It is as clear an indication as any just how out of touch the Open Source community is. Hitler murdered over 6 million people and Bill Gates ran a software company...? I am not seeing the comparison.
I'm not either. I don't see any comparison between Microsoft and the Nazis in the post you are responding to. So, spare us the righteous indignation.
Why does anyone post any MS related article on/.?
There are plenty of MS related articles, they just happen to be almost all negative. Why? Because that's what reflects what the company is about.
Microsoft has been behaving extremely badly towards users, the open source community, and business partners. They are convicted monopolists. They have subverted and corrupted the ISO standardization process and ISO itself simply to gain some marketing points. People like Ballmer are ruthless foulmouths. And Microsoft's software is responsible for almost all the viruses, malware, and security problems on the planet.
People have excellent justification to dislike Microsoft strongly and to not believe anything the company says.
Microsoft could give each open source developer a wheel barrow filled with gold and they would bitch about having to push it to the car.
Perhaps. But that's because so far, all MS have given open source developers and users are wheel barrows full of shit, and when they got to the car, they had to pay a toll for it.
Anybody who talks about "an approach for dealing with open source" is never going to be open source friendly. Companies are open source friendly if they see an intrinsic benefit in using and supporting open source software, and if they see it as an opportunity to save money and outsource costly development. Companies that think of open source software as a threat to be dealt with will never succeed with open source.
They should have switched to Linux as their primary platform around 2000, putting a PalmOS emulator on top of it and working with the open source community. This is no 20/20 hindsight, I was saying the same thing back then.
But they wanted to own it all and develop it all themselves.
What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
Join Android or Limo. Even if the market were still receptive to another platform, Palm doesn't have the buzz or developers to pull it off.
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys?
Those people have a right to vote, and they already regularly screw the nation. Who do you think elected people like Bush and Cheney? Who do you think lives on huge government subsidies that their senators bring home?
We have two choices: either deprive Louisianans of the vote, or educate them. There really is no third option. And since the first is politically infeasible, that leaves us with the second.
Creation Science doesn't try to test God's involvement, only the actual physical events described in the Bible (for example, that there was a global Flood around 2,000 BC or so that wiped out all humans and animals that couldn't fit in a really big boat). It doesn't look at whether the events described in Genesis were really caused by God, only whether or not they occurred as described (and the mechanics behind how they occurred).
Well, and that part is easy: they didn't. It is hard to imagine any scientific hypothesis less consistent with available data than intelligent design or most of the major events of the Bible.
The same could be said for kids up to the age of about 2. If they can't walk or talk, then they're basically worthless to society, so why not get rid of them then?
That is stupid demagoguery. Nowhere did I talk about "worth". I simply said that before you have a functioning brain, you can't really be said to be a person. You become a person only through what happens afterwards. So, it simply doesn't make logical sense for someone to talk about "I" in reference to decisions about the mass of cells that they had some physical continuity with.
The point I'm trying to make is that the cut-off of birth is really just an arbitrary point in the development of a person
Cut-off at birth? What the hell are you talking about?
My question for you is, where would you draw the line? When is the point that the brain has developed sufficiently? For those with developmental disorders, would that point come further along in the pregnancy?
We're talking about embryo ( 8 week) selection. For this purpose don't need to draw a precise line, since whatever the line may be, as a society, we already decided that "the line" is much later.
So, from the point of view of talking about individual, personal rights, the decision not to carry an embryo, for any reason, is little different from abstinence or contraceptives: it prevents the possibility of a person, but it doesn't destroy a person that already exists.
My argument against would be that folks that're "disabled" like me wouldn't have a chance to contribute to society as a whole....
Before your brain had developed sufficiently, you didn't exist. At best, there was the possibility of you developing, but there's little difference between preventing that possibility from being realized by abstaining from sex or preventing it from being realized by letting the embryo develop.
So, it makes no sense to talk about preventing you from contributing to society by not selecting your embryo. Now that you are an individual, you are a valuable member of society.
Embryos and people just aren't the same thing, so preventing other people with a disability from developing doesn't devalue your life, and it's a valid choice for parents to make.
In short, Beethoven.;)
What disability do you think Beethoven was born with?
But you still haven't listed alternatives available at that time. If not NFS, then what alternatives AVAILABLE AT THAT TIME?
What does that have to do with whether we should be grateful to Sun for their supposed open source contributions?
But if you must know, AFS, CODA, and 9P were reasonable alternatives in the late 80's. DEC, Xerox, Symbolics, IBM, and others had yet other network file systems.
The map that Sun gave everyone may have had flaws and inaccuracies, but it was still better than not having a map in the first place.
There were dozens of network file systems being developed at the time. The only reason NFS won was because Sun shipped it with every workstation and there was no easy way to replace it.
Sun's main contribution was statelessness, which turned out to be a complete disaster, and which they finally abandoned in NFS v4. They also built a bunch of general mechanisms (RPC, XDR, etc.), which turned out to be useless.
I guess I'm curious, not trying to start a war or anything...
I don't think it's worth debating the technical merits of NFS v1-3 again; it is, thankfully, dead. I'm just saying that Sun didn't give NFS to the open source community and we have nothing to be grateful there. Open source implemented NFS without significant support from Sun, and did so because NFS was a de-facto standard.
This is part of a disturbing trend for people to try to reframe an issue and take credit for it.
Anti-aging research has been going for decades and lots of money has been invested in it. People have looked at DNA, chromosomal changes, radicals, changes to proteins, etc. There is plenty of good and solid science there.
Stop bullshitting and avoiding the issue. You claimed that "As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone?" The fact is that during its first two decades, NFS was proprietary, insecure, inefficient, and hard to administer.
NFS v4 is irrelevant; as you yourself noted, it's a joint effort. And it isn't really NFS even.
When it comes to NFS, there is nothing to be grateful for.
I'm sorry you don't know the alternatives, but there were plenty. Sun just succeeded in killing most of them.
Though Mono is a fine project, I'm afraid that it will forever be stuck in the shadow of Microsoft.
Only because people like you keep spreading FUD.
Personally, I find it unfortunate that Mono strives to implement the CLI and CLS standard that is (let's be honest) controlled by Microsoft.
What does it matter? UNIX was controlled by AT&T. AT&T now may look like a bunch of losers, but in the 1980's, they were still the monopoly and ready to sue everybody and anybody. Did that matter for Linux? No.
No matter which direction Mono takes, you can bet that Microsoft will just continue to plow it's own way, ignoring anything innovation Mono brings forth.
What difference does that make? None of the Linux desktop applications written in Mono are based on.NET
I think Java people are confused about this because Sun has damaged their brains. With Java it actually matters what Sun does; with Mono, it doesn't matter what Microsoft does. And the fact that what Sun does with Java sucks so much is reason alone to prefer Mono.
Furthermore, I don't care what anyone says about.NET/Mono. It is a closed Microsoft technology that Mono will perpetually play catch-up to. It cannot replace what (Open) Java has to offer..NET is only a small part of Mono. Mono is no more a "closed Microsoft technology" because you can optionally install.NET compatible libraries on it, than Linux is a "closed Microsoft technology" because you can optionally install Wine on it.
The debate over dynamic vs static typing has been going on for half a century, and there is no compelling evidence to support the position that static typing is better than dynamic typing. Furthermore, among static type systems, Java's is not particularly good.
As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone?
Sun didn't "give" NFS to the open source community. Rather, open source operating systems had to start re-implementing it from scratch. Sun only open sourced it after it stopped mattering. That's adding insult to injury, and it's a recurring pattern with Sun.
There are more examples, but just for a moment wrap your head around the concept of what if Sun never released the specs to NFS.
We'd be a whole lot better off: NFSv3 and earlier is a piece of shit: it's insecure, unsafe, unreliable, hard to manage, and inefficient.
And Sun certainly didn't release NFS in order for open source operating sytems to clone it.
What would the BSDs and Linux use to map file shares? CIFS/SMB aka Samba?
Even that would have been better. SMB actually works pretty well with Linux these days. Or we might be using AFS or any of a number of other network file systems. Actually, most likely, we'd probably be using WebDAV.
You seem very defensive about the concept of universities using data auditing to check for cheating.
Huh? Where have I said anything against that "concept"? Go ahead and audit all you want. But a bad education remains a bad education even if the assignments are audited.
which just about every university Computer Science department offers, whether they are red-brick, ivy-league, campus or city-centre.
Sure, all universities offer embedded systems courses. However, the good ones don't give you even a passing grade merely for writing a device driver and some multi-threaded code.
Are you in the business of offshoring course assignments?
That's a retarded question even if you merely mean it rhetorically.
Since work could only take place in that room on a dedicated trusted server, and the students had to leave the work in a particular directory, it would be hard for any student to outsource the work.
Which only goes to show that some stupid final year projects, unfortunately, cannot be outsourced.
Writing device drivers and multi-threaded programming is simply not appropriate for a university degree. Or did you attend a trade school?
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It is as clear an indication as any just how out of touch the Open Source community is. Hitler murdered over 6 million people and Bill Gates ran a software company...? I am not seeing the comparison.
I'm not either. I don't see any comparison between Microsoft and the Nazis in the post you are responding to. So, spare us the righteous indignation.
Why does anyone post any MS related article on /.?
There are plenty of MS related articles, they just happen to be almost all negative. Why? Because that's what reflects what the company is about.
Microsoft has been behaving extremely badly towards users, the open source community, and business partners. They are convicted monopolists. They have subverted and corrupted the ISO standardization process and ISO itself simply to gain some marketing points. People like Ballmer are ruthless foulmouths. And Microsoft's software is responsible for almost all the viruses, malware, and security problems on the planet.
People have excellent justification to dislike Microsoft strongly and to not believe anything the company says.
Microsoft could give each open source developer a wheel barrow filled with gold and they would bitch about having to push it to the car.
Perhaps. But that's because so far, all MS have given open source developers and users are wheel barrows full of shit, and when they got to the car, they had to pay a toll for it.
Anybody who talks about "an approach for dealing with open source" is never going to be open source friendly. Companies are open source friendly if they see an intrinsic benefit in using and supporting open source software, and if they see it as an opportunity to save money and outsource costly development. Companies that think of open source software as a threat to be dealt with will never succeed with open source.
Come on, guys, put four USB ports on there and then we're talking. Without it, it's really limited.
You know, the sad part about that comment is that the Amiga was actually multi-tasking...
What happened to Palm is arrogance and greed.
They should have switched to Linux as their primary platform around 2000, putting a PalmOS emulator on top of it and working with the open source community. This is no 20/20 hindsight, I was saying the same thing back then.
But they wanted to own it all and develop it all themselves.
What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
Join Android or Limo. Even if the market were still receptive to another platform, Palm doesn't have the buzz or developers to pull it off.
European governments keep more detailed information about people who are in EU countries, so they need to get less information when you enter.
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys?
Those people have a right to vote, and they already regularly screw the nation. Who do you think elected people like Bush and Cheney? Who do you think lives on huge government subsidies that their senators bring home?
We have two choices: either deprive Louisianans of the vote, or educate them. There really is no third option. And since the first is politically infeasible, that leaves us with the second.
Creation Science doesn't try to test God's involvement, only the actual physical events described in the Bible (for example, that there was a global Flood around 2,000 BC or so that wiped out all humans and animals that couldn't fit in a really big boat). It doesn't look at whether the events described in Genesis were really caused by God, only whether or not they occurred as described (and the mechanics behind how they occurred).
Well, and that part is easy: they didn't. It is hard to imagine any scientific hypothesis less consistent with available data than intelligent design or most of the major events of the Bible.
That should be "embryo (< 8 week)"
The same could be said for kids up to the age of about 2. If they can't walk or talk, then they're basically worthless to society, so why not get rid of them then?
That is stupid demagoguery. Nowhere did I talk about "worth". I simply said that before you have a functioning brain, you can't really be said to be a person. You become a person only through what happens afterwards. So, it simply doesn't make logical sense for someone to talk about "I" in reference to decisions about the mass of cells that they had some physical continuity with.
The point I'm trying to make is that the cut-off of birth is really just an arbitrary point in the development of a person
Cut-off at birth? What the hell are you talking about?
My question for you is, where would you draw the line? When is the point that the brain has developed sufficiently? For those with developmental disorders, would that point come further along in the pregnancy?
We're talking about embryo ( 8 week) selection. For this purpose don't need to draw a precise line, since whatever the line may be, as a society, we already decided that "the line" is much later.
So, from the point of view of talking about individual, personal rights, the decision not to carry an embryo, for any reason, is little different from abstinence or contraceptives: it prevents the possibility of a person, but it doesn't destroy a person that already exists.
The cause of Beethoven's deafness is unknown.
My argument against would be that folks that're "disabled" like me wouldn't have a chance to contribute to society as a whole....
Before your brain had developed sufficiently, you didn't exist. At best, there was the possibility of you developing, but there's little difference between preventing that possibility from being realized by abstaining from sex or preventing it from being realized by letting the embryo develop.
So, it makes no sense to talk about preventing you from contributing to society by not selecting your embryo. Now that you are an individual, you are a valuable member of society.
Embryos and people just aren't the same thing, so preventing other people with a disability from developing doesn't devalue your life, and it's a valid choice for parents to make.
In short, Beethoven. ;)
What disability do you think Beethoven was born with?
(1) Either it works or it doesn't, for improving offspring.
(2) Lots of people won't be able to afford embryo selection, so humans will continue to explore both options.
I don't see a problem.
But you still haven't listed alternatives available at that time. If not NFS, then what alternatives AVAILABLE AT THAT TIME?
What does that have to do with whether we should be grateful to Sun for their supposed open source contributions?
But if you must know, AFS, CODA, and 9P were reasonable alternatives in the late 80's. DEC, Xerox, Symbolics, IBM, and others had yet other network file systems.
The map that Sun gave everyone may have had flaws and inaccuracies, but it was still better than not having a map in the first place.
There were dozens of network file systems being developed at the time. The only reason NFS won was because Sun shipped it with every workstation and there was no easy way to replace it.
Sun's main contribution was statelessness, which turned out to be a complete disaster, and which they finally abandoned in NFS v4. They also built a bunch of general mechanisms (RPC, XDR, etc.), which turned out to be useless.
I guess I'm curious, not trying to start a war or anything...
I don't think it's worth debating the technical merits of NFS v1-3 again; it is, thankfully, dead. I'm just saying that Sun didn't give NFS to the open source community and we have nothing to be grateful there. Open source implemented NFS without significant support from Sun, and did so because NFS was a de-facto standard.
This is part of a disturbing trend for people to try to reframe an issue and take credit for it.
Anti-aging research has been going for decades and lots of money has been invested in it. People have looked at DNA, chromosomal changes, radicals, changes to proteins, etc. There is plenty of good and solid science there.
de Grey, however, has contributed nothing to it.
Stop bullshitting and avoiding the issue. You claimed that "As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone?" The fact is that during its first two decades, NFS was proprietary, insecure, inefficient, and hard to administer.
NFS v4 is irrelevant; as you yourself noted, it's a joint effort. And it isn't really NFS even.
When it comes to NFS, there is nothing to be grateful for.
I'm sorry you don't know the alternatives, but there were plenty. Sun just succeeded in killing most of them.
Though Mono is a fine project, I'm afraid that it will forever be stuck in the shadow of Microsoft.
Only because people like you keep spreading FUD.
Personally, I find it unfortunate that Mono strives to implement the CLI and CLS standard that is (let's be honest) controlled by Microsoft.
What does it matter? UNIX was controlled by AT&T. AT&T now may look like a bunch of losers, but in the 1980's, they were still the monopoly and ready to sue everybody and anybody. Did that matter for Linux? No.
No matter which direction Mono takes, you can bet that Microsoft will just continue to plow it's own way, ignoring anything innovation Mono brings forth.
What difference does that make? None of the Linux desktop applications written in Mono are based on .NET
I think Java people are confused about this because Sun has damaged their brains. With Java it actually matters what Sun does; with Mono, it doesn't matter what Microsoft does. And the fact that what Sun does with Java sucks so much is reason alone to prefer Mono.
Care to go back 15 years and provide me with the list of better, popular languages at that time?
Smalltalk, CommonLisp, SML, CAML, Snobol, APL, J, Turing, Eiffel, awk, Splus, Objective-C, ObjectPascal, Oberon, Modula 2, Modula 3, Ada, Scheme, CLU, Cedar, Mesa, ...
Of course, they had much smaller communities because (1) there were many more of them splitting the market, and (2) there were fewer programmers.
Furthermore, I don't care what anyone says about .NET/Mono. It is a closed Microsoft technology that Mono will perpetually play catch-up to. It cannot replace what (Open) Java has to offer. .NET is only a small part of Mono. Mono is no more a "closed Microsoft technology" because you can optionally install .NET compatible libraries on it, than Linux is a "closed Microsoft technology" because you can optionally install Wine on it.
The debate over dynamic vs static typing has been going on for half a century, and there is no compelling evidence to support the position that static typing is better than dynamic typing. Furthermore, among static type systems, Java's is not particularly good.
As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone?
Sun didn't "give" NFS to the open source community. Rather, open source operating systems had to start re-implementing it from scratch. Sun only open sourced it after it stopped mattering. That's adding insult to injury, and it's a recurring pattern with Sun.
There are more examples, but just for a moment wrap your head around the concept of what if Sun never released the specs to NFS.
We'd be a whole lot better off: NFSv3 and earlier is a piece of shit: it's insecure, unsafe, unreliable, hard to manage, and inefficient.
And Sun certainly didn't release NFS in order for open source operating sytems to clone it.
What would the BSDs and Linux use to map file shares? CIFS/SMB aka Samba?
Even that would have been better. SMB actually works pretty well with Linux these days. Or we might be using AFS or any of a number of other network file systems. Actually, most likely, we'd probably be using WebDAV.
You have to start with the simple stuff, no way to avoid that
Well, he said "final year". But "simple" doesn't mean "coding" in any case.
The couples where one weak student had relied on the better one all those five years would be in deep shit.
Students are adults. If they want to waste five years, that's their business.
You seem very defensive about the concept of universities using data auditing to check for cheating.
Huh? Where have I said anything against that "concept"? Go ahead and audit all you want. But a bad education remains a bad education even if the assignments are audited.
which just about every university Computer Science department offers, whether they are red-brick, ivy-league, campus or city-centre.
Sure, all universities offer embedded systems courses. However, the good ones don't give you even a passing grade merely for writing a device driver and some multi-threaded code.
Are you in the business of offshoring course assignments?
That's a retarded question even if you merely mean it rhetorically.
Since work could only take place in that room on a dedicated trusted server, and the students had to leave the work in a particular directory, it would be hard for any student to outsource the work.
Which only goes to show that some stupid final year projects, unfortunately, cannot be outsourced.
Writing device drivers and multi-threaded programming is simply not appropriate for a university degree. Or did you attend a trade school?