Ok. So the dude thinks that Perl should now be built to operate as an OS?
Seems silly to me. I agree that there could be an interesting use for a high-level language that is completly independent upon the underlying OS or be the OS, but I don't think the languages he discusses are going to work.
Perl is a scripting language that is a bastardized version of every other language. I love perl, so don't think I am bashing Perl. It does a great job at what it does, but making it secure enough to run a multi-user OS is crazy. Look at how strange it does object-oriented stuff, it's ugly. I just think retrofiting a language to do something that it was not ever designed to do is wrong.
If you want a high-level language that is the OS and also the language you write user applications in, you better create a new language. Java is the closest I have come across that could run as an OS.
Start from the ground up and build a high-level language that handles, printing, DNS, user authentication, the file system, and every other thing the current OSes handle now as well as provide a kick ass development environment for application programmers.
Some day we probably will have a language that can do everything but it won't be Perl, or will it?
One of the reasons my fare country, the United States of America, sucks is because of education. Our education system is eroding more and more every year.
Why?
That's actually quite obvious. There are people, probably all neo-cons, that want privatization of our schools. They are vehemently against anything resembling socialism and will fight to the death to privatize everything.
Capitalism can only succeed if we have a mix between private corporations and some socialist programs. Schools should be available to everyone without the contamination of corporations, libraries should available to all, health care to everyone.
So the plan is let the public school system crumble to the ground, show the success of school vouchers for private schools, make public schools private. It's so freaking obvious it's not even worth debating. The Republicans want everything to be driven by capitalism and will stop at nothing to achieve it. The Democrats are too scared to do anything about it for fear of not getting re-elected. The average American doesn't have the time to worry about it because they are working 50-60 hours a week with 1 week vacation and trying to figure out how to afford sending their kids to college.
I hate to say it but we are fucked. We are going to be fucked for quite some time, until the average dumbass figures out he's working harder than his dad did and making less money and paying more taxes while corporations don't pay shit in taxes. It's only a matter of time before the shit hits the fan but I am afraid it will be a few years before the dumbasses realize the situation and a few more years to get it fixed.
Yeah, that's what it's for; tracking terrorists. The FBI just needs to read their own memos from their own agents to track down these terrorists. Why doesn't anyone ask that question? Do we really need to give up our privacy and freedom simply because the FBI isn't processing the information that is readily available to them?
Aside from the memo sent out by their own agent, I can promise you there was way more information available to the FBI prior to 9/11 that should have made them take notice. Taking into account that they had the information prior to 9/11 before everyone was shitting in their pants about terrorism it's no wonder they didn't do anything.
We are such reactionists. We got hit by terrorists, now lets shred the constitution and live under Marshall law and military rule until we stop shitting ourselves.
I don't believe we need a Dept. of Homeland Defence or any of that shit. The FBI and CIA need to read their fucking email and act on the information they have. Or did they have the information and we told not to act on it? I wonder.
I know a lot of you out there are thinking that the liberals should be against the TIA thingy, but it really should be the Republicans that have a shitfit over this crap.
The good old Republican party used to be for less government and less government in your shit. What the hell happened to that? These fucking neo-cons that are running our country are scary mofos.
Yes the ACLU should be throwing a fit and they are, but everyone (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Greens) should be putting up their fists and fighting this blatant abuse of power.
Please write or fax your politicians and tell them what you think. Harassing some dork with phone calls is funny, but this aint Crank Yankers this is politics and prank phone calls are going to stop anything. The only hope is that the media stop sucking Bush's dick and start talking some smack.
Before I drone on about why open source software is the way it is; open source is mainstream just no one knows it.
How many people surf the web without querying a DNS server running Bind? How many send email and have that email get touched by a sendmail server or some other open source application? How many people visit web sites running Apache with PHP and MySQL or Postgresql?
People are using open source software every day and have no idea they are.
I hope open source software doesn't start pandering to the lowest common denominator with regards to the intelligence of it's users. That is the beauty of open source software, it's for people that want to do cool shit rather than do something easily. It's a question of power over ease of use. What is easier to use Notepad or Emacs? Notepad is much less sophisticated and much easier to use. Emacs is extremely powerful but requires a tremendous amount of affort from the user to learn all of it's features (and I still don't know half of it). Now granted Notepad wasn't designed to replace emacs, but I think my point is still valid.
What many people fail to recognize is that because open source is not Microsoft, it doesn't need to gauge it's success in the same way. A commercial software company has to sell a certain amount of software in order to have money to pay all of it's people, support the users and create a new version. Open source has none of these limitations. Open source software is successful when people use it and benefit from it. My open source project gets about 600 downloads a month, is it successful? I think so.
Everyone is always looking for some measuring stick to gauge the success of Open Source as if millions of people using it aren't enough. People talk about success meaning that your grandmother can use it. The open source community is selfserving; we make software that we want, not software your grandmother wants. We make software that is not that user-friendly but kicks ass if you take the time to learn it.
I don't think this is necessarily a stupid idea, but it's wrought with problems.
Providing source code should be left up to the individual person or company who wrote the software. The market would dictate whether you provide source or not. If your competitors all provide source and you don't; you will probably have to provide the source or adjust your price.
Providing source that has functions and constants removed sounds like a simple thing to do, but it requires effort on the part of the software maker. The amount effort depends on the types of things you will have remove and how well your software is designed. Having to take into consideration the aspect of providing a stripped down version of the source during the design of the software would seemingly increase the cost of the software. Having to maintain a separate source that gets shipped with the product and the one you develop with would increase the cost of the software.
I write code that I release under the GPL and I write code that no one gets to see but me. The code that is mine and mine alone is my bread and butter and the GPL code is for fun.
There are rarely solutions that work for an entire industry. Remember when everyone said, "Everyone's switching to Microsoft, that's why I am." Well now everyone is not switching to MS; there are very few absolutes (other than I take a shot at MS in every/. post). Saying that the entire software industry should start distributing source with their applications is ridiculous. On the other hand those folks out there that are making really kick ass apps with really clean and beautiful source might benefit from releasing their source. They can say, "Hey, look at our code it's beautiful. Our competitors don't let you look under the hood, ever wonder why?"
But what's good for one business may not be for another. It's a business decision that is mostly dictated by the particular market the business is working.
A lot folks spout off about creating laws to stop these spammers.
Do we really want to have our Congressmen/woman making laws regarding the Internet? They don't have a very good track record for making laws period, much less laws dealing with technology. Not to mention the fact that US laws usually only apply to the US, usually.
I think that the fight needs to be waged at the ISP level. ISP's need to be booting these lowlifes off of their networks. If these people are constantly forced to move servers and get new connections for their servers, it will become unfeasible. We can start with this guys T1. Who provides that T1? File complaints to that provider? Where are his email servers, someone has to be providing access to the 'net for those server. You will be suprised what a few letters can do?
We don't need to kill anyone or even work that hard to stop these pricks. Just find out where they live and kill them...um... I mean tell their ISPs to either start cutting off connections or else...
What Linux really needs, I believe, to be the real market winner is to take on Microsoft on equal terms and win-out. Not some back-door, third-world country win, but a real win in the Fortune 500 cubicles of corporate America.
And then what will happen, you will stop using IE?
Think about who has more users the government of India or a fortune 500 company?
A not to everyone that thinks Linux is a failure as an OS because Fortune 500 companies in America aren't spending millions of dollars to switch, WHO CARES?
The age old question (at least in the last few years), is abstraction really beneficial to software development? The answer is.......Yes.
Abstraction is good to an extent. The problems that most people bring up regarding abstraction I find to be more of problem with programmers rather than programming. There are always going to be more shitty programmers than good ones. It's the same in everything in life, there is always fewer good than bad.
Abstraction is awesome, it allows for me to think about things that can make my software better, faster, and rich with features while not having to concern myself with the nitty gritty bits and bytes all the time. I have no problem, actually I enjoy, digging into the code to fix obscure bugs and problems with a particular abstraction.
People always say programmers are lazy, I say it all the time. But the reality is good programmers aren't lazy. Good programmers take pride in their craft and are eager to learn everything about the language or environment they are working in. Good programmers benefit tremendously with good abstraction. Bad programmers use abstraction as a crutch to get things done, then complain when something breaks that they can't figure out.
One last point about abstraction. I have seen people take abstraction too far. There is a point at which abstracting any further handcuffs the programmer and creates too much overhead to make it worth it's while. I prefer to implement an abstraction only when I feel the cost of not implementing the abstraction is higher than implementing the abstraction.
Programming is an art, some are good some are not. Everyone has their own style that they prefer to work with and what works for some, can fails miserably for others. I fortunately work by myself most of the time so I have the freedom to almost always work in my world; so all is good.
Remember just because some people are out their abusing abstraction, as if it ever did anything to them, doesn't mean that abstraction is bad and we should never utilize that technique ever again.
Do they want me to manually scan through a page of text compare it with an image and fix errors created by OCR? It goes against my very nature to do such a task. There has to be a better way, a programming way, to get this done without having to look at all of the files with human eyes.
I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet so I am at a loss for a solution, but it sounds like something Perl would be good at.
The motto of the open source community should be or is, "Progress not perfection."
Soon we will rid the world of all commercial software and open source zealots will rule the land.
"In breaking news today October 2, 2010 Mr. Stallman the leader of our free but not as in beer society has decided that we will be required by law to refer to him as GNU/Stallman. For those who fail to do so will be required to attend a course on proper acronym usage and application and could be fined up $5000.
In other news Bill Gates is still trying to figure out how Microsoft could have lost $40 billion dollars. Rumor has it that a Stallmanite hacked the.Net server which contained the bank account information containing the entire $40 billion and dispersed $1 to 40 billion PayPal accounts. Since the loss of the $40 billion in late 2004 Microsoft has struggled to stay in business. GNU/Stallman exiled Mr. Gates and his company to northern Canada, forbidding Mr. Gates from ever returning to the US. According to GNU/Stallman, 'He is a menace to our free society.' From this reporter's perspective Mr. GNU/Stallman used to be referred as the same."
A gunshot rings through the news studio as a Stallmanite assasinates the subversive news anchor for his obvious attempt to tarnish the good name of our leader GNU/Stallman.
Who is worse, the people who abuse privileges/freedoms, or the people who limit the privileges/freedoms to curb the abuse.
That's easy, the ones that attempt to limit privileges/freedom. Less freedom is always bad. Freedom comes with a cost, people will abuse it. Just because someone abuses freedom doesn't mean I don't deserve the right charish my freedom and love every minute of it.
I never understand people who wish to remove freedom under the guise of protecting it. If the freedom no longer exists, there's nothing to protect.
No one ever said living in a free society would be perfection and trouble-free. Every once in a while some jackass will say something that pisses you off, you can either some something back or go home and cry about it - you can't take away their right to say it though.
Actually I couldn't care less which one you use.Net or Sun but writing efficient code is the way to go. And my response was to someone suggesting that 14000 opposed to 2000 lines of code makes no difference.
I am suprised though that.Net was less code, but what do I know.
So you don't think that maintaining 2000 lines of code as opposed to 14000 makes any difference in the scalability, reliability or ease of use.
What's more scalable an application which is 7 times larger than it's counterpart? An application that new-to-the-project developers aren't afraid of because it's some big huge pile of code that takes countless hours to become familiar with.
How about which application is more reliable. Is the one that is 7 times the size going to be more reliable and be easier to fix bugs.
And our old friend ease of use. Let's see we have here 2 applications and one is 7 times the size as the other, which one will be the easiest and most fun for people to poke with a stick to fix all those annoying problems useability invariably comes up with.
Now of course the 14000 lines in the.Net application could be the best designed application that is has everything well abstracted and adheres tightly to the MVC model of programming, but I don't give a shit 2000 lines of code always going to better then 14000 if they both accomplish the same goal.
Writing efficient intelligent code is the way to go, not Microsoft's write tons of shit code and hope for the best mentality towards the development process. I am talking out of my ass a bit here, but I think I make sense - or do I?
"Publicly elected Karl Auerbach, suspected terrorist sympathiser, is booted from the ICANN board. His insubordination was seen as counter productive in the war on terrorism by the other self-appointed members of the board. One member said, 'Mr. Auerbach was a subversive who was sympathetic to freedom loving people - not a patriot. We will not allow these neo-commies the ability to destroy everything I, I mean we, have built. He may have been elected by the public, but the public doesn't know what we know and we know lots of stuff that would scare the public but we aren't to say what it is cause it's really scary.'"
If they didn't charge a monthly fee and just let you throw $20 into an account and let you download until you ran out of money and only charged $0.10 a track and you could download mp3s and politicians started telling the truth and if I could walk outside my house or turn on the tv and not get bombarded with advertising and if greed wasn't everyone's sole motivator and if the US (my homeland) stopped pissing on everyone else in the world then I would use their service.
If they accomplished everything before I started ranting and raving about stupid shit that no one really cares about, I would use their service.
This person is a patsy. Microsoft breeds this sort of shit with the culture it promotes internally. I know this because my wife worked there for 3 years. They don't care if someone does this sort of thing, they only care that they got caught.
It's the same way the approach secure software. They don't care if it's actually secure, they only care that no one finds the security problems. That's why they get pissed when people find holes in their software. "Well it wouldn't be a problem if someone didn't find out about it, now would it?"
That, and many other reasons, is why they will never open the source on their software. They know there code will not stand up to scrutiny and it wasn't designed to do so either. They make things to make money - period. Now I know some of you idiots out there are going to say, "Of course, Microsoft is a business that's why all businesses make software." My rebuttal is yes software companies make software to make money. However, there is this little thing called professionalism. It's where you do things for your profession because it's the right thing to do. Like when lawyers take cases pro bono or doctors help someone on the street who just got hit by a car. Software should be looked at the same way. You make software secure and reliable because it's your profession and your company should encourage you to do so. Microsoft does not encourage it's programmers to write quality code - it's not part of their culture. I am off topic now so I shall bid you farewell.
Sorry for going off, but the 3 years my wife worked at MS were some really difficult times and we love it now that she's free. It really is a horrible place to work, it's really fucked up.
But is the book any good. All I got from the "review" was that the reviewer thinks Mozilla is cool. What about the book? Was the book good? Was it well written? What did the reviewer like about the book, not the subject, that warrants a 9? Why not a 10, what didn't he like about the book?
There is no way this is going to work. Ever watch DirecTV and have the signal go alittle wacky? It's either on or off, it doesn't just get fuzzy. So you are driving in your car with your new fangled digital radio rocking out to Britney and it starts to rain really hard and the signal gets alittle sketchy. Do you know how annoying that is going to be to listen to music completely stop and then start. "Hit... baby... time".
Watch out for Jazz, it is a powerful form of music. I got into Jazz a few years ago, now I can't quit.
The scenario you just mentioned is what many people, including myself, have done with downloading music. The music industry is very short-sighted. Like most people they don't see the big picture, or the picture that says when the economy is in the shitter people don't always want to throw down $20 on a cd.
What is with us Americans who are so eager to start these wars that have no end and no possible way of really winning. They just go on and on and on.
War on drugs.
War on terrorism.
War on people who break copyright laws.
What next? Instead of waging "war" on everything we don't like, why not try and be alittle more creative.
Since there is no way that the RIAA or MPAA is going to stop people from making copies of their shit, why not embrace the technology?
How many people would pay for music if the recording industry charged $9 a cd if you could download it off the net or $11 if you wanted a hardcopy along with the ability to download.
However they do it, if they just made music available to people in various formats on fast servers, people would buy it. Maybe not the average slashdotter, but the average consumer would.
I am disgusted that the US governement feels it is somehow their responsibility or right to fight these battles for corporate America. Our government is nothing more than an extension of corporate America and has little to do with representing the citizens or protecting freedom.
I get his point and agree with some of what he says, but the article starts fall apart at the end. He sort just starts rambling on and on and fails to really drive home his message.
As for whether 'geeks' should support DRM or whatever just because all the other geeks are not, seems alittle silly. I think the point of the article should be to believe what YOU believe and who gives a shit if someone else disagrees.
I really feel that geeks are smart and that the majority of them really do believe in what they say. Maybe the message seems boring and represents a 'monoculture', but that could be because a lot of people believe this stuff.
A lot of people really do think the RIAA is evil and MS is evil as well. I don't think simply going against the grain simply because not enough people are doing so is good advice. There are real evils in the world and if enough people scream their heads off about such evils something will happen.
Not to mention that all the geeks in world add up to a very small minority. I guess the Green party should start supporting Bush because Nader is boring and they sick of saying the same thing over and over again.
I felt the article was just silly and that he failed to make a good point.
Why would you not use meta tags? Who cares if some people abuse them and some search engines don't use them - some do. If you are trying to convince your "client" to not use meta tags, that just seems ridiculous. Building a good list of keywords and throwing them in your meta keywords is not a bad thing.
I don't see what the issue is. Just because some people abuse a free market society doesn't mean that free market societies are bad. That was an analogy.
People, especially techie-weenies, have a tendency to off-the-deep-end of over stupid shit. But I guess it got me to kill 15 minutes out of my boring life reading and writing about it.
Whatever, use meta tags or don't use meta tags - who gives a shit? Hell don't even register at search engines, or even make a web site there are already millions of shitty web sites anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. So the dude thinks that Perl should now be built to operate as an OS?
Seems silly to me. I agree that there could be an interesting use for a high-level language that is completly independent upon the underlying OS or be the OS, but I don't think the languages he discusses are going to work.
Perl is a scripting language that is a bastardized version of every other language. I love perl, so don't think I am bashing Perl. It does a great job at what it does, but making it secure enough to run a multi-user OS is crazy. Look at how strange it does object-oriented stuff, it's ugly. I just think retrofiting a language to do something that it was not ever designed to do is wrong.
If you want a high-level language that is the OS and also the language you write user applications in, you better create a new language. Java is the closest I have come across that could run as an OS.
Start from the ground up and build a high-level language that handles, printing, DNS, user authentication, the file system, and every other thing the current OSes handle now as well as provide a kick ass development environment for application programmers.
Some day we probably will have a language that can do everything but it won't be Perl, or will it?
One of the reasons my fare country, the United States of America, sucks is because of education. Our education system is eroding more and more every year.
Why?
That's actually quite obvious. There are people, probably all neo-cons, that want privatization of our schools. They are vehemently against anything resembling socialism and will fight to the death to privatize everything.
Capitalism can only succeed if we have a mix between private corporations and some socialist programs. Schools should be available to everyone without the contamination of corporations, libraries should available to all, health care to everyone.
So the plan is let the public school system crumble to the ground, show the success of school vouchers for private schools, make public schools private. It's so freaking obvious it's not even worth debating. The Republicans want everything to be driven by capitalism and will stop at nothing to achieve it. The Democrats are too scared to do anything about it for fear of not getting re-elected. The average American doesn't have the time to worry about it because they are working 50-60 hours a week with 1 week vacation and trying to figure out how to afford sending their kids to college.
I hate to say it but we are fucked. We are going to be fucked for quite some time, until the average dumbass figures out he's working harder than his dad did and making less money and paying more taxes while corporations don't pay shit in taxes. It's only a matter of time before the shit hits the fan but I am afraid it will be a few years before the dumbasses realize the situation and a few more years to get it fixed.
Yeah, that's what it's for; tracking terrorists. The FBI just needs to read their own memos from their own agents to track down these terrorists. Why doesn't anyone ask that question? Do we really need to give up our privacy and freedom simply because the FBI isn't processing the information that is readily available to them?
Aside from the memo sent out by their own agent, I can promise you there was way more information available to the FBI prior to 9/11 that should have made them take notice. Taking into account that they had the information prior to 9/11 before everyone was shitting in their pants about terrorism it's no wonder they didn't do anything.
We are such reactionists. We got hit by terrorists, now lets shred the constitution and live under Marshall law and military rule until we stop shitting ourselves.
I don't believe we need a Dept. of Homeland Defence or any of that shit. The FBI and CIA need to read their fucking email and act on the information they have. Or did they have the information and we told not to act on it? I wonder.
I know a lot of you out there are thinking that the liberals should be against the TIA thingy, but it really should be the Republicans that have a shitfit over this crap.
The good old Republican party used to be for less government and less government in your shit. What the hell happened to that? These fucking neo-cons that are running our country are scary mofos.
Yes the ACLU should be throwing a fit and they are, but everyone (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Greens) should be putting up their fists and fighting this blatant abuse of power.
Please write or fax your politicians and tell them what you think. Harassing some dork with phone calls is funny, but this aint Crank Yankers this is politics and prank phone calls are going to stop anything. The only hope is that the media stop sucking Bush's dick and start talking some smack.
Before I drone on about why open source software is the way it is; open source is mainstream just no one knows it.
How many people surf the web without querying a DNS server running Bind? How many send email and have that email get touched by a sendmail server or some other open source application? How many people visit web sites running Apache with PHP and MySQL or Postgresql?
People are using open source software every day and have no idea they are.
I hope open source software doesn't start pandering to the lowest common denominator with regards to the intelligence of it's users. That is the beauty of open source software, it's for people that want to do cool shit rather than do something easily. It's a question of power over ease of use. What is easier to use Notepad or Emacs? Notepad is much less sophisticated and much easier to use. Emacs is extremely powerful but requires a tremendous amount of affort from the user to learn all of it's features (and I still don't know half of it). Now granted Notepad wasn't designed to replace emacs, but I think my point is still valid.
What many people fail to recognize is that because open source is not Microsoft, it doesn't need to gauge it's success in the same way. A commercial software company has to sell a certain amount of software in order to have money to pay all of it's people, support the users and create a new version. Open source has none of these limitations. Open source software is successful when people use it and benefit from it. My open source project gets about 600 downloads a month, is it successful? I think so.
Everyone is always looking for some measuring stick to gauge the success of Open Source as if millions of people using it aren't enough. People talk about success meaning that your grandmother can use it. The open source community is selfserving; we make software that we want, not software your grandmother wants. We make software that is not that user-friendly but kicks ass if you take the time to learn it.
I don't think this is necessarily a stupid idea, but it's wrought with problems.
/. post). Saying that the entire software industry should start distributing source with their applications is ridiculous. On the other hand those folks out there that are making really kick ass apps with really clean and beautiful source might benefit from releasing their source. They can say, "Hey, look at our code it's beautiful. Our competitors don't let you look under the hood, ever wonder why?"
Providing source code should be left up to the individual person or company who wrote the software. The market would dictate whether you provide source or not. If your competitors all provide source and you don't; you will probably have to provide the source or adjust your price.
Providing source that has functions and constants removed sounds like a simple thing to do, but it requires effort on the part of the software maker. The amount effort depends on the types of things you will have remove and how well your software is designed. Having to take into consideration the aspect of providing a stripped down version of the source during the design of the software would seemingly increase the cost of the software. Having to maintain a separate source that gets shipped with the product and the one you develop with would increase the cost of the software.
I write code that I release under the GPL and I write code that no one gets to see but me. The code that is mine and mine alone is my bread and butter and the GPL code is for fun.
There are rarely solutions that work for an entire industry. Remember when everyone said, "Everyone's switching to Microsoft, that's why I am." Well now everyone is not switching to MS; there are very few absolutes (other than I take a shot at MS in every
But what's good for one business may not be for another. It's a business decision that is mostly dictated by the particular market the business is working.
A lot folks spout off about creating laws to stop these spammers.
Do we really want to have our Congressmen/woman making laws regarding the Internet? They don't have a very good track record for making laws period, much less laws dealing with technology. Not to mention the fact that US laws usually only apply to the US, usually.
I think that the fight needs to be waged at the ISP level. ISP's need to be booting these lowlifes off of their networks. If these people are constantly forced to move servers and get new connections for their servers, it will become unfeasible. We can start with this guys T1. Who provides that T1? File complaints to that provider? Where are his email servers, someone has to be providing access to the 'net for those server. You will be suprised what a few letters can do?
We don't need to kill anyone or even work that hard to stop these pricks. Just find out where they live and kill them...um... I mean tell their ISPs to either start cutting off connections or else...
What Linux really needs, I believe, to be the real market winner is to take on Microsoft on equal terms and win-out. Not some back-door, third-world country win, but a real win in the Fortune 500 cubicles of corporate America.
And then what will happen, you will stop using IE?
Think about who has more users the government of India or a fortune 500 company?
A not to everyone that thinks Linux is a failure as an OS because Fortune 500 companies in America aren't spending millions of dollars to switch, WHO CARES?
The age old question (at least in the last few years), is abstraction really beneficial to software development? The answer is.......Yes.
Abstraction is good to an extent. The problems that most people bring up regarding abstraction I find to be more of problem with programmers rather than programming. There are always going to be more shitty programmers than good ones. It's the same in everything in life, there is always fewer good than bad.
Abstraction is awesome, it allows for me to think about things that can make my software better, faster, and rich with features while not having to concern myself with the nitty gritty bits and bytes all the time. I have no problem, actually I enjoy, digging into the code to fix obscure bugs and problems with a particular abstraction.
People always say programmers are lazy, I say it all the time. But the reality is good programmers aren't lazy. Good programmers take pride in their craft and are eager to learn everything about the language or environment they are working in. Good programmers benefit tremendously with good abstraction. Bad programmers use abstraction as a crutch to get things done, then complain when something breaks that they can't figure out.
One last point about abstraction. I have seen people take abstraction too far. There is a point at which abstracting any further handcuffs the programmer and creates too much overhead to make it worth it's while. I prefer to implement an abstraction only when I feel the cost of not implementing the abstraction is higher than implementing the abstraction.
Programming is an art, some are good some are not. Everyone has their own style that they prefer to work with and what works for some, can fails miserably for others. I fortunately work by myself most of the time so I have the freedom to almost always work in my world; so all is good.
Remember just because some people are out their abusing abstraction, as if it ever did anything to them, doesn't mean that abstraction is bad and we should never utilize that technique ever again.
Do they want me to manually scan through a page of text compare it with an image and fix errors created by OCR? It goes against my very nature to do such a task. There has to be a better way, a programming way, to get this done without having to look at all of the files with human eyes.
I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet so I am at a loss for a solution, but it sounds like something Perl would be good at.
The motto of the open source community should be or is, "Progress not perfection."
for the miost part
You must have meant moist, referring to that Britney Spears - Yowzer that is moist.
but how much is your soul worth?
.Net server which contained the bank account information containing the entire $40 billion and dispersed $1 to 40 billion PayPal accounts. Since the loss of the $40 billion in late 2004 Microsoft has struggled to stay in business. GNU/Stallman exiled Mr. Gates and his company to northern Canada, forbidding Mr. Gates from ever returning to the US. According to GNU/Stallman, 'He is a menace to our free society.' From this reporter's perspective Mr. GNU/Stallman used to be referred as the same."
Soon we will rid the world of all commercial software and open source zealots will rule the land.
"In breaking news today October 2, 2010 Mr. Stallman the leader of our free but not as in beer society has decided that we will be required by law to refer to him as GNU/Stallman. For those who fail to do so will be required to attend a course on proper acronym usage and application and could be fined up $5000.
In other news Bill Gates is still trying to figure out how Microsoft could have lost $40 billion dollars. Rumor has it that a Stallmanite hacked the
A gunshot rings through the news studio as a Stallmanite assasinates the subversive news anchor for his obvious attempt to tarnish the good name of our leader GNU/Stallman.
Viva GNU/Stallman
I love it when Slashdot posts stuff like this. All the morons that don't read the articles look stupid when they go off on a tangent.
It's like April 1st but better.
For the record, I can be caught not reading the articles from time to time - but I never said I wasn't a moron.
Who is worse, the people who abuse privileges/freedoms, or the people who limit the privileges/freedoms to curb the abuse.
That's easy, the ones that attempt to limit privileges/freedom. Less freedom is always bad. Freedom comes with a cost, people will abuse it. Just because someone abuses freedom doesn't mean I don't deserve the right charish my freedom and love every minute of it.
I never understand people who wish to remove freedom under the guise of protecting it. If the freedom no longer exists, there's nothing to protect.
No one ever said living in a free society would be perfection and trouble-free. Every once in a while some jackass will say something that pisses you off, you can either some something back or go home and cry about it - you can't take away their right to say it though.
Freedom for everyone or freedom for no one.
Actually I couldn't care less which one you use .Net or Sun but writing efficient code is the way to go. And my response was to someone suggesting that 14000 opposed to 2000 lines of code makes no difference.
.Net was less code, but what do I know.
I am suprised though that
So you don't think that maintaining 2000 lines of code as opposed to 14000 makes any difference in the scalability, reliability or ease of use.
.Net application could be the best designed application that is has everything well abstracted and adheres tightly to the MVC model of programming, but I don't give a shit 2000 lines of code always going to better then 14000 if they both accomplish the same goal.
What's more scalable an application which is 7 times larger than it's counterpart? An application that new-to-the-project developers aren't afraid of because it's some big huge pile of code that takes countless hours to become familiar with.
How about which application is more reliable. Is the one that is 7 times the size going to be more reliable and be easier to fix bugs.
And our old friend ease of use. Let's see we have here 2 applications and one is 7 times the size as the other, which one will be the easiest and most fun for people to poke with a stick to fix all those annoying problems useability invariably comes up with.
Now of course the 14000 lines in the
Writing efficient intelligent code is the way to go, not Microsoft's write tons of shit code and hope for the best mentality towards the development process. I am talking out of my ass a bit here, but I think I make sense - or do I?
Peace
"Publicly elected Karl Auerbach, suspected terrorist sympathiser, is booted from the ICANN board. His insubordination was seen as counter productive in the war on terrorism by the other self-appointed members of the board. One member said, 'Mr. Auerbach was a subversive who was sympathetic to freedom loving people - not a patriot. We will not allow these neo-commies the ability to destroy everything I, I mean we, have built. He may have been elected by the public, but the public doesn't know what we know and we know lots of stuff that would scare the public but we aren't to say what it is cause it's really scary.'"
If they didn't charge a monthly fee and just let you throw $20 into an account and let you download until you ran out of money and only charged $0.10 a track and you could download mp3s and politicians started telling the truth and if I could walk outside my house or turn on the tv and not get bombarded with advertising and if greed wasn't everyone's sole motivator and if the US (my homeland) stopped pissing on everyone else in the world then I would use their service.
If they accomplished everything before I started ranting and raving about stupid shit that no one really cares about, I would use their service.
This person is a patsy. Microsoft breeds this sort of shit with the culture it promotes internally. I know this because my wife worked there for 3 years. They don't care if someone does this sort of thing, they only care that they got caught.
It's the same way the approach secure software. They don't care if it's actually secure, they only care that no one finds the security problems. That's why they get pissed when people find holes in their software. "Well it wouldn't be a problem if someone didn't find out about it, now would it?"
That, and many other reasons, is why they will never open the source on their software. They know there code will not stand up to scrutiny and it wasn't designed to do so either. They make things to make money - period. Now I know some of you idiots out there are going to say, "Of course, Microsoft is a business that's why all businesses make software." My rebuttal is yes software companies make software to make money. However, there is this little thing called professionalism. It's where you do things for your profession because it's the right thing to do. Like when lawyers take cases pro bono or doctors help someone on the street who just got hit by a car. Software should be looked at the same way. You make software secure and reliable because it's your profession and your company should encourage you to do so. Microsoft does not encourage it's programmers to write quality code - it's not part of their culture. I am off topic now so I shall bid you farewell.
Sorry for going off, but the 3 years my wife worked at MS were some really difficult times and we love it now that she's free. It really is a horrible place to work, it's really fucked up.
But is the book any good. All I got from the "review" was that the reviewer thinks Mozilla is cool. What about the book? Was the book good? Was it well written? What did the reviewer like about the book, not the subject, that warrants a 9? Why not a 10, what didn't he like about the book?
There is no way this is going to work. Ever watch DirecTV and have the signal go alittle wacky? It's either on or off, it doesn't just get fuzzy. So you are driving in your car with your new fangled digital radio rocking out to Britney and it starts to rain really hard and the signal gets alittle sketchy. Do you know how annoying that is going to be to listen to music completely stop and then start. "Hit ... baby ... time".
Bad idea number 3,330,549,023.
Watch out for Jazz, it is a powerful form of music. I got into Jazz a few years ago, now I can't quit.
The scenario you just mentioned is what many people, including myself, have done with downloading music. The music industry is very short-sighted. Like most people they don't see the big picture, or the picture that says when the economy is in the shitter people don't always want to throw down $20 on a cd.
What is with us Americans who are so eager to start these wars that have no end and no possible way of really winning. They just go on and on and on.
War on drugs.
War on terrorism.
War on people who break copyright laws.
What next? Instead of waging "war" on everything we don't like, why not try and be alittle more creative.
Since there is no way that the RIAA or MPAA is going to stop people from making copies of their shit, why not embrace the technology?
How many people would pay for music if the recording industry charged $9 a cd if you could download it off the net or $11 if you wanted a hardcopy along with the ability to download.
However they do it, if they just made music available to people in various formats on fast servers, people would buy it. Maybe not the average slashdotter, but the average consumer would.
I am disgusted that the US governement feels it is somehow their responsibility or right to fight these battles for corporate America. Our government is nothing more than an extension of corporate America and has little to do with representing the citizens or protecting freedom.
I get his point and agree with some of what he says, but the article starts fall apart at the end. He sort just starts rambling on and on and fails to really drive home his message.
As for whether 'geeks' should support DRM or whatever just because all the other geeks are not, seems alittle silly. I think the point of the article should be to believe what YOU believe and who gives a shit if someone else disagrees.
I really feel that geeks are smart and that the majority of them really do believe in what they say. Maybe the message seems boring and represents a 'monoculture', but that could be because a lot of people believe this stuff.
A lot of people really do think the RIAA is evil and MS is evil as well. I don't think simply going against the grain simply because not enough people are doing so is good advice. There are real evils in the world and if enough people scream their heads off about such evils something will happen.
Not to mention that all the geeks in world add up to a very small minority. I guess the Green party should start supporting Bush because Nader is boring and they sick of saying the same thing over and over again.
I felt the article was just silly and that he failed to make a good point.
Why would you not use meta tags? Who cares if some people abuse them and some search engines don't use them - some do. If you are trying to convince your "client" to not use meta tags, that just seems ridiculous. Building a good list of keywords and throwing them in your meta keywords is not a bad thing.
I don't see what the issue is. Just because some people abuse a free market society doesn't mean that free market societies are bad. That was an analogy.
People, especially techie-weenies, have a tendency to off-the-deep-end of over stupid shit. But I guess it got me to kill 15 minutes out of my boring life reading and writing about it.
Whatever, use meta tags or don't use meta tags - who gives a shit? Hell don't even register at search engines, or even make a web site there are already millions of shitty web sites anyway.