You'd like to think so, but no. Assuming that you live in the US, you owe it to yourself to check up on the theory and practice of "civil forfeiture," in particular, how the militarization of police agencies is in part being funded by seized and auctioned goods.
Well, JESUS, it's good that there's no places left with anything other than a SoCal climate, now isn't it? We'd sure HATE to have to think about the consequences of less than a 70f temp all year round, wouldn't we? It'd be the end of the freaking world, wouldn't it? nosferatu-man (peeved 'cause it SNOWED on 1 October round here. Wooly Mammoths would be right at home.)
Remember how Apple lost their shorts over the Powerbook 540 (possibly more) fiasco? They advertised the systems as "upgradeable" and then never provided an upgrade, opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit, which they lost.
Therefore, my take on this whole situation is, is that Apple just went ahead and put the block in there partly to keep the market for G4 processors constrained, and their current weirdly legal-ese reaction to the complaints ("We never said it was upgradeable") is a straight-up liability dodge.
It wouldn't surprise me if they removed the block with a future rom upgrade.
There are/plenty/ of things to dislike about Linux and perl. Stevens' biases could well have been founded in a deeper understanding of the issues that he grappeled with than perhaps you know?
And in addition, the day that anyone in "The GNU Generation" writes a book as trenchant, concise, and informative as "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment," is the day that someone can start making noise about the torch being passed.
I gambled and lost, shedding COBRA and benefits in exchange for mucho dinero, and, as fate would have it, a sprung achilles tendon.
If you think that, say, a shit-hot Oracle kernel engineer makes big bucks, just wait until the bill from the anestheologist's office arrives. $3500 for forty minutes of work... not bad, eh?
I'd make the same sacrifice again, but I'm single and without dependents. How you approach the issue is almost wholly dependent on your specific situation.
I've not read anything of Stephenson's other than Cryptonomicon, so my judgements are based entirely on the one work.
This. Book. Blows.
Comparisons to Pynchon are totally unfounded: Pynchon can write. I think a much more accurate comparison would be to Tom Clancy, another drum-thumping polemicist who can't write a convincing character to save his life. Stephenson appears to believe that, by aping the literary tricks of his betters, he becomes something more than he is.
What is exceptionally galling about this book is that it reads much more like an audition for the much coveted role as Piper to the Anonymous Cowards than a thoughtful, funny, or interesting work of anything. The one-dimensional strawman enemies! The Techno-Correct sloganeering! The sheer awe-inspiring awfulness of the technical aspects of writing! This is a book so inelegantly plotted that, far from integrating the disparate plotlines into a satisfying whole, it shakes itself apart in the hands. Which is too bad, in a way, as Stephenson's obviously a smart cracker (and on the right side of many of the things he "writes" about), but his intelligence is much more in the perpetually masturbating (and feeling sick guilty after) 14yr old boy vein, than in that of, say, TC Boyle or Pynchon.
I understand that some people will see themselves in Randy or Doug or Avi or any of the other 'characters' that Stephenson poops forth -- and this is sad; they're not people, they're Pirates of the Caribbean golems, robotically spouting the puerile and self-congratulatory mantra of the self-identified ubermensch.
The females in the book are so laughably bad, so freakishly homogenous in their character, so divorced from any kind of reality, that it doesn't seem unlikely that we've finally encountered a writer/worse/ than Clancy at understanding and transcribing women.
Bah, humbug. I'd trade a mountain of Cryptonomicon for a page of Jack Vance.
It sounds like the reporter misunderstood what was being said (no great surprise from a rag like the WSJ.)
By multiprocessing, I'm positive that they mean SMP with more than four processors. I don't have any experience with Real Computers (my largest was a 16 processor Power Challenge) but I imagine that the big iron goes way up past 4 Xeons. This seems more like a hardware deficiency than a Linux-specific one.
And by logging, what was pretty obviously meant was the kinds of system accounting that mainframes provide -- a tremendously neurotic cascade of information that only a tremblingly uptight, card-punching MIS monkey could love. In this respect, Linux is no better nor worse than any commercial Unix, and, due to the open nature of the code base, better than most.
Or perhaps the article meant "logging" as in a log-structured filesystem (aka a journaling fs.) This is a real minus for Linux, and could concievably keep it out of the real enterprise, where it just can't compete with the Big Boys.
I even think I understand the inclusion of NT as a superior alternative (not, mind, that I agree.) The author/could/ mean that NT's application support outweighs it's huge technical shortcomings, and that until Linux is as much better than NT as are the commercial Unices, it isn't really an option.
Don't forget that what the datacenter wants out of it's application platform is very different than what makes a good web|SMB|login server. Which doesn't excuse nor explain why people are buying NT, but that's corporate evolution in action, as far as I'm concerned.
Linux people may not know, but Metrowerks is/very/ highly regarded in the MacOS world. They write outstanding compilers, and in fact, their PPC compiler pretty much saved Apple's bacon when they switched from 68k.
If they really get a new compiler for Linux out the door, I for one would pony up the $$$ to check it out.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to use something > like Java?
No.
> It's more widely supported,
Wrong.
> faster,
By what metric?
> and can be compiled to native code for even more > speed...
So? That's not the point of these tools (at least, as I can see.) They basically are a set of perl utilities that make the life of a perl programmer working in a brain-dead environment easier.
Finally,
> Not to mention the porting process would > probably be easier, since you could cut and > paste parts of the code.
I'm unsure exactly what this means, but the point of all this is that Jane Perl can carry a CD with all of these scripts on it to/any/ system and expect them to work: no porting involved.
Java is Java and perl is perl and they solve different problems and represent different approaches. Personally, I prefer Smalltalk, but that's neither here nor there.
How come somebody hasn't stepped up to the plate and brought a decent GUI to *nix?
X sucks. On this point there can be no serious argument. But the Linux kernel (for all of my philosophical differences) is an astounding bit of engineering. How is it that there aren't any "fresh" new projects to replace the Abomination Formerly Known As X?
The Linux kernel mated to a font-handling, colorspace managing, consistent GUI would be a hyper-attractive target for ports of graphics tools currently unavailable to *nix (Photoshop, Illustrator, to name just two.)
No matter how often you repeat the Unix canard about some missing feature of the OS being an "application issue," you won't make it true.
Color management is a hardware issue, and only the OS should be directly manipulating the hardware. In addition, color management is crucial for any serious graphics -- to say that it's only relevant for print media is the height of, shall we say, "technical ignorance."
The GIMP is a pretty amazing program, not so much for what it does, but rather for how sophisticated it is, given the overwhelming weaknesses of the underlying platform. X sucks.
Look, don't embarass yourself. You've never seen OpenStep, have you?
Linux doesn't have the Next Objective-C runtime. Nothing that runs on Linux doesn't support DPS as an imaging model. Linux on Mach doesn't support zone memory allocation, Mach messaging, Mach ports. Linux web tools are nothing/at all/ like WebObjects. Linux has nothing like Application or Interface Builder.
Linux is fine for what it is, but the $999 gets you a considerably more mature OS. Linux has wonderful tools, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
I'll concede the point about UI, as that is highly subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd like to think so, but no. Assuming that you live in the US, you owe it to yourself to check up on the theory and practice of "civil forfeiture," in particular, how the militarization of police agencies is in part being funded by seized and auctioned goods.
Your civil liberties at work!
(jfb)
One quick quibble: "lucent" is a word -- albeit a rare one.
Still, good comments.
(jfb)
Check your facts.
Well, JESUS, it's good that there's no places left with anything other than a SoCal climate, now isn't it? We'd sure HATE to have to think about the consequences of less than a 70f temp all year round, wouldn't we? It'd be the end of the freaking world, wouldn't it? nosferatu-man (peeved 'cause it SNOWED on 1 October round here. Wooly Mammoths would be right at home.)
Remember how Apple lost their shorts over the Powerbook 540 (possibly more) fiasco? They advertised the systems as "upgradeable" and then never provided an upgrade, opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit, which they lost.
.02$
Therefore, my take on this whole situation is, is that Apple just went ahead and put the block in there partly to keep the market for G4 processors constrained, and their current weirdly legal-ese reaction to the complaints ("We never said it was upgradeable") is a straight-up liability dodge.
It wouldn't surprise me if they removed the block with a future rom upgrade.
Just my
Regards,
JFB
There are /plenty/ of things to dislike about Linux and perl. Stevens' biases could well have been founded in a deeper understanding of the issues that he grappeled with than perhaps you know?
And in addition, the day that anyone in "The GNU Generation" writes a book as trenchant, concise, and informative as "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment," is the day that someone can start making noise about the torch being passed.
Regards,
JFB
Mac OS X Server and Gnus!
is an accident whilst you're uninsured.
... not bad, eh?
I gambled and lost, shedding COBRA and benefits in exchange for mucho dinero, and, as fate would have it, a sprung achilles tendon.
If you think that, say, a shit-hot Oracle kernel engineer makes big bucks, just wait until the bill from the anestheologist's office arrives. $3500 for forty minutes of work
I'd make the same sacrifice again, but I'm single and without dependents. How you approach the issue is almost wholly dependent on your specific situation.
Good luck,
JFB
If I'm not mistaken, it's the
Congressional
Omnibus
Budget
Reconciliation
Act
and is a federal statute, not a state one. I certainly made use of it here in Minnesota.
Regards,
JFB
Correction: 12 ram slots (for a total of 1.5gb), and the 8600/9600 series were the last of the 6 slot Macs - not the 8500/9500.
...
The Mach 5 versions of said boxes were very very very nice. I wish I still had my 8600/300
Regards,
JFB
They also have two stores in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
... the Seminary Co-op. I remember it well. Too bad there's nothing in Minneapolis that compares.
Ahhh
JFB
I've not read anything of Stephenson's other than Cryptonomicon, so my judgements are based entirely on the one work.
/worse/ than Clancy at understanding and transcribing women.
This. Book. Blows.
Comparisons to Pynchon are totally unfounded: Pynchon can write. I think a much more accurate comparison would be to Tom Clancy, another drum-thumping polemicist who can't write a convincing character to save his life. Stephenson appears to believe that, by aping the literary tricks of his betters, he becomes something more than he is.
What is exceptionally galling about this book is that it reads much more like an audition for the much coveted role as Piper to the Anonymous Cowards than a thoughtful, funny, or interesting work of anything. The one-dimensional strawman enemies! The Techno-Correct sloganeering! The sheer awe-inspiring awfulness of the technical aspects of writing! This is a book so inelegantly plotted that, far from integrating the disparate plotlines into a satisfying whole, it shakes itself apart in the hands. Which is too bad, in a way, as Stephenson's obviously a smart cracker (and on the right side of many of the things he "writes" about), but his intelligence is much more in the perpetually masturbating (and feeling sick guilty after) 14yr old boy vein, than in that of, say, TC Boyle or Pynchon.
I understand that some people will see themselves in Randy or Doug or Avi or any of the other 'characters' that Stephenson poops forth -- and this is sad; they're not people, they're Pirates of the Caribbean golems, robotically spouting the puerile and self-congratulatory mantra of the self-identified ubermensch.
The females in the book are so laughably bad, so freakishly homogenous in their character, so divorced from any kind of reality, that it doesn't seem unlikely that we've finally encountered a writer
Bah, humbug. I'd trade a mountain of Cryptonomicon for a page of Jack Vance.
It sounds like the reporter misunderstood what was being said (no great surprise from a rag like the WSJ.)
/could/ mean that NT's application support outweighs it's huge technical shortcomings, and that until Linux is as much better than NT as are the commercial Unices, it isn't really an option.
By multiprocessing, I'm positive that they mean SMP with more than four processors. I don't have any experience with Real Computers (my largest was a 16 processor Power Challenge) but I imagine that the big iron goes way up past 4 Xeons. This seems more like a hardware deficiency than a Linux-specific one.
And by logging, what was pretty obviously meant was the kinds of system accounting that mainframes provide -- a tremendously neurotic cascade of information that only a tremblingly uptight, card-punching MIS monkey could love. In this respect, Linux is no better nor worse than any commercial Unix, and, due to the open nature of the code base, better than most.
Or perhaps the article meant "logging" as in a log-structured filesystem (aka a journaling fs.) This is a real minus for Linux, and could concievably keep it out of the real enterprise, where it just can't compete with the Big Boys.
I even think I understand the inclusion of NT as a superior alternative (not, mind, that I agree.) The author
Don't forget that what the datacenter wants out of it's application platform is very different than what makes a good web|SMB|login server. Which doesn't excuse nor explain why people are buying NT, but that's corporate evolution in action, as far as I'm concerned.
Regards,
JFB
Linux people may not know, but Metrowerks is /very/ highly regarded in the MacOS world. They write outstanding compilers, and in fact, their PPC compiler pretty much saved Apple's bacon when they switched from 68k.
If they really get a new compiler for Linux out the door, I for one would pony up the $$$ to check it out.
Just info,
JFB
> Wouldn't it make more sense to use something
...
/any/ system and expect them to work: no porting involved.
> like Java?
No.
> It's more widely supported,
Wrong.
> faster,
By what metric?
> and can be compiled to native code for even more
> speed
So? That's not the point of these tools (at least, as I can see.) They basically are a set of perl utilities that make the life of a perl programmer working in a brain-dead environment easier.
Finally,
> Not to mention the porting process would
> probably be easier, since you could cut and
> paste parts of the code.
I'm unsure exactly what this means, but the point of all this is that Jane Perl can carry a CD with all of these scripts on it to
Java is Java and perl is perl and they solve different problems and represent different approaches. Personally, I prefer Smalltalk, but that's neither here nor there.
Regards,
JFB
How come somebody hasn't stepped up to the plate and brought a decent GUI to *nix?
X sucks. On this point there can be no serious argument. But the Linux kernel (for all of my philosophical differences) is an astounding bit of engineering. How is it that there aren't any "fresh" new projects to replace the Abomination Formerly Known As X?
The Linux kernel mated to a font-handling, colorspace managing, consistent GUI would be a hyper-attractive target for ports of graphics tools currently unavailable to *nix (Photoshop, Illustrator, to name just two.)
Curious,
JFB
No matter how often you repeat the Unix canard about some missing feature of the OS being an "application issue," you won't make it true.
Color management is a hardware issue, and only the OS should be directly manipulating the hardware. In addition, color management is crucial for any serious graphics -- to say that it's only relevant for print media is the height of, shall we say, "technical ignorance."
The GIMP is a pretty amazing program, not so much for what it does, but rather for how sophisticated it is, given the overwhelming weaknesses of the underlying platform. X sucks.
Regards,
JFB
Look, don't embarass yourself. You've never seen OpenStep, have you?
/at all/ like WebObjects. Linux has nothing like Application or Interface Builder.
Linux doesn't have the Next Objective-C runtime. Nothing that runs on Linux doesn't support DPS as an imaging model. Linux on Mach doesn't support zone memory allocation, Mach messaging, Mach ports. Linux web tools are nothing
Linux is fine for what it is, but the $999 gets you a considerably more mature OS. Linux has wonderful tools, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
I'll concede the point about UI, as that is highly subjective.
JFB
> "Ours does what their's does for a LOT less!"
No, your's doesn't.
DPS
Objective-C runtime
NetInfo
Mach
WebObjects
Quality user interface (- IMHO)
Linux ain't bad, but it ain't OpenStep.
JFB