Home directories, for instance, are stored in/Users instead of the more traditional/users or/home. Unix-native directories retain their classic lowercase status (/etc,/tmp,/dev), but everything else gets its formatting from the Mac side of the family.
This is the second story today I saw where you guys seem to be just trying to cause a fire-storm.
Well, duh. Slashdot is supported by banner ads. The more page views, the more revenue. The only way/. can make money with all the other news sites and weblogs that it competes with is to exploit controversy. So much for journalism.
no moral reason why copying and sharing pure patterns, regardless of their origin, is immoral
Well, here's how I see it. YMMV.
There is a cost associated with producing or creating information or knowledge. This may be measured in any unit you please, for example, time of the researcher, cash value of the reference materials and processing equipment, cost of the coffee drunk during the process, whatever.
There is a cost associated with producing food from farming. This may be measured in the farmer's time, the cost of his equipment and supplies, energy consumed, etc.
Now, here is the relationship:
Information can be traded for money.
Food can be traded for money.
Therefore, Information, indirectly, can be traded for Food.
Now, the problem is that once a piece of information has been produced, it can be duplicated indefinitely. However, once a piece of food has been eaten it cannot then be given away. Which leads to the conclusion:
You cannot have an "information must be free" based society until you have unlimited and freely available tangibles such as houses, cars, loaves of bread, etc.
Of course, producing information is often fun (observe the popularity of grad school). Farming, on the other hand, or digging foundations, or working on an auto assembly line are not generally pleasurable, and people do them because they need the money to live.
Therefore, while you are free to develop your own software or record your own music and distribute them at no cost to anyone who wants them, how exactly do you expect to pay your gas bill, or buy groceries based on this activity?
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that Free Software is an abberation caused by economic surplus, and cannot be a viable system in the long term.
. But the US is threatening sanctions if they do -- the point of IP is that no-one else can provide their own competing product.
You've entirely missed the point. The Africans are free to develop their own chemical compounds, and to do with them as they please. But the Western companies have invested hugely in development of their products, and the Africans have no right to steal the result of all that hard work.
If the world doesn't work like that, then the West will simply stop carrying the rest of the world on the shoulders of it's technological and commercial prowess. It will simply become economically impossible. Then, freed from our "cultural imperialism" and "capitalist exploitation", the Third World will be free to revert to chaos and anarchy.
Unfortunately, here in the UK, we've gone from treating education as a necessity to a healthy economy to a commercial product to be sold to as many as possible for as much as possible. Now, you expect that from the tories but we've even been betrayed by so called "socialist" labour. (So sucks to you "communist Europe" man).
Not strictly accurate. The government (at the time) wanted to decrease unemployment amongst the young, and to be seen to be "doing something", so they made the decision to convert the polytechnics into universities. I'm not sure how to map this directly onto US education concepts, but the basic difference is that a university is an academic institution that can award its own degrees, whereas a polytechnic was more vocational, and franchised degree programmes from external authorities.
So what we ended up with is a system in which degrees from traditional universities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, a few others) have retained their elite status (as they have the resources and reputation to be very selective in admission and rigourous in examinations) and the ex-polys offering courses in "media studies" or "art history" or other vaguely-defined subjects.
Because it was so easy to get into a "university", and because education is (quite rightly) preceived as valuable, there was a huge influx of people, but the quality of the average graduate plummeted. Despite their reputation, people of ability from *all* backgrounds have always been able to get into some of the elite UK colleges, which are meritocratic in the extreme (for example, UCL) with others such as Durham admitting people based on their social background.
As the student population increased, the cost of supporting them while studying went up, also more people weren't working or paying taxes, and of those people, a smaller overall percentage of graduates were able to enter the workforce in graduate-level roles, because rather than studying engineering or whatever (UK Bachelors degrees are typically more difficult than US ones, but fewer UK grads take a Masters, so I guess it balances out) they had studied things that weren't relevant to industry.
Given this, it makes a good deal of sense to adopt the US system, where people can study whatever they please, so long as they pay for it themselves. The only economically viable alternative would be to shut all the ex-polys, and return a university education to only the most academically able. A third possibility is of course an additional tax on graduates, but the Labour government (currently in power, and responsible for dismantling the grant system and introducing tuition fees) remember the last time the UK suffered a "brain drain" under their rule.
(I completed a Mechanical Engineering degree in the UK, and worked part time during it).
I both a little amused and a little dismayed when I see attitudes like this from Americans. The United States is the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth, and almost all of that is down to it's immigration policies throughout history. The US has always encouraged ambitious, hard-working people to join it, and then it has stepped back and given them the freedom they need to build their lives, raise their families, and produce economic value.
There are countless stories of immigrants arriving in the US and going on to achieve world renown, winning Nobel prizes for example, which may not have been possible in their own countries, but which have enriched their new homes in prestige, in knowledge, and in standard of living.
For anyone descended from immigrants, who owes everything they have to a nation that permitted their parent/grandparents/ancestors to live in it to criticize today's immigration policy is hypocritical, naive and reckless. The US works *because* it is the great melting pot, where people with diverse experiences can learn from one another, making everyone stronger. This is what makes it unique, and without it, eventual decline is inevitable.
(Disclosure: I am a UK citizen employed by a multinational, and the US is one of the places I have worked).
I've also experienced network systems crawling due to no-one having any idea of network bandwidth, and assuming that installing 100Mbit ethernet was the fix, as opposed to eliminating unneccessary traffic.
Programmers and sysadmins unfortunatly have different ways of thinking.
That's not necessarily fair. The sysadmin has been handed an application to support, looked at it and said "if you want to run this application at this level of performance, you require this hardware". And the programmers would have implemented the application they were told to, without needing to think about the "big picture".
The responsibility lies with the system architect, who from the very beginning should have calculated the usage of the application in a production setting, and made it clear in the specification exactly what was and was not required, so the programmers wouldn't waste resources, and written a business case so that the management would have invested in the infrastructure.
If you're suggesting that the government, or anybody for that matter, believes that "ducking and covering" under desks is an appropriate way to defend against an atomic blast, you are a cretin of unimaginable proportions.
I'm sure that the government didn't believe it, but during the 1950s that was exactly what they advised people to do. Y'see, they knew that they could not protect people if a war ever started, but they needed to give reassurance to a population who teetered on the edge of panic almost constantly. Remember that back then, people in general had a lot more faith in their government, and most of them were mollified by what they were told - and almost none of them knew anything about nuclear weapons apart from what they had been told, so had no reason to distrust one more piece of information.
China does not have the military strength to successfully invade Taiwan
That depends on how you count it. The only things that the Chinese really lack from a military perspective are naval logistics and air superiority. That's why they couldn't invade an island, but if they wanted to cross Mongolia and attack east Russia, there would be little to stop them. The danger then is that the Russians panic and do something that we'd all regret. Historically, governments who were losing their grip on their power often start foreign wars - see your comments on the decline of Communism.
exploration is a necessity, and if a bit of friendly competition can get NASA and the ESA off of their asses and step up their investments in this important field of study, then so much is the better.
One of the points he made was that you need to use your own product on a daily basis; not only does this give you incentive to improve it, but if you if you can't use it, then you know it's not very good
I don't believe for a second that Apple ever ran their payroll on a Mac, for example. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job. Anyone who lets platform bigotry and politics get in the way of sound business thinking is a fool.
How can we ever say how farther computing would be if M$ did not stifle competition?
Oh, please. How far would the average open source application be without commercial software to clone? I cite GIMP as my example, but there are plenty of others, including rLab, Afterstep, FVWM-95 and many, many more.
Generally, unless your doing some serous work on your computer, a 500Mhz chip should be fine
I can remember when people were saying that unless you played games, a 486 had more than enough power. And of course, they were right. The power available on the desktop today is far more than is needed for general office tasks. I have a P233 64M laptop that I run NT and MS Office '97 on primarily and it's easily powerful enough, even for apps like MATLAB. A P120 is enough to Windows 95 and Office 95 on without trouble.
You see, chips are very reliable pieces of equipment, much more so than, say, cars or even saucepans. There's no built in obsolescence, hence Intel et al need to create it, which they often do through marketing, in addition to encouraging ISVs to create ever more resource-hungry applications. They have almost no choice now but to compete on speed and hype - as the old saying goes, he who rides the tiger cannot dismount.
Tens of thousands of people use yours and my work freely, and physically contribute nothing in return. Its a parasitic process by design.
If it bothers you that much, go and work for Sun or Oracle or IBM. You cannot complain about "leeches" when you are actively encouraging them to take from you.
Most honest people pay for their software (even if it means buying a RedHat box set) and bandwidth. The rest (for example, those who use cable modems to run web servers) can easily be detected and prevented by the brokers (i.e. the ISP) and software pirates can be prosecuted under law. So the situation is not really as bad as you fear.
Where we have object oriented languages as a relatively recent phenom, I think that if the Japanese had created the languages they would have been done that way from the start.
Maybe they would have arrived at OO theory earlier, but I doubt they would have done it that way from the start: early programming languages were heavily influenced by what was easy for the machine to parse and process rather than what was easy for the human to write. Even these days, for the most efficient code, low level languages such as C and ASM must be used. When the cost of development is much higher than the cost of hardware (for example, in certain branches of financial services) languages like Smalltalk (easy for the humans, difficult for the machines) are used.
If the Japanese language was too ambiguous to give clear orders, how on earth could Japan in the space of 40 years develop a very productive, highly advanced industrial system?
As far as I am aware (I have worked with Japanese people, but never in Japan) English is used as the main language for business and engineering communication. This is common throughout the world, including parts of Europe.
At college, there were many Chinese (who would speak Mandarin) and Greeks (speaking Greek) but use English for technical terms, so it was perfectly possible to follow their conversation:0) In fact, it was common to see a lab team speaking several languages at once and still work together.
As to middlemen, let them find jobs where they are producing something of value, or performing a service, or even being middlemen in a transaction where they can add value (e.g. almost anything where the product can't be distributed instantly anywhere for practically nothing).
For an example of this, look at travel agents. They used to just book airline tickets for you, and hold them until you came and picked them up. But ETKT and airline websites made that business model obsolete. So now a good travel agent offers services over and above, like itinerary planning, locale-specific advice, emergency assistance services, etc, thereby adding value to the transaction.
The same thing happens in any commoditized marketplace, and despite what that fool Lars Ulrich says, music is a commodity (altho' it's not fungible).
But one thing that keeps getting forgotten is that the music industry is like the venture capital industry or the pharmaceutical industry: for every huge success, there are many, many expensive failures. Do you honestly believe that if word of mouth was all an artist had, your favourites would be heard above the hubbub? The music industry does need brokers.
Here's what I think:
Governments should exert much tighter controls on corporations.
What're you, stupid? Who would you rather have calling the shots, a corporation or a government? Bear in mind that if you don't like a corporation, you are free to exercise the ultimate sanction: buy from their rivals. If you don't like a government (particularly one "strong" enough to control corporation), do you really imagine they give a flying fsck if you vote for another party? In fact, they'd simply outlaw other parties, shoot their leaders and lock you in a concentration camp.
This is one thing the bleeding hearts never understand: it's the free market. Free as in speech, not as in beer. It's free individuals organising themselves as they see fit, and pursuing their goals, and taking their own risks, and earning their own rewards. How can you encourage competition in a world where the prize for success is punishment?
The only real supporters of strong government are the wannabe slave drivers.
There's no problem actually generating ENOUGH POWER... The problem is keeping the whole grid stable.
Not strictly the case - industrial grade air conditioning for a large scale facility in a warm climate is hugely expensive in terms of power consumption. Most colos have strict rules on how many amps you can use for a given area of floorspace because that's what they're rated to cool - ever wonder why they space racks so far apart, given that their product is sold on area? It's not just for human access. One large ISP is actively contemplating generating their own electricity and selling the excess back to the grid, in effect becoming a combination power company/telco utility.
And, weirdly, people (customers) *do* care about where their servers are, even tho' in theory they should not. You could seriously increase your profit margin (or cut your costs) by building a colo in Alaska (assuming you could get the bandwidth in there) but everyone builds them in metropolitan centres.
Remember that Jobs at the time was trying to sell a $10,000 machine to the educational market. Bill Gates showed admirable foresight in not getting involved with NeXT, which blundered from market to market, eventually dwindling to a negligible share.
Roosevelt created the New Deal precisely because the already present economic system was NOT able to handle the mass of unemployed and hungry people who lost their jobs, often as a result of unrestricted and unregulated capitalism.
The depression was directly caused by governments meddling in the economy to keep interest rates artificially low to promote growth by guaranteeing otherwise unsecured loans. Too much cheap money, in essence. The system would have been self-regulating otherwise, for example as capital reserves were depleted, interest rates would have risen until the reserves were replenished.
So you see, the great depression, and inflation in modern times are a direct result of government borrowing, which is "secured" on future taxation. It dilutes the money supply because there are no underlying assets.
Joe Schmoe VB developer cannot create distributed apps because like as not, he knows very little about networking.
He doesn't need to know much about networking, because Microsoft have provided DCOM, MTS and MSMQ for him, which take care of it all for him.
Most Unix's support CORBA and/or EJB for the same kind of approach: rely on the middleware for the application, and keep the OS running in discrete instances.
Linux users have utilities such as rsh to help them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's a NeXT thing.
Well, duh. Slashdot is supported by banner ads. The more page views, the more revenue. The only way /. can make money with all the other news sites and weblogs that it competes with is to exploit controversy. So much for journalism.
Well, here's how I see it. YMMV.
- There is a cost associated with producing or creating information or knowledge. This may be measured in any unit you please, for example, time of the researcher, cash value of the reference materials and processing equipment, cost of the coffee drunk during the process, whatever.
- There is a cost associated with producing food from farming. This may be measured in the farmer's time, the cost of his equipment and supplies, energy consumed, etc.
Now, here is the relationship:- Information can be traded for money.
- Food can be traded for money.
- Therefore, Information, indirectly, can be traded for Food.
Now, the problem is that once a piece of information has been produced, it can be duplicated indefinitely. However, once a piece of food has been eaten it cannot then be given away. Which leads to the conclusion:- You cannot have an "information must be free" based society until you have unlimited and freely available tangibles such as houses, cars, loaves of bread, etc.
Of course, producing information is often fun (observe the popularity of grad school). Farming, on the other hand, or digging foundations, or working on an auto assembly line are not generally pleasurable, and people do them because they need the money to live.Therefore, while you are free to develop your own software or record your own music and distribute them at no cost to anyone who wants them, how exactly do you expect to pay your gas bill, or buy groceries based on this activity?
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that Free Software is an abberation caused by economic surplus, and cannot be a viable system in the long term.
Thoughts?
You've entirely missed the point. The Africans are free to develop their own chemical compounds, and to do with them as they please. But the Western companies have invested hugely in development of their products, and the Africans have no right to steal the result of all that hard work.
If the world doesn't work like that, then the West will simply stop carrying the rest of the world on the shoulders of it's technological and commercial prowess. It will simply become economically impossible. Then, freed from our "cultural imperialism" and "capitalist exploitation", the Third World will be free to revert to chaos and anarchy.
Not strictly accurate. The government (at the time) wanted to decrease unemployment amongst the young, and to be seen to be "doing something", so they made the decision to convert the polytechnics into universities. I'm not sure how to map this directly onto US education concepts, but the basic difference is that a university is an academic institution that can award its own degrees, whereas a polytechnic was more vocational, and franchised degree programmes from external authorities.
So what we ended up with is a system in which degrees from traditional universities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, a few others) have retained their elite status (as they have the resources and reputation to be very selective in admission and rigourous in examinations) and the ex-polys offering courses in "media studies" or "art history" or other vaguely-defined subjects.
Because it was so easy to get into a "university", and because education is (quite rightly) preceived as valuable, there was a huge influx of people, but the quality of the average graduate plummeted. Despite their reputation, people of ability from *all* backgrounds have always been able to get into some of the elite UK colleges, which are meritocratic in the extreme (for example, UCL) with others such as Durham admitting people based on their social background.
As the student population increased, the cost of supporting them while studying went up, also more people weren't working or paying taxes, and of those people, a smaller overall percentage of graduates were able to enter the workforce in graduate-level roles, because rather than studying engineering or whatever (UK Bachelors degrees are typically more difficult than US ones, but fewer UK grads take a Masters, so I guess it balances out) they had studied things that weren't relevant to industry.
Given this, it makes a good deal of sense to adopt the US system, where people can study whatever they please, so long as they pay for it themselves. The only economically viable alternative would be to shut all the ex-polys, and return a university education to only the most academically able. A third possibility is of course an additional tax on graduates, but the Labour government (currently in power, and responsible for dismantling the grant system and introducing tuition fees) remember the last time the UK suffered a "brain drain" under their rule.
(I completed a Mechanical Engineering degree in the UK, and worked part time during it).
I both a little amused and a little dismayed when I see attitudes like this from Americans. The United States is the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth, and almost all of that is down to it's immigration policies throughout history. The US has always encouraged ambitious, hard-working people to join it, and then it has stepped back and given them the freedom they need to build their lives, raise their families, and produce economic value.
There are countless stories of immigrants arriving in the US and going on to achieve world renown, winning Nobel prizes for example, which may not have been possible in their own countries, but which have enriched their new homes in prestige, in knowledge, and in standard of living.
For anyone descended from immigrants, who owes everything they have to a nation that permitted their parent/grandparents/ancestors to live in it to criticize today's immigration policy is hypocritical, naive and reckless. The US works *because* it is the great melting pot, where people with diverse experiences can learn from one another, making everyone stronger. This is what makes it unique, and without it, eventual decline is inevitable.
(Disclosure: I am a UK citizen employed by a multinational, and the US is one of the places I have worked).
That's not necessarily fair. The sysadmin has been handed an application to support, looked at it and said "if you want to run this application at this level of performance, you require this hardware". And the programmers would have implemented the application they were told to, without needing to think about the "big picture".
The responsibility lies with the system architect, who from the very beginning should have calculated the usage of the application in a production setting, and made it clear in the specification exactly what was and was not required, so the programmers wouldn't waste resources, and written a business case so that the management would have invested in the infrastructure.
Thanks for the cookies, Richard. See you in the next life maybe.
I'm sure that the government didn't believe it, but during the 1950s that was exactly what they advised people to do. Y'see, they knew that they could not protect people if a war ever started, but they needed to give reassurance to a population who teetered on the edge of panic almost constantly. Remember that back then, people in general had a lot more faith in their government, and most of them were mollified by what they were told - and almost none of them knew anything about nuclear weapons apart from what they had been told, so had no reason to distrust one more piece of information.
China does not have the military strength to successfully invade Taiwan
That depends on how you count it. The only things that the Chinese really lack from a military perspective are naval logistics and air superiority. That's why they couldn't invade an island, but if they wanted to cross Mongolia and attack east Russia, there would be little to stop them. The danger then is that the Russians panic and do something that we'd all regret. Historically, governments who were losing their grip on their power often start foreign wars - see your comments on the decline of Communism.
exploration is a necessity, and if a bit of friendly competition can get NASA and the ESA off of their asses and step up their investments in this important field of study, then so much is the better.
Aye.
I don't believe for a second that Apple ever ran their payroll on a Mac, for example. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job. Anyone who lets platform bigotry and politics get in the way of sound business thinking is a fool.
Oh, please. How far would the average open source application be without commercial software to clone? I cite GIMP as my example, but there are plenty of others, including rLab, Afterstep, FVWM-95 and many, many more.
I can remember when people were saying that unless you played games, a 486 had more than enough power. And of course, they were right. The power available on the desktop today is far more than is needed for general office tasks. I have a P233 64M laptop that I run NT and MS Office '97 on primarily and it's easily powerful enough, even for apps like MATLAB. A P120 is enough to Windows 95 and Office 95 on without trouble.
You see, chips are very reliable pieces of equipment, much more so than, say, cars or even saucepans. There's no built in obsolescence, hence Intel et al need to create it, which they often do through marketing, in addition to encouraging ISVs to create ever more resource-hungry applications. They have almost no choice now but to compete on speed and hype - as the old saying goes, he who rides the tiger cannot dismount.
At least in my copy, the quote is the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil which is not the same thing at all.
If it bothers you that much, go and work for Sun or Oracle or IBM. You cannot complain about "leeches" when you are actively encouraging them to take from you.
Most honest people pay for their software (even if it means buying a RedHat box set) and bandwidth. The rest (for example, those who use cable modems to run web servers) can easily be detected and prevented by the brokers (i.e. the ISP) and software pirates can be prosecuted under law. So the situation is not really as bad as you fear.
Maybe they would have arrived at OO theory earlier, but I doubt they would have done it that way from the start: early programming languages were heavily influenced by what was easy for the machine to parse and process rather than what was easy for the human to write. Even these days, for the most efficient code, low level languages such as C and ASM must be used. When the cost of development is much higher than the cost of hardware (for example, in certain branches of financial services) languages like Smalltalk (easy for the humans, difficult for the machines) are used.
As far as I am aware (I have worked with Japanese people, but never in Japan) English is used as the main language for business and engineering communication. This is common throughout the world, including parts of Europe.
At college, there were many Chinese (who would speak Mandarin) and Greeks (speaking Greek) but use English for technical terms, so it was perfectly possible to follow their conversation :0) In fact, it was common to see a lab team speaking several languages at once and still work together.
For an example of this, look at travel agents. They used to just book airline tickets for you, and hold them until you came and picked them up. But ETKT and airline websites made that business model obsolete. So now a good travel agent offers services over and above, like itinerary planning, locale-specific advice, emergency assistance services, etc, thereby adding value to the transaction.
The same thing happens in any commoditized marketplace, and despite what that fool Lars Ulrich says, music is a commodity (altho' it's not fungible).
But one thing that keeps getting forgotten is that the music industry is like the venture capital industry or the pharmaceutical industry: for every huge success, there are many, many expensive failures. Do you honestly believe that if word of mouth was all an artist had, your favourites would be heard above the hubbub? The music industry does need brokers.
What're you, stupid? Who would you rather have calling the shots, a corporation or a government? Bear in mind that if you don't like a corporation, you are free to exercise the ultimate sanction: buy from their rivals. If you don't like a government (particularly one "strong" enough to control corporation), do you really imagine they give a flying fsck if you vote for another party? In fact, they'd simply outlaw other parties, shoot their leaders and lock you in a concentration camp.
This is one thing the bleeding hearts never understand: it's the free market. Free as in speech, not as in beer. It's free individuals organising themselves as they see fit, and pursuing their goals, and taking their own risks, and earning their own rewards. How can you encourage competition in a world where the prize for success is punishment?
The only real supporters of strong government are the wannabe slave drivers.
Oh, I get it now, Microsoft "rips off" and Unix "clones". Welcome to Slashdot.
Not strictly the case - industrial grade air conditioning for a large scale facility in a warm climate is hugely expensive in terms of power consumption. Most colos have strict rules on how many amps you can use for a given area of floorspace because that's what they're rated to cool - ever wonder why they space racks so far apart, given that their product is sold on area? It's not just for human access. One large ISP is actively contemplating generating their own electricity and selling the excess back to the grid, in effect becoming a combination power company/telco utility.
And, weirdly, people (customers) *do* care about where their servers are, even tho' in theory they should not. You could seriously increase your profit margin (or cut your costs) by building a colo in Alaska (assuming you could get the bandwidth in there) but everyone builds them in metropolitan centres.
Remember that Jobs at the time was trying to sell a $10,000 machine to the educational market. Bill Gates showed admirable foresight in not getting involved with NeXT, which blundered from market to market, eventually dwindling to a negligible share.
The depression was directly caused by governments meddling in the economy to keep interest rates artificially low to promote growth by guaranteeing otherwise unsecured loans. Too much cheap money, in essence. The system would have been self-regulating otherwise, for example as capital reserves were depleted, interest rates would have risen until the reserves were replenished.
So you see, the great depression, and inflation in modern times are a direct result of government borrowing, which is "secured" on future taxation. It dilutes the money supply because there are no underlying assets.
Sounds like Eric Raymond!
He doesn't need to know much about networking, because Microsoft have provided DCOM, MTS and MSMQ for him, which take care of it all for him.
Most Unix's support CORBA and/or EJB for the same kind of approach: rely on the middleware for the application, and keep the OS running in discrete instances.
Linux users have utilities such as rsh to help them.
You're forgetting corporations who may well find the ASP model cheaper than maintaining their own MIS and support staff.
that I don't trust Microsoft
Blah, blah blah... change the record, slashbots.