I read the Salon article. I don't have a clue where they found that "$5 billion a year" stat for porn, or why they got the wild idea that $5 billion counted "everything" associated with porn.
The porn industry is quite a bit larger than the hollywood movie industry -- it's certainly much more than twice $5 billion dollars if you count the total revenue from everything. (Real journalists are often as sloppy as the Slashdot toy journalists. Salon journalists are sometimes even sloppier than that. Imagine.)
The game industry will probably blow past the revenues of the hollywood movie industry soon, but they still have a long way to go before they're anywhere near the revenue of the porn industry.
So, instead of being like the $6 billion a year hollywood film industry, it will be more like the $10 billion a year (and extremely profitable) porn industry?
Boy, it would really really suck for games if they were had higher sales, and a much larger profit margin, than porn.
That is, get hold of the police chief and ask what plans he has for re-educating or firing those fools working for him, and if you aren't satisfied there, work on getting a new police chief.
Or, even better, get a hold of the Govenor, and ask what is going to be done to repeal the hundreds or thousands of laws that should have never been passed in the first place.
Here's a clue, people -- if we make not wearing a seatbelt a crime, then not wearing a seatbelt is a crime. Creating hundreds of asinine laws, and then asking police officers to "use more discretion" in the laws they choose to enforce, is asking for a world of pain and hurt.
Ok... so what you're proposing is that they compress the nitrogen (which would heat it), then allow heat to escape (to bring the nitrogen back down to ambient temperature), and then decompress the nitrogen (which would make the decompressed nitrogen extremely cold).
That's a pretty damned good idea. Maybe they could catch this cold nitrogen, and repeat the cycle many, many times, and make it even colder. In fact, perhaps they could cool and catch all the nitrogen this way, and avoid having to deal with highly pressurized nitrogen. Then, it would all be cold, but they would be able to keep it at a much lower temperature, and much less of it would escape as a gas and waste energy. Then only stuff above room temperature would be the stuff in the isolated compressor!
Wow! I should get a patent on this "refridgeration" method! I'll make a billion dollars!
Grammar Nazi, you really must stop drinking on Sunday nights. Barring that, you must teach yourself to post as an anonymous coward when you are drunk. I don't believe you've managed to nail a single homonym all evening, and it's really grating on my nerves.
Can you propose some mechanism where the nitrogen gas would "slurp up enough energy to cover it's (sic) latent heat of condensation" that didn't involve what we commonly think of as a temperature differential?
I didn't pay nearly enough attention in my PChem class, but I did pay some attention in the diff. eq., and I don't remember many situations where a cold material would transfer heat to a warm material. Can you elaborate on this?
The US political parties are certainly not the same, bit I don't believe that "the amount of corruption" is an any way a useful metric for descriminating between them. But your insinuation that more Democrat politicians and voters than Republican politicians and voters are willing to lie to preserve their own personal power is an interesting one. (Unless you mean that somehow the power and actions of the parties is seperate from the individuals that make up those parties.)
Interesting, but unsupported, possibly untrue, and mostly irrelevant anyway. It's little more than an ideology to allow you to dismiss belief without thought.
Katz would have rambled incoherently for 12 paragraphs, and then linked to some site claiming that Bush harassed geeks to suicide while in high school.
I really try to laugh when Republicans bash Democrats for being tools. I try to laugh when Democrats bash Repubicans, too. I try to laugh, but it really just makes me sad. We've got a nation full of fat morons, who treat the political process with all the intelligence and nuance of a WWF Smackdown.
I'm constantly amazed, saddened, and ashamed that anyone that I share a species with really believes that any political party (including the Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, or whatever) has all the answers, while the misguided fools who listen to the propaganda of some other political party (Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, or whatever) are a bunch of brainwashed tools.
You're right. Learning the querty keyboard layout, and the three-symbol code for each product would be infinitely faster than learning the register layout, and the one-symbol code for each product.
And, as a special bonus, they'd be able to put friendly, ergonomic 101-key keyboard on the counter, instead of that unisightly thing that looks like a cash register.
Not only that, but when they were running specials, everyone could be trained beforehand on the new three letter codes. If someone forgets, they could just call over the manager -- what would that take? Five minutes, max? It feels more efficient already. Just putting the new picture on the register would mean that learning the new register layout would take a good 10 or 15 seconds for anyone with a brain -- it's just to much work to imagine.
Development time is no issue... it is quicker to design a GUI using a guibuilder than it is to code something in curses.
The time-consuming part of GUI development is never the amount of time it takes to make the computer draw the pretty pictures you want it to draw. The difficult part is deciding how the information should be laid out on the screen, and how the user is going to interact with that information.
There are a few reasons that GUI apps often turn out to be so incredibly shitty for data entry or certain POS tasks, and none of them have anything to do with the GUI. First, they're often written by dumb-asses who believe that the difficult part of creating a GUI is is going clickity-click in the visual builder window. Second, they're often written by people who confuse ease-of-learning with ease-of-use, and no desire to learn the factors that go into ease-of-use for a data entry system.
I have no idea why you'd imagine a GUI system would be any harder or easier to write than a TUI system, when the difficult part has nothing at all to do with actually slapping up the code to do the TUI or GUI part.
8000 boxes that have to be separately administered?
Why would 8,000 identical boxes be difficult to administer? The guys that develop the monitoring software and the install and upgrade processes are probably pretty smart cookies. But the actual maintence of the machines could probably be handled by monkeys.
Think about it: the instructions for handling a hardware failure in one of these machines is probably:
Identify bad part
Replace bad part with any of the two dozen exactly identical parts we keep in the spare parts closet.
Put system recovery CD in drive.
reboot.
remove system recovery CD when it automatically ejects and the end of the recovery process.
If this doesn't work, call our system engineer, at 555-1212
The spare parts closet probably just has boxes with labels like: "This box contains 80GB Maxtor hard drives -- exact match for every hard drive in rack 5, 7, and 8." Another box might be labeled: "AMI A571 motherboards -- exact match for all motherboards in rack 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7."
Another box in the closet is probably labeled "Empty, pre-labeled Fed-Ex shipping boxes that are exactly the right size for our rack mounted hardware. Use to ship any badly broken machines back to our system engineer. Call first!"
What kind of support are you talking about? Are you talking about loozer "warranty" support, where you charge some moron $55 bucks every time calls you up and complains that he's unable to follow directions, and it's pretty clear the problem is in the interface between the chair and keyboard? Then get some monkeys to answer the phone, get a credit card before you do anything else, and refuse to help if the code is changed in any way.
Or, are you talking about real support, where the customer gives you enough money to buy a house, and the customer views you as a worthwhile partner who will help the customer find technical solutions to their business problems? If this is the case, then you had better expect the customer to change the code. They're paying you damned good money help make your product more useful in their environment, and you better be willing to do something for that money. If their code monkeys keep breaking the code, then increase your price. If you get to the point where you're charging them obcene amounts of money, but you just get sick with them, then drop them as a customer and lay off a couple of engineers.
I have to be honest, though -- I'd sooner boil myself alive in acid than I would try to provide $55/call incident support on just about any software. It would be even worse on most of the open source stuff I've seen, where you'd undoubtedly get just as many moron users, but a disappointingly high percentage would be both: 'l337' (i.e., still a moron, but blissfully unaware of the fact), and 'poor' (i.e., no business credit card to wave around).
It sounds like you're building a webserver farm where the failure of a webserver is a non-issue -- you're willing to deal with the possible loss of even a few dozen transactions if one of those servers abrubtly fails a critical time. If so, your farm of a few generic white boxes running linux or BSD is ideal.
But as you're discovering, on the back end -- the database machine, where failure is much less tolerable -- it is going to be much, much harder to spec out a machine. Your example of hardware RAID is the most suprising area where Linux simply falls down. Even though cards like Compaq's SmartArray RAID controller has working Linux drivers, there are no Linux utilities.
For far too many of the RAID controllers out there, reconfiguring or rebuilding the arrays either involves shutting down the machine and rebooting into a stand-alone utility, or "echo"ing pretty much undocumented commands into your/proc/scsi filesystem. If a drive fails, you will have downtime. The Linux RAID solutions might protect your data integrity, but they will not protect your uptime. I couldn't even imagine trying to hot-plug some new drives into the array, and then resizing the live filesystem when I needed more room. (Someone will try to refute this, and will use the word "ReiserFS" in their post, but all I have to say is that there are a lot of possible things I couldn't imagine actually doing).
Things like hot plugable CPUs, or network cards, or drive controllers, are simply non-existant on Linux. Stuff like monitoring utilities that will page you in the middle of the night when one of your redundant power supplies fail, or when one of your CPUs burns out, or when one of the drives in your storage arrays dies, simply don't exist. There's a lot of stuff that you need if you want to run 24x7 that just doesn't work in Linux yet.
A big part of that is because of posts like yours, of course -- you don't want to spend more than $2,000.00. It's pretty damned hard to build a well supported server for $2,000.00, and the people who are willing to spend the money for real support often don't care as much about Linux. You're left with a lot of after-thought solutions -- stuff that got built for something else, and just happens to work on Linux by an almost happy accident.
Carefully consider what it will cost you to lose one transaction, or all your current transactions, or all the transactions since your last backup. Carefully consider the cost of downtime. Consider the cost of your time, when you're trying to figure out how to reconfigure your RAID controller at 2 in the morning on a Sunday, and the tech support guy has never even heard of Linux. It's certainly possible that Linux is going to be fine for you -- it's fine for a lot of websites. If you need more, and you want to spend under $10K, consider running W2K and MS SQL. As much as it pains me to say it, I'm afraid I'm serious. If you really do need more than that, be prepared to spend some cash...
You'll lay him off and laugh when we (programmers in general) get it right. There's no reason for backups to be a problem, and there's no excuse for crashes at all.
Amen. You speak the truth, brother. Once we manage to write that last, perfect piece of software there will never again be any need for a software upgrade, or the accompying hardware upgrades, or the installation of new systems or functionality or security.
But just how long will it be before that perfect software is written, and all of use programmers and system administrators and hardware manufacturers can pack our bags and go home, secure in the knowledge of a job well done? When, exactly, do we get to the point when we never have to install new software ever again for as long as we live? I'm not putting any doubt on your claim -- it most certainly will happen, and soon. But I want to cash in my vacation time before I'm out of a job.
Two weeks before due date, the programmers work 22 hour days cobbling an application from... (apparently) one programmer bashing his face into the keyboard.
Only ONE programmer where you work writes code that looks like that? You work in an extremely high quality shop, my friend.
Of course, I work in a Perl shop. The reader is allowed to fill in his own joke here.
The biggest company behind any distro is RedHat, and they make almost no money off sales. They try and offer support contracts and make their money there, but even that is slim
I'm far too lazy to go read RedHat's public financial information, but I always assumed they made money from support. I don't mean the "Joe Consumer calls us up and we help him install X-Windows" bullshit end-user support that no-one on earth enjoys being subjected to in any situation. I mean real support, to people with money who need support, and not just a clue stick.
Like, the kind of support where IBM says "We wan't to sell a laptop with Linux pre-installed. Help us validate and test the hardware and driver list, and help us keep the driver list up to date for the next three years." Or, the kind of support where Compaq says "we want to sell more Linux severs. Help us improve the drivers and utility software for our Compaq SmartArray RAID controllers." Or, even the kind of support where Oracle says "help us validate our software on future versions of the Linux operating system and future versions of glibc."
If any Linux vendor is trying to make money by end user sales, or by selling support to end users, it should be clear to anyone that Linux vendor is going to be royally fucked. I believe there can be a great deal of value in writing, maintaining, and improving free software -- if you find someone who believes the existance of that software is valuable to them. I can't see any value in selling free software. It's not compatible with the shrink wrapped market.
But I can't give it up because all the other editors seem intent on copying MicroSoft's stupid control key bindings (ie ^P prints: I believe most people move up one line much more often than they print!)
Huh? Why would I use my editor to print? It's an editor, not a pretty-printer.
Emacs is nothing but a lisp compiler, a virtual machine for running compiled lisp files, and a really, really crappy editor written to match some guy's favorite macros on a 1975 text editor.
Well, there are also a few thousand additional lisp programs included in there that make it a little more useful. But I find myself editing text in a text editor, then firing up emacs to run on of those myriad programs on my text, quiting out of emacs again, and then continuing my editing with a real text editor.
Now, don't misunderstand -- I certainly believe a decent editor could have been written in emacs. Heck, it probably wouldn't be haard to write a decent text editor in emacs. But since vi is already a decent text editor, it's hard for me to see the point....
Just goes to show the dangers of closed document formats.
Nah, this doesn't just happen with closed document formats. It happens anytime people confuse the representation of the document on the screen for the document itself. For example, it seems like a high-profile misunderstanding of PDF happens every few months, too. And I'm sure we've all found "interesting" stuff commented out of websites, even though HTML is about as transparent as you can get, short of plain text.
What is the standard way to make sure that no revision history is contained in a Word document?
I would be suprised if there was one. It wasn't that long ago that Word documents routinely included whatever splooge happened to be on the sectors of your hard drive before Word allocated them. The program is quite good at what it's good for, but painfully bad as a document interchange format. It's a damn shame it gets used as a document interchange format.
No. I don't give a flying fuck what the "purpose" of the GPL is. The point I made was that the LCC license was an unintelligible mish-mash, probably without any legal meaning at all. The LCC "license" is not a license at all.
By contrast, the GPL is a license. Given a choice between no license (the LCC "license"), and a real license (the GPL license), the GPL license is always preferable, since it provides me with at least some rights. The LCC "license" does little more than convince me that the copyright holders feel that learning from the book is fair use, and they won't sue me if I try to use the book to learn from.
I have no idea what you have against the GPL license. If you don't like it, please stop using any software that falls under the license. Perhaps, if you feel strongly enough, you can create your own license, and spend the next 20 years of your life creating software and a community around your license. Or, you can just bitch and moan on slashdot. It's your choice.
Re:Pro GPL people with mod points are delusional.
on
xMach GPL Free
·
· Score: 1
If the document was well understood, companies who WANT to protect their IP would not touch GPLed code and instead use other code.
The GPL can be understood by anyone who is willing to invest a small amount of time in understanding it. You claim to understand it, and you are clearly of below average intelligence. I can't imagine a company like Corel would be unable to find a IP Lawyer who would explain the license to them for a few thousand dollars (read: very cheaply).
No-one is claiming the superiority of the GPL over the LCC license is due to the intent or underlying philosophy of either license. The claim is that the GPL license is superiour because it is a license -- is is not a non-intelligible and probably non-binding group of words which probably lack any legal meaning, like the LCC license is.
Of course, your measure of the "goodness" of a license is the Bormuth Grade Level of the license, as measure by Microsoft Word. It's certainly pretyy clear you have no understanding or appreciation of Law or Philosophy.
Slashdot Mirror
Cosmo sells sex from a "Producer" perspective and Playboy sells it from a "Consumer" perspective.
I prefer it from a "participant" perspective.
Go read this New York Times Magazine article on the porn industry.
I read the Salon article. I don't have a clue where they found that "$5 billion a year" stat for porn, or why they got the wild idea that $5 billion counted "everything" associated with porn.
The porn industry is quite a bit larger than the hollywood movie industry -- it's certainly much more than twice $5 billion dollars if you count the total revenue from everything. (Real journalists are often as sloppy as the Slashdot toy journalists. Salon journalists are sometimes even sloppier than that. Imagine.)
The game industry will probably blow past the revenues of the hollywood movie industry soon, but they still have a long way to go before they're anywhere near the revenue of the porn industry.
So, instead of being like the $6 billion a year hollywood film industry, it will be more like the $10 billion a year (and extremely profitable) porn industry?
Boy, it would really really suck for games if they were had higher sales, and a much larger profit margin, than porn.
That is, get hold of the police chief and ask what plans he has for re-educating or firing those fools working for him, and if you aren't satisfied there, work on getting a new police chief.
Or, even better, get a hold of the Govenor, and ask what is going to be done to repeal the hundreds or thousands of laws that should have never been passed in the first place.
Here's a clue, people -- if we make not wearing a seatbelt a crime, then not wearing a seatbelt is a crime. Creating hundreds of asinine laws, and then asking police officers to "use more discretion" in the laws they choose to enforce, is asking for a world of pain and hurt.
Ok... so what you're proposing is that they compress the nitrogen (which would heat it), then allow heat to escape (to bring the nitrogen back down to ambient temperature), and then decompress the nitrogen (which would make the decompressed nitrogen extremely cold).
That's a pretty damned good idea. Maybe they could catch this cold nitrogen, and repeat the cycle many, many times, and make it even colder. In fact, perhaps they could cool and catch all the nitrogen this way, and avoid having to deal with highly pressurized nitrogen. Then, it would all be cold, but they would be able to keep it at a much lower temperature, and much less of it would escape as a gas and waste energy. Then only stuff above room temperature would be the stuff in the isolated compressor!
Wow! I should get a patent on this "refridgeration" method! I'll make a billion dollars!
Grammar Nazi, you really must stop drinking on Sunday nights. Barring that, you must teach yourself to post as an anonymous coward when you are drunk. I don't believe you've managed to nail a single homonym all evening, and it's really grating on my nerves.
Can you propose some mechanism where the nitrogen gas would "slurp up enough energy to cover it's (sic) latent heat of condensation" that didn't involve what we commonly think of as a temperature differential?
I didn't pay nearly enough attention in my PChem class, but I did pay some attention in the diff. eq., and I don't remember many situations where a cold material would transfer heat to a warm material. Can you elaborate on this?
The US political parties are certainly not the same, bit I don't believe that "the amount of corruption" is an any way a useful metric for descriminating between them. But your insinuation that more Democrat politicians and voters than Republican politicians and voters are willing to lie to preserve their own personal power is an interesting one. (Unless you mean that somehow the power and actions of the parties is seperate from the individuals that make up those parties.)
Interesting, but unsupported, possibly untrue, and mostly irrelevant anyway. It's little more than an ideology to allow you to dismiss belief without thought.
Katz would have rambled incoherently for 12 paragraphs, and then linked to some site claiming that Bush harassed geeks to suicide while in high school.
I really try to laugh when Republicans bash Democrats for being tools. I try to laugh when Democrats bash Repubicans, too. I try to laugh, but it really just makes me sad. We've got a nation full of fat morons, who treat the political process with all the intelligence and nuance of a WWF Smackdown.
I'm constantly amazed, saddened, and ashamed that anyone that I share a species with really believes that any political party (including the Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, or whatever) has all the answers, while the misguided fools who listen to the propaganda of some other political party (Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, or whatever) are a bunch of brainwashed tools.
You're right. Learning the querty keyboard layout, and the three-symbol code for each product would be infinitely faster than learning the register layout, and the one-symbol code for each product.
And, as a special bonus, they'd be able to put friendly, ergonomic 101-key keyboard on the counter, instead of that unisightly thing that looks like a cash register.
Not only that, but when they were running specials, everyone could be trained beforehand on the new three letter codes. If someone forgets, they could just call over the manager -- what would that take? Five minutes, max? It feels more efficient already. Just putting the new picture on the register would mean that learning the new register layout would take a good 10 or 15 seconds for anyone with a brain -- it's just to much work to imagine.
Development time is no issue... it is quicker to design a GUI using a guibuilder than it is to code something in curses.
The time-consuming part of GUI development is never the amount of time it takes to make the computer draw the pretty pictures you want it to draw. The difficult part is deciding how the information should be laid out on the screen, and how the user is going to interact with that information.
There are a few reasons that GUI apps often turn out to be so incredibly shitty for data entry or certain POS tasks, and none of them have anything to do with the GUI. First, they're often written by dumb-asses who believe that the difficult part of creating a GUI is is going clickity-click in the visual builder window. Second, they're often written by people who confuse ease-of-learning with ease-of-use, and no desire to learn the factors that go into ease-of-use for a data entry system.
I have no idea why you'd imagine a GUI system would be any harder or easier to write than a TUI system, when the difficult part has nothing at all to do with actually slapping up the code to do the TUI or GUI part.
Why would 8,000 identical boxes be difficult to administer? The guys that develop the monitoring software and the install and upgrade processes are probably pretty smart cookies. But the actual maintence of the machines could probably be handled by monkeys.
Think about it: the instructions for handling a hardware failure in one of these machines is probably:
- Identify bad part
- Replace bad part with any of the two dozen exactly identical parts we keep in the spare parts closet.
- Put system recovery CD in drive.
- reboot.
- remove system recovery CD when it automatically ejects and the end of the recovery process.
- If this doesn't work, call our system engineer, at 555-1212
The spare parts closet probably just has boxes with labels like: "This box contains 80GB Maxtor hard drives -- exact match for every hard drive in rack 5, 7, and 8." Another box might be labeled: "AMI A571 motherboards -- exact match for all motherboards in rack 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7."Another box in the closet is probably labeled "Empty, pre-labeled Fed-Ex shipping boxes that are exactly the right size for our rack mounted hardware. Use to ship any badly broken machines back to our system engineer. Call first!"
What kind of support are you talking about? Are you talking about loozer "warranty" support, where you charge some moron $55 bucks every time calls you up and complains that he's unable to follow directions, and it's pretty clear the problem is in the interface between the chair and keyboard? Then get some monkeys to answer the phone, get a credit card before you do anything else, and refuse to help if the code is changed in any way.
Or, are you talking about real support, where the customer gives you enough money to buy a house, and the customer views you as a worthwhile partner who will help the customer find technical solutions to their business problems? If this is the case, then you had better expect the customer to change the code. They're paying you damned good money help make your product more useful in their environment, and you better be willing to do something for that money. If their code monkeys keep breaking the code, then increase your price. If you get to the point where you're charging them obcene amounts of money, but you just get sick with them, then drop them as a customer and lay off a couple of engineers.
I have to be honest, though -- I'd sooner boil myself alive in acid than I would try to provide $55/call incident support on just about any software. It would be even worse on most of the open source stuff I've seen, where you'd undoubtedly get just as many moron users, but a disappointingly high percentage would be both: 'l337' (i.e., still a moron, but blissfully unaware of the fact), and 'poor' (i.e., no business credit card to wave around).
It sounds like you're building a webserver farm where the failure of a webserver is a non-issue -- you're willing to deal with the possible loss of even a few dozen transactions if one of those servers abrubtly fails a critical time. If so, your farm of a few generic white boxes running linux or BSD is ideal.
/proc/scsi filesystem. If a drive fails, you will have downtime. The Linux RAID solutions might protect your data integrity, but they will not protect your uptime. I couldn't even imagine trying to hot-plug some new drives into the array, and then resizing the live filesystem when I needed more room. (Someone will try to refute this, and will use the word "ReiserFS" in their post, but all I have to say is that there are a lot of possible things I couldn't imagine actually doing).
But as you're discovering, on the back end -- the database machine, where failure is much less tolerable -- it is going to be much, much harder to spec out a machine. Your example of hardware RAID is the most suprising area where Linux simply falls down. Even though cards like Compaq's SmartArray RAID controller has working Linux drivers, there are no Linux utilities.
For far too many of the RAID controllers out there, reconfiguring or rebuilding the arrays either involves shutting down the machine and rebooting into a stand-alone utility, or "echo"ing pretty much undocumented commands into your
Things like hot plugable CPUs, or network cards, or drive controllers, are simply non-existant on Linux. Stuff like monitoring utilities that will page you in the middle of the night when one of your redundant power supplies fail, or when one of your CPUs burns out, or when one of the drives in your storage arrays dies, simply don't exist. There's a lot of stuff that you need if you want to run 24x7 that just doesn't work in Linux yet.
A big part of that is because of posts like yours, of course -- you don't want to spend more than $2,000.00. It's pretty damned hard to build a well supported server for $2,000.00, and the people who are willing to spend the money for real support often don't care as much about Linux. You're left with a lot of after-thought solutions -- stuff that got built for something else, and just happens to work on Linux by an almost happy accident.
Carefully consider what it will cost you to lose one transaction, or all your current transactions, or all the transactions since your last backup. Carefully consider the cost of downtime. Consider the cost of your time, when you're trying to figure out how to reconfigure your RAID controller at 2 in the morning on a Sunday, and the tech support guy has never even heard of Linux. It's certainly possible that Linux is going to be fine for you -- it's fine for a lot of websites. If you need more, and you want to spend under $10K, consider running W2K and MS SQL. As much as it pains me to say it, I'm afraid I'm serious. If you really do need more than that, be prepared to spend some cash...
You'll lay him off and laugh when we (programmers in general) get it right. There's no reason for backups to be a problem, and there's no excuse for crashes at all.
Amen. You speak the truth, brother. Once we manage to write that last, perfect piece of software there will never again be any need for a software upgrade, or the accompying hardware upgrades, or the installation of new systems or functionality or security.
But just how long will it be before that perfect software is written, and all of use programmers and system administrators and hardware manufacturers can pack our bags and go home, secure in the knowledge of a job well done? When, exactly, do we get to the point when we never have to install new software ever again for as long as we live? I'm not putting any doubt on your claim -- it most certainly will happen, and soon. But I want to cash in my vacation time before I'm out of a job.
Two weeks before due date, the programmers work 22 hour days cobbling an application from... (apparently) one programmer bashing his face into the keyboard.
Only ONE programmer where you work writes code that looks like that? You work in an extremely high quality shop, my friend.
Of course, I work in a Perl shop. The reader is allowed to fill in his own joke here.
The biggest company behind any distro is RedHat, and they make almost no money off sales. They try and offer support contracts and make their money there, but even that is slim
I'm far too lazy to go read RedHat's public financial information, but I always assumed they made money from support. I don't mean the "Joe Consumer calls us up and we help him install X-Windows" bullshit end-user support that no-one on earth enjoys being subjected to in any situation. I mean real support, to people with money who need support, and not just a clue stick.
Like, the kind of support where IBM says "We wan't to sell a laptop with Linux pre-installed. Help us validate and test the hardware and driver list, and help us keep the driver list up to date for the next three years." Or, the kind of support where Compaq says "we want to sell more Linux severs. Help us improve the drivers and utility software for our Compaq SmartArray RAID controllers." Or, even the kind of support where Oracle says "help us validate our software on future versions of the Linux operating system and future versions of glibc."
If any Linux vendor is trying to make money by end user sales, or by selling support to end users, it should be clear to anyone that Linux vendor is going to be royally fucked. I believe there can be a great deal of value in writing, maintaining, and improving free software -- if you find someone who believes the existance of that software is valuable to them. I can't see any value in selling free software. It's not compatible with the shrink wrapped market.
But I can't give it up because all the other editors seem intent on copying MicroSoft's stupid control key bindings (ie ^P prints: I believe most people move up one line much more often than they print!)
Huh? Why would I use my editor to print? It's an editor, not a pretty-printer.
Emacs is nothing but a lisp compiler, a virtual machine for running compiled lisp files, and a really, really crappy editor written to match some guy's favorite macros on a 1975 text editor.
Well, there are also a few thousand additional lisp programs included in there that make it a little more useful. But I find myself editing text in a text editor, then firing up emacs to run on of those myriad programs on my text, quiting out of emacs again, and then continuing my editing with a real text editor.
Now, don't misunderstand -- I certainly believe a decent editor could have been written in emacs. Heck, it probably wouldn't be haard to write a decent text editor in emacs. But since vi is already a decent text editor, it's hard for me to see the point....
I threw away my television. Am I ripping someone off? Who should I send the check to?
much is the same way that Win32 provides a layer beneath MFC and VCL, which were once two very distinct toolkits.
Perhaps we could write an "Xlib"... an X-tension library that would sit below Qt and Gtk.
Just goes to show the dangers of closed document formats.
Nah, this doesn't just happen with closed document formats. It happens anytime people confuse the representation of the document on the screen for the document itself. For example, it seems like a high-profile misunderstanding of PDF happens every few months, too. And I'm sure we've all found "interesting" stuff commented out of websites, even though HTML is about as transparent as you can get, short of plain text.
What is the standard way to make sure that no revision history is contained in a Word document?
I would be suprised if there was one. It wasn't that long ago that Word documents routinely included whatever splooge happened to be on the sectors of your hard drive before Word allocated them. The program is quite good at what it's good for, but painfully bad as a document interchange format. It's a damn shame it gets used as a document interchange format.
No. I don't give a flying fuck what the "purpose" of the GPL is. The point I made was that the LCC license was an unintelligible mish-mash, probably without any legal meaning at all. The LCC "license" is not a license at all.
By contrast, the GPL is a license. Given a choice between no license (the LCC "license"), and a real license (the GPL license), the GPL license is always preferable, since it provides me with at least some rights. The LCC "license" does little more than convince me that the copyright holders feel that learning from the book is fair use, and they won't sue me if I try to use the book to learn from.
I have no idea what you have against the GPL license. If you don't like it, please stop using any software that falls under the license. Perhaps, if you feel strongly enough, you can create your own license, and spend the next 20 years of your life creating software and a community around your license. Or, you can just bitch and moan on slashdot. It's your choice.
If the document was well understood, companies who WANT to protect their IP would not touch GPLed code and instead use other code.
The GPL can be understood by anyone who is willing to invest a small amount of time in understanding it. You claim to understand it, and you are clearly of below average intelligence. I can't imagine a company like Corel would be unable to find a IP Lawyer who would explain the license to them for a few thousand dollars (read: very cheaply).
No-one is claiming the superiority of the GPL over the LCC license is due to the intent or underlying philosophy of either license. The claim is that the GPL license is superiour because it is a license -- is is not a non-intelligible and probably non-binding group of words which probably lack any legal meaning, like the LCC license is.
Of course, your measure of the "goodness" of a license is the Bormuth Grade Level of the license, as measure by Microsoft Word. It's certainly pretyy clear you have no understanding or appreciation of Law or Philosophy.