No, it's "Linux with statically compiled binary blobs", architecture notwithstanding.
I agree that having the code makes stuff easier, but there is no reason why companies wouldn't be able to run closed source software on an open source OS. And even if you don't want to compile _everything_ into a single binary, there's always the option of LD_PRELOAD together with your own shared libraries.
Capitalism or Freedom. At least we're in the position to choose.
Seriously, I've worked for companies both big and small, even the government for a while.
Instead of locking myself up at yet another company, I decided to set up my own software development company. Instead of looking for assignments, the assignments find me. I take assignments on a per-project basis, and if I don't have time or the project isn't interesting I know enough programmers who might want to take it.
It's not for everyone, but with a professional attitude and some word-of-mouth advertising I must say it beats any job flat-out. And I get to give discounts for open source software development, as that's what I enjoy most.
To remind you all, advertising is not where the money is at. NewEgg, priceline, travelocity, amazon , each make more than x4 the money facebook/myspace digg/youtube/ or any large advertising space makes.
Yeah, you're right. GOOG isn't worth anything anymore and doesn't make any money.
So my question is, why don't a few of the universities that fall into the first category take some of the money they are plowing into Blackboard licenses (which presumably is quite a chunk of change) and use it hire some developers to improve Moodle to the point where it does not suck?
Because universities like the free of Moodle, but besides that don't care about quality?
Looks interesting, but one question that I couldn't find on the site: Why generate code at all?
I might be missing something, but libglade has a python wrapper (and probably Ruby/Perl too, I'm too lazy to check). You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code. Calling libglade in Python is about 4 LOC. Why would anyone need a generator for this?
Again, I'm not trolling here, just curious and both an avid GTK+ and Python user.
I don't know about Thrift being a real contender in the web/internet-based services area. Really, code generation? How 80's. Haven't we learned enough from Sun RPC that this is a PITA, give me a proper library dammit! And AFAIK D-Bus is for local IPC, good luck sending messages over a network without a couple of hoops to jump through.
I can see your viewpoint, if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your application you might want to investigate Thrift, D-Bus or simply write your own TCP protocol. It's not rocket science. However in a world where companies expect to exchange data and organizations want to link databases from different vendors together, I'd rather have a poor-but-workable standard than none at all.
SOAP is a complete pile of bloatware. It puts OpenOffice to shame on this front. However I'd rather have a nice Python library that lets me throw around objects and gets the job done than a performance improvement of 50% and a lot of extra work. It's simply not worth it for most of the time, premature optimization.
Having said that, I prefer XML-RPC and REST-style interfaces. The simpler, the better.
The researchers found that while both men and women quickly picked up the game's concepts, the guys were somewhat more aggressive and successful at gaining "territory" on the screen.
As there are no further details on what the game actually encompassed, we can assume 'gaining territory' was the sole purpose of the game. Duh, men have a tendency (either because of nature or nurture) to be more aggressive, and if the purpose of the game is to be aggressive they will enjoy it more. Nearly all games cater to this idea.
Women however tend to enjoy the story-telling and relationship-building aspects of games. My gf and her female relatives are totally addicted to the Sims, while I really can't stand it. I don't mind a bit of FPS, but I don't put nearly as much time in it.
So, like in all _proper_ research, the conclusion should be: It depends. In this case, on the type of videogame. But I guess that wouldn't make such an attention-grabbing headline.
There are plenty of uses for this attendant that doesn't require painting the driver as a crazy old person driving unsafely!
I guess I've too often had crazy old people drive in front of me, doing 40mph on the freeway. Get of the road and into your wheelchair!. Whoops, sorry!
But how about simply having a human pump attendant? In cases where things go wrong (keywords: robot, highly flammable gas, electricity and less-mobile human) having no one around to help can turn into a disaster. I'm all for new geek toys, however that's no reason to disregard human safety.
Then again, a couple of these might thin out the number of crazy-old-people driving around. Hmmm, the robotic attendant and a BOFH-developer? This might open some possibilities...
Oh sweet Jesus. Hundreds of people spent nearly a decade in "the domain wars" because the price was too high. Now you want it to go back?
So, I'm assuming you'd want to enlighten me on the proper way to solve this issue? If not, good luck with that brick wall.
Sure, the prices of domain names are entirely artificial, they are but entries in a DNS server, but at least this way it would be infeasible to register a couple of million of domain names and still turn a profit.
I'd be the last to want to pump more heaps of cash into Verisign's bankaccount, but if these leaches are making so much money from a couple of million of domain names, perhaps domain names simply have become too cheap?
If domain names were to cost $100 to register (like they did in the last decade, $50/year 2 years in advance), I guess we could get rid of this kind of domain name pollution. Removing 'kiting' is the first step, but pumping up the price might be a good second step. Plus, you'd avoid a lot of those similar leaches that want to charge you $500 for an obscure domain name. It simply wouldn't be profitable for them anymore.
Not to be disrespectful to those with disabilities, but if getting out of your car is so difficult maybe it's not a smart thing to be driving a car at 80mph?
I don't have any relatives who (still) drive and would require this, but there is a much easier solution to those that would require such a device: a $5/hour pump-attendant that fills your car instead (which would be a lot safer too).
IMHO this is a nice gimmick, total overkill but a nice gimmick.
But in the end, flexability was key, and you can see some of the microkernel design philosophies start to seep into the linux kernel. Take a look at kernel modules for example. The code is already being abstracted out, now if it just effectively was designed to run in userspace.
I think it's a question of necessity. There are quite a few people working on writing all kinds of filesystems for Linux, so it's natural to try to make writing filesystems easier, if only for developing a prototype first. There are far fewer people working on NIC or soundcard drivers (a few per chipset, perhaps), so the necessity to come up with a general interface for kernel modules in userspace is smaller.
Given time I don't have a doubt that a general xUSE-API or a Minix-style kernel-userspace message bus will be developed.
I'm considering taking the position that all domains less than 30 days old are junk, unless they have a good SSL certificate. Is that too severe, or a good idea? Comments?
Sounds like a good idea. The Domain tasting article has a few interesting numbers on the amount of domains canceled within the 5 days grace period (after which the bastards re-register it for another 5 days). You really shouldn't want to handle those domains.
30 days would also rule out legit domains that suddenly get a lot of interest (via marketing or word-of-mouth). I'd say a compromise of ruling out all domains within 1-2 weeks would be fair, but that's just my 2 cents.
As I understand it, Twisted is more of a framework for writing frameworks; it's not meant to provide the sort of higher-level stuff that people generally expect when they say "web framework." If I'm wrong about that, somebody please correct me.
Yes and no. I must admit having to look it up, as it has been a while I looked at twisted. Twisted provides a framework for networked applications, be them client-side or server-side. They have their own Web-oriented framework called TwistedWeb, which can be used to write a web-facing server. So yes, it's a (networking) framework with which you can write a framework, however not generally a 'web framework' like in the usual sense.
If you want to make your own (web) server in python, Twisted is a valid choice. If you want to make a web application, Django is a valid choice. There is little overlap, besides the fact that they both are python libraries.
I'm with you on twisted; you nead to twist your head around it. Python has indeed had a relatively quiet year. Django on the other hand seems to be doing things just right and leaves the programmer with the final say in how he wants to structure his application. I've been using it for various projects over the last 1.5 years: it has never let me down and shortened development time considerably, leading to very happy clients.
Given I charge by the hour, I might have to pick up Java to crank up those invoices...
With countries all over the world putting more and more restrictions and regulations on hosting servers, I can see the benefit of a floating datacenter: in the case of legal/authoritative problems just sail to international waters.
As other comments note there are major problems to overcome. Reliability will be a lot worse. Satellite connections are painfully slow and expensive, while UMTS/HSDPA/wimax/cables limit your range and provide points-of-failure on land. Having your own dormant volcano like in Cryptonomicon is probably an easier route.
Plus, think of all the pirate-jokes you'd have to endure. Arrgg!
Not having heard much about Wikia search or the hype that surrounds it (I like it under my rock, thank you very much) I gave it a shot.
The results aren't that bad (tried 2 dozen queries, albeit only moderately difficult. all gave satisfactory results in the first few hits), and the integration of a wiki article and people-profiles are interesting concepts. The interface is nice and clean. I guess they could work on their integration with wikipedia; it's one of the strong points of Clusty. All in all not a bad start.
Then again, maybe I'm just not as critical about the results. I haven't used Google Search as my main search engine for a couple of years, but with time I could see wikia search become one of my regulars. All I can say is keep it up!
It's such lame and dishonest branding the marketing group should be ashamed.
If every lame and dishonest practice of marketing groups were to be published on/. we'd be under an avalanche.
This isn't news for nerds. This isn't stuff that matters. Total nitwits are paid to come up with this crap, imho it doesn't deserve any additional coverage.
Public education *should* include the limitation of science.
But it does! Newton did okay with his three laws, however Einstein did better. Any self-respecting high-school teacher mentions that so-called laws in science have changed dramatically over the last 2000 years. Gravity or Evolution, science has always been changing due to new insights and indeed that's the beauty of it all.
Newton himself prescribed his laws to the design of God, just as Darwin was a theist. There is no need to reconcile religion and science, as religion is something everyone should decide for himself. Science however is always the closest one can come to fact at any given time, no matter what the clergy would have you think.
It was Doom that gave us the Windows Ecosystem, so it will have to be a killer Linux game that gives us the Linux ecosystem.
You had me nodding all the way, and you have to end your post with such a misinformed line. Doom came out way before Win '95 and didn't do zit in creating any ecosystem; Microsoft's marketing was immensely more important than any DOS/Windows game. And why should people switch to Linux merely for a game that will probably be ported to Windows if it's successful by any rate?
Don't get me wrong: more open source games the better. Not because they might switch users over to a different OS (yeah right), not to demonstrate the capabilities of Linux, but simply to give users of any operating system some fun. What's wrong with keeping it at that?
Apple just managed to actually succeed - and is being punished for that. Success is why Apple is being singled out...
Seriously, what success? Apple's Jesus-phone was probably the most hyped product of 2007. Months in advance you couldn't get around all the articles promising a revolution in mobile phones.
The reality is that I've yet to see one on this side of the pond, while I have a lot of Apple-fans in my network. They couldn't care less about some overpriced locked-down gimmick. Apple has been pushing out press-release after press-release and their marketing went into overdrive before launch here; reality is that the iPhone simply isn't that great.
It does seem a bit silly to boycott Random House (major book publisher and Bertelsmann subsidiary) over what happened to some music CDs
Why does that seem silly? I say boycott both Sony and Bertelsmann, and all their subsidiaries. Give a clear signal to those in charge that you don't want to put up with BS like this: vote with your money and shop somewhere else.
They buy them because they though they are a good deal, or just because they don't have the money for a good System. They are not happy with it. Then throw a OS that people can't buy new software in the stores or the latest or even older games on it.
Totally agree with you here. If you look at the companies using Linux on the low-end of the market (Asus with the Eee PC for instance) they are marketing them as appliances, not computers. Naturally all hell will break out once Jane Doe wants to run the latest version of the Sims, or Timmy's new printer doesn't work. This assumes Jane and Timmy think they are getting a computer, and they will regardless. I don't want to be on the other side of that support-call.
The low-end machines however aren't marketed at all as Linux. Look at the Walmart-PC, or the Eee PC./. naturally gets a geekgasm about the whole deal, but only in the technical details do you see such machines actually run Linux. These Linux machines have a great niche market as a second/kids/wife computer or laptop and in the case of a backlash Walmart or Asus will suffer, not Linux. So it's not all bad, and perhaps one or more of these computers will catch on and lead to more players in the field.
My personal opinion is that Linux-on-the-desktop is currently best suited for small/medium-sized corporate environments, as 95% of the employees have a fixed set of tasks their computer should be able to do. In home environments people expect their old and new games to just work, together with the printer they just picked up at Best Buy. Managing expectations only works to a degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Advertising is advertising. If you sell or resell ads, cold hard cash is being made here.
BTW, HP is worth $125B. Google is worth $149B. Stop pulling numbers out your *** and start backing them up with proper facts.
No, it's "Linux with statically compiled binary blobs", architecture notwithstanding.
I agree that having the code makes stuff easier, but there is no reason why companies wouldn't be able to run closed source software on an open source OS. And even if you don't want to compile _everything_ into a single binary, there's always the option of LD_PRELOAD together with your own shared libraries.
Capitalism or Freedom. At least we're in the position to choose.
Seriously, I've worked for companies both big and small, even the government for a while.
Instead of locking myself up at yet another company, I decided to set up my own software development company. Instead of looking for assignments, the assignments find me. I take assignments on a per-project basis, and if I don't have time or the project isn't interesting I know enough programmers who might want to take it.
It's not for everyone, but with a professional attitude and some word-of-mouth advertising I must say it beats any job flat-out. And I get to give discounts for open source software development, as that's what I enjoy most.
Yeah, you're right. GOOG isn't worth anything anymore and doesn't make any money.
Because universities like the free of Moodle, but besides that don't care about quality?
All software sucks. Didn't you get the memo?
Looks interesting, but one question that I couldn't find on the site: Why generate code at all?
I might be missing something, but libglade has a python wrapper (and probably Ruby/Perl too, I'm too lazy to check). You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code. Calling libglade in Python is about 4 LOC. Why would anyone need a generator for this?
Again, I'm not trolling here, just curious and both an avid GTK+ and Python user.
I don't know about Thrift being a real contender in the web/internet-based services area. Really, code generation? How 80's. Haven't we learned enough from Sun RPC that this is a PITA, give me a proper library dammit! And AFAIK D-Bus is for local IPC, good luck sending messages over a network without a couple of hoops to jump through.
I can see your viewpoint, if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your application you might want to investigate Thrift, D-Bus or simply write your own TCP protocol. It's not rocket science. However in a world where companies expect to exchange data and organizations want to link databases from different vendors together, I'd rather have a poor-but-workable standard than none at all.
SOAP is a complete pile of bloatware. It puts OpenOffice to shame on this front. However I'd rather have a nice Python library that lets me throw around objects and gets the job done than a performance improvement of 50% and a lot of extra work. It's simply not worth it for most of the time, premature optimization.
Having said that, I prefer XML-RPC and REST-style interfaces. The simpler, the better.
As there are no further details on what the game actually encompassed, we can assume 'gaining territory' was the sole purpose of the game. Duh, men have a tendency (either because of nature or nurture) to be more aggressive, and if the purpose of the game is to be aggressive they will enjoy it more. Nearly all games cater to this idea.
Women however tend to enjoy the story-telling and relationship-building aspects of games. My gf and her female relatives are totally addicted to the Sims, while I really can't stand it. I don't mind a bit of FPS, but I don't put nearly as much time in it.
So, like in all _proper_ research, the conclusion should be: It depends. In this case, on the type of videogame. But I guess that wouldn't make such an attention-grabbing headline.
I guess I've too often had crazy old people drive in front of me, doing 40mph on the freeway. Get of the road and into your wheelchair!. Whoops, sorry!
But how about simply having a human pump attendant? In cases where things go wrong (keywords: robot, highly flammable gas, electricity and less-mobile human) having no one around to help can turn into a disaster. I'm all for new geek toys, however that's no reason to disregard human safety.
Then again, a couple of these might thin out the number of crazy-old-people driving around. Hmmm, the robotic attendant and a BOFH-developer? This might open some possibilities...
So, I'm assuming you'd want to enlighten me on the proper way to solve this issue? If not, good luck with that brick wall.
Sure, the prices of domain names are entirely artificial, they are but entries in a DNS server, but at least this way it would be infeasible to register a couple of million of domain names and still turn a profit.
I'd be the last to want to pump more heaps of cash into Verisign's bankaccount, but if these leaches are making so much money from a couple of million of domain names, perhaps domain names simply have become too cheap?
If domain names were to cost $100 to register (like they did in the last decade, $50/year 2 years in advance), I guess we could get rid of this kind of domain name pollution. Removing 'kiting' is the first step, but pumping up the price might be a good second step. Plus, you'd avoid a lot of those similar leaches that want to charge you $500 for an obscure domain name. It simply wouldn't be profitable for them anymore.
Not to be disrespectful to those with disabilities, but if getting out of your car is so difficult maybe it's not a smart thing to be driving a car at 80mph?
I don't have any relatives who (still) drive and would require this, but there is a much easier solution to those that would require such a device: a $5/hour pump-attendant that fills your car instead (which would be a lot safer too).
IMHO this is a nice gimmick, total overkill but a nice gimmick.
Userspace like with Filesystem in USErspace? Done!
I think it's a question of necessity. There are quite a few people working on writing all kinds of filesystems for Linux, so it's natural to try to make writing filesystems easier, if only for developing a prototype first.
There are far fewer people working on NIC or soundcard drivers (a few per chipset, perhaps), so the necessity to come up with a general interface for kernel modules in userspace is smaller.
Given time I don't have a doubt that a general xUSE-API or a Minix-style kernel-userspace message bus will be developed.
Sounds like a good idea. The Domain tasting article has a few interesting numbers on the amount of domains canceled within the 5 days grace period (after which the bastards re-register it for another 5 days). You really shouldn't want to handle those domains.
30 days would also rule out legit domains that suddenly get a lot of interest (via marketing or word-of-mouth). I'd say a compromise of ruling out all domains within 1-2 weeks would be fair, but that's just my 2 cents.
Yes and no. I must admit having to look it up, as it has been a while I looked at twisted. Twisted provides a framework for networked applications, be them client-side or server-side. They have their own Web-oriented framework called TwistedWeb, which can be used to write a web-facing server. So yes, it's a (networking) framework with which you can write a framework, however not generally a 'web framework' like in the usual sense.
If you want to make your own (web) server in python, Twisted is a valid choice. If you want to make a web application, Django is a valid choice. There is little overlap, besides the fact that they both are python libraries.
Like Django, perhaps?
I'm with you on twisted; you nead to twist your head around it. Python has indeed had a relatively quiet year. Django on the other hand seems to be doing things just right and leaves the programmer with the final say in how he wants to structure his application. I've been using it for various projects over the last 1.5 years: it has never let me down and shortened development time considerably, leading to very happy clients.
Given I charge by the hour, I might have to pick up Java to crank up those invoices...
Reminds me about the serverhosting on Sealand.
With countries all over the world putting more and more restrictions and regulations on hosting servers, I can see the benefit of a floating datacenter: in the case of legal/authoritative problems just sail to international waters.
As other comments note there are major problems to overcome. Reliability will be a lot worse. Satellite connections are painfully slow and expensive, while UMTS/HSDPA/wimax/cables limit your range and provide points-of-failure on land. Having your own dormant volcano like in Cryptonomicon is probably an easier route.
Plus, think of all the pirate-jokes you'd have to endure. Arrgg!
Not having heard much about Wikia search or the hype that surrounds it (I like it under my rock, thank you very much) I gave it a shot.
The results aren't that bad (tried 2 dozen queries, albeit only moderately difficult. all gave satisfactory results in the first few hits), and the integration of a wiki article and people-profiles are interesting concepts. The interface is nice and clean. I guess they could work on their integration with wikipedia; it's one of the strong points of Clusty. All in all not a bad start.
Then again, maybe I'm just not as critical about the results. I haven't used Google Search as my main search engine for a couple of years, but with time I could see wikia search become one of my regulars. All I can say is keep it up!
If every lame and dishonest practice of marketing groups were to be published on
This isn't news for nerds. This isn't stuff that matters. Total nitwits are paid to come up with this crap, imho it doesn't deserve any additional coverage.
My sources say no
But it does! Newton did okay with his three laws, however Einstein did better. Any self-respecting high-school teacher mentions that so-called laws in science have changed dramatically over the last 2000 years. Gravity or Evolution, science has always been changing due to new insights and indeed that's the beauty of it all.
Newton himself prescribed his laws to the design of God, just as Darwin was a theist. There is no need to reconcile religion and science, as religion is something everyone should decide for himself. Science however is always the closest one can come to fact at any given time, no matter what the clergy would have you think.
You had me nodding all the way, and you have to end your post with such a misinformed line. Doom came out way before Win '95 and didn't do zit in creating any ecosystem; Microsoft's marketing was immensely more important than any DOS/Windows game. And why should people switch to Linux merely for a game that will probably be ported to Windows if it's successful by any rate?
Don't get me wrong: more open source games the better. Not because they might switch users over to a different OS (yeah right), not to demonstrate the capabilities of Linux, but simply to give users of any operating system some fun. What's wrong with keeping it at that?
Apple just managed to actually succeed - and is being punished for that. Success is why Apple is being singled out...
Seriously, what success? Apple's Jesus-phone was probably the most hyped product of 2007. Months in advance you couldn't get around all the articles promising a revolution in mobile phones.
The reality is that I've yet to see one on this side of the pond, while I have a lot of Apple-fans in my network. They couldn't care less about some overpriced locked-down gimmick. Apple has been pushing out press-release after press-release and their marketing went into overdrive before launch here; reality is that the iPhone simply isn't that great.
Why does that seem silly? I say boycott both Sony and Bertelsmann, and all their subsidiaries. Give a clear signal to those in charge that you don't want to put up with BS like this: vote with your money and shop somewhere else.
Totally agree with you here. If you look at the companies using Linux on the low-end of the market (Asus with the Eee PC for instance) they are marketing them as appliances, not computers. Naturally all hell will break out once Jane Doe wants to run the latest version of the Sims, or Timmy's new printer doesn't work. This assumes Jane and Timmy think they are getting a computer, and they will regardless. I don't want to be on the other side of that support-call.
The low-end machines however aren't marketed at all as Linux. Look at the Walmart-PC, or the Eee PC.
My personal opinion is that Linux-on-the-desktop is currently best suited for small/medium-sized corporate environments, as 95% of the employees have a fixed set of tasks their computer should be able to do. In home environments people expect their old and new games to just work, together with the printer they just picked up at Best Buy. Managing expectations only works to a degree.