Wow, where did you get that it has to be a time sucking event?
Evaluating a new piece of software doesn't take a fair amount of time?
Pardon me, my mistake. I must be living on another planet.
Skimming a paragraph of text may be enough to decide.
You're not listening to me. It's easy to find out when the buzz is on,
finding out if the buzz applies to you, or even if the buzz is justified
at all, that takes work.
Interestingly enough, in light of his demonization by anti-nuclear factions, it was Edward Teller who was largely responsible for insisting on containment vessels, a nice simple brute-force protection measure.
Among folks like myself, who are not at all anti-nuclear power, Edward Teller is demonized for testifying against Oppenheimer during the McCarthy witch-hunts.
Even among the anti-nuke crowd, I think Teller is demonized largely for his role in promoting nuclear weapons. Some of his ideas in this direction are arguably pretty crazy, e.g. orbiting nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers as anti-missle weapons.
Doing this in a way that's no weaker than the surrounding material is hard.
If I may pick a nit here, if I understand this right, on average a weld will be stronger than
the surrounding metal, the difficulty lies in being certain that that's the case for all of
your welds. The problem isn't getting the strength up, but getting the variation down -- and as you
point out earlier, non-destructive inspection of welds is a tough problem.
This is the reason that aircraft are still assembled using bolts and rivets -- in theory you could make
a lighter aircraft using welds, but there isn't any way to be certain that any particular weld was done right,
so we usually stick with a slightly inferior, but more dependable way of doing it.
(Or at least that was the case some years back... it would seem like there must be some way of cracking this
problem.)
Nothing to do with being satisified, it has to do with being afraid of change.
It has to do with not wanting to waste you're life experimenting with the latest crap.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where everything that was hyped as the latest and greatest was
really the greatest, but often it's pretty useless. If you're lucky it's at least a slight
improvement, and the work involved in learning the new crap might even be worth that improvement,
but there's no guarantee of that, ever, and everytime you put aside something that works and experiment with the new,
you're always taking a gamble.
But the people who need to have the latest because they've got to be able to say they have the latest are never going to understand that.
Oh, I'm just a FUD thrower now. The gross instability of Firefox 2 is a mere lie
I'm spreading, because... uh, because why? Because I'm a spy for Microsoft who wants you
to use IE because they make so much money off of giving it away with the OS?
You guys are seriously delusional on this subject, and I can't imagine why. Firefox 1 (plugins or no)
crashed once a month at most, Firefox 2, I'm lucky if I see an uptime of a few hours.
Firefox 1 was an improvement over Mozilla, Mozilla was an improvement over Netscape... what the
hell happened with Firefox 2?
On the other hand, there's some interesting reading material out there in those bug reports.
For example:
Jim Bray 2005-11-30 13:05:30 PDT
It's pretty clear this is a flash problem. Hopefully someone has told them
about
it.
As a wishlist item: it would be nice if plugins could be encapsulated somehow
so that instead of the browser crashing, the plugin crashes and is disabled. It
looks like Firefox is getting an X error and just throwing in the towel. A
little
more robustness and perseverance would be a good thing if possible.
Comment #21 [reply] Kevin Brosnan 2005-11-30 15:38:49 PDT
Jim the last bit is Bug 156493 'Browser should tolerate plug-in (plugin)
malfunctions, like with a separate (own) process' or bug 230017 'RFE: Run
plugins in a separate thread'.
You might want to ponder those words of wisdom a bit there, oh firefox fan.
Why don't you just avoid the extensions and plugins with horrible memory leaks?
So, why doesn't the the "addons" site warn the user that they shouldn't install
anything unless they're experts who really know what they're doing?
Something like "'addons' are dangerous and may trash your software."
Complaining about Firefox not saving you from buggy extensions is almost like blaming your OS for allowing you to install a keylogger.
Well you know, part of the job that a real operating system does is it tries to contain the amount of damage
a badly written app can do to the whole system. Under something like linux, you expect that if an app
crashes it won't take out the entire operating system...
Except, of course, in the case of Firefox. I've seen Firefox 2 randomly wedge my kubuntu laptop so hard I've had to
eject the battery to do a hard reboot (when this happens the X windows trick "Ctrl-Alt 4" will only sometimes get me a new shell I can use to kill firefox; sometimes the system refuses to respond even to that rather large hammer). But of course, this must be
enitrely my fault, I must have the wrong addon installed (I have trimmed them down to what I'd call a minimal
set -- adblock and whatever they call the latest re-write of the mozex idea and a few themes...), or maybe
it's my fault for not feeling like debugging the C code, (or maybe for not using Windows like a normal person, eh?).
What a bunch of winers, we users are, eh? We get handed this wonderful code for free, and get upset just because
we get to spend hours of our lives experiencing the joys of firefox bugs.
(Have I filed bug reports on this? No, I haven't bothered. My experience with filing bugs with mozilla.org is that
it's an exercise in futility...)
Most major complex apps have small leaks. It is damn near impossible to plug all of them,
You mean, major complex apps that are written in C.
And yet, the linux kernel hackers seem to have managed to plug their leaks.
Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions.
Ah, so you mean the Firefox extension mechanism is fundamentally broken, and
they can't figure out how to keep a misbehaving extension from taking out the
entire browser?
It's not doubt very comforting to the Firefox team to be able to point fingers
elsewhere, but what difference is this supposed to make to the end user?
And why would I want to use Firefox if I didn't want to use the extensions?
Konqueror works fine, you know?
I too stopped editing WP for similar reasons, but I'm sure that the people who opposed the inclusion of the material I contributed were reasonable, well-meaning people who just didn't think through what it was that they wanted, and what the consequences of making the community more insular and deletionist would mean.
That's the party line you're supposed to take when dealing with them, but actually, I'm convinced that there are a hell
of a lot of wikipedia-lawyers out there riding high on a sense of self-importance. It's nice to be able to "contribute" without actually
knowing anything except how to spew things like "Don't do that, it violates [WP:whatever], [WP:neverheardofit], and [WP:madeupbyafewprogrammers]".
According to my experimental data, there's a high probably that you will get fucked by your database vendor first.
As I mentioned at the outset, my personal opinion is that if you start off with postgresql, you are unlikely to need to switch later.
Even if you're using a "vendor", if they screw you over, you can drop them and find support elsewhere. The miracle of open source
software, you know?
(By the way, myself I don't have any problem with writing portable SQL and using things like DBI/DBD, but I have my
doubts this is what is meant by "a database abstraction layer" in this discussion.)
I really hope you are a developer. I make all of my money salvaging projects after they have been in the hands of people that do not understand the relationship between computer science and quality programming. And business is booming.
I'm sure you do well in business -- a tone of absolute certainty always goes over well.
And I've been a developer long enough to see multiple different fads come and go,
most of them based on (some interpretation or other) of "computer science".
The big problem with web programming is that developers are not following the basic tenets of computer science. They are writing tightly coupled code, instead of implementing basic programming paradigms (like OOP). This is not limited to database abstraction. You should always have your technologies properly separated, standards compliant (wherever possible), and your functionality encapsulated.
Oh, this is a result from Computer Science? So where's the experimental data that proves that this is the correct way of doing things?
(I have this funny idea that dogamatic recitations of theory and vague anecdotal evidence isn't really what "science" is about.)
Even if I grant the importance of some form of encapsulation in the design of a software project -- which of course I do -- it does not follow that the right place to draw one of the boundaries is at the "database abstraction layer".
"An anonymous reader sent in word that Linux kernel developer Nick Piggin reran the benchmark today and came to a different conclusion: In his benchmark Linux was faster than FreeBSD."
And I recommend Ruby on Rails. Its developer community has been growing exponentially, from 5 guys in 2006 to 10 guys in 2007.
I was going to yell at you, before I got the joke.
Awhile back, there was some core Ruby dude who was storming out the door with a FOD flamefest --
most discussion here centered on his obvious personality problems, but along the way the man
talked about Rails servers being horribly unstable, needing to be rebooted frequently.
It could be that The Problem is Fixed Now, but you have to wonder how the buzz for a platform
can reach such a tremendous pitch when there are still basic problems with it that need to
be solved...
(And why do you think they call ORMs "Object Relational Mappers"? They seem to be designed to make sure
you can't use any Relational features. Maybe "object dumpers" would be a better name -- or "database
crippleware".)
If you are having trouble finding the skillset, then you probably are on a less mainstream platform. It might work for you, but if your goal is to have interchangable parts, stick to platforms that are "standard".
But if you're the only people in the business using an unusual platform, you'll be able to attract the entire range of people who are familiar
with it, and they may very well be more enthusiastic to work on it than yet another corporate-grunt (I'm channeling Philip Graham here).
When a platform becomes popular, that encourages programmers to learn how to work on it, but if you jump on a bandwagon too soon,
you may find that the jobs are outpacing the trained programmers and you're hosed even if it did seem like very "mainstream" choice to you.
Surveying ads on Dice to make a decision is perhaps not the best idea: you'll find out what kinds of programmers everyone is having
trouble hiring, not what kinds are easy to hire.
And in any case: is "ease of hiring" really that big a concern? Maybe you should be worrying about employee retention so you don't need to hire so often. If you can keep your programmer's happy with a less-mainstream choice, then maybe that's the way to go (returning to Philip Graham, here).
This is why you write an abstraction layer to sit between your business logic and the platform. Lets take databases as an example. Suppose your application is initially written for MySQL. Now, lets say that your application becomes a big hit, and you want to move it to a more robust backend. If you're application is tied directly to the platform (i.e. you've peppered your code with direct MySQL calls), you've got a lot of work in development and testing to make sure that all of the MySQL stuff is replaced with Oracle equivalents. However, if you've got an abstraction layer, the only things you have to rewrite and retest are the components of the abstraction layer. Its not zero work with the latter strategy, but it is a lot less work.
Why that's a great idea... if you don't mind crippling all of your database code so that it runs at the same mediocre level with every database. ("We can't use materialized views!"; "Why not?"; "Well, database X and Y don't have them yet."; "But we're not using X and Y...")
(Personal opinion: if you start with postgresql, you won't ever need to switch, and database-independence starts looking like a pretty silly goal.)
Not only that, but can you imagine the flame fest, evangelism, crazy modding, and entirely worthless chaos that would ensue from him stating his platform? It would be nothing but Ruby, PHP, ASP,.Net, Java, Flash, Silverlight, AJAX, etc... fans screaming at each other over why their bandwagon is better than all the other bandwagons and flaming each other for even suggesting an alternative.
Yes, and y'all are depriving us of that fun.
Seriously: one way you evaluate platforms is by reading advocates flaming each other and then trying to decide which
group sounds like they know what they're talking about. How else are you going to learn about a platform, by
reading the hype put out on it's own website? (I tried looking at the Drupal web site the other day,
and they don't exactly make it easy to find technical information... hell, it's hard to find out that
it's written in PHP! They will however tell you that it's "robust" -- whatever that's supposed to mean).
The decision to avoid naming-names is a recognition that there are problems with this syndrome of dueling advocacy flames,
but it's just ducking the problem without fixing it. It sure would be nice to have something better, wouldn't it?
What exactly would that be?
How do you evaluate web platforms? Well, you re-implement your site in every available web platform, and create a
heavy duty system of performance benchmarking, and you hammer away at all of them and determine which one performs better.
Then you survey the sub-managers of each of the sub-projects for each platform, and ask them to tell you if they felt like
they were having trouble hiring qualified people to work on them (unfortunately, they'll all say "yes"), and so on.
Then you put that information all together, and then you'll get fired for spending millions of dollars without
doing any productive work.
Or, here's an idea: how about you go to one of those university departments with "Computer" in the name (CS, CE, whatever)
and talk them into doing comparitive studies like this, using their copious supply of undergraduates as volunteer
labor? Then they could publish useful data that everyone would actually want to know.
Or you, could look over the results of the "Plat Forms Contest" again... except it didn't show a lot of difference
between the language/platform choices, did it? It seems that if you've got a team of experienced developers working
with a mature set of libraries that they're familiar with, there just isn't a huge amount of gains to be made
from switching platforms.
The thing to understand is that as soon as a GNU/Nut starts talking about "the spirit of the GPL", they are basically admitting that the GPL doesn't actually say what they want it to, and they're going into some zone of extra-legal fantasyland. The GPL is a legal license, nothing more, and it has no spirit
I ain't no lawyer (thank god) but if you don't think that the intent of a contract matters when you go into court, I suspect that you ain't no lawyer either.
The real trouble with all these issues is that programmers have trouble understanding that legal code is not computer code -- legal definitions are not always precise, and they often require judgement calls (which is why we have judges), and in the case of the GPL the question of what a "derived work" is can be a problem on occasion.
(And if you ask me, the GPL is a pretty brilliant social institution, a really clever legal hack -- if you slashkids don't get the point,
it's just because we haven't been seeing too many problems of late like the unix wars of the 80s... unless of course, you count
OSX which looks a hell of a lot to me like the latest proprietary fork of the BSD code base.)
Let me tell you one you know already: if you're interested in following American elections you
should be reading electoral-vote, Andrew Tanenbaum's site.
One guy, working on his own is doing a better job of election reporting than the entire US media.
There was a Time magazine poll less than a month ago that showed that Obama could beat McCain,
but with Hillary against McCain it would be a tight race. Apparently independant voters like
Obama, but not Hillary -- it seems unlikely to me that Hillary can manage any backroom deals
that can conceal this fact: Obama is more electable, so the PLEOs (aka superdelegates) will back
Obama.
Note that Rush Limbaugh suggested to his listeners that they should cross-over and vote for Hillary,
just to mess up the Democratic party.
These trememdous "wins" and "loses" you keep hearing about are usually just symbolic: the assigned
delegates are breaking nearly evenly between the two democratic candidates, with on average a slight
preference for Obama. Neither candidate is going to reach the cut-off that puts the election in the bag: it's going to be a brokered primary (all praise the highly democratic Democratic party).
"non-commercial" is not Open Source.
I thought the advantage of Slashdot over Digg was that there were editors to fix things like this before going live,
No, no, the advantage of visiting this site is to giggle at CmdrTaco for getting the definition of "Open Source" wrong.
If this person has it right: reiser trial timeline,
then the actual events are not at all as you've been (repeatedly, and vehemently) representing them. You keep saying things like this:
I would want to know why he picked the kids up at school when it wasn't his turn, and when nobody knew that Nina was missing.
.
If you follow the link above, you'll find an account like this:
Tue 2006-09-05, 2:30 PM: Doren, turns up at the Joaquin Miller school to pick up the children from day care, but does not have permission for this and leaves without them. She tells school employees that "Nina is out of town." On Jan. 2, 2007, a teacher at the day care program, Natalie Potter, testifies that Nina's daughter, Niorline, was with Doren and that Doren made the remark "for the benefit of the child."
So, we are to believe that Doren, who is worried sick about her missing friend Nina, does not ask Niorline if she has seen her mother recently, or otherwise knows where she is. Doreen appears to be absolutely certain that Niorline does not know. How is this? Is this because Doreen already knows where Nina is?
Apparently, Potter does not ask either children if they know where their mother is. It should be emphasized that, as far as we know, the children attend a whole day of day care, without worrying about their mom. In all, it is clear that the daughter and probably the son, have no idea their mother is missing.
Tue 2006-09-05, 5:00 PM: Reiser, arrives at the Joaquin Miller school and sets up a meeting to discuss the program's enrollment policies. He speaks with Natalie Potter. Although Potter knows that Nina is missing, she neither tells Reiser this, nor asks Reiser if he knows where Nina is. Reiser states that he is not there to pick up the children and he gives his permission for Doren to pick them up, which she does a few minutes later, at about 5:15 PM. Reiser is at the school for about 10 minutes.
Tue 2006-09-05: At an unknown time, but supposedly after Nina does not pick up the children from day care, Ellen Doren files a missing-persons report.
At an unknown time, police conduct a phone interview with Reiser. Later, much of the press, repeatedly claim, "they have not been able to reach Hans Reiser since their investigation began." The police interview probably occurs before Doren calls.
At an unknown time, Doren phones Hans. She tells him she has the children and asks if he knows where Nina is, mentioning that Nina was last seen at his home. (It is not know why Doren has not called Reiser earlier.) This implicit accusation was noted by Reiser, who said, "I need to talk to my lawyer." This may be the first time that Reiser hears that Nina is missing.
Reiser drives his mother's, Honda Civic, to McGothigan's house near Mills College in Oakland to pick up his mom. Reiser spends about an hour at McGothigan's home. Reiser explains he is using the Honda Civic, as he is having trouble getting the CRX to start. He does not tell his mother, that Nina is missing, till the next day.
If you have anything that contradicts this account, please provide a link to it. I haven't been able to turn up anything that supports what you've been saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Evaluating a new piece of software doesn't take a fair amount of time? Pardon me, my mistake. I must be living on another planet.
You're not listening to me. It's easy to find out when the buzz is on, finding out if the buzz applies to you, or even if the buzz is justified at all, that takes work.
Among folks like myself, who are not at all anti-nuclear power, Edward Teller is demonized for testifying against Oppenheimer during the McCarthy witch-hunts.
Even among the anti-nuke crowd, I think Teller is demonized largely for his role in promoting nuclear weapons. Some of his ideas in this direction are arguably pretty crazy, e.g. orbiting nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers as anti-missle weapons.
If I may pick a nit here, if I understand this right, on average a weld will be stronger than the surrounding metal, the difficulty lies in being certain that that's the case for all of your welds. The problem isn't getting the strength up, but getting the variation down -- and as you point out earlier, non-destructive inspection of welds is a tough problem.
This is the reason that aircraft are still assembled using bolts and rivets -- in theory you could make a lighter aircraft using welds, but there isn't any way to be certain that any particular weld was done right, so we usually stick with a slightly inferior, but more dependable way of doing it.
(Or at least that was the case some years back... it would seem like there must be some way of cracking this problem.)
It has to do with not wanting to waste you're life experimenting with the latest crap.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where everything that was hyped as the latest and greatest was really the greatest, but often it's pretty useless. If you're lucky it's at least a slight improvement, and the work involved in learning the new crap might even be worth that improvement, but there's no guarantee of that, ever, and everytime you put aside something that works and experiment with the new, you're always taking a gamble.
But the people who need to have the latest because they've got to be able to say they have the latest are never going to understand that.
Oh, I'm just a FUD thrower now. The gross instability of Firefox 2 is a mere lie I'm spreading, because... uh, because why? Because I'm a spy for Microsoft who wants you to use IE because they make so much money off of giving it away with the OS?
You guys are seriously delusional on this subject, and I can't imagine why. Firefox 1 (plugins or no) crashed once a month at most, Firefox 2, I'm lucky if I see an uptime of a few hours. Firefox 1 was an improvement over Mozilla, Mozilla was an improvement over Netscape... what the hell happened with Firefox 2?
On the other hand, there's some interesting reading material out there in those bug reports. For example:
You might want to ponder those words of wisdom a bit there, oh firefox fan.
So, why doesn't the the "addons" site warn the user that they shouldn't install anything unless they're experts who really know what they're doing? Something like "'addons' are dangerous and may trash your software."
Well you know, part of the job that a real operating system does is it tries to contain the amount of damage a badly written app can do to the whole system. Under something like linux, you expect that if an app crashes it won't take out the entire operating system...
Except, of course, in the case of Firefox. I've seen Firefox 2 randomly wedge my kubuntu laptop so hard I've had to eject the battery to do a hard reboot (when this happens the X windows trick "Ctrl-Alt 4" will only sometimes get me a new shell I can use to kill firefox; sometimes the system refuses to respond even to that rather large hammer). But of course, this must be enitrely my fault, I must have the wrong addon installed (I have trimmed them down to what I'd call a minimal set -- adblock and whatever they call the latest re-write of the mozex idea and a few themes...), or maybe it's my fault for not feeling like debugging the C code, (or maybe for not using Windows like a normal person, eh?). What a bunch of winers, we users are, eh? We get handed this wonderful code for free, and get upset just because we get to spend hours of our lives experiencing the joys of firefox bugs.
(Have I filed bug reports on this? No, I haven't bothered. My experience with filing bugs with mozilla.org is that it's an exercise in futility...)
You mean, major complex apps that are written in C.
And yet, the linux kernel hackers seem to have managed to plug their leaks.
Ah, so you mean the Firefox extension mechanism is fundamentally broken, and they can't figure out how to keep a misbehaving extension from taking out the entire browser?
It's not doubt very comforting to the Firefox team to be able to point fingers elsewhere, but what difference is this supposed to make to the end user? And why would I want to use Firefox if I didn't want to use the extensions? Konqueror works fine, you know?
That's the party line you're supposed to take when dealing with them, but actually, I'm convinced that there are a hell of a lot of wikipedia-lawyers out there riding high on a sense of self-importance. It's nice to be able to "contribute" without actually knowing anything except how to spew things like "Don't do that, it violates [WP:whatever], [WP:neverheardofit], and [WP:madeupbyafewprogrammers]".
Well yeah... and needless to say the real answer is probably that they're both pretty good, and this isn't worth worrying about all that much.
As I mentioned at the outset, my personal opinion is that if you start off with postgresql, you are unlikely to need to switch later. Even if you're using a "vendor", if they screw you over, you can drop them and find support elsewhere. The miracle of open source software, you know?
(By the way, myself I don't have any problem with writing portable SQL and using things like DBI/DBD, but I have my doubts this is what is meant by "a database abstraction layer" in this discussion.)
I'm sure you do well in business -- a tone of absolute certainty always goes over well.
And I've been a developer long enough to see multiple different fads come and go, most of them based on (some interpretation or other) of "computer science".
Oh, this is a result from Computer Science? So where's the experimental data that proves that this is the correct way of doing things? (I have this funny idea that dogamatic recitations of theory and vague anecdotal evidence isn't really what "science" is about.)
Even if I grant the importance of some form of encapsulation in the design of a software project -- which of course I do -- it does not follow that the right place to draw one of the boundaries is at the "database abstraction layer".
"An anonymous reader sent in word that Linux kernel developer Nick Piggin reran the benchmark today and came to a different conclusion: In his benchmark Linux was faster than FreeBSD."
You need to hire this man before switching to a new platform. He'll keep management off your back.
There's nothing wrong with FreeBSD, of course, but as I understand it postgresql performance is better on linux now, for recent values of linux.
If you're a unix dude, I don't see why you'd care which one you're working on, myself.
(And I agree strongly with the recommendations for postgresql and perl -- which is much-maligned, but actually going strong.)
I was going to yell at you, before I got the joke.
Awhile back, there was some core Ruby dude who was storming out the door with a FOD flamefest -- most discussion here centered on his obvious personality problems, but along the way the man talked about Rails servers being horribly unstable, needing to be rebooted frequently. It could be that The Problem is Fixed Now, but you have to wonder how the buzz for a platform can reach such a tremendous pitch when there are still basic problems with it that need to be solved...
(And why do you think they call ORMs "Object Relational Mappers"? They seem to be designed to make sure you can't use any Relational features. Maybe "object dumpers" would be a better name -- or "database crippleware".)
But if you're the only people in the business using an unusual platform, you'll be able to attract the entire range of people who are familiar with it, and they may very well be more enthusiastic to work on it than yet another corporate-grunt (I'm channeling Philip Graham here).
When a platform becomes popular, that encourages programmers to learn how to work on it, but if you jump on a bandwagon too soon, you may find that the jobs are outpacing the trained programmers and you're hosed even if it did seem like very "mainstream" choice to you. Surveying ads on Dice to make a decision is perhaps not the best idea: you'll find out what kinds of programmers everyone is having trouble hiring, not what kinds are easy to hire.
And in any case: is "ease of hiring" really that big a concern? Maybe you should be worrying about employee retention so you don't need to hire so often. If you can keep your programmer's happy with a less-mainstream choice, then maybe that's the way to go (returning to Philip Graham, here).
Why that's a great idea... if you don't mind crippling all of your database code so that it runs at the same mediocre level with every database. ("We can't use materialized views!"; "Why not?"; "Well, database X and Y don't have them yet."; "But we're not using X and Y...")
(Personal opinion: if you start with postgresql, you won't ever need to switch, and database-independence starts looking like a pretty silly goal.)
Yes, and y'all are depriving us of that fun.
Seriously: one way you evaluate platforms is by reading advocates flaming each other and then trying to decide which group sounds like they know what they're talking about. How else are you going to learn about a platform, by reading the hype put out on it's own website? (I tried looking at the Drupal web site the other day, and they don't exactly make it easy to find technical information... hell, it's hard to find out that it's written in PHP! They will however tell you that it's "robust" -- whatever that's supposed to mean).
The decision to avoid naming-names is a recognition that there are problems with this syndrome of dueling advocacy flames, but it's just ducking the problem without fixing it. It sure would be nice to have something better, wouldn't it? What exactly would that be?
How do you evaluate web platforms? Well, you re-implement your site in every available web platform, and create a heavy duty system of performance benchmarking, and you hammer away at all of them and determine which one performs better. Then you survey the sub-managers of each of the sub-projects for each platform, and ask them to tell you if they felt like they were having trouble hiring qualified people to work on them (unfortunately, they'll all say "yes"), and so on. Then you put that information all together, and then you'll get fired for spending millions of dollars without doing any productive work.
Or, here's an idea: how about you go to one of those university departments with "Computer" in the name (CS, CE, whatever) and talk them into doing comparitive studies like this, using their copious supply of undergraduates as volunteer labor? Then they could publish useful data that everyone would actually want to know.
Or you, could look over the results of the "Plat Forms Contest" again... except it didn't show a lot of difference between the language/platform choices, did it? It seems that if you've got a team of experienced developers working with a mature set of libraries that they're familiar with, there just isn't a huge amount of gains to be made from switching platforms.
I ain't no lawyer (thank god) but if you don't think that the intent of a contract matters when you go into court, I suspect that you ain't no lawyer either.
The real trouble with all these issues is that programmers have trouble understanding that legal code is not computer code -- legal definitions are not always precise, and they often require judgement calls (which is why we have judges), and in the case of the GPL the question of what a "derived work" is can be a problem on occasion.
(And if you ask me, the GPL is a pretty brilliant social institution, a really clever legal hack -- if you slashkids don't get the point, it's just because we haven't been seeing too many problems of late like the unix wars of the 80s... unless of course, you count OSX which looks a hell of a lot to me like the latest proprietary fork of the BSD code base.)
There was a Time magazine poll less than a month ago that showed that Obama could beat McCain, but with Hillary against McCain it would be a tight race. Apparently independant voters like Obama, but not Hillary -- it seems unlikely to me that Hillary can manage any backroom deals that can conceal this fact: Obama is more electable, so the PLEOs (aka superdelegates) will back Obama.
Note that Rush Limbaugh suggested to his listeners that they should cross-over and vote for Hillary, just to mess up the Democratic party.
These trememdous "wins" and "loses" you keep hearing about are usually just symbolic: the assigned delegates are breaking nearly evenly between the two democratic candidates, with on average a slight preference for Obama. Neither candidate is going to reach the cut-off that puts the election in the bag: it's going to be a brokered primary (all praise the highly democratic Democratic party).
No, no, the advantage of visiting this site is to giggle at CmdrTaco for getting the definition of "Open Source" wrong.
But he's just a newbie, so don't laugh too hard.
(Proof positive: OSX rots your brain.)
tomhudson wrote:
Maybe because there's nothing to explain. As far as I can tell, Reiser actually did not pick up the kids that day.
Where are you getting your information? Links please.
If you have anything that contradicts this account, please provide a link to it. I haven't been able to turn up anything that supports what you've been saying.