When I used "we" I referred to "the west" rather than the US, which I imprecisely meant as the developed world eg The US, Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, NZ etc
I couldn't rightly use "we" to refer to just the US as I'm not American:)
Don't get me wrong, Americans are using up resources like crazy with seemingly little regard for the future or for anyone else.
However, CHINA is 100x worse. They are ramping up their economy ridiculously fast and they make us look like environmental super heroes.
Yeah you're correct, but nearly all of that activity in China is to feed the wests appetite for cheap stuff. We've just outsourced (some or most of) our own environmental damage to China.
The west has been more than happy that China had no environmental obligations - outsourcing our dirty stuff there allowed us to clean up our own back yards and pat ourselves on the back about how much we care for the environment. Out of sight, out of mind.
It probably doesn't need to be pointed out, but US politics is in poor shape. It's not the fault of either party, but a collective failure. I'm not sure exactly when, but it almost feels like the venom in government got considerably stronger during Bill Clinton's presidency. I'm not saying its his fault, but if you look at Clinton, then George W. Bush, and now this round of campaigning, it seems like politics has just become petty and people are focusing on the smallest, silly things. I'm not necessarily an Obama support, but there were some press trying to question his patriotism because he wasn't wearing a US flag pin. Just silly.
I'm not American, but I see the same crap starting to happen in my own country (and others). And it annoys the hell out of me. We are probably just following an overall trend. If anything it's probably driven by media ratings and the internet providing a way for loud mouthed nutjobs on either side to gather together and shout at each other.
Politics is moving away from policies and towards petty bullshit and personal point scoring. Our two main parties are probably closer together policy wise than ever. But you'd almost think it was the Spanish Civil War the way each sides supporters paint the others as Fascists or Communists.
Google is also failing miserably in hiring military vets. That's a big no-no. I expect them to get in serious trouble for that.
Yeah without real military experience how would those liberal namby pambies defend themselves against MS? Maybe they have an elite top secret Google Foreign Legion instead?
The philosophy that information wants to be free, money is the devil, Ballmer shouldn't throw chairs, etc. is bullshit. Sorry
Huh? That wasn't even close to my point and ignores the rest of the comment altogether. I notice you snipped off the previous sentence to remove its context.
The freedom to implement your own ideas and take existing code in a new direction is a very important concept for open source developers.
The attitudes you mention are far more likely to come from the "movement" type zealots (usually bitter Windows refugees) that are usually not open source developers themselves. It's these types that loudly make proclamations about what the "community" should and shouldn't do all while not contributing much (eg code, support, docs etc) themselves - although they probably mistakenly think shrill advocacy is a useful contribution.
The best thing for any FOSS community is having enough passionate motivated developers. Lose that and you will soon find the community stagnates. Telling someone to stop doing what they want to do and to do what you want them to instead is counter productive.
$>give me all files from openssl That ought to be enough for anybody!
The trouble is that computers have terrible telepathy and intuition - they have very black and white personalities. You have to tell them exactly what to do as they are too stupid to work it out for themselves.
What do you mean by "give"? List the filenames? List the filenames and paths? List the contents? Copy the files to you somehow?
What do you mean by "me"? The user account? The shell? The client computer you are on?
What do you mean by "all files"? Does that include hidden files? Should it include directories?
What do you mean by "from openssl"? Is that openssl the package or openssl the project or maybe the user on your system called "openssl"? Should it include files from just that package or from subpackages? Should it include only the files that came in the package, or any data files (eg certs) created with the package?
If the people behind this can code, then they should code on one of the countless projects already out there. They would be more helpful to that FOSS "community" I keep hearing so much about, and they'd be more likely to get attention, recognition, and maybe even some money in the future.
Yeah, FOSS developers should all be slaves to a "movement" rather than geeks that like to scratch their own itches. They should all be forced to code what the community needs rather than what they want to work on. That will do wonders for incentivizing people to code on FOSS software.
The whole point of FOSS in the first place is to give people the freedom to do EXACTLY what these guys are doing. Pissing on that is pissing on the philosophical basis of and reason for sharing code.
These guys are experimenting with ideas that are too disruptive for existing distributions to experiment on themselves, and they wouldn't be able to get anywhere with due to the inertia involved in a larger project. The lead has already said he's made more progress on his ideas in months than he was able to in years as part of Gentoo. If the ideas end up being valuable, then other distributions can run with proven solutions. If they don't end up working out, then what's the big deal? - the community now knows that the idea wasn't that good, and some coders learnt a huge amount playing around with their fun new ideas.
First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them anyways.
Yeah, nice going. Now the first zillion comments on this story are about the interface rather than the actual story.
Geez, talk about overly sensitive US centric knee jerk reactions.
If anyone objecting to it actually read the comment (and not embellish it with your own sensitivities) it was referring about war in general historical terms (ie the "Previously..." bit). And in that sense it was far more accurate than it was inaccurate.
The only reference to Iraq and/or the current American military was in the contrasting "Nowadays..." bit that related to the story.
Out of all western democracies, only the US seems to have this fawning glorification of all things military where any criticism of its actions gets the standard "you wouldn't have the freedom to say that without them" reaction or branded as unpatriotic.
It's not like it is a new approach - the W3C (which includes MS) already used it with XHTML 1.1 and 2.0, CSS 3 etc.
Maybe it hasn't been used so far for HTML 5 because it was the recent W3C approach which has failed in the eyes of the HTML 5 crowd - after all, what has become of XHTML 1.1/2.0 and CSS 3?
Note: I actually would prefer XHTML 2 to HTML 5, but realistically it too much to ask for and decent browser support would never eventuate.
From an engineering perspective but not from a marketing perspective. What is the easily communicated value that more than overcomes the network effect of Windows' accumulated user knowledge (already knows how to use Windows and Office), file interoperability (nearly everyone else is using office), informal support (family and friends can often help),...; and overcomes the switching costs of installing Linux (possibly having to pay someone to do it), learning an entirely different operating system and set of applications, a lack of informal support (family and friends still on Windows),...
That sounds more like asking "is the Desktop ready for Linux?" rather than the other way around.
Anyway, just a mild rant about this "ready for the desktop" topic in general....
There is a difference between being "ready for the desktop" and "ready to take a large chunk of the desktop market". The former is entirely up to the software, the latter is up to external factors and out of the hands of the software itself. When someone makes a judgement of software being ready or not ready - are they judging the software or the external factors? eg would the market share of OS X be different if Apple was just a software vendor like MS or Redhat? Apple tying OS X to their hardware is one of those external factors affecting their potential market share (note: market share isn't everything), but not one that really has any direct affect on the readiness/usability of OS X itself.
There are also many different desktop markets with different requirements. eg OS X is certainly more than ready for some of those markets (eg designers, web developers, non gaming home users etc) but less ready for others (gamers, tightly managed enterprise desktops etc).
This is why the "ready for the desktop" concept generates lots of arguments - it is an oversimplification with little agreement as to what the statement actually means. Viability isn't a binary state of "ready" vs "not ready", and viability also varies for different customers in different circumstances.
The article was about hops and barley growing conditions in Australia and NZ. The problem they face is that if production needs to move any further south the land isn't high enough above sea level and is far too wet all year round.
And this is why liberal arts majors aren't so impressed by engineering students: because some of them are so dense that they can't write an English sentence about a cup of coffee without using mathematical variables.
Why is that dense? The cup of coffee is interchangeable real world example used to explain the subject matter (eg the cooling equations themselves) not the subject matter itself.
Surely a liberal arts major would be able to see the difference?
Only if you missed the actual point. The point was based on Windows 2000 and 2003 DCs not being able to (by themselves) set up an NT4 domain - they have moved on to something fundamentally different.
So although you'd be correct to say that they are a better Windows Server OS than NT4, they aren't really a better NT4 implementation in the same way Samba 3.x is. You can't call Samba 3.x an Windows 200x DC implementation at all - hence the reason why the earlier poster compared (apples to apples) Samba 3.x against NT4 rather than later versions.
Well it makes sense in a way. Samba 3.x is effectively NT4 with a whole lot of extra stuff. Samba 3.x isn't Active Directory, although it does fit into an existing Active Directory network better than NT4 because of all those extras.
So Samba 3.x is a better more modern NT4 than NT4 (which was I think his point). But until Samba 4.0 that is as far as it goes.
From my impression that is an overstatement. OpenBSD will get WPA when someone writes it well enough for it to get in. Although the current devs don't want to write it themselves (as they don't feel they need it), they have left the door open for someone else to write it.
"doesn't provide real security" and "just use IPSEC" aren't reasons why it won't get in at all but reasons why that particular developer(s) isn't going to bother writing it themselves. OpenBSD is probably the ultimate "scratch your own itch" and "talk is cheap, show me the code" project. So far WPA hasn't made anyone in the OpenBSD community itchy enough. After all WEP still got in even though it is far less secure than WPA2 - someone wanted it enough to write it.
The material world never does what you tell it to and you never get to dictate how it should work. You have to go at length to make its own working to suit your needs. We have means of predicting its behavior but it always has a lot of uncertainty. The raw materials are ill-specified, initial state of the system is imprecise and the models are incomplete. Worse, future environment is usually unknowable. IOW, you never get to know the operating environment of a RW engineered system.
Exactly.
This is especially the case with Civil Engineering when your materials include stuff like soil. It is hard to pin down it's mechanical properties in the first place, let alone changes over time due to groundwater levels and settling etc.
Thinking that wind or earthquake forces are predictable and easy to model on a structure is also naive. While smaller structures can just be designed from overspecified design tables to compensate, that just doesn't cut it for bigger projects (eg skyscrapers or long suspension bridges) that are approaching the limits.
Also with real world engineering projects the design must be correct before building it. While modifications can be made to minor details after it is built, you can't wait for a refactored new release to fix any major design problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I always knew there was something fishy about you based on your other posts.
Would the corollary of that be "Windows is only expensive if your time is worth something" ?
Didn't Apple give up on writing its own print system for OSX and used CUPS instead?
When I used "we" I referred to "the west" rather than the US, which I imprecisely meant as the developed world eg The US, Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, NZ etc
I couldn't rightly use "we" to refer to just the US as I'm not American :)
Yeah you're correct, but nearly all of that activity in China is to feed the wests appetite for cheap stuff. We've just outsourced (some or most of) our own environmental damage to China.
The west has been more than happy that China had no environmental obligations - outsourcing our dirty stuff there allowed us to clean up our own back yards and pat ourselves on the back about how much we care for the environment. Out of sight, out of mind.
I'm not American, but I see the same crap starting to happen in my own country (and others). And it annoys the hell out of me. We are probably just following an overall trend. If anything it's probably driven by media ratings and the internet providing a way for loud mouthed nutjobs on either side to gather together and shout at each other.
Politics is moving away from policies and towards petty bullshit and personal point scoring. Our two main parties are probably closer together policy wise than ever. But you'd almost think it was the Spanish Civil War the way each sides supporters paint the others as Fascists or Communists.
Anyway, that was my unfocused rant off my chest :)
Yeah without real military experience how would those liberal namby pambies defend themselves against MS? Maybe they have an elite top secret Google Foreign Legion instead?
That's what the government wants you to think.
Huh? That wasn't even close to my point and ignores the rest of the comment altogether. I notice you snipped off the previous sentence to remove its context.
The freedom to implement your own ideas and take existing code in a new direction is a very important concept for open source developers.
The attitudes you mention are far more likely to come from the "movement" type zealots (usually bitter Windows refugees) that are usually not open source developers themselves. It's these types that loudly make proclamations about what the "community" should and shouldn't do all while not contributing much (eg code, support, docs etc) themselves - although they probably mistakenly think shrill advocacy is a useful contribution.
The best thing for any FOSS community is having enough passionate motivated developers. Lose that and you will soon find the community stagnates. Telling someone to stop doing what they want to do and to do what you want them to instead is counter productive.
The trouble is that computers have terrible telepathy and intuition - they have very black and white personalities. You have to tell them exactly what to do as they are too stupid to work it out for themselves.
What do you mean by "give"? List the filenames? List the filenames and paths? List the contents? Copy the files to you somehow?
What do you mean by "me"? The user account? The shell? The client computer you are on?
What do you mean by "all files"? Does that include hidden files? Should it include directories?
What do you mean by "from openssl"? Is that openssl the package or openssl the project or maybe the user on your system called "openssl"? Should it include files from just that package or from subpackages? Should it include only the files that came in the package, or any data files (eg certs) created with the package?
Yeah, FOSS developers should all be slaves to a "movement" rather than geeks that like to scratch their own itches. They should all be forced to code what the community needs rather than what they want to work on. That will do wonders for incentivizing people to code on FOSS software.
The whole point of FOSS in the first place is to give people the freedom to do EXACTLY what these guys are doing. Pissing on that is pissing on the philosophical basis of and reason for sharing code.
These guys are experimenting with ideas that are too disruptive for existing distributions to experiment on themselves, and they wouldn't be able to get anywhere with due to the inertia involved in a larger project. The lead has already said he's made more progress on his ideas in months than he was able to in years as part of Gentoo. If the ideas end up being valuable, then other distributions can run with proven solutions. If they don't end up working out, then what's the big deal? - the community now knows that the idea wasn't that good, and some coders learnt a huge amount playing around with their fun new ideas.
Yeah, nice going. Now the first zillion comments on this story are about the interface rather than the actual story.
Geez, talk about overly sensitive US centric knee jerk reactions.
If anyone objecting to it actually read the comment (and not embellish it with your own sensitivities) it was referring about war in general historical terms (ie the "Previously..." bit). And in that sense it was far more accurate than it was inaccurate.
The only reference to Iraq and/or the current American military was in the contrasting "Nowadays..." bit that related to the story.
Out of all western democracies, only the US seems to have this fawning glorification of all things military where any criticism of its actions gets the standard "you wouldn't have the freedom to say that without them" reaction or branded as unpatriotic.
I dunno about that.
It's not like it is a new approach - the W3C (which includes MS) already used it with XHTML 1.1 and 2.0, CSS 3 etc.
Maybe it hasn't been used so far for HTML 5 because it was the recent W3C approach which has failed in the eyes of the HTML 5 crowd - after all, what has become of XHTML 1.1/2.0 and CSS 3?
Note: I actually would prefer XHTML 2 to HTML 5, but realistically it too much to ask for and decent browser support would never eventuate.
Sounds a bit like the RAF bombers in WWII dropping chaff to create large confusing radar reflections:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(radar_countermeasure)
Hehe, I wasn't replying to you :)
The comment I was referring to has since been modded down. They were complaining that the table ranked Zimbabwe as less corrupt than Australia.
You have a strange way of reading that table.
That sounds more like asking "is the Desktop ready for Linux?" rather than the other way around.
Anyway, just a mild rant about this "ready for the desktop" topic in general....
There is a difference between being "ready for the desktop" and "ready to take a large chunk of the desktop market". The former is entirely up to the software, the latter is up to external factors and out of the hands of the software itself. When someone makes a judgement of software being ready or not ready - are they judging the software or the external factors? eg would the market share of OS X be different if Apple was just a software vendor like MS or Redhat? Apple tying OS X to their hardware is one of those external factors affecting their potential market share (note: market share isn't everything), but not one that really has any direct affect on the readiness/usability of OS X itself.
There are also many different desktop markets with different requirements. eg OS X is certainly more than ready for some of those markets (eg designers, web developers, non gaming home users etc) but less ready for others (gamers, tightly managed enterprise desktops etc).
This is why the "ready for the desktop" concept generates lots of arguments - it is an oversimplification with little agreement as to what the statement actually means. Viability isn't a binary state of "ready" vs "not ready", and viability also varies for different customers in different circumstances.
The article was about hops and barley growing conditions in Australia and NZ. The problem they face is that if production needs to move any further south the land isn't high enough above sea level and is far too wet all year round.
Why is that dense? The cup of coffee is interchangeable real world example used to explain the subject matter (eg the cooling equations themselves) not the subject matter itself.
Surely a liberal arts major would be able to see the difference?
Only if you missed the actual point. The point was based on Windows 2000 and 2003 DCs not being able to (by themselves) set up an NT4 domain - they have moved on to something fundamentally different.
So although you'd be correct to say that they are a better Windows Server OS than NT4, they aren't really a better NT4 implementation in the same way Samba 3.x is. You can't call Samba 3.x an Windows 200x DC implementation at all - hence the reason why the earlier poster compared (apples to apples) Samba 3.x against NT4 rather than later versions.
Well it makes sense in a way. Samba 3.x is effectively NT4 with a whole lot of extra stuff. Samba 3.x isn't Active Directory, although it does fit into an existing Active Directory network better than NT4 because of all those extras.
So Samba 3.x is a better more modern NT4 than NT4 (which was I think his point). But until Samba 4.0 that is as far as it goes.
I think he's correct, but the summary stated it the wrong way. It should've said:
"based on current trends, human intelligence will reach the level of a computer by 2029"
From my impression that is an overstatement. OpenBSD will get WPA when someone writes it well enough for it to get in. Although the current devs don't want to write it themselves (as they don't feel they need it), they have left the door open for someone else to write it.
"doesn't provide real security" and "just use IPSEC" aren't reasons why it won't get in at all but reasons why that particular developer(s) isn't going to bother writing it themselves. OpenBSD is probably the ultimate "scratch your own itch" and "talk is cheap, show me the code" project. So far WPA hasn't made anyone in the OpenBSD community itchy enough. After all WEP still got in even though it is far less secure than WPA2 - someone wanted it enough to write it.
Exactly.
This is especially the case with Civil Engineering when your materials include stuff like soil. It is hard to pin down it's mechanical properties in the first place, let alone changes over time due to groundwater levels and settling etc.
Thinking that wind or earthquake forces are predictable and easy to model on a structure is also naive. While smaller structures can just be designed from overspecified design tables to compensate, that just doesn't cut it for bigger projects (eg skyscrapers or long suspension bridges) that are approaching the limits.
Also with real world engineering projects the design must be correct before building it. While modifications can be made to minor details after it is built, you can't wait for a refactored new release to fix any major design problems.