whiteinge - Slashdot User

Comment Backward compatibility concerns (Score 4, Insightful) 94

by whiteinge on Sunday April 14, 2024 @05:14PM (#64394100) Attached to: Is PHP Declining In Popularity?

I just completed a migration from PHP 7 to 8 for an old, 1.5M LOC codebase. I will avoid PHP for new projects based on that experience alone.

The level of disregard for existing codebases in 8 is astounding. Yes, languages or features need to evolve, and historical baggage and design mistakes can be annoying or ugly. But the downstream effects of changing those things can be truly immense and sometimes it is better to just live with the warts. The current PHP steering committee seems to want PHP to be an entirely different language than it was 20 years ago and we're all paying the price in man-hours and surprise bugs. They have changed so, so many things, and some of those things are mind-boggling language fundamentals such as type coercion rules that are difficult if not impossible to detect and warn about in advance.

Comment Re: What crime (Score 1) 151

by whiteinge on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @07:59PM (#64350023) Attached to: UK Court Denies Bid To Extradite Assange To the US

"His detractors say he actually instigated Manning to deliver to him secret data."

I've heard that argument repeated as well but I don't think that's accurate. IANAL but journalists routinely work with sources to avoid detection and encourage leaks. The NY Times has a web page dedicated to doing both:

https://www.nytimes.com/tips

Submission + - The PermaTab Web Browser 3

Submitted by lee1 on Friday March 05, 2021 @06:37PM

lee1 writes: The UHI human interaction research group has been intensively studying a pervasive problem facing users of the web: the problem of tabs. How to organize them, preserve them, keep track of them. We have carefully considered the pros and cons of various approaches offered by different browsers, and by extensions: tab trees, second rows of tabs, vertical tabs, 3D tabs, musical tabs, you name it.

None of them were good enough.

Submission + - China Sanction Lockheed Martin over Arms Sales to Taiwan (cnn.com)

Submitted by hackingbear on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @12:02PM

hackingbear writes: China said on Tuesday it would place sanctions on Lockheed Martin for its involvement in arms sales to Taiwan, a move that could further escalate tensions between Beijing and Washington. Taiwan, an island broke off from mainland China after the Republic of China government lost in a protracted civil war, has spent billions of dollars on advanced American military hardware since the US dumped the island and established formal diplomatic relation with the People's Republic in 1978 in a quasi-partnership to fight the Cold War. The US State Department last week approved a request by Taiwan to upgrade its Patriot Surface-to-Air missiles at an estimated cost of $620 million, according to Taiwan's government-run Central News Agency. In response, China is imposing "sanctions on the main contractor of this arms sale, Lockheed Martin," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, without going into detail. The United States should "stop selling arms to Taiwan and cut its military ties to Taiwan, so it won't do further harm to bilateral relations between China and the United States," he added. It is also considered a tit-for-tat response against the US sanctions on Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE for their alleged business deals with Iran, a long-time arch rival of the US and Israel. It is not clear what kind of impact, if any, China’s action would have on Lockheed Martin. Some analysts have estimated that China represents 2 percent of the company’s revenue. Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky is involved in a joint venture called Shanghai Sikorsky Aircraft Co, a civilian helicopter company.

Microsoft To Open Retail Stores 535

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 13, 2009 @08:16AM from the world-class-shopping-experience dept.

chaz373 writes "CNET reports that Microsoft is going retail. In the 'Beyond Binary' blog Ina Fried reports, 'After years of brushing off the notion, Microsoft said on Thursday that it will open up its own line of retail stores. Without detailing the plans, Microsoft said it has hired David Porter, a 25-year Wal-Mart veteran, to lead the effort. Sources say that Porter's mission will be to develop the company's retail plans and that the effort is likely to start small with just a few locations.'"

Microsoft Bids To Take Over Open Document Format 256

Posted by kdawson on Saturday October 04, 2008 @04:34PM from the pinching-the-oxygen-feed dept.

what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ's reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) "Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this ... list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize ... Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma ... [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody 'standard,' OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of 'synchronized maintenance,' without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything." A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.

New Approach To Malware Modifies Linux Kernel 170

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 28, 2008 @01:05PM

Hugh Pickens writes "Professor Avishai Wool has unveiled a program to watch for malware on servers with a modification to the Linux kernel. 'We modified the kernel in the system's operating system so that it monitors and tracks the behavior of the programs installed on it,' says Wool. Essentially, Wool says, his software team has built a model that predicts how software running on a server should work (pdf). If the kernel senses abnormal activity, it stops the program from working before malicious actions occur. 'When we see a deviation, we know for sure there's something bad going on,' Wool explains. Wool cites problems with costly anti-virus protection. 'Our methods are much more efficient and don't chew up the computer's resources.'"

Comment Re:Great, but is it fireproof? (Score 1) 327

by whiteinge on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @01:48AM (#23721029) Attached to: Paper Stronger Than Cast Iron

I suddenly had an image of Japanese-style paper walls made of this stuff.

Whew! Finally some protection against attacks from rival ninja clans.

Feed Macworld: News: Apple and Microsoft extend font licensing agreement (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:52PM

Apple and Microsoft will extend the their font licensing agreement, giving Apple customers use of the latest Microsoft Windows core fonts.

The Need For A Tagging Standard 200

Posted by Hemos on Monday January 15, 2007 @09:13AM from the tagging-joy dept.

John Carmichael writes "Tags are everywhere now. Not just blogs, but famous news sites, corporate press bulletins, forums, and even Slashdot. That's why it's such a shame that they're rendered almost entirely useless by the lack of a tagging standard with which tags from various sites and tag aggregators like Technorati and Del.icio.us can compare and relate tags to one another. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the blogosphere — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it. I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.""

Optimizing Page Load Times 186

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 30, 2006 @05:05AM

John Callender writes, "Google engineer Aaron Hopkins has written an interesting analysis of optimizing page load time. Hopkins simulated connections to a web page consisting of many small objects (HTML file, images, external javascript and CSS files, etc.), and looked at how things like browser settings and request size affect perceived performance. Among his findings: For web pages consisting of many small objects, performance often bottlenecks on upload speed, rather than download speed. Also, by spreading static content across four different hostnames, site operators can achieve dramatic improvements in perceived performance."