Linux is good, and I'm not denying it, but it's place, at the moment, is as a personal server, or as part of a cluster of cheap computers.
The place of Linux is where the hardware of modern IT landscape is going - sub-50k servers. 2.6 series kernels scale well to 32 CPUs (and we'll be seeing 2.6 on production servers this year), and having any more than that is usually waste, or a sign of sub-optimal software architecture (i.e. not trying to use the clustering approach).
it sure as hell ain't running on the company's million-dollar hardware.
True - but soon, most companies will not have million-dollar hardware anyway. It stands for legacy non-standard hardware for which you pay way too much compared with what you get. It's not 1999 anymore.
The declaration stinks of pointy haired people sitting in afternoon long meetings.
Declarations that matter tend to be made by such people. Geeks in the cubicles (including your truly) can "declare" anything they want, and the world around tends to ignore it;-).
Luckily, seeing how much every "real" Unix appears to be a bitch for SCO.
It isn't POSIX compliant.
To the extent that it matters, it is (at least the kernel system call interface is, right?).
And if Linux is not POSIX compliant, it's more of a problem for POSIX than Linux. I.e., POSIX is not Linux compliant:-).
And while Linux is gettting more room on Intel-farms, people with Suns, and other big machines are still going to go for Solaris, or other real Unixes.
That's not what the market figures are saying. Everyone has/should have the Unix exit plan by now - for the ones who appreciate openness the exit plan is Linux, for the rest it's Windows.
Re:Ironic
on
IT, Be Free!
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They hold thousands of patents, and don't think twice about using them to crush competition
That's hardly a fault with IBM, rather than a fault with the patent system. If the law allows it, and you have tons of attorneys and patent people, you patent everything you can. They can prove to be useful for crushing competitors at some point, or defending yourself agains patent attacks. It's quite basic logic, in fact.
Abolishing the SW patent laws needs to happen at government level. I've said this before, but we need an all-out hostile patent lawsuit that is so ridiculous and hurts the industry so much that any idiot can see the damage, rather than this slow suffocating effect of just hindering potential growth and improvements in the state of technology. Nobody sees if progress doesn't happen, but everybody sees direct damage and can draw the conclusions.
Yes, that that's exactly what I wanted to point out. An unwary reader may very well draw some (wrong) conclusions about how this is just an attempt of Open Group to get some certification revenue or whatever. And a certification by Open Group doesn't matter that much these days anyway - Linux is the gold Unix standard, copyright/trademark/other irrelevant issues notwithstanding.
Open Group
on
IT, Be Free!
·
· Score: 4, Informative
From TFS (and TFA): The Boston-based Open Group promotes the POSIX open standard and sells compliance testing to OS vendors.
It should be noted that this appears to be an explanation what Open Group is, rather than what the petition is about. I would feel uncomfortable signing something that helps them "sell compliance testing", but that's emphatically *not* what the petition seems to be about - and the summary gives it that unwanted spin.
That said, this is great stuff. Open standards have always been the state of mind of every developer worth their salt (apart from those with extremely lucrative proprietary interests - IBM of yore, MSFT of today), but it's nice to see some more focused approach to promoting open standards.
And these days, we got IBM backing us. No doubt various naysayers are eager to jump on the fact that openness is "convenient" to IBM, they are not altruistic, blah blah - but that's exactly what makes me feel comfortable: if openness was incovenient and required some kind of altruistic, it could stop by the time of next change of the exec team at IBM.
Just use ion3. it's apt-gettable in Sid, and has worked for me without a hitch.
Tip for those who are about to create a multimedia set-top box - install ion. You want only minimal mouse interaction there, but still having X around enables use of vital software like streamtuner.
I have a feeling that there are more Bach lovers among beta people than there are among alpha people.
Beta people and Alpha people? You did understand that Brave New World was fiction, did you?
Regarding Bach - it's annoying to observe how many think they hate classical music, when they've never really paid attention to bach or other baroque music, and are therefore stuck with the idea that classical music is all that light-hearted (or perhaps "gay" is the word I should use on./;-) Tom & Jerry stuff like Mozart or Tchaikovsky...
And no, conspiracy theorists, I'm not going to assume that we all have chips implanted in our heads; trust me, we'd have another Revolution before that happened.
Stranger things have happened. "Important" people are already being fitted with chips via which they can be tracked in case of kidnapping. After 5% of people have something like this, it's not going to be a big step to start offering them for a cheap price, then free, then making them mandatory.
Yeah i still have the source code released a while ago in a nice little zip in my emule shared folder.
In that case, you might want to unshare it ASAP. You do realize that your IP can be trivially discovered when you have emule on?
It should be emphasized that having the windows source is much more damaging than beneficial. People are contaminated merely by seeing the source. If you want to learn stuff, there is enough OSS operating systems around that won't make you unemployable if you really catch the kernel bug, or MSFT just finds a good reason to ruin your future.
Just stick to pr0n, music and other binaries.
Re:Perfect!
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If each human being has their own IP, then we would need to pack a whole bunch of planets to require more than that!
Binding IP's to humans is arbitrary - it's more realistic to expect that every human with money is going to have several IP addresses (appliances, toasters, whatever), while most of the people in the world will have none.
Also, for some reason, I don't really like the idea of persistent per-human IP addresses. The idea has an Orwellian feel to it.
Hey, it makes sense. "Oops! I Did It Again" is the perfect song for the umpteenth BSOD.
Not to forget "hit me baby one more time", beautifully illustrating the admins vain attempts to bring up task manager by repeated hitting of ctrl+alt+del on an out-of-control system.
There's some inconsistencies that look bad (why str(foo) and not foo.str()?)
Well, there is __str__ which is "magic", and every objects implements one.
Not to even mention that deep down many types aren't really objects at all, even though they may be used as though they were.
Of course they are objects, they just weren't subclassable in older Pythons. They were still normal referenceable objects.
and one of Python's strengths is that you don't need to use OO in your own design, but you can if your design needs it.
Even if you don't use it, it's still there (and that's the way it must be). Everything you see are objects and names bound to objects. That's what I consider pure OO, not the B&D imposed by Java that enforces the use of *classes* for everything.
The idea that Microsoft is hell-bent on taking over the entire software industry only to stop it dead in its tracks is so patently false it's ridiculous.
No, they just want a total control of the industry so that everything happens on their terms. I don't want to see a publically traded predatory corporation in that position.
What really strikes me is that you seem to have adopted this idea that Microsoft really is the worst problem facing the human race. Before AIDS? Global warming? No, it really is Microsoft? I could be wrong, but that's the message I'm reading underneath your words.
Of course it's not the worst, but it's what they call a low-hanging fruit.
BTW, I don't think AIDS is a big problem as far as human race is concerned (individuals notwithstanding). HIV virus appears to be quite controllable with drugs these days, and getting the virus in the first place requires voluntary action that could be avoided by precautions (condoms & clean needles). So people who are afraid of AIDS don't get it.
Global warming, well there sure as hell is no way I could prevent it. Why fight something that is entirely beyond your control?
Well, if it makes you feel better, I consider that post to be one of the more disgusting things I've ever read, and demonstrates a really twisted set of priorities, IMHO...
Then you probably don't read much;-).
I admit I took a bit of a provocative angle to the issue, and apologize for the emotional harm done. Other worldwide problems are beyond my reach, but I feel fighting the "evil" of MSFT is quite doable with reasonable allocation of resources.
If you believe that Microsoft is more harmful to people than "lousy working conditions in some third world country" then maybe your anti-microsoft sentiments are getting to be unhealthy.
It's clearly more harmful for me, and people around me. It's often better to deal with your own problems first.
No, it's a programming language. It's just productive enough for scripting. "Scripting language" doesn't really mean anything.
I would also add that the Java SDK supplies developers with FAR more common libraries than Python does which tends to cut development time.
Python libraries generally have better (simpler) design and are easier to use. And there are lots of them, both in the standard library and available separately.
Semantically, Java is a pure-OO language. Python is not.
It's exactly the other way around. Python is pure OO language, java is not. Does 'int' ring a bell for you? Python provides functions, but they are objects, just like ints, strings and, say, sockets.
Not that being pure OO language is the end-all and be-all. It just makes the language semantically cleaner while trading off some performance.
Opening a file in Python is a one liner. In Java you need 2 or more objects and 3+ lines of code. But you have much greater control over how the descripter is read.
You can have all the control you need, all the way down to file descriptor level. People just don't seem to need the control. Nothing prevents you from writing wrapper objects with different buffering policies.
Maybe because nobody has a mainstream cross platform app that is written in a scripting language?
Bittorrent? And quit with the "scripting language" term, it's ignorant or intellectually dishonest, take your pick.
Do they make sure they buy fair-trade coffee? Refuse Nike shoes? Purchase food that wasn't grown by a factory-farming corporation? Buy 'dolphin-safe' tuna?
The things you list are not as relevant as trying to own a monopoly on software in general. Of course various companies use children as cheap labour, but they are hardly held at gunpoint. It's also mostly a problem for the kids involved, while Microsoft's reign is a problem for the information technology as a whole. Supressing technology is more evil than lousy working conditions in some third world country.
The technology could one day improve the living conditions of the third world. You should be more concerned with corporations patenting genetically engineered foodstuffs.
My point is that maybe you'd (not you, the general 'you') want to investigate if your antiestablishment energy would be more productive elsewhere
The anti-MSFT movement seems to be doing quite well, much better than various anti-globalization/whatever movements. IT professionals can actually hurt microsoft much more than someone who doesn't buy Nike sneakers can hurt Nike. And they can help advance OSS, which is even more important.
So keep on hurting MSFT, and let the non-IT personnel take care of lesser ills in the world:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is good, and I'm not denying it, but it's place, at the moment, is as a personal server, or as part of a cluster of cheap computers.
The place of Linux is where the hardware of modern IT landscape is going - sub-50k servers. 2.6 series kernels scale well to 32 CPUs (and we'll be seeing 2.6 on production servers this year), and having any more than that is usually waste, or a sign of sub-optimal software architecture (i.e. not trying to use the clustering approach).
it sure as hell ain't running on the company's million-dollar hardware.
True - but soon, most companies will not have million-dollar hardware anyway. It stands for legacy non-standard hardware for which you pay way too much compared with what you get. It's not 1999 anymore.
The declaration stinks of pointy haired people sitting in afternoon long meetings.
;-).
Declarations that matter tend to be made by such people. Geeks in the cubicles (including your truly) can "declare" anything they want, and the world around tends to ignore it
Linux isn't a Unix.
:-).
Luckily, seeing how much every "real" Unix appears to be a bitch for SCO.
It isn't POSIX compliant.
To the extent that it matters, it is (at least the kernel system call interface is, right?).
And if Linux is not POSIX compliant, it's more of a problem for POSIX than Linux. I.e., POSIX is not Linux compliant
And while Linux is gettting more room on Intel-farms, people with Suns, and other big machines are still going to go for Solaris, or other real Unixes.
That's not what the market figures are saying. Everyone has/should have the Unix exit plan by now - for the ones who appreciate openness the exit plan is Linux, for the rest it's Windows.
They hold thousands of patents, and don't think twice about using them to crush competition
That's hardly a fault with IBM, rather than a fault with the patent system. If the law allows it, and you have tons of attorneys and patent people, you patent everything you can. They can prove to be useful for crushing competitors at some point, or defending yourself agains patent attacks. It's quite basic logic, in fact.
Abolishing the SW patent laws needs to happen at government level. I've said this before, but we need an all-out hostile patent lawsuit that is so ridiculous and hurts the industry so much that any idiot can see the damage, rather than this slow suffocating effect of just hindering potential growth and improvements in the state of technology. Nobody sees if progress doesn't happen, but everybody sees direct damage and can draw the conclusions.
Um, that wasn't spin, that was a disclaimer.
Yes, that that's exactly what I wanted to point out. An unwary reader may very well draw some (wrong) conclusions about how this is just an attempt of Open Group to get some certification revenue or whatever. And a certification by Open Group doesn't matter that much these days anyway - Linux is the gold Unix standard, copyright/trademark/other irrelevant issues notwithstanding.
From TFS (and TFA):
The Boston-based Open Group promotes the POSIX open standard and sells compliance testing to OS vendors.
It should be noted that this appears to be an explanation what Open Group is, rather than what the petition is about. I would feel uncomfortable signing something that helps them "sell compliance testing", but that's emphatically *not* what the petition seems to be about - and the summary gives it that unwanted spin.
That said, this is great stuff. Open standards have always been the state of mind of every developer worth their salt (apart from those with extremely lucrative proprietary interests - IBM of yore, MSFT of today), but it's nice to see some more focused approach to promoting open standards.
And these days, we got IBM backing us. No doubt various naysayers are eager to jump on the fact that openness is "convenient" to IBM, they are not altruistic, blah blah - but that's exactly what makes me feel comfortable: if openness was incovenient and required some kind of altruistic, it could stop by the time of next change of the exec team at IBM.
Just use ion3. it's apt-gettable in Sid, and has worked for me without a hitch.
Tip for those who are about to create a multimedia set-top box - install ion. You want only minimal mouse interaction there, but still having X around enables use of vital software like streamtuner.
I have a feeling that there are more Bach lovers among beta people than there are among alpha people.
./ ;-) Tom & Jerry stuff like Mozart or Tchaikovsky...
Beta people and Alpha people? You did understand that Brave New World was fiction, did you?
Regarding Bach - it's annoying to observe how many think they hate classical music, when they've never really paid attention to bach or other baroque music, and are therefore stuck with the idea that classical music is all that light-hearted (or perhaps "gay" is the word I should use on
And no, conspiracy theorists, I'm not going to assume that we all have chips implanted in our heads; trust me, we'd have another Revolution before that happened.
Stranger things have happened. "Important" people are already being fitted with chips via which they can be tracked in case of kidnapping. After 5% of people have something like this, it's not going to be a big step to start offering them for a cheap price, then free, then making them mandatory.
Yeah i still have the source code released a while ago in a nice little zip in my emule shared folder.
In that case, you might want to unshare it ASAP. You do realize that your IP can be trivially discovered when you have emule on?
It should be emphasized that having the windows source is much more damaging than beneficial. People are contaminated merely by seeing the source. If you want to learn stuff, there is enough OSS operating systems around that won't make you unemployable if you really catch the kernel bug, or MSFT just finds a good reason to ruin your future.
Just stick to pr0n, music and other binaries.
If each human being has their own IP, then we would need to pack a whole bunch of planets to require more than that!
Binding IP's to humans is arbitrary - it's more realistic to expect that every human with money is going to have several IP addresses (appliances, toasters, whatever), while most of the people in the world will have none.
Also, for some reason, I don't really like the idea of persistent per-human IP addresses. The idea has an Orwellian feel to it.
so, you guys are MSCE? never heard of these songs.
Sometimes, Music TV is just on and you are too lazy to turn it off or switch the channel. These names are recollections of those shameful moments.
For the most part, any live versions are going to sound quite different than studio versions. ..
:)
Let's also not forget the heavy drug use that was rampant at Dead shows.
Is it just me, or is there a connection here?
Hey, it makes sense. "Oops! I Did It Again" is the perfect song for the umpteenth BSOD.
Not to forget "hit me baby one more time", beautifully illustrating the admins vain attempts to bring up task manager by repeated hitting of ctrl+alt+del on an out-of-control system.
They meant Microsoft certified members of the oldest profession.
Of course they are of the oldest profession, with highly cultivated appreciation of taking it up the tailpipe.
That sticker would sell better in some developer circles...
There's no true data hiding, for example.
What's the relevance of data hiding in OOP?
There's some inconsistencies that look bad (why str(foo) and not foo.str()?)
Well, there is __str__ which is "magic", and every objects implements one.
Not to even mention that deep down many types aren't really objects at all, even though they may be used as though they were.
Of course they are objects, they just weren't subclassable in older Pythons. They were still normal referenceable objects.
and one of Python's strengths is that you don't need to use OO in your own design, but you can if your design needs it.
Even if you don't use it, it's still there (and that's the way it must be). Everything you see are objects and names bound to objects. That's what I consider pure OO, not the B&D imposed by Java that enforces the use of *classes* for everything.
I didn't know the average /.er was antisemitic.
:). Typically most chess players probably think chess is perfect as it is.
Ok, I was mostly referring to paranoia & chess variant
Sound like a guy that could be posting on slashdot, if he only was into computers :-).
The idea that Microsoft is hell-bent on taking over the entire software industry only to stop it dead in its tracks is so patently false it's ridiculous.
No, they just want a total control of the industry so that everything happens on their terms. I don't want to see a publically traded predatory corporation in that position.
What really strikes me is that you seem to have adopted this idea that Microsoft really is the worst problem facing the human race. Before AIDS? Global warming? No, it really is Microsoft? I could be wrong, but that's the message I'm reading underneath your words.
Of course it's not the worst, but it's what they call a low-hanging fruit.
BTW, I don't think AIDS is a big problem as far as human race is concerned (individuals notwithstanding). HIV virus appears to be quite controllable with drugs these days, and getting the virus in the first place requires voluntary action that could be avoided by precautions (condoms & clean needles). So people who are afraid of AIDS don't get it.
Global warming, well there sure as hell is no way I could prevent it. Why fight something that is entirely beyond your control?
Well, if it makes you feel better, I consider that post to be one of the more disgusting things I've ever read, and demonstrates a really twisted set of priorities, IMHO...
;-).
Then you probably don't read much
I admit I took a bit of a provocative angle to the issue, and apologize for the emotional harm done. Other worldwide problems are beyond my reach, but I feel fighting the "evil" of MSFT is quite doable with reasonable allocation of resources.
(evil in quotes for obvious reasons).
If you believe that Microsoft is more harmful to people than "lousy working conditions in some third world country" then maybe your anti-microsoft sentiments are getting to be unhealthy.
It's clearly more harmful for me, and people around me. It's often better to deal with your own problems first.
No, Python is a SCRIPTING languate [sic].
No, it's a programming language. It's just productive enough for scripting. "Scripting language" doesn't really mean anything.
I would also add that the Java SDK supplies developers with FAR more common libraries than Python does which tends to cut development time.
Python libraries generally have better (simpler) design and are easier to use. And there are lots of them, both in the standard library and available separately.
Semantically, Java is a pure-OO language. Python is not.
It's exactly the other way around. Python is pure OO language, java is not. Does 'int' ring a bell for you? Python provides functions, but they are objects, just like ints, strings and, say, sockets.
Not that being pure OO language is the end-all and be-all. It just makes the language semantically cleaner while trading off some performance.
Opening a file in Python is a one liner. In Java you need 2 or more objects and 3+ lines of code. But you have much greater control over how the descripter is read.
You can have all the control you need, all the way down to file descriptor level. People just don't seem to need the control. Nothing prevents you from writing wrapper objects with different buffering policies.
Maybe because nobody has a mainstream cross platform app that is written in a scripting language?
Bittorrent? And quit with the "scripting language" term, it's ignorant or intellectually dishonest, take your pick.
Do they make sure they buy fair-trade coffee? Refuse Nike shoes? Purchase food that wasn't grown by a factory-farming corporation? Buy 'dolphin-safe' tuna?
:-).
The things you list are not as relevant as trying to own a monopoly on software in general. Of course various companies use children as cheap labour, but they are hardly held at gunpoint. It's also mostly a problem for the kids involved, while Microsoft's reign is a problem for the information technology as a whole. Supressing technology is more evil than lousy working conditions in some third world country.
The technology could one day improve the living conditions of the third world. You should be more concerned with corporations patenting genetically engineered foodstuffs.
My point is that maybe you'd (not you, the general 'you') want to investigate if your antiestablishment energy would be more productive elsewhere
The anti-MSFT movement seems to be doing quite well, much better than various anti-globalization/whatever movements. IT professionals can actually hurt microsoft much more than someone who doesn't buy Nike sneakers can hurt Nike. And they can help advance OSS, which is even more important.
So keep on hurting MSFT, and let the non-IT personnel take care of lesser ills in the world