I'm quite surprised the iMessage team would go to the effort of implementing end-to-end encryption without being familiar with the basics like perfect forward secrecy.
I keep hearing this canard from the Regressive Left. I've heard nobody claim that the more one studies Islam the more Radical one becomes. What is a true however is that the belief that violence is a legitimate response to perceived injustices towards Islam has a *mountain* of support from the Quran and Hadith, and unlike the Old Testament the Islamic texts haven't been "defanged" by modernity yet.
The problem is Agile is fundamentally incompatible with the way most businesses are run. Top down command and control organization, blind adherence to process, lack of discipline / peer accountability, lack of team autonomy, etc will all create a disaster out of Agile. Blame corporate culture, not the person pointing out the inconvenient truth that "Hey, software is hard and I'm not arrogant enough to sit in a room and design everything upfront and pretend here at the beginning of the project when I have the least amount of information over the problem that half of my decisions are going to be right."
The best place I've ever worked followed this philosophy: Focus on the user, be transparent and collaborative, and give everyone huge amounts of autonomy. Follow an agile methodology. No middle management allowed. Decisions should be made by consensus of small teams closest to the problem. If you can't reach consensus, only then does your job title materialize ensuring rank is pulled sparingly. The team evaluates their peer's performance anonymously and bad performance gets you fired.
This works incredibly well but requires hiring competent staff who are self motivated.
It seems to be overlooked by most people, but the fact that this little box is fanless means the laptop harddrive contains the only moving parts. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, but this might be a good candidate for a cheap air tight sealed industrial-environment box.
Currently, there are many "rough edges" in configuring a Linux distro from the GUI. There's a reason why you don't see dozens of excellent graphical configuration tools for Linux, and it's not because of some inherent superiority of the command line. It's because writing something like YAST is very difficult; far more so than necessary. The crux of the issue is the lack of consistency / machine readability in configuration files. The xorg.conf is the first example that comes to mind; it's quite frankly a mess even to edit by hand. Try making manual changes and watch the gui mangle the file as it fails to interpret syntax outside it's expected generated style.
Compare crontab, fstab, passwd, httpd.conf... pretty much anything in/etc/ and you'll see the problem. All of these certainly can be programmatically altered, but requires significant effort to create a clean bi-directional implementation that consistently works. This creates our present situation of often "hitting a brick wall" when trying to use the GUI and having no alternative but to do it by hand.
My preference would be files in XML. Now, say what you will about it, but XML is one of the few methods of storing data that is both easily human & machine readable. Without any additional work, you'd have countless tools that could edit and validate your config files. I'd take the trivial bloat over what we have now any day of the week.
I agree completely. As well, I think it's quite ignorant to compare BDSM and bisexuality to insanity as people seem to be doing. Sturgeon seems to be a disturbed and dangerous killer, but pointing to his sexuality a source or result of his madness is puritanical nonsense. As much progress has been made in the sexual revolution, closed-minded stereotypes still seem prevalent.
This is my choice as well (although I'd go with Eclipse), but who needs one game when you can write your own? I think the time would pass a lot faster if I had something interesting to work on; I can't imagine any game not getting old after playing it non-stop for over a month.
Okay, not to get too far off-topic, but this is just getting silly.
1. If you want everything to be an object, use Smalltalk. Primitives underly all data values in Java primarily for speed purposes, not due to legacy cruft issues. And frankly, it just makes sense; why on earth does the number 7 need to be an object? As for autoboxing, yes, if you're an idiot and your program doesn't bother doing any data validation / sanity checks, you might hit a problem like this.
2. Yes, erasures are sub-optimal, and there are some corner-cases in generics because of them. In practice however, they work just fine in 99% of normal usage cases. And unlike C++ templates, they're not so bloody complex that people don't use them. (you know the old joke that C++ templates are Turing complete...)
3. I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. What constraints do you want beyond type hierarchy?
4. Null isn't some evil force that blows up programs. It provides another testable value that's a much better alternative to passing around meaningless 'placeholder' values. NPEs are bug alerts.
5. This is being debated for inclusion in Java 7. The problem with (most forms of) type inference is it occurs during runtime. By not explicitly declaring types, the compiler is left guessing what type will actually be provided. This ambiguity leads to all sorts of fun problems; try asking your IDE to autocomplete a variable when the type can only be determined at runtime. This kind of thing is best left to dynamic languages, where it gets the most benefit for the least cost.
6. I have no idea what you're talking about here. What's the problem with implementing interfaces?
Hans,
I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell you how sorry I am to hear about your divorce. I'm a huge fan of your work, and would marry you in an instant!
...please don't try to pretend that "Java on the client-side tries to solve a completely different set of problems than AJAX does...
Sorry, but this is nonsense. You seem to misunderstand the problem each technology is trying to solve. The scope of AJAX is limited to making web-apps more responsive. It provides NOTHING DHTML can't already do except removing the need to submit a form.
The real issue at hand here is web-apps vs. rich-apps which in the real world have different goals.
First of all, Java on the client-side tries to solve a completely different set of problems than AJAX does. Java's goal is to provide a platform independent way of running rich applications. It provides its own libraries, UI toolkit(s), client-side business logic, and is self contained inside a virtual machine. AJAX on the other hand is just a cleaver way for browsers to provide asynchronous communication with servers. It provides nothing that JavaScript can't do already, it just spares you from having to submit a form every time you need to push/pull data.
Now, as for providing an easier method of deploying rich applications, take a look at Java Web Start. Applets are frankly awful; they're slow to load, have limited functionality, and sit inside a browser window (which is NOT where a desktop app belongs). Web Start solves this by providing an extremely simple deployment and update model, while maintaining the user experience only a rich app can.
It's an interesting observation that the web is highly standardized (although some companies actively choose to ignore it), while document formats are still suffering from the scars of proprietary battles. If you want open formats beyond ASCII & UNICODE it seems OASIS & PDF/PS are the only ones I can think of at the moment. Considering PDFs are not really intended to be "living" documents that are opened and changed, it seems OASIS is all we have going right now.
Deadlines encourage the development of critical components that are the most needed at the time. While this can lead to bad things if the time constraints are unrealistic, it's better than open-ended all-over-the-map kind of work you'd get otherwise.
I've been saying for years that windows was written by monkeys...
Honnestly, it's amazing to me how slashdot can turn any topic into a linux vs windows debate.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite surprised the iMessage team would go to the effort of implementing end-to-end encryption without being familiar with the basics like perfect forward secrecy.
I keep hearing this canard from the Regressive Left. I've heard nobody claim that the more one studies Islam the more Radical one becomes. What is a true however is that the belief that violence is a legitimate response to perceived injustices towards Islam has a *mountain* of support from the Quran and Hadith, and unlike the Old Testament the Islamic texts haven't been "defanged" by modernity yet.
Given we're talking about the internet here, they got off easy. It could have easily been the RSS Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.
You know what's significantly worse than an Open Source project with TF1? A closed source project with a TF1.
The problem is Agile is fundamentally incompatible with the way most businesses are run. Top down command and control organization, blind adherence to process, lack of discipline / peer accountability, lack of team autonomy, etc will all create a disaster out of Agile. Blame corporate culture, not the person pointing out the inconvenient truth that "Hey, software is hard and I'm not arrogant enough to sit in a room and design everything upfront and pretend here at the beginning of the project when I have the least amount of information over the problem that half of my decisions are going to be right."
The best place I've ever worked followed this philosophy: Focus on the user, be transparent and collaborative, and give everyone huge amounts of autonomy. Follow an agile methodology. No middle management allowed. Decisions should be made by consensus of small teams closest to the problem. If you can't reach consensus, only then does your job title materialize ensuring rank is pulled sparingly. The team evaluates their peer's performance anonymously and bad performance gets you fired.
This works incredibly well but requires hiring competent staff who are self motivated.
It seems to be overlooked by most people, but the fact that this little box is fanless means the laptop harddrive contains the only moving parts. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, but this might be a good candidate for a cheap air tight sealed industrial-environment box.
Yep. I agree. A schema is what I was trying to get at.
Currently, there are many "rough edges" in configuring a Linux distro from the GUI. There's a reason why you don't see dozens of excellent graphical configuration tools for Linux, and it's not because of some inherent superiority of the command line. It's because writing something like YAST is very difficult; far more so than necessary. The crux of the issue is the lack of consistency / machine readability in configuration files. The xorg.conf is the first example that comes to mind; it's quite frankly a mess even to edit by hand. Try making manual changes and watch the gui mangle the file as it fails to interpret syntax outside it's expected generated style.
/etc/ and you'll see the problem. All of these certainly can be programmatically altered, but requires significant effort to create a clean bi-directional implementation that consistently works. This creates our present situation of often "hitting a brick wall" when trying to use the GUI and having no alternative but to do it by hand.
Compare crontab, fstab, passwd, httpd.conf... pretty much anything in
My preference would be files in XML. Now, say what you will about it, but XML is one of the few methods of storing data that is both easily human & machine readable. Without any additional work, you'd have countless tools that could edit and validate your config files. I'd take the trivial bloat over what we have now any day of the week.
I agree completely. As well, I think it's quite ignorant to compare BDSM and bisexuality to insanity as people seem to be doing. Sturgeon seems to be a disturbed and dangerous killer, but pointing to his sexuality a source or result of his madness is puritanical nonsense. As much progress has been made in the sexual revolution, closed-minded stereotypes still seem prevalent.
This is my choice as well (although I'd go with Eclipse), but who needs one game when you can write your own? I think the time would pass a lot faster if I had something interesting to work on; I can't imagine any game not getting old after playing it non-stop for over a month.
Okay, not to get too far off-topic, but this is just getting silly.
1. If you want everything to be an object, use Smalltalk. Primitives underly all data values in Java primarily for speed purposes, not due to legacy cruft issues. And frankly, it just makes sense; why on earth does the number 7 need to be an object? As for autoboxing, yes, if you're an idiot and your program doesn't bother doing any data validation / sanity checks, you might hit a problem like this.
2. Yes, erasures are sub-optimal, and there are some corner-cases in generics because of them. In practice however, they work just fine in 99% of normal usage cases. And unlike C++ templates, they're not so bloody complex that people don't use them. (you know the old joke that C++ templates are Turing complete...)
3. I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. What constraints do you want beyond type hierarchy?
4. Null isn't some evil force that blows up programs. It provides another testable value that's a much better alternative to passing around meaningless 'placeholder' values. NPEs are bug alerts.
5. This is being debated for inclusion in Java 7. The problem with (most forms of) type inference is it occurs during runtime. By not explicitly declaring types, the compiler is left guessing what type will actually be provided. This ambiguity leads to all sorts of fun problems; try asking your IDE to autocomplete a variable when the type can only be determined at runtime. This kind of thing is best left to dynamic languages, where it gets the most benefit for the least cost.
6. I have no idea what you're talking about here. What's the problem with implementing interfaces?
Damn it! That was going to be MY 2001 reference!
Hans, I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell you how sorry I am to hear about your divorce. I'm a huge fan of your work, and would marry you in an instant!
First of all, Java on the client-side tries to solve a completely different set of problems than AJAX does. Java's goal is to provide a platform independent way of running rich applications. It provides its own libraries, UI toolkit(s), client-side business logic, and is self contained inside a virtual machine. AJAX on the other hand is just a cleaver way for browsers to provide asynchronous communication with servers. It provides nothing that JavaScript can't do already, it just spares you from having to submit a form every time you need to push/pull data.
Now, as for providing an easier method of deploying rich applications, take a look at Java Web Start. Applets are frankly awful; they're slow to load, have limited functionality, and sit inside a browser window (which is NOT where a desktop app belongs). Web Start solves this by providing an extremely simple deployment and update model, while maintaining the user experience only a rich app can.
It's an interesting observation that the web is highly standardized (although some companies actively choose to ignore it), while document formats are still suffering from the scars of proprietary battles. If you want open formats beyond ASCII & UNICODE it seems OASIS & PDF/PS are the only ones I can think of at the moment. Considering PDFs are not really intended to be "living" documents that are opened and changed, it seems OASIS is all we have going right now.
Deadlines encourage the development of critical components that are the most needed at the time. While this can lead to bad things if the time constraints are unrealistic, it's better than open-ended all-over-the-map kind of work you'd get otherwise.
You're just lucky Kent Beck isn't here...
While I agree comments are important, I think Martin Fowler said it best:
Excellent. Mod parent WAY up.
I've been saying for years that windows was written by monkeys... Honnestly, it's amazing to me how slashdot can turn any topic into a linux vs windows debate.
Fool me once, shame on ... shame on... you... Fool me -- you can't get fooled again!