You're kind of oversimplifying Obama's position. Ironically, it's the same oversimplification that his opponents are fond of.
It's true that Obama was against the war from day one. But he's also smart enough to see that the U.S. has some responsibility to clean up the mess it's made. I don't see him simply ordering Petraeus to pack up and leave. What he will do is insist on realistic goals, and a drawdown that will take months, not years.
I found accounts of Obama's conversations with Petraeus during the Iraq junket to be pretty interesting. (I think the one I'm thinking about is summarized here, though I could be misremembering.) While they didn't exactly come to a meeting of the minds, their differences of opinion turned out not to be that basic. The picture you end up with is an Obama strategy for the Middle East that's not so much a retreat as a completely different offensive strategy.
Where were you in 1968, when we really needed you?
Actually, that's not just a joke. My biggest fear about a McCain presidency is how he'd handle Iraq. He clearly sees Iraq as a Vietnam do-over. And he suffers from the illusion that Vietnam could have been won if the military had been given time to correct its early mistakes. But, as you point out, it doesn't matter how effective your military strategy is if you don't have clear goals.
Though to be fair, the goals in Iraq are a little clearer than they were in Vietnam. The Republic of Vietnam had no hope of staying unconquered without heavy U.S. military support. But some vaguely acceptable Iraqi government might be able to hold things together if we can leave them with a not-too-chaotic country to govern. The irony there is that Peacenik Obama probably has a better hope of achieving this goal than Iwontcutandrun McCain. For one thing, we're probably not going to get a stable Iraq that isn't pretty friendly with Iran, something McCain could never live with.
Now if only Microsoft & Apple could harness & effectively utilize the power of p2p... *cough* *cough*
That's funny, I've never had any trouble downloading from either Microsoft or Apple. It's not like they can't afford the bandwidth or server capacity.
I keep meaning to configure a P2P setup on my home system, but somehow never get round to it. It almost never seems to be an issue. When I'm looking to download software, there's usually enough HTTP or FTP server capacity available. When there isn't, it always seem to be a package that's so marginal, it's not worth my time anyway.
I'd be more motivated if I didn't have a huge Netflix backlog. That's because there's a movie and TV show that will probably never make it onto Region 1 DVD because of copyright issues. Really, the main reason to have P2P seems to be to bypass copyright laws, both stupid and legitimate.
P2P does have a higher technical kewlness factor than client-server. Oddly enough, few people care about that.
Your equation is ActiveDevelopers + LargeUserbase = Success.
But as I've already said, a successful software project also needs leadership. I've seen many projects, both open source and proprietary, fall apart because nobody's doing the boring scutwork: fixing bugs, integrating changes, documenting stuff. Left to themselves, developers will spend all their time implementing kewl new features and ignoring the necessary scutwork.
I agree that the Theony's enterprise will probably go nowhere. But that's no guarantee that the fork group will inherit all of TWiki's users. As a TWiki implementor and admin, I already had a lot of issues with the software even before this crisis. To gain my loyalty, the fork would have to not just recreate all the functionality of TWiki, but actually deal with its many problems. Otherwise the next time I need a major functionality upgrade, I'll bite the bullet and move to a new platform. It's not like I don't have a lot of options.
Actually, I used to have a lot of respect for McCain, despite agreeing with essentially none of his political views. Most of the time he was in the Senate, he really did try to make the place less corrupt, and to work with people of opposing views. He was one of the few right-wingers who didn't try to block the Clinton administration's every move on general principal. His friendship with David Ifshin (less violent than Bill Ayers, but just as radical, and somebody McCain had every excuse to hate) was very telling.
Alas, McCain sold his soul once he saw the presidency within his grasp. Now he goes around pushing the agenda of far-right assholes who privately despise him. Too bad.
Obama has run various small non-profits and used to be partner in a law firm. McCain was a commissioned officer in the Navy, which often requires one to supervise subordinates.
Palin's executive career seems to consist of managing the government of a city of 5,000 people (probably less than 100 city employees, not all of whom would report to her) and being governor of a state that has fewer citizens then the city where I live. You could maybe argue that her experience as governor outranks Obama's and McCain's in terms of total executive decision making. But none of them even begin to compare to running the government of a nation of 300 million people.
Besides, whatever her managerial experience, she's a total moron. When she was mayor, the city council had to vote on a prize for a local dogsled race. The other members tried to tell her she had to recuse herself, since her husband was likely to compete. Her response: he might not win, therefore no conflict of interest. Even if I totally agreed with her politics, and shared her contempt for the Bill of Rights (except, of course, for the Holy Second Amendment) I wouldn't vote for her unless every one of her opponents stood accused of a major war crime.
Enough with the Obama rumor nonsense. It isn't so much that nobody believes the stories that he's an adulterous socialist cryptomuslim alqaida mole whose really a citizen of Queen Maud Land. (Though you have to admit that the evidence is, to put it mildly, laughable.) It's just that nobody cares.
Why should they? He's different from the idiot who's now in power and the senile fool who's the alternative. That's all anybody cares about.
Your issues with TWiki are pretty consistent with my negative experiences. That said, I'm a little surprised that you chose MediaWiki instead. Its feature set seems to be very limited. No fine-tuning user access, no support for external authentication, not easy to add new markup. Of course, these aren't deal breakers for everybody.
Did you consider any other wikis? There are a lot of choices.
Re:IDA is a dissassembler
on
The IDA Pro Book
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Since the review doesn't really make it clear...
Someday, Slashdot editors and contributors that the first thing you do when talking about something is make it clear what you're talking about. That will also be the day I go to skiing in Hell.
You're making two big assumptions that don't quite work.
First, you're assuming that the fork will become an established product. Possible, but not certain. To survive, an OS project needs leadership — somebody who's willing to take a lot of time to do all the boring administration stuff that keeps any software project moving forward. From what I know about the people involved in the fork, none of them fits the bill. They all have day jobs that have little or nothing to do with TWiki. They just contribute bits and pieces of code in their spare time. Unless somebody emerges to fill the leadership role, this fork is just going to sputter and die — as most forks do.
Second, you're assuming that most of TWiki's users will immediately abandon TWiki and move to the new product. Speaking as a TWiki user, I can tell you that's not going to happen. We use TWiki to maintain corporate applications that have to be reliably available. We can't afford to shift to an unproven new product, even if it uses the same code base. Most users will take a wait-and-see attitude, and maybe shift once the fork proves itself.
Here are possible outcomes, in rough order of probability.
Both TWiki and the fork wither and die, TWiki from a lack of contributers, the fork from a lack of leadership. That's kind of a pain for those of us who use TWiki, but it's not the end of the world. There are a huge number of OS wiki products. Retooling to use one of them is something I would avoid as long as possible, but which might well pay dividends in the long run, since TWiki is not that great a piece of software.
Theony's VC partners give him money to hire paid help, and that keeps TWiki alive. How good that is for TWiki users depends on how much they restrict the new code. Most of us just can't afford to pay for this kind of software, so if key features become proprietary, we'll jump ship — maybe to the fork, but more likely to another wiki.
TWiki dies and the fork takes its place. Easiest for users like me (though not necessarily the best outcome!), but extremely unlikely.
Since Day One, Theony has been looking to cash in on TWiki. That's motivated a lot of dumb moves on his part — this last nonsense being one of many.
Actually, the big problem is not so much Theony's desire to be the next Red Hat as the boneheaded way he goes about it. He wants to sell TWiki as an "enterprise collaboration platform" despite the existence of many existing products in that customers space. Most of them are more powerful and easy to customize than TWiki, and many of them are open source.
The main result is that when you install a TWiki, your default pages are full of arcane markup designed to support these "Enterprise" features. When I installed my department TWiki, I spend a lot of time stripping out this crap, to avoid confusing my non-nerd users.
The current version also makes a new WYSIWYG editor the default — and hardwires it into the system in numerous places. Unfortunately, the editor is very buggy, with many formatting errors and frequent data loses. You can just disable the WYSIWYG plugin, but some of my users still prefer it. So I ended up enabling it and then carefully hacking the many places in TWiki where it assumes that you want the WYSIWYG editor, even if you say you don't.
Despite these clumsy attempts to support "Enterprises collaboration" TWiki has been notably deficient in the features an enterprise would look for, such as time zone support, use of a DBMS as a back end, a stable API, and a practical query language.
This last deficit was actually remedied in 4.2, which is one reason I upgraded. But the main reason was LDAP-over-SSL support, another enterprise feature TWiki only recently acquired — and which the company I work for requires me to have. Unfortunately, this version includes a major refactoring of the user authentication API. Not a bad thing in itself (and probably necessary for the LDAP thing), but it eliminated the object used to encapsulate user information! Not surprisingly, a bunch of plugins have been broken by this change.
If I ever have occasion to install another wiki, it won't be TWiki. I'll take the time to educate myself about one that still understands that wikis are about keeping things simple. That doesn't mean the software itself isn't complex, just that the complexity is hidden from the end users, and is structured in such a way that administrators and developers don't have to cope with a lot of spaghetti logic.
So what? The founders may have believed that a musket in every house was the final guarantee against tyranny. They may even have been right for maybe 80 years or so. But once the industrial revolution got going, that kind of militia was dead meat. From the Civil War on, to even compete in a major war, you have to have huge, well-trained forces backed up by skilled logisticians and major industrial output. That's not something individuals can compete with.
"Dark Age" is kind of an exaggeration. Presumably it's a reference to the period right after the Fall of Rome (475 AD) when most classical literature was lost because existing information technology (hand-transcription of documents) got too expensive for what passed for an economic system. This time around, if we lose much more, it's because we have a lot more to lose. But how much of it matters? If my USB drive dies and takes the last surviving copy of Debeee Does Dingos or the collected bloggings of Joey Joey, it's not that big a deal. But anything that really matters (the complete works of Shakespeare, the Beatles, the user's manual for Ultima IV) is going to be saved in multiple places in multiple formats, and it just not going to get lost.
I think the big problem is the exact opposite of what TFA warns about: too much preservation of stuff that isn't worth preserving and doesn't really represent our culture. Future generations wading through the digital crap we leave behind — blog rants, porn, advertising, spam, internet rumors, Star Trek flame wars and fan fiction — will be hard put to sift out our serious accomplishments.
Classical Greek civilization is probably the most influential in all of human history. And yet you can buy a single CD containing every single surviving work from the entire civilization! It's quality, not quantity, that defines a cultural heritage
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY.
Speaking of forgetting history, you seem to have forgotten that the Revolutionary War was being lost, until the French intervened. Their contributions included money, weapons, troops and (most crucially) a naval intervention that prevented the Brits from reinforcing their forces.
I love it; you mention Iraq, and then claim that a few dedicated persons with nothing but small arms couldn't possible stand in the way of the US Government.
Excuse me? When did the militias manage to kick the U.S. out of Iraq? What they have done is bullied, abused, and murdered the Iraqi people. The militias don't count as a counterweight to the central government, unless you consider total absence of any effect government a "counterweight".
Why does this argument keep getting trotted out, when the counterargument is pretty obvious: it's a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly to have one big, stationary generating plant in place of millions engines for converting fuel to motive power that each solitary vehicle has to carry around with it. Some figures I've seen cited put the fuel savings at 70%. That kind of saving kind of overwhelms the impact of using a less eco-friendly fuel like coal. Plus, it's a lot easier to control emissions when power generation is at a central source.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean you actually pay attention to those tags? Most of them are even more lame.
You're kind of oversimplifying Obama's position. Ironically, it's the same oversimplification that his opponents are fond of.
It's true that Obama was against the war from day one. But he's also smart enough to see that the U.S. has some responsibility to clean up the mess it's made. I don't see him simply ordering Petraeus to pack up and leave. What he will do is insist on realistic goals, and a drawdown that will take months, not years.
I found accounts of Obama's conversations with Petraeus during the Iraq junket to be pretty interesting. (I think the one I'm thinking about is summarized here, though I could be misremembering.) While they didn't exactly come to a meeting of the minds, their differences of opinion turned out not to be that basic. The picture you end up with is an Obama strategy for the Middle East that's not so much a retreat as a completely different offensive strategy.
Where were you in 1968, when we really needed you?
Actually, that's not just a joke. My biggest fear about a McCain presidency is how he'd handle Iraq. He clearly sees Iraq as a Vietnam do-over. And he suffers from the illusion that Vietnam could have been won if the military had been given time to correct its early mistakes. But, as you point out, it doesn't matter how effective your military strategy is if you don't have clear goals.
Though to be fair, the goals in Iraq are a little clearer than they were in Vietnam. The Republic of Vietnam had no hope of staying unconquered without heavy U.S. military support. But some vaguely acceptable Iraqi government might be able to hold things together if we can leave them with a not-too-chaotic country to govern. The irony there is that Peacenik Obama probably has a better hope of achieving this goal than Iwontcutandrun McCain. For one thing, we're probably not going to get a stable Iraq that isn't pretty friendly with Iran, something McCain could never live with.
Now if only Microsoft & Apple could harness & effectively utilize the power of p2p ... *cough* *cough*
That's funny, I've never had any trouble downloading from either Microsoft or Apple. It's not like they can't afford the bandwidth or server capacity.
I keep meaning to configure a P2P setup on my home system, but somehow never get round to it. It almost never seems to be an issue. When I'm looking to download software, there's usually enough HTTP or FTP server capacity available. When there isn't, it always seem to be a package that's so marginal, it's not worth my time anyway.
I'd be more motivated if I didn't have a huge Netflix backlog. That's because there's a movie and TV show that will probably never make it onto Region 1 DVD because of copyright issues. Really, the main reason to have P2P seems to be to bypass copyright laws, both stupid and legitimate.
P2P does have a higher technical kewlness factor than client-server. Oddly enough, few people care about that.
Your equation is ActiveDevelopers + LargeUserbase = Success.
But as I've already said, a successful software project also needs leadership. I've seen many projects, both open source and proprietary, fall apart because nobody's doing the boring scutwork: fixing bugs, integrating changes, documenting stuff. Left to themselves, developers will spend all their time implementing kewl new features and ignoring the necessary scutwork.
I agree that the Theony's enterprise will probably go nowhere. But that's no guarantee that the fork group will inherit all of TWiki's users. As a TWiki implementor and admin, I already had a lot of issues with the software even before this crisis. To gain my loyalty, the fork would have to not just recreate all the functionality of TWiki, but actually deal with its many problems. Otherwise the next time I need a major functionality upgrade, I'll bite the bullet and move to a new platform. It's not like I don't have a lot of options.
I stand corrected. I'll have to pay closer attention to MediaWiki next time I need to choose a wiki to implement.
Not every problem can be solved by filing a lawsuit!
Actually, I used to have a lot of respect for McCain, despite agreeing with essentially none of his political views. Most of the time he was in the Senate, he really did try to make the place less corrupt, and to work with people of opposing views. He was one of the few right-wingers who didn't try to block the Clinton administration's every move on general principal. His friendship with David Ifshin (less violent than Bill Ayers, but just as radical, and somebody McCain had every excuse to hate) was very telling.
Alas, McCain sold his soul once he saw the presidency within his grasp. Now he goes around pushing the agenda of far-right assholes who privately despise him. Too bad.
Dream on. She's an effective troll, no more. Her actual political record is less than stellar, and this year is it for her.
She probably won't even finish her term as Governor, not when Fox offers her 7 figures to deliver her brain dead zingers on cable.
I always knew that Bush was a closet socialist. Obama will probably turn out to be a klansman in blackface!
Obama has run various small non-profits and used to be partner in a law firm. McCain was a commissioned officer in the Navy, which often requires one to supervise subordinates.
Palin's executive career seems to consist of managing the government of a city of 5,000 people (probably less than 100 city employees, not all of whom would report to her) and being governor of a state that has fewer citizens then the city where I live. You could maybe argue that her experience as governor outranks Obama's and McCain's in terms of total executive decision making. But none of them even begin to compare to running the government of a nation of 300 million people.
Besides, whatever her managerial experience, she's a total moron. When she was mayor, the city council had to vote on a prize for a local dogsled race. The other members tried to tell her she had to recuse herself, since her husband was likely to compete. Her response: he might not win, therefore no conflict of interest. Even if I totally agreed with her politics, and shared her contempt for the Bill of Rights (except, of course, for the Holy Second Amendment) I wouldn't vote for her unless every one of her opponents stood accused of a major war crime.
Dude, do you understand the concept of sarcasm?
it might be more worthwhile to head to your local sports bar.
Did you miss the part where they have kids?
As does NPR.org itself. Which is also a good place to go to look for member station web sites, frequencies, and streams.
Still, there's a lot less drama when you can't see the talking heads.
And given SP's executive skills, they'd probably win! Oh well, I guess it was time for us to rejoin the British Empire...
Enough with the Obama rumor nonsense. It isn't so much that nobody believes the stories that he's an adulterous socialist cryptomuslim alqaida mole whose really a citizen of Queen Maud Land. (Though you have to admit that the evidence is, to put it mildly, laughable.) It's just that nobody cares.
Why should they? He's different from the idiot who's now in power and the senile fool who's the alternative. That's all anybody cares about.
Your issues with TWiki are pretty consistent with my negative experiences. That said, I'm a little surprised that you chose MediaWiki instead. Its feature set seems to be very limited. No fine-tuning user access, no support for external authentication, not easy to add new markup. Of course, these aren't deal breakers for everybody.
Did you consider any other wikis? There are a lot of choices.
Since the review doesn't really make it clear...
Someday, Slashdot editors and contributors that the first thing you do when talking about something is make it clear what you're talking about. That will also be the day I go to skiing in Hell.
You're making two big assumptions that don't quite work.
First, you're assuming that the fork will become an established product. Possible, but not certain. To survive, an OS project needs leadership — somebody who's willing to take a lot of time to do all the boring administration stuff that keeps any software project moving forward. From what I know about the people involved in the fork, none of them fits the bill. They all have day jobs that have little or nothing to do with TWiki. They just contribute bits and pieces of code in their spare time. Unless somebody emerges to fill the leadership role, this fork is just going to sputter and die — as most forks do.
Second, you're assuming that most of TWiki's users will immediately abandon TWiki and move to the new product. Speaking as a TWiki user, I can tell you that's not going to happen. We use TWiki to maintain corporate applications that have to be reliably available. We can't afford to shift to an unproven new product, even if it uses the same code base. Most users will take a wait-and-see attitude, and maybe shift once the fork proves itself.
Here are possible outcomes, in rough order of probability.
Since Day One, Theony has been looking to cash in on TWiki. That's motivated a lot of dumb moves on his part — this last nonsense being one of many.
Actually, the big problem is not so much Theony's desire to be the next Red Hat as the boneheaded way he goes about it. He wants to sell TWiki as an "enterprise collaboration platform" despite the existence of many existing products in that customers space. Most of them are more powerful and easy to customize than TWiki, and many of them are open source.
The main result is that when you install a TWiki, your default pages are full of arcane markup designed to support these "Enterprise" features. When I installed my department TWiki, I spend a lot of time stripping out this crap, to avoid confusing my non-nerd users.
The current version also makes a new WYSIWYG editor the default — and hardwires it into the system in numerous places. Unfortunately, the editor is very buggy, with many formatting errors and frequent data loses. You can just disable the WYSIWYG plugin, but some of my users still prefer it. So I ended up enabling it and then carefully hacking the many places in TWiki where it assumes that you want the WYSIWYG editor, even if you say you don't.
Despite these clumsy attempts to support "Enterprises collaboration" TWiki has been notably deficient in the features an enterprise would look for, such as time zone support, use of a DBMS as a back end, a stable API, and a practical query language.
This last deficit was actually remedied in 4.2, which is one reason I upgraded. But the main reason was LDAP-over-SSL support, another enterprise feature TWiki only recently acquired — and which the company I work for requires me to have. Unfortunately, this version includes a major refactoring of the user authentication API. Not a bad thing in itself (and probably necessary for the LDAP thing), but it eliminated the object used to encapsulate user information! Not surprisingly, a bunch of plugins have been broken by this change.
If I ever have occasion to install another wiki, it won't be TWiki. I'll take the time to educate myself about one that still understands that wikis are about keeping things simple. That doesn't mean the software itself isn't complex, just that the complexity is hidden from the end users, and is structured in such a way that administrators and developers don't have to cope with a lot of spaghetti logic.
So what? The founders may have believed that a musket in every house was the final guarantee against tyranny. They may even have been right for maybe 80 years or so. But once the industrial revolution got going, that kind of militia was dead meat. From the Civil War on, to even compete in a major war, you have to have huge, well-trained forces backed up by skilled logisticians and major industrial output. That's not something individuals can compete with.
"Dark Age" is kind of an exaggeration. Presumably it's a reference to the period right after the Fall of Rome (475 AD) when most classical literature was lost because existing information technology (hand-transcription of documents) got too expensive for what passed for an economic system. This time around, if we lose much more, it's because we have a lot more to lose. But how much of it matters? If my USB drive dies and takes the last surviving copy of Debeee Does Dingos or the collected bloggings of Joey Joey, it's not that big a deal. But anything that really matters (the complete works of Shakespeare, the Beatles, the user's manual for Ultima IV) is going to be saved in multiple places in multiple formats, and it just not going to get lost.
I think the big problem is the exact opposite of what TFA warns about: too much preservation of stuff that isn't worth preserving and doesn't really represent our culture. Future generations wading through the digital crap we leave behind — blog rants, porn, advertising, spam, internet rumors, Star Trek flame wars and fan fiction — will be hard put to sift out our serious accomplishments.
Classical Greek civilization is probably the most influential in all of human history. And yet you can buy a single CD containing every single surviving work from the entire civilization! It's quality, not quantity, that defines a cultural heritage
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY.
Speaking of forgetting history, you seem to have forgotten that the Revolutionary War was being lost, until the French intervened. Their contributions included money, weapons, troops and (most crucially) a naval intervention that prevented the Brits from reinforcing their forces.
I love it; you mention Iraq, and then claim that a few dedicated persons with nothing but small arms couldn't possible stand in the way of the US Government.
Excuse me? When did the militias manage to kick the U.S. out of Iraq? What they have done is bullied, abused, and murdered the Iraqi people. The militias don't count as a counterweight to the central government, unless you consider total absence of any effect government a "counterweight".
Why does this argument keep getting trotted out, when the counterargument is pretty obvious: it's a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly to have one big, stationary generating plant in place of millions engines for converting fuel to motive power that each solitary vehicle has to carry around with it. Some figures I've seen cited put the fuel savings at 70%. That kind of saving kind of overwhelms the impact of using a less eco-friendly fuel like coal. Plus, it's a lot easier to control emissions when power generation is at a central source.