It's true that dynamic typing is a clock-cycle hog, but almost all new languages use it... I'd be perfectly happy with a strongly-typed variant of Javascript if it will run faster.
No shit, my buddy continues to produce new ones to this day. Vinyl is still a favorite of many many DJs, due to familiarity and ease of production. Sure, it's easier to burn a CD, but for short mass-produced runs, vinyl is still king. It can also deliver much greater fidelity than CD, but only if it is specially produced to do so. Vinyl isn't magic, contrary to what many seem to believe.
I still have a working belt-drive, and I treasure my modest collection of records - most particularly my copy of Slayer's Diabolus In Musica... yeah, thrash on vinyl! It's one of the many albums that yield better quality than CD, owing to the specific compounds used in the material itself, as well as the extra care applied in the cutting process. Another album that sounds noticeably better than the CD release is Metallica's Master of Puppets.
Today's Atari is an insult to the historical company. Now it is nothing but a brand name, maybe some long-lost trademarks/IP and a bunch of dirty corporate slugs who are milking the name to death.
First they got bought out by that idiot Tramiel, the guy who pumped and dumped Commodore. They still managed to produce the 520ST and 1040ST, which were kind of proto-Macs. Then came the underpowered Jaguar and Lynx, both huge flops!
"Classic Atari" was pretty much dead by then, no good console to sell, and no developers either. Hasbro bought them out for pennies on the dollar, and started releasing a series of shitty 3D remakes like Frogger 3D, Space Invaders 3D but sadly no Custer's Revenge 3D:P
Then Infogrames bought the Atari name, and openly proclaimed they were going to "re-invent" the brand, which is another word for "rape everything it once stood for". They didn't actually use anything related to Atari besides the name and logo. After a few years, they posted huge losses and are now in the process of absorbing / dissolving the Atari brand.
I honestly don't think there's anything left of the original Atari, and most of the people working for Infogrames have probably never owned nor played a 2600. At least the Commodore brand's cadaver didn't get dragged into the 21st century...
I'm very pro-telecommuting, but I can understand why it fails for so many people.
Reasons it works for me:
- I'm a developer, and almost all the jobs we see are one-man gigs - it's not a team development kind of company. - I communicate via email and phone, and rarely attend meetings. I just take the specs and produce the app. Client interaction is very limited, mostly handled by our dedicated sales and support guy (our human shield!) - I'm self-motivated. If I'm working 9-5, then I'll work 9-5 from home too, and the wife can pretty much pretend I don't exist during those hours. - I live with the wife, but we have no kids - I have a ridiculously overpowered workstation, and I know how to use it - I can focus better with some background music, and the headphone thing just doesn't cut it, compared to my nice speakers - I actually find the office distracting, since we're all quite rowdy and jocular (think Animal House) - If a box barfs or panics, I can always hop in a cab and fix it - IF it happens! If it's mission-critical, the appropriate KVM-IP and/or remote-reboot gadgets be acquired.
Turn all of those things around, and you'll get all the reasons why some people can't telecommute. The noise, the distractions, the plentiful opportunities for laziness - some households just aren't suitable for work.
Me, I work all the time. I have private contracts, I build web sites, I produce music - my home is my office. Another little bit that helps is my job is a 10 minute bike or bus ride away, so I don't care about travel time. I telecommute because I like it, and I wish I could do it more because I think I could accomplish more work per week. I'm comfortable at home, no need to buy lunches (not a pack-lunch kinda guy), and since I'm so used to working here, my brain subliminally shifts into high gear - at the office I'm always kinda half-dazed, the environment just doesn't suit me.
One day a week will accomplish nothing. It takes a while to get into the telework mindset, it's a psychosomatic thing - working from home is like trying to change your sleep schedule: the first few days will be chaotic, but over time you get the hang of it and you're back to sleeping/working like you always did.
I could write a book on the topic, but really most of it is just common sense. Make a list of your reasons why you want to telecommute, then make a list of goals or success indicators. If you hesitate while writing either list, then telecommuting is not for you.
I think it's a bigger outrage in North America because we expect a higher level of respect and civility, even for prisoners. We have rules, and we expect everyone to abide by them. To have the "nation's leader" play dirty, looks bad on all of us.
Ok, so what if one of those "in" devs goes berserk (as us techies are prone to do), mows down the other dozen top dogs who just happened to be attending EgoCon 2009 before chainsawing his own head off (in a very unsuspicious manner, of course)... the kernel just suddenly dies ? Because no one else had a chance to learn from the masters, them being such a tight-assed bunch.
It just seems like it goes against the spirit of open-source.
Maybe I'm not enough of a capitalist, but I figure if email goes down, you can always grab a phone and call the person if it has to be done RIGHT EFFING NOW.
Actually, the disconnect probably comes from the fact that I'm extremely easygoing about many things. If I don't have email for 4 hours, well whatever... I'll do something else and catch up later.
Seeing how I went to one of those mildly pretentious schools (though it was worth it), everyone either became a lawyer (assholes), artist (flunkies), or I.T. guy (depressed and broke).
Well there are a handful who leveraged daddy's independent wealth to become annoyingly smug globe trotters who apparently do nothing but post pictures on Facebook.
But I do agree with you on the career path. In this day and age, you have to be either retarded or hopeless optimistic to even consider becoming a police officer/investigator. With the widespread abuses and cash-cow activities we hear about every day, there's really no room for honest, hard-working, community-minded cops anymore. Everyone hates them, and they hate everyone, including themselves.
I think the problem with Linux / Linus isn't so much the patch resistance, but the attitude. Countless times there have been well-written and widely-used patches that were stubbornly rejected by Linus, with little or not explanation as to why. This paints him as a fussy dictator, which may or may not be true - I don't know him personally so I can't say.
It's perfectly valid to reject bad code, and he should continue to do so, to ensure the quality and reliability of the kernel. What would be important, at least in my opinion, is to give some sort of constructive criticism to help that developer improve their code, or maybe point to a similar patch where the developers could join heads.
It's the whole "this sucks, you suck, fuck off" attitude that has built up Linus' reputation as an ego-tripper - so much that his programming ability has taken a back seat to the drama.
Yes, that's pretty much what they do, only they argue they either didn't make the purchase at all, or returned it and never got refunded. The biggest scam online right now is where a buyer will receive an item, then claim it is defective and demand their money back. Sometimes it is defective, I'd personally had it happen to me, just a year ago. It's normal for the shipper to break everything they touch, but the problem is the phone rep works for the bank, not the merchant. They don't care whether the claim is legitimate or not, they just mail out the forms and move on to the next caller. They don't even bother contacting the merchant to negotiate a positive resolution.
The credit firms make it incredibly easy. It's all just a game of "he said, she said", and the merchant is always on the defensive side. It's not like we ever get to file complaints about the cardholders. Any web site and most retail shops are victimized by buyer fraud on a regular basis.
I had one guy who tried to be sneaky, and he succeeded the first time. He'd buy two identical items, a minute or two apart. Then he'd call the bank and argue that I ran the same charge twice, and got the 2nd item refunded almost immediately. The second time around, I defeated his trick by charging a penny less on the 2nd item. He then argued that I should also give him the first item for a penny less (we're talking about $300+ computer gear). I countered by saying I should charge him extra for the item he stole the last time, and exposed his ruse in front of my other customers. They gave him so much hell (verbal and physical), he ran out without the items he had paid for, so I almost broke even.
I got lucky, thanks to my cult-like customers, but the credit companies never helped me worth a damn, and yet I'm the one paying their transaction fees - which, by the way, are directly tied to the number of chargebacks you have on record. Fraudsters don't only cost you the stolen item, they cost you a small fortune when they kick you into a higher "risk" bracket, and you don't get a fair chance to rebut. What's worse is this only hurts your good customers, who have to deal with rising prices (to cover fraud losses). The crooks get their shit for free, no matter how much it costs.
That sort of bullshit is just one of the reasons why every big store has its own credit card, usually backed by the most heinous national credit firms you can think of. It's called loss prevention, and today with security cameras up the wazoo, it's pretty freakin' hard to claim you didn't walk out of Best Buy with that 50" HDTV when the video evidence is so damning, but some people still manage to game the system. I heard of a con artist who scored a bunch of laptops in several stores by buying two of them - one on his Visa/MC, the other on the store card. He'd then pull a similar duplicate charge claim on each one, using the other card's printed statement as proof.
If the banks don't want to help us, what's a merchant supposed to do ? Beat the shit out of these crooks ? I'd love to, but I'm a business person, not a thug.
That's funny, computers GOT ME into this hole. They've encouraged my antisocial behavior, they eat up all my expendable income (damn upgrades!), and the paychecks suck.
So you want developing countries to make all the same mistakes we did ? How kind.
So they plot the crime scenes on a map, extrapolate a circle once they have enough data points (which means they've been sucking their thumbs for a while), then go to the center of the circle and hope to find some wacko with weapons and whatever other evidence they've so carefully planted to save face.
Who needs solid investigative skills and eyewitnesses when ZOOLOGY can achieve the same success rate with none of the hard work ?
I want to like law enforcement, I really do! But before they can start catching serial killers and other heinous criminals, they need to narrow the definition of "crime" back down to something manageable. How can you expect to have a secure territory when all your cruisers are out handing random fines and pestering teenagers ? To solve a problem, one requires focus and attention!
I love being the asshole, but let's be honest here: how many in-house systems actually deliver better uptime than Google ?
Not that many. If they did, all us sysadmins would be out of a job. Apps are not perfect. The fact that you can pay Google a few pennies to manage your email, even with some downtime, makes it several orders of magnitude cheaper than an in-house solution for most people.
Give them a break, people can survive without email for a few hours.
The best solution to this problem is to allocate more money to police budget
I have to disagree. At least where I live (Ottawa), there are too many cops. So much, in fact, that they dick around delivering fancy parking tickets (the kind with an extra digit on the fine), because apparently there's not enough serious police work to do around here.
The problem with bigger budgets is that police work is already a money sink, that needs to be counterbalanced with fines. Allocating more money to police will only result in more ridiculous enforcement to seize yet more money from nominally innocent people. The funds don't just magically appear in City Hall (that money goes to the mayor's stripper fund).
Actually, bumper stickers help more than you think. A big problem with the Tibetan crisis is lack of awareness. The great majority either don't know about it enough to care, or even worse they don't believe it at all.
It will require nothing less than for all the major news networks air a one-hour in-depth special on China's crimes against Tibet and against humanity, with an idiot proof "Free Tibet" message delivered to the TV watching drones. Maybe then, someone will take notice and China will have to answer some very difficult questions.
Until that happens, the problem remains small and China excels at mind control since it controls almost all communications crossing the border. Right now their reasoning is simple: destroying Tibet is cheap and easy, because the rest of the world largely ignores the whole fiasco.
It may have 1/200 Chinese athletes, but it has 100% of Chinese commercial interests, and more importantly to the billions of magpies watching, it's shifting attention away from the great vices of the Chinese government, painting them as a happy friendly internationally-welcoming country.
There's a reason China is feared, they have a ton of American money, and they have the morals of Hitler, Stalin and Hussein all chopped up into one big bad cloak of violent oppression.
Unless you like the idea of being dragged off to jail for blogging... hey everybody's different, right ?:P
Linux in 3 years will look much the same as Linux today, only we'll have longer mailing list archives to document the petty bickering and ego wars that have hobbled open-source projects since the dawn of computing.
Perhaps what irritates me as a long-time Linux user, is I keep seeing the same annoying quirks, the same old-world thought processes, the same lack of progress. It's still as big a pain to admin a Linux server today as it was five years ago, and the awkward bits have not been addressed. Any real progress comes from the individual distros, by adding their own flavor of heavy scripting on top of common apps. The distro maintainers have greatly improved over the years, but GNU/Linux is still the same stinker it's always been.
I haven't seen the restore disk, but the latest hack going around the OSX86 scene is a bootable EFI emulator of some sort, that apparently conceals the non-Mac nature of your PC so well that you can install from official Apple discs and get your updates like any other Mac.
I haven't yet tried it, but seeing how the Psystar announcement came just days after this EFI emu became available, well, I smell fish!
The problem with that particular wiki page comes from its "sources", which are mostly non-expert debates in the forums. Arguing back and forth until both parties admit they're unqualified, does not result in a statement of fact. One such thread featured an EE and a beginning self-taught DSP coder, making random statements, performing fundamentally flawed experiments using known-poor sound editing software (sorry, Audacity!), and finally divining contradictory observations from the absolutely useless results. They're more likely to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than quantifiable truths in sound waves.
The biggest fudge factor in the Vinyl vs CD debate comes from the re-mastering bullshit that has all but hatched today's overcompressed pop sound. It used to be that radio stations would compress the audio to maximize transmit power, but now even CDs are squeezed 6 to 15db beyond what they need to be, just to give that "loud" sound today's idiot kids lap up like high fructose pussy juice. Compounding the problem is the abundance of absolutely horrible speaker systems available in your average big-box store, which would make 70s music lovers cringe and puke.
The root of the problem is that the USA has been pissing everyone else off for the better part of a century. Were it not for that key fact, the military probably wouldn't be afraid of everyone everywhere, including their own citizens.
Sure, blame the coders... we're partly at fault here, but a bigger piece of the problem is that such arbitrary code is allowed to be executed at all, with no way to disable it.
You can restrict queries, but there's no option to disable EXEC. That, to me, is a grave oversight. What's worse is the SQL folks sternly refuse to implement such a feature.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that dynamic typing is a clock-cycle hog, but almost all new languages use it... I'd be perfectly happy with a strongly-typed variant of Javascript if it will run faster.
No shit, my buddy continues to produce new ones to this day. Vinyl is still a favorite of many many DJs, due to familiarity and ease of production. Sure, it's easier to burn a CD, but for short mass-produced runs, vinyl is still king. It can also deliver much greater fidelity than CD, but only if it is specially produced to do so. Vinyl isn't magic, contrary to what many seem to believe.
I still have a working belt-drive, and I treasure my modest collection of records - most particularly my copy of Slayer's Diabolus In Musica... yeah, thrash on vinyl! It's one of the many albums that yield better quality than CD, owing to the specific compounds used in the material itself, as well as the extra care applied in the cutting process. Another album that sounds noticeably better than the CD release is Metallica's Master of Puppets.
Today's Atari is an insult to the historical company. Now it is nothing but a brand name, maybe some long-lost trademarks/IP and a bunch of dirty corporate slugs who are milking the name to death.
First they got bought out by that idiot Tramiel, the guy who pumped and dumped Commodore. They still managed to produce the 520ST and 1040ST, which were kind of proto-Macs. Then came the underpowered Jaguar and Lynx, both huge flops!
"Classic Atari" was pretty much dead by then, no good console to sell, and no developers either. Hasbro bought them out for pennies on the dollar, and started releasing a series of shitty 3D remakes like Frogger 3D, Space Invaders 3D but sadly no Custer's Revenge 3D :P
Then Infogrames bought the Atari name, and openly proclaimed they were going to "re-invent" the brand, which is another word for "rape everything it once stood for". They didn't actually use anything related to Atari besides the name and logo. After a few years, they posted huge losses and are now in the process of absorbing / dissolving the Atari brand.
I honestly don't think there's anything left of the original Atari, and most of the people working for Infogrames have probably never owned nor played a 2600. At least the Commodore brand's cadaver didn't get dragged into the 21st century...
I'm very pro-telecommuting, but I can understand why it fails for so many people.
Reasons it works for me:
- I'm a developer, and almost all the jobs we see are one-man gigs - it's not a team development kind of company.
- I communicate via email and phone, and rarely attend meetings. I just take the specs and produce the app. Client interaction is very limited, mostly handled by our dedicated sales and support guy (our human shield!)
- I'm self-motivated. If I'm working 9-5, then I'll work 9-5 from home too, and the wife can pretty much pretend I don't exist during those hours.
- I live with the wife, but we have no kids
- I have a ridiculously overpowered workstation, and I know how to use it
- I can focus better with some background music, and the headphone thing just doesn't cut it, compared to my nice speakers
- I actually find the office distracting, since we're all quite rowdy and jocular (think Animal House)
- If a box barfs or panics, I can always hop in a cab and fix it - IF it happens! If it's mission-critical, the appropriate KVM-IP and/or remote-reboot gadgets be acquired.
Turn all of those things around, and you'll get all the reasons why some people can't telecommute. The noise, the distractions, the plentiful opportunities for laziness - some households just aren't suitable for work.
Me, I work all the time. I have private contracts, I build web sites, I produce music - my home is my office. Another little bit that helps is my job is a 10 minute bike or bus ride away, so I don't care about travel time. I telecommute because I like it, and I wish I could do it more because I think I could accomplish more work per week. I'm comfortable at home, no need to buy lunches (not a pack-lunch kinda guy), and since I'm so used to working here, my brain subliminally shifts into high gear - at the office I'm always kinda half-dazed, the environment just doesn't suit me.
One day a week will accomplish nothing. It takes a while to get into the telework mindset, it's a psychosomatic thing - working from home is like trying to change your sleep schedule: the first few days will be chaotic, but over time you get the hang of it and you're back to sleeping/working like you always did.
I could write a book on the topic, but really most of it is just common sense. Make a list of your reasons why you want to telecommute, then make a list of goals or success indicators. If you hesitate while writing either list, then telecommuting is not for you.
Wait, you actually READ ?
It is madness!
I think it's a bigger outrage in North America because we expect a higher level of respect and civility, even for prisoners. We have rules, and we expect everyone to abide by them. To have the "nation's leader" play dirty, looks bad on all of us.
Ok, so what if one of those "in" devs goes berserk (as us techies are prone to do), mows down the other dozen top dogs who just happened to be attending EgoCon 2009 before chainsawing his own head off (in a very unsuspicious manner, of course)... the kernel just suddenly dies ? Because no one else had a chance to learn from the masters, them being such a tight-assed bunch.
It just seems like it goes against the spirit of open-source.
Maybe I'm not enough of a capitalist, but I figure if email goes down, you can always grab a phone and call the person if it has to be done RIGHT EFFING NOW.
Actually, the disconnect probably comes from the fact that I'm extremely easygoing about many things. If I don't have email for 4 hours, well whatever... I'll do something else and catch up later.
Seeing how I went to one of those mildly pretentious schools (though it was worth it), everyone either became a lawyer (assholes), artist (flunkies), or I.T. guy (depressed and broke).
Well there are a handful who leveraged daddy's independent wealth to become annoyingly smug globe trotters who apparently do nothing but post pictures on Facebook.
But I do agree with you on the career path. In this day and age, you have to be either retarded or hopeless optimistic to even consider becoming a police officer/investigator. With the widespread abuses and cash-cow activities we hear about every day, there's really no room for honest, hard-working, community-minded cops anymore. Everyone hates them, and they hate everyone, including themselves.
No no, you're thinking "port OpenGL to Java". I want to see a Java VM written in OpenGL shader language.
Maybe having 384 lame little stream processors will make Java fast enough to compete with... um... Borland Pascal on a Cyrix 386.
I think the problem with Linux / Linus isn't so much the patch resistance, but the attitude. Countless times there have been well-written and widely-used patches that were stubbornly rejected by Linus, with little or not explanation as to why. This paints him as a fussy dictator, which may or may not be true - I don't know him personally so I can't say.
It's perfectly valid to reject bad code, and he should continue to do so, to ensure the quality and reliability of the kernel. What would be important, at least in my opinion, is to give some sort of constructive criticism to help that developer improve their code, or maybe point to a similar patch where the developers could join heads.
It's the whole "this sucks, you suck, fuck off" attitude that has built up Linus' reputation as an ego-tripper - so much that his programming ability has taken a back seat to the drama.
Yes, that's pretty much what they do, only they argue they either didn't make the purchase at all, or returned it and never got refunded. The biggest scam online right now is where a buyer will receive an item, then claim it is defective and demand their money back. Sometimes it is defective, I'd personally had it happen to me, just a year ago. It's normal for the shipper to break everything they touch, but the problem is the phone rep works for the bank, not the merchant. They don't care whether the claim is legitimate or not, they just mail out the forms and move on to the next caller. They don't even bother contacting the merchant to negotiate a positive resolution.
The credit firms make it incredibly easy. It's all just a game of "he said, she said", and the merchant is always on the defensive side. It's not like we ever get to file complaints about the cardholders. Any web site and most retail shops are victimized by buyer fraud on a regular basis.
I had one guy who tried to be sneaky, and he succeeded the first time. He'd buy two identical items, a minute or two apart. Then he'd call the bank and argue that I ran the same charge twice, and got the 2nd item refunded almost immediately. The second time around, I defeated his trick by charging a penny less on the 2nd item. He then argued that I should also give him the first item for a penny less (we're talking about $300+ computer gear). I countered by saying I should charge him extra for the item he stole the last time, and exposed his ruse in front of my other customers. They gave him so much hell (verbal and physical), he ran out without the items he had paid for, so I almost broke even.
I got lucky, thanks to my cult-like customers, but the credit companies never helped me worth a damn, and yet I'm the one paying their transaction fees - which, by the way, are directly tied to the number of chargebacks you have on record. Fraudsters don't only cost you the stolen item, they cost you a small fortune when they kick you into a higher "risk" bracket, and you don't get a fair chance to rebut. What's worse is this only hurts your good customers, who have to deal with rising prices (to cover fraud losses). The crooks get their shit for free, no matter how much it costs.
That sort of bullshit is just one of the reasons why every big store has its own credit card, usually backed by the most heinous national credit firms you can think of. It's called loss prevention, and today with security cameras up the wazoo, it's pretty freakin' hard to claim you didn't walk out of Best Buy with that 50" HDTV when the video evidence is so damning, but some people still manage to game the system. I heard of a con artist who scored a bunch of laptops in several stores by buying two of them - one on his Visa/MC, the other on the store card. He'd then pull a similar duplicate charge claim on each one, using the other card's printed statement as proof.
If the banks don't want to help us, what's a merchant supposed to do ? Beat the shit out of these crooks ? I'd love to, but I'm a business person, not a thug.
You must be a Java developer.
That's funny, computers GOT ME into this hole. They've encouraged my antisocial behavior, they eat up all my expendable income (damn upgrades!), and the paychecks suck.
So you want developing countries to make all the same mistakes we did ? How kind.
Goddamned idiot cops again.. bees ?
So they plot the crime scenes on a map, extrapolate a circle once they have enough data points (which means they've been sucking their thumbs for a while), then go to the center of the circle and hope to find some wacko with weapons and whatever other evidence they've so carefully planted to save face.
Who needs solid investigative skills and eyewitnesses when ZOOLOGY can achieve the same success rate with none of the hard work ?
I want to like law enforcement, I really do! But before they can start catching serial killers and other heinous criminals, they need to narrow the definition of "crime" back down to something manageable. How can you expect to have a secure territory when all your cruisers are out handing random fines and pestering teenagers ? To solve a problem, one requires focus and attention!
I love being the asshole, but let's be honest here: how many in-house systems actually deliver better uptime than Google ?
Not that many. If they did, all us sysadmins would be out of a job. Apps are not perfect. The fact that you can pay Google a few pennies to manage your email, even with some downtime, makes it several orders of magnitude cheaper than an in-house solution for most people.
Give them a break, people can survive without email for a few hours.
The best solution to this problem is to allocate more money to police budget
I have to disagree. At least where I live (Ottawa), there are too many cops. So much, in fact, that they dick around delivering fancy parking tickets (the kind with an extra digit on the fine), because apparently there's not enough serious police work to do around here.
The problem with bigger budgets is that police work is already a money sink, that needs to be counterbalanced with fines. Allocating more money to police will only result in more ridiculous enforcement to seize yet more money from nominally innocent people. The funds don't just magically appear in City Hall (that money goes to the mayor's stripper fund).
Actually, bumper stickers help more than you think. A big problem with the Tibetan crisis is lack of awareness. The great majority either don't know about it enough to care, or even worse they don't believe it at all.
It will require nothing less than for all the major news networks air a one-hour in-depth special on China's crimes against Tibet and against humanity, with an idiot proof "Free Tibet" message delivered to the TV watching drones. Maybe then, someone will take notice and China will have to answer some very difficult questions.
Until that happens, the problem remains small and China excels at mind control since it controls almost all communications crossing the border. Right now their reasoning is simple: destroying Tibet is cheap and easy, because the rest of the world largely ignores the whole fiasco.
It may have 1/200 Chinese athletes, but it has 100% of Chinese commercial interests, and more importantly to the billions of magpies watching, it's shifting attention away from the great vices of the Chinese government, painting them as a happy friendly internationally-welcoming country.
There's a reason China is feared, they have a ton of American money, and they have the morals of Hitler, Stalin and Hussein all chopped up into one big bad cloak of violent oppression.
Unless you like the idea of being dragged off to jail for blogging... hey everybody's different, right ? :P
Linux in 3 years will look much the same as Linux today, only we'll have longer mailing list archives to document the petty bickering and ego wars that have hobbled open-source projects since the dawn of computing.
Perhaps what irritates me as a long-time Linux user, is I keep seeing the same annoying quirks, the same old-world thought processes, the same lack of progress. It's still as big a pain to admin a Linux server today as it was five years ago, and the awkward bits have not been addressed. Any real progress comes from the individual distros, by adding their own flavor of heavy scripting on top of common apps. The distro maintainers have greatly improved over the years, but GNU/Linux is still the same stinker it's always been.
I haven't seen the restore disk, but the latest hack going around the OSX86 scene is a bootable EFI emulator of some sort, that apparently conceals the non-Mac nature of your PC so well that you can install from official Apple discs and get your updates like any other Mac.
I haven't yet tried it, but seeing how the Psystar announcement came just days after this EFI emu became available, well, I smell fish!
The problem with that particular wiki page comes from its "sources", which are mostly non-expert debates in the forums. Arguing back and forth until both parties admit they're unqualified, does not result in a statement of fact. One such thread featured an EE and a beginning self-taught DSP coder, making random statements, performing fundamentally flawed experiments using known-poor sound editing software (sorry, Audacity!), and finally divining contradictory observations from the absolutely useless results. They're more likely to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than quantifiable truths in sound waves.
The biggest fudge factor in the Vinyl vs CD debate comes from the re-mastering bullshit that has all but hatched today's overcompressed pop sound. It used to be that radio stations would compress the audio to maximize transmit power, but now even CDs are squeezed 6 to 15db beyond what they need to be, just to give that "loud" sound today's idiot kids lap up like high fructose pussy juice. Compounding the problem is the abundance of absolutely horrible speaker systems available in your average big-box store, which would make 70s music lovers cringe and puke.
Actually it sounds like far too little.
The root of the problem is that the USA has been pissing everyone else off for the better part of a century. Were it not for that key fact, the military probably wouldn't be afraid of everyone everywhere, including their own citizens.
Sure, blame the coders... we're partly at fault here, but a bigger piece of the problem is that such arbitrary code is allowed to be executed at all, with no way to disable it.
You can restrict queries, but there's no option to disable EXEC. That, to me, is a grave oversight. What's worse is the SQL folks sternly refuse to implement such a feature.
Why don't you email IBM and ask them to do it ?
They're the ones accusing the open-source movement of not having enough obscure single-digit-user-base apps.