Caldera is on its last legs and from checking out the CALD stock chart it looks like they'll soon be facing NASDAQ delistment. They've been trading below a dollar for a while and are under $35 million market capitalization.
One wonders which of the Linux companies will be left in a year that isn't IBM?
Maybe one day they might be useful, if they're cheap enough and have some actual use to them, but I don't see why I should spend $500 to connect my toaster to the WWW
Those aren't the kind of Internet Appliances being discussed in this article. The article references Sony's eVilla which is similar to 3COM's Audrey and Netpliance's I-Opener.
Most people thought that cheap devices that offered only web browsing would be a hit with consumers who wouldn't then have to buy expensive and powerful machines just to use them as little more than dumb terminals.
Unfortunately these devices were neither cheap enough nor did they offer enough functionality to entice consumers.
RE: Linus's thoughts on .NET and Hailstorm
on
LWCE Bits and Pieces
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine so I'm just going to get it off my chest..NET isn't Hailstorm.
Everytime I see some Open Source person talk about.NET or Hailstorm all I see is a case of Not Invented Here Syndrome.
.NET .NET the technology (versus.NET, the brand name) is a fairly decent idea. From what I've seen it borrows a lot from the Java platform but improves on it by adding a lot of features that Java should have that Sun has been slow to add plus having better cross language support than Java ever could. After being a Java programmer for about 2 years I think that both platforms are roughly equal in the functionality they bring with them since.NET has some features I think suck and Java has a few I think suck as well. (I'm probably going to write about this and submit to slashdot). Where the.NET platform outshines Java is how XML support is a lot more built into the platform and the tools than anything Java has to offer for now but I'm sure the Java folk will wake up once.NET actually ships.
The way I see it competition is always good. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
The main issues with the.NET platform are probably the fact that it'll only run on MSFT OSes while Java is a multi-OS development platform. But if you are doing development on MSFT OSes, I think the.NET platform would be a better in a bunch of places than Java although there are a few places I'd probably still stick with Java. If you don't believe this, download.NET and give it a shot.
Hailstorm
The main idea behind Hailstorm is a good one and the devil is in the details. I actually would pay money if I could be guaranteed a safe, central repository of all my user information currently floating around on the web especially for two reasons.
A while ago CD Now announced that they may be going out of business. This filled me with dread because they had my credit card info which would probably have been sold along with my CD listening preferences to the highest bidder as part of the liquidation process. At that time I would have loved it if there was some central place where CD Now got my credit card info from that I could just tell, "Hey, no longer share my credit card info with CD Now."
Also after the above incident I stopped shopping at CD Now and started shopping at Amazon. This meant that all the music preferences I had built up from rating over a hundred CDs at CDNow were lost and the only way to rebuild that relationship with Amazon would be to rate X amount of music or hope Amazon could do similar things with less info (which they have surprisingly enough). Again, some central repository which I could tell,"Stop sharing my music preferences with CD Now and share them with Amazon" would have been ideal.
The way I see it, the Hailstorm idea has merit. The problems I see are
Guaranteeing security and reliability will be a bitch and a half.
Websites may resist adopting it since customer info is the one valuable thing they have.
Without motivation (i.e. marketing blitz) and an easy way to sign up, consumers won't flock to it.
Entrusting all that information to a single entity would make some peole nervous.
All of the above problems can be tackled one way or the other either socially or technologically. Secondly, I think the time foir this kind of technology has come, whether it will be Microsoft's Hailstorm, the product of some competitor or an Open Source alternative is all that remains to be seen.
DISCLAIMER: I'm an ex-Microsoft emploee (former intern).
From ultra technical to ultra controversial, Slashdot is where the nerds converge to form the largest online community for Linux/Open Source developers interested in reading cutting-edge, Open Source Journalism
Now you can argue whether Slashdot's editorials are actually Open Source or not but to claim that CmdrTaco and crew providing you with news and their opinions on the news isn't journalism is quite frankly, rather incorrect.
Point is, I'm betting that a compiler written for a specific chip and specific language (i.e. Intel's compiler) will perform better (i.e. produce better code) than a "compiler collection" wuth multiple pluggable front- and back-ends, all other things being equal. (Not that all other things necessarily are equal in this case (Go GNU!).)
This is an illogical statement. Apache and IIS support using multiple language to develop apps while my homemade webserver only supports C++. Does this mean my webserver is of higher quality than Apache or IIS? gcc is written a modular manner and the different language compilers are written by different people so talking about compiler bloat (whatever that means) is moot.
The important point is that Intel engineers with access to all sorts of internal Intel resources wrote a compiler that optimizes specifically for Intel chipsets while the gcc folk wrote a compiler that optimizes for x86 as well as other chipsets. The fact that the Intel guys spent 100% of their efforts on Intel chipsets while the gcc guys didn't is more likely to be the reason that Intel's compiler will outperform gcc and not because of any nebulous concept as compiler bloat.
I have a friend who runs his own encryption company now and he's lamented to me that he wishes that he could excise some his posts made in earlier years from Bugtraq and USENET archives because he now receive several emails a day from script kiddies asking him to teach them how to steal AOL passwords and hack into hotmail.
I'm not exactly sure what compiler bloat is supposed to mean since what matters is the assemby the compiler generates and not how many lines of code the compiler was written in. Secondly it is very likely that a compiler written by Intel engineers for an Intel chipset will perform better than a general purpose compiler written by volunteers on Intel chipsets. Finally there are many that would argue that the Intel compiler has been of higher quality than gcc for quite sometime especially with regards to C++.
PS: The fact that a post as empty as yours is at +4 is a sure sign that all the good posters have either left Slashdot or no longer actively partcipate. Sad.:(
It's amazing how the marketing people have slowly but surely begun to brainwash people into believing that web services are some sort of fantastic technology that needs all sorts of special application servers and other doohickey's to be useful. The fact of the matter is and always will be that
Webservices are simply RPC via XML over HTTP which can be implemented in any language with a sockets library and on any platform with a web server.
The predominant web services protocols and standards are open and are in fact W3C recommendations or are soon going to be including XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.
Whenever I read articles like the one referenced in the above post I can't help but feel that people like screaming like Chicken Little simply to hear the sound of their own voices. The fact of the matter is that the goal of web services has always been for interoperability between platforms and languages hence the use of XML and HTTP, heck even Microsoft's Hailstorm claims to be language and platform agnostic with regards to accessing its web services.
Repeat after me, all you need to do web services is a web server and a programming language with a socket library and strings support (i.e. almost all of them). Everything else is syntactic sugar and icing on the cake to maximize developer productivity the same way VB and ASP are supposed to versus C++ and Perl CGI.
The problem I have with distributed computing technologies from Sun and the other Unix companies is that they are typically never fully standardized by vendors. CORBA suffered from the fact that the spec was too generic and yet to complex and thus didn't enforce that ORBs should provide enough default services which lead to all sorts of interesting vendor lock in as its almost impossible to find two ORBs that implement the same exact set of services.
Although J2EE decided to go a different route by specifying a comprehensive list of minimum requirements it is sizable enough that no two vendors currently completely implement all of the same functionality (or at least not the last time I checked).
Jxta seems to be taking the generic-ness route which from experience leads to incompatible implementations and vendor lock-in. Particularly telling where the following excerpts from the article
In other words, a Jxta application that meets the minimum specified interoperable requirements superficially and does not interoperate in any meaningful way with others can still be in accord with the Jxta specification. However, it is anticipated that the viral growth of P2P applications and services will force vendors to embrace interoperability as a key product feature. The consequences of this design decision are left to be tested by the trials and tribulations of open market forces.
Sounds like a journey that is starting with the wrong step to me.
Your post has nothing to do with Fair Use which is what the original poster was talking about.
No one forced Offspring or DMB to sign with a major label. People should learn to take responsibility for their actions and consider the ramifications of their decisions before acting. ANALOGY: This is just as stupid as me bitching that you can't work on OSS projects related to what you work on in your dayjob because if you signed an NDA, well "Duuuh". If that is a problem then don't sign the NDA and get another job and if you can't find an employer that will let you work on OSS projects then go in business for yourself as a consultant.
The so called "little guys" have nothing to lose if people download their stuff over the 'net since nobody is buying their stuff anyway. They number of new fans they get is worth the miniscule number of sales they lose from people downloading their songs instead of buying their CD. The same is not necessarily true for the major players.
steal
TRANSITIVE VERB: 1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
The question then becomes whether you believe that anyone who redistributes copyrighted works without the permission of the original author has the right to do so or not.
So if your belief is that if you write a piece of software, book, magazine article or song and then anyone is free to redistribute it without your permission and probably profit from it then according to your personal beliefs copyright infringement isn't stealing. If this isn't your personal belief, then yourself and the moderators that modded this up to +5 are full of shit.
It's interesting that when MSFT describes what they do as innovation people get all up in arms yet here's another group of people who are using even worse newspeak by tying the term innovation with copyright violation.
As a software developer I'm actually offended that there are people who are trying to perpetrate the idea that innovation in software and on the 'Net revolves around violating people's copyright and redistributing the works of others. Of course, it all is put in perspective when one realizes this article is being hosted by the OpenP2P.com which was just another "jump on the buzzword bandwagon" venture whose major proponents are focused around benefiting from redistributing the works of others.
So who cares about compression. Personally, I'd much prefer the open and obvious standards of XML to some obfuscated form. Data is confusing enough already; at least XML gives a clear description that I can use with a packet sniffer when trying to debug something.
You're kidding right? Most CS people I know cringe at the fact that XML can more than double the size of a document with largely redundant tags. The only thing to be thankful for is that the documents typically compress very well due to the large number of redundant tags and that HTTP 1.1 supports compression especially know that XML over HTTP (i.e. web services) is being beaten to death by a lot of people in the software industry.
NumerousarticlesaboutXML compression also tend to disagree with you that it is not an issue.
PS: If bandwidth is so cheap how come DSL companies are going out of business and AOL owns Time Warner? This would tend to imply that low bandwidth connections are still the order of the day.
A lot of technology companies try reverse stock splits to avoid being delisted from NASDAQ because their share price drops below a dollar for too long. A list of companies that have had reverse stock splits in recent memory,
There also a bunch more companies that decided not to go through the embarassment of a reverse split (especially since they rarely work) and just allowed themselves to be delisted without much of a fight. Considering that Caldera has been under a dollar for almost two weeks, who knows they may be next to face the delisting blues?
I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.
XSLT is designed not to have side effects and is instead more of a functional language meaning that you can't assign values to variables dynamically. Considering that this task may require quite a lot of storing of state before deciding which optimization to make I think it is rather unlikely that XSLT is a good language to use to solve this particular problem.
Then again I didn't look too hard at the task but it may be that the judges have designed it in such a way that it is amenable to functional programming considering that it is the being run by the International Conference on Functional Programming. Even then most functional languages do allow you to store state, even Lisp so an XSLT solution would have to be rather clever.
OK, so you've shown that if a friend emails you a suspicious.exe, you create a phony account with no permissions then run it from that account. This is also possible in Win2K and Windows XP. So what's your point?
All you've shown is that you are an extremely paranoid person and not that your OS of choice is some fantastically secure manifestation of operating system design. Most Linux users I know would not go through all that trouble if mailed a perl script or executable (or heck, compiling some obsfucated source from someones.sig).
And it's not just Linux, or other Unixes... VMS, NOS, NOS/VE, VM/CMS... IS there another OS out there that DOESN'T have proper ACL's and CPU/process limits?
Windows' ACL support has been more mature than Linux's for a long time. Because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The point of the GPL is to ensure that open-source programs remain open-source and freely modifiable.
Wrong. The point of the GPL is that users of software have complete and total freedom with the software they've been given not the next version or the one after but the version that was distributed to them.
I don't see why using it as a lever to get a company to release proprietary source code they never intended to open would do any good.
The original author of VirutuaDub put up a page about Vidomi where he mentioned that SloMedia infringed seven projects (VirtualDub, FlaskMPEG, DVD2AVI, MPEG2DEC, AC3DEC, XingMP3, smart deinterlacer). Does the newly GPLed source cover all the infringing projects or just VirtuaDub.
Either way the VirtuaDub author seems just as pissed as most of the Slashdotter here about how they nver released the original source.
Management calling good coders Primma Donnas always gets on my nerves for a variety of reasons. Many people (including Phil Greenspun) have quoted the confounding statistic that an excellent programmer is typically 10 times more productive than an average programmer.
Yet I'm yet to hear of a coder who brings in almost half a million dollars in salary. Instead I hear of good coders making about $10K or so more than mediocre HTML jockeys and VB h4x0rs. It continually astounds me that the U.S. claims to be a capitalist society but in this one area we act like everyone is equal when they clearly are not.
Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and Alan Cox could probably code in one weekend what it would take a team of coders a week to do, yet they at best are not even making twice what an intern at a Fortuen 500 makes. Then to add insult to injury the overpaid MBAs who have wrecked the tech industry now have the nerve to call them Primma Donnas.
Shut up, you know you just one of those spoiled white brats living South Africa where your wealthy family originaly moved to exploit the natives.
It is interesting that ignorant. ACs always make posts like this that insinuate that the only way an African can be a geek is if he is a White South African.
Sorry to dissappoint you but I'm a Black Nigerian. Thanks for playing.
If you really feel that this will be helpful, then that's great. However, some of your points just don't make sense. First, you say things aren't as bad as we make them out to be.
Where did I say things aren't as bad as people make them out to be? I said
It is true that most African's live in the kind of abject poverty that most Westerners can't even imagine let alone endure. It is also true that [we lack] basic infrastructure like regular power supply, potable water, health care services, etc. but this doesn't mean that this should somehow preclude African's from the fruits of the 21st century.
which in my opinion clearly states that things are bad but doesn't mean that we shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet and computers until we are as advanced as the Western world was in the 20th century.
You then say that it's in "poor taste" because the society is desparately in need.
I said
It is in extremely poor taste for you to bash them for donating their time and resources to a society desperately in need.
meaning that it is in poor taste to bash the people who are trying to find cheaper alternatives to getting Africans access to PCs.
Since when does having access to the Web count as "desparately in need"?
Lacking access to information does count as desperately in need. For instance, ignorance has caused AIDS in Africa to reach epidemic proportions. If a lot of these people had access to information just a few years earlier the devastation would not be as widespread as it is today. The same goes for a large number of diseases as well.
Everytime slashdot posts an article about computers and Africa there always has to be some +4 or +5 insightful post that restates this misguided opinion. Here's my response (some of it a repost from a Geekcorps article).
Disclaimer: I'm African and the last time I was back home was 2 months ago.
It is true that most African's live in the kind of abject poverty that most Westerners can't even imagine let alone endure. It is also true that basic infrastructure like regular power supply, potable water, health care services, etc. but this doesn't mean that this should somehow preclude African's from the fruits of the 21st century. Instead of being like most Westerners whose only thoughts of Africa occur when they guiltily switch the channel whenever one of those commercials asking for money to feed starving children who can be fed for less than $1 a day shows up, thesre are people who are trying to help out in some way or the other. It is in extremely poor taste for you to bash them for donating their time and resources to a society desperately in need.
Frankly I'm glad they're doing this, with the advent of the Net I've kept in touch with friends I left behind via ICQ and email whom I thought I'd never talk to again due to the prohibitive costs of calling or locating them after they moved. Anyone who is helping with the proliferation of technology and the Net in Africa has my thanks and undying appreciation. Oh by the way, for all the other people who are bashing them for sending "toys" to Africa. What the fuck are you doing for the poor and starving of the Earth?
PS: The last time I went home I asked my friends what they wanted and one of them asked for Java programming books. I am constantly in touch with another friend who just switched jobs and does ADO and Access database programming who used to write VBA applications in the past. My mom just bought a PC and complains about how she always ends up browsing for hours when all she wanted to do was spend 5 minutes checking her email. Hope that makes some you guys think before you rate this kind of jingoistic claptrap up.
So, whatever the community decides to do with.NET, Microsoft wins. That's why Microsoft has "no objections" (sic) to third-party open-source.NET implementations, and that's why most open-source public figures look like they're sitting on hot coal when the issue pops up.
4th alternative...
Create an Open Source alternative to.NET and see how many people show up at the party. People are always ragging on OSS for being un-innovative and riding on the coattails of corporations, well what are y'all waiting for?
The vision of.NET doing all sorts of RPC with XML over HTTP as the protocol to access web services (e.g. obtaining the current headlines on slashdot, stock quotes, perform a translation, or some other interesting web service), the author of the original article may have been trying to say that having access to the multitude of Open Source applications out there makes web services redundant since you could just download an Open Source app to do what the web service does.
This is probably true for a subset of web services but things like a realtime flight tracker provided by the airline's website, UPS's package tracker, real time stock quotes, or other information that belongs to a company that you cannot directly access is where web services will shine and simply downloading Open Source apps or various screen scrapers won't cut it.
PS: I posted part of this comment in another thread.
I suspect that you didn't read the article at all. Your comments have nothing to do with the article which in turn had nothing to do with.NET. Here's the quote from the article that mentions.NET.
Thus, the FreeBSD ports system, now as a cross-platform, globally distributed, cooperative development and distribution system could form a nexus of user freedom and empowerment. What possible significance could.NET have in such a world, where thousands of free software applications can be readily downloaded and configured especially for you, especially for a computer that is optimized according to your own personal needs and desires and none other?
This somehow implies that being able to quickly download and Open Source applications is somehow in competition with.NET which is about XML web services. It is a thing of particular bemusement to me that Open Source advocates and Slashdot editors keep attacking a.NET which is a figment of their imaginations and has nothing to do with what truly constitutes.NET (which can be gleaned from just reading the.NET website).
On second thought there is one way one might consider that this competes with.NET. The vision of.NET doing all sorts of RPC with XML over HTTP as the protocol to access web services (e.g. obtaining the current headlines on slashdot, stock quotes, perform a translation, or some other interesting web service), the author of the original article may have been trying to say that having access to the multitude of Open Source applications out there makes web services redundant since you could just download an Open Source app to do what the web service does. This is probably true for a subset of web services but things like a realtime flight tracker provided by the airline's website, UPS's package tracker, real time stock quotes, or other information that belongs to a company that you cannot directly access is where web services will shine and simply downloading Open Source apps or various screen scrapers won't cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
Caldera is on its last legs and from checking out the CALD stock chart it looks like they'll soon be facing NASDAQ delistment. They've been trading below a dollar for a while and are under $35 million market capitalization.
One wonders which of the Linux companies will be left in a year that isn't IBM?
Maybe one day they might be useful, if they're cheap enough and have some actual use to them, but I don't see why I should spend $500 to connect my toaster to the WWW
Those aren't the kind of Internet Appliances being discussed in this article. The article references Sony's eVilla which is similar to 3COM's Audrey and Netpliance's I-Opener. Most people thought that cheap devices that offered only web browsing would be a hit with consumers who wouldn't then have to buy expensive and powerful machines just to use them as little more than dumb terminals.
Unfortunately these devices were neither cheap enough nor did they offer enough functionality to entice consumers.
The way I see it competition is always good. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
The main issues with the
Hailstorm
The main idea behind Hailstorm is a good one and the devil is in the details. I actually would pay money if I could be guaranteed a safe, central repository of all my user information currently floating around on the web especially for two reasons.
- A while ago CD Now announced that they may be going out of business. This filled me with dread because they had my credit card info which would probably have been sold along with my CD listening preferences to the highest bidder as part of the liquidation process. At that time I would have loved it if there was some central place where CD Now got my credit card info from that I could just tell, "Hey, no longer share my credit card info with CD Now."
- Also after the above incident I stopped shopping at CD Now and started shopping at Amazon. This meant that all the music preferences I had built up from rating over a hundred CDs at CDNow were lost and the only way to rebuild that relationship with Amazon would be to rate X amount of music or hope Amazon could do similar things with less info (which they have surprisingly enough). Again, some central repository which I could tell,"Stop sharing my music preferences with CD Now and share them with Amazon" would have been ideal.
The way I see it, the Hailstorm idea has merit. The problems I see are- Guaranteeing security and reliability will be a bitch and a half.
- Websites may resist adopting it since customer info is the one valuable thing they have.
- Without motivation (i.e. marketing blitz) and an easy way to sign up, consumers won't flock to it.
- Entrusting all that information to a single entity would make some peole nervous.
All of the above problems can be tackled one way or the other either socially or technologically. Secondly, I think the time foir this kind of technology has come, whether it will be Microsoft's Hailstorm, the product of some competitor or an Open Source alternative is all that remains to be seen.DISCLAIMER: I'm an ex-Microsoft emploee (former intern).
Interesting, when I do a Google Search for "Open Source Journalism" and Slashdot I get a few dozen hits. One of which leads to the OSDN Media Kit which describes Slashdot as
Now you can argue whether Slashdot's editorials are actually Open Source or not but to claim that CmdrTaco and crew providing you with news and their opinions on the news isn't journalism is quite frankly, rather incorrect.
Point is, I'm betting that a compiler written for a specific chip and specific language (i.e. Intel's compiler) will perform better (i.e. produce better code) than a "compiler collection" wuth multiple pluggable front- and back-ends, all other things being equal. (Not that all other things necessarily are equal in this case (Go GNU!).)
This is an illogical statement. Apache and IIS support using multiple language to develop apps while my homemade webserver only supports C++. Does this mean my webserver is of higher quality than Apache or IIS? gcc is written a modular manner and the different language compilers are written by different people so talking about compiler bloat (whatever that means) is moot.
The important point is that Intel engineers with access to all sorts of internal Intel resources wrote a compiler that optimizes specifically for Intel chipsets while the gcc folk wrote a compiler that optimizes for x86 as well as other chipsets. The fact that the Intel guys spent 100% of their efforts on Intel chipsets while the gcc guys didn't is more likely to be the reason that Intel's compiler will outperform gcc and not because of any nebulous concept as compiler bloat.
I have a friend who runs his own encryption company now and he's lamented to me that he wishes that he could excise some his posts made in earlier years from Bugtraq and USENET archives because he now receive several emails a day from script kiddies asking him to teach them how to steal AOL passwords and hack into hotmail.
I'm not exactly sure what compiler bloat is supposed to mean since what matters is the assemby the compiler generates and not how many lines of code the compiler was written in. Secondly it is very likely that a compiler written by Intel engineers for an Intel chipset will perform better than a general purpose compiler written by volunteers on Intel chipsets. Finally there are many that would argue that the Intel compiler has been of higher quality than gcc for quite sometime especially with regards to C++.
:(
PS: The fact that a post as empty as yours is at +4 is a sure sign that all the good posters have either left Slashdot or no longer actively partcipate. Sad.
- Webservices are simply RPC via XML over HTTP which can be implemented in any language with a sockets library and on any platform with a web server.
- The predominant web services protocols and standards are open and are in fact W3C recommendations or are soon going to be including XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.
Whenever I read articles like the one referenced in the above post I can't help but feel that people like screaming like Chicken Little simply to hear the sound of their own voices. The fact of the matter is that the goal of web services has always been for interoperability between platforms and languages hence the use of XML and HTTP, heck even Microsoft's Hailstorm claims to be language and platform agnostic with regards to accessing its web services.Repeat after me, all you need to do web services is a web server and a programming language with a socket library and strings support (i.e. almost all of them). Everything else is syntactic sugar and icing on the cake to maximize developer productivity the same way VB and ASP are supposed to versus C++ and Perl CGI.
Although J2EE decided to go a different route by specifying a comprehensive list of minimum requirements it is sizable enough that no two vendors currently completely implement all of the same functionality (or at least not the last time I checked).
Jxta seems to be taking the generic-ness route which from experience leads to incompatible implementations and vendor lock-in. Particularly telling where the following excerpts from the article Sounds like a journey that is starting with the wrong step to me.
ANALOGY: This is just as stupid as me bitching that you can't work on OSS projects related to what you work on in your dayjob because if you signed an NDA, well "Duuuh". If that is a problem then don't sign the NDA and get another job and if you can't find an employer that will let you work on OSS projects then go in business for yourself as a consultant.
From the American Heritage Dictionary: The question then becomes whether you believe that anyone who redistributes copyrighted works without the permission of the original author has the right to do so or not.
So if your belief is that if you write a piece of software, book, magazine article or song and then anyone is free to redistribute it without your permission and probably profit from it then according to your personal beliefs copyright infringement isn't stealing. If this isn't your personal belief, then yourself and the moderators that modded this up to +5 are full of shit.
Thanks for your time.
As a software developer I'm actually offended that there are people who are trying to perpetrate the idea that innovation in software and on the 'Net revolves around violating people's copyright and redistributing the works of others. Of course, it all is put in perspective when one realizes this article is being hosted by the OpenP2P.com which was just another "jump on the buzzword bandwagon" venture whose major proponents are focused around benefiting from redistributing the works of others.
So who cares about compression. Personally, I'd much prefer the open and obvious standards of XML to some obfuscated form. Data is confusing enough already; at least XML gives a clear description that I can use with a packet sniffer when trying to debug something.
You're kidding right? Most CS people I know cringe at the fact that XML can more than double the size of a document with largely redundant tags. The only thing to be thankful for is that the documents typically compress very well due to the large number of redundant tags and that HTTP 1.1 supports compression especially know that XML over HTTP (i.e. web services) is being beaten to death by a lot of people in the software industry. Numerous articles about XML compression also tend to disagree with you that it is not an issue.
PS: If bandwidth is so cheap how come DSL companies are going out of business and AOL owns Time Warner? This would tend to imply that low bandwidth connections are still the order of the day.
- Webvan: 25 to 1 reverse stock split.
- Iomega: 5 to 1 reverse stock split.
- 24/7 Media: 25 to 1 reverse stock split
- Egghead.com: Between 5 and 10 to 1 reverse stock split
- Quokka.com: 50 to 1 reverse stock split
There also a bunch more companies that decided not to go through the embarassment of a reverse split (especially since they rarely work) and just allowed themselves to be delisted without much of a fight. Considering that Caldera has been under a dollar for almost two weeks, who knows they may be next to face the delisting blues?--
I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.
XSLT is designed not to have side effects and is instead more of a functional language meaning that you can't assign values to variables dynamically. Considering that this task may require quite a lot of storing of state before deciding which optimization to make I think it is rather unlikely that XSLT is a good language to use to solve this particular problem.
Then again I didn't look too hard at the task but it may be that the judges have designed it in such a way that it is amenable to functional programming considering that it is the being run by the International Conference on Functional Programming. Even then most functional languages do allow you to store state, even Lisp so an XSLT solution would have to be rather clever.
--
OK, so you've shown that if a friend emails you a suspicious .exe, you create a phony account with no permissions then run it from that account. This is also possible in Win2K and Windows XP. So what's your point?
.sig).
All you've shown is that you are an extremely paranoid person and not that your OS of choice is some fantastically secure manifestation of operating system design. Most Linux users I know would not go through all that trouble if mailed a perl script or executable (or heck, compiling some obsfucated source from someones
And it's not just Linux, or other Unixes... VMS, NOS, NOS/VE, VM/CMS... IS there another OS out there that DOESN'T have proper ACL's and CPU/process limits?
Windows' ACL support has been more mature than Linux's for a long time. Because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
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The point of the GPL is to ensure that open-source programs remain open-source and freely modifiable.
Wrong. The point of the GPL is that users of software have complete and total freedom with the software they've been given not the next version or the one after but the version that was distributed to them.
I don't see why using it as a lever to get a company to release proprietary source code they never intended to open would do any good.
If the proprietary code is made up of seven different Free Software components then the users of the software are supposed to get the source for the software.
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The original author of VirutuaDub put up a page about Vidomi where he mentioned that SloMedia infringed seven projects (VirtualDub, FlaskMPEG, DVD2AVI, MPEG2DEC, AC3DEC, XingMP3, smart deinterlacer). Does the newly GPLed source cover all the infringing projects or just VirtuaDub.
Either way the VirtuaDub author seems just as pissed as most of the Slashdotter here about how they nver released the original source.
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Management calling good coders Primma Donnas always gets on my nerves for a variety of reasons. Many people (including Phil Greenspun) have quoted the confounding statistic that an excellent programmer is typically 10 times more productive than an average programmer.
Yet I'm yet to hear of a coder who brings in almost half a million dollars in salary. Instead I hear of good coders making about $10K or so more than mediocre HTML jockeys and VB h4x0rs. It continually astounds me that the U.S. claims to be a capitalist society but in this one area we act like everyone is equal when they clearly are not.
Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and Alan Cox could probably code in one weekend what it would take a team of coders a week to do, yet they at best are not even making twice what an intern at a Fortuen 500 makes. Then to add insult to injury the overpaid MBAs who have wrecked the tech industry now have the nerve to call them Primma Donnas.
*spitting noise*
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Shut up, you know you just one of those spoiled white brats living South Africa where your wealthy family originaly moved to exploit the natives.
It is interesting that ignorant. ACs always make posts like this that insinuate that the only way an African can be a geek is if he is a White South African.
Sorry to dissappoint you but I'm a Black Nigerian. Thanks for playing.
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Where did I say things aren't as bad as people make them out to be? I said which in my opinion clearly states that things are bad but doesn't mean that we shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet and computers until we are as advanced as the Western world was in the 20th century.
You then say that it's in "poor taste" because the society is desparately in need.
I said meaning that it is in poor taste to bash the people who are trying to find cheaper alternatives to getting Africans access to PCs.
Since when does having access to the Web count as "desparately in need"?
Lacking access to information does count as desperately in need. For instance, ignorance has caused AIDS in Africa to reach epidemic proportions. If a lot of these people had access to information just a few years earlier the devastation would not be as widespread as it is today. The same goes for a large number of diseases as well.
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Everytime slashdot posts an article about computers and Africa there always has to be some +4 or +5 insightful post that restates this misguided opinion. Here's my response (some of it a repost from a Geekcorps article).
Disclaimer: I'm African and the last time I was back home was 2 months ago.
It is true that most African's live in the kind of abject poverty that most Westerners can't even imagine let alone endure. It is also true that basic infrastructure like regular power supply, potable water, health care services, etc. but this doesn't mean that this should somehow preclude African's from the fruits of the 21st century. Instead of being like most Westerners whose only thoughts of Africa occur when they guiltily switch the channel whenever one of those commercials asking for money to feed starving children who can be fed for less than $1 a day shows up, thesre are people who are trying to help out in some way or the other. It is in extremely poor taste for you to bash them for donating their time and resources to a society desperately in need.
Frankly I'm glad they're doing this, with the advent of the Net I've kept in touch with friends I left behind via ICQ and email whom I thought I'd never talk to again due to the prohibitive costs of calling or locating them after they moved. Anyone who is helping with the proliferation of technology and the Net in Africa has my thanks and undying appreciation. Oh by the way, for all the other people who are bashing them for sending "toys" to Africa. What the fuck are you doing for the poor and starving of the Earth?
PS: The last time I went home I asked my friends what they wanted and one of them asked for Java programming books. I am constantly in touch with another friend who just switched jobs and does ADO and Access database programming who used to write VBA applications in the past. My mom just bought a PC and complains about how she always ends up browsing for hours when all she wanted to do was spend 5 minutes checking her email. Hope that makes some you guys think before you rate this kind of jingoistic claptrap up.
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4th alternative...
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The vision of .NET doing all sorts of RPC with XML over HTTP as the protocol to access web services (e.g. obtaining the current headlines on slashdot, stock quotes, perform a translation, or some other interesting web service), the author of the original article may have been trying to say that having access to the multitude of Open Source applications out there makes web services redundant since you could just download an Open Source app to do what the web service does.
This is probably true for a subset of web services but things like a realtime flight tracker provided by the airline's website, UPS's package tracker, real time stock quotes, or other information that belongs to a company that you cannot directly access is where web services will shine and simply downloading Open Source apps or various screen scrapers won't cut it.
PS: I posted part of this comment in another thread.
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On second thought there is one way one might consider that this competes with
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