"America" as a continent came first than "America" (United States of America) as a country.
So, if we are speaking about fairness, U.S. citizens should be differentiated from people from the continent, not the opposite.
I am brazilian and also I don't like when U.S. citizens refer to themselves as 'Americans'. I am sorry, but they are NOT more American than me.
We should call them americanians, americanees or something like that. But not (specifically) americans, it would be disrespectful with the rest of the continent.
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT IBM CATE SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
Aside from saying that, unless the Mindcraft benchmark, the SPEC benchmark is a non-Microsoft (neither Redhat) sponsored standard benchmark (well, it has already been said on other posts), I'd like to comment some of your views:
Why specifically do you say Linux is not ready for mainstream? My experience shows exacly the opposite:
If you use RPM- or DEB-based distributions, Installing and Uninstalling programs are a breeze. I've studied both formats, and they are simply GREAT for tracking your installed applications and files. Windows Installshield does not even compare to a robust, well planned package systems like these.
X Window interface complexity? Oh, come on, maybe you don't understand the design issues of the X interface, but that doesn't make it unsuitable for the mainstream:
Network windowing is VERY useful. And for achieving this, it uses a very simple mechanism. All I must do is inform the target from the source (maybe with an export DISPLAY=..., but that can be just automatized).
Yes, it is somewhat slow. But the protocol is improving over time, and there are many people working on this right now. But while it is not the best possible algorithm, it is, yes, a optimal one. And there are several implementations of the X servers, some very fast, like the Metro X one.
You complain of X like if only Linux had X. But every Unix has X, so you do really mean that no Unix is ready for the mainstream??
Let's not forget one thing: the protocol can be complex, but hidden from the user. Based on the various easy-installing, graphic-oriented, user-friendly Linux distributions I have seen, I see no place where the typical newbie/luser could be troubled with X's technical aspects. For all means, it behaves just like the concept was as simple (and as wrong) as a single ubiquitous "Windows" screen.
Last, but not least: I don't know about your personal experience, but where I do live, Linux is already "mainstream". No, it has not grown as big as Windows, but it is on the shelves of supermarkets, on magazine stands, toy shops and even on Convenience Stores. It is also used widely, from domestic computers to corporative servers on IBM (Where I work).
Oh, come on. Your post is well-written, but that doesn't make your arguments more true. For me, it's just one more unimportant piece of anti-linux advocacy, from the people which are annoyed by its rising.
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT IBM CATE SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
Heir to the original UNIX placement scheme, there are real-world, VERY GOOD reasons for the naming and placement rules, and it shouldn't be broken just because you don't know them or you feel uncomfortable with them, because we would lose a lot of standardization this way.
The Joe User? He doesn't care as long as he has his place on the hard disk. He is not a system administrator. Maybe he has got his little system with Linux where he can do his particular mess, but don't expect serious people to try to follow his own common-sense thinkings about this placement of files.
Patola Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT IBM CATE SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
It isn't really a loophole that allowed LAME programmers to "circumvent" the fraunhofer license.
It is a fundamental liberty.
All "evil commercial software houses" (let's follow some stereotype here, some of them make sense) try to make their patents as broad as possible, extending their rights to everything related to it.
Reason and laws don't permit them to forbid all the things they would like, fortunately. One of them states indirectly that you can't forbid people to distribute patches to your program.
But, hey, now LAME is free from the encumberance of having to do the three-step-path do have your LAME MP3 ENCODER running happily.
Patola Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT IBM CATE SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
Re:Registration required at nytimes.com..
on
Sim Plague
·
· Score: 1
The usual privacy protector userid and password are:
username: cypherpunk password: cypherpunk Patola Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT IBM CATE SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
The GPL is not a damn virus, it is the reason for the success of Linux and the failure of the free BSD's, as was featured on an article on slashdot. It disallows people to go away from the freedom policy.
The AIX SMIT (System Management Interface Tool) is the dream configurator of all Unices. It is amazingly well-designed.
Just imagine if linuxconf was like it:
* It would be dismembered in a number of system commands; like, if you would change a device, you would use chdev; if you change network parameters, you would use a command called chinet; if you would delete a filesystem definition along with its partition, you would use rmfs; if you would list devices on your system (with parameters that specify things like: devices actually working of just device definitions), you would use lsdev, and so on. Mnemomic enough.
* You could get to where you want by a shortcut, not having to navigate through awkward menu options every time. Example: linuxconf user would take you to the "user accounts" section.
* You would have a less irritating text interface. Ever seen smit? Its interface is VERY simple. A title on the top, some options, each one in one line, the one that is selected is highlighted, that is, written in reverse. In the bottom, a small keys chart. And that's it. No fancy ascii art and text contours. Fast and visible. Straightforward.
* You could see the command, script, or linuxconf "subsystem command" it would execute if you selected the option. For example, if you fill the form to create a user and press F6 to see what it would do if you pressed enter, you could see something like: adduser -c 'New user' -d '/home/user' -G 'users' -s '/bin/ksh' 'foouser'. Or, if you are just about to reconfigure the serial line, you could get some chdev -l ttyS0 -a baud_rate=9600 -a parity=none -a stop_bits=1.
* EVERY option or entry would have a dedicated context-sensitive help if you pressed F1 (and not a general screen with boring explanations. Let's get to the point!)
* There's still more, like types of input (choices from certain lists, which are also activated by scripts or commands; numerical values; string arrays; pathnames), logging everything (even the menu entries selected) to a text file, but I almost lose my hopes... Something that born to be linuxconf will NEVER get to the feet of SMIT.
Really, linuxconf designers and programmers should get a grip on the better designed UNICES. Alas, they make a good work, they make it for free, yadda yadda yadda, I know that, but there IS good-designed stuff on the market for them to take their ideas from!
Patola.
Re:Your eyes say yes but your mouth says no...
on
Behold the Lizardman
·
· Score: 1
> What's right for me may not be right for you, > but neither of us has the right to make that call for the other.
I disagree. I think this point of view is valid but has some boundaries. As a society we have to care for our elements. If a killer, in his own point of view, sees himself as right, I cannot just 'respect' him and let him kill people. Even to another society, I couldn't help but apply my own moral principles and ethics; after all, that's what makes me as a person, and all my thoughts - including the law on which I agree - are derived from this.
I think this thought is usually too simplistic and too individualistic to be accepted as a principle for communistic coexistence. So, IMHO, it's not a "don't interfere, what happens with other people is none of your business", but a "respect other people's will until they do not prove themselves bad" - and as "bad", I mean there IS and there will always be some judgment here.
By the way, I do not feel good for this lizard guy. I think he's in some sort of awakened dream, thinking that he's "cool" or something like that, but he's more like a clown and do not realize it.
I know that. But it is at least a disrespect with other countries to entitle a country like that. America was founded in 1492, the United States of America was founded only in 1776.
In portuguese, when we have a city with the same name as a state, for example, there are different names for the natives. For example: a person born in Sao Paulo, the city, is called 'paulistano', and a person born in Sao Paulo, the state, is called 'paulista'. Since Sao Paulo city is the capital of Sao Paulo state, a 'paulistano' is also a 'paulista'.
I would be completely satisfied if I could just differentiate, like calling the real americans (I mean, from the entire continent) 'americans' and the natives of the U.S. as 'americanians' or something like that.
> And I hear that people from the US are > called "americanos" or something similar by >the vast majority of latin americans. Is that not true?
No, that isn't. Most spanish-language latin american countries treat people from the US as 'estadounidenses', as opposed to americans. That would be something like 'unitedstatians' in english. Pretty ugly, isn't it? I think it is appropriate with the disrespect of choosing the name of a continent to a single country.
In Brasil, however (sigh), almost everybody call the U.S. natives as 'americanos'. I wish I was born in a spanish-language latin american country, I would be less ashamed, I think.
Just kidding. I don't know anything about Europe standards.
I live in Brazil. Fortunately we don't have that kind of nonsense here, though we are labeled as a 'developing country'.
Really, I don't understand the US. It is a contradictory country. It's the most moralist country of all, but it also makes the most violent creations (from the movies and games to the highly weird crimes - children killing fathers, students making carnages) and the most wicked pornographic pieces (almost all the bizarre sex magazines I know are from the US).
And they even call themselves "the Americans", like if there wasn't other countries on the continent. Bah. Hey mom! Brazil is in America and I am not an American? How could it be?
I do think that such contradictions are made possible by the exxagerated rhetoric of the US culture. Everything seems reasonable when you hear it from a typically trained US executive.
Richard Stallman wants to show us that. That kind of culture, that kind of psicological force that makes us lose the sense of obviousness, that makes greedy and immoral things looks like nothing.
Of course, sometimes the obvious is also wrong, but there is a balance, and it is far from what the U.S. Patents office and U.S. Legal system tries to show us.
Just my two cents. I don't want to offend any nationality, just uncover some differences.
This one I have to say for Brazil. We have a different culture for IRC here. From the beginning IRC in Brazil created the tradition of IRC meetings, something we call IRContros ("IRCounters").
This is not the same concepts as other countries. IRcontros are like going to a date, party or very informal meeting. Some IRC channels make daily or weekly IRContros.
As long as I know, this is something unique to Brazil. I've even contacted people who are doing their master thesis on it and they say the same thing. In other countries, the "IRC meetings" are very different from ours. They don't get even close to the unifying feeling of an IRContro.
This provides an awesome community feeling and bursts your social life. It is wonderful to see the internet uniting people instead of isolating. No place for "socially-impaired nerds" here.
As a former "socially-impaired nerd", I can say IRC pretty much cured me from my isolation and even brought me a lot of girlfriends.
I currently use my Palm III handheld to read a lot of books. From Principia Discordia to Aristhotle's Rhetoric, and also for reference (I have a lot of awk, vi, emacs etc. reference books on my Palm), I regard them as being indeed useful. There are lots of sites for electronic texts converted to the common "doc" format (it is not MS Word DOC), proving that a lot of palm users actually use this handheld device as an e-book reader.
Consider this: it may not be ideal, but it is suitable. Reading a small surface is not so bad. Remember those little bibles that some religions distribute freely? it's the same feeling.
And you can even read in the dark, using the backlight. 3COM rules, when everybody have a Palm nobody will ever need books (even with pictures, I mean, my Principia Discordia has all the pictures of the original book).
I know what you're passing for. I am at college (Unicamp) right now, and there are only 5 disciplines on my course for me to finish.
Problem is, about one year and a half ago, I got contacted for a start-up company to a promising job in IBM products. I got this job, I am a sort of support person/installer/implementor/do-it-all. It is a good job and the company more than doubled throughout this time, and is about to double again.
I was very frustrated with college at the time I was contacted, and I don't regret it. This job taught me more than a few great lessons.
But, now, apart from unwilling to get back to that ugly chairs and desks and seeing the face of a teacher who knows less than me on several subjects, I can't reserve the time to *finish* these 5 disciplines. I have already postponed my year 2 times - and I can't do it anymore, subject to expulsion.
How do I handle this situation? I don't know. At one side, there is my job - and my future lies within it (it is a full-time job, I work almost 14 hours a day, most times even in holiday) - and at the other side, there's college - I can't step on to that same future without getting that rolled paper which certifies me as being 'capable' of doing what I do WELL for one year and a half.
I have already tried to attend college while studying. My college is about 130 km far from my work, so I take about two hours driving (apart that my job puts me traveling to distant places most of my time). Fortunately it was a discipline which was taught only once every two weeks, but even then I couldn't succeed to accompany it and I failed.
Any suggestions? I hope there was a magic recipe for succeeding in this kind of situation, which I believe to being highly parallel to yours, yet in a different context.
BTW - I don't think it would be easy to get a transfer to where I live, and even then, I would lose a whole set of disciplines and the big status of the college I attend to.
The title says it all. HP-UX is already at version 11. Does this sound dumb?
The matter is that there is no rule that says: go 1, then go 2, then go 3 and so on. I could make a program/distribution/something thats starts at 13.1, then goes down to 2, then go 3.14159265358979, then 3 billion, and so on.
Anyway, I think it's counterintuitive. I just feel that it would be less deceptive if it weren't for the odd versioning.
* Linux needs a unified and coherent High Availability Solution. The guys at HA-Linux are doing a great job (thanx, Allan!), but this project still lacks a lot of functionality.
A good High Availability Solution involves both software and hardware. As being used mostly on Intel platforms, Linux lacks adequate hardware to do things like disk sharing, and on the software side, it lacks a good journaled file system that also uses a LVM
Any of you guys has a real solution, or at least some effort being put into it, to show us? I am an AIX worker who works a lot with HACMP, the IBM product for High Availability. My company also does some jobs for Linux, too, and it is not uncommon for some customer to be interested in High Availability for Linux. The customer gives up as soon as it sees the obstacles for getting the software and hardware for it.
* Linux Certification. I've heard that IBM will be offering certification in Linux too. Are any of the technical guys in your company certified? If so, which exact certification do they have? The RedHat certification? Or other company's one? How important do you feel being certified is in the Linux market today? Do you also feel the lack of a strong, internationalized, unified Linux certification?
* Lovely distributions vs. Good distributions - As an Unix professional, I feel very sorry for the today distributions. Even the most corporate ones seems to be targeted to the home user and general services, being bloated with several daemons and applications which really aren't necessary or even desirable in most practical situations. This makes all the Linux distributions which I know very slow compared to the real power of the kernel.
A good distribution that could be tuned in installation time would be a gift from the heavens for technical people. Something that doesn't follow the redhat standard (sorry, redhat, but your distribution IS bloated) and don't make dumb mistakes like when you ask it not to install X in the installation menu and it still installs it because it is a prerequisite for most administration applications.
Do you plan for implementing something like that in your company? My boss proposed a while ago that we could make such a distribution, or at least an internal-use only version of it to ease our work.
* Corporate database using.It is fine to see that Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2 and so on have versions for Linux, it is nice to see SAP R/3 shipping for Linux too, but has ANYBODY having REAL experience with it? We are willing to work with Linux like we work with AIX, but we don't know anybody who has real experience with Linux in this database world so that we could use this knowledge to help clients to migrate to Linux.
Do you have any experience in Linux using these products in serious, mission-critical environments?
* Drivers, libraries and software issues - One of the shiny points about Linux is the availability of very good open-source software. The bad point of this good point is having to compile almost every application you get. To worse things up, you are on your own if you have trouble with shared libraries -- many software products use libraries in beta stages, and sometimes you can't use one of them because the other requires just the other version of that same library, and you can't have both on the same system. How do you explain that to a customer when you are providing support?
I guess these are my points. Hey, I could use these answers for the real world if I get them!
What is it that on a Solaris news everybody keeps talking about Linux?
I bet people can't realize what the next wave.
Behold, brothers and sisters. There will be a time when there will be no Linux, no Solaris, no AIX, no FreeBSD, no more Unices, just one whole, monolithic, united, big, UNIX (R) called something like HPSCOLinarisBSDIX (tm). Then everybody will be happy forever (except for Bill Gates and his minions, of course).
Or maybe we could stick with a hybrid version... Maybe WINE gets so big that it makes it possible to hybridize Unix with Windows, so we would have WINHPSCOLinarisBSDIX. Wouldn't that be great?
I Wonder how much time will it take for my message to be moderated out of existence.
I disagree. Many users do care about open-sourceness. There is also the hacker wannabe, or the techie boy (who isn't a programmer), or just the curious geek who likes to peek in the insides of a program. What could be more adequate than the freedom to grab all the GIFs and JPGs out of this action game, or the text out of this adventure game, or the WAV player out of this CD-grabber and editor, or any other resource you can think of?
After all, learning from "open" programs is not a privilege of programmers. It can be shared by graphic artists, novelists (from adventure games, open-licensed books) and many other kind of people. And the average user, curious just about everything, likes to fiddle with that. He can even learn to program, but that is not that which matters most.
Don't forget, part of the success of games like Doom and Quake was due to their openness and flexibility to incorporate hacks, sounds, graphics and extra pieces. And nobody would say that Quake is something of interest only to a developer.
Of course, most of my examples were games, and I am somewhat lazy to think about other things. But I am sure you can figure it out.
Haven't you read The Cathedral and The Bazaar,Homesteading the Noosphere and so on?I assume you don't understand why people make free software.
In these books, Eric Raymond clarified some of the aspects that make people write open source software. And these aspects do not meet Windows. Even if it were totally open-sourced, even if the Microsoft mentality was different about closed-sourcing, I don't think it would get momentum to surpass Linux, because the programmers would not get the satisfaction, self-esteem, bragging rights or whatever you call it that they get when making products for "the idealistic operating system".
That's a sense of feeling, not an objective issue. Would you waste your talented skills with a company that poses as the real-world Big Brother?
Neither would I. Indeed, I make all efforts to be completely Windows-independent.
Is that true? Can't they ship free software with their OS? I've had the impression that the GPL allows this, as long as no proprietary code is mixed in their source.
If I were an OS developer like Sun or IBM, I'd put at least some of the best free software products we have today - including the wonderful GNU rewritten UNIX utilities, like grep, ps, bash, awk and so on. I am an Unix worker, and it really annoys seeing these UNIX commands with lack of options - e.g, I tried to use grep on AIX with the -b (before) option some day, and realised the AIX version didn't have it.
It's a shame. Big companies like IBM, who already gives much to the free software world, can't leave the fear of their OS being superceded by Free Software.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if we are speaking about fairness, U.S. citizens should be differentiated from people from the continent, not the opposite.
I am brazilian and also I don't like when U.S. citizens refer to themselves as 'Americans'. I am sorry, but they are NOT more American than me.
We should call them americanians, americanees or something like that. But not (specifically) americans, it would be disrespectful with the rest of the continent.
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
IBM CATE
SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
Why specifically do you say Linux is not ready for mainstream? My experience shows exacly the opposite:
Oh, come on. Your post is well-written, but that doesn't make your arguments more true. For me, it's just one more unimportant piece of anti-linux advocacy, from the people which are annoyed by its rising.
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
IBM CATE
SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
And it's GPL'ed!!!!
Do never forget to mention mutt.
You could go to Micros~1 (i.e. hell) for that.
Patola
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
IBM CATE
SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
The FileSystem Hierarchy Standard shows the suggested directory and files placement for Linux (and for BSD systems too).
Heir to the original UNIX placement scheme, there are real-world, VERY GOOD reasons for the naming and placement rules, and it shouldn't be broken just because you don't know them or you feel uncomfortable with them, because we would lose a lot of standardization this way.
The Joe User? He doesn't care as long as he has his place on the hard disk. He is not a system administrator. Maybe he has got his little system with Linux where he can do his particular mess, but don't expect serious people to try to follow his own common-sense thinkings about this placement of files.
Patola
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
IBM CATE
SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
It isn't really a loophole that allowed LAME programmers to "circumvent" the fraunhofer license.
It is a fundamental liberty.
All "evil commercial software houses" (let's follow some stereotype here, some of them make sense) try to make their patents as broad as possible, extending their rights to everything related to it.
Reason and laws don't permit them to forbid all the things they would like, fortunately. One of them states indirectly that you can't forbid people to distribute patches to your program.
But, hey, now LAME is free from the encumberance of having to do the three-step-path do have your LAME MP3 ENCODER running happily.
Patola
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
IBM CATE
SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
username: cypherpunk
password: cypherpunk
Patola
Patola (Cláudio Sampaio) - Solvo IT
IBM CATE
SAIR GNU/Linux Certified
The GPL is not a damn virus, it is the reason for the success of Linux and the failure of the free BSD's, as was featured on an article on slashdot. It disallows people to go away from the freedom policy.
Patola
Just imagine if linuxconf was like it:
* It would be dismembered in a number of system commands; like, if you would change a device, you would use chdev; if you change network parameters, you would use a command called chinet; if you would delete a filesystem definition along with its partition, you would use rmfs; if you would list devices on your system (with parameters that specify things like: devices actually working of just device definitions), you would use lsdev, and so on. Mnemomic enough.
* You could get to where you want by a shortcut, not having to navigate through awkward menu options every time. Example: linuxconf user would take you to the "user accounts" section.
* You would have a less irritating text interface. Ever seen smit? Its interface is VERY simple. A title on the top, some options, each one in one line, the one that is selected is highlighted, that is, written in reverse. In the bottom, a small keys chart. And that's it. No fancy ascii art and text contours. Fast and visible. Straightforward.
* You could see the command, script, or linuxconf "subsystem command" it would execute if you selected the option. For example, if you fill the form to create a user and press F6 to see what it would do if you pressed enter, you could see something like: adduser -c 'New user' -d '/home/user' -G 'users' -s '/bin/ksh' 'foouser'. Or, if you are just about to reconfigure the serial line, you could get some chdev -l ttyS0 -a baud_rate=9600 -a parity=none -a stop_bits=1.
* EVERY option or entry would have a dedicated context-sensitive help if you pressed F1 (and not a general screen with boring explanations. Let's get to the point!)
* There's still more, like types of input (choices from certain lists, which are also activated by scripts or commands; numerical values; string arrays; pathnames), logging everything (even the menu entries selected) to a text file, but I almost lose my hopes... Something that born to be linuxconf will NEVER get to the feet of SMIT.
Really, linuxconf designers and programmers should get a grip on the better designed UNICES. Alas, they make a good work, they make it for free, yadda yadda yadda, I know that, but there IS good-designed stuff on the market for them to take their ideas from!
Patola.
> but neither of us has the right to make that call for the other.
I disagree. I think this point of view is valid but has some boundaries. As a society we have to care for our elements. If a killer, in his own point of view, sees himself as right, I cannot just 'respect' him and let him kill people. Even to another society, I couldn't help but apply my own moral principles and ethics; after all, that's what makes me as a person, and all my thoughts - including the law on which I agree - are derived from this.
I think this thought is usually too simplistic and too individualistic to be accepted as a principle for communistic coexistence. So, IMHO, it's not a "don't interfere, what happens with other people is none of your business", but a "respect other people's will until they do not prove themselves bad" - and as "bad", I mean there IS and there will always be some judgment here.
By the way, I do not feel good for this lizard guy. I think he's in some sort of awakened dream, thinking that he's "cool" or something like that, but he's more like a clown and do not realize it.
Patola.
In portuguese, when we have a city with the same name as a state, for example, there are different names for the natives. For example: a person born in Sao Paulo, the city, is called 'paulistano', and a person born in Sao Paulo, the state, is called 'paulista'. Since Sao Paulo city is the capital of Sao Paulo state, a 'paulistano' is also a 'paulista'.
I would be completely satisfied if I could just differentiate, like calling the real americans (I mean, from the entire continent) 'americans' and the natives of the U.S. as 'americanians' or something like that.
> And I hear that people from the US are
> called "americanos" or something similar by
>the vast majority of latin americans. Is that not true?
No, that isn't. Most spanish-language latin american countries treat people from the US as 'estadounidenses', as opposed to americans. That would be something like 'unitedstatians' in english. Pretty ugly, isn't it? I think it is appropriate with the disrespect of choosing the name of a continent to a single country.
In Brasil, however (sigh), almost everybody call the U.S. natives as 'americanos'. I wish I was born in a spanish-language latin american country, I would be less ashamed, I think.
Patola
I live in Brazil. Fortunately we don't have that kind of nonsense here, though we are labeled as a 'developing country'.
Really, I don't understand the US. It is a contradictory country. It's the most moralist country of all, but it also makes the most violent creations (from the movies and games to the highly weird crimes - children killing fathers, students making carnages) and the most wicked pornographic pieces (almost all the bizarre sex magazines I know are from the US).
And they even call themselves "the Americans", like if there wasn't other countries on the continent. Bah. Hey mom! Brazil is in America and I am not an American? How could it be?
I do think that such contradictions are made possible by the exxagerated rhetoric of the US culture. Everything seems reasonable when you hear it from a typically trained US executive.
Richard Stallman wants to show us that. That kind of culture, that kind of psicological force that makes us lose the sense of obviousness, that makes greedy and immoral things looks like nothing.
Of course, sometimes the obvious is also wrong, but there is a balance, and it is far from what the U.S. Patents office and U.S. Legal system tries to show us.
Just my two cents. I don't want to offend any nationality, just uncover some differences.
Patola
This is not the same concepts as other countries. IRcontros are like going to a date, party or very informal meeting. Some IRC channels make daily or weekly IRContros.
As long as I know, this is something unique to Brazil. I've even contacted people who are doing their master thesis on it and they say the same thing. In other countries, the "IRC meetings" are very different from ours. They don't get even close to the unifying feeling of an IRContro.
This provides an awesome community feeling and bursts your social life. It is wonderful to see the internet uniting people instead of isolating. No place for "socially-impaired nerds" here.
As a former "socially-impaired nerd", I can say IRC pretty much cured me from my isolation and even brought me a lot of girlfriends.
Patola
Consider this: it may not be ideal, but it is suitable. Reading a small surface is not so bad. Remember those little bibles that some religions distribute freely? it's the same feeling.
And you can even read in the dark, using the backlight. 3COM rules, when everybody have a Palm nobody will ever need books (even with pictures, I mean, my Principia Discordia has all the pictures of the original book).
Patola
Problem is, about one year and a half ago, I got contacted for a start-up company to a promising job in IBM products. I got this job, I am a sort of support person/installer/implementor/do-it-all. It is a good job and the company more than doubled throughout this time, and is about to double again.
I was very frustrated with college at the time I was contacted, and I don't regret it. This job taught me more than a few great lessons.
But, now, apart from unwilling to get back to that ugly chairs and desks and seeing the face of a teacher who knows less than me on several subjects, I can't reserve the time to *finish* these 5 disciplines. I have already postponed my year 2 times - and I can't do it anymore, subject to expulsion.
How do I handle this situation? I don't know. At one side, there is my job - and my future lies within it (it is a full-time job, I work almost 14 hours a day, most times even in holiday) - and at the other side, there's college - I can't step on to that same future without getting that rolled paper which certifies me as being 'capable' of doing what I do WELL for one year and a half.
I have already tried to attend college while studying. My college is about 130 km far from my work, so I take about two hours driving (apart that my job puts me traveling to distant places most of my time). Fortunately it was a discipline which was taught only once every two weeks, but even then I couldn't succeed to accompany it and I failed.
Any suggestions? I hope there was a magic recipe for succeeding in this kind of situation, which I believe to being highly parallel to yours, yet in a different context.
BTW - I don't think it would be easy to get a transfer to where I live, and even then, I would lose a whole set of disciplines and the big status of the college I attend to.
Patola
The matter is that there is no rule that says: go 1, then go 2, then go 3 and so on. I could make a program/distribution/something thats starts at 13.1, then goes down to 2, then go 3.14159265358979, then 3 billion, and so on.
Anyway, I think it's counterintuitive. I just feel that it would be less deceptive if it weren't for the odd versioning.
Patola.
* Linux needs a unified and coherent High Availability Solution. The guys at HA-Linux are doing a great job (thanx, Allan!), but this project still lacks a lot of functionality.
A good High Availability Solution involves both software and hardware. As being used mostly on Intel platforms, Linux lacks adequate hardware to do things like disk sharing, and on the software side, it lacks a good journaled file system that also uses a LVM
Any of you guys has a real solution, or at least some effort being put into it, to show us? I am an AIX worker who works a lot with HACMP, the IBM product for High Availability. My company also does some jobs for Linux, too, and it is not uncommon for some customer to be interested in High Availability for Linux. The customer gives up as soon as it sees the obstacles for getting the software and hardware for it.
* Linux Certification. I've heard that IBM will be offering certification in Linux too. Are any of the technical guys in your company certified? If so, which exact certification do they have? The RedHat certification? Or other company's one? How important do you feel being certified is in the Linux market today? Do you also feel the lack of a strong, internationalized, unified Linux certification?
* Lovely distributions vs. Good distributions - As an Unix professional, I feel very sorry for the today distributions. Even the most corporate ones seems to be targeted to the home user and general services, being bloated with several daemons and applications which really aren't necessary or even desirable in most practical situations. This makes all the Linux distributions which I know very slow compared to the real power of the kernel.
A good distribution that could be tuned in installation time would be a gift from the heavens for technical people. Something that doesn't follow the redhat standard (sorry, redhat, but your distribution IS bloated) and don't make dumb mistakes like when you ask it not to install X in the installation menu and it still installs it because it is a prerequisite for most administration applications.
Do you plan for implementing something like that in your company? My boss proposed a while ago that we could make such a distribution, or at least an internal-use only version of it to ease our work.
* Corporate database using.It is fine to see that Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2 and so on have versions for Linux, it is nice to see SAP R/3 shipping for Linux too, but has ANYBODY having REAL experience with it? We are willing to work with Linux like we work with AIX, but we don't know anybody who has real experience with Linux in this database world so that we could use this knowledge to help clients to migrate to Linux.
Do you have any experience in Linux using these products in serious, mission-critical environments?
* Drivers, libraries and software issues - One of the shiny points about Linux is the availability of very good open-source software. The bad point of this good point is having to compile almost every application you get. To worse things up, you are on your own if you have trouble with shared libraries -- many software products use libraries in beta stages, and sometimes you can't use one of them because the other requires just the other version of that same library, and you can't have both on the same system. How do you explain that to a customer when you are providing support?
I guess these are my points. Hey, I could use these answers for the real world if I get them!
Thanks in advance,
Cláudio Sampaio (Patola)
Solvo IT
I bet people can't realize what the next wave.
Behold, brothers and sisters. There will be a time when there will be no Linux, no Solaris, no AIX, no FreeBSD, no more Unices, just one whole, monolithic, united, big, UNIX (R) called something like HPSCOLinarisBSDIX (tm). Then everybody will be happy forever (except for Bill Gates and his minions, of course).
Or maybe we could stick with a hybrid version... Maybe WINE gets so big that it makes it possible to hybridize Unix with Windows, so we would have WINHPSCOLinarisBSDIX. Wouldn't that be great?
I Wonder how much time will it take for my message to be moderated out of existence.
Patola
After all, learning from "open" programs is not a privilege of programmers. It can be shared by graphic artists, novelists (from adventure games, open-licensed books) and many other kind of people. And the average user, curious just about everything, likes to fiddle with that. He can even learn to program, but that is not that which matters most.
Don't forget, part of the success of games like Doom and Quake was due to their openness and flexibility to incorporate hacks, sounds, graphics and extra pieces. And nobody would say that Quake is something of interest only to a developer.
Of course, most of my examples were games, and I am somewhat lazy to think about other things. But I am sure you can figure it out.
Patola
In these books, Eric Raymond clarified some of the aspects that make people write open source software. And these aspects do not meet Windows. Even if it were totally open-sourced, even if the Microsoft mentality was different about closed-sourcing, I don't think it would get momentum to surpass Linux, because the programmers would not get the satisfaction, self-esteem, bragging rights or whatever you call it that they get when making products for "the idealistic operating system".
That's a sense of feeling, not an objective issue. Would you waste your talented skills with a company that poses as the real-world Big Brother?
Neither would I. Indeed, I make all efforts to be completely Windows-independent.
Patola
Can't they ship free software with their OS? I've had the impression that the GPL allows this, as long as no proprietary code is mixed in their source.
If I were an OS developer like Sun or IBM, I'd put at least some of the best free software products we have today - including the wonderful GNU rewritten UNIX utilities, like grep, ps, bash, awk and so on. I am an Unix worker, and it really annoys seeing these UNIX commands with lack of options - e.g, I tried to use grep on AIX with the -b (before) option some day, and realised the AIX version didn't have it.
It's a shame. Big companies like IBM, who already gives much to the free software world, can't leave the fear of their OS being superceded by Free Software.
Patola