The point is that lobbying is hard. Slashdotters have adopted a "vending machine" model of legislators, which is far from reality. Unsurprisingly, we are losing big-time in the legislative arena. When your model doesn't match reality, you lose. People like the parent are unwilling to grapple with the complexities of lobbying, so they shrug the whole thing off with a burst of self-righteousness.
You pay your lawyer because litigating is hard. You also might pay court fees. Does that mean you "bought" the decision from the court?
Contributions to candidates are merely the price of admission. As Reed points out, they do not guarrantee results. Slashdotters want to believe the legislature is "bought" because it relieves them of the burden of having to actually learn the political process and learn what kinds of arguments could persuade a legislator. It's a lame cop-out and a good way to remain politically irrelevant.
I guess the IT organization has to be adapted to the company's philosophy. I work in Silicon Valley. Here, as in most places, most of the desktops are Windows. While I'm currently a programmer, I worked in IT at a big company in the valley, and my comments are based on both roles. You say:
But it's OK if the users cripple it? Sorry, that just doesn't fly.
In my world (which clearly isn't your world) it isn't up to the IT department to decide what flies. A tech company runs on engineers and salesmen. Everyone else is just there to support them.
No, you make them get management's permission, then you set it up securely for them.
We focussed on getting the job done, not political game playing. And if we didn't trust the first person, why would we trust his manager, who's also not an IT expert, and will probably just side with his employee? Are you coming from the very small company where "management" really means the owner?
I think your mindset is shaped too much by fear. Cleaning up after the users is not a big deal - it's just part of running a big IT department. Your plan seems to be keep everything tightly gripped in your hand, which is appropriate for a very small company where you can personally fill everyone's needs. At a large company with progressive policies, you can pretty much assume that things are "out of hand" to start with. There are so many acquisitions, departments, teams of developers doing their own thing, "appliances" bought under different budgets, that IT has to play catch-up. Attempting to impose a "fascist" IT regime on tens of thousands of highly paid professionals scattered around the world would merely cause resentment and waste everyone's time on political games and finger-pointing.
Of course, if I start a small company with my savings, I'll handle the IT the way you advocated.
This guy actually took time to give us a glimpse into the world of the lobbyist, and you learned nothing. Since you've got Washington all figured out, here's a question for you. If you can just write checks to politicians to buy votes, why does anyone need lobbyists? Why did Hilary Rosen make a million dollars a year? Couldn't the record companies just mail in their checks to Congress?
I think your view is much too curmudgeonly. The job of IT is to support the organization, not cripple it. If users are setting up insecure Linux machines, you work with them to bring them up to snuff. That's what I've seen from good IT departments.
I'm talking about desktop PC's. If you're talking about something else, then it's a different ball game.
I think the animosity which you are calling elitism comes from a contempt for the mind that surrenders so supinely to corporate powers. Let's say that Bob listens to some pop, claims he "likes" it, claims he has his own independent taste in music and it's sheer coincidence that everything he "likes" was heavily marketed to him. Some of us suspect that the very music Bob "likes" he could well have disliked if it were never signed to a major label. We think Bob is not in control of his though processes - a man who has surrendered man's prerogative to think for himself. Thus the contempt, translated as "elitism".
Failure to pay a judgement is not contempt of court. If it were, the whole topic of collecting on judgements would hardly exist. But I agree that a large company would pay the judgement rather than letting the creditor seize some of their assets.
I didn't see any "screw MS" in the article. Maybe the philosphical point is to pressure PC makers to unbundle the OS. Why would you expect several thousand orders to be served against one manufacturer? Wouldn't you expect even distribution among many manufacturers? And (several thousand) x $350 is not enough to make IBM or Dell go belly up. It's barely enough to get their attention.
I don't see where your hand-wringing is coming from. The court made a just ruling. The party playing games with licensing was justly penalized. No massive governmental oversight was needed.
This is a good point, and should not have been modded down. The creativity and energy of the computer industry were very high in the 80s. The rate of progress has definitely slowed since Microsoft settled its gray bulk over the industry, blotting out the sunlight. They have crushed many innovators through FUD, buyouts, and underhanded tactics. Computer users would be much better off today if Microsoft had never existed.
Although, as Linus Torvalds pointed out, the existence of Microsoft led to the standardized PC platform which enabled the birth of Linux.
The mistake I would junk is allowing enum {fred=36, bill=19, joe=333}; Which confuses predefined constants with the classic enumeration. The cost saving of a lookup table to convert the 0, 1, 2 sequence is tiny, and the knock on effects are horrible.
The cost of the lookup table is not necessarily trivial. It depends how often it's used. The C enum is good at adapting to arbitrary numbering schemes, especially if they have gaps. enum{fred=36, bill, joe};
My only complaint is that the enum values enter the same namespace as variables. They should only show up as symbols when comparing or assigning a variable of that enum type. Then there should be a qualifying mechanism to reach them from the outside, like x = person::bill;
It's true that our stock markets had serious problems during the boom, and some of the problems persist.
The only way this could work is if the people investing the money had access to all the information. CNN and FoxNews are decent news sources, but their coverage of world events is clearly limited by our (and foriegn) governments.
I disagree. If people want to invest their money solely on the basis of CNN and Fox, they are more likely to lose it. That will improve the market because these investors will have less money to invest and be more interested in research. There are tons of information available about the countries of interest - most of us don't have time to keep up.
Remember, intelligence agencies have a very bad track record at predicting future events. That may be because the incentives affecting an individual employee reward political conformity rather than correctness. The Cold War was largely shaped and perpetuated by the flawed intelligence of the CIA and KGB.
The proposed system creates a class of analysts with an incentive for accuracy. And having their own money at stake will harness the analytical powers more effectively.
In the big picture, Enron-type disasters are needed to discipline the market. Likewise, this events market would make some mistakes. Maybe after losing a few thousand dollars people would learn not to predict events based on their political beliefs or what they saw on TV.
I see a lot of people complaining about this, but it sounds to me like an excellent and forward-thinking idea. I see a lot of "forecasts" on slashdot and kuro5hin, but how many of these loud forecasters would put their money where their mouth is? It's amazing how often both pundits and ordinary internet users make stupid, unfounded predictions. And are never called on it. This system would select for accurate prediction.
I think the people complaining about this have never paid attention to how markets work already.
That would be insider trading. Anyone involved in terrorism would have to file a form with the SEC before buying or selling on this exchange. Just like our current markets.
Re:Is there anyone out there
on
Perl 6 Essentials
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I particularly don't like the automagic variables springing up all over the place...
Have you tried 'use strict'?
and don't get me started on "bless" and the class system..
What's wrong with bless? It's just a way of telling Perl what class an object belongs to. Any OO framework needs something equivalent. C++ does it at compile time, but I think the Perl approach is cleaner because a distinct keyword (bless) performs a distinct operation (marking the class of the object.)
What is a messaging server, and why would I want one? I looked at the web page and didn't see anything concrete. What does this software offer that's not easy to implement yourself?
I'm trying to keep an open mind, but this sounds awfully fraudulent. I think IBM pitched this product to us along with WebSphere, and it seemed to be aimed at folks who are intimidated by writing a little inter-application glue.
I'm not seeking to ruffle your feathers, but I'd love a no-nonsense answer, which IBM did not seem able to provide.
That's a starting point, but it misses something. CD is roughly the sound quality of master tape. LP and cassette are lower. So:
...you're transporting the sound from analog to analog, no loss...
is not quite true. You lose dynamic range/noise floor and frequency response when going from tape to LP. The fact that they're both analog means you avoid going through an AD converter.
I read that story earlier, and it's pretty bogus. Essentially the authors complain that a person with root access (or Windows equivalent thereof) on the database machine can do anything. Well that's obvious. Among other things, the authors complain that you can add admin accounts to the system by inserting rows into a table. So? This is true for every db-based app I've worked on. The key is that only authorized users should have access to that table in the first place.
I'm not saying the electronic voting system is "secure", whatever that would mean. Just that the article is poorly thought out.
Re:Insecurity: A Bogus Objection
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
Goto: http://www.securityfocus.com/search
Type qmail into the box, and push search. Be amazed!
OK, I did that, and found:
qmail-masq - A Perl program that works with qmail.
Qmail passing sendmail vulnerability downstream - I understand that Qmail is not vulnerable to the recent Sendmail issue, but I want to know if Qmail will still forward the sendmail vulnerability...
In the product world, it is nearly a gaurantee that compition will implement a feature that marketing (or engineering) will figure is a "Must Have", while your product is in alpha Q/A.
But there's no guarrantee that the meticulously developed code will be more agile at responding to these unforseen inputs than the dirty code. Remember, the meticulous code was designed around a specific requirement, and now the requirement changed. So the question is, when you decomposed the initial problem were you smart and lucky enough to properly identify the fault lines and build in the right kind of flexibility?
Re:Insecurity: A Bogus Objection
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
Very nice. Since insecurity exists in all software to varying degrees, please provide a list of holes in qmail.
One can overwrite the "admin" password with another, copied from another GEMS installation. It will appear encrypted; no worries, just cut and paste.
The authors go on to brag that they can add an unlimited number of users by the same procedure. They don't seem to realize that given write access to the database, this is an obvious outcome.
In other news:
Anyone with root on a Linux box can change the root password and add users.
Anyone with write access to the mysql.user table in MySQL can change the root password and add users.
Anyone who can modify a.htaccess file can add unlimited users with access to that directory.
What I've read so far does not inspire confidence in these authors.
It looks to me like you just haven't yet learned the lessons he learned. Which is fine - most of us can only learn through pain. HTTP, SMTP and friends were widely accepted because they're text-based. This has great implications. You can simulate a client with telnet. You can paste part of a session into email or chat when discussing a bug. When interpreting the complexities of HTTP 1.1 you don't have to perform a second level of mental indirection to translate a header to a numeric constant you're looking at in a hexdump.
I think the creation of a new binary application-level protocol needs to be specifically justified. Either:
One end of the link is computationally weak, like a tiny microcontroller.
The ratio of messages to available bandwidth is very high. But remember, binary protocols aren't guarranteed to save bandwidth - the simpler they are, the more wasteful of bandwidth. If you take a huge C struct and put it on the wire, and most of the fields are irrelevant in a particular message, you might have saved bandwidth by using a text key=value scheme.
On the whole, binary protocols are like any other optimization, and should be applied judiciously when a performance gain can be expected. If you properly abstract the generator/parser for textual messages, it shouldn't be too painful to make the optimization.
Yea, and then Intel didn't bother using any of their natural knowledge of x86 to make it a good compiler...
Looks like we're both speculating. I don't think we know exactly what happened to KAI after Intel bought it. I am nowhere near informed enough about this area to make an educated comment. But I think you could be overestimating the value of such knowledge. Linus Torvalds made an interesting comment that's somewhat appropriate:
You see, when you do a large enough survey of things like page table implementation and you make a decision based on your observations... you find later that you could only have done it that way if you were truly interested in having high performance.
I'm not sure if that conveys the whole idea - basically, catering to the peculiarities of one architecture is not as good for performance as it seems.
I think that someone with a strong general knowledge of compiler design and computer architecture, and all the public documents on Intel chips, will write a faster compiler than someone with less general knowledge and unlimited access to Intel's secrets. Remember, the secrets could lead you off in the wrong direction.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that lobbying is hard. Slashdotters have adopted a "vending machine" model of legislators, which is far from reality. Unsurprisingly, we are losing big-time in the legislative arena. When your model doesn't match reality, you lose. People like the parent are unwilling to grapple with the complexities of lobbying, so they shrug the whole thing off with a burst of self-righteousness.
You pay your lawyer because litigating is hard. You also might pay court fees. Does that mean you "bought" the decision from the court?
Contributions to candidates are merely the price of admission. As Reed points out, they do not guarrantee results. Slashdotters want to believe the legislature is "bought" because it relieves them of the burden of having to actually learn the political process and learn what kinds of arguments could persuade a legislator. It's a lame cop-out and a good way to remain politically irrelevant.
In my world (which clearly isn't your world) it isn't up to the IT department to decide what flies. A tech company runs on engineers and salesmen. Everyone else is just there to support them.
We focussed on getting the job done, not political game playing. And if we didn't trust the first person, why would we trust his manager, who's also not an IT expert, and will probably just side with his employee? Are you coming from the very small company where "management" really means the owner?
I think your mindset is shaped too much by fear. Cleaning up after the users is not a big deal - it's just part of running a big IT department. Your plan seems to be keep everything tightly gripped in your hand, which is appropriate for a very small company where you can personally fill everyone's needs. At a large company with progressive policies, you can pretty much assume that things are "out of hand" to start with. There are so many acquisitions, departments, teams of developers doing their own thing, "appliances" bought under different budgets, that IT has to play catch-up. Attempting to impose a "fascist" IT regime on tens of thousands of highly paid professionals scattered around the world would merely cause resentment and waste everyone's time on political games and finger-pointing.
Of course, if I start a small company with my savings, I'll handle the IT the way you advocated.
This guy actually took time to give us a glimpse into the world of the lobbyist, and you learned nothing. Since you've got Washington all figured out, here's a question for you. If you can just write checks to politicians to buy votes, why does anyone need lobbyists? Why did Hilary Rosen make a million dollars a year? Couldn't the record companies just mail in their checks to Congress?
I think your view is much too curmudgeonly. The job of IT is to support the organization, not cripple it. If users are setting up insecure Linux machines, you work with them to bring them up to snuff. That's what I've seen from good IT departments.
I'm talking about desktop PC's. If you're talking about something else, then it's a different ball game.
I think the animosity which you are calling elitism comes from a contempt for the mind that surrenders so supinely to corporate powers. Let's say that Bob listens to some pop, claims he "likes" it, claims he has his own independent taste in music and it's sheer coincidence that everything he "likes" was heavily marketed to him. Some of us suspect that the very music Bob "likes" he could well have disliked if it were never signed to a major label. We think Bob is not in control of his though processes - a man who has surrendered man's prerogative to think for himself. Thus the contempt, translated as "elitism".
Failure to pay a judgement is not contempt of court. If it were, the whole topic of collecting on judgements would hardly exist. But I agree that a large company would pay the judgement rather than letting the creditor seize some of their assets.
I didn't see any "screw MS" in the article. Maybe the philosphical point is to pressure PC makers to unbundle the OS. Why would you expect several thousand orders to be served against one manufacturer? Wouldn't you expect even distribution among many manufacturers? And (several thousand) x $350 is not enough to make IBM or Dell go belly up. It's barely enough to get their attention.
I don't see where your hand-wringing is coming from. The court made a just ruling. The party playing games with licensing was justly penalized. No massive governmental oversight was needed.
This is a good point, and should not have been modded down. The creativity and energy of the computer industry were very high in the 80s. The rate of progress has definitely slowed since Microsoft settled its gray bulk over the industry, blotting out the sunlight. They have crushed many innovators through FUD, buyouts, and underhanded tactics. Computer users would be much better off today if Microsoft had never existed.
Although, as Linus Torvalds pointed out, the existence of Microsoft led to the standardized PC platform which enabled the birth of Linux.
The cost of the lookup table is not necessarily trivial. It depends how often it's used. The C enum is good at adapting to arbitrary numbering schemes, especially if they have gaps. enum{fred=36, bill, joe};
My only complaint is that the enum values enter the same namespace as variables. They should only show up as symbols when comparing or assigning a variable of that enum type. Then there should be a qualifying mechanism to reach them from the outside, like x = person::bill;
I disagree. If people want to invest their money solely on the basis of CNN and Fox, they are more likely to lose it. That will improve the market because these investors will have less money to invest and be more interested in research. There are tons of information available about the countries of interest - most of us don't have time to keep up.
Remember, intelligence agencies have a very bad track record at predicting future events. That may be because the incentives affecting an individual employee reward political conformity rather than correctness. The Cold War was largely shaped and perpetuated by the flawed intelligence of the CIA and KGB.
The proposed system creates a class of analysts with an incentive for accuracy. And having their own money at stake will harness the analytical powers more effectively.
In the big picture, Enron-type disasters are needed to discipline the market. Likewise, this events market would make some mistakes. Maybe after losing a few thousand dollars people would learn not to predict events based on their political beliefs or what they saw on TV.
I see a lot of people complaining about this, but it sounds to me like an excellent and forward-thinking idea. I see a lot of "forecasts" on slashdot and kuro5hin, but how many of these loud forecasters would put their money where their mouth is? It's amazing how often both pundits and ordinary internet users make stupid, unfounded predictions. And are never called on it. This system would select for accurate prediction.
I think the people complaining about this have never paid attention to how markets work already.
That would be insider trading. Anyone involved in terrorism would have to file a form with the SEC before buying or selling on this exchange. Just like our current markets.
Have you tried 'use strict'?
What's wrong with bless? It's just a way of telling Perl what class an object belongs to. Any OO framework needs something equivalent. C++ does it at compile time, but I think the Perl approach is cleaner because a distinct keyword (bless) performs a distinct operation (marking the class of the object.)
Try to visit the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona. It's near Tucson. It's a missile silo, with missile, converted to a museum.
What is a messaging server, and why would I want one? I looked at the web page and didn't see anything concrete. What does this software offer that's not easy to implement yourself?
I'm trying to keep an open mind, but this sounds awfully fraudulent. I think IBM pitched this product to us along with WebSphere, and it seemed to be aimed at folks who are intimidated by writing a little inter-application glue.
I'm not seeking to ruffle your feathers, but I'd love a no-nonsense answer, which IBM did not seem able to provide.
Sometimes he writes well. CatB is good. I also really like his rebuttal to SCO, although it benefited from other contributors.
His detractors make fun of stuff like this.
is not quite true. You lose dynamic range/noise floor and frequency response when going from tape to LP. The fact that they're both analog means you avoid going through an AD converter.
I read that story earlier, and it's pretty bogus. Essentially the authors complain that a person with root access (or Windows equivalent thereof) on the database machine can do anything. Well that's obvious. Among other things, the authors complain that you can add admin accounts to the system by inserting rows into a table. So? This is true for every db-based app I've worked on. The key is that only authorized users should have access to that table in the first place.
I'm not saying the electronic voting system is "secure", whatever that would mean. Just that the article is poorly thought out.
OK, I did that, and found:
I'm not amazed yet. Could you please point me to a specific exploit?
But there's no guarrantee that the meticulously developed code will be more agile at responding to these unforseen inputs than the dirty code. Remember, the meticulous code was designed around a specific requirement, and now the requirement changed. So the question is, when you decomposed the initial problem were you smart and lucky enough to properly identify the fault lines and build in the right kind of flexibility?
Very nice. Since insecurity exists in all software to varying degrees, please provide a list of holes in qmail.
The authors go on to brag that they can add an unlimited number of users by the same procedure. They don't seem to realize that given write access to the database, this is an obvious outcome.
In other news:
What I've read so far does not inspire confidence in these authors.
Thanks. That was a breath of fresh air. I hope it gets modded up.
I think the creation of a new binary application-level protocol needs to be specifically justified. Either:
On the whole, binary protocols are like any other optimization, and should be applied judiciously when a performance gain can be expected. If you properly abstract the generator/parser for textual messages, it shouldn't be too painful to make the optimization.
Actually, you said the fundamental implementations of all modern OSes which seems to mean the kernels.
I did, and I figured out that you consider Mozilla the "fundamental implementation" of Linux. Did I guess correctly?
Looks like we're both speculating. I don't think we know exactly what happened to KAI after Intel bought it. I am nowhere near informed enough about this area to make an educated comment. But I think you could be overestimating the value of such knowledge. Linus Torvalds made an interesting comment that's somewhat appropriate:
I'm not sure if that conveys the whole idea - basically, catering to the peculiarities of one architecture is not as good for performance as it seems.
I think that someone with a strong general knowledge of compiler design and computer architecture, and all the public documents on Intel chips, will write a faster compiler than someone with less general knowledge and unlimited access to Intel's secrets. Remember, the secrets could lead you off in the wrong direction.