If you don't want your credit card transactions monitored, then you're already in trouble because the net doesn't offer any opportunities that didn't exist for credit card criminals 5 years ago.
ignorance is bliss. perhaps you haven't heard about the credit scams that porn sites have been accussed of?
net transactions mean more shadier people have your number, and it is easy for them to hide their identity from you.
The first poster was correct. I worked in for a credit card company for 8 years, and now do e-commerce programming, specifically credit card gateways.
The net only presents new ways to run the same old scams: using someone else's credit card number to buy something (which is much easier to get from garbage bins than it is from hacking into web sites) is only a small proportion of the scams perpetrated, the vast majority of which are done by merchants trying to get funds for nonexistent purchases, or conspiring with stooges to give them refunds on nonexistent purchases.
The only new twist is those porn sites who secretly route the calls to Moldavia or South America, and then split the toll charges with the phone companies concerned. This is semi-legal, though pretty naughty. Then again, if you are stupid and undisciplined enough to purchase porn by credit card, just remember the type of people you're likely to be dealing with.
Credit card transactions are and always have been traceable by banks, as every merchant must register with them before they can trade. So fraud of this type is difficult to get away with. In my experience, most credit card fraud is extraordinarily unsophisticated and easily traced. There may be extraordinarily talented criminals out there who are getting away with it, but not at a level where banks or other credit providers are seriously affected.
If you notice and tell your bank about a fraudulent transaction, you're usually well protected. If you don't notice, well...
For most purposes, SSL, especially 128-bit, is secure enough for transmission of this data. You CAN get 128 bit SSL outside the US. 40/56-bit triple DES used within SSL is probably good enough anyway. There are no DOCUMENTED cases of credit card transactions being intercepted by criminals during transmission over the internet. There are however plenty of cases of credit card numbers being stolen from servers - but this was going on well before the internet.
Sounds to me like yet another restatement of the bleeding obvious.
Since when are Microsoft and Net Freedom issues that writers shy away from? Microsoft-bashing is a one-in-all-in sport amongst the Linux and Open Source communities. Remember ESR's sentence-by-sentence word-by-word vivisection of the Halloween memos? Not to mention Katz's comparison of Bill Gates to Darth Vader in his rant on the Phantom Menace? Lots of less emotional and more balanced stuff out there as well.
And blocking of content on the internet. Sheesh. I live in Australia, and our clueless Minister for Communications wants to bring in content-blocking legislation. The press is just FULL of stuff about this here. Of course, if you forget the world doesn't end at the US border, you may have missed this.
Shapiro compained he couldn't get a decent political discussion on the Internet. Maybe because what he has to say isn't as novel or incisive as he would like to think.
BTW, to the person who complained about US crypto laws, they're basically irrelevant to the rest of the world anyway. You don't have to look very far to find strong encryption software (PGPi as just one).
I suppose some continue to think that everything that goes on in the US is necessarily vitally relevant to the international community.
>Knock it off. Stop trying to hurt the credibility of Open Source.
Oh, nice comeback. Treat Open Source like some holy writ which can't be questioned, and then treat anyone who does like a saboteur. This sort of attitude does more damage to open source than the previous poster's does.
Yes, it does take more creativity. How much money did YOU make writing Open source last year?
Not everyone regards Open Source vs Microsoft as The Ultimate Moral Choice. The previous poster has made his choice, as he's entitled.
Love and money are not XOR. Most really successful people have been lucky enough to make a living out of something they enjoy. Writers, muso's, athletes... programmers.
Money is right up there with fire and the wheel as a useful invention IMHO. Greed is the problem, not money. Get rid of money, greed won't go away.
If I told my wife I was going to program for love and forego my paycheck, she'd kill me and I'd deserve it. I like being a software developer. I also like being able to pay off my house.
If you really want to program for love, I've got a distributed credit card transaction capture system to build. You can come do it for $0.00 while I collect my salary and go surfing all day. You'll be doing it for love, so you'll come up with a better product than I. Everyone will be happy.
"None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money" - Samuel Johnson.
I agree. Katz's piece was a total waste of bandwidth.
I lost it when he started comparing Bill Gates to Darth Vader. Roll out the cliched MS-bashing for the Linux weenies, that'll make you popular.
James Cameron sold out just as bad with Titanic as Lucas did with any of his movies. That sickening Celine Dion music all the way through. The cheapass graphics which, despite the fact the rendering was done on a cluster of Linux boxes, still sucked to the point that my wife remarked on it, and she's not into computers at all. A screenplay that lasted about an hour longer than it needed to. Leonardo di Caprio (sp). A serious dose of Cameron ego and self-indulgence.
I don't care, is the bottom line. If Lucas and Cameron want to sell toys and make oodles of cash, that's their right. Good luck to them. I still liked all the Star Wars movies, Aliens, and the Abyss.
Star Wars was JUST A MOVIE. Making money is not a crime. If you don't like it, STAY AWAY. I DON'T CARE about your opinions unless they get in my face as bad as this poorly written piece did. Got it?
Ah, but if it works on his machine and my Linux box with 4.51, it sounds like a config problem at your end, not something MS did. YMMV, but it's YOU that's having the problem.
As for MS being Satan incarnate, I think old Nick would write better software;)
It worked fine for me - IE 4.01 (win98) and Communicator 4.51 (on RH 5.2).
Yeah, I can imagine your Mozilla-killer, but only if I put myself in a mindset of extreme and pointless paranoia.
Grow up... it's in MS's interests to have their pages readable by all, and Netscape and Mozilla's to ensure their browsers don't crash no matter what is thrown at them.
BTW,/.'s extended stay in "overload mode" recently isn't exactly an advert for Linux performance and scalability. Might be technically untrue, but perception is everything with marketroids, and it's the/. guys saying they're having probs, not MS.
As someone else mentioned, lots of industries require 24/7 uptime. Power stations. Foundries. Chemical Plants. Mines.
I manged credit card operations for a finance company data centre for four years. The mainframe ran continuously; the online system was up 7 am to 9 pm, the rest of the time spent running batch jobs. I was hands on - coming in all hours of the day and night, doing shifts for operators who got suddenly sick, etc. etc., plus working a regular 50 hour week dealing with non-techies.
Every few months we'd pull 36 hours without sleep due to upgrades, etc.
It only got stressful in the last year when the management outsourced the system and I was getting squeezed between operators worried about their jobs and suits demanding deadlines being met while trying to screw us for the lowest redundancies possible.
I liked this type of work. Some people thrive on it. Some left that place for the same shifts elsewhere, by choice.
In 1997 I was programming for a bank - putting in a new forex and money market dealing system. The hours were brutal in that at least three relationships cracked due to the extended time away from home. One guy did 215 hours in a fortnight, I only pulled 170 or so, but I was getting old. That was another 24/7 system.
So this brave new world of e commerce is going to make things tough for us techies. It's a "brave new world" only for those who came in late.
I care about my code, but I care about my paycheck too. I have dependants and responsibilities. Sue me.
Why and EXACTLY how will open source ease the burden, stop burnout, stop asshole bosses, etc. etc. etc.?
The flip side of your "argument", to use that term loosely, is that the remuneration structure for programmers will become a whole lot less certain. Yes, some people make money off open source, I'll bet plenty lose on it as well. Samuel Johnson said "None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." He might be speaking for a number of coders as well.
Open source COULD work. It's far from a foregone conclusion that it will significantly affect the issues mentioned in the article, which are more to do with culture and competitive advantage than the openness or otherwise of the source code.
>I feel that most of us, the/. people, are the most american people than most american are, and that's including the people that don't even live in the state. They contributed a bit in the whole discussion that has been going on here.
I'm Australian. I hope I can be called a/. person. I'm not sure whether to be flattered, insulted or totally unaffected by your statement above.
The Internet IS NOT America! Nor is it the United States thereof!
I agree 100%. Self-defense is a right, whether or not school rules say this or not. No one has the right to demand you put up with abuse.
Try a little boxing, wrestling, contact-oriented martial arts. You'll find that punches don't actually hurt that much once you get used to them and most jocks don't know how to hit really effectively anyway. Even moderate skills will give you an edge over the average schoolyard bully. Take their best shots and give 'em some pain of their own to reflect on later. Better than shooting them. Respect through appreciation wins, but if I can't get that, I'll take respect through fear.
Having some violent skills does not require or justify their use to opress others, nor does it predispose one towards doing so. Nor does Quake predispose you to machinegunning your classmates.
Yes, I class myself as a geek. I topped my class in 3rd and 4th grade, and went to selective classes for intelligent kids thereafter. BTW, not all bright kids are geeks and misfits - many excel at sports and mainstream pursuits. My eccentricities were better accepted by this group than the "proletariat", but I'm not convinced separatism is necessarily better. You have to return to the big wide world eventually.
Got into a few fights, yeah. The only times I felt bad about them or really suffered were times when I'd been the oppressor and deserved what I got back. More self-loathing than actual pain.
To paraphrase Hagbard Celine from "Illuminatus", a geek tome if ever there was one:
"Call me anything you like. If I don't like it, I might punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars."
You shouldn't shortchange Einstein in the pacifism stakes either. He recognised that his work in some way contributed to the development of nuclear weapons, and urged Roosevelt or Truman (can't remember which) to step up the effort to develop the Big One before the Axis powers did. Perhaps this isn't an act of pacifism, but then again it may well have led to the lesser of two evils.
Einstein was placed in a position where he was forced to consider the enormous implications (killing tens of thousands of Japanese) of his work and take some responsibility for it. This position gave him more than a little authority and credibility to speak on such subjects IMHO.
Linus is an UberHacker and deserves his place among the elite of 1990's info tech.
Where sociology is concerned, he's an amateur. His "insights" aren't exactly revelatory.
People are still working in jobs they hate to feed their kids. The world's still full of hate, war, and suffering.
Many rock stars freely dispense social and political opinions. Too many people lap thes up uncritically.
I'll listen to Linus talk about computers until the sun goes red giant. But when he ends up on the Tonight show dispensing opinions about other stuff, I'm reaching for the remote.
For an informed discussion of evolution and the fallacy of "improvement" associated with it, try Stephen Jay Gould's "Life's Grandeur". A bit heavy going in parts but well worth it overall.
Linux to me is a fine and valuable tool, and I got it for that, not to make a political statement or align myself with a movement, philosophy, or group.
As for advertising, I don't have a problem with it as a concept, but to me good software is as simple, precise and orthogonal in its purpose and design as possible. Adding the "advertising thread" seems to me to detract from this.
Still if it stops one good software company going out of business, I'm for it.
>The fact is, if a teacher or two had concealed carry permits and had a gun they could have fought back. They could probably have taken out the shooters before they killed all those people.
That is NOT fact. That is speculation.
Perhaps a couple of armed teachers could have shot these guys, though by the sound of things those teachers would have been seriously outgunned in any case. OTOH, they could have panicked and killed or injured one or more innocents in the crossfire, they could have scared the killers off, who then enraged went away and shot more softer targets than would otherwise have been the case. They could have gone into a rage and begun spraying bullets indiscriminately rather than picking shots, meaning more would have got killed than would otherwise have been the case.
Your use of the word "probably" is seriously flawed here.
Do you really want to send your kids to a school where the teachers all pack pieces and have gun racks in the staff rooms? More kids will carry guns, some in imitation, some for what they see as self-protection from the gun toting idiots who teach/oppress them.
>And, second BTW, I guess you're telling the Israelis that they're stupid too, given that Israeli teachers -- for that matter, Israelis in general -- regularly carry Uzis and other guns. Oddly enough, this kind of thing doesn't happen in Israel any more.
That's true, provided you conveniently forget the Israelis and Palestinians shooting one another (unless shooting Palestinians doesn't count), and the killing of Netanyahu's predecessor by a gun-wielding assassin.
The facts refute your argument in this case, I'm afraid.
What do you mean by this? As Sun would have it (and the courts agreed to a significant extent), Microsoft put J++ out to attempt to wrest control of the Java initiative away from its open proponents (more truthfully, away from Sun) by "polluting" it with MS proprietary features and extensions.
Are you really trying to convince us that Borland put out Object Pascal to stop those free software fiends threatening its domination of the software market with freeware/open source Pascal? If so, see your doctor and get your medication adjusted.
Crap. Borland put Object Pascal and Delphi out as Windows development tools, competing with other Windows development tools, something which they actually do extremely well.
Interbase IS, as some have said, simpler to use and less maintenance-intensive than Oracle.
However, it runs out of grunt pretty quick once you start getting into applications dealing with around a GB of data, intensive transaction processing, and requirement for fast batch throughput, i.e. enterprise-level applications. I've worked with both in medium and large sized companies, and speak from painful experience.
Oracle leaves Interbase for DEAD performance-wise on every other OS including various Unices, and is much more extensible and flexible due to tools such as PL/SQL, etc.
Oracle charge like wounded bulls for support, software and consulting. They won some award for the rather dubious achievement of outperforming Microsoft Product Support Services (that particular bar is EXTREMELY low), but were mentioned in the article as being even more expensive.
Oh, and the Oracle front end tools SUCK. DEsigner/2000 generates form and report PL/SQL which fails the database engine's syntax checking, Developer/2000 is the clunkiest visual development environment I've ever seen. This is MHO, but it is shared by a number of Oracle consultants with whom I have worked.
>Of course, he also had a hand in the completely fucking ridiculous and stupid Unix Haters' Handbook -- proving that even experts can be crack smokers.
The UHH is actually spot on enough to elicit comments like the above from Unix weenies. Better Unix hackers than you and I have contributed thereto.
I don't think all of the complaints apply to Linux, especially those on X, but if you're going to bash MS rabidly you need to give due consideration to the shortcomings of the alternative.
*Regardless of her obviously staggering intellect*
Chill. At least this woman had the nous and intellectual curiousity to give Linux a shot. She managed to write a few scripts, which is more than many do or are capable of.
The fact that she, as a non Unix weenie, gave it her best shot and decided it was not for her, says more about the shortcomings of Linux than any shortcomings she may have.
She doesn't like Linux, so SHE's at fault? Ever hear of Procrustes?
I like Linux. I'm using it for this. But I know why some people don't and respect their opinions. If you meet constructive criticism with hostility and refuse to see weaknesses, you'll never be able to make the product stronger.
*This has been a day in the life of a Windows Gamer. YMMV *
Sounds a lot like the lost weekend I spent trying to get the PCMCIA modem cards on my laptop working with Linux (the NetComm Card56 works with the serial driver, but CardManager doesn't detect it every time and has problems loading and unloading the driver, and the Xircom Realport don't work at all). Forgive me if I feel my time will be better spent doing things other than learning all about PCMCIA and contributing to the Linux/Xircom PCMCIA driver project.
Windows is crappy. But Linux still has some maturing to do.
*All a MCSE "qualifies" you for is to know how to "rebuild" a system i.e. format the hard disk and sit there with a bunch of CDROMs and reinstall everything. At least, this is what I have gathered so-called MCSE professionals do. *
It's not as simple as that - NT, Exchange, IIS, Proxy Server, etc. are riddled with Service Pack interdependencies. Things like you have to have Service Pack 3 to install RRAS, but if you install that Proxy Server dies unless you apply the patch which is included with SP4, which kills several third party apps like PCAnywhere unless you download THEIR patches, and then those patches only fix things up part of the time unless you reinstall the TCP/IP service, etc. etc. etc. Don't knock your good MCSE, he's been burned many times by the vagaries of NT and if he's still sane and functional he's both intelligent and tough.
Most decent NT engineers I know also have Linux familiarity and would install Linux for internet services every time given a choice. Actually the resource greed and lack of inter-app compatibility of NT usually means installing a File Print Server, Exchange Server, IIS Server and Proxy Server all as separate boxes, which a single Linux box will handle comfortably.
Unfortunately those of us that work in the real world are often faced with these sort of silk-purse-out-of-sows-ear scenarios, which those of you still at school are so far able to avoid.
Some of the Redmond-ites might see the place as a concentration camp, but Bill isn't exterminating them. In fact, they hang around till their stock options vest, and leave the place with a cool million or three.
Comparing Gates to Hitler is just plain stupid, and shows a lack of imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want your credit card transactions monitored, then you're already in trouble because the net doesn't offer any opportunities that didn't exist for credit card criminals 5 years ago.
ignorance is bliss. perhaps you haven't heard about the credit scams that porn sites have been accussed of?
net transactions mean more shadier people have your number, and it is easy for them to hide their identity from you.
The first poster was correct. I worked in for a credit card company for 8 years, and now do e-commerce programming, specifically credit card gateways.
The net only presents new ways to run the same old scams: using someone else's credit card number to buy something (which is much easier to get from garbage bins than it is from hacking into web sites) is only a small proportion of the scams perpetrated, the vast majority of which are done by merchants trying to get funds for nonexistent purchases, or conspiring with stooges to give them refunds on nonexistent purchases.
The only new twist is those porn sites who secretly route the calls to Moldavia or South America, and then split the toll charges with the phone companies concerned. This is semi-legal, though pretty naughty. Then again, if you are stupid and undisciplined enough to purchase porn by credit card, just remember the type of people you're likely to be dealing with.
Credit card transactions are and always have been traceable by banks, as every merchant must register with them before they can trade. So fraud of this type is difficult to get away with. In my experience, most credit card fraud is extraordinarily unsophisticated and easily traced. There may be extraordinarily talented criminals out there who are getting away with it, but not at a level where banks or other credit providers are seriously affected.
If you notice and tell your bank about a fraudulent transaction, you're usually well protected. If you don't notice, well...
For most purposes, SSL, especially 128-bit, is secure enough for transmission of this data. You CAN get 128 bit SSL outside the US. 40/56-bit triple DES used within SSL is probably good enough anyway. There are no DOCUMENTED cases of credit card transactions being intercepted by criminals during transmission over the internet. There are however plenty of cases of credit card numbers being stolen from servers - but this was going on well before the internet.
Sounds to me like yet another restatement of the bleeding obvious.
Since when are Microsoft and Net Freedom issues that writers shy away from? Microsoft-bashing is a one-in-all-in sport amongst the Linux and Open Source communities. Remember ESR's sentence-by-sentence word-by-word vivisection of the Halloween memos? Not to mention Katz's comparison of Bill Gates to Darth Vader in his rant on the Phantom Menace? Lots of less emotional and more balanced stuff out there as well.
And blocking of content on the internet. Sheesh. I live in Australia, and our clueless Minister for Communications wants to bring in content-blocking legislation. The press is just FULL of stuff about this here. Of course, if you forget the world doesn't end at the US border, you may have missed this.
Shapiro compained he couldn't get a decent political discussion on the Internet. Maybe because what he has to say isn't as novel or incisive as he would like to think.
BTW, to the person who complained about US crypto laws, they're basically irrelevant to the rest of the world anyway. You don't have to look very far to find strong encryption software (PGPi as just one).
I suppose some continue to think that everything that goes on in the US is necessarily vitally relevant to the international community.
>Knock it off. Stop trying to hurt the credibility of Open Source.
Oh, nice comeback. Treat Open Source like some holy writ which can't be questioned, and then treat anyone who does like a saboteur. This sort of attitude does more damage to open source than the previous poster's does.
Yes, it does take more creativity. How much money did YOU make writing Open source last year?
Not everyone regards Open Source vs Microsoft as The Ultimate Moral Choice. The previous poster has made his choice, as he's entitled.
>It's a simple fact.
... programmers.
It's a simplistic opinion.
Love and money are not XOR. Most really successful people have been lucky enough to make a living out of something they enjoy. Writers, muso's, athletes
Money is right up there with fire and the wheel as a useful invention IMHO. Greed is the problem, not money. Get rid of money, greed won't go away.
If I told my wife I was going to program for love and forego my paycheck, she'd kill me and I'd deserve it. I like being a software developer. I also like being able to pay off my house.
If you really want to program for love, I've got a distributed credit card transaction capture system to build. You can come do it for $0.00 while I collect my salary and go surfing all day. You'll be doing it for love, so you'll come up with a better product than I. Everyone will be happy.
"None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money" - Samuel Johnson.
I agree. Katz's piece was a total waste of bandwidth.
I lost it when he started comparing Bill Gates to Darth Vader. Roll out the cliched MS-bashing for the Linux weenies, that'll make you popular.
James Cameron sold out just as bad with Titanic as Lucas did with any of his movies. That sickening Celine Dion music all the way through. The cheapass graphics which, despite the fact the rendering was done on a cluster of Linux boxes, still sucked to the point that my wife remarked on it, and she's not into computers at all. A screenplay that lasted about an hour longer than it needed to. Leonardo di Caprio (sp). A serious dose of Cameron ego and self-indulgence.
I don't care, is the bottom line. If Lucas and Cameron want to sell toys and make oodles of cash, that's their right. Good luck to them. I still liked all the Star Wars movies, Aliens, and the Abyss.
Star Wars was JUST A MOVIE. Making money is not a crime. If you don't like it, STAY AWAY. I DON'T CARE about your opinions unless they get in my face as bad as this poorly written piece did. Got it?
Ah, but if it works on his machine and my Linux box with 4.51, it sounds like a config problem at your end, not something MS did. YMMV, but it's YOU that's having the problem.
;)
As for MS being Satan incarnate, I think old Nick would write better software
It worked fine for me - IE 4.01 (win98) and Communicator 4.51 (on RH 5.2).
... it's in MS's interests to have their pages readable by all, and Netscape and Mozilla's to ensure their browsers don't crash no matter what is thrown at them.
/.'s extended stay in "overload mode" recently isn't exactly an advert for Linux performance and scalability. Might be technically untrue, but perception is everything with marketroids, and it's the /. guys saying they're having probs, not MS.
Yeah, I can imagine your Mozilla-killer, but only if I put myself in a mindset of extreme and pointless paranoia.
Grow up
BTW,
So e-commerce is going to require 24/7 uptime...
Film at 11.
As someone else mentioned, lots of industries require 24/7 uptime. Power stations. Foundries. Chemical Plants. Mines.
I manged credit card operations for a finance company data centre for four years. The mainframe ran continuously; the online system was up 7 am to 9 pm, the rest of the time spent running batch jobs. I was hands on - coming in all hours of the day and night, doing shifts for operators who got suddenly sick, etc. etc., plus working a regular 50 hour week dealing with non-techies.
Every few months we'd pull 36 hours without sleep due to upgrades, etc.
It only got stressful in the last year when the management outsourced the system and I was getting squeezed between operators worried about their jobs and suits demanding deadlines being met while trying to screw us for the lowest redundancies possible.
I liked this type of work. Some people thrive on it. Some left that place for the same shifts elsewhere, by choice.
In 1997 I was programming for a bank - putting in a new forex and money market dealing system. The hours were brutal in that at least three relationships cracked due to the extended time away from home. One guy did 215 hours in a fortnight, I only pulled 170 or so, but I was getting old. That was another 24/7 system.
So this brave new world of e commerce is going to make things tough for us techies. It's a "brave new world" only for those who came in late.
I care about my code, but I care about my paycheck too. I have dependants and responsibilities. Sue me.
Why and EXACTLY how will open source ease the burden, stop burnout, stop asshole bosses, etc. etc. etc.?
The flip side of your "argument", to use that term loosely, is that the remuneration structure for programmers will become a whole lot less certain. Yes, some people make money off open source, I'll bet plenty lose on it as well. Samuel Johnson said "None but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." He might be speaking for a number of coders as well.
Open source COULD work. It's far from a foregone conclusion that it will significantly affect the issues mentioned in the article, which are more to do with culture and competitive advantage than the openness or otherwise of the source code.
>I feel that most of us, the /. people, are the most american people than most american are, and that's including the people that don't even live in the state. They contributed a bit in the whole discussion that has been going on here.
/. person. I'm not sure whether to be flattered, insulted or totally unaffected by your statement above.
I'm Australian. I hope I can be called a
The Internet IS NOT America! Nor is it the United States thereof!
I agree 100%. Self-defense is a right, whether or not school rules say this or not. No one has the right to demand you put up with abuse.
Try a little boxing, wrestling, contact-oriented martial arts. You'll find that punches don't actually hurt that much once you get used to them and most jocks don't know how to hit really effectively anyway. Even moderate skills will give you an edge over the average schoolyard bully. Take their best shots and give 'em some pain of their own to reflect on later. Better than shooting them. Respect through appreciation wins, but if I can't get that, I'll take respect through fear.
Having some violent skills does not require or justify their use to opress others, nor does it predispose one towards doing so. Nor does Quake predispose you to machinegunning your classmates.
Yes, I class myself as a geek. I topped my class in 3rd and 4th grade, and went to selective classes for intelligent kids thereafter. BTW, not all bright kids are geeks and misfits - many excel at sports and mainstream pursuits. My eccentricities were better accepted by this group than the "proletariat", but I'm not convinced separatism is necessarily better. You have to return to the big wide world eventually.
Got into a few fights, yeah. The only times I felt bad about them or really suffered were times when I'd been the oppressor and deserved what I got back. More self-loathing than actual pain.
To paraphrase Hagbard Celine from "Illuminatus", a geek tome if ever there was one:
"Call me anything you like. If I don't like it, I might punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars."
You shouldn't shortchange Einstein in the pacifism stakes either. He recognised that his work in some way contributed to the development of nuclear weapons, and urged Roosevelt or Truman (can't remember which) to step up the effort to develop the Big One before the Axis powers did. Perhaps this isn't an act of pacifism, but then again it may well have led to the lesser of two evils.
Einstein was placed in a position where he was forced to consider the enormous implications (killing tens of thousands of Japanese) of his work and take some responsibility for it. This position gave him more than a little authority and credibility to speak on such subjects IMHO.
Linus is an UberHacker and deserves his place among the elite of 1990's info tech.
Where sociology is concerned, he's an amateur. His "insights" aren't exactly revelatory.
People are still working in jobs they hate to feed their kids. The world's still full of hate, war, and suffering.
Many rock stars freely dispense social and political opinions. Too many people lap thes up uncritically.
I'll listen to Linus talk about computers until the sun goes red giant. But when he ends up on the Tonight show dispensing opinions about other stuff, I'm reaching for the remote.
For an informed discussion of evolution and the fallacy of "improvement" associated with it, try Stephen Jay Gould's "Life's Grandeur". A bit heavy going in parts but well worth it overall.
Don't speak for me either.
Linux to me is a fine and valuable tool, and I got it for that, not to make a political statement or align myself with a movement, philosophy, or group.
As for advertising, I don't have a problem with it as a concept, but to me good software is as simple, precise and orthogonal in its purpose and design as possible. Adding the "advertising thread" seems to me to detract from this.
Still if it stops one good software company going out of business, I'm for it.
>The fact is, if a teacher or two had concealed carry permits and had a gun they could have fought back. They could probably have taken out the shooters before they killed all those people.
That is NOT fact. That is speculation.
Perhaps a couple of armed teachers could have shot these guys, though by the sound of things those teachers would have been seriously outgunned in any case. OTOH, they could have panicked and killed or injured one or more innocents in the crossfire, they could have scared the killers off, who then enraged went away and shot more softer targets than would otherwise have been the case. They could have gone into a rage and begun spraying bullets indiscriminately rather than picking shots, meaning more would have got killed than would otherwise have been the case.
Your use of the word "probably" is seriously flawed here.
Do you really want to send your kids to a school where the teachers all pack pieces and have gun racks in the staff rooms? More kids will carry guns, some in imitation, some for what they see as self-protection from the gun toting idiots who teach/oppress them.
Leave me and my kids out of this one, thanks.
>And, second BTW, I guess you're telling the Israelis that they're stupid too, given that Israeli teachers -- for that matter, Israelis in general -- regularly carry Uzis and other guns. Oddly enough, this kind of thing doesn't happen in Israel any more.
That's true, provided you conveniently forget the Israelis and Palestinians shooting one another (unless shooting Palestinians doesn't count), and the killing of Netanyahu's predecessor by a gun-wielding assassin.
The facts refute your argument in this case, I'm afraid.
>Delphi is the moral equivalent of J++.
What do you mean by this? As Sun would have it (and the courts agreed to a significant extent), Microsoft put J++ out to attempt to wrest control of the Java initiative away from its open proponents (more truthfully, away from Sun) by "polluting" it with MS proprietary features and extensions.
Are you really trying to convince us that Borland put out Object Pascal to stop those free software fiends threatening its domination of the software market with freeware/open source Pascal? If so, see your doctor and get your medication adjusted.
Crap. Borland put Object Pascal and Delphi out as Windows development tools, competing with other Windows development tools, something which they actually do extremely well.
Interbase IS, as some have said, simpler to use and less maintenance-intensive than Oracle.
However, it runs out of grunt pretty quick once you start getting into applications dealing with around a GB of data, intensive transaction processing, and requirement for fast batch throughput, i.e. enterprise-level applications. I've worked with both in medium and large sized companies, and speak from painful experience.
Oracle leaves Interbase for DEAD performance-wise on every other OS including various Unices, and is much more extensible and flexible due to tools such as PL/SQL, etc.
Oracle charge like wounded bulls for support, software and consulting. They won some award for the rather dubious achievement of outperforming Microsoft Product Support Services (that particular bar is EXTREMELY low), but were mentioned in the article as being even more expensive.
Oh, and the Oracle front end tools SUCK. DEsigner/2000 generates form and report PL/SQL which fails the database engine's syntax checking, Developer/2000 is the clunkiest visual development environment I've ever seen. This is MHO, but it is shared by a number of Oracle consultants with whom I have worked.
The RDBMS is reasonably slick, though.
>Of course, he also had a hand in the completely fucking ridiculous and stupid Unix Haters' Handbook -- proving that even experts can be crack smokers.
The UHH is actually spot on enough to elicit comments like the above from Unix weenies. Better Unix hackers than you and I have contributed thereto.
I don't think all of the complaints apply to Linux, especially those on X, but if you're going to bash MS rabidly you need to give due consideration to the shortcomings of the alternative.
*Regardless of her obviously staggering intellect*
Chill. At least this woman had the nous and intellectual curiousity to give Linux a shot. She managed to write a few scripts, which is more than many do or are capable of.
The fact that she, as a non Unix weenie, gave it her best shot and decided it was not for her, says more about the shortcomings of Linux than any shortcomings she may have.
She doesn't like Linux, so SHE's at fault? Ever hear of Procrustes?
I like Linux. I'm using it for this. But I know why some people don't and respect their opinions. If you meet constructive criticism with hostility and refuse to see weaknesses, you'll never be able to make the product stronger.
*This has been a day in the life of a Windows Gamer. YMMV *
Sounds a lot like the lost weekend I spent trying to get the PCMCIA modem cards on my laptop working with Linux (the NetComm Card56 works with the serial driver, but CardManager doesn't detect it every time and has problems loading and unloading the driver, and the Xircom Realport don't work at all). Forgive me if I feel my time will be better spent doing things other than learning all about PCMCIA and contributing to the Linux/Xircom PCMCIA driver project.
Windows is crappy. But Linux still has some maturing to do.
*All a MCSE "qualifies" you for is to know how to "rebuild" a system i.e. format the hard disk and sit there with a bunch of CDROMs and reinstall
everything. At least, this is what I have gathered so-called MCSE professionals do. *
It's not as simple as that - NT, Exchange, IIS, Proxy Server, etc. are riddled with Service Pack interdependencies. Things like you have to have Service Pack 3 to install RRAS, but if you install that Proxy Server dies unless you apply the patch which is included with SP4, which kills several
third party apps like PCAnywhere unless you download THEIR patches, and then those patches only fix things up part of the time unless you reinstall the TCP/IP service, etc. etc. etc. Don't knock your good MCSE, he's been burned many times by the vagaries of NT and if he's still sane and functional he's both intelligent and tough.
Most decent NT engineers I know also have Linux familiarity and would install Linux for internet services every time given a choice. Actually the resource greed and lack of inter-app compatibility of NT usually means installing a File Print Server, Exchange Server, IIS Server and Proxy Server all as separate boxes, which a single Linux box will handle comfortably.
Unfortunately those of us that work in the real world are often faced with these sort of silk-purse-out-of-sows-ear scenarios, which those of you still at school are so far able to avoid.
Some of the Redmond-ites might see the place as a concentration camp, but Bill isn't exterminating them. In fact, they hang around till their stock options vest, and leave the place with a cool million or three.
Comparing Gates to Hitler is just plain stupid, and shows a lack of imagination.