to tide themselves until they can switch to a new manufacturer. If GM had continued to produce these engines, they'd have waited until their existing engines wore out before ordering replacements.
All the parts are still there, but, increasingly they're being controlled by a central engine computer. Unless you have the hardware to read data from and write data to that computer, the number of adjustments you can make is limited, since things that used to be controlled by screws and bolts (like valve timing, for example) are now controlled by register values.
Not everyone likes to work on their own cars, but, for those who do, having a standard engine design like the GM big block (or the GM small block, for that matter) has been a boon. The fact that the basic mechanics of the engine have changed little since the '70s means that the engine is great for learning the basic principles of engine mechanics. Put another way, the GM big block was the Unix of V-8 engines.
As one of the replies to a sibling post states, the perjury penalty is only for falsely saying that you're the copyright owner or a representative of the copyright owner. In this case, the company sending the DMCA notices was a representative of the copyright owner.
If it is the case, then the manager has to make that clear to the developers at the beginning of the project. Having a manager that pretends that the project is doable is worse than not having one at all.
That's a solution for low skill factory jobs, where there is little communication needed, and the work can be efficiently divided amongst many workers with little overhead. Programming is not such a job. Adding more workers to a late project usually only makes it later, since the new workers have to be trained in and the need of coordinating amongst more people adds overhead and slows development more.
Fred Brooks elucidates this concept with much more detail in The Mythical Man Month.
Oh yeah, "lessor of two evils" and all that. Who was it around here who first said "The lessor of two evils is still evil"?
The lesser of two evils is still evil, but it is also lesser. What's the alternative, voting for Cthulu? As long as we're going to elect evil, we may as well elect the greatest evil of all, right?
That would be the case if these laptop manufacturers were also developing their own batteries. Other than Sony, they're not. They buy battery cells from companies whose sole purpose is to make batteries, put plastic packaging on them and sell them to you as part of the laptop. These same battery manufacturers sell to the tool market as well. If these batteries were really so expensive batteries for power tools would cost more than they do.
Price discrimination (e.g. market segmentation) may be good for the producer, but its not good for the consumer. As I learned a long time ago in Econ 101, perfect price discrimination leads to the producer getting all of the economic surplus, leaving the consumer with none. I don't know about you, but, as a consumer, I like being able to capture some of the value surplus in my transactions.
Seriously. The Constitution spells out that Congress controls the purse strings. They allocate the money. If it requires the approval of other scientists, then congress chooses those scientists. It starts and ends with congress.
No it doesn't. The legislative branch passes the laws, but the executive branch executes the law. In this case, the legislature (Congress) passes a law allocating money for a general end (e.g. scientific research). The specific allocations of that money are made by executive branch agencies (e.g. NSF, DARPA, etc.). While Congress may be dominated by politicians, the executive branch has significant numbers of civil service employees who would presumably be resistant to the sort of blatant power grabs you are are describing.
If by spectacular, you mean spectacularly bad, then yes. For a game that purports to portray "modern warfare" with a semblance of realism, how does allowing for infinite sprint
make sense? How does a knife take out a riot shield, when even a submachine-gun barely dents it? What of the dual wielded shotguns?
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
As another commenter pointed out above, copyright only becomes necessary when it is easy and cheap to copy works. For the vast majority of the 10,000+ year timescale you mention, copying was very difficult. Before written language, poets would spend their entire lives reciting and memorizing epics. Before the printing press, monks would spend years creating a single book. After the printing press came along, and made copying text easy and (relatively cheap) copyright soon followed.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
There is abuse yes. I'm not going to deny the existence of patent trolls, and I do think the current penalties for downloading penalties are excessive. However, that's an argument for reform, not abolition. And, lets not forget that the open-source licenses that we like so much (like Creative Commons, and the GPL) only gain teeth from copyright law. If copyrights didn't exist, all work would be public domain. People could copy your effort without recourse, even when the only thing you want is attribution.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is.
The difference is exclusivity. If I have a pizza, and I give it to you, then I either go without pizza, or I have to go and buy or make one for myself. If I copy my CD and give it to you, then both you and I have, in a fundamental sense, the same CD. Lawmakers realized that intellectual property has value. If it didn't, we wouldn't want it. However, the lack of exclusivity means that intellectual property doesn't have the same level of natural protection as physical property. Therefore, copyright is a way to bring a limited form of exclusivity to intellectual property, so that creators can capture some of the value that would normally be taken by the distributors.
Books and other written matter created before printing presses are basically uncopyable anyway, since copying them would require one to sit down and copy the work by hand. Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of the population was illiterate, and you have an environment where copying a text is extremely difficult and can only be accomplished by a specialized set of people. In essence, you have an early version of DRM.
but three that stand out for me are Nixon, LBJ (for the Goldwater ad alone) and W, excuse me for missing anyone, recovering from long weekend.
Okay, I know you're recovering from the long weekend and all that, but really? You could have chosen any dictator that ruled with an iron fist, from Ivan the Terrible to Robert Mugabe, but you chose... Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush? I'm not saying that they were necessarily nice people, but they're not even close to the top of the list when it comes to ruling by fear.
PS: I'm really going to have to disagree with you regarding Lyndon Johnson. Yes, he got us deeply entrenched in Vietnam. But, he also got us Medicare, and Medicaid, greatly extending the social safety net for those who are worst off in society - the poor and the elderly.
You know what? I'd be far more comfortable with a fellow Slashdotter running the world than I would with the average politician. At least the random Slashdotter understands the way technology works and inherent limitations that crop up when trying to regulate the Internet. The average politician does not understand that, and so they push through bad laws that end up causing more problems than they solve.