Since Java Servlets came out, everything else has been a lot of promises and no delivery. Not interested in jsp, php, python.....and other 1000 or so new scripting languages that will end up in the dustbin of history.
Heh Python 1.0 predates the Servlet API 1.0 by about 3 years, and earlier versions were available for another 3 years before that. And PHP 3.0 was out the same year as the Servlet API 1.0, which was still a year after even Ruby 1.0. It gets even worse if you wait another 18 months for the first official Servlet spec (2.1) - even Zope 2.0 was out by then.
You Java kids need to get off my lawn. Quick before the Perl hacker next door sees you.
I think you touched on part of what actual engineering is with your flood example. And I'm not implying that software never counts as real engineering.
With actual engineering the limits of a design are an upfront consideration, and the recognition that all designs have some failure limit. And that the actual limit chosen for the design depends on a balance of budget and risk management. An engineer has to prove or at least satisfy someone that their design will work up to that limit - and cost as little as possible to do so.
eg the drainage under the bridge - a low traffic rural bridge in an area with alternate routes close by is always going to receive less design effort than a high traffic bridge where closure would overload alternate routes (if any). So the local authorities might design the low traffic bridge to handle floods with maybe a 5-10yr return period knowing that it will need to be closed (or even repaired) occasionally. But the high traffic bridge might get a design based on a 100yr return period because a failure there is much more expensive to the local economy. Of course real engineers can still make mistakes etc, and not all drainage even has any engineering input at all:)
The fact that this guy discovered 1x1 pixels in email and mis-attributes them to "bugs", is so technically incompetent I would think I am reading the technology section of AOL.
Hehe nice test - quite frustrating though (just like IT I suppose).
I'm down to just one wrong answer. Deduction only got me about 8 or 9 answers and a few other eliminations, so it was whack a mole after that. I think I'll give up now while I still have some of my sanity left. Hmmm... this really is starting to sound like IT.
So far as shareholders are concerned, investing in the destruction of one's competition is always justifiable.
I doubt even Oracle would think that is a good idea.
If Oracle managed to drive a lot of potential customers off using open source by stifling those projects, I suspect the majority of the customers would be driven further into Microsofts arms rather than Oracles. After all those customers are more likely to already be MS customers than Oracle customers.
Not to come off as a troll (too late?), but it's interesting to see that kind of post on a site that consistently takes an anti-copyright, pro-piracy stance. In piracy articles, other people's work is free to trade. In GPL articles, other people's work suddenly should be protected.
Bollox. For the most part you are conflating different sets of opinions with only a small overlap. It just so happens that each type of article generates different levels of vociferousness from holders of those different opinions - eg pro GPL people care a lot less about commenting on a piracy article, and pro piracy people care a lot less about commenting on a GPL article.
Hell even anti-copyright and pro-piracy opinions don't necessarily fully overlap either.
I'm glad they're finally capping it after months of spewing oil into the gulf, but there's no reason it should have taken this long.
This I don't get. Sure appalling incompetence/greed/irresponsibility etc lead to the disaster, but to imply that they dragged out fixing the problem without any reason doesn't make any sense.
Why on earth would they deliberately squander huge sums of money every day the leak went on and allow that growing damage to their image after the event? Once it had happened, it was definitely in BPs best interest to fix the leak as soon as possible. If it really was that easy to fix and someone else was capable of doing so (as you seem to think so), don't you think the govt would've forced the issue?
As someone who was only first coming into contact with *nix and open source in the late 90s, I had sometimes wondered about how widespread the term "open source" was before Bruce/Eric etc officially defined it and whether it ever meant something else.
I don't know about anyone else, but to me your blog probably had the opposite result than what you intended. It clarified to me that before Bruce and Eric popularised it, practically nobody used the term open source much and certainly nobody has gone on record trying to properly define it. You really seem to have a large chip on shoulder about Bruce Perens for some reason.
I personally don't really have any problem with the OSI definition being regarded as the actual offical definition now.
We have Mexico which is highly unsafe to drive through to the south and Frozen Canada to the North. We can't just hop in a Land Rover or on a train and go to another country, at least not one which is worth visiting. Further, Americans have been holding the short end of the economic stick for some time now, so the modern americans have an excuse for not flying places.
So how do Australians and New Zealanders manage to travel internationally so much then? They are both a long way from anywhere, surrounded by water and have had less money and relatively more expensive travel options than both Americans or Europeans have.
But living overseas for a couple of years before settling down is still commonly regarded as the thing to do.
The cost of a book is tangible. Chipping, pressing, bleaching, cutting, printing, binding, packaging, storing, transporting, vending. It happens every time a copy is sold. When you buy a copy, that is what you're paying for. A tangible good.
Even with a physical book, those per copy costs amount to a fraction of the price.
A book will have a break even point in terms of sales numbers to overcome all the fixed and/or up front costs. Most books never reach that point - publishers hope to subsidize the ones that don't by having some successes that make up for it. Part of being a good publisher is picking ones that will be successful.
The cost of a PDF is intangible. Writing, typesetting, marketing, webhosting. It already happened. It happened once; it's paid for. Millions of copies can be sold with very negligible overhead. It's nothing but a giant number. Ones and zeros. Costly to produce, but easy to replicate.
You make it sound like the publisher does their sums purely on the number of physical book sales and treats the ebook purely as an afterthought, rather than factoring in the expected sales numbers of both kinds of book. Especially for a book like this that will have a very limited audience - chances are it might not have even been taken on by the publisher without the expected ebook sales.
Not only that - but the products usually don't get released in the southern hemisphere until 6 or 18 months later anyway. So the season is still accurate.
Seriously though, I have to agree. If you want to divide up the year into 4 vague sections use quarters dammit.
Last I heard they had changed their minds on building their own cable, and were going to team up with PacificFibre. I could be wrong about that though.
A boat (an iceboat, a sandboat, a windsurf) might be much faster than the real wind but it's never faster than the apparent wind.
You can exceed apparent windspeed on a broad reach, just not on a run. All you need is enough lift from the sail to match the drag at that speed, and on a broad reach the larger forward component of the lift helps compensate for the fact the apparent wind is less than it would be closer to the wind.
eg going 40kts at 130deg off the wind (blowing at 40kts) is about 34kts of apparent wind (if I remember my trig correctly hehe). These aren't unheard of combos for windsurfers trying to set speed records - especially 10+ yrs ago. These days though with better gear they tend to sail a bit higher and don't need quite as much wind to reach 45+ kts as they used to.
In what universe is a language developed in 1964 and first marketed by Microsoft in 1975 a "mid-80s interpreted language"?
Maybe that referred to AmigaBASIC that MS wrote for the Amiga in the mid 80s. AmigaBasic was a version of BASIC with event handling and built in support for the WIMP interface. AmigaBASIC seemed to me like an 80s stepping stone between the traditional BASIC of the 60s and 70s and VB in the 90s.
I don't get migraines very often but I've had both the weird disappearing vision thing you describe, but I've also had swimming spots of light across my vision. Half the time the swimming spots are a precursor to the disappearing zone of vision.
But the swimming spots of light definitely didn't appear to be something external out in the real world.
Do you really think that the hearts of Englishmen would be wholly invested in pantomiming the successful invasion of the UK by the Nazis?
Really? That doesn't ring true for me at least.
The whole British psyche for decades after the war revolved around just how much imminent mortal danger they were in and how heroic Fighter Command saved them (and the free world) by the skin of their teeth against all odds.
Anything that diminished the threat they faced would somewhat negate the importance of winning the Battle of Britain. And by diminishing the importance of the battle in the wider war, the role of Britain itself in defeating the Nazis is diminished.
British morale after the war relied on this - the heroic defense of Britain was all they had to cling to after the rest of the empire crumbled and they desperately tried to stay relevant during the cold war as the US and USSR took over the world stage.
It could even be claimed there would be more pressure to bias those war games the other way.
Really? at what time did Germany attack the USA or get close to attacking the USA??? Japan attacked a USA base on a USA protected island. That was the only part of WWII we should have been in. We had no right to go to Europe.
I'm not American so my understanding of this may be a little off, but didn't Germany and Italy first declare war on the US due to a mutual defense treaty with Japan after the US declared war on Japan.
If so, for the US war with Germany was pretty much inevitable after Japan attacked the US.
It makes me sound like a humorless oversensitive prick from the very start.
Oh I dunno, the quip about Xiph panzer divisions was clearly intended as humour. Unless of course he wasn't actually joking about that - do you know something the rest of us don't?
There's also all the ink, toner, cartridges, drums etc that get manufactured, packaged, transported, stocked, sold etc. And printers themselves are getting more flimsy and disposable too. And then the power used by printing...
Couldn't a script just use stdin and/or arguments for input and only if nothing was supplied then pop up a GUI or interactively ask questions in the terminal?
Slashdot Mirror
Heh Python 1.0 predates the Servlet API 1.0 by about 3 years, and earlier versions were available for another 3 years before that. And PHP 3.0 was out the same year as the Servlet API 1.0, which was still a year after even Ruby 1.0. It gets even worse if you wait another 18 months for the first official Servlet spec (2.1) - even Zope 2.0 was out by then.
You Java kids need to get off my lawn. Quick before the Perl hacker next door sees you.
I think you touched on part of what actual engineering is with your flood example. And I'm not implying that software never counts as real engineering.
With actual engineering the limits of a design are an upfront consideration, and the recognition that all designs have some failure limit. And that the actual limit chosen for the design depends on a balance of budget and risk management. An engineer has to prove or at least satisfy someone that their design will work up to that limit - and cost as little as possible to do so.
eg the drainage under the bridge - a low traffic rural bridge in an area with alternate routes close by is always going to receive less design effort than a high traffic bridge where closure would overload alternate routes (if any). So the local authorities might design the low traffic bridge to handle floods with maybe a 5-10yr return period knowing that it will need to be closed (or even repaired) occasionally. But the high traffic bridge might get a design based on a 100yr return period because a failure there is much more expensive to the local economy. Of course real engineers can still make mistakes etc, and not all drainage even has any engineering input at all :)
Ummm... "web bug" is the actual term for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug
I would've thought someone ranting about technical incompetence would've known that.
That leads me to the one line I can remember from reading all those Mad Magazines as a kid:
Hehe nice test - quite frustrating though (just like IT I suppose).
I'm down to just one wrong answer. Deduction only got me about 8 or 9 answers and a few other eliminations, so it was whack a mole after that. I think I'll give up now while I still have some of my sanity left. Hmmm... this really is starting to sound like IT.
I doubt even Oracle would think that is a good idea.
If Oracle managed to drive a lot of potential customers off using open source by stifling those projects, I suspect the majority of the customers would be driven further into Microsofts arms rather than Oracles. After all those customers are more likely to already be MS customers than Oracle customers.
Bollox. For the most part you are conflating different sets of opinions with only a small overlap. It just so happens that each type of article generates different levels of vociferousness from holders of those different opinions - eg pro GPL people care a lot less about commenting on a piracy article, and pro piracy people care a lot less about commenting on a GPL article.
Hell even anti-copyright and pro-piracy opinions don't necessarily fully overlap either.
This I don't get. Sure appalling incompetence/greed/irresponsibility etc lead to the disaster, but to imply that they dragged out fixing the problem without any reason doesn't make any sense.
Why on earth would they deliberately squander huge sums of money every day the leak went on and allow that growing damage to their image after the event? Once it had happened, it was definitely in BPs best interest to fix the leak as soon as possible. If it really was that easy to fix and someone else was capable of doing so (as you seem to think so), don't you think the govt would've forced the issue?
As someone who was only first coming into contact with *nix and open source in the late 90s, I had sometimes wondered about how widespread the term "open source" was before Bruce/Eric etc officially defined it and whether it ever meant something else.
I don't know about anyone else, but to me your blog probably had the opposite result than what you intended. It clarified to me that before Bruce and Eric popularised it, practically nobody used the term open source much and certainly nobody has gone on record trying to properly define it. You really seem to have a large chip on shoulder about Bruce Perens for some reason.
I personally don't really have any problem with the OSI definition being regarded as the actual offical definition now.
As a kid I remember seeing these ones...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(arcade_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(arcade_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game)
So how do Australians and New Zealanders manage to travel internationally so much then? They are both a long way from anywhere, surrounded by water and have had less money and relatively more expensive travel options than both Americans or Europeans have.
But living overseas for a couple of years before settling down is still commonly regarded as the thing to do.
That would be this instead...
http://hueniverse.com/webfinger/
Now you know web 2.0 really has come full circle :)
Even with a physical book, those per copy costs amount to a fraction of the price.
A book will have a break even point in terms of sales numbers to overcome all the fixed and/or up front costs. Most books never reach that point - publishers hope to subsidize the ones that don't by having some successes that make up for it. Part of being a good publisher is picking ones that will be successful.
You make it sound like the publisher does their sums purely on the number of physical book sales and treats the ebook purely as an afterthought, rather than factoring in the expected sales numbers of both kinds of book. Especially for a book like this that will have a very limited audience - chances are it might not have even been taken on by the publisher without the expected ebook sales.
Not only that - but the products usually don't get released in the southern hemisphere until 6 or 18 months later anyway. So the season is still accurate.
Seriously though, I have to agree. If you want to divide up the year into 4 vague sections use quarters dammit.
Last I heard they had changed their minds on building their own cable, and were going to team up with PacificFibre. I could be wrong about that though.
You can exceed apparent windspeed on a broad reach, just not on a run. All you need is enough lift from the sail to match the drag at that speed, and on a broad reach the larger forward component of the lift helps compensate for the fact the apparent wind is less than it would be closer to the wind.
eg going 40kts at 130deg off the wind (blowing at 40kts) is about 34kts of apparent wind (if I remember my trig correctly hehe). These aren't unheard of combos for windsurfers trying to set speed records - especially 10+ yrs ago. These days though with better gear they tend to sail a bit higher and don't need quite as much wind to reach 45+ kts as they used to.
Maybe that referred to AmigaBASIC that MS wrote for the Amiga in the mid 80s. AmigaBasic was a version of BASIC with event handling and built in support for the WIMP interface. AmigaBASIC seemed to me like an 80s stepping stone between the traditional BASIC of the 60s and 70s and VB in the 90s.
I don't get migraines very often but I've had both the weird disappearing vision thing you describe, but I've also had swimming spots of light across my vision. Half the time the swimming spots are a precursor to the disappearing zone of vision.
But the swimming spots of light definitely didn't appear to be something external out in the real world.
Really? That doesn't ring true for me at least.
The whole British psyche for decades after the war revolved around just how much imminent mortal danger they were in and how heroic Fighter Command saved them (and the free world) by the skin of their teeth against all odds.
Anything that diminished the threat they faced would somewhat negate the importance of winning the Battle of Britain. And by diminishing the importance of the battle in the wider war, the role of Britain itself in defeating the Nazis is diminished.
British morale after the war relied on this - the heroic defense of Britain was all they had to cling to after the rest of the empire crumbled and they desperately tried to stay relevant during the cold war as the US and USSR took over the world stage.
It could even be claimed there would be more pressure to bias those war games the other way.
Does 'being attacked without putting up much opposition' mean the same thing as 'defence'?
Yeah I know... -1 Troll, -1 Not Funny etc etc
I'm not American so my understanding of this may be a little off, but didn't Germany and Italy first declare war on the US due to a mutual defense treaty with Japan after the US declared war on Japan.
If so, for the US war with Germany was pretty much inevitable after Japan attacked the US.
Oh I dunno, the quip about Xiph panzer divisions was clearly intended as humour. Unless of course he wasn't actually joking about that - do you know something the rest of us don't?
And of course that is just the paper itself.
There's also all the ink, toner, cartridges, drums etc that get manufactured, packaged, transported, stocked, sold etc. And printers themselves are getting more flimsy and disposable too. And then the power used by printing...
Yeah, printing sure is good for the environment.
Why is automation vs UI an either/or question?
Couldn't a script just use stdin and/or arguments for input and only if nothing was supplied then pop up a GUI or interactively ask questions in the terminal?
You have scantily clad maidens as management?
Whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing depends on the maidens I suppose.