If you want an Alpha, buy an Alpha and put Linux on it.:-)
About slashdot's stability, read rob's explanations of what happened. The instability usually falls under one of two categories: 1. mySQL crashed from some bug in it. 2. Rob saying, "noone should ever give me the root password to anything"
Solution to 1: use a better database. mySQL isn't built for great scalability or much complexity, though the way that it is handling slashdot on not very much hardware is a decent testiment to it's scalability.
Soltuion to 2: Don't give rob your root password. I.e., make sure to hire qualified administrators. This isn't a dig against rob, but I think that even he'd say that it isn't a fully qualified administrator for this kind of site, though has learned a great deal and is learning. (I'm not calling myself a qualified admin either, btw, so this isn't any sort of attack.)
Actually, GPL documentation is just like GPL code. You can change the text and redistribute, but it's got to be GPL'd to. The idea is identical to code, and there is an explanation of this by RMS around somewhere (it may be in the book Open Sources). To my knowledge, it has nothing to do with concepts, and it has been stated that way.
Btw, that part about restricting your freedom to take freedom away from other people "relicense the code under a different license", if you are talking about binary only, etc. is a bit fallacious. The laws to free speech take away my freedom to restrict other's speech. But that's misusing the word freedom. It's more like the GPL takes away your license to take away other people's freedom.
As a counterpoint, without the GPL, you are taking away the author's freedom to have his code freely distributed and modified in an open source fashion. You can't give everyone absolute freedom under any system, even public domain. It's all a matter of what freedoms you think more important. Frankly, I, like other people who have released code under the GPL, think that the freedom of knowledge is more important than the freedom of other people to make money off of my code.
Well, gnome is just a tremendously complex idea. They seem to have done a good job at implementing things so far. And their progress at fixing bugs seemed to be pretty good last I checked. Of course, i can't run gnome right now because it crashes my X server. I can't wait until I get my G200, hopefully the X server is better, and if not, I'm going to start participating in development.
On the E side of things, E has been perfectly stable for me for the last four months, and all but perfectly stable for the last year or so. I've almost never seen E crash, and I go back to the late 13.3 days. The only times I remember it crashed, it put upa window saying that it crashed, with an option to restart. If I selected restart, E restarted, and all my apps stayed up. Why do people always pick on E? it's extremely fast, with a small theme, it's pretty small, it looks great, and has tremendous flexibility to do things the way that I want them to be done (where I is the generic I).
What is the difference between read-write and full control? Otherwise, you can do this: chgrp report-group report.file chmod g+rw chmod o+r
And you will have that effect. However, this is clunky as the administrator has to set up groups. Of course, my experience with Novell ACLs is that the admins have to set up the ACLs anyhow, so not much is gained here.
Don't get me wrong, ACLs, when optional, are a good thing. something like an ACL bit would be a great addition to ext2.
However, don't miss the point that the UNIX permissions do work in many situations, many of them very common situations. It is rare that you can't fit the desired secutity model into an "owner" "group" and "everybody else" paradigm. Sometimes this is clunky to do, which is why ACLs are being implemented.
Is it me, or are the M$ employees that are hanging around here posting pro-M$ messages acting a bit weird? Don't they normally seem to post reasonable sounding messages without shouting? Do they strike any of you guys as a bit odd this time around?
A few details: *Being an engineer doesn't mean that your socially incompetent (sp?). *This "show me the babes" nonsense is prettymuch limited to this particular post. The rest of slashdot isn't much like this. At least not topic-wise. *Don't think that these people are representative of the average male. Those of us who didn't post requests for pictures of attrative also, by and large, didn't post requests for them not to be show either. *I'd rather have seen pictures of people like Linus, Alan Cox, RMS, ESR, etc. and the technology than the good looking but not terribly involved women. If some of the involved people happened to be women, then please give us pictures of them, too. The key point is their involvement. How much meaningful code did they write. That sort of thing. *Respectful interest generally does seem to work better, and be far more pleasant, than slobbering lust. It's also less messy on the shirts (or shoes, depending on what catches the slobber).:-)
Actually, there is a hacker culture, though it is loose. Remember hacker != linux. Linux was at least partially made by hackers. It doesn't necessarily make hackers.
And the distinction between suits and hackers is quite real. Try going to a head of administration and explaining the technical intricacies of a particular program. If he's good he'll want a working understanding of it, and he may even be interested. But he's not going to be fascinated by it, and he's not going to want to work on it. (with, of course, exceptions, as there are to every rule.)
That's good. Different people for different jobs. Each to his own, etc. But people are different. And there are groups of different people who are similar. Hackers are one of them. Read Eric S. Raymond's howto on being a hacker (I don't have the URL handy). That's a specific group that does, in fact, exist, though loosely.
So do PHBs. So do "suits". As Alan said, being a "suit" isn't a degrading term, it's a descriptive one. It's good that "suits" exist. Many of them are good people, and they contribute a lot to the world. Some of them, just like some of every group aren't, and they have a net detrimental effect on the world. This is just life.
It doesn't do anyone any good to pretend that everyone's the same, or that noone has anything in common. There are plenty of people who have hacking in common. And there are plenty of people involved in business who aren't hackers. Those are, generally speaking, the "suits". Are you going to deny that these groups exist?
Are you going to deny that the members of each group will tend to know more about the main focuses of their lives, which tend to be different?
I do object, as I think that you do, to the term "suit" as a degrading term. My father is a "suit" (though he isn't a manager), and he's a good man. However, there is a difference between him and me, and you can't get rid of that fact. Knowing our differences and embracing each other in light of those differences is what makes the world a better place.
If we don't understand and accept each other's differences, you just get prejudice against groups. If you don't understand why most people aren't going to be that technically oriented and that you should help them, you'll just end up thinking that they're stupid and possibly sub-human.
As long as you use stereotypes as a guide to what you shouldn't expect, i.e. if someone isn't a mechanic, you shouldn't expect them to know the fundamentals of mechanics. So don't get angry at them for not knowing what they have no reason to know. That's the useful side of prejudice, coming at something with toleration to begin with.
Of course, learn the truth and specifics of whatever situation you are in as quickly as possible. Doing without expectations is impractical, so it's best to have the most appropriate expectations that you can. This way we all get along the best.
Of course, never use a stereotype as a limitation. A stereotype should be used to not get annoyed with someone for spouting nonsense when they have no reason to know the truth. It should never be used to deny someone something, e.g. "you wouldn't understand that, you're just a kid."
Learn about each other. Come to know what to expect from each other so that we can get along best. Then learn specifically about each other when we get the chance.
If you get it wrong and a manager is a hacker too, then you've just lost some time being more patient with someone than you had to be. It's always better to make sure that someone understands the definitions of the words that you use and find out that they already knew (or knew better than you did), then to just blow right by them and have communicated nothing useful.
It's all about how to get along better. that's the spirit that I saw in Alan's post. How to get along better and more pleasantly.
It's quite simple: so that Ma Bill and Apple don't control anything anymore. I don't want to live in a world dominated by Bill Gatus of Borg. If Linux et al. remain niches for the rest of eternity, there's a good chance that that is what we'll face. As I put it to a friend of mine: would you rather help your parents fix their win95 computer, or keep their Linux computer working?
If you haven't noticed, we all live in the same world. If everyone else uses Win*, then unless you live in a bubble, you're going to have to deal with it. I've had to deal with it more than I want to (i.e. at all) because it's so common. I've had problems interoperating in real-life environments because of all the proprietary software. I hate it. Maybe you can live in a crystal bubble. I want open source support for the latest hardware. That's not going to happen in a binary-only paradigm. I want lots of open source software, that's not going to happen with only 5 people working on it. I want to contribute open source software (I've done a bit of that already) and get a dozen people contributing stuff that I wouldn't have thought of or couldn't have done. that's not going to happen with 3 people using their open source OS and everyone else on binary.
If you say screw them, you might as well say screw yourself. The free software boat has to be major and world recognized, or it's always going to be small and contracted. That is sort of self-evident. How do you think that it's going to be big if almost noone uses it?
Also, why are the non-techs sub-human? I bet that you don't know the intricate workings of mechanics and what's the best type of car to get from a technical point of view. So you live your life and make the best decisions that you can within what information that you have. Would you rather that mechanics said "Screw you." because you aren't a mechanic, or helped you by educating you?
Remember, we all live on the same world. If we let it go to hell, we're going to have to live in that hell. What are you going to do if the next CPU is proprietary and gcc doesn't support it? What are you going to do when your CPU dies (and it probably will), or your motherboard dies, or what have you? Are you going to go to antique shops to get replacements?
The world doesn't stay the same if you leave it alone. Most of the time it gets worse. If you want things to get better, you have to keep working at them. To keep something the same, you have to continually improve it. Stagnation is death. Do you really want Linux and BSD and hurd to stagnate to death?
Yes, what he pointed out was something of a flaw. As someone else pointed out, we take lessons to drive cars. Anyhow, the whole thing about Win* can't do it either is just a reality check. Linux can't wash my socks, but neither can anything else. It's just a matter of perspective. Complaining about real but understandable problems like they're tremendous problems that there's no excuse for is just silly. Linux can't survive very well on a broken CPU, but come one. Yes, it's theoretically possibly, at least slightly, but it's not very reasonable to complain about that flaw like someone forgot long filenames in a file system.
What are you referring to? I use E full time, and have been for the last several months. I can't remember it ever crashing on me, it's quite fast (though admittedly I'm running it on a fast machine), and allows me to configure things exactly how I want them. I'm using the cyrus theme right now. It's very fast, very good looking, and very small. I've got the most screen-realestate that I've had in a long time. The only way that I could get more that I can see would be to run without anything sticky on the screen and use only menus and key-cording, but I don't like that.
Now, E is a little tricky to get working if you're not lucky. Under a default RH 5.2, i just grabbed all the rpms and it worked. Then you do e-conf, and have a real easy way to configure your E setup.
About playing well with other unices, wasn't it informix who said, when questioned on how much work it took them to port to Linux, "we typed make". I.e. the source that they were using for sun compiled cleanly and worked under Linux?
Actually, having just read the Cygnus section on Open Sources, I get the impression that all binary target gccs are related. Considering that RMS wrote version 1.0 of gcc, I doubt that he'd give his permission to make the compiler proprietary.:-)
People generally advocate abiding by their agreements. Especially when they aren't being broken for a good cause. It's one thing to break an agreement for the greater good, even if it probably shouldn't be done in most cases. It's quite another to do it out of self interest. Anyhow, people aren't really bashing compaq for sharing, they're bashing microsoft for allegedly killing off the deal that they had no right to know about.
What on earth are you talking about? Microsoft was behind everyone on the web developing. It didn't have a TCP/IP stack in win 3.1, that had to be written by trumpet. The web nearly passed them by, they had to play catchup with netscape once they realized that the web mattered. The only concievable thing that Microsoft has done to benefit humanity is making better intel hardware more in deman, just to run the next version of windows at the same level as the last one.
Think about what a friend said to me (heavily paraphrased): "I figure that M$ has set computing back ten years. Here's why. W2k is supposed to be more posix compliant, have more UNIX utilities, and support user quotas. UNIX did all that 10 years ago."
> Of course, MS solutions have worked, and better > than just 'good enough'. Yes, and miracles happen, too. Pointing out the exception doesn't do much more than prove that Microsoft products haven't been magically cursed.
> 0. My dissertation research is done entirely on > NT. I tried Linux, but found myseld spending way > too much time doing system administration tasks > and not enough time doing actually research. What system administration were you doing? What was your dissertation? Once you get a linux box set up, it runs (assuming that you have a large enough disk to hold your system logs and user quotas, etc.). I'm in charge of the web server for the entire college of liberal arts and sciences here at alfred (which houses the search engine for the whole scool). It's been up for 59 days (power went down 59 days ago), and I've had to do precisely 1 administrative exercise that wasn't adding a user account or resetting a password. I had to restart apache because we're using an ancient version of apache due to a miniscule hard drive and not enough space to compile and install the new apache. This box is doing dynamic content, ftp, and mail. Practically 0 administration that isn't human necessary (setting up and modifying accounts, etc.). I've never had a Linux box that I had to administer in the sense of keep it up, only fine tune to what I want. I've never really had to do that with NT because, whenever I did anything with NT, there was no fine tuning to be done. You can occasionally change a thing or two, but otherwise it's fairly strict bondage on that beast. If something doesn't work, you're @#$@#'d. You want to do something non-standard, you have to start writing programs with expensive tools. Don't forget my question: what administration did you constantly have to do?
> 1. I work for an R&D govt contractor doing > simulation and modeling, software development, > and other scientific endeavors. All of our > deliverables, from programs to reports, are done > on NT. Our customers are very happy. Who are you customers? The gov't is fairly vague. Which government? What are you simulating? What are you modeling? What software are you developing? What other scientific endevors? What boxes that NT ran on were capable of doing intense calculations? The only high end hardware that NT runs on are Alpha boxes. That isn't that significant a fraction of high end hardware.
> 2. Dell runs there WWW site on NT. Wow. Microsoft runs Hotmail on Solaris and BSD. What hardware does Dell run its website on? If the answer is 200-500% more hardware than would reasonably be required like www.microsoft.com, that isn't saying much about NT past the fact that it isn't completely unworkable.
> I think the current antiMS sentiment is 80% fad. > Remember, computers are not sentient. They are a > tool. Use whatever helps you get the job done. Maybe the current antiMS sentiment is 80% fad. Maybe not. It's almost impossible to actually determine do to the vagueness of what you mean. If you're talking about the total population, then 80% of every populational sentiment is fad. I've yet to hear one person able to defend microsoft other than based on hardware support that someone else wrote (i.e. drivers provided by the manufacturer) or applications that run on windows. Neither of which is actually attributable to Windows being anything but dominant. Actually, that's not quite true. Superior integration often touted. I haven't really dealt with this, so I'm not qualified to say anything about it other than this: I haven't heard about any integrated capabilities that aren't either marginal improvements. Question: if my program invokes sendmail to send files, does that mean that I have "integrated email capabilities"? What about running wget to fetch a web page, do I have "integrated email and web functionality?" What if I use some of the database libraries to access a database, do I have "totally integrated email, web, and database capabilities"? If the answer is yes, then how is integration anything more than a word for what UNIX has been doing for the last 20 years?
I think that the previous poster wasn't reffering to Br. Boies, but rather to Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft can get away with all of their blatant lying (or at least what appears to be blatant lying) is really quite amazing.
Just like the Guys at IBM decided not to support Linux because some people wear penguins, or the guys at Burlington Coat Factory decided not to install Linux because of the penguin wearing people?
Btw, in America, europeans are often thought of sort of like the penguin wearing Geeks because you generally don't wash as often as Americans (or at least you don't seem to as a generality). It doesn't really matter, and eventually people will realize that irrelevant details are irrelevant. The point is to win the war, not to declare victory because we've conceded into agreement. Now, it really might be better if some of the people wore suits. In the end, it doesn't really matter. It's a precedent that's been set, not exactly what the precedent was. People are very selective about what they remember of their first impressions, and PHBs (whatever that stands for) probably won't really take any notice of this event one way or the other. If there even vaguely reasonable human beings, they look at the intelligent proposals put before them with costs attached.
Do you have any idea how many people who use windows satisfy the dark-room-geek-troll image? Do you think that if a number of them got together to talk about computers, and you broadcast pictures of them, that that image would stick and people would avoid windows?
The point is that *you* wear a suit when you put together a proposal that clearly shows a _reduction_in_costs_ and an _increase_in_profits_ when you give the proposal to the PHB, not what some people on TV did. Anyone with a quarter of a brain knows that there are all types attached to everything, and you can't get a picture of its character by a very small group of people. Do you really think that Ireland is an evil place and its people are horrible because the IRA exists?
Based on what grounds do you say that he pirated everything that he owns? Also, your conclusion of free software meaning no-cost software is erroneous. I give out my free software at no cost. The only people who can pirate it are people who broke the GPL on it (taking pirate loosely), and I doubt that the previous poster broke the licenses on the free software that he was given.
Also, Linux is quite relevant in terms of technology and in terms of politics. It's relevant in technology because it is an attempt to create the best possible system. It is relevant politically because it isn't an attempt to dominate the world in a controlling sense. It is an attempt to dominate the world with freedom, to force choice and knowledge on people. Ortega said that the only freedom that we don't have is the freedom not to be free. Many large corporations are, almost openly, trying to make that false. corporations aren't inherently evil, but, like governments, they are not to be trusted. The government of the USA was set up on exactly that principle (that governments are not to be trusted implicitly). Doesn't it seem like time to enforce the same principle on corporations, so that they don't become our governments?
Disclaimer: I have never used Samba personally. I have had (intentionally) limited experience with NT.
NT is not good enough to be a production NT server yet. Even if Samba is flaky, it's not like anyone who's used NT could tell the difference, unless Samba is down more than it is up.
Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting being obnoxious, impolite, or in any way immoral.
Part of the OSS movement is changing the rules. So they don't wear suits. So they wear weird cloths. The point is to win, not to replace. What do you think that the US setting up a democracy was about? They didn't set up a respectable monarchy. They did something really stupid, they gave people (even if just a fairly limited set of people at that point). And it worked. What's the point of fighting if you're not fighting for something?
Some starry-eyed idealism is worthwhile. Why win if you're not going to do something better than your competition. Maybe we are a bit nuts. Isn't that part of the fight? To be a little nuts? To give things away rather than keeping the source? To work together? That makes us a hell of a lot more weird than some funny clothes. The point is to win as we are, not to win by joining the enemy.
Another disclaimer: I was speaking with a good deal of hyperbole. I'm not advocating acting like a bunch of fools. I'm also not talking about not acting strategically. However, of the two ideas, giving away source code and wearing mildly funny clothes, which seems more nuts to you? Of course there is the idea of breaking people in gently. On the other hand, I can't help but think of the line from blade, "Get over it." There are a number of business men who really need to hear that.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. You are right about bug testing programs, I didn't mean to say that they were not a very valid and important part of programming. Part of it is my mindset. I've mostly been working with graphically based programs, which are difficult to test by program.
However, part of what you are missing is that OSS and what you were doing are catering to two different client bases. OSS is catering to the group who are all capable (or at least, in general, capable of learning) of debugging their problems. Commercial software is, for the most part (from what I understand of the situation, at least) catering to non-programmers. Thus the target community takes part in the debugging process. What's been happening, I think, is that a lot of people have been realizing, "Hey, this stuff has lots of features and works pretty well. Sure it isn't perfect, but neither are our alternatives." That's at least quite true of the Linux vs. Windows world. Having Used different versions of windows for years, it feels like they didn't use debugging tools.
There are, from what I understand, programmings shops that built ultra-high quality systems that were virtually crash-proof, for those systems that really are mission critical (e.g. NASA). That isn't the majority of people. Most people don't have that type of budget and don't need that kind of stability. If you're operating system hosting your web server goes down once every two or three years, that's fairly acceptable, considering that we live in an imperfect world. Most likely, you'll down the box yourself more often than that. Properly configured, I've heard stories and seen figures on Linux boxes with multi-year uptimes.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to put down commercial endevors. The fact that many corporations do act sort of liek they are evil does bother me, but that isn't all corporations. I've worked in a bank that was quite humane, at least to its employees, and it seemed to bend over, at least close to backwords, for its customers. My point is that OSS is a different method, it's a different paradigm (God, I hate that word, but I can't think of one that's better).
It's all a matter of what you are trying to accomplish. I don't think that anyone in their right mind is suggesting Linux on a pentium to control NASA's next deep space probe. On the other hand, I hope that noone is suggesting a multi-million dollar hyper-tested crash-proof system for a businesses web serving, print sharing, file sharing, or desktop environment. Everything has its place, and frankly, I'd prefer OSS-debugged software anyday over the barely debugged Windows software that's the alternative (or at least software that behaves as if it was barely debugged).
Different tools for different jobs. Btw, what makes you think that RedHat won't eventually hire some people to run debugging programs on Linux & associated programs?
Slashdot Mirror
If you want an Alpha, buy an Alpha and put Linux on it. :-)
About slashdot's stability, read rob's explanations of what happened. The instability usually falls under one of two categories:
1. mySQL crashed from some bug in it.
2. Rob saying, "noone should ever give me the root password to anything"
Solution to 1: use a better database. mySQL isn't built for great scalability or much complexity, though the way that it is handling slashdot on not very much hardware is a decent testiment to it's scalability.
Soltuion to 2: Don't give rob your root password. I.e., make sure to hire qualified administrators. This isn't a dig against rob, but I think that even he'd say that it isn't a fully qualified administrator for this kind of site, though has learned a great deal and is learning. (I'm not calling myself a qualified admin either, btw, so this isn't any sort of attack.)
Actually, GPL documentation is just like GPL code. You can change the text and redistribute, but it's got to be GPL'd to. The idea is identical to code, and there is an explanation of this by RMS around somewhere (it may be in the book Open Sources). To my knowledge, it has nothing to do with concepts, and it has been stated that way.
Btw, that part about restricting your freedom to take freedom away from other people "relicense the code under a different license", if you are talking about binary only, etc. is a bit fallacious. The laws to free speech take away my freedom to restrict other's speech. But that's misusing the word freedom. It's more like the GPL takes away your license to take away other people's freedom.
As a counterpoint, without the GPL, you are taking away the author's freedom to have his code freely distributed and modified in an open source fashion. You can't give everyone absolute freedom under any system, even public domain. It's all a matter of what freedoms you think more important. Frankly, I, like other people who have released code under the GPL, think that the freedom of knowledge is more important than the freedom of other people to make money off of my code.
Well, gnome is just a tremendously complex idea. They seem to have done a good job at implementing things so far. And their progress at fixing bugs seemed to be pretty good last I checked. Of course, i can't run gnome right now because it crashes my X server. I can't wait until I get my G200, hopefully the X server is better, and if not, I'm going to start participating in development.
On the E side of things, E has been perfectly stable for me for the last four months, and all but perfectly stable for the last year or so. I've almost never seen E crash, and I go back to the late 13.3 days. The only times I remember it crashed, it put upa window saying that it crashed, with an option to restart. If I selected restart, E restarted, and all my apps stayed up. Why do people always pick on E? it's extremely fast, with a small theme, it's pretty small, it looks great, and has tremendous flexibility to do things the way that I want them to be done (where I is the generic I).
Can you give a URL for the story of the $.50 coupon? Thanks.
What is sudo?
What is the difference between read-write and full control? Otherwise, you can do this:
chgrp report-group report.file
chmod g+rw
chmod o+r
And you will have that effect. However, this is clunky as the administrator has to set up groups. Of course, my experience with Novell ACLs is that the admins have to set up the ACLs anyhow, so not much is gained here.
Don't get me wrong, ACLs, when optional, are a good thing. something like an ACL bit would be a great addition to ext2.
However, don't miss the point that the UNIX permissions do work in many situations, many of them very common situations. It is rare that you can't fit the desired secutity model into an "owner" "group" and "everybody else" paradigm. Sometimes this is clunky to do, which is why ACLs are being implemented.
Darn! I guess I wasn't logged in. This was me who wrote this, btw.
Is it me, or are the M$ employees that are hanging around here posting pro-M$ messages acting a bit weird? Don't they normally seem to post reasonable sounding messages without shouting? Do they strike any of you guys as a bit odd this time around?
A few details: :-)
*Being an engineer doesn't mean that your socially incompetent (sp?).
*This "show me the babes" nonsense is prettymuch limited to this particular post. The rest of slashdot isn't much like this. At least not topic-wise.
*Don't think that these people are representative of the average male. Those of us who didn't post requests for pictures of attrative also, by and large, didn't post requests for them not to be show either.
*I'd rather have seen pictures of people like Linus, Alan Cox, RMS, ESR, etc. and the technology than the good looking but not terribly involved women. If some of the involved people happened to be women, then please give us pictures of them, too. The key point is their involvement. How much meaningful code did they write. That sort of thing.
*Respectful interest generally does seem to work better, and be far more pleasant, than slobbering lust. It's also less messy on the shirts (or shoes, depending on what catches the slobber).
Actually, there is a hacker culture, though it is loose. Remember hacker != linux. Linux was at least partially made by hackers. It doesn't necessarily make hackers.
And the distinction between suits and hackers is quite real. Try going to a head of administration and explaining the technical intricacies of a particular program. If he's good he'll want a working understanding of it, and he may even be interested. But he's not going to be fascinated by it, and he's not going to want to work on it. (with, of course, exceptions, as there are to every rule.)
That's good. Different people for different jobs. Each to his own, etc. But people are different. And there are groups of different people who are similar. Hackers are one of them. Read Eric S. Raymond's howto on being a hacker (I don't have the URL handy). That's a specific group that does, in fact, exist, though loosely.
So do PHBs. So do "suits". As Alan said, being a "suit" isn't a degrading term, it's a descriptive one. It's good that "suits" exist. Many of them are good people, and they contribute a lot to the world. Some of them, just like some of every group aren't, and they have a net detrimental effect on the world. This is just life.
It doesn't do anyone any good to pretend that everyone's the same, or that noone has anything in common. There are plenty of people who have hacking in common. And there are plenty of people involved in business who aren't hackers. Those are, generally speaking, the "suits". Are you going to deny that these groups exist?
Are you going to deny that the members of each group will tend to know more about the main focuses of their lives, which tend to be different?
I do object, as I think that you do, to the term "suit" as a degrading term. My father is a "suit" (though he isn't a manager), and he's a good man. However, there is a difference between him and me, and you can't get rid of that fact. Knowing our differences and embracing each other in light of those differences is what makes the world a better place.
If we don't understand and accept each other's differences, you just get prejudice against groups. If you don't understand why most people aren't going to be that technically oriented and that you should help them, you'll just end up thinking that they're stupid and possibly sub-human.
As long as you use stereotypes as a guide to what you shouldn't expect, i.e. if someone isn't a mechanic, you shouldn't expect them to know the fundamentals of mechanics. So don't get angry at them for not knowing what they have no reason to know. That's the useful side of prejudice, coming at something with toleration to begin with.
Of course, learn the truth and specifics of whatever situation you are in as quickly as possible. Doing without expectations is impractical, so it's best to have the most appropriate expectations that you can. This way we all get along the best.
Of course, never use a stereotype as a limitation. A stereotype should be used to not get annoyed with someone for spouting nonsense when they have no reason to know the truth. It should never be used to deny someone something, e.g. "you wouldn't understand that, you're just a kid."
Learn about each other. Come to know what to expect from each other so that we can get along best. Then learn specifically about each other when we get the chance.
If you get it wrong and a manager is a hacker too, then you've just lost some time being more patient with someone than you had to be. It's always better to make sure that someone understands the definitions of the words that you use and find out that they already knew (or knew better than you did), then to just blow right by them and have communicated nothing useful.
It's all about how to get along better. that's the spirit that I saw in Alan's post. How to get along better and more pleasantly.
It's quite simple: so that Ma Bill and Apple don't control anything anymore. I don't want to live in a world dominated by Bill Gatus of Borg. If Linux et al. remain niches for the rest of eternity, there's a good chance that that is what we'll face. As I put it to a friend of mine: would you rather help your parents fix their win95 computer, or keep their Linux computer working?
If you haven't noticed, we all live in the same world. If everyone else uses Win*, then unless you live in a bubble, you're going to have to deal with it. I've had to deal with it more than I want to (i.e. at all) because it's so common. I've had problems interoperating in real-life environments because of all the proprietary software. I hate it. Maybe you can live in a crystal bubble. I want open source support for the latest hardware. That's not going to happen in a binary-only paradigm. I want lots of open source software, that's not going to happen with only 5 people working on it. I want to contribute open source software (I've done a bit of that already) and get a dozen people contributing stuff that I wouldn't have thought of or couldn't have done. that's not going to happen with 3 people using their open source OS and everyone else on binary.
If you say screw them, you might as well say screw yourself. The free software boat has to be major and world recognized, or it's always going to be small and contracted. That is sort of self-evident. How do you think that it's going to be big if almost noone uses it?
Also, why are the non-techs sub-human? I bet that you don't know the intricate workings of mechanics and what's the best type of car to get from a technical point of view. So you live your life and make the best decisions that you can within what information that you have. Would you rather that mechanics said "Screw you." because you aren't a mechanic, or helped you by educating you?
Remember, we all live on the same world. If we let it go to hell, we're going to have to live in that hell. What are you going to do if the next CPU is proprietary and gcc doesn't support it? What are you going to do when your CPU dies (and it probably will), or your motherboard dies, or what have you? Are you going to go to antique shops to get replacements?
The world doesn't stay the same if you leave it alone. Most of the time it gets worse. If you want things to get better, you have to keep working at them. To keep something the same, you have to continually improve it. Stagnation is death. Do you really want Linux and BSD and hurd to stagnate to death?
Yes, what he pointed out was something of a flaw. As someone else pointed out, we take lessons to drive cars. Anyhow, the whole thing about Win* can't do it either is just a reality check. Linux can't wash my socks, but neither can anything else. It's just a matter of perspective. Complaining about real but understandable problems like they're tremendous problems that there's no excuse for is just silly. Linux can't survive very well on a broken CPU, but come one. Yes, it's theoretically possibly, at least slightly, but it's not very reasonable to complain about that flaw like someone forgot long filenames in a file system.
What are you referring to? I use E full time, and have been for the last several months. I can't remember it ever crashing on me, it's quite fast (though admittedly I'm running it on a fast machine), and allows me to configure things exactly how I want them. I'm using the cyrus theme right now. It's very fast, very good looking, and very small. I've got the most screen-realestate that I've had in a long time. The only way that I could get more that I can see would be to run without anything sticky on the screen and use only menus and key-cording, but I don't like that.
Now, E is a little tricky to get working if you're not lucky. Under a default RH 5.2, i just grabbed all the rpms and it worked. Then you do e-conf, and have a real easy way to configure your E setup.
What about E sucks?
About playing well with other unices, wasn't it informix who said, when questioned on how much work it took them to port to Linux, "we typed make". I.e. the source that they were using for sun compiled cleanly and worked under Linux?
Actually, having just read the Cygnus section on Open Sources, I get the impression that all binary target gccs are related. Considering that RMS wrote version 1.0 of gcc, I doubt that he'd give his permission to make the compiler proprietary. :-)
People generally advocate abiding by their agreements. Especially when they aren't being broken for a good cause. It's one thing to break an agreement for the greater good, even if it probably shouldn't be done in most cases. It's quite another to do it out of self interest. Anyhow, people aren't really bashing compaq for sharing, they're bashing microsoft for allegedly killing off the deal that they had no right to know about.
What on earth are you talking about? Microsoft was behind everyone on the web developing. It didn't have a TCP/IP stack in win 3.1, that had to be written by trumpet. The web nearly passed them by, they had to play catchup with netscape once they realized that the web mattered. The only concievable thing that Microsoft has done to benefit humanity is making better intel hardware more in deman, just to run the next version of windows at the same level as the last one.
Think about what a friend said to me (heavily paraphrased): "I figure that M$ has set computing back ten years. Here's why. W2k is supposed to be more posix compliant, have more UNIX utilities, and support user quotas. UNIX did all that 10 years ago."
> Of course, MS solutions have worked, and better
> than just 'good enough'.
Yes, and miracles happen, too. Pointing out the exception doesn't do much more than prove that Microsoft products haven't been magically cursed.
> 0. My dissertation research is done entirely on
> NT. I tried Linux, but found myseld spending way
> too much time doing system administration tasks
> and not enough time doing actually research.
What system administration were you doing? What was your dissertation? Once you get a linux box set up, it runs (assuming that you have a large enough disk to hold your system logs and user quotas, etc.). I'm in charge of the web server for the entire college of liberal arts and sciences here at alfred (which houses the search engine for the whole scool). It's been up for 59 days (power went down 59 days ago), and I've had to do precisely 1 administrative exercise that wasn't adding a user account or resetting a password. I had to restart apache because we're using an ancient version of apache due to a miniscule hard drive and not enough space to compile and install the new apache. This box is doing dynamic content, ftp, and mail. Practically 0 administration that isn't human necessary (setting up and modifying accounts, etc.). I've never had a Linux box that I had to administer in the sense of keep it up, only fine tune to what I want. I've never really had to do that with NT because, whenever I did anything with NT, there was no fine tuning to be done. You can occasionally change a thing or two, but otherwise it's fairly strict bondage on that beast. If something doesn't work, you're @#$@#'d. You want to do something non-standard, you have to start writing programs with expensive tools. Don't forget my question: what administration did you constantly have to do?
> 1. I work for an R&D govt contractor doing
> simulation and modeling, software development,
> and other scientific endeavors. All of our
> deliverables, from programs to reports, are done
> on NT. Our customers are very happy.
Who are you customers? The gov't is fairly vague. Which government? What are you simulating? What are you modeling? What software are you developing? What other scientific endevors? What boxes that NT ran on were capable of doing intense calculations? The only high end hardware that NT runs on are Alpha boxes. That isn't that significant a fraction of high end hardware.
> 2. Dell runs there WWW site on NT.
Wow. Microsoft runs Hotmail on Solaris and BSD. What hardware does Dell run its website on? If the answer is 200-500% more hardware than would reasonably be required like www.microsoft.com, that isn't saying much about NT past the fact that it isn't completely unworkable.
> I think the current antiMS sentiment is 80% fad.
> Remember, computers are not sentient. They are a
> tool. Use whatever helps you get the job done.
Maybe the current antiMS sentiment is 80% fad. Maybe not. It's almost impossible to actually determine do to the vagueness of what you mean. If you're talking about the total population, then 80% of every populational sentiment is fad. I've yet to hear one person able to defend microsoft other than based on hardware support that someone else wrote (i.e. drivers provided by the manufacturer) or applications that run on windows. Neither of which is actually attributable to Windows being anything but dominant.
Actually, that's not quite true. Superior integration often touted. I haven't really dealt with this, so I'm not qualified to say anything about it other than this: I haven't heard about any integrated capabilities that aren't either marginal improvements.
Question: if my program invokes sendmail to send files, does that mean that I have "integrated email capabilities"? What about running wget to fetch a web page, do I have "integrated email and web functionality?" What if I use some of the database libraries to access a database, do I have "totally integrated email, web, and database capabilities"? If the answer is yes, then how is integration anything more than a word for what UNIX has been doing for the last 20 years?
I think that the previous poster wasn't reffering to Br. Boies, but rather to Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft can get away with all of their blatant lying (or at least what appears to be blatant lying) is really quite amazing.
Just like the Guys at IBM decided not to support Linux because some people wear penguins, or the guys at Burlington Coat Factory decided not to install Linux because of the penguin wearing people?
Btw, in America, europeans are often thought of sort of like the penguin wearing Geeks because you generally don't wash as often as Americans (or at least you don't seem to as a generality). It doesn't really matter, and eventually people will realize that irrelevant details are irrelevant. The point is to win the war, not to declare victory because we've conceded into agreement. Now, it really might be better if some of the people wore suits. In the end, it doesn't really matter. It's a precedent that's been set, not exactly what the precedent was. People are very selective about what they remember of their first impressions, and PHBs (whatever that stands for) probably won't really take any notice of this event one way or the other. If there even vaguely reasonable human beings, they look at the intelligent proposals put before them with costs attached.
Do you have any idea how many people who use windows satisfy the dark-room-geek-troll image? Do you think that if a number of them got together to talk about computers, and you broadcast pictures of them, that that image would stick and people would avoid windows?
The point is that *you* wear a suit when you put together a proposal that clearly shows a _reduction_in_costs_ and an _increase_in_profits_ when you give the proposal to the PHB, not what some people on TV did. Anyone with a quarter of a brain knows that there are all types attached to everything, and you can't get a picture of its character by a very small group of people. Do you really think that Ireland is an evil place and its people are horrible because the IRA exists?
Based on what grounds do you say that he pirated everything that he owns? Also, your conclusion of free software meaning no-cost software is erroneous. I give out my free software at no cost. The only people who can pirate it are people who broke the GPL on it (taking pirate loosely), and I doubt that the previous poster broke the licenses on the free software that he was given.
Also, Linux is quite relevant in terms of technology and in terms of politics. It's relevant in technology because it is an attempt to create the best possible system. It is relevant politically because it isn't an attempt to dominate the world in a controlling sense. It is an attempt to dominate the world with freedom, to force choice and knowledge on people. Ortega said that the only freedom that we don't have is the freedom not to be free. Many large corporations are, almost openly, trying to make that false. corporations aren't inherently evil, but, like governments, they are not to be trusted. The government of the USA was set up on exactly that principle (that governments are not to be trusted implicitly). Doesn't it seem like time to enforce the same principle on corporations, so that they don't become our governments?
Disclaimer: I have never used Samba personally. I have had (intentionally) limited experience with NT.
NT is not good enough to be a production NT server yet. Even if Samba is flaky, it's not like anyone who's used NT could tell the difference, unless Samba is down more than it is up.
Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting being obnoxious, impolite, or in any way immoral.
Part of the OSS movement is changing the rules. So they don't wear suits. So they wear weird cloths. The point is to win, not to replace. What do you think that the US setting up a democracy was about? They didn't set up a respectable monarchy. They did something really stupid, they gave people (even if just a fairly limited set of people at that point). And it worked. What's the point of fighting if you're not fighting for something?
Some starry-eyed idealism is worthwhile. Why win if you're not going to do something better than your competition. Maybe we are a bit nuts. Isn't that part of the fight? To be a little nuts? To give things away rather than keeping the source? To work together? That makes us a hell of a lot more weird than some funny clothes. The point is to win as we are, not to win by joining the enemy.
Another disclaimer: I was speaking with a good deal of hyperbole. I'm not advocating acting like a bunch of fools. I'm also not talking about not acting strategically. However, of the two ideas, giving away source code and wearing mildly funny clothes, which seems more nuts to you? Of course there is the idea of breaking people in gently. On the other hand, I can't help but think of the line from blade, "Get over it." There are a number of business men who really need to hear that.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. You are right about bug testing programs, I didn't mean to say that they were not a very valid and important part of programming. Part of it is my mindset. I've mostly been working with graphically based programs, which are difficult to test by program.
However, part of what you are missing is that OSS and what you were doing are catering to two different client bases. OSS is catering to the group who are all capable (or at least, in general, capable of learning) of debugging their problems. Commercial software is, for the most part (from what I understand of the situation, at least) catering to non-programmers. Thus the target community takes part in the debugging process. What's been happening, I think, is that a lot of people have been realizing, "Hey, this stuff has lots of features and works pretty well. Sure it isn't perfect, but neither are our alternatives." That's at least quite true of the Linux vs. Windows world. Having Used different versions of windows for years, it feels like they didn't use debugging tools.
There are, from what I understand, programmings shops that built ultra-high quality systems that were virtually crash-proof, for those systems that really are mission critical (e.g. NASA). That isn't the majority of people. Most people don't have that type of budget and don't need that kind of stability. If you're operating system hosting your web server goes down once every two or three years, that's fairly acceptable, considering that we live in an imperfect world. Most likely, you'll down the box yourself more often than that. Properly configured, I've heard stories and seen figures on Linux boxes with multi-year uptimes.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to put down commercial endevors. The fact that many corporations do act sort of liek they are evil does bother me, but that isn't all corporations. I've worked in a bank that was quite humane, at least to its employees, and it seemed to bend over, at least close to backwords, for its customers. My point is that OSS is a different method, it's a different paradigm (God, I hate that word, but I can't think of one that's better).
It's all a matter of what you are trying to accomplish. I don't think that anyone in their right mind is suggesting Linux on a pentium to control NASA's next deep space probe. On the other hand, I hope that noone is suggesting a multi-million dollar hyper-tested crash-proof system for a businesses web serving, print sharing, file sharing, or desktop environment. Everything has its place, and frankly, I'd prefer OSS-debugged software anyday over the barely debugged Windows software that's the alternative (or at least software that behaves as if it was barely debugged).
Different tools for different jobs. Btw, what makes you think that RedHat won't eventually hire some people to run debugging programs on Linux & associated programs?