I don't think installer issues are relevant anymore, and in particular you cite the distro that has the weakest installation tools of all. I would like to see more work on installers, but I don't think this is a sticking point anymore.
As for the desktop, I suspect 2004 will see KDE and GNOME work more closely together via freedsktop.org thus making most flame wars irrelevant as interoperability will be vastly improved.
SCO will be forced to show their (nonexistant) hand in 2004 and the gig will likely be up. SCOX will get hammered as the speculators realize SCO is about to get laughed out of court with no remedy and huge legal bills looming.
2003 was clearly the year Linux became seriously accepted by analysts, investors, and most other non-technical people who needed convincing.
2004 will be a year for delivery-on-promise and return-on-investment. The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged. Fortunately, linux will continue to leverage huge cost benefits, huge mindshare benefits, and a rising tide of anti-Microsoftism. that said, lofty valuation for RedHat and Novell will likely come into question sometime soon.
I don't even know what your point is anymore. Fiat currencies represent fiat power - so in essence they are the culmination of what people believe is legitimate power. Yes I know what a fiat currency is and why they fail - don't try to snow me with that.
Once again, I have no idea what your point is, if you even have one.
Look, man. I have no patience or respect for Saudi Arabia. But don't pass that line of bullshit around here. In many ways, yeah, Saudi Arabia is a nasty place to live, especially if you're a woman. But we're not talking about mass graves and torture chambers here.
No, just public executions for minor infractions...religious "police" handing down harsh punishment for any minor infraction with respect to the Islamic faith...and as you said, absolutely no rights for women. Hell, at least in a place like Chechnya there is pure anarchy and you can at least shoot your way to liberty. You are wrong, Saudi Arabia is as close to "1" on your scale as anything else I can imagine.
No, you fucking moron. It's about power. Economic, military, social, and political. If you think money makes the world go 'round, you're not paying enough attention.
Money is power. REREAD YOUR SENTENCE you illiterate hillbilly - you react ot my point about it all being about money by telling me its all about economic power. Keep working for your GED.
Egypt, Denmark, the ROK, Jordan, and the UAE all have bigger weapons contracts with the US and US companies than Saudi does. Again: you're not paying enough attention.
Except plans shape decisions. Have we ever planned for peaceful coexistance with Muslims? Apparently not or we would not be fighting what is in essence a world war (also by proxy via Israel) to implement said plans.
I am not disputing preparedness, but I dispute if we have covered all of the contingencies that are in the best interest of US citizens.
Its amazing to listen to these tapes. Some of this crap is priceless. Priceless and sad and demented, but also hilarious. Typical banter involves Nixon talking about the skills black people have in "singing and dancing" but no ability in the "more disciplined" arts. Then there are his rants against Harvard grads.
The fact that this guy willfully taped all of this stuff is even more amazing than the content.
Its amazing how far we have gone with Saudi Arabia. It goes without saying this nation has one of the worst human rights records in the world, in many ways still a medieval society.
Yet the US continues to treat this tyrannical monarchy as a "partner". Its all about money folks. Most major political figures since the 70s have prospered in one way or another from Saudi money. From Frank Carlucci (fmr Defense official) to Kissinger (former Dr. Strangelove impersonator) to Will Kennard (former FCC Chair) to former UK PM John Major to former President George Bush have been deeply involved in lobbying, consulting, or arms deals with the Saudi government. Most of this is facillitated by the Carlyle Group, a defense firm selling arms and influence to the highest bidder.
We buy their oil, they buy our weapons (and A LOT of them, no other arms buyng nation is even close) and they also enrich those making these deals happen - see again, the Carlyle Group. The word to people currently in office is clear - if you want to get rich when you retire, and I mean RICH, you make things easy for the Saudis now. They will take care of you later, typically to the tune of many millions of dollars.
Amazingly this means many people who were once US government officials spend their days brokering weapons deals with a nation that is deeply involved with terrorism abroad and despotism at home.
The interior of the network continues to be "dumb", although we know there is much that could be done to reduce congestion by putting smarter nodes/uber-routers in place of the dumb boxes there now. From that perspective you can see routers as a P2P type appliance - at least via BGP. Replacing these with boxes that also cache content, block spam, etc might be a good idea. I'm not sure though if that is what the author meant.
This application was originally written in about five working days, and I firmly beleive that it would have been just about impossible in that time in any other language but shell.
For fun I downloaded your script. You are truly a glutton for punishment. 80% of this code could have been more sanely expressed in perl. Your script demonstrates extreme proficiency in sh scripting (hats off to you) but in no way invalidates the well-established idea that perl or python are superior for long scripts. I suspect this program would have been coded in half the number of lines using perl in particular, just in syntactic clarity and expressiveness without knowing anything about the actual hardware you are dealing with.
If one is to target Perl or Python, one cannot count on it being there.Well seeing as the target system for most scripts is YOUR OWN COMPUTER I think you should be able to handle apt-get install python.
What exactly is more powerful and less fragile about Python in comparison to a sh script?
Do you have an interactive debugger for sh? Thought not. Do you have language-level features for dumping and evaluating data structures in sh at run-time as inspectable structures? Thought not.
Every Posix-compliant system has/bin/sh, but not neccessarily Python or any other interpreter or compiler.
Name three major modern unices that does not include a decent scripting language by default. Perl and Python typically do show up in most self-respecting distros or are trivially available as precompiled packages.
It is the same language you use in an interactive shell
This is basically the "legacy" argument. You can use perl or python as interactive shells, there are tools to aid in this.
It is generally faster to start a shell than another interpreter
When all else fails, cite efficiency. I would ask you to provide one useful example where avoiding the startup time of perl has been a requirement for getting a job done.
You can source shell scripts, hence you can write a shell script that modifies the environment of your interactive session. You cannot do that with any other language.
To presume that efficiency concerns should outweigh maintainability and portability in scripts is a classic novice error. More shameful if you have actually been going at it for a few years.
If memory concerns are truly an issue, you are not going to get relief by simply switching environments. You probably need to rethink and redesign.
The poster is correct - sh is completely useless for anything non-trivial.
I typically discard shell for anything more complex than a while/do sh loop. For anything moderately complex, sh is baroque, syntactically retarded, and feature-deficient.
This book is irrelevant because anyone sane already knows the futility in trying to do anything non-trivial in sh.
sh and make are two utilities that frankly would never be succesfully introduced today. We use and accept them because of their incredible legacy presence.
There is no reason why I cannot have a shell language that has all of the functionality and features of python or perl. Yes there are projects to use these languages as true interactive shells but the continued use of sh keeps them from getting steam.
Killing sh and make would be two great steps forward for modernizing unix.
This book is absolute drivel. The cliffhangers are especially geared towards "young readers" - they hang for about three paragraphs (don't want to strain your brain), then its back to the one-dimensional "brilliant idiot" characters and laughable (and now very old and tired) conspiracy theory plot that hasn't been new since the 60s.
Interesting article, but I dispute the premise in paragraph 1 that states the world is ready for more software firms. While his comments were self-serving, I agree with Larry Ellison that probably 80% of the software firms in business now have no long-term future. The market is already shaking out badly, and the writing is on the wall for anyone who isn't first or second in their market - GET OUT OR BE PUT OUT.
Outsourcing has made the life of the small ISV even harder - for what it costs you to hire ten Bay Area engineers, BigSoftwareCo.com can hire a hundred in Bangalore. Whoops.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There is a reason that we apply and peel off abstactions at different layers of the system. And no there is no need for reflection at the assembly level.
If you believe that the government should keep out of the business of "picking winners" in the market, then you must be against this clear subsidy. We have to win by the same rules everyone else plays by.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the desktop, I suspect 2004 will see KDE and GNOME work more closely together via freedsktop.org thus making most flame wars irrelevant as interoperability will be vastly improved.
SCO will be forced to show their (nonexistant) hand in 2004 and the gig will likely be up. SCOX will get hammered as the speculators realize SCO is about to get laughed out of court with no remedy and huge legal bills looming.
2004 will be a year for delivery-on-promise and return-on-investment. The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged. Fortunately, linux will continue to leverage huge cost benefits, huge mindshare benefits, and a rising tide of anti-Microsoftism. that said, lofty valuation for RedHat and Novell will likely come into question sometime soon.
Once again, I have no idea what your point is, if you even have one.
No, just public executions for minor infractions...religious "police" handing down harsh punishment for any minor infraction with respect to the Islamic faith...and as you said, absolutely no rights for women. Hell, at least in a place like Chechnya there is pure anarchy and you can at least shoot your way to liberty. You are wrong, Saudi Arabia is as close to "1" on your scale as anything else I can imagine.
No, you fucking moron. It's about power. Economic, military, social, and political. If you think money makes the world go 'round, you're not paying enough attention.
Money is power. REREAD YOUR SENTENCE you illiterate hillbilly - you react ot my point about it all being about money by telling me its all about economic power. Keep working for your GED.
Egypt, Denmark, the ROK, Jordan, and the UAE all have bigger weapons contracts with the US and US companies than Saudi does. Again: you're not paying enough attention.
Wrong, and all of this is documented.
No wonder you posted as an AC.
I am not disputing preparedness, but I dispute if we have covered all of the contingencies that are in the best interest of US citizens.
The fact that this guy willfully taped all of this stuff is even more amazing than the content.
Yet the US continues to treat this tyrannical monarchy as a "partner". Its all about money folks. Most major political figures since the 70s have prospered in one way or another from Saudi money. From Frank Carlucci (fmr Defense official) to Kissinger (former Dr. Strangelove impersonator) to Will Kennard (former FCC Chair) to former UK PM John Major to former President George Bush have been deeply involved in lobbying, consulting, or arms deals with the Saudi government. Most of this is facillitated by the Carlyle Group, a defense firm selling arms and influence to the highest bidder.
We buy their oil, they buy our weapons (and A LOT of them, no other arms buyng nation is even close) and they also enrich those making these deals happen - see again, the Carlyle Group. The word to people currently in office is clear - if you want to get rich when you retire, and I mean RICH, you make things easy for the Saudis now. They will take care of you later, typically to the tune of many millions of dollars.
Amazingly this means many people who were once US government officials spend their days brokering weapons deals with a nation that is deeply involved with terrorism abroad and despotism at home.
Other than being "slave to an addiction", what are the health issues of using caffeine? I suspect it won't be what kills me.
The interior of the network continues to be "dumb", although we know there is much that could be done to reduce congestion by putting smarter nodes/uber-routers in place of the dumb boxes there now. From that perspective you can see routers as a P2P type appliance - at least via BGP. Replacing these with boxes that also cache content, block spam, etc might be a good idea. I'm not sure though if that is what the author meant.
For fun I downloaded your script. You are truly a glutton for punishment. 80% of this code could have been more sanely expressed in perl. Your script demonstrates extreme proficiency in sh scripting (hats off to you) but in no way invalidates the well-established idea that perl or python are superior for long scripts. I suspect this program would have been coded in half the number of lines using perl in particular, just in syntactic clarity and expressiveness without knowing anything about the actual hardware you are dealing with.
What you are describing is a syntax check, not a debugger.
If one is to target Perl or Python, one cannot count on it being there.Well seeing as the target system for most scripts is YOUR OWN COMPUTER I think you should be able to handle apt-get install python.
I'M A NEWBIE??? Gee - like i couldn't compile perl to reside in /bin??????
Make it your goal in 2004 to understand the --prefix feature of the gnu build toolset. And to think you are calling me a newbie.
Do you have an interactive debugger for sh? Thought not. Do you have language-level features for dumping and evaluating data structures in sh at run-time as inspectable structures? Thought not.
Name three major modern unices that does not include a decent scripting language by default. Perl and Python typically do show up in most self-respecting distros or are trivially available as precompiled packages.
It is the same language you use in an interactive shell
This is basically the "legacy" argument. You can use perl or python as interactive shells, there are tools to aid in this.
It is generally faster to start a shell than another interpreter
When all else fails, cite efficiency. I would ask you to provide one useful example where avoiding the startup time of perl has been a requirement for getting a job done.
You can source shell scripts, hence you can write a shell script that modifies the environment of your interactive session. You cannot do that with any other language.
This is categorically false. Sorry.
If memory concerns are truly an issue, you are not going to get relief by simply switching environments. You probably need to rethink and redesign.
Please, tell me what distro does not include perl or python practically by default. This is a silly argument that was irrelevant about four years ago.
I typically discard shell for anything more complex than a while/do sh loop. For anything moderately complex, sh is baroque, syntactically retarded, and feature-deficient.
sh and make are two utilities that frankly would never be succesfully introduced today. We use and accept them because of their incredible legacy presence.
There is no reason why I cannot have a shell language that has all of the functionality and features of python or perl. Yes there are projects to use these languages as true interactive shells but the continued use of sh keeps them from getting steam.
Killing sh and make would be two great steps forward for modernizing unix.
This book is absolute drivel. The cliffhangers are especially geared towards "young readers" - they hang for about three paragraphs (don't want to strain your brain), then its back to the one-dimensional "brilliant idiot" characters and laughable (and now very old and tired) conspiracy theory plot that hasn't been new since the 60s.
Well known crypto-hawk who petitioned the President to make a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.
Outsourcing has made the life of the small ISV even harder - for what it costs you to hire ten Bay Area engineers, BigSoftwareCo.com can hire a hundred in Bangalore. Whoops.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There is a reason that we apply and peel off abstactions at different layers of the system. And no there is no need for reflection at the assembly level.
If you believe that the government should keep out of the business of "picking winners" in the market, then you must be against this clear subsidy. We have to win by the same rules everyone else plays by.