The "mind trick" in object-oriented design is to conflate some "object" (which might be a person, place, or conceptual entity, not just a physical object) with a program data structure which holds information about it. The data structure itself is called the "object" by OO programmers, even though it only *represents* the original object. The original object is in the "problem domain" or "domain of discourse", while the data structure object is usually not. The information about the problem-domain object, stored in the data-structure object, is called the object's "state".
This conflation can be very useful and is done willfully. It's often much simpler for the programmer to think about maintaining a list of students than to think about maintaining a list of data structures, each of which stores information about a student. Good object-oriented programming involves making sure the analogy between the problem-domain objects and the data-structure objects continues to hold as the system is developed.
--Sandro Hawke on the www-tag mailing list, Monday, 30 Dec 2002
Intel's Lagrande and Microsoft's Palladiumm attack the essence of the PC--a universal machine, capable of doing anything that one can write software to describe or build an interface to control=--and threaten to turn the PC into a harem eunuch for an oligopoly of pay-per-use content vendors and channels. Legislators have likewise been to quick to accomodate the demands of deep-pocketed content creators.
--Peter Coffee, eWeek, December 23/30, 2002, p. 39
Necessary as tradeoffs between quality factors may be, one factor stands out from the rest: correctness. There is never any justification for compromising correctness for the sake of other concerns such as efficiency. If the software does not perform its function, the rest is useless.
--Bertrand Meyer
Read the rest in
Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition, p. 15
When you run a Gnome application on a KDE desktop, the GNOME application looks like a KDE application. Conversely KDE applications look like GNOME when run on the GNOME desktop. Apparently the two platforms use common run-time library calling conventions to display widgets. The desktop environment determines the look and feel more than the application's own code does.
If you are looking for one, single, outstanding validation of the open source devlopment model, this is it. With no profits to lose and no trade secrets to compromise, projects are encouraged to cross-pollinate their technologies, making all products better and advancing the state of technology across the board. You won't find much evidence of this cooperation among the mailing lists associated with both desktops. Mostly what you find is fierce competition and chauvinism. But separate yourself from all that, and the result is positive.
--Al Stevens
Read the rest in Dr. Dobbs Journal, October, 2001, p. 107
When you run a Gnome application on a KDE desktop, the GNOME application looks like a KDE application. Conversely KDE applicationns look like GNOME when run on the GNOME desktop. Apparently the two platforms use common run-time library calling conventions to display widgets. The desktop environment determines the look and feel more than the application's own code does.
If you are looking for one, single, outstanding validation of the open source devlopemnt model, this is it. With no profits to lose and no trade secrets to compromise, projects are encouraged to cross-pollinate their technologies, making all products better and advancing the state of technology across the board. You won't find much evidence of this cooperation among the mailing lists associated with both desktops. Mostly what you find is fierce competition and chauvinism. But separate yourself from all that, and the result is positive.
--Al Stevens
Read the rest in Dr. Dobbs Journal, October, 2001, p. 107
We're working on a new policy for software vendors that will say, 'Before you deliver your software to Sprint, you need to run certain tests and tell us the results. There are holes in Microsoft you can shoot a cannon through. It's only fair that they tell us.
--Robert Fox, Sprint's chief security officer
Read the rest in Sprint to Require Security Tests on Vendors' Software - Computerworld
A technical issue or project sometimes raises ethical issues. When that happens, discussing the ethical issues is an essential part of the technical discussion. A discussion which ignores the ethical aspect of the issue is severely incomplete.
That does not happen often. Most of the decisions in a technical project are purely technical, and whatever is technically best is really best. After many such issues, it is easy to start thinking that raising ethical issues in a technical issue is improper, that there is some virtue in keeping technical decisions away from ethics. That is a the worst mistake an engineer can make.
--Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in Linux and Main - The week that was: RMS - McVoy, Turbo - SuSE, MSFT - SunW, Wozniak, Cacheflow
When you are pure software, when you have a bug, you can fix it just by sending a new version down. When you're a piece of hardware, you fix it by doing a product recall. And, consequently, people who work with real atoms rather than just bits, tend to be more cautious than us software people would like them to be.
--Simon Phipps
Read the rest in An Interview with Simon Phipps [Mar. 15, 2001]
We, ASCII-age programmers, are used to considering plain text rendering as being injective up to binary identity. We carefully choose fonts that distinguish between O and 0, 1 and l. We use editors that warn us about non-native line ending conventions, about whitespace at the end of lines, about white lines at the end of files.
With Unicode, doing the same becomes impossible, which some of us (including myself) find disorienting. We will have to change our work habits, and we'll have to work out new tricks for making our software reliable when confronted with a non-technical user
--Juliusz Chroboczek on the unicode@unicode.org mailing list, 11 Feb 2002
A recent visit with the PC Magazine folks in China revealed some interesting facts. First, the Chinese are having some trouble coming to grips with intellectual-property laws. This is a cultural thing. Generations of Chinese were brought up to believe that intellectual property is the property of the people. It is a marxist ideal that has been inculcated in Russia as well as China.
The solution, insofar as computers are concerned, is open-source. Nobody can complain if the software you're passing around is free! The Chinese are very amenable to open-source and could become a massive conduit for Linux applications. Apparently, Microsoft is freaked out by this possibility and is investing a lot of money in China to educate people. My prediction: It's a lost cause, and China will go to Linux in a big way.
--John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, December 3, 2002, p. 63
Each time a new DVD movie is played on a computer, the WMP software contacts a Microsoft Web server to get title and chapter information for the DVD. When this contact is made, the Microsoft Web server is giving an electronic fingerprint which identifies the DVD movie being watched and a cookie which uniquely identifies a particular WMP player. With this two pieces of information Microsoft can track what DVD movies are being watched on a particular computer.
--Richard M. Smith
Read the rest in Why is Microsoft watching us watch DVD movies?
You might have noticed that most CEOs are not eager to work for companies that are already in the crapper and rotating clockwise. That's puzzling, because you would think that a confident CEO who believed in the power of his own leadership skills would prefer a challenge -- something with more of an upside potential. But it seems that given the choice between a hard job, like CEO of Bob's Pastry and Muffler Shop, or something easy, like CEO of General Electric, most leaders will opt for the position that could be handled equally well by a sock monkey.
--Scott Adams in the Dilbert Newsletter 44.0, Monday, 25 Nov 2002
Just turned on CNN to catch the headlines. The network is running a report about Iraq and the likely upcoming war.
The channel is also, in the middle of a supposed news report, playing ominous-sounding music in the background while the anchor/reporter talks and the images are displayed on the screen. This is a technique movie-makers use to stir up viewers' emotions. It works.
Most likely the purpose of this technique is to make the broadcast more interesting. But it's smells of propaganda, not serious journalism.
CNN's credibilty has been shrinking for some time. This kind of overt viewer manipulation puts it closer and closer to zero.
--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in Silicon Valley
Every paper you pick up today talks about threading as if we were working in a textile mill. Using the "thread" word is very popular. But those who know threading intimately know that multi-threading is often like a Steven King novel -- there are things crawling around in the night that can bite you.
--Edward Harned
Read the rest in Knowledge Base - - JAVAPeerPublishing
I tell kids now, if you want to get that Sixties sound, just get stoned and get into a tiny room, because we never had rehearsal rooms, we always used to jam in somebody's bedroom ‹ and above all, throw away your tuner. When you listen to the Eagles, which was the defining Californian sound of the 1970s, they were perfectly in tune. The electronic tuner had been perfected. In our day, nobody had tuners. Well, the Dead had what they called a strobe tuner, a huge thing the size of fridge. But we didn't and we would fight non-stop about who was in and out of tune, and the in-tuneness would only last for a hot minute before our guitarist Barry Melton hit the joystick on his guitar and the moment he did that, it went out of tune again.
--Country Joe McDonald
Read the rest in Independent News
Frequent readers, by now, have noticed that I've been thinking of the problem of how one might deliver an application on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows without paying disproportionately for the Linux and Macintosh versions. For this you need some kind of cross-platform library.
Java attempted this but Sun didn't grok GUIs well enough to deliver really slick native-feeling applications. Like the space alien in Star Trek watching Earth through a telescope, they knew exactly what human food was supposed to look like but they didn't realize it was supposed to taste like something. Java apps have menus in the right places but there are all these keyboard things that don't work the same way as every other Windows app and their tabbed dialogs look a little scary. And there is no way, no matter how hard you try, to make their menubars look exactly like Excel's menubars. Why? Because Java doesn't give you a very good way to drop down to the native facilities whenever the abstraction fails. When you're programming in AWT, you can't figure out the HWND of a window, you can't call the Microsoft APIs, and you certainly can't intercept WM_PAINT and do it differently. And Sun made it plenty clear that if you tried to do that, you weren't Pure. You were Polluted, and to hell with you.
After a number of highly publicized failures to build GUIs with Java (e.g. Corel's Java Office suite and Netscape's Javagator), enough people know to stay away from this world. Eclipse built their own windowing library from the ground up using native widgets just so they could write Java code that had a reasonably native look and feel.
The Mozilla engineers decided to address the cross platform problem with their own invention called XUL. So far, I'm impressed. Mozilla finally got to the point where it tastes like real food. Even my favorite bugaboo, Alt+Space N to minimize a window, works in Mozilla; it took them long enough but they did it.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software - Lord Palmerston on Programming
Why don't we set up the machinery of real international law? Why don't we talk about "justice" rather than revenge? Why don't we have international tribunals so that those who wish to kill us can have their time in court? I don't want al-Qa'ida's members blown to pieces in Yemen by Mr Bush's hit squads. I want to see them tried, fairly and by due process. Of course, the Americans will whinge and whine about this. They will rabbit on about how Americans may be taken to court for political ends, about how American troops might be liable for war crimes trials ‹ and given some of their behavior in Afghanistan, I can well see why they would worry about this. I can see, too, why Mr Sharon would worry that he, too, could end up in court on war crimes charges for his involvement in the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila in 1982. I don't know if Mr Sharon is guilty. But I think he deserves a fair trial.
--Robert Fisk
Read the rest in Ariel Sharon Has Walked Into a Trap. And We Are Following Him
The key discriminating function of the main Linux maintainers--which include Linus Torvalds--is their absolute no-compromise position on clean interfaces and forcing people who want to go two steps forward to not go one step back. What this means is, in many kernel mailing-list discussions I've seen over the last 12 months, when somebody proposes a solution that solves some problems but brings with it other problems, generally that solution is rejected until the other problems are addressed.
A great example of this is two years ago when a number of groups approached Linus, each trying to be the approved security mechanism for Linux. The NSA (National Security Administration) was showing their solution, HP (Hewlett-Packard) was showing their solution and Immunix/Wirex was showing theirs--and he told them all, "The fact that each of you is trying to get me to adopt your approach is proof that none of these approaches is correct. The only possible correct approach is one single approach that supports each of the different things you're trying to do. Come back when you've defined a set of interfaces that supports each of your systems, and I'll support that."
--Michael Tiemann
Read the rest in Vision Series 3: Michael Tiemann - Tech News - CNET.com
Back in the early 60's, IBM came out with a new line of computers to replace their various scientific and commercial models. They had a new idea: to create a line of computer systems that shared a common architecture, with a full range of models, all capable of running the same software.
They called this new product line System/360. Although the physical implementation details of these systems varied significantly, the ISA was consistent throughout, except for some specific features (packed decimal and/or floating point instructions were optional on certain models, depending on whether you needed to do scientific or commercial work). Of course those first systems had about the same processing power as today's digital watches, and we all know how neat digital watches are.
--Ford Prefect
Read the rest in Ace's Hardware
No one could have possibly arranged for more publicity for the open-source movement and its importance than Bill Gates coming and giving $400 million to fight Linux
--Atul Chitnis, Bangalore Linux Users Group
Read the rest in Linux, Microsoft tussle in India - Tech News - CNET.com
A lot of people in the scene talk about the evils of selling out, but I say sell out, sport a suit and tie, give up illegal cracking and get a life. I realized real quickly that I could learn a lot more working legitimately.
--Ejovi Nuwere
Read the rest in Wired News: Hacker From the 'Hood Tells All
Microsoft has given this vulnerability a maximum severity rating of moderate. Great, so arbitrary command execution, local file reading and complete system compromise is now only moderately severe, according to Microsoft.
--Thor Larholm
Read the rest in Microsoft: IE hole worse than reported - Tech News - CNET.com
Has anyone spotted something amiss about the latest episode in the "war on terror"? Has it dawned on any of the chickenhawks in the US administration or in Downing Street that they are losing the initiative? Has anyone noticed that Mr bin Laden is writing the script? Al-Qa'ida attacks New York so we attack Afghanistan. Al-Qa'ida attacks in Bali and the Australian government re-pledges its support for America. Al-Qa'ida threatens America and so we murder four of its members in Yemen. And our governments ‹ even the Irish last week ‹ respond not by protecting us, not by uniting in a new, inspiring system of international justice, but by producing laws that will diminish our freedoms, our rights and our liberty. Under attack by al-Qa'ida? Let's tap into the telephones and emails of our innocent citizens. Let's frisk every Muslim who goes through our airports. Let's spy on our own people. How Mr bin Laden ‹ hardly a man of humor, as I can personally attest ‹ must be smiling.
--Robert Fisk
Read the rest in Ariel Sharon Has Walked Into a Trap. And We Are Following Him
The Java Community Process is a wondrous beast, I'm coming into contact with it from another angle at the moment. I suspect they can't send you an acknowledgement without the agreement of 39 company lawyers.
--Michael Kay on the saxon-help mailing list, Thursday, 5 Dec 2002
We're seeing interest among Fortune 500 companies to make sure the software they need for their business continues to be available in open source. They've gone through this latest license nightmare with Microsoft, where suddenly their outlay became much larger and got locked into multiyear-long deals. A bunch of them don't want to be on the pusher-addict model of software anymore and are going to take a more active voice in directing that software.
--Bruce Perens
Read the rest in Vision Series 3: Bruce Perens - Tech News - CNET.com
The reality is that in anything resembling today's normal operating procedures, airliners are inescapably vulnerable to ground attack within a many-mile radius around any major airport. We couldn't hope to secure a dozen-mile safety zone around airports in Atlanta or Dallas, let alone Cairo or Jakarta. Surface-to-air missiles are so small, cheap, portable, and (reportedly) abundant on the black market that sooner or later terrorist groups will get and use them. The missile threat will mean to airline travel what the recent sniper episode means to metropolitan life. That is, once terrorist groups see how easy it is for a few people to generate widespread fear, and how impossible it would be to mount an effective defense, it is only a matter of time before it's done again. (If there were the slightest chance that terrorist groups had not already figured this out, I wouldn't mention it. But let's not kid ourselves.)
--James Fallows
Read the rest in Air Fright - Why Nov. 28 will prove scarier in the long run for airline passengers than Sept. 11. ByJamesÊFallows
For some reason, Richard Clarke continues to believe that he can increase cybersecurity in this country by asking nicely. This government has tried this sort of thing again and again, and it never works. This National Strategy document isn't law, and it doesn't contain any mandates to government agencies. It has lots of recommendations. It has all sorts of processes. It has yet another list of suggested best practices. It's simply another document in my increasingly tall pile of recommendations to make everything better. (The Clinton Administration had theirs, the "National Plan for Information Systems Protection." And both the GAO and the OMB have published cyber-strategy documents.) But plans, no matter how detailed and how accurate they are, don't secure anything; action does.
And consensus doesn't secure anything. Preliminary drafts of the plan included strong words about wireless insecurity, which were removed because the wireless industry didn't want to look bad for not doing anything about it. Preliminary drafts included a suggestion that ISPs provide all their users with personal firewalls; that was taken out because ISPs didn't want to look bad for not already doing something like that.
And so on. This is what you get with a PR document. You get lots of varying input from all sorts of special interests, and you end up with a document that offends no one because it demands nothing.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Counterpane: Crypto-Gram:
While not exactly newsworthy (but still interesting), a recent poll conducted by Billboard revealed that 42% of respondees stated they would be more willing to purchase a CD if it included additional perks such as unreleased songs or concert ticket offers. Is this really any surprise? The Christian music industry, one of the few markets making a profit these days, does this very thing. Buy a contemporary worship CD and with it you will commonly receive free lyric sheets, guitar tablature, and alternate, acoustic versions of songs in MP3 format - all included on the disc. This is one area where the Christian music industry is truly ahead of the secular market.
--David Nevue
Read the rest in MusicDish Industry e - Journal
If you replaced all of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies with Magic 8 Balls (tm), and came back in five years, you would discover that some of those companies had compiled excellent track records by pure chance. The CEO's job in a huge company is essentially the same as the Magic 8 Ball: saying yes, no, or maybe, without the benefit of understanding the questions. A Magic 8 Ball is highly qualified for that sort of work.
Recently I heard an interview that CNBC did with Lou Gerstner. He said his biggest contribution as CEO at IBM was changing its culture. His example of how he changed the culture is that when he came into the job there was a lot of talk about breaking up the company into smaller companies; he decided not to do that. In other words, his biggest contribution to IBM was NOT DOING SOMETHING. Then he wrote a best-selling book about his leadership. The Magic 8 Ball would have had a 50% chance making the same decision; a sock monkey would have nailed it on the first try.
--Scott Adams in the Dilbert Newsletter 44.0, Monday, 25 Nov 2002
Refactoring improves the design. What is the business case of good design? To me, it's that you can make changes to the software more easily in the future.
Refactoring is about saying, "Let's restructure this system in order to make it easier to change it." The corollary is that it's pointless to refactor a system you will never change, because you'll never get a payback. But if you will be changing the systemÑeither to fix bugs or add featuresÑkeeping the system well factored or making it better factored will give you a payback as you make those changes.
--Martin Fowler
Read the rest in Refactoring with Martin Fowler
One of the problems the tablet PC is supposed to solve is the barrier that's formed between you and another person when you use a conventional laptop. The screen is purportedly some kind of offensive shield that cuts people off from one another and erects an insulting wall between them. To which I say phooey. Laptops are endemic to business, and using a laptop during a meeting is commonplace. But is it rude?
Our society has gotten so rude and inconsiderate that using a laptop is small potatoes. People have been multitasking in meetings for as long as there have been meetings. Whether you're doodling on a pad, reading a memo that has nothing to do with the subject being discussed, gazing out the window, or sleeping with your eyes open, it's not a problem that technology caused, and additional technology is not the cure.
We're wireless here at PC Magazine, and people tip-tap away on their laptops throughout our meetings. I know from their stop-and-start pace that they're often sending instant messages. We can hope that they're answering urgent questions from outside the room that would otherwise disrupt the meeting, but it's equally possible that they're organizing social activities for the weekend or sending snide comments to coworkers across the table. If this is the current state of the multitasking art, so be it. These notebook users are a lot less detrimental than the clods who attempt to drive and talk on their cell phones.
--Bill Machrone
Read the rest in Tablet PCs: Yawn
I do admit to looking pretty out of it in that commercial Ñ I think I look horrible. It was after school, but I was the last person to make the commercial, so by the time I made it it was like 10, so I was really tired. The funny thing was, I was on drugs! I was on Benedryl, my allergy medication, so I was really out of it anyway. ThatÕs why my eyes were all red, because I have seasonal allergies. But no one believes me.
--Ellen Fleiss
Read the rest in the apple of apple's eye: ellen feiss
Behind that smiley face is a single mother who makes $7.50 an hour and can't afford health insurance for her family because Wal-Mart charges her $400 a month for it
--Rian Wathen, United Food & Commercial Workers Local 700
Read the rest in NOLA.com: Newflash
For us it is not a question of Microsoft versus Linux. It is just a matter of choosing between a free software and a monopoly. We feel that when we are putting public information out in the open, then it should not be through a proprietary software.
--Digvijay Singh, Madhya Pradesh Chief minister
Read the rest in MP opens windows to Linux - The Economic Times
Computer makers need to simplify their products and reduce crashes and conflicts among programs. As long as the industry gives nerds who think about computers 24 hours a day the final say on products headed to market, they're going to have stagnant sales.
The computer industry isn't suddenly stupid. it has always been stupid, conducting business by nerds for nerds year after year. Now they wonder why people aren't rushing out to buy the newest, fastest machines. The faster machines will crash just as often as the ones sitting on everybody's desks! Forget about speed—give us reliability.
--Warren Jamison, PC Magazine, December 3, 2002, p. 57
A technical issue or project sometimes raises ethical issues. When that happens, discussing the ethical issues is an essential part of the technical discussion. A discussion which ignores the ethical aspect of the issue is severely incomplete.
That does not happen often. Most of the decisions in a technical project are purely technical, and whatever is technically best is really best. After many such issues, it is easy to start thinking that raising ethical issues in a technical issue is improper, that there is some virtue in keeping technical decisions away from ethics. That is a the worst mistake an engineer can make.
--Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in Linux and Main - The week that was: RMS - McVoy, Turbo - SuSE, MSFT - SunW, Wozniak, Cacheflow
The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning.
And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software - The Law of Leaky Abstractions
It should be a crime to teach people C/C++.
This isn't an attack on the language itself (although there are plenty). The problem is that people use it to write high level applications. People who barely understand the language are writing millions of lines of code with it. Code that will one day run our electric shavers and lawn mowers and air traffic control systems.
If you don't take programming seriously and write code that looks like utter dog shit, and instead of committing hari-kari from shame, you just say "meh, it's a living" then please, for the sake of your species, at least use a high level programming language. High level languages are usually more secure than C/C++ and chances are you'll write less lines of utter dog shit that other people have to deal with.
High level languages like Ruby, Python, or even Java are strongly recommended for all new projects. The reason these languages are more secure (in theory) is that they don't have pointers. Most security vulnerabilities that involve breaking program code involve manipulating pointers-in fact, many programming bugs are generally related to pointers in some way. As with the OS issue noted above, do not mistake this for invulnerability. You're simply less likely to be compromised using this particular attack vector with a high level programming language.
--Michael Bacarella, Netgraft Corp
Read the rest in The Peon's Guide To Secure System Development
languages/systems that depend on IDEs have no evolutionary staying power. They are replaced over the long-term by competitors that are less picky about their creation environment. So, for example, MFC is dead and none of its modern replacements are even remotely as grotty. Same with COM (which is being replaced with .NET). And every attempt to make programming languages deeply visual has failed.
--Paul Prescod on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 11 Nov 2002
One of Microsoft's smarter tactics has been to advocate neutrality -- to say that the software ecosystem is fine with more than one choice as long as no one forces that choice. Of course, anyone who's been awake the past 20 years understands that Microsoft itself does not believe this. This monopolist believes the ecosystem is ideal when there is precisely one choice -- Microsoft.
--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in Mercury News | 11/12/2002 | Dan Gillmor: Accounting reform takes two steps back, no steps forward
After the Taliban's chums enter the Pakistan parliament, the Islamists are back in Turkey. Who said that fundamentalism is dead? No, the victory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not a specifically anti-American vote å‹ corruption and economic collapse produced its 350 seats in the 540-seat Turkish parliament. But opposition to corruption and economic collapse lay behind the Pakistani vote, too. Indeed, it is the foundation for almost every Islamist opposition vote in the Middle East, the desire to destroy the cancer which infects almost every pro-American regime in the region.
--Robert Fisk
Read the rest in Independent Argument
Open source is all about _other_ people being able to make their changes. It by no means means that those changes have to be accepted back: the license basically only boils down to that I must be _able_ to accept them back. But the really important thing, the thing that really makes a difference, is that you, your dog, and your company can make your OWN changes.
--Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in Linux Kernel Development Archive: Re: [lkcd - general] Re: What's
The smartest thing about Rendezvous, though, is the fact that it's just Apple's trademarkable, T-shirt-worthy name for an open standard called zero configuration networking. There are some things Apple doesn't get and maybe never will, but the value of a good open standard isn't one of them.
Microsoft's people still can't get their heads around this concept. When they decide that a good computer acts as a conduit for information, they say, "So if we build and control the standards for this basic conduit, we could control … the world!" The result is .Net, which isn't getting a lot of traction and has recently been co-opted by the open source community.
--Andy Ihnatko, Macworld, November 2002, p. 127
Objects are for people. The reason objects exist is to help human programmers do their jobs. This is important to keep in mind when designing APIs as well as objects, because if objects are for people, then so are object interfaces. (After all, API means application programmer interface.) When you design an object or API, you are primarily designing for the benefit of human programmers.
--Bill Venners
Read the rest in API Design: The Object
Time and again, in my own work, I have made premature optimization decisions that have cost me dear. I worked with a company in the Eighties that well nigh went under because of premature optimization. Unless you are very lucky, premature optimization will result in you bending your design out of shape for a perceived performance need that is illusory. I have been writing software since 1982 and I have yet to accurately guess where the real performance bottlenecks of any moderately sized system really are.
As the years go by, I also note with considerable interest, the extent to which willfully banishing thoughts of optimization from my head at design time leads to systems with better performance than I would have imagined possible. In a paradoxical, Tao-like way, you'll achieve good performance by ignoring performance issues during design. Let performance look after itself. If the design is right, it will.
--Sean McGrath
Read the rest in XML is Too Slow...Not!
There is a mentality that everyone is potentially a criminal. I resent the idea that I should be subjected to the scrutiny of invisible cameras just to satisfy someone's crazed idea of that way society is.
--Simon Davies, Privacy International
Read the rest in Wired News: London's Privacy Falling Down
We forced everyone to go to Macs for the desktops. The support load dropped to almost nothing and the only complaints were from people who couldn't play games on their machines any longer. So sorry, no games at work. We are so mean.
--Doug Humphrey, CEO Cidera
Read the rest in Wired News: All Aboard! (But No PCs Allowed)
I am not fond of copy constructors. In fact, I'm not very fond of constructors at all. The problem is that the code that creates the object with a constructor is defining the object's type. In all other operations, the code that uses an object effectively only defines that the object is at least a certain type. Constructors are an exception to that rule. I don't think that exception should exist.
You can also think of it this way:
new Fooshould turn into an invocation of a static method that might create a subclass. The static method could look at the parameters and say: I will create aFoosubclass that is efficient for these kinds of parameters. At the point where you want aFoo, there are myriad reasons why the implementer ofFoomay know you want a subclass, but you don't know it. And maybe you shouldn't know it, because next week a different set of decisions might make sense. The actual class of object that gets created is an implementation detail. You need something that is at least aFoo. You should go to theFooclass and say: I need something that is at least what you are, and here are the initialization parameters. Other languages will do that; of all things, Perl objects do that. I think this is a better solution. By calling a copy constructor onFoo, you are asking theFooclass to get a copy of this object that is at least aFoo, which is not theFooclass's business.
--Ken Arnold
Read the rest in Java Design Issues
JCP 2.5 breaks new ground by making open source licensing possible for those who work on Java specifications and those who create compatible independent implementations of the specifications. In addition the cost structure has been changed to allow smaller developer groups and individual developers to gain broader access to Java specifications, often times free of cost
--Jason Hunter
Read the rest in JAVA COMMUNITY PROCESS DELIVERS NEW PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS
We were lied into Vietnam, and we're being lied into a war right now.
--Daniel Ellsberg
Read the rest in Wired News: Ellsberg: Still Rabble - Rousing
One argument for privatising every field in Java is that if you then laboriously write pairs of get... and set... methods for each field then you can (later) put in consistency checks for valid field values, automatic updating of indices, security checks, etc. by modifying or overriding those get/set variables.
Ideally, of course, one would have a language where foo.bar = baz is just a shorthand for foo.setBar (baz) and foo.bar is short for foo.getBar (), like my beloved Dylan, since then you can declare fields public or public-read private-write as you see fit and still add behaviour later. Or remove the actual field storage altogether and replace it with a computation.
--Alaric B. Snell on xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 23 Oct 2002
What if we kill Saddam and take over the oil fields, in a 50-50 split with the Russians, and begin to pump them like crazy to rebuild Iraq? Would we be shocked that oil would crash through $20? How much FedEx or United Parcel or Southwest or jetBlue would you like to own if that happened? Would you like to catch the AMR double? The UAL triple? Heck, I'd even rent US Airways stock for a day or two if that scenario played out.
--James J. Cramer
Read the rest in Bear Trap
I never much liked Macs. All the interesting stuff is hidden away.
--Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in Torvalds: Next Linux due by June - Tech News - CNET.com
C++ and Java have pretty much given OO a bad name. Meyer's work in Eiffel proves that OO did not need to ditch axioms from abstract data types. Kay's work in Smalltalk proves that OO did not need to ditch dynamicism. Stroustroup started out with a solid, practical core and made too little fuss as a committee ruined it. Joy, as far as I can tell by the language he spawned, enjoyed strapping straitjackets onto paramedic training dummies.
--Uche Ogbuji on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 25 Oct 2002
Here is a scene that happens at some point in almost every young company. The founder/CEO/technical visionary meets with his board and finds him or herself out of a job. How could this happen? Well, the company has grown to the point where the board feels that "professional management" is required, so they are bringing in a new management team. The new team is composed of old friends and classmates of the board, and the new team costs five to 10 times as much, but that's okay because the company is "hiring for growth." This new team cuts staff, cuts costs and outsources everything that can be outsourced, with the result that earnings are improved and the stock goes up or the company makes itself look better for an Initial Public Offering. The professional managers get big bonuses, they exercise mountains of stock options, sell those option shares, then go on to some other, even bigger, job having "saved" the company, which then stagnates, goes into a slow decline, and is eventually acquired by a competitor.
In the PC industry, this is the path followed by almost every company. On the software side look at Borland, Broderbund, Personal Software, Lotus, WordPerfect and hundreds of others. The similarly afflicted hardware companies are so many that the names become a blur. All these companies, even though some of their names may remain, are effectively dead. Certainly, they bear no resemblance at all to what they once were. And every one of these companies had something else in common: At the time their management was displaced, they were profitable and had money in the bank.
--Robert X. Cringely
Read the rest in I, Cringely | The Pulpit
It is always the dream of corporations to give people things that seem like money to people without giving them any actual money. In the dot-com era, we had stock options. Now we don't have that option anymore. More and more companies are giving rocks. They are actually paperweights that say "quality" or have some other inspirational message. They are morale building mementos that by any other definition are in fact rocks. Companies are telling people they are not getting a raise and then are handing them a blunt object. I'm surprised there hasn't been more trouble.
--Scott Adams
Read the rest in Weasels rule, Scott Adams says
We're forced into a position where we're either out of compliance with Microsoft's licensing, which is not acceptable, or we're out of compliance with the law, which is not acceptable either. Under these circumstances, we'll probably change our operating system.
--Lester Warby, CIO, Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union
Read the rest in Is Microsoft Licensing Forcing Banks to Break The Law?
I joined Sun--actually, a small Sun spin-off called FirstPerson--in August 1993. I knew about the company because a few of my favorite coworkers had left NeXT to work at FirstPerson. But my main reason for joining was that I loved the cartoony user interfaces FirstPerson was developing, interfaces that featured a character nicknamed Duke.
--Kathy Walrath
Read the rest in The J2EE(tm) Tutorial
Python is a dynamic programming language with the power of well-known languages such as Java, C++, and Smalltalk. In fact, Python is leaner and meaner than any of these languages and yet very expressive; it doesn't talk much, but it has a lot to say.
--Richard Hightower
Read the rest in
Python Programming with the Java Class Libraries, p. xi
I now use Java for most of my programming work, primarily on UNIX systems (including Mac OS X). I admire and very much like doing Java programming. In many ways it reminds me of using Pascal and Modula-2 when I was younger. It's clean, simple, and safe. In many ways I feel that Java is to C++ as Pascal and Modula-2 are to C. Java lets you do 95% of what you need to do in object-oriented programming, with 10% of the complexity of more "advanced" languages like C++.
--John L. Norstad
Read the rest in John Norstad's Autobiography
Security is a commons. Like air and water and radio spectrum, any individual's use of it affects us all. The way to prevent people from abusing a commons is to regulate it. Companies didn't stop dumping toxic wastes into rivers because the government asked them nicely. Companies stopped because the government made it illegal to do so.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Counterpane: Crypto-Gram:
Getting down 20 percent over an 18-month period is a tough decision, but it's the right one to do at this point
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in With layoffs, Sun eyes profitability
Anyone who thinks that spy codes aren't much of a problem takes Microsoft statements (lies and all) at face value. In this case the fact that Redmond is saying very little and not even following their own security procedures (bulletins etc) is a sure sign that this is a big problem that the company wants to hide.
--Woody Leonhard on the Woody's Office Watch mailing list, Tuesday, 15 Oct 2002
My top-level question about Sept. 11 is, do we really want to live in a world in which U.S. intelligence can detect every half-million-dollar, 20-person, two-year activity? I'm very concerned that a number of things from the rise and power of intellectual property purveyors to the hard-to-resist concerns for life and limb that has given new life and power to police institutions are going to lead us toward a much more rule-bound and controlled society.
--Whitfield Diffie
Read the rest in Q&A Whit Diffie
The spirit of the Bitkeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand. It is the spirit that says, "You have no right to use Bitkeeper, only temporary privileges that we can revoke. Be grateful that we allow you to use Bitkeeper. Be grateful, and don't do anything we dislike, or we may revoke those privileges." It is the spirit of proprietary software. Every non-free license is designed to control the users more or less. Outrage at this spirit is the reason for the free software movement. (By contrast, the open source movement prefers to play down this same outrage.)
--Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in Linux and Main - RMS remarks, gets responses, on the BitKeeper license "outrage"
I'm glad it's a good old i variable. You just can't beat an i loop for smooth running, you know. Call me old-fashioned, but I can't be doing with iterators. I'm sure programmers think they look lovely in source code but, when all is said and done, it's not programmers that get to execute it, is it? Programmers think exceptions look nice in the source code; two bits will get you a nybble that they wouldn't be so glib with their throws and re-raises and finallys if they had to unwind their own stacks. Handling an exception is like sliding down a four-storey staircase on your backside.
--Verity Stob
Read the rest in Dr. Dobb's Journal, November 2002, p. 12
Some people view simplicity -- and again, I mean the external simplicity, the user's view -- as something that happens if their system is internally simple. I am saying you should strive for external simplicity on its own.
Just like you should strive for efficiency or clarity, you should strive for simplicity. And returning to taste, striving for simplicity requires that you make choices. You have to say to the user, "You know, frankly, you think you want to do this, but you really don't. And if you really do need to do it, come back and beat me up. Show me why, and we'll do it later." To achieve simplicity, you sometimes have to say, "You think you want this, but you're not quite right." That is arrogance, the arrogance of taste.
--Ken Arnold
Read the rest in Taste and Aesthetics
APIs are no substitute for actually understanding what is going on in any system. In some cases -- such as complex calculations and the like -- I can see why APIs are vital. But for things like HTTP -- protocols -- I have my doubts. The APIs get in the way of understanding the concepts, which are really quite simple. When the API hits the wall -- as happened in my case -- your productivity hits the wall too, unless you can think past the API to the underlying reality.
--Sean McGrath
Read the rest in ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - APIs Considered Harmful
Unix software and Unix services are sold at high prices because they have always been sold at high prices and prices in defined market segments are almost always "sticky". When Unix came to broad markets in the very early Eighties of the last century, Unix and Unix stuff were cheaper than the competing Big Iron products, or were seen to be by many buyers, for many of the same reasons that much free software today is perceived to be less expensive than older stuff. So Unix was the low price product back then, and Big Iron was the high priced product. Today the price of Unix looks high because it is now being compared with stuff sold for "personal computers". But because it is "Unix", the price does not fall as far as an idealistic fan of free markets might have predicted. Sun will simply not reduce by much the price of its Unix stuff, nor will most vendors whose stuff runs on top of Sun Unix.
The excuses proffered for the pricing of Unix stuff are, of course, simply fantasies by which vendors of Unix stuff justify to themselves their usually irrational over-pricing.
--Jay Sulzberger on the wwwac mailing list, Friday, 6 Sep 2002
Sometimes it seems faster to avoid modularity. Fred Brooks explains the issue very well; modular software is part of a "programming system" and takes longer to write than a plain old program. Three times longer. Robust, tested, documented, maintained software is part of a "programming product" and also takes three times longer than just typing in a "works for me" program.
Something you can support for serious customers over a period of years combines both these qualities into a "programming systems product" and takes _nine_ times as long to create. The gap between "works for me" and "supportable product" is order-of-magnitude.
Ignoring modularity is a false economy, it just keeps you from scaling your system to larger size or higher quality. You can write the small, local bit of code more quickly without modularity, but you slow down the big picture by preventing developers from working in parallel.
--Havoc Pennington
Read the rest in OSNews.com - Exploring the Future of Computing
What would the future be like without Mozilla? There's the frightening risk that Microsoft Internet Explorer would become the Mr. Burns of our online Springfield. Browsers are our increasingly essential portal to banking, shopping and learning, and if Explorer becomes the only game in town, there'd be the possibility that the Internet would exploit the user instead of the other way around. Remember that Microsoft is the company that wanted every word on every Web page in the world to become a link to one of its ad partners.
--Andy Ihnatko
Read the rest in New day dawns thanks to Mozilla software
Identix, of Minnesota, one of the largest face-recognition-technology companies, contends that in independent tests its FaceIt software has a success rate of 99.32 percentåÑthat is, when the software matches a passenger's face with a face on a list of terrorists, it is mistaken only 0.68 percent of the time. Assume for the moment that this claim is credible; assume, too, that good pictures of suspected terrorists are readily available. About 25 million passengers used Boston's Logan Airport in 2001. Had face-recognition software been used on 25 million faces, it would have wrongly picked out just 0.68 percent of themåÑbut that would have been enough, given the large number of passengers, to flag as many as 170,000 innocent people as terrorists. With almost 500 false alarms a day, the face-recognition system would quickly become something to ignore.
--Charles C. Mann
Read the rest in The Atlantic | September 2002 | Homeland Insecurity
Registered traveler IDs could well become extremely coveted by terrorist organizations. Some of these groups would likely be willing to recruit and prepare operatives who remained law-abidingly dormant for years, in order to place terrorist sleepers in a position to obtain those nifty ID cards.
All the fancy computerized biometric systems in the world won't tell you if the person holding the card is a would-be terrorist who successfully qualified for registered status. They could be all-American, too. Oklahoma City bomber and decorated Vietnam vet Timothy McVeigh might well have qualified for a registered traveler card.
Even one screwup in handing out these IDs -- if it permits a terrorist to pass through airport security with a lesser degree of scrutiny -- could be catastrophic.
--Lauren Weinstein
Read the rest in Register Air Travelers? P-shaw!
åÊ åÊIt's nice that the U.S. Department of Justice recognizes that Microsoft abused its monopoly power. But someone really needs to go after guys like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin for the more heinous crime of voluntary wordslaughter. I'm talking about how they beat the term innovation to death. One gets the impression they think they can justify their anticompetitive business practices if they simply learn to mouth the word innovation when they belch. But don't worry. I don't know of anyone under the illusion that Microsoft innovation extends beyond the areas of marketing and licensing, so I won't spend any more time torturing that deceased Clydesdale.
--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in What's New? - Computerworld
The two worst run industries in America are the telecom and the airline. Maybe WorldCom should merge with United and Sprint should merge with Delta. Imagine the possibilities of bad customer service, overbilling, doublebooking, golden parachutes, corrupt executives, demoralized workforces, customer complaints and gaping national security holes. All we need is Salomon Smith Barney and Goldman Sachs to get involved and we'll be living in a society where planes fall out of the sky and no one can dial 911 because our phones don't work. But it will be ok because a small group of middle-age white men will be making billions on all of it.
--Ben Silverman
Read the rest in Dotcom Scoop: As The WorldCom Turns
Yes, Virginia, it is possible to create a software development environment which is so difficult to use that no human being can do it. ATL and COM+ are my two favorite examples (the latter is so complicated that only one man on Earth, Don Box, actually understands everything that's going on). C++ itself comes pretty darn close. But most programmers are too macho to admit this.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software - Working on CityDesk, Part IV
I believe that if, in a generous gesture, we gave the Java language to the world (if we released our reference implementations under an open source license), Java technology would become even more popular because the community would build bridges between the Java language and languages like Perl and Python that are often entry points for new programmers.
--Danese Cooper
Read the rest in Open Source Advocate Danese Cooper on Open Source
It is very easy to fix the example exploit that I came up with. But to fix the inherent flaws in Passport is a pretty complex task.
--Marc Slemko
Read the rest in Security problems open Microsoft's Wallet
McNealy argues that Open Source is threatening licensing revenue needed to finance J2EE's advertising and R&D. Well, with a rumored $42B in the bank, Microsoft will ALWAYS outspend Sun on marketing. Good marketing starts with a good product; don't assume developers are dumb. JBoss has spent $0, I repeat "ZERO" dollars, on marketing and manages to get more downloads than Sun's own J2EE Reference Implementation. JBoss also enjoys an excellent reputation, better than many heavily marketed products out there. Scott, please forget our Open Source nature for a second and IMAGINE the impact we would have with just a fraction of Sun's marketing dollars and with Sun's backing. You don't need Microsoft's budget, you need JBoss and the people behind it; you need Open Source!
As for financing R&D with software licensing, there is a way around that. We don't charge licensing fees at JBoss Group. Our solution to financing development is to pursue the services route. J2EE is a very services intensive market. Those who know how to take advantage of this are sitting on a moneymaking machine. We certainly aren't the only ones to come to this realization. It is also IBM's take on J2EE, where they often discount software licenses if they can make money on services, or, like Sun, on hardware. At JBoss Group, we bill our services at expert rates. We understand Open Source, we understand remote networking and we understand the code because we wrote it.
--Marc Fleury
Read the rest in JBoss > COMING VERY NEAR
It's a double standard for people to keep suggesting that the Greens have a responsibility to avoid hurting the Democrats rather than arguing that the Democrats have a responsibility to pass instant-runoff voting
--Michael Feinstein, mayor of Santa Monica
Read the rest in Greens at the Crossroads
You are falling into the benchmark trap, assuming up front that the benchmark itself is valid. Or that the validity of the benchmark exceeds its own weaknesses. Or that the weaknesses of the benchmark do not exceed the purportedly measured weaknesses of the JVM. You're putting the cart before the horse, begging the question, or at best tacitly assuming the validity of the unproven measuring tool.
While a supposed benchmark may run fast or slow, many of them do not measure what they claim to measure. Or they measure more things than they intend, and present "tainted" measurements. It is astonishingly easy to write irrelevant benchmarks, or to think that they measure something that they do not measure.
This is a classic problem with ANY measurement. How do you know that the measuring tool is any good? How do you know it measures what it claims to measure? How do you know what other factors influence measurement errors? Are there other measuring tools that are better?
--Greg Guerin on the java-dev mailing list, Saturday, 28 Sep 2002
Here is the plan. Everyone who hates the DMCA has to illegally copy a movie or a song, and then tell both the Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office exactly what they did. We need 10 million or so confessed and unrepentant intellectual property pirates. That's too much illegal behavior to ignore (What could 10 million pirated copies of "Debbie Does Dallas" be worth?), but too many individual criminals to be prosecuted. Then, having pirated our movie or song, we also need to turn ourselves in to the authorities, clogging every hoosegow in America, facing our potential $10,000 fine, each of us demanding the jury trial we are guaranteed under the Constitution.
If we all do this, REALLY do it, the DMCA will be gone in a year. This follows the simple principal that if you or I drive 100 miles-per-hour on the highway, we get a ticket, but if EVERYONE drives 100 miles-per-hour, they change the speed limit. "They," whoever that is, can't afford to annoy so much of the population. We are, after all, the folks who elect all these officials who keep telling us what we can and can't do. But it isn't enough to just threaten to vote against your Congressman. To make the system really change we have to work it to death by all becoming criminals.
--Robert X. Cringely
Read the rest in I, Cringely | The Pulpit
Microsoft's .NET is like instructions for how to replace the kink joint in the plumbing in your bathroom sink. It's pretty straightforward how you tell a homeowner to hook that up. JXTA is like the plans for how to core down through the street outside to the water main -- you have to think about the pressure of that pipe.
--Clay Shirky
Read the rest in Open Source Advocate Danese Cooper on Open Source
The entire theme of the copyright community is that downloading off the Web is both illegal and immoral. It is neither.
--Gary Shapiro, CEO Consumer Electronics Association
Read the rest in Trade group: P2P not illegal or immoral
Intentional design choices and unintentional bugs in Microsoft Windows, Outlook, Word and Explorer have created vulnerabilities so numerous they've become legendary. Shoddy default settings have practically begged intruders to plunder Windows-equipped PCs. Any serious look at Internet security has to start with the world's largest software company.
--Declan McCullagh
Read the rest in Microsoft's new deal with Uncle Sam
Times have changed since the 1970s, when a relative unknown by the name of Bill Gates argued that charging for software licenses was a necessity in order to finance the huge upfront R&D cost necessary to develop an operating system. Since that time, the subsequent growth of the Internet and the accompanying improvement in Open Source developers' ability to collaborate and develop high-quality software, challenge both Microsoft and Sun's assumption that software development need be accomplished at great expense. Open Source software is not "free" R&D, but it does come at a very small cost. At JBoss, a lot of our professional motivation as developers is tied to the personal satisfaction that can be obtained through the Open Source lifestyle. It's about being your own boss, doing the work you enjoy, living and working where you want, collaborating with your peers worldwide, getting to see the kids grow up. By selling product-related services, many of us are able to work full time on JBoss, with an income as good, if not better, than any corporate development jobs I know of. Compared to the workplace opportunities of our parents' generation, this is priceless
--Marc Fleury
Read the rest in JBoss > COMING VERY NEAR
Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads å‹ though they didn't all know it å‹ had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions.
--Robert Fisk
Read the rest in Independent Argument
Every security system will fail. This is a vital concept. A good system lets you quickly detect failure, fix the problem, and apply necessary remedies.
--Walter Glenn on the cbp mailing list, Tuesday, 17 Sep 2002
porting from Java to .NET is so easy that it's not fun :-)
--Kohsuke Kawaguchi on the xml-dev mailing list, Saturday, 21 Sep 2002
I haven't had to upgrade my Windows to run a new version of Java in a long time. Windows 98 and NT 4 still run JDK 1.4.0 quite happily. Linux you could have stayed on 2.2.12 for the last 3 years to run it. So yes, forcing people to upgrade to a new OS (a charge for it too) to get a new version of Java is unique to Apple.
What is also unique to Apple is not releasing early versions to all so that people can try it and find bugs. How did Sun get 10,000 bugs into its database on JDK 1.4? It wasn't by charging for access to early releases or putting developers under NDAs.
--Andrew Newman on the java-dev mailing list, Friday, 20 Sep 2002
It takes a lot of energy to maintain an open source project. Most participants will try to harmonize within the community rather than forking and working against whatever momentum the primary project has. There's a major cultural taboo against wasting energy like that.
I understand the fear that Open Source will ruin the Java language, but those people don't realize that putting your code into Open Source doesn't mean you have to accept "all" the contributions. It doesn't mean that ice weasels will descend on your codebase and rip it to shreds. We've run into that fear on every open source project we've set up so far, but its been unfounded.
--Danese Cooper
Read the rest in Open Source Advocate Danese Cooper on Open Source
I am beginning to believe in disposable software for many applications. I know this sounds very "extreme programming" - ish but my belief on this is that until you actually get your hands dirty on a project and you get some feedback from the people using the tool ( or whatever it is ) you don't really have enough information to judge what the best usage of design effort is. Most projects are over designed and over engineered and many miss the mark. Not because of bad engineering but because there is not enough information to design the project for even 1 year in the future.
--Thomas Maciejewski on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 17 Sep 2002
We need a war with Iraq. It would help distract Americans from the scandals surrounding the president (and more broadly from the fact that our failing economy is killing the planet) than the start of football season: Nothing compares to the patriotic thrill of watching grainy footage of Iraqi radar facilitiesåÑor maybe houses or hospitals; the resolutionåÕs never quite good enough to tellåÑexplode into fragments, or better, simply vaporize from the pressure of the blasts.
We need a war with Iraq. It allows those who run the U.S. governmentåÑboth the politicians, who run the nominal government, and the CEOs, who run the de facto governmentåÑto talk about new jobs while increasing their fortunes. It allows the top 1% of AmericaåÕs power elite to speak of patriotism while sacrificing lives less valuable than their own. It brings about an urgencyåÑa frenzy, evenåÑthat allows the rationalization of massive public expenditures without even the illusion of a greater good or benefiting the public. It allows them to further centralize political and economic power under the guise of efficiency and national security. It allows them to imprison or execute those who oppose this centralization, with no fear of repercussion. It allows them to praise themselves and others like them for giving voice to an urge to destroy. It allows them to invent, deploy, and use no end of nightmarish devices. It allows them to kill, or rather give orders so others must kill, with no fear of public censure. It allows them to pull off the mask of public nicety and more fully concentrate and exercise their power, or more precisely, their power to destroy.
--Derrick Jensen
Read the rest in We need a war with Iraq
The latest botched Florida election has much to do with technology, not just incompetence among election workers. The computerized balloting was nothing less than a fiasco, with some precincts reporting turnout as low as zero percent in a hotly contested primary election.
--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in Mercury News | 09/14/2002 | Blame clumsy vote count partly on technology
Sadly, many US communities seem to feel that it is necessary to rush ahead with voting equipment procurements, while reliable systems, appropriate testing, usability, security, and auditability procedures, and other safeguards, are years away. Florida 2000 woke us up to what many already knew -- our voting systems and laws were flawed. Florida 2002 lets us know that expensive computers can not and will not provide the answer to our election troubles.
For the short run, communities that have purchased malfunctioning equipment should return it to the manufacturers and request refunds. There should be an immediate moratorium throughout the United States (and world) on the procurement of electronic voting systems that do not provide voter-verifiable paper ballots. In other words, if your community is thinking of buying touchscreen or other fully-computerized voting equipment, don't let them do it!
--Rebecca Mercuri, Bryn Mawr College
Read the rest in The Risks Digest Volume 22: Issue 24
Take, for example, the Nintendo GameCube. There's only one obvious way to plug in a controller, and the controllers plug into the front of a console. Why is that, do you think? Is it possible that's where you intend to use the controllers? Don't we also use keyboards and mice in front of the PC? Or consider the fact that wireless controllers on a GameCube are (gasp!) wireless. The receivers sit right on the GameCube itself. The receiver for my so-called wireless keyboard has a long wire so that I can place the receiver on my desk. And can we finally shoot and stuff the inventors of PS/2 plugs and any other round connectors one has to twist to find the sweet spot for pushing them in? At least you have only a 50% chance of frustration with a USB connector, because the worst you can do is get it upside down where it doesn't fit. But it should be illegal to produce ribbon cables without the tabs that prevent you from plugging them into your disk drives the wrong way, or to produce a motherboard with connectors that allow you to plug the cables in wrong even when the cable has the tab. I haven't seen the new serial cables for the upcoming high-speed IDE drives, but I hope they won't have this problem.
--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in What's New? - Computerworld
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Read the rest in "Structured Programming with go to Statements", Computing Surveys 6 (1974): 261-301
Computer programs are often overoptimized. It may not be worthwhile to take pains to ensure that an implementation of a particular algorithm is the most efficient possible unless the algorithm is to be used for an enormous task or is to be used many times. Otherwise, a careful, relatively simple implementation will suffice: We can have some confidence that it will work, and it is likely to run perhaps 5 to 10 slower at worst than the best possible version, which means that it may run for an extra few seconds. By contrast, the proper choice of algorithm in the first place can maker a difference of a factor of 100 or 1000 or more, which might translate to minutes, hours, or even more in running time.
--Robert Sedgewick
Read the rest in
Algorithms in Java, 3rd edition, p. 6
Dell charges extra for GNU/Linux loaded on its "servers" because Microsoft has threatened them. Microsoft has threatened that unless Dell overcharges for GNU/Linux Microsoft will take some action which Dell imagines would hurt Dell. Of course, unless Microsoft were to gain real monopoly power by getting control of the hardware, there is nothing Microsoft can do to hurt Dell. If Michael Dell were to go to Bill Gates and say "Bill, I have decided you will pay me fifty dollars for each box I sell with your stuff on it, otherwise I'll put some other OS on." Gates would say to Dell "Where do I sign?". Gates would also say to his lieutenants "Find out whom we must talk to make the Xbox the only Infotainment Central licensed home device."
--Jay Sulzberger on the wwwac mailing list, Friday, 6 Sep 2002
Yes, at some point a design is so simple it doesn't work anymore, right? I think the fundamental way you get simple, yet sufficient, systems is to ask yourself some questions. First, what does the user need to accomplish? Let me back up and explain what I mean by user. I have this really weird radical notion. Every great idea starts off with an absolutely radical notion. I am immodest enough to think I have this great idea. And the radical notion that founds it is that programmers are people. Now if you accept this premise, then the next step is to say that designing tools for programmers, including languages, APIs, and compilers, is a human factors problem. And so we should ask the same kinds of questions that people ask about GUIs [graphical user interfaces]. Is it easy to do what you need to do? Is it natural? Are simple things simple? Are complicated things complicated? Are dangerous things hard to do? Are common things easy to do? Are similar things done in a way that is naturally similar to the person?
You start asking all these questions. And if you do that right, like with a GUI, you come up with something easy to use. It may be rich and complicated, but it has an easy starting point and easier mechanisms to learn things.
However, the more common way to think of design is, "What can I, the designer, do?" instead of, "What does the user want to do?" For example, we could have done many things with JavaSpaces, but our capabilities were of no value. It is the user's desires that were of value.
--Ken Arnold
Read the rest in Perfection and Simplicity
The open-source people are still innovating, and that will continue. The problem is that we are dependent upon commodity hardware, but if motherboards won't boot Linux anymore then we are in trouble, and there are certainly people who want to make that happen.
--Bruce Perens
Read the rest in Corporate Paws Grab for Desktop
I'm not proud. We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers ... Our products just aren't engineered for security.
--Brian Valentine, Senioe Vice President, Microsoft
Read the rest in Lead Windows developer bugged by security
Disappointment with C++ indeed follows from exaggerated hopes. Earlier discussions in this book have carefully analyzed some of the language's more controversial design choices — especially in the areas of typing, memory management, inheritance conventions, and dynamic binding — and shown that better solutions are available. But one cannot criticize C++ as if it were the be-all and end-all of object-oriented languages. What C++ has attempted, and achieved beyond anyone's dreams, was to catch a particular moment in the history of software: the time at which a large part of the profession and its managers were ready to try object technology, but not ready to shed their current practices. C++ was the almost magical answer: still enough not to scare the managers; already O-O enough to attract the forward-looking members of the trade. In seizing the circumstance, C++ was only following the example of C itself, which, fifteen years earlier, was another product of coinciding opportunities — the need for a portable machine-oriented language, the development of Unix, the emergence of personal computers, and the availability of a few decommissioned machines at Bell Labs. The merits of C++ lie in the historic boost it gave to the development of object technology, making it presentable to a whole community that might not have accepted the ideas under a less conventional apparel.
THat C++ was not the ideal object-oriented language, a comment regularly made by authors and lecturers in the field, and obvious enough to anyone who has studied the concepts, should not obscure this contribution. We must not look at C++ as if it were destined to remain a major tool for the software engineering community well into the twenty-first century, as it would then be overstaying its welcome. In the meantime C++ has admirably played its role: that of a transition technology.
--Bertrand Meyer
Read the rest in
Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition, p. 1135
The
floatanddoubletypes are designed primarily for scientific and engineering calculations. They perform binary floating point arithmetic, which was carefully designed to furnish accurate approximations quickly over a broad range of magnitudes. They do not, however, provide exact results and should not be used where exact results are required. Thefloatanddoubletypes are particularly ill-suited for monetary calculations because it is impossible to represent 0.1 (or any other negative power fo ten) as afloatordoubleexactly.The best solution to this problem is to prohibit subclasing in classes that are not designed and documented to be safely subclassed.
--Joshua Bloch, Effective Java, p. 149, Addison-Wesley, 2001
programmers who start businesses often have the bad habit of thinking everybody else is a programmer just like them and wants the same stuff as them, and so they have an unhealthy tendency to start businesses that sell programming tools. That's why you see so many scrawny companies hawking source-code-generating geegaws, error catching and emailing geegaws, debugging geegaws, syntax-coloring editing tchotchkes, ftping baubles, and, ahem, bug tracking packages. All kinds of stuff that only a programmer could love.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software - Rub a dub dub
Cryptophiles, Schneier among them, had been so enraptured by the possibilities of uncrackable ciphers that they forgot they were living in a world in which people can't program VCRs. Inescapably, an encrypted message is harder to send than an unencrypted one, if only because of the effort involved in using all the extra software. So few people use encryption software that most companies have stopped selling it to individuals.
--Charles C. Mann
Read the rest in The Atlantic | September 2002 | Homeland Insecurity
What counts for me are the details, and they were all wrong. I found so many UI errors in OS X, I couldnåÕt believe it. A huge amount of work that went into designing the ultimate GUI was thrown away and all we got back was a bag full of candy that was dog slow.
--Maarten Hekkelman
Read the rest in Daring Fireball: Pepper Author Maarten Hekkelman
Don't buy computers from Dell, go to Wal-Mart and buy them. You'll get just as much technical support.
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in Dishin' the Dirt at LinuxWorld
The handwriting recognition is unbelievable, but the best thing about owning a Newton has to be the community. In the time it takes to get put on hold by a Handspring tech support agent, you can have 15 different solutions for your problem from Newton users worldwide.
--Jonathan Wise
Read the rest in Apple's Newton Just Won't Drop
But what about ordinary concrete classes? Traditionally, they are neither final nor designed and documented for subclassing, but this state of affairs is dangerous. Each time a change is made in such a class, there is a chance that client classes that extend this class will break. This is not just a theoretical problem. It is not uncommon to receive subclassing-related bug reports after modifying the internals of a nonfinal concrete class that was not designed and documented for inheritance.
The best solution to this problem is to prohibit subclasing in classes that are not designed and documented to be safely subclassed.
--Joshua Bloch, Effective Java, p. 82, Addison-Wesley, 2001
Microsoft was once something to behold. They saw an idea or two, cribbed them, took them to market, and steamrolled it into a new metaphor for success. Things would be fine if they continued to make strides like they made in the first half of their life. But they didn't. Then one day they looked on the horizon and said, "We can't generate the revenue we need on the current license renewal trending" and began to announce features that would never appear, and withhold critical bug fixes to invent reasons to upgrade. Then that blew up, and they had to threaten audits and lawsuits to keep the herd in front of the glacier.
And let's not forget, illegally leveraging their monopoly into markets they were sure would one day help keep their revenue projections in line with reality.
--Jeremy Hogan
Read the rest in Commentary: Is Red Hat the Microsoft of Linux?
A lot of code has been rearranged (change of variable names, loop unrolling etc. -- every student programmer once tried those tricks if he'd face the situation when time was running out and he had a working copy of a colleague's and had to modify it for his/her own needs -- but very seldom does this work out) Those code changes have no real use, they add no functionality, they don't improve anything -- they are just there to disguise the stealing of intellectual property.
--Michael Militzer
Read the rest in XVID leader: Despite code release, Sigma GPL problem still isn't resolved
Don't skip the design stage. At one point, our open source project went from being a 'new, small, fast, standards compliant browser' to being a superset rewrite of Netscape Communicator 4.x (a mature, full featured product), without any adjustment in the schedule. Due to impossible time constraints, an explicit design phase was largely skipped (along with requirements gathering and functional specification), with the substitute being 'just make it work like 4.x wherever you can'. Since the product was different, with many new participants who had little time, there were many exceptions, deviations, and features where the basic look was copied, but subtle detail was ignored or wrong. We wound up spending longer getting requirements in the form of bug reports, and doing design by accretion, backout and rework. Don't let rushed coders drive things, design the product.
--Peter Trudelle
Read the rest in
Shall We Dance?
Ten Lessons Learned from Netscape's Flirtation with Open Source UI
Development
We can't declare war on everything.åÊåÊWe've declared a war on poverty, a war on drugs and a war on terrorism.åÊ To declare war suggests there will be an end, a victory.åÊ How can there ever be an end to "wars" such as these?åÊ Is the word "war" just a catch phrase to get us all fired up?åÊ There is no war.åÊ There can be no war, because there will be no victor, no end.åÊ So here we are put in an open-ended obligation to fight something we cannot see, someone we cannot find, animosity we will not defeat by going to WAR.
--Tara Grubb
Read the rest in Tara Grubb For Congress Radio Weblog
SOAP is about firewall avoidance and even if we could bring the developers around to our point of view the marketers would never, ever, let anything slow the deployment of SOAP, including firewalls.
--Paul Prescod on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 21 Feb 2002
Two months ago India and Pakistan appeared headed for a nuclear war. Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state and a former general, played a key role in talking the two parties back from the brink. But here in India, I've discovered that there was another new, and fascinating, set of pressures that restrained the Indian government and made nuclear war, from its side, unthinkable.
Quite simply, India's huge software and information technology industry, which has emerged over the last decade and made India the back-room and research hub of many of the world's largest corporations, essentially told the nationalist Indian government to cool it. And the government here got the message and has sought to de-escalate ever since. That's right -- in the crunch, it was the influence of General Electric, not Powell, that did the trick.
--Thomas L. Friedman
Read the rest in Nukes are unthinkable if business is good
I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet -- and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing,
--Janis Ian
Read the rest in Mercury News | 08/22/2002 | Q&A: Janis Ian vs. the recording industry on file sharing
Real FORTRAN programmers can program FORTRAN in any language.
--Allen Brown
Read the rest in FORTRAN
C/C++/Java are practically the same performance for 95% of all the apps (esp 1.4 SDK for Java... NIO library is *very* fast). The people that bitch about Java being slow are the people that don't understand object-oriented technology.
--Frank D. Greco on the WWWAC mailing list, Friday, 16 Aug 2002
When I was on Wall St. Just suggesting the use of C++ was a career-ending move. (I heard a director of programming telling one of his programmers _exactly_ that.) People who really care about performance didn't use C++ or Java, and what's in-fashion didn't have much weight with the decision-makers.
--Ron Guerin on the WWWAC mailing list, 15 Aug 2002
It is impossible to guard all potential targets, because anything and everything can be subject to attack. Palestinian suicide bombers have shown this by murdering at random the occupants of pool halls and hotel meeting rooms. Horrible as these incidents are, they do not risk the lives of thousands of people, as would attacks on critical parts of the national infrastructure: nuclear-power plants, hydroelectric dams, reservoirs, gas and chemical facilities. Here a classic defense is available: tall fences and armed guards. Yet this past spring the Bush Administration cut by 93 percent the funds requested by the Energy Department to bolster security for nuclear weapons and waste; it denied completely the funds requested by the Army Corps of Engineers for guarding 200 reservoirs, dams, and canals, leaving fourteen large public-works projects with no budget for protection. A recommendation by the American Association of Port Authorities that the nation spend a total of $700 million to inspect and control ship cargo (today less than two percent of container traffic is inspected) has so far resulted in grants of just $92 million. In all three proposals most of the money would have been spent on guards and fences.
--Charles C. Mann
Read the rest in The Atlantic | September 2002 | Homeland Insecurity
Linux is the only operating system in major use today that was started outside of the United States, and I think it makes a difference,
--Jon "Maddog" Hall
Read the rest in International House of Penguins
To improve the efficiency of airport security screening, the FAA deployed the Computer Assisted Passenger Screening system (CAPS) in 1999. CAPS attempts to identify potential terrorists through the use of profiles so that security personnel can focus the bulk of their attention on high-risk individuals. In this paper, we show that since CAPS uses profiles to select passengers for increased scrutiny, it is actually less secure than systems that employ random searches. In particular, we present an algorithm called Carnival Booth that demonstrates how a terrorist cell can defeat the CAPS system. Using a combination of statistical analysis and computer simulation, we evaluate the efficacy of Carnival Booth and illustrate that CAPS is an ineffective security measure. Based on these findings, we argue that CAPS should not be legally permissible since it does not satisfy court-interpreted exemptions to the Fourth Amendment.
--Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss
Read the rest in Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System
Corporate user resentment and dissatisfaction with Microsoft and some of its practices are at an all-time high. A myriad of issues ranging from Microsoft's perceived monopolistic practices, hyperbolic marketing, ongoing security woes, and habitually slipping ship dates of major new product releases, as well as confusion surrounding the overall .NET strategy have undermined corporate customer confidence.
-- Laura DiDio, Yankee Group
Read the rest in Linux Feels the Corporate Love
Linux is doing very well on the desktop. We love that, and I promise you will hear more from us on this subject. Stay tuned, you will see more.
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in Linux Feels the Corporate Love
Software is becoming the oil of the 21st century, the difference being that this time the scarcity is entirely artificial. People are acutely aware that Microsoft and friends have as much power over them right now as OPEC had over people in the 1970's--and that makes them nervous.
--Alan Cox
Read the rest in Big computing flexes Linux muscle
What you will see from Sun is a lot more attention paid to Linux on the desktop, because there is a lot more growth there than anyone is willing to suggest.
--Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president Sun Microsystems
Read the rest in Big computing flexes Linux muscle
In the winter of 1997, I was consulting on an e-commerce project that was using Java RMI. Not surprisingly, the project failed because RMI didn't address performance, scalability, failover, security, or transactions, all of which are vital in a production environment. Although the outcome of that project is not unique to Java RMI—I have seen the same thing happen with CORBA—the timing of the project was especially interesting. Enterprise JavaBeans™ was first introduced by Sun Microsystems at around that time, and had Enterprise Javabeans (EJB) been available earlier, that same project probably would have succeeded.
--Richard Monson-Haefel, September, 2001
Read the rest in
Enterprise JavaBeans, 3rd edition, p. xi.
We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton when they were in The White House. The Clinton White House accepted the papers. Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest. If this Bush-Cheney White House is serious about corporate corruption and responsibility, it would not allow the Vice President to improperly hide behind White House security to evade service of process in the Halliburton securities fraud litigation, and it would not threaten the process server with arrest
--Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel
Read the rest in BUSH-CHENEY WHITE HOUSE OBSTRUCTS HALLIBURTON LAWSUIT
With a good implementation, we do not need to fear any negative consequence from the decision to define all types from classes. Nothing prevents a compiler from having special knowledge about the basic classes; the code it generates for operations on values of types such as INTEGER and BOOLEAN can then be just as efficient as if these were built-in types in the language.
--Bertrand Meyer
Read the rest in
Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition, p. 171
My high school wasn't one of those institutions for exceptionally smart or ambitious kids, which are common in most U.S. cities. Such schools are pretty much against how Finland works. Finnish schools don't separate out the good students--or the losers, for that matter. However, each school did have its specialty, a subject that was not required but that you couldn't get at any other school. In the case of Norssen High School, it was Latin. And Latin was fun. More fun than learning Finnish and English.
Too bad it's a dead language. I'd love to get to get together with a few buddies and tell jokes in Latin or maybe discuss operating system design strategies.
--Linus Torvalds, Just For Fun, p. 25
Debugged code is NOT free, whether proprietary or open source. Even if you don't pay cash dollars for it, it has opportunity cost, and it has time cost. There is a finite amount of volunteer programming talent available for open source work, and each open source project competes with each other open source project for the same limited programming resource, and only the sexiest projects really have more volunteer developers than they can use. To summarize, I'm not very impressed by people who try to prove wild economic things about free-as-in-beer software, because they're just getting divide-by-zero errors as far as I'm concerned.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software - Strategy Letter V
Palladium is unlikely to protect users from most exploits. There are a great number of attacks that can be executed within applications, as those applications have such power and reach. Microsoft Outlook viruses can continue to spread, as can other macro viruses. The cmd.exe execution vulnerability on IIS Web servers executes only trusted code -- but it does so in response to a Web request from an attacker.
From what I've seen, I don't think that Palladium can block any of these attacks, or most other application-layer attacks. While buffer overflows allow users to execute arbitrary code on systems, application attacks execute only approved code but nevertheless produce undesirable results. Those results can be every bit as serious as the buffer overflows that Palladium would eliminate.
--Jon Lasser
Read the rest in SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
People don't RTFM, much less the F****** Spec. Architectures that don't support the "principle of least surprise" are going to be fragile, no matter how logical and consistent their other principles might be.
Confusion IS a danger in itself, as various spacecraft lost for want of a comma, or misunderstandings of units of measurement, can attest.
--Mike Champion on the Xml-Dev mailing list, Thursday, 25 Jul 2002
Replace the PC with a console, a.k.a. network appliance or network computer, and you create a predictable platform for software developers, which should result in much more stable software, not to mention more secure software. Network computing fizzled for a number of reasons the first time around, some of them good ones, some bad. For one thing, once Larry Ellison's low price tag was imprinted on everyone's brain, there was no way to build a network computer fast enough to run Java well, or to sell one at a profit. One very bad reason network computing failed is that we have such an irrational love affair with the PC that we tolerate its unstable and insecure design.
--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in A Costly Affair - Computerworld
Will having a firewall -- or implementing strong system security practices or being a good system administrator -- become illegal and prosecuted as circumventing copyright controls under the existing Digital Millennium Copyright Act? If Hollywood can't easily inspect your system in their quest for copyright enforcement and world control, are you now a criminal suspect?
--Richard Forno
Read the rest in The Dark Side of Hacking Bill
What differentiates the Afghan campaign from previous US military engagements is that the civilians, increasingly, have not been caught up in strikes on legitimate targets or killed as a result of bombs going astray å‹ what in military parlance is known as "collateral damage". Rather they have been deliberately targeted by precision bombers acting on flawed instructions from their superiors.
--Andrew Gumbel
Read the rest in Independent News
while Richard Stallman argues that Linux should be called GNU Linux, there's a good argument for calling it Berkeley Linux :-) As a small data point, our informal market research, consisting of about five years of sponsoring a emacs vs. vi paintball battle at Atlanta Linux showcase, in which there was a consistent two-to-one signup for the vi team, and the fact that our vi book outsells our emacs book two to one.
--Tim O'Reilly on the Computer Book Publishers mailing list, Saturday, 27 Jul 2002
You can't create a standard that doesn't infringe patents - PNG or Ogg Vorbis could equally be challenged. So it's no good saying something is patent free.
--Richard Clark
Read the rest in The Register USA
Microsoft is already doing this now; their developers and testers (more than 10,000 people!) are sifting through the existing Windows XP, 2000, and .NET codebases, looking for, and fixing, security flaws. It's an organized, systematic, managed process that has, and will have, no equivalent in the Linux world, simply because you can't herd cats.
--Paul E. Robichaux on the Computer Book Publishing mailing list, Monday, 22 Jul 2002
Up until now, robotics has been more of a fringe thing and a manufacturing thing. But 20 years from now, robots are going to be both pervasive and invisible, embedded in so many different places. It won't be the C3P0 that we envision, but it'll be some type of robotic device.
--Bill Gross
Read the rest in Ideas Aplenty From Idealab Head
Windows emacs is better than *n*x emacs because there is *no confusion* over which keys are backspace/delete, and no escape sequences, and the names for F-keys and so on never change. I haven't changed my .emacs on windows for years and years, and I have to fiddle with it on linux/unix systems whenever I change terminal emulators or versions or look away from the screen too long.
--Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 23 Jul 2002
What bothers me even more than the corruption is the way business leaders have been presented as having the solutions to all the world's problems when in fact some of them haven't been able to run their own businesses without cooking the books and making questionable deals.
--Suzanne Lainson on the WWWAC mailing list, Saturday, 20 Jul 2002
The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms.
--Rachel King, ACLU
Read the rest in Is your cable guy a spy? - Tech News - CNET.com
Palladium will allow only authorized code to run on systems equipped with compliant hardware. While this sounds like a good thing, its real purpose seems to be to protect content providers, to permit Microsoft to enforce draconian licensing schemes, and quite possibly to allow Microsoft to act as gatekeeper for all PC software, allowing them to collect royalties on that software as though those systems were nothing more than video game consoles.
--Jon Lasser
Read the rest in SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
I have been using Mac OS X as my ONLY operating system since 10.1 came out. I don't even have Classic on my system. Using IE in Mac OS X I am able to do all my online banking with multiple credit card vendors, my bank, my wife's credit union, and the company that manages my student loans. I used Kiplinger TaxCut to file my taxes online this year.
All of these companies use Java applets, and I haven't had any substantial problems with any of them. There have been a few oddities here and there, such as strangely rendered text, but nothing that in any way inhibited the function of the a