so why does linux have 1 VM? it seems that 2 of them exist, and the BSD's have more... guys, "gimme a hunk" and "page fault" aren't exactly rocket science anymore, particularly with hardware support... the fact that there is room to make a big deal out of this is the problem, not the VMs.
If Linux was a microkernel I'm pretty sure this would be possible but from what I've seen of the Linux kernel code and from some discussions on the linux kernel mailing list, the virtual memory code is too entrenched in various parts of the code to be #ifdefed around with any sort of ease.
It knows what I have installed, what is *needed*, and other things I may *want*.
WindowsUpdate is a GUI tool that needs MSIE. Tell me how I upgrade a whole network of machines without doing it by hand on each one if I use Windows Update? Answer: I can't.
WindowsUpdate doesn't carry IIS patches which makes it practically useless for the major security issue surrounding Windows. which is IIS.
To successfully keep on top of IIS patches you have to use hfNetChk which is,
Exactly, and XML is a format for encoding structured data. There are many kinds of documents that live their live their entire lives as XML, from XHTML documents to configuration files to myriad kinds of XML documents that exist today.
Why is NASA switching to MySQL from Oracle [fcw.com] and noticing speed increases?
If all you want is speed then MySQL is all you need. Similarly I can quote how much faster TUX is than Apache but that means nothing if I have dynamic database driven content that I want to use JSP or Perl to access.
There is more to picking a database than how quickly it performs some SQL queries.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XML.. as a data interchange format.. but when i want tight storage and quick retrieval, give me a normalized RDBMS any day of the week. Because that's what it's for.
This means you're suggesting that people shred XML documents into relational data to store them in the DB and then reassemble them whenever they retrieve them. This is massive overhead and error prone since you're depending on your developers to come up with custom ways of doing this for each application. Also typically very difficult to ensure that the XML that was stored in the DB can be accurately reconstructed (what happens to comments, processing instructions, enbtities, etc).
One of my friends counters arguments about software being too sloppy with the point that there is practically no other field where a product is designed to be used on such a varying degree of ways and expected to still be robust. For instance, let's use a car as an analogy to your complaints
The key CD is now scratched which hangs the authenticator forced a quite ungraceful reboot and corrupted my hard drive. (Perhaps a $150 upgrade will help. I'll never know.)
how is a programmer expected to deal with the CD being scratched? Does your car still work if the transmission is damaged or half the engine has been riddled with bullet holes?
The last time I used Word a drive filled during a save operation and left me with just a mutilated copy of the original file. (I will not use it again.)
Again, a very unexpected and unnatural scenario. How well do cars function when they run out of fuel?
The most amazing part is that this state of affairs doesn't surprise me. If my refrigerator intermittently defrosted and melted icecream all over the kitchen I'd be ticked. If my car mysteriously dies at stop signs I get it fixed.
But how well would your refrigerator react if you treated it shoddily such as by leaving it outdoors intermuitently or diconnecting and reconnecting the power several times a day?
Now, I'm not trying to excuse sloppy software development but the fact of the matter is that software is constantly expected to work perfectly under situations completely outside its specifications yet we don't expect this from other items or appliances that we use.
I like the breakdown of his numbers and think that was very well researched but he makes waaaay to many assumptions without backing evidence for me to take this without a few healthy doses of skepticism. Let's begin:
The school using Unix can reasonably expect to achieve nearly perfect system reliability while maintaining a relative immunity to student attacks. Only hardware failure or serious administrator error can bring the Unix system to a stop. As a result, the Unix operation will fade into the background to become something which, like the telephone system, just works and can therefore be ignored by college management
A system where everyone logs into the server is vulnerable to local root exploits, exactly how is the setup he suggested with one Solaris server and 500 dumb terminals provide "immunity to student attacks"? Searching Google brings up lots of hits for:local root exploit" and Solaris.
The Unix administration job is really part-time although, in practice, it would be filled as a full-time position and the person hired will find additional ways to contribute to the college. The Windows-based solution, by contrast, will be under-supported with four full-time staff and lead to a serious loss of productivity among other professionals as they become part time PC support people.
Administering a system used by 500 students is definitely not a part time job regardless of what OS you are using. I do agree however that it'll probably take less administrators than if they got 500 Windows boxes.
We can reasonably expect the experience in the next five years will reflect that of the previous five. A Sun 5500 server bought in 1996 to support 200 X-terminal users would still be in use today, albeit with upgraded applications and a later Solaris release. In contrast, someone who bought a Windows networking system for 200 users in 1996 would have been forced to upgrade both his servers and his desktop hardware at least once, and more likely twice, in the period and now be facing yet another forced march to new hardware and software to cope with the XP/Net generation.
Again, numbers to back this up would be nice. Anyway two points
There is no need to upgrade the OS just because new versions are out. There are shops still using Windows 95 to do their work and that's like 3 Windows versions ago.
Is it really true that a server that could handle 200 users a few years ago can handle 200 users using Mozilla, Open Office and X at the same time off of the same server without any upgrades?
I won't comment on the 5000-user manufacturing operation since I have little knowledge about setups like that. I do have an issue however with his usage of application crash data from BugToaster.
Exactly what does how much an application (not OS) crashes on the OS have to do with it? Netscape and Pico (God, I hate pico) crash on me all the time, yet I never go around claiming that this has anything to do with Linux's stability.
Since BugToaster doesn't give statistical breakdowns such as application versus OS crashes their data is practically meaningless. I'm pretty sure Mindcraft can come up with a survey that shows that people running Linux that use the 2 year old versions of Netscape have to deal with a lot of crashes and it would be shouted down for being teh FUD that it is, well this guy is guilty of doing the same thing.
I see things like this, and my first reaction is that it confirms my biases that Miguel de Icaza et al. have gone completely off their rocker by thinking that they can work with Microsoft and support.NET using Mono or anything else developed as true free or open source software.
One of the reason that so many people are now using Windows 9x/ME/2000 is that Microsoft bascially gave away their SDK back in the days of Win 3.x, while IBM was looking to their OS/2 SDK as part of their revenue model, and charging accordingly.
Playstation 2 first editions were buggy as hell
on
Crashing Xbox Kiosks
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· Score: 4, Informative
If early generation games crash, Microsoft will have a perception problem regardless of who is at fault. The bar is set higher for entry machines these days. PlayStation and PlayStation II were not prone to crashing.
As someone already mentioned, comparing a kiosk that runs the early version of the console 24/7 in a poorly ventilated environment is different from comparing the final consumer product being used in regular conditions.
As for Playstation II's not crashing, you must have a very short memory. I seem to remember headlines like PS2 glitches likely to drag down Sony's earnings , Sony finds glitches in three PS2 games and more when they first came out and look how successful PS2 is now.
I say, the jury is out until the holiday season is over before we can tell if X-Box will be a success or failure.
Subscriptions should add value
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Some people will hate me for what I'm about to say but liek CmdrTaco said, I'd like Slashdot to be here in four years. So here goes:
Subscriptions that eliminate banner ads do not add much value for the purchaser especially in a technically savvy crowd like Slashdot where users that know how to install and configure JunkBuster to get rid of ads abound. For subscriptions to be valuable source of revenue then the people who subscribe must get a considerable amount more than the people who don't to make it worth it. Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
Subscribers can get an @slashdot.org email address or web page with no dynamic content.
Subscribers get better comment filtering functionality (e.g. I want to only see posts that have been moderated up even if it's from 0 to +1).
Subscribers automatically get the +1 posting bonus without having to get up to 25 karma.
Subscribers can get alerts if people respond to their posts.
Subscribers can see what the new comments have been made to a story since the last time they read it (kuro5hin has this functionality)
Only subscribers can customize their front page.
Only subscribers can post comments.
Only subscribers can submit stories.
A lot of the ideas are probably unworkable but they are put there to give an idea as to the kind of things that people are more likely to pay for than not.
All of these may seem distasteful but considering that VA Linux probably doesn't have much longer to go I think the Slashdot folks need to take a long hard look at how they're going to keep financing the site if they still want it to exist in four or five years.
But Microsoft? It's contributed to standards initiated by others. It's tried to detract from standards initiated by others (Java).
Java is not a standard unless your criteria for being a standard is simply that it is used by a lot of people. If that's the case then Microsoft has created lots of standards from COM to the Word file format to UDDI to their XML schema proposal that was rejected by the W3C but was embraced by most of industry.
If you're talking about standards in the strict sense of the Word then I can think of SOAP and C# and the CLI (in progress) but then again I haven't paid much attention to what Microsoft does until quite recently.
When I read the article I expected to read about some developer who was highly skilled but eccentric who ended up being fired because his/her boss could no longer deal with the developer's eccentricities. Instead what I read was a typical story of a developer who got canned for being unable to deliver. His "quirkiness" or eccentricity had little to do with it and in fact it looked like his employers may even have practiced a little reverse discrimination in assuming that simply by being eccentric he ws a high performer which turned out to be false. Kinda reminds me of how most companies expect their Indian programmers to be geniuses and react with surprise when some of them turn out not to be.
Anyway, from my experiences working in different software companies over the past few years, "quirky" engineers that deliver still exist and are respected by many in their organizations.
They tried to code for a standard that they hoped would be *the* standard by the time they shipped. Both missed the target. But had they written for what was at the time the current standard they'd have been releasing browser that, while stable and complient, would have been miles behind the competition in terms of features. Which is why writing a standards complient browser should be undertaken by someone who isn't trying to make money. Delibrately being behind your competition would be suicidal.
Both these companies tried to strongarm the W3C into accepting their versions of standards by going ahead and implementing them anyway. This began with Netscape and it's "time to market" fiasco where they felt major versions of their software had to be released at "Internet time" which lead to them forcing such travesties as Javascript, Javascript CSS and a number of other nonsensities on the web users while not fixing basic aspects of their implementation of the HTML spec like rendering tables.
Thankfully, it seems that now the major browsers have realized the errors of their ways and no longer see "time to market" as being more important than standards compliance. The Mozilla team has been doing excellent works with regards to implementing a number of the W3C standards and Microsoft has now gone as far as to start deprecating some of their own technologies in favor of the W3C versions (e.g. XDR -> XML Schema and XSL -> XSLT).
I am constantly amazed by people who claim that faster hardware leads to bad code as if we've been living in the Golden Age of quality code for the past few decades.
With current hardware, people are still writing code a lot of code in C and C++ for performance reasons which has lead to buffer overflows, segfaults, core dumps, general protection faults, and blue screens becoming generally accepted aspects of computer programming. Now that the hardware is finally becoming fast enough, maybe we can wean ourselves from C & C++ and move over to writing apps in Java or even C# instead of still dealing with the same issues that were solvable problems 20 years ago. Programmers have shown that it is practically impossible to deliver significantly problem free C/C++ code in a decent timeframe while programming environments like Java have shown the opposite. Once hardware creeps up enough we can rid ourselves of the problems of C & C++ once the performance gains are not worth the amount of bugs one has to deal with, which is already happening in lots of server applications.
Also once, hardware creeps up enough maybe some of the stuff that has been in research labs for the past 20 years can finally see some use. For instance microkernel are generally seen as a superior way to design an OS but have had difficulty taking hold due to performance reasons (although Windows NT is based on a -kernel architecure and MacOS X is also built on the Mach -kernel) which wil change once hardware advances make it possible for the performance difference to become acceptable.
A.I. being built into applications as well as the OS is another place where hardware performance and memory availability would play a big part in helping come to fruition.
How about voice recognition and face recognition being built into the applications you use?
How about bringing virtual reality to masses?
Or do you think that a 1 GHz CPU and 128 MBs of RAM is all the power a computer user will ever need?
There is little open source software for windows, because authors of open source software do not want to support microsoft.
Thanks for stereotyping Open Source software developers. Unfortunately you are wrong. Many people who become involved in Open Source software do so because they want to share software with people and not because Micro$oft sux0rs. Simply because most of the posts on Slashdot typically mindlessly bash Microsoft and call it the Great Satan doesn't mean that
people developing software that they want to benefit users of software will divorce themselves from the Windows platform.
What makes you think that Open Source development is restricted to users of a certain platform? Open Source Developer != Linux user even though a lot of them are.
Apache and Star Office are exceptions, because they want to become standards and that means being available for the most popular desktop platform.
but nobody even seems to care about the fact that Anthrax has been confirmed in New York City
So how will these laws prevent someone from putting some Anthrax spores in an envelope and mailing them to you? This is how the NBC reporter supposedly got the disease in case you didn't know.
Ok, we'll get them back after all this is over. Most of these provisions (the one the Senate passed in particular) has a SUNSET clause. Nobody seems to mention that. These are temporary restrictions to aid in the keeping the people safe.
This is incorrect. Read the Reuters article about the bill passing or any other major news story about the USA act. The Senate voted for No SUNSET on their version of the bill. That's right, congress believes ecret searches of the homes of suspects and treating people like the US is soviet Russia should become the new American way of life.
The House is pressing for sunset provisions to this law but the Senate is trying to convince them otherwise and according to the current slashdot article (you read the links right?), it looks like the House may have been convinced to throw out their objections except for a token disagreement about the wiretap sections expiring in 2004 but even that has provisions that allow it to be overruled if the government feels that it violates "national security".
Considering that the Senate Passed the Anti-Terrorism Bill with an overwhelming 96-1 vote. Reading through the quotes in the linked article, it is particularly disturbing how most of the senators see nothing wrong with the bill and are opposed to limiting the duration of the bill as the House wants to.
The house hasn't voted on their version of the bill yet so there is still time to inundiate your representatives with phone calls, faxes and letters.
Re:Of course "no one" will use it
on
J#
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In any case, if this is just a migration tool, MS is going through a hell of a lot of trouble to present it as a Java alternative.
Where and how has MSFT presented this as anything more than a migration tool? From the MSDN Visual J# page.
Visual J#.NET provides the easiest transition for Java developers into the world of XML Web services and dramatically improves the interoperability of Java-language programs with existing software written in a variety of other programming languages. Visual J#.NET enables Microsoft Visual J++ customers and other Java-language programmers to take advantage of existing investments in skills and code while fully exploiting the Microsoft platform today and into the future.
Visual J#.NET includes technology that enables customers to migrate Java-language investments to the.NET Framework. Existing applications developed with Visual J++ can be easily modified to execute on the.NET Framework, interoperate with other.NET-based languages and applications, and incorporate new.NET functionality such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms. Further, developers can use it to create entirely new.NET-based applications.
This is rather unfortunate since it looks like no one is working on a port of the Java language to.NET especially since the claims that Rational is working on a Java for.NET seem to be unfounded considering there is no mention of it anywhere on their site. That's a shame, since I feel the combo of Java and the CLR would make a very killer combination.
...what can adequately be blamed on stupidity. The Salon article goes on and on claiming that the fact that the menu options to change the default program that should be used to open a file with a given extension is buried deep in a bunch of menus is the indication of some sort of conspiracy theory. I assume the writer isn't used to using Microsoft products because if he was he'd realize that poorly placed yet important functionality is a staple of Microsoft software.
Recently I've had problems like that with MSFT software such as:
I've spent months trying to figure out how to turn of auto-indenting in numbered lists within Word 2000 with no success.
Using typeid() and other RTTI features is disabled by default in Visual C++ 6.0 and requires finding a very hidden, nested menu to turn it on. This took hours to find.
In general most of their products seem to lack a good Human Computer Interaction factor. But to go as far as calling bad design, some sort of attempt to keep a monopoly seems rather excessive to me, especially since it's fixed in Windows 2000 so that right-clicking on a file brings up the shortcut menu complete with an option that says "Open With..." where you can specify what program to open the file with and if you want the program permanently associated with that file extension.
The bill lists more than 40 criminal offenses, including computer intrusion and damaging a computer, and defines those offenses as terrorism if they are "calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion...or to retaliate against government conduct."
You don't prosecute someone from another country doing things that are legal there and not legal here.
Please name the countries where copyright infringement is legal (as opposed to illegal but unenforced due to how widespread it is like in most parts of Asia).
Artists literally can get checks from the RIAA of 0.12$US for a 20$US record sale.
That was my point about selling a million copies. Artists that go multi-platinum do fairly well while those that don't end up with a few good memories and sometimes in debt. This gamble is still preferable to making no money which is what the P2P services would eventually lead to given enough time.
Artists could make a LOT more money if they distributed online and took all the profits from said sales (and more power to them on doing this - I would buy music if my money was going to the artist, and not the RIAA).
This is very amusing. Why would anyone pay to download a song when they can get it for free on Morpheus, Gnutella, KaaZaa or Grokster? Wasn't there a recent Slashdot story about They Might Be Giants and how they were pissed at Napster because they had created an online presence only for Napster to render it all irrelvant?
BOTTOM LINE: For artists to make money from online music, free music services must disappear.
"[The RIAA] will be dealing with companies that are more rogue in nature and that have a better grasp of technology that masks actions and skirts copyright laws. They will need FastTrack in their corner. FastTrack controls the code that enables these three networks."
Who is to say this isn't a first step in realigning forces with the RIAA? The RIAA has learned their lesson and won't screw it up this time by driving people away from the service before making a deal like they did with Napster. Who knows, soon Morpheus could become a pay service which would make sense since those companies need to make money somehow.
I find it so amusing that the RIAA claims it hopes for the success of other music related businesses, then talks about handing enforcement. Enforcement!? RIAA: You are a conduit for music, not the source! Enforcement is up to the artists. If "Vibrating Sandbox" doesn't want its music distributed on *ster, then that's their problem.
So how should artists afford to prosecute multi-million dolar VC funded companies like Napster or companies that are outside the United?
If you are an artist with the choice of getting a major label deal and maybe making a profit if you sell over a million copies (or being in debt otherwise) or making no money from the spread of your music while being popular among the fans that don't pay for your music, what would you choose?
Eventually, when CD burners, Minidiscs and car MP3 players become cheap and popular enough, how do you propose artists make a living in this new world order?
Hi, mom.
Congress is considering a law that will make copying anything illegal. Taping shows from TV, copying songs to your Sony Minidisc, burning CDs, making backups of software, moving eBooks from your PC to your PDA, and a whole lot more won't be illegal but will be impossible because all computers and devices that will be made once the law is passed will explicitly ban it. Welcome to my nightmare.
Does anyone else worry about the NSA making the Linux kernel easy to modify? All I could think about while reading the above comment was "what else are they planning to put in?"
The NSA creates a system where you can plug in the security architecture that you want and you complain? Would you rather that they hardcoded it so only NSA provided security features could be used?
I guess it just goes to show that you can't please everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
so why does linux have 1 VM? it seems that 2 of them exist, and the BSD's have more... guys, "gimme a hunk" and "page fault" aren't exactly rocket science anymore, particularly with hardware support... the fact that there is room to make a big deal out of this is the problem, not the VMs.
If Linux was a microkernel I'm pretty sure this would be possible but from what I've seen of the Linux kernel code and from some discussions on the linux kernel mailing list, the virtual memory code is too entrenched in various parts of the code to be #ifdefed around with any sort of ease.
It knows what I have installed, what is *needed*, and other things I may *want*.
To successfully keep on top of IIS patches you have to use hfNetChk which is,
WAIT FOR IT,
a command line tool.
Databases are for storing data. End of Story.
Exactly, and XML is a format for encoding structured data. There are many kinds of documents that live their live their entire lives as XML, from XHTML documents to configuration files to myriad kinds of XML documents that exist today.
Why is NASA switching to MySQL from Oracle [fcw.com] and noticing speed increases?
If all you want is speed then MySQL is all you need. Similarly I can quote how much faster TUX is than Apache but that means nothing if I have dynamic database driven content that I want to use JSP or Perl to access.
There is more to picking a database than how quickly it performs some SQL queries.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XML.. as a data interchange format.. but when i want tight storage and quick retrieval, give me a normalized RDBMS any day of the week. Because that's what it's for.
This means you're suggesting that people shred XML documents into relational data to store them in the DB and then reassemble them whenever they retrieve them. This is massive overhead and error prone since you're depending on your developers to come up with custom ways of doing this for each application. Also typically very difficult to ensure that the XML that was stored in the DB can be accurately reconstructed (what happens to comments, processing instructions, enbtities, etc).
how is a programmer expected to deal with the CD being scratched? Does your car still work if the transmission is damaged or half the engine has been riddled with bullet holes?
Again, a very unexpected and unnatural scenario. How well do cars function when they run out of fuel?
But how well would your refrigerator react if you treated it shoddily such as by leaving it outdoors intermuitently or diconnecting and reconnecting the power several times a day?
Now, I'm not trying to excuse sloppy software development but the fact of the matter is that software is constantly expected to work perfectly under situations completely outside its specifications yet we don't expect this from other items or appliances that we use.
This is fucked up. I just successfully went to MSN.com with Netscape 4.72 on Linux but when I tried Mozilla 0.9.4 I got the error message.
- There is no need to upgrade the OS just because new versions are out. There are shops still using Windows 95 to do their work and that's like 3 Windows versions ago.
- Is it really true that a server that could handle 200 users a few years ago can handle 200 users using Mozilla, Open Office and X at the same time off of the same server without any upgrades?
I won't comment on the 5000-user manufacturing operation since I have little knowledge about setups like that. I do have an issue however with his usage of application crash data from BugToaster. Exactly what does how much an application (not OS) crashes on the OS have to do with it? Netscape and Pico (God, I hate pico) crash on me all the time, yet I never go around claiming that this has anything to do with Linux's stability.Since BugToaster doesn't give statistical breakdowns such as application versus OS crashes their data is practically meaningless. I'm pretty sure Mindcraft can come up with a survey that shows that people running Linux that use the 2 year old versions of Netscape have to deal with a lot of crashes and it would be shouted down for being teh FUD that it is, well this guy is guilty of doing the same thing.
I see things like this, and my first reaction is that it confirms my biases that Miguel de Icaza et al. have gone completely off their rocker by thinking that they can work with Microsoft and support .NET using Mono or anything else developed as true free or open source software.
.NET My Services a.k.a. Hailstorm. Miguel said as much when I interviewed him for Slashdot and the same thing is on the Mono FAQ page.
.NET My Services are web services provided by Microsoft. What exactly makes you thing there is any relationship at all?
Mono has nothing to do with
Mono is a development platform,
One of the reason that so many people are now using Windows 9x/ME/2000 is that Microsoft bascially gave away their SDK back in the days of Win 3.x, while IBM was looking to their OS/2 SDK as part of their revenue model, and charging accordingly.
.NET My Services which used to be called Hailstorm not the .NET Framework SDK.
The article is about pricing for accessing
If early generation games crash, Microsoft will have a perception problem regardless of who is at fault. The bar is set higher for entry machines these days. PlayStation and PlayStation II were not prone to crashing.
As someone already mentioned, comparing a kiosk that runs the early version of the console 24/7 in a poorly ventilated environment is different from comparing the final consumer product being used in regular conditions. As for Playstation II's not crashing, you must have a very short memory. I seem to remember headlines like PS2 glitches likely to drag down Sony's earnings , Sony finds glitches in three PS2 games and more when they first came out and look how successful PS2 is now.
I say, the jury is out until the holiday season is over before we can tell if X-Box will be a success or failure.
Subscriptions that eliminate banner ads do not add much value for the purchaser especially in a technically savvy crowd like Slashdot where users that know how to install and configure JunkBuster to get rid of ads abound. For subscriptions to be valuable source of revenue then the people who subscribe must get a considerable amount more than the people who don't to make it worth it. Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
A lot of the ideas are probably unworkable but they are put there to give an idea as to the kind of things that people are more likely to pay for than not.
All of these may seem distasteful but considering that VA Linux probably doesn't have much longer to go I think the Slashdot folks need to take a long hard look at how they're going to keep financing the site if they still want it to exist in four or five years.
Flame Away.
But Microsoft? It's contributed to standards initiated by others. It's tried to detract from standards initiated by others (Java).
Java is not a standard unless your criteria for being a standard is simply that it is used by a lot of people. If that's the case then Microsoft has created lots of standards from COM to the Word file format to UDDI to their XML schema proposal that was rejected by the W3C but was embraced by most of industry.
If you're talking about standards in the strict sense of the Word then I can think of SOAP and C# and the CLI (in progress) but then again I haven't paid much attention to what Microsoft does until quite recently.
When I read the article I expected to read about some developer who was highly skilled but eccentric who ended up being fired because his/her boss could no longer deal with the developer's eccentricities. Instead what I read was a typical story of a developer who got canned for being unable to deliver. His "quirkiness" or eccentricity had little to do with it and in fact it looked like his employers may even have practiced a little reverse discrimination in assuming that simply by being eccentric he ws a high performer which turned out to be false. Kinda reminds me of how most companies expect their Indian programmers to be geniuses and react with surprise when some of them turn out not to be.
Anyway, from my experiences working in different software companies over the past few years, "quirky" engineers that deliver still exist and are respected by many in their organizations.
They tried to code for a standard that they hoped would be *the* standard by the time they shipped. Both missed the target. But had they written for what was at the time the current standard they'd have been releasing browser that, while stable and complient, would have been miles behind the competition in terms of features. Which is why writing a standards complient browser should be undertaken by someone who isn't trying to make money. Delibrately being behind your competition would be suicidal.
Both these companies tried to strongarm the W3C into accepting their versions of standards by going ahead and implementing them anyway. This began with Netscape and it's "time to market" fiasco where they felt major versions of their software had to be released at "Internet time" which lead to them forcing such travesties as Javascript, Javascript CSS and a number of other nonsensities on the web users while not fixing basic aspects of their implementation of the HTML spec like rendering tables.
Thankfully, it seems that now the major browsers have realized the errors of their ways and no longer see "time to market" as being more important than standards compliance. The Mozilla team has been doing excellent works with regards to implementing a number of the W3C standards and Microsoft has now gone as far as to start deprecating some of their own technologies in favor of the W3C versions (e.g. XDR -> XML Schema and XSL -> XSLT).
I am constantly amazed by people who claim that faster hardware leads to bad code as if we've been living in the Golden Age of quality code for the past few decades.
With current hardware, people are still writing code a lot of code in C and C++ for performance reasons which has lead to buffer overflows, segfaults, core dumps, general protection faults, and blue screens becoming generally accepted aspects of computer programming. Now that the hardware is finally becoming fast enough, maybe we can wean ourselves from C & C++ and move over to writing apps in Java or even C# instead of still dealing with the same issues that were solvable problems 20 years ago. Programmers have shown that it is practically impossible to deliver significantly problem free C/C++ code in a decent timeframe while programming environments like Java have shown the opposite. Once hardware creeps up enough we can rid ourselves of the problems of C & C++ once the performance gains are not worth the amount of bugs one has to deal with, which is already happening in lots of server applications.
Also once, hardware creeps up enough maybe some of the stuff that has been in research labs for the past 20 years can finally see some use. For instance microkernel are generally seen as a superior way to design an OS but have had difficulty taking hold due to performance reasons (although Windows NT is based on a -kernel architecure and MacOS X is also built on the Mach -kernel) which wil change once hardware advances make it possible for the performance difference to become acceptable.
A.I. being built into applications as well as the OS is another place where hardware performance and memory availability would play a big part in helping come to fruition.
How about voice recognition and face recognition being built into the applications you use?
How about bringing virtual reality to masses?
Or do you think that a 1 GHz CPU and 128 MBs of RAM is all the power a computer user will ever need?
Thanks for stereotyping Open Source software developers. Unfortunately you are wrong. Many people who become involved in Open Source software do so because they want to share software with people and not because Micro$oft sux0rs. Simply because most of the posts on Slashdot typically mindlessly bash Microsoft and call it the Great Satan doesn't mean that people developing software that they want to benefit users of software will divorce themselves from the Windows platform.
What makes you think that Open Source development is restricted to users of a certain platform? Open Source Developer != Linux user even though a lot of them are.
Apache and Star Office are exceptions, because they want to become standards and that means being available for the most popular desktop platform.
Exceptions, huh? How about
but nobody even seems to care about the fact that Anthrax has been confirmed in New York City
So how will these laws prevent someone from putting some Anthrax spores in an envelope and mailing them to you? This is how the NBC reporter supposedly got the disease in case you didn't know.
Ok, we'll get them back after all this is over. Most of these provisions (the one the Senate passed in particular) has a SUNSET clause. Nobody seems to mention that. These are temporary restrictions to aid in the keeping the people safe.
This is incorrect. Read the Reuters article about the bill passing or any other major news story about the USA act. The Senate voted for No SUNSET on their version of the bill. That's right, congress believes ecret searches of the homes of suspects and treating people like the US is soviet Russia should become the new American way of life.
The House is pressing for sunset provisions to this law but the Senate is trying to convince them otherwise and according to the current slashdot article (you read the links right?), it looks like the House may have been convinced to throw out their objections except for a token disagreement about the wiretap sections expiring in 2004 but even that has provisions that allow it to be overruled if the government feels that it violates "national security".
Considering that the Senate Passed the Anti-Terrorism Bill with an overwhelming 96-1 vote. Reading through the quotes in the linked article, it is particularly disturbing how most of the senators see nothing wrong with the bill and are opposed to limiting the duration of the bill as the House wants to.
The house hasn't voted on their version of the bill yet so there is still time to inundiate your representatives with phone calls, faxes and letters.
Where and how has MSFT presented this as anything more than a migration tool? From the MSDN Visual J# page.
This is rather unfortunate since it looks like no one is working on a port of the Java language to
- I've spent months trying to figure out how to turn of auto-indenting in numbered lists within Word 2000 with no success.
- Using typeid() and other RTTI features is disabled by default in Visual C++ 6.0 and requires finding a very hidden, nested menu to turn it on. This took hours to find.
In general most of their products seem to lack a good Human Computer Interaction factor. But to go as far as calling bad design, some sort of attempt to keep a monopoly seems rather excessive to me, especially since it's fixed in Windows 2000 so that right-clicking on a file brings up the shortcut menu complete with an option that says "Open With..." where you can specify what program to open the file with and if you want the program permanently associated with that file extension.You don't prosecute someone from another country doing things that are legal there and not legal here.
Please name the countries where copyright infringement is legal (as opposed to illegal but unenforced due to how widespread it is like in most parts of Asia).
Artists literally can get checks from the RIAA of 0.12$US for a 20$US record sale.
That was my point about selling a million copies. Artists that go multi-platinum do fairly well while those that don't end up with a few good memories and sometimes in debt. This gamble is still preferable to making no money which is what the P2P services would eventually lead to given enough time.
Artists could make a LOT more money if they distributed online and took all the profits from said sales (and more power to them on doing this - I would buy music if my money was going to the artist, and not the RIAA).
This is very amusing. Why would anyone pay to download a song when they can get it for free on Morpheus, Gnutella, KaaZaa or Grokster? Wasn't there a recent Slashdot story about They Might Be Giants and how they were pissed at Napster because they had created an online presence only for Napster to render it all irrelvant?
BOTTOM LINE: For artists to make money from online music, free music services must disappear.
How do you explain this to your Mom?
Hi, mom.
Congress is considering a law that will make copying anything illegal. Taping shows from TV, copying songs to your Sony Minidisc, burning CDs, making backups of software, moving eBooks from your PC to your PDA, and a whole lot more won't be illegal but will be impossible because all computers and devices that will be made once the law is passed will explicitly ban it. Welcome to my nightmare.
Does anyone else worry about the NSA making the Linux kernel easy to modify? All I could think about while reading the above comment was "what else are they planning to put in?"
The NSA creates a system where you can plug in the security architecture that you want and you complain? Would you rather that they hardcoded it so only NSA provided security features could be used?
I guess it just goes to show that you can't please everyone.