Is issuing grants the best way (from a taxation perspective) to use these donations?
If the Perl Foundation is a non-profit (which I assume they are), wouldn't it make more sense to take these guys on the pay-roll so that the money wasn't taxed except for the consideribly smaller amount that would be paid for general living expenses?
The 20K travel budget is what suprised me... Since that's a grant, it's not 20K for travel because Larry would still have to pay taxes on that no?
I'm not terribly proficent in tax laws but something just seems a bit fishy to me... I wonder if it has to do with whether one can claim that writing perl is charity...
If it isn't, then there definitely needs to be a movement to make OSS a charitable act because it certainly is. I know there was a/. thread about this but I remember it being rather ambiguous.
I was suprised this hadn't been modded down so I went and checked this guys journal. He's got an f'ing novel devoted to a homosexual sex story between CmdrTaco and Bill Gates. I can believe people have this much free time on there hands!
Well, I have worked with a lot of women programmers (my last project had more women then men oddly enough).
But that's work, and work actually pays money. A lot of guys who work on FS don't really have anything better to do. Any woman _always_ has something better to do:)
Guys are much more desperate than women socially, that just goes without saying.
Without being sexist (although I can already feel my karma dying), I have yet to meet a woman who I would consider a hardcore hacker. It's not so much about skill, but about just shear determination. I just haven't seen any woman who feels passionate about programming. I've met good female programmers, but most of them can just tolerate it.
It's really the same in most math-based sciences. There aren't many female mathematicians or physists, while there are multitudes of female biologists and chemists.
I seem to remember a study done on spatial relation ability between men and women and the results showing that on average, while women tended to have much better memories than men, men had superior spatial relation ability and hence, had a greater natural ability with math and other abstract sciences.
It also seems logic to conclude that with finer senses and better memories, women would excel at sciences that dealt more with observation as biology and chemistry tend to.
I know I've made a ton of generalizations, but I think there is a degree of truth in the difference in intellegence between the sexes. I don't believe that one is more intellegent overall than the other, but that they both are more intellegent in certain fields of study.
Of course, this is just my very humble opinion and there are of course always exceptions. One thing I've always liked about the FS community is that I have yet to encounter _any_ form of discrimination. It's really the only community in the world that is truely non-bias as far as religion, race, and any other factor is concerned. The only thing that matters is ability.
After all that ranting though, here is probably the real reason: Why in the world would _any_ girl want to associate with a bunch of programming geeks??:)
I've been told by many managers that it is good to expect 33% true productivity from employees in a cube farm environment. People make personal calls, answer email, talk by the water cooler, etc.
Now, a good manager recongizes that this is ok. It's good for moral. If the biggest compliant of an FS programmer is that he spends some time at the office hacking away at a bug or scribbling some code on a notepad while the other goobers are talking about what they saw on Survivor, then that's a damn good thing because atleast the FS programmer is becoming a better programmer and will likely become even more productive.
Besides, since most FS programmers have a bit of experience (according to the article), it is likely to assume that they have enough experience to know how much they can get away with doing at work without work suffering.
Think of it this way, if your a manager would you rather see your C++ programmers spending an hour talking about the Super Bowl or spending an hour figuring out a non-work related bug in a C++ program that is FS and could therefore be used by the company in some way in the future?
C++ is not the best bet for speed unless you absolutely no your way inside and out around the standard. Would be _much_ easier to use C.
It's not that you can't accomplish the same thing in C++ as in C, but rather that you can't run into alot of the hidden speed bumps of C++ in C.
Just do a search on SF for gaming engines... There are soooo many that I couldn't even begin do list them here. My personal fav is the GNU flight simulator. It's sweet...
1) Slow down a bit, and give this project the respect that it truely deserves.
2) Don't use C# for everything*
3) Break the project down into parts that are actually accomplishable (i.e. network layer, world engine, actual game). Choose one of these layers and actually get it to work.
4) Read lots of books because it's gonna take a lot more than a couple of comments from/. to show you all that you need to do.
I don't really know of a great networking book, but you would really need to brush up on newtonian physics. There is an aweful lot of physics involved and 3d hardware will for the most part, not calculate this for you.
5) Pay your dues on some open source gaming engines. Get your feet wet before diving head first.
* C# is bad only because your gonna need big time speed for the 3d engine. The server is likely to require a bit of speed in handling client requests efficently too.
For these areas, I would recommend C, or C++ if you know C++ _really_ well. C++ can be just as efficent as C but you have to know _exactly_ how C++ works and you must know the spec inside and out.
C# is really fine for the frills of the engine, but any VM based language would not do well for the heart of the engine.
Key is to use languages where they are appropriate.
It's the ... While I don't disagree with what I put, I definitely don't think it is more deserving of +5 than alot of former posts...
Then again, since when has/. moderation _ever_ worked?
I have never heard of this company before, and perhaps they produce high quality software, but I was speaking in general terms. Go looking on TuCows or Download.com and you will see what I mean.
As for support, most commerical software comes with thorough support. That's why companies like MS get so much slack. They do not provide support, but commerical software also means all of the bussiness-to-bussiness software and you better bet your ass that that software is supported.
The whole consumer level software industry is messed up. Consumer level software does not constitute all commmerical software though...
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, [Richard Purchell] said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."
So, Billy boy is "annoyed" that Microsoft software sucks so much and is making everyone mad at them. What a rough life...
I've been on all sides of this issue. I've written shareware, cracked shareware, and know write Free Software.
Here are what I see as the general problem that leds to most shareware being cracked:
Overpriced Most shareware is _horribly_ overpriced. Writing 200 lines in VB does not constitute $30. Folks would benefit more if they sold those little 200 line programs for next to nothing ($1).
Difficulty of Payment The fact of the matter is that most people do not want to give their credit card to fifty million different websites just to get some silly software. There is no chance in hell that most people will send checks through the mail.
Lack of Support Whenever you sell a product in the real world, you are forced to hold it to certain standards. Most shareware has clauses though to exempt it from any warranty claims. Many shareware authors absolutely refuse to take the time to offer support too.
Poorly Designed Protection Mechanisms Software gets cracked not generally because of a public demand for it to be cracked, but rather because it presents a challenge for a potential cracker. There is one way to make sure that your software is not cracked, just don't release it! Teaser releases (i.e. time limited demo's) are just wrong and will not work. Besides, the strongest selling mechanism is novelity so why would one allow the novelity to fade prior to charging for the product? It just doesn't make any sense.
The best model to sell shareware through is by release a community edition and standard edition. The standard edition has to contain significantly more features and it needs to come with good support.
Most shareware just generally lacks any sense of quality. I was always suprised that a website like TuCows that does software rating never integrated a payment system so that folks could have a TuCows account and surf for 5 cows only and then buy software directly.
I think many people with overly liberal tendencies tend to jump on issues like this. In my experience, most Americans are pretty fed up with the justice system as it is.
They are fed up not because of mass corruption, or because many innocents are wrong imprisioned, but rather that too many people who are guilty are just not getting punished at all.
Prison is punishment and it just seems like we, as Americans, are not actually punishing anyone with prison. It's one thing to get up in arms about a system that is doing too much, but who's really going to take up the call to make prisons harsher.
It's not exactly a cause that's likely to make many friends. The idea of male prisoners being raped by other prisons is in so many ways an appealing idea _only_ because there is a sense of justice. The thought that many violent criminals out there are being humilated in the most de-masculating of manners gives one a certain sense of justice.
Of course, that is not reality. Any educated person can realize that. Rape is a horrific crime and noone deserves to be raped.
I don't necessarily regret my comment though, because it is drawn from the same desire to avoid the real problem as your call to help the inmates. Our justice system just doesn't work. It needs to be fixed.
I really won't shed many tears though over prisoners being raped. Instead, I'll say them for the much larger problems that we as a society face. Most inmates are just lifeless bodies, consumed by a life of drug abuse and poverty.
It disturbs me more that these individuals live such empty lives than it does that they may be physically assulted.
It's like the whole abortion issue, everyone is either pro-choice or pro-life, but noone is pro-helping the people who may be thinking of getting abortions overcome the problems that would lead them to that point in life.
So, if you really want to discuss things seriously, let's address the real issues and not dance around liberal nonsense.
Last year I went with two other people from my company. We went around doing the whole business thing and at one both, received a demo from some goober pushing a SourceForge replacement.
Of course the demo equipment was running RedHat at a time when RedHat defaulted to having edge flipping turned on. The guy had the most horrible time trying to figure out where his netscape kept going, finally to give up in frustration saying, "I wish I had a Windows machine here."
Needless to say we casually walked away... There was not very much Linux knowledge floating around, just lots of suits. The worst part was that there were _very_ few hot chicks!
That's the best part of going to Expos, the Booth Babes!
I do not know who said it, but I think it goes, "Let the animals destroy themselves."
I have _very_ little sympathy for any person who is justly* imprisoned for commiting a serious** crime and then is abused by his fellow inmates.
* I grow very tired of people complaining about the few exceptions when justice goes bad. By that reasoning, we should let everyone out of jail unless there is absolute 100% proof of guilt.
** Violent offenders tend to get grouped together so it is safe to assume that it is more likely that someone convicted of a lesser crime is less likely to be the victim of inmate violence.
No, that is not exactly correct. What Thoreau said was:
"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth, certainly it will wear out. If the injustice has a pully, or a crank, or a spring, or a rope exclusively for itself, perhaps you may consider whether the remedy is a worse evil. But if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another then I say break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I must do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
The _only_ time it is morally justified to break the law is if the law forces you to go against your own morals, not simply if you disagree with it. If he refused to pay his taxes because the money was being spent on something he felt was causing harm to another, then he would be morally justified in breaking the law by not paying taxes.
Breaking an unjust law may not be morally justified if breaking the law causes harm to your neighbor. For example, I may not think that the tax system is just but it would not be morally sound for me to break it because breaking it would cause general social disorder. This causes more harm to society than the unjust law.
Also, since we're on the subject anyway, I'd like to throw in another Thoreau quote:
"I ask not at once for no-government, but for all at once a better government."
It's one thing to promote reform within your government through civil disobediance but an entirely different thing to use the guise of civil disobediance in attempt to do away with government.
I have yet to read of any philosopher who prescribes to a truely idealistic view of human nature in which no government would result in totally harmony (i.e. Utopia).
It's also important to note that an Anarchist does not typically believe in no-government, rather he would not believe in the legitimacy of government. Because of this, he would not immediately obey government and instead, would use his own moral judgement before plainly obeying.
To use Thoreau's own words, he would recognize the right of government but just not pay government full respect. In Thoreau's case, he only paid full respect to divine law. In fact, Thoreau wrote that people should, "be men first, and then Americans."
In fact, if Germany was full of anarchists, Hilter would not have gained power because the people would have acted in autonomy and not have followed Hilter just because he was in charge.
Likewise, if the USSR really followed true Communism, everyone in Russia today would be prosperous and happy.
According to Austin, all of the site's files, which were dedicated to "the anti-corporate globalization movement,"
So while he's against corporate globalization, he has no problem with violating my privacy by display a doubleclick.com advertising banner on his site along with one of the stupid pop-down X10 windows...
I would be the first to run to this guy's defense for posting bomb-making techniques or anything of that nature but since he broke into computer systems I just simply can't condone his actions.
It's funnny though because he justifies breaking into a computer system (and thereby, violating someone's rights) because he's spreading a message against a government who are violating peoples rights.
I think his mommy forgot to tell him that two wrongs don't make a right...
Well, I take it people are not in tune with what I was thinking of when I spoke of "production" environments.
When I think of production environments, I think of environments that people use to run a software package where the environment is really an after thought next to the software.
This tends to be what makes or breaks operating systems since there is a much greater quanity of production environments than end user environments. I am aware that Mac is heavily used as an end-user environment in graphical design applications.
While they may dominate this market, I am confused at what they are trying to accomplish recently. Take the iMac or iBook for instance. In what way are these platforms targetted towards graphic designers in anyway? IMHO, they are targetted full heartedly at a desktop environment.
If Apple is going after a desktop environment - as the iMac would suggest - then very head end machines do not seem to make much sense.
I just don't quite understand who Apple is going after with this. One would think that they need to expand more into the desktop arena since they have no chance in the server or production world.
Let me rephrase that though to avoid being flamed, they have no chance in the server world or in _most_ production environments.
Anyway, Macs are cute and if they stress thrift and ease, they could probably make a big dent in the desktop market.
No, not at all. Whether a compiler is production quality is entirely dependent on the production environment.
There are not many production environments where Pentium III & IV processors are the only processor out there though and since most of the time, it doesn't make sense to release separate binaries for difference processors, Intel's compiler is hardly a replacement for GCC.
If it's C++ and GCC 2.95.x or lower, I'm not suprised at all:) 3.0 is much better at C++. Then again, earlier versions of VC++ have horrible C++ support and all versions of VC++ have a bastardized version of STL so that may be why your having trouble porting.
Atleast you agree though that portability is more important than speed in most circumstances. It's not just portability though. Even if your a Unix shop that uses multiple Unices but doesn't share code between them, it's important to have a standard compiler to avoid forcing employees to learn all the niches of each different compiler.
You miss my point. It's not about producing fast code for _every_ architecture, but producing the same code on all processors of a single architecture.
Look, all compilers optimize to the current architecture and for the desired chipset, but let's examine what this would be used for:
Let's say it's being used to write regular old application level programs. Well, all these fancy optimization has to be shut off because distributing different binaries for different processors is not only a pain, but will likely draw many false bug reports.
That means you have to use it for an in house project where you know the architecture and are looking to speed things up. Well, while this is surely convient to not have to rewrite these routines in assembly, it still could be done in GCC. While there is obviously a place for the Intel compiler, it is not anywhere near the market for GCC or even MSVC.
Optimizing is fine, but that doesn't mean GCC is obsolete. It's the same argument with regards to the VectorC compiler.
Anyway, I will say one good thing about Intel's compiler. It kicks ass for C++, mainly because Intel has patents on lots of the cool C++ optimizations...
Let me stress my point though, just because a compiler produces super fast code for a certain processor of a large processor family, doesn't mean that it's the silver bullet against GCC.
In essence, the Intel compiler attempts to maximally exploit the 128-bit Streaming Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) extensions on packed integers and floating point numbers, which enable fine-grained code parallelization, found in the Pentium III and Pentium 4 CPUs.
So the compiler produce code that only is optimized for Pentium III & Pentium IV CPUs. So it is not a production quality compiler because it can only produce code for specific processors of an architecture family.
I really don't see what the big deal is. If I wrote a program in assembly to take advantage of these extensions on a Pentium III does that mean I can get a story/.'d since assembly is now going to overtake C?
I remember when WinSock2 was supposed to have raw socket support, and then didn't. I wasn't aware that XP actually supports raw sockets, but it can't be terribly important for most folks.
As far as your comments in regards to raw sockets requiring root permission, well, it's a good thing that capabilities are built into the kernel or else you might actually have a point;-)
Root can deligate raw socket access to a non-root program. Capabilities were added 2.0.x I believe.
I'm just suprised that a company that has to deal with the press so often and is generally fighting an uphill publicity war does not have a mechanism for responding to a major news organization (or two of them for that matter) just because it's a weekend.
Might be a good idea to get some pagers for upper management. It just doesn't look very professional to me when an article talks about three companies and only one of them was unavailable for the weekend. It doesn't help RedHat's image.
Of course, this is just my humble opinion of course. I do know that as a RedHat customer, it makes me wary to read that RedHat is not available on the weekends when I am supposed to trust my software solutions to them.
So the Washington Post says that people close to the companies report that there are acquision talks but then CNN says that people close to the companies report that there aren't.
I'm not buying any of it until one of the companies makes a press announcement or until one of the companies discloses a source.
What I find funny though, is that when given the reason why each company (MS, AOL, RH) is not commenting, RedHat's excuse is the Martin Luther King Holiday weekend.
They sure aren't going very far if they are taking this many holidays... I thought RH _wasn't_ a dot-com company. They should of atleast had people working Saturday and Sunday...
Slashdot Mirror
Is issuing grants the best way (from a taxation perspective) to use these donations?
/. thread about this but I remember it being rather ambiguous.
If the Perl Foundation is a non-profit (which I assume they are), wouldn't it make more sense to take these guys on the pay-roll so that the money wasn't taxed except for the consideribly smaller amount that would be paid for general living expenses?
The 20K travel budget is what suprised me... Since that's a grant, it's not 20K for travel because Larry would still have to pay taxes on that no?
I'm not terribly proficent in tax laws but something just seems a bit fishy to me... I wonder if it has to do with whether one can claim that writing perl is charity...
If it isn't, then there definitely needs to be a movement to make OSS a charitable act because it certainly is. I know there was a
I was suprised this hadn't been modded down so I went and checked this guys journal. He's got an f'ing novel devoted to a homosexual sex story between CmdrTaco and Bill Gates. I can believe people have this much free time on there hands!
I just don't understand it at all...
Well, I have worked with a lot of women programmers (my last project had more women then men oddly enough).
:)
:)
But that's work, and work actually pays money. A lot of guys who work on FS don't really have anything better to do. Any woman _always_ has something better to do
Guys are much more desperate than women socially, that just goes without saying.
Without being sexist (although I can already feel my karma dying), I have yet to meet a woman who I would consider a hardcore hacker. It's not so much about skill, but about just shear determination. I just haven't seen any woman who feels passionate about programming. I've met good female programmers, but most of them can just tolerate it.
It's really the same in most math-based sciences. There aren't many female mathematicians or physists, while there are multitudes of female biologists and chemists.
I seem to remember a study done on spatial relation ability between men and women and the results showing that on average, while women tended to have much better memories than men, men had superior spatial relation ability and hence, had a greater natural ability with math and other abstract sciences.
It also seems logic to conclude that with finer senses and better memories, women would excel at sciences that dealt more with observation as biology and chemistry tend to.
I know I've made a ton of generalizations, but I think there is a degree of truth in the difference in intellegence between the sexes. I don't believe that one is more intellegent overall than the other, but that they both are more intellegent in certain fields of study.
Of course, this is just my very humble opinion and there are of course always exceptions. One thing I've always liked about the FS community is that I have yet to encounter _any_ form of discrimination. It's really the only community in the world that is truely non-bias as far as religion, race, and any other factor is concerned. The only thing that matters is ability.
After all that ranting though, here is probably the real reason: Why in the world would _any_ girl want to associate with a bunch of programming geeks??
I've been told by many managers that it is good to expect 33% true productivity from employees in a cube farm environment. People make personal calls, answer email, talk by the water cooler, etc.
Now, a good manager recongizes that this is ok. It's good for moral. If the biggest compliant of an FS programmer is that he spends some time at the office hacking away at a bug or scribbling some code on a notepad while the other goobers are talking about what they saw on Survivor, then that's a damn good thing because atleast the FS programmer is becoming a better programmer and will likely become even more productive.
Besides, since most FS programmers have a bit of experience (according to the article), it is likely to assume that they have enough experience to know how much they can get away with doing at work without work suffering.
Think of it this way, if your a manager would you rather see your C++ programmers spending an hour talking about the Super Bowl or spending an hour figuring out a non-work related bug in a C++ program that is FS and could therefore be used by the company in some way in the future?
C++ is not the best bet for speed unless you absolutely no your way inside and out around the standard. Would be _much_ easier to use C.
It's not that you can't accomplish the same thing in C++ as in C, but rather that you can't run into alot of the hidden speed bumps of C++ in C.
Just do a search on SF for gaming engines... There are soooo many that I couldn't even begin do list them here. My personal fav is the GNU flight simulator. It's sweet...
1) Slow down a bit, and give this project the respect that it truely deserves.
/. to show you all that you need to do.
2) Don't use C# for everything*
3) Break the project down into parts that are actually accomplishable (i.e. network layer, world engine, actual game). Choose one of these layers and actually get it to work.
4) Read lots of books because it's gonna take a lot more than a couple of comments from
I don't really know of a great networking book, but you would really need to brush up on newtonian physics. There is an aweful lot of physics involved and 3d hardware will for the most part, not calculate this for you.
5) Pay your dues on some open source gaming engines. Get your feet wet before diving head first.
* C# is bad only because your gonna need big time speed for the 3d engine. The server is likely to require a bit of speed in handling client requests efficently too.
For these areas, I would recommend C, or C++ if you know C++ _really_ well. C++ can be just as efficent as C but you have to know _exactly_ how C++ works and you must know the spec inside and out.
C# is really fine for the frills of the engine, but any VM based language would not do well for the heart of the engine.
Key is to use languages where they are appropriate.
What?
:)
RAM is solid state. It is simple a circuit board with a couple of IC modules. There are absolutely no moving parts.
The reason RAM goes bad is chiefly from operating temperatures and poor construction (mostly impurities in the air).
There are absolutely no moving parts in RAM though. That is just silly to even suggest
In fact, the only real moving parts in most PC's are the storage devices and fans...
Only humans could worry that they would create something smart enough to be smarter than themselves...
Let's all take a quick reality check, we simply aren't that smart. It would be nice if we were, but we aren't.
... While I don't disagree with what I put, I definitely don't think it is more deserving of +5 than alot of former posts...
/. moderation _ever_ worked?
Then again, since when has
I have never heard of this company before, and perhaps they produce high quality software, but I was speaking in general terms. Go looking on TuCows or Download.com and you will see what I mean.
As for support, most commerical software comes with thorough support. That's why companies like MS get so much slack. They do not provide support, but commerical software also means all of the bussiness-to-bussiness software and you better bet your ass that that software is supported.
The whole consumer level software industry is messed up. Consumer level software does not constitute all commmerical software though...
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, [Richard Purchell] said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."
So, Billy boy is "annoyed" that Microsoft software sucks so much and is making everyone mad at them. What a rough life...
Here are what I see as the general problem that leds to most shareware being cracked:
Most shareware is _horribly_ overpriced. Writing 200 lines in VB does not constitute $30. Folks would benefit more if they sold those little 200 line programs for next to nothing ($1).
The fact of the matter is that most people do not want to give their credit card to fifty million different websites just to get some silly software. There is no chance in hell that most people will send checks through the mail.
Whenever you sell a product in the real world, you are forced to hold it to certain standards. Most shareware has clauses though to exempt it from any warranty claims. Many shareware authors absolutely refuse to take the time to offer support too.
Software gets cracked not generally because of a public demand for it to be cracked, but rather because it presents a challenge for a potential cracker. There is one way to make sure that your software is not cracked, just don't release it! Teaser releases (i.e. time limited demo's) are just wrong and will not work. Besides, the strongest selling mechanism is novelity so why would one allow the novelity to fade prior to charging for the product? It just doesn't make any sense.
The best model to sell shareware through is by release a community edition and standard edition. The standard edition has to contain significantly more features and it needs to come with good support.
Most shareware just generally lacks any sense of quality. I was always suprised that a website like TuCows that does software rating never integrated a payment system so that folks could have a TuCows account and surf for 5 cows only and then buy software directly.
I think many people with overly liberal tendencies tend to jump on issues like this. In my experience, most Americans are pretty fed up with the justice system as it is.
They are fed up not because of mass corruption, or because many innocents are wrong imprisioned, but rather that too many people who are guilty are just not getting punished at all.
Prison is punishment and it just seems like we, as Americans, are not actually punishing anyone with prison. It's one thing to get up in arms about a system that is doing too much, but who's really going to take up the call to make prisons harsher.
It's not exactly a cause that's likely to make many friends. The idea of male prisoners being raped by other prisons is in so many ways an appealing idea _only_ because there is a sense of justice. The thought that many violent criminals out there are being humilated in the most de-masculating of manners gives one a certain sense of justice.
Of course, that is not reality. Any educated person can realize that. Rape is a horrific crime and noone deserves to be raped.
I don't necessarily regret my comment though, because it is drawn from the same desire to avoid the real problem as your call to help the inmates. Our justice system just doesn't work. It needs to be fixed.
I really won't shed many tears though over prisoners being raped. Instead, I'll say them for the much larger problems that we as a society face. Most inmates are just lifeless bodies, consumed by a life of drug abuse and poverty.
It disturbs me more that these individuals live such empty lives than it does that they may be physically assulted.
It's like the whole abortion issue, everyone is either pro-choice or pro-life, but noone is pro-helping the people who may be thinking of getting abortions overcome the problems that would lead them to that point in life.
So, if you really want to discuss things seriously, let's address the real issues and not dance around liberal nonsense.
Last year I went with two other people from my company. We went around doing the whole business thing and at one both, received a demo from some goober pushing a SourceForge replacement.
Of course the demo equipment was running RedHat at a time when RedHat defaulted to having edge flipping turned on. The guy had the most horrible time trying to figure out where his netscape kept going, finally to give up in frustration saying, "I wish I had a Windows machine here."
Needless to say we casually walked away... There was not very much Linux knowledge floating around, just lots of suits. The worst part was that there were _very_ few hot chicks!
That's the best part of going to Expos, the Booth Babes!
I do not know who said it, but I think it goes, "Let the animals destroy themselves."
I have _very_ little sympathy for any person who is justly* imprisoned for commiting a serious** crime and then is abused by his fellow inmates.
* I grow very tired of people complaining about the few exceptions when justice goes bad. By that reasoning, we should let everyone out of jail unless there is absolute 100% proof of guilt.
** Violent offenders tend to get grouped together so it is safe to assume that it is more likely that someone convicted of a lesser crime is less likely to be the victim of inmate violence.
No, that is not exactly correct. What Thoreau said was:
"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth, certainly it will wear out. If the injustice has a pully, or a crank, or a spring, or a rope exclusively for itself, perhaps you may consider whether the remedy is a worse evil. But if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another then I say break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I must do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
The _only_ time it is morally justified to break the law is if the law forces you to go against your own morals, not simply if you disagree with it. If he refused to pay his taxes because the money was being spent on something he felt was causing harm to another, then he would be morally justified in breaking the law by not paying taxes.
Breaking an unjust law may not be morally justified if breaking the law causes harm to your neighbor. For example, I may not think that the tax system is just but it would not be morally sound for me to break it because breaking it would cause general social disorder. This causes more harm to society than the unjust law.
Also, since we're on the subject anyway, I'd like to throw in another Thoreau quote:
"I ask not at once for no-government, but for all at once a better government."
It's one thing to promote reform within your government through civil disobediance but an entirely different thing to use the guise of civil disobediance in attempt to do away with government.
I have yet to read of any philosopher who prescribes to a truely idealistic view of human nature in which no government would result in totally harmony (i.e. Utopia).
It's also important to note that an Anarchist does not typically believe in no-government, rather he would not believe in the legitimacy of government. Because of this, he would not immediately obey government and instead, would use his own moral judgement before plainly obeying.
To use Thoreau's own words, he would recognize the right of government but just not pay government full respect. In Thoreau's case, he only paid full respect to divine law. In fact, Thoreau wrote that people should, "be men first, and then Americans."
In fact, if Germany was full of anarchists, Hilter would not have gained power because the people would have acted in autonomy and not have followed Hilter just because he was in charge.
Likewise, if the USSR really followed true Communism, everyone in Russia today would be prosperous and happy.
According to Austin, all of the site's files, which were dedicated to "the anti-corporate globalization movement,"
So while he's against corporate globalization, he has no problem with violating my privacy by display a doubleclick.com advertising banner on his site along with one of the stupid pop-down X10 windows...
I would be the first to run to this guy's defense for posting bomb-making techniques or anything of that nature but since he broke into computer systems I just simply can't condone his actions.
It's funnny though because he justifies breaking into a computer system (and thereby, violating someone's rights) because he's spreading a message against a government who are violating peoples rights.
I think his mommy forgot to tell him that two wrongs don't make a right...
Man, I got nailed hard for this one.
Well, I take it people are not in tune with what I was thinking of when I spoke of "production" environments.
When I think of production environments, I think of environments that people use to run a software package where the environment is really an after thought next to the software.
This tends to be what makes or breaks operating systems since there is a much greater quanity of production environments than end user environments. I am aware that Mac is heavily used as an end-user environment in graphical design applications.
While they may dominate this market, I am confused at what they are trying to accomplish recently. Take the iMac or iBook for instance. In what way are these platforms targetted towards graphic designers in anyway? IMHO, they are targetted full heartedly at a desktop environment.
If Apple is going after a desktop environment - as the iMac would suggest - then very head end machines do not seem to make much sense.
I just don't quite understand who Apple is going after with this. One would think that they need to expand more into the desktop arena since they have no chance in the server or production world.
Let me rephrase that though to avoid being flamed, they have no chance in the server world or in _most_ production environments.
Anyway, Macs are cute and if they stress thrift and ease, they could probably make a big dent in the desktop market.
No, not at all. Whether a compiler is production quality is entirely dependent on the production environment.
:) 3.0 is much better at C++. Then again, earlier versions of VC++ have horrible C++ support and all versions of VC++ have a bastardized version of STL so that may be why your having trouble porting.
There are not many production environments where Pentium III & IV processors are the only processor out there though and since most of the time, it doesn't make sense to release separate binaries for difference processors, Intel's compiler is hardly a replacement for GCC.
If it's C++ and GCC 2.95.x or lower, I'm not suprised at all
Atleast you agree though that portability is more important than speed in most circumstances. It's not just portability though. Even if your a Unix shop that uses multiple Unices but doesn't share code between them, it's important to have a standard compiler to avoid forcing employees to learn all the niches of each different compiler.
You miss my point. It's not about producing fast code for _every_ architecture, but producing the same code on all processors of a single architecture.
Look, all compilers optimize to the current architecture and for the desired chipset, but let's examine what this would be used for:
Let's say it's being used to write regular old application level programs. Well, all these fancy optimization has to be shut off because distributing different binaries for different processors is not only a pain, but will likely draw many false bug reports.
That means you have to use it for an in house project where you know the architecture and are looking to speed things up. Well, while this is surely convient to not have to rewrite these routines in assembly, it still could be done in GCC. While there is obviously a place for the Intel compiler, it is not anywhere near the market for GCC or even MSVC.
Optimizing is fine, but that doesn't mean GCC is obsolete. It's the same argument with regards to the VectorC compiler.
Anyway, I will say one good thing about Intel's compiler. It kicks ass for C++, mainly because Intel has patents on lots of the cool C++ optimizations...
Let me stress my point though, just because a compiler produces super fast code for a certain processor of a large processor family, doesn't mean that it's the silver bullet against GCC.
In essence, the Intel compiler attempts to maximally exploit the 128-bit Streaming Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) extensions on packed integers and floating point numbers, which enable fine-grained code parallelization, found in the Pentium III and Pentium 4 CPUs.
/.'d since assembly is now going to overtake C?
So the compiler produce code that only is optimized for Pentium III & Pentium IV CPUs. So it is not a production quality compiler because it can only produce code for specific processors of an architecture family.
I really don't see what the big deal is. If I wrote a program in assembly to take advantage of these extensions on a Pentium III does that mean I can get a story
I remember when WinSock2 was supposed to have raw socket support, and then didn't. I wasn't aware that XP actually supports raw sockets, but it can't be terribly important for most folks.
;-)
As far as your comments in regards to raw sockets requiring root permission, well, it's a good thing that capabilities are built into the kernel or else you might actually have a point
Root can deligate raw socket access to a non-root program. Capabilities were added 2.0.x I believe.
rotflmao!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
/. in a while...
mod the parent up [+1 Funny]
thats probably one of the funniest things I've seen on
I'm just suprised that a company that has to deal with the press so often and is generally fighting an uphill publicity war does not have a mechanism for responding to a major news organization (or two of them for that matter) just because it's a weekend.
Might be a good idea to get some pagers for upper management. It just doesn't look very professional to me when an article talks about three companies and only one of them was unavailable for the weekend. It doesn't help RedHat's image.
Of course, this is just my humble opinion of course. I do know that as a RedHat customer, it makes me wary to read that RedHat is not available on the weekends when I am supposed to trust my software solutions to them.
So the Washington Post says that people close to the companies report that there are acquision talks but then CNN says that people close to the companies report that there aren't.
I'm not buying any of it until one of the companies makes a press announcement or until one of the companies discloses a source.
What I find funny though, is that when given the reason why each company (MS, AOL, RH) is not commenting, RedHat's excuse is the Martin Luther King Holiday weekend.
They sure aren't going very far if they are taking this many holidays... I thought RH _wasn't_ a dot-com company. They should of atleast had people working Saturday and Sunday...