HE ASKED ABOUT ENTERPRISE SOULTIONS AND YOU GIVE HIM SOMETHING THAT CAN'T HANDLE FILESYSTEMS LARGER THAN A TAPE??????
Get a clue. Please. Please. Please. Can everyone remember that Enterprise doesn't mean "One step up from my little ISP where I did my first job after college". It means "The largest 20% of companies in the world".
This little program is probably great, and it probably fits the bill for loads of companies but
IT IS NOT A FREAKING ENTERPRISE SOLUTION FOR ANYTHING AT ALL.
I am aware of three Enterprise backup solutions:
Veritas Netbackup, Legato Networker, ADSM
These programs are so far beyond Amanda it's not even funny, so can we all stop flinging the word 'Enterprise' around until we've worked in Enterprise environments and actually know what we are talking about?
Please? Can we? That way we'll learn instead of spouting vaguely pro-Linux FUD all the time.
The problem is,/.'ers don't use shrink wrap software that's any good because they all work at 2 bit ISPs that can't afford it, or because they are students who know bugger all about the real world anyway. (Slight generalisation:-) )
Here's my list of shrink wrap products that are really really good and better than any OS equivalent that I'm aware of:
Veritas NetBackup HP OpenView Photoshop Painter Oracle Remedy Quark Xpress
I switched from Legato to Veritas for backup, and haven't looked back. And yes, I think Veritas is currently rather more expensive. But Oh so worth it:-)
Veritas NetBackup is real enterprise software. It's superb. Excellent. An example of a really fantastic closed source product. And their support is good too.
Arcserve (last I used it) is a mess - probably fine if you have a motley collection of 20 servers that need to be backed up to a single tape drive, but that's about it.
If you need good backup go with the good tools - Veritas, Legato, ADSM.
Incidentally, I am always dismayed at the number of Linux/BSD geeks who will have a fit if there aren't N levels of security and firewalls and ssh and whathave you, but will quite happily ignore backup, or think that if they dump a massive tar file onto a DAT once a day they are doing enough. Bleugh.
Since you must be very well acquainted with the internals of DOS, are there any parts of it that have struck you either as being very clever in a hackerish sort of way, or very clumsy and kludgy (in an equally hackerish sort of way)?
Whilst we all loathed DOS when it was around, there was no debating that it was danged fast for some things, and its complete lack of abstraction was fun for games programmers and the like who got to cut through to the hardware when it suited them (and when it didn't!). Do you miss this rawness and freedom in more protective environments like Unix and Win32?
ASP is a well thought out object model that gives access to session maintenance at a range of persistence levels and scopes, as well as cached, efficient DB connections, and feature rich objects that handle HTTP transactions.
It also provides a means to access this object model via Windows Scripting Host and any language that can be plugged into WSH. These include to my knowledge JavaScript, VBSCript, and PerlScript.
So, let's try it slowly:
ASP = language independant object toolkit for writing server side web applications
PHP = combination of a new high level scripting language and a way of embedding it in HTML and having an http server execute it.
People may have written PHP modules that emulate many of the methods available in ASP. That does not make it the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
I know there is a perl module Apache::ASP that attempts to closely replicated the object model used by ASP.
It is a good object model, and people would do well to use it as a base for similar projects.
Needling comment about Open Source not innovating should be inserted at this point.
Ummm. I think you'll find Corel _are_ the reason that people _will_ switch. They are targetting a new segment for Linux.
Personally I this interview makes me think well of Corel. It talks about what they are _doing_, rather than lots of guff and fluff about how super duper Linux and the GPL and the OS movement are and oh I couldn't have done it without you guys etc etc.
They talk about doing useful stuff to help ordinary people. Like sorting out the crap printing system that has dogged Unix in general and Linux in particular for such a long time.
They talk about software - writing software, writing good, useful software, then selling that software. I _like_ that. They aren't talking wishy washy stuff about moving in to the portal business offering enterprise level support and consultancy in the fast moving OpenSource blah blah blah community blah e-solution blah blah.
It's really nice to hear technology companies talking about technology and not talking about amazing paradigm shifting exciting new development strategy forecast peace in our time god bless america I love you all thank you so much it's great to be alive at this time and goodnight.
It's not a joke per se, but it's not serious either.
I find it amusing that companies such as LinuxCare are going IPO - best of luck to them and all that, but it's still kind of funny. I find it less amusing that/. insists on reporting on it.
Increasingly, reading/. threads is like watching a flock of amiable sheep. Not a great display of intelligence or original thought, but a pleasant way to spend a few minutes:-)
This company is really little better than LinuxOne. It is attempting to get rich off the backs of OS programmers everywhere, and trade on the popularity of the Linux name.
In reality, all this company does is sell support and consultancy. Like about, oh 2000 other companies. Except they focus on Linux, which as we all know is a radically new OS with hardly any similarity to any other OS, so re-training people to be Linux consultants will be REALLY hard, and other companies will find it SOO hard to catch up. Also, Linux is frequently used in massive fault tolerant systems where you really need expert help from the kind of people who understand the code at the lowest level. By contrast, Linux is hardly ever used for simple http and filesharing jobs where, frankly, you can get all the help you need in house or from contractors.
This company makes a loss TWENTY TIMES its REVENUE. That's like spending twenty pounds to make one pound. Bargain. I know, I'll ask LinuxCare to send me a cheque for 1000 quid, and I'll send one back for 100 quid, a deal apparently twice as good as the deals they are making now.*
72% of this company's revenue comes from three clients. That means that those clients hold an axe above the company's head. They are practically a division of their three main clients.
"If we fail to adequately promote and maintain our brand name or are unable to continue using "Linux" as part of our brand name, our business may be adversely affected. "
Ha ha ha well isn't that topical. Sorry, couldn't resist. Let's defend this company's use of 'Linux' because they are a really nice company that we all like.
". Mr. Linus Torvalds owns the trademark to "Linux" and has approved our use of the word Linux in our company name as well as in the title of our websites. "
Oh, that's all right then. So long as they have the Royal Warrant....
*My argument here argument is complete sophistry but it's fun so I put it in anyway.
In case you hadn't noticed, I REALLY AM NOT IMPRESSED by all these IPOs. And yes I'll bitch about it on Slashdot until they change the name from 'News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters' to 'Boring Industry Headlines and Capitalist Gossip and Speculation and Back Patting and Hype + some Interviews with My New Rich Friends and Reviews of Films and Books by my New Famous Friends.'
I AM the original poster, but the above post sums it up well:-)
For me, the Linux community (in as much as there _is_ such a thing) will go the same way as Usenet or anything else. The decay is inevitable. You cannot have a dinner party of 100 guests. It isn't good or bad, it's just a fact of human society and interaction. After point, the number of people, the disparate desires, the search for fame, or money, or whatever simply changes the society into something different.
That's fine, I prefer small groups that are not money motivated (or even money interested). I'll go find one that is (I dunno, the folks at POV-Ray for all their NON-opensource ness were the friendliest, sanest, nicest crown I ever found on the net).
But to carry on waving a flag that no-one believes in is just unpleasant. The community is in danger of becoming like a corrupt labour union that proclaims much about the workers and the needs of the people, but actually just serves the power and politics of its own leaders and its more ambitious members.
You make the implicit assertion that the presence of trademark owners and corporate activity related to the various free software communities is a problem. As if corpratism will somehow Borg-ify all of the developers of free software projects, or that we'll all wake up one day to discover that there are no people in the community, only corporations?!?
Yup, I do:-). I guess some people would agree and others wouldn't and now's not the time to discuss it. Yes, I feel that corporatism corrupts, and that money and fame corrupt. Or if you think corrupt is too strong (it implies immorality, which I don't intend), then 'change for the worse'.
I'll plainly state this is a personal bias. I enjoy volunteer work. Human interactions that don't involve money or fame have a quality that I personally like, and those qualities, in my experience DO NOT survive the introduction of money or fame. It's that simple.
"but this is our beloved Linux Trademark. " (quote from/. editor, not Linus)
Speak for yourself. No trademark is beloved as far as I'm concerned, and I think this says something about the community. People are starting to care a whole lot more about names and labels, and I think it is a shame.
Do you think the Gnu people would be doing the same thing? I notice that www.perlprogrammer.com is also 'squatted'. I don't hear Larry Wall getting the lawyers in. Or O'Reilly, for that matter. Gee, maybe Perl will get a really bad name - oh, but then with no Perl IPO's, that won't be hurting any back pockets too much, will it....
Sure, I can sympathise with Linus feeling miffed at a bunch of yobs, but that doesn't mean we should all cheer and wave flags. Linus happens to be able to call in the lawyers. Most people who make free software what it is can't do that and never have been able to. That hasn't really hurt free software much. If Linus wants to get legal so that he feels better, I think that's fine, if he can afford it.
But if he starts claiming that he's doing it for the good of the community*, I'm not going to be happy, because I'm part of that community and it does me no good. And if other people start claiming that he's doing it for the good of the communtiy, I'll get really pissed off. Especially if those people own shares in Linux companies.
For me, it's a community of people, and to a lesser extend a community of software. When it starts to be a community of 'OS friendly companies' or 'Trademark owners' or 'Approved cool people as voted by the/. mob' then I'll wave good bye to the lot of it.
I've got more hobbies and interests than programming and computers. If people want to make it all about trademarks and IPO's and what have you I'll spend more time sailing and cooking, and less time writing free software. No big deal. Either that or I'll go back to the world of Windows shareware, which is a whole lot less bitchy and is starting to produce better software.
Oh that's just great. A bunch of overpaid underskilled Hollywood wankers are going to tell the world how to pigeon hole me with the help of Jon Katz, the man who tried to make out that religious software was evil, can't use a computer, and generally has not the slightest idea of what it meant to grow up with a Commodore64 as your best friend, and then spend your fun filled college years playing muds and usenet when it was still good, and before the goddam www screwed the whole lot up.
I can't friggin wait. It'll be full of 'wild 'n' wacky' characters who are growing up in a bright shiny future where their skills are so in demand and they are the great young revolutionaries of the brave new world with exciting paradigms for a new millenium.
hurt maim destroy
Still, compared with the crap we've endured so far from 'hackers' and the like, I'm sure it will be great in comparison.
How do you/know/ it isn't all being generated by a computer somewhere, and fed into you brain. You don't.
Such certainty, such certainty. One of the things you learn from Philosophy (Western analytical Philosphy, anyway) is that all the cool sci-fi paradoxes and ideas that got you interested in the subject when you were 17 are MUCH MORE COMPLEX THAN THEY LOOK.
Do a google search for 'putnam brains in vats' or somesuch and check out some of the papers people have written. One is below:
But if sins were committed in the past, does that automatically mean that we have to relive them over and over again? Can't we just not accept the ripping off interfaces?
No. It is not the case that Apple 'got away with' stealing from Xerox or that MS got away with stealing from Apple. In each case the courts decided that what they did _was not wrong_.
Precedence is very important in American and to a slightly lesser extent English law. When something is ruled to be legal or illegal, then it takes a significant legislative chance to reverse the outcome in future significant cases.
This is not a bad thing. Consistancy is very important - it is important that acts do not effectively waver in and out of criminality simply according to one judge's beliefs or the views of the day as expressed ad hoc by a particular jury.
So, if someone thinks this kind of UI copying _is_ wrong after all, they should lobby for a change in the law, not simply keep on suing until the find a sympathetic judge or jury.
By all means look at the URL in the above post, but please bear in mind that everything at www.mackido.com is biased in a way that makes the worst Linux zealot flamer on slashdot look like blind justice herself.
Should we pursue all the Andy Warhol knock-offs with four faces in coloured squares?
Should we sue Oasis because they sound so much like the Beatles?
Do you think they should have arrested Roy Lichenstein for infringment on DC comics' look and feel?
Sorry to all the artists but it's the world we live in. Unless you can patent your technique, it's pretty hard to stop people copying your work. Overall, I think that results in better work out there.
OLE springs to mind. Linking a spreadsheet object to a word object and having both display in one application window was, I think, a true innovation at the time.
Possibly some professor had done the same in a lab 5 years earlier, but that hardly counts, any more than saying the internal combustion engine is just a copy of the steam engine because they both use the compressed-gas-cylinder-camshaft technology.
Anywa, here are some more, these are all just IMHO, so please correct me if I'm wrong:
docking toolbars and menus DHCP (and very good it is too) realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines in word) ODBC A comprehensive approach to disabled users Comprehensive (if occasionally random) support for non-roman charactersets and languages
And finally, MS get big bonus points for ditching ASCII and shifting to unicode everywhere WAY before anyone else.
Or, patronising, impolite, arrogant rubbish, depending on your take.
Yes, (s)he does put in the hours, and does answer lots of questions, but does so much to reinforce the arrogant smarter-than-thou unix person stereotype that I'd be loath to advocate him(her).
Yes, that's a great idea! I happen to be a professional Perl programmer and System architect, so maybe I _could_ help.
Gosh, except there's no CVS server for the Slashdot code. And no Slashdot developers mailing list. Hmmm, looks like maybe Slashdot doesn't want to be open source and get help from folks who want to help.
Wonder if that's linked to large sums of money somewhere? Naa.....
Quite. This isn't new by any definition. Given recent comment on/.'s increasing inability to publish breaking news, can I make a suggestion?
The requirements of a breaking news site and a community discussion site are radically different. They need to be treated differently. 'The Register' is IMHO the best breaking news site in the geek arena (sarcastic comments notwithstanding).
Slashdot's story submission system does not allow breaking stories to be posted promptly, and apparently it doesn't allow very good confirmation of the stories. Likewise, the time-based nature of the homepage doesn't allow the discussions to last much beyond 24hrs.
So can I suggest that if Slashdot wants to do news, it does news, and if it wants to do discussion forums it does them too, but that it does them in different parts of the site, with different and suitable user interfaces to each part?
Increasingly, I hear a news item on another site, only to see it on Slashdot the 10 hours later where a cursory 24hr discussion follows. That's not really a valuable resource.
The article is an article about Stephen Hawking, not about Stephen Hawking's thoughts or Stephen Hawking's works.
It is IMNSHO a very good article, since rather than regurgitating his theories in a layman's language that is both inaccurate and hard for most people to understand, it actually focusses on the person himself.
I had no idea it took that length of time to compose his answers. I had no idea what sort of room he lived in or that he had come so close to death.
I'll grant you that this age has an unhealthly interest in personality and personality cults, but this article was a good few notches above Hello magazine. It struck me as an honest account of what and how the author felt interview the person, and since I have often wondered what it would be like to talk to him, I found it interesting.
No offence, but if you'd read the whole article you would have found out that this ad campaign brought in some 150,000 USD, which he needs to pay for his nursing care (10 full time nurses for a start).
I believe that Mac OS X is by far the most serious challenge to Linux, and on purely practical grounds it is probably a superior OS.
It remains to be seen whether Apple can get the OS into the mainstream in a sensible way. If an intel version is released (I'm not sure why they appeared to halt it, since early betas were released for Intel) I would consider it a very serious choice.
My experience with version of the server product were positive, and although they have done some semi-radical stuff (like rip out the config files from/etc and stick it all in a nice organised directory), it is basically a good unix base with a GUI that leaves KDE and GNOME looking like two bit shareware projects, frankly.
print "We had $start pounds, and bought $number apples for $price per apple.";
And as for Perl programmers needing a manual, yes, that is true, because Perl is a big language with a large number of builtins. So what - Unix is a big OS and most sysadmins will frequenty need to do a quick 'man' to check out flags and arguments and such. Same with Perl. It's not big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
HE ASKED ABOUT ENTERPRISE SOULTIONS AND YOU GIVE HIM SOMETHING THAT CAN'T HANDLE FILESYSTEMS LARGER THAN A TAPE??????
Get a clue. Please. Please. Please. Can everyone remember that Enterprise doesn't mean "One step up from my little ISP where I did my first job after college". It means "The largest 20% of companies in the world".
This little program is probably great, and it probably fits the bill for loads of companies but
IT IS NOT A FREAKING ENTERPRISE SOLUTION FOR ANYTHING AT ALL.
I am aware of three Enterprise backup solutions:
Veritas Netbackup, Legato Networker, ADSM
These programs are so far beyond Amanda it's not even funny, so can we all stop flinging the word 'Enterprise' around until we've worked in Enterprise environments and actually know what we are talking about?
Please? Can we? That way we'll learn instead of spouting vaguely pro-Linux FUD all the time.
Thanks.
The problem is, /.'ers don't use shrink wrap software that's any good because they all work at 2 bit ISPs that can't afford it, or because they are students who know bugger all about the real world anyway. (Slight generalisation :-) )
Here's my list of shrink wrap products that are really really good and better than any OS equivalent that I'm aware of:
Veritas NetBackup
HP OpenView
Photoshop
Painter
Oracle
Remedy
Quark Xpress
These are the ones I've come across at work.
Arg. Not Networker, use Veritas NetBackup. :-)
:-)
I switched from Legato to Veritas for backup, and haven't looked back. And yes, I think Veritas is currently rather more expensive. But Oh so worth it
They aren't in the same league.
Veritas NetBackup is real enterprise software. It's superb. Excellent. An example of a really fantastic closed source product. And their support is good too.
Arcserve (last I used it) is a mess - probably fine if you have a motley collection of 20 servers that need to be backed up to a single tape drive, but that's about it.
If you need good backup go with the good tools - Veritas, Legato, ADSM.
Incidentally, I am always dismayed at the number of Linux/BSD geeks who will have a fit if there aren't N levels of security and firewalls and ssh and whathave you, but will quite happily ignore backup, or think that if they dump a massive tar file onto a DAT once a day they are doing enough. Bleugh.
Since you must be very well acquainted with the internals of DOS, are there any parts of it that have struck you either as being very clever in a hackerish sort of way, or very clumsy and kludgy (in an equally hackerish sort of way)?
Whilst we all loathed DOS when it was around, there was no debating that it was danged fast for some things, and its complete lack of abstraction was fun for games programmers and the like who got to cut through to the hardware when it suited them (and when it didn't!). Do you miss this rawness and freedom in more protective environments like Unix and Win32?
NO NO NO NO
ASP is a well thought out object model that gives access to session maintenance at a range of persistence levels and scopes, as well as cached, efficient DB connections, and feature rich objects that handle HTTP transactions.
It also provides a means to access this object model via Windows Scripting Host and any language that can be plugged into WSH. These include to my knowledge JavaScript, VBSCript, and PerlScript.
So, let's try it slowly:
ASP = language independant object toolkit for writing server side web applications
PHP = combination of a new high level scripting language and a way of embedding it in HTML and having an http server execute it.
People may have written PHP modules that emulate many of the methods available in ASP. That does not make it the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
I know there is a perl module Apache::ASP that attempts to closely replicated the object model used by ASP.
It is a good object model, and people would do well to use it as a base for similar projects.
Needling comment about Open Source not innovating should be inserted at this point.
Ummm. I think you'll find Corel _are_ the reason that people _will_ switch. They are targetting a new segment for Linux.
Personally I this interview makes me think well of Corel. It talks about what they are _doing_, rather than lots of guff and fluff about how super duper Linux and the GPL and the OS movement are and oh I couldn't have done it without you guys etc etc.
They talk about doing useful stuff to help ordinary people. Like sorting out the crap printing system that has dogged Unix in general and Linux in particular for such a long time.
They talk about software - writing software, writing good, useful software, then selling that software. I _like_ that. They aren't talking wishy washy stuff about moving in to the portal business offering enterprise level support and consultancy in the fast moving OpenSource blah blah blah community blah e-solution blah blah.
It's really nice to hear technology companies talking about technology and not talking about amazing paradigm shifting exciting new development strategy forecast peace in our time god bless america I love you all thank you so much it's great to be alive at this time and goodnight.
:-)
It's not a joke per se, but it's not serious either.
/. insists on reporting on it.
/. threads is like watching a flock of amiable sheep. Not a great display of intelligence or original thought, but a pleasant way to spend a few minutes :-)
I find it amusing that companies such as LinuxCare are going IPO - best of luck to them and all that, but it's still kind of funny. I find it less amusing that
Increasingly, reading
This is a flame. It's also sarcastic in parts.
This company is really little better than LinuxOne. It is attempting to get rich off the backs of OS programmers everywhere, and trade on the popularity of the Linux name.
In reality, all this company does is sell support and consultancy. Like about, oh 2000 other companies. Except they focus on Linux, which as we all know is a radically new OS with hardly any similarity to any other OS, so re-training people to be Linux consultants will be REALLY hard, and other companies will find it SOO hard to catch up. Also, Linux is frequently used in massive fault tolerant systems where you really need expert help from the kind of people who understand the code at the lowest level. By contrast, Linux is hardly ever used for simple http and filesharing jobs where, frankly, you can get all the help you need in house or from contractors.
This company makes a loss TWENTY TIMES its REVENUE. That's like spending twenty pounds to make one pound. Bargain. I know, I'll ask LinuxCare to send me a cheque for 1000 quid, and I'll send one back for 100 quid, a deal apparently twice as good as the deals they are making now.*
72% of this company's revenue comes from three clients. That means that those clients hold an axe above the company's head. They are practically a division of their three main clients.
"If we fail to adequately promote and maintain our brand name or are unable to
continue using "Linux" as part of our brand name, our business may be adversely
affected.
"
Ha ha ha well isn't that topical. Sorry, couldn't resist. Let's defend this company's use of 'Linux' because they are a really nice company that we all like.
". Mr. Linus Torvalds owns the
trademark to "Linux" and has approved our use of the word Linux in our company
name as well as in the title of our websites.
"
Oh, that's all right then. So long as they have the Royal Warrant....
*My argument here argument is complete sophistry but it's fun so I put it in anyway.
In case you hadn't noticed, I REALLY AM NOT IMPRESSED by all these IPOs. And yes I'll bitch about it on Slashdot until they change the name from 'News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters' to 'Boring Industry Headlines and Capitalist Gossip and Speculation and Back Patting and Hype + some Interviews with My New Rich Friends and Reviews of Films and Books by my New Famous Friends.'
I AM the original poster, but the above post sums it up well :-)
For me, the Linux community (in as much as there _is_ such a thing) will go the same way as Usenet or anything else. The decay is inevitable. You cannot have a dinner party of 100 guests. It isn't good or bad, it's just a fact of human society and interaction. After point, the number of people, the disparate desires, the search for fame, or money, or whatever simply changes the society into something different.
That's fine, I prefer small groups that are not money motivated (or even money interested). I'll go find one that is (I dunno, the folks at POV-Ray for all their NON-opensource ness were the friendliest, sanest, nicest crown I ever found on the net).
But to carry on waving a flag that no-one believes in is just unpleasant. The community is in danger of becoming like a corrupt labour union that proclaims much about the workers and the needs of the people, but actually just serves the power and politics of its own leaders and its more ambitious members.
Yup, I do
I'll plainly state this is a personal bias. I enjoy volunteer work. Human interactions that don't involve money or fame have a quality that I personally like, and those qualities, in my experience DO NOT survive the introduction of money or fame. It's that simple.
"but this is our beloved Linux Trademark. " (quote from /. editor, not Linus)
/. mob' then I'll wave good bye to the lot of it.
Speak for yourself. No trademark is beloved as far as I'm concerned, and I think this says something about the community. People are starting to care a whole lot more about names and labels, and I think it is a shame.
Do you think the Gnu people would be doing the same thing? I notice that www.perlprogrammer.com is also 'squatted'. I don't hear Larry Wall getting the lawyers in. Or O'Reilly, for that matter. Gee, maybe Perl will get a really bad name - oh, but then with no Perl IPO's, that won't be hurting any back pockets too much, will it....
Sure, I can sympathise with Linus feeling miffed at a bunch of yobs, but that doesn't mean we should all cheer and wave flags. Linus happens to be able to call in the lawyers. Most people who make free software what it is can't do that and never have been able to. That hasn't really hurt free software much. If Linus wants to get legal so that he feels better, I think that's fine, if he can afford it.
But if he starts claiming that he's doing it for the good of the community*, I'm not going to be happy, because I'm part of that community and it does me no good. And if other people start claiming that he's doing it for the good of the communtiy, I'll get really pissed off. Especially if those people own shares in Linux companies.
For me, it's a community of people, and to a lesser extend a community of software. When it starts to be a community of 'OS friendly companies' or 'Trademark owners' or 'Approved cool people as voted by the
I've got more hobbies and interests than programming and computers. If people want to make it all about trademarks and IPO's and what have you I'll spend more time sailing and cooking, and less time writing free software. No big deal. Either that or I'll go back to the world of Windows shareware, which is a whole lot less bitchy and is starting to produce better software.
*I'm not suggesting that he is, BTW.
Oh that's just great. A bunch of overpaid underskilled Hollywood wankers are going to tell the world how to pigeon hole me with the help of Jon Katz, the man who tried to make out that religious software was evil, can't use a computer, and generally has not the slightest idea of what it meant to grow up with a Commodore64 as your best friend, and then spend your fun filled college years playing muds and usenet when it was still good, and before the goddam www screwed the whole lot up.
I can't friggin wait. It'll be full of 'wild 'n' wacky' characters who are growing up in a bright shiny future where their skills are so in demand and they are the great young revolutionaries of the brave new world with exciting paradigms for a new millenium.
hurt maim destroy
Still, compared with the crap we've endured so far from 'hackers' and the like, I'm sure it will be great in comparison.
Such certainty, such certainty. One of the things you learn from Philosophy (Western analytical Philosphy, anyway) is that all the cool sci-fi paradoxes and ideas that got you interested in the subject when you were 17 are MUCH MORE COMPLEX THAN THEY LOOK.
Do a google search for 'putnam brains in vats' or somesuch and check out some of the papers people have written. One is below:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~dcole/evil90.htm
But if sins were committed in the past, does that automatically mean that we have to relive them over and over again? Can't we just not accept the ripping off interfaces?
No. It is not the case that Apple 'got away with' stealing from Xerox or that MS got away with stealing from Apple. In each case the courts decided that what they did _was not wrong_.
Precedence is very important in American and to a slightly lesser extent English law. When something is ruled to be legal or illegal, then it takes a significant legislative chance to reverse the outcome in future significant cases.
This is not a bad thing. Consistancy is very important - it is important that acts do not effectively waver in and out of criminality simply according to one judge's beliefs or the views of the day as expressed ad hoc by a particular jury.
So, if someone thinks this kind of UI copying _is_ wrong after all, they should lobby for a change in the law, not simply keep on suing until the find a sympathetic judge or jury.
By all means look at the URL in the above post, but please bear in mind that everything at www.mackido.com is biased in a way that makes the worst Linux zealot flamer on slashdot look like blind justice herself.
No, no really.
Should we pursue all the Andy Warhol knock-offs with four faces in coloured squares?
Should we sue Oasis because they sound so much like the Beatles?
Do you think they should have arrested Roy Lichenstein for infringment on DC comics' look and feel?
Sorry to all the artists but it's the world we live in. Unless you can patent your technique, it's pretty hard to stop people copying your work. Overall, I think that results in better work out there.
OLE springs to mind. Linking a spreadsheet object to a word object and having both display in one application window was, I think, a true innovation at the time.
Possibly some professor had done the same in a lab 5 years earlier, but that hardly counts, any more than saying the internal combustion engine is just a copy of the steam engine because they both use the compressed-gas-cylinder-camshaft technology.
Anywa, here are some more, these are all just IMHO, so please correct me if I'm wrong:
docking toolbars and menus
DHCP (and very good it is too)
realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines in word)
ODBC
A comprehensive approach to disabled users
Comprehensive (if occasionally random) support for non-roman charactersets and languages
And finally, MS get big bonus points for ditching ASCII and shifting to unicode everywhere WAY before anyone else.
Flames to me personally if you must, please...
'tough-love'??
Or, patronising, impolite, arrogant rubbish, depending on your take.
Yes, (s)he does put in the hours, and does answer lots of questions, but does so much to reinforce the arrogant smarter-than-thou unix person stereotype that I'd be loath to advocate him(her).
As others have said, Mike Stok any time..
Yes, that's a great idea! I happen to be a professional Perl programmer and System architect, so maybe I _could_ help.
Gosh, except there's no CVS server for the Slashdot code. And no Slashdot developers mailing list. Hmmm, looks like maybe Slashdot doesn't want to be open source and get help from folks who want to help.
Wonder if that's linked to large sums of money somewhere? Naa.....
Quite. This isn't new by any definition. Given recent comment on /.'s increasing inability to publish breaking news, can I make a suggestion?
The requirements of a breaking news site and a community discussion site are radically different. They need to be treated differently. 'The Register' is IMHO the best breaking news site in the geek arena (sarcastic comments notwithstanding).
Slashdot's story submission system does not allow breaking stories to be posted promptly, and apparently it doesn't allow very good confirmation of the stories. Likewise, the time-based nature of the homepage doesn't allow the discussions to last much beyond 24hrs.
So can I suggest that if Slashdot wants to do news, it does news, and if it wants to do discussion forums it does them too, but that it does them in different parts of the site, with different and suitable user interfaces to each part?
Increasingly, I hear a news item on another site, only to see it on Slashdot the 10 hours later where a cursory 24hr discussion follows. That's not really a valuable resource.
Um...
The article is an article about Stephen Hawking, not about Stephen Hawking's thoughts or Stephen Hawking's works.
It is IMNSHO a very good article, since rather than regurgitating his theories in a layman's language that is both inaccurate and hard for most people to understand, it actually focusses on the person himself.
I had no idea it took that length of time to compose his answers. I had no idea what sort of room he lived in or that he had come so close to death.
I'll grant you that this age has an unhealthly interest in personality and personality cults, but this article was a good few notches above Hello magazine. It struck me as an honest account of what and how the author felt interview the person, and since I have often wondered what it would be like to talk to him, I found it interesting.
No offence, but if you'd read the whole article you would have found out that this ad campaign brought in some 150,000 USD, which he needs to pay for his nursing care (10 full time nurses for a start).
I think you are right.
/etc and stick it all in a nice organised directory), it is basically a good unix base with a GUI that leaves KDE and GNOME looking like two bit shareware projects, frankly.
I believe that Mac OS X is by far the most serious challenge to Linux, and on purely practical grounds it is probably a superior OS.
It remains to be seen whether Apple can get the OS into the mainstream in a sensible way. If an intel version is released (I'm not sure why they appeared to halt it, since early betas were released for Intel) I would consider it a very serious choice.
My experience with version of the server product were positive, and although they have done some semi-radical stuff (like rip out the config files from
So, we'll wait and see.
It all depends what you are reading.
Sure, Perl's syntax for dereferencing sucks:
@array{$listofarrays->[$element]}
But them Perl's syntax for interpolation rocks:
print "We had $start pounds, and bought $number apples for $price per apple.";
And as for Perl programmers needing a manual, yes, that is true, because Perl is a big language with a large number of builtins. So what - Unix is a big OS and most sysadmins will frequenty need to do a quick 'man' to check out flags and arguments and such. Same with Perl. It's not big deal.