Okay, get your panties untwisted, sit back, and reread my comment in the context of the average Slashdot discussion on filtering. Filtering spam is okay and encouraged. But filtering pornography (unless it's spam) is called censorship. Go read some previous discussions on this topic on Slashdot, and see what the attitude is towards parents who don't want their children to see pornography. Heck, there's several in this very thread.
As for the ACLU, I feel my ragging was very mild. Perhaps you should grow a thicker skin.
But... that's a filter! Aren't filters supposed to be bad? The ACLU keeps telling me that filters are bad even if I use them voluntarily in my own household.
If you want to run a stable rock solid and slightly dated system, Debian is the distribution for you.
I wanted a stable rock solid system as well, but not one that was dated or hard to use. So I switched to FreeBSD. Of course, I'm not claiming FreeBSD is ready for the "high end" UNIX market either.
At the very basic level Linux still lacks stability. Here me out before you mod me down...
Stability means two things. First it means robustness. An OS should not crash or panic. Period. I've never seen Solaris crash. But Linux has crashed twice on me in one year. The kernel needs to be rock solid, and not a playground for hackers with new ideas. Your core libraries and utilities need to be the same.
Stability also means unchanging. It's a royal PITA when your API keep changing from release to release. Linux and GNU are horrible in this regard. Every minor distro release seems like a brand new system that you have to learn all over again. The C and common UNIX API has been standardized for decades, so why do we get a new incompatible glibc every couple of years? I'll accept changing an interface if the reason is conformance to a standard. Otherwise leave it alone. Only allow bug fixes into stable branches.
Asking each one via a method call is horrendously slow in comparison to a RDBMS. For instance, contrast "select last_activity, uid from users" to
my %blarg;
foreach ( my $user $users->$next() ) {
$blarg{uid} = $user->{uid};
$blarg{last_activity} = $user->{last_activity};
}
Ultimately, that's what your rdbms is doing way down deep in the code. Performance will be roughly equivalent either way, given the same storage type (RAM versus disk).
How many times has this been said before? "Use the right tool for the job!" If you have a large collection of objects all of the same class, then use a database. If you have a large collection of objects of differing classes, then use an OO method. For small collections of objects, or if you don't have any real objects at all, neither may be appropriate.
What irks me to no end are database freaks who have to do everything with a database, OO freaks who have to do everything with OO, and GP freaks who have to do everthing as pure GP. They're like guys who only know how to use a screwdriver, so they end up using the screwdriver to hammer in nails and chisel wood.
You are right. Barry's model works, but only as part of a complete economic system.
Go check out a bulk snail mail mailing list for sale. It's targeted by region, buying habits, occupation, etc. It's going to cost bulk mailers to send out the mail, so they demand targeting to get the most bang for the buck. Now look at a bulk email mailing list for sale. No targeting at all. At most it will be "one million confirmed addresses." If you had to pay to send email to every one of those million people, you're going to keep searching until you find a list that is targeted.
The key to setting up an online economy is to find out what the commodity is that needs to be charged. Bandwidth (in some form) is one possible answer. For you and I, that bandwidth charge might only be a few dollars a month, included in our ISP bill. But for a spammer, it might be several thousand dollars a month. Once bandwidth becomes an item of value, Barry's scheme will work.
Whatever this internet commodity turns out to be, you'll find a new economic system arise. Some ISPs will be really cheap, but you tend to get a lot of spam from them (broadcast TV). Or the ISP may be cheap but you're constantly barraged with fundraising pleas (public TV). Some may choose to pay higher prices and get no spam at all (cable TV).
Considering the enormous popularity of Linux with students
Student One: "Hey, let's go drink green beer until we puke!" Student Two: "Okay, whatever. Then we can go install this Linux thing I heard of." Student One: "Sure, whatever."
Students run Linux because other students run Linux, not because they've run it through an intelligent decision making process.
hese new faces will enter the field with much more programming experience and familiarity on Linux than [insert properietary UNIX here].
Until the next glibc or kernel comes out. There's probably more API differences between two glibc versions than there are between Solaris and Linux. Someone who can only write a program that runs on Linux is next to worthless in the marketplace.
Love it or hate it, KDE feels like a unified desktop, while Gnome feels like a cobbled together set of unrelated tools.
That's exactly the impression I get everytime I install gnome to try it out. Every time it still feels like unrelated applications that merely use the same toolkit. Different applications will have different dialogs, different toolbar layouts, etc. Mozilla is not a gnome application, but it integrates into the gnome desktop just as well as most core gnome apps.
MSWindows 98 is snappy, even on quite old hardware.
It's snappy because it doesn't do anything of importance. Seriously. I'm talking about gdi/win32, not the overall GUI. All it does is draw pixels on the screen and pass messages around. It's snappy because it's trivial as windowing systems go.
XFree runs like shit. It feels klunky and laggy.
Then you need to configure it correctly and appropriately. Maybe your distro defaults to one-size-fits-all settings. If so, change them. I'm runnning KDE under FreeBSD, and it blows away Win2K in the speed department running on the same machine.
p.s. 3D is a different story, because it has to run under X on the FreeBSD side, but is able to bypass Win32 completely on the Windows side and use DirectX.
On the other hand, I can honestly say that Xwindows is the only piece of software that ever caused my monitor to literally catch on fire. Gave me a very strong incentive to RTFM, I must say.
Only because X gave you the freedom to do that. Under Windows I can barely get a tolerable refresh rate.
Is Fresco (or whatever else is going to "replace" X) going to give you the same freedom? If so, then you'll be able to blow up old monitors as well.
Lots of X users do this every day, usually without even thinking about it.
Now that I think about it, I do do this every day! But I usually don't because it's so transparent.
I've got a FreeBSD box at work that's fast with an excellent monitor. But right next to it is an Sun box. I can transparently and trivially run ClearCase, ClearDDTS and FrameMaker on my FreeBSD box simply because it uses X.
So the firmly rooted conviction among many Americans that their system gives better protection to the accused... seems very misguided
The problem isn't the protection not given to the accused, but the fact that we have made the most trivial of unsocial acts into felonies. Take the narcotics offenders, prostitutes, check kiters, etc, out of prison and we'll be on parity with most of Europe. We do have a problem here, but it has to do with the laws and the enforcement of laws, and not the legal system itself.
So why do we have this problem? Just take a look at Slashdot. How many times have you seen a Slashdot poster suggest that justice is corrupted because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are not in prison? Have you ever secretly wished that? Yet they have not committed any felonies (check the laws, they haven't). There are some here that would wish every officer of every corporation, as well as every proprietary software developer, to be sent to jail. This kind of attitude is dangerous, and it isn't limited to the US.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why this attitude is more of a problem in the US than in Europe, I would say it's because of the US two party "winner takes all" system, which encourages pandering to the whim of the public. Most most European nations have parliamentary systems where the winners must share the "spoils" of power.
Private corporations are not the ideal method of provided uniform services, because not everyone can be served at uniform cost.
Why does broadband need to be provided at a uniform level for a uniform cost? Food, clothing and shelter are much more important then broadband, but those necessities aren't provided uniformly at fixed prices. What makes broadband so special? Maybe we should outlaw grocery stores and we can pick up our food at the local USDA office.
You havn't made up your mind, but your sick of people that have?
It's sort of like my friend the weekend before last. "Let's go over to San Fransisco, they're having this big peace rally thing. It will be fun. We can meet some chicks!"
I get just as tired as the poster at these people who protest the war simply because it's the thing to do. They're a "good liberal" so they think the way other "good liberals" tell them to think. I mean, Hollywood isn't out there telling people what to think because they're stupid. They're doing it because they know people will actually think how they're told to think by Hollywood!
Time for your to seriously consider cult deprogramming or brain dewashing. You could drop your post into the middle of Orwell's 1984 and no one would notice.
It's the good soothing gentle kind of force.
I retched multicolored spew upon reading this. It's the kind of quote you'd expect Evita Peron or Eva Braun to utter after her boyfriend just committed some atrocity.
My point was that GPL uses intellectual property, like a Jedi, not a Sith.
Now I am physically ill. Please let me do the cult deprogramming for you. I've never done it before, but I would like the opportunity to practice it on you.
"They're only coming for the jews, so it seems we should be okay."
Seriously, this patent has a truckload of prior art. People have been using versioning control for web content since about five minutes after the first web page was posted. This particular methodology of versioning web content has at probably ten years of prior art. Five at the minimum. Even Interwoven and the USPTO know this.
Patents are granted for new technologies or methodologies. But this is essentially a patent on a methodology's purpose. They're trying to ram through a new concept in patentability, which if it flies will cause all sorts of hideous problems.
It merely uses it to force software in to the public domain.
it does no such thing! Public Domain software has no restrictions. As in zero, nada, zilch. Heck, you can even claim you wrote it! On the other hand, GPLd software has several significant restrictions on what you can do with it.
There are few good analogies, but a close one is waterways. Most proprietary software is like a canal. You pay for use. Open Source and Free Software is like a public waterway. There is full public access, but there are rules you must follow while using it. Public Domain software is like the open ocean. Make your own route across it.
Translation: I can use the language features of Perl, but I won't let you use the language features of Java or C++.
Quote of the Day: You can win any race if the other guy is sufficiently handicapped.
Executive Summary: You can sort a list of strings with one line of code in Java or C++.
Obligatory Postscript: Though it will take you substantially more lines of code to do this in raw C, there are 1,001 free libraries that will let you do it in one.
As a corporation, you get those "privileges". But you as a person do not.
Taxes: You have to keep your personal funds separate from your corporate funds. In most cases this is done simply by paying yourself a salary. That salary is taxed. If you don't pay yourself a salary, the IRS and SEC are going to start wondering how you're buying your groceries.
Murder: The perpetrator of the crime will go to jail, and hopefully do the "electric dance". The corporation won't. The person will. You are that person. You commit a crime as a person and you will be tried for that crime as a person.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, get your panties untwisted, sit back, and reread my comment in the context of the average Slashdot discussion on filtering. Filtering spam is okay and encouraged. But filtering pornography (unless it's spam) is called censorship. Go read some previous discussions on this topic on Slashdot, and see what the attitude is towards parents who don't want their children to see pornography. Heck, there's several in this very thread.
As for the ACLU, I feel my ragging was very mild. Perhaps you should grow a thicker skin.
But... that's a filter! Aren't filters supposed to be bad? The ACLU keeps telling me that filters are bad even if I use them voluntarily in my own household.
If you want to run a stable rock solid and slightly dated system, Debian is the distribution for you.
I wanted a stable rock solid system as well, but not one that was dated or hard to use. So I switched to FreeBSD. Of course, I'm not claiming FreeBSD is ready for the "high end" UNIX market either.
At the very basic level Linux still lacks stability. Here me out before you mod me down...
Stability means two things. First it means robustness. An OS should not crash or panic. Period. I've never seen Solaris crash. But Linux has crashed twice on me in one year. The kernel needs to be rock solid, and not a playground for hackers with new ideas. Your core libraries and utilities need to be the same.
Stability also means unchanging. It's a royal PITA when your API keep changing from release to release. Linux and GNU are horrible in this regard. Every minor distro release seems like a brand new system that you have to learn all over again. The C and common UNIX API has been standardized for decades, so why do we get a new incompatible glibc every couple of years? I'll accept changing an interface if the reason is conformance to a standard. Otherwise leave it alone. Only allow bug fixes into stable branches.
Asking each one via a method call is horrendously slow in comparison to a RDBMS. For instance, contrast "select last_activity, uid from users" to
my %blarg;
foreach ( my $user $users->$next() ) {
$blarg{uid} = $user->{uid};
$blarg{last_activity} = $user->{last_activity};
}
Ultimately, that's what your rdbms is doing way down deep in the code. Performance will be roughly equivalent either way, given the same storage type (RAM versus disk).
How many times has this been said before? "Use the right tool for the job!" If you have a large collection of objects all of the same class, then use a database. If you have a large collection of objects of differing classes, then use an OO method. For small collections of objects, or if you don't have any real objects at all, neither may be appropriate.
What irks me to no end are database freaks who have to do everything with a database, OO freaks who have to do everything with OO, and GP freaks who have to do everthing as pure GP. They're like guys who only know how to use a screwdriver, so they end up using the screwdriver to hammer in nails and chisel wood.
You are right. Barry's model works, but only as part of a complete economic system.
Go check out a bulk snail mail mailing list for sale. It's targeted by region, buying habits, occupation, etc. It's going to cost bulk mailers to send out the mail, so they demand targeting to get the most bang for the buck. Now look at a bulk email mailing list for sale. No targeting at all. At most it will be "one million confirmed addresses." If you had to pay to send email to every one of those million people, you're going to keep searching until you find a list that is targeted.
The key to setting up an online economy is to find out what the commodity is that needs to be charged. Bandwidth (in some form) is one possible answer. For you and I, that bandwidth charge might only be a few dollars a month, included in our ISP bill. But for a spammer, it might be several thousand dollars a month. Once bandwidth becomes an item of value, Barry's scheme will work.
Whatever this internet commodity turns out to be, you'll find a new economic system arise. Some ISPs will be really cheap, but you tend to get a lot of spam from them (broadcast TV). Or the ISP may be cheap but you're constantly barraged with fundraising pleas (public TV). Some may choose to pay higher prices and get no spam at all (cable TV).
except for the fact that the Open Group says it's UNIX...
Considering the enormous popularity of Linux with students
Student One: "Hey, let's go drink green beer until we puke!"
Student Two: "Okay, whatever. Then we can go install this Linux thing I heard of."
Student One: "Sure, whatever."
Students run Linux because other students run Linux, not because they've run it through an intelligent decision making process.
hese new faces will enter the field with much more programming experience and familiarity on Linux than [insert properietary UNIX here].
Until the next glibc or kernel comes out. There's probably more API differences between two glibc versions than there are between Solaris and Linux. Someone who can only write a program that runs on Linux is next to worthless in the marketplace.
Well, you could use your intuition to figure out that "Settings -> Menu Updating Tool" probably updates the menu.
Another thing I don't like about KDE is that it is hard to add buttons to launch X (not KDE) applications to the sidebars.
Uh, just drag it over dude! If it's not on your menu, then run kappfinder and THEN drag it over. It's easy. It's simple.
you've proven my point...
Love it or hate it, KDE feels like a unified desktop, while Gnome feels like a cobbled together set of unrelated tools.
That's exactly the impression I get everytime I install gnome to try it out. Every time it still feels like unrelated applications that merely use the same toolkit. Different applications will have different dialogs, different toolbar layouts, etc. Mozilla is not a gnome application, but it integrates into the gnome desktop just as well as most core gnome apps.
MSWindows 98 is snappy, even on quite old hardware.
It's snappy because it doesn't do anything of importance. Seriously. I'm talking about gdi/win32, not the overall GUI. All it does is draw pixels on the screen and pass messages around. It's snappy because it's trivial as windowing systems go.
XFree runs like shit. It feels klunky and laggy.
Then you need to configure it correctly and appropriately. Maybe your distro defaults to one-size-fits-all settings. If so, change them. I'm runnning KDE under FreeBSD, and it blows away Win2K in the speed department running on the same machine.
p.s. 3D is a different story, because it has to run under X on the FreeBSD side, but is able to bypass Win32 completely on the Windows side and use DirectX.
On the other hand, I can honestly say that Xwindows is the only piece of software that ever caused my monitor to literally catch on fire. Gave me a very strong incentive to RTFM, I must say.
Only because X gave you the freedom to do that. Under Windows I can barely get a tolerable refresh rate.
Is Fresco (or whatever else is going to "replace" X) going to give you the same freedom? If so, then you'll be able to blow up old monitors as well.
Lots of X users do this every day, usually without even thinking about it.
Now that I think about it, I do do this every day! But I usually don't because it's so transparent.
I've got a FreeBSD box at work that's fast with an excellent monitor. But right next to it is an Sun box. I can transparently and trivially run ClearCase, ClearDDTS and FrameMaker on my FreeBSD box simply because it uses X.
So the firmly rooted conviction among many Americans that their system gives better protection to the accused ... seems very misguided
The problem isn't the protection not given to the accused, but the fact that we have made the most trivial of unsocial acts into felonies. Take the narcotics offenders, prostitutes, check kiters, etc, out of prison and we'll be on parity with most of Europe. We do have a problem here, but it has to do with the laws and the enforcement of laws, and not the legal system itself.
So why do we have this problem? Just take a look at Slashdot. How many times have you seen a Slashdot poster suggest that justice is corrupted because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are not in prison? Have you ever secretly wished that? Yet they have not committed any felonies (check the laws, they haven't). There are some here that would wish every officer of every corporation, as well as every proprietary software developer, to be sent to jail. This kind of attitude is dangerous, and it isn't limited to the US.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why this attitude is more of a problem in the US than in Europe, I would say it's because of the US two party "winner takes all" system, which encourages pandering to the whim of the public. Most most European nations have parliamentary systems where the winners must share the "spoils" of power.
Private corporations are not the ideal method of provided uniform services, because not
everyone can be served at uniform cost.
Why does broadband need to be provided at a uniform level for a uniform cost? Food, clothing and shelter are much more important then broadband, but those necessities aren't provided uniformly at fixed prices. What makes broadband so special? Maybe we should outlaw grocery stores and we can pick up our food at the local USDA office.
You havn't made up your mind, but your sick of people that have?
It's sort of like my friend the weekend before last. "Let's go over to San Fransisco, they're having this big peace rally thing. It will be fun. We can meet some chicks!"
I get just as tired as the poster at these people who protest the war simply because it's the thing to do. They're a "good liberal" so they think the way other "good liberals" tell them to think. I mean, Hollywood isn't out there telling people what to think because they're stupid. They're doing it because they know people will actually think how they're told to think by Hollywood!
Yes, the comparison is ridiculous. But so is the comparison between the GPL and the Jedi.
Time for your to seriously consider cult deprogramming or brain dewashing. You could drop your post into the middle of Orwell's 1984 and no one would notice.
It's the good soothing gentle kind of force.
I retched multicolored spew upon reading this. It's the kind of quote you'd expect Evita Peron or Eva Braun to utter after her boyfriend just committed some atrocity.
My point was that GPL uses intellectual property, like a Jedi, not a Sith.
Now I am physically ill. Please let me do the cult deprogramming for you. I've never done it before, but I would like the opportunity to practice it on you.
"They're only coming for the jews, so it seems we should be okay."
Seriously, this patent has a truckload of prior art. People have been using versioning control for web content since about five minutes after the first web page was posted. This particular methodology of versioning web content has at probably ten years of prior art. Five at the minimum. Even Interwoven and the USPTO know this.
Patents are granted for new technologies or methodologies. But this is essentially a patent on a methodology's purpose. They're trying to ram through a new concept in patentability, which if it flies will cause all sorts of hideous problems.
It merely uses it to force software in to the public domain.
it does no such thing! Public Domain software has no restrictions. As in zero, nada, zilch. Heck, you can even claim you wrote it! On the other hand, GPLd software has several significant restrictions on what you can do with it.
There are few good analogies, but a close one is waterways. Most proprietary software is like a canal. You pay for use. Open Source and Free Software is like a public waterway. There is full public access, but there are rules you must follow while using it. Public Domain software is like the open ocean. Make your own route across it.
And no using 'templates'
Translation: I can use the language features of Perl, but I won't let you use the language features of Java or C++.
Quote of the Day: You can win any race if the other guy is sufficiently handicapped.
Executive Summary: You can sort a list of strings with one line of code in Java or C++.
Obligatory Postscript: Though it will take you substantially more lines of code to do this in raw C, there are 1,001 free libraries that will let you do it in one.
As a corporation, you get those "privileges". But you as a person do not.
Taxes: You have to keep your personal funds separate from your corporate funds. In most cases this is done simply by paying yourself a salary. That salary is taxed. If you don't pay yourself a salary, the IRS and SEC are going to start wondering how you're buying your groceries.
Murder: The perpetrator of the crime will go to jail, and hopefully do the "electric dance". The corporation won't. The person will. You are that person. You commit a crime as a person and you will be tried for that crime as a person.