Yes, ASP is infinitely extendible. So is Excel for that matter. In both cases you VBscript can call methods of COM objects that can be written in C++ and can therefore do pretty much anything you want.
It's a good scripting model, live with it. In fact, I can write a COM object in Perl and call its methods from ASP. Fun fun fun.
"Imagine the impact of millions of fresh-thinking, energized youth -armed with the most powerful tools ever created-hitting the work force"
This happens every generation. I don't see what's new.
However, the perception of human resources as capital assets rather than an expense is very important. Those of us with even a limited remit on the commercial side of business know that expense and capital are two very different things. I know that if I could get management to think of people as a capital resource our engineering team at least would be all the better for it.
However, the article seems to think that the entire next generation will be these media-savvy uber-workers. They won't. There will be just as many people working in light industry for minimum wages, just as many short order chefs and just as many petrol station cashiers.
I've speed read the whole deal and find it seems to be lacking some key stuff:
1. Excerpts. What if a print magazine is doing an article on Widgets, and wants to quote two paragraphs from the GDL'd Widgets Manual. Is it possible? Does the Magazine have to GDL itself? GDL that article? Since the magazine has a circulation of >100 does that have an impact?
2. Private use. Some guy wants to take a whole GDL document, modify it with his comments and give it to the 115 people in his lecture class. Does he also have to give them floppies since the distribution is > 100?
3. Inclusions. Some guy is writing a GDL'd document and wants to include a longish section of a non-GDL'd document. Is this illegal, as it would be with code under GPL? Suppose I want to quote a large chunk of text that is genuinely public domain. Does the license now infect that text in other places?
I was never a massive fan of GPL, although it has its uses. I think GDL will have its uses too, but it is a minority license suitable only for a certain set of technical documentation.
This comment is actually pretty valuable. These days many sites have dynamic content when they could easily get away with a batch job run once an hour or even once a day.
The acceleration gain is greater than any other solution mentioned.
Also, people sometimes think 'batch' == 'old', probably because batch makes people think of MSDOS batch files. You can actually get quites sophisticated with batch jobs - I've designed batch daemons that watch the content - when enough of it is new they kick of the batch job, so if a major update to the underlying db occurs, the content will reflect it quickly.
Its an option that you should consider fully. Don't just write it off as old or clumsy or not cool.
When we had 'free software' it compiled on pretty much everything that smelt of Unix and often on things that didn't.
Now, much of the latest and greatest 'open source' software seems to think that cross platform means RPMS for Red Hat AND SuSE. It really annoys me. I see shit like "This was designed as a cross platform project, so it should work on Linux and *BSD".
Increasingly, the quality of applications can be linked to the number of supported platforms and the number of geeky libraries required. The more platforms and fewer libraries, the better.
My definition of cross platform does NOT include requirements such as:
1. The GNU version of tar 2. The GNU version of make 3. Any particular kind of C compiler beyond specifying ANSI compliance or other standards compliance
At work I have a very well looked after Sparc-solaris 2.7 box. Free software that doesn't build on it, and whose readmes only talk about Linux goes straight in the bin. Yes, I do email the authors so they can fix it. No I don't immediately sign up as the official Solaris porter for the project and fix it myself. Yes I do like to point out that if they'd written it in Perl* they wouldn't have these problems:-)
The traditional argument has been that the developers don't have access to the wide range of platforms to test on. Cynics like me might point out that SHURELY wonderful amazing open source software will never suffer from such problems because it has 2.6 billion potential developers who have every known flavour of every hardware to test it on. Sure...
So, it would be nice to see a place with some HP-UX machines, some RS/6000 gear, and some Irix boxes so that people can actually write cross platform code. Or, to be more accurate, so that people would no longer have an excuse when they didn't write cross platform code.
*Substitute Java for Perl if you feel that way inclined:-)
Of all the companies that I've dealt with on the net, Verisign was the worst.
I phoned them once asking why my certificate registration was taking weeks. They said there was a paperwork problem and they'd phoned me four times trying to get hold of me.
Turns out that Verisign only phone during office hours. US office hours. And no, they never tried to use email.
"We have a long history in this country of distrust of the governments, and for good reason."
You could say that Europe has a long history of distrusting corporations, which the US does not. I'd rather have the government reading my email than NewsCorp or WalMart. Any day. See also the strict data protection and privacy laws in Europe that do not exist at all in the US. It's a cultural difference
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
Well, Franklin was a genius, but this overused quote is nonetheless trite. My definition of essential liberty is not the same as yours (or, indeed, Franklins), which is very much to the point here.
Errr - I think you're missing the point. This card is for _out of band_ access. So, even if you whole machine is non-booting you can still go in and play with the bios from remote.
Of course you don't want a sea of serial cabling, so use a console server that acts as a gateway between TCP/IP traffic and serial connections.
These things only cost about $100/ port, and are prettymuch vital for anyone running a machine room or server farm.
OK, I shouldn't have used the word 'desktop' in my post, but you end up making the same mistake.
MacOS X is not just a desktop. It is a deskop, a UI layer, a font handling layer, a rendering layer, an all the other things X windows does, as well as all the things a wm does.
You can't easily build a MacOS X clone on X windows, becuase you can build something good and modern ontop of something that crap and ancient. See also Windows built ontop of DOS and 1001 other examples throughout computer history.
Until people recognise that X is out of date and useless, and recognise that someone is going to have to do LOTS OF REALLY BORING WORK to replace it with something good, then the KDE and GNOME folks are wasting their time.
Yes, great, X works nicely over a network. That it. That's _all_ it does nicely. We need to re-create the whole X windows layer properly. By all means keep the wm independance and keep the remote features, but lets have a font system that works, a colour system that works, a layout system that works, a window system that works better, and a rendering system that doesn't crawl and maybe even uses vectors.
The only thing worse that X Windows pasting is X Windows font handling.
Oh, and X Windows colour handling is quite dire, too. As is X Windows.... oh never mind.
I guess the best thing you can say about X is that the spec is minimal enough that it leaves plenty of room for the different window managers to screw things up in their own unique way.
Remember - you haven't lived till you seen a computer showing 5 windows all with different types of scroll bar. Hmmmmmmmmm, lovely.
I saw an ploughman once who was expending a huge amount of energy making his old horse go faster. He kicked it, and shouted and screamed, and whispered in its ear, and tickled its tail, and spurred it and whipped it and waved a carrot in front of it. But, the horse was dead, so it made no difference.
We can keep on showing each other screenshots of 'the next amazing Linux desktop' and we can revel in the fact that someone somewhere has finally cracked transparent anti-aliased PDF support and found a way to have radial scroll bars and a three dimensional colour picker widget.
But none of it will make any difference, because X-windows is already dead. It died a while back when someone thought "gee, I know, let's make a desktop whose strengths come not from the elegance of the theoretical design of the comittee that programmed it, but from its usefulness to the world at large, and the average human being in particular."
So, from where I'm standing, MacOS X, if it ever gets released for Intel, has got it in the bag.
Re:PKI and other issues
on
SSH v. SRP
·
· Score: 1
The security of the system is in the encryption of the private key. The authentication is that anyone with the private key, has to be me (is assumed). So...if my key has a passphrase...only me can ever open the private key and use it... even though it is stored on multiple machines (hopefully moved to them in a secure manner) only I can unlock it on any of these machines.
Doh! I said 'public key' in my original post and meant private key.
Anyway, my point was meant to be that if the private key is only protected by a passphrase we are back where we started with the weakness of passwords/phrases. I don't want to leave copies of my private key all over the place and protect them with a password. I want to keep my private key in my wallet and protected it that way IN ADDITION to a password.
Re:PKI and other issues
on
SSH v. SRP
·
· Score: 5
Too many people either fail to make the distinction between authentication and encryption, or else feel that if you fix encryption then you fix authentication.
This latter belief appears to stem from the very shortsighted supposition that if you have an unguessable (not in crack files) password and always send it encrypted you'll be OK.
There are so many ways to get a password its not true. Passwords, while a good start, are not the be-all and end all of authorisation.
The public key authentication mechanism of SSH actually makes things worse, because the key is (effectively) tied to one or more computers rather being tied to the individual, which is almost always the wrong approach. Most authentication systems are trying to authenticate people, not computers - the fact that the same people often use the same computers is merely convenient - convenient for the computer system not the user.
Worse still, the public key, being digital, is easily copied without the owner knowing. Sure, it's password protected, but that just brings us back to passwords again.
So, for authentication I much prefer physical card based systems - i.e. two factor systems. You know when you've lost your card, you can keep track of who has cards, and you can't replicate stealthily.
SecurID is nice because it integrates well with existing systems - no special card reading hardware needed. Other such systems exist, too.
Sure, we need the encryption as well, but simply sending ye olde unix password over an encrypted channel is no magic solution to safe authentication.
So it seems what causes bloat and fragility in MS apps is not marketing driven focus on looks, but rather unrestrained "wouldn't it be neat if".
So, why is OpenSource largely proof against this?
First, because projects have a definite zeitgeist and maintainers who enforce it. Sendmail won't include a tetris patch, and AbiWord won't add email-reader functionality just because someone created it and showed them it could be done.
I disagree. You give the example of Sendmail not having a tetris patch - well, gee. I mean MS don't have tetris in Outlook, either. So what. You give the example of AbiWord not having email-reader functionality - fine, last I checked MS word couldn't read email either.
What's that you say? You can compose and view emails using Word as part of Outlook? Well yes - but that's not bloat on a single application, that's the existance of a working system wide object model, something Unix has never had and is only just starting to look at with Gnome and KDE. Once this object model exists, it becomes so easy to add one bit of functionality to every app that uses the object model, bloat happens all over the shop - except that such object systems make the notion of 'application' rather redundant. It is not a case of applications having too many features, it is a case of applications having too many embedded objects switched on at once.
I think Enlightenment is bloat on a stick. As is Emacs. I think OS stuff is highly susceptible to bloat, the only thing that saves it sometimes is that the original structures are good enough that they don't crumble under the weight of the feature creep. Yes, some things like bind have managed to resist much of this, but for alot of OS projects the only thing that stops them being as bloated as their MS counterpats is lack of developers...
"The relevant results will come up immediately because it will have a very high relevance coefficient. "
That's not really true, is it. MSDN and technet are pretty good. It's depressing the number of times you search for a problem on the net and find 50 pointers to different archives of the same mailing list, all of which reveal someone with exactly the same problem as you - someone who got no response from the mailing list beyond a couple of 'me too' followups.
More to the point, MSDN/Technet is simply more convenient. There's alot to be said for putting some of that stuff on CD-Rom and giving it a real search engine. Imagine something like all the documentation of every app in a standard Linux distribution on CD-Rom. With a proper search engine. Properly searchable Man pages would be a start, but then add to that the contents of every user-foo and admin-foo and devel-foo mailing list archive for each application. Then add to that all the documentation branches of the applications' respective home pages. Then add all the howto's and the rest.
Then update the CD-set quarterly or bi-monthly. Sounds like a useful thing to me.
If I had to choose MSDN style or Internet style, I'd probably go for Internet - but both together would be much nicer than either on it's own. Sitting around saying "No Linux documentation? Just search the ***ing net man" is actually not too helpful.
So, gratz to the LDP, but if anyone's looking for business plan I'd go for a Linux Technet CD-Rom set. Errr, only I use Solaris at work. But otherwise I would:-)
Yes, the demand for people with my particular skill set (Unix-TCP/IP + management knowledge) is massive. I am in the position of being able to walk out of my job at any time and get a new one with the same base salary in about a fortnight or less. Of course such a move would probably not look so hot on my c.v. but the fact that I can do it (and management knows I can) has a big impact.
Also, it won't last. I give it about another five years at most, before either the market floods or business practices become more streamlined and the need to hire loads of people reduces.
I'm rare, because when I was 16 and starting to choose career options, Unix was a black art as practised by a couple of distinctly weird kids in school. Everyone laughed at computer nerds. Now, the 16 year olds are hearing of cool entrepreneurs making easy fortunes. Many will have email addresses at home. The school I went to already has email for every child - where I once looked for my sports timetable on a pinboard they have it on an intranet.
So, when those children get into the market place, it'll be a whole different ball game - and of course all my skills will be obsolete by then, too:-). I'm _really_ looking forward to it!
That is the heart of it, really. The people who work daft hours do it because they want to, or because they start out that way and then feel guilty about cutting back.
We (skilled computer types) are a very rare resource compared with demand and can easily set reasonable hours as part of our package, especially at big companies. I leave the office at 5.30 every day, unless I'm doing something fun and I'd rather stay late to finish it in one go.
Yes, at small companies people tend to work later to meet the deadlines. But that's because the industry is incapable of good project management, and because in many small (and large) companies employees feel very loyal, and really want to ship stuff on time.
There are very few places (in my experience of the UK market) that will have a problem with someone who says 'Sorry, I have a family and I only work my contracted hours'. Of course, if they then also spend 2 hours a day reading slashdot, then sure the boss won't be happy.
And that's another thing. Alot of people work very inefficiently, so the hours stretch out. Think of all the times you started out looking for documentation on a troublesome driver and ended up spending an hour reading about the latest developments in something else.
So, yes, there are lots of people who stay in the office alot, but it's not a case of exploitation (of course in some cases it may be, but not as an industry).
VA Linux to Acquire Andover.Net in Most Significant Transaction in Linux History; Combined Network Creates the Leading Internet Destination in the Linux and Open Source Community
Politically incorrect??!?! I think in the UK your opinion is the common and the politically correct one. Taiwan good, China bad, basically.
However, I am always a cynic when it comes to US foreign policy. I think the U.S. is as worried by Taiwans power in respect to chip manufacture as it is worried by China's power in respect to Taiwan.
The more Taiwan relies on the US for defence, the less willing they will be to complain about the US's protectionist actions that favour its domestic chip manufacturing business.
I'm not suggesting that the US is currently that protectionist WRT chip fabs - but given the way it behaves in other industries (agriculture being the big one of late), it's only a matter of time.
Interesting. I used Automony long ago and hadn't come across it since. I wasn using it on a very small dataset, so I fear it didn't really show the best of its abilities, but it was interesting. Bit expensive though...
"Any Mac users in/. care to comment on the strengths of audio creation/manipulation on the Mac?"
Not a user but used to work in a Mac shop. Yes, they lead the field in low-medium end digital video, most 2D image manipulation, digital photography, compositing, DTP, and typesetting.
Partly this is cultural, partly technological, partly software support.
What's interesting to me is how well entrenched this is. The fact that Photoshop on a PC is nigh identical to Photoshop on a Mac will not make anyone switch, despite the obvious advantage of integrating with all the other PC users in the company. There are good reasons for this - graphic designers use their computers more intensely than almost anyone - certainly as much as hardcore programmers. They should be given the tools they prefer, and I.T. should deal with it.
As a non-Mac person who had to design an IT strategy around them, I know (a bit) about what I'm talking about.
Oh dear, I seem to be on a Veritas advocacy mission today.
If you want good backup, get Veritas Netbackup. It's good. You pay for it. About 6000UKPS for the server license and about 120UKPS for each client license.
It's the best there is IMHO and so far above anything open source that it's not even funny.
Sadly, there seems to be nothing good in the middle between Veritas and the like at the top and BRU and the like at the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, ASP is infinitely extendible. So is Excel for that matter. In both cases you VBscript can call methods of COM objects that can be written in C++ and can therefore do pretty much anything you want.
It's a good scripting model, live with it. In fact, I can write a COM object in Perl and call its methods from ASP. Fun fun fun.
"Imagine the impact of millions of fresh-thinking, energized youth -armed with the most powerful tools ever created-hitting the work force"
This happens every generation. I don't see what's new.
However, the perception of human resources as capital assets rather than an expense is very important. Those of us with even a limited remit on the commercial side of business know that expense and capital are two very different things. I know that if I could get management to think of people as a capital resource our engineering team at least would be all the better for it.
However, the article seems to think that the entire next generation will be these media-savvy uber-workers. They won't. There will be just as many people working in light industry for minimum wages, just as many short order chefs and just as many petrol station cashiers.
It's only a revolution of the yuppies.
The cables break after while due to continental drift. I think trans-atlantic cables generally last around 20 years and then they are duds.
The very first few trans-atlantic cables were dredged up for repairs, but I don't believe that this is done any more.
I too have heard of shark problems, esp. goblin sharks, but I imagine modern cables are proof against this.
I've speed read the whole deal and find it seems to be lacking some key stuff:
1. Excerpts. What if a print magazine is doing an article on Widgets, and wants to quote two paragraphs from the GDL'd Widgets Manual. Is it possible? Does the Magazine have to GDL itself? GDL that article? Since the magazine has a circulation of >100 does that have an impact?
2. Private use. Some guy wants to take a whole GDL document, modify it with his comments and give it to the 115 people in his lecture class. Does he also have to give them floppies since the distribution is > 100?
3. Inclusions. Some guy is writing a GDL'd document and wants to include a longish section of a non-GDL'd document. Is this illegal, as it would be with code under GPL? Suppose I want to quote a large chunk of text that is genuinely public domain. Does the license now infect that text in other places?
I was never a massive fan of GPL, although it has its uses. I think GDL will have its uses too, but it is a minority license suitable only for a certain set of technical documentation.
This comment is actually pretty valuable. These days many sites have dynamic content when they could easily get away with a batch job run once an hour or even once a day.
The acceleration gain is greater than any other solution mentioned.
Also, people sometimes think 'batch' == 'old', probably because batch makes people think of MSDOS batch files. You can actually get quites sophisticated with batch jobs - I've designed batch daemons that watch the content - when enough of it is new they kick of the batch job, so if a major update to the underlying db occurs, the content will reflect it quickly.
Its an option that you should consider fully. Don't just write it off as old or clumsy or not cool.
Good to see that /. is back on track notifying us of software releases that we'd _never_ have noticed otherwise.
This is VERY true.
:-)
:-)
When we had 'free software' it compiled on pretty much everything that smelt of Unix and often on things that didn't.
Now, much of the latest and greatest 'open source' software seems to think that cross platform means RPMS for Red Hat AND SuSE. It really annoys me. I see shit like "This was designed as a cross platform project, so it should work on Linux and *BSD".
Increasingly, the quality of applications can be linked to the number of supported platforms and the number of geeky libraries required. The more platforms and fewer libraries, the better.
My definition of cross platform does NOT include requirements such as:
1. The GNU version of tar
2. The GNU version of make
3. Any particular kind of C compiler beyond specifying ANSI compliance or other standards compliance
At work I have a very well looked after Sparc-solaris 2.7 box. Free software that doesn't build on it, and whose readmes only talk about Linux goes straight in the bin. Yes, I do email the authors so they can fix it. No I don't immediately sign up as the official Solaris porter for the project and fix it myself. Yes I do like to point out that if they'd written it in Perl* they wouldn't have these problems
The traditional argument has been that the developers don't have access to the wide range of platforms to test on. Cynics like me might point out that SHURELY wonderful amazing open source software will never suffer from such problems because it has 2.6 billion potential developers who have every known flavour of every hardware to test it on. Sure...
So, it would be nice to see a place with some HP-UX machines, some RS/6000 gear, and some Irix boxes so that people can actually write cross platform code. Or, to be more accurate, so that people would no longer have an excuse when they didn't write cross platform code.
*Substitute Java for Perl if you feel that way inclined
Of all the companies that I've dealt with on the net, Verisign was the worst.
I phoned them once asking why my certificate registration was taking weeks. They said there was a paperwork problem and they'd phoned me four times trying to get hold of me.
Turns out that Verisign only phone during office hours. US office hours. And no, they never tried to use email.
"We have a long history in this country of distrust of the governments, and for good reason."
You could say that Europe has a long history of distrusting corporations, which the US does not. I'd rather have the government reading my email than NewsCorp or WalMart. Any day. See also the strict data protection and privacy laws in Europe that do not exist at all in the US. It's a cultural difference
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
Well, Franklin was a genius, but this overused quote is nonetheless trite. My definition of essential liberty is not the same as yours (or, indeed, Franklins), which is very much to the point here.
Errr - I think you're missing the point. This card is for _out of band_ access. So, even if you whole machine is non-booting you can still go in and play with the bios from remote.
Of course you don't want a sea of serial cabling, so use a console server that acts as a gateway between TCP/IP traffic and serial connections.
These things only cost about $100/ port, and are prettymuch vital for anyone running a machine room or server farm.
Err let's see:
/. does not use CGI - it uses a preprocessor (mod_perl) which shares memory and caches compiled Perl bytecode.
/. uses a seperate server for static content (images)
/. content, I'm not sure that a accelerator proxy would be such a big help.
/. uses no CGI in time critical areas, and mod_perl is in many ways superior to fast-CGI.
/. code being scary I'll take your word for it. I can't for the life of me see what's wrong with using DBI though.
1.
2. Last I checked
3. Given (2) above and the highly dynamic nature of
4. As I said
As for
OK, I shouldn't have used the word 'desktop' in my post, but you end up making the same mistake.
MacOS X is not just a desktop. It is a deskop, a UI layer, a font handling layer, a rendering layer, an all the other things X windows does, as well as all the things a wm does.
You can't easily build a MacOS X clone on X windows, becuase you can build something good and modern ontop of something that crap and ancient. See also Windows built ontop of DOS and 1001 other examples throughout computer history.
Until people recognise that X is out of date and useless, and recognise that someone is going to have to do LOTS OF REALLY BORING WORK to replace it with something good, then the KDE and GNOME folks are wasting their time.
Yes, great, X works nicely over a network. That it. That's _all_ it does nicely. We need to re-create the whole X windows layer properly. By all means keep the wm independance and keep the remote features, but lets have a font system that works, a colour system that works, a layout system that works, a window system that works better, and a rendering system that doesn't crawl and maybe even uses vectors.
The only thing worse that X Windows pasting is X Windows font handling.
.... oh never mind.
Oh, and X Windows colour handling is quite dire, too. As is X Windows
I guess the best thing you can say about X is that the spec is minimal enough that it leaves plenty of room for the different window managers to screw things up in their own unique way.
Remember - you haven't lived till you seen a computer showing 5 windows all with different types of scroll bar. Hmmmmmmmmm, lovely.
I saw an ploughman once who was expending a huge amount of energy making his old horse go faster. He kicked it, and shouted and screamed, and whispered in its ear, and tickled its tail, and spurred it and whipped it and waved a carrot in front of it. But, the horse was dead, so it made no difference.
We can keep on showing each other screenshots of 'the next amazing Linux desktop' and we can revel in the fact that someone somewhere has finally cracked transparent anti-aliased PDF support and found a way to have radial scroll bars and a three dimensional colour picker widget.
But none of it will make any difference, because X-windows is already dead. It died a while back when someone thought "gee, I know, let's make a desktop whose strengths come not from the elegance of the theoretical design of the comittee that programmed it, but from its usefulness to the world at large, and the average human being in particular."
So, from where I'm standing, MacOS X, if it ever gets released for Intel, has got it in the bag.
The security of the system is in the encryption
of the private key. The authentication is that
anyone with the private key, has to be me (is
assumed). So...if my key has a passphrase...only
me can ever open the private key and use it...
even though it is stored on multiple machines
(hopefully moved to them in a secure manner)
only I can unlock it on any of these machines.
Doh! I said 'public key' in my original post and meant private key.
Anyway, my point was meant to be that if the private key is only protected by a passphrase we are back where we started with the weakness of passwords/phrases. I don't want to leave copies of my private key all over the place and protect them with a password. I want to keep my private key in my wallet and protected it that way IN ADDITION to a password.
Too many people either fail to make the distinction between authentication and encryption, or else feel that if you fix encryption then you fix authentication.
This latter belief appears to stem from the very shortsighted supposition that if you have an unguessable (not in crack files) password and always send it encrypted you'll be OK.
There are so many ways to get a password its not true. Passwords, while a good start, are not the be-all and end all of authorisation.
The public key authentication mechanism of SSH actually makes things worse, because the key is (effectively) tied to one or more computers rather being tied to the individual, which is almost always the wrong approach. Most authentication systems are trying to authenticate people, not computers - the fact that the same people often use the same computers is merely convenient - convenient for the computer system not the user.
Worse still, the public key, being digital, is easily copied without the owner knowing. Sure, it's password protected, but that just brings us back to passwords again.
So, for authentication I much prefer physical card based systems - i.e. two factor systems. You know when you've lost your card, you can keep track of who has cards, and you can't replicate stealthily.
SecurID is nice because it integrates well with existing systems - no special card reading hardware needed. Other such systems exist, too.
Sure, we need the encryption as well, but simply sending ye olde unix password over an encrypted channel is no magic solution to safe authentication.
So, why is OpenSource largely proof against this?
First, because projects have a definite zeitgeist and maintainers who enforce it. Sendmail won't include a tetris patch, and AbiWord won't add email-reader functionality just because someone created it and showed them it could be done.
I disagree. You give the example of Sendmail not having a tetris patch - well, gee. I mean MS don't have tetris in Outlook, either. So what. You give the example of AbiWord not having email-reader functionality - fine, last I checked MS word couldn't read email either.
What's that you say? You can compose and view emails using Word as part of Outlook? Well yes - but that's not bloat on a single application, that's the existance of a working system wide object model, something Unix has never had and is only just starting to look at with Gnome and KDE. Once this object model exists, it becomes so easy to add one bit of functionality to every app that uses the object model, bloat happens all over the shop - except that such object systems make the notion of 'application' rather redundant. It is not a case of applications having too many features, it is a case of applications having too many embedded objects switched on at once.
I think Enlightenment is bloat on a stick. As is Emacs. I think OS stuff is highly susceptible to bloat, the only thing that saves it sometimes is that the original structures are good enough that they don't crumble under the weight of the feature creep. Yes, some things like bind have managed to resist much of this, but for alot of OS projects the only thing that stops them being as bloated as their MS counterpats is lack of developers...
"The relevant results will come up immediately because it will have a very high relevance coefficient. "
:-)
That's not really true, is it. MSDN and technet are pretty good. It's depressing the number of times you search for a problem on the net and find 50 pointers to different archives of the same mailing list, all of which reveal someone with exactly the same problem as you - someone who got no response from the mailing list beyond a couple of 'me too' followups.
More to the point, MSDN/Technet is simply more convenient. There's alot to be said for putting some of that stuff on CD-Rom and giving it a real search engine. Imagine something like all the documentation of every app in a standard Linux distribution on CD-Rom. With a proper search engine. Properly searchable Man pages would be a start, but then add to that the contents of every user-foo and admin-foo and devel-foo mailing list archive for each application. Then add to that all the documentation branches of the applications' respective home pages. Then add all the howto's and the rest.
Then update the CD-set quarterly or bi-monthly. Sounds like a useful thing to me.
If I had to choose MSDN style or Internet style, I'd probably go for Internet - but both together would be much nicer than either on it's own. Sitting around saying "No Linux documentation? Just search the ***ing net man" is actually not too helpful.
So, gratz to the LDP, but if anyone's looking for business plan I'd go for a Linux Technet CD-Rom set. Errr, only I use Solaris at work. But otherwise I would
Yes, the demand for people with my particular skill set (Unix-TCP/IP + management knowledge) is massive. I am in the position of being able to walk out of my job at any time and get a new one with the same base salary in about a fortnight or less. Of course such a move would probably not look so hot on my c.v. but the fact that I can do it (and management knows I can) has a big impact.
:-). I'm _really_ looking forward to it!
Also, it won't last. I give it about another five years at most, before either the market floods or business practices become more streamlined and the need to hire loads of people reduces.
I'm rare, because when I was 16 and starting to choose career options, Unix was a black art as practised by a couple of distinctly weird kids in school. Everyone laughed at computer nerds. Now, the 16 year olds are hearing of cool entrepreneurs making easy fortunes. Many will have email addresses at home. The school I went to already has email for every child - where I once looked for my sports timetable on a pinboard they have it on an intranet.
So, when those children get into the market place, it'll be a whole different ball game - and of course all my skills will be obsolete by then, too
That is the heart of it, really. The people who work daft hours do it because they want to, or because they start out that way and then feel guilty about cutting back.
We (skilled computer types) are a very rare resource compared with demand and can easily set reasonable hours as part of our package, especially at big companies. I leave the office at 5.30 every day, unless I'm doing something fun and I'd rather stay late to finish it in one go.
Yes, at small companies people tend to work later to meet the deadlines. But that's because the industry is incapable of good project management, and because in many small (and large) companies employees feel very loyal, and really want to ship stuff on time.
There are very few places (in my experience of the UK market) that will have a problem with someone who says 'Sorry, I have a family and I only work my contracted hours'. Of course, if they then also spend 2 hours a day reading slashdot, then sure the boss won't be happy.
And that's another thing. Alot of people work very inefficiently, so the hours stretch out. Think of all the times you started out looking for documentation on a troublesome driver and ended up spending an hour reading about the latest developments in something else.
So, yes, there are lots of people who stay in the office alot, but it's not a case of exploitation (of course in some cases it may be, but not as an industry).
Well, that's a load of fucking crap for a start.
Politically incorrect??!?! I think in the UK your opinion is the common and the politically correct one. Taiwan good, China bad, basically.
However, I am always a cynic when it comes to US foreign policy. I think the U.S. is as worried by Taiwans power in respect to chip manufacture as it is worried by China's power in respect to Taiwan.
The more Taiwan relies on the US for defence, the less willing they will be to complain about the US's protectionist actions that favour its domestic chip manufacturing business.
I'm not suggesting that the US is currently that protectionist WRT chip fabs - but given the way it behaves in other industries (agriculture being the big one of late), it's only a matter of time.
Interesting. I used Automony long ago and hadn't come across it since. I wasn using it on a very small dataset, so I fear it didn't really show the best of its abilities, but it was interesting. Bit expensive though...
"Any Mac users in /. care to comment on the strengths of audio creation/manipulation on the Mac?"
Not a user but used to work in a Mac shop. Yes, they lead the field in low-medium end digital video, most 2D image manipulation, digital photography, compositing, DTP, and typesetting.
Partly this is cultural, partly technological, partly software support.
What's interesting to me is how well entrenched this is. The fact that Photoshop on a PC is nigh identical to Photoshop on a Mac will not make anyone switch, despite the obvious advantage of integrating with all the other PC users in the company. There are good reasons for this - graphic designers use their computers more intensely than almost anyone - certainly as much as hardcore programmers. They should be given the tools they prefer, and I.T. should deal with it.
As a non-Mac person who had to design an IT strategy around them, I know (a bit) about what I'm talking about.
Oh dear, I seem to be on a Veritas advocacy mission today.
If you want good backup, get Veritas Netbackup. It's good. You pay for it. About 6000UKPS for the server license and about 120UKPS for each client license.
It's the best there is IMHO and so far above anything open source that it's not even funny.
Sadly, there seems to be nothing good in the middle between Veritas and the like at the top and BRU and the like at the bottom.