-- I like the transparency of the open source community.
Not when it comes to pettyness. Just makes you look bad.
Why hide the warts? Who are you trying to impress? There are real people and real personalities involved in the community. Jerks who do not provide useful input will be purged. No long term harm seems to have been inflicted due to free speech.
No one is disputing that Apple has great idiot-appeal for people who want something that "just works" - that has never been open source's forte. The flipside to this uber-controlled market is that you get to pay $120 for each point release for the OS, and you get to pay a significant premium for hardware. You also get limited access to source (limited to Darwin) which ultimately puts you in the same "hostage" situation many Microsoft users are in with respect to security.
Microsoft: Internet Explorer
Open Source: Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror,...
Uh, because "open source" is not a company, it is a community, in the same sense that Windows developers are a community (for which multiple browsers also exist...Opera etc).
Microsoft: Media Player
Open Source: Mplayer, XMMS, Xine,...
But increasingly the GNOME world at least is using Gstreamer as a backend. If someone wants to code up yet-another GUI for Gstreamer, go nuts.
Why do you care if Sun or Microsoft have turf battles?
I didn't say I "cared" that there were turf wars inside these companies, I was just saying they existed just like they do in the open source community, except you as a user do not have any chance to provide input.
When he talks about each of the complaints he's got, he's not talking about competing with Microsoft, or Sun, or SGI -- he's talking about problems with the community itself. You're the one who turned his observation into a negative comment about FOSS compared to closed source. He's talking about things to fix, and you want to turn it into things to compete about. Look at his point 5, and tell me that doesn't apply to your reaction.
I can't figure out what your point is here at all, other than you seem to take issue with the fact that I posted a comment at all.
What this author is really doing is digging up some nitpicks and embellishing them as signs of the end.
How do you know that the same feuds and itch scratching don't happen at Sun or Microsoft? They certainly do, but you don't know this because your only interface to the firm is a PR rep. I like the transparency of the open source community. I want to see the debates and bickering take place in public, where maybe just maybe I can provide some input.
When I started working in the industry, Alta Vista was literally the kingmaker of the web. You were in their index (or Yahoo's directory) or your were unreachable.
Yes there were SEOs (third party optimizers) for Alta Vista back then too.
Then came Lycos. Then came Inktomi. Then came Google. Google has stayed on top a long time by their regin must end - sooner or later PageRank will be totally cracked by SEOs and their algorithm won't provide decent results anymore.
Will MS play nice with Friendster? Huminity? How about the half dozen other peer network systems setting up shop? Its not enough anymore to support people who inhabit only the MS network (or AOL, or Yahoo for that matter). The future will be in agnostic clients invited into, or hacking into whatever networks are in ascendency.
In this sense I see even Jabber as a dead-end - give me GAIM and the other multinetwork clients anyday, and open up more peer networks to them as they are populated.
What would be gained from Apple suing individual open source developers??? Apple probably benefits from the same individuals putting code back into X and BSD.
I have read his article a few times now and still can't see what point he is trying to express. His basic argument seems to be:
Oh heaven forbid you can actually get good software for free!
So what of it? He makes no useful statements about the quality, support, or costs of any of the software in question. My thinking is that he is probably a moron (look at what he does for a living) who gets his kicks writing vapid screeds for non-publications.
What is with this trend? Wired devotes at least ten pages a month to hawking gadgets. Popular Science too. Now Scientific American? Guys - we already get the Sharper Image catalog in the mail whether we want it or not - please stick to reporting on science.
Vidal may be a notorious blue-blood, and clearly a luddite, but nonetheless he is the source of an incredible amount of scathing invective tracing back to The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, which somewhat dated now, is still biting.
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
There is very little competition in the high end housing market, because a few uber-prestigious agents own the market in any area and laugh off competition. The houses sell themselves or do not sell at all. You don't get fooled into buying a $10 million home unless you really want it.
None of the premises you state about cut-throat competition hold in high end real estate. The market is held tightly by a few country-club mavens who give it up on retirement and not before. Try breaking into their turf. They won't lower their fees for you. They will laugh at you and you will not be laughing back - you will instead watch them leisurely dine with the other blue bloods at the polo club, wondering why you are near the kitchen and they have a private room.
First, this industry attracts the weakest hands in business when times are good. Look at the cruft brought into this business in the last five years. The money is easy in a real estate bubble and the ease is reflected in the talent going into this market.
I am not speaking from the sidelines, I am speaking as the owner of a $1 million+ home and I have dealt with these people. Homes in that range sell themselves or never get sold at all. You do not convince someone to spend seven figures unless they have already decided to on their own. What the agent does is place the home in MLS, put up a sign, hold a few open houses, and order an inspection. For a smaller home this is decent work for decent pay, but on seven figure homes they end up doing an incredibly small amount of work for what they take down, particularly if they represent buyer and seller, which is quite often the case.
If you really think they screen clients, think again. They will tell you to your face that word of mouth is very important, and they want almost anyone passable seeing the house. So yes they will let the guy who lives in a van see your house, because they are convinced he has a rich cousin.
Real estate agents really only bring one thing to the table - access to MLS. Thats it. Its an incredible monopoly that is now being broken. ANYONE can order an inspection and do the closing. You do not have to be an agent to sell a house.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
Unix is a collection of small applications glued together by the shell.
Why can't that shell give you all of the power of a real modern scripting language?? Its not like you can't run sh commands in perl-shell.
The reason why people use sh syntax is because it is enormously effective. Try expressing something like:
find . -type f | xargs grep -il foo
in Perl or some other scripting language.
in psh:
psh% find . -type f | xargs grep -il foo
works just fine. EXCEPT I can now put this result in a perl var and do waaaay more with it than you could conceive, like apply anything in CPAN to it without losing context. It is 'conception' that is basically the problem - you don't know what it is like to use a real scripting language from the command line so its strengths are not apparent.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
The primary interactive use of the shell is to call exec on a list of strings. Sometimes you redirect standard io. Sometimes you also call fork. You also change the cwd. There's also a substantial amount of simple substitution from what you type to what it calls exec on.
I'm glad you only have to solve simple problems. This is not the case for all of us. We start out with shells and then want to add control structures like loops. Okay, easy enough. Then we may need to use variables. Okay, still not too bad. Now one more change and I need a function. Whoops. This is where sh starts to break.
You have the same problem most other posters seem to - you don't know of a world where the shell can do more so you can't conceive of it and the thought seems absurd. Give me one coherent reason why the shell should be apart and distinct from a strong scripting language like Pyhon or Perl. There is no reason beyond the fact that you have never had to solve complex problems.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
And are you volunteering to be the one who explains to the python fans why the next version of their Linux distro boots into perl?
My point wasn't perl specifically (as I mentioned - "or something new") - but just a better language than sh. Yes Python would do.
Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...if people would be willing to drop sh/bash etc and adopt a more compelling, orthogonal approach like psh (perl shell) or something entirely new.
I don't know why more people don't actively pursue a modern language for the shell interface. sh script syntax is tortorous. So much easier and maintainable to write perl scripts. So why not use perl from the command line??
psh never really seemed to take off but it let you basically enter a perl debugging session but execute shell commands also. This would basically trump anything msh could muster and also provide the entire universe of CPAN to the shell.
sh is right up there with Makefiles for unix utilities that basically suck but are too entrenched to replace.
There was no scientific, economic, or environmental imperative to put humans in space. We always wanted to know if it could be done, so we did it. Now we know space is toxic to humans and Earth is actually the best place in the galaxy for us to live, so maybe we should start spending money on preserving it instead of fantasies of leaving it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not when it comes to pettyness. Just makes you look bad.
Why hide the warts? Who are you trying to impress? There are real people and real personalities involved in the community. Jerks who do not provide useful input will be purged. No long term harm seems to have been inflicted due to free speech.
No one is disputing that Apple has great idiot-appeal for people who want something that "just works" - that has never been open source's forte. The flipside to this uber-controlled market is that you get to pay $120 for each point release for the OS, and you get to pay a significant premium for hardware. You also get limited access to source (limited to Darwin) which ultimately puts you in the same "hostage" situation many Microsoft users are in with respect to security.
Uh, because "open source" is not a company, it is a community, in the same sense that Windows developers are a community (for which multiple browsers also exist...Opera etc).
Microsoft: Media Player Open Source: Mplayer, XMMS, Xine, ...
But increasingly the GNOME world at least is using Gstreamer as a backend. If someone wants to code up yet-another GUI for Gstreamer, go nuts.
I didn't say I "cared" that there were turf wars inside these companies, I was just saying they existed just like they do in the open source community, except you as a user do not have any chance to provide input.
When he talks about each of the complaints he's got, he's not talking about competing with Microsoft, or Sun, or SGI -- he's talking about problems with the community itself. You're the one who turned his observation into a negative comment about FOSS compared to closed source. He's talking about things to fix, and you want to turn it into things to compete about. Look at his point 5, and tell me that doesn't apply to your reaction.
I can't figure out what your point is here at all, other than you seem to take issue with the fact that I posted a comment at all.
How do you know that the same feuds and itch scratching don't happen at Sun or Microsoft? They certainly do, but you don't know this because your only interface to the firm is a PR rep. I like the transparency of the open source community. I want to see the debates and bickering take place in public, where maybe just maybe I can provide some input.
...as a result of the Overture acquisition
Search is a well researched and well understood problem. What Google has is a better API and API business model.
Yes there were SEOs (third party optimizers) for Alta Vista back then too.
Then came Lycos. Then came Inktomi. Then came Google. Google has stayed on top a long time by their regin must end - sooner or later PageRank will be totally cracked by SEOs and their algorithm won't provide decent results anymore.
In this sense I see even Jabber as a dead-end - give me GAIM and the other multinetwork clients anyday, and open up more peer networks to them as they are populated.
Suse got bought. They will do what Novell wants. In any case his statement was a polite way of saying KDE is over.
What would be gained from Apple suing individual open source developers??? Apple probably benefits from the same individuals putting code back into X and BSD.
Dell is notorious for utterly worthless tech support. If you don't have standards, your location is irrelevant.
Oh heaven forbid you can actually get good software for free!
So what of it? He makes no useful statements about the quality, support, or costs of any of the software in question. My thinking is that he is probably a moron (look at what he does for a living) who gets his kicks writing vapid screeds for non-publications.
What is with this trend? Wired devotes at least ten pages a month to hawking gadgets. Popular Science too. Now Scientific American? Guys - we already get the Sharper Image catalog in the mail whether we want it or not - please stick to reporting on science.
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
None of the premises you state about cut-throat competition hold in high end real estate. The market is held tightly by a few country-club mavens who give it up on retirement and not before. Try breaking into their turf. They won't lower their fees for you. They will laugh at you and you will not be laughing back - you will instead watch them leisurely dine with the other blue bloods at the polo club, wondering why you are near the kitchen and they have a private room.
I am not speaking from the sidelines, I am speaking as the owner of a $1 million+ home and I have dealt with these people. Homes in that range sell themselves or never get sold at all. You do not convince someone to spend seven figures unless they have already decided to on their own. What the agent does is place the home in MLS, put up a sign, hold a few open houses, and order an inspection. For a smaller home this is decent work for decent pay, but on seven figure homes they end up doing an incredibly small amount of work for what they take down, particularly if they represent buyer and seller, which is quite often the case.
If you really think they screen clients, think again. They will tell you to your face that word of mouth is very important, and they want almost anyone passable seeing the house. So yes they will let the guy who lives in a van see your house, because they are convinced he has a rich cousin.
Real estate agents really only bring one thing to the table - access to MLS. Thats it. Its an incredible monopoly that is now being broken. ANYONE can order an inspection and do the closing. You do not have to be an agent to sell a house.
Why can't that shell give you all of the power of a real modern scripting language?? Its not like you can't run sh commands in perl-shell.
find . -type f | xargs grep -il foo
in Perl or some other scripting language.
in psh:
psh% find . -type f | xargs grep -il foo
works just fine. EXCEPT I can now put this result in a perl var and do waaaay more with it than you could conceive, like apply anything in CPAN to it without losing context. It is 'conception' that is basically the problem - you don't know what it is like to use a real scripting language from the command line so its strengths are not apparent.
I'm glad you only have to solve simple problems. This is not the case for all of us. We start out with shells and then want to add control structures like loops. Okay, easy enough. Then we may need to use variables. Okay, still not too bad. Now one more change and I need a function. Whoops. This is where sh starts to break.
You have the same problem most other posters seem to - you don't know of a world where the shell can do more so you can't conceive of it and the thought seems absurd. Give me one coherent reason why the shell should be apart and distinct from a strong scripting language like Pyhon or Perl. There is no reason beyond the fact that you have never had to solve complex problems.
My point wasn't perl specifically (as I mentioned - "or something new") - but just a better language than sh. Yes Python would do.
I don't know why more people don't actively pursue a modern language for the shell interface. sh script syntax is tortorous. So much easier and maintainable to write perl scripts. So why not use perl from the command line??
psh never really seemed to take off but it let you basically enter a perl debugging session but execute shell commands also. This would basically trump anything msh could muster and also provide the entire universe of CPAN to the shell.
sh is right up there with Makefiles for unix utilities that basically suck but are too entrenched to replace.
There was no scientific, economic, or environmental imperative to put humans in space. We always wanted to know if it could be done, so we did it. Now we know space is toxic to humans and Earth is actually the best place in the galaxy for us to live, so maybe we should start spending money on preserving it instead of fantasies of leaving it.
Preserve the resources and lower the population. Or do you think we can just fry off the best biosphere we know of and just go live on Mars??
How many companies do you see chomping at the bit to do ISS research? NONE. Orbital research was a dream of the 80s and it died shortly thereafter.