My biggest complaint is that the interface is completely nonstandard, so nothing is where it would be expected.
um, and windows 3.1, its contemporary operating system, was so good that you couldn't improve on its approach?
come on, you can't have innovation without change. hopefully, people put a lot of thought into ui or interface changes; just because things are different and not exactly what you've grown accustomed to using for the last however many years doesn't mean they are bad.
What happens when you reach a buck in the hardware or have to patch the system or replace a kernel because of a hack that came about? It is costly and hellish to work on 4-6,000 pcs
Yea, and just think about how much work it would take to make 4000 emergency floppy disks.
>Sendmail, BIND, Apache (well, I guess NCSA HTTPD at that point) all lead the way.
except for apache, im reading that "lead" as past tense. have you counted security fixes on either sendmail or bind lately? unfortunately i dont know of a good alterative to bind, but for mail i use qmail (though postfix is good too). both of these were originally developed by individuals, rather than in the traditional open source manner.
One thing to consider, and one that can multiply our power _many_fold is that we dont actually have to give the shares to our designated organization. as i understand it, anyone can designate anyone else as authorized to proxy vote for them. that means that a certain number of days before a shareholder's meeting, we each go out and spend $1000 or whatever we can to buy stock (temporarily), assign the proxy vote to our organization, and then sell it after the meeting.
i bet that some smarty-pants can even figure out how to use various stock tricks such as hedging so that we dont even risk any money, other than the cost of buying/selling the shares. ($12/per, in my case)
i know a certain percent of you folks out there are highly paid web-folks. how about it? are you willing to lend some money to a good cause temporarily? (and you know that the press we got over this would do at least as much as the combined voting power we gained!)
and counting the days 'till slashdot provides a clickbox to filter out posts with the word "conspiracy" in them.
(and by the way, maybe a little campaign to bring down microsoft.com using only windows 2000 machines would be sort of fun. think of the contortions we'd send their pr monkeys through! too bad that would be immature, immoral and illegal...;)
regarding ac/dc, tesla was pushed out of the picture by the marketing battles going on between the heavy hitters of the day, westinghouse and edison. edison was trying to push his dc system, and westinghouse wanted the world to go ac.
a little story from that time: edison came up with the idea of pushing the angle that ac is dangerous, and to make his point, gave his invention, the electric chair (a pretty barbaric way to kill), to prisons across america, under the condition that they referred to the process as "westinghousing" a prisoner.
Open source software is usually designed to be very powerful and flexible. With flexibility and power comes complexity. Do we sacrifice writing powerful software with writing "easy to use" software? It cannot always be both.
The best designs are always the simplest. This has no bearing on how powerful they are. it is simply a matter of bringing requirements down to the lowest common level, and then providing the functionality of that level extremely well.
Unfortunately, the greatest advantage of software, (versus any previous sort of machine) that it is infinitely flexible, is also its disadvantage. Can you imagine the inventor of the bicycle deciding that it would be cool to have a shell around the bike to keep people warm, and then his friend thinks that knobby tires would be cool for mud, and then someone else decides that a large motor would make it easier for his mother... Each of these is a good idea, and the result is also a good idea, but the bicycle and the motorcycle perform very different functions. If you start tacking too many permanent subfunctions onto a function, it no longer can perform the original function at full efficiency. (see "camel":)
Another way to look at it: machine or program is simply the collection of knowledge of all people who have contributed to that effort. Each has his own needs and requirements, which they will wish to add to the capabilities of the program. The result is usually a flexible but dissapated program. Usually, software functionality is just like software programming-- 90% of the time, people are using 10% of the functionality. So perhaps its better to default to some approximation of that functionality in the first place.
Linux/BSD/Whatever should install easily and flawlessly out of the box, in a very simple and predictable installation, one click, with the very flexible possibility to modify that to get something more complicated, if you know what you need.
The same very cool guys who can write excellent Software that doesn't suck can write installers and configurers that don't suck, right?
Slashdot Mirror
hi, i'm Hal, and i'm really sorry your windows box got hacked. want a beer?
um, and windows 3.1, its contemporary operating system, was so good that you couldn't improve on its approach?
come on, you can't have innovation without change. hopefully, people put a lot of thought into ui or interface changes; just because things are different and not exactly what you've grown accustomed to using for the last however many years doesn't mean they are bad.
and you are skeptical?
except for apache, im reading that "lead" as past tense. have you counted security fixes on either sendmail or bind lately? unfortunately i dont know of a good alterative to bind, but for mail i use qmail (though postfix is good too). both of these were originally developed by individuals, rather than in the traditional open source manner.
i bet that some smarty-pants can even figure out how to use various stock tricks such as hedging so that we dont even risk any money, other than the cost of buying/selling the shares. ($12/per, in my case)
i know a certain percent of you folks out there are highly paid web-folks. how about it? are you willing to lend some money to a good cause temporarily? (and you know that the press we got over this would do at least as much as the combined voting power we gained!)
(and by the way, maybe a little campaign to bring down microsoft.com using only windows 2000 machines would be sort of fun. think of the contortions we'd send their pr monkeys through! too bad that would be immature, immoral and illegal... ;)
a little story from that time: edison came up with the idea of pushing the angle that ac is dangerous, and to make his point, gave his invention, the electric chair (a pretty barbaric way to kill), to prisons across america, under the condition that they referred to the process as "westinghousing" a prisoner.
incredible, huh?
Unfortunately, the greatest advantage of software, (versus any previous sort of machine) that it is infinitely flexible, is also its disadvantage. Can you imagine the inventor of the bicycle deciding that it would be cool to have a shell around the bike to keep people warm, and then his friend thinks that knobby tires would be cool for mud, and then someone else decides that a large motor would make it easier for his mother... Each of these is a good idea, and the result is also a good idea, but the bicycle and the motorcycle perform very different functions. If you start tacking too many permanent subfunctions onto a function, it no longer can perform the original function at full efficiency. (see "camel":)
Another way to look at it: machine or program is simply the collection of knowledge of all people who have contributed to that effort. Each has his own needs and requirements, which they will wish to add to the capabilities of the program. The result is usually a flexible but dissapated program. Usually, software functionality is just like software programming-- 90% of the time, people are using 10% of the functionality. So perhaps its better to default to some approximation of that functionality in the first place.
Linux/BSD/Whatever should install easily and flawlessly out of the box, in a very simple and predictable installation, one click, with the very flexible possibility to modify that to get something more complicated, if you know what you need.
The same very cool guys who can write excellent Software that doesn't suck can write installers and configurers that don't suck, right?