A free OS is not the interesting point for enterprises. They couldn't care less.
It's the ability to run Unix functionality and Unix application software on cheap Intel (IA32) hardware. OK, one doesn't have enterprise-strength HA, double-precision performance, etc. But it saves a hell of money.
In a recent benchmark for an automotive company, a Linux cluster had (for easy crash simulation models) the same performance for a third of the price of large proprietary Unix boxes. That's what counts. (Sorry, can't be more precise due to an NDA.)
You mean, like, introduce SAP R/3 for half to two thirds of the tasks you mentioned?
Gimme the budget and I'll do an SAP implementation for you. (The budget must include business process reorganization, of course.) I'll promise your management that it'll be more manageable and more streamlined afterwords. I won't promise you or your fellow co-workers that the situation will be better for you afterwards, though.
But that won't matter, since I'll have earned BIG bucks in the mean time...:-)
Yes and no. It wasn't a paper, it was a letter to the Editor. Titles for letters are created by the editorial staff. So his famous letter was titled as such, but the title wasn't chosen by EJD.
Here we see how young (mentally) most/.ers are.
And how "high" their education is.
That there are other addiction than physical ones, and that game addiction is one of the strongest one is known since aeons, and has been documented and illustrated so often in literature that one cannot count it any more.
Go out to a real library, and read Dostojewski some time. (He lived from 1821 to 1881. English transliteration of his name might be Dostoevsky.) Go and read his famous book "The Gambler". You might join the thousands of readers who have learned something.
No, then it's not a bridge, then it's a skyscraper.
But wait, those get built successfully, too.
The real difference is that civil engineers (and the companies that employ them) are bound by legal regulations and are liable for their work's success. The pressure to save costs at any price is there as well, perhaps even more than in software engineering - after all, the profit rates are much much smaller than in our business. They simply aren't allowed to skip essential safety measurements. If they could, they would.
Similar safety measurements exist in the software profession as well. But we are allowed to skip them. Most real world software projects I've seen give a damn about elementar development methods. Hell, many developers I've spoken with think that a finite state automaton is something "academic" and worthless as such! And don't let me start about old-school COBOL and Assembler programers who still change their 70s programs by trial and error without understanding their structure. (I'm currently working on a project changing literally thousands of mainframe programs to adapt to current legal requirements.)
Dick Gabriel is a wonderful and spirited person. I once had the fortune to spend a few days with him, it's an experience many people should have the chance. But obvioulsy he has had few opportunities to work in the grunges, and he has never worked with civil engineers. He spent his work time more with lunaries like jwz...:-)
does it bother anyone else that Harry Potter is supposed to be this great and powerful wizard, but his friends at Hogwarts always seem to be saving his ass?
I think this is a main point of Rowling's books: Harry Potter is a normal boy. He needs time to discover and train his capabilities, up 'til now he can use them only unconsciously. I think that's one of the main tricks why the young kids are able to identify with Harry Potter so much.
You know, just like they were supposed to identify with a certain character on ST:TNG. (Sorry, cheap shot, but I couldn't resist. Comparing the differing characterisation of Potter and Wesley Crusher and their reception in media and with fans might actually be quite interesting.)
If you really want to have your code portable, your exit code must be < 126, since exit codes 126 and 127 are used for "command not executable" and "command not found".
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between the semantics of a shell's exit and of Unix exit. The have a completely different API, and always had. I'm sure you know this, but your article might have been read by newbies who could easily fall in this "false friend" trap.
But to expand on the point: in Unix, the exit status of a program is an integer (7 unsigned bits, anyway: trying to use more is not portable). Convention dictates that 0 is normal termination, non-zero is abnormal, and anything over 128 means it was killed by a signal rather than the exit() function. (Which signal? Subtract 128 to find out.)
Bad advice.
The argument to exit() has unsigned 8 bits, not 7. And they are returned in the first byte of the status integer, not in the second.
But good programmers don't care for this. They use WIFEXITED(), WEXITSTATUS(), WTERMSIG(), etc, as defined in POSIX.1. "man 2 wait" is your friend. (Or "man wstat", depending on your Unix flavour.)
They are here. First thing they had to learn was: You cannot skip the Union here and exploit your employees at will. Second thing was: The share for malls did not increase, they are fighting with the other chains over redistribution of market share, but don't get them from the high-quality shops.
Yes, in the small German town I live in (ca. 8000 inhabitants) there are as many supermarkets.
But what's much more important: There are butchers with high-quality meat and sausages (self-made, not those that just resell stuff), family-run bakeries that have a wide variety of bread, shops with daily fresh fruits and vegetables from all over Europe, etc. Hope you get it.
Granted there are European areas where the US mall concept is now prevalent, too - but IMNSHO it's much easier to find a small town with a more-than-decent living standard in Europe than in the US. Of course, it depends on your definition of "living standard."
E.g., I don't really think it's a big problem that most of our shops (as I've said, family-run) close around 7pm. As long as the bars stay open... I have been to so many small US towns where it was impossible to get a drink after one's dinner - but where one could buy T-shirts 24x7. And all the time, for me, at 11pm it was more important to have a drink with friends than being able to buy T-shirts...;-)
I never said a word about tap water. I was making a point because water is the most abundant resource on Earth (other than gases
in the Atmosphere, of course).
Where are you living? Have you ever looked outside your small town?
Fresh, clean, drinkable water is one of the most precious and most rarest things on earth.
At least 70% of world's population have no ready access to drink water but must make great efforts to get it. Wars are fought over it. (Hint: The Isreal/Palestina conflict is not over religion alone.) Not to speak about the tragedies in Asia.
Wake up, the world is a different and a much more uglier place than you seem to believe.
But for archival, refereed journals of ACM or IEEE, the parent poster is right on the spot. The work that goes into one "ACM Transactions on *" article or similar is really a lot, both from the writer and from the referee side. And I demand examples for your allegation - you won't find spelling errors in this kind of journal. (Now, SIG publications, that's a complete different matter.)
Btw, I'm not a student, but write this from an experience background of more than 20 years in academia.
The level of allowed or tolerated private activities depends on the kind of business you're in.
Look, I own a consulting company. And I wouldn't even employ somebody with your opinion. I simply expect my staff to keep their private activities to a reasonable level, and that level is judged according to how they get their work done and how good they get it done.
Anything else is counter-productive, it diminishes work efficiency. That's not even a matter of "friendlyness" from my side, that's pure business.
But then, we're not located in the US with it's hire-and-fire mentality either.
You might be a journalist, but you're obviously not a writer, i.e., somebody who creates literary works.
I suppose you wouldn't publish James Joice's Ulysses either, due it's incoherence.
Keep writing for your mags, and keep Bruce Sterling writing his books and essays, and let him give his great talks. It's better this way; luckily there are enough readers that can appreciate Sterling's prose.
The point is not if he is profitable, but if he will remain to be so after venture capital and the associated demands came into his company. I hope that this guy did a very thorough cost-benefit analysis before he took the money.
Venture capitalists are not in for the long run, they want to capitalize their investments in the mid term. Quite some companies went bankrupt or got in difficulties after external money and the demand for quick market grab came in and drove solid growth strategy out. Look at SuSE for an example from the Linux world.
Disclaimer: I'm owner and CEO of a (privately held, incorporated) company. We still make profits, even in this harsh market, because we didn't join the hype train, but brought solid add-on value to our customers. I wish Marty Roesch luck in choosing his business strategy...
Re:Brasilians do not have last names?
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 1
On the shirts: Very often greetings to their beloved ones. Also many references to Jesus, I interpret them as prayers. E.g., one read "100% Jesus. 100% Bahia."
Best wishes to Brazil. As a German, I have to say, they deserved it - they were the better players. But then, vice world champion isn't bad as well; and we'll get our revanche in 4 years.
But, as you write, the real problem is to get the client (i.e., the person with the money who thinks he or she knows everything about the problem domain; there's no need to talk to the people in the trenches, this would disturb them in their work) to the point that one is allowed to produce a software system that is good for the user (most often a subordinate of the person with the money).
And HCI doesn't help us, here.
E.g., participatory design is nice and actually one of the most successful SE methods, but needs management buy-in. And with all the tumbling budgets that's the real bummer for HCI adoption in the Real World(tm).
I live in Germany, and I'm heavily involved in TeX development since 1982. Actually, I'm a founding member of the German TeX User Group (DANTE).
Some day I received an email from his secretary (DEK never writes email personally) that said "Hi, Don visits Europe. He wants to meet you. Do you have time?". I have never ever in my life written an answer so fast.:-) That evening will be one of the most memorable evenings ever; and the evening's picture that Jill, his wife, sent me some weeks later, is still a precious part of our house hold.
And I've learned somebody this evening. Don is not somebody far away on a different planet. He is a man with both feet on the ground, and he doesn't want us youngsters looking up to him. He wants us to fulfill our own dreams, and he is one of the inspirations that make me stretch further, to reach my own goals that I've set myself.
Sorry, I didn't want to get into intrinsic details.
1986 appears in LaTeX history because it is the copyright day of the LaTeX book, published by AddWes. As usual, free software is quite some time around until a book is published. I don't remember when I've had LaTeX code in use for the first time, my earliest styles that I still have around, are from 1984. I.e., it is older than Ventura.
Btw, I've been a member of the LaTeX core development team, so I'm biased in this area. But I think my bias is based on facts...:-):-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's the ability to run Unix functionality and Unix application software on cheap Intel (IA32) hardware. OK, one doesn't have enterprise-strength HA, double-precision performance, etc. But it saves a hell of money.
In a recent benchmark for an automotive company, a Linux cluster had (for easy crash simulation models) the same performance for a third of the price of large proprietary Unix boxes. That's what counts. (Sorry, can't be more precise due to an NDA.)
Gimme the budget and I'll do an SAP implementation for you. (The budget must include business process reorganization, of course.) I'll promise your management that it'll be more manageable and more streamlined afterwords. I won't promise you or your fellow co-workers that the situation will be better for you afterwards, though.
But that won't matter, since I'll have earned BIG bucks in the mean time... :-)
For beginner's, the articles in Scientific American are fine.
I remember a post from Larry Wall back in the early 90s - wait, google, got it:
-
I've written some scripts that work in 582 different languages,
Take a look at Perl's Configure, and tell me again that sh is "portable" without getting red.all of them named sh.
Larry Wall
lwall@netlabs.com
Yes and no. It wasn't a paper, it was a letter to the Editor. Titles for letters are created by the editorial staff. So his famous letter was titled as such, but the title wasn't chosen by EJD.
I think I've read an article about Alphas with consumption above 250W/CPU, but I don't find the reference at short hand.
That there are other addiction than physical ones, and that game addiction is one of the strongest one is known since aeons, and has been documented and illustrated so often in literature that one cannot count it any more.
Go out to a real library, and read Dostojewski some time. (He lived from 1821 to 1881. English transliteration of his name might be Dostoevsky.) Go and read his famous book "The Gambler". You might join the thousands of readers who have learned something.
The real difference is that civil engineers (and the companies that employ them) are bound by legal regulations and are liable for their work's success. The pressure to save costs at any price is there as well, perhaps even more than in software engineering - after all, the profit rates are much much smaller than in our business. They simply aren't allowed to skip essential safety measurements. If they could, they would.
Similar safety measurements exist in the software profession as well. But we are allowed to skip them. Most real world software projects I've seen give a damn about elementar development methods. Hell, many developers I've spoken with think that a finite state automaton is something "academic" and worthless as such! And don't let me start about old-school COBOL and Assembler programers who still change their 70s programs by trial and error without understanding their structure. (I'm currently working on a project changing literally thousands of mainframe programs to adapt to current legal requirements.)
Dick Gabriel is a wonderful and spirited person. I once had the fortune to spend a few days with him, it's an experience many people should have the chance. But obvioulsy he has had few opportunities to work in the grunges, and he has never worked with civil engineers. He spent his work time more with lunaries like jwz... :-)
I think this is a main point of Rowling's books: Harry Potter is a normal boy. He needs time to discover and train his capabilities, up 'til now he can use them only unconsciously. I think that's one of the main tricks why the young kids are able to identify with Harry Potter so much.
You know, just like they were supposed to identify with a certain character on ST:TNG. (Sorry, cheap shot, but I couldn't resist. Comparing the differing characterisation of Potter and Wesley Crusher and their reception in media and with fans might actually be quite interesting.)
Recommended reading:
his Salon article on the Star Wars Universe, named "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists,
the followup essay on his own Web site,
and the essay on Attack of the Clones.
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between the semantics of a shell's exit and of Unix exit. The have a completely different API, and always had. I'm sure you know this, but your article might have been read by newbies who could easily fall in this "false friend" trap.
Bad advice.
The argument to exit() has unsigned 8 bits, not 7. And they are returned in the first byte of the status integer, not in the second.
But good programmers don't care for this. They use WIFEXITED(), WEXITSTATUS(), WTERMSIG(), etc, as defined in POSIX.1. "man 2 wait" is your friend. (Or "man wstat", depending on your Unix flavour.)
They are here. First thing they had to learn was: You cannot skip the Union here and exploit your employees at will. Second thing was: The share for malls did not increase, they are fighting with the other chains over redistribution of market share, but don't get them from the high-quality shops.
But what's much more important: There are butchers with high-quality meat and sausages (self-made, not those that just resell stuff), family-run bakeries that have a wide variety of bread, shops with daily fresh fruits and vegetables from all over Europe, etc. Hope you get it.
Granted there are European areas where the US mall concept is now prevalent, too - but IMNSHO it's much easier to find a small town with a more-than-decent living standard in Europe than in the US. Of course, it depends on your definition of "living standard."
E.g., I don't really think it's a big problem that most of our shops (as I've said, family-run) close around 7pm. As long as the bars stay open... I have been to so many small US towns where it was impossible to get a drink after one's dinner - but where one could buy T-shirts 24x7. And all the time, for me, at 11pm it was more important to have a drink with friends than being able to buy T-shirts... ;-)
Where are you living? Have you ever looked outside your small town?
Fresh, clean, drinkable water is one of the most precious and most rarest things on earth. At least 70% of world's population have no ready access to drink water but must make great efforts to get it. Wars are fought over it. (Hint: The Isreal/Palestina conflict is not over religion alone.) Not to speak about the tragedies in Asia.
Wake up, the world is a different and a much more uglier place than you seem to believe.
From abroad, it looks like the PATRIOT Act instantiated this principle.
But then, Washington only follows the lead of Hollywood who worships such behaviour for their movie heros since a long time.
But for archival, refereed journals of ACM or IEEE, the parent poster is right on the spot. The work that goes into one "ACM Transactions on *" article or similar is really a lot, both from the writer and from the referee side. And I demand examples for your allegation - you won't find spelling errors in this kind of journal. (Now, SIG publications, that's a complete different matter.)
Btw, I'm not a student, but write this from an experience background of more than 20 years in academia.
The level of allowed or tolerated private activities depends on the kind of business you're in.
Look, I own a consulting company. And I wouldn't even employ somebody with your opinion. I simply expect my staff to keep their private activities to a reasonable level, and that level is judged according to how they get their work done and how good they get it done.
Anything else is counter-productive, it diminishes work efficiency. That's not even a matter of "friendlyness" from my side, that's pure business.
But then, we're not located in the US with it's hire-and-fire mentality either.
I suppose you wouldn't publish James Joice's Ulysses either, due it's incoherence.
Keep writing for your mags, and keep Bruce Sterling writing his books and essays, and let him give his great talks. It's better this way; luckily there are enough readers that can appreciate Sterling's prose.
Venture capitalists are not in for the long run, they want to capitalize their investments in the mid term. Quite some companies went bankrupt or got in difficulties after external money and the demand for quick market grab came in and drove solid growth strategy out. Look at SuSE for an example from the Linux world.
Disclaimer: I'm owner and CEO of a (privately held, incorporated) company. We still make profits, even in this harsh market, because we didn't join the hype train, but brought solid add-on value to our customers. I wish Marty Roesch luck in choosing his business strategy...
Best wishes to Brazil. As a German, I have to say, they deserved it - they were the better players. But then, vice world champion isn't bad as well; and we'll get our revanche in 4 years.
CU in Germany, world championship 2006.
You mean, like, massbombing civil targets in Iraq and Afganistan?
And HCI doesn't help us, here.
E.g., participatory design is nice and actually one of the most successful SE methods, but needs management buy-in. And with all the tumbling budgets that's the real bummer for HCI adoption in the Real World(tm).
Some day I received an email from his secretary (DEK never writes email personally) that said "Hi, Don visits Europe. He wants to meet you. Do you have time?". I have never ever in my life written an answer so fast. :-) That evening will be one of the most memorable evenings ever; and the evening's picture that Jill, his wife, sent me some weeks later, is still a precious part of our house hold.
And I've learned somebody this evening. Don is not somebody far away on a different planet. He is a man with both feet on the ground, and he doesn't want us youngsters looking up to him. He wants us to fulfill our own dreams, and he is one of the inspirations that make me stretch further, to reach my own goals that I've set myself.
1986 appears in LaTeX history because it is the copyright day of the LaTeX book, published by AddWes. As usual, free software is quite some time around until a book is published. I don't remember when I've had LaTeX code in use for the first time, my earliest styles that I still have around, are from 1984. I.e., it is older than Ventura.
Btw, I've been a member of the LaTeX core development team, so I'm biased in this area. But I think my bias is based on facts... :-) :-)