He said undervalued compared to some other companies, and he went on to hint about the market: opensource, though it wasn't clear if he meant compared to other opensource companies or companies that do not understand opensource. So, you are wrong just starting out.
Then, saying that all other investors (the ones bidding up these prices) are wrong, and that IBM is the only company that's valued right is just ridiculous. You're recommending, therefore, that IBM is where all your money should be: good luck. That was bad advice before Microsoft cleaned their clocks.
Believe the market, all people in it collectively know better than you do. Including all of the rare downturns, recessions and depressions, the market is always the best place to put your money, and nobody has a formula for beating the market. And if anyone did?:) They wouldn't be hanging out on slashdot!:)
well, your post was mostly pretty good, but you did call it a nitpick and you screwed it up at the end so I feel I should meta-pick:
"safe" is word without a precise definition. better to speak of risk which is defined as variance.
you describe call options but they shouldn't really be compared to selling short.
it is speculating (gambling) to purchase on the belief that a security will move in one direction. better to purchase according to overall portfolio risk/return (hedging or speculating). This has nothing to do with what you were talking about, but I feel I shouldn't go forward without noting it.
so, if one believes that magically one can predict the future better than the market does, and then consider selling short, better to buy puts than calls. Selling calls is good, too, but has the "same" unlimited loss potential that selling short does.
Gee, there's more to say (in the money, or out?) but I'm getting tired of quibbling. Best to say that the risk adjusted expected returns of all securities are the same -- ??? yep, once you take portfolio weight and co-variances into account.:) I.e., there's a place for everybody in the market portfolio.
Your points are well taken, thank you, but they don't answer mine.
The LinuxNewbie discussion groups permit everybody to post questions as well as advice.
I didn't criticize the discussions groups, in this post. In the other post I criticized just the discussion about switching to NT. I thought that whole thread was a little strange on a site whose name is "linuxnewbie", a site that carried an editorial criticizing LinuxOne (rightfully) for riding on the linux name.
Due to this, there is good probablity that SOME advice given may not be the right advice.
I think my critique was pretty comprehensive, and not focused on random erroneous info.
Then write an editorial response of some kind, if you think his opinion is invalid. I don't really care.
[sigh] I did write one, it's what you read. And you didn't care so much you... responded. I get so sick of this kind of thing (believe me, compared to the rest here, you are an angel) people mouthing off "betawze I huwt dere feewings"
Newbies don't write the documentation.
mmmm... I'll give you your interpretation, though if you go read the page with the credo it says the site is "we the newbies" and doc is written by "users"... forgive me for being confused.
It seems that you have an opinion about the site, but you fail to show good reasons for it...How about you do a little legwork yourself.
I mentioned several articles quite explicity in my original post. You made reference to a few yourself but didn't say which they were, so: anyone can go see what I was talking about, and nobody can go see what you are talking about... who did the legwork and who didn't? Slashdot needs a gentle "Incorrect" moderation category.
Interesting discussions are about analyzing and investigating what other people say. You seem like a generally open-minded intelligent person, but in this discussion you are simply repeating yourself and asking for evidence that I've already provided. You either need to disprove or provide counterexamples to make your case. But any response from me will have to come in a future forum, because I said what I wanted here, and the S/N is a little out of hand. Plus, with sensei now ignoring me because I don't post my email address, what's the point? He's absolutely right, of course, why should he respond substantively in public? : )
I came back here to clean up loose ends, and answer the good questions, but brianvan's were pretty much the best.
Thanks for the moderation that removed the "flamebait" I was awarded. That seemed a bit much to me too, though I do wish I had toned down my original post a little. I think the way I wrote it is not out of bounds for making a strong statement to neutral parties, but I do see that it would not elicit the most helpful answers from partisans from the other side, so: sorry guys, for ruffling your feathers. I don't want to denigrate anyone's hard work, but I don't like to see hard work poured into misguided projects either.
As to all the other noise here, some of it is humorous: how could my original remarks be called "pre-judging"? Which part of "pre" don't you understand? : ) Or, "you never come to our site" except "you come there all the time to flame us" and "you're 14" but "you worked on OS/2". Make up your minds, is it pre, post, often or never? And, give my email address to people who clearly want to flame me more? You are grasping at straws. Try the simple way: respond to the actual allegations rather than attacking the person who made them.
Finally, do I work at LinuxOne? The irony is, that's kinda how this all got started. I went and read that editorial at LinuxNewbie, and it then surfed around a bit whereupon I saw all the unhelpful help. Then I got bored of that slashdot discussion with everybody endlessly repeating the same negatives (very old news) about LinuxOne. So, I went away. Then, a couple of hours later it just popped into my head: LinuxNewbie that day was featuring nothing but negative news about opensource (in addition to LinuxOne, you had some stuff about Java and IBM and DeCSS) and it just clicked: If I were Bill Gates, I would want a site that prominently featured controversy about opensource, just to sow the seeds of doubt, and then I'd add in a bunch of "help" that was broken, and testimonials from people who tell stories about switching back to NT. I'd have to tone it down, though, don't want to get caught. BINGO! "FUD site" is what I thought. By the way, in that light, the samba doc is a masterwork: undermines rpm, tarballs,.debs, etc., all in one fell swoop! Since that discussion on Slashdot had gotten very stale, but LinuxNewbie was still on topic, I figured I'd post at least something a little different to try to liven it up. So, no, I don't work at or approve of LinuxOne. Grasp at another straw.
Finally, why do I criticize instead of going back to help newbies, fire off corrections, participate in every forum, and rewrite all the doc? From this I take it that:
you never read restaurant or movie reviews written by "armchair" reviewers.
if I said nice things about LinuxNewbie would you come back and say, "why are you wasting your time praising us, you should be helping to make us even better.
when you eat a few items on a menu and they're all bad, you make sure to try everything else on the menu before criticizing
when you go to a bad mechanic you volunteer to work there to help everyone else who comes in and make the owner successful.
... and you guys call me silly? I am contributing by reviewing, it is hard work and takes time, especially this discussion we are having right here. Otherwise, in other venues I do plenty of volunteer work, and I send people constructive criticism when I think there's something salvagable. The site didn't thrill me, I didn't want to see people voting for you just on the basis of your name, and I haven't seen anything here today that would draw me back either.
So, I'd be perfectly happy to be proven wrong. It would be great if you helped tons of people to learn linux... and hurd and the BSDs -- those are the "other" OSes advocated in the LinuxOne credo, right?
And to the rest of you who responded to my post: you are all forgiven. You are forgiven for calling me names; you are forgiven for calling my mother a moron (may she rest in peace); and you are forgiven for accusing me of not having been to the the linuxnewbie site (how do you think I wrote my original post?)
I'm serious. I understand completely that if you feel insulted or passionately about something it is natural to lash out. I've done it myself. But I think this is a serious topic and worth pursuing so I'm ignoring all the noise.
Respond, if you'd like, to the actual details of what I posted (hint: it would make you look more credible if you admit which parts you might agree with and separately which parts you disagree with) and we can talk about it. Helping newbies is a noble cause and worth getting right, which I suspect is the reason the award is being given.
thanks brianvan, and especially for sticking to the issue at hand : ) (moderators, brianvan's post was technically more "insightful" than "informative". MattMann does not cotton to loose definitions of terms.)
which makes all of your "They're wrong about this and that" points on advanced topics kind of moot
You should reread what I wrote. I was not saying that newbies should be bogged down in the detail of advanced topics. I was saying that IMHO the advice offered on linuxnewbie is likely to get newbies into trouble, without helping them to get out of it. And I cited specific examples. Please, cite a specific counterexample, and we'll wrassle on it.
why chastise them for spending more time on original content rather than messing around with all of the other easily available documentation
When criticizing someone (me) you should take into account everything they said, not just a small piece. I criticized the linux HOWTOs quite sharply. I said they were not good enough for newbies in today's environment. So, even if I was not clear enough in tying together all that I said, there must be some reason I said it all. Clearly, I was not advocating a simple LDP mirror. So, a rational conclusion (why does everything have to be so laboriously spelled out on slashdot) would be that I was advocating improving on the HOWTOs rather than tearing them up and starting from scratch. "Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it" is popularly considered to be good advice.
Now, please don't take me to task and say that it doesn't always make sense to migrate, that sometimes it makes sense to start fresh, because that point is obvious. However, since the corollary to that is the equally obvious "it only sometimes makes sense to start afresh," my criticism must have been (why does everything need to be spelled out so laboriously on slashdot) that linuxnewbie has chosen the start-from-scratch option in every single case. I think that's a bad idea. I think you think it's a bad idea too, except that you like linuxnewbie so you don't want to admit it in this context. It's a completely valid and simple criticism.
There are really two issues I raised, so perhaps they should discussed separately. One question is "how bad is linuxnewbie", as in, is it in toto useful? (I could be convinced.) And "how good is linuxnewbie", as in, is it better than all the rest and therefore worthy of winning this contest. (I could even be convinced of that if you show me that what else is out there is worse.)
But I'm only interested in hearing from people who are willing to do the legwork: tell me the specific pages you think are good or bad. I could care less about it's-good-it's-bad-me-too" one-liners. Even testimonials from people who were helped or not are of limited value. Unless it's from a randomly selected sample, it's unscientific and invalid -- advice that newbies to science too often ignore.
Please don't vote for LinuxNewbie.Org, without going over there and really scrutinizing what they are offering. I ask you to do this because I don't think that they have made a good contribution to newbie help, other than taking up a memorable domain name.
Look at their Samba install advice: download the source and build... the RPM? For a huge percentage of newbies this is just plain wrong-headed. If one is on a system that supports RPM, one probably already has an RPM that is consistent with the kernel version. If that samba is too old, probably the whole distro is too old. If one is not on a system that supports RPM: totally screwed. There is no mention of any of this. Instead it says right at the front of that article: having problems? go read the samba doc.
That was one example. I have similar complaints about just about everything else I looked at, including the home page which does not strike me as at all simple and/or inviting to people who want to try linux but aren't sure where to start or where they stand.
Read the piece about "why some guy chose NT over linux." His reason boils down to security: he thinks the way samba (not linux, samba) handles expired passwords (they keep working) is not secure enough. That guy doesn't know much about Windows security, does he? Expire your passwords all you want, pal, but if you send'em in clear text you are completely insecure. And where did you read about this anyway? I would doubt highly that it was uncovered by accident.
That article calls into question the LinuxNewbie model: newbies writing doc for other newbies? All previously existing Linux HOWTOs and advice are missing from LinuxNewbie.Org... that's not just a waste, it's is less than helpful.
Probably, it's just poor execution and not bad intent. But if Bill Gates paid me to set up a website that would undermine linux by getting newbies into trouble, what I would do is mirror LinuxNewbie.Org. To tilt the table any more against linux would, in my opinion, get me caught. Yes, that's how harsh my criticism is.
I do not have blinders on about linux. Cross platform advice is important to many newbies who will likely have a foot in several OS camps for the foreseeable future. And, the linux HOWTO world is pretty screwed up: while once it was highly useful, it is now too far out of date for newbies (oh, for how long did I slavishly rebuild my kernel to get masquerading... years after RedHat built it in). But ignoring it all and have newbies hash out the "new" way is not a good idea.
Somebody, please convince me that I'm wrong about this.
yes, tricks like that work some of the time. The danger is: if you ever buy anything online, anywhere, using a credit card, and you have a static ip address, forget about cookies and lying in your registrations, you are at risk of being identified everywhere, all the time, very accurately, and tied into your full credit, purchasing, and healthcare histories.
I think it would be nice to be able to use e-commerce without this kind of a problem.
Until then the fastest way send a message was by horse at maybe 100 miles/day. Think about that paradigm shift.
Actually, Napolean, around 1800, stationed soldiers every few hundred yards between Paris and Rome, and was able to send messages via visual semaphores between the two cities in a matter of hours! True.
and as a quibble to some of the other posts here: the technology did not have to be invented in the 20th century to qualify. Might be a good rule, but that's not what it says.
and, while it's fun to think about all the impacts that various technologies have, the most significant one is always going to be energy harnessing, electric or internal combustion or whatever. At the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of Westerners were farmers, and we still would have to be, like the Third World, if we did not have labor saving devices. Everything else will always pale in comparison to that.
Oh, please! refer back to your post: you didn't say "BSD copier", you said "compared BSD to a copier". By those rules, the GPL could be compared just as easily. Leaving out that you are toying with the word copier the way Stallman toys with the word free, and the rules attach to the documents, not the copier...
It is still a stupid analogy. This magical BSD copier you love so much lets you collate copies together into one book, yes, but it lets you stop other people from copying that book even on a magical BSD copier? Copiers like that used to sit in the basement of the Kremlin. No wonder Stallman has the urge to scream freedom! Me, I just want to scream that I'm wasting my time talking about this.
Have an opinion, sure, but I can see the merit in the BSD license. If you can't see the corresponding merit in the GPL, you are not very sharp.
Now, if we could lay some ground rules for trust, I wouldn't mind having ads personalized for me and my tastes. I mean, I like drinking beer, and I don't like cola, so I'd rather see beer ads than cola ads. However, I'd want it to be "relatively" anonymous. That is (random list off the top of my head),
I don't care if a computer knows that I have hemorroids, but I don't want a person to be able to look it up
I don't mind if a person knows aggregate things like "a beer drinker just saw your ad on Slashdot"
but I want to know what they'll know about me if I click on the ad, then I can decide whether to click. A promise of "aggregate" statistics is not good enough: what if the aggregate is "wine drinkers with hemorroids"
Promising me "We won't sell your info" is not good enough. "We won't look at it with your name attached" is what I want.
If info is shared between different domain names, I want to know.
I'd like the "no sharing" promise enforced through merger and acquisition. What if Slashdot goes public and Microsoft acquires it, and the backup tapes? Yipes! I never agreed to that!
I would accept promises from companies. I think most are trustworthy enough. But, promising alone is not enough, I want recourse and/or punishment. IRS employees keep getting caught sneaking peeks: the death penalty is what I'd like to see (don't like it? don't peek and even if you are the President (hi Echelon) something they've been known to do) But assuming others aren't that etreme, how about firing, pension loss... something serious. At least tell me what the punishment is. A simpler case to illustrate: I haven't forgiven Real Networks for its spying transgressions, but they could have repaired a lot of trust if they said, "we screwed up, and we are going to delete all the info we grabbed, plus one month worth of all our server logs, and we fired that guy."
A more global pet proposal of mine is this: as a compromise between the privacy nuts and data gulpers: if information about me is stored in a database and includes any sort of address/contact information, then the database owner must tell me once a year what they have on me. It would cost only a small amount per person, and if it does not have that much economic value, don't keep it. Then at least the average person would develop an awareness of what's out there.
That's because we have the concept of freedom as in liberty.
Yes, we have those concepts. You are unfortunately arguing against yourself. You didn't say "we have those words", because they are just words. You said "concepts" as in ideas and thoughts: you can understand these ideas in the face of imprecise words, and Africans and Native Americans can understand those concepts also with different words.
I'd like to see you walk up to their village and attempt to describe ownership to them.
But according to your argument, language influences thought. So, all we'd need to do is teach them the words, right? That should be easy... but it's wrong.
Grass and green... blue and sky... Instead of 'chief' you have 'one-who-does-good' - think about how different that is from the perception of government as a hierarchy.
Yes, but we have orange oranges. And yellow cowards. Do you think you are influenced by those word/colors? I don't think Native Americans are either. We also have New York... think how different it is from old York, which did not pop into your head till I mentioned it. Words, language... they've nothing to do with thoughts but rather with communication.
By the way, this is all taught in linguistics classes, it's standard science, shoulders of giants, etc. By the way, it just occurred to me that I'm a native American, but I'm just not a Native American. When spoken aloud (the true definition of language anyway, but that's another whole can of worms) you can't tell the difference: the language is not the idea.
I like the way you think, made for a clear and easy read, but I can't buy the analogy. The differences between C and Lisp are the types and semantics of the primitive data types.
With human languages the semantics and primitive data types turn out to be the same. We can see it across the specturm of linguistic categories, particularly if we look at special cases: rhyming, alliteration, stuttering, aphasia (e.g. forgetting the words for different emotions), synonym, homophone, babytalk,... all of these things exist the same regardless of language. When you look closely, the apparent differences are simply syntactic.
you can clearly understand the difference between 'free as in speech' vs. 'free as in free beer.'
I totally agree with what you meant, and the guy you were responding to should note what you said.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that "free as in speech" is still ambiguous in conveying the sofware concepts: "open" source, and GPL-user vs BSD-vendor freedoms of redistribution. It's easy to conceive of paid source you can't redistribute, free object you can, and source you are free to redistribute as object, and object whose source you are entitled to see.
to what you said about Microsoft's tools I would add, "and used their monopoly power to bundle their incompatible engine into their OSified browser in a way that would deny many many users access to a true Java implementaton."
I'm French and at first I was telling "already seen" instead if "deja vu" because I didn't knew how to say it, until somebody told me
Thanks, that's funny! Have you ever heard of Yogi Berra, an American baseball player? He's famous for saying things like: "It's deja vu all over again!" Deja vu encore! Perhaps there's a funnier way to translate it?
I knew that article was off to a bad start when he didn't refer to "natural" and "formal" languages by their official names. But this early post got it mostly right, but lacked examples so too many people got distracted by that obscure philosophical discussion. Here are some examples that I think make the points vlax was attempting.
Sapir-Whorf is wrong. It is very easy to see that language does not determine what or how you think:
When you can't remember a word, you know exactly what you want to say, you just can't get to the word
People who suffer from aphasic brain damage often lose entire vocabularies (all the colors, for example) but they don't lose the ability to see and think about the concepts
Deaf people don't learn their native" language, and yet, they can think perfectly clearly, and
deaf Frenchmen are just as clearly "French" as other Frenchmen (tant pis?:)
Russians have no word for fun? I doubt it! But, if they don't, it means they have no sense of fun. But in that case it's the culture influencing the language, not vice versa. English had no word for chic, but we knew/learned the concept so we borrowed a word from French. Our culture considers French culture to be chic and so do the French. But that's why they had a word for it: that's the culture talking. Eskimos have 32 words for snow (myth, I know) because they need them to succintly describe the snow they encounter. English could add those too, if it needed them, just like cross country skiers quickly learn the names of the different waxes they need to use. It's pretty overwhelming: thinking takes place underneath the veneer of language.
programming languages need not limit what kinds of programs we write
This "string handling in C" counterexample is a small one. Full object-oriented programming is easily accessible in C. When you typedef a struct (let's use "Shape" as the example), include an array "data member" (hint: call it vtable) which is pointers to functions. Use NewShape() instead of malloc to create one, and have NewShape initialize the vtable with pointers to functions like PrintShape. Create a "circle" struct, and have NewCircle first call NewShape, then depending on how you initialize its vtable, you can have inheritance, virtuals, polymorphism, etc. There are small syntactic differences: instead of circle.PrintObj(), use PrintObj(circle), though you could use C's awkward function pointer syntax. Passing the obj as an arg is what C++ does underneath anyway. if you think that this is not OOP, you need to learn to think abstractly. There are some differences of course: this way lacks destructors (like Java) but it can solve the multiple inheritance "problem" by being explicit about the semantics.
the weakness of the analysis in the article can be seen in the table. Look across the columns... object-object-object? That axis has little to distinguish it. Most of what he says is not outright wrong, can even be insightful, but still so much is severely lacking. For example, I understand his "procedural" programming paradigm and why he is tempted to lump fortran and C together, and yet fortran can't conveniently be object oriented in the way that I describe for C.
Thanks for that link! I feel compelled to go over and campaign for any other candidate: Regardless of their motivations, I don't think they are helping. MHO, of course, but I did take the time to read their pages...
Slashdot Mirror
Then, saying that all other investors (the ones bidding up these prices) are wrong, and that IBM is the only company that's valued right is just ridiculous. You're recommending, therefore, that IBM is where all your money should be: good luck. That was bad advice before Microsoft cleaned their clocks.
Believe the market, all people in it collectively know better than you do. Including all of the rare downturns, recessions and depressions, the market is always the best place to put your money, and nobody has a formula for beating the market. And if anyone did? :) They wouldn't be hanging out on slashdot! :)
- "safe" is word without a precise definition. better to speak of risk which is defined as variance.
- you describe call options but they shouldn't really be compared to selling short.
- it is speculating (gambling) to purchase on the belief that a security will move in one direction. better to purchase according to overall portfolio risk/return (hedging or speculating). This has nothing to do with what you were talking about, but I feel I shouldn't go forward without noting it.
- so, if one believes that magically one can predict the future better than the market does, and then consider selling short, better to buy puts than calls. Selling calls is good, too, but has the "same" unlimited loss potential that selling short does.
Gee, there's more to say (in the money, or out?) but I'm getting tired of quibbling. Best to say that the risk adjusted expected returns of all securities are the same -- ??? yep, once you take portfolio weight and co-variances into account.it's not as if VA is the only company offering Intel products. They are good products (as x86s go). The monopoly practices are the bad part.
The LinuxNewbie discussion groups permit everybody to post questions as well as advice.
I didn't criticize the discussions groups, in this post. In the other post I criticized just the discussion about switching to NT. I thought that whole thread was a little strange on a site whose name is "linuxnewbie", a site that carried an editorial criticizing LinuxOne (rightfully) for riding on the linux name.
Due to this, there is good probablity that SOME advice given may not be the right advice.
I think my critique was pretty comprehensive, and not focused on random erroneous info.
[sigh] I did write one, it's what you read. And you didn't care so much you ... responded. I get so sick of this kind of thing (believe me, compared to the rest here, you are an angel) people mouthing off "betawze I huwt dere feewings"
Newbies don't write the documentation.
mmmm... I'll give you your interpretation, though if you go read the page with the credo it says the site is "we the newbies" and doc is written by "users"... forgive me for being confused.
I mentioned several articles quite explicity in my original post. You made reference to a few yourself but didn't say which they were, so: anyone can go see what I was talking about, and nobody can go see what you are talking about... who did the legwork and who didn't? Slashdot needs a gentle "Incorrect" moderation category.
Interesting discussions are about analyzing and investigating what other people say. You seem like a generally open-minded intelligent person, but in this discussion you are simply repeating yourself and asking for evidence that I've already provided. You either need to disprove or provide counterexamples to make your case. But any response from me will have to come in a future forum, because I said what I wanted here, and the S/N is a little out of hand. Plus, with sensei now ignoring me because I don't post my email address, what's the point? He's absolutely right, of course, why should he respond substantively in public? : )
I came back here to clean up loose ends, and answer the good questions, but brianvan's were pretty much the best.
Thanks for the moderation that removed the "flamebait" I was awarded. That seemed a bit much to me too, though I do wish I had toned down my original post a little. I think the way I wrote it is not out of bounds for making a strong statement to neutral parties, but I do see that it would not elicit the most helpful answers from partisans from the other side, so: sorry guys, for ruffling your feathers. I don't want to denigrate anyone's hard work, but I don't like to see hard work poured into misguided projects either.
As to all the other noise here, some of it is humorous: how could my original remarks be called "pre-judging"? Which part of "pre" don't you understand? : ) Or, "you never come to our site" except "you come there all the time to flame us" and "you're 14" but "you worked on OS/2". Make up your minds, is it pre, post, often or never? And, give my email address to people who clearly want to flame me more? You are grasping at straws. Try the simple way: respond to the actual allegations rather than attacking the person who made them.
Finally, do I work at LinuxOne? The irony is, that's kinda how this all got started. I went and read that editorial at LinuxNewbie, and it then surfed around a bit whereupon I saw all the unhelpful help. Then I got bored of that slashdot discussion with everybody endlessly repeating the same negatives (very old news) about LinuxOne. So, I went away. Then, a couple of hours later it just popped into my head: LinuxNewbie that day was featuring nothing but negative news about opensource (in addition to LinuxOne, you had some stuff about Java and IBM and DeCSS) and it just clicked: If I were Bill Gates, I would want a site that prominently featured controversy about opensource, just to sow the seeds of doubt, and then I'd add in a bunch of "help" that was broken, and testimonials from people who tell stories about switching back to NT. I'd have to tone it down, though, don't want to get caught. BINGO! "FUD site" is what I thought. By the way, in that light, the samba doc is a masterwork: undermines rpm, tarballs, .debs, etc., all in one fell swoop! Since that discussion on Slashdot had gotten very stale, but LinuxNewbie was still on topic, I figured I'd post at least something a little different to try to liven it up. So, no, I don't work at or approve of LinuxOne. Grasp at another straw.
Finally, why do I criticize instead of going back to help newbies, fire off corrections, participate in every forum, and rewrite all the doc? From this I take it that:
... and you guys call me silly? I am contributing by reviewing, it is hard work and takes time, especially this discussion we are having right here. Otherwise, in other venues I do plenty of volunteer work, and I send people constructive criticism when I think there's something salvagable. The site didn't thrill me, I didn't want to see people voting for you just on the basis of your name, and I haven't seen anything here today that would draw me back either.
So, I'd be perfectly happy to be proven wrong. It would be great if you helped tons of people to learn linux... and hurd and the BSDs -- those are the "other" OSes advocated in the LinuxOne credo, right?
I'm serious. I understand completely that if you feel insulted or passionately about something it is natural to lash out. I've done it myself. But I think this is a serious topic and worth pursuing so I'm ignoring all the noise.
Respond, if you'd like, to the actual details of what I posted (hint: it would make you look more credible if you admit which parts you might agree with and separately which parts you disagree with) and we can talk about it. Helping newbies is a noble cause and worth getting right, which I suspect is the reason the award is being given.
which makes all of your "They're wrong about this and that" points on advanced topics kind of moot
You should reread what I wrote. I was not saying that newbies should be bogged down in the detail of advanced topics. I was saying that IMHO the advice offered on linuxnewbie is likely to get newbies into trouble, without helping them to get out of it. And I cited specific examples. Please, cite a specific counterexample, and we'll wrassle on it.
why chastise them for spending more time on original content rather than messing around with all of the other easily available documentation
When criticizing someone (me) you should take into account everything they said, not just a small piece. I criticized the linux HOWTOs quite sharply. I said they were not good enough for newbies in today's environment. So, even if I was not clear enough in tying together all that I said, there must be some reason I said it all. Clearly, I was not advocating a simple LDP mirror. So, a rational conclusion (why does everything have to be so laboriously spelled out on slashdot) would be that I was advocating improving on the HOWTOs rather than tearing them up and starting from scratch. "Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it" is popularly considered to be good advice.
Now, please don't take me to task and say that it doesn't always make sense to migrate, that sometimes it makes sense to start fresh, because that point is obvious. However, since the corollary to that is the equally obvious "it only sometimes makes sense to start afresh," my criticism must have been (why does everything need to be spelled out so laboriously on slashdot) that linuxnewbie has chosen the start-from-scratch option in every single case. I think that's a bad idea. I think you think it's a bad idea too, except that you like linuxnewbie so you don't want to admit it in this context. It's a completely valid and simple criticism.
There are really two issues I raised, so perhaps they should discussed separately. One question is "how bad is linuxnewbie", as in, is it in toto useful? (I could be convinced.) And "how good is linuxnewbie", as in, is it better than all the rest and therefore worthy of winning this contest. (I could even be convinced of that if you show me that what else is out there is worse.)
But I'm only interested in hearing from people who are willing to do the legwork: tell me the specific pages you think are good or bad. I could care less about it's-good-it's-bad-me-too" one-liners. Even testimonials from people who were helped or not are of limited value. Unless it's from a randomly selected sample, it's unscientific and invalid -- advice that newbies to science too often ignore.
I do not have blinders on about linux. Cross platform advice is important to many newbies who will likely have a foot in several OS camps for the foreseeable future. And, the linux HOWTO world is pretty screwed up: while once it was highly useful, it is now too far out of date for newbies (oh, for how long did I slavishly rebuild my kernel to get masquerading... years after RedHat built it in). But ignoring it all and have newbies hash out the "new" way is not a good idea.
Somebody, please convince me that I'm wrong about this.
I'm sure that's a Good Thing.
I think it would be nice to be able to use e-commerce without this kind of a problem.
Actually, Napolean, around 1800, stationed soldiers every few hundred yards between Paris and Rome, and was able to send messages via visual semaphores between the two cities in a matter of hours! True.
and as a quibble to some of the other posts here: the technology did not have to be invented in the 20th century to qualify. Might be a good rule, but that's not what it says.
and, while it's fun to think about all the impacts that various technologies have, the most significant one is always going to be energy harnessing, electric or internal combustion or whatever. At the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of Westerners were farmers, and we still would have to be, like the Third World, if we did not have labor saving devices. Everything else will always pale in comparison to that.
the power drops off geometrically or polynomially, not exponentially.
It is still a stupid analogy. This magical BSD copier you love so much lets you collate copies together into one book, yes, but it lets you stop other people from copying that book even on a magical BSD copier? Copiers like that used to sit in the basement of the Kremlin. No wonder Stallman has the urge to scream freedom! Me, I just want to scream that I'm wasting my time talking about this.
Have an opinion, sure, but I can see the merit in the BSD license. If you can't see the corresponding merit in the GPL, you are not very sharp.
I would accept promises from companies. I think most are trustworthy enough. But, promising alone is not enough, I want recourse and/or punishment. IRS employees keep getting caught sneaking peeks: the death penalty is what I'd like to see (don't like it? don't peek and even if you are the President (hi Echelon) something they've been known to do) But assuming others aren't that etreme, how about firing, pension loss... something serious. At least tell me what the punishment is. A simpler case to illustrate: I haven't forgiven Real Networks for its spying transgressions, but they could have repaired a lot of trust if they said, "we screwed up, and we are going to delete all the info we grabbed, plus one month worth of all our server logs, and we fired that guy."
A more global pet proposal of mine is this: as a compromise between the privacy nuts and data gulpers: if information about me is stored in a database and includes any sort of address/contact information, then the database owner must tell me once a year what they have on me. It would cost only a small amount per person, and if it does not have that much economic value, don't keep it. Then at least the average person would develop an awareness of what's out there.
they provide the ads for many many many sites. do a view-image on an Altavista ad, for example.
my SETI@home was the one that found it! :)
Yes, we have those concepts. You are unfortunately arguing against yourself. You didn't say "we have those words", because they are just words. You said "concepts" as in ideas and thoughts: you can understand these ideas in the face of imprecise words, and Africans and Native Americans can understand those concepts also with different words.
I'd like to see you walk up to their village and attempt to describe ownership to them.
But according to your argument, language influences thought. So, all we'd need to do is teach them the words, right? That should be easy... but it's wrong.
Grass and green... blue and sky... Instead of 'chief' you have 'one-who-does-good' - think about how different that is from the perception of government as a hierarchy.
Yes, but we have orange oranges. And yellow cowards. Do you think you are influenced by those word/colors? I don't think Native Americans are either. We also have New York... think how different it is from old York, which did not pop into your head till I mentioned it. Words, language... they've nothing to do with thoughts but rather with communication.
By the way, this is all taught in linguistics classes, it's standard science, shoulders of giants, etc. By the way, it just occurred to me that I'm a native American, but I'm just not a Native American. When spoken aloud (the true definition of language anyway, but that's another whole can of worms) you can't tell the difference: the language is not the idea.
With human languages the semantics and primitive data types turn out to be the same. We can see it across the specturm of linguistic categories, particularly if we look at special cases: rhyming, alliteration, stuttering, aphasia (e.g. forgetting the words for different emotions), synonym, homophone, babytalk, ... all of these things exist the same regardless of language. When you look closely, the apparent differences are simply syntactic.
Copyleft stops me from running off as many as I like?
I totally agree with what you meant, and the guy you were responding to should note what you said.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that "free as in speech" is still ambiguous in conveying the sofware concepts: "open" source, and GPL-user vs BSD-vendor freedoms of redistribution. It's easy to conceive of paid source you can't redistribute, free object you can, and source you are free to redistribute as object, and object whose source you are entitled to see.
to what you said about Microsoft's tools I would add, "and used their monopoly power to bundle their incompatible engine into their OSified browser in a way that would deny many many users access to a true Java implementaton."
Thanks, that's funny! Have you ever heard of Yogi Berra, an American baseball player? He's famous for saying things like: "It's deja vu all over again!" Deja vu encore! Perhaps there's a funnier way to translate it?
Sapir-Whorf is wrong. It is very easy to see that language does not determine what or how you think:
Russians have no word for fun? I doubt it! But, if they don't, it means they have no sense of fun. But in that case it's the culture influencing the language, not vice versa. English had no word for chic, but we knew/learned the concept so we borrowed a word from French. Our culture considers French culture to be chic and so do the French. But that's why they had a word for it: that's the culture talking. Eskimos have 32 words for snow (myth, I know) because they need them to succintly describe the snow they encounter. English could add those too, if it needed them, just like cross country skiers quickly learn the names of the different waxes they need to use. It's pretty overwhelming: thinking takes place underneath the veneer of language.
programming languages need not limit what kinds of programs we write
This "string handling in C" counterexample is a small one. Full object-oriented programming is easily accessible in C. When you typedef a struct (let's use "Shape" as the example), include an array "data member" (hint: call it vtable) which is pointers to functions. Use NewShape() instead of malloc to create one, and have NewShape initialize the vtable with pointers to functions like PrintShape. Create a "circle" struct, and have NewCircle first call NewShape, then depending on how you initialize its vtable, you can have inheritance, virtuals, polymorphism, etc. There are small syntactic differences: instead of circle.PrintObj(), use PrintObj(circle), though you could use C's awkward function pointer syntax. Passing the obj as an arg is what C++ does underneath anyway. if you think that this is not OOP, you need to learn to think abstractly. There are some differences of course: this way lacks destructors (like Java) but it can solve the multiple inheritance "problem" by being explicit about the semantics.
the weakness of the analysis in the article can be seen in the table. Look across the columns... object-object-object? That axis has little to distinguish it. Most of what he says is not outright wrong, can even be insightful, but still so much is severely lacking. For example, I understand his "procedural" programming paradigm and why he is tempted to lump fortran and C together, and yet fortran can't conveniently be object oriented in the way that I describe for C.
Thanks for that link! I feel compelled to go over and campaign for any other candidate: Regardless of their motivations, I don't think they are helping. MHO, of course, but I did take the time to read their pages...