Top 10 reasons we NEED MORE female geeks!
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Top Ten Geek Girls
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· Score: 1
And why, might you ask? Well because:
1. They have a FAR better attention to detail
2. They would actualy READ the documentation
3. The sudden, and very timely I might add, disappearance of buffer overruns
4. Programs would have actual help.
5. Error messages would actualy mean something.
6. RTL's would actualy be organized in a meaningfull way.
7. Program flow would actualy make logical sense.
8. When answering yes to a prompt before the program does something that would be un-recoverable, they would prompt: Doing this could be really bad, are you still sure you want to do this? And of course it would actualy be recoverable.
9. The features annouced for the program would actualy be there and they would actualy work!
10. And last but not least, there would be FAR fewer undocumented features.
So there you have it, in a nutshell, top ten list fashion if you will. Women are just better at most things then men, when they have a chance to learn and are interested. Now having said that, i think sometimes its hard to find woemn who are actualy interested in becomming programmers because the vast majority of them don't dig the uber testostrone filled field. The female web geeks that I know, rarely miss deadlines, their code is impecable AND commented. The few source level programmers I know simply hate most all of the frameworks and packages out there because they make little sense in their organization and are just full of bugs. They would rather re-write the function and have it be rock solid.
So next time you run into a woman or a young girl who shows an interest in programming, support them, nurture and support this aspiration, we would ALL be a lot better off because of it.
XML -- The answer to a problem that didn't exist..
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Celebrate the XML Decade
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· Score: -1, Troll
XML is just a pathetic attempt to do what SQL already does quite nicely thank you very much
You cqn query an SQL server and get the schema, then its a simple query for the data. Its all wrapped up quite nicely and its very logical and it works. Why oh why do these people continue to dream up this hierarchical madness!
So lets see, whats easier. You need data, you go to the data source and you request the schema of what you are getting. It comes from a table, a view or a query, but its a schema with defined field names and types. Then you query for the data, it comes in nicely packaged records and there you have it!. Now lets do it the XML way. You request some data. Then you spend the next several billion CPU cycles traversing up and down a hierarchical tree, building tempory array's etc. ad nauseum to get the data all sorted out.
Using a markup language that was designed to describe the layout of a page for data transfer is just plain stupid. STOP trying to make a one size fits all, use what is the simplest method for each task. You want to do page markup, use SMGL and its derivitives, you want to move data, use SQL, thats what it was designed for! This keeps the bug count low, it keeps troublshooting simple, it removes data from layout, its just a right way to do things.
Yeah to bad they don't include ACTUAL programming more then here is the Java Framework, write me a pizza ordering program for the web. Programming is 33.3% skill, 33.3% Art and 33.3% inspiration, that Eureka Moment. If you want to be a good programmer, learn how to do puzzles in your head. Visualize the process of moving data in, manipulating it, and then outputting it.
And then there are the rest of us, who write well formated, well structured, well designed code every day, but never went to collage. We did what a LOT of people did in the 80's we picked up a copy of whatever language we could get our hands on and started teaching ourselves.
We read books, we looked at other peoples code, we experimented. We wrote our own Direct to Video Memory code to avoid the bios screen write functions.
But now we are in our late 40's and not hip and cool. We don't get hired because we don't have a piece of paper saying we know something, we just have massive amounts of code to back us up, but none of the under 30 hip cool crowd cares about that, its "You got your degree from where?" When I tell them SHK ( school of Hard Knocks ) as a joke and then tell them I am self taught, I get the "We want someone more qualified" What a bunch of horse shit.
Thats the biggest problem with our society, no one values experience, no one values wisdom gleaned from 25 years of doing the JOB.
Most of us don't care for the latest and greatest Ruby on Rails or Roads or even a race track. We don't do cutting edge, we do what works, we do it most of the time under budget, ahead of schedule and in code that readable AND commented.
So we will keep writing code that supports what all you "Latest & Greatest" fan boys think is SO cool, when in fact its the exact same language we built so many years ago, with a cosmetic twist.
I guess the other thing that is SO fucking depressing is that most CS or even SE grads these days don't have a clue how to create anything unless its spoon fed to them in some object repository. I asked a recent CS graduate if he knew any assembler of ANY flavor. His response was, "Well we had about 2 hours of it and some theory", but other then that all he knew was Java and rudimentary C.
A pretty sad state of affairs if you ask me. And people wonder why companies outsource.
A gas turbine in a ship has a lot of control's that are simply physical linkages to other parts of it. Those engines are quite simple. The more fuel you push into them the faster they turn.
I sailed nuclear submarines for 10 years. No computers in the engine room and the entire nuclear plant was run by 2 guys, the Reactor Operator and the Engineering Office of the watch. Electric Plant operator kept the power straight, the throttle-man made sure the speed was right. There were 3 watch standers in the rest of the entire engine room plus a supervisor. So a total of 8 guys ran the entire engineering plant per shift. Then again submarine sailors tend to be highly educated and motivated.
I think you could use computers for remote sensing of various pressures and levels of things and logging that information, but never let the computer make decisions. On submarines there is a "Battle Short" switch which when thrown, bypasses every interlock and safety cut-out circuit for when things are hot and heavy and the depth charges and torpedoes are flying. You don't want anything tripping the reactor or the propulsion or electric plant off-line. If your in a battle screw it if you overheat the core a little, or melt some bus bar or over-speed a main propulsion turbine. Thats what the repair yards are for if you survive the battle.
As to your car's ECU. If it fails you simply pull over. If it fails on a warship in battle you simply die. No thanks.
Naval warships should not have ANY computer software controlling the propulsion system as there is no need for it.
For the uninitiated here is how it works:
At the helm there is a little thing called an Engine Order Telegraph. This device has a knob in the middle of it that the helmsman turns and sets a pointer to Ahead 1/3, Back 1/3, All Stop etc. This makes a corresponding indicator move in a room in the engineering spaces called Maneuvering. This is where the people that monitor the propulsion plant work. One of them is called the Throttle Man. He sees his indicator move and then he turns a big wheel that controls a valve that allows more or less steam into the steam turbines that turn the propeller shaft, or it changes the pitch of the propeller blades to provide more or less thrust therefor making the ship go faster or slower.
Now on most ships with constant speed variable pith propellers the pitch change control is controlled directly from the bridge, but control can be taken back by the people in the engine room in case the ship takes a shell to the bridge and therefor the crew can continue to fight the battle they are in. The electronics to do this are VERY simple to design and build and they are very robust, so there is no need for a computer to be in the chain.
This, IMO, is where the computerization of everything has just gone too far. Yes you can put a computer in everything, by why would you want to. Some things on Naval Ships require a computer. Things such as fire control, sharing tactical data, Ship to shore communication, Navigation, etc. But does running the propulsion system require a computer? Not in the least.
OK, so my experience with Oracle Support has never been anything other then stunning. I have a client that is a very small wine company. They purchased Oracle with the minimum license, 5 named users.
The server it was running on went to the big server farm in the sky, it was an HP Pro-liant. HP fed-ex's a new one, the same day and we re-loaded the server, re-loaded Oracle but for some reason Oracle just refused to come up.
So I get on the phone with Oracle and we start to troubleshoot the problem. I am talking to a tech in Colorado and at some point its time for her to go home. I get transfered to another tech in London and he continues to work the problem with me and we solved it about 3 A.M. and all was good.
Now, if the London Tech had not solved it, from what they told me, I would get shifted into the next time zone or whatever the hell and another tech would pick up the ball as long as I was willing to be there.
So you tell me, what other company gives that kind of support for an under $1000.00 purchase?
Sure Oracle is an expensive product. You get what you pay for though. Remember Word Perfect? You paid like $600.00 for a DOS program, in 1985 dollars!! But you know what? You got a 1-800 number to call and all the free support you could suck up and I doubt if I was ever on hold for more then 5 minutes waiting for a MORE then knowledgeable tech support person on everything from installation to their VERY extensive macro language.
What you get now for your $300.00 office suite is pay by incident. You get some man or woman in India, who forces you through a script, before they read you a canned answer, that half the time does not work. I take nothing away from these hard working men and women, but they simply do not have the in depth knowledge of the product they are supporting, and the ones that do end up doing their best to keep 50 of the other people going. You wanted cheep software, thats what you get.
Larry Ellison may be the biggest jerk this side of our solar system, but ya know what? Oracle will get you running no matter what.
I was at Oracle World last week. Had a coveted invite to the dinner and drinks reception. I talked with 4 or 5 tech types that just handed me their cards and said, if you ever have any questions, just drop me an e-mail, I will find the answers for you. Oracle, at least in my book, is a great company to buy software from. YMMV.
Thats the problem with creating a spec by consensus. To many ego's to stroke, to many interests to serve. HTML, XHTML, CSS are all a huge fucking mess and need to get cleaned up, badly.
On the browser side its time to realize that their are a few things the browser needs to have built into to make this shit work well:
1. Boxes - The need to just be a part of the browser. You call a box, you give it the size and location via the (x-y,x-y,layer) coordinates and you can either let if float on give it an absolute position. This solves all the problems with content X being in Box X and content Y being in Box Y. After that all CSS decorations, font sizes and whatever else some yo-yo dreams up apply as to what is rendered in the box.
2. Menus - The absolute garbage, yet very clever, hacks that are menus now become just about utterly un-maintainable with bastardization of the UI and UL tags. Use an XML type of format to describe the menu tree either drop-down or fly-out or a combination of either.
3. This crap about positioning, is it pixels, percent, EML's or what the fuck ever. You need TWO types and two types only. Pixels as in: LOCATION X,Y and thats where it stays, period. Or its a percentage of the area of reference. If it's the entire page, ie: not bound by a box, as described above, its simply a percentage, IN PIXELS of the width and or height of the browser window. If its in an area thats a defined BOX its restricted to the bounds of the box, pure and simple, no fuss, no muss.
JUST those 3 things would go a hell of a long way towards making the WEB a better place to create things. There is a hell of a lot more to be done, but that would be a great start.
The encryption key is stored elsewhere and AFAIK its not accessable.
The NDS administrator can change any password on the system, Netware, GroupWise E-mail, GroupWise Messenger. So if your locked out, those are the LEAST of your problems.
There is a company that you can by an unlock disk for NDS, but you had better have a 3.5" floppy in your server, because it will only access the floppy drive to run its program and it must be run from the console andit will only unluck a local copy of the NDS database.
I know this from painfull expirience. A client purchased a new server w/o a floppy then changed the admin password I had put on the system and then promptly forgot it and they had deleted my account that had admin priviledges. So i had to order a special mini-floppy from Dell, get it overnighted, install it and then run the unluck program.
All GroupWise traffic is 128bit encrypted when its moving between a GroupWise system and a GroupWise client via intranet or internet. It might be vulnerable to a MIM attack since its using Diffy Hellman key exchange, but I am not sure if it hasn't been modified by Novell.
Every system I set up ONLY uses https for the web interface, so no leaks there, well unless your machine is hacked, but then all bets are off with screen stripers and the like.
SMTP has the same issue as everyone else does unless you config GW's smtp agent to refuse to talk unless the other end uses SLL, which can be done, but you will limit your e-mail system the same way as if you refuse to accept e-mail if the sender can't be verified, which you can do with GW.
The issue with Sendmail, QMail and all the rest that are your basic POP style e-mail systems, is that they either store the data in plain text, or even if stored on database servers they still store as plain text. Hence any sysadmin can read the mail in its raw form and no one knows this happened.
GroupWise stores everything in its own database which is first compresed (LZH) then 128 bit encrypted. There is no way a system admin can read anyones e-mail without using either the GW Client ( X-Platform of course ), the built in web interface or some of the more sophisticated e-mail monitoring tools that are available for GW. Without the tools, you MUST know someones password to get into their e-mail account. Now unless you have a list of passwords you will never be able to do so unless you change their password, as a system admin can, but they will be alerted because they will no longer be able to get their e-mail
Now you can use deception, ie: change their password, do whatever it is you want/need to do, then when they can't access their e-mail, you claim ignorance and cheerfully set them a new password and then tell them to be sure and change it, which they more then likely will not do and then rely on their laziness to then continue on with snooping, but at some point this will make someone think something is rotten in IT
The bottom line is that e-mail security is only as good as a System Admin who can change / monitor things, which is their job. At some point you have to trust someone to keep your system up and running
Why yes I AM a Novell fan boy, whats your fucking point!
As other have replied its all about the bus speed. The amount of time it takes to move data from chip to chip can insert enormous overhead.
Think back a little to the DEC Alpha. Now the ALPHA chip in and of itself was not really that remarkable. What was so VERY remarkable about the Alpha system was its bus switching. It was blazingly fast and could handle monster amounts of data from main memory to CPU, GPU, etc. The reason ( mostly ) that its now sitting in HP's vault is that the bus switch was/is really expensive to manufacture.
So the way you do this without haveing to build this very expensice bus architecture is to just put the GPU on the die with the CPU. Everything runs at the internal speed of the processor and its fairly inexpensive, comparatively, to build.
DNA has been there, done that and has the 20 node t-shirt or the Traveling Salesman Problem.
is been over 5 years since this was done and this is not that impressive. Now a decent desktop can do this, but it will take a little time since there are over 1 million possbile routes.
Microsfot was NOT forced to integrate the browser into the OS!
Aern't you forgetting MS's claims that they could not remove IE from the OS
because it was an integrel part of windows
They claimed this until a CS professor from someplace walked into court and did it right in front of everyone's eyes. THis is the point at which MS's case simply fell apart.
They use the rendering engine to present the various bits of a file window, but IE in and of itself can be removed, its a known fact.
If you dont believe me do this simple test. Set your view setting to show hidden & system files, go into c:\windown\system32\DLLCache and rename iexplore.exe. Ignore the FUD warning, then go into the explorer folder in the program files folder. Rename iexplore.exe and you will be IE free.
This action prevents programs that will attempt to call IE directly from screwing your system. I have only tested this on Windows 2000, but I would imagine it will work perfectly on various other versions as well.
Microsofts little kernel game here is nothing but that, its a game to shut out the competition, nothing more nothing less. They will FUD this to death and cry wolf to anyone who will listen. They simply want to own yet another market.
This is typical MS behavior, they see something that makes money and then they study it and then bring something to the market that is typicaly inferior but with a marketing budget behind it that rivals the defense budgets of some small countries and make a turd smell like a rose.
If you don't believe that, jsut take a good long hard look at Zune.
Ohhhh stop whining! This is a small fatty tumor in someones forearm! Nothing ITFA says anything about its size and location. For all you know it could be sub-Q and a few cm in size.
This could be done with a local with a slightly heavier then normal Epi load, very little bleading, capilary at best with the remote possibility that the tumors connective tissue blood supply is slightly larger then capilary.
So stop beging so critical of a surgical team taking the next step in understanding the dynamics of zero-g work.
And FURTHER more, stop complaining about French doctors. I doubt they would have committed the same sin as American doctors by leaving thousands of cases of syphilis untreated in poor, mostly illiterate, black men just to see what the "outcome" was, or did you forget that part you hepicratical [purposeful mangling or the word] moron.
Re:Indians will complain about foreigners soon
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Reverse Off-Shoring
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· Score: 1
Hey Leeum,
Great post. I think there is something else going on here though, as well as what you have mentioned. I call it the Great Circle of Cheep ( GCC ).. Uhmm I didn't intend for those initials.
The news is flashed in milliseconds that XYZ Corp will miss the "streets" target by 2 cents. Hurry run run run to your broker or on-line equivilent and get your money out of this poorly performing POS company! This causes management to focus on nothing but share price and meeting some analyst's often rediculous expectations of "growth" instead of making great products. Trying to shave pennies here and pennies there. That part they decided they could save that 4 pennies on by making it platic instead of metal breaks and me, the consumer, is utterly pissed off because my $300.00 widget is no unusable and I have to go buy a new one because of the throw away society we have built.
This makes me think the company that made it are really dumb and so i dont want to buy their products anymore which makes the share price slip, so management in their never ending share price quest either slashes work force or quality again to bolster the share price to meet "expectations", but alas its only short term at best.
The global race for cheep labor. Yeah well it started in Japan. Japanese workers started demanding western ( US ) levels of waqes and benefits. Then its off to Tiawan, and then they start wanting more for their work. Then off to Korea and now they ar wanting more. Then off to... Pick the next company where they can find a cheap, but talented labor pool. Pretty soon it will land right back here, and we will be the cheeper but talented labor pool.
Steel production left the US for two basic reasons. The first of which the companies were myopic, they didn't see the rest of the world starting to build the infastructure to make steel. People in this country started getting the idea that vast smelting omplexes were poisoning the environment and they started demanding that those companies clean things up, a popular, but very expensive notion, yet now in hindsite not as expensive as they thought if judged by the utter lack of steel production and whole parts of the country still economicaly depressed because of it. How much longer before Korea heads down the same rode and steel production moves to a new place to save the money that should be used to make clean(er) steel production.
How much longer before India will no longer tollerate the massive poisoning of their coast from ship breaking and that moves to the next place where governments will turn a blind eye?
The cycle will continue aroudnt he globe. I dont know if it will make it back to the US since I doubt you will have ships being driven onto the shore in the gulf coast and an army of poor people scrambling onto them with cutting torches simply because it would not be tollerated.
So a defined menu system drop down, fly-out, combinations of those forms, downloaded once. It would encompas a raw menu system that could then be styled by a web page.
Style would entail things like tabs with rounded corners, square corners, color, depth, parent ( local to an equivilent of a DIV ) and such?
But how do you keep something like this from becomming a large bandwidth burden? Would it be every interactive site then has to be downloaded as an entire program? What you seem to be describing was MS's vision of ActiveX wouldn't you agree?
This became something that has caused probelms, security holes, etc.
The most tedious and problematic things like menu's that dont quite look correct from browser to browser unless some of the most increadably convoluted CSS is applied should be, IMHO, be spec'd, coded up and linked into the browser rendering engine, to provide a consistent browser and platform independent expirience.
Slashdot Mirror
And why, might you ask? Well because:
So there you have it, in a nutshell, top ten list fashion if you will. Women are just better at most things then men, when they have a chance to learn and are interested. Now having said that, i think sometimes its hard to find woemn who are actualy interested in becomming programmers because the vast majority of them don't dig the uber testostrone filled field. The female web geeks that I know, rarely miss deadlines, their code is impecable AND commented. The few source level programmers I know simply hate most all of the frameworks and packages out there because they make little sense in their organization and are just full of bugs. They would rather re-write the function and have it be rock solid.
So next time you run into a woman or a young girl who shows an interest in programming, support them, nurture and support this aspiration, we would ALL be a lot better off because of it.
XML is just a pathetic attempt to do what SQL already does quite nicely thank you very much
You cqn query an SQL server and get the schema, then its a simple query for the data. Its all wrapped up quite nicely and its very logical and it works. Why oh why do these people continue to dream up this hierarchical madness!
So lets see, whats easier. You need data, you go to the data source and you request the schema of what you are getting. It comes from a table, a view or a query, but its a schema with defined field names and types. Then you query for the data, it comes in nicely packaged records and there you have it!. Now lets do it the XML way. You request some data. Then you spend the next several billion CPU cycles traversing up and down a hierarchical tree, building tempory array's etc. ad nauseum to get the data all sorted out.
Using a markup language that was designed to describe the layout of a page for data transfer is just plain stupid. STOP trying to make a one size fits all, use what is the simplest method for each task. You want to do page markup, use SMGL and its derivitives, you want to move data, use SQL, thats what it was designed for! This keeps the bug count low, it keeps troublshooting simple, it removes data from layout, its just a right way to do things.
Dont forget Diabold runs Windows CE as the base OS. Hmmm How CAN they get it right.
Pardon my ignorance, but what the hell is QT ?
Ohhh please! Don't ya think MS has built in a back door, somewhere ? The cooperate fully with the FBI, CIA, NSA.
Amen bro.
Yeah to bad they don't include ACTUAL programming more then here is the Java Framework, write me a pizza ordering program for the web. Programming is 33.3% skill, 33.3% Art and 33.3% inspiration, that Eureka Moment. If you want to be a good programmer, learn how to do puzzles in your head. Visualize the process of moving data in, manipulating it, and then outputting it.
And then there are the rest of us, who write well formated, well structured, well designed code every day, but never went to collage. We did what a LOT of people did in the 80's we picked up a copy of whatever language we could get our hands on and started teaching ourselves.
We read books, we looked at other peoples code, we experimented. We wrote our own Direct to Video Memory code to avoid the bios screen write functions.
But now we are in our late 40's and not hip and cool. We don't get hired because we don't have a piece of paper saying we know something, we just have massive amounts of code to back us up, but none of the under 30 hip cool crowd cares about that, its "You got your degree from where?" When I tell them SHK ( school of Hard Knocks ) as a joke and then tell them I am self taught, I get the "We want someone more qualified" What a bunch of horse shit.
Thats the biggest problem with our society, no one values experience, no one values wisdom gleaned from 25 years of doing the JOB.Most of us don't care for the latest and greatest Ruby on Rails or Roads or even a race track. We don't do cutting edge, we do what works, we do it most of the time under budget, ahead of schedule and in code that readable AND commented.
So we will keep writing code that supports what all you "Latest & Greatest" fan boys think is SO cool, when in fact its the exact same language we built so many years ago, with a cosmetic twist.
I guess the other thing that is SO fucking depressing is that most CS or even SE grads these days don't have a clue how to create anything unless its spoon fed to them in some object repository. I asked a recent CS graduate if he knew any assembler of ANY flavor. His response was, "Well we had about 2 hours of it and some theory", but other then that all he knew was Java and rudimentary C.
A pretty sad state of affairs if you ask me. And people wonder why companies outsource.
A gas turbine in a ship has a lot of control's that are simply physical linkages to other parts of it. Those engines are quite simple. The more fuel you push into them the faster they turn.
I sailed nuclear submarines for 10 years. No computers in the engine room and the entire nuclear plant was run by 2 guys, the Reactor Operator and the Engineering Office of the watch. Electric Plant operator kept the power straight, the throttle-man made sure the speed was right. There were 3 watch standers in the rest of the entire engine room plus a supervisor. So a total of 8 guys ran the entire engineering plant per shift. Then again submarine sailors tend to be highly educated and motivated.
I think you could use computers for remote sensing of various pressures and levels of things and logging that information, but never let the computer make decisions. On submarines there is a "Battle Short" switch which when thrown, bypasses every interlock and safety cut-out circuit for when things are hot and heavy and the depth charges and torpedoes are flying. You don't want anything tripping the reactor or the propulsion or electric plant off-line. If your in a battle screw it if you overheat the core a little, or melt some bus bar or over-speed a main propulsion turbine. Thats what the repair yards are for if you survive the battle.
As to your car's ECU. If it fails you simply pull over. If it fails on a warship in battle you simply die. No thanks.
Myth or not, this should have never happened.
Naval warships should not have ANY computer software controlling the propulsion system as there is no need for it.
For the uninitiated here is how it works:
At the helm there is a little thing called an Engine Order Telegraph. This device has a knob in the middle of it that the helmsman turns and sets a pointer to Ahead 1/3, Back 1/3, All Stop etc. This makes a corresponding indicator move in a room in the engineering spaces called Maneuvering. This is where the people that monitor the propulsion plant work. One of them is called the Throttle Man. He sees his indicator move and then he turns a big wheel that controls a valve that allows more or less steam into the steam turbines that turn the propeller shaft, or it changes the pitch of the propeller blades to provide more or less thrust therefor making the ship go faster or slower.
Now on most ships with constant speed variable pith propellers the pitch change control is controlled directly from the bridge, but control can be taken back by the people in the engine room in case the ship takes a shell to the bridge and therefor the crew can continue to fight the battle they are in. The electronics to do this are VERY simple to design and build and they are very robust, so there is no need for a computer to be in the chain.
This, IMO, is where the computerization of everything has just gone too far. Yes you can put a computer in everything, by why would you want to. Some things on Naval Ships require a computer. Things such as fire control, sharing tactical data, Ship to shore communication, Navigation, etc. But does running the propulsion system require a computer? Not in the least.
My wishes have been answered! It's JUST a phone. It makes phone calls.
Wait! Dont get excited self! TFA says, "Emerging Markets"... I hope that does not mean, Not for sale anyplace where Spirt, Verizon or AT&T are.
OK, so my experience with Oracle Support has never been anything other then stunning. I have a client that is a very small wine company. They purchased Oracle with the minimum license, 5 named users.
The server it was running on went to the big server farm in the sky, it was an HP Pro-liant. HP fed-ex's a new one, the same day and we re-loaded the server, re-loaded Oracle but for some reason Oracle just refused to come up.
So I get on the phone with Oracle and we start to troubleshoot the problem. I am talking to a tech in Colorado and at some point its time for her to go home. I get transfered to another tech in London and he continues to work the problem with me and we solved it about 3 A.M. and all was good.
Now, if the London Tech had not solved it, from what they told me, I would get shifted into the next time zone or whatever the hell and another tech would pick up the ball as long as I was willing to be there.
So you tell me, what other company gives that kind of support for an under $1000.00 purchase?
Sure Oracle is an expensive product. You get what you pay for though. Remember Word Perfect? You paid like $600.00 for a DOS program, in 1985 dollars!! But you know what? You got a 1-800 number to call and all the free support you could suck up and I doubt if I was ever on hold for more then 5 minutes waiting for a MORE then knowledgeable tech support person on everything from installation to their VERY extensive macro language.
What you get now for your $300.00 office suite is pay by incident. You get some man or woman in India, who forces you through a script, before they read you a canned answer, that half the time does not work. I take nothing away from these hard working men and women, but they simply do not have the in depth knowledge of the product they are supporting, and the ones that do end up doing their best to keep 50 of the other people going. You wanted cheep software, thats what you get.
Larry Ellison may be the biggest jerk this side of our solar system, but ya know what? Oracle will get you running no matter what.
I was at Oracle World last week. Had a coveted invite to the dinner and drinks reception. I talked with 4 or 5 tech types that just handed me their cards and said, if you ever have any questions, just drop me an e-mail, I will find the answers for you. Oracle, at least in my book, is a great company to buy software from. YMMV.
Let us not forget about Teddy Bear!
Thats the problem with creating a spec by consensus. To many ego's to stroke, to many interests to serve. HTML, XHTML, CSS are all a huge fucking mess and need to get cleaned up, badly.
On the browser side its time to realize that their are a few things the browser needs to have built into to make this shit work well:
1. Boxes - The need to just be a part of the browser. You call a box, you give it the size and location via the (x-y,x-y,layer) coordinates and you can either let if float on give it an absolute position. This solves all the problems with content X being in Box X and content Y being in Box Y. After that all CSS decorations, font sizes and whatever else some yo-yo dreams up apply as to what is rendered in the box.
2. Menus - The absolute garbage, yet very clever, hacks that are menus now become just about utterly un-maintainable with bastardization of the UI and UL tags. Use an XML type of format to describe the menu tree either drop-down or fly-out or a combination of either.
3. This crap about positioning, is it pixels, percent, EML's or what the fuck ever. You need TWO types and two types only. Pixels as in: LOCATION X,Y and thats where it stays, period. Or its a percentage of the area of reference. If it's the entire page, ie: not bound by a box, as described above, its simply a percentage, IN PIXELS of the width and or height of the browser window. If its in an area thats a defined BOX its restricted to the bounds of the box, pure and simple, no fuss, no muss.
JUST those 3 things would go a hell of a long way towards making the WEB a better place to create things. There is a hell of a lot more to be done, but that would be a great start.
The encryption key is stored elsewhere and AFAIK its not accessable.
The NDS administrator can change any password on the system, Netware, GroupWise E-mail, GroupWise Messenger. So if your locked out, those are the LEAST of your problems.
There is a company that you can by an unlock disk for NDS, but you had better have a 3.5" floppy in your server, because it will only access the floppy drive to run its program and it must be run from the console andit will only unluck a local copy of the NDS database.
I know this from painfull expirience. A client purchased a new server w/o a floppy then changed the admin password I had put on the system and then promptly forgot it and they had deleted my account that had admin priviledges. So i had to order a special mini-floppy from Dell, get it overnighted, install it and then run the unluck program.
All GroupWise traffic is 128bit encrypted when its moving between a GroupWise system and a GroupWise client via intranet or internet. It might be vulnerable to a MIM attack since its using Diffy Hellman key exchange, but I am not sure if it hasn't been modified by Novell.
Every system I set up ONLY uses https for the web interface, so no leaks there, well unless your machine is hacked, but then all bets are off with screen stripers and the like.
SMTP has the same issue as everyone else does unless you config GW's smtp agent to refuse to talk unless the other end uses SLL, which can be done, but you will limit your e-mail system the same way as if you refuse to accept e-mail if the sender can't be verified, which you can do with GW.
The issue with Sendmail, QMail and all the rest that are your basic POP style e-mail systems, is that they either store the data in plain text, or even if stored on database servers they still store as plain text. Hence any sysadmin can read the mail in its raw form and no one knows this happened.
GroupWise stores everything in its own database which is first compresed (LZH) then 128 bit encrypted. There is no way a system admin can read anyones e-mail without using either the GW Client ( X-Platform of course ), the built in web interface or some of the more sophisticated e-mail monitoring tools that are available for GW. Without the tools, you MUST know someones password to get into their e-mail account. Now unless you have a list of passwords you will never be able to do so unless you change their password, as a system admin can, but they will be alerted because they will no longer be able to get their e-mail
Now you can use deception, ie: change their password, do whatever it is you want/need to do, then when they can't access their e-mail, you claim ignorance and cheerfully set them a new password and then tell them to be sure and change it, which they more then likely will not do and then rely on their laziness to then continue on with snooping, but at some point this will make someone think something is rotten in IT
The bottom line is that e-mail security is only as good as a System Admin who can change / monitor things, which is their job. At some point you have to trust someone to keep your system up and running
Why yes I AM a Novell fan boy, whats your fucking point!
As other have replied its all about the bus speed. The amount of time it takes to move data from chip to chip can insert enormous overhead.
Think back a little to the DEC Alpha. Now the ALPHA chip in and of itself was not really that remarkable. What was so VERY remarkable about the Alpha system was its bus switching. It was blazingly fast and could handle monster amounts of data from main memory to CPU, GPU, etc. The reason ( mostly ) that its now sitting in HP's vault is that the bus switch was/is really expensive to manufacture.
So the way you do this without haveing to build this very expensice bus architecture is to just put the GPU on the die with the CPU. Everything runs at the internal speed of the processor and its fairly inexpensive, comparatively, to build.
DNA has been there, done that and has the 20 node t-shirt or the Traveling Salesman Problem.
is been over 5 years since this was done and this is not that impressive. Now a decent desktop can do this, but it will take a little time since there are over 1 million possbile routes.
Microsfot was NOT forced to integrate the browser into the OS!
Aern't you forgetting MS's claims that they could not remove IE from the OS because it was an integrel part of windows
They claimed this until a CS professor from someplace walked into court and did it right in front of everyone's eyes. THis is the point at which MS's case simply fell apart.
They use the rendering engine to present the various bits of a file window, but IE in and of itself can be removed, its a known fact.
If you dont believe me do this simple test. Set your view setting to show hidden & system files, go into c:\windown\system32\DLLCache and rename iexplore.exe. Ignore the FUD warning, then go into the explorer folder in the program files folder. Rename iexplore.exe and you will be IE free.
This action prevents programs that will attempt to call IE directly from screwing your system. I have only tested this on Windows 2000, but I would imagine it will work perfectly on various other versions as well.
Microsofts little kernel game here is nothing but that, its a game to shut out the competition, nothing more nothing less. They will FUD this to death and cry wolf to anyone who will listen. They simply want to own yet another market.
This is typical MS behavior, they see something that makes money and then they study it and then bring something to the market that is typicaly inferior but with a marketing budget behind it that rivals the defense budgets of some small countries and make a turd smell like a rose.
If you don't believe that, jsut take a good long hard look at Zune.
Ohhhh stop whining! This is a small fatty tumor in someones forearm! Nothing ITFA says anything about its size and location. For all you know it could be sub-Q and a few cm in size.
This could be done with a local with a slightly heavier then normal Epi load, very little bleading, capilary at best with the remote possibility that the tumors connective tissue blood supply is slightly larger then capilary.
So stop beging so critical of a surgical team taking the next step in understanding the dynamics of zero-g work.
And FURTHER more, stop complaining about French doctors. I doubt they would have committed the same sin as American doctors by leaving thousands of cases of syphilis untreated in poor, mostly illiterate, black men just to see what the "outcome" was, or did you forget that part you hepicratical [purposeful mangling or the word] moron.
Hey Leeum,
Great post. I think there is something else going on here though, as well as what you have mentioned. I call it the Great Circle of Cheep ( GCC ).. Uhmm I didn't intend for those initials.
The news is flashed in milliseconds that XYZ Corp will miss the "streets" target by 2 cents. Hurry run run run to your broker or on-line equivilent and get your money out of this poorly performing POS company! This causes management to focus on nothing but share price and meeting some analyst's often rediculous expectations of "growth" instead of making great products. Trying to shave pennies here and pennies there. That part they decided they could save that 4 pennies on by making it platic instead of metal breaks and me, the consumer, is utterly pissed off because my $300.00 widget is no unusable and I have to go buy a new one because of the throw away society we have built.
This makes me think the company that made it are really dumb and so i dont want to buy their products anymore which makes the share price slip, so management in their never ending share price quest either slashes work force or quality again to bolster the share price to meet "expectations", but alas its only short term at best.
The global race for cheep labor. Yeah well it started in Japan. Japanese workers started demanding western ( US ) levels of waqes and benefits. Then its off to Tiawan, and then they start wanting more for their work. Then off to Korea and now they ar wanting more. Then off to... Pick the next company where they can find a cheap, but talented labor pool. Pretty soon it will land right back here, and we will be the cheeper but talented labor pool.
Steel production left the US for two basic reasons. The first of which the companies were myopic, they didn't see the rest of the world starting to build the infastructure to make steel. People in this country started getting the idea that vast smelting omplexes were poisoning the environment and they started demanding that those companies clean things up, a popular, but very expensive notion, yet now in hindsite not as expensive as they thought if judged by the utter lack of steel production and whole parts of the country still economicaly depressed because of it. How much longer before Korea heads down the same rode and steel production moves to a new place to save the money that should be used to make clean(er) steel production.
How much longer before India will no longer tollerate the massive poisoning of their coast from ship breaking and that moves to the next place where governments will turn a blind eye?
The cycle will continue aroudnt he globe. I dont know if it will make it back to the US since I doubt you will have ships being driven onto the shore in the gulf coast and an army of poor people scrambling onto them with cutting torches simply because it would not be tollerated.
Master_P,
So a defined menu system drop down, fly-out, combinations of those forms, downloaded once. It would encompas a raw menu system that could then be styled by a web page.
Style would entail things like tabs with rounded corners, square corners, color, depth, parent ( local to an equivilent of a DIV ) and such?
Lets start a project!
I like your notion...
But how do you keep something like this from becomming a large bandwidth burden? Would it be every interactive site then has to be downloaded as an entire program? What you seem to be describing was MS's vision of ActiveX wouldn't you agree?
This became something that has caused probelms, security holes, etc.
The most tedious and problematic things like menu's that dont quite look correct from browser to browser unless some of the most increadably convoluted CSS is applied should be, IMHO, be spec'd, coded up and linked into the browser rendering engine, to provide a consistent browser and platform independent expirience.
Imagine this...
Document.Background = white
Document.Styles =
DefArea('TopHeader',(0,0),100px,Document.Width)
DefMenu('MainMenu','/menus/main',TopHeader)
TopHeader.ApplyStyle = Document.HeaderStyle
MainMenu.ApplyStyle = Document.MainMenuStyle
Or something like that.