Sounds more like an attempt to do something about corruption for the public while leaving plenty opportunity for receiving money. The system was designed in such a way that it would leave plenty of room for funding (otherwise it would not have been accepted). As I understand it, the contribution limit is on an individual basis. I.e. two people working for the same company may donate to the same politicians. About donations being public, I don't think it makes much difference. Neither the democratic or the republican party has any interest in donation money scandals since they are both guilty of being corrupted. So, it usually is a non issue for the media also. To prevent corruption, we have very strict rules in holland. Politicians are not allowed to accept gifts over 50$ or something like that. Generally it works reasonably well (we've had some small cases in local politics). At least I would be very much surprised if our prime minister would be involved in this sort of stuff.
"the $51,000 is the amount Micros~1 has donated to the Senator's re-election campaign. Quite different from direct payments into the Senator's personal account (or is it, really?). Often in the U.S. elections, whichever side spends the most cash (advertisements on TV are expensive), wins most of the time."
Still sounds like corruption to me. The only reason companies like MS give money to politicians is because they expect something in return. Though the money is spent on elections, the senator has a clear interest in it since he will be reelected and receive the status and salary that is part of the job of a senator.
"Also, the U.S. has campaign contribution limits"
Yeah right, if there's one law with holes in it its probably that law.
"it will take twenty years"
It will take forever because no politician has any interest in changing the system. It will probably get worse.
One of the great achievements of the french revolution was separation of state, church and law. American politicians put the word god in just about any sentence they speak (to please their ignorant voters) and have great influence on the legal system since they control its funding (judging from the story).
In addition to that they are as corrupted as the french royal clan was before the revolution. It's time for a new revolution, it can't get more perverted than this: the defending party in a legal battle bribing politicians in order to obstruct justice. The sad part is that it is all legal.
They are a perfect example of how perverted the US is these this.
As a dutch person I was shocked to read this:
"But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about $51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget."
If this happens in Italy or South America you call it corruption. I don't think there's another word for it. MS is just using the system, they didn't create it. The whole DOJ case was lobbied for by other parties like SUN and IBM. Nobody is talking about that. Needless to say those parties benefited from the DOJ case by taking market share back from MS.
It's disgusting what you can get away with if you have money in the US. As a comparison, if a dutch politician would accept "gifts" like this and it would get into the media, he could start looking for another job.
What amazes me most is that in the current campaigns for the US presidency, the candidates are actually using the amount of bribing money they received to prove how suitable they are for the job. Judging from this George Bush seems to be the most corrupt/best candidate of all.
For that you will have to look at unreal instead of quake. The unreal engine has been licensed to a wide variety of companies who did all sorts of stuff with it. One of the things I read about a few months back was using it in a tool for architects.
The reason the unreal engine is chosen for these things is not so much its graphic superiority but more its superior flexibility. The unreal engine is highly customizable. From a software engineering perspective quake's customization capabilities are a bit clumsy. Clearly Carmack's talents are focused on the graphic side. I really hate the way you have to customize the game with the.pkx files. All of it seems so primitive. Examples of cool unreal stuff: Unreal has some really cool scripting capabilities, a nice way of installing user mods & levels (basically fool proof), a nice way of varying game behavior (mutators are really cool). All these features make it easier to customize the unreal engine for other stuff than "point & shoot" style games.
Don't get me wrong, quake is great. Personally I prefer Quake II above Unreal since it has better gameplay. Unreal looks better though. I'm not sure about UT & Q3 yet. I played both of them a lot lately. I probably need better hardware to make a final decision (though UT is superior when it comes to visual quality).
BTW. the slash is really hidden away on swedish keyboards. Really annoying. Luckily the dot is where it should be:)
Re:I have a big problem with that statement...
on
Gartner Slams Linux
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· Score: 2
Maybe Linux offers the functionality in seperate applications but it doesn't integrate them as well as windows. Sure we have Gnome and we have KDE. Both are nice approaches to integrated applictation environments. But both star office and wordperfect don't seem to integrate well with either of those environments. So even though there's wordperfect and the gimp and netscape, ect. None of these applications work well together. The big advantage of windows is that all applications use the same (inferior) application framework which enables them to interact.
Integration of applications is something both windows and mac os offer. Linux doesn't offer this and therefore is an inferior desktop environment. I'm not talking about speed or stability here. I'm talking about usability. It doesn't matter if there's a presentation tool X and a spreadsheet tool Y for linux if X and Y can't work together.
As for star office, I installed a 5.x version (on windows) and was shocked to find that it completely takes ownership of the desktop. It's worse than MS Office! Not that I'm an office user anyway, I prefer framemaker for serious writing.
Of course it should be possible to have a nice application environment on linux. For that to happen there should some standardization of how applications interact with each other. Either KDE or Gnome seems a good candidate for this but not both at the same time because that would fragment the application market (unless you can somehow get applications to work in both environments without using only a subset of their capabilities)
Another argument for not using a version number for large stuff such as operating systems and GNOME is that they are made up out of relatively independent components. A release should be seen as a collection of specific versions of those components. From this point of view, ms naming their latest release Windows 98 second edition is rather nice. It indicates that it is an incremental update over the original windows 98 (you might argue that it should actually be called windows 95 fourth/fifth edition).
Though at first sight the idea of translating to an intermediate language seems interesting, I can't help but note that similar projects in europe have all failed so far.
Automatic translation between languages in the EU is something that could save a lot of money. So there have been a lot of research projects funded with loads of EU money to accomplish this. All of these projects have failed (as far as I know).
This seems to be a similar effort, this time by the UN which is an equally burocratic organization. I think the goal of this project is probably too ambitious to work. Even translations between two related languages (english and german)are troublesome (babelfish for example is not exactly perfect), so I can't see why translations to an intermediate language would change things (ever tried to do that in babelfish? the result is not pretty).
So, it will probably fail and loads of money will be wasted on it.
Finally a non religious post that makes sense. I don't see how this could be interpreted other than good.
As has been pointed out before, SUNs main interest is selling hardware, not selling software. The increased openness of Solaris will make it more popular and will thus boost hardware sales. Microsoft is in a fundamentally different position since they don't sell hardware (except for some input devices). Unlike MS, SUN has no interest in locking up their software. They have no interest in giving it away either. So they choose a nice compromise. Everybody can see/change the source, only if you are going to use it for commercial purposes you are required to pay a license fee.
So what does opensource mean from SUNs perspective: - public APIs. Since the source is available the APIs are available too. This alone is an advantadge over closed source. Companies like MS are infamous for not diclosing their APIs. - People with an interest in getting bugs fixed (i.e. solaris users) can do so themselves if they think SUN is too slow (this is the argument that is used over and over to promote Linux).
I think SUN is doing smart things lately. Their community license (which currently is being applied to about anything they have) is great for marketing since they can now claim their stuff is open. At the same time they are not giving it away since they still can ask money for commercial usage.
There seem to be people who are worried that SUN will turn out just like MS. A few comments on that. Both companies are fairly large, both companies are pretty arrogant in their marketing, both companies use all dirty tricks that big companies use to protect themselves. So what. There are also some differences. SUNs products are far more open than microsoft products. SUN listens more to developers than MS (basically all the current Java APIs were developed in an open process where developers had the opportunity to suggest changes).
Of course SUN is not a perfect company. My point just is that they are more open than MS and that that is good for both SUN and its clients.
"Jou don't get that from himplementing Perl in Java."
Sure you do, the interpreter is a Java program. The java program gets optimized so the perl implementation benefits from the optimizations. Of course you would never get the same speed as with compiled perl (since we are talking about an interpreter), you are right about that. But also a Perl JIT compiler could be written in Java, especially if it is supposed to compile to Java bytecode but other code should be no problem either.
But as I said in my original post, I don't belief Java is fast enough at this moment to meet the performance requirements for PERL (i.e. be as fast as modc, or whatever its called, for apache).
Macros are evil. Each time you use a macro you are working around a language limitation. C++ has more language constructs than C so you can avoid macros more often. The nice thing about C++ is that the use of those language constructs is optional. I.e. if the use of a certain language construct in a certain spot of your program has a serious performance impact on your program the solution is simple: don't use it.
"Overall this will end up one of two ways: 1) it will fail because C++ is too slow or 2) it will succede because he uses C++ only for what advantages the syntax can provide him without being trapped into the glitzy (and mostly useless) constructs that make C++ about as speedy as my grandmother on a cold winter day."
I would go for number 2 and would like to add the prediction that if this thing is designed in a proper way, performance might actually be better than the old C version.
One of the arguments for reimplementing was that the current version is so complex that there are only a handfull of programmers who have enough knowledge to make non trivial changes to the code. A nicely designed C++ version of Perl could change this. An example of an increasingly successfull C++ implementation is Mozilla. It is fast, well designed and progressing really fast.
This discussion seems to be drifting in the "you can do anything in C" direction. While this is certainly true, it does not mean that C is the best solution for everything. Most perl users at least wouldn't dream of using C for the stuff they normally use perl for. Why?? perl is a better solution for their problem.
Likewise, C++ is a good language for large, complicated software. It's OO features allow for better structuring of the programs, and its C inheritance allows for performance optimizations should they be needed.
"Along those lines: I heard a good joke recently. A JIT compiler for Java that claimed to run code "just as fast as C++"! I laughed for minutes. Then I cried when I realized that this will likely work as an add campaign. Sigh."
You'll be crying a lot in the coming few years. Probably Java is not a good solution for implementing perl right now. But I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes an option in a few years. Perl is used mainly for server side processing of scripts. Good performance is essential there. Java has been coming quite nicely in this area and can be expected to improve even further the coming few years.
from the article: "I finally realized that Perl may be competing with Java in the problem space, but when you're writing Perl, implementing the Perl runtime, really what you're doing is something equivalent to writing a JVM. You're writing the equivalent of a Java Virtual Machine. Now, would you write a JVM in Eiffel? I don't think so. No, so neither would you write the Perl runtime in Java or in Eiffel"
While this may be true, implementing Perl in Java would mean that pearl benefits from all the optimizations in the Java vm (that would otherwise have to be implemented in the C++ version of perl). It would also mean that Perl would benefit from the portability of Java. One major advantage of a Java implementation would be that it would be far easier to maintain than a C or C++ implementation.
"I always thought that carpal tunnel syndrome was mostly invented by doctors -- until I started showing symptoms myself. I'm almost convinced of the need for surgery -- is there anyone else out there who has had this done? If so, what sort of recovery time did you have before you were reasonably self-sufficient again?" Have you thought of changing the way you do your work. Most likely it caused yoour pain in the first place. any solution for it will have to include changing that. If you don't it is likely your wrists will get worse and that they will be permanently dammaged.
From what you wrote I gather that you are looking for an easy fix in the form of an operation in order to continue working the way you have always done. As far as I know there are no easy fixes. If you go to a doctor he will only do the obvious, that is try to prevent you from further damage your wrists rather than cutting them open rearrange some stuff and declaring you cured.
If you are a programmer (what i suspect) and are planning to spend the rest of your life programming, you might want to start considering that your wrists won't go all the way. I.e. start thinking about ways of reducing the amount of typing you have to do for your work.
KOffice is irrelevant at this moment. It's a promising product but a finished version that can compete with MS/Star/Wordperfect is a long time away for us.
I don't think SUN has bought Star Office to make money on it. At least not directly. What they are hoping to do is boost server sales (hardware that is). For that reason it wouldn't surprise me if they will be giving start office portal away for free or for a relatively low fee. Once they finished it their main concern will be to get as much copies in the market as possible (running on sun servers). Asking a lot of money for it won't help so they won't.
I think one month or so ago when sun bought Star there was this guy (forgot the name) who claimed that if Sun would not get their suit onto 5 of the most important internet portals, it would have failed. Seen in that light it is very likely they will give the software away for free.
"Why don't I see them? Oh, yeah I forgot, its all "server side". Right. "
Yeah, it's all hype. Millions of Java programmers are just playing quake all day and reading slashdot. Of course they are not producing anything that works.
I have strong suspicions Linus job at Transmeta is to simply create a lot of hype and thus investment money, something they never would have pulled of without him.
Something that strengthens me in this opinion is that he manages to coordinate the linux kernel development in the time of his boss, something that could hardly be described as a light weight job.
Where are his publications (his non source code ones), where is his dissertation, where's the scientific contribution. Right, there isn't any. Hacking away at the linux kernel is definately not the same a graduate student has to go through.
He deserved his title for his contribution to the community. I congratulate him with that. Hip Hip Hurray for Linus!
27 years of programming is not the same as an academic title.
"But counting soley on a degree to evaluate a person's worth is plain oversimplification"
I agree with you on that.
"A technical exam at the interview is both more fair and certain."
There's a lot more than technique you learn at a university. You can't test that in a simple technical exam. A university diploma certifies you as a person who got through a school that is known to be tough and challenging. This qualifies you as somebody with a certain amount of cleverness. On the otherhand if you drop out of college, that generally is a sign that you don't have what it takes to finnish college. This does not necessarily qualify you as an idiot but it is not exactly proof of the opposite either.
"But honorary PhDs are closer to what the real meaning of the degree should be"
Honorary Ph Ds are usually given to people who contributed in a positive way to society. Nelson Mandela for instance has several honorary Ph Ds. Seen in this light, Linus Torvalds Ph D. is entirely justified since he contributed to society. A honorary Ph D. is not the same as a normal Ph. D. since it does not have the requirement that you also contributed to science (which neither Mandela or Torvalds has done as far as I know). Often of course honorary Ph. Ds are given to people who did contribute to science but that is beside the point. It is not a requirement for receiving one.
A degree merely classifies you as somebody who reached a certain milestone. To get one you have to pass tests. If you fail those tests you don't reach your milestone (at least not in a verifiable way) and you don't get a degree. It's that simple.
So when you apply for a job and you can say I have this degree, your future employer knows what you are capable of.
They practically invented it. News and sendmail were created by students, So was ftp, I think. Not to mention BSD (we all know what the B stands for I hope).
So your statement should be: "without universities we would *NEVER* have free software on our pc's"
And remember Bill Gates was a University drop out and Linus did finnish university. If you have brains, universities are an excellent place to train them and learn how to use them. Some people manage to aquire those skills elsewhere but most people don't.
"Besides the place or degree doesn't matter, it's the people that count!"
Linux is an interesting piece of engineering but it is of little scientific meaning. Therefore it is unsuitable as a Ph D. thesis since the goal of a Ph D. thesis is to contribute to science. This does not mean that it is unsuitable as a research subject. For instance there is very little scientific material about the OSS development model (at least not that I know of) so that might be an area where research can be done. Apart from that there is little revolutionary I can think of. Basically the design is 20 to 30 years old tweaked with some modern stuff like clustering and stuff like that (mostly copied from other operating systems).
Of course Linus seems to be intelligent and knowledgable enough to write such a thesis but as far as I know he hasn't done so.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds more like an attempt to do something about corruption for the public while leaving plenty opportunity for receiving money. The system was designed in such a way that it would leave plenty of room for funding (otherwise it would not have been accepted). As I understand it, the contribution limit is on an individual basis. I.e. two people working for the same company may donate to the same politicians. About donations being public, I don't think it makes much difference. Neither the democratic or the republican party has any interest in donation money scandals since they are both guilty of being corrupted. So, it usually is a non issue for the media also.
To prevent corruption, we have very strict rules in holland. Politicians are not allowed to accept gifts over 50$ or something like that. Generally it works reasonably well (we've had some small cases in local politics). At least I would be very much surprised if our prime minister would be involved in this sort of stuff.
"the $51,000 is the amount Micros~1 has donated to the Senator's re-election campaign. Quite different from direct payments into the Senator's personal account (or is it, really?). Often in the U.S. elections, whichever side spends the most cash (advertisements on TV are expensive), wins most of the time."
Still sounds like corruption to me. The only reason companies like MS give money to politicians is because they expect something in return. Though the money is spent on elections, the senator has a clear interest in it since he will be reelected and receive the status and salary that is part of the job of a senator.
"Also, the U.S. has campaign contribution limits"
Yeah right, if there's one law with holes in it its probably that law.
"it will take twenty years"
It will take forever because no politician has any interest in changing the system. It will probably get worse.
One of the great achievements of the french revolution was separation of state, church and law. American politicians put the word god in just about any sentence they speak (to please their ignorant voters) and have great influence on the legal system since they control its funding (judging from the story).
In addition to that they are as corrupted as the french royal clan was before the revolution. It's time for a new revolution, it can't get more perverted than this: the defending party in a legal battle bribing politicians in order to obstruct justice. The sad part is that it is all legal.
They are a perfect example of how perverted the US is these this.
As a dutch person I was shocked to read this:
"But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about $51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget."
If this happens in Italy or South America you call it corruption. I don't think there's another word for it. MS is just using the system, they didn't create it. The whole DOJ case was lobbied for by other parties like SUN and IBM. Nobody is talking about that. Needless to say those parties benefited from the DOJ case by taking market share back from MS.
It's disgusting what you can get away with if you have money in the US. As a comparison, if a dutch politician would accept "gifts" like this and it would get into the media, he could start looking for another job.
What amazes me most is that in the current campaigns for the US presidency, the candidates are actually using the amount of bribing money they received to prove how suitable they are for the job. Judging from this George Bush seems to be the most corrupt/best candidate of all.
For that you will have to look at unreal instead of quake. The unreal engine has been licensed to a wide variety of companies who did all sorts of stuff with it. One of the things I read about a few months back was using it in a tool for architects.
.pkx files. All of it seems so primitive.
The reason the unreal engine is chosen for these things is not so much its graphic superiority but more its superior flexibility. The unreal engine is highly customizable. From a software engineering perspective quake's customization capabilities are a bit clumsy. Clearly Carmack's talents are focused on the graphic side. I really hate the way you have to customize the game with the
Examples of cool unreal stuff: Unreal has some really cool scripting capabilities, a nice way of installing user mods & levels (basically fool proof), a nice way of varying game behavior (mutators are really cool). All these features make it easier to customize the unreal engine for other stuff than "point & shoot" style games.
Don't get me wrong, quake is great. Personally I prefer Quake II above Unreal since it has better gameplay. Unreal looks better though. I'm not sure about UT & Q3 yet. I played both of them a lot lately. I probably need better hardware to make a final decision (though UT is superior when it comes to visual quality).
in dutch: deelstreep punt
:)
BTW. the slash is really hidden away on swedish keyboards. Really annoying. Luckily the dot is where it should be
Maybe Linux offers the functionality in seperate applications but it doesn't integrate them as well as windows. Sure we have Gnome and we have KDE. Both are nice approaches to integrated applictation environments. But both star office and wordperfect don't seem to integrate well with either of those environments. So even though there's wordperfect and the gimp and netscape, ect. None of these applications work well together. The big advantage of windows is that all applications use the same (inferior) application framework which enables them to interact.
Integration of applications is something both windows and mac os offer. Linux doesn't offer this and therefore is an inferior desktop environment. I'm not talking about speed or stability here. I'm talking about usability. It doesn't matter if there's a presentation tool X and a spreadsheet tool Y for linux if X and Y can't work together.
As for star office, I installed a 5.x version (on windows) and was shocked to find that it completely takes ownership of the desktop. It's worse than MS Office! Not that I'm an office user anyway, I prefer framemaker for serious writing.
Of course it should be possible to have a nice application environment on linux. For that to happen there should some standardization of how applications interact with each other. Either KDE or Gnome seems a good candidate for this but not both at the same time because that would fragment the application market (unless you can somehow get applications to work in both environments without using only a subset of their capabilities)
Another argument for not using a version number for large stuff such as operating systems and GNOME is that they are made up out of relatively independent components. A release should be seen as a collection of specific versions of those components. From this point of view, ms naming their latest release Windows 98 second edition is rather nice. It indicates that it is an incremental update over the original windows 98 (you might argue that it should actually be called windows 95 fourth/fifth edition).
Though at first sight the idea of translating to an intermediate language seems interesting, I can't help but note that similar projects in europe have all failed so far.
Automatic translation between languages in the EU is something that could save a lot of money. So there have been a lot of research projects funded with loads of EU money to accomplish this. All of these projects have failed (as far as I know).
This seems to be a similar effort, this time by the UN which is an equally burocratic organization. I think the goal of this project is probably too ambitious to work. Even translations between two related languages (english and german)are troublesome (babelfish for example is not exactly perfect), so I can't see why translations to an intermediate language would change things (ever tried to do that in babelfish? the result is not pretty).
So, it will probably fail and loads of money will be wasted on it.
Finally a non religious post that makes sense. I don't see how this could be interpreted other than good.
As has been pointed out before, SUNs main interest is selling hardware, not selling software. The increased openness of Solaris will make it more popular and will thus boost hardware sales. Microsoft is in a fundamentally different position since they don't sell hardware (except for some input devices). Unlike MS, SUN has no interest in locking up their software. They have no interest in giving it away either. So they choose a nice compromise. Everybody can see/change the source, only if you are going to use it for commercial purposes you are required to pay a license fee.
So what does opensource mean from SUNs perspective:
- public APIs. Since the source is available the APIs are available too. This alone is an advantadge over closed source. Companies like MS are infamous for not diclosing their APIs.
- People with an interest in getting bugs fixed (i.e. solaris users) can do so themselves if they think SUN is too slow (this is the argument that is used over and over to promote Linux).
I think SUN is doing smart things lately. Their community license (which currently is being applied to about anything they have) is great for marketing since they can now claim their stuff is open. At the same time they are not giving it away since they still can ask money for commercial usage.
There seem to be people who are worried that SUN will turn out just like MS. A few comments on that. Both companies are fairly large, both companies are pretty arrogant in their marketing, both companies use all dirty tricks that big companies use to protect themselves. So what. There are also some differences. SUNs products are far more open than microsoft products. SUN listens more to developers than MS (basically all the current Java APIs were developed in an open process where developers had the opportunity to suggest changes).
Of course SUN is not a perfect company. My point just is that they are more open than MS and that that is good for both SUN and its clients.
"Jou don't get that from himplementing Perl in Java."
Sure you do, the interpreter is a Java program. The java program gets optimized so the perl implementation benefits from the optimizations. Of course you would never get the same speed as with compiled perl (since we are talking about an interpreter), you are right about that. But also a Perl JIT compiler could be written in Java, especially if it is supposed to compile to Java bytecode but other code should be no problem either.
But as I said in my original post, I don't belief Java is fast enough at this moment to meet the performance requirements for PERL (i.e. be as fast as modc, or whatever its called, for apache).
"Macros are the reason to dump C for C++? "
Macros are evil. Each time you use a macro you are working around a language limitation. C++ has more language constructs than C so you can avoid macros more often. The nice thing about C++ is that the use of those language constructs is optional. I.e. if the use of a certain language construct in a certain spot of your program has a serious performance impact on your program the solution is simple: don't use it.
"Overall this will end up one of two ways: 1) it will fail because C++ is too slow or 2) it will succede because he uses C++ only for what advantages the syntax can provide him without being trapped into the glitzy (and mostly useless) constructs that make C++ about as speedy as my grandmother on a cold winter day."
I would go for number 2 and would like to add the prediction that if this thing is designed in a proper way, performance might actually be better than the old C version.
One of the arguments for reimplementing was that the current version is so complex that there are only a handfull of programmers who have enough knowledge to make non trivial changes to the code. A nicely designed C++ version of Perl could change this. An example of an increasingly successfull C++ implementation is Mozilla. It is fast, well designed and progressing really fast.
This discussion seems to be drifting in the "you can do anything in C" direction. While this is certainly true, it does not mean that C is the best solution for everything. Most perl users at least wouldn't dream of using C for the stuff they normally use perl for. Why?? perl is a better solution for their problem.
Likewise, C++ is a good language for large, complicated software. It's OO features allow for better structuring of the programs, and its C inheritance allows for performance optimizations should they be needed.
"Along those lines: I heard a good joke recently. A JIT compiler for Java that claimed to run code "just as fast as C++"! I laughed for minutes. Then I cried when I realized that this will likely work as an add campaign. Sigh."
You'll be crying a lot in the coming few years. Probably Java is not a good solution for implementing perl right now. But I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes an option in a few years. Perl is used mainly for server side processing of scripts. Good performance is essential there. Java has been coming quite nicely in this area and can be expected to improve even further the coming few years.
from the article: "I finally realized that Perl may be competing with Java in the problem space, but when you're writing Perl, implementing the Perl runtime, really what you're doing is something equivalent to writing a JVM. You're writing the equivalent of a Java Virtual Machine. Now, would you write a JVM in Eiffel? I don't think so. No, so neither would you write the Perl runtime in Java or in Eiffel"
While this may be true, implementing Perl in Java would mean that pearl benefits from all the optimizations in the Java vm (that would otherwise have to be implemented in the C++ version of perl). It would also mean that Perl would benefit from the portability of Java. One major advantage of a Java implementation would be that it would be far easier to maintain than a C or C++ implementation.
"I always thought that carpal tunnel syndrome was mostly invented by doctors -- until I started showing symptoms myself. I'm almost convinced of the need for surgery -- is there anyone else out there who has had this done? If so, what sort of recovery time did you have before you were reasonably self-sufficient again?"
Have you thought of changing the way you do your work. Most likely it caused yoour pain in the first place. any solution for it will have to include changing that. If you don't it is likely your wrists will get worse and that they will be permanently dammaged.
From what you wrote I gather that you are looking for an easy fix in the form of an operation in order to continue working the way you have always done. As far as I know there are no easy fixes. If you go to a doctor he will only do the obvious, that is try to prevent you from further damage your wrists rather than cutting them open rearrange some stuff and declaring you cured.
If you are a programmer (what i suspect) and are planning to spend the rest of your life programming, you might want to start considering that your wrists won't go all the way. I.e. start thinking about ways of reducing the amount of typing you have to do for your work.
both :)
Am I confusing you?
Star Office Portal does not run your laptop. Am I still confusing you?
KOffice is irrelevant at this moment. It's a promising product but a finished version that can compete with MS/Star/Wordperfect is a long time away for us.
I don't think SUN has bought Star Office to make money on it. At least not directly. What they are hoping to do is boost server sales (hardware that is). For that reason it wouldn't surprise me if they will be giving start office portal away for free or for a relatively low fee. Once they finished it their main concern will be to get as much copies in the market as possible (running on sun servers). Asking a lot of money for it won't help so they won't.
I think one month or so ago when sun bought Star there was this guy (forgot the name) who claimed that if Sun would not get their suit onto 5 of the most important internet portals, it would have failed. Seen in that light it is very likely they will give the software away for free.
"Why don't I see them? Oh, yeah I forgot, its all "server side". Right. "
Yeah, it's all hype. Millions of Java programmers are just playing quake all day and reading slashdot. Of course they are not producing anything that works.
DUH!!!!
"Don't believe the hype. Java isn't mature."
Are you?
I have strong suspicions Linus job at Transmeta is to simply create a lot of hype and thus investment money, something they never would have pulled of without him.
Something that strengthens me in this opinion is that he manages to coordinate the linux kernel development in the time of his boss, something that could hardly be described as a light weight job.
Where are his publications (his non source code ones), where is his dissertation, where's the scientific contribution. Right, there isn't any. Hacking away at the linux kernel is definately not the same a graduate student has to go through.
He deserved his title for his contribution to the community. I congratulate him with that. Hip Hip Hurray for Linus!
We once had DR Dos but I don't recall any DR Windows. And now we have DR Linux :)
27 years of programming is not the same as an academic title.
"But counting soley on a degree to evaluate a person's worth is plain oversimplification"
I agree with you on that.
"A technical exam at the interview is both more fair and certain."
There's a lot more than technique you learn at a university. You can't test that in a simple technical exam. A university diploma certifies you as a person who got through a school that is known to be tough and challenging. This qualifies you as somebody with a certain amount of cleverness. On the otherhand if you drop out of college, that generally is a sign that you don't have what it takes to finnish college. This does not necessarily qualify you as an idiot but it is not exactly proof of the opposite either.
"But honorary PhDs are closer to what the real meaning of the degree should be"
Honorary Ph Ds are usually given to people who contributed in a positive way to society. Nelson Mandela for instance has several honorary Ph Ds. Seen in this light, Linus Torvalds Ph D. is entirely justified since he contributed to society. A honorary Ph D. is not the same as a normal Ph. D. since it does not have the requirement that you also contributed to science (which neither Mandela or Torvalds has done as far as I know). Often of course honorary Ph. Ds are given to people who did contribute to science but that is beside the point. It is not a requirement for receiving one.
A degree merely classifies you as somebody who reached a certain milestone. To get one you have to pass tests. If you fail those tests you don't reach your milestone (at least not in a verifiable way) and you don't get a degree. It's that simple.
So when you apply for a job and you can say I have this degree, your future employer knows what you are capable of.
used it???
They practically invented it. News and sendmail were created by students, So was ftp, I think. Not to mention BSD (we all know what the B stands for I hope).
So your statement should be:
"without universities we would *NEVER* have free software on our pc's"
And remember Bill Gates was a University drop out and Linus did finnish university. If you have brains, universities are an excellent place to train them and learn how to use them. Some people manage to aquire those skills elsewhere but most people don't.
"Besides the place or degree doesn't matter, it's the people that count!"
Now there's something I can agree with.
Linux is an interesting piece of engineering but it is of little scientific meaning. Therefore it is unsuitable as a Ph D. thesis since the goal of a Ph D. thesis is to contribute to science. This does not mean that it is unsuitable as a research subject. For instance there is very little scientific material about the OSS development model (at least not that I know of) so that might be an area where research can be done. Apart from that there is little revolutionary I can think of. Basically the design is 20 to 30 years old tweaked with some modern stuff like clustering and stuff like that (mostly copied from other operating systems).
Of course Linus seems to be intelligent and knowledgable enough to write such a thesis but as far as I know he hasn't done so.
yes, amazing isn't it
worse, 01 is used as a special number for people who don't have a personnumber. I have no idea how they are going to solve that next year.