you have it more backward than not: if you want to draw the distinction you're drawing, then cracking is the password circumvention phase, while hacking is the defacement you engage in once you break in... all other meanins notwithstanding.
I didn't excuse Microsoft at all, that's a bug up your ass. Microsoft products are bad, yes. But if they're as bad as you say, how come I never get bit? Do you get bit? I believe only stupid people do. There are a lot of stupid people, and sysadmins (smart and stupid) have to live with the consequences, so better, more secure products are a good thing. But still: at this point you either just arrived on the planet, or you gotta be pretty stupid to click a link in an email without confirming that it's text or graphic. Somebody sends me a.DOC, I try running it through mswordview or I tell 'em to try again, and I don't care if it is my boss. If you're serious, it's simple.
Let me repeat, cuz you are probably getting it wrong again: I'm not saying software couldn't be better, I'm saying surround yourself with smarter people, and this "problem" disappears over the horizon.
Yeah, but... it's difficult to word this sort of critique. Look: there's no shame in not knowing something. That's where we all start before learning. But, just as techies roll their eyes when they hear some of the clueless things that non-techies say, it had to be said that your article provokes the same eye-rolling response among econ and MBA types. If you wrote it as "wow, I never realized how clueless I was" that would be one thing. But it had more of a "hey, guys, you'll never guess how good i-opener is: I authoritatively endorse their strategy." You see, their strategy is business school cookbook, the equivalent of selecting hashing as a good algorithm to implement associative memory... but think how lame an MBA would sound saying, "hey, Microsoft is such a cool company: they use this technique they call hashing to..."
And, the author of the original critique was pointing out that there is a commonality among the "emissaries" in the tone of the pieces they/you write wherein you endorse i-opener or whoever: guess what? to an MBA, the difference between i-opener, Apple, Palm, AOL, Be and whoever is, some have selected hashing, some use binary search, and others use btrees. That's all. There's nothing particularly original or clueful about any of their strategies. The market conditions differ, and the execution varies,... and it's even interesting to learn when you don't know it. But it just sounds dumb for you to endorse them.
(and as an aside quibble: "familiarity breeds contempt" does not refer to meeting people, but to living in close quarters with them.)
Anyway, to the folks in this forum who say i-opener is a hardware company so they should sell hardware... is your cable company a hardware company because they give you a cable box? You have to think about the staff required to interface with customers and the money invested in the various infrastructures you need to support your sales and support model. Hardware, software, content, services... these are completely different things which is why we see different companies doing them, and having different cultures. With the current i-opener model, when they deliver a box to a grandmother, they get to go to wall street and say, "it cost us X to deliver this, but we expect to see Y+Y+Y+... coming in monthly". That "+Y+..." is the key to the value of this customer. If they start selling hardware alone, it'll be "we spent X to get Z". Wall Street prefers recurring revenue because as you expend more effort to get more customers, the stream of cash coming in GROWS. With non-recurring revenue, you need to keep working for each new bit of revenue. It's hard to grow sales that way.
C'mon: users have to take some responsibility. I get viruses sent to me all the time: I don't click on them. Sure, Outlook sucks, but I'm forced to use it at work and I still don't ever have problems with viruses.
So, add on to your total cost of ownership the stupidity tax: it's non-refundable. And in your calculations, don't forget the opportunity cost of stupidity: if your users got the time Outlook wasted back, they'd have more time simply to figure out some other way to screw up.
so-called emissaries of the open source movement...seem like raving fanatics or clueless cheapskates.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for saying that. You left out "self-appointed", but otherwise you are spot on! It is embarrassing to read articles like this one. Not only did the author display his (and the general geek audience's) cluelessness about econ, but then he decided to embrace the "let's be grownups" movement and dressed his piece in "suck to the suits" style, with the result that it begins to read like an ad. I don't want to attack apple pie or motherhood, but instead of "oh, how wonderful is Netpliance", isn't a more appropriate geek question something along the lines of, how can our mothers, who produced us, be so clueless about computers?:)
Please, just keep writing about how to take the covers off of boxes, or have intelligent econ geeks explain econ.
However, a little good does comes out of it. Unlike some spelling errors, I've never seen a truly smart person mistake "lose" and "loose": it just doesn't happen. So, it makes a nice little flag, sort of a real-world self-moderation of "-1 Overrated":)
This is a great day, indeed! It's like the fall of communist totalitarianism!
Think of what it has been like for the past 10 years: "hey, I've got an idea for a product... nah, if it made any headway at all, Microsoft would just crush it." Like they did with everything else:
Remember when there was competition in word processors? It took Microsoft 10 full years using time and money that only a monopoly has to steal the ideas and stamp it out
Remember when there was competition in spreadsheets? It took Microsoft 11 full years using time and money that only a monopoly has to steal the ideas and stamp it out
Remember when OS competition emerged in the form of innovative ideas (Dr. DOS, VisiOn, Stak, QEMM, etc.)... all crushed.
... and they've tried to grab the internet, java, etc.... thank God we won't have to listen to them take credit for it.
Those who've come to the industry recently forget that Apple and the Mac pioneered ease of use for the masses (having borrowed the ideas from PARC), only to have the credit stolen, along with, quite literally, technology.
But now...
Now, this is a propitious moment, because the open and free software movement waits in the wings, along with the (now well underway) digital convergence/network everywhere/handheld revolution. Because, make no mistake, these things are unrelated. Microsoft was a monopoly before the internet and despite Linux and BSD (and some tools from an outfit calling itself gnu). The breakup of the Microsoft monopoly is the right thing to do on the basis of Microsoft's history, without regard to competition that they currently or in the future will face.
The huge windfall for consumers would have come about whenever the breakup occurred, but it would have taken some time. But having the alternatives offered by "Linux" (heck, too tiring to list'em all again) and the internet and all the new chips at this moment... It is just so cool, so glorious, so... yeesh! I gotta go get to work on the future
A few of us were contacted by email as a result of this discussion. Here's the email we received and my response to it.
Hello,
I'm mailing you about the thread on/. about the lack of an OpenBSD ISO.
Let me first refer you to the FAQ, which I'll extend later tonight if I have time.
FACTS:
1. ISO's are a waste of time. OpenBSD has a great one floppy network install, so if you can afford to download two bloated 650 MB files, you'll have no problem with selective downloading only what you need during the install (look, only 80 MB).
Under some circumstances, what you say is true, but open your mind to other possibilities. The "internet" (connectivity, various servers, etc.) is not always up. So, yes I could successfully install on some occasion, but what if I want to add a package later but at that moment I can't get to it? I'd be screwed. I've got T3's at work: if I download the ISO and take it home, I won't have to install at 56K, and I'll have the pieces I need when I need them, no matter what.
There are many reasons to prefer to have the whole distro locally. So why grab the ISO instead of mirroring the tree? A number of small reasons, but essentially, if I look at the ISO on my filesystem, I know whether I have it or not. I don't need to diff the ls-lF. Many tools know how to quickly pick up where they left off on the download. Microsoft Windows machines have no trouble storing and burning ISOs, so I can do it from my boss's desk as easily as mine.
And the bandwidth wastage... in computer science terms, N bytes and 2N bytes are both O(N), and it's computer time, not human time, so it's less important to me than my other concerns. (read on before objecting, please)
2. There is currently no room and money to be spend on providing diskspace and bandwidth for this ISO. That's why there is no such thing on the FTP server or the mirror sites.
That is a good reason. In financial terms, 2N is double N. But, there are dozens of places to download Linux ISOs from, so where do they get the money? They get the money from being flexible and attempting to give people what the people want. BSDers keep trying to give people what the BSDers want. There's no shame in not having the resources, but there's no shame in thinking about why, either.
3. Everybody is free do whatever they want with the OpenBSD system. You have all the source *and* all the build tools. That is FREE and open. Even Open, whatever you understand by that. The fact that OpenBSD does not publish any ISO, is purely for sanity reasons: they are a waste of time.
I know of an OpenBSD ISO that is published and it's copyrighted with no license granted. So, reword your statement to accurately include that fact and you'll see what people are annoyed at. Oh, I forgot, you don't care what annoys other people, it's all about you:)
Everybody is free and yet nobody has done it so far. It's not difficult to download the 80 MB worth of i386 files and make your own ISO. Yet nobody is putting that ISO up on their FTP server. It seems 99% of the wellconnected OpenBSD people like the FTP install over ISO's.
Yep, but it's 99% of a small number of people. If you want more people to use OpenBSD, give the people what they want. You're like a restauranteur who keeps saying "eat off of these plates, they're beautiful china! 99% of our customers want them", to which I respond, "but, I want my food to go... are you going to force me to dine elsewhere?"
None of this is to dis the distro/download/build system that the BSDs have created. I think it's a great system. I wish RedHat had it... in addition to the other things that RedHat has, not as a replacement.
And yes, the ISOs Theo makes have his Copyright, I don't see a problem in that. All the tools you need to build your own ISO is included in OpenBSD, anybody can make them. Yet nobody does. Think about that.
I don't have a problem with him copyrighting them either. The BSD license allows that. It also allows GPLing, so I assume you have no problem with that. It's all about doing what each of us wants and getting what each of us wants. But, if you want more people to adopt more of your views about important things (like all the good things about OpenBSD), then swallow your tired opinions about what kind of medium I prefer. I don't want to get my distros via Morse code:) I don't care how much you like it.
Think about how many people have adopted Linux. Think about how many people have adopted FreeBSD. And now, with that corner of the mind still unoccupied, think about how many have adopted OpenBSD. Think there's a relationship? Think about that, this way: If you fulfill the needs people tell you about, you might discover they'll appreciate many of the other benefits of your system.
Oh, and one final point of clarification: I am expressing disdain of a number of your ideas, but not of you, and not of all of your ideas. I'm showing my respect for you by going to all this trouble to write. Keep up the good work that you've been doing, for sure. I'd just like to see more people benefit from it.
you still don't get it. I don't feel disrespected because I'm self-confident. Here, try reading it as analogy: "Michael Jordan does not care what you think about his basketball playing ability. He is willing, however, to give you some pointers on your game." So, is that respect, or disrespect? I call it respect, because he's taking the time, and there's valuable "truth" in what he thinks and knows. You call it disrespect, because you seek ego-stroking and approval before all else: he would need to tell you you are a good player before you will listen to what he says.
I do not honor your disclaimer, because it too is ridiculous.
Now, you may have been speaking quickly in labelling it a "disclaimer" and that's entirely understandable, but in case you meant it literally I want to clarify. I was not disclaiming my position, I was making reference to the fact that we are talking about issues that are similar to getting rejected from a university you wished to attend: keep it in perspective, it doesn't mean everybody (or anybody) hates you, or that you have no chance of accomplishing anything. Lots of fine people... heck let me put it even stronger: the vast majority of things that are accomplished in our economy and civilization are accomplished by people who are not in the top percentile of IQ. Many other skills are more important to being a successful, productive person than intelligence. However, we should not relabel intelligence just because of sour grapes.
Your closing statement is just such an attempt, almost comical. Something like, "the NFL coaches do not know what constitutes good football. they know..." blah blah, you get the picture, it's a bunch of BS. Doesn't mean you're not a nice guy, and it doesn't mean you are incredibly dull-witted, but the way to score points against Phil (who is not as smart as he thinks he is) is show he's wrong, not change the definition of intelligence.
Phil, you forget to address this of his points, and it sums up how he "just doesn't get it".
LISP, like Pascal, can be a great teaching tool, but is otherwise worthless.
Pascal is not a great teaching tool. It's "good" in the sense that it's fairly simple. It has a few features that take you from the realm of programming into "CS" (recursion, call by value v. reference, lexical scope), but its union types are broken and not typesafe. It's better than Fortran, ok. But lexical scope is truly interesting when contrasted with dynamic scope for which you need Lisp. Recursion's ok, but tail recursion is startling (the ultimate goto). Objects, heap storage gc, erasing the distinction between code and data, none of that is easy to explore with Pascal (except in the Turing Complete sense). Smart people taught me LISP decades ago, and now the rest of the world has "invented" a tiny piece of it in the form of XML for which they've written a bunch of sucky parsers. And the worst part, they don't even realize it.
Good luck with the school, though. It'll make the world a little better.
He came across as very arrogant. I think that he could have said pretty much the same thing without that 'preaching from on-high' tone. He could have conveyed some small bit of respect for his audience.
No, he could not have conveyed the same thing without that preaching from on-high tone. Phillip is arrogant, everybody who knows him knows that. But smart people don't feel threatened by arrogance. The question is, is he smart, and Phillip is pretty bright. To really smart people, Phillip's approach is showing respect. It's the smart person's equivalent of talking trash or head-butting. It says "I'm smart and if you are too, it won't scare you. He doesn't want to sound all warm and fuzzy because then he'd just have to plow through more applications from people who would suddenly feel like they belonged at ADU.
you don't have to spend a week interviewing a student
His original statement ("spend a week interviewing each student") could alternatively be parsed to mean that he doesn't have a week to interview all the students in toto. See? the ability to come up with all the various parsings and not go chasing after only one of them is the mark of a person who got high SAT scores. That's what Ars Digita is looking for.
P.S. I'm just talkin' trash here too, so don't get all hot under the collar: this is fun!:)
look at it this way: freshman at MIT (and the other prestigious universities to varying degrees) take a very challenging set of classes. If you did not score highly on the SAT and get high marks in high school, your probablility of being totally smoked by the curriculum is very high. Just as some athletes are better, so are some students. It's not about being elitist or not, it's about being scientific: it can be observed, measured, described, and predicted. And, just as you can fantasize about being a great athlete, you can fantasize that the great students are no better than you are. Sure, there are some football players in the NFL who are not as good as some who are not in the NFL... but to say that the quality of play is the same no matter where you play football would be to say something stupid.
As to the quality of instruction: there are all sorts of ways of being a great teacher, and there are great teachers everywhere... but for whatever reason, the overwhelming quality of the MIT in-classroom experience including the material covered, the workload required, and the questions asked in class by fellow students is not available just anywhere.
How unique is it to MIT? First, I can only describe MIT because I only went there. However, I do know some equally smart people who attended Harvard and Stanford and Cal. But those schools also accept people on the basis of their tuba playing, so they must have at least some classes which are less academically rigorous.
how exactly are Dre's lawyers going to hunt down all of these people?
One at a time? After the first few hundred, others might take notice.
But the genie is out of the bottle. People have had a taste of free software, and they'll just quit using Napster and switch to private networks. I'm not saying right or wrong, I'm just saying that I don't see it stopping. Think back to before MP3s: I'm sure that Dr Dre never made a cassette recording of anything copyrighted, but people of his integrity are quite rare. (I wonder if he'd swear to that under oath?)
you meant to say "obvious". Intuitive in a UI means that things that you learn are generally applicable, like the same paste key always pastes, not just sometimes. But, you still have to learn which one it is.
Second, learning curves measure learning correlated to experience. So, no learning curve would mean no learning: the interface would remain as difficult to use the Nth time as it was the first. You could make the case that if an interface were completely obvious, that this is how it would operate:) but I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant. Steep learning curves are good ones.
it's just too close to the future to not be the truth. Be can't compete against Windows on the desktop while it's being squeezed by Apple in the ease of use direction, and Linux & *BSD in the "good choice for an OEM or hardware mfr who wishes to be set free" direction. So, even if it's true that Be has no plans to fold desktop BeOS in favor of BeIA, that's what will happen.
And, unfortunately, that's going to happen in the appliance business also. As much as customers like to have choices, customers like more to have compatibility, and there is no room for Be (or Amiga, or...) to break in here. Yep, we haven't seen the last OS yet; there will be some new OS someday (I'm not predicting, but something like PalmOS on steroids could leverage its current success) but right now it's not going to be Be.
2. have it reference a declared but undefined external
3. always link against it
4. just stop calling it.
it is a sickness. how many fucking security holes do we have to patch one at a fucking time because we are asking every new person who comes along not to make the same mistakes we made. It's stupid.
Too much old code to fix? email it to me. I will fix it for you. It is not difficult, there is no excuse.
My post was completely for humor value. Yes, I'm deeply sorry that nobody got it or thought it was funny. I keep forgetting that on Slashdot you need to label things as "joke" or people don't get it.
However, since you were kind enough to respond: I thought the Bill of Rights bans the taking of private property without due process. Microsoft has been through due process...
Actually, this raises an interesting issue: If if the courts forced an opening of Microsoft's source code, should the court impose a GPL license, or a BSD style? Please discuss. I am positive in my heart that Slashdot can come to a conclusion that we'd all agree with:)
I totally disagree, I used to watch that and it was really good. Remember the one where the guy said, "got any sixes?". How can you not laugh at that?:)
I saw this article this morning and decided to try SuSE. I've installed a lot of
RedHat since version 3.
Prior to that I used Slackware but not recently enough to comment on.
I've also tried FreeBSD several times (the last time was pretty good: the ports system is really cool, automated tarballs: rpm, source rpms, and rpmfind all rolled into one) and
Debian very recently (clear, informative, step by step...and VERY tedious; do you want to install ftp? do you want to configure ftp? do you want to start ftp? do you want to change that configuration? do you want to move on now? did you think you'd be done by now? do you wish you were done now? do you want to slit your wrists now?).
So, getting SuSE downloaded too all day. (I had previously started once before, so I knew to go to sourceforge where they make life a lot simpler than at SuSE where they really want you to buy a disk).
I just completed the install, and I have to say, SuSE is a very nice system in comparison with RedHat. Uses RPM, BTW, so you won't have to throw away that knowledge and you can keep benefitting from rpmfind, but it also has "yast" which is like linuxconf, except it works! It also does a lot more, from hardware config,/etc config, X config (SaX is a better way to configure X, too), to package management. And, since they use the same yast during install and for later admin, it has that nice feel of "everything I learn is useful as reference later, and if I make the wrong choice now I'll know how to fix it"
Redhat should ditch linuxconf and adopt yast (and "ports" too, while they're at it). If you are new to linux, you should give SuSE a look, I think you'll find it easier to admin. If you already use RedHat, it's not so much better that it's worth switching to, but you should not fear trying it if you are curious because it will be a painless transition. The purple lizard on the desktop is kinda cute, too, though I wish they'da spelled it Geecko?
Slashdot Mirror
you have it more backward than not: if you want to draw the distinction you're drawing, then cracking is the password circumvention phase, while hacking is the defacement you engage in once you break in... all other meanins notwithstanding.
I didn't excuse Microsoft at all, that's a bug up your ass. Microsoft products are bad, yes. But if they're as bad as you say, how come I never get bit? Do you get bit? I believe only stupid people do. There are a lot of stupid people, and sysadmins (smart and stupid) have to live with the consequences, so better, more secure products are a good thing. But still: at this point you either just arrived on the planet, or you gotta be pretty stupid to click a link in an email without confirming that it's text or graphic. Somebody sends me a .DOC, I try running it through mswordview or I tell 'em to try again, and I don't care if it is my boss. If you're serious, it's simple.
Let me repeat, cuz you are probably getting it wrong again: I'm not saying software couldn't be better, I'm saying surround yourself with smarter people, and this "problem" disappears over the horizon.
And, the author of the original critique was pointing out that there is a commonality among the "emissaries" in the tone of the pieces they/you write wherein you endorse i-opener or whoever: guess what? to an MBA, the difference between i-opener, Apple, Palm, AOL, Be and whoever is, some have selected hashing, some use binary search, and others use btrees. That's all. There's nothing particularly original or clueful about any of their strategies. The market conditions differ, and the execution varies, ... and it's even interesting to learn when you don't know it. But it just sounds dumb for you to endorse them.
(and as an aside quibble: "familiarity breeds contempt" does not refer to meeting people, but to living in close quarters with them.)
Anyway, to the folks in this forum who say i-opener is a hardware company so they should sell hardware... is your cable company a hardware company because they give you a cable box? You have to think about the staff required to interface with customers and the money invested in the various infrastructures you need to support your sales and support model. Hardware, software, content, services... these are completely different things which is why we see different companies doing them, and having different cultures. With the current i-opener model, when they deliver a box to a grandmother, they get to go to wall street and say, "it cost us X to deliver this, but we expect to see Y+Y+Y+... coming in monthly". That "+Y+..." is the key to the value of this customer. If they start selling hardware alone, it'll be "we spent X to get Z". Wall Street prefers recurring revenue because as you expend more effort to get more customers, the stream of cash coming in GROWS. With non-recurring revenue, you need to keep working for each new bit of revenue. It's hard to grow sales that way.
So, add on to your total cost of ownership the stupidity tax: it's non-refundable. And in your calculations, don't forget the opportunity cost of stupidity: if your users got the time Outlook wasted back, they'd have more time simply to figure out some other way to screw up.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for saying that. You left out "self-appointed", but otherwise you are spot on! It is embarrassing to read articles like this one. Not only did the author display his (and the general geek audience's) cluelessness about econ, but then he decided to embrace the "let's be grownups" movement and dressed his piece in "suck to the suits" style, with the result that it begins to read like an ad. I don't want to attack apple pie or motherhood, but instead of "oh, how wonderful is Netpliance", isn't a more appropriate geek question something along the lines of, how can our mothers, who produced us, be so clueless about computers? :)
Please, just keep writing about how to take the covers off of boxes, or have intelligent econ geeks explain econ.
yeah but, no, he didn't. Parole is early release with conditions in exchange for jail time that you should be serving.
- So, you cannot run ads as a business making false claims like "we say our cigarettes do not give you cancer"; that speech can be censored.
- However, a newspaper would be allowed to report "they say their cigarettes do not give you cancer"; that speech cannot be censored.
... under U.S. law, that is. I would presume that the dispute with 2600 would be along these lines.However, a little good does comes out of it. Unlike some spelling errors, I've never seen a truly smart person mistake "lose" and "loose": it just doesn't happen. So, it makes a nice little flag, sort of a real-world self-moderation of "-1 Overrated" :)
Think of what it has been like for the past 10 years: "hey, I've got an idea for a product... nah, if it made any headway at all, Microsoft would just crush it." Like they did with everything else:
Those who've come to the industry recently forget that Apple and the Mac pioneered ease of use for the masses (having borrowed the ideas from PARC), only to have the credit stolen, along with, quite literally, technology.
But now...
Now, this is a propitious moment, because the open and free software movement waits in the wings, along with the (now well underway) digital convergence/network everywhere/handheld revolution. Because, make no mistake, these things are unrelated. Microsoft was a monopoly before the internet and despite Linux and BSD (and some tools from an outfit calling itself gnu). The breakup of the Microsoft monopoly is the right thing to do on the basis of Microsoft's history, without regard to competition that they currently or in the future will face.
The huge windfall for consumers would have come about whenever the breakup occurred, but it would have taken some time. But having the alternatives offered by "Linux" (heck, too tiring to list'em all again) and the internet and all the new chips at this moment... It is just so cool, so glorious, so... yeesh! I gotta go get to work on the future
Happy day, /.ers!!
Hello,
I'm mailing you about the thread on /. about the lack of an OpenBSD ISO.
Let me first refer you to the FAQ, which I'll extend later tonight if I have time.
FACTS:
1. ISO's are a waste of time. OpenBSD has a great one floppy network install, so if you can afford to download two bloated 650 MB files, you'll have no problem with selective downloading only what you need during the install (look, only 80 MB).
Under some circumstances, what you say is true, but open your mind to other possibilities. The "internet" (connectivity, various servers, etc.) is not always up. So, yes I could successfully install on some occasion, but what if I want to add a package later but at that moment I can't get to it? I'd be screwed. I've got T3's at work: if I download the ISO and take it home, I won't have to install at 56K, and I'll have the pieces I need when I need them, no matter what.
There are many reasons to prefer to have the whole distro locally. So why grab the ISO instead of mirroring the tree? A number of small reasons, but essentially, if I look at the ISO on my filesystem, I know whether I have it or not. I don't need to diff the ls-lF. Many tools know how to quickly pick up where they left off on the download. Microsoft Windows machines have no trouble storing and burning ISOs, so I can do it from my boss's desk as easily as mine.
And the bandwidth wastage ... in computer science terms, N bytes and 2N bytes are both O(N), and it's computer time, not human time, so it's less important to me than my other concerns. (read on before objecting, please)
2. There is currently no room and money to be spend on providing diskspace and bandwidth for this ISO. That's why there is no such thing on the FTP server or the mirror sites.
That is a good reason. In financial terms, 2N is double N. But, there are dozens of places to download Linux ISOs from, so where do they get the money? They get the money from being flexible and attempting to give people what the people want. BSDers keep trying to give people what the BSDers want. There's no shame in not having the resources, but there's no shame in thinking about why, either.
3. Everybody is free do whatever they want with the OpenBSD system. You have all the source *and* all the build tools. That is FREE and open. Even Open, whatever you understand by that. The fact that OpenBSD does not publish any ISO, is purely for sanity reasons: they are a waste of time.
I know of an OpenBSD ISO that is published and it's copyrighted with no license granted. So, reword your statement to accurately include that fact and you'll see what people are annoyed at. Oh, I forgot, you don't care what annoys other people, it's all about you :)
Everybody is free and yet nobody has done it so far. It's not difficult to download the 80 MB worth of i386 files and make your own ISO. Yet nobody is putting that ISO up on their FTP server. It seems 99% of the wellconnected OpenBSD people like the FTP install over ISO's.
Yep, but it's 99% of a small number of people. If you want more people to use OpenBSD, give the people what they want. You're like a restauranteur who keeps saying "eat off of these plates, they're beautiful china! 99% of our customers want them", to which I respond, "but, I want my food to go... are you going to force me to dine elsewhere?"
None of this is to dis the distro/download/build system that the BSDs have created. I think it's a great system. I wish RedHat had it... in addition to the other things that RedHat has, not as a replacement.
And yes, the ISOs Theo makes have his Copyright, I don't see a problem in that. All the tools you need to build your own ISO is included in OpenBSD, anybody can make them. Yet nobody does. Think about that.
I don't have a problem with him copyrighting them either. The BSD license allows that. It also allows GPLing, so I assume you have no problem with that. It's all about doing what each of us wants and getting what each of us wants. But, if you want more people to adopt more of your views about important things (like all the good things about OpenBSD), then swallow your tired opinions about what kind of medium I prefer. I don't want to get my distros via Morse code :) I don't care how much you like it.
Think about how many people have adopted Linux. Think about how many people have adopted FreeBSD. And now, with that corner of the mind still unoccupied, think about how many have adopted OpenBSD. Think there's a relationship? Think about that, this way: If you fulfill the needs people tell you about, you might discover they'll appreciate many of the other benefits of your system.
Oh, and one final point of clarification: I am expressing disdain of a number of your ideas, but not of you, and not of all of your ideas. I'm showing my respect for you by going to all this trouble to write. Keep up the good work that you've been doing, for sure. I'd just like to see more people benefit from it.
you still don't get it. I don't feel disrespected because I'm self-confident. Here, try reading it as analogy: "Michael Jordan does not care what you think about his basketball playing ability. He is willing, however, to give you some pointers on your game." So, is that respect, or disrespect? I call it respect, because he's taking the time, and there's valuable "truth" in what he thinks and knows. You call it disrespect, because you seek ego-stroking and approval before all else: he would need to tell you you are a good player before you will listen to what he says.
I do not honor your disclaimer, because it too is ridiculous.
Now, you may have been speaking quickly in labelling it a "disclaimer" and that's entirely understandable, but in case you meant it literally I want to clarify. I was not disclaiming my position, I was making reference to the fact that we are talking about issues that are similar to getting rejected from a university you wished to attend: keep it in perspective, it doesn't mean everybody (or anybody) hates you, or that you have no chance of accomplishing anything. Lots of fine people... heck let me put it even stronger: the vast majority of things that are accomplished in our economy and civilization are accomplished by people who are not in the top percentile of IQ. Many other skills are more important to being a successful, productive person than intelligence. However, we should not relabel intelligence just because of sour grapes.
Your closing statement is just such an attempt, almost comical. Something like, "the NFL coaches do not know what constitutes good football. they know ..." blah blah, you get the picture, it's a bunch of BS. Doesn't mean you're not a nice guy, and it doesn't mean you are incredibly dull-witted, but the way to score points against Phil (who is not as smart as he thinks he is) is show he's wrong, not change the definition of intelligence.
LISP, like Pascal, can be a great teaching tool, but is otherwise worthless.
Pascal is not a great teaching tool. It's "good" in the sense that it's fairly simple. It has a few features that take you from the realm of programming into "CS" (recursion, call by value v. reference, lexical scope), but its union types are broken and not typesafe. It's better than Fortran, ok. But lexical scope is truly interesting when contrasted with dynamic scope for which you need Lisp. Recursion's ok, but tail recursion is startling (the ultimate goto). Objects, heap storage gc, erasing the distinction between code and data, none of that is easy to explore with Pascal (except in the Turing Complete sense). Smart people taught me LISP decades ago, and now the rest of the world has "invented" a tiny piece of it in the form of XML for which they've written a bunch of sucky parsers. And the worst part, they don't even realize it.
Good luck with the school, though. It'll make the world a little better.
No, he could not have conveyed the same thing without that preaching from on-high tone. Phillip is arrogant, everybody who knows him knows that. But smart people don't feel threatened by arrogance. The question is, is he smart, and Phillip is pretty bright. To really smart people, Phillip's approach is showing respect. It's the smart person's equivalent of talking trash or head-butting. It says "I'm smart and if you are too, it won't scare you. He doesn't want to sound all warm and fuzzy because then he'd just have to plow through more applications from people who would suddenly feel like they belonged at ADU.
you don't have to spend a week interviewing a student
His original statement ("spend a week interviewing each student") could alternatively be parsed to mean that he doesn't have a week to interview all the students in toto. See? the ability to come up with all the various parsings and not go chasing after only one of them is the mark of a person who got high SAT scores. That's what Ars Digita is looking for.
P.S. I'm just talkin' trash here too, so don't get all hot under the collar: this is fun! :)
As to the quality of instruction: there are all sorts of ways of being a great teacher, and there are great teachers everywhere... but for whatever reason, the overwhelming quality of the MIT in-classroom experience including the material covered, the workload required, and the questions asked in class by fellow students is not available just anywhere.
How unique is it to MIT? First, I can only describe MIT because I only went there. However, I do know some equally smart people who attended Harvard and Stanford and Cal. But those schools also accept people on the basis of their tuba playing, so they must have at least some classes which are less academically rigorous.
One at a time? After the first few hundred, others might take notice.
But the genie is out of the bottle. People have had a taste of free software, and they'll just quit using Napster and switch to private networks. I'm not saying right or wrong, I'm just saying that I don't see it stopping. Think back to before MP3s: I'm sure that Dr Dre never made a cassette recording of anything copyrighted, but people of his integrity are quite rare. (I wonder if he'd swear to that under oath?)
this statement contains two errors:
you meant to say "obvious". Intuitive in a UI means that things that you learn are generally applicable, like the same paste key always pastes, not just sometimes. But, you still have to learn which one it is.
Second, learning curves measure learning correlated to experience. So, no learning curve would mean no learning: the interface would remain as difficult to use the Nth time as it was the first. You could make the case that if an interface were completely obvious, that this is how it would operate :) but I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant. Steep learning curves are good ones.
And, unfortunately, that's going to happen in the appliance business also. As much as customers like to have choices, customers like more to have compatibility, and there is no room for Be (or Amiga, or...) to break in here. Yep, we haven't seen the last OS yet; there will be some new OS someday (I'm not predicting, but something like PalmOS on steroids could leverage its current success) but right now it's not going to be Be.
Yeah, but that wouldn't make Theo burn in his gut enough. How about creating a new one, just as you said, but GPLing it? :)
However, you could buy it and squat on it hoping to sell it to an ophthamologist :)
2. have it reference a declared but undefined external
3. always link against it
4. just stop calling it.
it is a sickness. how many fucking security holes do we have to patch one at a fucking time because we are asking every new person who comes along not to make the same mistakes we made. It's stupid.
Too much old code to fix? email it to me. I will fix it for you. It is not difficult, there is no excuse.
However, since you were kind enough to respond: I thought the Bill of Rights bans the taking of private property without due process. Microsoft has been through due process...
Actually, this raises an interesting issue: If if the courts forced an opening of Microsoft's source code, should the court impose a GPL license, or a BSD style? Please discuss. I am positive in my heart that Slashdot can come to a conclusion that we'd all agree with :)
I totally disagree, I used to watch that and it was really good. Remember the one where the guy said, "got any sixes?". How can you not laugh at that? :)
your suggestion is a good one: break Microsoft up into a ... beowulf cluster!
I saw this article this morning and decided to try SuSE. I've installed a lot of
So, getting SuSE downloaded too all day. (I had previously started once before, so I knew to go to sourceforge where they make life a lot simpler than at SuSE where they really want you to buy a disk).
I just completed the install, and I have to say, SuSE is a very nice system in comparison with RedHat. Uses RPM, BTW, so you won't have to throw away that knowledge and you can keep benefitting from rpmfind, but it also has "yast" which is like linuxconf, except it works! It also does a lot more, from hardware config, /etc config, X config (SaX is a better way to configure X, too), to package management. And, since they use the same yast during install and for later admin, it has that nice feel of "everything I learn is useful as reference later, and if I make the wrong choice now I'll know how to fix it"
Redhat should ditch linuxconf and adopt yast (and "ports" too, while they're at it). If you are new to linux, you should give SuSE a look, I think you'll find it easier to admin. If you already use RedHat, it's not so much better that it's worth switching to, but you should not fear trying it if you are curious because it will be a painless transition. The purple lizard on the desktop is kinda cute, too, though I wish they'da spelled it Geecko?