There's a reason GWB (disclaimer:yes, he's a moron) is proposing a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans - the top 10% is current paying at least 1/3 of all taxes, by even the most conservative estimate. Even left-leaning economists are beginning to concede that the wealthy are being disproporionately and perhaps unfialry taxed.
The US is prosperous while Europe continues to plod along with a lame-duck currency. This isn't by accident - its a result of policy.
Grab a clue - linux adoption is all about PR
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HURD For 'Big Iron'?
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Folks - IBM already has a stable OS for mainframes - the only reasons they are bothering with linux is to hop on the bandwagon and capture some good PR.
That being the case, why would they adopt a non-linux OS?? This wouldn't make any sense at all. If not for the PR value of adopting linux, they could simply stick with what they already have.
Re:You don't do coding, do you? We need this!
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Deja For Sale
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So what you're saying is that you like hearing all the same questions asked over, and over, and over again?
No, what I'm saying is that I don't use usenet anymore and I wouldn't pay a nickel for Deja's service...neither would nayone else, evidently.
Re:You don't do coding, do you? We need this!
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Deja For Sale
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Market value? Yeah, probably not. Usenet isn't there for market value; it's there to facilitate a huge meeting of the minds. And
we need to preserve that information
I wasn't saying usenet had no worth, I was saying that Deja's archives had little monetary worth. I'm glad you have found tidbits in there from time to time, but you aren't going to pony up $100 million for it either, are you??
The net does not want its own history
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Deja For Sale
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The value of a web article, news story, or usenet post is inversely proportional to the square of its age in days.
Or something like that.
I highly doubt that anyone will want to pay for an archive of usenet postings. Frankly, they are of limited use - most post threads offer very little useful information.
Deja's archives may be of interest to an educational institution looking at the historical value of the posts, but the useful market value of the posts is zilch.
As for Deja as a product review site - what can you say? It lost the race.
Epinions, Yahoo, and Amazon's product reviews are far out ahead, and Deja never really made a meaningful transition from being a usenet archive.
The bigger question is whether NNTP is kaput altogether at this stage.
Larry works for O'Reilly, and Tom has his own perl consultancy.
If you check the perl6 mail list logs, you can see that both are quite active, and at least in Tom's case, his entire business rests upon the continued success of perl.
Sorry folks, but what has gone from an enecdote about supposed age discrimination, has bloomed into a full conspiracy that slashdotters are treating as fact, simply because it has been repeated so many times (with each new poster being as essentially clueless as the last).
My conjecture is simple - older tech workers are not nearly as numerous or willing to take staff coding positions as any of you claim. Until I hear at least one useful statistic, or at least one convincing realistic anecodte, I treating this issue of vast and systemic age discrmimination as complete hooey.
My counter anecdote is that I work for an internet company that you would think is on the cutting edge of just about anything, and we certainly have numerous programmers old enough to be my...very old uncle.
Name me one site in the top ten sites that make significant use of CSS.
Name three in the top fifty.
How it CSS died is irrelevant - its dead
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Send Some Mo' Zilla
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Once again, you can blame netscape or microsoft for not supporting CSS when it was in its infancy - at this juncture its a moot point - no site is going to bother with it. Its now a dead technology that browser builders can safely avoid supporting.
Look at how many "branded" versions of IE there are - Yahoo's FinanceVision and Player (viewing pane), NeoPlanet, and others come to mind - sorry, but IE has a huge lead in the OEM market for browser technology.
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless. Once again, in the real world, the production IE code is far far ahead of anything out of the mozilla project in every way that is meaningful to common users.
No one is ever going to win the browser market with better CSS support, because 99% of the users out there have no use for CSS. Name one major website that makes effective use of it...face it, mozilla conforms to more dead standards than any other browser. Most users would have settled for functional javascript support.
Coming from another blackbox user, I heartily agree. Gnome and KDE are fairly pathetic imitations of an already pathetic OS (windows).
Until linux/bsd has a truly pervasive UI, and solid pervasive support for multimedia, things like KDE and Gnome are window dressing.
The joy of blackbox is that it doesn't try to fool you into thinking that unix actually supports a full-featured UI - so instead it gives you what unix actually provides, and then gets out of your way.
If the debate is silly, why do you keep engaging in it?
Because I have multiple years of experience working at a web site that get well over one hundred million hits every day, which gives me some insight into the issue others may not have.
Your website may be busy enough that it matters only during those performance spikes, and that's not a rare
case at all if you consider basic statistical assumptions (normal distributions, poisson processes, etc.)
Drop it, you're applying statistical phrases to look smart, but they have almost no relevance to website performance spikes. Every site in the top 500 sites has had significant increases in page views in the last three years - these aren't spikes - you can be rest assured that for almost any popular mainstream site, there is a good chance its pageviews are doubling annually, and your server farm should be growing ahead of this. Hardware is almost always the limiting factor in growth. I have never heard anyone tell me that their site performance improved substantially due to webserver software (by going from Netscape to Apache, etc.), and I'm not talking about Slashdot, I'm talking about some of the busiest sites on the web.
Other people shouldn't test things both because they won't like the outcomes and because you already know the results, and the
whole debate is silly?
No, if you actually go back and read the post you'll see that the poster was fishing for hints that enterprise DBs on linux are superior to NT. My response wasn't to tell him he shouldn't test, only that I already know the results (from having all of the db and platform vendors give their best shot to win a contract through a multiweek trial).
Yes, it was an amazingly dreadful display of pissing into the wind that was the hallmark of the Spindler/Amellio administrations, and nearly put Apple out of business.
Look at any Apple marketing now and you will not find any direct comparisons to Microsoft products - this has little to do with the $150 million investment MS made in Apple and more to do with the common sense that it was just lousy marketing.
Non-geeks don't know anything other than what the numbers and PR tells them.
No, you're missing the point here - most of the reasons not to define yourself in terms of one competitor have everything to do with marketing, and almost nothing to do with technical issues.
Look at Apple - for years they flogged this whole Apple vs. MS thing, until they realized that it wasn't selling any more computers. Much of Apple's success of late is due to the fact that it no longer tries to go head to head with Microsoft, or define the Mac simply as "better than Windows".
The linux community won't be able to see AOL, Symbian, Palm, or other worthy competitors coming if it mindlessly pursues this David vs. Goliath thing (that nearly killed Apple).
Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system.
That might sound like marketing-speak, but for better or worse, its true. NT is there in the server farms of America, and it is staying up and performing in spite of itself. Get used to seeing Win2k more and more in the server farms you visit in coming years.
There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux
Once again, the grain of truth here is that none of the linux distro vendors can really be taken seriously at this point, and most have thrived purely on the goodwill of the community. I can't think of one commercial distro that is truly enterprise worthy outside of Debian (which I consider noncommercial).
After the RH 7 debacle, do you really expect them to offer uptime guarantees? Sometimes I wish someone like IBM would issue a distro, just so there would be a real player with a serious service commitment behind the product.
Linux is getting there, and for most of its users its presents an incredible value. You have to look past these customers at some point and consider how you are going to satisfy customers who do not have budget constraints, but do have significant demands of the software and support they pay for.
Static web content. This is almost a non-issue for dynamic eCommerce sites that generate most pages from database content
This whole debate is silly.
If your website is busy enough that the performance issues between IIS and Apache actually matter, then your website gets serious traffic, and you should be way overcompensating on servers in the racks just to catch access spikes and unexpected server downtimes.
Servers need to be tested for performance talking to Oracle/DB2/SQL Server databases
You may not like the results. Most of the enterprise -ready database products for linux are still nowhere near the performance of even their NT brethren, let alone Solaris.
How long is the/. community going to define itself through Microsoft?
Move on folks - there is a whole huge world of computing out there and as dominant as Microsoft is (or more accurately, was), the whole pie is going to grow by such a substantial amount in coming years that any notion of "us v. them" is illusory - the IT market, and hence the market for linux products, is expanding, mutating, and growing. TV, cellphones, home automation, handhelds, servers, etc.
Added to which, the whole linux v. Microsoft thing just gets really tired.
Its probably AOL you should be more concerned with at this point.
Java Servlets for instance is very widely used as the backend for a lot of websites...
whose webmasters don't understand that there are vastly superior ways of building websites.
Really, Java has its uses, but JSP has got to be the most fractured and counterintuitive technology I have ever come across. Even on the most ra-ra Java websites, you can easily find serious critics of JSP.
Compare JSP to PHP generated pages for any application - there's no comparison with regards to simplicity, speed, and suitability.
He's a racist bastard because he can't understand someone's incredibly thick accent?
Yes. He is unwilling and unable to deal with anyone who doesn't look and sound like him.
Unfortunately, he's going to find himself out of place in a global market where every day you have to deal with people who don't look, sound , or act like you, and guess what - picking on their accents won't write your paycheck.
I agree 100%. We need to get these people on green cards and eventually citizenship. In the past, immigrants were encouraged to pursue citizenship. Its time to get back to the cherished notion of an America that welcomes and nurtures immigrants.
They can't be officers of a publicly held company or such, no?
I'm not sure, but in any case many immigrants are active in closely held companies. I know numerous examples in Silicon Valley where immigrants have been instrumental in getting new enterprises off the ground.
Foreign workers aren't just at the bottom rung anymore - many of them are running tech companies and creating jobs and work for Americans.
Added to which they're helping pay off your national debt instead of shoring up the tax base of their own nation of origin.And those older tech workers? They've all gone fishing anyway - they don't want the jobs these people typically take.
Slashdot Mirror
The US is prosperous while Europe continues to plod along with a lame-duck currency. This isn't by accident - its a result of policy.
That being the case, why would they adopt a non-linux OS?? This wouldn't make any sense at all. If not for the PR value of adopting linux, they could simply stick with what they already have.
No, what I'm saying is that I don't use usenet anymore and I wouldn't pay a nickel for Deja's service...neither would nayone else, evidently.
I wasn't saying usenet had no worth, I was saying that Deja's archives had little monetary worth. I'm glad you have found tidbits in there from time to time, but you aren't going to pony up $100 million for it either, are you??
Or something like that.
I highly doubt that anyone will want to pay for an archive of usenet postings. Frankly, they are of limited use - most post threads offer very little useful information.
Deja's archives may be of interest to an educational institution looking at the historical value of the posts, but the useful market value of the posts is zilch.
As for Deja as a product review site - what can you say? It lost the race.
Epinions, Yahoo, and Amazon's product reviews are far out ahead, and Deja never really made a meaningful transition from being a usenet archive.
The bigger question is whether NNTP is kaput altogether at this stage.
If you check the perl6 mail list logs, you can see that both are quite active, and at least in Tom's case, his entire business rests upon the continued success of perl.
My conjecture is simple - older tech workers are not nearly as numerous or willing to take staff coding positions as any of you claim. Until I hear at least one useful statistic, or at least one convincing realistic anecodte, I treating this issue of vast and systemic age discrmimination as complete hooey.
My counter anecdote is that I work for an internet company that you would think is on the cutting edge of just about anything, and we certainly have numerous programmers old enough to be my ...very old uncle.
Name me one site in the top ten sites that make significant use of CSS.
Name three in the top fifty.
Once again, you can blame netscape or microsoft for not supporting CSS when it was in its infancy - at this juncture its a moot point - no site is going to bother with it. Its now a dead technology that browser builders can safely avoid supporting.
Also, I don't understand your conjecture that Mozilla will be easier to modify for future standards. Unless you have firsthand experience with the IE code, your comment is baseless. Once again, in the real world, the production IE code is far far ahead of anything out of the mozilla project in every way that is meaningful to common users.
No one is ever going to win the browser market with better CSS support, because 99% of the users out there have no use for CSS. Name one major website that makes effective use of it...face it, mozilla conforms to more dead standards than any other browser. Most users would have settled for functional javascript support.
Until linux/bsd has a truly pervasive UI, and solid pervasive support for multimedia, things like KDE and Gnome are window dressing.
The joy of blackbox is that it doesn't try to fool you into thinking that unix actually supports a full-featured UI - so instead it gives you what unix actually provides, and then gets out of your way.
Because I have multiple years of experience working at a web site that get well over one hundred million hits every day, which gives me some insight into the issue others may not have.
Your website may be busy enough that it matters only during those performance spikes, and that's not a rare case at all if you consider basic statistical assumptions (normal distributions, poisson processes, etc.)
Drop it, you're applying statistical phrases to look smart, but they have almost no relevance to website performance spikes. Every site in the top 500 sites has had significant increases in page views in the last three years - these aren't spikes - you can be rest assured that for almost any popular mainstream site, there is a good chance its pageviews are doubling annually, and your server farm should be growing ahead of this. Hardware is almost always the limiting factor in growth. I have never heard anyone tell me that their site performance improved substantially due to webserver software (by going from Netscape to Apache, etc.), and I'm not talking about Slashdot, I'm talking about some of the busiest sites on the web.
Other people shouldn't test things both because they won't like the outcomes and because you already know the results, and the whole debate is silly?
No, if you actually go back and read the post you'll see that the poster was fishing for hints that enterprise DBs on linux are superior to NT. My response wasn't to tell him he shouldn't test, only that I already know the results (from having all of the db and platform vendors give their best shot to win a contract through a multiweek trial).
Yes, it was an amazingly dreadful display of pissing into the wind that was the hallmark of the Spindler/Amellio administrations, and nearly put Apple out of business.
Look at any Apple marketing now and you will not find any direct comparisons to Microsoft products - this has little to do with the $150 million investment MS made in Apple and more to do with the common sense that it was just lousy marketing.
No, you're missing the point here - most of the reasons not to define yourself in terms of one competitor have everything to do with marketing, and almost nothing to do with technical issues.
Look at Apple - for years they flogged this whole Apple vs. MS thing, until they realized that it wasn't selling any more computers. Much of Apple's success of late is due to the fact that it no longer tries to go head to head with Microsoft, or define the Mac simply as "better than Windows".
The linux community won't be able to see AOL, Symbian, Palm, or other worthy competitors coming if it mindlessly pursues this David vs. Goliath thing (that nearly killed Apple).
That might sound like marketing-speak, but for better or worse, its true. NT is there in the server farms of America, and it is staying up and performing in spite of itself. Get used to seeing Win2k more and more in the server farms you visit in coming years.
There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux
Once again, the grain of truth here is that none of the linux distro vendors can really be taken seriously at this point, and most have thrived purely on the goodwill of the community. I can't think of one commercial distro that is truly enterprise worthy outside of Debian (which I consider noncommercial).
After the RH 7 debacle, do you really expect them to offer uptime guarantees? Sometimes I wish someone like IBM would issue a distro, just so there would be a real player with a serious service commitment behind the product.
Linux is getting there, and for most of its users its presents an incredible value. You have to look past these customers at some point and consider how you are going to satisfy customers who do not have budget constraints, but do have significant demands of the software and support they pay for.
This whole debate is silly.
If your website is busy enough that the performance issues between IIS and Apache actually matter, then your website gets serious traffic, and you should be way overcompensating on servers in the racks just to catch access spikes and unexpected server downtimes.
Servers need to be tested for performance talking to Oracle/DB2/SQL Server databases
You may not like the results. Most of the enterprise -ready database products for linux are still nowhere near the performance of even their NT brethren, let alone Solaris.
How long is the /. community going to define itself through Microsoft?
Move on folks - there is a whole huge world of computing out there and as dominant as Microsoft is (or more accurately, was), the whole pie is going to grow by such a substantial amount in coming years that any notion of "us v. them" is illusory - the IT market, and hence the market for linux products, is expanding, mutating, and growing. TV, cellphones, home automation, handhelds, servers, etc.
Added to which, the whole linux v. Microsoft thing just gets really tired.
Its probably AOL you should be more concerned with at this point.
whose webmasters don't understand that there are vastly superior ways of building websites.
Really, Java has its uses, but JSP has got to be the most fractured and counterintuitive technology I have ever come across. Even on the most ra-ra Java websites, you can easily find serious critics of JSP.
Compare JSP to PHP generated pages for any application - there's no comparison with regards to simplicity, speed, and suitability.
Hell, even mod_perl is preferrable.
Yes. He is unwilling and unable to deal with anyone who doesn't look and sound like him.
Unfortunately, he's going to find himself out of place in a global market where every day you have to deal with people who don't look, sound , or act like you, and guess what - picking on their accents won't write your paycheck.
I agree 100%. We need to get these people on green cards and eventually citizenship. In the past, immigrants were encouraged to pursue citizenship. Its time to get back to the cherished notion of an America that welcomes and nurtures immigrants.
I'm not sure, but in any case many immigrants are active in closely held companies. I know numerous examples in Silicon Valley where immigrants have been instrumental in getting new enterprises off the ground.
Added to which they're helping pay off your national debt instead of shoring up the tax base of their own nation of origin.And those older tech workers? They've all gone fishing anyway - they don't want the jobs these people typically take.
Everyone wins folks.
Sure its debatable, but I would give them mention.
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ - the postmodern essay generator.
Win2k has not taken over the world and put unices out of business...
WinME has been an incredible flop...
Yahoo Mail has caught up to HotMail in numbers of users...
BizTalk, and MS's entire XML strategy, has yet to materialize...
C# was met with a yawn...
Linux keeps on rocking...
AOL continues to dominate entire swaths of the mediaspace, and Yahoo continues strongly on the web...
What happened to the Microsoft threat??
Any action now is more about the power of government as an exercise.