It depends on how we define "transparent". If you set up the cron job yourself then it's not really transparent. Strictly speaking, I don't think Apple is suggesting that they will secretly set up silent background updates without providing an opt-in as well as history reporting either.
All this reasoning misses a key point. If Microsoft releases patches on a very frequent basis, IT departments aren't necessarily going to patch their infrastructures (remember we're talking potentially about tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes) with the same cadence. So in many cases those infrastructures are going to lag behind the current patch level.
But once a patch is made available, it provides an opportunity to reverse engineer the patch to determine what the defect was. This gives hackers the opportunity to devise attacks that leverage the vulnerability.
So you see what happens: if Microsoft releases too frequently it creates a large window of opportunity for infrastructures to remain unpatched and therefore vulnerable to exploits.
Microsoft chose a monthly release strategy as a balance between too often and not often enough. It's not perfect but the alternative is far less desirable.
I also recall doing Google searches when I first started running Vista a couple of months ago. Even the Google Toolbar works.
Don't know if it's FUD or PEBCAK or a legitimate glitch with the original poster.
Well sure, there's nothing wrong with sharpening your pencil. Munich pointed out that they could get a better solution elsewhere, and Microsoft discounted the deal. But at the end of the day the open-source solution was more expensive than the Microsoft solution, mostly due to the immense cut the consulting companies will be taking.
And whether or not you personally would get a better deal is beside the point. When the original story broke one of the key points made repeatedly of the effort was to save money - "free as in beer" and all that sort of thing. But that turns out not to be the case.
So why proceed? I would suspect at this point that the project has little to do with economics and much to do with the ongoing battle between the EU and American-based Microsoft. I think the new solution will be made to work - no matter what the cost.
Conversely, I'm sure Microsoft HATES lines like these.
Well, not when it takes this long and when it costs this much. From the article:
After a decision was made in 2003 to migrate to Linux
If anything, this project demonstrates that open-source isn't a magic silver bullet solution to everyone's problems. It should also be noted that the final Microsoft solution was actually less expensive than the open-source one, so one cannot look to cost as a compelling factor for switch. This article - http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-29-linux -munich-choose_x.htm - provides a few more details.
I think out of all of those reasons it is d) is the one making more than 90% of the impact on oracle's business.
Gosh, I'll say - if it in fact costs that much. Oops, it rarely does - a quick check of Oracle's web site could have refuted the original claim.
Most companies are starting to realize that they don't need the 5 million features that oracle offers (and charges for).
It's fascinating to see this line of reasoning. I have two counterpoints:
1) Have you noticed that MySQL is striving to include more and more of those seemingly unecessary features with each new release? So as MySQL approaches more and more of the functionality of an Oracle or a SQL Server, will you start to fault it as well? Will you then look towards the next underdog relational database solution that only implements a few features?
2) The fact that a single customer may not need all the features of a product should not be translated to mean that the product has "too many features". A person that extrapolates the scope of their own personal use of a product on the entire population is a little narrow-minded. A thousand different users might each only use a small subset of a tool's functions - but each could use different subsets. Furthermore, a customer that might not need a feature today might in fact need it tomorrow; not having the foresight to realize that could be rather expensive if the alternative is switching from product to product as each new feature requirement rears its ugly head.
I was blessed with a lab full of Apple ][+ linked to a Corvus Constellation 10MB hard drive in 9th grade. My first computer of note was a ][+ clone, called a Linden Series III that had both 6502 and Z/80 processors on board so you could boot Apple DOS or CP/M (the latter of which I never actually really used, but was cool nonetheless).
I was an Apple shill of the highest order - the other competitors (Commodore, Atari, TRS) were in my opinion junky machines good only for games.
Ah, the memories of Choplifter and SkyFox, of Locksmith and Bag Of Tricks, of getting an 80-column card, of making my first NMI card...
Well said, and thank you very much for linking to the actual research paper. Having skimmed it, I believe there is at least one serious flaw in the premises for their setup decisions: From the paper. They mention that they used Firefox 1.0.6, and also the following:
We analyzed two different browser configurations, both based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) version 6.0, running on Windows XP without either SP1 or SP2 installed. We deliberately chose to use unpatched versions of XP, since the majority of existing exploits attack vulnerabilities in such older system configurations. In addition, most (but not all) newly found exploits affect both patched
and unpatched systems.
Firefox 1.0.6 was released July 2005. Internet Explorer 6.0 was released August 2001. This translates into a four and a half year delta between the two products. This hardly appears to be a fair comparison of the two browsers; according to the entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Cookies_Plac eholder#Release_history), Firefox didn't even exist in any form prior to late 2002.
Furthermore, their assertion that "most (but not all) newly found exploits affect both patched and unpatched systems" raises the question as to why they simply didn't use a more contemporary version of IE, at least one patched and up-to-date circa the July 2005 Firefox 1.0.6 release.
Perhaps I've misinterpreted the data, or in skimming the paper overlooked relevant supporting information for their decisions. But on the surface of it appears to me that they deliberately set up the experiment in a rather biased way. Whether this is sensationalism intended to generate more traffic and publicity I don't know, but it doesn't have a very scientific feel to it.
So, I'm an IT consultant and I've worked with Russian customers. The KGB calls up and wants information about my clients. What do I do? Personally, I tell them to go stuff it. Knowing I won't be able to work in Russia ever again.
Part of the problem with these sorts of situations is that people want to imprint foreign custom and law with their own beliefs. If it was a legal requirement for businesses in Russia to provide information to the authorities as part of an ongoing investigation of criminal activity, then you would of course comply. If you don't feel you could do that, then you should have never elected to do business with them in the first place.
Now I want to take another approach. Let me put a different spin on your assertion and see if you feel the same way:
"So, I'm an IT consultant and I've worked with American customers. The NSA calls up and wants information about my clients. What do I do? Personally, I tell them to go stuff it. Knowing I could be branded as supporting terrorism and never seeing light of day again."
Still thinking of denying the authorities?
But that's just me. Yahoo might have a different perspective.
They most certainly do. I'm fairly confident that Yahoo's legal department has cleared the decision as in accordance with Chinese law. And I mean no disrespect when I say I'm also pretty confident that they stood to lose a lot more financially than you would if they were blackballed by the Chinese government. Yahoo can't cloak itself in its own morality when shareholders are at stake, especially if it's one culture's morality being applied against another's.
I'm sorry, but your story doesn't sound quite right to me for a number of reasons:
I had a boss once that refused to allow me to install a Linux-based webserver, and instead poured over $800 into software simply to run IIS.
$800 is the cost of an entire Windows Server 2003 license. But you haven't explained how much the software you were installing cost, or what need it solved. You're also leaving out if you are a Windows shop, and if this application needed to fit into your infrastructure in a particular way.
It took a few weeks to get the software in
What does that mean - "get the software in"? From later in your tale it seems to be an ASP or ASP.NET project (I'm going to guess the latter because it's been available for a couple of years), but I'm a little fuzzy on what you meant. If it's an application problem that's no fault of Windows, just like it would be no fault of a LAMP install if the developer wrote wonky code for that platform.
another week to get it configured
To get what configured? Surely not Windows, IIS and ASP.NET - about thirty or forty minutes of largely unattended installation, add the "application server" role, and you're in business. If you were learning Windows, IIS, ASP.NET and NTFS from absolute scratch it might be possible to stretch it to a week, but what IT department would give a complete newbie responsibility over such a project?
and yet another week to lock it down tight and get the file permissions to run properly.
None of this smells right. What exactly does "lock it down tight" mean? File permissions, by default, are configured to be pretty secure. But if you're talking about an ASP.NET application, file permissions don't matter that much - limit access to system and the ASP.NET worker process (or impersonation if you're going that route) and it's as tight as a drum.
(keep in mind IIS kindly ignores windows file permissions on a fairly random basis, at least from my experience.)
This smells like FUD to me. In your experience? Your "experience" with Windows sounds like "little or no experience", so how do you feel you are even qualified to make such a statement seem substantiated? I haven't ever seen IIS "ignore" file permissions - usually it's a result of misconfiguration between the access levels in IIS and the NTFS permissions on the virtual folder that might make it seem like an error - until you realize where you goofed.
Now that that IT Professional has left to do ASP development elsewhere, I spent 3 days learning how to set up a linux webserver and lock it down, and 1 day actually carrying out what I learned. It has thus far cost us nothing
Wait wait wait, this is the part that really confuses me. If you are implying that you replaced the Windows solution with a Linux one, then the question that leaps to mind first is: how did you port the ASP or ASP.NET application so quickly? ASP.NET applications aren't just a bunch of static web pages - there's actual codebehind running on an ASP.NET server process. Did you get Mono running? Was there a database involved?
Or are you instead suggesting that you ran a default Linux install on some spare hardware to play with it, and took a couple of days to get Apache running? If that's the case then I'd say you're only part of the way there if you're comparing apples to apples - serving static web pages is trivial on IIS or Apache, but getting apps to run takes a bit more effort (although not three weeks).
Understand I'm not accusing you of lying; I just find most of your story difficult to understand given that I've developed IIS/ASP.NET solutions and implemented them in far less time than you've described. If the world truly worked as you say then no one would use Microsoft as a web applications provider.
The rest of your post sounds like you're bitter towards IT professionals (whether they're qualified or not) - perhaps you're on the outside looking in. I'll leave that for others to address.
I have a $20 camera here by my computer. It's made out of plastic and I can throw it pretty damn hard and it won't experience anything more than a couple scratches.:
You can throw it thirty or forty feet? You can roll it like a bowling ball for ten or twenty yards? I really doubt that's true. Web cams aren't well known for their ability to take a lot of abuse. My old Logitech Quickcam Web survived a few minutes in my dishwasher (wrapped in plastic so I could diagnose a problem with the lower spray arm) but I wouldn't be too happy about dropping it off a table into a concrete floor, let alone pitching it into the air; the EyeBall can apparently survive a two-story drop.
Now granted, it's wired to my computer by a 20 foot cable, but making it wireless wouldn't take a lot of money. I'd say $50 ish tops.:
How do you know this? Could you perhaps describe the inventory of hardware required to make a wireless interface that's also shock resistant the point of being throwable? And compact enough to fit with the power supply, optics, logic and wi-fi transceiver into a baseball-sized object?
Note also that this unit has the additional features: it can capture video up to 25 yards away, with 55 degree horizontal and 41 degree vertical fields of view. It also has near infrared capability, making it useful in nighttime exercises. This would I think add to the cost a little.
I certainly wouldn't want to spend more than $70 for a camera that I would use to throw around corners that might not even end up pointing in the right direction.:
Please read the article. It will assume an upright position, and it's capable of 360 degree rotation (you can see the seam near the bottom of the device). It even has a simple feature where the picture can be reversed vertically if it lands upside down and doesn't right itself.
And with these new suggested cameras, you still have to view the output from said camera. In order to use this camera you have to:
- Throw camera
- Look at screen displaying camera output
- Put away the screen displaying camera output
- Go around corner.
Between steps 2 and 4 there is a huge amount of time that people could use to change their position, thus negating effects of having a camera at all.
Did you consider the possibility that it doesn't have to be thrown all the time? You could put it on a pole, lower it on a line, even attach it to a small robot for transport into the site. Consider also the possibility that the same guy throwing the camera isn't the same guy watching the screen. You almost sound like you're considering this as a player in a first person shooter video game, and not real live law enforcement or counter-terror activity. This could easily be used as a last-minute tactical information-gathering device, in preparation for a final assault: throw or roll the thing for a last check to determine target disposition before you attack. Or it can be used quietly for longer periods of reconnaissance.
This is a pretty nifty package.
"I disagree, why should the coder HAVE to do work arounds/fixes just to get his site to work with non standards compliant browsers?"
Because the coder typically doesn't have the last say in such matters. It is up to the customer requesting the web site to decide what will be supported and how. Your militant stance would not be well received, seeing as you would be asking them to alienate upwards of 85% of their own possible customer base.
If you're developing for your own pleasure and don't care who uses your site, then it's of course a different scenario. But if the coder makes his livelihood off what he constructs and wants to eat and make car payments, then snapping to his customer's requirements is probably a safer bet.
This is just off the top of my head, and the details might be a little off:
High frequency radio waves don't travel well underwater, either from above or within the medium. Submarines typically trail very long antenna wires to retrieve simple codegroup messages via ELF (Extremely Low Frequency, only a few hertz but with a wavelength hundreds of km long) radio, which can penetrate to the service depth of any current submarine. The US Navy maintains (or used to maintain, I don't know for sure) two large arrays in Wisconsin and I think Michigan to communicate with their submarine fleet around the world. The one-way message (three or four characters) can often tell them to surface to receive a more detailed message; usually it's just translated to a pre-determined set of instructions so the submarine can stay deep.
A submarine has radio antennas in its sonar mast for normal HF communications when it's near the surface (say less than sixty feet), and they can deploy things like antenna buoys to stay a bit deeper.
Most ROVs, for this reason, require a tether for communications. It's usually either electrical wire, but some of the newer ones use fibre optics to transmit more bandwidth (for video feeds and manipulator controls, for example).
Agreed. Go all the way back to Neuromancer, and you can find a veritable host of buzzwords and the seeds of remixed sci-fi used today. Heck, Gibson is credited with coining the term "cyberspace", as well as fleshing out the concept of a "matrix" of computers creating a world of virtual reality.
P.S. The overuse of the cliche "throw up in my mouth" is getting ridiculously irritating - why people think this is catchy bewilders me to no end.
I don't think he's endorsing spaghetti code. His whole statement was:
"People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said. "In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. It's easy-to-build 'spaghetti' code."
Perhaps using "spaghetti code" was a poor choice - it sounds like he meant poorly designed and constructed code in general. I think he's saying that Ajax requires more experienced development skills (and hopefully more experienced and therefore competent developers), which will result in an increased likelihood of well-structured code. This would differ from a lot of the poorly-written Javascript out there.
Seriously, if you're graduating with a M Comp Sci, surely you've thought about what you want to do and had some specific targets in mind. Asking for advice on Slashdot seems a little absurd. But I will say one thing: if you wanted to just get into programming, you just wasted five or six years.
With your background and education, you might want to look towards something like research and development - things like user interface design or AI or something that will draw upon talents you have already demonstrated. Heck, I was only kidding when I mentioned Steve Jobs - check out companies like Apple, or Microsoft or Google, all of which are on the leading edge of many different technologies. This is not a dig against Open Source, by the way: I'm just not as familiar with where the opportunities and money are in that realm. Perhaps someone else can help out here.
If you truly want to become a senior developer, you will have to be content to grind through a few lower-tier jobs (for hopefully only a short while) until you develop some practical experience and demonstrate your capabilities.
Did you have any particular major or speciality? Perhaps you could indicate it - it would help towards determining a direction.
I'm not sure if I understand your use of the word "barely". IE supports PNG as per the W3C recommendation, including binary transparency. IE doesn't support optional alpha channel transparency:
"Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency."
While it would be nice if they supported the optional features, it's actually the developers who continue to use alpha channel transparency PNG that are deviating from the W3C recommendation.
If I'm not mistaken, DARPA stipulates in the rules that the course is easily navigable by a person with a light-duty 4x4 pickup or SUV. Twenty miles an hour over the indicated types of terrain is no problem for most humans with basic driving skills. It's just really tough to make software do the same thing. AI, despite recent progress, really has a long way to go; we're not much past being able to emulate the performance of a common beetle.
Hell, I'm having a tough time making my Lego RIS keep the floor clean;)
Good points. It's incredibly hard to make truly self-guiding vehicles, especially land-based ones where you have far more obstacles to avoid than air or sea. It's a combination of sensor input and AI.
To expand on this: read up on the DARPA Grand Challenge. The goal is to design and build a completely autonomous vehicle capable of navigating various kinds of terrain and obstables over long distances, using only a set of waypoint coordinates given to each team two hours prior to the competition. DARPA hopes to bootstrap the research into autonomous military vehicles, starting with logistics and supply and working up to battlefield weapons. GPS is permitted, but no remote control whatsoever (aside from a remote kill installed by DARPA officials), and you only have a corridor a few yards wide for maneuvering.
Last year, the course was out in Nevada, around 160 miles in length and with a time limit of 10 hours - including obstable navigation, you would expect an average speed of around 20 miles per hour. Out of the bunch of universities and companies that submitted various entries, the farthest anyone made it was only a few (ie, less than 10) miles; most of them stopped or died within sight of the starting line. It's that tough.
This year promises to show vast improvement - some of the demo videos show pretty decent speeds - but the proof is in the pudding.
P.S. Most of that was recalled from memory - I apologize for any errors of fact.
If this was true, then how come the motor that turns the hard drive spindle doesn't corrupt the data? It's far closer than a cooling fan and works at up to 10,000 RPM depending on the drive.
Hmmm. I had two choices for a quick response but couldn't decide on which one to pick, so I'll submit both of them:
1) If you paid the proverbial $129 Apple tax for each payable point release between 10.0 and 10.4 and also paid the rather high premium for being only able to run it on Apple hardware, then I would certainly *hope* that it runs a bit quicker each time.
2) There is absolutely no substantiation to the comment that Windows XP hasn become "slower" over time. It's convenient FUD from the uneducated, nothing more.
Pick whichever one you feel is more appropriate to you, and enjoy!
The typical Slashdot ABMer double standard is quite funny: if Microsoft hires someone away from another company, it's not that a big deal and it won't really benefit them. If, however, another company hires someone away from Microsoft, it's a major coup and creates a frenzy that the end of their dominance is nigh upon us.
Ya gotta love hypocrisy.
It's sort of funny to watch how some people will compromise their morals just a little bit further as open-source projects become increasingly complex and start to suffer the same pitfalls as their closed-source brethren. The first slide occurred when Firefox security holes went unpatched for weeks. Now I see that at least one person is attempting to justify this latest concern by comparing Firefox to IE - how ironic considering the former is considered to be a completely different alternative to the latter.
The fact of the matter is that developers - open-source or closed-source - would largely prefer to work on writing new code rather than maintaining old code (especially bug fixes). New code is trailblazing and ego-stroking and cool, while bug fixes don't have nearly the same sexiness. Once a project is deployed, enthusiasm for it tends to fall away.
Now, with closed-source commercial projects you're paying people to maintain the code throughout its whole life cycle, so you can ensure that the software is enhanced and fixed as is appropriate for your business needs. People will grumble and try to squirm out of it, but if their paychecks rely on getting bug fixes and small enhancements done they can be forced to finish the work. But if you're volunteering your time to a project freely you have far more flexibility to pick and choose what you work on. I think the enthusiasm for getting 1.0.1 out the door is far thinner and weaker than the excitement generated on the march towards 1.0. This is what I perceive to be the Achilles heel of most large-scale open-source projects that don't at least have some sort of corporate interest (and therefore backing) to ensure forward progress will be continued.
This isn't an open-source bash, by the way - I have great respect for people who donate their time freely to these sorts of efforts, and open-source has done some pretty amazing things for software development.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on how we define "transparent". If you set up the cron job yourself then it's not really transparent. Strictly speaking, I don't think Apple is suggesting that they will secretly set up silent background updates without providing an opt-in as well as history reporting either.
All this reasoning misses a key point. If Microsoft releases patches on a very frequent basis, IT departments aren't necessarily going to patch their infrastructures (remember we're talking potentially about tens or even hundreds of thousands of nodes) with the same cadence. So in many cases those infrastructures are going to lag behind the current patch level.
But once a patch is made available, it provides an opportunity to reverse engineer the patch to determine what the defect was. This gives hackers the opportunity to devise attacks that leverage the vulnerability.
So you see what happens: if Microsoft releases too frequently it creates a large window of opportunity for infrastructures to remain unpatched and therefore vulnerable to exploits.
Microsoft chose a monthly release strategy as a balance between too often and not often enough. It's not perfect but the alternative is far less desirable.
I also recall doing Google searches when I first started running Vista a couple of months ago. Even the Google Toolbar works. Don't know if it's FUD or PEBCAK or a legitimate glitch with the original poster.
Well sure, there's nothing wrong with sharpening your pencil. Munich pointed out that they could get a better solution elsewhere, and Microsoft discounted the deal. But at the end of the day the open-source solution was more expensive than the Microsoft solution, mostly due to the immense cut the consulting companies will be taking.
And whether or not you personally would get a better deal is beside the point. When the original story broke one of the key points made repeatedly of the effort was to save money - "free as in beer" and all that sort of thing. But that turns out not to be the case.
So why proceed? I would suspect at this point that the project has little to do with economics and much to do with the ongoing battle between the EU and American-based Microsoft. I think the new solution will be made to work - no matter what the cost.
Conversely, I'm sure Microsoft HATES lines like these.
x -munich-choose_x.htm - provides a few more details.
Well, not when it takes this long and when it costs this much. From the article:
After a decision was made in 2003 to migrate to Linux
If anything, this project demonstrates that open-source isn't a magic silver bullet solution to everyone's problems. It should also be noted that the final Microsoft solution was actually less expensive than the open-source one, so one cannot look to cost as a compelling factor for switch. This article - http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-29-linu
I think out of all of those reasons it is d) is the one making more than 90% of the impact on oracle's business.
Gosh, I'll say - if it in fact costs that much. Oops, it rarely does - a quick check of Oracle's web site could have refuted the original claim.
Most companies are starting to realize that they don't need the 5 million features that oracle offers (and charges for).
It's fascinating to see this line of reasoning. I have two counterpoints:
1) Have you noticed that MySQL is striving to include more and more of those seemingly unecessary features with each new release? So as MySQL approaches more and more of the functionality of an Oracle or a SQL Server, will you start to fault it as well? Will you then look towards the next underdog relational database solution that only implements a few features?
2) The fact that a single customer may not need all the features of a product should not be translated to mean that the product has "too many features". A person that extrapolates the scope of their own personal use of a product on the entire population is a little narrow-minded. A thousand different users might each only use a small subset of a tool's functions - but each could use different subsets. Furthermore, a customer that might not need a feature today might in fact need it tomorrow; not having the foresight to realize that could be rather expensive if the alternative is switching from product to product as each new feature requirement rears its ugly head.
I was blessed with a lab full of Apple ][+ linked to a Corvus Constellation 10MB hard drive in 9th grade. My first computer of note was a ][+ clone, called a Linden Series III that had both 6502 and Z/80 processors on board so you could boot Apple DOS or CP/M (the latter of which I never actually really used, but was cool nonetheless).
I was an Apple shill of the highest order - the other competitors (Commodore, Atari, TRS) were in my opinion junky machines good only for games.
Ah, the memories of Choplifter and SkyFox, of Locksmith and Bag Of Tricks, of getting an 80-column card, of making my first NMI card...
Well said, and thank you very much for linking to the actual research paper. Having skimmed it, I believe there is at least one serious flaw in the premises for their setup decisions: From the paper. They mention that they used Firefox 1.0.6, and also the following:
c eholder#Release_history), Firefox didn't even exist in any form prior to late 2002.
We analyzed two different browser configurations, both based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) version 6.0, running on Windows XP without either SP1 or SP2 installed. We deliberately chose to use unpatched versions of XP, since the majority of existing exploits attack vulnerabilities in such older system configurations. In addition, most (but not all) newly found exploits affect both patched and unpatched systems.
Firefox 1.0.6 was released July 2005. Internet Explorer 6.0 was released August 2001. This translates into a four and a half year delta between the two products. This hardly appears to be a fair comparison of the two browsers; according to the entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Cookies_Pla
Furthermore, their assertion that "most (but not all) newly found exploits affect both patched and unpatched systems" raises the question as to why they simply didn't use a more contemporary version of IE, at least one patched and up-to-date circa the July 2005 Firefox 1.0.6 release.
Perhaps I've misinterpreted the data, or in skimming the paper overlooked relevant supporting information for their decisions. But on the surface of it appears to me that they deliberately set up the experiment in a rather biased way. Whether this is sensationalism intended to generate more traffic and publicity I don't know, but it doesn't have a very scientific feel to it.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
;)
That's true, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility that every complex problem also has a solution that is simple, neat and right.
So, I'm an IT consultant and I've worked with Russian customers. The KGB calls up and wants information about my clients. What do I do? Personally, I tell them to go stuff it. Knowing I won't be able to work in Russia ever again.
Part of the problem with these sorts of situations is that people want to imprint foreign custom and law with their own beliefs. If it was a legal requirement for businesses in Russia to provide information to the authorities as part of an ongoing investigation of criminal activity, then you would of course comply. If you don't feel you could do that, then you should have never elected to do business with them in the first place.
Now I want to take another approach. Let me put a different spin on your assertion and see if you feel the same way:
"So, I'm an IT consultant and I've worked with American customers. The NSA calls up and wants information about my clients. What do I do? Personally, I tell them to go stuff it. Knowing I could be branded as supporting terrorism and never seeing light of day again."
Still thinking of denying the authorities?
But that's just me. Yahoo might have a different perspective.
They most certainly do. I'm fairly confident that Yahoo's legal department has cleared the decision as in accordance with Chinese law. And I mean no disrespect when I say I'm also pretty confident that they stood to lose a lot more financially than you would if they were blackballed by the Chinese government. Yahoo can't cloak itself in its own morality when shareholders are at stake, especially if it's one culture's morality being applied against another's.
I'm sorry, but your story doesn't sound quite right to me for a number of reasons:
I had a boss once that refused to allow me to install a Linux-based webserver, and instead poured over $800 into software simply to run IIS.
$800 is the cost of an entire Windows Server 2003 license. But you haven't explained how much the software you were installing cost, or what need it solved. You're also leaving out if you are a Windows shop, and if this application needed to fit into your infrastructure in a particular way.
It took a few weeks to get the software in
What does that mean - "get the software in"? From later in your tale it seems to be an ASP or ASP.NET project (I'm going to guess the latter because it's been available for a couple of years), but I'm a little fuzzy on what you meant. If it's an application problem that's no fault of Windows, just like it would be no fault of a LAMP install if the developer wrote wonky code for that platform.
another week to get it configured
To get what configured? Surely not Windows, IIS and ASP.NET - about thirty or forty minutes of largely unattended installation, add the "application server" role, and you're in business. If you were learning Windows, IIS, ASP.NET and NTFS from absolute scratch it might be possible to stretch it to a week, but what IT department would give a complete newbie responsibility over such a project?
and yet another week to lock it down tight and get the file permissions to run properly.
None of this smells right. What exactly does "lock it down tight" mean? File permissions, by default, are configured to be pretty secure. But if you're talking about an ASP.NET application, file permissions don't matter that much - limit access to system and the ASP.NET worker process (or impersonation if you're going that route) and it's as tight as a drum.
(keep in mind IIS kindly ignores windows file permissions on a fairly random basis, at least from my experience.)
This smells like FUD to me. In your experience? Your "experience" with Windows sounds like "little or no experience", so how do you feel you are even qualified to make such a statement seem substantiated? I haven't ever seen IIS "ignore" file permissions - usually it's a result of misconfiguration between the access levels in IIS and the NTFS permissions on the virtual folder that might make it seem like an error - until you realize where you goofed.
Now that that IT Professional has left to do ASP development elsewhere, I spent 3 days learning how to set up a linux webserver and lock it down, and 1 day actually carrying out what I learned. It has thus far cost us nothing
Wait wait wait, this is the part that really confuses me. If you are implying that you replaced the Windows solution with a Linux one, then the question that leaps to mind first is: how did you port the ASP or ASP.NET application so quickly? ASP.NET applications aren't just a bunch of static web pages - there's actual codebehind running on an ASP.NET server process. Did you get Mono running? Was there a database involved?
Or are you instead suggesting that you ran a default Linux install on some spare hardware to play with it, and took a couple of days to get Apache running? If that's the case then I'd say you're only part of the way there if you're comparing apples to apples - serving static web pages is trivial on IIS or Apache, but getting apps to run takes a bit more effort (although not three weeks).
Understand I'm not accusing you of lying; I just find most of your story difficult to understand given that I've developed IIS/ASP.NET solutions and implemented them in far less time than you've described. If the world truly worked as you say then no one would use Microsoft as a web applications provider.
The rest of your post sounds like you're bitter towards IT professionals (whether they're qualified or not) - perhaps you're on the outside looking in. I'll leave that for others to address.
I have a $20 camera here by my computer. It's made out of plastic and I can throw it pretty damn hard and it won't experience anything more than a couple scratches.:
You can throw it thirty or forty feet? You can roll it like a bowling ball for ten or twenty yards? I really doubt that's true. Web cams aren't well known for their ability to take a lot of abuse. My old Logitech Quickcam Web survived a few minutes in my dishwasher (wrapped in plastic so I could diagnose a problem with the lower spray arm) but I wouldn't be too happy about dropping it off a table into a concrete floor, let alone pitching it into the air; the EyeBall can apparently survive a two-story drop.
Now granted, it's wired to my computer by a 20 foot cable, but making it wireless wouldn't take a lot of money. I'd say $50 ish tops.:
How do you know this? Could you perhaps describe the inventory of hardware required to make a wireless interface that's also shock resistant the point of being throwable? And compact enough to fit with the power supply, optics, logic and wi-fi transceiver into a baseball-sized object?
Note also that this unit has the additional features: it can capture video up to 25 yards away, with 55 degree horizontal and 41 degree vertical fields of view. It also has near infrared capability, making it useful in nighttime exercises. This would I think add to the cost a little.
I certainly wouldn't want to spend more than $70 for a camera that I would use to throw around corners that might not even end up pointing in the right direction.:
Please read the article. It will assume an upright position, and it's capable of 360 degree rotation (you can see the seam near the bottom of the device). It even has a simple feature where the picture can be reversed vertically if it lands upside down and doesn't right itself.
And with these new suggested cameras, you still have to view the output from said camera. In order to use this camera you have to: - Throw camera - Look at screen displaying camera output - Put away the screen displaying camera output - Go around corner. Between steps 2 and 4 there is a huge amount of time that people could use to change their position, thus negating effects of having a camera at all.
Did you consider the possibility that it doesn't have to be thrown all the time? You could put it on a pole, lower it on a line, even attach it to a small robot for transport into the site. Consider also the possibility that the same guy throwing the camera isn't the same guy watching the screen. You almost sound like you're considering this as a player in a first person shooter video game, and not real live law enforcement or counter-terror activity. This could easily be used as a last-minute tactical information-gathering device, in preparation for a final assault: throw or roll the thing for a last check to determine target disposition before you attack. Or it can be used quietly for longer periods of reconnaissance. This is a pretty nifty package.
"I disagree, why should the coder HAVE to do work arounds/fixes just to get his site to work with non standards compliant browsers?"
Because the coder typically doesn't have the last say in such matters. It is up to the customer requesting the web site to decide what will be supported and how. Your militant stance would not be well received, seeing as you would be asking them to alienate upwards of 85% of their own possible customer base.
If you're developing for your own pleasure and don't care who uses your site, then it's of course a different scenario. But if the coder makes his livelihood off what he constructs and wants to eat and make car payments, then snapping to his customer's requirements is probably a safer bet.
This is just off the top of my head, and the details might be a little off:
High frequency radio waves don't travel well underwater, either from above or within the medium. Submarines typically trail very long antenna wires to retrieve simple codegroup messages via ELF (Extremely Low Frequency, only a few hertz but with a wavelength hundreds of km long) radio, which can penetrate to the service depth of any current submarine. The US Navy maintains (or used to maintain, I don't know for sure) two large arrays in Wisconsin and I think Michigan to communicate with their submarine fleet around the world. The one-way message (three or four characters) can often tell them to surface to receive a more detailed message; usually it's just translated to a pre-determined set of instructions so the submarine can stay deep.
A submarine has radio antennas in its sonar mast for normal HF communications when it's near the surface (say less than sixty feet), and they can deploy things like antenna buoys to stay a bit deeper.
Most ROVs, for this reason, require a tether for communications. It's usually either electrical wire, but some of the newer ones use fibre optics to transmit more bandwidth (for video feeds and manipulator controls, for example).
Agreed. Go all the way back to Neuromancer, and you can find a veritable host of buzzwords and the seeds of remixed sci-fi used today. Heck, Gibson is credited with coining the term "cyberspace", as well as fleshing out the concept of a "matrix" of computers creating a world of virtual reality.
P.S. The overuse of the cliche "throw up in my mouth" is getting ridiculously irritating - why people think this is catchy bewilders me to no end.
I don't think he's endorsing spaghetti code. His whole statement was:
"People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said. "In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. It's easy-to-build 'spaghetti' code."
Perhaps using "spaghetti code" was a poor choice - it sounds like he meant poorly designed and constructed code in general. I think he's saying that Ajax requires more experienced development skills (and hopefully more experienced and therefore competent developers), which will result in an increased likelihood of well-structured code. This would differ from a lot of the poorly-written Javascript out there.
I think.
...Steve Jobs, of course ;)
Seriously, if you're graduating with a M Comp Sci, surely you've thought about what you want to do and had some specific targets in mind. Asking for advice on Slashdot seems a little absurd. But I will say one thing: if you wanted to just get into programming, you just wasted five or six years.
With your background and education, you might want to look towards something like research and development - things like user interface design or AI or something that will draw upon talents you have already demonstrated. Heck, I was only kidding when I mentioned Steve Jobs - check out companies like Apple, or Microsoft or Google, all of which are on the leading edge of many different technologies. This is not a dig against Open Source, by the way: I'm just not as familiar with where the opportunities and money are in that realm. Perhaps someone else can help out here.
If you truly want to become a senior developer, you will have to be content to grind through a few lower-tier jobs (for hopefully only a short while) until you develop some practical experience and demonstrate your capabilities.
Did you have any particular major or speciality? Perhaps you could indicate it - it would help towards determining a direction.
I'm not sure if I understand your use of the word "barely". IE supports PNG as per the W3C recommendation, including binary transparency. IE doesn't support optional alpha channel transparency:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/
From the first paragraph:
"Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency."
While it would be nice if they supported the optional features, it's actually the developers who continue to use alpha channel transparency PNG that are deviating from the W3C recommendation.
If I'm not mistaken, DARPA stipulates in the rules that the course is easily navigable by a person with a light-duty 4x4 pickup or SUV. Twenty miles an hour over the indicated types of terrain is no problem for most humans with basic driving skills. It's just really tough to make software do the same thing. AI, despite recent progress, really has a long way to go; we're not much past being able to emulate the performance of a common beetle.
;)
Hell, I'm having a tough time making my Lego RIS keep the floor clean
Good points. It's incredibly hard to make truly self-guiding vehicles, especially land-based ones where you have far more obstacles to avoid than air or sea. It's a combination of sensor input and AI.
To expand on this: read up on the DARPA Grand Challenge. The goal is to design and build a completely autonomous vehicle capable of navigating various kinds of terrain and obstables over long distances, using only a set of waypoint coordinates given to each team two hours prior to the competition. DARPA hopes to bootstrap the research into autonomous military vehicles, starting with logistics and supply and working up to battlefield weapons. GPS is permitted, but no remote control whatsoever (aside from a remote kill installed by DARPA officials), and you only have a corridor a few yards wide for maneuvering.
Last year, the course was out in Nevada, around 160 miles in length and with a time limit of 10 hours - including obstable navigation, you would expect an average speed of around 20 miles per hour. Out of the bunch of universities and companies that submitted various entries, the farthest anyone made it was only a few (ie, less than 10) miles; most of them stopped or died within sight of the starting line. It's that tough.
This year promises to show vast improvement - some of the demo videos show pretty decent speeds - but the proof is in the pudding.
P.S. Most of that was recalled from memory - I apologize for any errors of fact.
If this was true, then how come the motor that turns the hard drive spindle doesn't corrupt the data? It's far closer than a cooling fan and works at up to 10,000 RPM depending on the drive.
Hmmm. I had two choices for a quick response but couldn't decide on which one to pick, so I'll submit both of them:
1) If you paid the proverbial $129 Apple tax for each payable point release between 10.0 and 10.4 and also paid the rather high premium for being only able to run it on Apple hardware, then I would certainly *hope* that it runs a bit quicker each time.
2) There is absolutely no substantiation to the comment that Windows XP hasn become "slower" over time. It's convenient FUD from the uneducated, nothing more.
Pick whichever one you feel is more appropriate to you, and enjoy!
The typical Slashdot ABMer double standard is quite funny: if Microsoft hires someone away from another company, it's not that a big deal and it won't really benefit them. If, however, another company hires someone away from Microsoft, it's a major coup and creates a frenzy that the end of their dominance is nigh upon us. Ya gotta love hypocrisy.
It's sort of funny to watch how some people will compromise their morals just a little bit further as open-source projects become increasingly complex and start to suffer the same pitfalls as their closed-source brethren. The first slide occurred when Firefox security holes went unpatched for weeks. Now I see that at least one person is attempting to justify this latest concern by comparing Firefox to IE - how ironic considering the former is considered to be a completely different alternative to the latter.
The fact of the matter is that developers - open-source or closed-source - would largely prefer to work on writing new code rather than maintaining old code (especially bug fixes). New code is trailblazing and ego-stroking and cool, while bug fixes don't have nearly the same sexiness. Once a project is deployed, enthusiasm for it tends to fall away.
Now, with closed-source commercial projects you're paying people to maintain the code throughout its whole life cycle, so you can ensure that the software is enhanced and fixed as is appropriate for your business needs. People will grumble and try to squirm out of it, but if their paychecks rely on getting bug fixes and small enhancements done they can be forced to finish the work. But if you're volunteering your time to a project freely you have far more flexibility to pick and choose what you work on. I think the enthusiasm for getting 1.0.1 out the door is far thinner and weaker than the excitement generated on the march towards 1.0. This is what I perceive to be the Achilles heel of most large-scale open-source projects that don't at least have some sort of corporate interest (and therefore backing) to ensure forward progress will be continued.
This isn't an open-source bash, by the way - I have great respect for people who donate their time freely to these sorts of efforts, and open-source has done some pretty amazing things for software development.