I remember thinking the same when I was forced to study it academically some time ago, and thought at the time what the fuck is the point in it exactly?
Well at least now I have my answer, it makes for good headlines when you want to troll your competitors with it if nothing else.
It's the same here in the UK with the BBC. The BBC has taken quite some hits this last few years in terms of reduced funding and artificial limitations placed on it's ability to compete.
The reason is that the Tories want the favour of Murdoch and Sky, who were all set to take 100% of Sky over until the phone hacking scandal upended the deal. By weakening the BBC, strengthening Sky, and strengthening Murdoch's grasp of Sky they were trying to ensure that TV became their own personal propaganda channel.
Perhaps it's a regional thing but I still see.NET as far and away the most prominent development environment here in the UK outside London (and arguably even inside London judging by the languages requested in job adverts). You're right things are more web focussed now but it still seems to generally be ASP.NET with a hefty focus on ASP.NET MVC nowadays outside London, Java takes a bigger share of the pie in London, whilst PHP holds second place behind.NET outside London.
I suspect it's this regionality that is where much disagreement about language popularity comes from, in the story about iOS being one of the biggest new languages the other day I pointed out that hardly anyone is recruiting for iOS devs around here (though perhaps somewhat ironically, we are!) - I suspect in somewhere like San Francisco though where there's an absolute ton of new startups in the mobile arena that the iOS market is absolutely thriving in contrast though. As I say you see it here in the UK too with London - particularly in the North of England Java jobs are probably every 1 in 10 or 1 in 20, yet in London every other job advertised seems to be Java.
We do a lot of mobile work, so we're one of those places that does actually look for Android devs (in fact we're recruiting for one right now). It depends on the amount the client is paying and so forth, but for more low budget stuff we tend to use HTML5 + jQuery + PhoneGap rather than ObjectiveC and Java. Part of the ballache in the mobile world right now is the fact that you have Windows Phone which is C# only, Android which is Java and C/C++, and iOS which is ObjectiveC and C/C++. For writing cross platform native apps there's no single solution that fits all, we can write C++ libraries that'll cover common stuff in iOS and Android then just build the front ends natively, but that still leaves Windows Phone out the bag. As such we've actually been ignoring it to this point, but if we do get more request for Windows Phone stuff then we're going to have to look at buying in or even building our own Java-esque environment whereby we have a VM for each machine, that executes bytecode we can use commonly across that. Whether we can do this with Java I'm not sure, and I know Apple don't like that, but afaik it's the way things like Unity get away with it so it's going to be the only choice. In an ideal world you'd build a custom UI for each device anyway so you can adhere to the standards for that platform but most clients aren't willing to foot the bill for that.
We have some fairly big clients like BP, Swiss Re, the MoD, GM and so forth, and most requests we get for C# work tend to be either ASP.NET backend stuff, or Sharepoint stuff. We get a lot of HTML/Javascript work, and we get the afformentioned mobile work. We did have one potential tender for some Java work last year, but it was a pretty big Java project and we just couldn't get 5 additional talented Java devs at the time so we had to turn it away. As I say, personally, I'd actually like to get some more Java work which is why I want to put some effort into training our new interns on it when we hire them - I'd love nothing more than an upsurge in Java work, especially if it meant throwing out the shitty PHP contracts instead;) It's certainly what I've been pushing for for some time to actively seek more Java work because if nothing else I believe there's much more money in it than the PHP and HTML/Javascript stuff at least. The beauty of Java/.NET is that when you sell a system like that you're selling a "proper" system that's solid, and maintainable and can hence charge proper money from it, which isn't the case with devalued tools like HTML, and to a lesser extent, PHP that any monkey can hack together in a half-arsed manner but where clients aren't willing to pay a reasonable markup to have it done properly making it for the most part, much more low profit stuff. Some clients value having things done properly, some don't, but those that do are willing to pay more to have it done properly, and those that do want it done properly are also the ones asking for Java/.NET stuff, and arguably even C++ for that matter hence why I want to chase them more.
It makes me despair as it's been some years since I left IT support behind, and I noticed at the time the profession was becoming more and more filled with people who simply have no idea what the fuck they're doing but coast by nonetheless, calling in consultants for a fortune when they don't know how to do something that any half competent IT support person should be able to do, or blaming the software, going off sick, hiding at a different office or whatever else when inevitably things go wrong and they'd otherwise have to face up to their responsibilities.
It seems now that these numpties have found their way to Slashdot, extolling their blame on software to the world at large, rather than facing up to the fact that they just don't know what in the flying fuck they are actually doing.
Of course, the worst part is, they then moan when their job gets outsourced to India - is it any fucking wonder why when they show such ineptitude? It's no wonder Chinese hackers are supposedly pillaging Western firms dry of IP when IT security means "blame the software when your incorrectly configured security policy lets the user do something they weren't meant to be able to do".
This is why IT support has rapidly started to gain the same sort of disrespect as a profession that many manual trades like bricklaying long have, and why support has seen a deterioration in wages to boot - because there's so many IT staff out there who really can't be trusted to show a bit of intelligence and do a good job nowadays, and they drag it down for those who know what they're doing.
I'm just glad I got the hell out of there seeing as it's only continued to deteriorate as a profession!
What Google is doing in TFA is not an exploit, just because Apple didn't want people to write Javascript in that way, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it per-se. This isn't to defend it as it's obviously not a particularly respectful thing to do, but it's not illegal, nor does it breach any standards, in contrast, abusing an operating system level exploit potentially falls foul of both these things and opens Google up to a lawsuit. Perhaps you or the GP could consider taking it to court and challenge it there if you genuinely believe it's the case? You'd be able to get a pretty hefty payout or settlement if true.
Don't come crying when you actually get laughed out of court though because it turns out you just didn't know how to configure a network properly.
"That is a gigantic security hole just waiting to be exploited."
Right, so a browser that isolates itself to userspace is a gigantic security hole waiting to be exploited, yet a browser that requires admin privileges to install is not?
"Further, there's a reason corporate machines are locked down. We don't want people, especially IT people, installing every random piece of software that asks the user to install it."
So why are you letting people run arbitrary executables in the first place if you need that level of control of your systems?
"Rule #3 of IT that should never be broken: Never, ever, ever, EVER give a regular user administrative rights on their machine. Ever. Chrome breaks this rule with a wrecking ball."
Er no, that's exactly what it DOESN'T do.
"It's bad enough that as an admin I am constantly harassed by Windows 7, "Do you want to allow...?" Yes, I'm a fucking admin, just install the damn thing! Now we have to put up with companies making it so every user can install whatever they want and expect us to figure out what they did."
Well at least now we know you're really not qualified for your own profession. Really, you have a degree of IT security responsibility yet you complain when an OS alerts you to a request by an application for (or if you're a user, blocks you from providing) admin access, and say you just blindly accept, but then you complain when an application doesn't try and obtain admin access that you previously suggested should never be given to a user?
You haven't configured your network to limit what people can run and install, you've configured your network to only allow executables to work within the permissions defined for the currently active user account, Chrome is doing exactly that, thus the only problem is that how you've configured your network, isn't how you seem to beleive your network should be configured.
"But on a locked down machine, nothing should be able to be installed without the admins knowing about it. Period. Google found a way around that."
No they didn't, that's precisely the point, the issue isn't that Google found some way around the lock down, it's that the system wasn't locked down properly to facilitate that goal.
Chrome is not some magical psychic piece of software that can tell what the system admin intended, it can only do what the OS allows it to do and is configured to allow it to do.
If Chrome is able to do things you did not intend on your systems then you have much more serious problems and your systems are incompetently configured and managed. You can guarantee if Chrome is obtaining admin privileges as a legitimate peice of software then a peice of malware would have a hell of a time enjoying your poorly configured systems. The first step to solving your problem is get rid of the geek squad level of staff, and start hiring some proper admins.
I don't think Google have done anything wrong there, saving settings to a user section of the registry makes more sense than a browser needing me to give it admin priviliges to write wherever the fuck it wants. It's precisely that sort of behaviour that leads people to click okay each time windows notifies them a program wants admin rights without even stopping to consider why.
It sounds more like your problem is that your lockdown policy isn't configured as you'd like it to be, yet you blame the software for not obeying how you wanted things setup, rather than how things actually are setup, other than that it sounds like Chrome is following correct and best practice behaviour in this respect whereas how you'd have liked it to respond is bad practice and not preferable.
Because it's pretty fucking funny watching the authorities try to play whackamole?
Part of the reason anti-piracy measures are failing are not simply about new technological tools outflanking the police, but also because as soon as you take your eye off the ball with one mechanism (i.e. P2P) then it'll pop straight back up.
They took down centralised stuff years ago and along came P2P, they focus on P2P and now centralised stuff returns. With the lack of focus on P2P sites and such lately I wouldn't be surprised to see it growing in popularity again.
Write them a letter if you are in the UK even. In fact, it'll probably be more effective.
Personally for me, as a British citizen living in the UK, admittance by a police officer that my PC may have been hacked simply for visiting a site linked in a news article gives me all the justification I feel I need to submit a formal complaint to the IPCC and to my MP.
Whether it has or not, and whether the officer knew what he was on about is neither here nor there, the fact he believes that it's legitimate policing needs to be stamped right out.
I completely agree that Java's strengths really come to fruition when you're developing for heterogeneous systems and that's actually the purpose for which I really really like it and definitely advocate it over those who suggest you should resort to C++ and just compile multiple binaries for each system.
The problem is though many - I'm certain the vast majority of business actually just use Windows systems and in this circumstance it becomes harder to justify Java - C#'s advantage come to the forefront, even more so if the firm in question is fully invested in the Microsoft route - i.e. using SQL server as their database system, and Active Directory for account management. But ignoring that set of scenarios and looking at a system built on a Windows only network even if it doesn't need to work with AD or SQL Server (and this isn't an uncommon scenario) then that's the situation in which it really comes down to language vs. language much more.
Many of the new C# keywords like lock, using, and the LINQ constructs are actually shorthand for standard method style syntax and actually just get converted to exactly that by the compiler anyway. LINQ works based on extension methods, just in case you're not aware of them, very briefly, extension methods are methods that can be defined to act on existing types without modifying the code definition for that type. LINQ to objects for example works by adding methods like OrderBy onto the IEnumerable (which would have been better named IIterable IMO) interface such that it can be used to order any iterable collection. The following demonstrates an example LINQ query:
var query = from c in Cars
where c.Name.Contains("Focus")
orderby c.Name
select c;
This really just translates to:
var query = Cars.Where(c => c.Name.Contains("foo").OrderBy(c => c.Name);
Effectively the methods just return a result of the same type (IEnumerable) and so you can just chain the extension methods onto each other. All LINQ does is convert it's syntax into this anyway. You don't even have to use the lambda syntax for parameters if you don't want either, you can equally use the anonymous method syntax.
Some C# programmers frankly prefer to avoid the LINQ syntax altogether and just use the extension methods, and there's actually good reason to do this too - if you want to extend the range of extension methods available then LINQ wont recognise that and so you'll end up with a mix of LINQ and extension methods anyway.
The lock keyword i.e. lock(x) {... } to lock a variable in a multithreaded environment is really just shorthand for using the Monitor pattern:
The using statement is just shorthand for previously prevalent IDisposable code, so using(var x = new x()) {... } becomes:
var x = new x(); try {
statement; } finally {
if (resource != null) { (IDisposable)resource).Dispose(); } }
So you can see a lot of the new syntax really needn't muddy your code if you're not keen on it, it's really just there to cut the amount of code you need to write, and in the case of LINQ may not even achieve that and you may resort to extension methods anyway.
If you're going to be building for heterogeneous systems then you've really no reason to give up on Java, but for me if I'm building a Windows only system then I use C#, and the reasons are that I genuinely find that the combination of Visual Studio + C# features let me do what I want to do faster. Some of this is down to the fact the.NET libraries are focussed towards that platform and so have that inherent advantage, but part of it is down to the language too. You touch upon the point of looking at the bigger pic
[citation needed] 1. I'm too lazy to Google what you said to confirm it's true, so for the sake of my fundamentally flawed argument I'll pretend it's not
2. I disagree, and don't really have a decent rebuttal, so I'll just put my hands over my ears, scream "la la la" I can't hear you and pretend you don't have a point either.
Guess which definition your usage falls under? Hint: No citation was needed, because it's pretty easy to find the details of the judges decision.
"One other thing, accused murderers dont generally have access to the murder weapon once the case has started"
No but they often have permission to visit the scene of the crime to look for anything pertinent to proving whether or not they were there.
"Likewise, someone accused of computer mischief is not likely to be allowed access to said server because of how easy it would be to clear evidence."
The police took copies of everything they needed. Unless you think he's going to hack into the police to access data that may not even be network attached then this is really really silly. Almost as silly as implying that finding a random unknown lawyer using an operator or yellow pages is a magical solution to the issue of being able to access data essential to your defence stored on a large scale distributed system that requires quite some in depth knowledge to acquire necessary data for defence from.
"And when you are on bail, there are real restrictions that come with it because of the risk that you could take actions subversive to the case-- such as messing with evidence or fleeing the country."
Yet he's been granted bail with neither of these things at issue. If he was a flight risk he wouldn't have been granted bail. What was the relevance of this point? it's meaningless in the context of the discussion.
So are you done now with your irrelevant points, or would you like to scream "get off my lawn" pointlessly for a little longer?
Most MPs in the UK hold what they call surgerys whereby they go somewhere public, such as a town hall and allow citizens to have one-to-one meetings with them to take up issues which they can then choose to raise in parliament.
It's a much more effective way of dealing with issues IMO because they are not given room to easily weasle out of things, and it's easier to tell when they are lying to you, though I recommend saving it for the most serious of issues else they will get fed up of seeing you all the time. For me this is an issue that warrants raising the greivance in a face to face manner as I think this is a pretty gross abuse of police resources clearly pushing a private corporate agenda rather than objectively policing.
What if he wants to defend himself? What if he can't afford a lawyer? what if he can't afford a lawyer trustworthy enough to be handed his password? what if he can't afford a lawyer both trustworthy enough, and competent enough to gather the information from Megauploads servers? Could you really trust your lawyer to search through the guts of a large scale distributed system effectively to find evidence showing the relative scale of copyright infringement to legitimate use for example?
To be fair my previous post was made somewhat tongue in cheek in order to provoke discussion on the topic, but I think there's a valid debate to be had over how fair it is to ban someone from the internet in a case like this. Consider that you're involved in a car crash where someone died and the police decide to press charges for manslaughter even though you believe you were not at fault - would you be happy if the judge granted you bail, but prevented you returning to the scene of the crash so you could better think through the events to help compose your defence?, or to see if you recognise anyone who witnessed the incident and who you could hence ask to provide their version of events as a statement?, or to take photographs of for example skid marks, or other points on the road that may be relevant such as oil patches or similar.
Sure your lawyer can do some of these things, but they wont be able to do so effectively as you could. Why should anyone have to suffer such a disadvantage in building their case when the ban on visiting the location (i.e. using the internet in this case) is of negligible value?
This is the 21st century, where many people only know many other people online, where much useful content is online and many libraries have been outright closed. This is a case about the internet where facts on the internet are important to the case.
Pray tell how exactly he intends to phone people when he doesn't have their phone number, or perhaps even their address or real name?
Sure he could ask his lawyer to get these things, but that assumes he can find and afford a lawyer who is competent enough to use the internet, whom he can trust with his passwords and accounts, and who knows where online to look for the information in question.
Look, I get your point, people are too dependent on the internet nowadays, but your argument doesn't really work in this case - this is a case about a very modern issue, one that is simply not well catered to by the pre-90s disconnected world. The guy should have every right to connect to the net and grab any information relevant to his defence himself - he shouldn't have to depend on anyone else for his defence if he chooses not to, he should have the right to log onto his servers, and extract logs demonstrating the scale of illegal content if it aids his case for example, he shouldn't have to employ anyone else, or trust anyone else.
The fact is there's also more, and more useful information than one has ever been able to find or access in the disconnected world. Whilst my previous comment was actually a little mischeivous if I'm honest, this has the inherent implication that he is still disadvantaged in his defence, and this should frankly never be the case. Even if it's simply that it'll take him many hours longer travelling to a library and finding something of relevance than it would going to Google, searching, then using ctrl+f to find what he's looking for then that's still time loss that he could otherwise be using to better build his defence.
Fundamentally the point is that an internet ban is meaningless, if he really was going to do something that'd hide evidence he'd get someone else to do it to avoid the ban anyway and besides police took their own copies of the data. If he was going to do something else genuinely criminal he'd only be worsening the case against himself. The damage he could do by being allowed internet access is completely and utterly negligible relative to the fact that people should not be disadvantaged in building their defence in a fair and just justice system. If a justice system has to do things like this to stack the odds against the defendant, there is something grossly problematic with that justice system in that it is no longer there to administer justice, but instead to push politically charged agendas.
"Java has this goal in mind, it is pretty clear that C# does not."
Sorry, but that's FUD. Java is implementing most the things C# already has, and C# is pretty flexible in how you express yourself with some of the new features. You do not have to use the LINQ query syntax if you do not want, you can use the method syntax which is incredibly readable- far more so than the equivalent code in Java would currently be, but whilst still providing the power that Java simply does not.
Other features the GP mentioned like the using clause (and the lock clause for that matter) greatly simplify code and aren't in any way about making it more complex, it is these sorts of simplifications that Java commonly lacks.
It pains me to see you so rabidly attack C# and so rabidly defend Java all the time because you otherwise give the impression of having a lot of potential as a developer, but your inability to see past Java's faults and recognise that all tools have pros and cons, betrays that potential. Java is a wonderful language and the JVM is a wonderfully battle hardened and tried and tested platform that has proven itself through and through, but as languages go Java without a doubt has fallen behind C# in recent years in terms of it's ability to allow developers to express themselves with readable, maintainable code that can be built rapidly.
God only knows, I've defended Java many times here against the hoardes of C programmers who still think everything should be written in C, and who spread the FUD that Java doesn't perform well but it's so tiresome seeing you pretend it's also some flawless magical language that's better than any other language ever - yes that's hyperbole from me, but that's the impression your constant posts on the topic give of your belief in the language. I'm not even saying C# is perfect, god only knows as someone whose done a fair bit of a mathematical programming I get pissed off at having to type Math.Pow instead of just using ^ for powers for example, but it does have some advantages and many recent advancements are pretty neat and are, for good reason, things that Java has thus ended up deciding to try and emulate.
The fact is, in this case that you are wrong, and clearly so because you just haven't given C# the time or chance to properly see what Microsoft have done with it to improve it in these areas, and it's sad because you're clearly an otherwise intelligent guy. Less of the fanboyism and a bit more rationality, less of the insistence that your way is unquestionably the best way, and that there's no truth in the idea that different methods have different merits depending on the facts of the task at hand, a bit more willingness to be open minded about other languages and other concepts and I'd wager that'd be enough to push you from being a top 20% developer where I suspect you are now, to being a top 2% developer.
No, you're conflating issue for no reason other than to attempt to Microsoft bash and it just makes your argument look silly. You're pursuing a line of argument that simply makes absolutely no sense just for the sake of trolling a company.
You can complain that Microsoft is making a profit off it's paying customers, you can complain that it's charging developers to release patches which have to be certified and distributed, but to imply that one should pay for the other or vice versa just doesn't make any sense.
The two have to be accounted for differently, for good reason, for example, patches are released to silver members, and they don't even pay a subscription. Are you really suggesting Microsoft should have to foot the cost of certification and distribution of patches to these users itself when the game company has fucked up and released a buggy game rather than bill the company for the costs incurred for it's mistake?
The Gold subscription pays for more than just patches, it pays for things like Last.fm and many of the video services, so if you drop the patch fees to developers then Gold users are subsidising patches for silver and not just their additional content which is unfair. If you drop the gold subscription then Microsoft is left in an awkward situation where it doesn't have a reliable income stream (it has no idea when or how many patches a game will need) to fund other features that are entirely unrelated to patching such as free content streaming.
Put simply, conflating the issues of billing for patches, and billing for gold content makes no sense - they pay for completely different things and to ditch one would have negative effects on the other. You can't run a business without making sure you know how different parts of it are going to be paid for, it's a sure way to fail.
I don't think my XBox 360 has ever had a patch that doesn't improve functionality in the 4 years I've had it, so you're wrong on that. You're also wrong to imply they constantly need updates - maybe 1 or 2 a year at most, that's hardly on the scale of the almost daily, and certainly at least weekly barrage of updates I get on my PC between Windows update, Java's updater, and Flash updater etc.
Updates are pretty much always there to give complete new features, the only exceptions I can recall is where they released parts of new features early but didn't enable them until a later update a few weeks later to spread the load.
There's been a pretty clear evolution of the console from 360 updates, the launch dashboard and the features available pale in comparison to the avatar and general 3D content supporting, voice and gesture enabled, search supporting dashboard of today.
My Wii saw a lot more updates that didn't really seem to improve anything granted, and I don't have a PS3 so can't really judge, but certainly the situation with the 360 isn't anything like you are claiming - the console hardware updates are neither void of feature improvements, nor are they constant. Game updates are a different matter, and if they charge companies $40,000 for them then great, it'll encourage them to release quality titles from the outset.
The real scandal is that they were set up to combat serious, organised crime, such as terrorism, and criminal gangs such as those involved in people trafficing, drugs smuggling and so forth.
Yet it appears they're now taking down MP3 sites.
I will be arranging to meet my MP at his next surgery and protesting very vocally to him in person about this blatant misappropriation of tax payer funds for something those funds were never intended for. Effectively we have this supposedly elite, extremely well funded group of police offers kitted out for dealing with the most serious of crimes, acting as mere sock puppets of the US content industry.
To expand on this, get a new domain, setup a new e-mail address etc. keep the old domain for a year but redirect everything to your new domain, over that year keep a log of anything that was addressed to your old domain and make sure it gets updated to the new one. If a years not long enough, make it 2 years, but effectively the point is this, if you get to a point where you've not had anything through in a year to the old domain you can be pretty sure nothing of value is still using that address, and then hand it over.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember thinking the same when I was forced to study it academically some time ago, and thought at the time what the fuck is the point in it exactly?
Well at least now I have my answer, it makes for good headlines when you want to troll your competitors with it if nothing else.
Who are these legitimate wealthy that we've supposedly driven away?
It's the same here in the UK with the BBC. The BBC has taken quite some hits this last few years in terms of reduced funding and artificial limitations placed on it's ability to compete.
The reason is that the Tories want the favour of Murdoch and Sky, who were all set to take 100% of Sky over until the phone hacking scandal upended the deal. By weakening the BBC, strengthening Sky, and strengthening Murdoch's grasp of Sky they were trying to ensure that TV became their own personal propaganda channel.
Perhaps it's a regional thing but I still see .NET as far and away the most prominent development environment here in the UK outside London (and arguably even inside London judging by the languages requested in job adverts). You're right things are more web focussed now but it still seems to generally be ASP.NET with a hefty focus on ASP.NET MVC nowadays outside London, Java takes a bigger share of the pie in London, whilst PHP holds second place behind .NET outside London.
I suspect it's this regionality that is where much disagreement about language popularity comes from, in the story about iOS being one of the biggest new languages the other day I pointed out that hardly anyone is recruiting for iOS devs around here (though perhaps somewhat ironically, we are!) - I suspect in somewhere like San Francisco though where there's an absolute ton of new startups in the mobile arena that the iOS market is absolutely thriving in contrast though. As I say you see it here in the UK too with London - particularly in the North of England Java jobs are probably every 1 in 10 or 1 in 20, yet in London every other job advertised seems to be Java.
We do a lot of mobile work, so we're one of those places that does actually look for Android devs (in fact we're recruiting for one right now). It depends on the amount the client is paying and so forth, but for more low budget stuff we tend to use HTML5 + jQuery + PhoneGap rather than ObjectiveC and Java. Part of the ballache in the mobile world right now is the fact that you have Windows Phone which is C# only, Android which is Java and C/C++, and iOS which is ObjectiveC and C/C++. For writing cross platform native apps there's no single solution that fits all, we can write C++ libraries that'll cover common stuff in iOS and Android then just build the front ends natively, but that still leaves Windows Phone out the bag. As such we've actually been ignoring it to this point, but if we do get more request for Windows Phone stuff then we're going to have to look at buying in or even building our own Java-esque environment whereby we have a VM for each machine, that executes bytecode we can use commonly across that. Whether we can do this with Java I'm not sure, and I know Apple don't like that, but afaik it's the way things like Unity get away with it so it's going to be the only choice. In an ideal world you'd build a custom UI for each device anyway so you can adhere to the standards for that platform but most clients aren't willing to foot the bill for that.
We have some fairly big clients like BP, Swiss Re, the MoD, GM and so forth, and most requests we get for C# work tend to be either ASP.NET backend stuff, or Sharepoint stuff. We get a lot of HTML/Javascript work, and we get the afformentioned mobile work. We did have one potential tender for some Java work last year, but it was a pretty big Java project and we just couldn't get 5 additional talented Java devs at the time so we had to turn it away. As I say, personally, I'd actually like to get some more Java work which is why I want to put some effort into training our new interns on it when we hire them - I'd love nothing more than an upsurge in Java work, especially if it meant throwing out the shitty PHP contracts instead ;) It's certainly what I've been pushing for for some time to actively seek more Java work because if nothing else I believe there's much more money in it than the PHP and HTML/Javascript stuff at least. The beauty of Java/.NET is that when you sell a system like that you're selling a "proper" system that's solid, and maintainable and can hence charge proper money from it, which isn't the case with devalued tools like HTML, and to a lesser extent, PHP that any monkey can hack together in a half-arsed manner but where clients aren't willing to pay a reasonable markup to have it done properly making it for the most part, much more low profit stuff. Some clients value having things done properly, some don't, but those that do are willing to pay more to have it done properly, and those that do want it done properly are also the ones asking for Java/.NET stuff, and arguably even C++ for that matter hence why I want to chase them more.
It makes me despair as it's been some years since I left IT support behind, and I noticed at the time the profession was becoming more and more filled with people who simply have no idea what the fuck they're doing but coast by nonetheless, calling in consultants for a fortune when they don't know how to do something that any half competent IT support person should be able to do, or blaming the software, going off sick, hiding at a different office or whatever else when inevitably things go wrong and they'd otherwise have to face up to their responsibilities.
It seems now that these numpties have found their way to Slashdot, extolling their blame on software to the world at large, rather than facing up to the fact that they just don't know what in the flying fuck they are actually doing.
Of course, the worst part is, they then moan when their job gets outsourced to India - is it any fucking wonder why when they show such ineptitude? It's no wonder Chinese hackers are supposedly pillaging Western firms dry of IP when IT security means "blame the software when your incorrectly configured security policy lets the user do something they weren't meant to be able to do".
This is why IT support has rapidly started to gain the same sort of disrespect as a profession that many manual trades like bricklaying long have, and why support has seen a deterioration in wages to boot - because there's so many IT staff out there who really can't be trusted to show a bit of intelligence and do a good job nowadays, and they drag it down for those who know what they're doing.
I'm just glad I got the hell out of there seeing as it's only continued to deteriorate as a profession!
What Google is doing in TFA is not an exploit, just because Apple didn't want people to write Javascript in that way, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it per-se. This isn't to defend it as it's obviously not a particularly respectful thing to do, but it's not illegal, nor does it breach any standards, in contrast, abusing an operating system level exploit potentially falls foul of both these things and opens Google up to a lawsuit. Perhaps you or the GP could consider taking it to court and challenge it there if you genuinely believe it's the case? You'd be able to get a pretty hefty payout or settlement if true.
Don't come crying when you actually get laughed out of court though because it turns out you just didn't know how to configure a network properly.
"That is a gigantic security hole just waiting to be exploited."
Right, so a browser that isolates itself to userspace is a gigantic security hole waiting to be exploited, yet a browser that requires admin privileges to install is not?
"Further, there's a reason corporate machines are locked down. We don't want people, especially IT people, installing every random piece of software that asks the user to install it."
So why are you letting people run arbitrary executables in the first place if you need that level of control of your systems?
"Rule #3 of IT that should never be broken: Never, ever, ever, EVER give a regular user administrative rights on their machine. Ever. Chrome breaks this rule with a wrecking ball."
Er no, that's exactly what it DOESN'T do.
"It's bad enough that as an admin I am constantly harassed by Windows 7, "Do you want to allow...?" Yes, I'm a fucking admin, just install the damn thing! Now we have to put up with companies making it so every user can install whatever they want and expect us to figure out what they did."
Well at least now we know you're really not qualified for your own profession. Really, you have a degree of IT security responsibility yet you complain when an OS alerts you to a request by an application for (or if you're a user, blocks you from providing) admin access, and say you just blindly accept, but then you complain when an application doesn't try and obtain admin access that you previously suggested should never be given to a user?
You haven't configured your network to limit what people can run and install, you've configured your network to only allow executables to work within the permissions defined for the currently active user account, Chrome is doing exactly that, thus the only problem is that how you've configured your network, isn't how you seem to beleive your network should be configured.
"But on a locked down machine, nothing should be able to be installed without the admins knowing about it. Period. Google found a way around that."
No they didn't, that's precisely the point, the issue isn't that Google found some way around the lock down, it's that the system wasn't locked down properly to facilitate that goal.
Chrome is not some magical psychic piece of software that can tell what the system admin intended, it can only do what the OS allows it to do and is configured to allow it to do.
If Chrome is able to do things you did not intend on your systems then you have much more serious problems and your systems are incompetently configured and managed. You can guarantee if Chrome is obtaining admin privileges as a legitimate peice of software then a peice of malware would have a hell of a time enjoying your poorly configured systems. The first step to solving your problem is get rid of the geek squad level of staff, and start hiring some proper admins.
I don't think Google have done anything wrong there, saving settings to a user section of the registry makes more sense than a browser needing me to give it admin priviliges to write wherever the fuck it wants. It's precisely that sort of behaviour that leads people to click okay each time windows notifies them a program wants admin rights without even stopping to consider why.
It sounds more like your problem is that your lockdown policy isn't configured as you'd like it to be, yet you blame the software for not obeying how you wanted things setup, rather than how things actually are setup, other than that it sounds like Chrome is following correct and best practice behaviour in this respect whereas how you'd have liked it to respond is bad practice and not preferable.
Because it's pretty fucking funny watching the authorities try to play whackamole?
Part of the reason anti-piracy measures are failing are not simply about new technological tools outflanking the police, but also because as soon as you take your eye off the ball with one mechanism (i.e. P2P) then it'll pop straight back up.
They took down centralised stuff years ago and along came P2P, they focus on P2P and now centralised stuff returns. With the lack of focus on P2P sites and such lately I wouldn't be surprised to see it growing in popularity again.
Write them a letter if you are in the UK even. In fact, it'll probably be more effective.
Personally for me, as a British citizen living in the UK, admittance by a police officer that my PC may have been hacked simply for visiting a site linked in a news article gives me all the justification I feel I need to submit a formal complaint to the IPCC and to my MP.
Whether it has or not, and whether the officer knew what he was on about is neither here nor there, the fact he believes that it's legitimate policing needs to be stamped right out.
I completely agree that Java's strengths really come to fruition when you're developing for heterogeneous systems and that's actually the purpose for which I really really like it and definitely advocate it over those who suggest you should resort to C++ and just compile multiple binaries for each system.
The problem is though many - I'm certain the vast majority of business actually just use Windows systems and in this circumstance it becomes harder to justify Java - C#'s advantage come to the forefront, even more so if the firm in question is fully invested in the Microsoft route - i.e. using SQL server as their database system, and Active Directory for account management. But ignoring that set of scenarios and looking at a system built on a Windows only network even if it doesn't need to work with AD or SQL Server (and this isn't an uncommon scenario) then that's the situation in which it really comes down to language vs. language much more.
Many of the new C# keywords like lock, using, and the LINQ constructs are actually shorthand for standard method style syntax and actually just get converted to exactly that by the compiler anyway. LINQ works based on extension methods, just in case you're not aware of them, very briefly, extension methods are methods that can be defined to act on existing types without modifying the code definition for that type. LINQ to objects for example works by adding methods like OrderBy onto the IEnumerable (which would have been better named IIterable IMO) interface such that it can be used to order any iterable collection. The following demonstrates an example LINQ query:
var query = from c in Cars
where c.Name.Contains("Focus")
orderby c.Name
select c;
This really just translates to:
var query = Cars .Where(c => c.Name.Contains("foo") .OrderBy(c => c.Name);
Effectively the methods just return a result of the same type (IEnumerable) and so you can just chain the extension methods onto each other. All LINQ does is convert it's syntax into this anyway. You don't even have to use the lambda syntax for parameters if you don't want either, you can equally use the anonymous method syntax.
Some C# programmers frankly prefer to avoid the LINQ syntax altogether and just use the extension methods, and there's actually good reason to do this too - if you want to extend the range of extension methods available then LINQ wont recognise that and so you'll end up with a mix of LINQ and extension methods anyway.
The lock keyword i.e. lock(x) { ... } to lock a variable in a multithreaded environment is really just shorthand for using the Monitor pattern:
Monitor.Enter(x); ...
try {
}
finally {
Monitor.Exit(x);
}
The using statement is just shorthand for previously prevalent IDisposable code, so using(var x = new x()) { ... } becomes:
var x = new x();
try {
statement;
}
finally {
if (resource != null) { (IDisposable)resource).Dispose(); }
}
So you can see a lot of the new syntax really needn't muddy your code if you're not keen on it, it's really just there to cut the amount of code you need to write, and in the case of LINQ may not even achieve that and you may resort to extension methods anyway.
If you're going to be building for heterogeneous systems then you've really no reason to give up on Java, but for me if I'm building a Windows only system then I use C#, and the reasons are that I genuinely find that the combination of Visual Studio + C# features let me do what I want to do faster. Some of this is down to the fact the .NET libraries are focussed towards that platform and so have that inherent advantage, but part of it is down to the language too. You touch upon the point of looking at the bigger pic
Nope, you just made that up in your head.
It's probably one of those things you have to do to rationalise with yourself about being wrong.
[citation needed]
1. I'm too lazy to Google what you said to confirm it's true, so for the sake of my fundamentally flawed argument I'll pretend it's not
2. I disagree, and don't really have a decent rebuttal, so I'll just put my hands over my ears, scream "la la la" I can't hear you and pretend you don't have a point either.
Guess which definition your usage falls under? Hint: No citation was needed, because it's pretty easy to find the details of the judges decision.
"One other thing, accused murderers dont generally have access to the murder weapon once the case has started"
No but they often have permission to visit the scene of the crime to look for anything pertinent to proving whether or not they were there.
"Likewise, someone accused of computer mischief is not likely to be allowed access to said server because of how easy it would be to clear evidence."
The police took copies of everything they needed. Unless you think he's going to hack into the police to access data that may not even be network attached then this is really really silly. Almost as silly as implying that finding a random unknown lawyer using an operator or yellow pages is a magical solution to the issue of being able to access data essential to your defence stored on a large scale distributed system that requires quite some in depth knowledge to acquire necessary data for defence from.
"And when you are on bail, there are real restrictions that come with it because of the risk that you could take actions subversive to the case-- such as messing with evidence or fleeing the country."
Yet he's been granted bail with neither of these things at issue. If he was a flight risk he wouldn't have been granted bail. What was the relevance of this point? it's meaningless in the context of the discussion.
So are you done now with your irrelevant points, or would you like to scream "get off my lawn" pointlessly for a little longer?
Most MPs in the UK hold what they call surgerys whereby they go somewhere public, such as a town hall and allow citizens to have one-to-one meetings with them to take up issues which they can then choose to raise in parliament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgery_(politics)
It's a much more effective way of dealing with issues IMO because they are not given room to easily weasle out of things, and it's easier to tell when they are lying to you, though I recommend saving it for the most serious of issues else they will get fed up of seeing you all the time. For me this is an issue that warrants raising the greivance in a face to face manner as I think this is a pretty gross abuse of police resources clearly pushing a private corporate agenda rather than objectively policing.
What if he wants to defend himself? What if he can't afford a lawyer? what if he can't afford a lawyer trustworthy enough to be handed his password? what if he can't afford a lawyer both trustworthy enough, and competent enough to gather the information from Megauploads servers? Could you really trust your lawyer to search through the guts of a large scale distributed system effectively to find evidence showing the relative scale of copyright infringement to legitimate use for example?
To be fair my previous post was made somewhat tongue in cheek in order to provoke discussion on the topic, but I think there's a valid debate to be had over how fair it is to ban someone from the internet in a case like this. Consider that you're involved in a car crash where someone died and the police decide to press charges for manslaughter even though you believe you were not at fault - would you be happy if the judge granted you bail, but prevented you returning to the scene of the crash so you could better think through the events to help compose your defence?, or to see if you recognise anyone who witnessed the incident and who you could hence ask to provide their version of events as a statement?, or to take photographs of for example skid marks, or other points on the road that may be relevant such as oil patches or similar.
Sure your lawyer can do some of these things, but they wont be able to do so effectively as you could. Why should anyone have to suffer such a disadvantage in building their case when the ban on visiting the location (i.e. using the internet in this case) is of negligible value?
This is the 21st century, where many people only know many other people online, where much useful content is online and many libraries have been outright closed. This is a case about the internet where facts on the internet are important to the case.
Pray tell how exactly he intends to phone people when he doesn't have their phone number, or perhaps even their address or real name?
Sure he could ask his lawyer to get these things, but that assumes he can find and afford a lawyer who is competent enough to use the internet, whom he can trust with his passwords and accounts, and who knows where online to look for the information in question.
Look, I get your point, people are too dependent on the internet nowadays, but your argument doesn't really work in this case - this is a case about a very modern issue, one that is simply not well catered to by the pre-90s disconnected world. The guy should have every right to connect to the net and grab any information relevant to his defence himself - he shouldn't have to depend on anyone else for his defence if he chooses not to, he should have the right to log onto his servers, and extract logs demonstrating the scale of illegal content if it aids his case for example, he shouldn't have to employ anyone else, or trust anyone else.
The fact is there's also more, and more useful information than one has ever been able to find or access in the disconnected world. Whilst my previous comment was actually a little mischeivous if I'm honest, this has the inherent implication that he is still disadvantaged in his defence, and this should frankly never be the case. Even if it's simply that it'll take him many hours longer travelling to a library and finding something of relevance than it would going to Google, searching, then using ctrl+f to find what he's looking for then that's still time loss that he could otherwise be using to better build his defence.
Fundamentally the point is that an internet ban is meaningless, if he really was going to do something that'd hide evidence he'd get someone else to do it to avoid the ban anyway and besides police took their own copies of the data. If he was going to do something else genuinely criminal he'd only be worsening the case against himself. The damage he could do by being allowed internet access is completely and utterly negligible relative to the fact that people should not be disadvantaged in building their defence in a fair and just justice system. If a justice system has to do things like this to stack the odds against the defendant, there is something grossly problematic with that justice system in that it is no longer there to administer justice, but instead to push politically charged agendas.
"Java has this goal in mind, it is pretty clear that C# does not."
Sorry, but that's FUD. Java is implementing most the things C# already has, and C# is pretty flexible in how you express yourself with some of the new features. You do not have to use the LINQ query syntax if you do not want, you can use the method syntax which is incredibly readable- far more so than the equivalent code in Java would currently be, but whilst still providing the power that Java simply does not.
Other features the GP mentioned like the using clause (and the lock clause for that matter) greatly simplify code and aren't in any way about making it more complex, it is these sorts of simplifications that Java commonly lacks.
It pains me to see you so rabidly attack C# and so rabidly defend Java all the time because you otherwise give the impression of having a lot of potential as a developer, but your inability to see past Java's faults and recognise that all tools have pros and cons, betrays that potential. Java is a wonderful language and the JVM is a wonderfully battle hardened and tried and tested platform that has proven itself through and through, but as languages go Java without a doubt has fallen behind C# in recent years in terms of it's ability to allow developers to express themselves with readable, maintainable code that can be built rapidly.
God only knows, I've defended Java many times here against the hoardes of C programmers who still think everything should be written in C, and who spread the FUD that Java doesn't perform well but it's so tiresome seeing you pretend it's also some flawless magical language that's better than any other language ever - yes that's hyperbole from me, but that's the impression your constant posts on the topic give of your belief in the language. I'm not even saying C# is perfect, god only knows as someone whose done a fair bit of a mathematical programming I get pissed off at having to type Math.Pow instead of just using ^ for powers for example, but it does have some advantages and many recent advancements are pretty neat and are, for good reason, things that Java has thus ended up deciding to try and emulate.
The fact is, in this case that you are wrong, and clearly so because you just haven't given C# the time or chance to properly see what Microsoft have done with it to improve it in these areas, and it's sad because you're clearly an otherwise intelligent guy. Less of the fanboyism and a bit more rationality, less of the insistence that your way is unquestionably the best way, and that there's no truth in the idea that different methods have different merits depending on the facts of the task at hand, a bit more willingness to be open minded about other languages and other concepts and I'd wager that'd be enough to push you from being a top 20% developer where I suspect you are now, to being a top 2% developer.
It's to stop him being able to carry out valuable research, or contact people who could aid in his defence.
In other words, it's to make it harder for him to build a defence now they've stitched him up.
No, you're conflating issue for no reason other than to attempt to Microsoft bash and it just makes your argument look silly. You're pursuing a line of argument that simply makes absolutely no sense just for the sake of trolling a company.
You can complain that Microsoft is making a profit off it's paying customers, you can complain that it's charging developers to release patches which have to be certified and distributed, but to imply that one should pay for the other or vice versa just doesn't make any sense.
The two have to be accounted for differently, for good reason, for example, patches are released to silver members, and they don't even pay a subscription. Are you really suggesting Microsoft should have to foot the cost of certification and distribution of patches to these users itself when the game company has fucked up and released a buggy game rather than bill the company for the costs incurred for it's mistake?
The Gold subscription pays for more than just patches, it pays for things like Last.fm and many of the video services, so if you drop the patch fees to developers then Gold users are subsidising patches for silver and not just their additional content which is unfair. If you drop the gold subscription then Microsoft is left in an awkward situation where it doesn't have a reliable income stream (it has no idea when or how many patches a game will need) to fund other features that are entirely unrelated to patching such as free content streaming.
Put simply, conflating the issues of billing for patches, and billing for gold content makes no sense - they pay for completely different things and to ditch one would have negative effects on the other. You can't run a business without making sure you know how different parts of it are going to be paid for, it's a sure way to fail.
I don't think my XBox 360 has ever had a patch that doesn't improve functionality in the 4 years I've had it, so you're wrong on that. You're also wrong to imply they constantly need updates - maybe 1 or 2 a year at most, that's hardly on the scale of the almost daily, and certainly at least weekly barrage of updates I get on my PC between Windows update, Java's updater, and Flash updater etc.
Updates are pretty much always there to give complete new features, the only exceptions I can recall is where they released parts of new features early but didn't enable them until a later update a few weeks later to spread the load.
There's been a pretty clear evolution of the console from 360 updates, the launch dashboard and the features available pale in comparison to the avatar and general 3D content supporting, voice and gesture enabled, search supporting dashboard of today.
My Wii saw a lot more updates that didn't really seem to improve anything granted, and I don't have a PS3 so can't really judge, but certainly the situation with the 360 isn't anything like you are claiming - the console hardware updates are neither void of feature improvements, nor are they constant. Game updates are a different matter, and if they charge companies $40,000 for them then great, it'll encourage them to release quality titles from the outset.
The real scandal is that they were set up to combat serious, organised crime, such as terrorism, and criminal gangs such as those involved in people trafficing, drugs smuggling and so forth.
Yet it appears they're now taking down MP3 sites.
I will be arranging to meet my MP at his next surgery and protesting very vocally to him in person about this blatant misappropriation of tax payer funds for something those funds were never intended for. Effectively we have this supposedly elite, extremely well funded group of police offers kitted out for dealing with the most serious of crimes, acting as mere sock puppets of the US content industry.
To expand on this, get a new domain, setup a new e-mail address etc. keep the old domain for a year but redirect everything to your new domain, over that year keep a log of anything that was addressed to your old domain and make sure it gets updated to the new one. If a years not long enough, make it 2 years, but effectively the point is this, if you get to a point where you've not had anything through in a year to the old domain you can be pretty sure nothing of value is still using that address, and then hand it over.
He supposedly did something in Europe to do with FOSS a long time ago.
Nowaday's he's employed by Microsoft, and the use of the term FOSS is merely a weak attempt to add legitimacy to his FUD.