Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Game the system... (Score 2, Interesting) 888

You can always game the system. Remember search engines will only find your name if it is indexed. So all you need to do is create a bunch of websites and pages about yourself that are clean and sanitized as per your requirements on websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace/Twitter, and some interesting blog sites that have high rankings as per ranking systems and high traffic such as Alexa (probably). Perform some search engine optimization on your webpages and profiles such that these sites come in the first page and textfiles.com is pushed back 2-3 pages. No one goes beyond the first page if they find the main stuff in the first few links. Remember that's why Google gave the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Of course, if someone wants to they can find every detail on you, but you can divert them intelligently by using the internet. Think it over.

Comment Re:Lowest Common Denominator (Score 2, Insightful) 477

Why should I write my code so that the lowest-common-denominator dull thud who took CSci just for the money can come along five years later and maintain it?

No, so that you can come along five years later and maintain it.

Or your future boss can outsource it to some peanut-salaried person in Eastern Europe or Asia or Latin America or Nigeria.

Comment Re:Hold on (Score 1) 183

The mergers and acquisition group at Oracle should have known

Sorry to remind you that M&As mostly for huge corporations such as Oracle are handled by the likes of Goldman Sachs and their brethren, who as we all know are the quintessential causes of the financial crises (yes, plural) of today. To think that they knew beyond their own arrogance is to ignore recent history!

Comment Re:How did the "many eyes" miss this? (Score 1) 208

It can't be that hard or "bloated" since many others are already doing this - Blackberry, Android, etc. - can't be too hard for a web browser.

They run a very minimal type of browser, and do not have extensions, so you're point here is not valid. Blackberry and/or Android are full fledged operating systems where sandboxing is easily implemented whereas browser is just an application and sandboxing an extension while still giving it access to every web page's content is a little harder to implement.

Comment Re:How did the "many eyes" miss this? (Score 1) 208

The real trouble is that most extensions are in javascript and javascript is not a language that emphasises security. The fact that there is no way to perform a "use strict;" (as in Perl) is for starters a way to get access to all the other global variables in other scripts.

I have written a Firefox extension, and the Mozilla Developer API allows you to load any script at runtime, and also gives access to all the possible extensions that are installed, thus giving you an idea of where they can be located on the disk, and then loading those files and manipulating the content on the fly. Because of the lack of strictness in javascript as a language, if a global variable XYZ is in one script, it can be manipulated by any other script as well. Fundamentally it is a problem with Javascript and not with the Mozilla API. The API is excellent and allows you to do a lot of things. Any solution to sandbox each extension will just lead to eventual bloat.

Slashdot Top Deals

Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky

Working...