Right, but that happened once and there was a major outcry.
In contrast, such events happen daily in the US, only you have to switch Brazilian with Mexican, or African-American and it barely even makes the news any more because it's so common there and hence by definition not news.
One negative event in years doesn't compare to the same thing happening daily.
"The presence of SAS men and Israeli commandos in Westgate, at the time of the attack is remarkable."
What's remarkable about it? Kenya is an ex-British colony with extremely close ties still, so much so that the British basically have a permanent training presence there both training the Kenyans and using Kenya's terrain for training of British forces in African environments. At any moment in time there will be SAS in Kenya training or off-duty between training, it's just a major training nation for British forces and the Kenyan government gets a lot of British money and training as payment for that in return.
Israeli presence is also unsurprising given that Kenya is Israel's biggest ally in Africa and that they have a mutual security treaty that allows them to call on each other for support in times of attack. Given that Israel is only a relatively short flight away it's not unsurprising in the slightest that Kenya would call in Israeli support when Israel's forces are pretty effective in that kind of environment.
What is truly surprising is the fact that countries like Algeria didn't accept any foreign help when one of their refineries were taken over. In fact, that was pretty fucking stupid. Much in the same way that Russia put pride in the way of asking for assistance at Beslan and so forth.
Kenya did the rational thing - it put aside nationalist pride and asked the best in the business that were available at the time to come and help with a major incident and it's a testament to that rationality that it seems pretty much no more civilians died once those forces (plus reportedly Delta or the Seals) showed up. Allowing in a dream team of the who's who of the world's best special forces was the smartest thing the Kenyans did. Things could've turned out even worse again if they hadn't.
The same applies to privacy though, the US signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1977 and ratified it in 1992. Article 17 of this document states:
1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
So really, the US does have an obligation not to arbitrarily spy on absolutely everyone's communications. The treaty does not differentiate between Americans and non-Americans.
If the US doesn't want to abide by this treaty then it should pull out of it, but it wont, because it likes beating countries it dislikes over the head with the human rights stick, something it could not do without being laughed at as a non-signatory. The fact is it wants the best of both worlds - it wants the ability to pretend it's all high and mighty, defender of human rights, but it also wants to violate some of the most basic principles of human rights going. Sadly it's a broader problem than this though, reading through the universal declaration of human rights on which the above covenant is based feels more like a checklist of human rights violations the US has carried out ranging from torture, detention without trial, breach of privacy and so on and so forth.
Was an interesting article in The Guardian from Huhne who of course before his fall was right at the highest echelons of government and stated that none of them had any clue anything like prism was happening. He believes only perhaps the home secretaries have known once they got the jobs and spoke to the guys there but kept it quiet because of the illegality of it and no MP wanting to be implicated in something illegal. This explains why numerous home secretaries have said they're against the Interception Modernisation Program until they actually become the home secretary - because they realise they have to push it through to make what the security services already doing legal and hope no one realises they were doing it when it was illegal (as they are currently).
God only knows what would've happened to the £4bn or so they had quoted for it though given that it has already been done and was already there. That's a lot of spare money for something they've already built with their existing budget.
"Russia and Canada are geographically big, but cannot even match the headcounts of a medium sized Indian city / state."
Right yet despite that, Canada, with only 2% the population of India still generates nearly the same amount of economic output which shows how utterly inefficient the Indian workforce is largely due to areas of great poverty and non-existent infrastructure investment (because the government in India would rather launch rockets into space than sort out more glaring issues). To say they are not competition and they depend on immigrants is absurd. So what if they depend on immigrants? What if they allow more immigrants in and can scale their economy accordingly? They'll be way ahead of India with way less people to boot.
"There is no country which can match Chinese hardware / manufacturing base in scale and ambition. There might be niches in certain industries, but overall China is unbeatable."
Well India most definitely could have, but it chose not to.
"India is the software powerhouse. "
No it's not. America is, with European nations following shortly behind. Relative to their size even the tiny Scandinavian and Eastern European nations have better software output per head of population than India.
"Every Indian city and town have billboards shouting words like Java or.NET. The effect of this blanketing should not be overlooked. The world NEED programmers, and India will provide the numbers."
Except as has been known from at least the release of "The mythical man-month" we know that numbers are irrelevant and it's quality that matters which is precisely why India has failed to take off with software like China has with manufacturing. You can't write software by just throwing more and more people at it if those people aren't skilled enough, and therein lies the problem. Underinvestment in India means it can never train those numbers to the degree nations in the West, or even nowadays China or South America can.
"There is no company similar to Infosys, TCS or Wipro anywhere else in this planet."
Actually there are loads, and those are relatively small fry in comparison. Companies like Accenture make as much profit as Wipro and Infosys put together, and that's just one of many. There's no shortage of companies that make a fortune off of gullible managers or bribed public sector workers offering to produce projects that they never actually manage to succesfully deliver on top and on budget. Many companies do this, India doesn't have a monopoly on it, the problem is it is all that India has - it doesn't have any of the more successful or innovative IT companies. The three companies you mention combined don't even make anywhere near as much profit as Google, IBM or Microsoft.
But this raises and even bigger question, if India is the world's software producer as you claim then where are it's indigenous big-name software houses that people see? People have heard of Baidu, Yandex and the obvious ones in the West like Google but few could name anything out of India other than the outsourcing companies you mention that are still smaller than their Western counterparts (who often just subcontract to those smaller Indian companies anyway).
"Bullshit!!! Some of the best positions in the world of software are held by Indians. Look at the number of Indians occupying top spot at Google."
India has 1/5th of the world's population but Indians don't hold 1/5th of the top software jobs in the world, not even close. A few examples of successful Indians at Google is irrelevant in the bigger picture, and arguably even irrelevant at Google if they don't hold 1/5th of top positions. India has a great track record and proud history of producing some great geniuses in the world but it doesn't do so to an extent that mirrors it's percentage of the world population and again this is due to issues with poverty, poor infrastructure and education investment and so forth. So it's okay for you to say, write off Canada and Russia as too small to m
You're just focussing on one incident though, and there have been hundreds over the years. Often Linus is right and is just dealing with an idiot, but sometimes he's not.
But I'm simply reasoning a response to the GP's post as to why people may wish to steer clear of contributing a fix once they've written a paper. If a clique is unnecessarily cruel to anyone, no matter how stupid that person, then that's going to put people off interacting with it directly. As far back as the original Tanenbaum debate he's admitted himself that he could be a bit over the top, but rather than do something about it he's only gotten worse.
I hope you're right that they do evaluate this and do something if necessary, but fundamentally my point is that this may be for the best anyway. I suspect this will work far better than if they'd just published a fix themselves and had to potentially face Linus' defensiveness, particularly as Linus has had to publicly be defensive on this issue already (albeit for valid reasons in that case) such that it's probably not his favourite topic right now and not one he wants to revisit if he can help it.
Or to cut a long story short, the GP asked why they didn't just fix it themselves. I'm offering one possible reason why that may be- that it may just be best to write the paper, avoid the politics and let the kernel developers deal with it amongst themselves. They're understandably a tight knit group, but also one that's highly opinionated, so it probably is best to just hand them your research, walk away, and leave them to it, rather than try and fix it yourself and then argue with them about whether you're a talented enough developer to allow the fix through, whether it's necessary, whether there's a better way of implementing it and so forth - they'll probably be happier figuring all that out amongst themselves if they feel there's a valid concern anyway.
America might even lose a good proportion of it's military too though. Any default would allow host nations to seize US government assets. They'd better hope they've got no carriers docked in ports of allied nations with a full compliment of F-35s on board and half the crew on shore leave if it were to happen. I imagine there's a whole host of nations that would be grateful for such a prize to seize to pay for a US debt default.
And like most bailiffs, nation states often tend to undervalue these things and seize a little more in practice than they're owed - a $10bn carrier for a $6bn debt for example.
India just isn't as successful as China. It tried too hard to skip the whole industrial revolution thing and went straight for services and then cocked it up.
China had it right, go through it's own industrial revolution and become a manufacturing powerhouse, and as you grow that then try and focus more towards services which is what it's attempting now/next.
India just ended up making a complete hash up of services with so many companies now realising what an awful mistake outsourcing software development, call centres, finance and HR and so forth to there actually was.
That's why whilst China has flown into the spot of second largest economy, India is still stuck barely hanging on to it's top 10 spot with Russia and Canada biting at it's heels, all this despite the fact that India has just as much access to natural resources as China, is similarly situated globally, had better relationships with important export destinations, and and has a similar population size at 1.2 billion.
There was a time when people were looking at India as the next big thing alongside, or possibly even ahead of China. Now the world has turned it's attention more to the likes of Brazil alongside China.
India and China aren't that interchangeable, America couldn't just drop China tomorrow and replace it with India, as India has lost many years in failing to optimise itself to the demands of the global economy in the way China did.
The fact is that China is just more successful than India. China got it right. If America switches it's focus to India, it wont be China that loses out because India has neither the manufacturing capacity nor infrastructure to support it to meet US demand that China has built up precisely because of India's premature misadventure into services (even in Finance where for a while India was pipped to be a top 3 financial centre it's fallen far for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index). That means the US will be unable to acquire the products it demands whilst everyone else gladly takes them off China's hands.
As a semi-related aside, I'm intrigued. Where is the NSA finding all these uber-mathematicians and developers to carry out some of the feats it's supposedly carrying out?
I've often noticed the mindset of some of the smartest people in society is often at odds with that blind patriotism required to agree with the NSA's goals of total surveillance as a good idea. It's not like this is World War II where the likes of Turing were happy to go breaking cryptography and stuff because they were fighting the Nazis that were genuinely evil and a threat to their existence. Even during the Cold War there was a bit more of a threat so as to convince smart people to do their bit for the security services, but now? I just think that if you're smart enough to do high level maths and science that you're smart enough to see that the supposed biggest threats of the moment, like terrorism, aren't worth the infringement of rights we're seeing.
Is it reasonable to think that the NSA has the authority to simply pay these people more than the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, et. al? but if so then why aren't these people retiring early? Is there a secret place where all these mathematicians and developers with their millions in NSA pay are playing around on their yachts or do they manage to train them well enough to pretend to everything they don't have a clue about maths and computing and they made their money creating a flip-flop business or whatever?
I'm largely speculating, but I'm intrigued as to how realistic it is that the NSA would have hoardes of the greatest minds on the planet solving problems that even the publicly known smartest people on the planet have consistently failed to solve (despite being far greater in numbers than the NSA could possibly find).
This isn't to say they haven't managed some breakthroughs, they clearly have and it's hard to know what they have and haven't broken. But I suspect it's for this reason that the NSA has relied on strongarming people and companies to allow backdoors and weaknesses in their products instead.
I suspect that the public capacity for solving great mathematical and scientific problems is greater than the private capacity of the security services such that it's a fair bet that if something like a millenium problem hasn't be solved by publicly known geniuses, then it almost certainly hasn't been solved by those in the security services either.
This doesn't preclude them from finding zero day vulnerabilities that are otherwise unknown (by definition with zero day I suppose) but I'd be amazed if they have any special capacity for particularly miraculous breakthroughs that the public doesn't also have.
Because whilst they may have had the time and resources to research it and come up with a solution, they don't necessarily have the time and resources to fight their patch past Commander Torvald's ego and army of protective zealots.
Many bright academics simply have better things to do than get involved in that sort of childishness. Research is what they enjoy and they have neither the time nor interest in political bickering to get involved, especially if it flies in the face of logic - i.e. someone refusing to let something be fixed simply because they have too big an ego to admit they were wrong, rather than because they have a valid counter argument.
Blame Linus for building a public image of himself as a hot-headed grand-dictator rather than a rational level-headed respectful leader for scaring smart people off. Note that I'm not saying he is the former, I don't know him personally well enough, maybe he is rational, level-headed and respectful in person, but that's not the public image he's built of himself and he's done neither himself nor his project any favours in building the image he has, as much fun as it seems at the time to bitchslap stupid people down in the most brutal way one can manage with words.
Sometimes it's just better to do what you're good at and leave the rest to everyone else. In this case the guys behind this study are probably good at the research but neither good nor interested in dealing with the politics of getting a patch accepted and would hence rather let others deal with that, or who knows, maybe even Torvalds himself will now accept that there's a theoretical problem that may be exploitable in practice and will change his mind and do it without any argument.
Exactly. If the recent leaks have taught us anything it's that the NSA has managed to produce real working exploits where previously such issues have just been discarded as nothing to worry about because they were "only theory".
At this point it's stupid to assume that just because you can't come up with a working exploit that someone with the resources the NSA has hasn't already.
It's of course not even just the NSA people should worry about, it seems naive to think the Russians, Chinese et. al. haven't put similar resources into this sort of thing, the difference is they just haven't had their Snowden incidents yet. I'd imagine the Chinese and Russians have exploits for things the NSA hasn't managed to break as well as the NSA having exploits for things the Chinese and Russians haven't managed to break. Then there's the Israelis, the French, the British and many others.
It's meaningless to separate theory and practice at this point. If there's a theoretical exploit then it should be fixed, because whilst it may just be theoretical to one person, it may not to a group of others.
"Companies are amoral. Period. The people running the company have to do what will produce the most shareholder value."
But how is that defined, is there some court ruling in US history that value is defined purely as money?
Value could equally arbitrarily defined as reputation, and if a company is more responsible then it's going to increase the reputation of shareholders thereby giving them value.
I don't know how fucked up the US is on this issue but it strikes me that value is a rather arbitrary thing, people place different value in different things, it simply seems that the term value has been hijacked to mean "money" and nothing else.
It may well be that most shareholders view value as financial payback (let's be honest, they do), but if a corporation has it's mission statement as "Our number one goal is to provide shareholders value by increasing their reputation by allowing them to invest in our company which aims to be socially responsible" then could shareholders really complain that the management team wasn't providing value when the company isn't being horrible to it's employees to turn a little more profit?
"They legally have to. Corporations in America have to make the most money they can"
Is that actually true or are you talking crap?
I'm just amazed that any country would have a law that states companies legally have to make as much money as they can at all costs. It would also seem to go against America's ideals of freedom - shouldn't it be up to those in charge of the company to determine what the company's priorities are rather than have it legally enforced that they should only focus on profit?
In the UK there's been a renewed focus in recent years on responsible companies. I'm surprised the US hasn't seen the same given how much harm we've witnessed from companies that pursue profit above all else and at any cost.
"Putting the two together will give apple the perfect os for content consumption and content creation to better take on windows."
Really though? It strikes me as saying french fries are quite nice, chocolate is quite nice, stick the two together and you'll have the ultimate meal.
Except you wont. You'll have a vomitworthy abomination.
I think the sooner the "evangelists" or whatever they want to call themselves get over the idea of merging desktop and phone the better. The two can't be merged effectively, they're different use cases. It's like merging a book and a TV, sure you can read the book on screen but fuck me is it an uncomfortable pain in the arse compared to just reading the book.
IMO the real solution is to work on better sharing between devices. Make it easier to get your data between phone, tablet, and desktop and the interface differences just don't matter. Whether it's documents, browser links, music, or e-mails. We have this sort of thing in dribs and drabs, create a fully unified sharing solution for all content whilst keeping the mobile and desktop paradigms separate and optimised for each use case and that's the real prize IMO.
As long as people can get everything that's personal to them as they need to between platforms they wont give a flying fuck if each device works differently. I really don't expect my TV remote to be able to also control my oven, toaster, washing machine, microwave, and car. I'm quite happy for them to all have different interfaces best suited to their respective use cases.
I don't find it awful, but it does feel like a step back from Windows 7. I think it works for me because I always just used shortcut keys anyway and they're all the same, but other things are slower. If I wasn't a shortcut key user I've really no idea how the fuck anyone would find their way around it. Things rely on you just happening to put the mouse in the right place on the screen, I mean, really, what the flying fuck?
It's also missing features, for example, for some fucking god unknown reason you can't make a VPN connection auto-redial anymore if it drops. I'm assuming this is because they rewrote the UI for VPN connections to fit into the Windows 8 style and forgot/didn't have time to implement that rather useful feature.
I agree, it's a step backwards, and for what? Where is this miraculous gain in the touch world that was surely the reason they sacrificed all this usability and functionality?
So in other words what you're saying is that if you turn a mobile device into a desktop in just about every way that matters then it's as good as a desktop?
I can't say I'm overly surprised by that if I'm honest.
"JIT is generic in a sense that each program (and even different parts of a single program) is different and you cannot base them all on a common framework."
What does this have to do anything? That describes just about every language ever or are you under the impression that the JCL doesn't exist?
"I wouldn't say that "Java performs as well as C++", unless you are speaking about UI-heavy programs where bottleneck is user input - or, alternatively, C++ programs written by people who don't know how CPUs implement a virtual method call and why it's slower than a non-virtual one."
No, I'm saying it performs as well as C++ in most cases. Virtual method handling is one example as to why, the JIT has a better view at execution time as to what can and can't be inlined, so it can inline much more than a statically compiled C++ program possibly can.
"Yeah, with native languages you are bound to a specific architecture (and even variations of it, e.g. AVX, SSE), but is it better to be a jack of all trades and master of none?"
Well that's precisely the problem you face if you don't have an explosion of optimised binaries, unless you want to accept that the JVM is going to optimise more efficiently. It's not just about compiling for different architectures, it's about the JIT automatically being able to optimise to take advantage of extensions, and other hardware that may be present too. It can optimise dependent on amount of RAM, cache sizes etc. - something that just isn't known when you compile a plain old generic C++ binary for, say, the generic x86 platform.
But there are a number of other things it can do better too - better loop vectorisation (as a result of better inlining of virtual functions) and more efficient heap allocations for example.
"Server software does not [need to] have single-thread performance because it's more often I/O bound - that means that CPU vendors can get away with CPUs like Bulldozer or SPARCs that suck at IPC (instruction per clock) performance."
This is nonsense. It depends entirely on the application. A heavy load web server for example may not really be I/O bound in the slightest depending on the size and what it does. Bulldozer is designed for optimisation of performance per watt, you're again confusing cause and effect as to why some things are the way they are.
"That's not a problem of Java, though, but all managed languages -.NET also sucks."
Really, the problem is simply that you don't understand managed languages. Your understanding of the optimisations performed by JIT compilers is clearly woefully inadequate to being making this sort of comment. Your comments on server applications just don't even make sense for the most part to the point I'm not even sure you have the slightest grasp of what sort of things servers commonly serve.
"Microsoft tried to build an OS which would be.NET based - they wasted like 6 years on that and ultimately had to abandon the idea. Now they are going native:)"
This is just further nonsense. There was a Microsoft research project to try and build such a thing, and they did, and open sourced it. I don't know what you mean by "Now they are going native:)", they've always been native with their operating systems. If you were expecting their managed OS to cause them to throw out 3 decades of legacy code then you have a disturbing view of how software is developed.
It was a research project and nothing more, and even then it wasn't purely managed, they still had to bootstrap natively because no one ever pretended that managed languages are designed to do such low level operations. You can find out more about it here:
It's worth noting though that some of the things learnt from this research project have already made their way into Windows, but that's kind of the point of r
Same. I suspect the problem is that because it is an open standard it can be used by anyone, which means it can be used in the cheapest weakest shit on the market.
I don't buy the most expensive stuff on the market but even my mid-range stuff has never suffered broken micro-USB ports even when I've inadvertently tested their resilience by tripping over the cables when plugged in.
I'm amazed people buy cheap crap and then seem surprised when it breaks. Either way, the user reviews on Apple's own site don't exactly bode well for the resilience of the lightning connector and that genuinely is a premium product for which there should be no excuse.
It's more likely that people don't have time to read the terms and I'm amazed you do even. You're an outlier for sure because most people don't have time to read a Terms and Conditions page almost twice as long as Shakespeare's Hamlet which is how long Paypal's is for instance.
That's so extensive it's unreasonable to expect people to read it, and even less reasonable that anything in there should be able to override more prominent text - if a page says buy it should mean buy, not rent, and the T&Cs shouldn't get to overrule that.
That's actually how it works though in most countries, T&Cs are rarely enforceable if they're unreasonable. The problem is simply that no one's really bothered to take a company to court over it yet with a decent legal team behind them.
Either way you can't blame the consumers, it's obviously an intentional tactic - there's no need for T&Cs to be so long and so confusing that people neither have time nor even necessarily the legal training to enforce them.
I guess you're just lucky in having that much more spare time than 99.9999% of the rest of the population and having the legal understanding to interpret them correctly without fail too.
I think it's always been this way though, when I was 17 and I wanted to get served at pubs that were strict on ID'ing people I'd just flash up my drivers license and they'd serve me. None of them stopped to think that anyone would have the cheek to hand over their license and actually be underage so rather than check the DOB on it they just assumed "Oh he has ID" and served you.
Similarly on the trains once, I used to buy a monthly pass, but it was a day out one day and I didn't realise. The conductor came round asking to see passes and I flashed it up to him and he just said thank you and moved on. It wasn't until the next week on the Monday morning that I noticed I needed a new pass. I have an annual pass now and go through a ticket barrier each morning and they don't even look at it. You could probably flash up something completely random and they'd let you through.
I like the security guard where I currently work though. Even if he knows you really well he'll still demand to see your pass every time you want to enter the building. He's a real pro and does it exactly right.
I think you're right, you can get away with a hell of a lot of things if you do nothing more than what people would expect you to do if you were who you said you were, or were doing what you implied you were doing. It's really only the fear of getting caught that puts people off, even if that chance of getting caught is probably lower than 1% in many cases.
It makes me wonder how many people actually do do this sort of thing. I've always wondered how many people with the old style rail passes still used round here have just printed them out because there's no security features on them like metallic strips or holographic seals for example. Like you say, I wonder how many people do just go into places they're not supposed to by pretending they're someone they're not. Given how easy it is I'd wager it's more common than most people realise.
We know full well how to write good solid software, developers can do that just fine, it's a well researched area that's pretty well understood.
The problem is that no one is willing to pay for or wait for that software.
You can't blame software engineering for the priorities society and project managers have decided to prioritise. It's not the fault of software engineering if users want a new shiny every year rather than a perfectly secure and stable shiny every 5 years.
Some buildings are built quickly and cheaply from kids wendy houses and tree houses, to a tramps cardboard box or buildings in a shanty town. None of which last particularly well in the face of a bomb or natural disaster because none of which are engineered to.
It's just the way project management works, the issue you take isn't a problem with software engineering and everything to do with the project managers and the priorities forced upon them by society and business needs.
I'm not even sure it can actually be classed as a problem though anyway, if society has pushed things this way then it just means you're in a minority that has been outvoted by society at large in wanting something stable and secure rather than something new and shiny ASAP. It just means most people have different priorities to you and so the market has bent that way, that's all. Effectively it's just working as intended, unless you're suggesting software engineers should be responsible for somehow warping reality and laying waste to the project management triangle, something no other profession has ever managed to do, and in that case you're just being unrealistic.
I was never afraid of needles as a kid, even at the dentist but there was just one time in my early teens where I caught a glimpse of the dentists needle as he put it in my mouth and I've never been so scared of anything in my life.
But I've been fine with them again ever since, it never happened again.
So I'm not sure it's something as simple as conditioning, it turns out even if you're not afraid of them then sometimes something in your brain can click to make you shit yourself like never before when you see one going into you.
The market exists because most people don't realise what they're being sold until it bites them and that's the problem. They've changed the game without changing the advertising and they need to be more transparent to customers as to what they are offering. They won't do this though because they know people wouldn't buy then.
Buy has historically meant buy to keep. The buttons on sites peddling a lot of DRM content say buy, not rent, yet really it's a rental. That's the problem.
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Right, but that happened once and there was a major outcry.
In contrast, such events happen daily in the US, only you have to switch Brazilian with Mexican, or African-American and it barely even makes the news any more because it's so common there and hence by definition not news.
One negative event in years doesn't compare to the same thing happening daily.
"The presence of SAS men and Israeli commandos in Westgate, at the time of the attack is remarkable."
What's remarkable about it? Kenya is an ex-British colony with extremely close ties still, so much so that the British basically have a permanent training presence there both training the Kenyans and using Kenya's terrain for training of British forces in African environments. At any moment in time there will be SAS in Kenya training or off-duty between training, it's just a major training nation for British forces and the Kenyan government gets a lot of British money and training as payment for that in return.
Israeli presence is also unsurprising given that Kenya is Israel's biggest ally in Africa and that they have a mutual security treaty that allows them to call on each other for support in times of attack. Given that Israel is only a relatively short flight away it's not unsurprising in the slightest that Kenya would call in Israeli support when Israel's forces are pretty effective in that kind of environment.
What is truly surprising is the fact that countries like Algeria didn't accept any foreign help when one of their refineries were taken over. In fact, that was pretty fucking stupid. Much in the same way that Russia put pride in the way of asking for assistance at Beslan and so forth.
Kenya did the rational thing - it put aside nationalist pride and asked the best in the business that were available at the time to come and help with a major incident and it's a testament to that rationality that it seems pretty much no more civilians died once those forces (plus reportedly Delta or the Seals) showed up. Allowing in a dream team of the who's who of the world's best special forces was the smartest thing the Kenyans did. Things could've turned out even worse again if they hadn't.
The same applies to privacy though, the US signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1977 and ratified it in 1992. Article 17 of this document states:
1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
So really, the US does have an obligation not to arbitrarily spy on absolutely everyone's communications. The treaty does not differentiate between Americans and non-Americans.
If the US doesn't want to abide by this treaty then it should pull out of it, but it wont, because it likes beating countries it dislikes over the head with the human rights stick, something it could not do without being laughed at as a non-signatory. The fact is it wants the best of both worlds - it wants the ability to pretend it's all high and mighty, defender of human rights, but it also wants to violate some of the most basic principles of human rights going. Sadly it's a broader problem than this though, reading through the universal declaration of human rights on which the above covenant is based feels more like a checklist of human rights violations the US has carried out ranging from torture, detention without trial, breach of privacy and so on and so forth.
Was an interesting article in The Guardian from Huhne who of course before his fall was right at the highest echelons of government and stated that none of them had any clue anything like prism was happening. He believes only perhaps the home secretaries have known once they got the jobs and spoke to the guys there but kept it quiet because of the illegality of it and no MP wanting to be implicated in something illegal. This explains why numerous home secretaries have said they're against the Interception Modernisation Program until they actually become the home secretary - because they realise they have to push it through to make what the security services already doing legal and hope no one realises they were doing it when it was illegal (as they are currently).
God only knows what would've happened to the £4bn or so they had quoted for it though given that it has already been done and was already there. That's a lot of spare money for something they've already built with their existing budget.
"Russia and Canada are geographically big, but cannot even match the headcounts of a medium sized Indian city / state."
Right yet despite that, Canada, with only 2% the population of India still generates nearly the same amount of economic output which shows how utterly inefficient the Indian workforce is largely due to areas of great poverty and non-existent infrastructure investment (because the government in India would rather launch rockets into space than sort out more glaring issues). To say they are not competition and they depend on immigrants is absurd. So what if they depend on immigrants? What if they allow more immigrants in and can scale their economy accordingly? They'll be way ahead of India with way less people to boot.
"There is no country which can match Chinese hardware / manufacturing base in scale and ambition. There might be niches in certain industries, but overall China is unbeatable."
Well India most definitely could have, but it chose not to.
"India is the software powerhouse. "
No it's not. America is, with European nations following shortly behind. Relative to their size even the tiny Scandinavian and Eastern European nations have better software output per head of population than India.
"Every Indian city and town have billboards shouting words like Java or .NET. The effect of this blanketing should not be overlooked. The world NEED programmers, and India will provide the numbers."
Except as has been known from at least the release of "The mythical man-month" we know that numbers are irrelevant and it's quality that matters which is precisely why India has failed to take off with software like China has with manufacturing. You can't write software by just throwing more and more people at it if those people aren't skilled enough, and therein lies the problem. Underinvestment in India means it can never train those numbers to the degree nations in the West, or even nowadays China or South America can.
"There is no company similar to Infosys, TCS or Wipro anywhere else in this planet."
Actually there are loads, and those are relatively small fry in comparison. Companies like Accenture make as much profit as Wipro and Infosys put together, and that's just one of many. There's no shortage of companies that make a fortune off of gullible managers or bribed public sector workers offering to produce projects that they never actually manage to succesfully deliver on top and on budget. Many companies do this, India doesn't have a monopoly on it, the problem is it is all that India has - it doesn't have any of the more successful or innovative IT companies. The three companies you mention combined don't even make anywhere near as much profit as Google, IBM or Microsoft.
But this raises and even bigger question, if India is the world's software producer as you claim then where are it's indigenous big-name software houses that people see? People have heard of Baidu, Yandex and the obvious ones in the West like Google but few could name anything out of India other than the outsourcing companies you mention that are still smaller than their Western counterparts (who often just subcontract to those smaller Indian companies anyway).
"Bullshit!!! Some of the best positions in the world of software are held by Indians. Look at the number of Indians occupying top spot at Google."
India has 1/5th of the world's population but Indians don't hold 1/5th of the top software jobs in the world, not even close. A few examples of successful Indians at Google is irrelevant in the bigger picture, and arguably even irrelevant at Google if they don't hold 1/5th of top positions. India has a great track record and proud history of producing some great geniuses in the world but it doesn't do so to an extent that mirrors it's percentage of the world population and again this is due to issues with poverty, poor infrastructure and education investment and so forth. So it's okay for you to say, write off Canada and Russia as too small to m
You're just focussing on one incident though, and there have been hundreds over the years. Often Linus is right and is just dealing with an idiot, but sometimes he's not.
But I'm simply reasoning a response to the GP's post as to why people may wish to steer clear of contributing a fix once they've written a paper. If a clique is unnecessarily cruel to anyone, no matter how stupid that person, then that's going to put people off interacting with it directly. As far back as the original Tanenbaum debate he's admitted himself that he could be a bit over the top, but rather than do something about it he's only gotten worse.
I hope you're right that they do evaluate this and do something if necessary, but fundamentally my point is that this may be for the best anyway. I suspect this will work far better than if they'd just published a fix themselves and had to potentially face Linus' defensiveness, particularly as Linus has had to publicly be defensive on this issue already (albeit for valid reasons in that case) such that it's probably not his favourite topic right now and not one he wants to revisit if he can help it.
Or to cut a long story short, the GP asked why they didn't just fix it themselves. I'm offering one possible reason why that may be- that it may just be best to write the paper, avoid the politics and let the kernel developers deal with it amongst themselves. They're understandably a tight knit group, but also one that's highly opinionated, so it probably is best to just hand them your research, walk away, and leave them to it, rather than try and fix it yourself and then argue with them about whether you're a talented enough developer to allow the fix through, whether it's necessary, whether there's a better way of implementing it and so forth - they'll probably be happier figuring all that out amongst themselves if they feel there's a valid concern anyway.
America might even lose a good proportion of it's military too though. Any default would allow host nations to seize US government assets. They'd better hope they've got no carriers docked in ports of allied nations with a full compliment of F-35s on board and half the crew on shore leave if it were to happen. I imagine there's a whole host of nations that would be grateful for such a prize to seize to pay for a US debt default.
And like most bailiffs, nation states often tend to undervalue these things and seize a little more in practice than they're owed - a $10bn carrier for a $6bn debt for example.
India just isn't as successful as China. It tried too hard to skip the whole industrial revolution thing and went straight for services and then cocked it up.
China had it right, go through it's own industrial revolution and become a manufacturing powerhouse, and as you grow that then try and focus more towards services which is what it's attempting now/next.
India just ended up making a complete hash up of services with so many companies now realising what an awful mistake outsourcing software development, call centres, finance and HR and so forth to there actually was.
That's why whilst China has flown into the spot of second largest economy, India is still stuck barely hanging on to it's top 10 spot with Russia and Canada biting at it's heels, all this despite the fact that India has just as much access to natural resources as China, is similarly situated globally, had better relationships with important export destinations, and and has a similar population size at 1.2 billion.
There was a time when people were looking at India as the next big thing alongside, or possibly even ahead of China. Now the world has turned it's attention more to the likes of Brazil alongside China.
India and China aren't that interchangeable, America couldn't just drop China tomorrow and replace it with India, as India has lost many years in failing to optimise itself to the demands of the global economy in the way China did.
See here for an illustration of the problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_india_gdp.jpg
The fact is that China is just more successful than India. China got it right. If America switches it's focus to India, it wont be China that loses out because India has neither the manufacturing capacity nor infrastructure to support it to meet US demand that China has built up precisely because of India's premature misadventure into services (even in Finance where for a while India was pipped to be a top 3 financial centre it's fallen far for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index). That means the US will be unable to acquire the products it demands whilst everyone else gladly takes them off China's hands.
As a semi-related aside, I'm intrigued. Where is the NSA finding all these uber-mathematicians and developers to carry out some of the feats it's supposedly carrying out?
I've often noticed the mindset of some of the smartest people in society is often at odds with that blind patriotism required to agree with the NSA's goals of total surveillance as a good idea. It's not like this is World War II where the likes of Turing were happy to go breaking cryptography and stuff because they were fighting the Nazis that were genuinely evil and a threat to their existence. Even during the Cold War there was a bit more of a threat so as to convince smart people to do their bit for the security services, but now? I just think that if you're smart enough to do high level maths and science that you're smart enough to see that the supposed biggest threats of the moment, like terrorism, aren't worth the infringement of rights we're seeing.
Is it reasonable to think that the NSA has the authority to simply pay these people more than the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, et. al? but if so then why aren't these people retiring early? Is there a secret place where all these mathematicians and developers with their millions in NSA pay are playing around on their yachts or do they manage to train them well enough to pretend to everything they don't have a clue about maths and computing and they made their money creating a flip-flop business or whatever?
I'm largely speculating, but I'm intrigued as to how realistic it is that the NSA would have hoardes of the greatest minds on the planet solving problems that even the publicly known smartest people on the planet have consistently failed to solve (despite being far greater in numbers than the NSA could possibly find).
This isn't to say they haven't managed some breakthroughs, they clearly have and it's hard to know what they have and haven't broken. But I suspect it's for this reason that the NSA has relied on strongarming people and companies to allow backdoors and weaknesses in their products instead.
I suspect that the public capacity for solving great mathematical and scientific problems is greater than the private capacity of the security services such that it's a fair bet that if something like a millenium problem hasn't be solved by publicly known geniuses, then it almost certainly hasn't been solved by those in the security services either.
This doesn't preclude them from finding zero day vulnerabilities that are otherwise unknown (by definition with zero day I suppose) but I'd be amazed if they have any special capacity for particularly miraculous breakthroughs that the public doesn't also have.
Because whilst they may have had the time and resources to research it and come up with a solution, they don't necessarily have the time and resources to fight their patch past Commander Torvald's ego and army of protective zealots.
Many bright academics simply have better things to do than get involved in that sort of childishness. Research is what they enjoy and they have neither the time nor interest in political bickering to get involved, especially if it flies in the face of logic - i.e. someone refusing to let something be fixed simply because they have too big an ego to admit they were wrong, rather than because they have a valid counter argument.
Blame Linus for building a public image of himself as a hot-headed grand-dictator rather than a rational level-headed respectful leader for scaring smart people off. Note that I'm not saying he is the former, I don't know him personally well enough, maybe he is rational, level-headed and respectful in person, but that's not the public image he's built of himself and he's done neither himself nor his project any favours in building the image he has, as much fun as it seems at the time to bitchslap stupid people down in the most brutal way one can manage with words.
Sometimes it's just better to do what you're good at and leave the rest to everyone else. In this case the guys behind this study are probably good at the research but neither good nor interested in dealing with the politics of getting a patch accepted and would hence rather let others deal with that, or who knows, maybe even Torvalds himself will now accept that there's a theoretical problem that may be exploitable in practice and will change his mind and do it without any argument.
Exactly. If the recent leaks have taught us anything it's that the NSA has managed to produce real working exploits where previously such issues have just been discarded as nothing to worry about because they were "only theory".
At this point it's stupid to assume that just because you can't come up with a working exploit that someone with the resources the NSA has hasn't already.
It's of course not even just the NSA people should worry about, it seems naive to think the Russians, Chinese et. al. haven't put similar resources into this sort of thing, the difference is they just haven't had their Snowden incidents yet. I'd imagine the Chinese and Russians have exploits for things the NSA hasn't managed to break as well as the NSA having exploits for things the Chinese and Russians haven't managed to break. Then there's the Israelis, the French, the British and many others.
It's meaningless to separate theory and practice at this point. If there's a theoretical exploit then it should be fixed, because whilst it may just be theoretical to one person, it may not to a group of others.
"Companies are amoral. Period. The people running the company have to do what will produce the most shareholder value."
But how is that defined, is there some court ruling in US history that value is defined purely as money?
Value could equally arbitrarily defined as reputation, and if a company is more responsible then it's going to increase the reputation of shareholders thereby giving them value.
I don't know how fucked up the US is on this issue but it strikes me that value is a rather arbitrary thing, people place different value in different things, it simply seems that the term value has been hijacked to mean "money" and nothing else.
It may well be that most shareholders view value as financial payback (let's be honest, they do), but if a corporation has it's mission statement as "Our number one goal is to provide shareholders value by increasing their reputation by allowing them to invest in our company which aims to be socially responsible" then could shareholders really complain that the management team wasn't providing value when the company isn't being horrible to it's employees to turn a little more profit?
"They legally have to. Corporations in America have to make the most money they can"
Is that actually true or are you talking crap?
I'm just amazed that any country would have a law that states companies legally have to make as much money as they can at all costs. It would also seem to go against America's ideals of freedom - shouldn't it be up to those in charge of the company to determine what the company's priorities are rather than have it legally enforced that they should only focus on profit?
In the UK there's been a renewed focus in recent years on responsible companies. I'm surprised the US hasn't seen the same given how much harm we've witnessed from companies that pursue profit above all else and at any cost.
Yeah, I hate that search change too, it's one of the biggest annoyances I've noticed also.
"Putting the two together will give apple the perfect os for content consumption and content creation to better take on windows."
Really though? It strikes me as saying french fries are quite nice, chocolate is quite nice, stick the two together and you'll have the ultimate meal.
Except you wont. You'll have a vomitworthy abomination.
I think the sooner the "evangelists" or whatever they want to call themselves get over the idea of merging desktop and phone the better. The two can't be merged effectively, they're different use cases. It's like merging a book and a TV, sure you can read the book on screen but fuck me is it an uncomfortable pain in the arse compared to just reading the book.
IMO the real solution is to work on better sharing between devices. Make it easier to get your data between phone, tablet, and desktop and the interface differences just don't matter. Whether it's documents, browser links, music, or e-mails. We have this sort of thing in dribs and drabs, create a fully unified sharing solution for all content whilst keeping the mobile and desktop paradigms separate and optimised for each use case and that's the real prize IMO.
As long as people can get everything that's personal to them as they need to between platforms they wont give a flying fuck if each device works differently. I really don't expect my TV remote to be able to also control my oven, toaster, washing machine, microwave, and car. I'm quite happy for them to all have different interfaces best suited to their respective use cases.
Been using it myself for a few months too.
I don't find it awful, but it does feel like a step back from Windows 7. I think it works for me because I always just used shortcut keys anyway and they're all the same, but other things are slower. If I wasn't a shortcut key user I've really no idea how the fuck anyone would find their way around it. Things rely on you just happening to put the mouse in the right place on the screen, I mean, really, what the flying fuck?
It's also missing features, for example, for some fucking god unknown reason you can't make a VPN connection auto-redial anymore if it drops. I'm assuming this is because they rewrote the UI for VPN connections to fit into the Windows 8 style and forgot/didn't have time to implement that rather useful feature.
I agree, it's a step backwards, and for what? Where is this miraculous gain in the touch world that was surely the reason they sacrificed all this usability and functionality?
So in other words what you're saying is that if you turn a mobile device into a desktop in just about every way that matters then it's as good as a desktop?
I can't say I'm overly surprised by that if I'm honest.
"JIT is generic in a sense that each program (and even different parts of a single program) is different and you cannot base them all on a common framework."
What does this have to do anything? That describes just about every language ever or are you under the impression that the JCL doesn't exist?
"I wouldn't say that "Java performs as well as C++", unless you are speaking about UI-heavy programs where bottleneck is user input - or, alternatively, C++ programs written by people who don't know how CPUs implement a virtual method call and why it's slower than a non-virtual one."
No, I'm saying it performs as well as C++ in most cases. Virtual method handling is one example as to why, the JIT has a better view at execution time as to what can and can't be inlined, so it can inline much more than a statically compiled C++ program possibly can.
"Yeah, with native languages you are bound to a specific architecture (and even variations of it, e.g. AVX, SSE), but is it better to be a jack of all trades and master of none?"
Well that's precisely the problem you face if you don't have an explosion of optimised binaries, unless you want to accept that the JVM is going to optimise more efficiently. It's not just about compiling for different architectures, it's about the JIT automatically being able to optimise to take advantage of extensions, and other hardware that may be present too. It can optimise dependent on amount of RAM, cache sizes etc. - something that just isn't known when you compile a plain old generic C++ binary for, say, the generic x86 platform.
But there are a number of other things it can do better too - better loop vectorisation (as a result of better inlining of virtual functions) and more efficient heap allocations for example.
"Server software does not [need to] have single-thread performance because it's more often I/O bound - that means that CPU vendors can get away with CPUs like Bulldozer or SPARCs that suck at IPC (instruction per clock) performance."
This is nonsense. It depends entirely on the application. A heavy load web server for example may not really be I/O bound in the slightest depending on the size and what it does. Bulldozer is designed for optimisation of performance per watt, you're again confusing cause and effect as to why some things are the way they are.
"That's not a problem of Java, though, but all managed languages - .NET also sucks."
Really, the problem is simply that you don't understand managed languages. Your understanding of the optimisations performed by JIT compilers is clearly woefully inadequate to being making this sort of comment. Your comments on server applications just don't even make sense for the most part to the point I'm not even sure you have the slightest grasp of what sort of things servers commonly serve.
"Microsoft tried to build an OS which would be .NET based - they wasted like 6 years on that and ultimately had to abandon the idea. Now they are going native :)"
This is just further nonsense. There was a Microsoft research project to try and build such a thing, and they did, and open sourced it. I don't know what you mean by "Now they are going native :)", they've always been native with their operating systems. If you were expecting their managed OS to cause them to throw out 3 decades of legacy code then you have a disturbing view of how software is developed.
It was a research project and nothing more, and even then it wasn't purely managed, they still had to bootstrap natively because no one ever pretended that managed languages are designed to do such low level operations. You can find out more about it here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
It's worth noting though that some of the things learnt from this research project have already made their way into Windows, but that's kind of the point of r
Same. I suspect the problem is that because it is an open standard it can be used by anyone, which means it can be used in the cheapest weakest shit on the market.
I don't buy the most expensive stuff on the market but even my mid-range stuff has never suffered broken micro-USB ports even when I've inadvertently tested their resilience by tripping over the cables when plugged in.
I'm amazed people buy cheap crap and then seem surprised when it breaks. Either way, the user reviews on Apple's own site don't exactly bode well for the resilience of the lightning connector and that genuinely is a premium product for which there should be no excuse.
It's more likely that people don't have time to read the terms and I'm amazed you do even. You're an outlier for sure because most people don't have time to read a Terms and Conditions page almost twice as long as Shakespeare's Hamlet which is how long Paypal's is for instance.
That's so extensive it's unreasonable to expect people to read it, and even less reasonable that anything in there should be able to override more prominent text - if a page says buy it should mean buy, not rent, and the T&Cs shouldn't get to overrule that.
That's actually how it works though in most countries, T&Cs are rarely enforceable if they're unreasonable. The problem is simply that no one's really bothered to take a company to court over it yet with a decent legal team behind them.
Either way you can't blame the consumers, it's obviously an intentional tactic - there's no need for T&Cs to be so long and so confusing that people neither have time nor even necessarily the legal training to enforce them.
I guess you're just lucky in having that much more spare time than 99.9999% of the rest of the population and having the legal understanding to interpret them correctly without fail too.
I think it's always been this way though, when I was 17 and I wanted to get served at pubs that were strict on ID'ing people I'd just flash up my drivers license and they'd serve me. None of them stopped to think that anyone would have the cheek to hand over their license and actually be underage so rather than check the DOB on it they just assumed "Oh he has ID" and served you.
Similarly on the trains once, I used to buy a monthly pass, but it was a day out one day and I didn't realise. The conductor came round asking to see passes and I flashed it up to him and he just said thank you and moved on. It wasn't until the next week on the Monday morning that I noticed I needed a new pass. I have an annual pass now and go through a ticket barrier each morning and they don't even look at it. You could probably flash up something completely random and they'd let you through.
I like the security guard where I currently work though. Even if he knows you really well he'll still demand to see your pass every time you want to enter the building. He's a real pro and does it exactly right.
I think you're right, you can get away with a hell of a lot of things if you do nothing more than what people would expect you to do if you were who you said you were, or were doing what you implied you were doing. It's really only the fear of getting caught that puts people off, even if that chance of getting caught is probably lower than 1% in many cases.
It makes me wonder how many people actually do do this sort of thing. I've always wondered how many people with the old style rail passes still used round here have just printed them out because there's no security features on them like metallic strips or holographic seals for example. Like you say, I wonder how many people do just go into places they're not supposed to by pretending they're someone they're not. Given how easy it is I'd wager it's more common than most people realise.
It's got nothing to do with software engineers, it's the classic project management triangle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle
We know full well how to write good solid software, developers can do that just fine, it's a well researched area that's pretty well understood.
The problem is that no one is willing to pay for or wait for that software.
You can't blame software engineering for the priorities society and project managers have decided to prioritise. It's not the fault of software engineering if users want a new shiny every year rather than a perfectly secure and stable shiny every 5 years.
Some buildings are built quickly and cheaply from kids wendy houses and tree houses, to a tramps cardboard box or buildings in a shanty town. None of which last particularly well in the face of a bomb or natural disaster because none of which are engineered to.
It's just the way project management works, the issue you take isn't a problem with software engineering and everything to do with the project managers and the priorities forced upon them by society and business needs.
I'm not even sure it can actually be classed as a problem though anyway, if society has pushed things this way then it just means you're in a minority that has been outvoted by society at large in wanting something stable and secure rather than something new and shiny ASAP. It just means most people have different priorities to you and so the market has bent that way, that's all. Effectively it's just working as intended, unless you're suggesting software engineers should be responsible for somehow warping reality and laying waste to the project management triangle, something no other profession has ever managed to do, and in that case you're just being unrealistic.
I was never afraid of needles as a kid, even at the dentist but there was just one time in my early teens where I caught a glimpse of the dentists needle as he put it in my mouth and I've never been so scared of anything in my life.
But I've been fine with them again ever since, it never happened again.
So I'm not sure it's something as simple as conditioning, it turns out even if you're not afraid of them then sometimes something in your brain can click to make you shit yourself like never before when you see one going into you.
The market exists because most people don't realise what they're being sold until it bites them and that's the problem. They've changed the game without changing the advertising and they need to be more transparent to customers as to what they are offering. They won't do this though because they know people wouldn't buy then.
Buy has historically meant buy to keep. The buttons on sites peddling a lot of DRM content say buy, not rent, yet really it's a rental. That's the problem.
Troll moderation doesn't mean "I disagree". Sorry to break it to you.