And when they're taught religion in the science classroom - namely atheism - and athiest organisations such as the National Academy of Science wishes to force students to only learn their religion - this is okay too?
But also in that version of GTA, you'd hear the voice of Elvis Presley going "uh-huh uh-huh" and so on. I could never work out if it was simply random or if there was something you did that triggered the king.
Steve Ballmer is not a stupid man. He fully understands that his ability to dance around a stage like a primate, and to toss company furniture around, and to make death threats against other individuals; and generally behave anti-socially and immaturely and in a manner that would get regular folks like you and I slapped in gaol rests solely on the fact he has made an arse-load of money via his company's illegally-obtained monopoly - and gotten away with it all to the point where the arguably strongest government in the world won't touch him or his criminal organisation.
You'd be dancing around too with that kind of injustice^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgood fortune.
I agree. Visual Studio is a tool, now you can put an M16 carbine in the hands of a trained, experienced soldier and you can put one in the hands of a 13-yr-old punk wannabe. Both could be shooting people but its not usually the M16's fault where the bullets go.
The real problem that needs addressing are the more subtle things like who needs to be shot, is a M16 required for this mission or should we use a knife instead, or even does shooting people address the problem or are we meant to be building houses and providing clean water and educating on good irrigation techniques instead?
Too often I've witnessed innocent people die (in this metaphor) because some punk with little control over recoil is indiscriminately shooting things they can't see.
I did go off the track with the personal experience, which wasn't the point. My point was somewhat twofold, first that Visual Studio is, while a useful tool, also a vehicle for what the real problem is that TFA is trying to get at (in my interpretation). That problem being a virulent culture in IT that undermines and compromises quality and long-term success for short-term gain. "Brain rot" is a symptom of that problem, I was using my own experience to attempt to illustrate the evidence of this and just got carried away.
What I didn't say is that there's a lot of stuff where people's lives depend on software, from somewhat niche areas such as aircraft traffic control systems & GPS navigational aides to the potential of commodity office software with numerous known bugs to corrupt information in a database resulting in someone in desperate need of aide (say, a disabled or elderly person) not receiving it.
When people graduating now with tertiary degrees simply cannot solve those problems as they lack the basic brain functions to comprehend something outside the M$ environment, then as older & wiser people with those skills die off (or bugger off because they're sick of the crap) we eventually become unable to solve problems. Like how we're still speculating on exactly how the Mayans and Egyptians built their structures. Knowledge lost. As a geek I can't think of a more heinous crime against society.
And its not just Microsoft bashing, I don't give a flying f*** who promotes this kind of culture, they need to be stopped before they do any more damage than they already have. Visual Studio is the straw man here, its just a classic example of a situation where we know that the ratio of skilled programmers to morons who can paint stuff they memorized from a textbook is in the order of 1:20.
I've seen this sentiment a couple of times in this article, so I choose you to respond to. Congratulations;)
Some background first: I dropped out of University for two reasons, first I wasn't sure if I wanted to focus on software development or network administration and I wanted some industry experience. Second, there were far too many people there who could memorize textbooks and regurgitate the examples, and hence go exceedingly well in examinations which seemed to only test this attribute; yet who could not understand yet explain the concepts being "taught".
That group I labelled, through its abundance of occurrances, the Visual Basic programmers. Using the term "programmers" loosely, of course. They could paint applications really well (drag & drop little GUI shit around in Visual Studio and come up with something tangible) but you didn't even have to take them outside of Visual Studio for them to be well out of their depth (which they obviously are when you do). Just ask them to explain what any of the Visual Studio-generated code does. They have no freaking idea what their code does, they just know if they drag this here and drop that there and click here and type that, that they get foo.
Now, in a culture when IT professionals are treated less than dirt, particularly by those in management, the focus is on generating Maggi programs. You know, the classic 2-minute noodles. Tangible results ASAP, don't care that the weird geeky stuff looks like spaghetti and the cook can't tell you what its made of because they simply don't know. All they had to do was drag some shit out of a package and drop it into a saucepan and stir for a little bit.
Nobody denies that Visual Studio has features that are useful. What is under scrutiny here is the fact that it also has features, and there's some crossover, that enable complete dimwits to produce the kind of results management is looking for in the time they are looking for, leaving those who can actually design and develop software looking incompetent. The PHB doesn't care that the real hacker's design is far superior and the implementation robust, it took 4 weeks longer (because they understood the entire problem and handled all the cases) and dammit the client wants it NOW, who cares that its crap - that's just a small detail that can be fixed later - potentially for more money. This then forms a culture that a particular breed of "programmer" - namely those that can only use Microsoft tools and work solely on the Microsoft platform - are better and that Microsoft solutions are better; not because they are but simply because more quality people and alternative solutions are shut down before their full benefits are realised, because of the impetus on getting a quick buck and must have things NOW.
I work with someone who only last week could not comprehend exactly how they were going to go about doing a particular job as Visual Studio was not installed on the server. The job involved editing some XML config files and doing some minor Python programming. Visual Studio by default has absolutely zero Python support (Activestate and presumably others have $$$ plugins for it, but that's not the point). That particular sentiment came the day after I installed Vim (with the Cream suite - I do that on Windoze boxes to stop Windoze gumbies whining about the default keybindings - another symptom of "cannot cope outside the box") while they watched on, and we did some of the work together. The whole "outside the box" thing annoys me because this VB programmer culture festers this idea that those who do it the Microsoft Way are somehow immune to the requirement to be flexible. Case in point, there's no requirement for them to "put up with" using something other than Visual Studio - yet you take someone with Unix experience and the onus *is* on them to adapt. I know its because Unix people are far more flexible and generally smarter and more capable, but in reality it translates to our skills being taken for granted
This is a situation similar to why I gave up buying their games back when Diablo 2 was the in thing.
There's all this talk about game balance, but the fact is Blizzard have absolutely no idea what the concept is. Their rules and they way they implement things in the game are completely out of touch with their gaming community. For example, in D2 the ability to PK was there so players could duel or challenge each other - except there was no capability of saying "not interested". As soon as someone went into PK mode they could kill you whether you liked it or not. It became commonplace, out of necessity, that whenever someone tapped the PK button - even if it was accidentally because of its poor placement on screen - their entire party would turn on them. There were simply too many rogues (no pun intended) who would un-fun the game for so many people by PKing them - usually it was some lvl 90+ turboed char PKing some lvl 15 newbie with some duped super weapon. Blizzards response to this was to ignore it despite considerable customer input. Insteaqd, they bring out a whole swag of patches that get forced on you when you join the realms that nerfed your character. This was done in the name of "balance". What it meant was that all the hours you put in to honing particular skills, and more importantly getting friends to buy Blizzard's products so they could party with you so you all help each other out, is completely wasted. Yes, I'm extremely bitter about this if you can't tell by the fact I can recall this stuff 5 years later;)
Another example of their stupidity, someone who pirated their game generated a dupe CD key of a friend of mine, and this was detected and my friend's characters were all deleted off the realms. Blizzard would not respond to any communication regarding proving ownership and restoring even one character. That was hundreds of hours of time & effort (and reputation earned in the game) gone.
Coupled with the fact they refuse to bring out their games on better platforms like Linux left me with no choice but to dump their trashy games and crappier, borderline non-existant, service. And to be honest it hasn't been a great loss.
I don't know what part of Australia you live in, but in this part petrol has risen ~ 130%, houses have risen 85%, even milk has risen 5%. The only thing that hasn't risen is my salary!
According to a recent discussion on SAGE-AU the only way to get a pay rise is to get a new job. That's the expectation - you want more, you go elsewhere.
It's a mindset thing. Most people (yes, I recognise that's a generalisation) coming from that camp are adverse to change. You can't run any software in production that hasn't already been running in production for 15 years, that sort of thing. Having lost marketshare first to Linux and then to Windows, they are defeatist, and basically go to these conferences out of a sense of "meetings, the practical alternative to work" rather than in the hope of learning something, getting new contacts, an opportunity to think about things in a different way, etc. That's not a very good explanation, but it's all you're going to get:-P
You have to understand the Australian IT environment. The only people with any money to spend on *real* IT stuff is federal government and big business. FedGov are a subsidiary of Microsoft - they sold out 6 years ago - and big business, needing to talk with FedGov (public servants are a closed-minded bunch of lazy-arse neanderthals), have gone that way as well.
The Australian Unix & Open Systems Users Group is a bunch of old *BSD people wishing their OS of choice was relevent today, all the while working in Microsoft environments. It doesn't surprise me Microsoft have sent another person to rub their nostalgic egos into staying silent on the real issues, like the complete & utter illegal monopoly Microsoft have that has been destroying the IT industry for almost 2 decades, and how this has gone on unpunished.
Note that all the discussion in the resulting threads has been about web-based publically-available search engines.
Don't confuse this with a more generic "search engines" which includes the technology of companies like Autonomy, FAST, Verity, ISYS, and so on.
Autonomy's products have been doing a bloody good job at natural language search for almost a decade now (and they run on Linux as well as legacy platforms). Have you ever heard of Kenjin? These guys had a better desktop search engine 5 years before the so-called "major players" had anything at all. And of course its all distributed, modular, scalable, and maps security. If you need any of that.
BitKeeper is not "open source." Nobody ever got the source outside of Larry McVoy's company.
Wrong. BitKeeper originally was open source, and many Bitmover clients even now have the source under NDI. The situation changed for the majority of people because too many started breaking the license agreement, and Bitmover were forced to diminish rights because of this - they'd rather spend their money on engineers than lawyers.
Ubuntu needs to have the stability, whereas sid is basically to deliberately break things that need breaking for the next release.
I think sid needs to be caught up to the real world, then Ubuntu and any other Debian derivatives can leverage off that. I don't see the problem in Debian sid being the playground for developers from any Debian derivative in a co-maintenance fashion. There's no reason to fork for anything more than branding (and even that only intrudes on a subset of packages). Even in the event that one distribution has a need to do something different, let the computer figure that out.
case $distro in
Ubuntu) do_it_the_ubuntu_way;;
Progeny) do_it_the_progeny_way;;
*) do_it_the_default_debian_way;; esac
If I really was to redesign Debian, I would drop "testing" altogether, the "stable" release would be an annual snapshot on all architectures, and there would be no recommended distribution for people to run. Derivatives such as Ubuntu would base off sid, and folks just run whatever suits their needs. People running "stable" are encouraged to test packages in sid and each month there's an incremental stable release update so that the gap between stable and sid is not so huge. Items breaking binary compatibility (eg, recompiling everything with the next version of gcc) would be held back from stable for a quarterly or maybe bi-annual update (rather than the monthly one) just to give a bit of extra time to iron out any problems that might occur. Architectures that would normally hold back a release can retarget minor releases for a different period (ie, if arm can't make March, everyone else gets the March update and arm can sync in April instead). The only exception of course is the annual stable release. I would probably freeze for the quarter before it and actively promote bug-squashing parties during this time. The two monthly releases during the freeze would be release candidates. I really couldn't care less if nobody could work (as such) during the last month because rc2 was gold, they'd deserve the time off.
Like most people I agree its a bit of a "duh" to have moved far away from sarge. It's difficult to remain compatible with something that is so far behind the times it will be obselete on release. Even sid has moved away in some regards; yet even it is obselete in many areas. There is no business sense whatsoever in being chained to the old sloth.
Part of the compatibility problem is on Debian's side: many maintainers are annoyed that Ubuntu exists and choose to not work with them out of pride/arrogance. This attitude is something I hope Branden breaks in his new tenure as DPL.
This is where I think it will be very interesting. Branden has always been a progressive and practical person, with extremely little time for the kind of political rubbish that has prevented sarge from being released. We know that the platforms Ubuntu has chosen are the ones that matter for their market, and the ones that matter for the near future in the desktop and server market (with Sun dropping UltraSPARC for amd64) in general. We know there's already been talk of refocussing Debian such that architectures like arm that usually hold everything up will no longer do so.
So the way I see it, there's a lot of hand-waving going on here that could be completely irrelevent in the future as Debian is architecturally focussed the same as Ubuntu which should foster greater cooperation. Of course Ubuntu is clearly on the desktop side and not the server, so I guess it will have more of the eye-candy and desktop apps while Debian has a far greater range of packages; though it doesn't necessarily need to be that way. It would be fantastic if Ubuntu is simply re-branding the Debian desktop packages in a co-maintenance fashion.
My greatest gripe with Debian over the past 6 years is how they seemed to have wasted time arguing over pathetic things like should this document licensed under the GFDL really be in Debian, and have hence fallen from their position as the #1 distribution on the ball technically, always up-to-date (at least in sid) with what's out there, to being so far behind its becoming very tempting to switch. Come on, the commercial distros used to be the last to get anything new, now they are becoming the first. Okay, so Novell *wrote* Beagle but the source has always been available, why is is still not in sid (even an old version?). Call me out for not packaging it myself, but neither have you so that's hardly an argument. That's just one minor example. (and fwiw I did try packaging it myself, but the dependencies were also either not packaged or out of date and it became a much bigger and riskier task than I have time for)
I can understand Ian's frustration, he created Debian and then went on to found Progeny and I guess there's some angst/jealousy there over how popular Ubuntu has become in such a short time while Progeny hasn't quite seen that kind of success for however many years (most people forget it even exists unless prompted by some mention somewhere). Get over it. I've seen more cooperation from Ubuntu maintainers with "upstream" Debian than any other Debian fork as witnessed by changelogs of packages I use, I put their success down to this and their good business strategy/vision. Credit where credit is due. I hope this cooperation will increase in the future.
You'd swear Microsoft had some secret agenda to wipe you all out in a covert operation.
Only the agenda isn't secret (Halloween docs, et al) and the operations aren't covert (supporting DRM, software patents, abusing their illegal monopoly position to squash competitors, funding SCO and other anti-Linux legal battles, funding FUDpapers, funding whole governments,...)
Debian has always been a very strong player in the Linux server "community". In fact, I upgraded my servers from Redhat to Debian (8 years ago) because pretty much everyone in the server space was running Debian and it a) worked and b) had everything I needed and c) meant I could spend my time actually doing work, not rebuilding half the distro and then some because the distro's RPMs were crap or non-existant.
I haven't had the chance to seriously use MacOSX, but I'm sure its great knowing its roots in NeXTstep and UNIX. I have to agree with the PalmOS statement, its been my most productive personal operating system. My most productive routers have run Cisco IOS. That thing "just works" and needs little maintenance.
Including Microsoft Windows is unfair, since you need to stretch your definition of "operating". If constantly having to scan for viruses & trojans, putting up with unexplicable complete system meldowns several times an hour, and corrupting data quite a lot is "operating" then I guess its in. Somewhere down the bottom just above Microsoft Windows CE (aka "Wince"). I'd rather an Atari ST.
On a server its UNIX. The two go hand-in-hand so much that basically, if it doesn't run UNIX or a UNIX-like OS, it's not a server. My current desktop also runs a UNIX-like OS and I'm most comfortable in that environment, to the point I find other people's desktops (like cow-orkers with M$ WinXPsp2hf2934hf3945hf93047hf9385hf902375hf90385hf 208347hf028734hf028364hf02834hf028374hf028364hf028 34hf028364hf082365hf972345hf7254hf98724 ad nauseum) extremely frustrating to use. I don't know how they can put up with that crap.
How to measure productivity? I think productivity has nothing to do with the solution used so much as the person using it. You don't measure how much of something is done, you talk to the person doing it and see what they're having problems with. There is no benchmark or performance criteria for programming, for example. There's just good management and bad management, happy coders and frustrated coders. Frustrated coders, under bad management, I would expect to be extremely unproductive.
Maybe, just maybe, someone wants to see a file that's inaccessible by anyone else (or perhaps limited to a select few). Like, personal info, classified information (be it military classification or simply commercial-in-confidence), employment records, blah blah blah blah. Most search engines handle this, as I mentioned before, through various means that are more or less secure.
You are inferring that search engines should only index public information, essentially crippling their usefulness. Glad you don't work here.
Slashdot Mirror
And when they're taught religion in the science classroom - namely atheism - and athiest organisations such as the National Academy of Science wishes to force students to only learn their religion - this is okay too?
It was a line of Hari Krishnas. Gouranga!
But also in that version of GTA, you'd hear the voice of Elvis Presley going "uh-huh uh-huh"
and so on. I could never work out if it was simply random or if there was something you did that triggered the king.
I was thinking more along the lines of... lets put Slashdot on that mother so we might be closer to getting stories that a "news" and not "olds" ;)
No.
Steve Ballmer is not a stupid man. He fully understands that his ability to dance around a stage like a primate, and to toss company furniture around, and to make death threats against other individuals; and generally behave anti-socially and immaturely and in a manner that would get regular folks like you and I slapped in gaol rests solely on the fact he has made an arse-load of money via his company's illegally-obtained monopoly - and gotten away with it all to the point where the arguably strongest government in the world won't touch him or his criminal organisation.
You'd be dancing around too with that kind of injustice^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgood fortune.
I agree. Visual Studio is a tool, now you can put an M16 carbine in the hands of a trained, experienced soldier and you can put one in the hands of a 13-yr-old punk wannabe. Both could be shooting people but its not usually the M16's fault where the bullets go.
The real problem that needs addressing are the more subtle things like who needs to be shot, is a M16 required for this mission or should we use a knife instead, or even does shooting people address the problem or are we meant to be building houses and providing clean water and educating on good irrigation techniques instead?
Too often I've witnessed innocent people die (in this metaphor) because some punk with little control over recoil is indiscriminately shooting things they can't see.
I did go off the track with the personal experience, which wasn't the point.
My point was somewhat twofold, first that Visual Studio is, while a useful tool, also a vehicle for what the real problem is that TFA is trying to get at (in my interpretation). That problem being a virulent culture in IT that undermines and compromises quality and long-term success for short-term gain. "Brain rot" is a symptom of that problem, I was using my own experience to attempt to illustrate the evidence of this and just got carried away.
What I didn't say is that there's a lot of stuff where people's lives depend on software, from somewhat niche areas such as aircraft traffic control systems & GPS navigational aides to the potential of commodity office software with numerous known bugs to corrupt information in a database resulting in someone in desperate need of aide (say, a disabled or elderly person) not receiving it.
When people graduating now with tertiary degrees simply cannot solve those problems as they lack the basic brain functions to comprehend something outside the M$ environment, then as older & wiser people with those skills die off (or bugger off because they're sick of the crap) we eventually become unable to solve problems. Like how we're still speculating on exactly how the Mayans and Egyptians built their structures. Knowledge lost. As a geek I can't think of a more heinous crime against society.
And its not just Microsoft bashing, I don't give a flying f*** who promotes this kind of culture, they need to be stopped before they do any more damage than they already have. Visual Studio is the straw man here, its just a classic example of a situation where we know that the ratio of skilled programmers to morons who can paint stuff they memorized from a textbook is in the order of 1:20.
I've seen this sentiment a couple of times in this article, so I choose you to respond to. Congratulations ;)
Some background first: I dropped out of University for two reasons, first I wasn't sure if I wanted to focus on software development or network administration and I wanted some industry experience. Second, there were far too many people there who could memorize textbooks and regurgitate the examples, and hence go exceedingly well in examinations which seemed to only test this attribute; yet who could not understand yet explain the concepts being "taught".
That group I labelled, through its abundance of occurrances, the Visual Basic programmers. Using the term "programmers" loosely, of course. They could paint applications really well (drag & drop little GUI shit around in Visual Studio and come up with something tangible) but you didn't even have to take them outside of Visual Studio for them to be well out of their depth (which they obviously are when you do). Just ask them to explain what any of the Visual Studio-generated code does. They have no freaking idea what their code does, they just know if they drag this here and drop that there and click here and type that, that they get foo.
Now, in a culture when IT professionals are treated less than dirt, particularly by those in management, the focus is on generating Maggi programs. You know, the classic 2-minute noodles. Tangible results ASAP, don't care that the weird geeky stuff looks like spaghetti and the cook can't tell you what its made of because they simply don't know. All they had to do was drag some shit out of a package and drop it into a saucepan and stir for a little bit.
Nobody denies that Visual Studio has features that are useful. What is under scrutiny here is the fact that it also has features, and there's some crossover, that enable complete dimwits to produce the kind of results management is looking for in the time they are looking for, leaving those who can actually design and develop software looking incompetent. The PHB doesn't care that the real hacker's design is far superior and the implementation robust, it took 4 weeks longer (because they understood the entire problem and handled all the cases) and dammit the client wants it NOW, who cares that its crap - that's just a small detail that can be fixed later - potentially for more money. This then forms a culture that a particular breed of "programmer" - namely those that can only use Microsoft tools and work solely on the Microsoft platform - are better and that Microsoft solutions are better; not because they are but simply because more quality people and alternative solutions are shut down before their full benefits are realised, because of the impetus on getting a quick buck and must have things NOW.
I work with someone who only last week could not comprehend exactly how they were going to go about doing a particular job as Visual Studio was not installed on the server. The job involved editing some XML config files and doing some minor Python programming. Visual Studio by default has absolutely zero Python support (Activestate and presumably others have $$$ plugins for it, but that's not the point). That particular sentiment came the day after I installed Vim (with the Cream suite - I do that on Windoze boxes to stop Windoze gumbies whining about the default keybindings - another symptom of "cannot cope outside the box") while they watched on, and we did some of the work together. The whole "outside the box" thing annoys me because this VB programmer culture festers this idea that those who do it the Microsoft Way are somehow immune to the requirement to be flexible. Case in point, there's no requirement for them to "put up with" using something other than Visual Studio - yet you take someone with Unix experience and the onus *is* on them to adapt. I know its because Unix people are far more flexible and generally smarter and more capable, but in reality it translates to our skills being taken for granted
This is a situation similar to why I gave up buying their games back when Diablo 2 was the in thing.
;)
There's all this talk about game balance, but the fact is Blizzard have absolutely no idea what the concept is. Their rules and they way they implement things in the game are completely out of touch with their gaming community. For example, in D2 the ability to PK was there so players could duel or challenge each other - except there was no capability of saying "not interested". As soon as someone went into PK mode they could kill you whether you liked it or not. It became commonplace, out of necessity, that whenever someone tapped the PK button - even if it was accidentally because of its poor placement on screen - their entire party would turn on them. There were simply too many rogues (no pun intended) who would un-fun the game for so many people by PKing them - usually it was some lvl 90+ turboed char PKing some lvl 15 newbie with some duped super weapon.
Blizzards response to this was to ignore it despite considerable customer input. Insteaqd, they bring out a whole swag of patches that get forced on you when you join the realms that nerfed your character. This was done in the name of "balance". What it meant was that all the hours you put in to honing particular skills, and more importantly getting friends to buy Blizzard's products so they could party with you so you all help each other out, is completely wasted. Yes, I'm extremely bitter about this if you can't tell by the fact I can recall this stuff 5 years later
Another example of their stupidity, someone who pirated their game generated a dupe CD key of a friend of mine, and this was detected and my friend's characters were all deleted off the realms. Blizzard would not respond to any communication regarding proving ownership and restoring even one character. That was hundreds of hours of time & effort (and reputation earned in the game) gone.
Coupled with the fact they refuse to bring out their games on better platforms like Linux left me with no choice but to dump their trashy games and crappier, borderline non-existant, service. And to be honest it hasn't been a great loss.
I don't know what part of Australia you live in, but in this part petrol has risen ~ 130%, houses have risen 85%, even milk has risen 5%. The only thing that hasn't risen is my salary!
According to a recent discussion on SAGE-AU the only way to get a pay rise is to get a new job. That's the expectation - you want more, you go elsewhere.
"killing each other" gave us the IP stack of protocols, for instance
And here I was thinking that was SMB/CIFS. Wait, no, I'm getting cause/effect all muddled up.
It's a mindset thing. Most people (yes, I recognise that's a generalisation) coming from that camp are adverse to change. You can't run any software in production that hasn't already been running in production for 15 years, that sort of thing. Having lost marketshare first to Linux and then to Windows, they are defeatist, and basically go to these conferences out of a sense of "meetings, the practical alternative to work" rather than in the hope of learning something, getting new contacts, an opportunity to think about things in a different way, etc. :-P
That's not a very good explanation, but it's all you're going to get
You have to understand the Australian IT environment. The only people with any money to spend on *real* IT stuff is federal government and big business. FedGov are a subsidiary of Microsoft - they sold out 6 years ago - and big business, needing to talk with FedGov (public servants are a closed-minded bunch of lazy-arse neanderthals), have gone that way as well.
The Australian Unix & Open Systems Users Group is a bunch of old *BSD people wishing their OS of choice was relevent today, all the while working in Microsoft environments. It doesn't surprise me Microsoft have sent another person to rub their nostalgic egos into staying silent on the real issues, like the complete & utter illegal monopoly Microsoft have that has been destroying the IT industry for almost 2 decades, and how this has gone on unpunished.
Note that all the discussion in the resulting threads has been about web-based publically-available search engines.
Don't confuse this with a more generic "search engines" which includes the technology of companies like Autonomy, FAST, Verity, ISYS, and so on.
Autonomy's products have been doing a bloody good job at natural language search for almost a decade now (and they run on Linux as well as legacy platforms). Have you ever heard of Kenjin? These guys had a better desktop search engine 5 years before the so-called "major players" had anything at all. And of course its all distributed, modular, scalable, and maps security. If you need any of that.
Perhaps you've never heard of GreaseMonkey.
http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
Wit, intelligence, and a talking buttcrack are things that typify Indy
wrt. Jim Carrey, score 1 for the talking buttcrack.
BitKeeper is not "open source." Nobody ever got the source outside of Larry McVoy's company.
Wrong. BitKeeper originally was open source, and many Bitmover clients even now have the source under NDI. The situation changed for the majority of people because too many started breaking the license agreement, and Bitmover were forced to diminish rights because of this - they'd rather spend their money on engineers than lawyers.
Mmmmm... maybe not.
Ubuntu needs to have the stability, whereas sid is basically to deliberately break things that need breaking for the next release.
I think sid needs to be caught up to the real world, then Ubuntu and any other Debian derivatives can leverage off that. I don't see the problem in Debian sid being the playground for developers from any Debian derivative in a co-maintenance fashion. There's no reason to fork for anything more than branding (and even that only intrudes on a subset of packages). Even in the event that one distribution has a need to do something different, let the computer figure that out.
case $distro in
Ubuntu) do_it_the_ubuntu_way;;
Progeny) do_it_the_progeny_way;;
*) do_it_the_default_debian_way;;
esac
If I really was to redesign Debian, I would drop "testing" altogether, the "stable" release would be an annual snapshot on all architectures, and there would be no recommended distribution for people to run. Derivatives such as Ubuntu would base off sid, and folks just run whatever suits their needs.
People running "stable" are encouraged to test packages in sid and each month there's an incremental stable release update so that the gap between stable and sid is not so huge. Items breaking binary compatibility (eg, recompiling everything with the next version of gcc) would be held back from stable for a quarterly or maybe bi-annual update (rather than the monthly one) just to give a bit of extra time to iron out any problems that might occur. Architectures that would normally hold back a release can retarget minor releases for a different period (ie, if arm can't make March, everyone else gets the March update and arm can sync in April instead). The only exception of course is the annual stable release. I would probably freeze for the quarter before it and actively promote bug-squashing parties during this time. The two monthly releases during the freeze would be release candidates. I really couldn't care less if nobody could work (as such) during the last month because rc2 was gold, they'd deserve the time off.
So there.
Like most people I agree its a bit of a "duh" to have moved far away from sarge. It's difficult to remain compatible with something that is so far behind the times it will be obselete on release. Even sid has moved away in some regards; yet even it is obselete in many areas. There is no business sense whatsoever in being chained to the old sloth.
Part of the compatibility problem is on Debian's side: many maintainers are annoyed that Ubuntu exists and choose to not work with them out of pride/arrogance. This attitude is something I hope Branden breaks in his new tenure as DPL.
This is where I think it will be very interesting. Branden has always been a progressive and practical person, with extremely little time for the kind of political rubbish that has prevented sarge from being released. We know that the platforms Ubuntu has chosen are the ones that matter for their market, and the ones that matter for the near future in the desktop and server market (with Sun dropping UltraSPARC for amd64) in general. We know there's already been talk of refocussing Debian such that architectures like arm that usually hold everything up will no longer do so.
So the way I see it, there's a lot of hand-waving going on here that could be completely irrelevent in the future as Debian is architecturally focussed the same as Ubuntu which should foster greater cooperation. Of course Ubuntu is clearly on the desktop side and not the server, so I guess it will have more of the eye-candy and desktop apps while Debian has a far greater range of packages; though it doesn't necessarily need to be that way. It would be fantastic if Ubuntu is simply re-branding the Debian desktop packages in a co-maintenance fashion.
My greatest gripe with Debian over the past 6 years is how they seemed to have wasted time arguing over pathetic things like should this document licensed under the GFDL really be in Debian, and have hence fallen from their position as the #1 distribution on the ball technically, always up-to-date (at least in sid) with what's out there, to being so far behind its becoming very tempting to switch. Come on, the commercial distros used to be the last to get anything new, now they are becoming the first. Okay, so Novell *wrote* Beagle but the source has always been available, why is is still not in sid (even an old version?). Call me out for not packaging it myself, but neither have you so that's hardly an argument. That's just one minor example.
(and fwiw I did try packaging it myself, but the dependencies were also either not packaged or out of date and it became a much bigger and riskier task than I have time for)
I can understand Ian's frustration, he created Debian and then went on to found Progeny and I guess there's some angst/jealousy there over how popular Ubuntu has become in such a short time while Progeny hasn't quite seen that kind of success for however many years (most people forget it even exists unless prompted by some mention somewhere). Get over it. I've seen more cooperation from Ubuntu maintainers with "upstream" Debian than any other Debian fork as witnessed by changelogs of packages I use, I put their success down to this and their good business strategy/vision. Credit where credit is due. I hope this cooperation will increase in the future.
You'd swear Microsoft had some secret agenda to wipe you all out in a covert operation.
...)
Only the agenda isn't secret (Halloween docs, et al) and the operations aren't covert (supporting DRM, software patents, abusing their illegal monopoly position to squash competitors, funding SCO and other anti-Linux legal battles, funding FUDpapers, funding whole governments,
Debian has always been a very strong player in the Linux server "community". In fact, I upgraded my servers from Redhat to Debian (8 years ago) because pretty much everyone in the server space was running Debian and it a) worked and b) had everything I needed and c) meant I could spend my time actually doing work, not rebuilding half the distro and then some because the distro's RPMs were crap or non-existant.
And it would lead us back to the moon landing.
either the officers ordered the troops to mistreat the prisoners, or they didn't have control of their troops.
Option 3 - liberals and other anti-war wankers had a field day with Macromedia Director et al.
That reminds me of the stable Linux kernel that was first released several years ago along with its corresponding "REAMME" (sic) file.
"For Linus, a typo, for #linuxnet, a way of life"
I haven't had the chance to seriously use MacOSX, but I'm sure its great knowing its roots in NeXTstep and UNIX. I have to agree with the PalmOS statement, its been my most productive personal operating system. My most productive routers have run Cisco IOS. That thing "just works" and needs little maintenance.
f 208347hf028734hf028364hf02834hf028374hf028364hf028 34hf028364hf082365hf972345hf7254hf98724 ad nauseum) extremely frustrating to use. I don't know how they can put up with that crap.
Including Microsoft Windows is unfair, since you need to stretch your definition of "operating". If constantly having to scan for viruses & trojans, putting up with unexplicable complete system meldowns several times an hour, and corrupting data quite a lot is "operating" then I guess its in. Somewhere down the bottom just above Microsoft Windows CE (aka "Wince"). I'd rather an Atari ST.
On a server its UNIX. The two go hand-in-hand so much that basically, if it doesn't run UNIX or a UNIX-like OS, it's not a server. My current desktop also runs a UNIX-like OS and I'm most comfortable in that environment, to the point I find other people's desktops (like cow-orkers with M$ WinXPsp2hf2934hf3945hf93047hf9385hf902375hf90385h
How to measure productivity? I think productivity has nothing to do with the solution used so much as the person using it. You don't measure how much of something is done, you talk to the person doing it and see what they're having problems with. There is no benchmark or performance criteria for programming, for example. There's just good management and bad management, happy coders and frustrated coders. Frustrated coders, under bad management, I would expect to be extremely unproductive.
Maybe, just maybe, someone wants to see a file that's inaccessible by anyone else (or perhaps limited to a select few). Like, personal info, classified information (be it military classification or simply commercial-in-confidence), employment records, blah blah blah blah. Most search engines handle this, as I mentioned before, through various means that are more or less secure.
You are inferring that search engines should only index public information, essentially crippling their usefulness. Glad you don't work here.
(and FWIW I did RTFA.)