Re:Why not do something CONSTRUCTIVE?
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
They can't write great code themselves so they pick apart other peoples. A valuable niche job to be sure, but not deserving of some sort of "star" status of their own.
There are plenty of interviews with Linus. Good developers get publishing deals. Also, interviews tend to get your book sold, not land you opertunities to get paid to code. When you write a book your doing it to educate. Some people are good teachers. ANd then there are those that lend wait to the cliche, those who can't do . . .
If you really believe that the pols themselves are actually writing, or even reading these, I've got a bridge in Manhattan I'll let you have very cheap. This is a staffer job.
I don't know of any bridges that are completly contained in New York County aka borough og Manhattan. However there are several connecting it to Jersey, da Bronx, and the barrier island I currently inhabit.
That's funny, only because I'm having a heck of a time getting IE to run on my SuSE Linux 10 machine.
Try crossover office. It works really well. Well worth the price. Seriously though, linux on the desktop is a pretty small minority. ReactOS is the key to an open source desktop for the masses.
I doubt people out of the US give a flying crap about Martin Luther King Jr. His contributions were pretty much limited to repeal of the Jim crowe laws, the civil rights act, and an affirmative action program to hire black bus drivers in Montgomery county. Only one of those has national scope. Another had county scope and yet another only affected those south of the Mason Dixon line.
Faster? Yes. Better? Yes. Only for Mac/Linux? NO!!
I'll skip the whole you forgot about the inventors of nfs whining and just point out that better is highly subjective. First of all you can do password authentication with samba. With NFS its by uid only. While thats convient if your exporting home directories where all the machines can trust each other and are running UNIX, if you want users to be able to mount or browse shares themselves then samba is the way to go. Also samba allows you to share printers and do domain based authentication. Perhaps NFSv4 can do that and you can prove me wrong, but you should have specified that as I'm sure the average NFS user is as unaware of the features of NFS4 as I am.
By 2008, the projected release date of the 1" hard drive, I'm sure miniSD's will be up to at least 4GB if not 8GB, without the power drain of spinning platters, without the seek and latency, and in a much smaller form factor.
I know a few professional photographers, and the thinking amongst them is to limit themselves to 1 gig compact flash drives. Anthing more dense is percieved as unstable.
Personally my 2 gig USB flash drives work just fine. However, what I do is not very I/O intensive. The most I've done is work on a sharp develop project (less than a thousand lines of code probally) directly on said thumb drive. Other than that I sneaker net things around. I'm not exactly pushing my thumb drives to the limit.
It's not a fair comparison.
The java sdk is just a suite of command line tools. The.NET express edition is an IDE. It has a damn good editor/gui builder with a bunch of other components. The.NET sdk with command line compilers is a better comparison to the java SDK,
That being said I think sun has a free as in speech IDE. I personally do alot of my java editing in vi, well used to when I did alot of java programming.
And the George W. Bush award for using 9/11 as an explanation for something completely unrelated to 9/11 goes to.... Larry Wall.
I don't know about nationally, but there was a major recession in the NY area after 9/11 for a good year and a half. I was stuck workign at burger king at one point. Granted, I choose the worse time to drop out of college, it was even hard for a high school graduate with some college and a solid skillset at the time for entry level IT work to get a minimum wage service job.
The company I work for now is an ISP/developmenthouse. They are based out in eastern longisland 36.9 miles from my house in Queens according to google. There business core was out east. They had inroads and a solid plan to break into Manhattan, but they were, and still are a longisland company. Before september 11th they were looking at adding phone lines. Afterwards, the phones stopped ringing. There development work almost stopped. They had to lay off several people.
Anyway, claiming September 11th had a negative aspect on the business of computer book publishing is far from unbased.
I got paid to write some last year, and I'll never do it again. The pain of a simple Office upgrade breaking all your apps is too great. I mean, Office 2000 -> 2002 removed the DateTimePicker control. That alone cost me quite a bit of time to fix.
I feel your pain on that one. I had to go download said control from Microsoft. I didn't consider that painful at the time because I auctually did alot of research regarding what date/tie picker to use and evaluated several MS and non MS provided solutions. I've also seen queries simply disappear from my database if I ran them in different versions of access. There's a reason I keep all my sql statements in CVS.
I think you put it best though, access is ok, VBA, and to a lesser extent VB6 introduce alot of problems.
Imagine if you would the ability to use Xen for unlimited operating systems, no licensing cost of the base OS, thinking about it, I would prefer to be in Microsoft's shoes as opposed to VMWare's. Only difference is that Xen when compared to VMWare is a very immature platform and no IT manager is going to take Xen over VMWare just yet (Unless cost is a BIG factor).
I've been using xen here in what I call "production development." Its serving several development servers. One of them is running a crappy spam assassing frontend thats pretty resource intensive. I was quite satisfied when my colleuge asked me when I was going to move said test server from real hardware to Xen a week after I did the migration.
Anyway, while vmware is definatly prettier, I think xen performs better. Of course being xen can't run windows I can't see how one of the machines catching a virus affects the performance of all the machines. But if your comfortable with the command line, and have a decent grasp of lvm and piping tar over ssh, you should have no problem using xen.
Ok except consider the following:
If your developing for Windows, the JetSQLengine will be built in. For small databases that will always run on windows, Access is good enough. Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe, or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external dependencies.
If you have to extend any product that stores its data in something ODBC accessiable, you can do a linked table in MS ACCESS and store all your data in your own database.
I keep all the SQL for my access queries in version control with my code. When ever possible I try to wean my clients onto MySQL/PHP web apps. When I'm interfacing with a third party program I try to eventually rewrite said app or get a cleaner interface to it than access.
It takes him years to bring out a new version, it takes me only a few months.
Did you ever think that maybe he's not devoting as much time to you to improving his OS. Also, he purposely keeps the OS at a level where it can be studied in one semester.
Well dont forget about -p option. Sometimes I want to clone whole machine. The target lacks entries for the uids in/etc/passwd so -p preserves them. I boot it up with the redhat rescue disk or knoppix, setup my desired mounting scheme within/mnt/sysimage and do:
tar -czf - / | ssh user@system " tar -C/mnt/sysimage -xzpf - "
After this edit fstab, and get the kernel to boot your system.
I'm primarily a windows admin but a LAMP install is both much more robust and much more useful than an average WAMP install. since when is a GUI more efficient?
Why not WIMP out of curosity? I've used both IIS and apache on windows but neither extensively. I can understand going with apache for the likes of tomcat, but isn't there a mod-cgi equivilant for IIS that does the same type of script compiling and caching? Honestly, I've never setup or used a Production W?MP box except for a small internal one that already was running IIS. Also this was before I knew anything
Well have you seen some of the closed source crap out there. Right now (ok after I finish reading slashdot) I am writing a timekeeping system in VB6 that has to interface with an identification program called Instant ID+. If the database design is any indication of the code then I'm glad that he is going to pay me to rewrite that portion of the system.
Go ahead and dismiss me outright for writing the program in VB6. I'm doing this on the side and its the only thing I know that will fit his requirements (read: I can't deliver this as a web app and it has to run on windows). I'm under too tight a deadline to learn.NET, I haven't touched Java in years and part of this system is ab excel VBA app so in this case vb6 is the best choice.
The point is just like you can write bad code in any language, you can write bad code under any philosophical or economical model. I write some pretty clean 2 tier VB code. Its all pretty well commented and stored in CVS. Would the code be alot cleaner in PHP? Perhaps, but then again if I wrote the code in.NET it would probally be very ugly because it was my first app.
I can't tell a single feature in MS Office, not supported here.
Really? So OO exports its application suite as COM objects so I can automate office tasks via my choice of VB dialect or any oter language for that matter? And I can fire up visual basic for applications and write macros such as my all time favorite reverse dns formula for excel (ok I googles for an example of the api call sockets and tweaked the code a bit, but I found this very useful.
I know OO has its own macro language and API for office application automation, and that you can make an argument for its superiority. However, there is alot of VB codce out there. There are alot of VB coders out there. And if your on windows, vbscript is the way to get stuff done.
I can understand writing VB compilers/interperters/bytecodeJITifiers for linux and macosx would not be the best use of time. The developers on those platforms would use python or perl for there office automation. Adding the ability to handle vba macros in OO in windows is probalyl overkill too. However, exporting the current API as COM objects (not sure if its object based but at the very least a wrapper sticking all function in one constructorless class ), as well as whever you.NET folks use instead of com object would be nice.
P.S. Prove me wrong about OO not exporting its api to COM objects on windows, please.
Basically we're focusing our studies on building software for mechanical engineering, making us a bit of a hybrid between a conventional mechanical engineers and (userspace) software engineers.
I've always noticed that mechanical engineers tend to make excellent programmers and sysadmins. I knew a meche in college that programmed his own IRC client in VB and a ray tracer using assembly DLLs for the ray tracing and visual basic for the UI code. He even compiled VB code to assembly to figure out how variants work. I've also heard of a few meches on slashdot that say they have jobs admining there companys cad/modeling workstations and server farms. Good luck to you and your classmates. The world needs more of you folks.
I think a standard that's better for everyone is far better than a standard that's better for one entity, even if it means the original entity has some work to do.
Well that's the wonderful thing about standards, there are so many to choose from. Also, if you don't liek any existing ones, you can make your own.
Seriously, though bottom up standars seem more successful to me. Look at the Maildir standard. DJB simply said to himeself mbox sucks, I shall replace it and publish the format on my webpages. Others saw it was good and implemented it. There was no committee. Someone did something, presented it to the world, and it caught on because of its merits.
The OASIS standard just adopted OOo's format, there was no working group that developed it from scratch to be a an open and extensible standard. That's what needs to be done, IMO.
The problem is the OASIS seem to be support bottom up and you seem to be in favor of top down standards. Allowing some product to become the referenmce implementation for a standard becasue the product proved itself is not a bad idea.
Microsoft Word has become a defacto standard for document interchange. This has happened because everone uses Word and so everyone has word. As a side effect, everything that isn't word tends to import/export to word to different degrees.
There are people that feel that the Open Office format solves the same problems as the word format does besides the universal interoperability. You may argue the LaTeX or some other technology is better. Regardless, a group of these people created an infrastructure for other products to implement the OpenOffice standard so in an attempt to evolve the open office standard from a propietary OO only thing to a bottom up defacto standard.
The top down approch you speak of has only the intangiable benifit of making a standard that "better for everyone". It has the very tangable drawback of Open Office would have to implement this standard.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't write great code themselves so they pick apart other peoples. A valuable niche job to be sure, but not deserving of some sort of "star" status of their own.
There are plenty of interviews with Linus. Good developers get publishing deals. Also, interviews tend to get your book sold, not land you opertunities to get paid to code. When you write a book your doing it to educate. Some people are good teachers. ANd then there are those that lend wait to the cliche, those who can't do . . .
If you really believe that the pols themselves are actually writing, or even reading these, I've got a bridge in Manhattan I'll let you have very cheap. This is a staffer job.
I don't know of any bridges that are completly contained in New York County aka borough og Manhattan. However there are several connecting it to Jersey, da Bronx, and the barrier island I currently inhabit.
That's funny, only because I'm having a heck of a time getting IE to run on my SuSE Linux 10 machine.
Try crossover office. It works really well. Well worth the price. Seriously though, linux on the desktop is a pretty small minority. ReactOS is the key to an open source desktop for the masses.
Don't forget, a PHP-powered site has to load the interprettor and all libraries for every page-hit, and runs fine.
Ever hear of modphp?
I doubt people out of the US give a flying crap about Martin Luther King Jr. His contributions were pretty much limited to repeal of the Jim crowe laws, the civil rights act, and an affirmative action program to hire black bus drivers in Montgomery county. Only one of those has national scope. Another had county scope and yet another only affected those south of the Mason Dixon line.
However, he made google's list.
Magic missle. Although spels are cast using methods so you could probally overload the mountain_dew().
Faster? Yes. Better? Yes. Only for Mac/Linux? NO!!
I'll skip the whole you forgot about the inventors of nfs whining and just point out that better is highly subjective. First of all you can do password authentication with samba. With NFS its by uid only. While thats convient if your exporting home directories where all the machines can trust each other and are running UNIX, if you want users to be able to mount or browse shares themselves then samba is the way to go. Also samba allows you to share printers and do domain based authentication. Perhaps NFSv4 can do that and you can prove me wrong, but you should have specified that as I'm sure the average NFS user is as unaware of the features of NFS4 as I am.
By 2008, the projected release date of the 1" hard drive, I'm sure miniSD's will be up to at least 4GB if not 8GB, without the power drain of spinning platters, without the seek and latency, and in a much smaller form factor.
I know a few professional photographers, and the thinking amongst them is to limit themselves to 1 gig compact flash drives. Anthing more dense is percieved as unstable.
Personally my 2 gig USB flash drives work just fine. However, what I do is not very I/O intensive. The most I've done is work on a sharp develop project (less than a thousand lines of code probally) directly on said thumb drive. Other than that I sneaker net things around. I'm not exactly pushing my thumb drives to the limit.
It's not a fair comparison. The java sdk is just a suite of command line tools. The .NET express edition is an IDE. It has a damn good editor/gui builder with a bunch of other components. The .NET sdk with command line compilers is a better comparison to the java SDK,
That being said I think sun has a free as in speech IDE. I personally do alot of my java editing in vi, well used to when I did alot of java programming.
to drop out of college Yeah, we can tell.
Yes, because that electrical engineering degree would have taught me to proofread my slashdot postings.
And the George W. Bush award for using 9/11 as an explanation for something completely unrelated to 9/11 goes to .... Larry Wall.
I don't know about nationally, but there was a major recession in the NY area after 9/11 for a good year and a half. I was stuck workign at burger king at one point. Granted, I choose the worse time to drop out of college, it was even hard for a high school graduate with some college and a solid skillset at the time for entry level IT work to get a minimum wage service job.
The company I work for now is an ISP/developmenthouse. They are based out in eastern longisland 36.9 miles from my house in Queens according to google. There business core was out east. They had inroads and a solid plan to break into Manhattan, but they were, and still are a longisland company. Before september 11th they were looking at adding phone lines. Afterwards, the phones stopped ringing. There development work almost stopped. They had to lay off several people.
Anyway, claiming September 11th had a negative aspect on the business of computer book publishing is far from unbased.
If you follow the Mary Magdalene is the grail, and drinking from the grail would give you eternal life . . .
I wonder if she shaves? I'm going to hell for that one.
You mean port AQUA from FreeBSD to linux? But the custom Mach kernel, and FreeBSD userland add to the elitist air of OSX.
I got paid to write some last year, and I'll never do it again. The pain of a simple Office upgrade breaking all your apps is too great. I mean, Office 2000 -> 2002 removed the DateTimePicker control. That alone cost me quite a bit of time to fix.
I feel your pain on that one. I had to go download said control from Microsoft. I didn't consider that painful at the time because I auctually did alot of research regarding what date/tie picker to use and evaluated several MS and non MS provided solutions. I've also seen queries simply disappear from my database if I ran them in different versions of access. There's a reason I keep all my sql statements in CVS.
I think you put it best though, access is ok, VBA, and to a lesser extent VB6 introduce alot of problems.
Imagine if you would the ability to use Xen for unlimited operating systems, no licensing cost of the base OS, thinking about it, I would prefer to be in Microsoft's shoes as opposed to VMWare's. Only difference is that Xen when compared to VMWare is a very immature platform and no IT manager is going to take Xen over VMWare just yet (Unless cost is a BIG factor).
I've been using xen here in what I call "production development." Its serving several development servers. One of them is running a crappy spam assassing frontend thats pretty resource intensive. I was quite satisfied when my colleuge asked me when I was going to move said test server from real hardware to Xen a week after I did the migration.
Anyway, while vmware is definatly prettier, I think xen performs better. Of course being xen can't run windows I can't see how one of the machines catching a virus affects the performance of all the machines. But if your comfortable with the command line, and have a decent grasp of lvm and piping tar over ssh, you should have no problem using xen.
Ok except consider the following: If your developing for Windows, the JetSQLengine will be built in. For small databases that will always run on windows, Access is good enough. Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe, or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external dependencies. If you have to extend any product that stores its data in something ODBC accessiable, you can do a linked table in MS ACCESS and store all your data in your own database. I keep all the SQL for my access queries in version control with my code. When ever possible I try to wean my clients onto MySQL/PHP web apps. When I'm interfacing with a third party program I try to eventually rewrite said app or get a cleaner interface to it than access.
It takes him years to bring out a new version, it takes me only a few months.
Did you ever think that maybe he's not devoting as much time to you to improving his OS. Also, he purposely keeps the OS at a level where it can be studied in one semester.
"A Linux bridge is more powerful than a pure hardware bridge because it can also filter and shape traffic"
Can it block the (stsp)state trooper smokey protocol?
Well dont forget about -p option. Sometimes I want to clone whole machine. The target lacks entries for the uids in
After this edit fstab, and get the kernel to boot your system.
I'm primarily a windows admin but a LAMP install is both much more robust and much more useful than an average WAMP install. since when is a GUI more efficient?
Why not WIMP out of curosity? I've used both IIS and apache on windows but neither extensively. I can understand going with apache for the likes of tomcat, but isn't there a mod-cgi equivilant for IIS that does the same type of script compiling and caching? Honestly, I've never setup or used a Production W?MP box except for a small internal one that already was running IIS. Also this was before I knew anything
Well have you seen some of the closed source crap out there. Right now (ok after I finish reading slashdot) I am writing a timekeeping system in VB6 that has to interface with an identification program called Instant ID+. If the database design is any indication of the code then I'm glad that he is going to pay me to rewrite that portion of the system.
.NET, I haven't touched Java in years and part of this system is ab excel VBA app so in this case vb6 is the best choice.
.NET it would probally be very ugly because it was my first app.
Go ahead and dismiss me outright for writing the program in VB6. I'm doing this on the side and its the only thing I know that will fit his requirements (read: I can't deliver this as a web app and it has to run on windows). I'm under too tight a deadline to learn
The point is just like you can write bad code in any language, you can write bad code under any philosophical or economical model. I write some pretty clean 2 tier VB code. Its all pretty well commented and stored in CVS. Would the code be alot cleaner in PHP? Perhaps, but then again if I wrote the code in
I can't tell a single feature in MS Office, not supported here.
.NET folks use instead of com object would be nice.
Really? So OO exports its application suite as COM objects so I can automate office tasks via my choice of VB dialect or any oter language for that matter? And I can fire up visual basic for applications and write macros such as my all time favorite reverse dns formula for excel (ok I googles for an example of the api call sockets and tweaked the code a bit, but I found this very useful.
I know OO has its own macro language and API for office application automation, and that you can make an argument for its superiority. However, there is alot of VB codce out there. There are alot of VB coders out there. And if your on windows, vbscript is the way to get stuff done.
I can understand writing VB compilers/interperters/bytecodeJITifiers for linux and macosx would not be the best use of time. The developers on those platforms would use python or perl for there office automation. Adding the ability to handle vba macros in OO in windows is probalyl overkill too. However, exporting the current API as COM objects (not sure if its object based but at the very least a wrapper sticking all function in one constructorless class ), as well as whever you
P.S. Prove me wrong about OO not exporting its api to COM objects on windows, please.
Basically we're focusing our studies on building software for mechanical engineering, making us a bit of a hybrid between a conventional mechanical engineers and (userspace) software engineers.
I've always noticed that mechanical engineers tend to make excellent programmers and sysadmins. I knew a meche in college that programmed his own IRC client in VB and a ray tracer using assembly DLLs for the ray tracing and visual basic for the UI code. He even compiled VB code to assembly to figure out how variants work. I've also heard of a few meches on slashdot that say they have jobs admining there companys cad/modeling workstations and server farms.
Good luck to you and your classmates. The world needs more of you folks.
I think a standard that's better for everyone is far better than a standard that's better for one entity, even if it means the original entity has some work to do.
Well that's the wonderful thing about standards, there are so many to choose from. Also, if you don't liek any existing ones, you can make your own.
Seriously, though bottom up standars seem more successful to me. Look at the Maildir standard. DJB simply said to himeself mbox sucks, I shall replace it and publish the format on my webpages. Others saw it was good and implemented it. There was no committee. Someone did something, presented it to the world, and it caught on because of its merits.
The OASIS standard just adopted OOo's format, there was no working group that developed it from scratch to be a an open and extensible standard. That's what needs to be done, IMO.
The problem is the OASIS seem to be support bottom up and you seem to be in favor of top down standards. Allowing some product to become the referenmce implementation for a standard becasue the product proved itself is not a bad idea.
Microsoft Word has become a defacto standard for document interchange. This has happened because everone uses Word and so everyone has word. As a side effect, everything that isn't word tends to import/export to word to different degrees.
There are people that feel that the Open Office format solves the same problems as the word format does besides the universal interoperability. You may argue the LaTeX or some other technology is better. Regardless, a group of these people created an infrastructure for other products to implement the OpenOffice standard so in an attempt to evolve the open office standard from a propietary OO only thing to a bottom up defacto standard.
The top down approch you speak of has only the intangiable benifit of making a standard that "better for everyone". It has the very tangable drawback of Open Office would have to implement this standard.