I'd be curious to know what the net benefit is, seeing as concrete production is itself one of the largest contributors to air pollution in the first place.
Since when has Forbes ever had enough of a grasp of the open source world to have an opinion worth printing? Or a grasp of the software industry in general? How many people lost fortunes following Forbes' advice when the dot-com bubble burst?
Vendors Symantec and McAfee have looked into the future and realized that people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape.
I don't know about you, but it will be a cold, cold day in hell before I speak reverently of McAfee or Symantec. It's much more likely that I will gripe about Windows' vulnerabilities and the marginally effective, resource-hogging third-party antivirus software that kinda sorta fixed the problem.
I count on the contents of my thumb drive being easily readable to ensure its safe return if I lose it. I put everything in a directory tree that looks like this:
Have things really descended to the point that someone can seriously utter a phrase like, "the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple"? Apple's entire schtick, from the first Macintosh onwards, has been that their products don't require any kind of expertise, that they "just work", and that they produce the computer "for the rest of us" -- where "us" should probably not be construed to mean frequent Slashdot readers and users of Sourceforge.
People hire convicted felons all the time. What they generally don't do is to hire them in roles that were central to their offenses. It's one thing to hire a convicted pedophile to balance the books, but quite another to put him in charge of the company daycare.
The unchallenged assumption here, of course, is that a "black hat" necessarily has any special qualification for a security job. It's like assuming that a graffiti artist will have any useful insights into formulating a graffiti-resistant exterior paint. For that, you really want a chemist.
That's not to say that there aren't some black hats who wouldn't be useful in a security role, but simply having exploited security holes from the outside doesn't automatically translate into knowing how to plug them from the inside, and it certainly doesn't automatically translate into being able to communicate effectively and work as a member of a larger IT team.
[...] but is blocking really twice as effective as just warning users?
While I am loath to say anything positive about Microsoft, I'd have to agree with the scoring. Most end-users, especially the developmentally challenged ones that are prone to phishing scams, simply do not read warnings. If someone is drooling, it does no good to tell them. Just wipe their chin.
Pair programming can be seen as a kind of code review, but with the reviewer in equal position with the programmer. Traditional code reviews tend to be frustrating for the programmers, because the reviewers are in position of authority.
I've never seen one of those. Every code review I've participated in has been a collaborative effort between peers. If you treat a code review as a cooperative effort between programmers, it doesn't have to be frustrating.
Like any kind of engineering, software engineering needs as much face to face collaboration as possible.
To a point. But real engineering requires planning and clear interface definitions, and XP -- almost to the point of being pathological -- attempts to avoid planning as much as possible by subsitituting endless chatter and tremendous time wasting repeatedly reimplementing what could have been done right the first time. (And yes, I know some things always have to be reimplemented, but just because mistakes are inevitable doesn't mean they have to be encouraged.)
Software development has an unfortunate tendency towards fanatical adherence to the latest silver bullet. Usually, this involves an implementation language backed by a marketing push; XP seems to be the first programming fad built entirely on book publishing. But then, no implementation language ever actively encouraged the kind of passive-aggressive personality that thrives on XP.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts.
This really sums up 95% of the opposition to Wikipedia. (The other 5% comes from people who actually contribute to Wikipedia and whose opinions, therefore, actually count for shit.) It's petty egotism.
The contents of any given article are either factually correct, well-organized, and well-written, or they are not. And as far as Wikipedia goes, there are some really excellent articles and some really awful ones, and a bunch of relatively mediocre articles in between. There are some areas -- the physical sciences and European history, for example -- which are generally pretty good, and there are some areas -- biographical articles in general -- which are of much lower quality overall. Some articles, like the ones on quantum chromodynamics, are mostly maintained by people who have the necessary expertise, but who seem to think they're writing for people who already have expertise in the subject.
The bottom line, though, is that a good article is a good article whether it is written by a PhD or a "bored 17-year-old". The expert is more likely to be able to write an article off-the-cuff, while the 17-year-old is going to have to do more research to write the same article, but either way, the end result stands or falls on its own merits. There is such a thing as expertise, but there is also such a thing as a well-informed layman. Arguably, encyclopedias are written for laymen and other non-experts: a professional particle physicist isn't ever going to look up fermions in an encyclopedia.
The sad part is that experts could make a significant contribution to Wikipedia (and many, in fact, do), but that's only possible if they don't stomp in the door with raging egos expecting lay users to just roll over because some random netizen claims to have an advanced degree -- a claim that often made falsely anyway. That's appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. If you are an expert and you are interested in educating the public then you should be willing to take the time to back up your arguments with evidence and, most importantly, do so calmly and politely even when not everyone else is. If you're not interested in educating the public -- and doing whatever it takes to accomplish that task -- then Wikipedia doesn't need you. Neither does anyone else, in fact. Go masturbate with your ego somewhere else.
Wikipedia is as successful as it is because it invites active public participation, and simply being able to participate as a peer is the incentive that drives contributors. Encyclopaedia Britannica is as successful as it is because it pays experts to participate. Citizendium offers neither money or treatment as a peer. It doesn't take an expert to see that Citizendium will be authoritative... and very nearly devoid of content.
Even expert opinions are deeply divided, ranging from 'more cores are absolutely necessary' to 'why do I need something more than my five-year-old PC system?
These are obviously experts who have never heard of servers.
I'm perfectly content with my 1.2GHz single-core single-processor laptop, but I'd sure as shit like to have more muscle in the database cluster I'm responsible for maintaining at work. Whether these chips are a good solution remains to be seen, but that's a separate question.
Maybe it's just my pet peeve, but it's getting really tiresome to see every half-assed heuristic or simple algorithm described as "AI" just because it's used to control the action of some in-game object. This sounds like it might be a useful chip, but AI it is not.
And as more and more people become concerned with the mess we are creating, "greeness" gets added to the list of criteria they use to select their next purchase. Smart companies (EG Dell and Nokia) perceive this new customer need and fullfill it, thereby taking that small (but growing) niche market.
Given that greenness ranks fairly low on the average consumer's list of criteria when making a purchase, it might be that the relative eco-friendliness of Dell and Nokia has a lot more to do with being based in countries with strict environmental regulations than it does with market forces.
At most of the places I have worked, the majority of the developers had degrees in other fields. Oddly or perhaps not so oddly, the largest chunk were English majors.
One of the things I have noticed about career discussions on Slashdot is that they bear little or no resemblance to the real world, at least as I have experienced it. If anything, they are centered exclusively around the very highest tiers of corporate IT in Silicon Valley, which represents a vanishingly small percentage of the millions of software development jobs out there. It's actually a hugely varied field.
He also claims that a kernel would only be a few kilobytes large!
I've seen sub-1k kernels for FORTH systems before. The question is, how much functionality do you want to wrap into that kernel? More capable kernels would, of course, be correspondingly larger.
That said, stack computing and languages like FORTH have long been underrated. Depending on the application, the combination of stack computers and postfix languages can be quite powerful.
I see this a lot, too: asserting that computers are useful to students without actually providing a single concrete example of a way in which they actually are useful. I didn't start out cynical about computers in education; I spent years working in education, promoting the use of computers, and frankly didn't see many worthwhile results, with the possible exception of training a bunch of kids in the use of office software. If you have some experiences in this area to relate, I'd love to hear them.
Studies need to be done to determine if those laptops actually help (or perhaps hinder) learning in these schools.
No kidding. I've watched school districts in the US spend insane amounts of money on computer technology on the basis of blind faith that computers will automagically improve the quality and effectiveness of education. Even if most such programs were not sabotaged from the start by failing to allocate funds to actually train teachers to use them, there is seldom if ever any effort to measure results.
(To be fair, while I was working for a school district, I saw some really creative uses of computers, but these were a) the exception, and b) still not very good uses of money compared to other things that it could have been spent on.)
The other problem that is not often considered at the outset is the maintenance cost. A school district full of computers needs a full-time support staff, which takes away money that could have gone to hiring new teachers and reducing class sizes, and it also requires regular replacement. One-third of the IT budget for the district I worked in was devoted to replacing obsolete machines.
Surprisingly, the best use I saw for computers was reducing the amount of time it took teachers and staff to take attendance and collate grades. That actually did some good because teachers had more time to teach.
All in all, I'm a little confused as to the exact value this release brings, other than some better support for M$ based content environments.
It is indeed vague, and since their site is thoroughly slashdotted right now, it will remain so if and until I remember to check it out later.
Support for MS document formats is, however, a pretty big deal. If I had a dollar for every time an OSS solution was rejected in my workplace because it didn't support MS docs, I'd have enough money to buy a legitimate copy of Windows XP. Some people regard playing nice with MS software to be some kind of impurity or treason, but as a practical matter, it provides for easy inroads to business environments.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be curious to know what the net benefit is, seeing as concrete production is itself one of the largest contributors to air pollution in the first place.
Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?
Developers already know this. But at the end of the day, we're paid to implement the ill-considered plans of marketers and designers.
The Loeb Classical Library would also be great, but I doubt it's for sale.
Since when has Forbes ever had enough of a grasp of the open source world to have an opinion worth printing? Or a grasp of the software industry in general? How many people lost fortunes following Forbes' advice when the dot-com bubble burst?
No kidding. But hey, I hear Syria is lovely this time of year.
Vendors Symantec and McAfee have looked into the future and realized that people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape.
I don't know about you, but it will be a cold, cold day in hell before I speak reverently of McAfee or Symantec. It's much more likely that I will gripe about Windows' vulnerabilities and the marginally effective, resource-hogging third-party antivirus software that kinda sorta fixed the problem.
Have things really descended to the point that someone can seriously utter a phrase like, "the tech-savvy community currently owned by Apple"? Apple's entire schtick, from the first Macintosh onwards, has been that their products don't require any kind of expertise, that they "just work", and that they produce the computer "for the rest of us" -- where "us" should probably not be construed to mean frequent Slashdot readers and users of Sourceforge.
(C'mon, don't tell me you've never pressed on a URL on a printed page and expected something to happen.)
No, I haven't. But then, I've been outside in the last five years, so I may not be the intended audience for that remark.
People hire convicted felons all the time. What they generally don't do is to hire them in roles that were central to their offenses. It's one thing to hire a convicted pedophile to balance the books, but quite another to put him in charge of the company daycare.
The unchallenged assumption here, of course, is that a "black hat" necessarily has any special qualification for a security job. It's like assuming that a graffiti artist will have any useful insights into formulating a graffiti-resistant exterior paint. For that, you really want a chemist.
That's not to say that there aren't some black hats who wouldn't be useful in a security role, but simply having exploited security holes from the outside doesn't automatically translate into knowing how to plug them from the inside, and it certainly doesn't automatically translate into being able to communicate effectively and work as a member of a larger IT team.
[...] but is blocking really twice as effective as just warning users?
While I am loath to say anything positive about Microsoft, I'd have to agree with the scoring. Most end-users, especially the developmentally challenged ones that are prone to phishing scams, simply do not read warnings. If someone is drooling, it does no good to tell them. Just wipe their chin.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so:
When I hear the word "micropayments", I reach for my revolver.
Pair programming can be seen as a kind of code review, but with the reviewer in equal position with the programmer. Traditional code reviews tend to be frustrating for the programmers, because the reviewers are in position of authority.
I've never seen one of those. Every code review I've participated in has been a collaborative effort between peers. If you treat a code review as a cooperative effort between programmers, it doesn't have to be frustrating.
Like any kind of engineering, software engineering needs as much face to face collaboration as possible.
To a point. But real engineering requires planning and clear interface definitions, and XP -- almost to the point of being pathological -- attempts to avoid planning as much as possible by subsitituting endless chatter and tremendous time wasting repeatedly reimplementing what could have been done right the first time. (And yes, I know some things always have to be reimplemented, but just because mistakes are inevitable doesn't mean they have to be encouraged.)
Software development has an unfortunate tendency towards fanatical adherence to the latest silver bullet. Usually, this involves an implementation language backed by a marketing push; XP seems to be the first programming fad built entirely on book publishing. But then, no implementation language ever actively encouraged the kind of passive-aggressive personality that thrives on XP.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts.
This really sums up 95% of the opposition to Wikipedia. (The other 5% comes from people who actually contribute to Wikipedia and whose opinions, therefore, actually count for shit.) It's petty egotism.
The contents of any given article are either factually correct, well-organized, and well-written, or they are not. And as far as Wikipedia goes, there are some really excellent articles and some really awful ones, and a bunch of relatively mediocre articles in between. There are some areas -- the physical sciences and European history, for example -- which are generally pretty good, and there are some areas -- biographical articles in general -- which are of much lower quality overall. Some articles, like the ones on quantum chromodynamics, are mostly maintained by people who have the necessary expertise, but who seem to think they're writing for people who already have expertise in the subject.
The bottom line, though, is that a good article is a good article whether it is written by a PhD or a "bored 17-year-old". The expert is more likely to be able to write an article off-the-cuff, while the 17-year-old is going to have to do more research to write the same article, but either way, the end result stands or falls on its own merits. There is such a thing as expertise, but there is also such a thing as a well-informed layman. Arguably, encyclopedias are written for laymen and other non-experts: a professional particle physicist isn't ever going to look up fermions in an encyclopedia.
The sad part is that experts could make a significant contribution to Wikipedia (and many, in fact, do), but that's only possible if they don't stomp in the door with raging egos expecting lay users to just roll over because some random netizen claims to have an advanced degree -- a claim that often made falsely anyway. That's appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. If you are an expert and you are interested in educating the public then you should be willing to take the time to back up your arguments with evidence and, most importantly, do so calmly and politely even when not everyone else is. If you're not interested in educating the public -- and doing whatever it takes to accomplish that task -- then Wikipedia doesn't need you. Neither does anyone else, in fact. Go masturbate with your ego somewhere else.
Wikipedia is as successful as it is because it invites active public participation, and simply being able to participate as a peer is the incentive that drives contributors. Encyclopaedia Britannica is as successful as it is because it pays experts to participate. Citizendium offers neither money or treatment as a peer. It doesn't take an expert to see that Citizendium will be authoritative... and very nearly devoid of content.
Lately, it seems like some moderators are handing out troll ratings like candy. How was that a troll? Stating the obvious, perhaps, but a troll?
Even expert opinions are deeply divided, ranging from 'more cores are absolutely necessary' to 'why do I need something more than my five-year-old PC system?
These are obviously experts who have never heard of servers.
I'm perfectly content with my 1.2GHz single-core single-processor laptop, but I'd sure as shit like to have more muscle in the database cluster I'm responsible for maintaining at work. Whether these chips are a good solution remains to be seen, but that's a separate question.
Personally, I'm just tired of PC games that can't run decently on anything more than six months old.
Maybe it's just my pet peeve, but it's getting really tiresome to see every half-assed heuristic or simple algorithm described as "AI" just because it's used to control the action of some in-game object. This sounds like it might be a useful chip, but AI it is not.
And as more and more people become concerned with the mess we are creating, "greeness" gets added to the list of criteria they use to select their next purchase. Smart companies (EG Dell and Nokia) perceive this new customer need and fullfill it, thereby taking that small (but growing) niche market.
Given that greenness ranks fairly low on the average consumer's list of criteria when making a purchase, it might be that the relative eco-friendliness of Dell and Nokia has a lot more to do with being based in countries with strict environmental regulations than it does with market forces.
That's not a data type problem; it's being too stupid to format the output properly.
Seriously.
At most of the places I have worked, the majority of the developers had degrees in other fields. Oddly or perhaps not so oddly, the largest chunk were English majors.
One of the things I have noticed about career discussions on Slashdot is that they bear little or no resemblance to the real world, at least as I have experienced it. If anything, they are centered exclusively around the very highest tiers of corporate IT in Silicon Valley, which represents a vanishingly small percentage of the millions of software development jobs out there. It's actually a hugely varied field.
He also claims that a kernel would only be a few kilobytes large!
I've seen sub-1k kernels for FORTH systems before. The question is, how much functionality do you want to wrap into that kernel? More capable kernels would, of course, be correspondingly larger.
That said, stack computing and languages like FORTH have long been underrated. Depending on the application, the combination of stack computers and postfix languages can be quite powerful.
I see this a lot, too: asserting that computers are useful to students without actually providing a single concrete example of a way in which they actually are useful. I didn't start out cynical about computers in education; I spent years working in education, promoting the use of computers, and frankly didn't see many worthwhile results, with the possible exception of training a bunch of kids in the use of office software. If you have some experiences in this area to relate, I'd love to hear them.
Studies need to be done to determine if those laptops actually help (or perhaps hinder) learning in these schools.
No kidding. I've watched school districts in the US spend insane amounts of money on computer technology on the basis of blind faith that computers will automagically improve the quality and effectiveness of education. Even if most such programs were not sabotaged from the start by failing to allocate funds to actually train teachers to use them, there is seldom if ever any effort to measure results.
(To be fair, while I was working for a school district, I saw some really creative uses of computers, but these were a) the exception, and b) still not very good uses of money compared to other things that it could have been spent on.)
The other problem that is not often considered at the outset is the maintenance cost. A school district full of computers needs a full-time support staff, which takes away money that could have gone to hiring new teachers and reducing class sizes, and it also requires regular replacement. One-third of the IT budget for the district I worked in was devoted to replacing obsolete machines.
Surprisingly, the best use I saw for computers was reducing the amount of time it took teachers and staff to take attendance and collate grades. That actually did some good because teachers had more time to teach.
All in all, I'm a little confused as to the exact value this release brings, other than some better support for M$ based content environments.
It is indeed vague, and since their site is thoroughly slashdotted right now, it will remain so if and until I remember to check it out later.
Support for MS document formats is, however, a pretty big deal. If I had a dollar for every time an OSS solution was rejected in my workplace because it didn't support MS docs, I'd have enough money to buy a legitimate copy of Windows XP. Some people regard playing nice with MS software to be some kind of impurity or treason, but as a practical matter, it provides for easy inroads to business environments.