At least in America this is unenforcable. You can' tax used items either because the government already got it's cut the first time around.
Buzz... wrong. It depends upon where you shop. Sales taxes are transactional taxes, and what is taxable in the transaction depends upon the jurisdiction (typically state, but ocassionally county or city). In Virginia, used books are taxable. In New York, x% goes to the state, and y% goes to the county -- and what's taxable depends upon the county.
For myself, I prefer to buy books that are in good condition... and if I have time to go to a used book store and search for good condition books, I can buy more books for a constant amount of money. If I don't have lots of time, and don't mind spending more, I can go to Borders and get a new book. If I don't have *any* time, then I'll shop Amazon. What I wish is that my favorite used book store had a decent (onlioe?) catalog, so I could go in and find what I want quickly, instead of having to visually-grep every single shelf in SF/Fantasy.
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Philip K. Dick's "Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep" was a so-so book -- too disjointed to be truly entertaining and captivating. "Blade Runner," the movie Ridley Scott made out of that book was a cinematic masterpiece.
More movies that were better than the original book:
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Die Hard
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The embedded marketplace is very different from your typical computer/os/software/hardware market. In the embedded market, the developer typically ends up hard-linking his application into the OS, since both pieces are going to be jammed into the same EPROM (or Flash if you've got the budget). To save space, often the developer will decide which OS services he needs, and discard the rest (ie: if you're not building a network appliance, why load the ethernet drivers?) An embedded OS is really more like a development framework -- it gives your application the tools it needs to function without the programmer having to implement those tools from scratch.
If you attempt to GPL the kernel to an embedded OS, then you're going to force developers to release all of their source code, simply because they linked their code with the OS. If you put this restriction on an embedded OS, then no embedded developers will buy your OS, no matter how good it is. On the other hand, either LGPL or MPL can be commercially viable, while still encouraging developers to contribute.
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Multics administrators like lusers even less than Unix administrators like them
Terminal I/O is ugly because it was developed around the VT-100 and print terminals.
mail is basically brain-dead.
And, last but not least...
Emacs, which was ported to both Multics and Unix from ITS.
On a historical note, Primos (the Pr1me Operating System), was a much more direct steal from Multics, down to implementing CPL exactly. I learned Primos years before I used Multics, and Multics was merely more difficult to administrate.
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What's interesting is that Bull (?), the company that owns the rights to the source code, never wanted to release the source code because they claimed they had to "continue to support the few remaining Multics systems in existence" -- they can't possibly be doing this now, so give us the damn source!;-)
The source won't do you a lot of good; it's all written in PL/I and ALM (Assembly Language for Multics) on a machine with a 9-bit byte and a 36-bit word.
In any case, after 35+ years of development, I *don't* want to see how much cruft has accumulated. There are things Man Was Not Meant To Know -- that's one of them.
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I had the "opportunity" to work as a systems operator on *6* Multics systems, from 1986 to 1988. (Yes, I'm listed with Multicians.org.) Your interpretations of some of the goals of the Multics project is somewhat colored by modern technology. Let me explain what some of those goals meant to the Multicians, and why they still aren't met by modern operating systems:
Continuous operation analogous to power & telephone services
This meant that the entire system was hot swappable: disk drives, CPUs, Memory units, IO units. Of course, your odds of the system surviving the addition or subtraction of any one of these were... low. This was more a function of the hardware architecture than the OS, but most modern computers don't take this to the extremes of Multics. Since hardware is so cheap, it's much more effective to build redundant clusters with shared, redundant storagem where you add and subtract entire systems, instead of adding and subtracting components.
A wide range of system configurations, changeable without system or user program reorganization.
This is the hot-swappable hardware thang again. You could add a CPU to a system without interrupting the processing on the rest of the system. System software updates were quite a different matter -- that generally required a system restart, and there were still "system" drives whose failure could cause the entire system to crash.
Support for selective controlled information sharing.
This refers to classifying information, not filesystems. Multics could run with Classified, Secret, and Top-Secret information (and programs) all co-resident, and without a lower-classification program being able to access higher-classification information. No modern operating system works this way; the set of systems that replaced the Multics group that I worked on was *3* separate Unix networks, one for each security classification.
Hierarchical structures of information for system administration and decentralization of user activities.
This refers to the traditional hierarchical file structure, with hierarchical user management thrown in for good measure. What CP/M and MS-DOS stole from Unix, Unix in turn stole from Multics.
In general, Multics achieved its goals, though the cost was too high. More recent operating environments have judged the cost of some of those goals (primarily security) to be so unrealistic as to be completely undesirable. While I think that Multics aimed too high on some goals, I think that too many operating systems (including Linux) aim too low.
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I believe that George Will's defense of the Electoral College is predicated on his belief that there should only be 2 parties: the Republicans and everyone else. Thus Will's observation that "The two party system will not survive the abandonment of [the] winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes." He's worried about preserving the status quo, instead of allowing equal representation to all voters.
Will also believes in the one-buck, one-vote system... excuse me... he believes in no limits on campaign contributions or campaign spending, since any limits would be limits on the candidate's (or contributer's) First Amendment rights. I don't think he's right, but he has some good points: most of the campaign finance rules either eliminate anonymous speech, or can be interpreted as censoring speech (ie: after you've spent your limit, you're not allowed to say anything else). I don't have any good answers to these issues... anyone else got any bright ideas?
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The GeForce 2 MX would probably be the best for Linux gaming (best driver support), but that would require XFree 4.0. Why do you want 3.3.6, just out of curiousity?
Speed. Everything review of 3D cards that has compared performance under XF3.3.6 with XF4.0 has rated XF4.0 as slower. If I'm getting a less expensive card, it might as well be one that gets the most out my environment.
Time. I'm running RedHat 6.2 (my preferred distro until RedHat gets most of the 7.0 bugs out) and I would prefer not to waste time chasing down XFree86 4.0 bugs in addition to chasing down adapter 'features'. I'd rather spend my meager free time enjoying myself... <g>
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I'm only interested in Linux gaming, and I'm not a super-fast speed-freak gamer, and I don't have an infinite budget. These cards look nice, but which ones have Linux drivers, and what versions of XFree86 do they support?
I was pretty happy with my Matrox Millenium G200 card until I tried to load Q3 Arena... figuring out which drivers to load where and how to configure them was more effort than I could afford. I would like to replace it, but I want something that works with XFree86 3.3.6 and Q3A. Recommendations?
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Welcome to leap before looking school. You have successfully leaped to a conclusion without looking at the surrounding facts. To help you better understand your position, here are some facts that you may have missed:
CCVS = Credit Card Verification System
This is software intended to help online merchants interoperate with existing credit card clearing houses.
Credit Card Clearing Houses use proprietary software!
Red Hat (or more likely, the company they bought CCVS from) probably had to sign a lot of NDAs in order to get access to the specifications for those proprietary protocols.
Releasing the source code to the resulting application would violate those NDAs.
Red Hat is providing open source APIs to CCVS which allows developers to build open source applications that integrate with proprietary protocols.
Thus Red Hat has released the software with a license that complies with the legal requirements, but still allows merchants to build Linux solutions. This is a GOOD thing. For details see this.
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E*Trade totally breached your 5th and 6th amendment rights.
How many times does this have to be repeated? The Bill of Rights only restricts the actions of the Federal government, and to a lesser degree, the actions of State and Local governments. Period. The Bill of Rights does not restrict private or corporate citizens.
What E*Trade did violated NASD guidelines, which they have to agree to abide by or face additional SEC regulations... so it was right for them to get slapped... but even so they didn't violate Federal law. It's not against Federal law to be sleazy and slimy...
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I first read "The Shockwave Rider" on the suggestion of the head of Academic Computing at the college I attended. He loaned me his copy, and I was hooked. I think he wanted me to read it so that if I was destined to be a hacker, at least I might be an ethical one. I suppose it worked... <grin>
I spent the next 10 years hunting through used book stores looking for a copy (it was out of print at the time). Eventually I found a copy at a SF convention, and I was happy... and then I found more copies and bought them too, just so I would have copies to give other people when the need arises. Now that it's back in print, that makes it easier... but I still prefer the first edition cover.
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Now what we need is a list of distributions that deliver the minimums that the LDPS recommends, and/or what is necessary to bring any particular distribution up to snuff. Without such a list, we're making the game harder for the new Linux developer to play, which will not endear Linux to anyone.
I'm relatively certain that RedHat 6.2 meets the minimum criteria, but what updates (if any) would be necessary for earlier RedHat releases? What about SuSE, Mandrake, Debian and everyone else's Favorite Distribution?
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Unix programmers seems to dislike using threads in their applications. After all, they can just fork(); and run along instead of using the thread functions. But, that's not important right now.
I know why I dislike threads in C/C++ applications, particularly web applications: If one thread breaks, you break the server, whereas with forked processes, if one process dies, the rest of the server keeps running. In addition, not all libraries (in particular database APIs) are threadsafe, which makes writing multi-threaded servers much more error-prone than writing single-threaded servers.
I know from where I speak: Netscape's Enterprise Server, which is much faster than Apache on equivalent hardware, is much more error-prone, particularly with 3rd-party NSAPI modules, than Apache, and almost all of it directly related to threading issues (the rest is due to it being closed source -- don't get me started on that). Which is why I just proposed Apache on Solaris for a web solution instead of Netscape, I mean iPlanet.
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(2) use of such Documents from this Server is for informational and non-commercial or personal use only and will not be copied or posted on any network computer or broadcast in any media -- This seems to preclude using this document as source material for building an interoperable interface to MS-Kerberos, and
Elements of Microsoft websites are protected by trade dress, trademark, unfair competition, and other laws and may not be copied or imitated in whole or in part. -- So Microsoft is depending upon anti-trust laws to protect them from unfair competition?
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It's Sun's software, they can do with it what they will. If they want to give it away for free, they can. If they want to charge hundreds of dollars per copy, they can. When you spend millions of dollars to buy Star Office away from them, you can do with it what you want, but not until then.
Don't like the price? Use something else. Don't like the features? Use something else. Don't like the license? Use something else. Don't like the interface? Use something else. There are plenty of alternatives. You're not required to use Star Office, and you're not entitled to free perpetual upgrades delivered your way, when you want them.
Sun is offering several low-cost ways to get a product that would otherwise be worth several hundred dollars per copy. Why do you feel you have a right to complain? It costs Sun a lot of money to package each separate distribution; presumably Sun has determined (either through market research or use of a Ouija board) that most of the users who would pay money for a CD would also be willing to pay a little more and get a manual as well. If you disagree, then by all means send Sun a polite note suggesting a change, but why whine about it here?
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The answer for why the big office suite vendors haven't banded together in the same manner as the OpenDWG Alliance seems pretty self-evident to me. I'm sure that each of these software manufacturers have at one time or another signed an NDA with regards to the MS Office file formats. Once they did that, they were precluded from sharing that information amongst themselves. End of question.
As for why they signed those NDAs? Again self-evident: early access. If Corel or Lotus wanted to be able to support the new file formats in a timely fashion, they need to know what the spec is well in advance -- TechNet doesn't get that sort of new information fast enough. For that matter, when you subscribe to TechNet, you're signing a limited NDA with Microsoft; I'd check the fine print before I depended upon TechNet information...
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I'm not here to defend the MPAA or the DMCA, and certainly not the creator of the MPAA ratings -- I hate them all as much as the next slashdotter -- but I am highly disappointed with the way most of the posters to this thread have been treating Mr. Valenti.
At the time of this deposition he was 79 years old and claimed to have a 102 degree fever. I've been that sick before and I don't think I would have stood up to a full deposition. If you think being grilled by a hostile lawyer when you're that sick, you've never been that sick. Give it a rest -- he's an old man, he's sick, he may even be dying -- if you can't give him any respect for living that long and still being active and productive, then I can't give your views any respect, and no one else will either.
On the other hand, I have to admit that it was an excellent tactic by Mr. Valenti's lawyers. I think Mr. Garbus got sucker-punched; he got a mostly worthless deposition, and whenever he goes to use it to try and discredit Mr. Valenti he's going to get laughed at in court. <sigh>
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Somewhat related to this is the trend by lots of fascist homeowner's associations to ban even mini-satellite dishes (that could be used for internet access) where they are visible from the street. Interestingly, the FCC has set down rules thwapping the homeowner's associations, and freeing homeowners to put up dishes. The only thing protecting us is that most homeowner association directors are so hidebound and archaic, they probably don't deal with the internet much (at least, not in my association...bunch of cane-wielding nazis).
Funny you should mention that. I ended up on the Board of Directors for my HOA because the HOA was trying to make rulings about satellite dishes. I explained the FCC rules to them and talked them out of making any rules -- make a rule that you can't enforce and you weaken all of the rest of the rules too -- and they practically drafted me the next time they had an opening on the board. I do my best to keep any extreme ideas from seeing the light of day.
Don't fight the HOA -- get involved with it and subvert it from within!
I've recently had the task of creating an in-house database driven app. By splitting it into a three tier system with a layer between the DBM (initially MySQL) and the web code, I have the option of swapping out SQL servers with only a fraction of the effort of rewriting the whole system for a new database.
It may not run as blazing fast as an app tied directly to the DBM, but I consider not being tied to a specific DBM to be a Very Good Thing. Does anyone else think this is a good idea?
Hell yes!
I'm in the process of building a data-collection and reporting application -- with database independence a requirement. MySQL fit the bill for the initial implementation for several reasons:
It's Tiny -- this application had to run on low-budget hardware (Pentium 133, 32MB RAM). Don't even think about installing Oracle on something that small.
It's Fast -- when processor power is a limitation, you want your database to be using that power efficiently.
It's Reliable Enough -- MySQL doesn't support transactions, but our servers have UPSes, and most of our data collection platforms have at least some level of redundancy. That's good enough for our needs.
It's Easy to Administer -- implementing an Oracle database usually means hiring an Oracle DBA to babysit the database, and likewise for the other enterprise databases. Not all customers can afford a fulltime DBA, and I'm not interested in being a DBA either. MySQL is pretty easy to configure for the long term (though it could be even easier), and my customers want that more than anything else.
While I'd love to have transactions and subqueries available to me, in the final analysis, my application doesn't need them (as far as most of my processes are concerned, there's no such thing as an RDBMS -- most processes are talking CORBA to a database frontend, and the frontend handles queuing DBMS requests itself). Why? Because neither SQL nor ODBC/JDBC are truly database independent.
In the long run, I'll be supporting Oracle, DB2, even MS SQL Server... but for now MySQL is good enough.
It has been my experience that postgres is just hideously slow. After removing "time travel" from the database engine, things improved greatly but postgres is still one of the (if not the) slowest SQL engines available. However, postgres is one of the most complete SQL implementations you can find (free and in source form.) It's not a speed demon, nor was it designed to be -- make it work, then make it fast.
Let me follow up to that.
Once upon a time I spent a year and a half developing applications for Illustra, the commercial follow-on to Postgres. Illustra had the same features as Postgres, plus SQL-compatibility, plus all of the standard SQL datatypes, while still including all of the ORDBMS features of Postgres. They even had support.
What Illustra didn't have, couldn't have, and what Postgres will never have is speed. The Object-Relational data model is not as efficient at doing plain Relational data work -- it can't be. Using Illustra/Postgres for normal relational databases is like trying to fight Mike Tyson with one arm tied behind your back -- you're playing the other guy's (in this case Oracle/DB2/Sybase) game, and giving him points to start out. Why is this important? Because all of the database APIs (SQL, ODBC, JDBC) only understand rows in tables with cursors, and all of the back-end reporting engines only cope with relational tools.
Illustra and Postgres are much more interesting for storing object data... but the only way to take advantage of their capabilities is to use their special APIs. At which point you've thrown away portability and standards, and you've bought yourself a proprietary (even if it's open source) solution. It may be the perfect solution to your problem, but like a black hole, it will warp everything around it. Take replication -- replication is hard for ordinary RDBMSes to implement reliably; when you add object IDs to every row of every table in every database, you multiply the problem, since you can't just copy the rows directly from one database/table to another, for the same reason that you can't easily serialize a C structure containing memory pointers -- all of the pointers (object IDs) will be wrong.
I should really be talking about Illustra in the past tense -- the company got bought out by Informix several years ago, and Informix folded most of Illustra's technology into their Universal Server database. Dr. Stonebreaker (the creator of Ingres, Postgres, and Illustra) went on to become the VP of Technology for Informix.
This is extreemly important. I have so many tools on my resume because I was always been willing to say, shure I'll try, learn, and do it. It sure helps that I bothered to learn the fundamental computer science theories and am willing to learn more.
I agree that it's important to know lots of tools, and to be willing to learn new tools, but I disagree about listing all of them. See my resume for an example. As someone who's spent a fair amount of time evaluating resumes, I would see most of your list as noise... I would expect anyone who has Unix programming experience to be able to use shells and editors. I would be more interested in knowing how much experience you have with the important skills on your list: C, C++, Perl, Oracle, Unix, Windows. How long (and how long ago) did you use them, and what did you use them for?
My rule of thumb for listing skills on my resume is simple -- only list those skills that you would want someone to ask you to use for a job today, or those skills that demonstrate depth of expertise in a specific area. I could list COBOL, Fortran, and 40 other programming languages, but I don't have (a) any interest in coding in them today, and (b) enough experience with any of them to consider myself an expert. On the other hand, I can always brush up on them if it's important for a job.
If you have more education than skills, list your education first. If you have more skills than education (my case) then list the skills first. Never leave time gaps in your employment history -- it makes employers wonder why you weren't employed. Only list the non-paying jobs for one of two reasons: either to fill a gap where you weren't professionally employed, or when you don't have enough paid experience on your resume. Nothing before college matters unless (1) it was a professionally relevant job, and (2) you've been out of school less than 10 years.
One last piece of advice -- don't job hop without a damned good reason. While it may be more acceptable these days to hire someone who's worked 6 months here and 12 months there for their entire career, given a choice between someone like that, and someone who works 2-4 years at any particular job, most employers will take the latter person -- because he/she is demonstrably more stable, and unlikely to leave just when they're becoming useful. If you have had to leave a position after a short amount of time, make sure you have a good explanation (and if it's short, so much the better). It's OK to state that your style didn't match the company's style... as long as you only use that excuse once.
True story: I've only worked at one job (other than my current job) for less than a year -- the company reorganized and moved from Connecticut to Texas, and I wasn't interested in moving to Texas. In every interview I've had since I left that company, I've been asked why I was only there for 6 months -- and I've always explained that the company moved to Texas, and I didn't think that I would look good in boots and a Stetson. Everyone laughs, and we move on to the next item... but every interviewer has noticed the short-time job.
It was news Sunday night when I wrote here about it. On Tuesday morning it's just history.
The most telling point about this article is that the posts about the moderation (or lack thereof) score consistently higher than the posts about the UCITA and what to do about it.
Now for an off-topic rant... about off-topic posts: Enough with the "my number is lower than your number" nonsense. Longevity doesn't matter if you don't make good posts; neither does Karma.
That said, now here's my suggestion: Modify slashdot so that the editors have the option to move a higly-rated, but obviously off-topic, post to it's own article, along with all of its' own responses. If an off-topic post gets moderated up to 5, then it's obviously worth discussing, but it shouldn't be cluttering up the main threads discussing an article. For that matter, I think that "Off-Topic" should be split into two seperate moderations: OT Good and OT Bad. "OT Good" would be used to indicate that a post is off-topic from the original discussion, but worth discussing on its own merits. "OT Bad" would have the same connotations that the current "Off Topic" rating has: a post that doesn't add anything to the discussion at hand, and isn't worth discussing on its own merits.
I'd also like to see moderation of articles -- but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) in Japan is supposed to prevent insanity like this. (Mostly as a result of Betamax vs VHS). Since their member corporations are on both sides of the line, has anyone heard of them taking a stand on this issue?
MITI has been out of favor for the last several years, primarily because they didn't do what they were supposed to do: keep the Japanese economy booming, and keep beating up on the Americans. Thus, today MITI is in no position to leverage any of the Japanese corporations. Too bad, so sad.
Does DVD +RW stand a chance at this point to compete with the DVD Forum's Products? Unless they can come out with a cheaper product that works with all existing products I have my doubts.
With C3D planning on having 1st generation products available by Q1 2001, will either group be able to move in time to make a difference. After all, it's not like most of us will have DVD-R loyalty in the next two years. (yes, some will, but will enough?) A lot of us went from floppy to zip to CD-R. With competing DVDs I'm willing to wait for C3Ds.
The only loyalty I'm apt to have will be to the technology that I've already invested in -- a DVD player. If it won't read my existing DVD media, and write media that is compatible with my existing system components, I won't be buying it. As an individual user (even with too many computers to back up) I just don't need to backup gigabytes of data on a single disk. As an IT professional, I might have a different opinion, but none of the technology is anywhere close to affordable yet.
Does this mean the end of ISA? If you have a CD, CD-RW, DVD, and Hard Drive then you're full up. With DVD-R, DVD-RW (635ns & 650ns versions), DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM, I'm not sure I'll still be able to lug this thing to lan parties.
Well, you can have up to 8 IDE devices (4 controllers, 2 devices per controller) in a Wintel machine, presuming that your case is big enough, and your power supply is big enough. Don't worry; no doubt someone will figure another kludge to allow more than 8 IDE devices coexist.
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Buzz ... wrong. It depends upon where you shop. Sales taxes are transactional taxes, and what is taxable in the transaction depends upon the jurisdiction (typically state, but ocassionally county or city). In Virginia, used books are taxable. In New York, x% goes to the state, and y% goes to the county -- and what's taxable depends upon the county.
For myself, I prefer to buy books that are in good condition ... and if I have time to go to a used book store and search for good condition books, I can buy more books for a constant amount of money. If I don't have lots of time, and don't mind spending more, I can go to Borders and get a new book. If I don't have *any* time, then I'll shop Amazon. What I wish is that my favorite used book store had a decent (onlioe?) catalog, so I could go in and find what I want quickly, instead of having to visually-grep every single shelf in SF/Fantasy.
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Philip K. Dick's "Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep" was a so-so book -- too disjointed to be truly entertaining and captivating. "Blade Runner," the movie Ridley Scott made out of that book was a cinematic masterpiece.
More movies that were better than the original book:
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The embedded marketplace is very different from your typical computer/os/software/hardware market. In the embedded market, the developer typically ends up hard-linking his application into the OS, since both pieces are going to be jammed into the same EPROM (or Flash if you've got the budget). To save space, often the developer will decide which OS services he needs, and discard the rest (ie: if you're not building a network appliance, why load the ethernet drivers?) An embedded OS is really more like a development framework -- it gives your application the tools it needs to function without the programmer having to implement those tools from scratch.
If you attempt to GPL the kernel to an embedded OS, then you're going to force developers to release all of their source code, simply because they linked their code with the OS. If you put this restriction on an embedded OS, then no embedded developers will buy your OS, no matter how good it is. On the other hand, either LGPL or MPL can be commercially viable, while still encouraging developers to contribute.
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You've got it turned around -- Unix is similar to Multics, since Multics came first -- but I'll take you seriously anyways:
On a more humorous note ...
And, last but not least ...
On a historical note, Primos (the Pr1me Operating System), was a much more direct steal from Multics, down to implementing CPL exactly. I learned Primos years before I used Multics, and Multics was merely more difficult to administrate.
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The source won't do you a lot of good; it's all written in PL/I and ALM (Assembly Language for Multics) on a machine with a 9-bit byte and a 36-bit word.
In any case, after 35+ years of development, I *don't* want to see how much cruft has accumulated. There are things Man Was Not Meant To Know -- that's one of them.
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I had the "opportunity" to work as a systems operator on *6* Multics systems, from 1986 to 1988. (Yes, I'm listed with Multicians.org.) Your interpretations of some of the goals of the Multics project is somewhat colored by modern technology. Let me explain what some of those goals meant to the Multicians, and why they still aren't met by modern operating systems:
This meant that the entire system was hot swappable: disk drives, CPUs, Memory units, IO units. Of course, your odds of the system surviving the addition or subtraction of any one of these were
This is the hot-swappable hardware thang again. You could add a CPU to a system without interrupting the processing on the rest of the system. System software updates were quite a different matter -- that generally required a system restart, and there were still "system" drives whose failure could cause the entire system to crash.
This refers to classifying information, not filesystems. Multics could run with Classified, Secret, and Top-Secret information (and programs) all co-resident, and without a lower-classification program being able to access higher-classification information. No modern operating system works this way; the set of systems that replaced the Multics group that I worked on was *3* separate Unix networks, one for each security classification.
This refers to the traditional hierarchical file structure, with hierarchical user management thrown in for good measure. What CP/M and MS-DOS stole from Unix, Unix in turn stole from Multics.
In general, Multics achieved its goals, though the cost was too high. More recent operating environments have judged the cost of some of those goals (primarily security) to be so unrealistic as to be completely undesirable. While I think that Multics aimed too high on some goals, I think that too many operating systems (including Linux) aim too low.
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I believe that George Will's defense of the Electoral College is predicated on his belief that there should only be 2 parties: the Republicans and everyone else. Thus Will's observation that "The two party system will not survive the abandonment of [the] winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes." He's worried about preserving the status quo, instead of allowing equal representation to all voters.
Will also believes in the one-buck, one-vote system ... excuse me ... he believes in no limits on campaign contributions or campaign spending, since any limits would be limits on the candidate's (or contributer's) First Amendment rights. I don't think he's right, but he has some good points: most of the campaign finance rules either eliminate anonymous speech, or can be interpreted as censoring speech (ie: after you've spent your limit, you're not allowed to say anything else). I don't have any good answers to these issues ... anyone else got any bright ideas?
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Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
I'm only interested in Linux gaming, and I'm not a super-fast speed-freak gamer, and I don't have an infinite budget. These cards look nice, but which ones have Linux drivers, and what versions of XFree86 do they support?
I was pretty happy with my Matrox Millenium G200 card until I tried to load Q3 Arena ... figuring out which drivers to load where and how to configure them was more effort than I could afford. I would like to replace it, but I want something that works with XFree86 3.3.6 and Q3A. Recommendations?
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
CPSR sponsors The Social Security Number FAQ, which should answer all of your questions. Of course, don't expect to like any of the answers...
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Welcome to leap before looking school. You have successfully leaped to a conclusion without looking at the surrounding facts. To help you better understand your position, here are some facts that you may have missed:
This is software intended to help online merchants interoperate with existing credit card clearing houses.
Red Hat (or more likely, the company they bought CCVS from) probably had to sign a lot of NDAs in order to get access to the specifications for those proprietary protocols.
Thus Red Hat has released the software with a license that complies with the legal requirements, but still allows merchants to build Linux solutions. This is a GOOD thing. For details see this.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
How many times does this have to be repeated? The Bill of Rights only restricts the actions of the Federal government, and to a lesser degree, the actions of State and Local governments. Period. The Bill of Rights does not restrict private or corporate citizens.
What E*Trade did violated NASD guidelines, which they have to agree to abide by or face additional SEC regulations ... so it was right for them to get slapped ... but even so they didn't violate Federal law. It's not against Federal law to be sleazy and slimy...
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
I first read "The Shockwave Rider" on the suggestion of the head of Academic Computing at the college I attended. He loaned me his copy, and I was hooked. I think he wanted me to read it so that if I was destined to be a hacker, at least I might be an ethical one. I suppose it worked... <grin>
I spent the next 10 years hunting through used book stores looking for a copy (it was out of print at the time). Eventually I found a copy at a SF convention, and I was happy ... and then I found more copies and bought them too, just so I would have copies to give other people when the need arises. Now that it's back in print, that makes it easier ... but I still prefer the first edition cover.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Now what we need is a list of distributions that deliver the minimums that the LDPS recommends, and/or what is necessary to bring any particular distribution up to snuff. Without such a list, we're making the game harder for the new Linux developer to play, which will not endear Linux to anyone.
I'm relatively certain that RedHat 6.2 meets the minimum criteria, but what updates (if any) would be necessary for earlier RedHat releases? What about SuSE, Mandrake, Debian and everyone else's Favorite Distribution?
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
I know why I dislike threads in C/C++ applications, particularly web applications: If one thread breaks, you break the server, whereas with forked processes, if one process dies, the rest of the server keeps running. In addition, not all libraries (in particular database APIs) are threadsafe, which makes writing multi-threaded servers much more error-prone than writing single-threaded servers.
I know from where I speak: Netscape's Enterprise Server, which is much faster than Apache on equivalent hardware, is much more error-prone, particularly with 3rd-party NSAPI modules, than Apache, and almost all of it directly related to threading issues (the rest is due to it being closed source -- don't get me started on that). Which is why I just proposed Apache on Solaris for a web solution instead of Netscape, I mean iPlanet.
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-- This seems to preclude using this document as source material for building an interoperable interface to MS-Kerberos, and
-- So Microsoft is depending upon anti-trust laws to protect them from unfair competition?
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
... and get a life.
It's Sun's software, they can do with it what they will. If they want to give it away for free, they can. If they want to charge hundreds of dollars per copy, they can. When you spend millions of dollars to buy Star Office away from them, you can do with it what you want, but not until then.
Don't like the price? Use something else. Don't like the features? Use something else. Don't like the license? Use something else. Don't like the interface? Use something else. There are plenty of alternatives. You're not required to use Star Office, and you're not entitled to free perpetual upgrades delivered your way, when you want them.
Sun is offering several low-cost ways to get a product that would otherwise be worth several hundred dollars per copy. Why do you feel you have a right to complain? It costs Sun a lot of money to package each separate distribution; presumably Sun has determined (either through market research or use of a Ouija board) that most of the users who would pay money for a CD would also be willing to pay a little more and get a manual as well. If you disagree, then by all means send Sun a polite note suggesting a change, but why whine about it here?
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The answer for why the big office suite vendors haven't banded together in the same manner as the OpenDWG Alliance seems pretty self-evident to me. I'm sure that each of these software manufacturers have at one time or another signed an NDA with regards to the MS Office file formats. Once they did that, they were precluded from sharing that information amongst themselves. End of question.
As for why they signed those NDAs? Again self-evident: early access. If Corel or Lotus wanted to be able to support the new file formats in a timely fashion, they need to know what the spec is well in advance -- TechNet doesn't get that sort of new information fast enough. For that matter, when you subscribe to TechNet, you're signing a limited NDA with Microsoft; I'd check the fine print before I depended upon TechNet information...
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I'm not here to defend the MPAA or the DMCA, and certainly not the creator of the MPAA ratings -- I hate them all as much as the next slashdotter -- but I am highly disappointed with the way most of the posters to this thread have been treating Mr. Valenti.
At the time of this deposition he was 79 years old and claimed to have a 102 degree fever. I've been that sick before and I don't think I would have stood up to a full deposition. If you think being grilled by a hostile lawyer when you're that sick, you've never been that sick. Give it a rest -- he's an old man, he's sick, he may even be dying -- if you can't give him any respect for living that long and still being active and productive, then I can't give your views any respect, and no one else will either.
On the other hand, I have to admit that it was an excellent tactic by Mr. Valenti's lawyers. I think Mr. Garbus got sucker-punched; he got a mostly worthless deposition, and whenever he goes to use it to try and discredit Mr. Valenti he's going to get laughed at in court. <sigh>
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it, or because it doesn't add any value to the discussion?Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Funny you should mention that. I ended up on the Board of Directors for my HOA because the HOA was trying to make rulings about satellite dishes. I explained the FCC rules to them and talked them out of making any rules -- make a rule that you can't enforce and you weaken all of the rest of the rules too -- and they practically drafted me the next time they had an opening on the board. I do my best to keep any extreme ideas from seeing the light of day.
Don't fight the HOA -- get involved with it and subvert it from within!
I've recently had the task of creating an in-house database driven app. By splitting it into a three tier system with a layer between the DBM (initially MySQL) and the web code, I have the option of swapping out SQL servers with only a fraction of the effort of rewriting the whole system for a new database.
It may not run as blazing fast as an app tied directly to the DBM, but I consider not being tied to a specific DBM to be a Very Good Thing. Does anyone else think this is a good idea?
Hell yes!
I'm in the process of building a data-collection and reporting application -- with database independence a requirement. MySQL fit the bill for the initial implementation for several reasons:
While I'd love to have transactions and subqueries available to me, in the final analysis, my application doesn't need them (as far as most of my processes are concerned, there's no such thing as an RDBMS -- most processes are talking CORBA to a database frontend, and the frontend handles queuing DBMS requests itself). Why? Because neither SQL nor ODBC/JDBC are truly database independent.
In the long run, I'll be supporting Oracle, DB2, even MS SQL Server ... but for now MySQL is good enough.
Let me follow up to that.
Once upon a time I spent a year and a half developing applications for Illustra, the commercial follow-on to Postgres. Illustra had the same features as Postgres, plus SQL-compatibility, plus all of the standard SQL datatypes, while still including all of the ORDBMS features of Postgres. They even had support.
What Illustra didn't have, couldn't have, and what Postgres will never have is speed. The Object-Relational data model is not as efficient at doing plain Relational data work -- it can't be. Using Illustra/Postgres for normal relational databases is like trying to fight Mike Tyson with one arm tied behind your back -- you're playing the other guy's (in this case Oracle/DB2/Sybase) game, and giving him points to start out. Why is this important? Because all of the database APIs (SQL, ODBC, JDBC) only understand rows in tables with cursors, and all of the back-end reporting engines only cope with relational tools.
Illustra and Postgres are much more interesting for storing object data ... but the only way to take advantage of their capabilities is to use their special APIs. At which point you've thrown away portability and standards, and you've bought yourself a proprietary (even if it's open source) solution. It may be the perfect solution to your problem, but like a black hole, it will warp everything around it. Take replication -- replication is hard for ordinary RDBMSes to implement reliably; when you add object IDs to every row of every table in every database, you multiply the problem, since you can't just copy the rows directly from one database/table to another, for the same reason that you can't easily serialize a C structure containing memory pointers -- all of the pointers (object IDs) will be wrong.
I should really be talking about Illustra in the past tense -- the company got bought out by Informix several years ago, and Informix folded most of Illustra's technology into their Universal Server database. Dr. Stonebreaker (the creator of Ingres, Postgres, and Illustra) went on to become the VP of Technology for Informix.
I agree that it's important to know lots of tools, and to be willing to learn new tools, but I disagree about listing all of them. See my resume for an example. As someone who's spent a fair amount of time evaluating resumes, I would see most of your list as noise ... I would expect anyone who has Unix programming experience to be able to use shells and editors. I would be more interested in knowing how much experience you have with the important skills on your list: C, C++, Perl, Oracle, Unix, Windows. How long (and how long ago) did you use them, and what did you use them for?
My rule of thumb for listing skills on my resume is simple -- only list those skills that you would want someone to ask you to use for a job today, or those skills that demonstrate depth of expertise in a specific area. I could list COBOL, Fortran, and 40 other programming languages, but I don't have (a) any interest in coding in them today, and (b) enough experience with any of them to consider myself an expert. On the other hand, I can always brush up on them if it's important for a job.
If you have more education than skills, list your education first. If you have more skills than education (my case) then list the skills first. Never leave time gaps in your employment history -- it makes employers wonder why you weren't employed. Only list the non-paying jobs for one of two reasons: either to fill a gap where you weren't professionally employed, or when you don't have enough paid experience on your resume. Nothing before college matters unless (1) it was a professionally relevant job, and (2) you've been out of school less than 10 years.
One last piece of advice -- don't job hop without a damned good reason. While it may be more acceptable these days to hire someone who's worked 6 months here and 12 months there for their entire career, given a choice between someone like that, and someone who works 2-4 years at any particular job, most employers will take the latter person -- because he/she is demonstrably more stable, and unlikely to leave just when they're becoming useful. If you have had to leave a position after a short amount of time, make sure you have a good explanation (and if it's short, so much the better). It's OK to state that your style didn't match the company's style ... as long as you only use that excuse once.
True story: I've only worked at one job (other than my current job) for less than a year -- the company reorganized and moved from Connecticut to Texas, and I wasn't interested in moving to Texas. In every interview I've had since I left that company, I've been asked why I was only there for 6 months -- and I've always explained that the company moved to Texas, and I didn't think that I would look good in boots and a Stetson. Everyone laughs, and we move on to the next item ... but every interviewer has noticed the short-time job.
It was news Sunday night when I wrote here about it. On Tuesday morning it's just history.
The most telling point about this article is that the posts about the moderation (or lack thereof) score consistently higher than the posts about the UCITA and what to do about it.
Now for an off-topic rant ... about off-topic posts: Enough with the "my number is lower than your number" nonsense. Longevity doesn't matter if you don't make good posts; neither does Karma.
That said, now here's my suggestion: Modify slashdot so that the editors have the option to move a higly-rated, but obviously off-topic, post to it's own article, along with all of its' own responses. If an off-topic post gets moderated up to 5, then it's obviously worth discussing, but it shouldn't be cluttering up the main threads discussing an article. For that matter, I think that "Off-Topic" should be split into two seperate moderations: OT Good and OT Bad. "OT Good" would be used to indicate that a post is off-topic from the original discussion, but worth discussing on its own merits. "OT Bad" would have the same connotations that the current "Off Topic" rating has: a post that doesn't add anything to the discussion at hand, and isn't worth discussing on its own merits.
I'd also like to see moderation of articles -- but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
MITI has been out of favor for the last several years, primarily because they didn't do what they were supposed to do: keep the Japanese economy booming, and keep beating up on the Americans. Thus, today MITI is in no position to leverage any of the Japanese corporations. Too bad, so sad.
The only loyalty I'm apt to have will be to the technology that I've already invested in -- a DVD player. If it won't read my existing DVD media, and write media that is compatible with my existing system components, I won't be buying it. As an individual user (even with too many computers to back up) I just don't need to backup gigabytes of data on a single disk. As an IT professional, I might have a different opinion, but none of the technology is anywhere close to affordable yet.
Well, you can have up to 8 IDE devices (4 controllers, 2 devices per controller) in a Wintel machine, presuming that your case is big enough, and your power supply is big enough. Don't worry; no doubt someone will figure another kludge to allow more than 8 IDE devices coexist.