All the I know, is that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (Across the Seventh Dimension), was the worst thing that I ever ever got in charades once. My sister got Jaws! Picking nits, it was the eighth dimension.
Look, folks, let's think about this for a second. The talk was given to a group handing out an award for protecting freedom of speech. You would have to be heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots to go in front of such a group and claim to want to restrict freedom of speech. Regardless of what you think of Newt's politics, he isn't an idiot, and above all he is a politician. Politicians just don't go around slapping their constituency in the face; it just wouldn't make sense.
The bottom line is that the article got it wrong, either through error or (as I personally would suspect) intent. Newt publishes transcripts of a number of his speeches on his web site, http://www.newt.org/ Maybe if it shows up there we'll know what was said.
(As an aside, I'm registered non-partisan, and lean towards libertarian, so I'm not here toting the Republican party line. I have heard Newt talk on C-SPAN, though, and I do respect a lot of what he says.)
The analogy (with regards to your reference to Consumer Reports) would be if Consumer Reports published an opinion that a car company strongly disagreed with and believed was incorrect.
Funny you should mention that. Consumer Reports was actually sued by the Sharper Image people after CR reported that SI's Ionic Breeze basically didn't do anything. If the facts as determinined by reasoned observations are on your side, it shouldn't matter whether the subject of the observations disagrees; you should still be able to report your observations without fear of legal reprisals.
You think 64GB of RAM is something to drool over? Take a look at the Broadbus B-1. http://www.broadbus.com/products1.asp We're talking over a terabyte of RAM here.
Yes, the article was about disclosing vulnerabilities, not releasing open source software. However, if you don't have the source, the details of the vulnerability don't do you much good, since you have no way of fixing it. So open source users will tend to want the details out there, while closed source users will tend to want the lid kept on until the vendor fixes the problem.
In either case, you need active administration to keep things properly patched. Maybe McAfee thinks their customers want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that security problems aren't going to affect them so that they don't have to pay for administration resources to prevent them. Keep the noise level down by keeping the problems quiet and maybe the customer won't keep asking you to protect them from the latest threat.
Nothing stirs things up and annoys more people than new ideas. Just look at Newt Gingrich. He is about three things: Politics, History, and Ideas. I think people will forgive him for being a historian, but combining politics and ideas creates a violent reaction, not a civil dialogue. You could say the same thing about Hillary and her infamous health care plan. It was a big idea thrust into the political arena, and we know what happened to that. We could wish it were otherwise, but as long as the politicians are running the show, substantive discussions about ideas aren't going to happen.
I can understand why this is coming out of Tampere. I was on a two week tour of Finland back in '88, which included concerts in a number of churches and cathedrals. Most of them were really nice, except for the one in Tampere (Tampereen Tuomiokirkko). The art in the place was downright scary. Behind the altar is an image of the Resurrection which looks more like Night of the Living Dead. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but they certainly didn't seem happy about being alive.) To the side was a painting of some sort of bone demon with a scythe. And to top it off, the dome overhead had an image of a huge coiled snake, jaws open, with an apple in its mouth, poised to attack the viewer from above. Maybe a dozen locals attended the concert there, while the other concerts were well attended, and I can't blame them a bit.
Yeah, this doesn't sound like the best application for CORBA. Anything with a wide area network or firewall should raise a red flag. The scale seems a bit large, too. I'd generally limit CORBA to projects with a maximum node count in the dozens.
Your CORBA implementation may take some of the blame; some have a larger memory/cpu/management footprint than others.
Overall, your project was using a really large hammer to try to drive a lot of tiny nails. Smashed thumbs are pretty much inevitable.
For all its faults, CORBA does fill an important niche. As far as I know it is the only communication technology that features:
High Performance (implementation dependent, of course)
Language Interoperability (standard language bindings)
OS Interoperability
CPU Interoperability
Vendor Independence
Object Orientation
Healthy Open Source Community
I think we can agree that these are good things to have.
There are a number of caveats, though:
CORBA works best when you have tight integration between the client and the server. The more you try to put between the two (e.g. the public Internet) the more problems you will have.
There is a good bit to learn to be able to design and build a CORBA-based system, from basic concepts to language bindings. Once you have it down most of it makes sense, and developing new applications can go fairly quickly, but it does take a while to get there. You might want to try starting with a Python ORB, since it is a lot easier to use than C++ or Java ORBs, and you can use Python later to build tests for your C++ or Java code.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff. The bulk of the CORBA services out there aren't really useful; stick to things line Naming, Notification, and Trading. Some features like valuetypes are a pain to support, so are better ignored. CCM might be worth something eventually, but it would require really good vendor tools support, and it is better avoided for now. You can get by pretty well with the concepts in Henning and Vinoski's book, "Advanced CORBA Programming with C++".
Interface evolution needs to managed carefully, since IDL is generally more rigid than XML.
These caveats make CORBA inappropriate for a lot of projects, no question, but for those projects which have performance and interoperability requirements which match with CORBA's feature set, it is worthy of consideration.
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Picking nits, it was the eighth dimension.
Look, folks, let's think about this for a second. The talk was given to a group handing out an award for protecting freedom of speech. You would have to be heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots to go in front of such a group and claim to want to restrict freedom of speech. Regardless of what you think of Newt's politics, he isn't an idiot, and above all he is a politician. Politicians just don't go around slapping their constituency in the face; it just wouldn't make sense.
The bottom line is that the article got it wrong, either through error or (as I personally would suspect) intent. Newt publishes transcripts of a number of his speeches on his web site, http://www.newt.org/ Maybe if it shows up there we'll know what was said.
(As an aside, I'm registered non-partisan, and lean towards libertarian, so I'm not here toting the Republican party line. I have heard Newt talk on C-SPAN, though, and I do respect a lot of what he says.)
You think 64GB of RAM is something to drool over? Take a look at the Broadbus B-1.
http://www.broadbus.com/products1.asp
We're talking over a terabyte of RAM here.
How can you "cause ... physical injury or death" to a ghost? Ghosts have no physical form and are already dead!
Yes, the article was about disclosing vulnerabilities, not releasing open source software. However, if you don't have the source, the details of the vulnerability don't do you much good, since you have no way of fixing it. So open source users will tend to want the details out there, while closed source users will tend to want the lid kept on until the vendor fixes the problem.
In either case, you need active administration to keep things properly patched. Maybe McAfee thinks their customers want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that security problems aren't going to affect them so that they don't have to pay for administration resources to prevent them. Keep the noise level down by keeping the problems quiet and maybe the customer won't keep asking you to protect them from the latest threat.
Nothing stirs things up and annoys more people than new ideas. Just look at Newt Gingrich. He is about three things: Politics, History, and Ideas. I think people will forgive him for being a historian, but combining politics and ideas creates a violent reaction, not a civil dialogue. You could say the same thing about Hillary and her infamous health care plan. It was a big idea thrust into the political arena, and we know what happened to that. We could wish it were otherwise, but as long as the politicians are running the show, substantive discussions about ideas aren't going to happen.
I can understand why this is coming out of Tampere. I was on a two week tour of Finland back in '88, which included concerts in a number of churches and cathedrals. Most of them were really nice, except for the one in Tampere (Tampereen Tuomiokirkko). The art in the place was downright scary. Behind the altar is an image of the Resurrection which looks more like Night of the Living Dead. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but they certainly didn't seem happy about being alive.) To the side was a painting of some sort of bone demon with a scythe. And to top it off, the dome overhead had an image of a huge coiled snake, jaws open, with an apple in its mouth, poised to attack the viewer from above. Maybe a dozen locals attended the concert there, while the other concerts were well attended, and I can't blame them a bit.
Yeah, this doesn't sound like the best application for CORBA. Anything with a wide area network or firewall should raise a red flag. The scale seems a bit large, too. I'd generally limit CORBA to projects with a maximum node count in the dozens.
Your CORBA implementation may take some of the blame; some have a larger memory/cpu/management footprint than others.
Overall, your project was using a really large hammer to try to drive a lot of tiny nails. Smashed thumbs are pretty much inevitable.
For all its faults, CORBA does fill an important niche. As far as I know it is the only communication technology that features:
High Performance (implementation dependent, of course)
Language Interoperability (standard language bindings)
OS Interoperability
CPU Interoperability
Vendor Independence
Object Orientation
Healthy Open Source Community
I think we can agree that these are good things to have.
There are a number of caveats, though:
CORBA works best when you have tight integration between the client and the server. The more you try to put between the two (e.g. the public Internet) the more problems you will have.
There is a good bit to learn to be able to design and build a CORBA-based system, from basic concepts to language bindings. Once you have it down most of it makes sense, and developing new applications can go fairly quickly, but it does take a while to get there. You might want to try starting with a Python ORB, since it is a lot easier to use than C++ or Java ORBs, and you can use Python later to build tests for your C++ or Java code.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff. The bulk of the CORBA services out there aren't really useful; stick to things line Naming, Notification, and Trading. Some features like valuetypes are a pain to support, so are better ignored. CCM might be worth something eventually, but it would require really good vendor tools support, and it is better avoided for now. You can get by pretty well with the concepts in Henning and Vinoski's book, "Advanced CORBA Programming with C++".
Interface evolution needs to managed carefully, since IDL is generally more rigid than XML.
These caveats make CORBA inappropriate for a lot of projects, no question, but for those projects which have performance and interoperability requirements which match with CORBA's feature set, it is worthy of consideration.