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CFD?? Accessing... Ah, Computational Fluid Dynamics. Interesting.

The parent was referring to SMOP, a (Simple/Small) Matter Of Programming. "...used ironically to imply that a difficult problem can be easily solved because a program can be written to do it; the irony is that it is very clear that writing such a program will be a great deal of work..."

It's an amazing OS. I really think that this one's going to give Apple Macs a run for their money.

It's funny they would even be worried. Their real fear is the free software that works like a charm on 1/10th the hardware Vista wants. Still, I like the transitive property of the statement for allowing the following to also be true:

Apple is going to give them a run for their money.

Depending on your hardware, try FreeBSD. VLC works a treat via ports, and installs a heap of codecs as well. Granted, the Open Sound System perhaps isn't quite as nice as ALSA, but it offers perfectly good stereo, and there are actually a number of sound filters available for XMMS at least which do various different things, so if you want something that boosts volume or cleans sound up in some way, you can probably get that from ports too.

I wouldn't bother with Samba, personally...use FTP. You can put an ftpd on the Windows box, make the directories you want accessible, and then do a batch wget from the Linux/FreeBSD box to transfer whatever files you need over. If you need to send files the other way, there are any number of GUI ftp clients for Linux or FreeBSD available; either search here for Linux or here for FreeBSD.

Until Linux frees itself from the horrible terminal/command line dependencies, eliminates text files for configuration (how the heck is the average joe supposed to know which one of hundreds of config files he needs to edit just to connect a network drive??)

What do you advocate as a replacement? The Registry? ;) The Registry uses text in places...the DWORD is actually an assembler variable...but it also uses a lot of non-text and is completely non-transparent in places. There are good reasons why UNIX (and hence Linux) uses text config files...you can read about those here if you want.

Your problem wasn't text config files...it was knowing which transfer protocol to use for what you want.

Also realise that Microsoft created the interoperability problems themselves...it's very convenient...first they make something completely closed and proprietary, and then they can use their obviously greater level of familiarity with their own system to make it marginally more workable with Linux.

Unfortunately, things like DRM which people talk about so much on here go hand in glove with people wanting Windows to do everything for them. If you willingly surrender self-responsibility to Microsoft, they're going to use that power to make some bad decisions...it's human nature. You can't reasonably expect them to give you something which works without you investing any effort at all on the one hand, and not have them include things with it which are actively harmful to you on the other. I realise that is going to sound self-righteous, condescending, and offensive...but unfortunately, it's also true.

If you want a system which does what you want, and only what you want, you're going to have to accept some responsibility, and do some work...that isn't Linux's fault. It's simply that you've got used to having most things done for you on the one hand, but also being abused on the other.

You really are one paranoid little man. Seriously, anyone who even takes a critical look at Linux to you is a sockpuppet of Gates/Ballmer/Allchin/Satan/me.

You are annoying but you should not think you are equal to your masters. They consider you a pawn to be fucked over and discarded.

Yes, there are plenty of people wasting their life harassing Twitter and Slashdot. It's pathetic, but that's how M$ "competes" through FUD and disruption and it's really all they have. To the point, I quote M$ themselves:

... to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.

Not quite Wikipedia per the question posed in the article but... (anyway, many/most posters have the correct idea about following citations.)

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have written a book called Wikinomics http://www.wikinomics.com./ They point out that a Wiki is an amazing collaboration tool that can/will turn academia on its ear. An open source collaborative model makes very complex projects much easier to manage. One example they give is the way Boeing now designs aircraft. By abandoning top down design and management, they get the benefits predicted in the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar and in the process out-compete Airbus, their major rival. So, what place does Wikipedia have in education? I say the same as everyone else: 'follow the citations'. On the other hand, what about the underlying technology? It seems reasonable to me that whole courses could be run on a Wiki. Properly used, the technology has the potential to radically transform education.

"People criticize MS for removing ActiveX, so..."

Not "people", bonehead. The Korean Government.

And the Korean Government didn't "criticize" MS - they advised their citizens to hold off on Vista just yet.

But if you want criticism of that semi-criminal, corrupt, dishonest organization, Microsoft, here's some:

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

If you think I'm a redneck, you haven't met my good friend.

Looks to me like somebody has been paying attention to ESR's World Domination 201 article.

Putting aside whether you like it or not, sometimes you have got to admit the man has a point :)

I guess a native binary blob is slightly better than a MS coded binary blob

It's significantly better, actually. Not because it's technically superior (although it may be), but because it can legally be rolled into a commercial version of Linux. Right now, you can't legally distribute a Linux distro with multimedia support (at least not in the U.S.), because they depend either on MS DLLs (obvious copyright problems) or patent-encumbered free implementations (which can't be distributed with the distro for legal reasons).

This makes Linux into a second-rate desktop OS, even if you're willing to pay for it, because it means key features don't work out of the box. There have been exceptions to this from time to time (Xandros, Lindows), but they weren't well accepted by the community, possibly because they tried to leverage their use of proprietary codecs as an advantage over other Linux distros, rather than against Windows -- not a good way to make friends.

A company which wasn't involved in the actual production of a distro, might be in a good position (assuming it dealt with everyone on the same terms) to produce codecs that could be incorporated into (a non-free, pay-per-copy) version of any distro. E.g., someone could take Ubuntu, add the codecs (paying Fluendo, obviously), and sell the result as a package, suitable for pre-installation. I don't think this would violate GPL either, if the codecs were built in a way that didn't require linking or otherwise producing a "derived work."

In short, Fluendo could be in a position to be ESR's "Streaming Penguin." In that paper, he discusses some of the major problems facing Linux as a marketable desktop OS, and the lack of modern multimedia capabilities are a real deal-breaker. In fact, the lack of multimedia capabilities are more of a weakness, than simply being free-as-in-beer is a strength; people are obviously willing to pay for an OS that works, but one that doesn't work out of the box (or works only after fiddling around with some shady instructions involving PLF mirrors) won't fly, even if it's free.

While people here on Slashdot may not regard having to manually install LAME, Xvid, Flash, and the Win32 codecs as a significant problem, it's one of the many reasons why you can't go out and buy a Dell pre-configured with Linux as a home computer. Even if there wasn't Microsoft trying to torpedo it before it gets going, I'm not sure customers would accept anything that didn't work right, right out of the box. Fluendo could, if they play their cards right, be a big benefit to the adoption of Linux.

They'd probably be legally unable to be as good as MPlayer

That doesn't matter - that's not what this is intended for. It just has to be not much worse than the common alternatives on Windows. Linux has plenty of other advantages that make it a good choice - maintenance alone is far easier for Linux than Windows, for example.

I have much more time to visit with my parents when I'm over now that I've got them switched to Linux. I don't have to keep Windows running anymore. But I couldn't have done it (there or with my family at home) if they couldn't watch viral videos on YouTube and email. Setting that up was possible thanks to the quasi-legal packages, but not easy. Some repositories were down when I tried - twice - to use EasyUbuntu or Automatix and if I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes I couldn't have done it.

I'm not convinced that ESR has the timing right, but the general outline - that the transition from 32- to 64-bit represents a major opportunity for Linux, and being able to play (note: not edit, just play) multimedia stuff easily and legally is important - I think is spot on. See here for the oft-argued-about details.

Users with more advanced needs or less full pocketbooks (or less ethics, depending on the exact circumstances) could use the 'other' packages. But a good out-of-the-box multimedia experience is worth a lot for Linux promotion. Since the problem isn't technical, it's legal, a legal approach is unfortunately needed.

If you are from the ESR tribe you will see this as a positive step towards world domination.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/wor ld-domination-201.html

ESR, et al, believes the ability to play codecs such as these is so vital to the 2008 world domination deadline, that we should put up with these binary blobs. For a while, at least.

Lindows is supposed to be working on this also.

i'll admit it, i've done my share of luzer-bashing over the years. however, i've also learned that there are two main problems with most of the people that we call "luzers"...

(1) they don't want to use a computer in the first place, or they know that they are lost and are therefore scared of the computer. either way, they try to avoid having to even touch the thing if they don't have to. these people i don't mind working with- because they generally know their limitations, and in many cases they actually listen when you tell them something. the trick is to tell them in a way that they actually understand- because just like they're scared of the computer, if you say something and they don't understand it, they're usually scared to ask you to repeat it or explain it in a way which is better for them... or they're afraid you're going to turn into one of these arrogant weenies that the article spoke of- the kind of people who would wear an "i see dumb people" t-shirt to a client's office.

in my current work (consulting) i have quite a bit of contact with these people. for the most part they "just want it to work", and they KNOW that they're not computer experts. these people make mistakes, but they almost always realize when they've screwed something up, and they ask for help. and unless they were doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place (installing software that the company doesn't want on the machine is a big one that i see) they will usually admit what happened. and after you explain to them that your service call was only necessary because of the software that they installed, and (in the case of installing unauthorized software) after their boss threatens to take my fee out of their paycheck, they usually won't do it again.

(2) companies like microsoft have convinced a lot of people that, just because they know how to use ALT-TAB to flip between outlook and solitaire when the boss walks by, that they are some kind of computer expert. THESE are the ones who piss me off- the people who think that just because they figured out how to turn on file and printer sharing on a windoze 2000 machine, that they are also qualified to handle everything from mail servers to cisco routers.

i don't normally have much contact with these people in my work, because when i find them, i make it a point to make sure their supervisors know exactly what kind of person they have on the payroll- and either the person starts improving, or they end up fired.

however, in my non-paid work (i maintain a combined patch file for qmail, and am a developer for vpopmail) i deal almost exclusively with these people who believe that, just because they can click the right buttons to make windoze do something, that they are also "computer experts" in general. these people are the ones who generally won't READ any more documentation than they have to- they'll just blindly follow along with some poorly written "qmail install guide" they found on the net, without understanding what they're actually doing. when they're done they'll usually have a machine which will move mail from one place to another, but it won't be secure, and they won't have any idea how it works, how to configure it, or how to fix it when something goes wrong.

THESE are the people who i freely admit to being rude with... the people who are in over their head but just plain don't care. (for me, "being rude" usually means referring them to ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" page instead of answering the same questions over and over again.)

i think another problem is that many so-called "IT professionals" are afraid to use the phrase "i don't know" in front of a client or employer. i've found that being honest with my clients about my own skills and knowledge, as well as about the things i DON'T know, has worked really well- in a few cases the clients have even been willing to pay for my time to learn about whatever it is.

so when it comes to no

Pardon the reality, but Paul Graham is full of crap.

To parody your post, there's at least four fundamental errors that are made or implied by Paul Grahm

1. Money is not zero-sum, just because some CEO gets a lot of money doesn't mean I get less.

Each dollar is rivalous, it must be exchanged for something to acquire that dollar. The supply is finite. The money paid to a CEO did not magically appear, it came from someone else. It looks like a duck, acts like a duck and talks like a duck. Yet Grahm insists it's a cow.

Money is quite zero-sum: exchange of goods and services for value. Work is not. Work (labor over time) is put into the economy. Some work is harder than other work, but supply and demand is limited by skill and ability not by how hard that work it. Thus post-hole diggers earn almost nothing while Oracle DBAs drive a different colored Porsche to work every day. So many B.S. economic theories ignore where the value in the economy originates and enshrine money as something other than dirty paper passed between willing parties. It is a medium and nothing else, Grahm calls it 'wealth' but it's still the same by any other name.

However, only the government is authorized to make "money", it is the only authorized means of measuring value in an exchange of goods and labor. Both of these are backed by guns and solders. In a perfect world the government would be exchanging its money for goods and labor such that no value is taken out of the economy. Unfortunately, reality is deficit spending. This enables bankers and creditors to pretend they are creating value when they are betting on future work to be put into the economy.

Since it is work that is putting value into the economy and not magic money fairies in some accounting department, examining income disparity thus examines the disparity among effort applied to get that money. The public sees that CEOs get enormous gains for very little work and very little risk. The poor sees that at some point when climbing the ladder the job switches from actual work to luncheons and speeches. It is easy to justify stealing from those CEOs when you believe they didn't earn it. Some poor are robbing the rich and rationalizing it with this very logic. The correlation between crime and inequality in Asian and South America backs this mechanism very strongly. Grahm fails to refute this in his work.

But then he admits that he thought wall sockets created electricity, so maybe he uses analogy in place of thinking.

2. If there were perfect equality then there would be no incentive for anybody to make any progress at all.

This is very comical as Grahm's essay starts off talking about how some people are highly motivated to do things, but fails to mention they did or would do those things without money. He fails to understand the difference between money, which is only a metric for value, and everything else, which has value. You are posting on slashdot, a major pro-OSS community. I've not checked recently, but Linux wasn't written to get rich. In Grahm's Daddy Theory of money, Linux is not even possible. He denies the existence of toolsmiths,. To Grahm everyone is just a bean counter and he makes a (well read but poorly written) argument that wealth is either inherited or stolen.

Define progress. Removing the need to 'do something valuable' frees up time for creators of content, the real makers and doers. Significant advances in the arts and sciences came about regardless of the economic incentive. The system of patronage in the arts directly refutes Grahm's argument. Every Cathedral standing in Europe testifies that money is not the only motivator. Grahm himself would rather live as a pauper in a 'modern' society than a robber-baron among cavemen.

Grahm, like other die-hard capitalism apologists, assume that people only work for money. True, some people would just quit doing anything without the p

doubt that Windows will be as popular in 10 years as it is now. That's just the way of things - new technologies come around and old empires decline.

It's been in the Jagon File for ages..

You're out of date.

Most people *aren't* just browsing (and doing email) now. They're using multimedia applications. And in fact *that* is a problem for Linux:

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/wor ld-domination-201.html#id288174

That is a really good thesis. I enjoyed reading it. I have one disagreement, but my disagreement does not have solid footing.

As of yet, there is no killer app for Linux, nor for 64-bit hardware.

The one thing that got me started on using Linux (though I had installed Linux a dozen times previously) is MythTV. Granted, that application has potential pits, but it could be the killer app that even non-geeks could learn to love. My brother, an attorney, was surprised when I got on his computer at his home and started recording a program using MythWeb running on my pc at my home.

yay!

"you can't do it commercially when Microsoft gives Outlook Express away for free and bundles Outlook with the office suite everyone must use."

Quite, you can't. The point is there's no free market in the software space - or not a properly functioning one, because for the market to function properly, and hence for all actors' interests to be served, there must a large number of both buyers and sellers. That's not the case, because Microsoft is able to exercise a near-monopoly:

"Microsoft will literally put an OEM out of business before it lets them help a competitor. This is why big OEMs like Dell keep introducing Linux support and then pulling it again when Microsoft flexes its muscles."

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/wor ld-domination-201.html

But there obviously is still room for alternative mail clients on the Windows platform besides the bundled one (Outlook Express) - and even for paid ones, not just Thunderbird. Or what's this?

http://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/

It obviously _is_ possible to get people to download an alternative and even pay for it. Perhaps some of the difference is that the Bat has several developers, whereas David Harris was on his own. One man couldn't keep up: a small team could. Maybe the fact that it was free also caused people not to respect it: you can charge too little.

I see the $ as referring not to capitalism but to Microsoft's heritage as a developer of BASIC language interpreters, from Altair BASIC through Applesoft BASIC, GW-BASIC, QBasic, and Visual Basic to VB.NET. Line numbered BASIC dialects used the $ sigil on string variables:

10 LET M$ = "Microsoft"
20 PRINT "Hello ";M$
30 END
produces
Hello Microsoft

In this way, saying M$ to refer to "random BASIC vendor" is no different from saying $PHB to refer to "random out-of-touch manager" (as described in Jargon File: Hacker Writing Style).

Using M$ in Slashdot comments' subject lines has another advantage: it abbreviates "Microsoft" to save seven bytes out of the 50 permitted in a subject, without inviting comparison to multiple sclerosis.

Oh, great. You'd hope Slashdot would be the last place someone would use top-posting.

Wikipedia has a fairly good definition ofAstroturfing:

In politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the "AstroTurf" (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate "fake grassroots" support.

Note the part "formal public relations (PR) campaigns". That doesn't mean "everyone of a dissenting viewpoint", it's about organized, covert attempts at manipulating opinion by distorting open discussion with an explicit unacknowledged agenda.

A buncha folks with a different opinion, including those with the same different opinion, are not automatically Astroturfing. They may be (in your opinion) misguided, they may be (in your opinion) misinformed, they may even being quoting (in your opinion) propaganda, but unless you've real reason to suspect more sinister motives then mere difference of opinion don't go crying "Astroturfing!" at every sign of opposition.

Do the RIAA/MPAA/et al engage in underhanded covert public relations? Sure. I've no doubt they've got their hands in as many front groups as they do in their publicly acknowledged relationships. And they've never shied away from hiring folks to lobby on their behalf, in Washington or in public discourse.

But let's keep some perspective: Slashdot, as high visibility as it is amongst a certain set, is not where they're going to be hiring a buncha paid mouthpieces to burp up poorly articulated postings. I'm not saying it couldn't ever happen, but there's no good evidence of such and certain folks trying to netcop by shouting down every dissenting opinion is as harmful as any possible Astroturfing.

So, until you've got some persuasive evidence that there is more then the usual level of dissent, unoriginal argument, poorly understood implications, and simple bloody mindedness please don't go trying to shut down folks with "Aftroturfer!" ad hominem attacks. Anyone who plays such intellectually dishonest games should be immediately modded down into oblivion.

Guy tried to install Ubuntu using all the help already given via the website

I think you need to go read that thread again. It's pretty clear that this is not the case. There are screwups such as believing that a bit-for-bit compare of a downloaded file to another copy from the same download is the same thing as verifying an MD5 sum.

This guy was a arrogant dickhead from the get go.

I tried installing Ubuntu once to precisely these same problems.

Perhaps because you're the same guy Mr. Anonymous Coward.....

However, if you want people to USE your systems and BOOT your OS you damn well better provide fucking support and you'd better be damn cheery about it or you can expect your distro to die pretty quickly if NOBODY CAN INSTALL IT PROPERLY.

Boy doesn't this tone sound familiar....

Let's see:
Sarcasm and dickishness.... check
Crazy sense of entitlement.... check
"sky is falling" comments regarding linux... check

As I said, problem is between keyboard and chair. The vast majority of us are doing just fine.
If you'd like to join us, I suggest you read How to Ask Questions the Smart Way.
As someone else has already pointed out, it's simply amazing how many of these guidelines this guy violated in his post.

It is amazing how much of this guide (to asking "smart" questions) he violated.

1 gig is about the sweet spot for most people

Interestingly, as we were first writing this paper, Bill Gates announced his intention to retire from running Microsoft in 2008 -- the same year we see the 64-bit transition completing. The timing is suggestive, and Gates isn't stupid; we assume he can read the hardware trend curves as well as we can. Perhaps, suspecting he knows what's coming, he has decided to leave at the top of his game. Gates' successor, Ray Ozzie, seems much more open to the idea that there are portions of the universe Microsoft cannot easily consume.

Hey, it was just a week ago, and it summarizes all the struggle pretty well:

Eveyone will switch to 64bit hardware by the end of 2008, it's impossible otherwise. The moore's law tells us what will be the memory capacity by 2008. And with 32bit it's impossible to address more than 4GB. Yeah, go ahead and tell that it will take a bit more, like just one year more. No problem. We will not see a working 64bit version of windows by then.

That article is great and gave me a lot of thought

I thought release early, release often was considered a good thing. Even if not, compare to Microsoft's behavior during the Windows 9x era: Windows 95 (August 1995), Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, and Windows XP (December 2001), released within 76 months.

Closed-captioning for the 'Net history-impaired. :)

Of all the Linux distributions I've seen, Ubuntu is the only one which has produced a sneaking feeling that it might just have a vague chance of achieving critical mass on the desktop.

However, it's a double edged sword. The Ubuntu people have apparently thought out a number of different usage scenarios, and an end-user following any of those can do so quickly and easily. The down side is when you're trying to do anything (and I do mean anything) outside of the box...it becomes a nightmare.

For people who want their computer to be an appliance, with only a few highly specialised uses, Ubuntu could meet their needs...and given that this description fits most end-users, that is the reason why I could see it becoming/remaining the most popular Linux distribution. For anyone who wants anything more versatile, however (and for anyone who cares about a system which follows UNIX design philosophy - I'm talking about the stuff here) both Ubuntu and Debian are to be avoided, in my own mind.

Well, at least he laid it all out for us, a long time ago. From How To Become A Hacker http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html:

5. Serve the hacker culture itself
Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

Though he seems to have forgotten the 'blatant ego' bit, unless this sort of thing seems modest to you:

I became a respected priest, elder, and bard. I developed something of a reputation as a ritual designer and theoretician. And out of me flowed poetry and healing and inspiration, and by these signs I knew and others knew that the Gods moved and lived within me. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html

He's a mixed bag, but a mixed bag of nuts.

Well, at least he laid it all out for us, a long time ago. From How To Become A Hacker http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html:

5. Serve the hacker culture itself
Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

Though he seems to have forgotten the 'blatant ego' bit, unless this sort of thing seems modest to you:

I became a respected priest, elder, and bard. I developed something of a reputation as a ritual designer and theoretician. And out of me flowed poetry and healing and inspiration, and by these signs I knew and others knew that the Gods moved and lived within me. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html

He's a mixed bag, but a mixed bag of nuts.

See What's new on Eric's website.

I think you're talking about this:

If the conventional, closed-source, heavily-managed style of software development is really defended only by a sort of Maginot Line of problems conducive to boredom, then it's going to remain viable in each individual application area for only so long as nobody finds those problems really interesting and nobody else finds any way to route around them. Because the moment there is open-source competition for a `boring' piece of software, customers are going to know that it was finally tackled by someone who chose that problem to solve because of a fascination with the problem itself--which, in software as in other kinds of creative work, is a far more effective motivator than money alone.

and/or this:

Indeed, it seems the prescription for highest software productivity is almost a Zen paradox; if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines. To a conventional manager this sounds crazily indulgent and doomed--but it is exactly the recipe with which the open-source culture is now clobbering its competition.

The quotes in themselves aren't fully summing up the idea, but I didn't think it would be wise to cut and paste the whole chapter(s) in this post. The first quote is from the chapter "On Management and the Maginot Line" in tC&tB. The second quote comes from the chapter "Gift Outcompetes Exchange" in Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere.

I think you're talking about this:

If the conventional, closed-source, heavily-managed style of software development is really defended only by a sort of Maginot Line of problems conducive to boredom, then it's going to remain viable in each individual application area for only so long as nobody finds those problems really interesting and nobody else finds any way to route around them. Because the moment there is open-source competition for a `boring' piece of software, customers are going to know that it was finally tackled by someone who chose that problem to solve because of a fascination with the problem itself--which, in software as in other kinds of creative work, is a far more effective motivator than money alone.

and/or this:

Indeed, it seems the prescription for highest software productivity is almost a Zen paradox; if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines. To a conventional manager this sounds crazily indulgent and doomed--but it is exactly the recipe with which the open-source culture is now clobbering its competition.

The quotes in themselves aren't fully summing up the idea, but I didn't think it would be wise to cut and paste the whole chapter(s) in this post. The first quote is from the chapter "On Management and the Maginot Line" in tC&tB. The second quote comes from the chapter "Gift Outcompetes Exchange" in Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere.

Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent and in the process of being phased out, usually in favor of a specified replacement.

[..] even then they have to know what that little toggle switch does!

Whatever you do with your new package format, please ditch -devel packages.

The use of -devel packages is my single biggest objection to both rpm and dpkg. I went to #debian on Freenode the other night and complained about this...the idiots there of course tried to justify it. IT IS NOT JUSTIFIABLE. It is an *obscenity*, and it *destroys* installations.

There are very few things in the world that I feel more passionate about than the use of subpackaging...it should NEVER, EVER, -=*EVER*=- be done.

My other primary objection to dpkg/rpm is that they are single (or at most, dual) process monoliths which are an abomination in the face of UNIX philosophy. Jeff Johnson and the people behind dpkg need to go and read this and educate themselves about the operating system they are developing for...either that or go and write for Windows instead. Study ports. That is a system which uses a collection of small, co-operating processes, not one or two giant opaque blocks. Both rpm and dpkg are products of *exceedingly* poor design, and it's why they have the degree of problems that they do.

Here are the real links that refer to today's media briefing:

ZDnet blog posting by Garett Rogers.
NASA's media advisory about today's media briefing (link via Gregg's blog post).
Article in New Scientist about Google and NASA's iEarth software (link via Gregg's blog post).

Start rant

The press release submitted by eldavojohn was issued on September 28, 2005! The media briefing hadn't even started when this posting was approved!

Attention slashdot "editors" -- the reason why you're losing mindshare to digg and other sites is for editing like this -- only a novice or clueless "editor" would get taken in by a bogus submission about a real event ocurring because they didn't trivally check its contents.

It's far too easy to slip things past slashdot's "editors", since a single "editor" can have the wool pulled over his eyes. Thus the surge in popularity of sites like digg, since (to build on esr's quote) Given enough eyeballs, all scams are transparent.

-- An unhappy long-time reader.

End rant

You are correct, the author is a beginner for three separate reasons

1) mkdir -p succeeds silently if the directory already exists, so the test is pointless

2) In any case, good practice is to do what you wanna do and take remedial action if it fails, not to see whether you can do it and then if you can. That is for the terminally underconfident :)

3) Even if that weren't the case, what's wrong with "test -d /tmp/a/b/c"

For good Unix practice you are better off reading a random page of Raymond's collected "Art of Unix Programming", on the net at http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/

"10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency" would probably have been a better title.

The title did however bring back fond memories of Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming. The book is available online, and if you were hoping for something a bit more substantial as well, then the section Basics of the Unix Philosophy might be worth a read.

"10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency" would probably have been a better title.

The title did however bring back fond memories of Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming. The book is available online, and if you were hoping for something a bit more substantial as well, then the section Basics of the Unix Philosophy might be worth a read.

When I was about 11 years old, installing Netscape 3.0 corrupted my computer. Netscape had let me down, so I started using IE. About ten years later IE let me down, so I gave Netscape a try again (well, Firefox). I never hated either, and I was thankful that they gave me a free product that I used frequently.

I was impressed with the quality of Firefox and decided to give other pieces of Open Source a try. Eventually, I decided to try using Linux as my primary operating system (the primary motivation is because the Blaster Worm had hit me two years earlier).

At the same time, I got a cheap mac, and learned more about OS X. I still use it to this day.

This period lasted about 6-8 months, and I would refer to myself as "os agnostic" during it.

Being a computer science student, I had a work term ahead of me. It was my first job primarily in C++. The task assigned to me was to work at the device driver level and above for a wireless software company.

To explain what that job was like, read esr's The Tale of J. Random Newbie. Things were a lot more painful than what they should have been. Consider the current difficulties in the open source world concerning wireless devices. The same problems (no specs or source (MS and manufacturer's)) exist in the Window's world, it's just that the average user isn't faced with it.

I placed the blame primarily on Microsoft. Because they were the only parties capable of writing the glue layers necessary. The DDK they had for the task did most of the job, but never 100%, and edge cases were killers.

But what did this mean for the user? 1. When Windows XP was being developed wireless wasn't as prevalent as it is now. Thus, Microsoft will improve the glue layer and possibly even duplicate the functionality my code created. All meaning that the project I worked on will probably have to be re-written. 2. That I couldn't do as much as I wanted, meaning that the user got less than I wish I could have given. While a portion of this is my fault, I blame poor documentation (that and proof of concept code are the only ways I could research how the system operated) and the difficulties with using an abstraction layer (if the programmer doesn't abstract something you wanted, you don't get it). It is obviously too dangerous (and short-sighted) for me to go under the abstraction layer (the edge cases as is were bad enough). These two points lead me to conclude that developer time and depth are inefficiently used when dealing with closed source. And a well known side effect is the prevalence of bugs (when you can't see the source you can't know what will happen).

So, I determined that my profession has suffered due to closed source. Microsoft could end a huge amount of this pain, but they care more about their bottom dollar than the industry (one example would be to write acceptable documentation, it's the best substitute for code). Which I understand fully, but that doesn't mean I have to like them. What you have just read is why I went from being OS-agnostic to Anything But Microsoft in about two or three months. I only described a fraction of the problems, the ones I witnessed, and some that we've all seen (like Blaster and the trouble with IE). Now people think I'm a zealot when I challenge Microsoft. But I ask, what should an engineer do when they realize the frailty of current critical infrastructure that the economy is dependent on?

In short, I hate what Microsoft has done to my profession, and will do everything in my power to remedy it.

Are current CPUs optimised for physics simulations? No.
For image processing? No.
For data compression? No.
For encryption? No.

Maybe not, but if you have specialized cores for each of these, you will have 4 cores idling when you don't do any of that. The alternative would be to have 5 general purpose cores. Each single one would be slower at a specific task, but the symmetric design would give better flexibility allowing all cores to operate all the time. It isn't a clear cut case which approach is the better, and the general consensus seems to vary periodically over time (see the wheel of reincarnation).

• An operating system that runs on an extremely wide variety of hardware
• A stable and mature TCP/IP stack, transparently integrated into the system via Berkeley sockets
• Thousands of programmers who submit patches and/or modify the system to do exactly what they want it to do
• Full POSIX compatibility
• Real separation of mechanism from policy-- tools can be used in a variety of ways, often in ways not foreseen by the original author
• A system that doesn't require specialized tools to customize-- every system comes with a text editor and development tools
• A real, working permissions model-- for some uses, THIS is a dealbreaker, as the GP mentions
• Multiprocessing is easy
• Pipes and powerful shell scripting capabilities
• And so on...

Quoth parent:

That doesn't make a lick of sense. References please.

No problem. Here you go.

http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html:

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

That was too easy....

Thats exactly the point. It's a bastardization of the TCP/IP standard by M$. They want everything to operate to the M$ standard not the approved W3C/ISO standards.

Exactly. This strategy has been advocated in Microsoft internal documents dating from years back. Eric S. Raymond quotes a Microsoft confidential Linux strategy report as saying:

Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.

I know I've been waiting since then for this particular shoe to drop. As for the rest of you, especially those who don't believe that Microsoft would do such a thing: Please read the documents, study Microsoft's strategy, and then decide where you want to be when their execution [sic] is complete.

I dunno. I actually subscribed to it waaay early in its US career. I always found it interesting.

Sometimes, "horrible gruesome high-speed multivehicle multi-fatality accident" interesting. Sometimes, "huh, that's cool" interesting.

Kinda like the net.

Although I'm grateful for the relative immunity to online angry fruit salad I developed by suffering through the "cutting edge" style of Wired.