you don't have to the station an hour and a half ahead of time and go through a strip search to get on the train? you're more likely to be able to get a train that will take you directly to your destination?
when i lived in chicago, i was often times tempted to take the ordinary amtrak trains to visit my relatives in nebraska rather than fly, and this was even before 9/11 made airport security so much more of a pain in the butt.
from memory: amtrak: 15 minute trip to downtown chicago to get on the train. show up about 15 minutes before the train leaves. spend about 9 hours on the train (where, by the way, you can get up and walk around freely, sit in seats that recline fully and dont feel like they were designed by goverment interrogators.) arrive about 20 minutes from my grandparents house.
fly: 1 1/2 hours to the airport if flying from o'hare. about 45 minutes to midway. get to the airport about an hour early, more if checking bags. sit on the plane in the most uncomfortable seats imagineable for 2-3 hours. spend a half hour at the baggage claim if i checked any luggage. drive about an hour and a half to my grandparents house.
in total, i'd spend about 10 hours in relative comfort getting to my granparents house via amtrak vs about 7-8 hours being herded like cattle via the airlines. in fact, the only reason i never did had more to do with the price than time. sometimes i wonder if the government wasn't so concerned about keeping the airlines afloat and subsidising airline tickets as much as they do whether amtrak wouldn't be a much more attractive option. (and yes, i do realize that the government also heavily subsidizes amtrak as well)
The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack, but as implemented by the greedy idiots in control of Telecom and TelstraClear, the internet in New Zealand can't even withstand an assault by frickin rat and some clown with a power tool.
the internet as a whole was designed to survive when any arbitrary node (or a number of arbitrary nodes) was disconnected. which it did just fine- the rest of the internet didn't even notice new zealand was missing unless they tried to contact a host located in new zealand. if you think this incident is peculiar to new zealand, think again. there was a time in relatively recent memory when a decent size chunk of the second largest city in the united states was offline for most of a day due to accidents involving large fiber optic cables. just because the internet as a whole is designed to work around missing nodes, doesn't mean it doesn't suck if you're on the part that gets disconnected. on the contrary, the internet was designed to accomodate for this siutation without slowing down or stopping the rest of the network.
Sure, it's realistic, if you're only writing HTML and some simple CSS (although IE even screws up some of the simple stuff). Try checking out how well any of the major browsers support the W3C standards for JavaScript. Only Mozilla comes close, and even there 'close' is a somewhat relative measure.
well, at least with gmail, opera would't work with their normal version until very recently. it's suport for xmlHttpRequest was non-existat for a long time, and then horribly broken for several versions before they (apparently) finally got it right with 8.0.
as great as opera is at css support, it's javascript support has until very recently always been a little (or in some cases a lot) behind Mozilla or even IE.
Since nobody else seems to have posted this yet (surprisingly)...
Ob. Simpson's reference:
Kent: With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States congress.
Speaker: Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of --
Congressman: Wait a minute, I want to tack on a rider to that bill: $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.
Speaker: All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
[everyone boos]
Speaker: Bill defeated. [bangs gavel]
Kent: I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.
If you leave your keys in plain sight in your car, and someone steals your car; you will be held liable.
umm, not quite. if you leave your keys in your car and it gets stolen, the person who stole the car has still committed a crime. you can still go in and file a police report. the police may laugh at you, but they will still do what they can to get your car back and arrest the theif. at worst you might get a ticket for leaving your keys in your car if you live in an area where they issue tickets for that.
if you leave your keys in your car and it gets stolen, and the theif then uses your car to commit another crime, either intentionally (e.g. uses it as a getaway car for a robbery) or unintentionally (e.g. runs over a pedestrian), once again it is the car theif who has committed and will be charged with the crime. you may be charged as an accessory to the crime depending on the circumstances, but that is not the same as being liable for the crime.
under any circumstances, the theif still must bear the full responsibility for their actions. under some circumstances, you may be made to bear some responsibility for making it easier for the theft to happen, but that does not lessen the theifs responsibility.
I think by late '99 everyone with an ounce of sense knew that a serious recession was on the way regardless of who won the next presidential election, so that one is certainly not all that 'prophetic'. The war probably wasn't that great a leap either, as the fact that Saddam still remained in power seemed to a lot of people to be a serious thorn in Bush Jr's side, even then.
your comment only applies to one of the three examples he gave. while i will side with you on the specific case of protecting files from idiot users, the other two he lists are good examples of microsoft making things harder and more iritating for the majority of users while adding no improved resiliance and very little improved ease of use for a small number of novice users.
i've been watching for this to happen for a while now. i worked for a company that wanted to do this several years ago. the technology has been around to handle this on the phone side for a while now. the problem has always been finding a way to integrate it with the millions of existing POS terminals already out there, which we eventually gave up on. it looks like i was right back then- rather than trying to figure out how to work with the existing systems, this was going to have to wait until somebody with big enough pockets to roll out all new POS terminals got involved. i suspect that it will be wuite a while before this is available here in the US- the cost involved in rolling out new POS terminals across the country here would be ginormous.
this was as much or more the fault of the kernel developers as it was of the gcc team. for a long time, the linux kernel (ab)used a lot of bugs and internal data structures in older versions of gcc, to the point that for some time, gcc 2.8 was the only compiler that could produce a working kernel. it was so bad that when gcc 2.95/gcc 3.0 were released, many linux distros packaged up gcc 2.8 as "kgcc" strictly for the purpose of compiling the kernel. after a while the kernel developers cleaned up their act, so that linux would compile with any decently standards conforming c compiler.
i think in most cases, lack of backward compatibility in gcc means the old behavior was a bug or a non-standard extension. lack of backwards compatibility in glibc, on the other hand, usually seems to mean ulrich felt like changing something important, just for the hell of it. it's funny, i was just getting into linux when they were making the switch from libc to glibc (what a mess that was) and i thought part of the reason for the switch was to eliminate precisely the kind of problems that seem to happen with pretty much every minor glibc revision.
The man does have one good point, no matter how poorly he managed to express it. while it is good to make your software portable, it is bad (and unnecessary) to slow down the progress of a project as a whole for the sake of a small minority, especially if that small minority can't or won't contribute the changes by themselves. the debian project is a great example. while it's great that debian runs on so many different architectures, and i don't think they should stop that, part of the immense delay behind the upcoming stable release is that they wouldn't release any for any platform until all of the 'major' platforms (some of which did not have active maintainers, from what i understand) were ready. at some point, it makes sense to say "if you want this code to run on your platform, you have to fix it, because i don't have the time, resources, or whatever else i need to do it properly." (on the other hand, his suggestion that these fixes, when they are made, be maintained outside of the official project tree seems rather pointless)
of course, he managed to surround his one good point with so much personal sniping, attacks on various software vendors, political ideology, and various other self serving BS that it's hard to take any of what he says in this rant seriously. but then, he's never been known to be the easiest project maintainer to get along with, and i suspect people who have followed glibc development for any length of time are not surprised in the least by anything he says here.
more likely she just didn't have the capability to work the titanium herself. titanium has a very high melting point, and is extremely difficult to machine safely. the place i bought my wife's and my wedding bands offered titanium rings, but unlike the rest of the rings they sold, which they custom made themselves, the titanium rings were ordered from another manufacturer, and the selection was specifically limited to the designs they had in the catalog- no custom modifications were possible.
most likely the artisan just didn't want to sell something she couldn't make herself, or was ill-informed. i've heard this claim from a variety of places (always second or third hand) but if you actually bother to do even the smallest bit of research, it's pretty easy to show that it's false.
one interesting comment i found when looking for information on this myself (i have a titanium wedding band):
During our 30+ years of jewelry repair experience, we've only seen a dozen or so rings that have been cut off in hospital emergency rooms, and in most of those cases the rings had been bent out-of-round and were putting painful pressure on the finger. Titanium rings are less likely to crush or bend out-of-round, so if you shut your hand in a car door or drop a heavy object on it, it might be safer to be wearing a titanium ring than a precious metal band!
i had a dell inspiron 8100 that i used with freebsd for 3 years, and i didn't have any problems for most of that time. there were a few problems with acpi when i first got it (which turned out to be as much of a problem with dell's acpi implementation as with freebsd) but once that was resolved it was smooth sailing for me. i would assume everything worked at least as well in linux, although as far as i remember i never tried installing linux on it.
of course, i'm sure the current models have some new hardware issue that won't be fixed until the laptop has been out for a year or two, at which time they'll have released a new model with new problems... but most of the time, hardware that was top of the line two years ago is still perfectly adequate. if i were on the market for a new laptop right now and absolutely needed it to run linux, i'd probably look for a refurb coming off a corporate lease.
The biggest issue i can think of is that many newer wifi chipsets seem to be the modern equivalent of the winmodem- a lot of the chips functionality is driven by the drivers. I haven't tried to get a new wireless card working on a *nix laptop in over a year, but the last card i bought (a year and a half to two years ago) i think had binary only drivers for linux, and some specs which people were just starting to use to write freebsd drivers.
other than that, graphics, sound, network, etc. all "just worked" in freebsd on my dell inspiron. i never even tried getting sleep/hibernate to work, so i have no idea if it was supported, but on that laptop, those never worked too well in windows either, so i never felt like i was missing much by not having them.
Remember when AltaVista was the way the majority of people on the web got around? AltaVista started sucking and people stopped using it. Now it's all but dead, and has been for some time. There web was around long before Google, and somehow people managed.
If Google starts showing all spam instead the intended sites, people will start using Yahoo. Or MSN. Or....
Google's death would hardly doom the web, much less the Internet. At some point people would decide that they don't like the results that Google is providing any more, and move on. And Google would become just as much a footnote in history as AltaVista.
McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet. Though his product, BitKeeper, is not an open source program, from 2002 until 2005, McVoy let open source programmers use it for free.
i might have believed at one point that providing a free tool for open source development somehow halped him understand open source, but every time he opens his mouth he he shows even more just how litle he really understands open source.
funny, if i remember correctly, something like 3/4ths of the chips intel manufactures are not x86 processors. intel is no more dependent on microsoft than microsoft is on intel.
This page indicates that XMLHttpRequest has been available in Mozilla since at least April 2002. I don't think Safari even existed outside of Apple at that time, and almost nobody cared about Opera- Opera 6 was pretty useless wrt JavaScript anyway, and Opera 7 wasn't released until 2003.
Also, there are several other ways to implement asynchronous JavaScript- Google Maps, one of the other widely hailed examples of AJAX, does not use XmlHttpRequest at all.
hardly. by the time slashdot started giving out user ID's at all it was already going downhill. the addition of user ID's and later the moderation system helped for a little while, but not much.
funny, if i had known then that low user ID's would someday be a status symbol, it wouldn't have been tough to get one in the 2 or 3 digits- i waited a couple of months after they introduced user ID's before I bothered to sign up for an account, as did most others at the time.
Let me ask you this: How often do you see an OSS product (EG: phpwiki) that doesn't offer support for numerous databases?
I see quite a few that only work on mysql (many of the form phpMy*). it seems to me that anything that was written originally for mysql will pretty much always be mysql centric, while projects that were originally written for databases other than mysql quickly branch out to support a variety of databases.
Slashdot Mirror
you don't have to the station an hour and a half ahead of time and go through a strip search to get on the train? you're more likely to be able to get a train that will take you directly to your destination?
when i lived in chicago, i was often times tempted to take the ordinary amtrak trains to visit my relatives in nebraska rather than fly, and this was even before 9/11 made airport security so much more of a pain in the butt.
from memory:
amtrak:
15 minute trip to downtown chicago to get on the train. show up about 15 minutes before the train leaves. spend about 9 hours on the train (where, by the way, you can get up and walk around freely, sit in seats that recline fully and dont feel like they were designed by goverment interrogators.) arrive about 20 minutes from my grandparents house.
fly:
1 1/2 hours to the airport if flying from o'hare. about 45 minutes to midway. get to the airport about an hour early, more if checking bags. sit on the plane in the most uncomfortable seats imagineable for 2-3 hours. spend a half hour at the baggage claim if i checked any luggage. drive about an hour and a half to my grandparents house.
in total, i'd spend about 10 hours in relative comfort getting to my granparents house via amtrak vs about 7-8 hours being herded like cattle via the airlines. in fact, the only reason i never did had more to do with the price than time. sometimes i wonder if the government wasn't so concerned about keeping the airlines afloat and subsidising airline tickets as much as they do whether amtrak wouldn't be a much more attractive option. (and yes, i do realize that the government also heavily subsidizes amtrak as well)
The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack, but as implemented by the greedy idiots in control of Telecom and TelstraClear, the internet in New Zealand can't even withstand an assault by frickin rat and some clown with a power tool.
the internet as a whole was designed to survive when any arbitrary node (or a number of arbitrary nodes) was disconnected. which it did just fine- the rest of the internet didn't even notice new zealand was missing unless they tried to contact a host located in new zealand. if you think this incident is peculiar to new zealand, think again. there was a time in relatively recent memory when a decent size chunk of the second largest city in the united states was offline for most of a day due to accidents involving large fiber optic cables. just because the internet as a whole is designed to work around missing nodes, doesn't mean it doesn't suck if you're on the part that gets disconnected. on the contrary, the internet was designed to accomodate for this siutation without slowing down or stopping the rest of the network.
I'm not normally one to nitpick on spelling errors, but if you're going to YELL that loud, you could at least yell the word correctly.
Sure, it's realistic, if you're only writing HTML and some simple CSS (although IE even screws up some of the simple stuff). Try checking out how well any of the major browsers support the W3C standards for JavaScript. Only Mozilla comes close, and even there 'close' is a somewhat relative measure.
well, at least with gmail, opera would't work with their normal version until very recently. it's suport for xmlHttpRequest was non-existat for a long time, and then horribly broken for several versions before they (apparently) finally got it right with 8.0.
as great as opera is at css support, it's javascript support has until very recently always been a little (or in some cases a lot) behind Mozilla or even IE.
Since nobody else seems to have posted this yet (surprisingly)...
Ob. Simpson's reference:
Kent: With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States congress.
Speaker: Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of --
Congressman: Wait a minute, I want to tack on a rider to that bill: $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.
Speaker: All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
[everyone boos]
Speaker: Bill defeated. [bangs gavel]
Kent: I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.
If you leave your keys in plain sight in your car, and someone steals your car; you will be held liable.
umm, not quite. if you leave your keys in your car and it gets stolen, the person who stole the car has still committed a crime. you can still go in and file a police report. the police may laugh at you, but they will still do what they can to get your car back and arrest the theif. at worst you might get a ticket for leaving your keys in your car if you live in an area where they issue tickets for that.
if you leave your keys in your car and it gets stolen, and the theif then uses your car to commit another crime, either intentionally (e.g. uses it as a getaway car for a robbery) or unintentionally (e.g. runs over a pedestrian), once again it is the car theif who has committed and will be charged with the crime. you may be charged as an accessory to the crime depending on the circumstances, but that is not the same as being liable for the crime.
under any circumstances, the theif still must bear the full responsibility for their actions. under some circumstances, you may be made to bear some responsibility for making it easier for the theft to happen, but that does not lessen the theifs responsibility.
I think by late '99 everyone with an ounce of sense knew that a serious recession was on the way regardless of who won the next presidential election, so that one is certainly not all that 'prophetic'. The war probably wasn't that great a leap either, as the fact that Saddam still remained in power seemed to a lot of people to be a serious thorn in Bush Jr's side, even then.
hmm... the way i remember my internet histroy, as soon as everyone realized that nobody wanted it, everybody stopped talking about push.
your comment only applies to one of the three examples he gave. while i will side with you on the specific case of protecting files from idiot users, the other two he lists are good examples of microsoft making things harder and more iritating for the majority of users while adding no improved resiliance and very little improved ease of use for a small number of novice users.
i've been watching for this to happen for a while now. i worked for a company that wanted to do this several years ago. the technology has been around to handle this on the phone side for a while now. the problem has always been finding a way to integrate it with the millions of existing POS terminals already out there, which we eventually gave up on. it looks like i was right back then- rather than trying to figure out how to work with the existing systems, this was going to have to wait until somebody with big enough pockets to roll out all new POS terminals got involved. i suspect that it will be wuite a while before this is available here in the US- the cost involved in rolling out new POS terminals across the country here would be ginormous.
Obviously, you've never been to Indiana- that's actually what it looks like.
this was as much or more the fault of the kernel developers as it was of the gcc team. for a long time, the linux kernel (ab)used a lot of bugs and internal data structures in older versions of gcc, to the point that for some time, gcc 2.8 was the only compiler that could produce a working kernel. it was so bad that when gcc 2.95/gcc 3.0 were released, many linux distros packaged up gcc 2.8 as "kgcc" strictly for the purpose of compiling the kernel. after a while the kernel developers cleaned up their act, so that linux would compile with any decently standards conforming c compiler.
i think in most cases, lack of backward compatibility in gcc means the old behavior was a bug or a non-standard extension. lack of backwards compatibility in glibc, on the other hand, usually seems to mean ulrich felt like changing something important, just for the hell of it. it's funny, i was just getting into linux when they were making the switch from libc to glibc (what a mess that was) and i thought part of the reason for the switch was to eliminate precisely the kind of problems that seem to happen with pretty much every minor glibc revision.
The man does have one good point, no matter how poorly he managed to express it. while it is good to make your software portable, it is bad (and unnecessary) to slow down the progress of a project as a whole for the sake of a small minority, especially if that small minority can't or won't contribute the changes by themselves. the debian project is a great example. while it's great that debian runs on so many different architectures, and i don't think they should stop that, part of the immense delay behind the upcoming stable release is that they wouldn't release any for any platform until all of the 'major' platforms (some of which did not have active maintainers, from what i understand) were ready. at some point, it makes sense to say "if you want this code to run on your platform, you have to fix it, because i don't have the time, resources, or whatever else i need to do it properly." (on the other hand, his suggestion that these fixes, when they are made, be maintained outside of the official project tree seems rather pointless)
of course, he managed to surround his one good point with so much personal sniping, attacks on various software vendors, political ideology, and various other self serving BS that it's hard to take any of what he says in this rant seriously. but then, he's never been known to be the easiest project maintainer to get along with, and i suspect people who have followed glibc development for any length of time are not surprised in the least by anything he says here.
more likely she just didn't have the capability to work the titanium herself. titanium has a very high melting point, and is extremely difficult to machine safely. the place i bought my wife's and my wedding bands offered titanium rings, but unlike the rest of the rings they sold, which they custom made themselves, the titanium rings were ordered from another manufacturer, and the selection was specifically limited to the designs they had in the catalog- no custom modifications were possible.
most likely the artisan just didn't want to sell something she couldn't make herself, or was ill-informed. i've heard this claim from a variety of places (always second or third hand) but if you actually bother to do even the smallest bit of research, it's pretty easy to show that it's false.
one interesting comment i found when looking for information on this myself (i have a titanium wedding band):
During our 30+ years of jewelry repair experience, we've only seen a dozen or so rings that have been cut off in hospital emergency rooms, and in most of those cases the rings had been bent out-of-round and were putting painful pressure on the finger. Titanium rings are less likely to crush or bend out-of-round, so if you shut your hand in a car door or drop a heavy object on it, it might be safer to be wearing a titanium ring than a precious metal band!
i had a dell inspiron 8100 that i used with freebsd for 3 years, and i didn't have any problems for most of that time. there were a few problems with acpi when i first got it (which turned out to be as much of a problem with dell's acpi implementation as with freebsd) but once that was resolved it was smooth sailing for me. i would assume everything worked at least as well in linux, although as far as i remember i never tried installing linux on it.
of course, i'm sure the current models have some new hardware issue that won't be fixed until the laptop has been out for a year or two, at which time they'll have released a new model with new problems... but most of the time, hardware that was top of the line two years ago is still perfectly adequate. if i were on the market for a new laptop right now and absolutely needed it to run linux, i'd probably look for a refurb coming off a corporate lease.
The biggest issue i can think of is that many newer wifi chipsets seem to be the modern equivalent of the winmodem- a lot of the chips functionality is driven by the drivers. I haven't tried to get a new wireless card working on a *nix laptop in over a year, but the last card i bought (a year and a half to two years ago) i think had binary only drivers for linux, and some specs which people were just starting to use to write freebsd drivers.
other than that, graphics, sound, network, etc. all "just worked" in freebsd on my dell inspiron. i never even tried getting sleep/hibernate to work, so i have no idea if it was supported, but on that laptop, those never worked too well in windows either, so i never felt like i was missing much by not having them.
Remember when AltaVista was the way the majority of people on the web got around? AltaVista started sucking and people stopped using it. Now it's all but dead, and has been for some time. There web was around long before Google, and somehow people managed.
If Google starts showing all spam instead the intended sites, people will start using Yahoo. Or MSN. Or....
Google's death would hardly doom the web, much less the Internet. At some point people would decide that they don't like the results that Google is providing any more, and move on. And Google would become just as much a footnote in history as AltaVista.
I particularly liked this line:
McVoy understands open source as well as anyone on the planet. Though his product, BitKeeper, is not an open source program, from 2002 until 2005, McVoy let open source programmers use it for free.
i might have believed at one point that providing a free tool for open source development somehow halped him understand open source, but every time he opens his mouth he he shows even more just how litle he really understands open source.
funny, if i remember correctly, something like 3/4ths of the chips intel manufactures are not x86 processors. intel is no more dependent on microsoft than microsoft is on intel.
This page indicates that XMLHttpRequest has been available in Mozilla since at least April 2002. I don't think Safari even existed outside of Apple at that time, and almost nobody cared about Opera- Opera 6 was pretty useless wrt JavaScript anyway, and Opera 7 wasn't released until 2003.
Also, there are several other ways to implement asynchronous JavaScript- Google Maps, one of the other widely hailed examples of AJAX, does not use XmlHttpRequest at all.
hardly. by the time slashdot started giving out user ID's at all it was already going downhill. the addition of user ID's and later the moderation system helped for a little while, but not much.
funny, if i had known then that low user ID's would someday be a status symbol, it wouldn't have been tough to get one in the 2 or 3 digits- i waited a couple of months after they introduced user ID's before I bothered to sign up for an account, as did most others at the time.
Who are Nick and Jessica?
this mousepad from 3M (http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en&lr=&c2cof f=1&tab=wf&q=3m+precise+mousepad+wrist+rest&btnG=S earch+Froogle) is (imo) the greatest mousepad ever made. they make ones without the wrist pad as well, but i like this version better. besides the wrist pad, it has a much heavier backing which keeps it from moving around on me. excellent surface for both ball mice and optical mice.
Let me ask you this: How often do you see an OSS product (EG: phpwiki) that doesn't offer support for numerous databases?
I see quite a few that only work on mysql (many of the form phpMy*). it seems to me that anything that was written originally for mysql will pretty much always be mysql centric, while projects that were originally written for databases other than mysql quickly branch out to support a variety of databases.