If you don't even know how to secure other users' profiles on an NT box, you don't really have any business talking about NT security, much less running an NT system. Making these sweeping statements about things you know nothing about honestly don't give me much faith in your ability to secure *nix boxes, either -- it's a good sign that instead of putting in some work to secure your system, you'll just fake your way through it and pray each night that the hackers don't have a field day on your ass. Good luck.
Another amusing note is that Slashdot, with that wonderful Linux security, has been hacked into at least once, while your pals at www.microsoft.com haven't.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call "bullshit" on your post. I like perl, even have fun when using it for work, but you seem to have a pretty unrealistic view of it, especially in relation to the strengths of other languages.
Sorry, Jon, but I couldn't take seriously your claims of Goths being so individualistic. Just because one gets kicks out of annoying Mommy and Daddy, claims of uniqueness fall by the wayside when you strive to look exactly like all your friends. The reason why it's so easy to play "spot the Goth" is precisely because there is so little individualism within that group. I guarantee that you'll find greater stylistic variation within the front rows of a Brittany Spears concert than you will in the front rows of a Cure show.
Mocking the mainstream does not equal individualism, especially when done in the same style as millions of other Goths. The Onion had an absolutely hilarious and spot-on article about this, where people who don't go around proclaiming or advertizing how "different" they are are actually the non-mainstream minority now. Lot of truth to that.
SCO didn't support that Microsoft code for all that long. The issue was decided by the European Commission in late 1997, so I'm sure that SCO filed the complaint a while before then. SCO only owned Unix[tm] since 1995 (they bought the rights from Novell, who had bought them from AT&T, the company that made the original deal with Microsoft back in the '80s.), so we're probably talking two years max. I believe that SCO had been compaining to Microsoft for at least a year before they took them in front of the EC.
As for why they went to Europe, it's because the EC is a lot stricter in these big guy vs. little guy battles. I remember an article at the time even discussing how companies going outside the U.S. to air their complaints had become a trend even before this case. News.com or ZDnet had that article, just do a search on "SCO" AND "Microsoft" AND "european commission" and it should turn up at one of them.
Gee, how long did those take, less than three months? Those were the alledgedly "release quality" products, so why are you trying to blunt the previous poster's remarks with your strawman argument of, "Gee, of course development releases have bugs!" Who said anything about the development releases?
Yeah, I guess that's why SCO took Microsoft in front of the European Commission about 18 months ago to nullify a contract with them, and why one of their senior VPs referred to the incident as "dealing with the devil." Got any more FUD for us, Sparky?
First off, a smart person or a nerd is not equivalent to an outcast. I've seen a lot of posts here with people blaming their poor high school social lives on their supposed intelligence. Well, as someone who played on two HS state champion soccer teams and won another HS state championship on the math team, I don't buy it. Yes, I know I'm tooting my own horn here, but it's the first time I've ever done it at Slashdot and I feel that it's necessary to explain my own experience in the subject.
No nerds ever gave me crap about being a jock, and no jocks gave me crap about being a nerd (I'm talking serious crap here, not throwing smack between friends), and it wasn't because I was bigger than most -- it's because I didn't mind getting to know people. Which isn't to say that everyone liked me, because some didn't. Actually, nobody on the math team ever suffered the afflictions that I'm reading here -- they were friendly and everybody I know thought that they were good guys, even if we never hung out together socially. (I mainly hung out with what most of you would call the jock/prep crowd, even if I have absolutely no fashion sense whatsoever.)
A lot of the comments I see here, though, are the same things I observed from the outcasts at our school: complaints that everyone rejected them, but possessing an attitude of being too cool/too smart to deign to hang out with anyone different from them. Basically, the same attitude that they're accusing others of. Oh, those guys on the football team are all a bunch of drunk, girl-abusing bullies -- they're all idiots and they'll get theirs in the real world when they're working for me! (Funny how it so rarely turns out this way...) Look at those preps -- bunch of teenybopper sluts who think Mariah Carey is deep or something. Hey, I hate Mariah's music as much as any "outcast" around here, but I don't look down my nose at people based on what they like to listen to. C'mon, you think Nine Inch Nails (who I like) or Alanis (who I don't) is deep just because they appeal to disaffected youth? Please. I could write a "Mad Libs" script in about 5 minutes to crank out some songs just as deep. (Let's see, throw in some bitterness, heartbreak, some profanity so that the kids can think that they're shocking their parents, mix well, bake 15 minutes...). Anybody out there think that the Trench Coat Mafia or your average Goth type or your average nerd, isn't just as much a sheep as your average prep or jock. Well, by all means, go to the next Marilyn Manson concert or Linux InstallFest and please come explain the difference to me. It's the whole, "I'm unique! (just like everybody else)" thing.
Yeah, I know there are genuine cases of people getting raw deals out there, but a lot of the people here are much more judgemental than they'd like to think -- in truth, I believe that most "outcast" types are more judgemental than any other clique, even to the point of harping on just how judgemental they think all the other groups are. I see a lot of this foolish pride, badges of honor that these people think they wear because they think that they're too cool for anyone else to understand them. Truth is, nobody's all that hard to understand (any girl I'm dating being the exception to the rule), because way deep down in our psyches, we're really not all that different. Try swallowing your pride sometime and actually make an effort to get to know some people, because you never know when you might meet your next lifelong friend or lover. If you really are unhappy with your life, what do you honestly have to lose?
I couldn't care less about what the makers care about. I care about the quality of the game. Damn shame it's not available for your platform, though -- guess that's the price you pay for putting all your eggs in one basket. Especially when that basket has such poor application availability.:)
Ya know, Oscar Robinson was a damn good basketball player in his day, but I don't think there are too many teams that would take him as a player today. He's still a great person, but his best athletic days are long behind him.
Similarly, Raymond's better days of advocacy are long behind him, back around the Cathedral and Halloweens I and II days. Ever since then, it's seems like he's turned into a self-serving egomaniac who can't take one lick of criticism, committing one blunder after another.
Sure, he didn't do any damage with his post here, but I remember seeing at least a dozen other people discussing this much more effectively. Not to mention days ago. If someone's going to weigh in with their opinion so long after the fact, it better be good. This wasn't by a long shot. It was basically, "I am ESR, I have now come to allow you to listen to my infinite wisdom on the subject. Feel grateful, I command it!" What a boob. The guy only remains a player because people like Rob (or whoever posted it) take anything he says, no matter how inconsequential, no matter how many other people said it earlier and better, and elevate it to Topic status. It creates a self-fulfilling fame, like Zsa Zsa Gabor or Charles Nelson Reilly, where a person ends up being famous simply for being famous, and you eventually can't even remember what made them famous in the first place. Lame.
p>Good job, Eric! Way to take the same things that have been said over and over and over and try to sound meaningful! Wow, just how long did it take you to come up with that? I can just see you sitting there, rubbing your low and protruding forehead, trying to think just how you can win back all that respect you've lost because of your recent pettiness. Let's see, should I attack all those "kiddies" at Slashdot again, maybe that'll do it. Oh wait, I know! I'll attack Microsoft! Absolutely brilliant!
Nice try, Eric, but pretty transparent. I've gotta give this one a thumbs down and await Halloween Letter LXII or maybe I Quit IV, aka "But Mommy, I Use Linux Too So Why Does Everyone Hate Me?"
Yeah, I remember reading one conference report noting that he said this few times (news.com or zdnet, I forget). I found it surprising myself, in that it seemed particularly unclassy. It made me wonder if some recent incident sent him over the edge, because I agree that it didn't sound like him. Unfortunately, the article didn't place the quotes in any sort of context, and it doesn't seem like anyone's transcribed his keynote yet, so I'll just have to wait.
I'm sure all the kids in the audience loved it, but it's not going to win him any style points, and I've come to expect better from Linus.
For everyone worrying about bloat out there: Don't. It's going to be a pluggable module. That said, the mozilla developers really need to quit spreading themselves thin with these side projects and concentrate on just getting a Mozilla 1.0 out now. There is not one person out there who is going to use or not use Mozilla because it either has or is lacking a chat client. I know people are going to say that it's totally separate and won't distract from the main project development, and that everyone working on the chat client wouldn't have been working on the main project anyway, but I don't buy it. I have no doubt that this will delay mozilla further, and even if it's only one more day, IE's only going to gain more mindshare and marketshare. Good luck to all the guys who stuck with the project despite the resignations, but c'mon, focus on the main goal and get a 1.0 browser out.
Seriously, some great open source products came out years ago, but has there been anything original during Linux's lifetime? The number of inferior products directly ripped off from others (Harmony, KOffice, GNUstep, Stampede, Gimp, Linux itself, etc., etc.) is almost limitless, but any fresh ideas seem to have dried up. Just another good reason why Linux could never do the world domination thing -- it breeds a follower, rather than a leader, mentality.
Why don't they just use a Beowulf cluster instead!?
Cheers, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Great point; Linux advocacy is an embarrassment
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Linux Advocacy Hurts
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Thanks to Rob for the scoring system at Slashdot, which helps a little, but the fact remains that most reasonable advocacy replies in the Linux community get drowned out by uninformed ranting. This is especially true whenever the subject involves Microsoft -- the stars really shine, then. I especially loved the kernel scheduling on NT vs. Linux thread, hearing dozens of morons here say things like, "What's wrong with cron!?" Ahh yes, any thread involving CORBA is also likely to bring about some wonderfully clueless comments. Tip: Saying nothing is better than screaming "Beowulf!"
I'm content to leave my little P200 box running Linux in the corner, but man, it gets harder and harder to let anyone know what I've got running on it. The funny thing is to hear Linux folks rip on Windows or Mac users for being computer illiterate. LOL. I've used Linux for years, but I definitely feel more in common with the NT and Solaris (which I haven't even used as long as Linux) community, and while there are a lot of brilliant Linux guys out there, the massive number of idiots among you are leaving a big stain on the platform. Oh well, maybe the reason for Apple's EvangeList closing up was to allow Linux users to replace rabid Mac fans on the lunatic fringe. You and Team OS/2 should be happy together!:)
That's nice and all, but there's no supporting facts that the software industry can survive and prosper on support alone. It's truly amazing how many people around here take it as an immutable law, just because a handful of companies were able to make it work for them.
See, most people don't want to pay for support. They don't want to pay for software either, but when it's a choice between the two, they'd rather have something that they can easily use themselves instead of having to call for support every five minutes. And no, most people don't care whether or not they have the source code to their software. Most computer literate people don't even care about that, much less the masses.
The industry, as it always has, is moving toward making things simpler -- just look at the success of the iMac -- more expensive than the competition upfront, but simple enough that relatively few customers are going to need to pay for "support" later. Like it or not, the main reason why Linux is getting so much mainstream press is because the newbie journalists can use KDE or GNOME to try it out. In other words, because it was made simpler for those people. Simpler, meaning that there are fewer times that they would need to pester a knowledgeable friend or hop on IRC (the hobbyist's form of "support").
So, if we want a lot of people to be making money from Linux, there's going to have to be a Hell of a lot more demand for support than there is now. Unfortunately, that conflicts with the fact that everything's getting easier to use. Easier to use, less support needed, fewer support people needed, more free software programmers working at McDonalds between coding stints.
It would really be nice to have a real explanation of how this economic model can continue to work in a world of increasing simplicity -- preferably, and especially since we're talking about how the programmers' economic stability, not the revenue stream for those that leech off of them, something a little more substantial than the tired arguments of:
Bob Young/RedHat! What's he been coding, anyway?
Tim O'Reilly! So fond of the free software model that he sells a proprietary, closed-source web server and has made selling Windows books a higher priority within his company.
Beowulf! Oh c'mon, you know someone will argue that sooner or later!;-)
Wow, you're just so stupid that you'll never get it, so I can't explain it to you! / Do you work for Microsoft? / Do you work for Apple? As more legitimate questions get asked about the viability of this economic model, I see more and more advocates resorting to this one. Trust me guys, it ain't workin' -- just makes it look like you and your plan can't stand up under scrutiny.
People who write for Open-Source aren't savages who like to take other people's code and change the name on it to further their ego.
Tell that to Mr. Free Software himself, Richard Stallman, who throws a hissy fit whenever someone doesn't honor his attempt to change the name of Linux to GNU/Linux.
Nice concept and cute logo and all, but its database is woefully lacking. I did a couple of comparisions between it and Northern Light, AltaVista, HotBot, and Microsoft Search, and Google just couldn't hang. Now, if you're saying once they crawl more pages that it'll be the best, that's one thing, but right now it seems like a glorified Yahoo!, in that it's more likely to find the most popular sites, but come up empty on some detailed searches that the others can handle. Plus, it doesn't even have an "OR" operator, and I might've missed it, but I didn't see how I could search single domains. I'm not sure that this is even second-rate searching -- it definitely isn't first.
Why do I get the feeling that if the Google operators were Amiga advocates instead of Linux advocates, they wouldn't be getting all these swell reviews here at Slashdot? It's like the hoopla that goes one whenever someone actually comes out with a game for Linux --- no matter how inferior it is, or just plain bad, people rally around it to tell us how it's actually really really awesome. Anybody got a good term for this "Linux programmer welfare" phenomenon?
For the record, I prefer Northern Light, but still head to AltaVista first out of habit quite a bit --- by the time I remember that I had meant to go to NL, AV's already loaded. MS Search seemed pretty damn good at the queries I threw at it today --- I hadn't tried it out since it was in beta --- so I might have to play around with it some more and really push it. Hotbot's not bad, Excite has some ability, but its interface is just horrible; those are pretty much the only ones I bother to use anymore (although I might add MS Search).
...But I'm guessing that they went to print before people started jumping off the Tita^h^h^h^h Good Ship Mozilla. But hey, Javagator's probably a good example. Speaking of Java, this book could probably include every new thing that Corel has tried this decade.
I've seen a huge amount of Monday morning quarterbacking ever since JWZ's resignation was released. This basically boils down to people saying, "Yeah, well I knew it would never work because it didn't adhere to what was laid out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. My problems with this:
Where were all these people saying "I knew this would happen" back then? If they knew it would happen, I would've thought that there'd be more messages saying, "OK, this is unworkable, we need to scrap this and do our own thing according to CatB." But no, the most consistent message was, "This rawks! Microsoft is dead now! Wheeee!"
People need to quit acting like CatB is some immutable law. It's one man's theory -- a well thought-out one, but still just a theory that's never been proven. There have been plenty of things that sounded great in theory that don't hold up in practice. This might turn out to be one of them, or it might not, but either way it's way too early to be taking it as an ultimate truth.
OK, I'm a little tentative after getting smoked in Atlantic City last week, but I could be tempted if someone out there gives me some good odds on this fight. No guns allowed, of course!
On a side note, I'm a little disappointed how slow Slashdot was to report this. Freakin' _Mac advocacy groups_ have been talking about this for a week now, after Bruce posted Eric's threat to the APSL list. Heh, never thought I'd see the day when Mac newsgroups started scooping Slashdot on open source news.;-)
Man, you crack me up! How much is the Chinese government, I mean the Buddhist monks, I mean the Democratic Party, paying you to say that, anyway? Al could care less about open source, he's just trying to jump on a bandwagon. Anyone who coins a term as annoying as "Information Superhighway" deserves to be unemployed.
Seriously, nobody who really had "the/. attitude" would ever, ever honestly try to say that Al Gore had it, too. It's laughable and just makes you sound like a shill.
Intel has done this for years now, and I don't see what the big deal is. It's marketing, people, and Intel's proven that they know what they're doing when it comes to marketing. You don't want an Intel CPU, buy a different one. It's really not that hard.
Also, they don't just start yanking the money from companies--they work with them to let them know how to get in compliance. Finally, is it really necessary to scream "FUD!!" at every single computer-related thing that you don't like? It's getting tired.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't even know how to secure other users' profiles on an NT box, you don't really have any business talking about NT security, much less running an NT system. Making these sweeping statements about things you know nothing about honestly don't give me much faith in your ability to secure *nix boxes, either -- it's a good sign that instead of putting in some work to secure your system, you'll just fake your way through it and pray each night that the hackers don't have a field day on your ass. Good luck.
Another amusing note is that Slashdot, with that wonderful Linux security, has been hacked into at least once, while your pals at www.microsoft.com haven't.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call "bullshit" on your post. I like perl, even have fun when using it for work, but you seem to have a pretty unrealistic view of it, especially in relation to the strengths of other languages.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Sorry, Jon, but I couldn't take seriously your claims of Goths being so individualistic. Just because one gets kicks out of annoying Mommy and Daddy, claims of uniqueness fall by the wayside when you strive to look exactly like all your friends. The reason why it's so easy to play "spot the Goth" is precisely because there is so little individualism within that group. I guarantee that you'll find greater stylistic variation within the front rows of a Brittany Spears concert than you will in the front rows of a Cure show.
Mocking the mainstream does not equal individualism, especially when done in the same style as millions of other Goths. The Onion had an absolutely hilarious and spot-on article about this, where people who don't go around proclaiming or advertizing how "different" they are are actually the non-mainstream minority now. Lot of truth to that.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
SCO didn't support that Microsoft code for all that long. The issue was decided by the European Commission in late 1997, so I'm sure that SCO filed the complaint a while before then. SCO only owned Unix[tm] since 1995 (they bought the rights from Novell, who had bought them from AT&T, the company that made the original deal with Microsoft back in the '80s.), so we're probably talking two years max. I believe that SCO had been compaining to Microsoft for at least a year before they took them in front of the EC.
As for why they went to Europe, it's because the EC is a lot stricter in these big guy vs. little guy battles. I remember an article at the time even discussing how companies going outside the U.S. to air their complaints had become a trend even before this case. News.com or ZDnet had that article, just do a search on "SCO" AND "Microsoft" AND "european commission" and it should turn up at one of them.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
RedHat 6.0's been out for days now. Hell, I'm already on my second installation of it, and I'm the freakin' King of procrastination! :-P
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Gee, how long did those take, less than three months? Those were the alledgedly "release quality" products, so why are you trying to blunt the previous poster's remarks with your strawman argument of, "Gee, of course development releases have bugs!" Who said anything about the development releases?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yeah, I guess that's why SCO took Microsoft in front of the European Commission about 18 months ago to nullify a contract with them, and why one of their senior VPs referred to the incident as "dealing with the devil." Got any more FUD for us, Sparky?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
First off, a smart person or a nerd is not equivalent to an outcast. I've seen a lot of posts here with people blaming their poor high school social lives on their supposed intelligence. Well, as someone who played on two HS state champion soccer teams and won another HS state championship on the math team, I don't buy it. Yes, I know I'm tooting my own horn here, but it's the first time I've ever done it at Slashdot and I feel that it's necessary to explain my own experience in the subject.
No nerds ever gave me crap about being a jock, and no jocks gave me crap about being a nerd (I'm talking serious crap here, not throwing smack between friends), and it wasn't because I was bigger than most -- it's because I didn't mind getting to know people. Which isn't to say that everyone liked me, because some didn't. Actually, nobody on the math team ever suffered the afflictions that I'm reading here -- they were friendly and everybody I know thought that they were good guys, even if we never hung out together socially. (I mainly hung out with what most of you would call the jock/prep crowd, even if I have absolutely no fashion sense whatsoever.)
A lot of the comments I see here, though, are the same things I observed from the outcasts at our school: complaints that everyone rejected them, but possessing an attitude of being too cool/too smart to deign to hang out with anyone different from them. Basically, the same attitude that they're accusing others of. Oh, those guys on the football team are all a bunch of drunk, girl-abusing bullies -- they're all idiots and they'll get theirs in the real world when they're working for me! (Funny how it so rarely turns out this way...) Look at those preps -- bunch of teenybopper sluts who think Mariah Carey is deep or something. Hey, I hate Mariah's music as much as any "outcast" around here, but I don't look down my nose at people based on what they like to listen to. C'mon, you think Nine Inch Nails (who I like) or Alanis (who I don't) is deep just because they appeal to disaffected youth? Please. I could write a "Mad Libs" script in about 5 minutes to crank out some songs just as deep. (Let's see, throw in some bitterness, heartbreak, some profanity so that the kids can think that they're shocking their parents, mix well, bake 15 minutes...). Anybody out there think that the Trench Coat Mafia or your average Goth type or your average nerd, isn't just as much a sheep as your average prep or jock. Well, by all means, go to the next Marilyn Manson concert or Linux InstallFest and please come explain the difference to me. It's the whole, "I'm unique! (just like everybody else)" thing.
Yeah, I know there are genuine cases of people getting raw deals out there, but a lot of the people here are much more judgemental than they'd like to think -- in truth, I believe that most "outcast" types are more judgemental than any other clique, even to the point of harping on just how judgemental they think all the other groups are. I see a lot of this foolish pride, badges of honor that these people think they wear because they think that they're too cool for anyone else to understand them. Truth is, nobody's all that hard to understand (any girl I'm dating being the exception to the rule), because way deep down in our psyches, we're really not all that different. Try swallowing your pride sometime and actually make an effort to get to know some people, because you never know when you might meet your next lifelong friend or lover. If you really are unhappy with your life, what do you honestly have to lose?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I couldn't care less about what the makers care about. I care about the quality of the game. Damn shame it's not available for your platform, though -- guess that's the price you pay for putting all your eggs in one basket. Especially when that basket has such poor application availability. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Well, the kernel (which some people will say _is_ Linux, but I disagree) is about 15 million lines of code all by itself, no small number.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Ya know, Oscar Robinson was a damn good basketball player in his day, but I don't think there are too many teams that would take him as a player today. He's still a great person, but his best athletic days are long behind him.
Similarly, Raymond's better days of advocacy are long behind him, back around the Cathedral and Halloweens I and II days. Ever since then, it's seems like he's turned into a self-serving egomaniac who can't take one lick of criticism, committing one blunder after another.
Sure, he didn't do any damage with his post here, but I remember seeing at least a dozen other people discussing this much more effectively. Not to mention days ago. If someone's going to weigh in with their opinion so long after the fact, it better be good. This wasn't by a long shot. It was basically, "I am ESR, I have now come to allow you to listen to my infinite wisdom on the subject. Feel grateful, I command it!" What a boob. The guy only remains a player because people like Rob (or whoever posted it) take anything he says, no matter how inconsequential, no matter how many other people said it earlier and better, and elevate it to Topic status. It creates a self-fulfilling fame, like Zsa Zsa Gabor or Charles Nelson Reilly, where a person ends up being famous simply for being famous, and you eventually can't even remember what made them famous in the first place. Lame.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Nice try, Eric, but pretty transparent. I've gotta give this one a thumbs down and await Halloween Letter LXII or maybe I Quit IV, aka "But Mommy, I Use Linux Too So Why Does Everyone Hate Me?"
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yeah, I remember reading one conference report noting that he said this few times (news.com or zdnet, I forget). I found it surprising myself, in that it seemed particularly unclassy. It made me wonder if some recent incident sent him over the edge, because I agree that it didn't sound like him. Unfortunately, the article didn't place the quotes in any sort of context, and it doesn't seem like anyone's transcribed his keynote yet, so I'll just have to wait.
I'm sure all the kids in the audience loved it, but it's not going to win him any style points, and I've come to expect better from Linus.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
For everyone worrying about bloat out there: Don't. It's going to be a pluggable module. That said, the mozilla developers really need to quit spreading themselves thin with these side projects and concentrate on just getting a Mozilla 1.0 out now. There is not one person out there who is going to use or not use Mozilla because it either has or is lacking a chat client. I know people are going to say that it's totally separate and won't distract from the main project development, and that everyone working on the chat client wouldn't have been working on the main project anyway, but I don't buy it. I have no doubt that this will delay mozilla further, and even if it's only one more day, IE's only going to gain more mindshare and marketshare. Good luck to all the guys who stuck with the project despite the resignations, but c'mon, focus on the main goal and get a 1.0 browser out.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Seriously, some great open source products came out years ago, but has there been anything original during Linux's lifetime? The number of inferior products directly ripped off from others (Harmony, KOffice, GNUstep, Stampede, Gimp, Linux itself, etc., etc.) is almost limitless, but any fresh ideas seem to have dried up. Just another good reason why Linux could never do the world domination thing -- it breeds a follower, rather than a leader, mentality.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Why don't they just use a Beowulf cluster instead!?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Thanks to Rob for the scoring system at Slashdot, which helps a little, but the fact remains that most reasonable advocacy replies in the Linux community get drowned out by uninformed ranting. This is especially true whenever the subject involves Microsoft -- the stars really shine, then. I especially loved the kernel scheduling on NT vs. Linux thread, hearing dozens of morons here say things like, "What's wrong with cron!?" Ahh yes, any thread involving CORBA is also likely to bring about some wonderfully clueless comments. Tip: Saying nothing is better than screaming "Beowulf!"
I'm content to leave my little P200 box running Linux in the corner, but man, it gets harder and harder to let anyone know what I've got running on it. The funny thing is to hear Linux folks rip on Windows or Mac users for being computer illiterate. LOL. I've used Linux for years, but I definitely feel more in common with the NT and Solaris (which I haven't even used as long as Linux) community, and while there are a lot of brilliant Linux guys out there, the massive number of idiots among you are leaving a big stain on the platform. Oh well, maybe the reason for Apple's EvangeList closing up was to allow Linux users to replace rabid Mac fans on the lunatic fringe. You and Team OS/2 should be happy together! :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
That's nice and all, but there's no supporting facts that the software industry can survive and prosper on support alone. It's truly amazing how many people around here take it as an immutable law, just because a handful of companies were able to make it work for them.
See, most people don't want to pay for support. They don't want to pay for software either, but when it's a choice between the two, they'd rather have something that they can easily use themselves instead of having to call for support every five minutes. And no, most people don't care whether or not they have the source code to their software. Most computer literate people don't even care about that, much less the masses.
The industry, as it always has, is moving toward making things simpler -- just look at the success of the iMac -- more expensive than the competition upfront, but simple enough that relatively few customers are going to need to pay for "support" later. Like it or not, the main reason why Linux is getting so much mainstream press is because the newbie journalists can use KDE or GNOME to try it out. In other words, because it was made simpler for those people. Simpler, meaning that there are fewer times that they would need to pester a knowledgeable friend or hop on IRC (the hobbyist's form of "support").
So, if we want a lot of people to be making money from Linux, there's going to have to be a Hell of a lot more demand for support than there is now. Unfortunately, that conflicts with the fact that everything's getting easier to use. Easier to use, less support needed, fewer support people needed, more free software programmers working at McDonalds between coding stints.
It would really be nice to have a real explanation of how this economic model can continue to work in a world of increasing simplicity -- preferably, and especially since we're talking about how the programmers' economic stability, not the revenue stream for those that leech off of them, something a little more substantial than the tired arguments of:
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Tell that to Mr. Free Software himself, Richard Stallman, who throws a hissy fit whenever someone doesn't honor his attempt to change the name of Linux to GNU/Linux.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Nice concept and cute logo and all, but its database is woefully lacking. I did a couple of comparisions between it and Northern Light, AltaVista, HotBot, and Microsoft Search, and Google just couldn't hang. Now, if you're saying once they crawl more pages that it'll be the best, that's one thing, but right now it seems like a glorified Yahoo!, in that it's more likely to find the most popular sites, but come up empty on some detailed searches that the others can handle. Plus, it doesn't even have an "OR" operator, and I might've missed it, but I didn't see how I could search single domains. I'm not sure that this is even second-rate searching -- it definitely isn't first.
Why do I get the feeling that if the Google operators were Amiga advocates instead of Linux advocates, they wouldn't be getting all these swell reviews here at Slashdot? It's like the hoopla that goes one whenever someone actually comes out with a game for Linux --- no matter how inferior it is, or just plain bad, people rally around it to tell us how it's actually really really awesome. Anybody got a good term for this "Linux programmer welfare" phenomenon?
For the record, I prefer Northern Light, but still head to AltaVista first out of habit quite a bit --- by the time I remember that I had meant to go to NL, AV's already loaded. MS Search seemed pretty damn good at the queries I threw at it today --- I hadn't tried it out since it was in beta --- so I might have to play around with it some more and really push it. Hotbot's not bad, Excite has some ability, but its interface is just horrible; those are pretty much the only ones I bother to use anymore (although I might add MS Search).
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ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
...But I'm guessing that they went to print before people started jumping off the Tita^h^h^h^h Good Ship Mozilla. But hey, Javagator's probably a good example. Speaking of Java, this book could probably include every new thing that Corel has tried this decade.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've seen a huge amount of Monday morning quarterbacking ever since JWZ's resignation was released. This basically boils down to people saying, "Yeah, well I knew it would never work because it didn't adhere to what was laid out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. My problems with this:
- Where were all these people saying "I knew this would happen" back then? If they knew it would happen, I would've thought that there'd be more messages saying, "OK, this is unworkable, we need to scrap this and do our own thing according to CatB." But no, the most consistent message was, "This rawks! Microsoft is dead now! Wheeee!"
- People need to quit acting like CatB is some immutable law. It's one man's theory -- a well thought-out one, but still just a theory that's never been proven. There have been plenty of things that sounded great in theory that don't hold up in practice. This might turn out to be one of them, or it might not, but either way it's way too early to be taking it as an ultimate truth.
Cheers,ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
OK, I'm a little tentative after getting smoked in Atlantic City last week, but I could be tempted if someone out there gives me some good odds on this fight. No guns allowed, of course!
On a side note, I'm a little disappointed how slow Slashdot was to report this. Freakin' _Mac advocacy groups_ have been talking about this for a week now, after Bruce posted Eric's threat to the APSL list. Heh, never thought I'd see the day when Mac newsgroups started scooping Slashdot on open source news. ;-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Man, you crack me up! How much is the Chinese government, I mean the Buddhist monks, I mean the Democratic Party, paying you to say that, anyway? Al could care less about open source, he's just trying to jump on a bandwagon. Anyone who coins a term as annoying as "Information Superhighway" deserves to be unemployed.
Seriously, nobody who really had "the /. attitude" would ever, ever honestly try to say that Al Gore had it, too. It's laughable and just makes you sound like a shill.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Intel has done this for years now, and I don't see what the big deal is. It's marketing, people, and Intel's proven that they know what they're doing when it comes to marketing. You don't want an Intel CPU, buy a different one. It's really not that hard.
Also, they don't just start yanking the money from companies--they work with them to let them know how to get in compliance. Finally, is it really necessary to scream "FUD!!" at every single computer-related thing that you don't like? It's getting tired.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com