OSS will kill a small minority of programming jobs, namely that of hugely popular shrink-wrap programs - which ATM mostly seems to be the problem for MSFT, which is why MSFT is the most violent OSS opposer. Most programmers get the money for doing custom software, or less popular/more tedious software products (embedded stuff), which don't interest OSS programmers all that much.
So a big evil monopolistic corporation loses, while others benefit. More programming jobs will be created, and a lot of them will be integration/RAD langs such as Python. Systems will be based on Open Standards, and be in general much more sane. Infrastructure wants to be free.
This could be a break for Sun Microsystems though if they would do something with Solaris under x86 ala Linux or BSD. (freely downloadable I meant to say).
It doesn't matter whether it's freely downloadable, if it's not free as in OSS. Using Solaris would not be a strategic move, it would be a temporary measure in the migration path to Linux.
Building systems on Solaris is better than building them on Windows (because of the open standards), but using Solaris on a productivity desktop is just pure idiocy.
There are pros and cons to free software being you won't necessarily receive great tech support for it as opposed to some (note I said some*) companies tech support.
If you pay $1500 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, you sure as hell expect great tech support. And it's still free (libre) software, because you would not be "sharecropping"... BTW, I would expect the RHEL/SLES support to be far superior to the support of proprietary OSen, as it is *the* thing you are asked to pay for, instead of the special privilege of using the OS, or past R&D costs of a company.
So I say go AMD64 and go KIA, so I can buy those Athlons 2000+ based-machines I need even cheaper.
Actually, 2600+ is at 100EUR at the moment. It's not going to go much lower, percentually... they just phase out products that are 70EUR. And motherboards, older generations don't really plummet in price, they just disappear. But the CPU-mobo combo costs something like 200EUR if you go with AMD, so who cares?
Obviously you can buy the stuff second hand, which is a different matter altogether.
so perhaps one should be including the UltraSparc IIe that's in the SunBlade 100/150, which retail for less than most new PC's.
and with any luck, it can probably even reach the stellar performance of a PC that was mainstream 5 years ago.
By all accounts this is not the best of the current 64-bit chips, but I think it was the first to be offered in "PC-priced" systems.
And I bet some crackheads even bought it.
Really, I have had the "pleasure" of dabbling with some (old, I admit it) 64 bit sun boxes and got the first hand impression of the absence of correlation between n-bitness and performance.
Perhaps K8 is the first cheap (cheap as in volume) 64 bit arch that has a decent performance. PPC970 is the other one that I can think of.
Anyone wonder how Sun is suddenly making so much noise about Linux? They expect us to ignore all the recent backstabbing efforts (regarding SCO FUD) by merely distracting our attention with pretty toys?
Expect a statement along the lines of "but to really get the benefit of the cutting edge Mad Hatter, along with a robust, industrial strength OS, take a look at this Solaris-x86 over here..."
And the more ridiculous it gets, the better! The more SCO flail desperately around, attacking everybody around it, the more enemies and negative publicity they get. And that's great for us.
BTW, anybody notice how SCO's actions are more and more in line with Microsoft's wishes? Attacking GPL is one such thing, urging IBM and others to abandon their "futile" GPL use... Attacking Linux end users, trying to scare people away from Linux, saying how SCO code can not be removed from Linux, how the Linux business model is flawed... Many of their arguments don't even help their case at all, since they have no interest in doing Unix business anymore anyway. SCO is doing its best to drag the (once) good name of Unix (not just Linux, all of them) through dirt, making MSFT Windows look more and more attractive.
Please, make it a standard policy to moderate all the "stop-publishing-these" rants down to 0, at least. I know I do. It is easy to ignore an article that doesn't interest you and frankly, if the SCO issue doesn't interest you, what the fsck are you doing on slashdot? Linux has never been under such a concrete attack before.
Excuse me? Have you ever really used their products?
Yes, the 9.x versions. Their users are locked in to their db, as the db doesn't really work properly for non-4gl code... the SQL support is broken (no row-level locks).
The 4GL paradigm is alright for many applications, but they should just open up their db a little bit more. Nowadays getting into a voluntary lock-in situation is not fashinable anymore, considering that you can get databases that support both 4GL *and* other languages.
And now that they support SCO we have yet another reason to advice against using their products:-). Never underestimate the power of the community...
Progress Software is in a way like SCO - their product (db & devel tools) is crap, and the only reason people keep using it is because they have a lot of code written in their proprietary 4GL that can't be ported to something like Oracle. I was kinda happy that they managed to stay afloat - and even released their product on Linux. But I assume most of their licenses are used to run legacy applications on legacy OSen like Unixwarez.
However, a piece of good news for all who are trapped in the Progress 4GL world: it runs just fine with Linux, and you have absolutely no reason to use something apart from Linux. Let alone Unixwarez, which will be dead Any Day Now.
BTW, was anyone else annoyed by the way the crowd applaused for McBrides antics in the conference? Would you really like to support such a crowd by providing them with your OSS product? Samba team could do a cunning stunt by dropping Unixware support, now that SCO advertises how great they run in Windows networks, thanks to Samba.
Just to pick a medical nit, however, he did misspell his medication... it's Vicodin, not "Vicaden" (changing a letter or two in a medication name could cause a medication error)
Yet another peace of ammunition for anti-open source lobbyists - OSS supporters are junkies.
Note that this is not xwin.org... I browsed the xwin website a while ago (Keith Packards project) and people there have been complaining about how that project seems dead, while something should start happening. I applaud the effort of these guys.
I imagine it won't be too long before someone will figure out how to write a worm to DDOS a companies phone system!
And such a worm would be a boon for operators that charge for calls. Expect the operators' share prices to skyrocket whenever a worm alarm is given:-).
I think the phones should have a hardware "lock" that would require the user to explicitly allow doing an operation that will cost them money.
Microsoft's long awaited Smartphone 2003 SDK was released today.
Not a slashdot regular, are you?
Really, it is critical that Smartphone not be allowed to succeed. We don't want Microsoft gaining a significant market share there also. If they happen to get something like 20%, they will start "integrating" a lot of proprietary interop stuff to Windows and aggressively wrestle up the marketshare. MSFT Windows/Offics business is winding down, so Smartphones are an excellent migration route because people actually buy new phones all the time.
Symbian is not all that "open", but they have to support public standards, because they have no choice. Do the industry a favor and boycott handsets that run SmartPhone. I don't know how much it is going to help though, because MSFT has endless stash of money to throw to these "strategic" projects. They are not going to drop out even if they sold zero licenses in 10 year.
Obviously multiple platforms means competition, which brings a little bit energy to the market. Smartphones will be a huge thing in a few years, so platform developers can't really be sitting on their asses for long.
C++ has vectors and pairs built in, and tuples will probably be in the next version of the standard.
Not built-in enough; In python I can do:
mylist = [("hello",3),("world",4)]
Additionally, some environments shun STL (and templates in general) because it leads to code bloat.
There's been some discussion about introducing type-inference into the language, so you could say:
auto entries = get_address_entries();
Like that is ever going to happen... I don't even think any C++ compiler has achieved ISO C++ compliance yet. Type inference would be lovely, it seems to work nicely on Ocaml at least. Perhaps gcc project should fork the language, C++ is by definition quite unportable anyway:-).
And regarding your example code, the same can be done trivially in C++ with the added significant bonus of strong static typing:
Yes, I have written code like this, and generally like STL (too bad I can't use any of it for my work). However, it requires quite a lot of typing, and the resulting code is not as easy to understand.
Three lines of Python, three lines of C++ (barring the typedef, which is only there to make the rest of it easier to read).
I typically use C/C++ and Perl for development, and every time I've been using Perl for a while, I get bouts of frustration with traditional languages for the lack of such things as hash datatypes and inline regular expressions.
I'm a professional C++ programmer, and a devout pythonista. What I miss most in C++ are the easy-to-instantiate datatypes like tuples. It's so much easier to pass a relatively simple datatype as a tuple, as opposed to introducing a whole new class and even *gasp* a new file to do the trick.
For example I can trivially code a function that returns an array of (name, address) tuples, and I can easily manipulate such an array:
tuples = get_address_entries() for name,address in tuples:
print name,"lives in",address
After doing Python for a while, one sees how much static typing gets in your way of doing things the "proper" way, and very often one tries to avoid doing the damn thing at all... resulting in a sub-optimal design. Python allows you to be all you can be:-)
Sounds like he has investments, or some other finiancial interests, in embedded linux.
Indeed.
Maybe "desktop linux profits" aren't so hot, but linux wasn't designed to make money with anyways.
On the contrary, I allege that lots of money are going to be made on Linux desktops. Support, mass deployment, customization, life cycle extension... so the money will be made in corporate space, and that's the way it should be. That's where the money in Linux servers is made at the moment.
Also, as an nvidia card owner, linux gaming is good enough to fill all my gamings needs.
The thing is, gaming doesn't matter all that much, again because of the corporate focus. I'm looking forward to the time when every OpenGL game will have Linux binaries on the same CDs. But meanwhile, home users can just dual boot to their war3z windows installations.
Really, some pressure should be applied on HP. Are they indeed so clueless how much PR damage this is going to cause HP, as opposed to the positive PR they would get by loudly dropping out their sponsorship?
It appears that in the end, IBM is the only HW manufacturer worth supporting.
One thing I forgot - don't demand that all archs are released at the same time. Oddball archs can get by with fewer releases, focus on Intel/AMD/IBM technology and release versions for other archs when they are ready. Let the people who care about them take their time to ensure that everything works ok. Debian doesn't need to be the NetBSD of linux distros, however appealing that seems on paper...
Obviously debian doesn't "need" to be popular, being noncommercial and all. But it would be shame to see such a good distro being marginalized in the battle for desktop Linux dominance.
Some people advocate splitting the distro into a more modular approach were groups of packages (like file server packages, wes server packages, desktop packages) could be deemed stable and released independently.
Yep, and some advocate that there should only be a stable "core" debian, with the rest having the life of their own. I don't see why everyone else must wait for some my3117widget to stabilize. It should be possible to "lock down" the core, and ensure that most packages could be upgraded without disrupting the core. There is some sensibility in the windows approach, where the "OS" is the core, and the rest are seperate.
Obviously Linux is advancing much more rapidly than windows (I am running unstable myself, and like it more than I ever did stable (since slinky)), but at some point in time a sufficient level of maturity is achieved, and the core can be locked down. This is essential for corporate desktop environments at least.
Of course some see debian more as a platform on which to build a good desktop distro (Libranet, LindowsOS...)
And moderators: I'm not dissing debian, so ease up on that trigger. It's idiotic to mod someone down for giving suggestions, the civilized approach is to reply instead.
I've moved everything of theirs I can off the SCO box to Linux boxes except for one expensive database accounting program. That program won't run on Linux (I've tried) and would bankrupt the company to try to replace it in this economy
And you are hardly going to install a new version of gcc on it, right? Such installations are mostly for things that are still developing, not stuff that just sits there.
The GCC issue on the other hand is one party, who has not been harmed in any way, pummeling the users of a maligned company instead of the company itself.
It's a good hint for everyone to avoid, or migrate away from SCO. They should realize that by choosing the OS, they are choosing to be left out.
This is foolish as it creates enemies from friends.
SCO users are not friends, they are just clueless. Such enemies are hardly dangerous enemies to have.
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The OSS will kill our job. At least, part of it.
*yawn*
OSS will kill a small minority of programming jobs, namely that of hugely popular shrink-wrap programs - which ATM mostly seems to be the problem for MSFT, which is why MSFT is the most violent OSS opposer. Most programmers get the money for doing custom software, or less popular/more tedious software products (embedded stuff), which don't interest OSS programmers all that much.
So a big evil monopolistic corporation loses, while others benefit. More programming jobs will be created, and a lot of them will be integration/RAD langs such as Python. Systems will be based on Open Standards, and be in general much more sane. Infrastructure wants to be free.
It's all beautiful.
This could be a break for Sun Microsystems though if they would do something with Solaris under x86 ala Linux or BSD. (freely downloadable I meant to say).
It doesn't matter whether it's freely downloadable, if it's not free as in OSS. Using Solaris would not be a strategic move, it would be a temporary measure in the migration path to Linux.
Building systems on Solaris is better than building them on Windows (because of the open standards), but using Solaris on a productivity desktop is just pure idiocy.
There are pros and cons to free software being you won't necessarily receive great tech support for it as opposed to some (note I said some*) companies tech support.
If you pay $1500 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, you sure as hell expect great tech support. And it's still free (libre) software, because you would not be "sharecropping"... BTW, I would expect the RHEL/SLES support to be far superior to the support of proprietary OSen, as it is *the* thing you are asked to pay for, instead of the special privilege of using the OS, or past R&D costs of a company.
So I say go AMD64 and go KIA, so I can buy those Athlons 2000+ based-machines I need even cheaper.
Actually, 2600+ is at 100EUR at the moment. It's not going to go much lower, percentually... they just phase out products that are 70EUR. And motherboards, older generations don't really plummet in price, they just disappear. But the CPU-mobo combo costs something like 200EUR if you go with AMD, so who cares?
Obviously you can buy the stuff second hand, which is a different matter altogether.
so perhaps one should be including the UltraSparc IIe that's in the SunBlade 100/150, which retail for less than most new PC's.
and with any luck, it can probably even reach the stellar performance of a PC that was mainstream 5 years ago.
By all accounts this is not the best of the current 64-bit chips, but I think it was the first to be offered in "PC-priced" systems.
And I bet some crackheads even bought it.
Really, I have had the "pleasure" of dabbling with some (old, I admit it) 64 bit sun boxes and got the first hand impression of the absence of correlation between n-bitness and performance.
Perhaps K8 is the first cheap (cheap as in volume) 64 bit arch that has a decent performance. PPC970 is the other one that I can think of.
Anyone wonder how Sun is suddenly making so much noise about Linux? They expect us to ignore all the recent backstabbing efforts (regarding SCO FUD) by merely distracting our attention with pretty toys?
Expect a statement along the lines of "but to really get the benefit of the cutting edge Mad Hatter, along with a robust, industrial strength OS, take a look at this Solaris-x86 over here..."
Sun certainly has a trust problem to deal with.
Ref: the historical Linus - Tannenbaum thread
This just keeps getting more and more rediculous.
And the more ridiculous it gets, the better! The more SCO flail desperately around, attacking everybody around it, the more enemies and negative publicity they get. And that's great for us.
BTW, anybody notice how SCO's actions are more and more in line with Microsoft's wishes? Attacking GPL is one such thing, urging IBM and others to abandon their "futile" GPL use... Attacking Linux end users, trying to scare people away from Linux, saying how SCO code can not be removed from Linux, how the Linux business model is flawed... Many of their arguments don't even help their case at all, since they have no interest in doing Unix business anymore anyway. SCO is doing its best to drag the (once) good name of Unix (not just Linux, all of them) through dirt, making MSFT Windows look more and more attractive.
Please, make it a standard policy to moderate all the "stop-publishing-these" rants down to 0, at least. I know I do. It is easy to ignore an article that doesn't interest you and frankly, if the SCO issue doesn't interest you, what the fsck are you doing on slashdot? Linux has never been under such a concrete attack before.
Excuse me? Have you ever really used their products?
:-). Never underestimate the power of the community...
Yes, the 9.x versions. Their users are locked in to their db, as the db doesn't really work properly for non-4gl code... the SQL support is broken (no row-level locks).
The 4GL paradigm is alright for many applications, but they should just open up their db a little bit more. Nowadays getting into a voluntary lock-in situation is not fashinable anymore, considering that you can get databases that support both 4GL *and* other languages.
And now that they support SCO we have yet another reason to advice against using their products
Progress Software is in a way like SCO - their product (db & devel tools) is crap, and the only reason people keep using it is because they have a lot of code written in their proprietary 4GL that can't be ported to something like Oracle. I was kinda happy that they managed to stay afloat - and even released their product on Linux. But I assume most of their licenses are used to run legacy applications on legacy OSen like Unixwarez.
However, a piece of good news for all who are trapped in the Progress 4GL world: it runs just fine with Linux, and you have absolutely no reason to use something apart from Linux. Let alone Unixwarez, which will be dead Any Day Now.
BTW, was anyone else annoyed by the way the crowd applaused for McBrides antics in the conference? Would you really like to support such a crowd by providing them with your OSS product? Samba team could do a cunning stunt by dropping Unixware support, now that SCO advertises how great they run in Windows networks, thanks to Samba.
Just to pick a medical nit, however, he did misspell his medication... it's Vicodin, not "Vicaden" (changing a letter or two in a medication name could cause a medication error)
Yet another peace of ammunition for anti-open source lobbyists - OSS supporters are junkies.
Note that this is not xwin.org... I browsed the xwin website a while ago (Keith Packards project) and people there have been complaining about how that project seems dead, while something should start happening. I applaud the effort of these guys.
I imagine it won't be too long before someone will figure out how to write a worm to DDOS a companies phone system!
:-).
And such a worm would be a boon for operators that charge for calls. Expect the operators' share prices to skyrocket whenever a worm alarm is given
I think the phones should have a hardware "lock" that would require the user to explicitly allow doing an operation that will cost them money.
Microsoft's long awaited Smartphone 2003 SDK was released today.
Not a slashdot regular, are you?
Really, it is critical that Smartphone not be allowed to succeed. We don't want Microsoft gaining a significant market share there also. If they happen to get something like 20%, they will start "integrating" a lot of proprietary interop stuff to Windows and aggressively wrestle up the marketshare. MSFT Windows/Offics business is winding down, so Smartphones are an excellent migration route because people actually buy new phones all the time.
Symbian is not all that "open", but they have to support public standards, because they have no choice. Do the industry a favor and boycott handsets that run SmartPhone. I don't know how much it is going to help though, because MSFT has endless stash of money to throw to these "strategic" projects. They are not going to drop out even if they sold zero licenses in 10 year.
Obviously multiple platforms means competition, which brings a little bit energy to the market. Smartphones will be a huge thing in a few years, so platform developers can't really be sitting on their asses for long.
C++ has vectors and pairs built in, and tuples will probably be in the next version of the standard.
:-).
Not built-in enough; In python I can do:
mylist = [("hello",3),("world",4)]
Additionally, some environments shun STL (and templates in general) because it leads to code bloat.
There's been some discussion about introducing type-inference into the language, so you could say:
auto entries = get_address_entries();
Like that is ever going to happen... I don't even think any C++ compiler has achieved ISO C++ compliance yet. Type inference would be lovely, it seems to work nicely on Ocaml at least. Perhaps gcc project should fork the language, C++ is by definition quite unportable anyway
And regarding your example code, the same can be done trivially in C++ with the added significant bonus of strong static typing:
Yes, I have written code like this, and generally like STL (too bad I can't use any of it for my work). However, it requires quite a lot of typing, and the resulting code is not as easy to understand.
Three lines of Python, three lines of C++ (barring the typedef, which is only there to make the rest of it easier to read).
And therein lies the catch, typedef is needed.
I typically use C/C++ and Perl for development, and every time I've been using Perl for a while, I get bouts of frustration with traditional languages for the lack of such things as hash datatypes and inline regular expressions.
:-)
I'm a professional C++ programmer, and a devout pythonista. What I miss most in C++ are the easy-to-instantiate datatypes like tuples. It's so much easier to pass a relatively simple datatype as a tuple, as opposed to introducing a whole new class and even *gasp* a new file to do the trick.
For example I can trivially code a function that returns an array of (name, address) tuples, and I can easily manipulate such an array:
tuples = get_address_entries()
for name,address in tuples:
print name,"lives in",address
After doing Python for a while, one sees how much static typing gets in your way of doing things the "proper" way, and very often one tries to avoid doing the damn thing at all... resulting in a sub-optimal design. Python allows you to be all you can be
Sounds like he has investments, or some other finiancial interests, in embedded linux.
Indeed.
Maybe "desktop linux profits" aren't so hot, but linux wasn't designed to make money with anyways.
On the contrary, I allege that lots of money are going to be made on Linux desktops. Support, mass deployment, customization, life cycle extension... so the money will be made in corporate space, and that's the way it should be. That's where the money in Linux servers is made at the moment.
Also, as an nvidia card owner, linux gaming is good enough to fill all my gamings needs.
The thing is, gaming doesn't matter all that much, again because of the corporate focus. I'm looking forward to the time when every OpenGL game will have Linux binaries on the same CDs. But meanwhile, home users can just dual boot to their war3z windows installations.
Really, some pressure should be applied on HP. Are they indeed so clueless how much PR damage this is going to cause HP, as opposed to the positive PR they would get by loudly dropping out their sponsorship?
It appears that in the end, IBM is the only HW manufacturer worth supporting.
I'm going to spoil the enjoyment and give out the ending of the book. The last chapter ends by a dramatic sentence:
"Red ink flows like a river of blood".
One thing I forgot - don't demand that all archs are released at the same time. Oddball archs can get by with fewer releases, focus on Intel/AMD/IBM technology and release versions for other archs when they are ready. Let the people who care about them take their time to ensure that everything works ok. Debian doesn't need to be the NetBSD of linux distros, however appealing that seems on paper...
Obviously debian doesn't "need" to be popular, being noncommercial and all. But it would be shame to see such a good distro being marginalized in the battle for desktop Linux dominance.
Some people advocate splitting the distro into a more modular approach were groups of packages (like file server packages, wes server packages, desktop packages) could be deemed stable and released independently.
Yep, and some advocate that there should only be a stable "core" debian, with the rest having the life of their own. I don't see why everyone else must wait for some my3117widget to stabilize. It should be possible to "lock down" the core, and ensure that most packages could be upgraded without disrupting the core. There is some sensibility in the windows approach, where the "OS" is the core, and the rest are seperate.
Obviously Linux is advancing much more rapidly than windows (I am running unstable myself, and like it more than I ever did stable (since slinky)), but at some point in time a sufficient level of maturity is achieved, and the core can be locked down. This is essential for corporate desktop environments at least.
Of course some see debian more as a platform on which to build a good desktop distro (Libranet, LindowsOS...)
And moderators: I'm not dissing debian, so ease up on that trigger. It's idiotic to mod someone down for giving suggestions, the civilized approach is to reply instead.
I've moved everything of theirs I can off the SCO box to Linux boxes except for one expensive database accounting program. That program won't run on Linux (I've tried) and would bankrupt the company to try to replace it in this economy
And you are hardly going to install a new version of gcc on it, right? Such installations are mostly for things that are still developing, not stuff that just sits there.
'I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend your right to say it to the death'.
'but you should not expect me to invite you for lunch'.
The GCC issue on the other hand is one party, who has not been harmed in any way, pummeling the users of a maligned company instead of the company itself.
It's a good hint for everyone to avoid, or migrate away from SCO. They should realize that by choosing the OS, they are choosing to be left out.
This is foolish as it creates enemies from friends.
SCO users are not friends, they are just clueless. Such enemies are hardly dangerous enemies to have.