The paper describes using string concatenation in java to prepare the string in memory. In essence, it's comparing an O(1) operation to an O(n) operation and complaining that the latter is slower for large values of n.
Your manager doesn't care how you will use it or what the internals are doing in the background. They care a) how much it will cost/save (both in terms of your time and in terms of cash), b) what will it enable you to do (extra services they can sell?) and c) what risks will it mitigate or exacerbate. Give them a couple of buzzwords that they can google if they want to sound knowledgeable (such as Change Management and Release Management).
I just checked map24 and google with my work address. It's a bit of a tough test, since the city name has changed in the past couple of years, people use two different acronyms for the province, and the postal code is a government-wide one, so no help there.
Neither found it on the first pass. With a bit of fiddling, I got google to find it (oddly enough, I had to use the old city name to find it, but google displayed it with the new city name). Map24 still has no idea what I was asking for.
Not to mention that trying different searches with map24 was a real pain - the UI jumps all over the place while the page loads.
"This would allow the die-hard fans to either purchase a legitimate non-English DVD and apply the subtitles themselves (there is lots of software to do this available)."
There are a few problems with this. The minor ones first:
DVD region coding; most DVD-ROM drivers only allow a certain number of toggles between regions. Having to buy a separate DVD-ROM for anime is possible, but an annoying workaround.
Most anime fans have no idea where to get or how to use subtitling software. It'd have to become far more prolific and user-proof for it to catch on.
The big problem that I have with this idea is: most of the anime I watch isn't from DVDs, it's from the original broadcast. Literally, a show will get broadcast for the first time, fansubbed and distributed within a couple of days. Some of these shows will never make it to DVD.
I don't own a PVR. Some of the features (such as live-pause) make it really attractive, but I've put it off for various reasons.
One of which is that I own a VCR. I rarely watch commercials - instead I record the shows I want to see and then (often immediately after the show is finished taping) rewind and watch it commercial-free. Even in the case when I'm watching live TV, I don't watch commercials - I do what every other red-blooded male in the world does and reach for the remote.
It's not theft anymore than tossing bulk mail straight into the recycling bin is. They're sending me something that I don't want and didn't ask to receive.
"She has a list of names her son scrawled while playing the game: "Phargun." "Occuler." "Cybernine." But Woolley is not sure if they are names of online friends, places he explored in the game or treasures his character may have captured in quests."
Sorry to say, there are only about a million people who know the answer to that - and that's anybody who's ever played EQ. Here's a hint - they aren't items or places (and one of those names technically violates EQ's character name policy). It really isn't so tough to buy a copy of EQ, log on and start asking around...
Well, if 1.4 million of these things are in use by people who *haven't* started fires, I'd imagine it'd be safe enough to use if you kept a close eye on it.
To put it another way, just because Compaq has issued a recall does not make them any *less* dangerous than they were yesterday...
"I want to access my email, but when I open up the Access icon my messages aren't there!"
"Excel? I'd think a serious software package wouldn't be named after chewing gum."
No, not real quotes, but they could be. *Everything* has context. These Microsoftisms are only in place because that's what these people have been taught (yes, taught) to recognize. Just because something is different doesn't make it "wrong" or "less intuitive" - you have to look past the first impressions and see how the GUI works once the user gets some basic familiarity with it.
At my place of work, courses on Word and Outlook are de rigeur. Do we really want to base a user-friendly GUI on a system that requires training to use? That's what most of the comments provided seem to indicate ("where's the start button?", "why settings and not control panel?", etc).
Actually, I'm a federal government employee. The only reason people want to spit out gobs of paper is to *prevent* people from attempting to read it. For that, you hardly need to produce actual reports - and especially not pretty ones (the more bland and boring, the better for that purpose). While it might promote job security, it's a lousy way to actually accomplish anything, though.
There are a few solutions out there for generating web-viewable reports but I don't particularly like them (Crystal reports has caused a number of headaches around here in particular).
You need fonts and page breaks? Just about anything other than raw text can do that (yes, even HTML). I use HTML/CSS for all my reports (ranging from crosstabs to listings to canned documents) - how you generate it is wide open.
Hundreds of pages worth of reports at once? If your reports are that large, you probably don't even want to deliver it to a browser. Some sort of server-side report queue would seem to be in order (ie the user requests a report and if they need to download a copy they come back and pick it up later when it's done). If you're printing from the server, just pick and choose your tech.
Drag-and-drop? Well, I far prefer building reports in HTML than in something like Crystal (which is what Access uses, by the way) - I hate mucking around with field alignments/sizes etc. I find that things go a lot quicker for me with HTML (CSS helps tremendously).
I'd really recommend reviewing your requirements. Is *anybody* really going to read hundreds of pages of reports? Perhaps you should be building a more flexible query tool so that your users can get the specific data they want without having to wade through mammoth wads of paper?
I see, I really love it how Unix has 10000 text editors. But I'd prefer one that works, and is easy to use. Does XEmacs support intellisense? No, I didn't think so
I'll assume that was sarcasm. While I prefer nvi, Emacs is highly extensible, and nedit is about the best combination of standard idiot-proof gui and configurability you can get, in my opinion. They're all "easy to use", once you've surpassed the learning curve that every editor has. I hate Intellisense, by the way - it slows me down and my keys stop working properly. After a year or two of 9-to-5 coding, you start to vaguely remember the odd property or method... Yes, that was sarcasm. If there's something I don't remember, I'll look it up, but I don't want the editor to slap me around like that.
Yes I have some friends who can't program that well who refuse to use anything WITHOUT the source code. When I ask them what they do with the source code, they say, they use it to build the binary.
True, the source is useless unless is used for something. I like having the source (if only to compile it) in order to put everything (binaries & configs etc) where I want them. When you install MS-App 98, you get the choice of where to put the base directory and that's it. I also occasionally have to deal with bugs, and unlike your friends, have a clue about what I'm doing.
The thing about Windows development is it's blackbox. You shouldn't need to know anything about the components except thru the interfaces. Makes things much more stable....guesss what Unix is starting to do. That's right, copy Windows...so far - poorly.
This actually made me laugh. In the grand "OO theory of everything", you are correct in that no object should need to know the details of any other - just the interface between them. Well. I've done enough programming under Windows to notice the slight (sarcasm again) disparity between the documented interface and the real one. I've even had Microsoft ship me a new version of an API with older docs than the ones I already had! If Microsoft wrote to their own published interfaces, their apps wouldn't compile let alone run, let alone run crash-free. Not that they've achieved the last, of course...
The X Window System is no more a desktop than your pencil. The mistake you make is not with the death of the horse, but that you seem anxious to bury the harness with the beast!
X Windows is an underlying layer upon which a desktop may be built - you could easily build a MacOS X clone on top of it, if you were of such a mind. Presumably, then, you have an objection to one or more of the window managers (desktops) currently available for X Windows (such as TVM, FVWM and Enlightenment).
While many people see the MacOS desktops as "pretty", that's not my only criterion (or even my primary criterion) for a desktop. I like to play. I like to make *my* desktop work the way I do; I don't want people dictating how I should be moving windows or switching between virtual desktops - I want to configure things according to my whim. As such, the Windows and MacOS window managers bug me with the limitations they force me to endure.
The problem is that it's not what people really want. What people really want is to protect their children. They see passing on their morals as one vehicle for this; this in and of itself isn't a problem, but rather than examining and evaluating them they get passed on blindly, which is. But I digress. The obvious way to protect a child is sheltering the child. I don't think that this is a correct solution, as it raises a child to be defenseless against the rigours of the life it will experience as it grows older. The obvious way to shelter a child from "bad" content is to hide it from them - and every parent does that. This isn't necessarily a bad thing to do, as the child may not be emotionally equipped to handle exposure to some things (like images of brutal killings on CNN) - that I won't argue. However, so long as their child is "protected", parents don't care what else the filter does; they don't know the technical details and don't want to spend the time and effort to learn. It's not that people want to remain ignorant for its own sake, but that with the rapid pace of technology, people must learn increasingly specialized tasks, techniques and tools in order to further advance the state of the world.
"Yahoo is the reason that "Internet" is synonymous with "World-Wide Web" these days."
So maybe I'm an old-timer, but I'll never accept Internet as synonymous with WWW. Sure, web traffic dwarfs everything else, but that everything else is what makes the net so useful; take telnet and SMTP, for instance. Heck - email is the killer app that brought the internet to the foreground in the first place.
"Ever bought anything online? Thank Amazon and eBay."
Why? I bought stuff on the net before Amazon or eBay existed.
"Ever found a website without looking through one of those archaic internet yellow pages? Thank Yahoo."
Never liked Yahoo - in fact I found the content to be too bland to be of use to me; I used real, honest-to-goodness web-crawling search engines instead of human-generated ones. WWWW, Webcrawler, then Altavista and Google were my indexing friends. The first two are definitely archaic, but they produced far more useful information than I was ever able to get out of Yahoo.
"There are no social or legal rules, so people do what they please, and some people like to break things."
On the contrary - there are social rules, but the problem with social rules is that they cannot be enforced! The whole deal with society is that it is composed of its members, and peer pressure is the only force it (as society) can bring to bear.
If you break society back down into individuals, people can try to enforce the societal mean, but you'll always find a blip on the other end of the curve - people trying to exploit a given society, people who may even be *outside* it. A society isn't defined by numbers, wires or boundaries; it's defined by the individuals who choose to compose it.
The eToys contact page is at http://www.etoys.com/html/about_i nformation.shtml They've got a service address (service@etoys.com), a VP of communications (kross@etoys.com), a Director of Investor Relations (ir@etoys.com) and the most likely addressee: Jonathan Cutler, PR Manager (jcutler@etoys.com)
My first reaction is too laugh. At the beginning, I was curious - in the middle I was confused. Then I read the end, where he claims "NT, now approaching 23x6 availability, is already overpowering Linux." That got me laughing, all right.
30-year-old technology? What about all the enhancements and improvements that have been developed in the past 30 years? What about other old stuff that's still the backbone of computing, like, oh, say the 26-year-old Ethernet? Then what about the spritely youth of the 5-year old, no - 15 year old, no - 20 year old, no... How old is Windows/DOS anyhow? It's had so many facelifts I doubt even Gates remembers. I'm half convinced that the entire column was either a joke or a tentative stab to see if we were still alive...
As to the comparison of the "OSM" to communism - what does that make Microsoft? A dictator and a warlord. Hmm.
This sounds like a death knell for commercial/closed software if it gets passed into law. Does a company *really* want to give its competitors the ability to shut down its systems remotely? How long will it take for somebody to write an exploit to prematurely trigger the self-destruct? Oh sorry, they called it the "self help feature", didn't they?
I'd much rather stick to open source, so I know that nobody else will be controlling that assembly line or office environment. Talk about a massive DoS attack...
"VA Research buys linux.com. Sits on it for a couple of months, with big fat VAR ads all over it, now says it's opening today (Tuesday), and at 9:17a Eastern, it's still nothing but a giant VAR ad."
Huh. I guess your day has only 9 hours in it. Mine has 24. On top of that, there's always the possibility of unforeseen delays. Oh, but I forget - they should have warned you in advance.
"VAR has no right to call themselves a Linux vendor, IMNSHO."
They sell Linux boxes. They don't sell boxes with all available Linux software, but then why should they? They don't sell boxes with every piece of Linux-compatible hardware in them either.
"You can specify to REMOVE 'Linux Office Suite 99.' Who the hell assumed I wanted that shite on a *SERVER*!? I don't want some trashy setup; I want a real system that has only components I choose. If I can't get that at least to a certain extent, you won't get my business."
So when VAR gives you the option to either have or not have a given component installed, you complain that you can't choose what software is installed? Not to mention the fact that some people buy Linux-based systems to *NOT* use as a server. *Some* people even have the gall to use Linux as a workstation! *Gasp*!
I agree that it would be *nice* if VAR decided to preinstall other distributions/OSes, but I never planned on buying from them anyhow so their decision doesn't affect (or bother) me in the slightest.
"As for the speculators who do pay the fee and still sit on the names, there needs to be a total ban on the private resale of domain names. This is a real problem and we need a measure like this to stop it."
A ban on private resale won't do any good. You could still tie up a domain name and then charge $10,000 to drop the registration.
A better system would be to make the charges incremental. So, you'd pay $20 for one domain name, $30 for the second, $40 for the third, etc. Somebody who's just registering a few names can soak the extra cost but speculators would go broke registering even dozens.
A big reason SGI put forth the name change (according to the press release, anyhow) was that while 50% of their revenue came from servers and supercomputers, the public perception was primarily that of graphics.
As it should be. Everybody does servers. A few big names do supercomputers, but everybody knows who they are anyhow (most people just don't buy them). What Silicon Graphics built its reputation as a solid performer on was... Graphics!
Instead of underscoring their victories and capitalizing on their successes, they're "repositioning" themselves to the same "yeah, we do servers" slot as every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the business. Instead of happily enjoying and spreading their niche, it seems to me that they're doing their best to abandon it altogether.
As to the privacy issue, I believe that that example would fall under copyright - not the *idea* of using a ring to symbolize marriage, but a specific *implementation* of that idea. I think that most are willing to cede implementation restrictions. Secondly, the example inherently depends on the concept of ownership while attempting to put aside the same concept - "*my* wife". Could this "wife" not be "used" simultaneously by everybody (no disrespect intended - this *is* after all a thought experiment) - is this "wife" really *yours*?
As to the chairmaker, he could persuade you to do it in many ways; he could do something of equal value for you (make you a better saw, for example), or convince you to do it out of a sense of pride or challenge or glory.
The essay argued that by the very same logic that states that you *should* be compensated for goods that you produce, you *shouldn't* own abstract things - ideas.
Paintings, books, produce - these are all *physical* things. It can be argued that source code is also physical - it is a product. It cannot be argued that the algorithms used in the software are physical - they are not products, they are mathematical constructs which were always there (anybody care to patent PI?).
As for your arguments for capitalism vs socialism - are you BLIND!? You claim that socialism is bad because overall it tries to do what's best for society and screw the individual - as if capitalism doesn't cause at *least* as much harm to individuals...
The DFSG #1 states that the license "may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software".
The NCL states: "You MAY NOT distribute this work for profit as an executable or in object form".
Does anybody else remember a little thing that programmers like called "source code"? The NCL doesn't appear to restrict source distribution, just binary. Thus, the DFSG only chokes if it defines "software" solely as "binaries". If, however, it includes "source code" in its definition of "software", there's no inherent conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper describes using string concatenation in java to prepare the string in memory. In essence, it's comparing an O(1) operation to an O(n) operation and complaining that the latter is slower for large values of n.
Your manager doesn't care how you will use it or what the internals are doing in the background. They care a) how much it will cost/save (both in terms of your time and in terms of cash), b) what will it enable you to do (extra services they can sell?) and c) what risks will it mitigate or exacerbate. Give them a couple of buzzwords that they can google if they want to sound knowledgeable (such as Change Management and Release Management).
I just checked map24 and google with my work address. It's a bit of a tough test, since the city name has changed in the past couple of years, people use two different acronyms for the province, and the postal code is a government-wide one, so no help there.
Neither found it on the first pass. With a bit of fiddling, I got google to find it (oddly enough, I had to use the old city name to find it, but google displayed it with the new city name). Map24 still has no idea what I was asking for.
Not to mention that trying different searches with map24 was a real pain - the UI jumps all over the place while the page loads.
- DVD region coding; most DVD-ROM drivers only allow a certain number of toggles between regions. Having to buy a separate DVD-ROM for anime is possible, but an annoying workaround.
- Most anime fans have no idea where to get or how to use subtitling software. It'd have to become far more prolific and user-proof for it to catch on.
The big problem that I have with this idea is: most of the anime I watch isn't from DVDs, it's from the original broadcast. Literally, a show will get broadcast for the first time, fansubbed and distributed within a couple of days. Some of these shows will never make it to DVD.I don't own a PVR. Some of the features (such as live-pause) make it really attractive, but I've put it off for various reasons.
One of which is that I own a VCR. I rarely watch commercials - instead I record the shows I want to see and then (often immediately after the show is finished taping) rewind and watch it commercial-free. Even in the case when I'm watching live TV, I don't watch commercials - I do what every other red-blooded male in the world does and reach for the remote.
It's not theft anymore than tossing bulk mail straight into the recycling bin is. They're sending me something that I don't want and didn't ask to receive.
"She has a list of names her son scrawled while playing the game: "Phargun." "Occuler." "Cybernine." But Woolley is not sure if they are names of online friends, places he explored in the game or treasures his character may have captured in quests."
Sorry to say, there are only about a million people who know the answer to that - and that's anybody who's ever played EQ. Here's a hint - they aren't items or places (and one of those names technically violates EQ's character name policy). It really isn't so tough to buy a copy of EQ, log on and start asking around...
Well, if 1.4 million of these things are in use by people who *haven't* started fires, I'd imagine it'd be safe enough to use if you kept a close eye on it.
To put it another way, just because Compaq has issued a recall does not make them any *less* dangerous than they were yesterday...
"I want to access my email, but when I open up the Access icon my messages aren't there!"
"Excel? I'd think a serious software package wouldn't be named after chewing gum."
No, not real quotes, but they could be. *Everything* has context. These Microsoftisms are only in place because that's what these people have been taught (yes, taught) to recognize. Just because something is different doesn't make it "wrong" or "less intuitive" - you have to look past the first impressions and see how the GUI works once the user gets some basic familiarity with it.
At my place of work, courses on Word and Outlook are de rigeur. Do we really want to base a user-friendly GUI on a system that requires training to use? That's what most of the comments provided seem to indicate ("where's the start button?", "why settings and not control panel?", etc).
Actually, I'm a federal government employee. The only reason people want to spit out gobs of paper is to *prevent* people from attempting to read it. For that, you hardly need to produce actual reports - and especially not pretty ones (the more bland and boring, the better for that purpose). While it might promote job security, it's a lousy way to actually accomplish anything, though.
There are a few solutions out there for generating web-viewable reports but I don't particularly like them (Crystal reports has caused a number of headaches around here in particular).
You need fonts and page breaks? Just about anything other than raw text can do that (yes, even HTML). I use HTML/CSS for all my reports (ranging from crosstabs to listings to canned documents) - how you generate it is wide open.
Hundreds of pages worth of reports at once? If your reports are that large, you probably don't even want to deliver it to a browser. Some sort of server-side report queue would seem to be in order (ie the user requests a report and if they need to download a copy they come back and pick it up later when it's done). If you're printing from the server, just pick and choose your tech.
Drag-and-drop? Well, I far prefer building reports in HTML than in something like Crystal (which is what Access uses, by the way) - I hate mucking around with field alignments/sizes etc. I find that things go a lot quicker for me with HTML (CSS helps tremendously).
I'd really recommend reviewing your requirements. Is *anybody* really going to read hundreds of pages of reports? Perhaps you should be building a more flexible query tool so that your users can get the specific data they want without having to wade through mammoth wads of paper?
I'll assume that was sarcasm. While I prefer nvi, Emacs is highly extensible, and nedit is about the best combination of standard idiot-proof gui and configurability you can get, in my opinion. They're all "easy to use", once you've surpassed the learning curve that every editor has. I hate Intellisense, by the way - it slows me down and my keys stop working properly. After a year or two of 9-to-5 coding, you start to vaguely remember the odd property or method... Yes, that was sarcasm. If there's something I don't remember, I'll look it up, but I don't want the editor to slap me around like that.
True, the source is useless unless is used for something. I like having the source (if only to compile it) in order to put everything (binaries & configs etc) where I want them. When you install MS-App 98, you get the choice of where to put the base directory and that's it.
I also occasionally have to deal with bugs, and unlike your friends, have a clue about what I'm doing.
This actually made me laugh. In the grand "OO theory of everything", you are correct in that no object should need to know the details of any other - just the interface between them. Well. I've done enough programming under Windows to notice the slight (sarcasm again) disparity between the documented interface and the real one. I've even had Microsoft ship me a new version of an API with older docs than the ones I already had! If Microsoft wrote to their own published interfaces, their apps wouldn't compile let alone run, let alone run crash-free. Not that they've achieved the last, of course...
The X Window System is no more a desktop than your pencil. The mistake you make is not with the death of the horse, but that you seem anxious to bury the harness with the beast!
X Windows is an underlying layer upon which a desktop may be built - you could easily build a MacOS X clone on top of it, if you were of such a mind. Presumably, then, you have an objection to one or more of the window managers (desktops) currently available for X Windows (such as TVM, FVWM and Enlightenment).
While many people see the MacOS desktops as "pretty", that's not my only criterion (or even my primary criterion) for a desktop. I like to play. I like to make *my* desktop work the way I do; I don't want people dictating how I should be moving windows or switching between virtual desktops - I want to configure things according to my whim. As such, the Windows and MacOS window managers bug me with the limitations they force me to endure.
MacOS X won't get *me* in the bag.
The problem is that it's not what people really want. What people really want is to protect their children. They see passing on their morals as one vehicle for this; this in and of itself isn't a problem, but rather than examining and evaluating them they get passed on blindly, which is. But I digress.
The obvious way to protect a child is sheltering the child. I don't think that this is a correct solution, as it raises a child to be defenseless against the rigours of the life it will experience as it grows older.
The obvious way to shelter a child from "bad" content is to hide it from them - and every parent does that. This isn't necessarily a bad thing to do, as the child may not be emotionally equipped to handle exposure to some things (like images of brutal killings on CNN) - that I won't argue. However, so long as their child is "protected", parents don't care what else the filter does; they don't know the technical details and don't want to spend the time and effort to learn.
It's not that people want to remain ignorant for its own sake, but that with the rapid pace of technology, people must learn increasingly specialized tasks, techniques and tools in order to further advance the state of the world.
"Yahoo is the reason that "Internet" is synonymous with "World-Wide Web" these days."
So maybe I'm an old-timer, but I'll never accept Internet as synonymous with WWW. Sure, web traffic dwarfs everything else, but that everything else is what makes the net so useful; take telnet and SMTP, for instance. Heck - email is the killer app that brought the internet to the foreground in the first place.
"Ever bought anything online? Thank Amazon and eBay."
Why? I bought stuff on the net before Amazon or eBay existed.
"Ever found a website without looking through one of those archaic internet yellow pages? Thank Yahoo."
Never liked Yahoo - in fact I found the content to be too bland to be of use to me; I used real, honest-to-goodness web-crawling search engines instead of human-generated ones. WWWW, Webcrawler, then Altavista and Google were my indexing friends. The first two are definitely archaic, but they produced far more useful information than I was ever able to get out of Yahoo.
"There are no social or legal rules, so people do what they please, and some people like to
break things."
On the contrary - there are social rules, but the problem with social rules is that they cannot be enforced! The whole deal with society is that it is composed of its members, and peer pressure is the only force it (as society) can bring to bear.
If you break society back down into individuals, people can try to enforce the societal mean, but you'll always find a blip on the other end of the curve - people trying to exploit a given society, people who may even be *outside* it. A society isn't defined by numbers, wires or boundaries; it's defined by the individuals who choose to compose it.
The eToys contact page is at http://www.etoys.com/html/about_i nformation.shtml They've got a service address (service@etoys.com), a VP of communications (kross@etoys.com), a Director of Investor Relations (ir@etoys.com) and the most likely addressee:
Jonathan Cutler, PR Manager (jcutler@etoys.com)
Wow. That was a very agile stab in two seemingly opposite directions at once - I'm impressed!
I'd like to see more of these, although I probably shouldn't read them at work (the loud laughter would probably disturb people).
My first reaction is too laugh. At the beginning, I was curious - in the middle I was confused. Then I read the end, where he claims "NT, now approaching 23x6 availability, is already overpowering Linux." That got me laughing, all right.
30-year-old technology? What about all the enhancements and improvements that have been developed in the past 30 years? What about other old stuff that's still the backbone of computing, like, oh, say the 26-year-old Ethernet? Then what about the spritely youth of the 5-year old, no - 15 year old, no - 20 year old, no... How old is Windows/DOS anyhow? It's had so many facelifts I doubt even Gates remembers. I'm half convinced that the entire column was either a joke or a tentative stab to see if we were still alive...
As to the comparison of the "OSM" to communism - what does that make Microsoft? A dictator and a warlord. Hmm.
James Ojaste
This sounds like a death knell for commercial/closed software if it gets passed into law. Does a company *really* want to give its competitors the ability to shut down its systems remotely? How long will it take for somebody to write an exploit to prematurely trigger the self-destruct? Oh sorry, they called it the "self help feature", didn't they?
I'd much rather stick to open source, so I know that nobody else will be controlling that assembly line or office environment. Talk about a massive DoS attack...
"VA Research buys linux.com. Sits on it for a couple of months, with big fat VAR ads all over it, now says it's opening today (Tuesday), and at 9:17a Eastern, it's still nothing but a giant VAR ad."
Huh. I guess your day has only 9 hours in it. Mine has 24. On top of that, there's always the possibility of unforeseen delays. Oh, but I forget - they should have warned you in advance.
"VAR has no right to call themselves a Linux vendor, IMNSHO."
They sell Linux boxes. They don't sell boxes with all available Linux software, but then why should they? They don't sell boxes with every piece of Linux-compatible hardware in them either.
"You can specify to REMOVE 'Linux Office Suite 99.' Who the hell assumed I wanted that shite on a *SERVER*!? I don't want some trashy setup; I want a real system that has only components I choose. If I can't get that at least to a certain extent, you won't get my business."
So when VAR gives you the option to either have or not have a given component installed, you complain that you can't choose what software is installed?
Not to mention the fact that some people buy Linux-based systems to *NOT* use as a server. *Some* people even have the gall to use Linux as a workstation! *Gasp*!
I agree that it would be *nice* if VAR decided to preinstall other distributions/OSes, but I never planned on buying from them anyhow so their decision doesn't affect (or bother) me in the slightest.
"As for the speculators who do pay the fee and still sit on the names, there needs to be a total ban on the private resale of domain names. This is a real problem and we need a measure like this to stop it."
A ban on private resale won't do any good. You could still tie up a domain name and then charge $10,000 to drop the registration.
A better system would be to make the charges incremental. So, you'd pay $20 for one domain name, $30 for the second, $40 for the third, etc. Somebody who's just registering a few names can soak the extra cost but speculators would go broke registering even dozens.
A big reason SGI put forth the name change (according to the press release, anyhow) was that while 50% of their revenue came from servers and supercomputers, the public perception was primarily that of graphics.
As it should be. Everybody does servers. A few big names do supercomputers, but everybody knows who they are anyhow (most people just don't buy them). What Silicon Graphics built its reputation as a solid performer on was... Graphics!
Instead of underscoring their victories and capitalizing on their successes, they're "repositioning" themselves to the same "yeah, we do servers" slot as every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the business. Instead of happily enjoying and spreading their niche, it seems to me that they're doing their best to abandon it altogether.
The whole concept is misdirected.
James Ojaste
As to the privacy issue, I believe that that example would fall under copyright - not the *idea* of using a ring to symbolize marriage, but a specific *implementation* of that idea. I think that most are willing to cede implementation restrictions. Secondly, the example inherently depends on the concept of ownership while attempting to put aside the same concept - "*my* wife". Could this "wife" not be "used" simultaneously by everybody (no disrespect intended - this *is* after all a thought experiment) - is this "wife" really *yours*?
As to the chairmaker, he could persuade you to do it in many ways; he could do something of equal value for you (make you a better saw, for example), or convince you to do it out of a sense of pride or challenge or glory.
You obviously didn't understand the essay.
The essay argued that by the very same logic that states that you *should* be compensated for goods that you produce, you *shouldn't* own abstract things - ideas.
Paintings, books, produce - these are all *physical* things. It can be argued that source code is also physical - it is a product. It cannot be argued that the algorithms used in the software are physical - they are not products, they are mathematical constructs which were always there (anybody care to patent PI?).
As for your arguments for capitalism vs socialism - are you BLIND!? You claim that socialism is bad because overall it tries to do what's best for society and screw the individual - as if capitalism doesn't cause at *least* as much harm to individuals...
The DFSG #1 states that the license "may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software".
The NCL states: "You MAY NOT distribute this work for profit as an executable or in object form".
Does anybody else remember a little thing that programmers like called "source code"? The NCL doesn't appear to restrict source distribution, just binary. Thus, the DFSG only chokes if it defines "software" solely as "binaries". If, however, it includes "source code" in its definition of "software", there's no inherent conflict.
"no one knows where the term ``slashdot effect'' originated"?
:-)
I know.
It was on Slashdot.