b0's comments

I've never heard the one-eyed trouser snake one before - I nearly spat my (non-Olympic-overlord approved) water in my ThinkPad :-)

They are by far the worst mascots ever.

As the parent commenter and a previous resident (of Leyton), you've nailed it there. Our landlord upped our rent from 1000GBP a month to 1400GPB a month the moment it was announced.

I'll give you some ideas why it's an absolute fucking disgrace:

* Rapier missile launchers installed on residential flats.

* Dispersal Zone around Olympics which has kerfew, 42,000 strong mostly private police force and all legal rights suspended for residents and visitors.

* Armed drones patrolling the air around the site.

* Armed troops on site and the surrounding area.

* They built on Leyton Marshes which is common land.

* Warships have been stationed on the Thames.

* Transport disruption due to Olympic traffic lanes added and service alterations over the entire transport network (resulting in a 3 mile walk to take my disabled daughter to her physiotherapist - fun eh?)

* The fact that we have bankrupt hospital trusts which could have been bailed out several times over for that amount of money.

* The fact that NHS maternity and surgical services are turning people away and warning of serious disruption during the event.

* The fact that the Olympic village was promised for social housing. Out of 11,000 residences, 675 are going to it.

* There are branding police and official products which must be purchsed on site. You can't even take a flask of water with you incase they can't make money out of you.

* The fact that the political elite asked for the event despite polls taken at the time suggesting that the general opinion is that we didn't want it.

* The fact that "we're going to benefit from it", but there are no tangible benefits which are provable and every Olympic city has gone down the pan after the Olympics.

Ultimately, everything we expect and pay huge amounts for in tax is suspended for our political and corporate overlords. It's a militarisation exercise.

Pretty picture: http://www.terratag.com/Files/52189/Img/06/APOCOLYMPICS_DETA...

(product link for it: http://www.terratag.com/PBSCProduct.asp?ItmID=8759948)

That wouldn't be that horrid Adobe forms thing that sits on JBoss would it? (we have a VM for that!)

Good stuff.

Can you please make the text darker - I suffer from some sight problems which make grey on grey quite hard for me to read.

We run around 400 VMs across 44 (big scary) servers and I find that VMware only exists as a cop out for bad planning and bad architecture, albeit more cost effective than fixing it. It also shoots you periodically like 2Tb LUN size on our vSphere meaning we had to introduce mega-frigs to breach a 2Tb filesystem like NTFS links and sharding. 2Tb isn't much.

I think most enterprises are using as a big sticky plaster.

New VMware is probably more expensive than old vmware and it's expensive enough already. Every portrayed advantage of virtualisation is not cost effective when you have to pay their extortionate prices. Xen/KVM and HyperV have a serious advantage.

For ref, I currently have to babysit a large vsphere installation (44 hosts) and it's a money pit.

Sorry I will clarify with a genuine question: where is the public source code with changelog?

It seems like a snapshotting tool, so you check out the stub and then dump the snapshot into it from the depot.

(this is similar to how Windows is built inside Microsoft).

Looking at the code, you have to check out the source and then run another script to check out the source from Google's private source control system/depot.

Why it isn't just in a public repo, I don't know. It looks like it is set up so they can pull it at a moment's notice.

I agree with your comments.

I thought TCP over TCP was a sin?

It depends where you live. My local Tesco is like fort Knox as it is right next to a council estate.

It's a commentary on how providing isolated islands (app stores) damages the distributed nature of the world wide web. Effectively every app technology is a landgrab by some entity who wants some exclusive chunk of the web with their own rules, usually for commercial gain.

Basically the principle turns the world wide web into another WalMart or McDonald's rather than a vast library.

Of course there are. They just aren't as noisy which is why you don't think they exist.

Away from the buzz of the tech cities, the trendy "apps" culture and tech giants, there are lots. In fact, these people are actually the silent (and better paid) majority in the industry.

However, there is not much fanfare and most of them produce specialist software for niche industries.

I myself produce specialist financial modelling software which is all Windows desktop (C# + WinForms). I spent a few years doing logistics software (C# + WinCE + WinForms) and before that I spent 10 years writing a large desktop based system for distributed logistics and asset management for the defence industry.

Excuse my ignorance on the matter but you make yourself look immature, arrogant and patronising and this does no credit for your project or yourself.

So basically, NaCl:

1. Validates the binary image. Of course that validation has no holes in it. When it does it...

2. Stops unsafe operations. Of course it never misses any and knows every instruction side effect...

3. Oh wait...

I'd put cash on someone breaking the sandbox, I mean after all it's perfect isn't it:

http://www.matasano.com/research/NaCl_Summary-Team-CJETM.pdf

You can't build a flawless sandbox on top of a system by closing the holes one by one, especially on x86/x86-64. The number of edge cases is immense.

Some little known facts which point to your assertions being wrong:

1. IE4 worked on UNIX (Solaris/HP-UX) and supported ActiveX.

2. MainSoft provided tools to port your ActiveX to UNIX (Usually a straight recompilation and little else required).

3. Other vendors are allowed to use Silverlight - look: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

4. ActiveX,COM,MSRPC are all open specifications here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(v=prot.10)

1-2 died because there was lack of demand.

3 died because there was lack of demand and MS decided it was the wrong route.

4 is used by MANY open source projects from Samba to tsclient.

As far as improving things goes, I've had many a thing fixed by Microsoft over the years. They ALWAYS solve a problem.

Not quite, and I'm not confused.

Both have sandboxes (ActiveX since Windows 6.0, IE7), both have restricted APIs, both run native code.

PNaCl is equivalent of silverlight which is cut down CLR.

More performance - I doubt it. CLR+JVM is pretty much up there. The moment you add any virtualization, trap code or translation layer to native code via NaCl which you will require for security, there is going to be overhead which will knock it inline with a VM architecture. Startup time might be less - that is it.

Better security - that's a lie. Virtualization on any layer never gave anyone better security. It's throwing stones in glass houses. The only hard security boundary is at the MMU/page table. As NaCl grows, you will see it break.

No-one getting sued? I'm sure the EU will have something to say when no other vendor implements it and Google uses it to leverage market share, much like Microsoft did in the late 90's and early 00's.

Well actually you're wrong on the following point:

There's nothing you can achieve with up-front planning that you can't achieve by refactoring your design after a release

If your application is relatively standalone then yes, but if you have heavy APIs and integration (which value adding applications usually do), you're up shit creek.

This is all a terrible idea and it will fragment the Internet as we know it. The internet is not a budget strip-mall of different low grade outlets; it's more an orchard full of fruit you can discover and pick at will from millions of trees.

What people have invented is HTML applications, much as Microsoft promoted in the early 00's with some marketing and store ceremony around them.

Also, let's look at NaCl while we're here: it's basically a modern version of ActiveX.

Then we had silverlight, which was glorified Flash for LOB applications and could be out-of-browser. I wonder how long it'll be before Google invent that again.

All those are dead, and for a good reason.

Microsoft even sees that these approaches are just bad and has pushed away from them heavily recently apart from in the desktop and mobile space where they are 100% REQUIRED.

As far as their integration goes now, you can pin sites to the taskbar and there is no massive ceremony or framework around it - it's just a glorified bookmark.

Just because Google packages it up and throws it into the fad browser of the day, don't assume it's not the same golden turd that we've all hated in the past.

George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

They use scp now rather than ftp. They don't use git because it's too complicated for contractors to handle.

I'm not sure I agree. I've watched large numbers of people crash and burn running 'agile' processes.

Agile doesn't work at all with large numbers of people on code that is constantly changing. Regardless of how you package it, the only way to achieve coherency and scalability of product development is through extensive planning, solid architecture and loose coupling of components.

Agile throws those three concepts out of the window for time to market. Sure your first few iterations will survive this, but as your product grows, so will coupling logarithmically. This eventually cripples you.