He's not describing a socialist utopia. He's simply imagining a world where CEOs don't make three to four hundred times the pay of the line worker while driving the corporation into the ground.
I agree 100%. A little flash and dazzle helps keep the audience alert and interested. However, most people go way overboard, to the point where the effects detract from their presentation rather than enhance it.
I think his point is that WikiLeaks should confine itself to highlighting illegal or unethical activities by eliciting internal documents that don't have general public distribution. I, like you don't agree with this, since, companies can often dig themselves into a hole by marketing illegal or unethical services (like this) to certain clients while trying to hide those same services from other clients.
While bandwidth isn't decreasing, it certainly isn't increasing either. Despite what the advertising for broadband claims, we've still all got pretty much the same amount of bandwidth we had in 2000. Increased competition could certainly help here, as the larger number of providers would certainly provide some incentive for everyone to give more bandwidth.
The more pressing concern is that, because of their vertical monopoly, carriers could block services (e.g. VoIP) that competes with services they provide, or content that they disapprove of. Having competition would certainly be a blessing here, since on could use the lack of content filtering as a marketing point when selling one's product.
How is it irrelevant? The DMCA prohibits reverse-engineering for the purpose of breaking copyright. Sure, in this case, the developer's intent was not to break copyright, but how was the company to know that? How was the company to know that this person didn't come across this code while decompiling the application to remove anti-piracy features or to make his own version of the same product?
What I'm saying is that, even though the intent to copy wasn't there, any reasonable lawyer or judge would have been able to see that there was a potential case there. The fact that the company chose not to pursue legal charges and instead admitted that they screwed up is refreshing.
That's the thing about this hack. Running a packet sniffer would not have helped you. All you would have seen is GArchiver send SSL encrypted packets to the GMail server. You wouldn't have been able to pick up on the fact that some of these packets would have contained information telling GMail to send your username and password to the developer's account.
Pointing to the Confederacy and saying that individual states are welcome to break away is like pointing to an apprehended criminal and saying that we are free to commit crime. If states in the US break away, the US government is willing to go to war to bring them back. Contrast this with the EU, where the right to secede is enshrined in the founding charter.
Right, but the Russians are paying significantly less, both in upfront and per-mission costs for their Soyuz and Progress launches than we are for our shuttle launches. Essentially we're getting the same reliability as the Russians, but paying a lot more for it.
Be that as it may, individual states in the US do not have the right to break away. EU member states have that right. Therefore, the EU isn't a country (yet). Rather, it is a very close confederation of countries.
Consider how much better society would be if they were each individually working on something different.
Consider how much faster progress could be made if there were incentives encouraging a large number of our best minds to all focus on the most pressing issues of the day.
Even if they have actually worked with another DB server, they still wouldn't know what an abstraction layer is. If they managed to use an abstraction layer with their web app, the site performance would slow to a crawl because of the performance hit the abstraction layer incurrs. Not that it would matter in the end because their site is going to crash with a few concurrent requests.
Huh? Its not that hard to have a create a proper abstraction layer. You can even just start out with basic wrapper functions for the native DB library calls. The main thing is to separate logic from I/O. That's the thing to start with. As you get more revenue and see the need to invest more, you can elaborate your abstraction layer to grow with your application.
Any high level programming language that lets you declare variables on the fly and without a datatype is just plain stupid. And when's the last time you didn't get the result you expected because you had a typo in the variable name?
As far a criticisms of PHP go, that's a pretty dumb one, given that that's a feature shared by almost all web-programming languages. What would you do your server side work in? Java?
I would smack them round the head. It's a clear violation of the YAGNI principle - significantly extra work for something that probably won't ever be required.
Really? I certainly wouldn't react that harshly. Fact is, its quite difficult to tell where your application is going to be headed in a couple of years, and a little bit of forethought can save a lot of hard work later on. Granted, I'd probably refuse the developer too, but I'd probably have to think about it first. I'd see what the chances are of having to incorporate this feature, and I'd try to do an informal cost-benefit analysis before shooting him down.
However, this might be because the application I worked on at my last job was written for Oracle, and our client was moving to MS-SQL and wanted our app to comply with the new database. Because the application wasn't designed with that sort of portability in mind, the refactoring was a lot harder than it ought to have been.
On the other hand, I suspect you're not talking about a full-blown database abstraction layer, just a separation of data access code from business logic (like a Repository pattern). This I would view as simply good design, with more realistic benefits like easier testing, more understandable code, and better separation of concerns.
That is what I was talking about, but that doesn't mean that you should rule out a full abstraction layer offhand.
One more thing: Abstraction. Make sure that your new setup makes it easy to write an abstraction layer, or includes an abstraction layer. There's nothing worse than having finished your application to realize that the customer wants to run it on a different backend, so you have to rewrite all the database calls that are scattered all across your application. Having all your I/O stuff concentrated in a (relatively) small set of classes does wonders for maintainability and extensibility.
Most platforms don't provide a simple way to transition between one platform and another, especially in the web development sector.
This is why you write an abstraction layer to sit between your business logic and the platform. Lets take databases as an example. Suppose your application is initially written for MySQL. Now, lets say that your application becomes a big hit, and you want to move it to a more robust backend. If you're application is tied directly to the platform (i.e. you've peppered your code with direct MySQL calls), you've got a lot of work in development and testing to make sure that all of the MySQL stuff is replaced with Oracle equivalents. However, if you've got an abstraction layer, the only things you have to rewrite and retest are the components of the abstraction layer. Its not zero work with the latter strategy, but it is a lot less work.
This is actually one of the gripes I have against web programming as it stands today. It seems to me that programmers are far too eager to call the database directly from their application, without using any sort of abstraction layer. Sure, its faster to create the application without an abstraction layer, but it makes porting the app to another backend an absolute nightmare.
Some lock you in more than others, but I think it would be quite difficult to switch between them, if you had a reasonable amount of code.
If you have a good abstraction layer, even the most proprietary platform won't lock you in.
The Supreme Court has upheld the right of Customs to confiscate laptops and other electronic devices at the border without any probable cause. I don't know if they can force you to give up encryption keys to the laptop, but that might be what you're thinking of.
The issue with Moonlight is that its patent encumbered, and the only vendor that Microsoft has a licensing agreement with is Novell. While they've indicated that they don't intend to sue users of Moonlight even if they don't use Novell Linux, they haven't entered into any soft of legally binding covenant and could go back on that decision at any time. Therefore, unless you use Novell Linux, you have nothing other than Microsoft's word protecting you from a patent infringement lawsuit if you use Moonlight.
If you go to the publications page for Ulysses, you'll see that about 60 PhDs have been awarded for Ulysses research, in addition to vast numbers of research papers and other article. By any count, this mission has been a success. Congratulations to all involved.
They got 17 years of science out of it. This spacecraft lasted more than 4 times its intended lifetime, and was the first spacecraft to go out of the plane of orbit shared by the planets. Yeah, I'd say they got something out of the project before the batteries died.
Bloat and underfunding? Aren't those two a contradiction in terms?
It really is piss poor what Bush has done to science. Bushs' vision of mars is nothing but a political tool to get temporary ratings approval in the polls. Fact is, his vision is severely underfunded, uninspired, and uneducated.
I dislike Bush as much as any other Democrat, but, to be brutally honest, every administration past LBJ has underfunded the space program. NASA has been suffering from decades of neglect, and its unfair to put all the blame on the current occupant.
Imagine if we took that trillion dollar surplus and some real inspiration and dedicated 400 billion to the space program instead of way. A good president would cut out the bureaucracy (with still keeping quality assurance) and size down Nasa's management, and their space vehicles (last time i checked we are using 30+ year old shuttle technology, what exactly is going to happen again when the shuttle retires? There is no clear cut plan, also sad).
Again, every administration since LBJ has promised to set up a vision for NASA and return to its Apollo-era glory days. And, predictably, NASA has fallen far down the priority list as other issues come up. Given the huge issues facing the country today (the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare, Social Security, climate change, etc.), why should anyone believe that there'll be any more attention paid to NASA by the next administration?
Not only has Microsoft attempted such a thing, but they've succeeded and already have a working version. Its Google that's playing catch-up here, not Microsoft.
To be fair, though, I wouldn't like either company to be snooping around in my health records.
Reality has a liberal bias, but, by indulging in that sort of rhetoric rather than letting the facts speak for themselves, you end up making yourself look like as much of a fool as the fools you oppose.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not describing a socialist utopia. He's simply imagining a world where CEOs don't make three to four hundred times the pay of the line worker while driving the corporation into the ground.
Yes. We should have government step in and regulate, because government has done such a good job of regulating technology in the past.</sarcasm>
I agree 100%. A little flash and dazzle helps keep the audience alert and interested. However, most people go way overboard, to the point where the effects detract from their presentation rather than enhance it.
I think his point is that WikiLeaks should confine itself to highlighting illegal or unethical activities by eliciting internal documents that don't have general public distribution. I, like you don't agree with this, since, companies can often dig themselves into a hole by marketing illegal or unethical services (like this) to certain clients while trying to hide those same services from other clients.
Mules and donkeys are certainly more suited to rough terrain than horses, but they're generally more ornery, and can't run as fast.
While bandwidth isn't decreasing, it certainly isn't increasing either. Despite what the advertising for broadband claims, we've still all got pretty much the same amount of bandwidth we had in 2000. Increased competition could certainly help here, as the larger number of providers would certainly provide some incentive for everyone to give more bandwidth.
The more pressing concern is that, because of their vertical monopoly, carriers could block services (e.g. VoIP) that competes with services they provide, or content that they disapprove of. Having competition would certainly be a blessing here, since on could use the lack of content filtering as a marketing point when selling one's product.
How is it irrelevant? The DMCA prohibits reverse-engineering for the purpose of breaking copyright. Sure, in this case, the developer's intent was not to break copyright, but how was the company to know that? How was the company to know that this person didn't come across this code while decompiling the application to remove anti-piracy features or to make his own version of the same product?
What I'm saying is that, even though the intent to copy wasn't there, any reasonable lawyer or judge would have been able to see that there was a potential case there. The fact that the company chose not to pursue legal charges and instead admitted that they screwed up is refreshing.
That's the thing about this hack. Running a packet sniffer would not have helped you. All you would have seen is GArchiver send SSL encrypted packets to the GMail server. You wouldn't have been able to pick up on the fact that some of these packets would have contained information telling GMail to send your username and password to the developer's account.
Pointing to the Confederacy and saying that individual states are welcome to break away is like pointing to an apprehended criminal and saying that we are free to commit crime. If states in the US break away, the US government is willing to go to war to bring them back. Contrast this with the EU, where the right to secede is enshrined in the founding charter.
Right, but the Russians are paying significantly less, both in upfront and per-mission costs for their Soyuz and Progress launches than we are for our shuttle launches. Essentially we're getting the same reliability as the Russians, but paying a lot more for it.
Be that as it may, individual states in the US do not have the right to break away. EU member states have that right. Therefore, the EU isn't a country (yet). Rather, it is a very close confederation of countries.
Consider how much faster progress could be made if there were incentives encouraging a large number of our best minds to all focus on the most pressing issues of the day.
Huh? Its not that hard to have a create a proper abstraction layer. You can even just start out with basic wrapper functions for the native DB library calls. The main thing is to separate logic from I/O. That's the thing to start with. As you get more revenue and see the need to invest more, you can elaborate your abstraction layer to grow with your application.
Any high level programming language that lets you declare variables on the fly and without a datatype is just plain stupid. And when's the last time you didn't get the result you expected because you had a typo in the variable name?As far a criticisms of PHP go, that's a pretty dumb one, given that that's a feature shared by almost all web-programming languages. What would you do your server side work in? Java?
Really? I certainly wouldn't react that harshly. Fact is, its quite difficult to tell where your application is going to be headed in a couple of years, and a little bit of forethought can save a lot of hard work later on. Granted, I'd probably refuse the developer too, but I'd probably have to think about it first. I'd see what the chances are of having to incorporate this feature, and I'd try to do an informal cost-benefit analysis before shooting him down.
However, this might be because the application I worked on at my last job was written for Oracle, and our client was moving to MS-SQL and wanted our app to comply with the new database. Because the application wasn't designed with that sort of portability in mind, the refactoring was a lot harder than it ought to have been.
On the other hand, I suspect you're not talking about a full-blown database abstraction layer, just a separation of data access code from business logic (like a Repository pattern). This I would view as simply good design, with more realistic benefits like easier testing, more understandable code, and better separation of concerns.That is what I was talking about, but that doesn't mean that you should rule out a full abstraction layer offhand.
One more thing: Abstraction. Make sure that your new setup makes it easy to write an abstraction layer, or includes an abstraction layer. There's nothing worse than having finished your application to realize that the customer wants to run it on a different backend, so you have to rewrite all the database calls that are scattered all across your application. Having all your I/O stuff concentrated in a (relatively) small set of classes does wonders for maintainability and extensibility.
This is why you write an abstraction layer to sit between your business logic and the platform. Lets take databases as an example. Suppose your application is initially written for MySQL. Now, lets say that your application becomes a big hit, and you want to move it to a more robust backend. If you're application is tied directly to the platform (i.e. you've peppered your code with direct MySQL calls), you've got a lot of work in development and testing to make sure that all of the MySQL stuff is replaced with Oracle equivalents. However, if you've got an abstraction layer, the only things you have to rewrite and retest are the components of the abstraction layer. Its not zero work with the latter strategy, but it is a lot less work.
This is actually one of the gripes I have against web programming as it stands today. It seems to me that programmers are far too eager to call the database directly from their application, without using any sort of abstraction layer. Sure, its faster to create the application without an abstraction layer, but it makes porting the app to another backend an absolute nightmare.
Some lock you in more than others, but I think it would be quite difficult to switch between them, if you had a reasonable amount of code.If you have a good abstraction layer, even the most proprietary platform won't lock you in.
The Supreme Court has upheld the right of Customs to confiscate laptops and other electronic devices at the border without any probable cause. I don't know if they can force you to give up encryption keys to the laptop, but that might be what you're thinking of.
Isn't that sort of the premise for GUN?
The issue with Moonlight is that its patent encumbered, and the only vendor that Microsoft has a licensing agreement with is Novell. While they've indicated that they don't intend to sue users of Moonlight even if they don't use Novell Linux, they haven't entered into any soft of legally binding covenant and could go back on that decision at any time. Therefore, unless you use Novell Linux, you have nothing other than Microsoft's word protecting you from a patent infringement lawsuit if you use Moonlight.
If you go to the publications page for Ulysses, you'll see that about 60 PhDs have been awarded for Ulysses research, in addition to vast numbers of research papers and other article. By any count, this mission has been a success. Congratulations to all involved.
They got 17 years of science out of it. This spacecraft lasted more than 4 times its intended lifetime, and was the first spacecraft to go out of the plane of orbit shared by the planets. Yeah, I'd say they got something out of the project before the batteries died.
Bloat and underfunding? Aren't those two a contradiction in terms?
It really is piss poor what Bush has done to science. Bushs' vision of mars is nothing but a political tool to get temporary ratings approval in the polls. Fact is, his vision is severely underfunded, uninspired, and uneducated.I dislike Bush as much as any other Democrat, but, to be brutally honest, every administration past LBJ has underfunded the space program. NASA has been suffering from decades of neglect, and its unfair to put all the blame on the current occupant.
Imagine if we took that trillion dollar surplus and some real inspiration and dedicated 400 billion to the space program instead of way. A good president would cut out the bureaucracy (with still keeping quality assurance) and size down Nasa's management, and their space vehicles (last time i checked we are using 30+ year old shuttle technology, what exactly is going to happen again when the shuttle retires? There is no clear cut plan, also sad).Again, every administration since LBJ has promised to set up a vision for NASA and return to its Apollo-era glory days. And, predictably, NASA has fallen far down the priority list as other issues come up. Given the huge issues facing the country today (the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare, Social Security, climate change, etc.), why should anyone believe that there'll be any more attention paid to NASA by the next administration?
Splitting one of these mainframes into multiple Linux VMs is actually one of the more common uses for these things.
Not only has Microsoft attempted such a thing, but they've succeeded and already have a working version. Its Google that's playing catch-up here, not Microsoft.
To be fair, though, I wouldn't like either company to be snooping around in my health records.
Reality has a liberal bias, but, by indulging in that sort of rhetoric rather than letting the facts speak for themselves, you end up making yourself look like as much of a fool as the fools you oppose.