"wtfismiddleware" tag
on
Oracle Buys BEA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Middleware" is IT-speak for "we've got this closed-source thing over there, and it doesn't talk at all to this closed-source thing over here, and we have no idea what their data formats or wire formats are but we've spent scads of money on both of them and now we need them to talk to each other, so can you please figure out how to make that work?
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
That makes sense allow domain holders to keep their domains, but close the domain to new registrations.
None of that makes any sense. A domain name system is nothing more than a way of turning a string humans can read into an address a machine can use. There's already lots of alternatives that have sprung up because the TLD situation is an entirely manufactured problem; it's not like there's a critical shortage of letter sequences in the world. Show me the legitimate technical problem with letting some guy off the street register screw.yu or dollarsfordonuts.su, or whatever. It is a relic, a holdover from the dark ages. It is legacy architecture.
But, hey, if we admitted that, we'd admit that there's probably no need for ICANN, full stop.
Why does creating lame new TLDs have to be a protracted, painful process? Why can't they just be made up on the fly? As far as I can tell, the answer is "because if could do that, we wouldn't need ICANN", and there's nothing more important to a typical organization than justifying its own existence.
The production costs of dvds, like every other kind of media ever, has only gotten cheaper over time. Has the price of CDs or DVDs dropped during that time? Not so much. If anything, the opposite.
TV shows pay for themselves with advertising. Movies pay for themselves with product placements and box office receipts. DVD sales, especially on successful movies are as close to pure profit as makes no difference; they don't cost what they cost because there's some line item somewhere on Studio's budgets that says "to cover cost of extra explosions, increase the price of DVD sales by $1." They cost what they cost because people have proven themselves consistently willing to pay that much, over and over. How many slashdotters have every single copy of the first Star Wars trilogy ever released? At, what, sixty bucks a box? You don't think those things got more expensive to make over time, did you?
DVD sales are almost pure profit. Not "covering expenses" profit, but the regular old rolling around in piles of cash surrounded by hookers and blow kind.
So, you're saying that the company that created Betamax, ATRAC encoding, the S-Link protocol, Minidisc players, Super-AudioCDs, Memory Sticks and Universal Media Discs might actually lose a format war?
I imagine you consider yourself to be a smart person; so, your argument is that we need "smarter" rulings? Perhaps not made by people "too stupid to get out of jury duty". Maybe it's idealistic of me, but perhaps if more supposedly smart people held less spent less time weaseling out of what is ostensibly their civic duty, you'd get your wish.
It's an anecdote, but the worst thing that's happened to my network in the last six months was a nasty worm that propagated to all our correctly-updated Windows machines via, drumroll please, a vulnerability in Symantec's enterprise AV product.
There was so much love that weekend, I tell you. So much.
So the assertion there is that the cost of the hardware isn't just the cost of the box, but the cost of supporting and connecting that box to other boxes over a period of time. And that these costs outstrip the actual cost of the box by a factor of large.
Well, yeah. Without even going into the validity of their numbers, the thing is that everyone knows that. Welcome to enterprise IT, here's your sign.
The special thing here is that the hardware is as close to being completely disposable as possible, and that the training is as close to universally available as possible, and that as a result it's just possible that the poor nations of the world aren't condemned to the grim meathook future that's lying in wait for people who aren't well-educated enough and well-trained enough to be a part of the information age.
The point is not "India is a bad place to do business". The point is "your data can be trivially moved from a place where its security is a legal requirement to a place where those laws don't apply."
I'd like to see privacy laws that include data-migration limits. Like "once you've agreed to a privacy statement, it is then illegal to move that data to another national jurisdiction", or something.
Re:The diplomatic response
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That's great, but a lot of projects don't even put out point releases; they're just in a constant state of CVS flux, and there's consequently no way at all for the user to tell what's been fixed when, to know what problems they've got or what problems have been solved. FFMpeg, I'm looking at you.
In fact, awesome, the FFMpeg people come right out and say that if you're not using CVS to basically screw off and leave them alone.
Here in Canada, data-over-cellphones is absolutely extortionate. All the plans are insanely expensive, before you even consider them on a per megabyte basis. There is no "unlimited" plan; all the plans that say "unlimited" have a little asterisk over them that says "100 megabytes max." Not only that, going over that limit costs you three to five cents a kilobyte.
That's not a typo, that says "kilobyte".
It's cheaper to get an American data plan and pay the roaming fees than it is to buy locally. I'd love to be able to just plug my cell into my laptop and go, but there's just no way.
Show me the person who uses every single feature available at a bash prompt, for crying out loud. You know how many options there are to configure an xterm? I'll tell you: way more than you'll ever use. The bash manpage is more than four thousand lines long, bash-builtins is another thousand. And that's before you even touch the hundreds of little utilities that come standard with anything unixy. My/usr/bin has more than two thousand files in it.
They're not there because I use them, that's for sure, but that doesn't make them useless.
I've never had to do that, so to me, that feature is unnecessary clutter. Might not be to you, though.
Not surprisingly, most features are like that. Allegations of bloat or "unnecessary" features always end up sounding like vague allegations you read on Usenet: "Some people believe", or "It is said that"... Which features, specifically, are "unnecessary"? Bearing in mind that unnecessary-for-me is not the same as unnecessary-for-anyone. You can argue all you like about frequency of use of those features if you like, but for every feature in those products that you care to name I'll bet you that there's somebody, probably lots of somebodies out there, who absolutely must have that feature on their desktops.
I, for example, strongly prefer to work with white text on a dark blue background, a feature pretty much nobody even knows about anymore. Is it unnecessary? Probably. I sure do like it though.
Common courtesy is not a technology problem.
on
Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 0
"A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality." - Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy Of The Commons".
Substitute "technology" in for "natural sciences" and "common courtesy" for "morality" here, and you've got a pretty good idea what my view on this is. The name of this miraculous technology is "set to vibrate plus call display". It takes almost zero effort to use. You think people who don't have the brains or manners to do that are going to tell their cellphone when they're going into a movie theater? Or that a light sensor will work when people carry their phones in their pockets, for that matter? Please.
I've heard it said that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it; Microsoft has declared that it is now emphasizing security in its development cycle, which no doubt requires some changes in the way product development is managed. I'm wondering what sort of changes you have had to make to your process on the project management end, and what sort of internal metrics you are employing to measure the success rate of those changes.
Re:Screw that, I wrote about Web 4.0
on
Web 3.0
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· Score: 0, Funny
You're clearly incorrect.
Web 1.0 is about gathering underpants.
Web 2.0 is a whole bunch of question marks, and
Web 3.0 is about rolling in cash.
First, you narrowly define what you mean by "intelligence". Then you put together something that meets those narrow criteria while pumping your stock. Profit!
Bruce Schneier has covered this already, but I would like to know why F-Secure didn't contact, say, everyone else when they found out that Sony was installing a rootkit on people's machines. I would like to know why nobody else on the long list of companies that get paid protection money to keep this sort of thing from happening saw fit to inform the world about this, instead of having it appear on some guy's weblog. It's not like that little cabal isn't paid what amounts to protection money specifically so that this kind of thing doesn't happen.
It's worth mentioning here that the real strength of the pipe is not "what you can pipe", but "what you can pipe things from, and to", and the fact that you can daisy-chain them together as far as you like. There are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of little tools and widgets that you can pipe information into and out of to achieve various effects. Regardless of what new things the MSH pipe can do, the unix world has a significantly larger toolbox.
It's worth observing here that this sort of thing will ultimately only affect the poor. If the quality of public education gets bad enough, the well-enough-off will just arrange private schooling for their kids.
The problem is that a good education is the only real chance that the very poor have of escaping poverty. Reducing the real quality of public education (whether by destroying real scientific education, or by the awful No Child Left Behind act, among numerous others) basically means that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor.
Whatever you think the American Dream might be, it's not that.
Well, obviously they can't do that. It's not rocket science, after all.
As an aside, this is the first time I've ever seen someone use a derogatory "that bunch of rocket scientists" on a bunch of smart people whose chief concern is the science of rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the user tax on closed formats and closed source, basically.
None of that makes any sense. A domain name system is nothing more than a way of turning a string humans can read into an address a machine can use. There's already lots of alternatives that have sprung up because the TLD situation is an entirely manufactured problem; it's not like there's a critical shortage of letter sequences in the world. Show me the legitimate technical problem with letting some guy off the street register screw.yu or dollarsfordonuts.su, or whatever. It is a relic, a holdover from the dark ages. It is legacy architecture.
But, hey, if we admitted that, we'd admit that there's probably no need for ICANN, full stop.
Why does creating lame new TLDs have to be a protracted, painful process? Why can't they just be made up on the fly? As far as I can tell, the answer is "because if could do that, we wouldn't need ICANN", and there's nothing more important to a typical organization than justifying its own existence.
TV shows pay for themselves with advertising. Movies pay for themselves with product placements and box office receipts. DVD sales, especially on successful movies are as close to pure profit as makes no difference; they don't cost what they cost because there's some line item somewhere on Studio's budgets that says "to cover cost of extra explosions, increase the price of DVD sales by $1." They cost what they cost because people have proven themselves consistently willing to pay that much, over and over. How many slashdotters have every single copy of the first Star Wars trilogy ever released? At, what, sixty bucks a box? You don't think those things got more expensive to make over time, did you?
DVD sales are almost pure profit. Not "covering expenses" profit, but the regular old rolling around in piles of cash surrounded by hookers and blow kind.
Believing that the price of something is in any way related to the cost of thing to the seller is deeply naive, a sure sign of a sucker.
What everyone really wants is World Of Starcraft.
So, you're saying that the company that created Betamax, ATRAC encoding, the S-Link protocol, Minidisc players, Super-AudioCDs, Memory Sticks and Universal Media Discs might actually lose a format war?
Preposterous!
I imagine you consider yourself to be a smart person; so, your argument is that we need "smarter" rulings? Perhaps not made by people "too stupid to get out of jury duty". Maybe it's idealistic of me, but perhaps if more supposedly smart people held less spent less time weaseling out of what is ostensibly their civic duty, you'd get your wish.
There was so much love that weekend, I tell you. So much.
Well, yeah. Without even going into the validity of their numbers, the thing is that everyone knows that. Welcome to enterprise IT, here's your sign.
The special thing here is that the hardware is as close to being completely disposable as possible, and that the training is as close to universally available as possible, and that as a result it's just possible that the poor nations of the world aren't condemned to the grim meathook future that's lying in wait for people who aren't well-educated enough and well-trained enough to be a part of the information age.
I'd like to see privacy laws that include data-migration limits. Like "once you've agreed to a privacy statement, it is then illegal to move that data to another national jurisdiction", or something.
In fact, awesome, the FFMpeg people come right out and say that if you're not using CVS to basically screw off and leave them alone.
They're not alone in this.
That's not a typo, that says "kilobyte".
It's cheaper to get an American data plan and pay the roaming fees than it is to buy locally. I'd love to be able to just plug my cell into my laptop and go, but there's just no way.
What are the natural boundaries of an idea?
They're not there because I use them, that's for sure, but that doesn't make them useless.
Not surprisingly, most features are like that. Allegations of bloat or "unnecessary" features always end up sounding like vague allegations you read on Usenet: "Some people believe", or "It is said that"... Which features, specifically, are "unnecessary"? Bearing in mind that unnecessary-for-me is not the same as unnecessary-for-anyone. You can argue all you like about frequency of use of those features if you like, but for every feature in those products that you care to name I'll bet you that there's somebody, probably lots of somebodies out there, who absolutely must have that feature on their desktops.
I, for example, strongly prefer to work with white text on a dark blue background, a feature pretty much nobody even knows about anymore. Is it unnecessary? Probably. I sure do like it though.
Substitute "technology" in for "natural sciences" and "common courtesy" for "morality" here, and you've got a pretty good idea what my view on this is. The name of this miraculous technology is "set to vibrate plus call display". It takes almost zero effort to use. You think people who don't have the brains or manners to do that are going to tell their cellphone when they're going into a movie theater? Or that a light sensor will work when people carry their phones in their pockets, for that matter? Please.
Try not to be a dick. There's a novel idea.
I've heard it said that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it; Microsoft has declared that it is now emphasizing security in its development cycle, which no doubt requires some changes in the way product development is managed. I'm wondering what sort of changes you have had to make to your process on the project management end, and what sort of internal metrics you are employing to measure the success rate of those changes.
Web 1.0 is about gathering underpants.
Web 2.0 is a whole bunch of question marks, and
Web 3.0 is about rolling in cash.
This could not be more obvious.
What does "intelligent" mean, please?
Bruce Schneier has covered this already, but I would like to know why F-Secure didn't contact, say, everyone else when they found out that Sony was installing a rootkit on people's machines. I would like to know why nobody else on the long list of companies that get paid protection money to keep this sort of thing from happening saw fit to inform the world about this, instead of having it appear on some guy's weblog. It's not like that little cabal isn't paid what amounts to protection money specifically so that this kind of thing doesn't happen.
It's worth mentioning here that the real strength of the pipe is not "what you can pipe", but "what you can pipe things from, and to", and the fact that you can daisy-chain them together as far as you like. There are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of little tools and widgets that you can pipe information into and out of to achieve various effects. Regardless of what new things the MSH pipe can do, the unix world has a significantly larger toolbox.
I wonder what the going exchange rate between high-powered acoustic lasers and, say, MREs and bottled water is at this point.
I can't help but think that "news for nerds" might not be "stuff that matters" for the next few weeks.
The problem is that a good education is the only real chance that the very poor have of escaping poverty. Reducing the real quality of public education (whether by destroying real scientific education, or by the awful No Child Left Behind act, among numerous others) basically means that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor.
Whatever you think the American Dream might be, it's not that.
As an aside, this is the first time I've ever seen someone use a derogatory "that bunch of rocket scientists" on a bunch of smart people whose chief concern is the science of rockets.