You probably remember having trouble getting most hardware to work, That's a thing of the past as well, It's a rare case for me to install Linux, and have to manually configure hardware.
This is almost true. I just had a seven-day nightmare, trying to get an unrecognized wireless card to work with SuSE. The great advantage Microsoft has is that every piece of hardware you buy comes with Windows drivers.
(Actually, come to think of it, my card had a Linux driver. But I had to compile it myself (kernel versioning hell prevents precompiled drivers) and when the card wasn't autorecognized, there was no way their tech support would help. They just pointed me at the HOWTO.)
From which I conclude... well, don't buy Trendware wireless cards. But also, that Linux is going to impact the corporate desktop long before it really makes a difference in the home desktop.
Corporations can have hardware buying policies and make sure they get Linux-compatible hardware. Corporations have sysadmins who can use the wonderful command line. And Linux is naturally built for multi-user environments.
The home desktop is a much harder - and less lucrative - market to crack. I don't really see it, to be honest, until the corporate market has cracked.
Actually, I did try Eclipse. It seemed nice, but very slow - I think this was actually on Windows too. Anyway, I'm a 1337 linux haxx0r, and a fan of kdevelop, especially the new gideon version.
But it's a pain to program in, and it's only really cross-platform on Windows.
Oh, well w0000t! It's only cross-platform on Windows. What a very fucking useful piece of cross-platformness that must be. Truly its cross-platform powers are astonishing. What a dazzling range of platforms it crosses, indeed. If I ever need a cross-platform IDE, but I only want to run it on fucking Windows, Eclipse will be my first port of fucking call.
I agree completely. My girlfriend told me the other day that she'd refered to Tux in a discussion with some fellow university students. When they didn't understand she said "You know, the Linux penguin". Apparently they had never even heard of Linux.
Funny you should say that. I refered to a girfriend the other day on Slashdot, and when they didn't understand I said "you know, like a girl with whom you have sex". Apparently, they had never...
I believe Mensa is an entirely undesirable institution created in the 1940's by English upper middle members of society FOR upper middle class members of society, to provide a comfort layer of separation between the great British middle classes and the oiks that make up the vast majority of the population.
I hardly think so, old bean. Mensa has people like Gary Bushell in it, and he's a frightful oik.
It's a tricky one. But in my experience, it is very difficult to have this model whereby the programmer provides all the strings/arrays of strings the designer needs, and s/he puts them neatly into tables. In practice, good design requires careful thinking about data, may require different bits of data than what the programmer originally thought, etc. - and therefore requires close co-operation between designer and programmer. As such, I reckon it is better if they speak the same language, which makes the designer a "first-class citizen" of the process, so to speak. I think the difference between
$statement;
and
<template>
is fairly superficial - after all, PHP is bigger than cold fusion by miles, mostly on the back of HTML designers who got into it.
Ah, now that _is_ more interesting. Yeah, I accept that as evidence.
It's a fine balance. I respect Red Hat - they seem to be both dedicated to open source, and a really professional company. (I've never tried their stuff though.) I think the basic strategy of going for corporate deployments makes total sense, and I can see why they want to use the.0 and.1 releases of the desktop as testing grounds. On the other hand, their hobbyist userbase is providing them with a valuable service, so they shouldn't piss them off too much. Especially as Gentoo et al seem to be gaining mindshare.
I ain't sure I buy this. I agree with separating business logic and presentation, but I recently read a very good article on why (PHP's own, but the argument applies to all languages) templating systems suck: essentially, they end up creating their own little language, and forcing the designer to use it.
I would prefer to have the two layers use the same language. I'm not sure designers ought to be handicapped by the limitations of a templating system - the reason for PHP's success is that lots of HTML designers started using it to write code.
In any case, I would Just Use Perl given half a chance... here's hoping that Perl 6 gains some ground back, although with operators like ^=~ I have my doubts.
Something that nobody seems to have mentioned. It may be true that you have lots of in-house Linux expertise. However, your company should think about opportunity cost. They have certain standards to meet in terms of uptime, security, etc. Can they meet them more cheaply by having in-house people spend time on the server maintenance? Or can they hive that off to Red Hat, and your in-house people
(a) can spend time doing required development work and stuff that actually makes money, or (b) can be laid off (ouch!)
Just because you have the expertise, doesn't mean you ought to be using it.
You initially refered to "instabilities" in the hobbyist versions. Most of these problems you mention seem to be about not having the latest version of XXX. This might make Red Hat more stable, although I also appreciate that it would lack useful features. I don't think your claim that the free distros are "going to become... a proving ground for features" has been backed up yet.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable. My lawyer tells me that you should stop taking the quaaludes.
Y'know, it might be just me, but I am not sure it's a good idea to call your company Rim U Hosting. That level of service seems a little extreme. I'd be fine with just having my website hosted.
You wrote a one-line comment denying it. That hardly counts as a refutation, especially given that the original story was from a reputable news source, and you didn't mention which version of the Office 2003 beta you were using.
The kilogram is a French invention anyway. In today's knowledge-based economy, the US shouldn't be relying on foreign imports for its most basic scientific measurements.
I propose we replace the kilogram with the Freedogram, measured as the amount of high explosive sufficient, when embedded in an unexploded cluster bomb, to blow the foot off a statistically average Iraqi 8 year old.
We don't need websites with radical motives....We don't need protests of SCO's customers.
How does this chime with your.sig file:
Boycott SCO [boycottsco.org]
?
Re:Conclusion
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Not entirely true. The default way to build objects in Perl exposes private functions and members, and just trusts the API user to be sensible. But there are well-documented ways to create truly private functions and members - like using file-scoped variables or anonymous file-scoped subroutines. Damian Conway's book (Object-Oriented Perl) describes this in detail. Perhaps there are still ways to get round this security by something more lowlevel, like peeking directly into RAM, but they certainly aren't at all easy.
I agree with your general point that people ought to be interested in the world around them and try to increase their knowledge. But your original post was that anyone "who didn't understand computers" shouldn't be allowed to use them. This is foolish. Are you really suggesting that secretaries should have to go back to using typewriters? And how much understanding are you supposed to have anyway? Could you build your own motherboard? Design your own chip? If not, maybe you don't understand computers that well either.
For ease of use and teaching you good principles, Python would be ideal. On the other hand, if you are thinking of making this a career, you might want to consider Java. It is also relatively straightforward, although a bit less "high-level" than Python, and it has very widespread acceptance in the commercial world.
Very well put. But I think IVF and abortion are OK, and genetic manipulation is not, or not always.
Abortion prevents unwanted children being born. It reduces the number of unloved children in the world.
IVF allows desperately wanted children to be born. It increases the number of loved children in the world. Both these technologies increase human happiness and respect the rights of individuals - if, like me, you don't believe that embryos are individuals.
Genetic manipulation is rather different. It allows us to cure diseases, which can be a good thing. However, it also allows us to cure all manner of "faults" - or as the techno-enthusiast crowd on Slashdot like to call them, "bugs" - that humans have. Bugs like physical or mental disability, or lower IQ, or ugliness, or shortness. There is no clear dividing line, unfortunately, between "disease" and simple "disadvantage".
The human rights problem that I see with GM has nothing to do with putative attacks on future GM humans - a speculative idea which seems, as other posters have said, to have come out of the X-men plot. I am more worried by the idea that non-GM humans - with flaws like disabilities, low IQ or physical imperfections - will be seen as somehow inferior, or indeed as not up to the standard of the new superhumans.
The idea of human rights comes historically from the Christian tradition. I am not a Christian, but I believe that the best fundamental defence of human rights is to say that all humans, weak, foolish and helpless as we are, are intrinsically worthy of love and respect. People who are desperately keen to "improve" future generations, as if they were designing a better toaster, seem to forget this.
Slashdot Mirror
This is almost true. I just had a seven-day nightmare, trying to get an unrecognized wireless card to work with SuSE. The great advantage Microsoft has is that every piece of hardware you buy comes with Windows drivers.
(Actually, come to think of it, my card had a Linux driver. But I had to compile it myself (kernel versioning hell prevents precompiled drivers) and when the card wasn't autorecognized, there was no way their tech support would help. They just pointed me at the HOWTO.)
From which I conclude... well, don't buy Trendware wireless cards. But also, that Linux is going to impact the corporate desktop long before it really makes a difference in the home desktop.
Corporations can have hardware buying policies and make sure they get Linux-compatible hardware. Corporations have sysadmins who can use the wonderful command line. And Linux is naturally built for multi-user environments.
The home desktop is a much harder - and less lucrative - market to crack. I don't really see it, to be honest, until the corporate market has cracked.
Actually, I did try Eclipse. It seemed nice, but very slow - I think this was actually on Windows too. Anyway, I'm a 1337 linux haxx0r, and a fan of kdevelop, especially the new gideon version.
But it's a pain to program in, and it's only really cross-platform on Windows.
Oh, well w0000t! It's only cross-platform on Windows. What a very fucking useful piece of cross-platformness that must be. Truly its cross-platform powers are astonishing. What a dazzling range of platforms it crosses, indeed. If I ever need a cross-platform IDE, but I only want to run it on fucking Windows, Eclipse will be my first port of fucking call.
... and before it's even expired, the Perl monks have an implementation out. That's the power of open source, man.
Funny you should say that. I refered to a girfriend the other day on Slashdot, and when they didn't understand I said "you know, like a girl with whom you have sex". Apparently, they had never...
I hardly think so, old bean. Mensa has people like Gary Bushell in it, and he's a frightful oik.
It's a tricky one. But in my experience, it is very difficult to have this model whereby the programmer provides all the strings/arrays of strings the designer needs, and s/he puts them neatly into tables. In practice, good design requires careful thinking about data, may require different bits of data than what the programmer originally thought, etc. - and therefore requires close co-operation between designer and programmer. As such, I reckon it is better if they speak the same language, which makes the designer a "first-class citizen" of the process, so to speak. I think the difference between
$statement;
and
<template>
is fairly superficial - after all, PHP is bigger than cold fusion by miles, mostly on the back of HTML designers who got into it.
dave
Ah, now that _is_ more interesting. Yeah, I accept that as evidence.
.0 and .1 releases of the desktop as testing grounds. On the other hand, their hobbyist userbase is providing them with a valuable service, so they shouldn't piss them off too much. Especially as Gentoo et al seem to be gaining mindshare.
It's a fine balance. I respect Red Hat - they seem to be both dedicated to open source, and a really professional company. (I've never tried their stuff though.) I think the basic strategy of going for corporate deployments makes total sense, and I can see why they want to use the
I ain't sure I buy this. I agree with separating business logic and presentation, but I recently read a very good article on why (PHP's own, but the argument applies to all languages) templating systems suck: essentially, they end up creating their own little language, and forcing the designer to use it.
I would prefer to have the two layers use the same language. I'm not sure designers ought to be handicapped by the limitations of a templating system - the reason for PHP's success is that lots of HTML designers started using it to write code.
In any case, I would Just Use Perl given half a chance... here's hoping that Perl 6 gains some ground back, although with operators like ^=~ I have my doubts.
Something that nobody seems to have mentioned. It may be true that you have lots of in-house Linux expertise. However, your company should think about opportunity cost. They have certain standards to meet in terms of uptime, security, etc. Can they meet them more cheaply by having in-house people spend time on the server maintenance? Or can they hive that off to Red Hat, and your in-house people
(a) can spend time doing required development work and stuff that actually makes money, or
(b) can be laid off (ouch!)
Just because you have the expertise, doesn't mean you ought to be using it.
You initially refered to "instabilities" in the hobbyist versions. Most of these problems you mention seem to be about not having the latest version of XXX. This might make Red Hat more stable, although I also appreciate that it would lack useful features. I don't think your claim that the free distros are "going to become... a proving ground for features" has been backed up yet.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable. My lawyer tells me that you should stop taking the quaaludes.
Y'know, it might be just me, but I am not sure it's a good idea to call your company Rim U Hosting. That level of service seems a little extreme. I'd be fine with just having my website hosted.
WTF does this mean? How is object orientation incompatible with open APIs? Do you know what you are talking about, or are you just a marketing idiot?
You wrote a one-line comment denying it. That hardly counts as a refutation, especially given that the original story was from a reputable news source, and you didn't mention which version of the Office 2003 beta you were using.
The kilogram is a French invention anyway. In today's knowledge-based economy, the US shouldn't be relying on foreign imports for its most basic scientific measurements.
I propose we replace the kilogram with the Freedogram, measured as the amount of high explosive sufficient, when embedded in an unexploded cluster bomb, to blow the foot off a statistically average Iraqi 8 year old.
How does this chime with your .sig file:
Boycott SCO [boycottsco.org]
?
Not entirely true. The default way to build objects in Perl exposes private functions and members, and just trusts the API user to be sensible. But there are well-documented ways to create truly private functions and members - like using file-scoped variables or anonymous file-scoped subroutines. Damian Conway's book (Object-Oriented Perl) describes this in detail.
Perhaps there are still ways to get round this security by something more lowlevel, like peeking directly into RAM, but they certainly aren't at all easy.
Yeah... I'd like to see 400 blank pages and the last one says "JUST USE PERL".
I agree with your general point that people ought to be interested in the world around them and try to increase their knowledge. But your original post was that anyone "who didn't understand computers" shouldn't be allowed to use them. This is foolish. Are you really suggesting that secretaries should have to go back to using typewriters? And how much understanding are you supposed to have anyway? Could you build your own motherboard? Design your own chip? If not, maybe you don't understand computers that well either.
A well-thought-out argument? On Slashdot?
I think you mean "Life after Love". If you believe in Love after Life, then you're pretty twisted.
For ease of use and teaching you good principles, Python would be ideal. On the other hand, if you are thinking of making this a career, you might want to consider Java. It is also relatively straightforward, although a bit less "high-level" than Python, and it has very widespread acceptance in the commercial world.
dave
Right, and apparently you "grew" into building your own 8088-based computer....
Very well put. But I think IVF and abortion are OK, and genetic manipulation is not, or not always.
Abortion prevents unwanted children being born. It reduces the number of unloved children in the world.
IVF allows desperately wanted children to be born. It increases the number of loved children in the world. Both these technologies increase human happiness and respect the rights of individuals - if, like me, you don't believe that embryos are individuals.
Genetic manipulation is rather different. It allows us to cure diseases, which can be a good thing. However, it also allows us to cure all manner of "faults" - or as the techno-enthusiast crowd on Slashdot like to call them, "bugs" - that humans have. Bugs like physical or mental disability, or lower IQ, or ugliness, or shortness. There is no clear dividing line, unfortunately, between "disease" and simple "disadvantage".
The human rights problem that I see with GM has nothing to do with putative attacks on future GM humans - a speculative idea which seems, as other posters have said, to have come out of the X-men plot. I am more worried by the idea that non-GM humans - with flaws like disabilities, low IQ or physical imperfections - will be seen as somehow inferior, or indeed as not up to the standard of the new superhumans.
The idea of human rights comes historically from the Christian tradition. I am not a Christian, but I believe that the best fundamental defence of human rights is to say that all humans, weak, foolish and helpless as we are, are intrinsically worthy of love and respect. People who are desperately keen to "improve" future generations, as if they were designing a better toaster, seem to forget this.