I think the thing is that in a lot of shops this "open source" stuff just doesn't fly. Okay, so SVN might be just as good as BK, but who's selling support for it? It will be interesting to see, once SVN is done, whether people start adopting it or not. If and until some company decides to start selling support for SVN, though, it is a non-threat to companies like BitMover because it doesn't keep any real money out of their pockets.
I think this is all moot though, since nobody's going to be buying BK licenses to develop their own OSS SCCM just "to piss McVoy off." At least no serious contender would.
And yes, I think I've seen the same shirt. Still, nothing beats the ternary operator in terms of fun.;)
Ignoring the obvious request for an argument with the language comparison, it is in fact a testament to the languaes that it is possible to develop other languages using them. For example, could you write Python using VB? Probably not. So the comparison is "C is better for developing languages than VB. Look at Python!" Similarly, McVoy can say "BitKeeper is a great SCCM, even competing SCCMs have used it for their projects."
Basically it says that the people who know lots about SCCMs (or programming languages) settled on whichever tool because it was the best one to do the work they wanted to do, even if that isn't true. So no, as I said, Mr. McVoy would probably end up being pleased.
Ten to one McVoy isn't going to care anyhow. He just doesn't want to give bitkeeper away to people so they can turn around and use it to put him out of business. If the license is worded strongly that is to make it abundantly clear.
I'm entirely sure Mr. McVoy could care less if you pay for his product.:) When svn (or whatever) is done, he can simply say "they had to use bitkeeper to develop it. What does that tell you?"
One of the easiest ways to filter a fan on a computer is to stretch a nylon stocking tightly over it. The air flows in, but dirt does not. Nylons can be picked up for cheap, though you might want to have your wife/girlfriend/mom(heh) do that for you so you don't look like a weirdo.;)
It's just frustrating that the Postgres team decides to port to a platform that is now relatively obscure (Netware) instead of a platform that is one of the top 3 in the database market (Windows.) It seems to be a case of "maybe if we ignore this platform, it will just go away." That attitude is disappointing, especially when it comes from a company that I'd like to support.
Please point out to me where anyone said that the PostgreSQL people actually did the NetWare port? It sounds to me more like Novell did the porting and is packaging it with their system. Also, it's entirely possible that a NetWare port would be a hell of a lot simpler than a Windows port. Windows has no real compatibility with programming in "the rest of the computer world," so why would a bunch of volunteer developers spend time on revmaping the whole application to run on it?
Would you rather they got all hardcore about running on Windows or worked on making the DB itself better on the platforms where it already runs?
(And coincidence or not, Pete Abrams has been doing a Potter parody at Sluggy Freelance for the last couple of weeks, based weakly off the first book/movie).
I doubt it's a coincidence. Pete tends to have plotlines worked out 6-12 months in advance (at least according to the hintings on his site). I imagine he's been planning this for quite a while. He said he had the last arc (Aylee showdown) planned since what would have been Summer 2000 (The Lodoze/Gofotron arc). I think he has more ideas and less time to draw, which is definitely not a bad thing.
It's a shame sluggy isn't syndicated or similar, it's probably the best daily comic out there.
I have a SonyEricsson T68 (not a t68i, but it would be if I got the firmware upgrade). My phone is tri-band GSM, which means it will work no matter what country I'm in so long as they have a GSM phone network.
However, the t68 (which is probably the nicest phone I've seen to date) is not exactly cheap.
Now whether *this* chop is tri-band is another question, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't.
If you want to access information on a site rather far away, there's a respectable chance you'll cross over an American backbone provider to do it. This effects not just America, but everyone else on the internet.
Check out my email address. Yes, that's legitimate. I really can be contacted as wd@arpa.com. In fact, I'm one of the administrators. Should DARPA or the NSF (or whomever, these days) go after us for having arpa.com because our email looks like it's coming "from those ARPA people"? The domain was registered legitimately, and has been held legitimately for years. Of course, much longer than 'unix.com', but still.
Would you trust me because my email came from 'arpa.com'?:)
That could possibly be true. I'm not sure, though. My discussion with the IT/integration folks was that there hadn't been a push from IBM.
Personally, I don't blame those who want to keep OS/2. OS/2 was a great system. It had a nice, clean GUI, was full 32-bit preemptive multitasking, and ran quite nicely on my 486DX/33 w/ 8mb of RAM. OS/2 was one of those vastly superior pieces of software that was vanquished by the Microsoft Machine, and I definitely miss it. OS/2 had some odd quirks, to be sure (it took object oriented desktop computing to rather painful extremes at times) but overall it was a thing of beauty. It was basically what NT should have been, and couldn't become because of Win32.
I agree and disagree here. For a medium sized shop, they're probably not going to be able to make a change like that. However, in a really big shop, they can actually work on and test a deployment in a small area with little real cost impact. Or, in other words, they can say "Let's try this Lycoris thing over in Sales in Podunkville." and see how it pans out.
That being said, of course, the OS/2 path was well known and they dropped it (slowly:). With enough incentive, anyone would probably drop Windows as well. Amusingly, I've heard very little about the "Windows Subscription Model" lately, probably because Microsoft suddenly realized that nobody is going to incur that kind of cost when there are alternatives which are catching up to business needs rapidly.
I think, as a side note, it's worth mentioning that most new products don't give businesses anything extra. Sears, for example, was still running NT as of November or so on most of its desktops. Most people couldn't tell you why Office XP is more useful than Office 97. Etc. Even if Linux was always five years behind Microsoft, in the business world, it wouldn't matter that much. Nobody cares that XP is prettier than NT in an office world, and nobody cares that it has native firewalling or ICS or better support for internet media or... If it runs the apps they want it to, that's all they need.
Why pay Microsoft (or anybody) every year when you can either buy a license for as long as you (and your IT department) need to keep it for, or get it for free?
I can't say I agree with the "it must be identical to Windows" idea.
My mother, for a very long time, worked at the headquarters of Sears. They used OS/2 at Sears for a long time (being lovers of IBM and having lots of IBM contracts and so forth). Eventually (circa 1998 or thereabouts) they dumped OS/2 for WinNT 4.0. If you've used OS/2 and WinNT 4, you'll certainly recognize that they are not very much alike, except for the superficiality of having windows and menus and things. So basically, Sears broke off a long-standing contract with IBM (although that contract may have been up for renewal) to roll out an NT distribution across several thousand desktops.
Why? Probably because it was too expensive or difficult to get OS/2 developers, and possibly for various other reasons. It was certainly not to make the end-user's life any easier (as my mother often testified to me when she'd drag me in on weekends to help figure out "what the heck is wrong with this damn machine.") So, if you have something that basically works like Windows (or whatever), and is not incredibly painstaking to migrate to, (and in this case) is free free free! (or cheap:), I could definitely see a company being willing to switch.
The only requirement to me seems to be that people stop assuming that you always "get what you pay for." My mother, for example, still doesn't get how you can just give software away for nothing. Not to say that Linux trumps Windows in quality (maybe this is unpopular sentiment, but by and large Windows is more friendly, if not more stable, than a desktop Unix). Still, Linux is definitely "good enough" at this point to be a replacement in a simple office-use environment, where people basically word process, email, spreadsheet, and maybe make presentations. At least for me. And as far as 'productivity' tools go, I do roughly as much as the typical end-user.:)
To end a long ramble, basically, I think that Linux is ready to move in to a corporate world of limited/scaled down use. All someone really needs to do is make a distro with simple instructions on how to prevent end-users from doing anything they're not supposed to do (e.g. by creating a distro that allows you to create custom install images with very limited menu options, etc).
Probably true, in the OOP sense. I think if this is the case, then a language with transparent getters/setters like ruby is really great. This lets you basically insert a getter (or setter) with no outside impact, which is really slick.
I'm not a big OOP fan, but I love ruby for OOP because it does things like the above right.
If the standard getters/setters work for you, why the hell are you even using them? I'm not sure if you're talking about Java or C++ here (pardon me, I didn't find it clear), but why don't you just make the variables public? The only time you should waste on getters/setters is if they actually *do* something besides return the value of the variable or change the value of the variable.
This is one of those things about OO that never made sense. I think if people used their languages a bit more wisely, you'd see a lot less of instanceOfClass.getSomeVar(), and you'd need a hell of a lot less autocompletion.:)
Boy there's a lot of self righteousness flying around in this story. "MTV is so lame," "MTV is so irrelevant," "I am SOOOOO much cooler than MTV." Good, great, that's nice. Get over yourselves. If you don't care about the MTV movie awards (which is your right) then be content with that and shut the hell up about it.
Incidentally, I personally find the MTV movie awards amusing, if nothing else. I'd take them over the Oscars any day, at least real people vote for the awards, instead of paid off Hollywood types. The fact that the "real people" in question are predominantly teenagers doesn't bother me, since it's at least a finger on the pulse of the teenage consciousness.
But, seriously folks, if you're too good for the MTV movie awards than just be pleased with that and move on.
I choose to follow the logical progression that is 1D->2D->3D->4D... The human perception of "rate of change" and how we handle the understanding and rectifying of our quasi-4d selves is purely a mortal problem. Obviously, relativity comes up when trying to observe a higher dimension from what is effectively a lower one. This is my personal understanding, and a lot of it is horribly basic and simple, but I think what science will (eventually) end up doing is describing something that works quite a lot like this.
So for all two-dimensional beings (prove there aren't any), they can be safely assured that there is no third dimension? This is absolutely silly. Just because we happen to be progressing in a usual manner in a fourth dimensional "space", instead of being able to progress at will through it, does not make said fourth-dimensional space nonexistant. However, everything we know of in this universe (a theoretically infinite set of three-dimensional spaces positioned in a fourth-dimensional space) seem to behave as we do (traveling in what we see as a linear path through the space).
Think of it as a line (1D) moving slowly across a square (2D). We are just part of a "box" (3D) moving slowly across(?) time (4D). The memory is not simply the memory of humans of this sequence, but the memory of large particles in the universe of this sequence. All atomic and greater behavior is governed by its progression across time. Time, for we quasi-4D beings is not 'perception and nothing more' any more than space, for a 2D/quasi-3D being is merely 'perception.' It is simply a dimension which exists outside of our ability to control and navigate.
Incidentally, conceive of a 5D space containing an infinite number of 4D spaces. Neat, huh?
So where does this 'eye projection' leave people with visual problems? I've got a particular form of albinism which deforms my eye in such a way that my vision is basically uncorrectable (retinal problems). I've also got astigmatism. Is this thing going to track my eye movements while projecting into them, or am I basically screwed?
I've got problems enough with having to maintain close proximity with tvs and monitors, I'd hate to see all sorts of display technology move to a form like this which seems to lock me out. If you've got perfect or at elast good vision, sure, you're fine, but some of us don't.
I'd be interested to see if any care will be given for those of us not blessed with perfect vision, although I'd be surprised (and delighted) if that were the case. On the other hand, by the time this is affordable (and popular) I may have new options available to fix my vision with. Here's hoping.
Teach them how to use sh, or ksh. Most systems don't come with bash. Most systems' default shells do NOT tab complete. Although tab completion is great (I'm a zsh junkie) they need to understand that it isn't always going to be there for them. If you want to teach beyond Linux, teach beyond bash. ksh is available on just about everything but BSD (who for whatever reason LIKE csh;), and that's as good a starting shell as any other.
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I think the thing is that in a lot of shops this "open source" stuff just doesn't fly. Okay, so SVN might be just as good as BK, but who's selling support for it? It will be interesting to see, once SVN is done, whether people start adopting it or not. If and until some company decides to start selling support for SVN, though, it is a non-threat to companies like BitMover because it doesn't keep any real money out of their pockets.
;)
I think this is all moot though, since nobody's going to be buying BK licenses to develop their own OSS SCCM just "to piss McVoy off." At least no serious contender would.
And yes, I think I've seen the same shirt. Still, nothing beats the ternary operator in terms of fun.
Now show me a PHB who thinks that hard. :)
Ignoring the obvious request for an argument with the language comparison, it is in fact a testament to the languaes that it is possible to develop other languages using them. For example, could you write Python using VB? Probably not. So the comparison is "C is better for developing languages than VB. Look at Python!" Similarly, McVoy can say "BitKeeper is a great SCCM, even competing SCCMs have used it for their projects."
Basically it says that the people who know lots about SCCMs (or programming languages) settled on whichever tool because it was the best one to do the work they wanted to do, even if that isn't true. So no, as I said, Mr. McVoy would probably end up being pleased.
Ten to one McVoy isn't going to care anyhow. He just doesn't want to give bitkeeper away to people so they can turn around and use it to put him out of business. If the license is worded strongly that is to make it abundantly clear.
:) When svn (or whatever) is done, he can simply say "they had to use bitkeeper to develop it. What does that tell you?"
I'm entirely sure Mr. McVoy could care less if you pay for his product.
Just because "everyone" uses $SOFTWARE to do $TASK does not make $SOFTWARE the most suitable.
Replace $SOFTWARE with "cvs" or, if you like, "Windows", and you will see what I mean.
One of the easiest ways to filter a fan on a computer is to stretch a nylon stocking tightly over it. The air flows in, but dirt does not. Nylons can be picked up for cheap, though you might want to have your wife/girlfriend/mom(heh) do that for you so you don't look like a weirdo. ;)
That's okay, if your compiler was being friendly about type checking you probably would've gotten away with it anyways. :)
Don't forget the crossword puzzles, spider-man comics, and mama's homemade rhubarb pie!
No, at least not if you want to stick to the world of the living you can't. :)
It's just frustrating that the Postgres team decides to port to a platform that is now relatively obscure (Netware) instead of a platform that is one of the top 3 in the database market (Windows.) It seems to be a case of "maybe if we ignore this platform, it will just go away." That attitude is disappointing, especially when it comes from a company that I'd like to support.
Please point out to me where anyone said that the PostgreSQL people actually did the NetWare port? It sounds to me more like Novell did the porting and is packaging it with their system. Also, it's entirely possible that a NetWare port would be a hell of a lot simpler than a Windows port. Windows has no real compatibility with programming in "the rest of the computer world," so why would a bunch of volunteer developers spend time on revmaping the whole application to run on it?
Would you rather they got all hardcore about running on Windows or worked on making the DB itself better on the platforms where it already runs?
(And coincidence or not, Pete Abrams has been doing a Potter parody at Sluggy Freelance for the last couple of weeks, based weakly off the first book/movie).
I doubt it's a coincidence. Pete tends to have plotlines worked out 6-12 months in advance (at least according to the hintings on his site). I imagine he's been planning this for quite a while. He said he had the last arc (Aylee showdown) planned since what would have been Summer 2000 (The Lodoze/Gofotron arc). I think he has more ideas and less time to draw, which is definitely not a bad thing.
It's a shame sluggy isn't syndicated or similar, it's probably the best daily comic out there.
first post
I have a SonyEricsson T68 (not a t68i, but it would be if I got the firmware upgrade). My phone is tri-band GSM, which means it will work no matter what country I'm in so long as they have a GSM phone network.
However, the t68 (which is probably the nicest phone I've seen to date) is not exactly cheap.
Now whether *this* chop is tri-band is another question, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't.
If you want to access information on a site rather far away, there's a respectable chance you'll cross over an American backbone provider to do it. This effects not just America, but everyone else on the internet.
Check out my email address. Yes, that's legitimate. I really can be contacted as wd@arpa.com. In fact, I'm one of the administrators. Should DARPA or the NSF (or whomever, these days) go after us for having arpa.com because our email looks like it's coming "from those ARPA people"? The domain was registered legitimately, and has been held legitimately for years. Of course, much longer than 'unix.com', but still.
:)
Would you trust me because my email came from 'arpa.com'?
That could possibly be true. I'm not sure, though. My discussion with the IT/integration folks was that there hadn't been a push from IBM.
Personally, I don't blame those who want to keep OS/2. OS/2 was a great system. It had a nice, clean GUI, was full 32-bit preemptive multitasking, and ran quite nicely on my 486DX/33 w/ 8mb of RAM. OS/2 was one of those vastly superior pieces of software that was vanquished by the Microsoft Machine, and I definitely miss it. OS/2 had some odd quirks, to be sure (it took object oriented desktop computing to rather painful extremes at times) but overall it was a thing of beauty. It was basically what NT should have been, and couldn't become because of Win32.
Ah, memories.
I agree and disagree here. For a medium sized shop, they're probably not going to be able to make a change like that. However, in a really big shop, they can actually work on and test a deployment in a small area with little real cost impact. Or, in other words, they can say "Let's try this Lycoris thing over in Sales in Podunkville." and see how it pans out.
:). With enough incentive, anyone would probably drop Windows as well. Amusingly, I've heard very little about the "Windows Subscription Model" lately, probably because Microsoft suddenly realized that nobody is going to incur that kind of cost when there are alternatives which are catching up to business needs rapidly.
That being said, of course, the OS/2 path was well known and they dropped it (slowly
I think, as a side note, it's worth mentioning that most new products don't give businesses anything extra. Sears, for example, was still running NT as of November or so on most of its desktops. Most people couldn't tell you why Office XP is more useful than Office 97. Etc. Even if Linux was always five years behind Microsoft, in the business world, it wouldn't matter that much. Nobody cares that XP is prettier than NT in an office world, and nobody cares that it has native firewalling or ICS or better support for internet media or... If it runs the apps they want it to, that's all they need.
Why pay Microsoft (or anybody) every year when you can either buy a license for as long as you (and your IT department) need to keep it for, or get it for free?
I can't say I agree with the "it must be identical to Windows" idea.
:), I could definitely see a company being willing to switch.
:)
My mother, for a very long time, worked at the headquarters of Sears. They used OS/2 at Sears for a long time (being lovers of IBM and having lots of IBM contracts and so forth). Eventually (circa 1998 or thereabouts) they dumped OS/2 for WinNT 4.0. If you've used OS/2 and WinNT 4, you'll certainly recognize that they are not very much alike, except for the superficiality of having windows and menus and things. So basically, Sears broke off a long-standing contract with IBM (although that contract may have been up for renewal) to roll out an NT distribution across several thousand desktops.
Why? Probably because it was too expensive or difficult to get OS/2 developers, and possibly for various other reasons. It was certainly not to make the end-user's life any easier (as my mother often testified to me when she'd drag me in on weekends to help figure out "what the heck is wrong with this damn machine.") So, if you have something that basically works like Windows (or whatever), and is not incredibly painstaking to migrate to, (and in this case) is free free free! (or cheap
The only requirement to me seems to be that people stop assuming that you always "get what you pay for." My mother, for example, still doesn't get how you can just give software away for nothing. Not to say that Linux trumps Windows in quality (maybe this is unpopular sentiment, but by and large Windows is more friendly, if not more stable, than a desktop Unix). Still, Linux is definitely "good enough" at this point to be a replacement in a simple office-use environment, where people basically word process, email, spreadsheet, and maybe make presentations. At least for me. And as far as 'productivity' tools go, I do roughly as much as the typical end-user.
To end a long ramble, basically, I think that Linux is ready to move in to a corporate world of limited/scaled down use. All someone really needs to do is make a distro with simple instructions on how to prevent end-users from doing anything they're not supposed to do (e.g. by creating a distro that allows you to create custom install images with very limited menu options, etc).
Probably true, in the OOP sense. I think if this is the case, then a language with transparent getters/setters like ruby is really great. This lets you basically insert a getter (or setter) with no outside impact, which is really slick.
I'm not a big OOP fan, but I love ruby for OOP because it does things like the above right.
If the standard getters/setters work for you, why the hell are you even using them? I'm not sure if you're talking about Java or C++ here (pardon me, I didn't find it clear), but why don't you just make the variables public? The only time you should waste on getters/setters is if they actually *do* something besides return the value of the variable or change the value of the variable.
:)
This is one of those things about OO that never made sense. I think if people used their languages a bit more wisely, you'd see a lot less of instanceOfClass.getSomeVar(), and you'd need a hell of a lot less autocompletion.
Boy there's a lot of self righteousness flying around in this story. "MTV is so lame," "MTV is so irrelevant," "I am SOOOOO much cooler than MTV." Good, great, that's nice. Get over yourselves. If you don't care about the MTV movie awards (which is your right) then be content with that and shut the hell up about it.
Incidentally, I personally find the MTV movie awards amusing, if nothing else. I'd take them over the Oscars any day, at least real people vote for the awards, instead of paid off Hollywood types. The fact that the "real people" in question are predominantly teenagers doesn't bother me, since it's at least a finger on the pulse of the teenage consciousness.
But, seriously folks, if you're too good for the MTV movie awards than just be pleased with that and move on.
I choose to follow the logical progression that is 1D->2D->3D->4D... The human perception of "rate of change" and how we handle the understanding and rectifying of our quasi-4d selves is purely a mortal problem. Obviously, relativity comes up when trying to observe a higher dimension from what is effectively a lower one. This is my personal understanding, and a lot of it is horribly basic and simple, but I think what science will (eventually) end up doing is describing something that works quite a lot like this.
So for all two-dimensional beings (prove there aren't any), they can be safely assured that there is no third dimension? This is absolutely silly. Just because we happen to be progressing in a usual manner in a fourth dimensional "space", instead of being able to progress at will through it, does not make said fourth-dimensional space nonexistant. However, everything we know of in this universe (a theoretically infinite set of three-dimensional spaces positioned in a fourth-dimensional space) seem to behave as we do (traveling in what we see as a linear path through the space).
Think of it as a line (1D) moving slowly across a square (2D). We are just part of a "box" (3D) moving slowly across(?) time (4D). The memory is not simply the memory of humans of this sequence, but the memory of large particles in the universe of this sequence. All atomic and greater behavior is governed by its progression across time. Time, for we quasi-4D beings is not 'perception and nothing more' any more than space, for a 2D/quasi-3D being is merely 'perception.' It is simply a dimension which exists outside of our ability to control and navigate.
Incidentally, conceive of a 5D space containing an infinite number of 4D spaces. Neat, huh?
So where does this 'eye projection' leave people with visual problems? I've got a particular form of albinism which deforms my eye in such a way that my vision is basically uncorrectable (retinal problems). I've also got astigmatism. Is this thing going to track my eye movements while projecting into them, or am I basically screwed?
I've got problems enough with having to maintain close proximity with tvs and monitors, I'd hate to see all sorts of display technology move to a form like this which seems to lock me out. If you've got perfect or at elast good vision, sure, you're fine, but some of us don't.
I'd be interested to see if any care will be given for those of us not blessed with perfect vision, although I'd be surprised (and delighted) if that were the case. On the other hand, by the time this is affordable (and popular) I may have new options available to fix my vision with. Here's hoping.
Teach them how to use sh, or ksh. Most systems don't come with bash. Most systems' default shells do NOT tab complete. Although tab completion is great (I'm a zsh junkie) they need to understand that it isn't always going to be there for them. If you want to teach beyond Linux, teach beyond bash. ksh is available on just about everything but BSD (who for whatever reason LIKE csh ;), and that's as good a starting shell as any other.