seriously, any unix admin worth their paycheck isn't using unsecure telnet or ftp..
If management seriously don't want to use OpenSSH, then have them go for regular telnet and ftp over a Cisco VPN. Problem solved. (Note that I didn't say S/WAN 'cos that might be free too).
Re:I think that M$ has Missed the Point
on
Microsoft Freon
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· Score: 2
Worse than this, If MS thinks it can make a Video set top box better than SONY can, they are plain wrong. SONY is now a major manufacturer of professional video devices, and a major maker of game consoles, they have the know-how to tie all this together with their own chips and manufacturing plants. Nice try microsoft, but this is not going to work...:-)
Business 101: Corporations have two basic resources: capital, and management attention. Corporate strategy is the decision making process that allocates these in ways that fulfill the company's objectives (which may be as nebulously defined as "enhance shareholder value"). Anything a company wants or wants to do can usually be acquired or fulfilled using these two resources. It's wrong to assume that Microsoft not owning a fab right now will make much difference in the long term.
Also, there's something that savvy players in professional services (law, consulting, investment banking, etc) have known for a long time: unless you really want the brand, it's often not worth buying another company, since all the assets are intellectual. It's much cheaper to simply poach the key players and selectively encourage defections from their staff to yours. The same is true in high tech, witness Microsoft's strategy aagainst Borland. If Microsoft want to get people (all business is people, really) they can look to Sony or to Sony's rivals.
It's good, but I've switched to PuTTY, mainly because it can heartbeat an SSH connection with an empty packet every minute to prevent sessions being timed out by over-zealous firewalls - very convenient if you need to monitor several machines.
Ahhhhhh!!!!!! What the heck! It must just be too early in the morning for most of you. More than half the posts already have said basically, "So what, wouldn't you do it too?" or "What's so wrong with that?" How is it that we find it so easy to place a value on a human life? If asked the question, "What is my life worth to you?", can you really respond to me with a dollar amount?
Actually, there is a dollar amount placed on your life. It varies, of course, but it's pretty easy to work it out. How much does an airline expect to pay in compensation if you're killed in a crash? That's a dollar amount on your life right there. How many dollars are there per participant in your HMO's fund? That's the average dollar value of a whole bunch of people's lives. How much does your government budget for airlifting its citizens out of a war zone? Another dollar value on your life. (Incidentally, the US State Dept. can require you to pay the first $10,000 of the cost of rescuing you, altho' in practice they rarely do).
Saying human life cannot be priced may give you the warm fuzzies, but it's simply not true, it happens all the time. There are 6 billion people on the planet... in the grand scheme of things, an individual life isn't worth very much.
How about walking into a store, and having a big ad greet you? I don't think so.
Honestly, it depends if that ad comes with a discount on something I want to buy. If so, I don't mind at all. It's just like when you go to Amazon, and it says, hello, this is what we recommend for you, and this is what we're running on special offer today.
Otherwise I am reminded of that episode of Star Trek where Troi's mother takes Worf's son to a health spa. Worf and Troi go looking for them, but there is a sort of flying drone that gets in their way, it will only let people into the spa who are happy. Worf reaches up with one hand and crushes it.
Does "Intelligence Community" include the CIA, who are quite adept at fighting covert wars...
As they so ably demonstrated at the Bay of Pigs? As Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon, Microsoft are 10x smarter and 100x as agressive as any mere government.
ESR always was unbearably smug and self-righteous - particularly considering just how little code of his is in a typical Linux distro. Let's just look at a few quotes, minus the rambling and fluff: I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself
we discussed during the last Board conference call
When you're already a media figure
the respect and the trust of a lot of hackers
there aren't likely to be a lot more multimillion-dollar bonanzas like mine
I'm a VA board member
Megabucks are power, and with power comes an obligation to use it wisely
anybody who wants me to give a talk has to cover my expenses and eliminate hassle
The whole essay was a big "LOOK AT ME!" but he's gone remarkably quiet of late. I guess I'll leave you with this final quote.
Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?"
Which is why its too bad that Microsoft hasn't ever done much of it. I like to call what they do 'immovation'. Its 90% immitation.
There's an old saying, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. There's not much in Linux that didn't come (ported or copied) from Minix, the original BSD, SVR4 or a commercial Unix. And on the applications side, KDE from CDE, GIMP from Photoshop, Octave from Matlab, etc. etc.
Sure, a lot of open source is clones of other products as well, but in most cases at least the clones are faithful to the original. Microsoft tends to copy ideas poorly.
Not that that's inherently a good or bad thing, but at least when Microsoft use someone's ideas, that someone has a chance of getting paid for it.
Re:The Digital Dilemma -- Our Exploitation
on
Ghana's Digital Dilemma
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What normally would go for (at least) 6.00 an hour (more in most places) in the states is happening at _dollars per day_. This has nothing to do with "giving technology to the masses" -- it is a corporate strategy to get more "bang for their buck" -my US $0.02 (In Ghana thats $0.000000002)
You have completely misunderstood the difference in currencies. In the US, you pay $4 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. A cup of coffee in a third world nation costs a fraction of a cent. People aren't working 8 hrs a day to afford a single Big Mac, in their local currency, they are well off! The reason for this is that their currencies aren't "hard", they are volatile, and hence FX market participants who hold hard currencies (USD, GBP, CHF, EUR and JPY) are relucant to exchange them for the local currency. The law of supply and demand means that you can buy a lot of local currency for a small amount of hard currency. Why would you want to? Either you want to spend some money in that country, or you are in that country and want to buy something outside of it. Since that doesn't happen much, relative to the rest of the global economy, hard currencies command a premium.
You are also forgetting that these workers would otherwise be unemployed, and that they are happy to have the work. They have changed the weakness of their currency from a burden to an advantage by exploiting the comparative purchasing power of their economy. This scenario is win-win: the locals are employed and have revenue coming in, the multinationals get their work done for a lower cost, and can therefore provide consumers in the West with cheaper products.
Eventually, as has happened in India, local tech skills will develop, and they will move up the value chain from data entry, to technical support, to programming, to complete systems development. Then you will find that these "poor, exploited" people are competing on a level playing field with Americans, and if they manage their economy skillfully, they will be able to do it while still remaining cheaper.
I think you're right in this. A project manager should, in my opinion, be responsible for planning and control, and not for any tech-stuff. In my company, there is a group of persons that discusses with the customers about what they want, and what is possible. THAT's a point where tech-expertise is needen. When the specs are settled, it is handed over to a PM to make sure it gets implemented.
A project manager has a set of skills that are distinct from by complementary to the skills of an engineer. A project manager who starts their career as a project manager often has great skills for, budgeting, say, and understands the administrative details as a role. The reason that these people fail is that, lacking an engineering background, when creating plans they are unable to accurately estimate time and resource requirement, and even worse they are unable to identify critical paths, dependencies and opportunites for parallelism.
The ideal structure is to have a project manager to take care of the details, and a system architect to see the "big picture" and have overall responsibility for planning and executing the project. If the project manager is in charge, then that individual should have at leat 5 years experience "in the trenches" on similar projects, and should have the authority to set priorities and trim the feature set if necessary.
Problem is a) that's a very small market and b) the people who carry mobile network troubleshooting platforms are precisely the ones who don't want and won't pay for Linux support, because they're capable of installing and configuring for themselves.
Linux on a laptop is cool, but desktop Linux users are mostly either programmers with a desk and an office who don't need to be mobile, or "power" users running graphics, CPU or I/O intensive applications who require more resources than laptop hardware can currently support. Corporate laptop users - who would need and be willing to pay for support - use them for preparing documents, spreadsheets and presentations and checking email while traveling on business, and that means (these days) Win 2000/XP and MS Office.
I wouldn't be surprised if it came back to haunt me in some way some day. As a previous poster mentioned, such is the burden of free speech.
The thing is, people posted to usenet believing that it was an ephermeral medium, and that everything they said was essentially a throwaway comment that would expire within a week at most. The idea that someone was actually saving all this stuff simply didn't occur to 99% of posters (myself included). Partly it was because way back when, the storage to keep a usenet history online would have been prohibitively expensive, and partly because who would even want to preserve alt.*?
Google do have a procedure for removing posts from their archive, but either it doesn't work or they are simply autoresponding then ignoring the request.
I don't let customers dictate how programs should work. I make them tell me what information they have to enter, and what they want to get back out. I decide on mostly everything in the middle.
Then you aren't writing particularly complex software. If your users need software that does sophisticated processing, mathematical or otherwise, then the programmer probably isn't the best person to work out how it should do it. This is true whether you're working on software for pricing derivatives, or for tracking shipments in a supply chain, or for controlling manufacturing machinery. That's why there are notations like UML, so that functional experts can communicate unambiguously to the software developers what a system should be doing. A good programmer knows about programming, a good analyst knows about business processes, some people are both, but only with years of experience, and even then, only within a single industry.
The requirements, specification and alanlysis process is what separates software engineering from "hacking".
... is to not make the mistake in the first place. This may sound kind of stupid, but it's true. Don't skip on sleep - so you may stay properly awake, don't run yourself on Coca/Pitr Cola, eat good food, go for walks, and you'll find yourself making far fewer mistakes and producing better quality stuff.
The question is what type of mistake. Is your program crashing a lot? Then see the above poster. Is your program generating the wrong results? Then the problem is that you have not specified rigorously enough. With good engineering specs, the actual code is just data entry.
The real driving force behind free software is end users and efficient sharing of development costs.
That is only true in the cases where the end users are the developers. It works for GCC and Apache, for example. It doesn't work for any software that isn't directly useful to the people writing it. The way our economy deals with situations like that is to pay people to write software, thereby making the writing of software directly useful to the people doing it. If the people aren't paid - for example, by selling shrinkwrapped, licenced CDs - then the software simply doesn't get written and the economy as a whole is worse off.
Software companies think they can get Java developers right out of school for half the salary they would have paid an experienced C/C++ developer to write software just as efficient, in half the time!
You are absolutely right, and not just Java but all of "open source" too. A lot of the college-age/. crowd are going to hit their 30s in a few years and discover that it will be impossible (or at least very difficult) to make a decent living as a programmer or a sysadmin - partly because the upfront cost of the software is minimal, and partly because the ongoing costs have been eroded by the constant stream of college-age workers with Linux boxes in their bedrooms who have little choice but to work cheaply because there are so many of them competing for jobs. Once you lower the barriers to entry, the market becomes a commodity, and no-one makes any money apart from those who have moved up the value chain (which means into non-technical roles, which the typical/.'er professes a great reluctance to do).
then you actually would be able to write an application for Windows, Linux and Solaris all at the same time. And have people use it. People do it ( I'm one of them), but it's not for the general public consumption yet.
If Java were faster, you wouldn't need to buy large, expensive Sun hardware to run it. There is a theory that running C applications to simply too efficient to justify large purchases of Sun equipment, and they needed to find a way to make people buy more.
Netscape is trying to commoditize the browser market.. in order to dominate the server market. This would have been plausible in, say, 1997. I find it amazing that he tries to push this by anybody--the browser was commoditized.. and servers turned out to be irrelevant! Where is netscape now?
No, Joel is right. Back in '95 or '96, Jim Clark said Netscape sell printing presses, but first we have to teach people to read.
My own take on Netscape's collapse in the server market is that they stretched themselves too thin. Netscape Enterprise Server 2 was an excellent product, fast, stable and flexible. Version 3 of most of their products - and there were a lot of them by now - almost universally sucked, they had been rushed out of the door, and it showed.
IBM is investing in open source software to bolster its consulting services
I think Joel's right here - IBM Global Services is what makes the money for IBM, consulting and outsourcing. If IBM can compete on data centre implementation and operations, something they have always excelled at, they can get software for free and hire people cheaply, because sysadmin and programming skills will be commoditized.
Suddenly, it has what--spent a lot of money for the benefit of all while increasing what it can personally consult on by a whopping 3%.
Really, contributing to open source is just their approach to learning about how to make open source software work in a managed facility, so they can adapt and maintain it - they could care less about "the community". It's a better way to train their people, letting them cut their teeth in the real world rather than in a classroom.
Remember, IBM created the PC industry, then lost control of it. They created the relational database industry, and lost control of it. They know a great deal about how to survive and make money in a commoditized environment, and that's on "value add" - i.e. services.
That is an amazingly ignorant observation regarding joint strike fighter pilots. Their major aircraft is the A-10 Thunderbolt [a-10.org]. It is so ugly they call it the Warthog and say it with pride.
Of course they do, have you seen the bloody great 30-mm cannon sticking out the front? I think Dr Freud would have something to say about that!
The Lockheed plane can fly nose down at speeds as low as 20 Knots (for strafing) - while being able to run away from an F-15 on the top end. It has the radar profile of a bird. The plane is unlike anything that has ever flown before. It can cruise at supersonic speeds without afterburners. The Marine Corps version can take off vertically - go supersonic - then land vertically at the end of the mission. It is a better air superiority fighter than anything we have in service now - while being a better ground support plane than an A-10 Warthog. Computerized control is what makes all of that possible.
The best feature about the Lockheed design is its modularity. The Navy are very interested in vertical/short launch, but the Air Force aren't so bothered. The design makes it possible to simply detach the vertical lift unit and replace it with additional fuel tanks or weapons.
Of course, I'd much rather BAe had had a Super Harrier to sell...
Most PDAs depend on the touch screen, whereas calcs have buttons to achieve the specific task. I'd rather be pushing buttons then using a stylus to navigate the screen. Plus, you have to use HP with RPN!;)
My HP calculator has a 2-line dot matrix LCD, and 6 buttons along the bottom of the screen. The top line is the calculation in progress, and the lower line labels 6 different functions related to the mode the calculator is in, or options to drill down through a hierarchy of menus to get to a new mode. You can also enter formulae and add them by name to the menu system, it's very cool.
Call it cynical perhaps - but you'd be surprised how often it is the case that people present themselves as being motivated by some non-political cause but are actually long-time supporters or even members of the opposition party.
It wouldn't matter one bit if she was a member of a political party - this is a woman who testified to a board of enquiry with her face held on by a transparent plastic mask, as a survivor of a wreck in which many people were killed! Surely you cannot mean that being a member of a political party other than the one in power means that you sacrifice your right to justice - because that really is Fascism. In rhetorical terms, trying to claim that an opponent has no valid case because of an unrelated personal decision is an ad hominem attack, and definitely unacceptable in such a serious matter. The Blair government has a history of "spin", using PR to deflect legitimate criticism - do a web search for "Stephen Byers", whose department used September 11 to "bury" news unfavourable to their party.
Wake up, you brits: the police state envisioned by Orwell is becoming real. If you look at the loss of liberty in the last fifteen years, and extrapolate forward fifteen more, we'll be RFID tagging the populace.
This is a particularly sinister development. Tony Blair's government attempts to discredit critics (in this case, the survivor of a train disaster who criticised his governments handling of rail safety) using background checks and database searches. These new powers will give the civil service the ability to persecute anyone who has a grievance against the government, even if only by ad hominem attacks, ad nauseum.
as far as I know it is impossible to do this with normal UNIX permissions
Your "impossible" example is trivial on NT. Please try to understand that NTFS is nothing like FAT. NTFS ACLs are really very good, much better than anything on Solaris or Linux - that's its VMS heritage showing.
You're clearly too young to remember AT&T before deregulation. You couldn't plug anything into a phone socket that they didn't own. The popular variant of their marketing slogans was "AT&T: we don't care, we don't have to."
AT&T before deregulation was a government-sanctioned monopoly. You're just proving my point that governments don't need to care what people think about them. After deregulation, AT&T improved drastically, because the market forced them to.
By definition, a private corporation in competition with other private corporations couldn't have survived behaving that way. Witness the intense competition between and well-staffed call centers of the various mobile telcos.
Slashdot Mirror
seriously, any unix admin worth their paycheck isn't using unsecure telnet or ftp..
If management seriously don't want to use OpenSSH, then have them go for regular telnet and ftp over a Cisco VPN. Problem solved. (Note that I didn't say S/WAN 'cos that might be free too).
Worse than this, If MS thinks it can make a Video set top box better than SONY can, they are plain wrong. SONY is now a major manufacturer of professional video devices, and a major maker of game consoles, they have the know-how to tie all this together with their own chips and manufacturing plants. :-)
Nice try microsoft, but this is not going to work...
Business 101: Corporations have two basic resources: capital, and management attention. Corporate strategy is the decision making process that allocates these in ways that fulfill the company's objectives (which may be as nebulously defined as "enhance shareholder value"). Anything a company wants or wants to do can usually be acquired or fulfilled using these two resources. It's wrong to assume that Microsoft not owning a fab right now will make much difference in the long term.
Also, there's something that savvy players in professional services (law, consulting, investment banking, etc) have known for a long time: unless you really want the brand, it's often not worth buying another company, since all the assets are intellectual. It's much cheaper to simply poach the key players and selectively encourage defections from their staff to yours. The same is true in high tech, witness Microsoft's strategy aagainst Borland. If Microsoft want to get people (all business is people, really) they can look to Sony or to Sony's rivals.
The future is still very much in play.
Tera Term on Windows is the best.
It's good, but I've switched to PuTTY, mainly because it can heartbeat an SSH connection with an empty packet every minute to prevent sessions being timed out by over-zealous firewalls - very convenient if you need to monitor several machines.
Ahhhhhh!!!!!! What the heck! It must just be too early in the morning for most of you. More than half the posts already have said basically, "So what, wouldn't you do it too?" or "What's so wrong with that?" How is it that we find it so easy to place a value on a human life? If asked the question, "What is my life worth to you?", can you really respond to me with a dollar amount?
Actually, there is a dollar amount placed on your life. It varies, of course, but it's pretty easy to work it out. How much does an airline expect to pay in compensation if you're killed in a crash? That's a dollar amount on your life right there. How many dollars are there per participant in your HMO's fund? That's the average dollar value of a whole bunch of people's lives. How much does your government budget for airlifting its citizens out of a war zone? Another dollar value on your life. (Incidentally, the US State Dept. can require you to pay the first $10,000 of the cost of rescuing you, altho' in practice they rarely do).
Saying human life cannot be priced may give you the warm fuzzies, but it's simply not true, it happens all the time. There are 6 billion people on the planet... in the grand scheme of things, an individual life isn't worth very much.
How about walking into a store, and having a big ad greet you? I don't think so.
Honestly, it depends if that ad comes with a discount on something I want to buy. If so, I don't mind at all. It's just like when you go to Amazon, and it says, hello, this is what we recommend for you, and this is what we're running on special offer today.
Otherwise I am reminded of that episode of Star Trek where Troi's mother takes Worf's son to a health spa. Worf and Troi go looking for them, but there is a sort of flying drone that gets in their way, it will only let people into the spa who are happy. Worf reaches up with one hand and crushes it.
Does "Intelligence Community" include the CIA, who are quite adept at fighting covert wars...
As they so ably demonstrated at the Bay of Pigs? As Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon, Microsoft are 10x smarter and 100x as agressive as any mere government.
ESR always was unbearably smug and self-righteous - particularly considering just how little code of his is in a typical Linux distro. Let's just look at a few quotes, minus the rambling and fluff:
I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself
we discussed during the last Board conference call
When you're already a media figure
the respect and the trust of a lot of hackers
there aren't likely to be a lot more multimillion-dollar bonanzas like mine
I'm a VA board member
Megabucks are power, and with power comes an obligation to use it wisely
anybody who wants me to give a talk has to cover my expenses and eliminate hassle
The whole essay was a big "LOOK AT ME!" but he's gone remarkably quiet of late. I guess I'll leave you with this final quote.
Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?"
Which is why its too bad that Microsoft hasn't ever done much of it. I like to call what they do 'immovation'. Its 90% immitation.
There's an old saying, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. There's not much in Linux that didn't come (ported or copied) from Minix, the original BSD, SVR4 or a commercial Unix. And on the applications side, KDE from CDE, GIMP from Photoshop, Octave from Matlab, etc. etc.
Sure, a lot of open source is clones of other products as well, but in most cases at least the clones are faithful to the original. Microsoft tends to copy ideas poorly.
Not that that's inherently a good or bad thing, but at least when Microsoft use someone's ideas, that someone has a chance of getting paid for it.
What normally would go for (at least) 6.00 an hour (more in most places) in the states is happening at _dollars per day_. This has nothing to do with "giving technology to the masses" -- it is a corporate strategy to get more "bang for their buck" -my US $0.02 (In Ghana thats $0.000000002)
You have completely misunderstood the difference in currencies. In the US, you pay $4 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. A cup of coffee in a third world nation costs a fraction of a cent. People aren't working 8 hrs a day to afford a single Big Mac, in their local currency, they are well off! The reason for this is that their currencies aren't "hard", they are volatile, and hence FX market participants who hold hard currencies (USD, GBP, CHF, EUR and JPY) are relucant to exchange them for the local currency. The law of supply and demand means that you can buy a lot of local currency for a small amount of hard currency. Why would you want to? Either you want to spend some money in that country, or you are in that country and want to buy something outside of it. Since that doesn't happen much, relative to the rest of the global economy, hard currencies command a premium.
You are also forgetting that these workers would otherwise be unemployed, and that they are happy to have the work. They have changed the weakness of their currency from a burden to an advantage by exploiting the comparative purchasing power of their economy. This scenario is win-win: the locals are employed and have revenue coming in, the multinationals get their work done for a lower cost, and can therefore provide consumers in the West with cheaper products.
Eventually, as has happened in India, local tech skills will develop, and they will move up the value chain from data entry, to technical support, to programming, to complete systems development. Then you will find that these "poor, exploited" people are competing on a level playing field with Americans, and if they manage their economy skillfully, they will be able to do it while still remaining cheaper.
I think you're right in this. A project manager should, in my opinion, be responsible for planning and control, and not for any tech-stuff. In my company, there is a group of persons that discusses with the customers about what they want, and what is possible. THAT's a point where tech-expertise is needen. When the specs are settled, it is handed over to a PM to make sure it gets implemented.
A project manager has a set of skills that are distinct from by complementary to the skills of an engineer. A project manager who starts their career as a project manager often has great skills for, budgeting, say, and understands the administrative details as a role. The reason that these people fail is that, lacking an engineering background, when creating plans they are unable to accurately estimate time and resource requirement, and even worse they are unable to identify critical paths, dependencies and opportunites for parallelism.
The ideal structure is to have a project manager to take care of the details, and a system architect to see the "big picture" and have overall responsibility for planning and executing the project. If the project manager is in charge, then that individual should have at leat 5 years experience "in the trenches" on similar projects, and should have the authority to set priorities and trim the feature set if necessary.
Mobile network troubleshooting platform.
Problem is a) that's a very small market and b) the people who carry mobile network troubleshooting platforms are precisely the ones who don't want and won't pay for Linux support, because they're capable of installing and configuring for themselves.
Linux on a laptop is cool, but desktop Linux users are mostly either programmers with a desk and an office who don't need to be mobile, or "power" users running graphics, CPU or I/O intensive applications who require more resources than laptop hardware can currently support. Corporate laptop users - who would need and be willing to pay for support - use them for preparing documents, spreadsheets and presentations and checking email while traveling on business, and that means (these days) Win 2000/XP and MS Office.
I wouldn't be surprised if it came back to haunt me in some way some day. As a previous poster mentioned, such is the burden of free speech.
The thing is, people posted to usenet believing that it was an ephermeral medium, and that everything they said was essentially a throwaway comment that would expire within a week at most. The idea that someone was actually saving all this stuff simply didn't occur to 99% of posters (myself included). Partly it was because way back when, the storage to keep a usenet history online would have been prohibitively expensive, and partly because who would even want to preserve alt.*?
Google do have a procedure for removing posts from their archive, but either it doesn't work or they are simply autoresponding then ignoring the request.
I don't let customers dictate how programs should work. I make them tell me what information they have to enter, and what they want to get back out. I decide on mostly everything in the middle.
Then you aren't writing particularly complex software. If your users need software that does sophisticated processing, mathematical or otherwise, then the programmer probably isn't the best person to work out how it should do it. This is true whether you're working on software for pricing derivatives, or for tracking shipments in a supply chain, or for controlling manufacturing machinery. That's why there are notations like UML, so that functional experts can communicate unambiguously to the software developers what a system should be doing. A good programmer knows about programming, a good analyst knows about business processes, some people are both, but only with years of experience, and even then, only within a single industry.
The requirements, specification and alanlysis process is what separates software engineering from "hacking".
... is to not make the mistake in the first place. This may sound kind of stupid, but it's true. Don't skip on sleep - so you may stay properly awake, don't run yourself on Coca/Pitr Cola, eat good food, go for walks, and you'll find yourself making far fewer mistakes and producing better quality stuff.
The question is what type of mistake. Is your program crashing a lot? Then see the above poster. Is your program generating the wrong results? Then the problem is that you have not specified rigorously enough. With good engineering specs, the actual code is just data entry.
The real driving force behind free software is end users and efficient sharing of development costs.
That is only true in the cases where the end users are the developers. It works for GCC and Apache, for example. It doesn't work for any software that isn't directly useful to the people writing it. The way our economy deals with situations like that is to pay people to write software, thereby making the writing of software directly useful to the people doing it. If the people aren't paid - for example, by selling shrinkwrapped, licenced CDs - then the software simply doesn't get written and the economy as a whole is worse off.
Software companies think they can get Java developers right out of school for half the salary they would have paid an experienced C/C++ developer to write software just as efficient, in half the time!
/. crowd are going to hit their 30s in a few years and discover that it will be impossible (or at least very difficult) to make a decent living as a programmer or a sysadmin - partly because the upfront cost of the software is minimal, and partly because the ongoing costs have been eroded by the constant stream of college-age workers with Linux boxes in their bedrooms who have little choice but to work cheaply because there are so many of them competing for jobs. Once you lower the barriers to entry, the market becomes a commodity, and no-one makes any money apart from those who have moved up the value chain (which means into non-technical roles, which the typical /.'er professes a great reluctance to do).
You are absolutely right, and not just Java but all of "open source" too. A lot of the college-age
then you actually would be able to write an application for Windows, Linux and Solaris all at the same time. And have people use it. People do it ( I'm one of them), but it's not for the general public consumption yet.
If Java were faster, you wouldn't need to buy large, expensive Sun hardware to run it. There is a theory that running C applications to simply too efficient to justify large purchases of Sun equipment, and they needed to find a way to make people buy more.
Netscape is trying to commoditize the browser market .. in order to dominate the server market. This would have been plausible in, say, 1997. I find it amazing that he tries to push this by anybody--the browser was commoditized.. and servers turned out to be irrelevant! Where is netscape now?
No, Joel is right. Back in '95 or '96, Jim Clark said Netscape sell printing presses, but first we have to teach people to read.
My own take on Netscape's collapse in the server market is that they stretched themselves too thin. Netscape Enterprise Server 2 was an excellent product, fast, stable and flexible. Version 3 of most of their products - and there were a lot of them by now - almost universally sucked, they had been rushed out of the door, and it showed.
IBM is investing in open source software to bolster its consulting services
I think Joel's right here - IBM Global Services is what makes the money for IBM, consulting and outsourcing. If IBM can compete on data centre implementation and operations, something they have always excelled at, they can get software for free and hire people cheaply, because sysadmin and programming skills will be commoditized.
Suddenly, it has what--spent a lot of money for the benefit of all while increasing what it can personally consult on by a whopping 3%.
Really, contributing to open source is just their approach to learning about how to make open source software work in a managed facility, so they can adapt and maintain it - they could care less about "the community". It's a better way to train their people, letting them cut their teeth in the real world rather than in a classroom.
Remember, IBM created the PC industry, then lost control of it. They created the relational database industry, and lost control of it. They know a great deal about how to survive and make money in a commoditized environment, and that's on "value add" - i.e. services.
That is an amazingly ignorant observation regarding joint strike fighter pilots. Their major aircraft is the A-10 Thunderbolt [a-10.org]. It is so ugly they call it the Warthog and say it with pride.
Of course they do, have you seen the bloody great 30-mm cannon sticking out the front? I think Dr Freud would have something to say about that!
The Lockheed plane can fly nose down at speeds as low as 20 Knots (for strafing) - while being able to run away from an F-15 on the top end. It has the radar profile of a bird. The plane is unlike anything that has ever flown before. It can cruise at supersonic speeds without afterburners. The Marine Corps version can take off vertically - go supersonic - then land vertically at the end of the mission. It is a better air superiority fighter than anything we have in service now - while being a better ground support plane than an A-10 Warthog. Computerized control is what makes all of that possible.
The best feature about the Lockheed design is its modularity. The Navy are very interested in vertical/short launch, but the Air Force aren't so bothered. The design makes it possible to simply detach the vertical lift unit and replace it with additional fuel tanks or weapons.
Of course, I'd much rather BAe had had a Super Harrier to sell...
Most PDAs depend on the touch screen, whereas calcs have buttons to achieve the specific task. I'd rather be pushing buttons then using a stylus to navigate the screen. Plus, you have to use HP with RPN! ;)
My HP calculator has a 2-line dot matrix LCD, and 6 buttons along the bottom of the screen. The top line is the calculation in progress, and the lower line labels 6 different functions related to the mode the calculator is in, or options to drill down through a hierarchy of menus to get to a new mode. You can also enter formulae and add them by name to the menu system, it's very cool.
Call it cynical perhaps - but you'd be surprised how often it is the case that people present themselves as being motivated by some non-political cause but are actually long-time supporters or even members of the opposition party.
It wouldn't matter one bit if she was a member of a political party - this is a woman who testified to a board of enquiry with her face held on by a transparent plastic mask, as a survivor of a wreck in which many people were killed! Surely you cannot mean that being a member of a political party other than the one in power means that you sacrifice your right to justice - because that really is Fascism. In rhetorical terms, trying to claim that an opponent has no valid case because of an unrelated personal decision is an ad hominem attack, and definitely unacceptable in such a serious matter. The Blair government has a history of "spin", using PR to deflect legitimate criticism - do a web search for "Stephen Byers", whose department used September 11 to "bury" news unfavourable to their party.
Wake up, you brits: the police state envisioned by Orwell is becoming real. If you look at the loss of liberty in the last fifteen years, and extrapolate forward fifteen more, we'll be RFID tagging the populace.
This is a particularly sinister development. Tony Blair's government attempts to discredit critics (in this case, the survivor of a train disaster who criticised his governments handling of rail safety) using background checks and database searches. These new powers will give the civil service the ability to persecute anyone who has a grievance against the government, even if only by ad hominem attacks, ad nauseum.
they just aren't as braindead as MS ones
as far as I know it is impossible to do this with normal UNIX permissions
Your "impossible" example is trivial on NT. Please try to understand that NTFS is nothing like FAT. NTFS ACLs are really very good, much better than anything on Solaris or Linux - that's its VMS heritage showing.
You're clearly too young to remember AT&T before deregulation. You couldn't plug anything into a phone socket that they didn't own. The popular variant of their marketing slogans was "AT&T: we don't care, we don't have to."
AT&T before deregulation was a government-sanctioned monopoly. You're just proving my point that governments don't need to care what people think about them. After deregulation, AT&T improved drastically, because the market forced them to.
By definition, a private corporation in competition with other private corporations couldn't have survived behaving that way. Witness the intense competition between and well-staffed call centers of the various mobile telcos.