If your IS person chucked out the micro or mainframe systems 2 to 5 years ago to replace them with MS NT, that was the time when the problem happened.
One last try: so you're saying that, even though that was the time when the problem happened, I should fire my current IT manager today because he makes the IMO-reasonable risk assessment that shutting down systems for the Y2K rollover is wise?
And please don't make up different scenarios, e.g. just to wiggle out of what you emphatically stated so publically earlier (and see the bottom of my other long post for my opinion of how much damage you're doing the OSS movement with your vicious posts).
Answer my question: are you saying I should fire my Linux-advocating IT manager today because he recommended that, since he couldn't replace all the WNT machines a previous regime installed last year in time for Y2K, they be shut down for the Y2K rollover?
The answer is, of course, yes, you have said that. The only real question is, when will you have the decency to admit that it was an obnoxious, as well as grossly incorrect, thing to say, and apologize to all those IT managers out there you've now insulted by claiming they should be fired for taking reasonable steps to reduce risk of exposure to certain (common!) types of Y2K bugs (the ones most prone to exposure by the rollover itself)?
No, its silly for the following reason: When a company says they are going to do this, its really is an indicator that the CIO (or higher) simply has no faith in his or her IT staff (if you KNEW the system was going to be fine, why shut it down? Wouldn't you want to trumpet to the world how on top of your game you were? And heres the final proof?). Any investor in a company that downs a mission critical systems (or their e-com site) for the roll-over, should pay VERY close attention to that fact because it signals the low faith the board and executives have in the IT staff - and perhaps the board has good reason to not trust their staff (or maybe not).
You've just changed the subject from shutting down any system over Y2K, which is what Bruce had been talking about, to shutting down mission-critical systems. (You add e-com sites to that -- sorry, they aren't necessarily mission-critical.)
Sorry, but perhaps you can see why IT managers don't always place such faith in macho, ego-driven posturing such as yours -- it seems to blind people like you to what is actually being discussed.
After all, I even explicitly wrote this in my post, to which you were replying:
If your systems are specified to be up 7x24, leave 'em up
How are IT managers expected to trust so-called brilliant programmers who can't even read basic stuff like this to guarantee no Y2K bugs in the software they write, especially when posts such as Bruce's, with which yours apparently attempts to agree, are moderated up to the maximum level by fellow programmers? (Maybe the moderation was an attempt to say "hey, this comment is so clueless and comes from such an otherwise-trusted source, everyone should see it", but IIRC it was characterized as "Insightful". I guess/. moderators think hitting IT managers over the head with a 2x4 for taking reasonable precautions against risks constitutes "insight". Perhaps we should hit such moderators over the head with a dictionary?)
I have to admit here I don't know exactly what "mission-critical" means. You and others appear to use it to mean "specified to be available 7x24". It seems to me that a machine that irradiates people to look for problems is also mission-critical. Maybe not, but such a machine, while it need not be running 7x24, and certainly needn't necessarily run during the Y2K rollover, is "critical" in the sense that, if a Y2K-rollover bug could cause it to accidentally irradiate someone with 100x the maximum radiation, that would be Bad. Testing such a machine (or any sufficiently complicated system) to ensure that all of its functions work perfectly, no matter in what combination they're used vis-a-vis the Y2K rollover, is extremely difficult and can be cost-prohibitive. So why should systems that are critical, but needn't be running over the Y2K rollover, be left up, besides for the sort of posturing you appear to advocate?
Add to that your inability to do basic logic -- for example, your use of the "excluded middle", in which you assume that any IT manager who doesn't exhibit 100% (at least some of which is certainly blind) faith in his staff and systems by leaving all systems up and running is therefore indicating no faith (versus 50%, 80%, or 99%) in them -- and I can see why IT managers don't trust Joe Macho Hacker. (I sure as heck don't. Of course, I used to be Joe Macho Hacker, but now I'd rather write software that actually works, if at all.)
Yes, there's a lot of irrational Y2K fear out there, but there are also lots of very loud, but ignorant, programmers who think all Y2K bugs behave as "if Y2K, crash system", when in fact some of them (like most kinds of bugs, e.g. out-of-array-bounds errors, dangling pointer references, etc.) behave in all sorts of other ways, like "if Y2K, introduce subtle internal inconsistency that causes data corruptions that go undetected for awhile".
Basically, whatever a virus can do, a bug can conceivably do, including a Y2K bug. (I haven't even gotten into the issue of viruses that might exist, be dormant, and be triggered only by the transition into Y2K, which might then go on to do much damage. Nor have I raised the issue of yet another class of bug, the hash-computing bug that computes an incorrect hash as of 2000, leading to data corruption, except the initial calculation when the system is brought up is range-checked, so you get a crashed system if you brought your systems down after Y2K, else you get a subtly corrupted one if you left them on during rollover. Etc., etc.)
But, it always embarrasses me seeing programmers who entertain the delusion that they're masters of their domain (often because they get paid so much to do so little, in terms of constructing systems that work) venture to tell people in other disciplines how to do their jobs. E.g. I used to be pretty arrogant about how tech writers should do their jobs, until I became one. (I got to be pretty good, but not by remaining arrogant about how "easy" it was to write good documentation. That was a painful, but worthwhile, experience for me.) It was pretty embarrassing discovering not only how stupidly I had behaved, but how poorly my (former programmer) colleagues continued to behave (as I wrote, initially, for the same company for which I'd done programming), though they improved as the writers they came to respect (such as myself) "educated" them (and not -- normally -- by yelling about how they should be fired for, e.g., not reviewing a draft in time).
Note carefully that it's not that I claim a particular course of action will lead to the lowest Y2K-related risk. I'm happy to admit I don't know enough about anyone's situation to say. I don't know enough to be a good IT manager.
All I'm saying is that there's far more to this issue than the simple-minded "leave your systems up or you're a wimp who should be fired" recommendations by Perens and Python.
Oh, and by the way: last night my wife encountered what is probably a date-subtraction bug on our old Mac SE system. It runs Mac OS 5, I believe (no balloon help), she was running MacMoney 3.02 (IIRC), and had reports printed by it printing off in the background. At midnight, the system completely froze up on her. She rebooted, set the clock back from 2000 (which shows up as 1/1/0 on the control panel) to 1999-12-31, and finished printing stuff off.
This morning, she booted up, MacMoney worked fine, modulo a probably-Y2K-related problem with selected a date range in a custom report, and printing worked fine also.
In other words, we got bit by a date-subtraction bug that doesn't show up when the system is off over Y2K.
(Yes, we "shouldn't" be running such old systems. The fact that we are, despite our collective know-how, suggests that many IT managers are indeed wise to leave systems off during Y2K rollover. I didn't shut down my Linux systems, of course, and they're working fine, both PII and UltraSparc-1. I mean, hey, if programmers were as brilliant as some seem to think they are, why do we have to replace our systems every couple of years anyway? I'm still driving my 1983 Camaro Berlinetta, why shouldn't computers built in 1983 continue to be used, if they do the job?)
The saddest thing about these anti-IT-manager posts, especially Bruce's, is that they'll make it that much harder for the rest of us to convince IT managers worldwide that they should, once the critical time period ends (say, within a month or so), sit down, analyze how much $$/time/worry was expended on proprietary (e.g. Microsoft) software vs. open-source (e.g. GNU/Linux) software, and use that to guide them regarding future software acquisitions. That would be much easier if there weren't now this significant public record of Open Source(TM) advocates loudly claiming IT managers should be fired for what amounts to making reasonable risk-management decisions. I hope that I, as a comparatively minor player in the OS movement, can offset this somewhat by having added my opinion to this same record (and I'm grateful to/. for allowing this sort of thing, vs. being a site that allows only the "annointed" to pop off about whatever they like, without feedback).
Well, heh, yes, but maybe not in this case. Shutting down a computer accidentally shouldn't be a disaster, and corrupting DNS tables shouldn't be the typical result.
So, in essence, they learned a lesson (one hopes) from this experience, and it happened at a time that people were, relatively speaking, more tolerant of such problems.
Kinda like, if you wanna tweak your shower head, sure, it's better to leave well enough alone, but, given that you're going to do it anyway, would you rather do it while wearing overalls and sporting a beltful of tools during an afternoon off, or while naked and covered with suds 30 minutes before you have to show up for work?
I mean, think about what happens if something does go wrong....
you already had a reason to find a new IS person before Y2K came around.
Ah, so, in your expert, or at least extremely loudly expressed, opinion, if I'd replaced my IT department head four weeks ago with a Linux expert, said "replace all the MS systems with Linux in time for Y2K", he said "can't do it, boss, maybe in six months", I said "what'll you do for Y2K", and he said "shut MS systems down for a few hours then reboot, among other things"...
...I should fire him?
Sheesh. Gotta agree with that other guy -- you don't seem to know what you're talking about, and, worse, you seem to think you do. That's a combination that's very hard to respect.
Uh, guys, what most or all of you seem to be missing is that there's a whole class of (Y2K) bug that starts with miscalculating elapsed time from some kind of wall-clock times using only dynamic memories (i.e. times not saved between reboots).
Ideally, all Y2K (and other) bugs have been found and fixed, but assuming that they have is the disease of the modern computer professional -- the sort of person for whom the famous quote about programmers vs. builders vs. woodpeckers was invented.
So, you've got a choice. Leave the systems running over Y2K (my personal preference), which risks hitting that particular class of bug. The results could be reasonably catastrophic, depending on all sorts of factors (and I've certainly seen plenty of such results from simple bugs like this), but you get that extra, what, 1 hour of uptime? Or shut the system down and avoid that class of bug entirely.
Downsides, though: that sort of bug isn't necessarily local-time based -- it might be GMT-based; and there's a (my-guess-much-smaller) class of bug that prevents systems booting shortly after Y2K but doesn't affect their running through it. (I've seen non-time-related bugs like this.)
So it boils down to a simple choice. If your systems are specified to be up 7x24, leave 'em up (unless you know they'll fail over Y2K, of course, and can't do anything about it).
Otherwise, it's not a big problem for the systems to be down for an hour or two and skip a whole class of bug potentially biting.
After all, it's already been pointed out that systems go down ("DoS") due to power outages and other things not Y2K-related. Why shouldn't that lead one to the opposite conclusion for which these assertions have been intended, and accept that another hour or so downtime, especially in light of the fact that the systems will be least likely to be used at that time, isn't going to hurt anyone any more, and probably less, than any other outage?
Next point: rare activities, like doing incremental backups, since they invoke rarely-executed and rarely-seen code, are more likely to contain hidden Y2K bugs, perhaps including some not necessarily visible during certain forms of testing.
Given that, it's reasonable to do a "final Y1K" backup, right?
Now, as soon as Y2K rolls around, do another backup, then carefully verify all backups (perhaps moreso than usual).
Only problem -- what about transactions entered into the system, say by "enthusiastic" employees, between the last Y1K backup and the first Y2K backup, if that backup fails and the system gets corrupted?
Since that's more predictable (Y2K, after all) then any other random outage, it's not unreasonable to do the final Y1K backup with the system effectively shut down to further transactions.
That way, there is much less risk of lost transactions due to Y2K failures in rarely-executed code.
It simply is not stupid to shut down systems over Y2K, if that's what a reasonable analysis of the overall situation suggests. My wife's facility is doing this even as we speak (she's not the IT manager, but he works for her, and we just visited the site). Yes, I had an urge to say "that's stupid", and 20 years ago, when I was less experienced and less able to rationally assess risk, I would have.
Fortunately, I know better now.
I am concerned about how much hysteria might result from people reporting downed web sites in the early hours of Y2K, due to widespread use of the shutdown strategy.
But I'd rather people think, for a few hours, that Y2K bugs themselves shut these systems down than for actual Y2K bugs to cause real problems just because some overly macho IT managers decided to leave some non-critical systems on through Y2K.
And, really, would anyone here claiming this shutdown strategy is stupid (hi, Bruce!;-) prefer that the world's nuclear arsenal be left on over Y2K, instead of being shut down and rebooted, on the theory that someone might want to use it? (Okay, that's a loaded question...sure wouldn't want to announce to the world that the USA's arsenal will be off-line for two hours starting at Y2K....;-)
Shutting systems down over Y2K. It's not what Joe Macho Hacker would do, but it's reasonably sane. And leaving it off permanently, if it's running any version of Windows, is especially sane. (I was watching my wife's organization actually shut down one of its few remaining VAX 6000 machines, permanently, while I was there tonight, by the way. It took me back a few years seeing the VMS diagnostics on the screen. Though, back when I actually worked there, their main computer was running TOPS-10....)
Most people can accept the fact that the 20th century is the 1900's.
You just nailed it, highlighting (inadvertently?) the contradiction inherent in the two numbering systems (the older being origin-1-based, the newer origin-0-based).
Specifically, while you're right that people (mostly) "get" that the 20th century consists mostly of years labeled 19xx...
...you're also right that people seem to think the century's last year is 1999, not 2000! ("...the 1900s" referring to 1900-1999.)
Personally, I prefer origin-0-based numbering, and don't really mind when people refer to a decade as ending in an xxx9-numbered year, as long as they don't call it, say, the 199th Decade.
The problem with this comes when the same people then want to talk about decades v. centuries v. millenia. It makes sense that the year the ends a given millenium also ends a given century and a given decade. But if you've been saying decades end in xxx9 all along, you're in trouble when the official (Western) millennium ends in xxx0 (ditto for the end of the century).
I wonder if this is the problem The Weather Channel has run into, for example? They're running "storm of the century" shows, like most everyone else, but you'd think they'd honor the Naval Observatory more than hewing to common perceptions (well, maybe not), but if they've been treating decades as ending in xxx9, well, there's no really good solution. (I'd prefer they do end-of-decade shows now, end-of-century/millennium shows next year, but that is a bit strained.)
Oh well. At any given moment, we're caught up in three millenial events: living in one millenium, ending another, and starting yet another. Live In The Now. Drink In The Light. Double-Click God's Button.;-)
Amazing! I was just watching Headline News, and the anchor, Linda Stouffer, explained (finally; though I predicted this would happen, I didn't think it'd start until after Y2K) that this isn't really the start of "the" Millennium, due to the way years are numbered. She said "but who's counting, right?", or something like that.
(Yes, I was actually listening to her, not just watching her lips move. Maybe that's because she was wearing a bit too much makeup today, so looking less than totally supremely gorgeous.;-)
So, to those of you who, despite well-knowing that the official (according to e.g. the US Naval Observatory) start of the third millennium is 2001-01-01, not 2000-01-01, argue that we should just "accept" what the mass media (and ignorant masses) tell us what they think is the beginning of "the" Millennium, get ready to be made complete fools out of your chosen leaders, who'll happily spend much of 2000 claiming that, no, really, 1999 wasn't the last year of the century/millennium, 2000 is, so everybody pay attention as we run all these new shows about the end of the millennium again.
Yes, it's an arbitrary date. Yes, it was the result of a (probably) failed attempt to base the origin date (0001-01-01) on the birth of Jesus. Yes, really, people shouldn't get so excited about mere number-based events.
But, the one thing that should have been true about "the" Millennium we all get to transition into is that it happens only once in a lifetime. Now it'll happen at least twice, three times if you account for at least one "real" birth of Jesus. (Hardly important, since we've accepted the distinction between 01-01 and 12-25 for decades, at least, but there are those who believe the most important millennial numbering begins with the actual birth of Jesus. They probably care little for our artificial date numbering, or 12-25, anyway.)
Personally, I don't care about such events. I don't really care about things like birthdays or such, except to the extent others wish to celebrate them. I'll go to some First Night (Boston) shows because I want to go to the shows, not because I want to "celebrate" New Year's per se. (A friend is part of a precision-skating group to skate on Frog Pond, for example.)
Yes, perhaps the best thing to do to people who insist of having a single Millennium transition to celebrate is to add to the confusion by first saying "yes, go ahead, believe it's 2000-01-01" and then saying "hey, y'know, it's really 2001-01-01", but those of us who actually care about preserving some semblance of a useful international language, it would have been nice to have fewer supposedly informed, intelligent people advocating the complete elimination of the one aspect of the concept "ring in the Millennium" that everyone could have agreed upon: that it happens only once every thousand years.
And, to Linda Stouffer and others in the media who say "but who's counting, right?": you are, you have been, and you've been representing yourselves as doing it for us so you can convince us to spend tons of hours watching all your end-of-the-second-Millennium shows. And now you want to pull an Emily Litella and say "Never mind!", as if you didn't know all along??
My point was more along the lines of, while a condom defends against the so-called inevitability of having sex (which in my experience is an overblown myth, but anyway...), a gun defends against the so-called inevitably of being threatened with physical violence.
Further, we have about as much chance of taking away all guns from the American people as we do of getting them to stop having sex outside of marriage.
Well, I guess this is really getting off-topic, and I've lost track of what my point really was. I think it was really more along the lines that, if our society decided it feared students being shot at by adults (drug dealers etc.) "invading" schools, the self-righteous among us might force children to learn to use guns and might even hand out guns, just as they did both with condoms, all without the parents' permission.
IMO teaching responsible use of condoms and guns is equally important, even when both abstinence and non-violence are taught at the same time. I think they all should be taught, as permitted by the parents. Whether they should all be learned, I dunno...I have no clue how to use a gun, and hardly much more of one as to how to use a condom, though I'm much less concerned about my failing to use the latter properly if I was to take up both "habits"!;-)
Now, if only we could add to the list of things kids should be taught to use responsibly items like: C++, Perl, and Slashdot...!
You make two great points about people blaming both guns (for violence) and condoms (for sex).
Put together, though, it occurred to me how ironic it was that, while the availability of both guns and condoms clearly does involve a statistical increase in the chances of something going wrong (a gun being mistakenly fired, a condom failing or being used incorrectly), resulting in injury (transmission of sexual disease for a condom) or death (ditto, or an abortion later on)...
...many of the same people who campaign against the mere availability of guns also are (or were, 10 or so years ago) campaigning for forcing condoms on children whose parents were doing everything they could to prevent their children from engaging in sexual activity.
Imagine trying to teach your child non-violence as a lifestyle, and having the local school give him real, live guns and tell him "violence is okay, it's in your basic nature, you're gonna do it, you might as well do it right" against your will!
Food for thought. Not very nutritious, perhaps - just a lite snack.;-)
(Personally, I'd like to think children could, as of a certain age - say 11 or 12 - be capable of knowing how to use both condoms and guns while also thoroughly understanding the reasons they should, themselves, not use them except in very specific instances. But though I'd like to think that, I'm not nearly confident enough to oppress others by forcing their children to learn all about condom or gun use.)
My point is that MS is not even hurting until their stock or bottom line starts to show it.
I'd tend to agree.
Still, I wonder how well MSFT can do retaining enthusiastic, high-energy employees, as well as increasingly-tech-savvy investors, when everyone sees the free-software community, among others not part and parcel of the MSFT camp, outperforming MSFT in the stock market, and (maybe?) in the trend of capturing market share in new, even some existing, markets.
It is my belief few people are enthusiastic about the MSFT world because of the beauty, elegance, and simplicity of its products, as has been the case for Apple and some others.
So they're mostly really in it for the money, for the fame, for the perception that they're on the "cutting edge" of things.
Seems to me most of that has been going down the tubes lately. I think of my relative, who someday might have her grandchildren ask "how did you get so wealthy?", answering "I worked on a little product called Microsoft Internet Explorer, including a stint as a Program Manager", and hearing them say "oh, right, that's the product Microsoft created to destroy Netscape". Compared to being able to say "I worked on GNU/Linux software for years, up through the point at which the stock market finally took note"...?
Seems like a decision fewer and fewer cutting-edge-type people will make in favor of helping MSFT maintain its ham-handed dominance.
And once the market begins to see such "talent" no longer defaulting to employment by MSFT, and its potential customers see that too, how long can it maintain its earnings or its P/E??
"Check the stock price"?? Which stock would you rather have bought, say, last August -- MSFT or RHAT??
(RHAT closed today at 213.5, was as low as 45 or so when it opened, $14 was the IPO price; MSFT has been hovering around 85-95 for what seems like ages.)
I can't figure out why so many investors want in on RHAT, and I've been happily using (and developing for) GNU/Linux since 1992 or so.
But this huge NASDAQ run-up of late doesn't seem to have swept MSFT along in its wake -- it's almost as if people don't consider MSFT to be a likely beneficiary of the continuing Internet revolution!? Weird.
(Disclaimer: a relative of mine works at MSFT as Lead PM for MSIE.)
I would much sooner applaud the work of people who support Linux WITHOUT seeing any money any return.
You would or you have? Put your money, support, and effort where your mouth is!!
Meanwhile, many free-software hackers are grateful to have been thoughtfully included in RHAT's IPO, something they need not have done to maintain their "profit motive"...
...unless you consider their "greed" to require satiating by, among other things, keeping the enthusiasm among free-software developers, upon whom they depend, very high.
And, if you do so consider, perhaps you can see why it's important to applaud Red Hat when they do things right, as defined by that community.
Because without that feedback, they'll end up having only the bottom line to look at.
(Maybe that's indeed all they're looking at right now. But if they make a series of missteps as viewed by the community that supports them, then see their bottom line take a hit, it'll be easier for them if there's a good, public record showing just when and why things went wrong by that community, and they'll start paying more attention to it then. But IMO they seem to be paying attention already.)
If Intel funds Linux/*BSD development to improve their performance on Intels, why complain? Your Intels will run faster. If you want non-Intel hardware to run faster too, get the manufacturers of those chips to pony up some $$ as well.
Or leave that to the hobbyists (not necessarily a bad choice!).
In a free-software world, there's little point in complaining about someone investing $$ to improve software, even if it's for just one platform.
It's not the money that'll hurt the community, it's the poor-quality, non-portable software that might result from that investment. But if the community doesn't defend itself against that, it's going to hurt itself anyway, whether for $$ or to pursue the latest "in" platform.
That's exactly the thinking I was trying to suggest represents a limited, Internet-centric mindset, just as "If I want food, I'll go out and get some" is a limited, non-Internet-centric mindset.
I mean, yes, it's very nice that the Internet (among many other enabling technologies) allow us to conduct ourselves in such a goal-driven way:
"When I want to find bugs, I'll run tests."
"When I want to write docs, I'll work on that."
"When I want to waste some time, I'll read/.".
Great. The question is, are you limiting your life experience to whatever comes purely as a result of goal-driven activity? If so, why?
20 years ago I fantasized about having the ability to conduct myself (especially in terms of my interests) in the goal-driven way you describe, and now I have that ability.
Yes, it's nice. But, frankly, it's more rewarding to run into a friend in an unexpected place (especially if the friend has just been walked out on by a spouse, something that actually happened once), to take care of some friends' children for awhile so the parents can "play", and to do all sorts of other things in situations that can never be adequately emulated by technology.
Though, I do see why having a high-priority project that takes precedence over these sorts of things can make one very grateful for the ability to insulate oneself from unplanned outside influences. That's probably why I avoid taking on such projects these days -- "been there, done that" -- but I do still appreciate having the freedom to do so, and might exercise it in the future.
But I don't think the time I spent in blinders-on-full-speed-ahead hack mode prepared me to enjoy (and especially give back) life's simpler pleasures. Like many on-line venues,/. just hints at (and can provide a helpful training-ground for) some of those pleasures. All the technologies in the world can never replace all of them, so it's best to keep practicing the real thing, too.
And just as Dune's Paul was taught that fighting is a skill one must be able to deploy when not in the mood, so is real life. So it's wise to practice it at times you think you'd rather be hacking.
Several responses have indicated a strong desire among some to "save time" by not having to go shopping.
Well, yes, there are times I'd find that mighty convenient (especially in bad weather), as would my wife.
But give up the whole shopping experience? Ditto for other activities that can, at least theoretically, be carried out on a future Internet?
No Way.
I've run into to many friends and acquaintances in the supermarket (despite my relatively low lifetime frequency of shopping), and, hey, I met my wife in church, so "on-line worship" doesn't strike me as a wonderful alternative to being There, either.
The great thing about the Internet is that it opens up a world of possibilities for nearly everybody, vis-a-vis their often-limited assumptions about What Can Happen.
The dangerous thing about the Internet is that too many people will close their mind to the world of possibilities inherent in the everyday mundane activities of real life.
There's simply no substitute for the kind of playful shoulder-punching in the church foyer my wife and I engaged in while discussing some church business, a simple-but-effective precursor to the mating ritual society calls "dating". Even a Star Trek holodeck could not possibly recreate the casual trust and tenderness expressed by that sort of interaction -- forget about today's or tomorrow's real-world Virtual Reality.
Never underestimate the sublime joy of finding an attractive member of the desired gender in a supermarket, assuming a confused look (which is far more easily practiced off line than on), and plaintively asking, "Excuse me, but where's the toast?"
Nor should one underestimate the value of a warm smile to someone else, or to yourself -- or of a "have a nice day" -- when it's obviously not simply part of someone's.sig.
Yeah, I'll believe we're breaking the atomic barrier to increase processor speeds when I see Gillette come out with a new shaving cream named "Quantum Foam".;-)
...which is hard to admit, seeing as everybody else says they hated it.
I barely tolerated it at first, but seeing the longer cut a couple of times on TV gave me more appreciation for it vis-a-vis the book (which I love and have read many times).
Can't remember the original version so well anymore, but it seemed as though some of my favorite scenes from the book weren't in it, but were in the long version.
The long version also gave me much more appreciation for Kyle MacLachlan (sp?) in the lead role -- who I thought was a lousy choice at first.
I even have the soundtrack, and enjoy most of that (despite not having heard anything else by Toto I thought was worth buying).
So while a new series on Sci-Fi might be a great thing, I don't feel it'll automatically be better than the movie, especially given some of the other great aspects of the movie (e.g. some of the "lesser" roles -- gotta admit, it's a bit strange watching Patrick Stewart in Dune now compared to before his doing ST:TNG).
Wish 'em all well, though, and might even tune in, since I can get Sci-Fi (though with some hassle, as it's scrambled, requiring me to actually use my cable box to tune it in instead of my VCR/TV setup...thank goodness for the convenient A/B switch I finally installed, mainly to watch MST3K).
Red Hat won't be "forced" by shareholders to switch over to developing proprietary variants of Linux, GNU, etc. for two reasons I can think of:
One, the shareholders have already bought into the free-software (aka Open Source(TM)) model. See the RHAT prospectus and other info. That public info would have to be changed, requiring agreement among the stockholders and board members.
In the past, GPL opponents have sometimes argued that corporations wouldn't touch GPL'ed software with a ten-foot pole (especially wouldn't distribute software under the GPL) because it'd violate the trust they have with stockholders to maximize corporate value.
Now we have a company that makes that kind of maximization based on GPL'ed (and other freely-licensed) software part and parcel of its raison d'etre.
In effect, this means anybody wanting to invest in a company that makes money off of proprietary software won't invest in RHAT. Without such investors, there won't be the pressure to become a proprietary software company. (Compare S.u.S.E., Caldera, etc., companies that must eternally judge which software is "worthy" as proprietary versus free.)
Two, the only tantalizing aspect of twisting RHAT's mission is to try to extract profits by proprietizing software RHAT already owns. Such as RPM.
Now, how valuable could a proprietary RPM or similar really be? Remember, the programmers who people point to as new RHAT employees and as those who might assist this proprietization have already established their credentials as free-software, even GPL, enthusiasts.
For RHAT to convince them to go the proprietary route, it'd have to promise more money, fame, and/or hack value. They've already got money and fame, and the hack value of proprietary software is lower anyway. Further, the ability of such a programmer to leave RHAT and get good work outside goes down, not up, when that programmer's work becomes enshrouded by the proprietary veil.
So, only unenlightened-suit-type programmers are likely to take that bait, meanwhile, the big-name, free-software enthusiasts already there would see what was happening and probably leave like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
So, ultimately, for RHAT to go proprietary would be a huge mistake for its stockholders, who have a much easier approach to investing in proprietary software: buy MSFT.
The most likely way RHAT would be abused to injure our community would be if, say, MSFT bought it up wholesale and shut down as much competitive free-software stuff as it could. How successful could that strategy really be? Very Un, IMO, for many reasons, such as the above, and here we can be grateful for RHAT's insane market cap. If MSFT couldn't do it in one fell swoop now, how could a loosely organized bunch of RHAT stockholders manage to do it down the road? I don't see it.
The five-apes analogy is amusing, but works on humans only insofar as they are as dumb as apes.
Humans tell each other stories, which apes cannot do. That's why we have the Bible, for example. Remember: even those five ignorant apes are avoiding what could be a dangerous thing still, going after the banana. How well do we listen to the wisdom of our ancient ancestors, who often had much more harsh conditions in which to discover what rules of behavior do and don't work in growing a society, a city, or a country to a ripe old age and success for its inhabitants? At least the apes have the excuse of not being able to read.
The other point is about classism. Yes, it is part of the overall picture. I wonder how much our "progressive" tax system, complete with constant complaints about "tax cuts for the wealthy" as if they were a class to be despised, and the implication that a "tax-paying citizen" is perhaps more valuable (to some, anyway) because he pays more taxes, contributes to the culture's acceptance of classism? Ditto racism vis-a-vis laws effectively mandating racial quotas.
I mean, yes, these may have their place, but don't ignore the effect they have in continuing the very "ignorant thinking" about which so many rightly complain.
Um, if the government decides you no longer have those rights or recourses, it can do what no corporation can do -- legally gun you down in the street, imprison you, take all your property, etc.
Corporations can do this only via government action or inaction.
Therefore it's best to limit government's role to holding the reins of violence in its firm hand, and best to implement government as a simple, straightforward organization with a clear mandate from the people, and staff it with only those who have the highest honor and integrity.
Yes, that's a bit trite, I know. Many important truths are trite, I think.
...have, based on all the disagreements I've read so far, shown far more willingness and flexibility in understanding my points (and I hope you'll agree I've shown the same towards yours) than I might have expected...
...having read that Al Gore "cannot comprehend" why a person like myself would have the views I do.
So, please ask yourselves why you would support a man for President who cannot even comprehend someone like me, when y'all have no problems doing so, no problems treating my posts with respect!
Don't we deserve a President who is at least as respectful of disagreements as y'all are?
(Do we even have such a candidate? GWB seems to tolerate disagreement better than most anyone in the present White House, but his mockery of Carla Fay Tucker struck me as unworthy of a Presidential candidate. Then again, I'm using Reagan as a standard, not Clinton, which is hardly fair!)
"Threatening other people" is exactly what all criminal law is about.
The crime has already been committed, and punishment is almost never an attempt to reverse its effects.
Society therefore punishes to relieve other members of society of feeling they must take independent action to counter what they might see as a continuing threat posed by the accused.
So I still don't see how a murderer threatens other people more because the murder yelled "die, white trash" (for example) while pulling the trigger as compared to yelling "die, cburley!"
Yet the latter is clearly not a "hate crime", whereas the former is apparently considered so.
Would you really feel that much less protected if my murderer had yelled the former than the latter, assuming you're white?
If so -- if you and many others feel that you'd have to take the law into your own hands to provide your own security in such a case -- then hate crime legislation might make sense, not because it's "right", but because it could do the important job of keeping people taking the law into their own hands.
But such vigilantism was once the scourge of the Old South (KKK etc.), and I see hate crime legislation as just promoting it as legislatively valid in a time when some minorities happen to have some cult status. When that status goes away, as it will, the legislation will be turned against them. I think society is better off in the long run if we set a strong precedent for firm fairness in our criminal system, by excluding the finer points of minority status.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet Microsoft executives are hopping mad!
This oughta set a record for beta-test volunteer sign-ups!
BSOD => BrewSki Of Death
Suggested motto: "When every day is just another excuse to crash!"
Suggested motto: "Had it with computer viruses? Behold the joy of yeast!"
Suggested motto: "Windows 99: start me up, and you'll definitely never stop!"
Suggested motto: "Our beer will make a grown woman cry, too!"
Suggested motto: "What, do you want to `go', today?"
(BTW, "hopping"...hops...get it?)
Now I'm looking forward to the press release from Microsoft claiming that the mere existence of "Windows 99" beer shows that it's not a monopoly....
One last try: so you're saying that, even though that was the time when the problem happened, I should fire my current IT manager today because he makes the IMO-reasonable risk assessment that shutting down systems for the Y2K rollover is wise?
And please don't make up different scenarios, e.g. just to wiggle out of what you emphatically stated so publically earlier (and see the bottom of my other long post for my opinion of how much damage you're doing the OSS movement with your vicious posts).
Answer my question: are you saying I should fire my Linux-advocating IT manager today because he recommended that, since he couldn't replace all the WNT machines a previous regime installed last year in time for Y2K, they be shut down for the Y2K rollover?
The answer is, of course, yes, you have said that. The only real question is, when will you have the decency to admit that it was an obnoxious, as well as grossly incorrect, thing to say, and apologize to all those IT managers out there you've now insulted by claiming they should be fired for taking reasonable steps to reduce risk of exposure to certain (common!) types of Y2K bugs (the ones most prone to exposure by the rollover itself)?
You've just changed the subject from shutting down any system over Y2K, which is what Bruce had been talking about, to shutting down mission-critical systems. (You add e-com sites to that -- sorry, they aren't necessarily mission-critical.)
Sorry, but perhaps you can see why IT managers don't always place such faith in macho, ego-driven posturing such as yours -- it seems to blind people like you to what is actually being discussed.
After all, I even explicitly wrote this in my post, to which you were replying:
How are IT managers expected to trust so-called brilliant programmers who can't even read basic stuff like this to guarantee no Y2K bugs in the software they write, especially when posts such as Bruce's, with which yours apparently attempts to agree, are moderated up to the maximum level by fellow programmers? (Maybe the moderation was an attempt to say "hey, this comment is so clueless and comes from such an otherwise-trusted source, everyone should see it", but IIRC it was characterized as "Insightful". I guess /. moderators think hitting IT managers over the head with a 2x4 for taking reasonable precautions against risks constitutes "insight". Perhaps we should hit such moderators over the head with a dictionary?)
I have to admit here I don't know exactly what "mission-critical" means. You and others appear to use it to mean "specified to be available 7x24". It seems to me that a machine that irradiates people to look for problems is also mission-critical. Maybe not, but such a machine, while it need not be running 7x24, and certainly needn't necessarily run during the Y2K rollover, is "critical" in the sense that, if a Y2K-rollover bug could cause it to accidentally irradiate someone with 100x the maximum radiation, that would be Bad. Testing such a machine (or any sufficiently complicated system) to ensure that all of its functions work perfectly, no matter in what combination they're used vis-a-vis the Y2K rollover, is extremely difficult and can be cost-prohibitive. So why should systems that are critical, but needn't be running over the Y2K rollover, be left up, besides for the sort of posturing you appear to advocate?
Add to that your inability to do basic logic -- for example, your use of the "excluded middle", in which you assume that any IT manager who doesn't exhibit 100% (at least some of which is certainly blind) faith in his staff and systems by leaving all systems up and running is therefore indicating no faith (versus 50%, 80%, or 99%) in them -- and I can see why IT managers don't trust Joe Macho Hacker. (I sure as heck don't. Of course, I used to be Joe Macho Hacker, but now I'd rather write software that actually works, if at all.)
Yes, there's a lot of irrational Y2K fear out there, but there are also lots of very loud, but ignorant, programmers who think all Y2K bugs behave as "if Y2K, crash system", when in fact some of them (like most kinds of bugs, e.g. out-of-array-bounds errors, dangling pointer references, etc.) behave in all sorts of other ways, like "if Y2K, introduce subtle internal inconsistency that causes data corruptions that go undetected for awhile".
Basically, whatever a virus can do, a bug can conceivably do, including a Y2K bug. (I haven't even gotten into the issue of viruses that might exist, be dormant, and be triggered only by the transition into Y2K, which might then go on to do much damage. Nor have I raised the issue of yet another class of bug, the hash-computing bug that computes an incorrect hash as of 2000, leading to data corruption, except the initial calculation when the system is brought up is range-checked, so you get a crashed system if you brought your systems down after Y2K, else you get a subtly corrupted one if you left them on during rollover. Etc., etc.)
But, it always embarrasses me seeing programmers who entertain the delusion that they're masters of their domain (often because they get paid so much to do so little, in terms of constructing systems that work) venture to tell people in other disciplines how to do their jobs. E.g. I used to be pretty arrogant about how tech writers should do their jobs, until I became one. (I got to be pretty good, but not by remaining arrogant about how "easy" it was to write good documentation. That was a painful, but worthwhile, experience for me.) It was pretty embarrassing discovering not only how stupidly I had behaved, but how poorly my (former programmer) colleagues continued to behave (as I wrote, initially, for the same company for which I'd done programming), though they improved as the writers they came to respect (such as myself) "educated" them (and not -- normally -- by yelling about how they should be fired for, e.g., not reviewing a draft in time).
Note carefully that it's not that I claim a particular course of action will lead to the lowest Y2K-related risk. I'm happy to admit I don't know enough about anyone's situation to say. I don't know enough to be a good IT manager.
All I'm saying is that there's far more to this issue than the simple-minded "leave your systems up or you're a wimp who should be fired" recommendations by Perens and Python.
Oh, and by the way: last night my wife encountered what is probably a date-subtraction bug on our old Mac SE system. It runs Mac OS 5, I believe (no balloon help), she was running MacMoney 3.02 (IIRC), and had reports printed by it printing off in the background. At midnight, the system completely froze up on her. She rebooted, set the clock back from 2000 (which shows up as 1/1/0 on the control panel) to 1999-12-31, and finished printing stuff off.
This morning, she booted up, MacMoney worked fine, modulo a probably-Y2K-related problem with selected a date range in a custom report, and printing worked fine also.
In other words, we got bit by a date-subtraction bug that doesn't show up when the system is off over Y2K.
(Yes, we "shouldn't" be running such old systems. The fact that we are, despite our collective know-how, suggests that many IT managers are indeed wise to leave systems off during Y2K rollover. I didn't shut down my Linux systems, of course, and they're working fine, both PII and UltraSparc-1. I mean, hey, if programmers were as brilliant as some seem to think they are, why do we have to replace our systems every couple of years anyway? I'm still driving my 1983 Camaro Berlinetta, why shouldn't computers built in 1983 continue to be used, if they do the job?)
The saddest thing about these anti-IT-manager posts, especially Bruce's, is that they'll make it that much harder for the rest of us to convince IT managers worldwide that they should, once the critical time period ends (say, within a month or so), sit down, analyze how much $$/time/worry was expended on proprietary (e.g. Microsoft) software vs. open-source (e.g. GNU/Linux) software, and use that to guide them regarding future software acquisitions. That would be much easier if there weren't now this significant public record of Open Source(TM) advocates loudly claiming IT managers should be fired for what amounts to making reasonable risk-management decisions. I hope that I, as a comparatively minor player in the OS movement, can offset this somewhat by having added my opinion to this same record (and I'm grateful to /. for allowing this sort of thing, vs. being a site that allows only the "annointed" to pop off about whatever they like, without feedback).
Well, heh, yes, but maybe not in this case. Shutting down a computer accidentally shouldn't be a disaster, and corrupting DNS tables shouldn't be the typical result.
So, in essence, they learned a lesson (one hopes) from this experience, and it happened at a time that people were, relatively speaking, more tolerant of such problems.
Kinda like, if you wanna tweak your shower head, sure, it's better to leave well enough alone, but, given that you're going to do it anyway, would you rather do it while wearing overalls and sporting a beltful of tools during an afternoon off, or while naked and covered with suds 30 minutes before you have to show up for work?
I mean, think about what happens if something does go wrong....
Ah, so, in your expert, or at least extremely loudly expressed, opinion, if I'd replaced my IT department head four weeks ago with a Linux expert, said "replace all the MS systems with Linux in time for Y2K", he said "can't do it, boss, maybe in six months", I said "what'll you do for Y2K", and he said "shut MS systems down for a few hours then reboot, among other things"...
Sheesh. Gotta agree with that other guy -- you don't seem to know what you're talking about, and, worse, you seem to think you do. That's a combination that's very hard to respect.
Ideally, all Y2K (and other) bugs have been found and fixed, but assuming that they have is the disease of the modern computer professional -- the sort of person for whom the famous quote about programmers vs. builders vs. woodpeckers was invented.
So, you've got a choice. Leave the systems running over Y2K (my personal preference), which risks hitting that particular class of bug. The results could be reasonably catastrophic, depending on all sorts of factors (and I've certainly seen plenty of such results from simple bugs like this), but you get that extra, what, 1 hour of uptime? Or shut the system down and avoid that class of bug entirely.
Downsides, though: that sort of bug isn't necessarily local-time based -- it might be GMT-based; and there's a (my-guess-much-smaller) class of bug that prevents systems booting shortly after Y2K but doesn't affect their running through it. (I've seen non-time-related bugs like this.)
So it boils down to a simple choice. If your systems are specified to be up 7x24, leave 'em up (unless you know they'll fail over Y2K, of course, and can't do anything about it).
Otherwise, it's not a big problem for the systems to be down for an hour or two and skip a whole class of bug potentially biting.
After all, it's already been pointed out that systems go down ("DoS") due to power outages and other things not Y2K-related. Why shouldn't that lead one to the opposite conclusion for which these assertions have been intended, and accept that another hour or so downtime, especially in light of the fact that the systems will be least likely to be used at that time, isn't going to hurt anyone any more, and probably less, than any other outage?
Next point: rare activities, like doing incremental backups, since they invoke rarely-executed and rarely-seen code, are more likely to contain hidden Y2K bugs, perhaps including some not necessarily visible during certain forms of testing.
Given that, it's reasonable to do a "final Y1K" backup, right?
Now, as soon as Y2K rolls around, do another backup, then carefully verify all backups (perhaps moreso than usual).
Only problem -- what about transactions entered into the system, say by "enthusiastic" employees, between the last Y1K backup and the first Y2K backup, if that backup fails and the system gets corrupted?
Since that's more predictable (Y2K, after all) then any other random outage, it's not unreasonable to do the final Y1K backup with the system effectively shut down to further transactions.
That way, there is much less risk of lost transactions due to Y2K failures in rarely-executed code.
It simply is not stupid to shut down systems over Y2K, if that's what a reasonable analysis of the overall situation suggests. My wife's facility is doing this even as we speak (she's not the IT manager, but he works for her, and we just visited the site). Yes, I had an urge to say "that's stupid", and 20 years ago, when I was less experienced and less able to rationally assess risk, I would have.
Fortunately, I know better now.
I am concerned about how much hysteria might result from people reporting downed web sites in the early hours of Y2K, due to widespread use of the shutdown strategy.
But I'd rather people think, for a few hours, that Y2K bugs themselves shut these systems down than for actual Y2K bugs to cause real problems just because some overly macho IT managers decided to leave some non-critical systems on through Y2K.
And, really, would anyone here claiming this shutdown strategy is stupid (hi, Bruce! ;-) prefer that the world's nuclear arsenal be left on over Y2K, instead of being shut down and rebooted, on the theory that someone might want to use it? (Okay, that's a loaded question...sure wouldn't want to announce to the world that the USA's arsenal will be off-line for two hours starting at Y2K.... ;-)
Shutting systems down over Y2K. It's not what Joe Macho Hacker would do, but it's reasonably sane. And leaving it off permanently, if it's running any version of Windows, is especially sane. (I was watching my wife's organization actually shut down one of its few remaining VAX 6000 machines, permanently, while I was there tonight, by the way. It took me back a few years seeing the VMS diagnostics on the screen. Though, back when I actually worked there, their main computer was running TOPS-10....)
You just nailed it, highlighting (inadvertently?) the contradiction inherent in the two numbering systems (the older being origin-1-based, the newer origin-0-based).
Specifically, while you're right that people (mostly) "get" that the 20th century consists mostly of years labeled 19xx...
Personally, I prefer origin-0-based numbering, and don't really mind when people refer to a decade as ending in an xxx9-numbered year, as long as they don't call it, say, the 199th Decade.
The problem with this comes when the same people then want to talk about decades v. centuries v. millenia. It makes sense that the year the ends a given millenium also ends a given century and a given decade. But if you've been saying decades end in xxx9 all along, you're in trouble when the official (Western) millennium ends in xxx0 (ditto for the end of the century).
I wonder if this is the problem The Weather Channel has run into, for example? They're running "storm of the century" shows, like most everyone else, but you'd think they'd honor the Naval Observatory more than hewing to common perceptions (well, maybe not), but if they've been treating decades as ending in xxx9, well, there's no really good solution. (I'd prefer they do end-of-decade shows now, end-of-century/millennium shows next year, but that is a bit strained.)
Oh well. At any given moment, we're caught up in three millenial events: living in one millenium, ending another, and starting yet another. Live In The Now. Drink In The Light. Double-Click God's Button. ;-)
(Yes, I was actually listening to her, not just watching her lips move. Maybe that's because she was wearing a bit too much makeup today, so looking less than totally supremely gorgeous. ;-)
So, to those of you who, despite well-knowing that the official (according to e.g. the US Naval Observatory) start of the third millennium is 2001-01-01, not 2000-01-01, argue that we should just "accept" what the mass media (and ignorant masses) tell us what they think is the beginning of "the" Millennium, get ready to be made complete fools out of your chosen leaders, who'll happily spend much of 2000 claiming that, no, really, 1999 wasn't the last year of the century/millennium, 2000 is, so everybody pay attention as we run all these new shows about the end of the millennium again.
Yes, it's an arbitrary date. Yes, it was the result of a (probably) failed attempt to base the origin date (0001-01-01) on the birth of Jesus. Yes, really, people shouldn't get so excited about mere number-based events.
But, the one thing that should have been true about "the" Millennium we all get to transition into is that it happens only once in a lifetime. Now it'll happen at least twice, three times if you account for at least one "real" birth of Jesus. (Hardly important, since we've accepted the distinction between 01-01 and 12-25 for decades, at least, but there are those who believe the most important millennial numbering begins with the actual birth of Jesus. They probably care little for our artificial date numbering, or 12-25, anyway.)
Personally, I don't care about such events. I don't really care about things like birthdays or such, except to the extent others wish to celebrate them. I'll go to some First Night (Boston) shows because I want to go to the shows, not because I want to "celebrate" New Year's per se. (A friend is part of a precision-skating group to skate on Frog Pond, for example.)
Yes, perhaps the best thing to do to people who insist of having a single Millennium transition to celebrate is to add to the confusion by first saying "yes, go ahead, believe it's 2000-01-01" and then saying "hey, y'know, it's really 2001-01-01", but those of us who actually care about preserving some semblance of a useful international language, it would have been nice to have fewer supposedly informed, intelligent people advocating the complete elimination of the one aspect of the concept "ring in the Millennium" that everyone could have agreed upon: that it happens only once every thousand years.
And, to Linda Stouffer and others in the media who say "but who's counting, right?": you are, you have been, and you've been representing yourselves as doing it for us so you can convince us to spend tons of hours watching all your end-of-the-second-Millennium shows. And now you want to pull an Emily Litella and say "Never mind!", as if you didn't know all along??
Bah.
My point was more along the lines of, while a condom defends against the so-called inevitability of having sex (which in my experience is an overblown myth, but anyway...), a gun defends against the so-called inevitably of being threatened with physical violence.
Further, we have about as much chance of taking away all guns from the American people as we do of getting them to stop having sex outside of marriage.
Well, I guess this is really getting off-topic, and I've lost track of what my point really was. I think it was really more along the lines that, if our society decided it feared students being shot at by adults (drug dealers etc.) "invading" schools, the self-righteous among us might force children to learn to use guns and might even hand out guns, just as they did both with condoms, all without the parents' permission.
IMO teaching responsible use of condoms and guns is equally important, even when both abstinence and non-violence are taught at the same time. I think they all should be taught, as permitted by the parents. Whether they should all be learned, I dunno...I have no clue how to use a gun, and hardly much more of one as to how to use a condom, though I'm much less concerned about my failing to use the latter properly if I was to take up both "habits"! ;-)
Now, if only we could add to the list of things kids should be taught to use responsibly items like: C++, Perl, and Slashdot...!
You make two great points about people blaming both guns (for violence) and condoms (for sex).
Put together, though, it occurred to me how ironic it was that, while the availability of both guns and condoms clearly does involve a statistical increase in the chances of something going wrong (a gun being mistakenly fired, a condom failing or being used incorrectly), resulting in injury (transmission of sexual disease for a condom) or death (ditto, or an abortion later on)...
...many of the same people who campaign against the mere availability of guns also are (or were, 10 or so years ago) campaigning for forcing condoms on children whose parents were doing everything they could to prevent their children from engaging in sexual activity.
Imagine trying to teach your child non-violence as a lifestyle, and having the local school give him real, live guns and tell him "violence is okay, it's in your basic nature, you're gonna do it, you might as well do it right" against your will!
Food for thought. Not very nutritious, perhaps - just a lite snack. ;-)
(Personally, I'd like to think children could, as of a certain age - say 11 or 12 - be capable of knowing how to use both condoms and guns while also thoroughly understanding the reasons they should, themselves, not use them except in very specific instances. But though I'd like to think that, I'm not nearly confident enough to oppress others by forcing their children to learn all about condom or gun use.)
I'd tend to agree.
Still, I wonder how well MSFT can do retaining enthusiastic, high-energy employees, as well as increasingly-tech-savvy investors, when everyone sees the free-software community, among others not part and parcel of the MSFT camp, outperforming MSFT in the stock market, and (maybe?) in the trend of capturing market share in new, even some existing, markets.
It is my belief few people are enthusiastic about the MSFT world because of the beauty, elegance, and simplicity of its products, as has been the case for Apple and some others.
So they're mostly really in it for the money, for the fame, for the perception that they're on the "cutting edge" of things.
Seems to me most of that has been going down the tubes lately. I think of my relative, who someday might have her grandchildren ask "how did you get so wealthy?", answering "I worked on a little product called Microsoft Internet Explorer, including a stint as a Program Manager", and hearing them say "oh, right, that's the product Microsoft created to destroy Netscape". Compared to being able to say "I worked on GNU/Linux software for years, up through the point at which the stock market finally took note"...?
Seems like a decision fewer and fewer cutting-edge-type people will make in favor of helping MSFT maintain its ham-handed dominance.
And once the market begins to see such "talent" no longer defaulting to employment by MSFT, and its potential customers see that too, how long can it maintain its earnings or its P/E??
(RHAT closed today at 213.5, was as low as 45 or so when it opened, $14 was the IPO price; MSFT has been hovering around 85-95 for what seems like ages.)
I can't figure out why so many investors want in on RHAT, and I've been happily using (and developing for) GNU/Linux since 1992 or so.
But this huge NASDAQ run-up of late doesn't seem to have swept MSFT along in its wake -- it's almost as if people don't consider MSFT to be a likely beneficiary of the continuing Internet revolution!? Weird.
(Disclaimer: a relative of mine works at MSFT as Lead PM for MSIE.)
You would or you have? Put your money, support, and effort where your mouth is!!
Meanwhile, many free-software hackers are grateful to have been thoughtfully included in RHAT's IPO, something they need not have done to maintain their "profit motive"...
And, if you do so consider, perhaps you can see why it's important to applaud Red Hat when they do things right, as defined by that community.
Because without that feedback, they'll end up having only the bottom line to look at.
(Maybe that's indeed all they're looking at right now. But if they make a series of missteps as viewed by the community that supports them, then see their bottom line take a hit, it'll be easier for them if there's a good, public record showing just when and why things went wrong by that community, and they'll start paying more attention to it then. But IMO they seem to be paying attention already.)
If Intel funds Linux/*BSD development to improve their performance on Intels, why complain? Your Intels will run faster. If you want non-Intel hardware to run faster too, get the manufacturers of those chips to pony up some $$ as well.
Or leave that to the hobbyists (not necessarily a bad choice!).
In a free-software world, there's little point in complaining about someone investing $$ to improve software, even if it's for just one platform.
It's not the money that'll hurt the community, it's the poor-quality, non-portable software that might result from that investment. But if the community doesn't defend itself against that, it's going to hurt itself anyway, whether for $$ or to pursue the latest "in" platform.
That's exactly the thinking I was trying to suggest represents a limited, Internet-centric mindset, just as "If I want food, I'll go out and get some" is a limited, non-Internet-centric mindset.
I mean, yes, it's very nice that the Internet (among many other enabling technologies) allow us to conduct ourselves in such a goal-driven way:
Great. The question is, are you limiting your life experience to whatever comes purely as a result of goal-driven activity? If so, why?
20 years ago I fantasized about having the ability to conduct myself (especially in terms of my interests) in the goal-driven way you describe, and now I have that ability.
Yes, it's nice. But, frankly, it's more rewarding to run into a friend in an unexpected place (especially if the friend has just been walked out on by a spouse, something that actually happened once), to take care of some friends' children for awhile so the parents can "play", and to do all sorts of other things in situations that can never be adequately emulated by technology.
Though, I do see why having a high-priority project that takes precedence over these sorts of things can make one very grateful for the ability to insulate oneself from unplanned outside influences. That's probably why I avoid taking on such projects these days -- "been there, done that" -- but I do still appreciate having the freedom to do so, and might exercise it in the future.
But I don't think the time I spent in blinders-on-full-speed-ahead hack mode prepared me to enjoy (and especially give back) life's simpler pleasures. Like many on-line venues, /. just hints at (and can provide a helpful training-ground for) some of those pleasures. All the technologies in the world can never replace all of them, so it's best to keep practicing the real thing, too.
And just as Dune's Paul was taught that fighting is a skill one must be able to deploy when not in the mood, so is real life. So it's wise to practice it at times you think you'd rather be hacking.
Well, yes, there are times I'd find that mighty convenient (especially in bad weather), as would my wife.
But give up the whole shopping experience? Ditto for other activities that can, at least theoretically, be carried out on a future Internet?
No Way.
I've run into to many friends and acquaintances in the supermarket (despite my relatively low lifetime frequency of shopping), and, hey, I met my wife in church, so "on-line worship" doesn't strike me as a wonderful alternative to being There, either.
The great thing about the Internet is that it opens up a world of possibilities for nearly everybody, vis-a-vis their often-limited assumptions about What Can Happen.
The dangerous thing about the Internet is that too many people will close their mind to the world of possibilities inherent in the everyday mundane activities of real life.
There's simply no substitute for the kind of playful shoulder-punching in the church foyer my wife and I engaged in while discussing some church business, a simple-but-effective precursor to the mating ritual society calls "dating". Even a Star Trek holodeck could not possibly recreate the casual trust and tenderness expressed by that sort of interaction -- forget about today's or tomorrow's real-world Virtual Reality.
Never underestimate the sublime joy of finding an attractive member of the desired gender in a supermarket, assuming a confused look (which is far more easily practiced off line than on), and plaintively asking, "Excuse me, but where's the toast?"
Nor should one underestimate the value of a warm smile to someone else, or to yourself -- or of a "have a nice day" -- when it's obviously not simply part of someone's .sig.
Yeah! Come to think of it, what other kind of pup is there? Aren't they all young? ;-)
I barely tolerated it at first, but seeing the longer cut a couple of times on TV gave me more appreciation for it vis-a-vis the book (which I love and have read many times).
Can't remember the original version so well anymore, but it seemed as though some of my favorite scenes from the book weren't in it, but were in the long version.
The long version also gave me much more appreciation for Kyle MacLachlan (sp?) in the lead role -- who I thought was a lousy choice at first.
I even have the soundtrack, and enjoy most of that (despite not having heard anything else by Toto I thought was worth buying).
So while a new series on Sci-Fi might be a great thing, I don't feel it'll automatically be better than the movie, especially given some of the other great aspects of the movie (e.g. some of the "lesser" roles -- gotta admit, it's a bit strange watching Patrick Stewart in Dune now compared to before his doing ST:TNG).
Wish 'em all well, though, and might even tune in, since I can get Sci-Fi (though with some hassle, as it's scrambled, requiring me to actually use my cable box to tune it in instead of my VCR/TV setup...thank goodness for the convenient A/B switch I finally installed, mainly to watch MST3K).
One, the shareholders have already bought into the free-software (aka Open Source(TM)) model. See the RHAT prospectus and other info. That public info would have to be changed, requiring agreement among the stockholders and board members.
In the past, GPL opponents have sometimes argued that corporations wouldn't touch GPL'ed software with a ten-foot pole (especially wouldn't distribute software under the GPL) because it'd violate the trust they have with stockholders to maximize corporate value.
Now we have a company that makes that kind of maximization based on GPL'ed (and other freely-licensed) software part and parcel of its raison d'etre.
In effect, this means anybody wanting to invest in a company that makes money off of proprietary software won't invest in RHAT. Without such investors, there won't be the pressure to become a proprietary software company. (Compare S.u.S.E., Caldera, etc., companies that must eternally judge which software is "worthy" as proprietary versus free.)
Two, the only tantalizing aspect of twisting RHAT's mission is to try to extract profits by proprietizing software RHAT already owns. Such as RPM.
Now, how valuable could a proprietary RPM or similar really be? Remember, the programmers who people point to as new RHAT employees and as those who might assist this proprietization have already established their credentials as free-software, even GPL, enthusiasts.
For RHAT to convince them to go the proprietary route, it'd have to promise more money, fame, and/or hack value. They've already got money and fame, and the hack value of proprietary software is lower anyway. Further, the ability of such a programmer to leave RHAT and get good work outside goes down, not up, when that programmer's work becomes enshrouded by the proprietary veil.
So, only unenlightened-suit-type programmers are likely to take that bait, meanwhile, the big-name, free-software enthusiasts already there would see what was happening and probably leave like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
So, ultimately, for RHAT to go proprietary would be a huge mistake for its stockholders, who have a much easier approach to investing in proprietary software: buy MSFT.
The most likely way RHAT would be abused to injure our community would be if, say, MSFT bought it up wholesale and shut down as much competitive free-software stuff as it could. How successful could that strategy really be? Very Un, IMO, for many reasons, such as the above, and here we can be grateful for RHAT's insane market cap. If MSFT couldn't do it in one fell swoop now, how could a loosely organized bunch of RHAT stockholders manage to do it down the road? I don't see it.
Seriously, yes, I meant "negligent homicide", thanks for the chuckle by pointing it out -- I mightn't have noticed it otherwise!
The five-apes analogy is amusing, but works on humans only insofar as they are as dumb as apes.
Humans tell each other stories, which apes cannot do. That's why we have the Bible, for example. Remember: even those five ignorant apes are avoiding what could be a dangerous thing still, going after the banana. How well do we listen to the wisdom of our ancient ancestors, who often had much more harsh conditions in which to discover what rules of behavior do and don't work in growing a society, a city, or a country to a ripe old age and success for its inhabitants? At least the apes have the excuse of not being able to read.
The other point is about classism. Yes, it is part of the overall picture. I wonder how much our "progressive" tax system, complete with constant complaints about "tax cuts for the wealthy" as if they were a class to be despised, and the implication that a "tax-paying citizen" is perhaps more valuable (to some, anyway) because he pays more taxes, contributes to the culture's acceptance of classism? Ditto racism vis-a-vis laws effectively mandating racial quotas.
I mean, yes, these may have their place, but don't ignore the effect they have in continuing the very "ignorant thinking" about which so many rightly complain.
Corporations can do this only via government action or inaction.
Therefore it's best to limit government's role to holding the reins of violence in its firm hand, and best to implement government as a simple, straightforward organization with a clear mandate from the people, and staff it with only those who have the highest honor and integrity.
Yes, that's a bit trite, I know. Many important truths are trite, I think.
So, please ask yourselves why you would support a man for President who cannot even comprehend someone like me, when y'all have no problems doing so, no problems treating my posts with respect!
Don't we deserve a President who is at least as respectful of disagreements as y'all are?
(Do we even have such a candidate? GWB seems to tolerate disagreement better than most anyone in the present White House, but his mockery of Carla Fay Tucker struck me as unworthy of a Presidential candidate. Then again, I'm using Reagan as a standard, not Clinton, which is hardly fair!)
The crime has already been committed, and punishment is almost never an attempt to reverse its effects.
Society therefore punishes to relieve other members of society of feeling they must take independent action to counter what they might see as a continuing threat posed by the accused.
So I still don't see how a murderer threatens other people more because the murder yelled "die, white trash" (for example) while pulling the trigger as compared to yelling "die, cburley!"
Yet the latter is clearly not a "hate crime", whereas the former is apparently considered so.
Would you really feel that much less protected if my murderer had yelled the former than the latter, assuming you're white?
If so -- if you and many others feel that you'd have to take the law into your own hands to provide your own security in such a case -- then hate crime legislation might make sense, not because it's "right", but because it could do the important job of keeping people taking the law into their own hands.
But such vigilantism was once the scourge of the Old South (KKK etc.), and I see hate crime legislation as just promoting it as legislatively valid in a time when some minorities happen to have some cult status. When that status goes away, as it will, the legislation will be turned against them. I think society is better off in the long run if we set a strong precedent for firm fairness in our criminal system, by excluding the finer points of minority status.