I can recommend Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringely. His writing style is a little, er, idiosyncratic, but I personally find it most entertaining.
Check out his own website:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/
to get a taste.
The book doesn't really document OS history as much as that of the computer industry, but IMHO it's essential reading for anyone who sees themselves as a pundit on such matters.
"Triumph of the Nerds", is worth a look in the same vein. From memory, Cringley did an earlier program as well, to do with computers rather than the Internet, which is primarily what "Nerds" is about.
Neal Stephenson's essay "In the beginning was the Command Line" is not really historical, but is worth reading to appreciate some of the differences between modern OS's, if you haven't seen it before:
ActiveState got into a business relationship with Microsoft about a year(?) ago. Forgive me if I err in some details, but AS got some money, and MS got better support for Perl, which apparently is used quite extensively within MS.
ActiveState also apparently benefit from MS knowledge, specifically at the time producing a version of fork() which would work on Perl for Win32.
I've used the Win32 version of ActivePerl extensively. It's a GOOD product, more than making up for the lack of decent command scripting tools in base NT. The only real deficiency at the time was the lack of multiprocessing or thread support, which the latest version (with fork()) has recently implemented.
You can get Python, Zope, Java for Windows. Free. Perl for Win32 has been around for a while, ActiveState just took it to a new level of professionalism. Even Apache has a Windows offering, which is an excellent and far less clunky replacement for PWS.
Some of us need to use Win32 at work. Some of us, shock horror, may even like some aspects of it.
I can't see ActiveState coercing Unix Perl users to go over to the enemy. Rather I think it may help give Win32 programmers an insight into Unix-based tools and maybe get them to check out this Linux stuff.
Zealotry and anti_MS paranoia does get really boring at times. Guilt-tripping AS because they don't share your paranoia about MS is in my opinion a sign of immaturity.
Re:But here's a question...Plse help
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Universal Access
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· Score: 1
Talking to one exec about this, she said, and I quote directly: "But one problem we're already encountering is that many people just can't use computers and have trouble navigating the Net. We can provide and upgrade and maintain the equipment, which helps, but some people are already asking us for some education as well, especially in other countries. Do you know anyone who does this or specializes in this? How difficult would this be?"
IT training is a large and quite profitable industry. I am sure that any large training company would send people to developing countries - if the price was right, and the sponsoring company was willing to pay. An altruistic training company which would do such things on a non-profit basis might be harder to find, but my point is that any company could arrange this if the price was right.
This exec presumably has a computer of her own via her company as part of its, ahem, "universal access" policy, and could well do the necessary searches for such companies herself, if the facility is as wonderful a thing and such a boon as John Katz seems to think. Start with international companies who do IT training in India, perhaps.
I find it rather surprising that this rather fawning piece comes so close on the heels of the recent "corporatism" rant. There's truth on both sides, but it's difficult to trust the sincerity of a writer who can jump from one political extreme to the other with so little apparent self-awareness.
We can all get cynical about multinationals ripping off the third world, but OTOH prehaps just giving some of those people jobs is charity enough for the present.
A small percentage of beneficiaries of such a program may log on to online universities and the like, but what are the rest going to do? Fantasise about books from Amazon or CD's from wherever that they can't afford? Save up their wages to buy a copy of "Geeks" or the "Hellmouth" book? Scan porn?
As someone else intimated, some of these people have more basic needs. "Universal Access" is still much further up Maslow's heirarchy of needs than the level that many of the citizens of third world countries are at.
On the other hand we are already hearing the first shots fired in a new revolution A lot of people went in like this in the sixties, too. I expect the outcome from this "revolution" to be of the same ilk, i.e. a whimper rather than a bang. In Russia, the oppressors got overthrown. A new class of rich people sucked the economy even dryer than it was. Crime rates went through the roof. The French Revolution was another success story if you ignore all the guillotinings. A lot of African countries threw off colonial rule. Yeah, I agree with that, but there has been an enormous amount of corruption and killing in its place. Is the average African better off? Overthrowing the old order obviates the need for something better in its place. Open Source might work for software (though the other models ain't dead yet), but I can't see it working for government or resource management. I don't want to be governed by a bunch of techno-liberals and nouveau-hippies. Australia tried that in the early 70's, and the wounds didn't heal for a decade. Enjoy your revolution. What do YOU have to offer in its place?
Unlike your post. Are you saying this is good? bad? Danny Thorpe is the Devil incarnate? That Kylix is crap because it's based on Delphi concepts, not Linux concepts, or good for those reasons? That Danny Thorpe beleives in commercial software, not Open Source, and thus every Linux zealot should spam him unmercifully? Or that he's making good sense?
I might agree with your point if I knew what it was.
I use the Camel book regularly and found it invaluable, but IMHO the WORST part of it is Larry Wall's one liners. They are distracting to the extreme, and add whole new shades of meaning to the word "corny".
Why he couldn't be happy as a successful Uberhacker, and feel he had to try and flop as a comedy writer as well, is beyond me.
Clint Eastwood? As far as one liners go, more like Peewee Herman.
Gimme a break. Tech Support extremely frustrating and thankless? Try being a cop or a nurse, or a collections agent or telemarketer for a day, and thank your lucky stars. Yes, I HAVE worked in Tech Support for a number of years.
I'm in Sydney 9am... Exchange and Proxy Server at work are still kicking, or you wouldn't be seeing this. Both my Win98 laptop and Linux desktop booted no probs (tried 'em all last night around 0145).
The AUS government Y2K site (http://www.y2kaustralia.gov.au) reports all services working and no recorded events.
Guess I won't have to make that end run for my bunker in the boonies after all.
Re:Java Servlets increase your development time?
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Java Success Stories
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· Score: 1
I think the point he was making was that a good programming environment should decrease your development time, not increase it.
Presumably this was an idiomatic slip on your part. Not being catty, you weren't the first and won't be the last.
Java's socket implementation is crap. It doesn't handle writes to a socket server using non-blocking I/O at all. No analog to select().
Some dork at Sun wrote something on java.sun.com which says you "can stop blocking on sockets by using separate threads", which is NOT the same as non-blocking socket I/O. now every loser on comp.java.programmer floods you with "use a separate thread" if you raise the subject. One twit even told me what I was trying to do was invalid because the Java language didn't cover it.
Non-blocking socket I/O can be very useful and greatly simplify programming for certain socket apps, but no, Java don't do it.
You can do this in Perl, Delphi, C++ (Unix/Win32) but not in Java.
Yes, you have to do error handling in Perl. You should be doing it in Java as well.
I don't see why Java suddenly made it necessary for everyone to start learning OO design techniques. OO languages have been around a LOT longer than Java and gained significant use. C++, Delphi, Smalltalk etc have been around for quite a while longer than Java.
Web apps might be getting really complicated, but there were complex apps around well before the web became popular. The web hasn't changed anything in this regard.
You have done nothing to explain why Java is more suitable for web server apps than anything else.
Who woulda thunk it a couple of years ago that a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work would today be saying, "At least there's IBM to look to for real support of Java on Linux without trying to screw us over."
Ah, IBM. I remember the 80's and those 20 page IBM invoices full of "Monthly Service Charges" for utilities, device drivers, and the like. I remember the FUD and intimidation when we told them we were going to use Netware instead of their LAN manager product (I can't even remember the name any more).
Most of the IBM 'lifers' who enforced these policies are still there, with the same attitudes, even if they've had to swallow some pride.
They manage to support Java without (yet) screwing up like Sun have, and make a nice JVM for Linux... sorry, not enough for this journeyman.
"a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work "? You sound to me like a shameless karma junkie.
Re:Our JServ success story at Webstakes.com
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Java Success Stories
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· Score: 1
You have to draw a pretty long bow to say ASP is a function of the web server, and ADO certainly is not.
I've used both extensively, and they can be productive but IMHO have nothing special over Perl:DBI, PHP, Cold Fusion or Zope as a Web development environment.
Interbase is MUCH slower than Oracle, and in some circumstances is slower than Access. I've actually had to WORK with it in a commercial environment for 12 months, I didn't just read the documentation. It also has size limitations which make it very restrictive in a medium size enterprise and useless if you need large amounts of data (e.g. big companies, banks, etc.) If you want to keep more than about 2G of info in your DB (and this is more common than you might think in the real world), Interbase is not the best choice.
Oracle IMHO are even worse than Microsoft when it comes to pricing structure, aggressive marketing, and FUD, and they make incredibly awful development products (Designer/Developer 2000) but they do have a good RDBMS. I don't believe what Oracle or MS say, but I don't believe Inprise's hype about Interbase either, though it seems that perhaps you do.
Get praise for the work you do right, and be ashamed for your mistakes.
I think this happens a lot quicker and at peer rather than management level using the team approach. I also think you learn more when forced or encouraged to bounce ideas off each other rather than working alone in a box. Finding everything out for yourself when another person could show you how in five minutes is just plain stupid IMHO.
I don't think anyone suggested that each day a different pair of programmers take up where the last one left off. That I agree would be lunacy.
The way I like it, each person on their own, knowing what to work towards. On routine schedules, a manager(s) will look over everyone's code and test it together. If a problem is found, the manager will discuss it with the coder, and give help on fixing it.
That puts the onus on the manager for checking the code. Great, as long as you're not the manager. Team review, testing and debugging, allow him to do what he should be doing, making decisions, arranging resources and support, reviewing schedules and running interference with the PHB's. Team debugging may put more onus on you to do the less glamourous testing work, and illuminate your errors and shortcomings for all to see. If you can't handle that, you shouldn't be in business application development. It's a whole lot worse when your customers find the bugs that your peers on the team could have caught.
(the strong make up for the weak).
In my 23 years of programming, the strong are usually only too happy to expose the weak. If management are any good they'll do something about it (training the inexperienced, firing the lazy and incompetent, counselling or firing the prima donnas).
I'm really hoping more geeks will go the route of Socrates[1] and prove to the world that, while they could easily make alot of money, they choose not to because there are more interesting things in this world to do.
Yeah, but in this case, all he has to do is sit back and let the riches accumulate, he can become rich and *still* go out and do the more interesting things.
Your historical reference is to someone who made money on the ancient Greek equivalent of the stock market. What is the relevance of this story to your argument? It seems to argue as much against as for the point you are trying to make.
It's good that this guy follows his principles, though I would have had just as much respect for him if he'd taken the cash. It would have been more impressive if he'd stayed out of the papers, though.
Telling the world how virtuous you are is just another form of pride. Mr Elz is not really guilty of this, though RMS might be.
Got to agree. Looking at the tutorial, I felt like I was rereading "client/server programming with Java and CORBA".
Call me a luddite, but I've yet to see any of this stuff which makes me want to do away with Perl/CGI for web apps and socket programming for non-web apps (in Perl or anything else, Java IMHO not being the best choice until it supports nonblocking IO on sockets).
And all that stuff is open source, if not GPL, not that I give a toss about that distinction.
Somehow, Australia needs to get democracy and some kind of Bill of Rights/Constitution going to cut back on these abuses in the future. The Vote, Free Speech, and some written guarantees to the people go a long way.
Australia is a democracy. We have a constitution - not a Bill of Rights. Voting is compulsory. We end up with inept politicians. You, living in a country which elected both Reagan and Clinton for two terms each, should know all about that.
Not all our politicians just swallow and smile. There are and continue to be voices of dissent in Parliament. This was a bad decision, but I'm not sure it was arrived at undemocratically.
Do they have any Universities or Law schools down there? Maybe if someone went to a quality law school, and was also a citizen of Australia, they could file a suit against the government just like they do in the "First World" Western countries.
We have good universities and law schools here, and very good lawyers, for example Geoffrey Robertson, who unfortunately for Australian techno weenies seems to selfishly regard international human rights abuses as more important than ASIO's shenanigans and the government's ineptitude.
You can more or less buy a qualification in Australia (though not from the better universities), but it's by no means as easy as it is in the US.
The US has more lawyers and litigation than anywhere else, and I can't see how that has improved things, more the reverse.
So you advocate international terrorism (shooting down satellites) against an elected government, and throw out the baby with the bathwater by taking action which will affect the average citizen and not the politicians?
You are correct, Australia has no real enemies at the moment. The other poster's comment about Fiji was snide and uninformed. Our relationship with Indonesia is rather rocky at present, after the East Timor referendum, and our subsequent major push behind and membership of a peace keeping force. Someone else talked about our "occupation of Indonesia", but the circumstances of East Timor's annexation makes it debatable whether it ever actually was Indonesian territory.
A friend of mine works in military intelligence (show you have some and spare us the "army intelligence" jokes) and while of course he did not speak directly about his work, he did say that Indonesia was a prime interest of his unit.
IMHO most of our real concerns are related to internal terrorism, of which there is not a lot but what there is has occasionally been sensational. Some nutters tried to blow up a Commonwealth Heads of Govenment meeting in Sydney in the 1970's, and there are plenty of screwball individuals and organisations around.
We basically have four parties here. The Liberal/National Coalition are currently in power. The Labor party are contenders and held government through most of the '80s and early 90's. The Democrats are a small party who at present hold the balance of power in the Senate and have the balance of power when the major parties disagree on an issue, usually resulting in intense negotiation with the government. In the recent past, a few independents have had an unjustifiably huge say in political decisions.
The harshness Internet Censorship legislation was to a significant degree a result of the Liberals' desire to get an independent with a strong anti-porn stance to vote for their tax legislation, a move which backfired in any case.
In that case, the Labor party did not oppose the legislation - no one wants to be seen as an advocate of kiddie porn. The democrats put up some resistance to their credit, but without Labore opposing the legislation theirs were token efforts at best. The same thing seems to have happened here.
WE do have another party, One Nation, a populist right wing organsation whose platform seems to be bashing our indigenous people and blaming the country's problems on single parents, the unemployed, etc., headed by a former female fish and chip shop owner with the nastiest pair of eyes I've ever seen. They'd be a real worry poitically were it not for their staggering level of ineptitude and internal bickering. I doubt they'd ever come up with a coherent policy on communications or the internet.
This really kind of showcases my igorance both of Australian government and culture
You've described yourself pretty well.
I assume you're from the US from your URL (I tried accessing your page to check but it took too damn long - have you considered cable access?).
It's always a laugh to have Australian political processes criticised by citizens of a country that elected both Reagan and Clinton for two terms each.
Voting is compulsory in Australia. Unfortunately our party system results in two realistic options, both of which suck. From what I've seen, US citizens find themselves in a similar boat.
BTW, this charging thing was essentially done by a corporation which the government is trying to privatise. It is a business decision, not a legislative one. The censorship thing was a legislative one, this wasn't.
There are a few things to get angry about - like unasked-for lectures from clueless non-citizens. Call me again when you do something about your crypto export laws.
Slashdot Mirror
I cringed at "Netizen", but even more at "mediascape".
It's a pity that an alleged journalist colludes with such cold-blooded murder of the English language.
I can recommend Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringely. His writing style is a little, er, idiosyncratic, but I personally find it most entertaining.
Check out his own website:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/
to get a taste.
The book doesn't really document OS history as much as that of the computer industry, but IMHO it's essential reading for anyone who sees themselves as a pundit on such matters.
"Triumph of the Nerds", is worth a look in the same vein. From memory, Cringley did an earlier program as well, to do with computers rather than the Internet, which is primarily what "Nerds" is about.
Neal Stephenson's essay "In the beginning was the Command Line" is not really historical, but is worth reading to appreciate some of the differences between modern OS's, if you haven't seen it before:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
ActiveState got into a business relationship with Microsoft about a year(?) ago. Forgive me if I err in some details, but AS got some money, and MS got better support for Perl, which apparently is used quite extensively within MS.
ActiveState also apparently benefit from MS knowledge, specifically at the time producing a version of fork() which would work on Perl for Win32.
I've used the Win32 version of ActivePerl extensively. It's a GOOD product, more than making up for the lack of decent command scripting tools in base NT. The only real deficiency at the time was the lack of multiprocessing or thread support, which the latest version (with fork()) has recently implemented.
You can get Python, Zope, Java for Windows. Free. Perl for Win32 has been around for a while, ActiveState just took it to a new level of professionalism. Even Apache has a Windows offering, which is an excellent and far less clunky replacement for PWS.
Some of us need to use Win32 at work. Some of us, shock horror, may even like some aspects of it.
I can't see ActiveState coercing Unix Perl users to go over to the enemy. Rather I think it may help give Win32 programmers an insight into Unix-based tools and maybe get them to check out this Linux stuff.
Zealotry and anti_MS paranoia does get really boring at times. Guilt-tripping AS because they don't share your paranoia about MS is in my opinion a sign of immaturity.
Talking to one exec about this, she said, and I quote directly: "But one problem we're already
encountering is that many people just can't use computers and have trouble navigating the Net. We can
provide and upgrade and maintain the equipment, which helps, but some people are already asking us for
some education as well, especially in other countries. Do you know anyone who does this or specializes in
this? How difficult would this be?"
IT training is a large and quite profitable industry. I am sure that any large training company would send people to developing countries - if the price was right, and the sponsoring company was willing to pay. An altruistic training company which would do such things on a non-profit basis might be harder to find, but my point is that any company could arrange this if the price was right.
This exec presumably has a computer of her own via her company as part of its, ahem, "universal access" policy, and could well do the necessary searches for such companies herself, if the facility is as wonderful a thing and such a boon as John Katz seems to think. Start with international companies who do IT training in India, perhaps.
I find it rather surprising that this rather fawning piece comes so close on the heels of the recent "corporatism" rant. There's truth on both sides, but it's difficult to trust the sincerity of a writer who can jump from one political extreme to the other with so little apparent self-awareness.
We can all get cynical about multinationals ripping off the third world, but OTOH prehaps just giving some of those people jobs is charity enough for the present.
A small percentage of beneficiaries of such a program may log on to online universities and the like, but what are the rest going to do? Fantasise about books from Amazon or CD's from wherever that they can't afford? Save up their wages to buy a copy of "Geeks" or the "Hellmouth" book? Scan porn?
As someone else intimated, some of these people have more basic needs. "Universal Access" is still much further up Maslow's heirarchy of needs than the level that many of the citizens of third world countries are at.
On the other hand we are already hearing the first shots fired in a new revolution A lot of people went in like this in the sixties, too. I expect the outcome from this "revolution" to be of the same ilk, i.e. a whimper rather than a bang. In Russia, the oppressors got overthrown. A new class of rich people sucked the economy even dryer than it was. Crime rates went through the roof. The French Revolution was another success story if you ignore all the guillotinings. A lot of African countries threw off colonial rule. Yeah, I agree with that, but there has been an enormous amount of corruption and killing in its place. Is the average African better off? Overthrowing the old order obviates the need for something better in its place. Open Source might work for software (though the other models ain't dead yet), but I can't see it working for government or resource management. I don't want to be governed by a bunch of techno-liberals and nouveau-hippies. Australia tried that in the early 70's, and the wounds didn't heal for a decade. Enjoy your revolution. What do YOU have to offer in its place?
Yes, I've been waiting for this.
the availability of fork() on Win32 ActivePerl will be a big step forward. I'll use it even more than I do now.
That paints a pretty clear picture to me...
Unlike your post. Are you saying this is good? bad? Danny Thorpe is the Devil incarnate? That Kylix is crap because it's based on Delphi concepts, not Linux concepts, or good for those reasons? That Danny Thorpe beleives in commercial software, not Open Source, and thus every Linux zealot should spam him unmercifully? Or that he's making good sense?
I might agree with your point if I knew what it was.
I use the Camel book regularly and found it invaluable, but IMHO the WORST part of it is Larry Wall's one liners. They are distracting to the extreme, and add whole new shades of meaning to the word "corny".
Why he couldn't be happy as a successful Uberhacker, and feel he had to try and flop as a comedy writer as well, is beyond me.
Clint Eastwood? As far as one liners go, more like Peewee Herman.
Gimme a break. Tech Support extremely frustrating and thankless? Try being a cop or a nurse, or a collections agent or telemarketer for a day, and thank your lucky stars. Yes, I HAVE worked in Tech Support for a number of years.
I'm in Sydney 9am ... Exchange and Proxy Server at work are still kicking, or you wouldn't be seeing this. Both my Win98 laptop and Linux desktop booted no probs (tried 'em all last night around 0145).
The AUS government Y2K site (http://www.y2kaustralia.gov.au) reports all services working and no recorded events.
Guess I won't have to make that end run for my bunker in the boonies after all.
I think the point he was making was that a good programming environment should decrease your development time, not increase it.
Presumably this was an idiomatic slip on your part. Not being catty, you weren't the first and won't be the last.
Perl's socket implementation is crap.
Java's socket implementation is crap. It doesn't handle writes to a socket server using non-blocking I/O at all. No analog to select().
Some dork at Sun wrote something on java.sun.com which says you "can stop blocking on sockets by using separate threads", which is NOT the same as non-blocking socket I/O. now every loser on comp.java.programmer floods you with "use a separate thread" if you raise the subject. One twit even told me what I was trying to do was invalid because the Java language didn't cover it.
Non-blocking socket I/O can be very useful and greatly simplify programming for certain socket apps, but no, Java don't do it.
You can do this in Perl, Delphi, C++ (Unix/Win32) but not in Java.
Yes, you have to do error handling in Perl. You should be doing it in Java as well.
I don't see why Java suddenly made it necessary for everyone to start learning OO design techniques. OO languages have been around a LOT longer than Java and gained significant use. C++, Delphi, Smalltalk etc have been around for quite a while longer than Java.
Web apps might be getting really complicated, but there were complex apps around well before the web became popular. The web hasn't changed anything in this regard.
You have done nothing to explain why Java is more suitable for web server apps than anything else.
Who woulda thunk it a couple of years ago that a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work would today be saying, "At least there's IBM to look to for real support of Java on Linux without trying to screw us over."
... sorry, not enough for this journeyman.
Ah, IBM. I remember the 80's and those 20 page IBM invoices full of "Monthly Service Charges" for utilities, device drivers, and the like. I remember the FUD and intimidation when we told them we were going to use Netware instead of their LAN manager product (I can't even remember the name any more).
Most of the IBM 'lifers' who enforced these policies are still there, with the same attitudes, even if they've had to swallow some pride.
They manage to support Java without (yet) screwing up like Sun have, and make a nice JVM for Linux
"a die-hard Linux fan who does a lot of Java and database work "? You sound to me like a shameless karma junkie.
You have to draw a pretty long bow to say ASP is a function of the web server, and ADO certainly is not.
I've used both extensively, and they can be productive but IMHO have nothing special over Perl:DBI, PHP, Cold Fusion or Zope as a Web development environment.
Interbase is MUCH slower than Oracle, and in some circumstances is slower than Access. I've actually had to WORK with it in a commercial environment for 12 months, I didn't just read the documentation. It also has size limitations which make it very restrictive in a medium size enterprise and useless if you need large amounts of data (e.g. big companies, banks, etc.) If you want to keep more than about 2G of info in your DB (and this is more common than you might think in the real world), Interbase is not the best choice.
Oracle IMHO are even worse than Microsoft when it comes to pricing structure, aggressive marketing, and FUD, and they make incredibly awful development products (Designer/Developer 2000) but they do have a good RDBMS. I don't believe what Oracle or MS say, but I don't believe Inprise's hype about Interbase either, though it seems that perhaps you do.
Get praise for the work you do right, and be ashamed for your mistakes.
I think this happens a lot quicker and at peer rather than management level using the team approach. I also think you learn more when forced or encouraged to bounce ideas off each other rather than working alone in a box. Finding everything out for yourself when another person could show you how in five minutes is just plain stupid IMHO.
I don't think anyone suggested that each day a different pair of programmers take up where the last one left off. That I agree would be lunacy.
The way I like it, each person on their own, knowing what to work towards. On routine schedules, a manager(s) will look over everyone's code and test it together. If a problem is found, the manager will discuss it with the coder, and give help on fixing it.
That puts the onus on the manager for checking the code. Great, as long as you're not the manager. Team review, testing and debugging, allow him to do what he should be doing, making decisions, arranging resources and support, reviewing schedules and running interference with the PHB's. Team debugging may put more onus on you to do the less glamourous testing work, and illuminate your errors and shortcomings for all to see. If you can't handle that, you shouldn't be in business application development. It's a whole lot worse when your customers find the bugs that your peers on the team could have caught.
(the strong make up for the weak).
In my 23 years of programming, the strong are usually only too happy to expose the weak. If management are any good they'll do something about it (training the inexperienced, firing the lazy and incompetent, counselling or firing the prima donnas).
I'm really hoping more geeks will go the route of Socrates[1] and prove to the world that, while they could easily make alot of money, they choose not to because there are more interesting things in this world to do.
Yeah, but in this case, all he has to do is sit back and let the riches accumulate, he can become rich and *still* go out and do the more interesting things.
Your historical reference is to someone who made money on the ancient Greek equivalent of the stock market. What is the relevance of this story to your argument? It seems to argue as much against as for the point you are trying to make.
It's good that this guy follows his principles, though I would have had just as much respect for him if he'd taken the cash. It would have been more impressive if he'd stayed out of the papers, though.
Telling the world how virtuous you are is just another form of pride. Mr Elz is not really guilty of this, though RMS might be.
Got to agree. Looking at the tutorial, I felt like I was rereading "client/server programming with Java and CORBA".
Call me a luddite, but I've yet to see any of this stuff which makes me want to do away with Perl/CGI for web apps and socket programming for non-web apps (in Perl or anything else, Java IMHO not being the best choice until it supports nonblocking IO on sockets).
And all that stuff is open source, if not GPL, not that I give a toss about that distinction.
Somehow, Australia needs to get democracy and some kind of Bill of Rights/Constitution going to cut back on these abuses in the future. The Vote, Free Speech, and some written guarantees to the people go a long way.
Australia is a democracy. We have a constitution - not a Bill of Rights. Voting is compulsory. We end up with inept politicians. You, living in a country which elected both Reagan and Clinton for two terms each, should know all about that.
Not all our politicians just swallow and smile. There are and continue to be voices of dissent in Parliament. This was a bad decision, but I'm not sure it was arrived at undemocratically.
Do they have any Universities or Law schools down there? Maybe if someone went to a quality law school, and was also a citizen of Australia, they could file a suit against the government just like they do in the "First World" Western countries.
We have good universities and law schools here, and very good lawyers, for example Geoffrey Robertson, who unfortunately for Australian techno weenies seems to selfishly regard international human rights abuses as more important than ASIO's shenanigans and the government's ineptitude.
You can more or less buy a qualification in Australia (though not from the better universities), but it's by no means as easy as it is in the US.
The US has more lawyers and litigation than anywhere else, and I can't see how that has improved things, more the reverse.
So you advocate international terrorism (shooting down satellites) against an elected government, and throw out the baby with the bathwater by taking action which will affect the average citizen and not the politicians?
And YOU call US stupid?
Oh please. Why don't you read some of the posts here about how the Oz political system works? We all have to vote. We do, politicians still get in.
Short of armed revolution (the "cures" of which have historically often turned out to be worse than the disease) what do you suggest?
You are correct, Australia has no real enemies at the moment. The other poster's comment about Fiji was snide and uninformed. Our relationship with Indonesia is rather rocky at present, after the East Timor referendum, and our subsequent major push behind and membership of a peace keeping force. Someone else talked about our "occupation of Indonesia", but the circumstances of East Timor's annexation makes it debatable whether it ever actually was Indonesian territory.
A friend of mine works in military intelligence (show you have some and spare us the "army intelligence" jokes) and while of course he did not speak directly about his work, he did say that Indonesia was a prime interest of his unit.
IMHO most of our real concerns are related to internal terrorism, of which there is not a lot but what there is has occasionally been sensational. Some nutters tried to blow up a Commonwealth Heads of Govenment meeting in Sydney in the 1970's, and there are plenty of screwball individuals and organisations around.
We basically have four parties here. The Liberal/National Coalition are currently in power. The Labor party are contenders and held government through most of the '80s and early 90's. The Democrats are a small party who at present hold the balance of power in the Senate and have the balance of power when the major parties disagree on an issue, usually resulting in intense negotiation with the government. In the recent past, a few independents have had an unjustifiably huge say in political decisions.
The harshness Internet Censorship legislation was to a significant degree a result of the Liberals' desire to get an independent with a strong anti-porn stance to vote for their tax legislation, a move which backfired in any case.
In that case, the Labor party did not oppose the legislation - no one wants to be seen as an advocate of kiddie porn. The democrats put up some resistance to their credit, but without Labore opposing the legislation theirs were token efforts at best. The same thing seems to have happened here.
WE do have another party, One Nation, a populist right wing organsation whose platform seems to be bashing our indigenous people and blaming the country's problems on single parents, the unemployed, etc., headed by a former female fish and chip shop owner with the nastiest pair of eyes I've ever seen. They'd be a real worry poitically were it not for their staggering level of ineptitude and internal bickering. I doubt they'd ever come up with a coherent policy on communications or the internet.
Australia Post and Telstra have next to nothing to do with each other.
This really kind of showcases my igorance both of Australian government and culture
You've described yourself pretty well.
I assume you're from the US from your URL (I tried accessing your page to check but it took too damn long - have you considered cable access?).
It's always a laugh to have Australian political processes criticised by citizens of a country that elected both Reagan and Clinton for two terms each.
Voting is compulsory in Australia. Unfortunately our party system results in two realistic options, both of which suck. From what I've seen, US citizens find themselves in a similar boat.
BTW, this charging thing was essentially done by a corporation which the government is trying to privatise. It is a business decision, not a legislative one. The censorship thing was a legislative one, this wasn't.
There are a few things to get angry about - like unasked-for lectures from clueless non-citizens. Call me again when you do something about your crypto export laws.