But, sadly, it's completely false. Business @ The Speed of Thought was created by taking statements like that and putting them in the blender.
The statements, sadly, existed before the book. Wish I could give Bill Gates & friends the blame for inventing this style of lousy writing, but I can't.
(I didn't actually read the book, but I picked it up in Fry's Electronics and flipped through it. Just the chapter headings were good enough to show what this book was about - it featured every crummy business cliche I've ever seen).
This is a particularly interesting parallel because this division most likely was the beginning of the real decline and fall for GM.
Since they centralized design and assembly instead of having it in the car lines, they managed to homogenize their line, resulting in the dullest cars on the planet short of the Trabant.
Bad move. Admittedly, it did make the corporation more efficient, in building cars nobody wanted to buy.
However, if my memory serves, the head of the AI Lab still let him stick around and use their equipment/offices without obligation. So, like it or not, the work was still indirectly paid for by the folks who funded the AI Lab.
I did find that interesting. My first thought was that her distribution was obsolete; I was surprised that she wouldn't have gone for a fresh Red Hat or SuSE install, which I've noticed go much smoother than the CD ROMs you get included with books.
She may have just been unlucky. I've heard something vaguely about CD ROMs that are hooked up to sound cards, and that Linux doesn't generally support them. But I've installed Linux on three different modern computers and never had that problem.
True enough, but neither User Friendly nor Segfault have parodied AT&T in any way, shape or form.
I would say it's likely to be Star Wars, since they have the greatest interest in protecting their trademarks, but I would think that:
(1) Illiad et al would be at least somewhat sympathetic towards a Star Wars argument; few people that I can see have any particular animus towards SW.
(2) Illiad and Segfault have been (deservedly) relentless in attacking Microsoft, but the Star Wars references have been fairly rare, and not negative towards SW.
So I would suspect it's Microsoft, especially with the number of really rude (and stupid, in my view) Microsoft stories that appeared recently.
Still hard to believe it's either - MS has had an "embrace and extend" attitude about anti-MS sites. When I was actively running mine, I got a call from a very nice MS employee who sent me a whole bunch of MS software, gratis, in an effort to get me to change my mind. Didn't work, but I was impressed by the gesture anyway.
Doesn't seem like it would be reasonable to remove Roy's moderator access for posting something reasonable under his own name. It would be fine if he was saying "Hey, I'm a moderator, how cool", but I think reasonable commentary on the moderating system should be allowed even under a moderator's name.
I'd definitely think less of Rob if he obeyed his own rule and diminished Roy's status. Just for the record.
Well, I can think of perfectly valid reasons to make the Windows port only for pay.
Open Source software is generally written for two basic reasons: Because the author wants to solve a problem for him (or, sadly rarely, her) self, and for the sheer creative enjoyment of building it.
To maximize the latter, these projects are rarely done under Windows. Obviously, a Windows port doesn't help the original author satisfy a need, either. So why should he do a Windows port?
Consumer demand, of course. The slavering masses over there in Windows-land are desperate for half-decent software.
So, why should he do a Windows port? It's no fun. It won't help him solve his own problems.
Money, from the slavering masses, of course. And thus, a different license to pay him back for the misery of working on Windows.
Granted, the book had some really annoying errors (as discussed in some of the other reviews), but I'd checked out GTK on the web, decided it was too difficult to bother figuring out, and did nothing.
I checked out this book in the bookstore, and was off and running within an hour after having read the first few chapters. It's true that I ran into a bunch of snags because he didn't describe all the API calls, but it was good enough to get me excited and start me writing code.
Incidentally, I really liked his examples, since many of them described things that I wanted to do with GTK, so they gave me a nice head start.
I'm thinking it might be worth writing "Cross-Platform Database Programming using GTK+ and mySQL", using my new email handler/PIM application as a guide. Anyone think that would be interesting? There have been a lot of interesting pitfalls that I think would be worth documenting. And - an exciting thought indeed - it might be possible to do the development on Linux or even SGI Irix, and then send the result straight to Windows, Linux, Irix and SunOS without having to (ugh!) develop on a Windows system. If that would work, I'm pumped.
Why shouldn't Alias | Wavefront port their software to Linux, especially on the new SGI NT box? I don't think it would be too hard; they'd have to support the same hardware they do under NT, and they'd give Irix lovers a way out.
I don't see them NOT doing that, once an easily installable Linux exists for the new systems.
What's even worse is that the programming lanugage changes radically for every version of Office.
I've written a commercial application that was written in VB. We decided to make Word our word processor using what was, at that time, WordBasic. Of course shortly after we started, WordBasic changed. At that time it was possible to put in a whole ton of conditionals that allowed me to say "MailMerge" or "ToolsMailMerge" depending on which version was being used. When WordBasic changed to VBA, we had to rewrite everything once again.
It was a big pain, but it definitely forced our user base to migrate to Office97, since our code would have otherwise become unmaintainable.
If that was a deliberate effort to make people miserable, it couldn't have worked better.
On the other hand, I will admit that I like many things about the design of VBA. Programming your word processor does have many advantages few users will ever see. One of the few things MS has done that deserves praise.
I've been fooling around with GTK thanks to the most excellent book 'Developing Linux Applications' by Eric Harlow (see my review at amazon.com).
I remember when I last tried C++ on Windows. I had an application I needed to write; it wasn't very complex, because I could just use Internet Explorer (yes, I know, I know...) to get most of the needed functionality. But it was several hundred lines of impossible to read code, cranked out by some kind of Wizard.
I don't think Microsoft is going to beat the ease and elegance of GTK+ any time soon. I can write graphical applications that work and that don't require all sorts of confusing DLLs, and - most importantly - I understand every line of every program I write.
So far, I'm impressed. I think the temptation of the Microsoft libraries might be easier to resist than you might think. Haven't you lost code you were writing while using the MS development environments, because they crashed, or because you couldn't save your stuff (!)? I have. I haven't lost one byte of anything I've written in EMACS.
The dark side isn't so tempting when you have choice.
> and if MS violates the GPL, who will sue them? > who can afford to stay in court with them for > years?
Anyone.
Think damages.
Think contingency fees.
99 times out of 100, the rapaciousness of the legal profession is only horrifying. But in this case, it would do some good. I don't doubt that an enterprising law firm would leap at the chance.
I noticed that, once the paper clip is installed, you get angry at it instead of Microsoft. The scenerio is like this:
Before Clippit
You get a problem
You type some plausible word into the help search box
No useful answer is forthcoming
You: "Grr, that blasted Microsoft, they create junk software, mumble, mumble."
Now
You get a problem
You type some plausible question into the Clip
The clip doesn't find a useful answer
You: "Grr, that blasted paperclip is a piece of garbage, mumble, mumble."
In other words, the primitive parts of the human brain are quick to blame Clippit, not its creator. So now Microsoft is still a fine company, and that Paper Clip is the source of all unsolveable problems. Brilliant.
The first words I typed in Microsoft Office97 was a little essay called "The Paperclip Spy". Because that's what it seemed like, a critter that was always looking at your document, ready to send any criticisim of Windows to Redmond.
Of course Microsoft could always do that.
But the paperclip somehow made it seem real.
And now, of course, we know that's not as farfetched as I'd thought.
The whole principle behind free software is that you should be free to do with it as you will - that is, if you find an exasperating bug that's been knawing at you for centuries, you have the freedom to go through the source and fix it.
This doesn't really apply to books, since errors in books don't affect your ability to get stuff done in the way software bugs do.
(Real-world example: I found several errors in a book I bought; I was able to change my code accordingly and move on).
A stock S500 is $ 77,500 if my memory serves, so you're actually paying $ 132,500 to the engine/handling tuning folks. You could always do this on the "cheap" by getting the car for $ 77,500 and the hardware for $ 90,000, making a $ 167,500 vehicle. That's not nearly as bad as 295,000/300,000 (note how Tom and MegaCar have a rather petty $ 5 price difference).
If you wait, you'll probably get a discount on the car. I wouldn't count on that now, because the new S500 is looking to be a pretty hot car, but in six months to a year you should be able to find a Mercedes dealer willing to dicker.
You'll also have to wait for the traffic sensing cruise control, which automatically activates the brakes when it sees you coming too close to the car in front of you. With features like that, the S500 seems like an appropriate car to fit out.
I have pictures of the new S-Class (on which Megacar is based) at http://www.amazing.com/portfolio/auto-show/ .
If history is any guide, the JenniCam's server won't be able to handle Slashdot-style loads.
I used to run a JenniCam archive, but unfortunately Jen herself asked me (and pretty much all other archivists) to shut it down. Since they are, after all, her pictures, I complied, albiet sadly.
She was a lot more fun before she got the death threats. Yes, I know that sounds like a stupid joke - unfortunately, it's true. Ever since her site was hacked a year or two back, she's been a lot less brave. Can't say I blame her.
While I was seriously infatuated with her, it was a lot of fun to watch the cam, especially since I was present at the creation. But I drifted out of it, and now I think it's a dangerous addiction. In the long run, it's a lot healthier to find a girl of your own.
(Not that I've managed to, of course, but it's a nice idea:-( ).
D
----
So what about a trunk version?
on
Empeg in March
·
· Score: 1
Wouldn't this significantly reduce the amount of music you could have in the thing? If my memory serves, even the 2GB version has the equivalent of 35 albums worth of storage, and you can only handle 6-12 CDs with a trunk-mounted CD changer.
I got the joke, but I was a little upset that they put down Linus so strongly. Why shouldn't people want to meet the guy in person? I'm sure there are plenty of people who want to meet Bill, after all.
We don't have a BillOS because Bill doesn't have a personal link to it. He paid people to write it, that's all. Linux is Linux because the design and philosophy came out of the heart and mind of one person.
I will need to buy a new machine soon. I like to use my primary machine as both a client and web server. I suppose I should just break down and use NFS, but I like having everything on the same machine.
(1) Would SMP then be useful to me? That is, would I wind up having one CPU devoted to web serving and one devoted to the workstation, thus having effectively two computers in the same box? Or would I be better off buying two separate compuers, putting X on one and putting the web server on the other, and connecting them via NFS? What about NFS security questions? Note that I'm sitting on a 10mb line and would like to be able to saturate it if necessary. Most of my content would be CGI-driven, so CPU might well be a factor.
(2) How much CPU and memory are needed to make Enlightenment snappy? I have a K5/333 and use Enlightenment at 1280x1024 and it's sluggish. I'd like to see things really zip. What do I need?
(3) I will admit a lingering fondness for proprietary workstations such as Sun and SGI. I've pretty much given up on SGI, despite their really nice user interface, because they are trending to Windows, and because the SGI workstations I've used have not proven reliable. But Sun has had some very tempting ads for systems that would cost about the same as a decent VA Research Linux machine, and the Sun clone I bought five years ago is easily the most reliable computer I've ever owned. How would I compare the performance between Sun and VA? I like supporting the Linux revolution, but I also like the smoothness and higher reliability of a Sun.
I believe the Xerox printer was a gift from Xerox, not a purchase. That's very nice of the Xerox folks, of course, but you certainly don't have much of a choice of vendors:-).
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, whenever I hear SAP, I hear:
- It powers an entire enterprise
- It's very customizable
- It's very hard to learn and use
- It costs boatloads of money
So why not just hire in-house programmers to do a totally customized solution instead? With the prices they charge, you could certainly do a lot.D
----
Great comment - I laughed.
But, sadly, it's completely false. Business @ The Speed of Thought was created by taking statements like that and putting them in the blender.
The statements, sadly, existed before the book. Wish I could give Bill Gates & friends the blame for inventing this style of lousy writing, but I can't.
(I didn't actually read the book, but I picked it up in Fry's Electronics and flipped through it. Just the chapter headings were good enough to show what this book was about - it featured every crummy business cliche I've ever seen).
D
----
This is a particularly interesting parallel because this division most likely was the beginning of the real decline and fall for GM.
Since they centralized design and assembly instead of having it in the car lines, they managed to homogenize their line, resulting in the dullest cars on the planet short of the Trabant.
Bad move. Admittedly, it did make the corporation more efficient, in building cars nobody wanted to buy.
D
----
Yes.
However, if my memory serves, the head of the AI Lab still let him stick around and use their equipment/offices without obligation. So, like it or not, the work was still indirectly paid for by the folks who funded the AI Lab.
D
----
Well, we slashdotted the ad page. I like the message:
..."
:-)
"Our server freaked out trying to create a web page for you.
Seriously, I thought it was a pretty good joke on us.
D
----
I did find that interesting. My first thought was that her distribution was obsolete; I was surprised that she wouldn't have gone for a fresh Red Hat or SuSE install, which I've noticed go much smoother than the CD ROMs you get included with books.
She may have just been unlucky. I've heard something vaguely about CD ROMs that are hooked up to sound cards, and that Linux doesn't generally support them. But I've installed Linux on three different modern computers and never had that problem.
D
----
True enough, but neither User Friendly nor Segfault have parodied AT&T in any way, shape or form.
I would say it's likely to be Star Wars, since they have the greatest interest in protecting their trademarks, but I would think that:
(1) Illiad et al would be at least somewhat sympathetic towards a Star Wars argument; few people that I can see have any particular animus towards SW.
(2) Illiad and Segfault have been (deservedly) relentless in attacking Microsoft, but the Star Wars references have been fairly rare, and not negative towards SW.
So I would suspect it's Microsoft, especially with the number of really rude (and stupid, in my view) Microsoft stories that appeared recently.
Still hard to believe it's either - MS has had an "embrace and extend" attitude about anti-MS sites. When I was actively running mine, I got a call from a very nice MS employee who sent me a whole bunch of MS software, gratis, in an effort to get me to change my mind. Didn't work, but I was impressed by the gesture anyway.
D
----
Humph. theos.com worked fine; theos-software.com is down, "Document contains no data".
:-) Either that, or theos-software is too embarassed to let us see the page.
I guess we know whose operating system works.
D
----
I was stunned - it made my day - to see a shrink-wrapped copy of Applix office in the shiny new Costa Mesa/Newport Beach Borders.
There was a whole solid bookcase column (vertical member to vertical member) devoted to Linux distributions and applications. Wow!
D
----
This is a very fair point in my view.
Doesn't seem like it would be reasonable to remove Roy's moderator access for posting something reasonable under his own name. It would be fine if he was saying "Hey, I'm a moderator, how cool", but I think reasonable commentary on the moderating system should be allowed even under a moderator's name.
I'd definitely think less of Rob if he obeyed his own rule and diminished Roy's status. Just for the record.
D
----
Open Source software is generally written for two basic reasons: Because the author wants to solve a problem for him (or, sadly rarely, her) self, and for the sheer creative enjoyment of building it.
To maximize the latter, these projects are rarely done under Windows. Obviously, a Windows port doesn't help the original author satisfy a need, either. So why should he do a Windows port?
Consumer demand, of course. The slavering masses over there in Windows-land are desperate for half-decent software.
So, why should he do a Windows port? It's no fun. It won't help him solve his own problems.
Money, from the slavering masses, of course. And thus, a different license to pay him back for the misery of working on Windows.
What's wrong with that?
D
----
Granted, the book had some really annoying errors (as discussed in some of the other reviews), but I'd checked out GTK on the web, decided it was too difficult to bother figuring out, and did nothing.
I checked out this book in the bookstore, and was off and running within an hour after having read the first few chapters. It's true that I ran into a bunch of snags because he didn't describe all the API calls, but it was good enough to get me excited and start me writing code.
Incidentally, I really liked his examples, since many of them described things that I wanted to do with GTK, so they gave me a nice head start.
I'm thinking it might be worth writing "Cross-Platform Database Programming using GTK+ and mySQL", using my new email handler/PIM application as a guide. Anyone think that would be interesting? There have been a lot of interesting pitfalls that I think would be worth documenting. And - an exciting thought indeed - it might be possible to do the development on Linux or even SGI Irix, and then send the result straight to Windows, Linux, Irix and SunOS without having to (ugh!) develop on a Windows system. If that would work, I'm pumped.
D
----
Why shouldn't Alias | Wavefront port their software to Linux, especially on the new SGI NT box? I don't think it would be too hard; they'd have to support the same hardware they do under NT, and they'd give Irix lovers a way out.
I don't see them NOT doing that, once an easily installable Linux exists for the new systems.
D
----
What's even worse is that the programming lanugage changes radically for every version of Office.
I've written a commercial application that was written in VB. We decided to make Word our word processor using what was, at that time, WordBasic. Of course shortly after we started, WordBasic changed. At that time it was possible to put in a whole ton of conditionals that allowed me to say "MailMerge" or "ToolsMailMerge" depending on which version was being used. When WordBasic changed to VBA, we had to rewrite everything once again.
It was a big pain, but it definitely forced our user base to migrate to Office97, since our code would have otherwise become unmaintainable.
If that was a deliberate effort to make people miserable, it couldn't have worked better.
On the other hand, I will admit that I like many things about the design of VBA. Programming your word processor does have many advantages few users will ever see. One of the few things MS has done that deserves praise.
D
----
I've been fooling around with GTK thanks to the most excellent book 'Developing Linux Applications' by Eric Harlow (see my review at amazon.com).
...) to get most of the needed functionality. But it was several hundred lines of impossible to read code, cranked out by some kind of Wizard.
I remember when I last tried C++ on Windows. I had an application I needed to write; it wasn't very complex, because I could just use Internet Explorer (yes, I know, I know
I don't think Microsoft is going to beat the ease and elegance of GTK+ any time soon. I can write graphical applications that work and that don't require all sorts of confusing DLLs, and - most importantly - I understand every line of every program I write.
So far, I'm impressed. I think the temptation of the Microsoft libraries might be easier to resist than you might think. Haven't you lost code you were writing while using the MS development environments, because they crashed, or because you couldn't save your stuff (!)? I have. I haven't lost one byte of anything I've written in EMACS.
The dark side isn't so tempting when you have choice.
D
----
> and if MS violates the GPL, who will sue them?
> who can afford to stay in court with them for
> years?
Anyone.
Think damages.
Think contingency fees.
99 times out of 100, the rapaciousness of the legal profession is only horrifying. But in this case, it would do some good. I don't doubt that an enterprising law firm would leap at the chance.
D
----
Before Clippit
- You get a problem
- You type some plausible word into the help search box
- No useful answer is forthcoming
- You: "Grr, that blasted Microsoft, they create junk software, mumble, mumble."
Now- You get a problem
- You type some plausible question into the Clip
- The clip doesn't find a useful answer
- You: "Grr, that blasted paperclip is a piece of garbage, mumble, mumble."
In other words, the primitive parts of the human brain are quick to blame Clippit, not its creator. So now Microsoft is still a fine company, and that Paper Clip is the source of all unsolveable problems. Brilliant.The first words I typed in Microsoft Office97 was a little essay called "The Paperclip Spy". Because that's what it seemed like, a critter that was always looking at your document, ready to send any criticisim of Windows to Redmond.
Of course Microsoft could always do that.
But the paperclip somehow made it seem real.
And now, of course, we know that's not as farfetched as I'd thought.
Oops.
D
----
The whole principle behind free software is that you should be free to do with it as you will - that is, if you find an exasperating bug that's been knawing at you for centuries, you have the freedom to go through the source and fix it.
This doesn't really apply to books, since errors in books don't affect your ability to get stuff done in the way software bugs do.
(Real-world example: I found several errors in a book I bought; I was able to change my code accordingly and move on).
D
----
I've often thought it's a shame that blinkenlights went out of style.
It would be cool to have the lights programmable, say, to indicate CPU use and/or web traffic. Seems like this would be pretty easy to do under Linux.
D
----
A stock S500 is $ 77,500 if my memory serves, so you're actually paying $ 132,500 to the engine/handling tuning folks. You could always do this on the "cheap" by getting the car for $ 77,500 and the hardware for $ 90,000, making a $ 167,500 vehicle. That's not nearly as bad as 295,000/300,000 (note how Tom and MegaCar have a rather petty $ 5 price difference).
If you wait, you'll probably get a discount on the car. I wouldn't count on that now, because the new S500 is looking to be a pretty hot car, but in six months to a year you should be able to find a Mercedes dealer willing to dicker.
You'll also have to wait for the traffic sensing cruise control, which automatically activates the brakes when it sees you coming too close to the car in front of you. With features like that, the S500 seems like an appropriate car to fit out.
I have pictures of the new S-Class (on which Megacar is based) at http://www.amazing.com/portfolio/auto-show/ .
D
----
If history is any guide, the JenniCam's server won't be able to handle Slashdot-style loads.
:-( ).
I used to run a JenniCam archive, but unfortunately Jen herself asked me (and pretty much all other archivists) to shut it down. Since they are, after all, her pictures, I complied, albiet sadly.
She was a lot more fun before she got the death threats. Yes, I know that sounds like a stupid joke - unfortunately, it's true. Ever since her site was hacked a year or two back, she's been a lot less brave. Can't say I blame her.
While I was seriously infatuated with her, it was a lot of fun to watch the cam, especially since I was present at the creation. But I drifted out of it, and now I think it's a dangerous addiction. In the long run, it's a lot healthier to find a girl of your own.
(Not that I've managed to, of course, but it's a nice idea
D
----
Wouldn't this significantly reduce the amount of music you could have in the thing? If my memory serves, even the 2GB version has the equivalent of 35 albums worth of storage, and you can only handle 6-12 CDs with a trunk-mounted CD changer.
D
----
I got the joke, but I was a little upset that they put down Linus so strongly. Why shouldn't people want to meet the guy in person? I'm sure there are plenty of people who want to meet Bill, after all.
We don't have a BillOS because Bill doesn't have a personal link to it. He paid people to write it, that's all. Linux is Linux because the design and philosophy came out of the heart and mind of one person.
D
----
I will need to buy a new machine soon. I like to use my primary machine as both a client and web server. I suppose I should just break down and use NFS, but I like having everything on the same machine.
(1) Would SMP then be useful to me? That is, would I wind up having one CPU devoted to web serving and one devoted to the workstation, thus having effectively two computers in the same box? Or would I be better off buying two separate compuers, putting X on one and putting the web server on the other, and connecting them via NFS? What about NFS security questions? Note that I'm sitting on a 10mb line and would like to be able to saturate it if necessary. Most of my content would be CGI-driven, so CPU might well be a factor.
(2) How much CPU and memory are needed to make Enlightenment snappy? I have a K5/333 and use Enlightenment at 1280x1024 and it's sluggish. I'd like to see things really zip. What do I need?
(3) I will admit a lingering fondness for proprietary workstations such as Sun and SGI. I've pretty much given up on SGI, despite their really nice user interface, because they are trending to Windows, and because the SGI workstations I've used have not proven reliable. But Sun has had some very tempting ads for systems that would cost about the same as a decent VA Research Linux machine, and the Sun clone I bought five years ago is easily the most reliable computer I've ever owned. How would I compare the performance between Sun and VA? I like supporting the Linux revolution, but I also like the smoothness and higher reliability of a Sun.
Many thanks for any thoughts.
D
----
I believe the Xerox printer was a gift from Xerox, not a purchase. That's very nice of the Xerox folks, of course, but you certainly don't have much of a choice of vendors :-).
D
----