There are a lot of good ideas in that piece beyond just the purchase of SCO. (And if folks would read the article instead of trying to grab 'first post' they'd know what SCO was.) Whether Red Hat acts on any of them (and who knows, RHAT may have already been thinking about some of them) remains to be seen.
One thing, I believe Microsoft still owns about a 10% position in SCO (as do a couple of other companies - AT&T?). Wonder if they'd be willing to sell it, and with what attached strings?
Ghod, that was one of the most unreadable pieces of crap I've seen in a while. I hope it didn't say anything important, I couldn't finish reading it.
The guy needs to go back to grade school and, relearn basic. Rules of English punctuation. He sprinkles commas. At random with, no apparent clue about where periods belong ( to say nothing of the strange spaces around parens ) .
I don't trust his math, either.
IPv6 is coming, anyway. Doesn't almost everything that counts already support it?
The book outline starts out with "What kind of server do you want" and goes from there. A book for "Essential Server Linux" is a fine idea, but I'd hate to see someone looking for something about Linux on the desktop (or embedded, or wearable, or whatever) pick this up.
Nothing against documentation, mind, but anyone calling a book "Essential Linux" and planning on it being only about servers is misguided.
How about a series? "Essential Server Linux", "Essential Desktop Linux", "Essential Wearable Linux", "Essential Toaster Linux", etc...
> Besides, if they chose Motif they'd have to licence it, adding it to the price of Delphi.
Or use Lesstif instead. (Modulo licensing issues with that, since I believe Lesstif is GPL'd.)(Er, I just checked, and Lesstif is LGPL'd. No problem.) Which would be great if it helps improve Lesstif.
Re:Motif is ugly, but is the 'industry standard'
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 2
Exactly. There are a lot of Motif programmers out there. Motif has been around for what, better than ten years now? And the free Lesstif has most of it covered.
True, Motif tends toward some ugly defaults (mostly in component spacing and apparent widget "thickness"), but these are easily overridden. There are even class libraries around to encapsulate Motif for the C++ hackers that really can't figure out how (or don't want to spend the time) to roll their own.
Not to say that {Mo,Less}tif is perfect, but it's silly to ignore the talent pool that exists for it.
I agree that C++ fits naturaly into the GUI model of programming. (Ditto Java, and likely many other OO languages, although GUIs weren't around when I was programming in Simula-67).
Which is why I've used it the last few times I had to do Motif development. Pretty easy to wrap classes around the Motif stuff you need. Heck, I even used C++ to do X Windows 10 stuff, back when.
C makes sense in some problem domains, and I'll grant that too many C++ programmers tend to write unreadable code, but graphics and GUIs are domains that practically beg for an OO approach. (And yes, you can do OO in C, but why?)
Rubber (polybutyldiene, IIRC) is used in most large solid fuel rockets as well as the hybrids. The worst thing that can happen in a solid (or hybrid) is for the grain to crack, increasing burn surface area (thus pressure, etc, in a positive feedback loop that usually ends with spectacular bang), so rubber compounds are used to add resilience to the grain.
Further, in e.g. hybrids, the rubber is being burned in e.g. a pure O2 (injected LOX) environment, which makes for very efficient burning. Burning tires just plain do not burn well (and the rubber is mixed with all kinds of other stuff), and it's the incomplete combustion that makes tire fires so bad.
You may be right about the lower efficiency, but hybrids have advantages to counter this: lower cost to manufacture than liquid engines, and greater control than solids. (You can't stop and restart a solid, and any throttling has to be designed into the shape of the grain. Hybrids can be throttled, stopped, and restarted by controlling the oxidizer flow).
Ancient technology. A private company (American Rocket Co?) was doing this stuff ten years ago and might well have made orbit by now if the CEO (George Koopman) hadn't managed to get killed in an auto accident.
And sport rocketry hobbyists have been doing hybrids on a smaller scale for a few years now too.
NASA, particularly the rocket folks, have become as hidebound and fossilized as any other government bureaucracy. They innovate about as well as Microsoft.
I can't speak to the Debian installation, not having done one recently, but I choose Caldera whenever (a) the machine already has Windows and has to be dual bootable and/or (b) when someone with little unix/linux experience is going to be administering it. I think my 4-year-old could handle the install (especially if it's not going to be a dual-boot system) and the Caldera COAS stuff makes routine admin pretty easy.
Only 10 percent of Red Hat stock was made available in the IPO. Presumably RedHat is making a few more shares available at the original price to the affinity group. (I'm just guessing, no firsthand knowledge.)
The thing is, stuff published on the web is evanescent. We've all encountered broken links, or links to pages that aren't what they used to be, etc. Sites come and go, and even archive sites eventually offline the stuff.
The nice thing about paper journals is that you can usually find a copy *somewhere*. Maybe in some obscure library at the university of outer gondwanaland, maybe even only on microfiche, but the stuff doesn't go away just because somebody typed 'rm *' or reformatted the hardrive or rearranged their web site. I can dig up papers published fifty and a hundred years ago -- and sometimes that is very worth doing (among other things, consider the issue of prior art in patents). Try finding a web document from even five years ago, or five months in some cases.
This is particularly relevant with articles that may not be "politically correct", whatever that might mean in a given context. Aside from the ease of simply destroying the article in question, it is comparitively trivially easy to change the offending article. Remember Winston Smith's job in Orwell's "1984"?
I'm all for web publication -- when the pages are there it certainly simplifies finding them, and hyperlinking the citations to the originals and summaries to the raw data, etc, would be wonderful. But we need to give some thought too to how this stuff gets archived for accessibility ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now, and how the electronic copies avoid mutation. (PGP checksum, perhaps?)
(I allways find Dijkstras 'gotos considered harmfull' hilarious. The man is so narrow minded B-)
You've got to remember that Dijkstra was writing that in an era when most programs were still being written in assembler, COBOL, or FORTRAN IV. Anyone who has had to maintain e.g. a FORTRAN IV program will sympathize with the sentiment.
Then too, Dijkstra was a Burroughs Fellow, and Burroughs was well known for machines whose "assembly language" was a variant of ALGOL.
Before I read this I thought all those backdoor stories in Heinlein books or Gibsons Stuff where just urban Myth
Not at all. Backdoors were (are?) fairly common to allow access to special or privileged functions for maintenance/debugging (or cracking). My favorite was the phrase "Springhead, this is worker", borrowed from a Firesign Theatre sketch.
I forget the name of the utility, but it let you assign different sounds to various system events. These sounds could be (often were) digitized clips from various movies, downloaded from bulletin board sites. And there were certainly portable 68K Macs. (The 68K establishes the time frame - I remember this stuff from late 80s/first couple years of the 90s)
(Example events/sound-clips: Inserting a floppy: "Ooh, input!" (from Short Circuit) General error alert: "Human error." (HAL from 2001) and so forth. There were some pretty long sound clips available, kinda useless for system event sounds though.)
Edlin is and always has been a piece of crap compared to ed, let alone ex. I've used ed for fifteen years. I've written a couple of versions of ed. Nope, edlin is no ed. Anyone who says otherwise has never used one or the other, or is trolling.
The specific configuration of "Emacs lite" you describe may never have been created (and I wouldn't be too sure of that, either), but an "editor only" version has been around for about fifteen years, namely micro-emacs. Wonderful little program, I used to use it a lot because it was the only decent editor available on a (8088, 10MHz, 640k) PC.
But I have no use for the hulking monstrosity that is GNU/Emacs.
Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense. The presence of a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home. The presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide fivefold." http://www.handguncontrol.org/firearm_facts.htm
Well now, there's an unbiased source.
The "statistics" are irrelevant bullshit, of course.
Let's take a look in more detail:
Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense
Two major things wrong with that statement, even assuming that the numbers aren't fabricated. (1) the vast majority of "kill a family member or friend" cases are suicides, thus irrelevant here; there are plenty of ways for someone intent on suicide to do so. (2) Most - by orders of magnitude - uses of a gun in self-defense do not involve killing the attacker. Even if we count only the actual confrontations that occur (and ignore the large deterrent value a firearm has), most end with the bad guy being scared off or held until the police arrive, no shots fired at all. In a much smaller incidence, the perp may be wounded - these cases still outnumber those cases in which the perp is killed.
Of course, the whole paragraph is nonsense if taken literally: guns don't kill anybody, don't have family members, and don't defend themselves.
The presence of a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home. The presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide fivefold.
Heh. Now subtract out the number of those cases in which the gun was acquired with the specific intent to commit murder and/or suicide (which acts can certainly be accomplished without a gun), and what are the numbers?
The facts are, when other influences are factored out (eg socioeconomic background, cultural influences, etc), the crime rate is inversely proportional to the availability of guns. MOst people are neither homicidal nor suicidal. Most criminals, while perhaps stupid, are not suicidal either. The facts also are that women who defend themselves against rape/assault with a gun are more likely to survive than those who don't defend themselves at all or who use some other (less effective) weapon.
A Pentium III -- what a wimp, using somebody else's ready-made CPU.
My CPU doesn't even have transistors, it uses electromagnetic relays hand-made from old paperclips and rubber bands. And toggle switches -- a real programmer just touches the bare wires together.
The MITS Altair (the original) had the metal toggle switches. The one with the red and blue plastic switches (which I thought looked cooler, because they looked like the switches on the front of a PDP-8 or PDP-11) was the Imsai, a different company. (And perhaps the first microcomputer "clone", being essentially the same as the Altair behind the front panel.)
(And having toggled my share of PDP-8 and PDP-11 programs in through the front panel, I'd guess that the Imsai was easier to program -- less wear and tear on the fingertips than those metal toggle switches!:-)
But Linux(R) is not a buzzword, it's a trademark. Trademark dilution in this case is not a good thing, for many reasons. Here's two:
Somebody buys an iToaster because it's "Linux buzzword compliant", takes it home, sets it up, and discovers it doesn't run his Linux apps, because it isn't really Linux.
or worse:
Because of trademark dilution, anybody can call anything Linux. Microsoft releases their next version of NT as "Microsoft Linux". Linux gets a rep as a crashy OS because of this (plus the problems of brand confusion as above.)
If the iToaster really contains no Linux then Microjerkz should get a very nice letter from a law firm on the behalf of Linus (the trademark owner), to cease and desist and issue a retraction at least as prominently as the initial announcment. Maybe the marketdroids really didn't know that Linux was a trademark. But they need to be formally reminded that it is.
(If it does contain Linux, then they have the GPL problem.)
Several parts of this continent are without running water or food
This is true of every continent, including Europe and North America. So?
have we thrown out all sense of humanity when we worry about a continent having internet access when the people there are starving and dying on a daily basis?
Nope. The starvation problem is one of distribution, and that largely due to political problems/corruption/etc more than lack of infrastructure (although that's a problem too). Communications - the internet - can only help alleviate that.
And again, people are starving and dying on every continent. If it bothers you that much, give up your slashdot account, sell your computer, and use the money to go help somebody.
BTW, clearly you are one of the moron crowd: "do not have a PostScript printer(probably regular HP instead)". Bwahahahahaha
Go ahead and laugh, monkey boy. HP printers default (ie, bottom end of each line) to being PCL only, which is just fine for Windows users. As a rule only the HP *M (for Macintosh) or built-in networking machines support PostScript, not the regular HPs.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of good ideas in that piece beyond just the purchase of SCO. (And if folks would read the article instead of trying to grab 'first post' they'd know what SCO was.) Whether Red Hat acts on any of them (and who knows, RHAT may have already been thinking about some of them) remains to be seen.
One thing, I believe Microsoft still owns about a 10% position in SCO (as do a couple of other companies - AT&T?). Wonder if they'd be willing to sell it, and with what attached strings?
Ghod, that was one of the most unreadable pieces of crap I've seen in a while. I hope it didn't say anything important, I couldn't finish reading it.
The guy needs to go back to grade school and, relearn basic. Rules of English punctuation. He sprinkles commas. At random with, no apparent clue about where periods belong ( to say nothing of the strange spaces around parens ) .
I don't trust his math, either.
IPv6 is coming, anyway. Doesn't almost everything that counts already support it?
The book outline starts out with "What kind of server do you want" and goes from there. A book for "Essential Server Linux" is a fine idea, but I'd hate to see someone looking for something about Linux on the desktop (or embedded, or wearable, or whatever) pick this up.
Nothing against documentation, mind, but anyone calling a book "Essential Linux" and planning on it being only about servers is misguided.
How about a series? "Essential Server Linux", "Essential Desktop Linux", "Essential Wearable Linux", "Essential Toaster Linux", etc...
> Besides, if they chose Motif they'd have to licence it, adding it to the price of Delphi.
Or use Lesstif instead. (Modulo licensing issues with that, since I believe Lesstif is GPL'd.)(Er, I just checked, and Lesstif is LGPL'd. No problem.) Which would be great if it helps improve Lesstif.
Exactly. There are a lot of Motif programmers out there. Motif has been around for what, better than ten years now? And the free Lesstif has most of it covered.
True, Motif tends toward some ugly defaults (mostly in component spacing and apparent widget "thickness"), but these are easily overridden. There are even class libraries around to encapsulate Motif for the C++ hackers that really can't figure out how (or don't want to spend the time) to roll their own.
Not to say that {Mo,Less}tif is perfect, but it's silly to ignore the talent pool that exists for it.
I agree that C++ fits naturaly into the GUI model of programming. (Ditto Java, and likely many other OO languages, although GUIs weren't around when I was programming in Simula-67).
Which is why I've used it the last few times I had to do Motif development. Pretty easy to wrap classes around the Motif stuff you need. Heck, I even used C++ to do X Windows 10 stuff, back when.
C makes sense in some problem domains, and I'll grant that too many C++ programmers tend to write unreadable code, but graphics and GUIs are domains that practically beg for an OO approach. (And yes, you can do OO in C, but why?)
Or, that turns out not to be the case.
Rubber (polybutyldiene, IIRC) is used in most large solid fuel rockets as well as the hybrids. The worst thing that can happen in a solid (or hybrid) is for the grain to crack, increasing burn surface area (thus pressure, etc, in a positive feedback loop that usually ends with spectacular bang), so rubber compounds are used to add resilience to the grain.
Further, in e.g. hybrids, the rubber is being burned in e.g. a pure O2 (injected LOX) environment, which makes for very efficient burning. Burning tires just plain do not burn well (and the rubber is mixed with all kinds of other stuff), and it's the incomplete combustion that makes tire fires so bad.
You may be right about the lower efficiency, but hybrids have advantages to counter this: lower cost to manufacture than liquid engines, and greater control than solids. (You can't stop and restart a solid, and any throttling has to be designed into the shape of the grain. Hybrids can be throttled, stopped, and restarted by controlling the oxidizer flow).
A jab at Microsoft? Not at all, merely a comparison that most Slashdotters will understand. Writing for the intended audience, as it were.
Interesting, though, that a comparison between NASA and Microsoft is seen as a jab at Microsoft.
Ancient technology. A private company (American Rocket Co?) was doing this stuff ten years ago and might well have made orbit by now if the CEO (George Koopman) hadn't managed to get killed in an auto accident.
And sport rocketry hobbyists have been doing hybrids on a smaller scale for a few years now too.
NASA, particularly the rocket folks, have become as hidebound and fossilized as any other government bureaucracy. They innovate about as well as Microsoft.
I can't speak to the Debian installation, not having done one recently, but I choose Caldera whenever (a) the machine already has Windows and has to be dual bootable and/or (b) when someone with little unix/linux experience is going to be administering it. I think my 4-year-old could handle the install (especially if it's not going to be a dual-boot system) and the Caldera COAS stuff makes routine admin pretty easy.
(I use SuSE at home, though.)
Only 10 percent of Red Hat stock was made available in the IPO. Presumably RedHat is making a few more shares available at the original price to the affinity group. (I'm just guessing, no firsthand knowledge.)
Note, this isn't a wordprocessor, but a text formatter like "nroff", or more like IBM's old "script" (which it was cloned from).
(Sorry about the double post, I screwed up the HTML for the link in the previous and Slashdot ate it.)
If you're interested in (free) text formatting software for DOS, check out my old "FORMAL" program, which compiles under TurboPascal on DOS.
Note, this isn't a wordprocessor, but a text formatter like "nroff", or more like IBM's old "script" (which it was cloned from).
The thing is, stuff published on the web is evanescent. We've all encountered broken links, or links to pages that aren't what they used to be, etc. Sites come and go, and even archive sites eventually offline the stuff.
The nice thing about paper journals is that you can usually find a copy *somewhere*. Maybe in some obscure library at the university of outer gondwanaland, maybe even only on microfiche, but the stuff doesn't go away just because somebody typed 'rm *' or reformatted the hardrive or rearranged their web site. I can dig up papers published fifty and a hundred years ago -- and sometimes that is very worth doing (among other things, consider the issue of prior art in patents). Try finding a web document from even five years ago, or five months in some cases.
This is particularly relevant with articles that may not be "politically correct", whatever that might mean in a given context. Aside from the ease of simply destroying the article in question, it is comparitively trivially easy to change the offending article. Remember Winston Smith's job in Orwell's "1984"?
I'm all for web publication -- when the pages are there it certainly simplifies finding them, and hyperlinking the citations to the originals and summaries to the raw data, etc, would be wonderful. But we need to give some thought too to how this stuff gets archived for accessibility ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now, and how the electronic copies avoid mutation. (PGP checksum, perhaps?)
(I allways find Dijkstras 'gotos considered harmfull' hilarious. The man is so narrow minded B-)
You've got to remember that Dijkstra was writing that in an era when most programs were still being written in assembler, COBOL, or FORTRAN IV. Anyone who has had to maintain e.g. a FORTRAN IV program will sympathize with the sentiment.
Then too, Dijkstra was a Burroughs Fellow, and Burroughs was well known for machines whose "assembly language" was a variant of ALGOL.
Before I read this I thought all those backdoor stories in Heinlein books or Gibsons Stuff where just urban Myth
Not at all. Backdoors were (are?) fairly common to allow access to special or privileged functions for maintenance/debugging (or cracking). My favorite was the phrase "Springhead, this is worker", borrowed from a Firesign Theatre sketch.
I forget the name of the utility, but it let you assign different sounds to various system events. These sounds could be (often were) digitized clips from various movies, downloaded from bulletin board sites. And there were certainly portable 68K Macs. (The 68K establishes the time frame - I remember this stuff from late 80s/first couple years of the 90s)
(Example events/sound-clips:
Inserting a floppy: "Ooh, input!" (from Short Circuit)
General error alert: "Human error." (HAL from 2001)
and so forth. There were some pretty long sound clips available, kinda useless for system event sounds though.)
Edlin is and always has been a piece of crap compared to ed, let alone ex.
I've used ed for fifteen years. I've written a couple of versions of ed. Nope, edlin is no ed. Anyone who says otherwise has never used one or the other, or is trolling.
The specific configuration of "Emacs lite" you describe may never have been created (and I wouldn't be too sure of that, either), but an "editor only" version has been around for about fifteen years, namely micro-emacs. Wonderful little program, I used to use it a lot because it was the only decent editor available on a (8088, 10MHz, 640k) PC.
But I have no use for the hulking monstrosity that is GNU/Emacs.
Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense. The presence of a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home. The presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide fivefold."
http://www.handguncontrol.org/firearm_facts.htm
Well now, there's an unbiased source.
The "statistics" are irrelevant bullshit, of course.
Let's take a look in more detail:
Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense
Two major things wrong with that statement, even assuming that the numbers aren't fabricated. (1) the vast majority of "kill a family member or friend" cases are suicides, thus irrelevant here; there are plenty of ways for someone intent on suicide to do so. (2) Most - by orders of magnitude - uses of a gun in self-defense do not involve killing the attacker. Even if we count only the actual confrontations that occur (and ignore the large deterrent value a firearm has), most end with the bad guy being scared off or held until the police arrive, no shots fired at all. In a much smaller incidence, the perp may be wounded - these cases still outnumber those cases in which the perp is killed.
Of course, the whole paragraph is nonsense if taken literally: guns don't kill anybody, don't have family members, and don't defend themselves.
The presence of a gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home. The presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide fivefold.
Heh. Now subtract out the number of those cases in which the gun was acquired with the specific intent to commit murder and/or suicide (which acts can certainly be accomplished without a gun), and what are the numbers?
The facts are, when other influences are factored out (eg socioeconomic background, cultural influences, etc), the crime rate is inversely proportional to the availability of guns. MOst people are neither homicidal nor suicidal. Most criminals, while perhaps stupid, are not suicidal either. The facts also are that women who defend themselves against rape/assault with a gun are more likely to survive than those who don't defend themselves at all or who use some other (less effective) weapon.
A Pentium III -- what a wimp, using somebody else's ready-made CPU.
My CPU doesn't even have transistors, it uses electromagnetic relays hand-made from old paperclips and rubber bands. And toggle switches -- a real programmer just touches the bare wires together.
Kids these days.
You're misremembering.
:-)
The MITS Altair (the original) had the metal toggle switches. The one with the red and blue plastic switches (which I thought looked cooler, because they looked like the switches on the front of a PDP-8 or PDP-11) was the Imsai, a different company. (And perhaps the first microcomputer "clone", being essentially the same as the Altair behind the front panel.)
(And having toggled my share of PDP-8 and PDP-11 programs in through the front panel, I'd guess that the Imsai was easier to program -- less wear and tear on the fingertips than those metal toggle switches!
Title says it all.
Pretty small ones, at that.
But Linux(R) is not a buzzword, it's a trademark. Trademark dilution in this case is not a good thing, for many reasons. Here's two:
Somebody buys an iToaster because it's "Linux buzzword compliant", takes it home, sets it up, and discovers it doesn't run his Linux apps, because it isn't really Linux.
or worse:
Because of trademark dilution, anybody can call anything Linux. Microsoft releases their next version of NT as "Microsoft Linux". Linux gets a rep as a crashy OS because of this (plus the problems of brand confusion as above.)
If the iToaster really contains no Linux then Microjerkz should get a very nice letter from a law firm on the behalf of Linus (the trademark owner), to cease and desist and issue a retraction at least as prominently as the initial announcment. Maybe the marketdroids really didn't know that Linux was a trademark. But they need to be formally reminded that it is.
(If it does contain Linux, then they have the GPL problem.)
Several parts of this continent are without running water or food
This is true of every continent, including Europe and North America. So?
have we thrown out all sense of humanity when we worry about a continent having internet access when the people there are starving and dying on a daily basis?
Nope. The starvation problem is one of distribution, and that largely due to political problems/corruption/etc more than lack of infrastructure (although that's a problem too). Communications - the internet - can only help alleviate that.
And again, people are starving and dying on every continent. If it bothers you that much, give up your slashdot account, sell your computer, and use the money to go help somebody.
BTW, clearly you are one of the moron crowd: "do not have a PostScript printer(probably regular HP instead)". Bwahahahahaha
Go ahead and laugh, monkey boy. HP printers default (ie, bottom end of each line) to being PCL only, which is just fine for Windows users. As a rule only the HP *M (for Macintosh) or built-in networking machines support PostScript, not the regular HPs.