I'm not sure where all the languagism comes from. Perl has a bad rap, period, though. It seems like everyone has seem some lousy perl code somewhere. Does that make perl bad? Not really, it just seems like perl really lends itself well to it.
It is a direct result of the 'culture' surrounding the language. Of course Perl can be written in a maintainable way, but most of the online discussions seem to focus on the 'kewl' line-noise stuff and how to exploit the most obscure features.
Web projects especially tend to be done in an ad-hoc manner by largely self-taught programmers, most don't have the engineering culture which surrounds C++. So therefore when a language gives a lot of freedom, the result is massive variability in style from different programmers. And corporations especially hate that.
Also, Perl has been on the way out since the dot-com bust. So once again Slashdot is keeping up with the timely news.
Linus either rejects the patch, or there's a hoard of petty nitpicking.
Then one of the 'in crowd' of Linux developers comes up with something that does roughly the same thing (usually far more minimally). Original patch gets abandoned.
Note that there's enormous financial incentive for companies to have developers in the 'in crowd', so this is as much salary-driven as it is ego-driven.
Re:Groklaw is an example of the power of open sour
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
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· Score: 1
They did promise they were working on being UNIX(tm) certified though.
Re:Nothing wrong with bias -- per se.
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
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· Score: 2, Interesting
PJ is, in this case, both clearly pro-Linux and clearly right. She claims and I believe) that if things were coming out tha would have been clearly bad for the linux side, she would have documented it just as clearly (unhappily but clearly).
PJ also editorialized quite a bit about general IT and OSS stuff that had almost nothing to do with the SCO case. Furthermore, Groklaw's comments sections were full of slashbot-style "M$-Turd corrupted my DOC file in 1996. waaaaa!" stuff.
Anyone who doesn't see that Groklaw was full of "partisan noise" is addition to the legal analysis is either off the deep-end or has never really read the site.
Re:if groklaw made an impact on the court cases...
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Like what?
Quite frankly, it looked like they were bumbling around with ancient 1980s Unix stuff because by the time of the BSD lawsuits in the early 90s, AT&T/Novell got their IP house in order.
SCO should have concentrated on making technically superior products, marketing them effectively, and earning the rewards that come from making good business decisions.
You are forgetting that Caldera was in the Linux business for 10 years. (Or perhaps you don't consider Linux to be a technically superior product.)
Re:if groklaw made an impact on the court cases...
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Reviewing code really had nothing to do with the case, except for closed-door stuff with AIX/Monterrey.
Admittedly when it first started, some felt there might be some meat to SCO's claims and sought to prove that "Unix concepts" were outlined in various published material, ancient Unix versions, and so on. However that entire pursuit turned out to be an intellectual dead-end.
Re:Groklaw is an example of the power of open sour
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
·
· Score: 1
SFU contains various bits and pieces from OpenBSD. It was never a licensed version of SysV until the SCOSource thing.
To the thread starter, Microsoft is using it. It's now called "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications" and is included in some versions of Vista.
The problem is that every industry has a few of these super-specialized vertical apps that come from one-guy software companies. Most of them are fairly simplistic Access/FoxPro type things, the hard part was implementing all of the business rules.
I've worked with a few companies that recreated their software package in-house (because they needed specific customization the author wouldn't provide), and it's never as cheap or easy as it might seem superficially.
Good. Around here, Goodwill liked to put out stuff like Mac ColorClassics for $75, probably ripping off some poor family that just wanted to use the internet
They still take computers, but I think they just treat em all like e-waste.
This is a good idea, if you can find a willing victim, but it doesn't scale all that well.
Computer donation/recycling places often get 4-5 year old machines from businesses (P4s, decent RAM, 2K/XP and MS Office licenses). I did some work for a homeless shelter a few years ago, and they had fairly new rackmount servers that they couldn't figure out what to do with.
Computers converge on worthless quickly, especially if it takes labor or a "wierd" software stack to keep them running.
Microsoft dragged their heels and made it buggy (some say on purpose) so that it would compare poorly with Windows.
Bill Gates puts the blame on IBM for deciding to make a non-portable 16-bit 286 OS even though Intel was working on 32-bit products. The "Half a OS" joke is somewhat true... OS/2 was crippled in a lot of ways so that it wouldn't compete with IBM's midrange products. At the same time IBM/MS was developing OS/2, NeXT was developing a modern, Unix-based PC OS. Which one is still around?:)
And while it's true that Microsoft backstabbed IBM, in the end Big Blue got played by a smarter company one-tenth their size. Also, there's no evidence that IBM still has an "axe to grind" about this, that's purely OS/2 fanboy wank material.
There might be some wierdly delusional Teamers out there, but I really doubt anyone at IBM is still sore over the OS/2 thing. They've dumped that whole side of their business, been through several different CEOs, and are mostly a mainframe consulting company nowdays.
At my place of work, we've just gotten the client that allows you to sort by Subject.
Imagine. You couldn't sort by Subject until just a few months ago.
Funny thing is that this is one checkbox in the designer. The only reasonable conclusion is that IBM intentionally ships Notes in a broken state so that their consultants can come in and "fix" it.
Lotus Notes is a database application, with email as an afterthought. It is truly horrible.
This is exactly true. Some smart guy figured out that mail was just a specific database app, but it's taken IBM/Lotus decades to straighten out all the little UI tweaks people expect from a mail client.
I used to do Notes/Domino a million years ago, so this might be out-of-date.
The only way to program it, especially for web apps, was spaghetti code. Everything was an evil mixture of formula language, VB, and sometimes Java spread out over 99 different places in a database. It's closer to programming Excel than something like PHP or ASP.NET. Plus there was no real way to do source code revisions. So, yes, maintenance was a nightmare.
This was fine when original design goal was that endusers could create their own simple databases, but when it became more of an enterprise IT programming tool, its shortcomings became obvious.
Yeah, in the early days they probably didn't know if they were going to be an advertising company or a software company.
I suspect their enterprise strategy is mostly "Microsoft is trying to do search, let's fight back by doing office". Something like "Gmail in a box" is probably too cumbersome and expensive for them to really want to support.
That's true, but it's mainly because developers were targeting a buggy and incomplete version of W3C CSS, not because they were targeting MS proprietary features.
Recall that MS had a "working" version of CSS on the market 5 years before anyone else. People simply didn't know better.
The fact that these sites don't work in IE7 just proves it wasn't E/E/E.
Those search boxes have been around for years now, and we've yet to see anything like an "enterprise strategy" from Google. Not saying it won't happen, but it looks like they're entirely unrelated.
Plus, I haven't see it reported that the money is going into the Apache web server. (Apache does a lot more than HTTPD, Perens should know that.) The projects that Microsoft seems interested in are Java- and PHP-related.
The most successful Usenet troll I ever saw was a one line post that said "KILL NIGGERS" and spawned a thousand reply thread that went on for months. Quite an artform.
The average internet user never had any subtly in how they understood "trolling", it simply means anything they find objectionable to them. Much like the hacker example, you can't blame the newspaper for this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure where all the languagism comes from. Perl has a bad rap, period, though. It seems like everyone has seem some lousy perl code somewhere. Does that make perl bad? Not really, it just seems like perl really lends itself well to it.
It is a direct result of the 'culture' surrounding the language. Of course Perl can be written in a maintainable way, but most of the online discussions seem to focus on the 'kewl' line-noise stuff and how to exploit the most obscure features.
Web projects especially tend to be done in an ad-hoc manner by largely self-taught programmers, most don't have the engineering culture which surrounds C++. So therefore when a language gives a lot of freedom, the result is massive variability in style from different programmers. And corporations especially hate that.
Also, Perl has been on the way out since the dot-com bust. So once again Slashdot is keeping up with the timely news.
Linus either rejects the patch, or there's a hoard of petty nitpicking.
Then one of the 'in crowd' of Linux developers comes up with something that does roughly the same thing (usually far more minimally). Original patch gets abandoned.
Note that there's enormous financial incentive for companies to have developers in the 'in crowd', so this is as much salary-driven as it is ego-driven.
Not according to this:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981205114447/www.interix.com/22flyer.htm (product page before MS bought them out)
They did promise they were working on being UNIX(tm) certified though.
PJ is, in this case, both clearly pro-Linux and clearly right. She claims and I believe) that if things were coming out tha would have been clearly bad for the linux side, she would have documented it just as clearly (unhappily but clearly).
PJ also editorialized quite a bit about general IT and OSS stuff that had almost nothing to do with the SCO case. Furthermore, Groklaw's comments sections were full of slashbot-style "M$-Turd corrupted my DOC file in 1996. waaaaa!" stuff.
Anyone who doesn't see that Groklaw was full of "partisan noise" is addition to the legal analysis is either off the deep-end or has never really read the site.
Like what?
Quite frankly, it looked like they were bumbling around with ancient 1980s Unix stuff because by the time of the BSD lawsuits in the early 90s, AT&T/Novell got their IP house in order.
SCO should have concentrated on making technically superior products, marketing them effectively, and earning the rewards that come from making good business decisions.
You are forgetting that Caldera was in the Linux business for 10 years. (Or perhaps you don't consider Linux to be a technically superior product.)
Reviewing code really had nothing to do with the case, except for closed-door stuff with AIX/Monterrey.
Admittedly when it first started, some felt there might be some meat to SCO's claims and sought to prove that "Unix concepts" were outlined in various published material, ancient Unix versions, and so on. However that entire pursuit turned out to be an intellectual dead-end.
SFU contains various bits and pieces from OpenBSD. It was never a licensed version of SysV until the SCOSource thing.
To the thread starter, Microsoft is using it. It's now called "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications" and is included in some versions of Vista.
The problem is that every industry has a few of these super-specialized vertical apps that come from one-guy software companies. Most of them are fairly simplistic Access/FoxPro type things, the hard part was implementing all of the business rules.
I've worked with a few companies that recreated their software package in-house (because they needed specific customization the author wouldn't provide), and it's never as cheap or easy as it might seem superficially.
Good. Around here, Goodwill liked to put out stuff like Mac ColorClassics for $75, probably ripping off some poor family that just wanted to use the internet
They still take computers, but I think they just treat em all like e-waste.
Unfortunately, my local junkman has wised up. I saw him disassembling some castoff PC and complaining that it was a AMD K6.
This is a good idea, if you can find a willing victim, but it doesn't scale all that well.
Computer donation/recycling places often get 4-5 year old machines from businesses (P4s, decent RAM, 2K/XP and MS Office licenses). I did some work for a homeless shelter a few years ago, and they had fairly new rackmount servers that they couldn't figure out what to do with.
Computers converge on worthless quickly, especially if it takes labor or a "wierd" software stack to keep them running.
The funny thing is that MS Office for Mac has floating formatting pallets similar to SmartSuite, instead of the modal dialogs of the Windows version.
So everyone is trying to copy MS Office ... except MS themselves.
Microsoft dragged their heels and made it buggy (some say on purpose) so that it would compare poorly with Windows.
Bill Gates puts the blame on IBM for deciding to make a non-portable 16-bit 286 OS even though Intel was working on 32-bit products. The "Half a OS" joke is somewhat true ... OS/2 was crippled in a lot of ways so that it wouldn't compete with IBM's midrange products. At the same time IBM/MS was developing OS/2, NeXT was developing a modern, Unix-based PC OS. Which one is still around? :)
And while it's true that Microsoft backstabbed IBM, in the end Big Blue got played by a smarter company one-tenth their size. Also, there's no evidence that IBM still has an "axe to grind" about this, that's purely OS/2 fanboy wank material.
Haha.
There might be some wierdly delusional Teamers out there, but I really doubt anyone at IBM is still sore over the OS/2 thing. They've dumped that whole side of their business, been through several different CEOs, and are mostly a mainframe consulting company nowdays.
At my place of work, we've just gotten the client that allows you to sort by Subject.
Imagine. You couldn't sort by Subject until just a few months ago.
Funny thing is that this is one checkbox in the designer. The only reasonable conclusion is that IBM intentionally ships Notes in a broken state so that their consultants can come in and "fix" it.
Lotus Notes is a database application, with email as an afterthought. It is truly horrible.
This is exactly true. Some smart guy figured out that mail was just a specific database app, but it's taken IBM/Lotus decades to straighten out all the little UI tweaks people expect from a mail client.
I used to do Notes/Domino a million years ago, so this might be out-of-date.
The only way to program it, especially for web apps, was spaghetti code. Everything was an evil mixture of formula language, VB, and sometimes Java spread out over 99 different places in a database. It's closer to programming Excel than something like PHP or ASP.NET. Plus there was no real way to do source code revisions. So, yes, maintenance was a nightmare.
This was fine when original design goal was that endusers could create their own simple databases, but when it became more of an enterprise IT programming tool, its shortcomings became obvious.
Yeah, in the early days they probably didn't know if they were going to be an advertising company or a software company.
I suspect their enterprise strategy is mostly "Microsoft is trying to do search, let's fight back by doing office". Something like "Gmail in a box" is probably too cumbersome and expensive for them to really want to support.
That's true, but it's mainly because developers were targeting a buggy and incomplete version of W3C CSS, not because they were targeting MS proprietary features.
Recall that MS had a "working" version of CSS on the market 5 years before anyone else. People simply didn't know better.
The fact that these sites don't work in IE7 just proves it wasn't E/E/E.
Those search boxes have been around for years now, and we've yet to see anything like an "enterprise strategy" from Google. Not saying it won't happen, but it looks like they're entirely unrelated.
IE is actually a terrible example of successful E/E/E.
The extend/embrace parts (proprietary HTML, ActiveX) failed badly and have no market-adoption outside of specific intranet sites.
The non-compliant features are mostly stuff that's either buggy or half-done. Stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't make things easier for anyone.
Plus, I haven't see it reported that the money is going into the Apache web server. (Apache does a lot more than HTTPD, Perens should know that.) The projects that Microsoft seems interested in are Java- and PHP-related.
They could always ship *both* IIS and Apache.
Official support for the "WAMP" stack can only help sell more Windows servers.
I suspect it's just the opposite -- better Java interop with Microsoft technologies.
The most successful Usenet troll I ever saw was a one line post that said "KILL NIGGERS" and spawned a thousand reply thread that went on for months. Quite an artform.
The average internet user never had any subtly in how they understood "trolling", it simply means anything they find objectionable to them. Much like the hacker example, you can't blame the newspaper for this.