I did try rechargeable alkalines with my PalmPilot. The number of recharges is very limited (nominally 25), and they should be topped off often. Each use -- even if partially discharged -- significantly reduces its ability to hold a new charge. It is not clear to me that a rechargeable alkaline -- even if recharged optimally -- has significantly longer life than a conventional disposable alkaline. Moreover, optimal use requires frequent topping off, which rather inconvenient.
Besides being expensive up-front (so many toys come "batteries not included", after all), the problem is that existing rechargeables are not universal solutions. Should I stick an expensive NiMH AA into my $5 clock or smoke detector? NiCDs self-discharge in about 3 months, NiMHs in about 1. So if I want my emergency flashlight to work when I really (and occasionally) need it, it's alkalines for me.
There is also the discharge problem. That article you cited mentions that NiCDs go flat after 3 months, NiMHs after 1 month. This is fine for digital cameras and such, but you would not use them for a clock, a fire alarm or an emergency flashlight that should continue to work a year from now.
PalmOS devices do not have battery backups. They do have a capacitor to keep the RAM alive for a minute or so while you change the AAAs. Here is a legitimate use of a capacitor where high density, slow discharge energy storage is not called for.
I don't see how you can count a Yoido Full Gospel as the "largest church in the world". The Orthodox number approximately a quarter billion. The Catholic Church numbers about a billion. And yes, they are hierarchical. There is nothing wrong per se with cell groups, since even hierarchies like the Catholic Church have cell groups as a parallel structure. Cells certainly have advantages. But software development, like armies, need clear, solid direction, discipline and communication. Once you build a leadership structure into a cell structure, you pretty much have a classic hierarchy tree and the cell/hierarchy distinction is meaningless. I suspect that one could say the church that you described may be "cell based from the bottom up", but also simultaneously hierarchical from the top down.
No not "all are heard" in a cell model. It is essentially a partitioning that makes groups more personable, more anarchic and cosy, but does not scale. Think about it: you talk about cells coming together in a larger community so all can be heard. That's fine for smaller groups, but what happens when a church grows to, say, a million or a billion in number? Linux development is more so: communication is intense and data-heavy. The model, as it is now and continues to be, is the traditional hierarchy. Linus trusts a select few, who maintain their own hierarchies. The classic hierarchy is the only structure that works for large groups that need strong direction: armies, nation-states, and yes, some churches.
While the technology came from Apple, I think the point is that MS provided very good free TT fonts for the web. Compared to their standard web fonts pack, most anything else is junk. There is no open source equivalent anywhere near the quality of their screen-optimized fonts like Georgia or Verdana.
The decision was unanimous, meaning that conservative and liberal judges alike agreed to this. This is not a valid stick with which to beat up on conservatives.
Yes, Christmas would be a holiday for this person. Christmas IS a holiday for my Jewish inlaws, as I discovered amid an avalanche of gifts not too long ago. The original posting spoke of "holidays" in the secular sense, and all the countries I cited officially call Christmas a "holiday". A public holiday, as used by the original article, is simply a day off from work. It is you who are changing the definition for the purpose of the discussion. The vast majority of those celebrating Christmas, I suspect, celebrate it in the secular (days off, fat red elf, lots of presents) rather than the religious sense.
I've seen similar comments in this vein. If we are talking about allegory in the restricted sense of a story being one sustained allegory, then of course C.S. Lewis did not do allegories. It might be useful to say that while his stories contain allegories, they are not themselves allegories. The difference with Tolkien is that he dislikes even this use of allegory: that is, the overt use of story by the author to convey specific propositions.
Nevertheless, I say that allegory (in the looser sense) and good story are not mutually exclusive. In fact, C.S. Lewis could get away with that didactic genre -- now associated almost exclusively with him -- because he is a good story teller. Lewis and Tolkien may have different approaches to myth and story, but they have this in common: they write good stories. For this reason, neither the absence nor presence of allegories change the fact that their stories can be enjoyed on their own merits.
You are right that LotR is not an allegory. In fact, that very interview that he cited -- a Catholic one at that -- explicitly states that it is not an allegory. Tolkien really, really dislikes allegories (that article goes into further detail). Suffice to say, he finds it sufficient for a truth-revealing myth to be an expression of his faith. Tolkien does state that he intends his work to be applicable, which is a different thing, but it is reasonable that a deeply Catholic writer would want his work to be applicable to his own faith.
That interview, far from a "co-opting of the work to further an agenda", is indeed true to Tolkien. Keep in mind that the interviewee is a Tolkien biographer who has access to his letters. And his letters do reveal (found quote here) in his own words that the book is inseparable from his faith:
"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," he wrote, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." (Letter 142).
Unfortunately, many people cannot seem to understand that his faith was not merely smuggled in as allegory like his friend C.S. Lewis'. His works are not allegories. He considers allegories tacky. How he does use myth in expression of his faith is an interesting subject in its own right, which can be studied in his published letters and biographies, or (briefly) in the articles just cited.
Your own assertion is no better founded than the one you responded to. The simple fact is that holidays also have a secular purpose. A sample from Asia, where I originated: Christmas is a public holiday in Malaysia (6% Christian), Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, Phillippines, Brunei, Indonesia (largest Muslim country in the world, 4th overall) and India. Moreover, some countries (like Taiwan) have holidays on Dec 25th that coincide with Christmas. It is wrong to assume that it requires a majority Christian population to have a holiday on Dec 25th.
Your own assertion is no better founded than the one you responded to. The simple fact is that Christmas is also a secular holiday in addition to being a religious one. A sample from Asia: Christmas is a public holiday in Malaysia (6% Christian), Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, Phillippines, Brunei, Indonesia (largest Muslim country in the world, 4th overall) and India. It is "incredibly wrong" to assume that it requires a majority Christian population to have a Christmas holiday. Moreover, some countries (like Taiwan) have holidays on Dec 25th that coincide with Christmas.
I think it is fair to mention Caldera's Volution Messaging Server, which is marketed as a Linux-based, low cost alternative to Exchange. What is interesting is that a large part of this product is actually open source: Postfix, Cyrus-IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, HORDE/IMP. Caldera's contribution is arguably valuable: they tied the whole mess together, added a user-friendly interface (integration and user friendliness is something open source projects are often horrible at) and added Outlook-compatible calendaring. Still, what is notable is that the open source world is already a long way there. All it needs is packaging and calendaring. Make it work out of the box without the fuss, and you got an Exchange-killer.
Foxpro was not a rewrite of DBase, but a different product. It was a longtime competitor to DBase, and was itself an update from Foxbase. It was an excellent product -- outstanding performance, efficient memory usage, modern WIMP environment in text mode, event-driven programming -- even if not completely compatible with its DBase competitor. To their credit, Microsoft did not mandate a rewrite of Foxpro: the Dos product continued to evolve, and the Windows product was already in development before Fox Software got purchased. So, no: MS did not rewrite Foxpro, but paid $$ for the privilege of using existing code to compete.
I'm surprised the article does not even try to address the basic issue of file compatibility. Fact is, a normal office would have tons of documents in MS Word or Excel files. Excel is a complex and powerful piece of software: people write applications in it complete with menus and buttons. I know document conversion programs exist, but they never do a good job even with simple documents, let alone mega-apps-in-Excel and such. In addition, your business partners, suppliers and clients will want to collaborate with you using Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, and you are not in a position to dictate what they use. This is the reality of business. Even if you want to switch, and even if suitable Linux apps are available, you may not be able to.
This might result in a bunch of little solo projects (so the interviewer does not have to sort out who wrote which part). I am not convinced that this will benefit the large flagship projects that need significant ramp-up times. "Yeah, I submitted a patch to fix a bug in htmlentity.cpp in [mega humongous web browser project]" does not have much show-off value.
On the other hand, these flagship projects have fulltime programmers hired to work full-time on them. Red Hat hires kernel hackers, for example, and Mandrake hires KDE developers. Apache, PostgreSQL, Ghostscript, MySQL, Mozilla/Netscape and Gnome also have full-time developers. The landscape has changed: when corporate dollars are thrown at the open source world, projects gain momentum at the cost of dependence on paid work. So when full-time developers get laid off (like with some PostgreSQL folks recently), they may find themselves taking a paying job that has nothing to do with their old projects. Demoting full-time developers to your-free-time-only status will negatively impact any project.
There are a number of rescue CDs out there, but all of them require you to keep the CD in the drive to keep the rescue filesystem mounted. That ties up the drive, which is a bad thing if you want to load backups or other stuff from CDs. It would be nice to have a rescue image that is small enough to load entirely into a ramdisk or something, but not so small as to be limited like a rescue floppy. A 128MB system can easily afford, say, a 20MB rescue image. You could then take the CD out and use other CDs. It would be cool too if such a CD can adaptively load its goodies into a ramdisk depending on available RAM.
Please keep in mind that even a journaling file system can be damaged by power loss. When a system loses power, that system's behavior is
undefined. For example, memory contents can decay (become randomly corrupt) as the contents are copied to a hard drive running on the
last bit of power. This is a fundamentally different situation from the more defined sequence of events caused by pressing the system's "reset" button while the system is running. In addition, IDE hard drives do not provide all of the write order guarantees that SCSI drives do.
This is kiddies' stuff compared to what has gone on in the past. The fact is, the US has always had a contraction of civil liberties during wartime, but they were always restored. There was John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus, Ulysses Grant's expulsion of Jews, FDR's locking up of Japanese Americans etc: all much worse than what we have now. But as history shows, freedom and civil rights were always restored.
That iPAQ wireless pack is roughly equivalent to Handspring's old VisorPhone.
The VisorPhone is available now, and has been for some time.
Only Red Hat
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem is only with Red Hat, because they have decided not to provide KDE RPMs to upgrade their released distributions. Those RPMs you see for Red Hat are for their beta. You are expected to upgrade to the still-in-beta Red Hat 7.2 to get the latest KDE.
It's almost a cliche rather than a legend. The tale is a cautionary one well-known among investors. It does appear to be historical, though, being the first recorded investment bubble in history. Go and read about it.
I see no evidence of any widespread legal agreements to stay at their sponsor's company. It is fair to reimburse the company for legal costs of sponsoring the H1B, of course, but there is no evidence that I know of draconian contracts as you described on a widespread basis. I've lurked on H1B discussion forums, and they generally don't seem to have such problems.
I stated that companies have little incentive to hire H1Bs with the intention of underpaying them. There goes one of the major arguments against H1Bs. What is left is the conclusion that H1Bs are still in demand despite their job mobility, despite the fact that they cannot be underpaid, and despite the legal hassle and costs involved. This is a strong argument that there remains a significant programmer shortage.
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I did try rechargeable alkalines with my PalmPilot. The number of recharges is very limited (nominally 25), and they should be topped off often. Each use -- even if partially discharged -- significantly reduces its ability to hold a new charge. It is not clear to me that a rechargeable alkaline -- even if recharged optimally -- has significantly longer life than a conventional disposable alkaline. Moreover, optimal use requires frequent topping off, which rather inconvenient.
Besides being expensive up-front (so many toys come "batteries not included", after all), the problem is that existing rechargeables are not universal solutions. Should I stick an expensive NiMH AA into my $5 clock or smoke detector? NiCDs self-discharge in about 3 months, NiMHs in about 1. So if I want my emergency flashlight to work when I really (and occasionally) need it, it's alkalines for me.
There is also the discharge problem. That article you cited mentions that NiCDs go flat after 3 months, NiMHs after 1 month. This is fine for digital cameras and such, but you would not use them for a clock, a fire alarm or an emergency flashlight that should continue to work a year from now.
PalmOS devices do not have battery backups. They do have a capacitor to keep the RAM alive for a minute or so while you change the AAAs. Here is a legitimate use of a capacitor where high density, slow discharge energy storage is not called for.
I don't see how you can count a Yoido Full Gospel as the "largest church in the world". The Orthodox number approximately a quarter billion. The Catholic Church numbers about a billion. And yes, they are hierarchical. There is nothing wrong per se with cell groups, since even hierarchies like the Catholic Church have cell groups as a parallel structure. Cells certainly have advantages. But software development, like armies, need clear, solid direction, discipline and communication. Once you build a leadership structure into a cell structure, you pretty much have a classic hierarchy tree and the cell/hierarchy distinction is meaningless. I suspect that one could say the church that you described may be "cell based from the bottom up", but also simultaneously hierarchical from the top down.
No not "all are heard" in a cell model. It is essentially a partitioning that makes groups more personable, more anarchic and cosy, but does not scale. Think about it: you talk about cells coming together in a larger community so all can be heard. That's fine for smaller groups, but what happens when a church grows to, say, a million or a billion in number? Linux development is more so: communication is intense and data-heavy. The model, as it is now and continues to be, is the traditional hierarchy. Linus trusts a select few, who maintain their own hierarchies. The classic hierarchy is the only structure that works for large groups that need strong direction: armies, nation-states, and yes, some churches.
While the technology came from Apple, I think the point is that MS provided very good free TT fonts for the web. Compared to their standard web fonts pack, most anything else is junk. There is no open source equivalent anywhere near the quality of their screen-optimized fonts like Georgia or Verdana.
Chris
The decision was unanimous, meaning that conservative and liberal judges alike agreed to this. This is not a valid stick with which to beat up on conservatives.
Yes, Christmas would be a holiday for this person. Christmas IS a holiday for my Jewish inlaws, as I discovered amid an avalanche of gifts not too long ago. The original posting spoke of "holidays" in the secular sense, and all the countries I cited officially call Christmas a "holiday". A public holiday, as used by the original article, is simply a day off from work. It is you who are changing the definition for the purpose of the discussion. The vast majority of those celebrating Christmas, I suspect, celebrate it in the secular (days off, fat red elf, lots of presents) rather than the religious sense.
I've seen similar comments in this vein. If we are talking about allegory in the restricted sense of a story being one sustained allegory, then of course C.S. Lewis did not do allegories. It might be useful to say that while his stories contain allegories, they are not themselves allegories. The difference with Tolkien is that he dislikes even this use of allegory: that is, the overt use of story by the author to convey specific propositions.
Nevertheless, I say that allegory (in the looser sense) and good story are not mutually exclusive. In fact, C.S. Lewis could get away with that didactic genre -- now associated almost exclusively with him -- because he is a good story teller. Lewis and Tolkien may have different approaches to myth and story, but they have this in common: they write good stories. For this reason, neither the absence nor presence of allegories change the fact that their stories can be enjoyed on their own merits.
That interview, far from a "co-opting of the work to further an agenda", is indeed true to Tolkien. Keep in mind that the interviewee is a Tolkien biographer who has access to his letters. And his letters do reveal (found quote here) in his own words that the book is inseparable from his faith:
Unfortunately, many people cannot seem to understand that his faith was not merely smuggled in as allegory like his friend C.S. Lewis'. His works are not allegories. He considers allegories tacky. How he does use myth in expression of his faith is an interesting subject in its own right, which can be studied in his published letters and biographies, or (briefly) in the articles just cited.
Your own assertion is no better founded than the one you responded to. The simple fact is that holidays also have a secular purpose. A sample from Asia, where I originated: Christmas is a public holiday in Malaysia (6% Christian), Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, Phillippines, Brunei, Indonesia (largest Muslim country in the world, 4th overall) and India. Moreover, some countries (like Taiwan) have holidays on Dec 25th that coincide with Christmas. It is wrong to assume that it requires a majority Christian population to have a holiday on Dec 25th.
Your own assertion is no better founded than the one you responded to. The simple fact is that Christmas is also a secular holiday in addition to being a religious one. A sample from Asia: Christmas is a public holiday in Malaysia (6% Christian), Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, Phillippines, Brunei, Indonesia (largest Muslim country in the world, 4th overall) and India. It is "incredibly wrong" to assume that it requires a majority Christian population to have a Christmas holiday. Moreover, some countries (like Taiwan) have holidays on Dec 25th that coincide with Christmas.
I think it is fair to mention Caldera's Volution Messaging Server, which is marketed as a Linux-based, low cost alternative to Exchange. What is interesting is that a large part of this product is actually open source: Postfix, Cyrus-IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, HORDE/IMP. Caldera's contribution is arguably valuable: they tied the whole mess together, added a user-friendly interface (integration and user friendliness is something open source projects are often horrible at) and added Outlook-compatible calendaring. Still, what is notable is that the open source world is already a long way there. All it needs is packaging and calendaring. Make it work out of the box without the fuss, and you got an Exchange-killer.
Foxpro was not a rewrite of DBase, but a different product. It was a longtime competitor to DBase, and was itself an update from Foxbase. It was an excellent product -- outstanding performance, efficient memory usage, modern WIMP environment in text mode, event-driven programming -- even if not completely compatible with its DBase competitor. To their credit, Microsoft did not mandate a rewrite of Foxpro: the Dos product continued to evolve, and the Windows product was already in development before Fox Software got purchased. So, no: MS did not rewrite Foxpro, but paid $$ for the privilege of using existing code to compete.
I'm surprised the article does not even try to address the basic issue of file compatibility. Fact is, a normal office would have tons of documents in MS Word or Excel files. Excel is a complex and powerful piece of software: people write applications in it complete with menus and buttons. I know document conversion programs exist, but they never do a good job even with simple documents, let alone mega-apps-in-Excel and such. In addition, your business partners, suppliers and clients will want to collaborate with you using Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, and you are not in a position to dictate what they use. This is the reality of business. Even if you want to switch, and even if suitable Linux apps are available, you may not be able to.
Besides, StarOffice is a bloated monster.
This might result in a bunch of little solo projects (so the interviewer does not have to sort out who wrote which part). I am not convinced that this will benefit the large flagship projects that need significant ramp-up times. "Yeah, I submitted a patch to fix a bug in htmlentity.cpp in [mega humongous web browser project]" does not have much show-off value.
On the other hand, these flagship projects have fulltime programmers hired to work full-time on them. Red Hat hires kernel hackers, for example, and Mandrake hires KDE developers. Apache, PostgreSQL, Ghostscript, MySQL, Mozilla/Netscape and Gnome also have full-time developers. The landscape has changed: when corporate dollars are thrown at the open source world, projects gain momentum at the cost of dependence on paid work. So when full-time developers get laid off (like with some PostgreSQL folks recently), they may find themselves taking a paying job that has nothing to do with their old projects. Demoting full-time developers to your-free-time-only status will negatively impact any project.
There are a number of rescue CDs out there, but all of them require you to keep the CD in the drive to keep the rescue filesystem mounted. That ties up the drive, which is a bad thing if you want to load backups or other stuff from CDs. It would be nice to have a rescue image that is small enough to load entirely into a ramdisk or something, but not so small as to be limited like a rescue floppy. A 128MB system can easily afford, say, a 20MB rescue image. You could then take the CD out and use other CDs. It would be cool too if such a CD can adaptively load its goodies into a ramdisk depending on available RAM.
Red Hat 7.2's release notes on ext3:
Please keep in mind that even a journaling file system can be damaged by power loss. When a system loses power, that system's behavior is
undefined. For example, memory contents can decay (become randomly corrupt) as the contents are copied to a hard drive running on the
last bit of power. This is a fundamentally different situation from the more defined sequence of events caused by pressing the system's "reset" button while the system is running. In addition, IDE hard drives do not provide all of the write order guarantees that SCSI drives do.
This is kiddies' stuff compared to what has gone on in the past. The fact is, the US has always had a contraction of civil liberties during wartime, but they were always restored. There was John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus, Ulysses Grant's expulsion of Jews, FDR's locking up of Japanese Americans etc: all much worse than what we have now. But as history shows, freedom and civil rights were always restored.
That iPAQ wireless pack is roughly equivalent to Handspring's old VisorPhone.
The VisorPhone is available now, and has been for some time.
The problem is only with Red Hat, because they have decided not to provide KDE RPMs to upgrade their released distributions. Those RPMs you see for Red Hat are for their beta. You are expected to upgrade to the still-in-beta Red Hat 7.2 to get the latest KDE.
It's almost a cliche rather than a legend. The tale is a cautionary one well-known among investors. It does appear to be historical, though, being the first recorded investment bubble in history. Go and read about it.
You can now read the book about it.
I see no evidence of any widespread legal agreements to stay at their sponsor's company. It is fair to reimburse the company for legal costs of sponsoring the H1B, of course, but there is no evidence that I know of draconian contracts as you described on a widespread basis. I've lurked on H1B discussion forums, and they generally don't seem to have such problems.
I stated that companies have little incentive to hire H1Bs with the intention of underpaying them. There goes one of the major arguments against H1Bs. What is left is the conclusion that H1Bs are still in demand despite their job mobility, despite the fact that they cannot be underpaid, and despite the legal hassle and costs involved. This is a strong argument that there remains a significant programmer shortage.