I don't think that this is accurate; all of the 6 people who possess 59% of the world's wealth would own a computer. It would be about impossible to have that much stuff in these days and not own a computer. Maybe you don't use one directly, but a business that you own does, I bet.
Maybe. But on the other hand, if being the patch penguin is going to wreck somebody's life, it need to not wreck Linus' life, because he's more important as an architect and roadmap guy than he is as a patch integrator. And, without the duties of the architect to share time with, a lieutenant who only maintains the patch tree really might be able to do it more efficiently than Linus. And, once you've trained one patch penguin, it might be possible to coordinate the job between several people at once that share a brain closely enough. So with a little setup time you really could scale the integration duties, which would make up for the fact that the integrators might not be quite as efficient as Linus is.
Large software development projects can be scaled successfully - there are much larger projects than Linux that do this very well. It's just a question of whether Linus is willing to learn a little from their example, while at the same time avoiding their mistakes.
On the other hand, once they start charging for it, they have to give you a way out of the contract. Or more precisely, if they start charging, it's a new contract, and thus you can decline it at that point.
Actually, you can use Netscape mail with "Outlook" (really Exchange) servers - I do it every day. Just have your admin turn on the IMAP connectivity option (whatever it's called, IMAP something anyway) on your Exchange server. There's no reason at all to jump into the security hole that is Outlook.
All the trailers that were on the air here in IL looked uniformly awful. There was nothing to make you want to watch the movie at all. Jon, you must've been nuts to go see that one.
You have to remember: people on/. may be young, but they're generally not stupid. So youth movies may be a good choice for a review, but stupid movies (or at least ones that you can tell from the trailers are stupid) probably aren't. Then again, why do we even have movie reviews on/. anyway?
I dunno about GDB, but you can do this on command with the "abort" call and the "undump" command. While in your program, call abort(). Run undump on the core file to get an executable. When you run the executable it starts exactly where it left off at the abort().
Woops, after reading that it sounds like it starts off at the top of main() again. But, if you had a flag to indicate where you'd aborted from, you could jump to that immediately and resume operations.
It's a cool little trick; unfortunately I've not yet gotten to use it for anything:)
Exactly - by basing backwards-compatibility at the source rather than the binary level, Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows in terms of providing new features but still providing backwards compatibility. 30-year-old Unix code runs on Linux with a recompile.
And the source expectation has let the core Linux developers not worry about backwards compatibility so much. If you read the kernel mailing list or the KT articles, Linus will pretty much switch to a new interface at the drop of the hat if he thinks it's the right thing to do, and often will even allow things that slightly break backwards compatibility if they will force developers to start doing things the Right Way(tm). This would be suicide for a commercial OS/tools vendor, but it's one of Linux's strengths IMHO - it can change quickly if necessary, but anyone can still hack up the code to work with their legacy apps if they want to.
You can turn on Outlook Web Access on your exchange server and view calendar, mail, contacts, etc. over the web. You can also, as several other posters have pointed out, enable the IMAP access to the Exchange server and use any number of mail clients. I use Netscape 4.x to access an Exchange server daily and it works fine (well, except for when Exchange expires my password and doesn't tell me, but that's Microsoft's problem (as usual)).
There's always a need, though, so it's always a good idea. It is never a good idea to limit yourself to only one platform as an option. That doesn't mean make it portable to everything under the sun, but it does mean make sure that your eggs can be switched into one or two other baskets if the current platform starts to look like a bad decision. Especially since computing platforms and options seem to be proliferating more now than at any time in the past - who can predict for sure which platform they'll want to be on in 5, 10, 20 years?
People that don't plan for portability deserve the pain that they get. Unfortunately, they usually aren't able to connect the pain back to their poor decision-making in the first place, so the feedback loop doesn't work too well:)
Since these guys all worked on porting from Windows to Linux, I don't think you can assume that they didn't know Windows programming. To port effectively you really have to know both fairly well. I imagine that all of them that want to will be employed somewhere pretty soon.
For most people, though, the game also provides a break from real life. You could say the same thing about any recreational activity, like reading or watching TV. You wouldn't think "Oh, if I had worked instead of watching 20 hours of TV this week, I'd be 100k richer", because if you weren't watching TV to relax, you'd be goofing off some other way.
It's just fortunate that it is possible for people to make money in the EQ economy while doing something that they love.
Now there's an idea for folks who were thinking of finding a money sink in the game - random dragon conquerings of whole towns or parties that take their valuables. On the other hand, would the game be that fun if you could randomly lose it all like that? The experienced players wouldn't have any problems getting it all back quickly, and the newbies would just have to do it the hard way the second time in a row.
On the plus side, that would be a good way to introduce new quests. Rather than always creating money by having people solving the same quests that others have solved, the system should be set up so that if people win one quest, that dragon is gone forever, but another dragon (or other evil creature) triumphs over some people elsewhere. There would be a karmic balance between avatars and biots throughout the game. As more people join the game, the number of biots on the other end of the balance would be gradually increased.
Now if there was only a way to make sure that such karmic levelling only happened to people who could survive it and recover fairly easily.
Although that would be cool - EQ needs a futures market in goods, and then you really could short things like that. It would be virtual speculation on items that are themselves virtual. And to attain stratospheric levels of abstraction, the EQ market could then also have a derivatives market of its own.
Maybe you could spend your free time vacationing on that other world. You know, "Earth" or some lame name like that. It's not as boring as it sounds - we also have PKs and economic problems here:)
and, more importantly, it's a lot easier to remember and communicate "firestonesucks.com" than "angelfire.com/some/random/url/path/firestonesucks/".
This sort of action doesn't preclude all criticism, but it does lessen the strength of that criticism as well as how that criticism spreads. And even if it didn't, I would still find it, in my mind, to be unfair. Consuming a scarce resource that you're not going to really use just seems wrong to me.
My MSDN documentation experience (though not about hidden APIs): yesterday, I wanted to do two nonstandard things in Visual Basic (*spits*). In both cases the builtin MSDN library searches couldn't find anything helpful. In both cases I started up exceed, fired up Netscape from my real workstation, searched for the same thing on Google, and in each case the right answer was within the top three search results. Humorously, in one case the answer was even on msdn.microsoft.com, but their builtin search tools couldn't find it while Google could:)
MSDN is good documentation if you want to do things the Microsoft Way. But Heaven help you if you want to stretch yourself a little, or if you want to apply concepts from the rest of computer science (you remember, it's that discipline that Microsoft hasn't entirely bought yet). Ultimately, Microsoft tools and MSDN just make me wish that I could do the whole damn thing in Perl - I'd have been done days ago.
I locked up Win 2000 the other day when removing an icon from the task bar. Reports of its being any more stable seem to be greatly exaggerated. But you just keep telling yourself that, and maybe someday you'll even believe it:)
All right, so maybe it wasn't the best example, or I haven't explained where I'm drawing the parallel. What I'm saying is that if it were the case that the English language were as limited a resource as domain names are, and someone bought up all the words that could be used to criticise them, we would find this to be antithetical to the higher purpose of communication. And that is the argument that I'm making for the domain names - in fact, since domain names are a scarcer resource than English words, it is even more unethical to buy them up just to prevent criticism of yourself.
If I understand your meaning - and I apologise if I'm missunderstanding - this is just a silly fantasy hypothetical
situation. A company can't buy words and then forbid you from using it to criticise them.
That was exactly my meaning, and while it is silly, I'm drawing a parallel with the domain name situation through a bit of hyperbole. To me, I don't see the two situations as being that dissimilar.
Because unlike words domain names are a commodity that CAN be bought and sold. Turn the question on it's
head - how can it be OK for someone (the government?) to STOP the company from buying the domain names it
wants? Aren't the individuals who own the company afforded the same freedoms of speech and property that their
detractors are?
It's true that there are a limited amount of domain names, and thus we seem to need the buying and selling in order to distribute these scarce goods. But I will also point out that there is an equivalently limited set of English words (even if both sets are infinite, the cardinality is the same), and so you really could say that those words are a commodity and should be bought and sold, or at least paid for, prior to use. We don't, of course, because that would hinder communictation. And that's the reason that I'm opposed to people buying up all of the -sucks sites to prevent criticism on them.
I agree that it would be difficult to prevent companies from buying such sites, because I don't want to take that freedom away. I don't have a 100% brilliant idea to solve this at the moment. Here's one thought: trademark law considers the market when arbitrating trademark disputes, so that two entities can use the same mark if they are found to be in reasonably different markets so that there is no consumer confusion. In a similar manner, it should be possible to judge -sucks site registrations and say "is it reasonable to say that the registering entity really believes that so-and-so sucks?" In essence this would be building an entitlement for criticism into the system, just like trademark law builds an entitlement for mark recognition into the law. A disinterested third party would be able to determine "of course George W. Bush doesn't have a legitimate interest in bushsucks.com, since it would be self-derogatory and since he hasn't put anything up on the site". And then the site could be handed over to a plaintiff with presumably more critical things to say.
This would be a big step, from allowing criticism to encouraging it, and I throw it out here as more of a thought experiment than anything. I think our society could do with more encouragement to be critical, but I'm not sure what Constitutional grounds that would stand on.
This is actually a pet peeve of mine. The confusion over freedom of speech. You have the right to freedom of
speech which you can use to criticize the company. You do not however have a RIGHT to a soapbox! You have
every right to buy, rent or borrow a soapbox from whoever might be selling. But you do not have a right to compel
them to sell or to speak on your behalf. You do not have a right to air time on TV or Radio, in print, or to any
particular web domain you don't already own. The government choosing to deny your NEA grant, the paper
refusing to print your editorial, the *sucks.com domain the company you hate already bought - none of these
scenarios is an abridgement of your freedoms of speech or property!!
It's true that you could criticise from a different site; you don't have to have the -sucks domain to be effective. And you don't have a right to criticise for free. But I think it is also incumbent on the entities worthy of criticism in our society to not unfairly preclude such criticism by buying up all of the soapboxes in the city, so to speak. By effectively monopolizing domain names which might be critical of them, those entities are overstepping the bounds of freedom of speech IMHO.
I agree that it's not the end of the world and that this won't silence criticism very effectively. But it offends my sense of "fair play", so to speak, for an entity to buy up a scarce resource for the sole purpose of preventing the use of that resource by another who has an arguably more legitimate claim to it.
Besides even this is an unrealistic hypothetical. Any creativity at all will suggest domains the company never
would have thought of. Apple could buy Applesucks.com (they didn't but they could have) but they would most
likely have missed crapple.com. If someone want their own domain as a soapbox but can't think of ONE the
company didn't think of... well, if that's the case they're probably better off with a geoshanties site anyway.
Happily granted - protest will never be quieted by just buying up domain names.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that this is accurate; all of the 6 people who possess 59% of the world's wealth would own a computer. It would be about impossible to have that much stuff in these days and not own a computer. Maybe you don't use one directly, but a business that you own does, I bet.
Maybe. But on the other hand, if being the patch penguin is going to wreck somebody's life, it need to not wreck Linus' life, because he's more important as an architect and roadmap guy than he is as a patch integrator. And, without the duties of the architect to share time with, a lieutenant who only maintains the patch tree really might be able to do it more efficiently than Linus. And, once you've trained one patch penguin, it might be possible to coordinate the job between several people at once that share a brain closely enough. So with a little setup time you really could scale the integration duties, which would make up for the fact that the integrators might not be quite as efficient as Linus is.
Large software development projects can be scaled successfully - there are much larger projects than Linux that do this very well. It's just a question of whether Linus is willing to learn a little from their example, while at the same time avoiding their mistakes.
On the other hand, once they start charging for it, they have to give you a way out of the contract. Or more precisely, if they start charging, it's a new contract, and thus you can decline it at that point.
...at least as far as creating press releases without those moronic broken quotes. Maybe they need a quick tap upside the head with the demoroniser?
Are you pointing that out as a sysadmin, or as an asshole :) I suppose the not using Exchange tends to put you in the former category, doesn't it?
Actually, you can use Netscape mail with "Outlook" (really Exchange) servers - I do it every day. Just have your admin turn on the IMAP connectivity option (whatever it's called, IMAP something anyway) on your Exchange server. There's no reason at all to jump into the security hole that is Outlook.
It depends on what you mean by "send"...
ProudFEET!
All the trailers that were on the air here in IL looked uniformly awful. There was nothing to make you want to watch the movie at all. Jon, you must've been nuts to go see that one.
You have to remember: people on /. may be young, but they're generally not stupid. So youth movies may be a good choice for a review, but stupid movies (or at least ones that you can tell from the trailers are stupid) probably aren't. Then again, why do we even have movie reviews on /. anyway?
Mr. President, not that I don't enjoy your participation in our high-spirited discussion, but don't you have more important things to do?
P.S. your phony pseudonym (it means "fake name", sir) didn't fool me for a minute :)
I dunno about GDB, but you can do this on command with the "abort" call and the "undump" command. While in your program, call abort(). Run undump on the core file to get an executable. When you run the executable it starts exactly where it left off at the abort().
details here
Woops, after reading that it sounds like it starts off at the top of main() again. But, if you had a flag to indicate where you'd aborted from, you could jump to that immediately and resume operations.
It's a cool little trick; unfortunately I've not yet gotten to use it for anything :)
Exactly - by basing backwards-compatibility at the source rather than the binary level, Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows in terms of providing new features but still providing backwards compatibility. 30-year-old Unix code runs on Linux with a recompile.
And the source expectation has let the core Linux developers not worry about backwards compatibility so much. If you read the kernel mailing list or the KT articles, Linus will pretty much switch to a new interface at the drop of the hat if he thinks it's the right thing to do, and often will even allow things that slightly break backwards compatibility if they will force developers to start doing things the Right Way(tm). This would be suicide for a commercial OS/tools vendor, but it's one of Linux's strengths IMHO - it can change quickly if necessary, but anyone can still hack up the code to work with their legacy apps if they want to.
Y'all know that you've been trolled, right? Does the realization sink in once I say the magic words?
YHBT
YHL
HAND
And it wasn't even a particularly original troll - you could read all this stuff on /. in 1999, and in fact I think I did :)
You can turn on Outlook Web Access on your exchange server and view calendar, mail, contacts, etc. over the web. You can also, as several other posters have pointed out, enable the IMAP access to the Exchange server and use any number of mail clients. I use Netscape 4.x to access an Exchange server daily and it works fine (well, except for when Exchange expires my password and doesn't tell me, but that's Microsoft's problem (as usual)).
There's always a need, though, so it's always a good idea. It is never a good idea to limit yourself to only one platform as an option. That doesn't mean make it portable to everything under the sun, but it does mean make sure that your eggs can be switched into one or two other baskets if the current platform starts to look like a bad decision. Especially since computing platforms and options seem to be proliferating more now than at any time in the past - who can predict for sure which platform they'll want to be on in 5, 10, 20 years?
People that don't plan for portability deserve the pain that they get. Unfortunately, they usually aren't able to connect the pain back to their poor decision-making in the first place, so the feedback loop doesn't work too well :)
Since these guys all worked on porting from Windows to Linux, I don't think you can assume that they didn't know Windows programming. To port effectively you really have to know both fairly well. I imagine that all of them that want to will be employed somewhere pretty soon.
For most people, though, the game also provides a break from real life. You could say the same thing about any recreational activity, like reading or watching TV. You wouldn't think "Oh, if I had worked instead of watching 20 hours of TV this week, I'd be 100k richer", because if you weren't watching TV to relax, you'd be goofing off some other way.
It's just fortunate that it is possible for people to make money in the EQ economy while doing something that they love.
Now there's an idea for folks who were thinking of finding a money sink in the game - random dragon conquerings of whole towns or parties that take their valuables. On the other hand, would the game be that fun if you could randomly lose it all like that? The experienced players wouldn't have any problems getting it all back quickly, and the newbies would just have to do it the hard way the second time in a row.
On the plus side, that would be a good way to introduce new quests. Rather than always creating money by having people solving the same quests that others have solved, the system should be set up so that if people win one quest, that dragon is gone forever, but another dragon (or other evil creature) triumphs over some people elsewhere. There would be a karmic balance between avatars and biots throughout the game. As more people join the game, the number of biots on the other end of the balance would be gradually increased.
Now if there was only a way to make sure that such karmic levelling only happened to people who could survive it and recover fairly easily.
Although that would be cool - EQ needs a futures market in goods, and then you really could short things like that. It would be virtual speculation on items that are themselves virtual. And to attain stratospheric levels of abstraction, the EQ market could then also have a derivatives market of its own.
Maybe you could spend your free time vacationing on that other world. You know, "Earth" or some lame name like that. It's not as boring as it sounds - we also have PKs and economic problems here :)
True, you and I both know that. But,
This sort of action doesn't preclude all criticism, but it does lessen the strength of that criticism as well as how that criticism spreads. And even if it didn't, I would still find it, in my mind, to be unfair. Consuming a scarce resource that you're not going to really use just seems wrong to me.
My MSDN documentation experience (though not about hidden APIs): yesterday, I wanted to do two nonstandard things in Visual Basic (*spits*). In both cases the builtin MSDN library searches couldn't find anything helpful. In both cases I started up exceed, fired up Netscape from my real workstation, searched for the same thing on Google, and in each case the right answer was within the top three search results. Humorously, in one case the answer was even on msdn.microsoft.com, but their builtin search tools couldn't find it while Google could :)
MSDN is good documentation if you want to do things the Microsoft Way. But Heaven help you if you want to stretch yourself a little, or if you want to apply concepts from the rest of computer science (you remember, it's that discipline that Microsoft hasn't entirely bought yet). Ultimately, Microsoft tools and MSDN just make me wish that I could do the whole damn thing in Perl - I'd have been done days ago.
Now ending this off-topic rant.
I locked up Win 2000 the other day when removing an icon from the task bar. Reports of its being any more stable seem to be greatly exaggerated. But you just keep telling yourself that, and maybe someday you'll even believe it :)
All right, so maybe it wasn't the best example, or I haven't explained where I'm drawing the parallel. What I'm saying is that if it were the case that the English language were as limited a resource as domain names are, and someone bought up all the words that could be used to criticise them, we would find this to be antithetical to the higher purpose of communication. And that is the argument that I'm making for the domain names - in fact, since domain names are a scarcer resource than English words, it is even more unethical to buy them up just to prevent criticism of yourself.
That was exactly my meaning, and while it is silly, I'm drawing a parallel with the domain name situation through a bit of hyperbole. To me, I don't see the two situations as being that dissimilar.
It's true that there are a limited amount of domain names, and thus we seem to need the buying and selling in order to distribute these scarce goods. But I will also point out that there is an equivalently limited set of English words (even if both sets are infinite, the cardinality is the same), and so you really could say that those words are a commodity and should be bought and sold, or at least paid for, prior to use. We don't, of course, because that would hinder communictation. And that's the reason that I'm opposed to people buying up all of the -sucks sites to prevent criticism on them.
I agree that it would be difficult to prevent companies from buying such sites, because I don't want to take that freedom away. I don't have a 100% brilliant idea to solve this at the moment. Here's one thought: trademark law considers the market when arbitrating trademark disputes, so that two entities can use the same mark if they are found to be in reasonably different markets so that there is no consumer confusion. In a similar manner, it should be possible to judge -sucks site registrations and say "is it reasonable to say that the registering entity really believes that so-and-so sucks?" In essence this would be building an entitlement for criticism into the system, just like trademark law builds an entitlement for mark recognition into the law. A disinterested third party would be able to determine "of course George W. Bush doesn't have a legitimate interest in bushsucks.com, since it would be self-derogatory and since he hasn't put anything up on the site". And then the site could be handed over to a plaintiff with presumably more critical things to say.
This would be a big step, from allowing criticism to encouraging it, and I throw it out here as more of a thought experiment than anything. I think our society could do with more encouragement to be critical, but I'm not sure what Constitutional grounds that would stand on.
It's true that you could criticise from a different site; you don't have to have the -sucks domain to be effective. And you don't have a right to criticise for free. But I think it is also incumbent on the entities worthy of criticism in our society to not unfairly preclude such criticism by buying up all of the soapboxes in the city, so to speak. By effectively monopolizing domain names which might be critical of them, those entities are overstepping the bounds of freedom of speech IMHO.
I agree that it's not the end of the world and that this won't silence criticism very effectively. But it offends my sense of "fair play", so to speak, for an entity to buy up a scarce resource for the sole purpose of preventing the use of that resource by another who has an arguably more legitimate claim to it.
Happily granted - protest will never be quieted by just buying up domain names.