What is the coolest Linux distribution? I've installed Red Hat in the past (version 6 something) but I never really did anything with it. Anyway I was talking to a friend of mine and was kind of bragging a little bit more than I should and I was telling him that I used Linux. You know... because Linux like makes you "cool" or something.:) Anyway, now I'm in a bit of a pinch because I need to get Linux installed on my system again so I can show it off to him and I'm wondering what distribution is the coolest? Which one has the biggest "wow" factor? The slickest installation? The best default Desktop setup? The least amount of command line interaction (preferably NONE!).
That's a very good question, AC. Since there really is no distribution that fits your criteria, I've decided to create a new distribution, which will be called "l33t L1|\|ux", of course, although its internal codename will be "Poser Linux" because that's easier to spell and means the same thing.
I plan to replace all messages in the source code with their l33t_5p34k equivalents, for starters. It'll have an Enlightenment desktop, with a Matrix theme, of course - gotta stick to stuff that everyone recognizes as cool, even your parents, otherwise someone might not realize that you're cool. Best of all, this distribution is going to be 100% free - I'll even fedex you the CDs 2-day, for free! I figure the daemon I install to email me your parent's credit card numbers when you buy something online will more than make up for any distribution costs!
What makes you any different, Ars-Fartsica?
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Coder or Architect?
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
You're attempting to make yourself "special", too, with these kinds of comments. So your ego simply tends toward negative expression, unlike those who attempt to manifest their specialness by creating something (whether or not they succeed).
So why are you here? To try to puncture the egos of annoying and pimply young geeks? You know it isn't going to work, any more than my responding to your ongoing trolling will work.
It is said that meetings are proliferated by those who are best at putting on shows.
I'm sure that's true, but that ignores the ass-covering type of meeting. These tend to be held on a regular basis regardless of whether there's any need for them, and the fact that half a dozen or a dozen people are present serves to provide strength in numbers: something must be going on, because a dozen people are meeting every week about it.
The sort of managers who run this type of meeting can be the opposite of the kind of person who can put on a show: they're the kind who likes to keep their head down and not be noticed when something's gone wrong. When something does go wrong, they can point to how they've diligently been holding allegedly productive meetings, and the problem must lie elsewhere, preferably in another department represented at said meetings.
I currently attend one of these every Thursday at 9:00am, hence my intimate familiarity with the species...
Spelling matters to the/. editors when there are alternative spellings and one of them is American. In these cases, such as with "aluminium" and "aluminum",/. editors feel obliged to take a strong patriotic stand, denying the existence of any other spellings. This offends many non-Americans, and over time, countless little incidents like this build up, eventually spawning an irrational hatred of Americans, which ultimately turns into terrorism. Some hapless terrorist then attacks America, which gives America an excuse to bomb all the countries it has been itching to bomb for the last few decades. Thus, spelling is an important tool of military conquest, and/. plays a leading role in America's foreign policy.
The use of spelling in this way goes back to the very founding of America. In early secret sessions of the Congress, it was decided to deliberately change certain spellings, at that time as an irritation to the British. The King's court in England would be plunged into a grammatical outrage when receiving a communication from the American colony, containing strategic abuses of the King's English. This prompted the King to send troops to whip the colonies into shape, which in turn inspired ordinary American colonists to rise up and throw off their oppressor's yoke.
This is why the "spelling bee" is such an important feature of America's education system. As any boy can tell you, "bee" is for "bomb". Indoctrinating young Americans to misspell is the secret weapon which America has used to devastating effect against its enemies, who are so flummoxed by the apparent illiteracy of their opponent that they forget to watch for incoming Tomahawks. Misspellings are behind some of the key events which have shaped our history. Next time you see a/. editor use "then" instead of "than", turn on your TV - the consequences are sure to follow swiftly.
It's not that big a deal to generate something like this - it just takes time. With fractals, you can generate part of the picture at a time, e.g. one printed page at a time, about 8 million pixels at 300 DPI. Even on a slower machine, just let it churn away in the background whenever you get a chance, and slowly, your 10ft by 10ft poster will come together.
The common quotes are shorter and more digestable, literal truth is not relevant compared to effective communication.
I agree, but it seems not everyone does. Some people seem to be too literal-minded for this sort of phrase to be useful, since they can't help but focus on the literal meaning of the phrase.
In addition, in the particular case of "information wants to be free", there is a bias inherent in that statement which doesn't exist in a statement like "water seeks its own level". Perhaps if we were discussing water rights, it would be different, but there's another issue: water's level is driven by gravity, not by what people want. There's something more than just the pathetic fallacy at work here (someone let me know if it has a name): the objects aren't just being anthropomorphized, people's desires are being projected onto them.
Just as talking about "piracy" colors people's perception of copyright issues, saying that "information wants to be free" is somewhat biased towards, well, information wanting to be free, as though it has nothing to do with what people want. I personally like the phrase, but those with more conservative intellectual property agendas usually don't, for obvious reasons - one of which being that information does want to be free!;P
What all of these proposals miss is the incredible service that "nuisance" hackers and virus-writers perform.
Imagine if Osama bin Laden, or the "evil" terrorist or dictator of your choice, had spent a few million dollars developing a really dangerous version of Code Red or Nimda, and released it before those security holes had already mostly been closed as a result of more benign attacks.
A truly dangerous virus would remain fairly dormant, attracting little attention, until it had spread widely. It would then attack with the most devastating attack possible, which probably means deleting all files it can find. If it was really smart, it would figure out a way to compromise backup data without being detected, so that recent backups would be useless. An attack like this could cripple technological nations and cost trillions of dollars to recover from.
A truly dangerous virus like this is a little more difficult to deploy now, thanks to Nimda and Code Red. In other words, the cyber-equivalent of the World Trade Center tragedy has been at least partially averted, but without truly serious cost. In fact, rather than try to stamp out hackers (crackers), we should wish for a real-world equivalent - petty criminals who could have forced us, prior to Sep. 11, to close some of the enormous holes in security and strategic thinking that made the attack possible.
The real issue should be what the hackers actually do. In real life, small crimes (misdemeanours) such as defacement and minor vandalism get small penalties. The danger in cyberspace is that fear leads to an environment in which any cybercrime, no matter how small, is punished extremely. If this approach succeeds in inhibiting petty cybercrime, all this will do is open up huge loopholes to be exploited by those with a more dangerous agenda.
how long this would take. Its getting cheaper to use fiber. The boards are getting tighter packed etc. I wonder if they will design a board that you don't have to swap the motherboard every time a new cpu/bus archetechure comes out.
Backplane anyone? the S100 had it - It was a good idea at the time.
This could work for CPU upgrades, which is probably one reason manufacturers don't do it - they like built-in obsolescence.
But there's more to it than that. Other than CPU upgrades, the problem with a common bus in the past has been that the bus itself is a limiting factor. Think of commonly used buses and other interconnects, whether PCI, SCSI, IDE, the CPU/RAM FSB, etc. Every one of these has gone through multiple iterations of getting faster. Similiary, every time there was an improvement in backplane performance, you'd need to upgrade your backplane. Typically, during such an upgrade, you also want to upgrade other components, like CPU & RAM - so the most efficient way to do this is with a single motherboard that contains it all.
If it were possible to set up a backplane that had humongous speeds that far outstripped anything the components were capable of, the backplane approach might make more sense. Still, something like that sounds expensive, and actually adds complexity to systems from the point of view of manufacturers and even end users.
I can understand the firewall replacement (Proxy server -> linux based system), but replacing sourcesafe with CVS?
No offense, but I think you're reflecting your own prejudices rather than any real issue. This has actually been one of the most appreciated aspects of the migration. WinCVS is perfectly workable and usable, even with Visual Studio. What's the big deal about keeping a WinCVS window open, and Alt-Tabbing to it to do commits? Keep in mind that the CVS checkout model is significantly more powerful than that of VSS: typically, developers work with the entire source tree checked out, keeping a complete copy of the repository locally. So the anal checkin-checkout model required by VSS disappears, and you're mainly doing commits, only when you need to commit a change, while keeping the source checked out.
None of the developers at this client even murmured about it - once they got used to the improved checkout model, and found how much quicker remote version control became, they were sold.
Usability? Once it's configured by someone who knows what they're doing (e.g. me;), there's no usability problem for the "end developers" that I know of. I provided some scripts to do things like publish web pages from CVS to their intra/extranet web sites, and to update stored procedures in their MS SQL database from CVS.
Here's another way to answer your implied question: the fact that Visual Studio only integrates with VSS is simply another example of Microsoft's undesirable product tying, which restricts customer's options. When I pointed this out to the IT manager at this company, he was open to investigating alternatives to Visual Studio. Besides, since they're now migrating from ASP to JSP, Visual Studio is no longer really appropriate, and has begun being replaced by IDEs like JBuilder and NetBeans - the latter being open source, and having excellent CVS integration.
There are a couple of solutions for using visual sourcesafe over the internet though, fast and reliable, with all the benefits of VSS: integration in visual studio's tools and visual browsing of the database. Two things CVS will not bring you.
If by "visual browsing of the database" you mean browsing the repository, again, since developers typically work with the entire source tree checked out, they can browse the repository locally using WinCVS or even simply Windows Explorer. This is actually a big benefit over VSS. If you want to browse parts of the repository that aren't locally checked out, you can simply use a web interface, like cvsweb (the one used in this case) or ViewCVS. Here are a couple of arbitrary example repositories: cvsweb (OpenBSD) and ViewCVS (GNU).
Another argument in favor of CVS is since that's what many open source projects use, familiarity with CVS is an asset. The developers I work with liked that idea.
I guess the weapon making to destroy my small mind was only a facade.
Not a facade at all - as I said, a reaction to your original comment, which I still think was small-minded. You talk about fears - I have a fear that's already been realized, which is that people who denigrate the accomplishments of others oppress the people around them, reduce diversity, and make life less enjoyable. That's what you were doing, and that's why I reacted badly. Oppress me, I'll do the same back - not very enlightened, perhaps, but as I said, I reacted out of annoyance.
As for my advice on how to live your life, you were the one who brought up the totally unrelated subject of the attacks in response to my comment. That made it seem as though you weren't handling things too well, and perhaps could use some perspective. Seems like you've recovered your spine a bit now - glad to be of service.
The only fear I have in the world is that human beings have become increasingly more interested in their own personal accomplishments and ideas over the accomplishments of our race and society.
That's not a very well-founded fear. Very few real accomplishments are strictly personal. People inspire each other, and even one of those crazy languages might spark an idea in someone else. The only thing to fear, as I've already said, are the knee-jerk reactions like "this is different and unfamiliar, and therefore I am against it". Your sig talks about "the fundamentalist mind" - but isn't that exactly the sort of reaction you were exhibiting?
Microsoft uses FUD all the time, but they're not the only ones who can do that.
When IT people at one of my clients, a company with about 200 employees, were saying that they had heard bad things about Microsoft's Proxy Server 2.0, I reinforced that and explained to them how bad Windows is in general when it comes to Internet-related stuff, and why Unix-based systems are better. I suggested that they could use a Linux box with Squid as their proxy server, and that since it would be a dedicated-function box, it wouldn't have large maintenance overhead. I explained that Squid is used by large service providers and can handle big loads.
They went for it, and have been running Squid on Red Hat for some time now. Pressing my advantage, I suggested that they could switch their use of SourceSafe (version control) to CVS and getting much snappier operation across the Internet when developers are working from home. I demonstrated this to them, and they were convinced. They now run CVS for version control, too, using the WinCVS client.
The same company tried out Jitterbug for bug tracking. This wasn't as successful. There's now some talk of trying out Bugzilla. But I no longer have to evangelize this stuff, they're sold. They've received the threatening license letters from Microsoft, and have even gotten to the point of considering replacing Microsoft Exchange with an IMAP server. The only thing holding them back is good centralized calendar software. Anyone know anything good? It doesn't have to be free.
Another area where this company has moved in a more open direction is switching from Microsoft's ASP for web apps, to Java-based JSP. By now being thoroughly sold on the benefits of Free Software and Open Source (since they have developers and even admins who have been frustrated by Microsoft's lack of openness), they picked the Resin application server. Their intranet and extranet applications are now capable of running on either Linux or NT.
When their Windows-oriented vendor came to them with a $18,000 proposal for a Checkpoint Firewall-1 firewall, the IT manager said no thanks, we're thinking of setting up a firewall on one of our Linux boxes. This vendor was one of those who had been complaining of problems with Microsoft Proxy Server, and guess what, they're now showing interest in Linux also.
This company may even switch their file server. There's been some talk of this, due to Microsoft's per-seat license costs for accessing a Windows file server. It probably won't happen soon, but I have the feeling that it'll happen in the end.
Switching the desktops, though, is not considered a serious option, although it's been discussed more than once.
The important thing is to get a foot in the door. Figure out a reason to install an Open Source package - even if it's Apache on NT. Once people start having some familiarity and comfort with the idea of free/open source software, the possibilities become obvious, and it sells itself.
I'm sorry you're having such a bad reaction to the attack. However, you'll learn soon enough that life goes on. I live in the New York metro area - my girlfriend's sister was caught in the street during the collapse, had to be treated for smoke/dust inhalation, and still can't get back into her apartment near the WFC. Friends of friends of mine died. It was awful.
But that really has nothing to do with the comment you made. The way your comment was written, frankly, annoyed me. You assume that because someone develops something like a toy language that they're not also doing something worthwhile. You also presumably don't see the benefit in doing things as an intellectual exercise. I imagine you're not familiar with the enjoyment that can come from creating an interesting piece of computer software. Perhaps you're not familiar with the joy of creation in general. If you are, and you've ever painted a painting or written a poem or essay, or composed a tune, try to imagine that other people may get similar pleasure from writing software, even if the software doesn't seem to do anything "useful".
Some people do crossword puzzles, or grow gardenias, but that doesn't mean they're not also doing something productive. I doubt there are many people out there designing useless computer languages for a living. In fact, I suspect the people who have invented useless computer languages are probably also doing something quite productive with their lives. As such, your comment was inappropriate. I responded in annoyance, and for that I am sorry - it would probably have been better to try and explain to you what you're missing.
Now, let me tell you something about the terrorist attack. You're not dead. If you "walk around every day now wondering if I'm gonna blow up in a nuclear fireball by some crazy idiot human being who doesn't value the meaning of life", it just means you weren't paying attention before. Nothing much has changed in the world in terms of what's possible - it's just that you've suddenly become aware of more possibilities. Some terrorists took advantage of overconfidence, and lax security and policies. The US thought it was immune to this stuff, and you probably were one of those who thought that. You're now having to deal with having your imagined security taken away.
I've got good news for you: unless you lost close friends or family members (in which case I'm very sorry), not much has really changed in the long run. In fact, the end result of all this may be that things get safer, not more dangerous. But even if it doesn't - the world is still full of risks, whether natural or human. You have more chance of being mowed down by a cab in the city than you do of being hurt by the next terrorist attack. More people than were killed in NYC get killed in earthquakes on a fairly regular basis. That particular attack was likely to be a freak event - terrorists aren't going to be as successful every time (think about the previous WTC attack, for example). The world is not coming to an end, although many people's illusions may be.
Try to put your situation in perspective and think about it more broadly. You're not the only person on the planet, the terrorists aren't after you personally, and nor are they likely to get you. Take your own advice and do something useful with your life. I'm sure you'll live a long time, and have a fruitful life. But your life is happening now, attack or no attack. Walking around worrying about it is not going to help. Criticizing other people who aren't obssessing over it isn't going to help.
In fact, doing something creative, that expresses the joy of living and your human capabilities, is probably one of the best things you can do for your own psychology, which needs a little help right now. Express your humanity in a positive way - it's the best answer to what the terrorists have done. "Living well is the best revenge", is the saying, and the current situation is a variation on that. The terrorist problem is not going to be solved overnight, and if you try to suspend all other activity until it is solved, you'll simply burn out and end up in the loony bin.
Since "helping create a better world" would probably involve coming up with technologies to exterminate small-minded people like yourself, you should be thankful they're spending their time on harmless intellectual pursuits instead...
So, do you have any thoughts on O'Haskell? [chalmers.se]
So many languages, so little time... I haven't used O'Haskell.
My feeling is that the plethora of academic functional (and other) languages will eventually result in the most important and useful features and architectures becoming well-known and migrating to more mainstream languages. My personal and professional use of these languages is pretty much restricted to the ones which I like best, have active communities, and are evolving.
Absolutely, but the usual imperative style for this is for-loops galore and more assignment statements than you can shake a stick at.
I agree. Although one of the things I've learned from functional programming is that it's possible to program in functional style in imperative languages. For loops in themselves aren't necessarily bad; after all, you can prove their equivalence to a recursive function. The real issue is what you do inside those for loops - how you mutate variable values within the loop. Any time you find a variable having its value changed repeatedly within the same function, look at restructuring the function and possibly creating additional functions to eliminate that. Some simple code-refactoring rules along these lines can result in programs that are quite functional in their overall design and feel, even in languages like C, and even if you don't start out trying to design the program in a functional way (although it's obviously better to do that in the first place...)
I've written real systems in Haskell, including one which does some fairly sophisticated financial analysis. Haskell is a beautiful, expressive, and concise language. But my experience has been that a completely side-effect free language can be a real PITA and hamper development in various ways. Monads and the like are an interesting theoretical construct, and I'm very interested in the theoretical aspects of mutation in programming languages, particularly the way in which it relates to capturing the concept of time.
However, for real-world development, being able to "cheat" when it's convenient, and mutate a value here and there, can be a real development timesaver. I find languages which don't let you do that to be less practical. Also, for those new to functional programming, starting out with a language that's a little less pure may make things a little easier, and avoid frustration.
The "surprising angle" of the book you referenced is not all that surprising, except possibly to a total newbie. Graphical programs are a perfect application space for pure functional programming. The raytracing competition winning entry written in oCaml a year or so ago is a classic example of this.
My advice, based on my personal experience, is to learn Scheme and ML (try SML/NJ). Haskell is interesting, but in some ways too pure (no side effects, completely lazy). Scheme and ML cover two important parts of the functional language space, i.e. dynamically typed vs. statically typed. Scheme is a fairly easy language to get into, and makes a good bridging language to purer functional programming.
Given familiarity with Scheme and ML, most other functional languages are simply variations on these themes. Depending on what you want to do, for real-world work you might try using something like oCaml (although I find its syntax messy).
I don't think there is necessarily a *best* functional language. They have pros and cons, and I think which features are really important are still being hashed out. The existence of statically typed languages doesn't eliminate the need for languages like Scheme, for example - they excel at different things.
The best features of functional languages ultimately make their way into mainstream languages like Java etc. Automatic garbage collection, for example, has its roots in LISP. In future, you can expect mainstream languages to support things like closures and continuations (Stackless Python already does).
Why do you think that some of them had subscriptions to the National Enquirer?
Quiz them a little and they'd start talking about how aliens took Rosie O'Donnell's baby, and you'd be hard-pressed to believe they weren't true Americans!!
Hey, I saw that! Fnord... Am I supposed to to something now?:)
You saw what? fnord I'm afraid you must be mistaken...
Re:Imperial vs. Metric: SERIOUSLY OFFTOPIC!
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Biking @ 80 MPH
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· Score: 2
You see, that's the odd thing. The meter was not meant to be arbitrary at all, and in fact it forms the basis of the SI system (as I understand it). The original measurement of the meter assumed that the Earth had a latitudinal circumference of 4e4km... problem was that the datum they were using was rather inaccurate. *chuckle*
But the definition of the meter *is* arbitrary. The circumference of the Earth is no less arbitrary than the length of some human's foot. Both would certainly seem just as arbitrary to an extraterrestrial intelligence.
The only sort of values I can think of that might not be completely arbitrary are those based on apparently unvarying physical constants like the velocity of light in a vacuum (c). Of course, the meter has now been rejiggered to be based on this, but by using an arbitrary scaling factor.
Based on fractions of c, the common U.S. speed limit of 55mph would be 82e-9c, or 82nc (nano-c). Quite close to the metric equivalent of 88.5 km/h, as it happens. That's why I plan to recalibrate my speedometer in nano-c, so I'll be the only person on earth using meaningful speed measurements while cycling or driving.
Re:Imperial vs. Metric: SERIOUSLY OFFTOPIC!
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Biking @ 80 MPH
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Ahhh, but now you're just trying to screw with our minds. You call them Imperial measurements, but some are only in name. Take pints for example, 16 fl. oz. vs. 20 fl. oz. Which has a knock on effect on gallons, and thus car mileage. I find this makes for really small beers in the US. And what about the "short ton"? The US ton is 2,000 lbs vs. 2,240 for the Imperial ton. Talk about a perverted sense of humour!
This is the result of two effects:
When the first settlers came over to the US, they weren't the most educated people around, what with being persecuted for their religious beliefs and all, and some stuff just got screwed up.
Starting over in a new country gave some people the bright idea of "fixing" and "simplifying"
things, ranging from measurements to spelling (e.g. aluminum vs. aluminium).
The result, as usual when incremental changes are made to an historically accreted inconsistent system, was simply more inconsistency. But perhaps it's a good reminder that no matter what units we impose on the world, its underlying nature doesn't change. Base 10 isn't somehow "better" than base 12, and meters are just as arbitrary a unit as feet.
Myself, I want to mark my speedometer in fractions of the speed of light (c). That's what I call a meaningful unit.
Pipes are still used in server applications on Windows, and none of the IPC mechanisms you mention are a complete replacement for what pipes are good at: streaming data from one machine to another, where there's a reason to maintain a connection over a period of time. You can also use sockets for this purpose. Although sockets are often used instead of pipes, that's simply because it's more in line with most Internet applications - using sockets requires a bit more work.
Also, there's a performance issue: Windows' high-level IPC stuff is slower, and if you don't need all that functionality, you can be better off with a lower-level mechanism.
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That's a very good question, AC. Since there really is no distribution that fits your criteria, I've decided to create a new distribution, which will be called "l33t L1|\|ux", of course, although its internal codename will be "Poser Linux" because that's easier to spell and means the same thing.
I plan to replace all messages in the source code with their l33t_5p34k equivalents, for starters. It'll have an Enlightenment desktop, with a Matrix theme, of course - gotta stick to stuff that everyone recognizes as cool, even your parents, otherwise someone might not realize that you're cool. Best of all, this distribution is going to be 100% free - I'll even fedex you the CDs 2-day, for free! I figure the daemon I install to email me your parent's credit card numbers when you buy something online will more than make up for any distribution costs!
So why are you here? To try to puncture the egos of annoying and pimply young geeks? You know it isn't going to work, any more than my responding to your ongoing trolling will work.
I'm sure that's true, but that ignores the ass-covering type of meeting. These tend to be held on a regular basis regardless of whether there's any need for them, and the fact that half a dozen or a dozen people are present serves to provide strength in numbers: something must be going on, because a dozen people are meeting every week about it.
The sort of managers who run this type of meeting can be the opposite of the kind of person who can put on a show: they're the kind who likes to keep their head down and not be noticed when something's gone wrong. When something does go wrong, they can point to how they've diligently been holding allegedly productive meetings, and the problem must lie elsewhere, preferably in another department represented at said meetings.
I currently attend one of these every Thursday at 9:00am, hence my intimate familiarity with the species...
The use of spelling in this way goes back to the very founding of America. In early secret sessions of the Congress, it was decided to deliberately change certain spellings, at that time as an irritation to the British. The King's court in England would be plunged into a grammatical outrage when receiving a communication from the American colony, containing strategic abuses of the King's English. This prompted the King to send troops to whip the colonies into shape, which in turn inspired ordinary American colonists to rise up and throw off their oppressor's yoke.
This is why the "spelling bee" is such an important feature of America's education system. As any boy can tell you, "bee" is for "bomb". Indoctrinating young Americans to misspell is the secret weapon which America has used to devastating effect against its enemies, who are so flummoxed by the apparent illiteracy of their opponent that they forget to watch for incoming Tomahawks. Misspellings are behind some of the key events which have shaped our history. Next time you see a /. editor use "then" instead of "than", turn on your TV - the consequences are sure to follow swiftly.
It's not that big a deal to generate something like this - it just takes time. With fractals, you can generate part of the picture at a time, e.g. one printed page at a time, about 8 million pixels at 300 DPI. Even on a slower machine, just let it churn away in the background whenever you get a chance, and slowly, your 10ft by 10ft poster will come together.
Hey, maybe that's why it didn't succeed as an "open source" project! Just a thought.
I agree, but it seems not everyone does. Some people seem to be too literal-minded for this sort of phrase to be useful, since they can't help but focus on the literal meaning of the phrase.
In addition, in the particular case of "information wants to be free", there is a bias inherent in that statement which doesn't exist in a statement like "water seeks its own level". Perhaps if we were discussing water rights, it would be different, but there's another issue: water's level is driven by gravity, not by what people want. There's something more than just the pathetic fallacy at work here (someone let me know if it has a name): the objects aren't just being anthropomorphized, people's desires are being projected onto them.
Just as talking about "piracy" colors people's perception of copyright issues, saying that "information wants to be free" is somewhat biased towards, well, information wanting to be free, as though it has nothing to do with what people want. I personally like the phrase, but those with more conservative intellectual property agendas usually don't, for obvious reasons - one of which being that information does want to be free! ;P
Imagine if Osama bin Laden, or the "evil" terrorist or dictator of your choice, had spent a few million dollars developing a really dangerous version of Code Red or Nimda, and released it before those security holes had already mostly been closed as a result of more benign attacks.
A truly dangerous virus would remain fairly dormant, attracting little attention, until it had spread widely. It would then attack with the most devastating attack possible, which probably means deleting all files it can find. If it was really smart, it would figure out a way to compromise backup data without being detected, so that recent backups would be useless. An attack like this could cripple technological nations and cost trillions of dollars to recover from.
A truly dangerous virus like this is a little more difficult to deploy now, thanks to Nimda and Code Red. In other words, the cyber-equivalent of the World Trade Center tragedy has been at least partially averted, but without truly serious cost. In fact, rather than try to stamp out hackers (crackers), we should wish for a real-world equivalent - petty criminals who could have forced us, prior to Sep. 11, to close some of the enormous holes in security and strategic thinking that made the attack possible.
The real issue should be what the hackers actually do. In real life, small crimes (misdemeanours) such as defacement and minor vandalism get small penalties. The danger in cyberspace is that fear leads to an environment in which any cybercrime, no matter how small, is punished extremely. If this approach succeeds in inhibiting petty cybercrime, all this will do is open up huge loopholes to be exploited by those with a more dangerous agenda.
But there's more to it than that. Other than CPU upgrades, the problem with a common bus in the past has been that the bus itself is a limiting factor. Think of commonly used buses and other interconnects, whether PCI, SCSI, IDE, the CPU/RAM FSB, etc. Every one of these has gone through multiple iterations of getting faster. Similiary, every time there was an improvement in backplane performance, you'd need to upgrade your backplane. Typically, during such an upgrade, you also want to upgrade other components, like CPU & RAM - so the most efficient way to do this is with a single motherboard that contains it all.
If it were possible to set up a backplane that had humongous speeds that far outstripped anything the components were capable of, the backplane approach might make more sense. Still, something like that sounds expensive, and actually adds complexity to systems from the point of view of manufacturers and even end users.
No offense, but I think you're reflecting your own prejudices rather than any real issue. This has actually been one of the most appreciated aspects of the migration. WinCVS is perfectly workable and usable, even with Visual Studio. What's the big deal about keeping a WinCVS window open, and Alt-Tabbing to it to do commits? Keep in mind that the CVS checkout model is significantly more powerful than that of VSS: typically, developers work with the entire source tree checked out, keeping a complete copy of the repository locally. So the anal checkin-checkout model required by VSS disappears, and you're mainly doing commits, only when you need to commit a change, while keeping the source checked out.
None of the developers at this client even murmured about it - once they got used to the improved checkout model, and found how much quicker remote version control became, they were sold.
Usability? Once it's configured by someone who knows what they're doing (e.g. me ;), there's no usability problem for the "end developers" that I know of. I provided some scripts to do things like publish web pages from CVS to their intra/extranet web sites, and to update stored procedures in their MS SQL database from CVS.
Here's another way to answer your implied question: the fact that Visual Studio only integrates with VSS is simply another example of Microsoft's undesirable product tying, which restricts customer's options. When I pointed this out to the IT manager at this company, he was open to investigating alternatives to Visual Studio. Besides, since they're now migrating from ASP to JSP, Visual Studio is no longer really appropriate, and has begun being replaced by IDEs like JBuilder and NetBeans - the latter being open source, and having excellent CVS integration.
There are a couple of solutions for using visual sourcesafe over the internet though, fast and reliable, with all the benefits of VSS: integration in visual studio's tools and visual browsing of the database. Two things CVS will not bring you.
If by "visual browsing of the database" you mean browsing the repository, again, since developers typically work with the entire source tree checked out, they can browse the repository locally using WinCVS or even simply Windows Explorer. This is actually a big benefit over VSS. If you want to browse parts of the repository that aren't locally checked out, you can simply use a web interface, like cvsweb (the one used in this case) or ViewCVS. Here are a couple of arbitrary example repositories: cvsweb (OpenBSD) and ViewCVS (GNU).
Another argument in favor of CVS is since that's what many open source projects use, familiarity with CVS is an asset. The developers I work with liked that idea.
Not a facade at all - as I said, a reaction to your original comment, which I still think was small-minded. You talk about fears - I have a fear that's already been realized, which is that people who denigrate the accomplishments of others oppress the people around them, reduce diversity, and make life less enjoyable. That's what you were doing, and that's why I reacted badly. Oppress me, I'll do the same back - not very enlightened, perhaps, but as I said, I reacted out of annoyance.
As for my advice on how to live your life, you were the one who brought up the totally unrelated subject of the attacks in response to my comment. That made it seem as though you weren't handling things too well, and perhaps could use some perspective. Seems like you've recovered your spine a bit now - glad to be of service.
The only fear I have in the world is that human beings have become increasingly more interested in their own personal accomplishments and ideas over the accomplishments of our race and society.
That's not a very well-founded fear. Very few real accomplishments are strictly personal. People inspire each other, and even one of those crazy languages might spark an idea in someone else. The only thing to fear, as I've already said, are the knee-jerk reactions like "this is different and unfamiliar, and therefore I am against it". Your sig talks about "the fundamentalist mind" - but isn't that exactly the sort of reaction you were exhibiting?
When IT people at one of my clients, a company with about 200 employees, were saying that they had heard bad things about Microsoft's Proxy Server 2.0, I reinforced that and explained to them how bad Windows is in general when it comes to Internet-related stuff, and why Unix-based systems are better. I suggested that they could use a Linux box with Squid as their proxy server, and that since it would be a dedicated-function box, it wouldn't have large maintenance overhead. I explained that Squid is used by large service providers and can handle big loads.
They went for it, and have been running Squid on Red Hat for some time now. Pressing my advantage, I suggested that they could switch their use of SourceSafe (version control) to CVS and getting much snappier operation across the Internet when developers are working from home. I demonstrated this to them, and they were convinced. They now run CVS for version control, too, using the WinCVS client.
The same company tried out Jitterbug for bug tracking. This wasn't as successful. There's now some talk of trying out Bugzilla. But I no longer have to evangelize this stuff, they're sold. They've received the threatening license letters from Microsoft, and have even gotten to the point of considering replacing Microsoft Exchange with an IMAP server. The only thing holding them back is good centralized calendar software. Anyone know anything good? It doesn't have to be free.
Another area where this company has moved in a more open direction is switching from Microsoft's ASP for web apps, to Java-based JSP. By now being thoroughly sold on the benefits of Free Software and Open Source (since they have developers and even admins who have been frustrated by Microsoft's lack of openness), they picked the Resin application server. Their intranet and extranet applications are now capable of running on either Linux or NT.
When their Windows-oriented vendor came to them with a $18,000 proposal for a Checkpoint Firewall-1 firewall, the IT manager said no thanks, we're thinking of setting up a firewall on one of our Linux boxes. This vendor was one of those who had been complaining of problems with Microsoft Proxy Server, and guess what, they're now showing interest in Linux also.
This company may even switch their file server. There's been some talk of this, due to Microsoft's per-seat license costs for accessing a Windows file server. It probably won't happen soon, but I have the feeling that it'll happen in the end.
Switching the desktops, though, is not considered a serious option, although it's been discussed more than once.
The important thing is to get a foot in the door. Figure out a reason to install an Open Source package - even if it's Apache on NT. Once people start having some familiarity and comfort with the idea of free/open source software, the possibilities become obvious, and it sells itself.
But that really has nothing to do with the comment you made. The way your comment was written, frankly, annoyed me. You assume that because someone develops something like a toy language that they're not also doing something worthwhile. You also presumably don't see the benefit in doing things as an intellectual exercise. I imagine you're not familiar with the enjoyment that can come from creating an interesting piece of computer software. Perhaps you're not familiar with the joy of creation in general. If you are, and you've ever painted a painting or written a poem or essay, or composed a tune, try to imagine that other people may get similar pleasure from writing software, even if the software doesn't seem to do anything "useful".
Some people do crossword puzzles, or grow gardenias, but that doesn't mean they're not also doing something productive. I doubt there are many people out there designing useless computer languages for a living. In fact, I suspect the people who have invented useless computer languages are probably also doing something quite productive with their lives. As such, your comment was inappropriate. I responded in annoyance, and for that I am sorry - it would probably have been better to try and explain to you what you're missing.
Now, let me tell you something about the terrorist attack. You're not dead. If you "walk around every day now wondering if I'm gonna blow up in a nuclear fireball by some crazy idiot human being who doesn't value the meaning of life", it just means you weren't paying attention before. Nothing much has changed in the world in terms of what's possible - it's just that you've suddenly become aware of more possibilities. Some terrorists took advantage of overconfidence, and lax security and policies. The US thought it was immune to this stuff, and you probably were one of those who thought that. You're now having to deal with having your imagined security taken away.
I've got good news for you: unless you lost close friends or family members (in which case I'm very sorry), not much has really changed in the long run. In fact, the end result of all this may be that things get safer, not more dangerous. But even if it doesn't - the world is still full of risks, whether natural or human. You have more chance of being mowed down by a cab in the city than you do of being hurt by the next terrorist attack. More people than were killed in NYC get killed in earthquakes on a fairly regular basis. That particular attack was likely to be a freak event - terrorists aren't going to be as successful every time (think about the previous WTC attack, for example). The world is not coming to an end, although many people's illusions may be.
Try to put your situation in perspective and think about it more broadly. You're not the only person on the planet, the terrorists aren't after you personally, and nor are they likely to get you. Take your own advice and do something useful with your life. I'm sure you'll live a long time, and have a fruitful life. But your life is happening now, attack or no attack. Walking around worrying about it is not going to help. Criticizing other people who aren't obssessing over it isn't going to help.
In fact, doing something creative, that expresses the joy of living and your human capabilities, is probably one of the best things you can do for your own psychology, which needs a little help right now. Express your humanity in a positive way - it's the best answer to what the terrorists have done. "Living well is the best revenge", is the saying, and the current situation is a variation on that. The terrorist problem is not going to be solved overnight, and if you try to suspend all other activity until it is solved, you'll simply burn out and end up in the loony bin.
Since "helping create a better world" would probably involve coming up with technologies to exterminate small-minded people like yourself, you should be thankful they're spending their time on harmless intellectual pursuits instead...
It wasn't intended to be funny. Are you OK? You seem a little on edge. Take a deep breath, and stop being so hard on yourself...
So many languages, so little time... I haven't used O'Haskell.
My feeling is that the plethora of academic functional (and other) languages will eventually result in the most important and useful features and architectures becoming well-known and migrating to more mainstream languages. My personal and professional use of these languages is pretty much restricted to the ones which I like best, have active communities, and are evolving.
Absolutely, but the usual imperative style for this is for-loops galore and more assignment statements than you can shake a stick at.
I agree. Although one of the things I've learned from functional programming is that it's possible to program in functional style in imperative languages. For loops in themselves aren't necessarily bad; after all, you can prove their equivalence to a recursive function. The real issue is what you do inside those for loops - how you mutate variable values within the loop. Any time you find a variable having its value changed repeatedly within the same function, look at restructuring the function and possibly creating additional functions to eliminate that. Some simple code-refactoring rules along these lines can result in programs that are quite functional in their overall design and feel, even in languages like C, and even if you don't start out trying to design the program in a functional way (although it's obviously better to do that in the first place...)
However, for real-world development, being able to "cheat" when it's convenient, and mutate a value here and there, can be a real development timesaver. I find languages which don't let you do that to be less practical. Also, for those new to functional programming, starting out with a language that's a little less pure may make things a little easier, and avoid frustration.
The "surprising angle" of the book you referenced is not all that surprising, except possibly to a total newbie. Graphical programs are a perfect application space for pure functional programming. The raytracing competition winning entry written in oCaml a year or so ago is a classic example of this.
Given familiarity with Scheme and ML, most other functional languages are simply variations on these themes. Depending on what you want to do, for real-world work you might try using something like oCaml (although I find its syntax messy).
I don't think there is necessarily a *best* functional language. They have pros and cons, and I think which features are really important are still being hashed out. The existence of statically typed languages doesn't eliminate the need for languages like Scheme, for example - they excel at different things.
The best features of functional languages ultimately make their way into mainstream languages like Java etc. Automatic garbage collection, for example, has its roots in LISP. In future, you can expect mainstream languages to support things like closures and continuations (Stackless Python already does).
Quiz them a little and they'd start talking about how aliens took Rosie O'Donnell's baby, and you'd be hard-pressed to believe they weren't true Americans!!
But the definition of the meter *is* arbitrary. The circumference of the Earth is no less arbitrary than the length of some human's foot. Both would certainly seem just as arbitrary to an extraterrestrial intelligence.
The only sort of values I can think of that might not be completely arbitrary are those based on apparently unvarying physical constants like the velocity of light in a vacuum (c). Of course, the meter has now been rejiggered to be based on this, but by using an arbitrary scaling factor.
Based on fractions of c, the common U.S. speed limit of 55mph would be 82e-9c, or 82nc (nano-c). Quite close to the metric equivalent of 88.5 km/h, as it happens. That's why I plan to recalibrate my speedometer in nano-c, so I'll be the only person on earth using meaningful speed measurements while cycling or driving.
This is the result of two effects:
- When the first settlers came over to the US, they weren't the most educated people around, what with being persecuted for their religious beliefs and all, and some stuff just got screwed up.
- Starting over in a new country gave some people the bright idea of "fixing" and "simplifying"
things, ranging from measurements to spelling (e.g. aluminum vs. aluminium).
The result, as usual when incremental changes are made to an historically accreted inconsistent system, was simply more inconsistency. But perhaps it's a good reminder that no matter what units we impose on the world, its underlying nature doesn't change. Base 10 isn't somehow "better" than base 12, and meters are just as arbitrary a unit as feet.Myself, I want to mark my speedometer in fractions of the speed of light (c). That's what I call a meaningful unit.
If that's not a commercial, I don't know what is.
Also, there's a performance issue: Windows' high-level IPC stuff is slower, and if you don't need all that functionality, you can be better off with a lower-level mechanism.