The point isn't about the reliability of code. If code fails certain situations that can't be guaranteed not to occur, and such failure is not acceptable, then the code isn't necessarily crappy, but the solution or application is.
If, however, you have really shitty code (and I know, I've written some) that never fails in the situations you throw at it... you get the idea.
Code crashing cars is the failure of the implemented solution. The code that crashes the car, however, could in theory be quite elegant.
Hunter-gatherer societies are in general hierachical, war-like, mysogynstic, and rigidly bound by social mores that would make the Victorians look like libertines.
I'm intrigued by what you say here because of a fascinating article I read in National Geographic several weeks ago about the Hadza people. They're one of the last few "modern" hunter-gatherer societies that are left in the world. No true political hierarchy, no religious beliefs, no tribal war, and so on. The journalist mentioned specifically about how much leisure time they have, and was quite jealous.
Altiris has had application virtualization for a while now, but after comparing the products, I found Softgrid (which was acquired by Microsoft and rebranded as App-V) to be a more compelling one.
It's kind of odd, but it seems to me that products gobbled up by the Symantec overlords tend to turn pretty crappy with age, whereas those acquired (and usually rebranded) by Microsoft, when focused on of course (and App-V is getting very heavily used by them, check out the Office 2010 beta "Click to Run"), tend to mature into even better and usually more seamless solutions.
Now you've got me thinking... There needs to be a movie, starring Chuck Norris, of course, and a whole slew of people who'll get paid tons of cash due to their notoriety but be left out of the opening credits, where Chuck goes on a non-stop beyond-godlike multinational testosterone-fueled spree of death and pillage, without care for his own safety, in a man-with-nothing-to-lose odyssey to obtain some personally invaluable McGuffin, with obvious spots of intrigue and investigation, HUGE explosions that he just walks out of, and small tactical nukes that he disarms using nothing but his beard, all while his hands are tied behind his back (for the challenge, not because he couldn't break or slip the bonds).
Something like a cross between Taken and 300, only so much manlier that he makes Leonidas look like a pussy.
The world needs more awesome, gripping, extremely manly films that have good plots, and I submit that a decent director and screenwriter need to put Chuck into this role. For all our sakes.
For the last three years or so, I've been using Hostmonster for my web hosting needs.
TBH, I just use it as a file dump currently to distribute a couple of FOSS projects I've written, but when pulling files from them, I've usually maxed out my connection. 200GB/2T transfer, but they don't cut you off if you exceed limits.
$5/month when paid by the year. Typical Linux/Apache/PHP setup, but I think it's Postgre's instead of MySQL.
But my question would be how many people in this type of situation are developing said applications internally.
At my last job, we had several ActiveX apps that were used, but they were all hosted by outside parties. As the cost of making those apps compatible with IE7 or IE8 would be taken on by a different company, it makes more sense to me that IT departments could demand newer browser compatibility from those vendors instead.
If an app is completely internal, developed and used in house, then couldn't compatibility with multiple browsers be demanded from the programmers by the IT admins? Is working in an upgrade path that allows multiple client browsers for a period of 1-3 years so costly that it can't be considered a reasonable expenditure? Do these companies see no benefit to allowing themselves to upgrade away from XP with their next desktop refresh?
Most of the available apps could easily be mimicked using Flash
Indeed. I'm shocked at how frequently Slashdotters will offer technical reasons as to why Flash isn't on the iPhone, without realizing this. It makes me wonder if there was ever an article posted here on this.
I have a Viliv S5 MID, and while I can't echo specifically to issues using Flash (other than the fact that the hardware accelerated 10.1 Flash doesn't yet support my chipset) I can say that mouseover based features are very difficult to utilize with the touch screen. I can switch the joystick on the left side to move the mouse, but that's tedious. I find that when I want to make right-click actions on things in the start menu, to bring up computer management for example, I often open the menu, do an invalid drag/drop (like documents to computer) and then hit the right click button.
I could likely click and hold to get that functionality, but I sort of just figured that out while typing this.....
I didn't switch to Vista until post SP1 for several reasons, but one of the biggest was that my 3Ware RAID controller didn't have finished drivers for a significant amount of time.
I actually learned about the feature because it was highlighted by the person giving the demos at the Server 2008 launch that I attended, at which point I also got a free license for Ultimate, as well as Server 2008 Enterprise and SQL 2008. It was quite the fantastic and informative day.
In spite of the fact that I have several Win7 licenses at my disposal, I refuse to upgrade my main desktop. Reinstalling and re-tweaking every app I use would be too big of a chore, and I imagine that Windows Easy Transfer would be incomplete or simply take... days.
Either way, while I'm sad that it took several years for OEMs to catch up with hardware reqs and a complete re-versioning of the operating system, I am glad that people have come to see the improvements to the OS that Vista ushered in and that Win7 has refined as the fantastic leaps forward in usability that they are.
On a side note, though, folks that set their desktops and start menus to "Classic" (a.k.a. "I fear change") mode don't get to experience a significant portion of the UI enhancements;)
Whomever came up with the search bar for Win7 was a God damned genius
I know this is off topic, and I hate to break it to you, but that search/run combo box and the majority of the UI changes you've come to love or find useful in Win7 were all introduced in 2006 with Vista. We non-haters have been enjoying them for years now.
Maybe there should be a limit on market cap so that no company is ever allowed to get to be too big to fail.
Perhaps we should repeal Sarbanes-Oxley instead and save some money on companies' bottom lines. I've heard that SOX adds 4% to operating costs, and the funny thing about it is that it was enacted, reflexively I may add, in the wake of Enron and Worldcom, which, when looked back upon under the light of SOX, would have likely happened the same way anyway.
In short, SID regeneration is only 100% necessary in workgroup environments, from what I recall, but I remember reading or hearing that Microsoft won't support a cloned system unless it's been sysprepped. Is that still true?
Support is a separate line item that must be added to the purchase order.
At my last job, when I was working with sales reps and PC Connection, a piece of software I was looking at purchasing could not be sold without support, regardless of whether or not you wanted it. It was a separate line item, but for what it's worth, the vendor didn't actually list the price of their product without the support included anyway. The two items together came to the vendor's advertised price.
Aye you've got a point, wasn't trying to be too pedantic, but I suppose I really meant "the incarnation of the free market as it currently exists in the USA." Which means we've got oligopolies instead, but I'm just saying that if Amazon can swing it's weight that effectively, isn't there a problem then that business regulators should be looking into?
When I buy something, I want to own it. I don't want to license it at the whim of a service that dictates what I can do with it. That's just ridiculous.
Generally speaking, I agree with you, but I'd say there's a notable exception. If I could choose to buy (and own) product A for $X, or I could choose to license product A for $X-Y, licensing might be a viable alternative in certain situations. Kind of like renting a DVD movie or console game, only with more straightforward (I suppose) DRM. DRM that, of course, by being a licensee rather than an owner, I'd be explicitly agreeing to be "managed" by.
Similar to the difference between buying Windows licenses--and yes I'm aware of the irony in what I've just written--and buying into Software Assurance, only on the sub-$100,000 scale.
Not that I've read TFA, but isn't this what free market economics is supposed to prevent? When a single entity can have that kind of power, isn't it a monopoly?
...If Amazon can dictate terms to book publishers in this fashion, do you think that Apple could pull a similar stunt with RIAA members?
It's not that hitting all surfers would yield fewer attack victims in a given amount of time, it's that hitting all of them means that the malicious code is more likely to get caught by an admin. If the malicious code is only active for 24 hours but hits everyone, chances are low that such code will actually result in a successful attack. However, if it can linger for longer periods of time, months or years, and simultaneously evade safe-browsing filters provided by MS/Google/Mozilla, that's likely going to be enough time for a stray IE6 user to wander into something he shouldn't (which is every URI beginning with "http://", so Slashdot tells me).
I haven't used any antivirus software on my Win2K box in the past 9 years and NEVER had a virus in that time.
I used to do the same thing, specifically because I didn't want to take the performance hit I have always associated with running an AV product.
Fast forward a few years, I'm running a dual core chip with gobs of ram and (though I know I'm a minority on this one) an extremely fast hardware RAID controller, I can drag and drop 100GB of data, defrag an array, and run a virus scan... while playing a video game.
In that time, my AV has caught a few things I didn't suspect were infected, and a few I had expected that were. The ironic thing is that it's frequently deleted a keygen or some such while I've tried to drag and drop it into a virtual machine to run it. In the end, I suppose it's a good thing that most AV products shoot first and ask questions later (including the fake malware/extortion ones).
This would mean that 90% of the pwned Linux servers are really the fault of Microsoft Windows
You mean to say that such servers' pwned state is the result of improper security practices on the result of a Windows user. [/pedant]
In all likelihood, I don't see why this wouldn't be the case. Unless these sites are running some type of publicly available CMS product, like Wordpress or Joomla, chances are good that these sites are uploaded via FTP. There was a feature on Slashdot, it may have been Mr. Hassleton's writing, too, saying that certain types of trojans will scan your incoming and outgoing traffic, looking for FTP sessions and plucking out the credentials. Such is particularly easy, too, because FTP authentication and traffic is completely unencrypted.
Based on what I've read here and from how prolific the archaic security nightmare known as FTP is, I'd say it's quite plausible.
Bluray wouldn't be copyright'd, but rather patented.
I wanted to thank you, actually, for pointing that out. I usually try to keep myself mindful of that difference, but of course in pursuit of a cheap joke...;)
I suppose what I was really going after was the fact that royalties and licensing are still involved. Reminds me of HDMI, h264, Blu-Ray, et. al.
Slashdot Mirror
The point isn't about the reliability of code. If code fails certain situations that can't be guaranteed not to occur, and such failure is not acceptable, then the code isn't necessarily crappy, but the solution or application is.
If, however, you have really shitty code (and I know, I've written some) that never fails in the situations you throw at it... you get the idea.
Code crashing cars is the failure of the implemented solution. The code that crashes the car, however, could in theory be quite elegant.
Crappy code is all around.
Crappy code exists because it works. It matters not how elegant a solution is; it matters that such is, in fact, a solution.
Disclaimer: I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer.
Hunter-gatherer societies are in general hierachical, war-like, mysogynstic, and rigidly bound by social mores that would make the Victorians look like libertines.
I'm intrigued by what you say here because of a fascinating article I read in National Geographic several weeks ago about the Hadza people. They're one of the last few "modern" hunter-gatherer societies that are left in the world. No true political hierarchy, no religious beliefs, no tribal war, and so on. The journalist mentioned specifically about how much leisure time they have, and was quite jealous.
A very worthwhile read.
Altiris has had application virtualization for a while now, but after comparing the products, I found Softgrid (which was acquired by Microsoft and rebranded as App-V) to be a more compelling one.
It's kind of odd, but it seems to me that products gobbled up by the Symantec overlords tend to turn pretty crappy with age, whereas those acquired (and usually rebranded) by Microsoft, when focused on of course (and App-V is getting very heavily used by them, check out the Office 2010 beta "Click to Run"), tend to mature into even better and usually more seamless solutions.
...I'm starting to hate Symantec.
Does anyone else find it hysterical when atheists evangelize?
it won't become a problem.
Isn't the cause of these problems due to the fact that people are changing the OS at the source code level?
If the changes to Android from device to device were done instead at an API level, wouldn't these issues be redressed to a significant extent?
Please sell the movie rights to your idea.
Now you've got me thinking... There needs to be a movie, starring Chuck Norris, of course, and a whole slew of people who'll get paid tons of cash due to their notoriety but be left out of the opening credits, where Chuck goes on a non-stop beyond-godlike multinational testosterone-fueled spree of death and pillage, without care for his own safety, in a man-with-nothing-to-lose odyssey to obtain some personally invaluable McGuffin, with obvious spots of intrigue and investigation, HUGE explosions that he just walks out of, and small tactical nukes that he disarms using nothing but his beard, all while his hands are tied behind his back (for the challenge, not because he couldn't break or slip the bonds).
Something like a cross between Taken and 300, only so much manlier that he makes Leonidas look like a pussy.
The world needs more awesome, gripping, extremely manly films that have good plots, and I submit that a decent director and screenwriter need to put Chuck into this role. For all our sakes.
For the last three years or so, I've been using Hostmonster for my web hosting needs.
TBH, I just use it as a file dump currently to distribute a couple of FOSS projects I've written, but when pulling files from them, I've usually maxed out my connection. 200GB/2T transfer, but they don't cut you off if you exceed limits.
$5/month when paid by the year. Typical Linux/Apache/PHP setup, but I think it's Postgre's instead of MySQL.
a new internal web application
But my question would be how many people in this type of situation are developing said applications internally.
At my last job, we had several ActiveX apps that were used, but they were all hosted by outside parties. As the cost of making those apps compatible with IE7 or IE8 would be taken on by a different company, it makes more sense to me that IT departments could demand newer browser compatibility from those vendors instead.
If an app is completely internal, developed and used in house, then couldn't compatibility with multiple browsers be demanded from the programmers by the IT admins? Is working in an upgrade path that allows multiple client browsers for a period of 1-3 years so costly that it can't be considered a reasonable expenditure? Do these companies see no benefit to allowing themselves to upgrade away from XP with their next desktop refresh?
Just things to think about, I suppose.
Most of the available apps could easily be mimicked using Flash
Indeed. I'm shocked at how frequently Slashdotters will offer technical reasons as to why Flash isn't on the iPhone, without realizing this. It makes me wonder if there was ever an article posted here on this.
I have a Viliv S5 MID, and while I can't echo specifically to issues using Flash (other than the fact that the hardware accelerated 10.1 Flash doesn't yet support my chipset) I can say that mouseover based features are very difficult to utilize with the touch screen. I can switch the joystick on the left side to move the mouse, but that's tedious. I find that when I want to make right-click actions on things in the start menu, to bring up computer management for example, I often open the menu, do an invalid drag/drop (like documents to computer) and then hit the right click button.
I could likely click and hold to get that functionality, but I sort of just figured that out while typing this.....
did't seem to be a marquee feature
I didn't switch to Vista until post SP1 for several reasons, but one of the biggest was that my 3Ware RAID controller didn't have finished drivers for a significant amount of time.
;)
I actually learned about the feature because it was highlighted by the person giving the demos at the Server 2008 launch that I attended, at which point I also got a free license for Ultimate, as well as Server 2008 Enterprise and SQL 2008. It was quite the fantastic and informative day.
In spite of the fact that I have several Win7 licenses at my disposal, I refuse to upgrade my main desktop. Reinstalling and re-tweaking every app I use would be too big of a chore, and I imagine that Windows Easy Transfer would be incomplete or simply take... days.
Either way, while I'm sad that it took several years for OEMs to catch up with hardware reqs and a complete re-versioning of the operating system, I am glad that people have come to see the improvements to the OS that Vista ushered in and that Win7 has refined as the fantastic leaps forward in usability that they are.
On a side note, though, folks that set their desktops and start menus to "Classic" (a.k.a. "I fear change") mode don't get to experience a significant portion of the UI enhancements
Whomever came up with the search bar for Win7 was a God damned genius
I know this is off topic, and I hate to break it to you, but that search/run combo box and the majority of the UI changes you've come to love or find useful in Win7 were all introduced in 2006 with Vista. We non-haters have been enjoying them for years now.
Maybe there should be a limit on market cap so that no company is ever allowed to get to be too big to fail.
Perhaps we should repeal Sarbanes-Oxley instead and save some money on companies' bottom lines. I've heard that SOX adds 4% to operating costs, and the funny thing about it is that it was enacted, reflexively I may add, in the wake of Enron and Worldcom, which, when looked back upon under the light of SOX, would have likely happened the same way anyway.
In short, SID regeneration is only 100% necessary in workgroup environments, from what I recall, but I remember reading or hearing that Microsoft won't support a cloned system unless it's been sysprepped. Is that still true?
I wager that this is supposed to be funny, but could a soul more well versed in betting explain why?
Support is a separate line item that must be added to the purchase order.
At my last job, when I was working with sales reps and PC Connection, a piece of software I was looking at purchasing could not be sold without support, regardless of whether or not you wanted it. It was a separate line item, but for what it's worth, the vendor didn't actually list the price of their product without the support included anyway. The two items together came to the vendor's advertised price.
Anti-trust laws make the market less free.
Aye you've got a point, wasn't trying to be too pedantic, but I suppose I really meant "the incarnation of the free market as it currently exists in the USA." Which means we've got oligopolies instead, but I'm just saying that if Amazon can swing it's weight that effectively, isn't there a problem then that business regulators should be looking into?
When I buy something, I want to own it. I don't want to license it at the whim of a service that dictates what I can do with it. That's just ridiculous.
Generally speaking, I agree with you, but I'd say there's a notable exception. If I could choose to buy (and own) product A for $X, or I could choose to license product A for $X-Y, licensing might be a viable alternative in certain situations. Kind of like renting a DVD movie or console game, only with more straightforward (I suppose) DRM. DRM that, of course, by being a licensee rather than an owner, I'd be explicitly agreeing to be "managed" by.
Similar to the difference between buying Windows licenses--and yes I'm aware of the irony in what I've just written--and buying into Software Assurance, only on the sub-$100,000 scale.
Not that I've read TFA, but isn't this what free market economics is supposed to prevent? When a single entity can have that kind of power, isn't it a monopoly?
...If Amazon can dictate terms to book publishers in this fashion, do you think that Apple could pull a similar stunt with RIAA members?
It's not that hitting all surfers would yield fewer attack victims in a given amount of time, it's that hitting all of them means that the malicious code is more likely to get caught by an admin. If the malicious code is only active for 24 hours but hits everyone, chances are low that such code will actually result in a successful attack. However, if it can linger for longer periods of time, months or years, and simultaneously evade safe-browsing filters provided by MS/Google/Mozilla, that's likely going to be enough time for a stray IE6 user to wander into something he shouldn't (which is every URI beginning with "http://", so Slashdot tells me).
I haven't used any antivirus software on my Win2K box in the past 9 years and NEVER had a virus in that time.
I used to do the same thing, specifically because I didn't want to take the performance hit I have always associated with running an AV product.
Fast forward a few years, I'm running a dual core chip with gobs of ram and (though I know I'm a minority on this one) an extremely fast hardware RAID controller, I can drag and drop 100GB of data, defrag an array, and run a virus scan... while playing a video game.
In that time, my AV has caught a few things I didn't suspect were infected, and a few I had expected that were. The ironic thing is that it's frequently deleted a keygen or some such while I've tried to drag and drop it into a virtual machine to run it. In the end, I suppose it's a good thing that most AV products shoot first and ask questions later (including the fake malware/extortion ones).
This would mean that 90% of the pwned Linux servers are really the fault of Microsoft Windows
You mean to say that such servers' pwned state is the result of improper security practices on the result of a Windows user. [/pedant]
In all likelihood, I don't see why this wouldn't be the case. Unless these sites are running some type of publicly available CMS product, like Wordpress or Joomla, chances are good that these sites are uploaded via FTP. There was a feature on Slashdot, it may have been Mr. Hassleton's writing, too, saying that certain types of trojans will scan your incoming and outgoing traffic, looking for FTP sessions and plucking out the credentials. Such is particularly easy, too, because FTP authentication and traffic is completely unencrypted.
Based on what I've read here and from how prolific the archaic security nightmare known as FTP is, I'd say it's quite plausible.
Bluray wouldn't be copyright'd, but rather patented.
I wanted to thank you, actually, for pointing that out. I usually try to keep myself mindful of that difference, but of course in pursuit of a cheap joke... ;)
I suppose what I was really going after was the fact that royalties and licensing are still involved. Reminds me of HDMI, h264, Blu-Ray, et. al.
Oh; and I really worry about decisions made before active MRI and other techniques came about, I think some horrible things have happened.
Indeed. It makes you wonder if people who were previously misdiagnosed as PVS but really had locked-in syndrome had the "plug pulled" on them.
Of course, though, Terry Schiavo was not one of those people.