So, the Right Thing fails. IMHO, this is not, however, an excuse to do the Wrong Thing. If the problem has no solution, then the problem is not a problem!
You've GOT to be kidding? Please, tell me you're joking. Or, go tell every computer scientist writing heuristics to NP-complete problems to find a new job. We can't solve TSP (at least not doing the "RightThing") so we should just forget about it? We can't write a good multiplayer game using OpenSource so we shouldn't write the game period? I'm really sorry, but what are you smoking? And where can I get some?
I'm not advocating closed-source solutions, but doing the WrongThing may be the only way to fix this. We have to accept that until computing power and networks enable the "RightThing," some other solution should be used. As other people have pointed out, this is not national security we're dealing with, nor billions of international dollars. People can cheat at an old game. The lessons can be learned by the private sector for "more important" applications.
Yes indeed! First: I used to work for Clariion, doing software development for the FibreChannel box controller software. I fell in love with the hardware there, and they really do have products that span the whole spectrum. (7-Up is a small, 7 disk array with a single controller board, but which does write caching by backing up unfinished writes to a PCMCIA flash memory card. Good stuff.) As someone else said, they've since been bought by EMC, so I'm not sure how available any of their stuff is.
Other people pointed out that you might want to switch to RAID 3 for this application. I can assure you that the Clariion software is EXTENSIVELY tested and optimized for RAID 3. SGI uses Clariion arrays for video storage/streaming/editing work, so bandwidth (optimized by RAID 3) is their number one concern.
Of course, FibreChannel is JustPlainCool(tm). Good luck with whatever you choose...
I'm not sure why retail isn't carrying them, but the places (web) that claim to have them, do. I ordered a complete system last and it's already been shipped (today actually) though the company had been shipping Athlon boxes for about a week. (I can't wait to my grubby little hands on it!)
But that's exactly the point! If Sun's model were to spread everywhere (homes, as well as corporations) then we wouldn't have useless equipment like hard drives on our PCs. Our software would be stored across a network, so things that we now load from CD would actually be coming over the net. Granted, we may still have CD drives for some apps, but the whole point is to move software and its maintenance out of the hands of the average user, which means storing EVERYTHING on servers.
If this is true (and it makes quite a bit of sense) one has to wonder what rock the geniuses at Sun have been living under. Have they not noticed that NO ONE seems interested in network computing as a general purpose solution? While it may make inroads in certain markets, one of the single largest (if not the largest) markets for home PCs completely precludes this model of computing: games. Thin clients (in their current incarnations at least) can't run (nor store) the latest games. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but this is still a motivating factor in the hardware race, and anybody that's willing to pay in excess of $200 for a 3D accelerator is not going to want to deal with lag just to load their games.
If nothing else, we can take solace in the fact that Sun seems to be the only ones interested in their vision of the future, and that the market has already demonstrated it's not viable. Maybe once they wake up, they'll start supporting Linux in spirit, not just as a horse and pony show.
That's ok... but Lord Of The Fries has become one of the absolute favorite games among all of the people in gaming group. That game is SO simple, while simultanesously filled with strategy. (Besides, the illustrations rock!) (:
Everyone seems to be so happy that they too can open a swiss bank account with only $5000. I've got news for you: If all you have to start your account is $5000, you're not saving that much in taxes by doing this. It's a risk/reward trade-off, and you'd have to be a moron to think it's worth it.
Anybody that actually stands to gain (from the tax-evasion persepctive) by putting their money in swiss accounts, has much more money, and doesn't do it via the web. (They fly to Switzerland in their private jet.)
People are quick to point out the "current" or "latest" cool free software projects. How about the authors of something that has truly made a difference, and for a long time at that: The Apache Team.
Apache is clearly one of the cornerstones of Linux WorldDomination(TM)... it would be nice to recognize those responsible. (Of course, I'm not actually familiar with the development team, including how large the "core" is.)
It's got some stories generated by the program, and other information by Selmer. (Incidentally, I've now had Selmer for three separate courses, and he is one of the absolute best professors I've had in my four years. Period.) Selmer fully believes that "true" AI is impossible, and that man is more than a machine, but has devoted his life to the study of AI anyway, and finding close approximations.
Very true. My previous employment was doing embedded development on Fibre Channel RAID arrays. We also had serial access to do debugging. Without it, you're just staring at a big box with a bunch of blinking lights.
True. More importantly, we have distributions across an important spectrum. There are still those aimed at the hacker crowd (Slackware, Debian), the general market and some businesses (RedHat, SuSE) and those with major (pre-existing) commercial backing (Caldera, Corel). Many people don't like these newer distros because they dumb things down or whatever, but the surest way to get Linux into corporations is to have a known quantity backing it (with support). Personally, I'm anxiously awaiting Corel's distro, as I've always heard good things about Debian...
OK, and people that tinker with their cars and know their engine inside out, don't. Granted, they get much better performance out of their cars, and they probably have fewer problems with them because they know exactly when something goes wrong, but they don't insist that everyone else should be the same way. They still accept that most people have better things to do, so they should just go buy a new car from the dealer and go to Jiffy Lube every few months. I honestly believe that 90% of the people with this extremist attitude don't even believe in it, they just want to do anyhting possible to avoid being labeled a newbie.
I'm also not saying that it's a waste of time to learn how to use one's system... quite the opposite. But ultimately, it's not for everyone, and if it weren't for things like rpm, we'd have much more trouble attracting non-Linux users and breaking into the workstation market. I use my machine primarily as a workstation, so building stupid applications like my CD player from source so I can squeeze 2% extra performance on them (not bloodly likely on my piece of shit Cyrix P150) just isn't worth the effort. What possible benefit does that get me? Gee, I know that my CD application is rock solid because I built it from source! Who cares? And at the other end, my aging Cyrix box really doesn't have the time (nor do I) to built XFree86, but I've come to trust someone else to do that for me. Of course, if there weren't source available I'd probably start looking elsewhere, but I don't feel this overwhelming urge to waste an entire day trying to build that source tree. It's a giant bloated piece of crap. I download the SVGA server, run it, and forget about it.
I've only been using Linux for four years, so I still consider myself a relative newbie with only a moderate level of skill. But... if some of these people stopped trying to be the most badass, hard kore users, we MIGHT stop scaring away the tourists.
Likewise: your car, refrigerator, alarm clock, photocopier, fax machine, etc... Yet, we're not expected to tear all of these things apart and know how they work before using them. "I'm sorry, you can't have that cup of decaf until you grok the chemical process by which it came to be. And you better be able to build a Mr. Coffee from scratch, or you don't deserve to live." Why must we constantly measure our computer peckers against one another by pulling this ridiculous bullshit that would get us all laughed out of any other sane community?
No, that's not my point, but that is what many people are saying here. I just feel compelled to point out that this is absurd. I'm not saying I don't like Slack, it's great for people that want a clean system, and I think the distro-war is ludicrously stupid. But... Lambasting people that want to use RPM/DEB/whatever packages is silly. A computer is a tool, used to solve OTHER problems. Many people don't have the time to build every last miniscule program they intend to use from source. And if I'm using a machine that (OS-wise) looks very much like every other RedHat (or Debian, or whatever) machine, why should I duplicate all that work? I quite often download some app I see to check it out. My console ends up looking like this:
$ su $ rpm -U foo.rpm $ exit $ foo [ Realize it's some really lame package I don't want. ] $ su $ rpm -e foo.rpm
I'm done! I'm sorry, but I can't justify building something that resides on my machine for less than a day from source. Maybe I'm just wierd in my usage habits, and I should stop trying out new software, but ultimately it seems silly to villify RPM and friends, who have done more to make Linux accessible to the masses than anything else. (And given his pragmatic view of things, I have to believe that Linus would approve of packages/prebuilt binaries.)
I don't suppose there are any concrete details to support this? A website? A name? Sure, there are other formats out there, but I find it hard to believe that some mysterious unknown format is going to make MP3 players "junk in nine months."
The only next-gen standard I've heard of (though I don't really keep up on this) is MP4, based off VQF. And while it hasn't yet caught on completely, it is available. If portable players had the horsepower to do the decoding, it would make for superior systems. (Lower bitrate needed to get the same sound quality as MP3 -> more songs in same amount of space.)
I've now worked in the software industry at large, and more revently at a games company, working on an upcoming PC game. While it's true that development practices suck universally throughout the industry, I have to say that game companies are MUCH worse. They've somehow found a way to take the standard (and piss poor) software engineering of most software companies, and make it ten times as excruciating for the developer. Part of this might be because one has higher expectations going in ("Oh wow! I get to write games!") but I think the author has some VERY valid points here.
People keep saying that this must be lots of Windows developers, but question 13 makes me wonder about that. Linux application user interfaces should be... Native GUI got >76%!
That's impressive. Even if the people taking the poll were from the Windows school of programming, at least they haven't been brainwashed into thinking that HTML/XML (8.6%) is a good way to write applications. (There might be worse methods for doing application user interface, but I'd have to work really hard to come up with one.)
I can't help but think that X is lacking one thing that would really help the situation. (Though this could be done, and X is still great, regardless.) There ought to be some layer between X itself (Xlib and friends) and the window manager. As everyone keeps pointing out, the window manager is what controls the interface, but it's usually more complex than that. Nowadays, it's a combination of the WM, and the toolkit used to write the app. I may be silly, but I'd like a desktop with a consistent appearance. And when I'm running apps written in three (or four, five, six...) different toolkits (raw Xlib, Qt, GTK, fltk...) I get the feeling that things just aren't tied together. KDE and GNOME help somewhat, but only so long as you're running their apps.
If there were some layer of abstraction that dealt with general user preferences on how windows should behave/look but with enough freedom for toolkits to provide real added value (ie speed of widgets -> Motif moves like molasses uphill in January, whereas GTK is snappy) I'd be in GUI heaven.
This idea isn't really fleshed out fully, it just hit me while reading other people's comments, but I think X has the necessary basics to be a next-generation GUI. (Though it could certainly use a "cleanup" stage whereby unnecessary features are removed, and the important ones are made more universal -> shared memory)
My bad. In that case, I guess he has little right to complain about not being able to ship a usable product. If they started with a nearly unusable/unworkable code base and decided that rather than get something resembling a browser out the door the best thing to do is add more unrelated features, then he deserves the crumbling mess he got. I don't want to sound harsh, but supporting something this ridiculous, then complaining about featureitis and an inability to produce a releaseable version is absurd.
OK, but those people already have the means to eat. Unfortunately, I'm not indepedently wealthy. (And I have this funny feeling that most other programmers aren't either.) And, note that all of those 5,000 made their millions from IPOs, almost certainly from commercial software companies. Sure, they can live the good life somewhere, being good samaritans and producing code that they love which makes the world a better place in which to live. I'm not motivated by the desire to do something to eat, but self preservation dictates that I get a steady stream of income so that I can eat. -Brian
I think one of the key issues that many people are working on when they try to create "futures" for open source is this: Currently, a very large portion of open source software is written by people that have jobs writing (other) commercial software. Why? Because they need to eat. Not everyone can live off their fame. (RMS) Even Linus has a real job... If open source is the solution to all of the world's software problems, then eventually (to listen to some people here) all projects will be open source. Who then pays the programmers? I realize that there are other business models which can alleviate that strain (Cygnus, RedHat, etc...) but I'm still not convinced that it will be enough. I'd like to see someone provide a feasible economic model of how the entire world could operate on open source and still keep its programmers fed and clothed.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the Right Thing fails. IMHO, this is not, however, an excuse to do the Wrong Thing. If the problem has no solution, then the problem is not a problem!
You've GOT to be kidding? Please, tell me you're joking. Or, go tell every computer scientist writing heuristics to NP-complete problems to find a new job. We can't solve TSP (at least not doing the "RightThing") so we should just forget about it? We can't write a good multiplayer game using OpenSource so we shouldn't write the game period? I'm really sorry, but what are you smoking? And where can I get some?
I'm not advocating closed-source solutions, but doing the WrongThing may be the only way to fix this. We have to accept that until computing power and networks enable the "RightThing," some other solution should be used. As other people have pointed out, this is not national security we're dealing with, nor billions of international dollars. People can cheat at an old game. The lessons can be learned by the private sector for "more important" applications.
-Brian
Yes indeed! First: I used to work for Clariion, doing software development for the FibreChannel box controller software. I fell in love with the hardware there, and they really do have products that span the whole spectrum. (7-Up is a small, 7 disk array with a single controller board, but which does write caching by backing up unfinished writes to a PCMCIA flash memory card. Good stuff.) As someone else said, they've since been bought by EMC, so I'm not sure how available any of their stuff is.
Other people pointed out that you might want to switch to RAID 3 for this application. I can assure you that the Clariion software is EXTENSIVELY tested and optimized for RAID 3. SGI uses Clariion arrays for video storage/streaming/editing work, so bandwidth (optimized by RAID 3) is their number one concern.
Of course, FibreChannel is JustPlainCool(tm). Good luck with whatever you choose...
-Brian Osman
Another non-functioning site was uncertainty.microsoft.com The purpose of that site was not known. --- Hmmm, I'm not sure myself. :)
I'm not sure why retail isn't carrying them, but the places (web) that claim to have them, do. I ordered a complete system last and it's already been shipped (today actually) though the company had been shipping Athlon boxes for about a week. (I can't wait to my grubby little hands on it!)
-Brian
-Brian
If this is true (and it makes quite a bit of sense) one has to wonder what rock the geniuses at Sun have been living under. Have they not noticed that NO ONE seems interested in network computing as a general purpose solution? While it may make inroads in certain markets, one of the single largest (if not the largest) markets for home PCs completely precludes this model of computing: games. Thin clients (in their current incarnations at least) can't run (nor store) the latest games. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but this is still a motivating factor in the hardware race, and anybody that's willing to pay in excess of $200 for a 3D accelerator is not going to want to deal with lag just to load their games.
If nothing else, we can take solace in the fact that Sun seems to be the only ones interested in their vision of the future, and that the market has already demonstrated it's not viable. Maybe once they wake up, they'll start supporting Linux in spirit, not just as a horse and pony show.
-Brian
That's ok... but Lord Of The Fries has become one of the absolute favorite games among all of the people in gaming group. That game is SO simple, while simultanesously filled with strategy. (Besides, the illustrations rock!) (:
-Brian
I saw this elsewhere a little while ago...
Everyone seems to be so happy that they too can open a swiss bank account with only $5000. I've got news for you: If all you have to start your account is $5000, you're not saving that much in taxes by doing this. It's a risk/reward trade-off, and you'd have to be a moron to think it's worth it.
Anybody that actually stands to gain (from the tax-evasion persepctive) by putting their money in swiss accounts, has much more money, and doesn't do it via the web. (They fly to Switzerland in their private jet.)
-Brian
People are quick to point out the "current" or "latest" cool free software projects. How about the authors of something that has truly made a difference, and for a long time at that: The Apache Team.
Apache is clearly one of the cornerstones of Linux WorldDomination(TM)... it would be nice to recognize those responsible. (Of course, I'm not actually familiar with the development team, including how large the "core" is.)
-Brian
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/ppcs/BRUTUS /brutus.html
It's got some stories generated by the program, and other information by Selmer. (Incidentally, I've now had Selmer for three separate courses, and he is one of the absolute best professors I've had in my four years. Period.) Selmer fully believes that "true" AI is impossible, and that man is more than a machine, but has devoted his life to the study of AI anyway, and finding close approximations.
-Brian
Very true. My previous employment was doing embedded development on Fibre Channel RAID arrays. We also had serial access to do debugging. Without it, you're just staring at a big box with a bunch of blinking lights.
True. More importantly, we have distributions across an important spectrum. There are still those aimed at the hacker crowd (Slackware, Debian), the general market and some businesses (RedHat, SuSE) and those with major (pre-existing) commercial backing (Caldera, Corel). Many people don't like these newer distros because they dumb things down or whatever, but the surest way to get Linux into corporations is to have a known quantity backing it (with support). Personally, I'm anxiously awaiting Corel's distro, as I've always heard good things about Debian...
OK, and people that tinker with their cars and know their engine inside out, don't. Granted, they get much better performance out of their cars, and they probably have fewer problems with them because they know exactly when something goes wrong, but they don't insist that everyone else should be the same way. They still accept that most people have better things to do, so they should just go buy a new car from the dealer and go to Jiffy Lube every few months. I honestly believe that 90% of the people with this extremist attitude don't even believe in it, they just want to do anyhting possible to avoid being labeled a newbie.
I'm also not saying that it's a waste of time to learn how to use one's system... quite the opposite. But ultimately, it's not for everyone, and if it weren't for things like rpm, we'd have much more trouble attracting non-Linux users and breaking into the workstation market. I use my machine primarily as a workstation, so building stupid applications like my CD player from source so I can squeeze 2% extra performance on them (not bloodly likely on my piece of shit Cyrix P150) just isn't worth the effort. What possible benefit does that get me? Gee, I know that my CD application is rock solid because I built it from source! Who cares? And at the other end, my aging Cyrix box really doesn't have the time (nor do I) to built XFree86, but I've come to trust someone else to do that for me. Of course, if there weren't source available I'd probably start looking elsewhere, but I don't feel this overwhelming urge to waste an entire day trying to build that source tree. It's a giant bloated piece of crap. I download the SVGA server, run it, and forget about it.
I've only been using Linux for four years, so I still consider myself a relative newbie with only a moderate level of skill. But... if some of these people stopped trying to be the most badass, hard kore users, we MIGHT stop scaring away the tourists.
Likewise: your car, refrigerator, alarm clock, photocopier, fax machine, etc... Yet, we're not expected to tear all of these things apart and know how they work before using them. "I'm sorry, you can't have that cup of decaf until you grok the chemical process by which it came to be. And you better be able to build a Mr. Coffee from scratch, or you don't deserve to live." Why must we constantly measure our computer peckers against one another by pulling this ridiculous bullshit that would get us all laughed out of any other sane community?
No, that's not my point, but that is what many people are saying here. I just feel compelled to point out that this is absurd. I'm not saying I don't like Slack, it's great for people that want a clean system, and I think the distro-war is ludicrously stupid. But... Lambasting people that want to use RPM/DEB/whatever packages is silly. A computer is a tool, used to solve OTHER problems. Many people don't have the time to build every last miniscule program they intend to use from source. And if I'm using a machine that (OS-wise) looks very much like every other RedHat (or Debian, or whatever) machine, why should I duplicate all that work? I quite often download some app I see to check it out. My console ends up looking like this:
$ su
$ rpm -U foo.rpm
$ exit
$ foo
[ Realize it's some really lame package I don't want. ]
$ su
$ rpm -e foo.rpm
I'm done! I'm sorry, but I can't justify building something that resides on my machine for less than a day from source. Maybe I'm just wierd in my usage habits, and I should stop trying out new software, but ultimately it seems silly to villify RPM and friends, who have done more to make Linux accessible to the masses than anything else. (And given his pragmatic view of things, I have to believe that Linus would approve of packages/prebuilt binaries.)
I don't suppose there are any concrete details to support this? A website? A name? Sure, there are other formats out there, but I find it hard to believe that some mysterious unknown format is going to make MP3 players "junk in nine months."
The only next-gen standard I've heard of (though I don't really keep up on this) is MP4, based off VQF. And while it hasn't yet caught on completely, it is available. If portable players had the horsepower to do the decoding, it would make for superior systems. (Lower bitrate needed to get the same sound quality as MP3 -> more songs in same amount of space.)
So... Where's the beef?
I've now worked in the software industry at large, and more revently at a games company, working on an upcoming PC game. While it's true that development practices suck universally throughout the industry, I have to say that game companies are MUCH worse. They've somehow found a way to take the standard (and piss poor) software engineering of most software companies, and make it ten times as excruciating for the developer. Part of this might be because one has higher expectations going in ("Oh wow! I get to write games!") but I think the author has some VERY valid points here.
People keep saying that this must be lots of Windows developers, but question 13 makes me wonder about that. Linux application user interfaces should be... Native GUI got >76%!
That's impressive. Even if the people taking the poll were from the Windows school of programming, at least they haven't been brainwashed into thinking that HTML/XML (8.6%) is a good way to write applications. (There might be worse methods for doing application user interface, but I'd have to work really hard to come up with one.)
-Brian
I can't help but think that X is lacking one thing that would really help the situation. (Though this could be done, and X is still great, regardless.) There ought to be some layer between X itself (Xlib and friends) and the window manager. As everyone keeps pointing out, the window manager is what controls the interface, but it's usually more complex than that. Nowadays, it's a combination of the WM, and the toolkit used to write the app. I may be silly, but I'd like a desktop with a consistent appearance. And when I'm running apps written in three (or four, five, six...) different toolkits (raw Xlib, Qt, GTK, fltk...) I get the feeling that things just aren't tied together. KDE and GNOME help somewhat, but only so long as you're running their apps.
If there were some layer of abstraction that dealt with general user preferences on how windows should behave/look but with enough freedom for toolkits to provide real added value (ie speed of widgets -> Motif moves like molasses uphill in January, whereas GTK is snappy) I'd be in GUI heaven.
This idea isn't really fleshed out fully, it just hit me while reading other people's comments, but I think X has the necessary basics to be a next-generation GUI. (Though it could certainly use a "cleanup" stage whereby unnecessary features are removed, and the important ones are made more universal -> shared memory)
-Brian
My bad. In that case, I guess he has little right to complain about not being able to ship a usable product. If they started with a nearly unusable/unworkable code base and decided that rather than get something resembling a browser out the door the best thing to do is add more unrelated features, then he deserves the crumbling mess he got. I don't want to sound harsh, but supporting something this ridiculous, then complaining about featureitis and an inability to produce a releaseable version is absurd.
-Brian
jwz has abandoned the project. Boy, the developers over there learned their lesson for all of a week. I had such high hopes for the project. Oh well.
-Brian
OK, but those people already have the means to eat. Unfortunately, I'm not indepedently wealthy. (And I have this funny feeling that most other programmers aren't either.) And, note that all of those 5,000 made their millions from IPOs, almost certainly from commercial software companies. Sure, they can live the good life somewhere, being good samaritans and producing code that they love which makes the world a better place in which to live. I'm not motivated by the desire to do something to eat, but self preservation dictates that I get a steady stream of income so that I can eat. -Brian
I think one of the key issues that many people are working on when they try to create "futures" for open source is this: Currently, a very large portion of open source software is written by people that have jobs writing (other) commercial software. Why? Because they need to eat. Not everyone can live off their fame. (RMS) Even Linus has a real job... If open source is the solution to all of the world's software problems, then eventually (to listen to some people here) all projects will be open source. Who then pays the programmers? I realize that there are other business models which can alleviate that strain (Cygnus, RedHat, etc...) but I'm still not convinced that it will be enough. I'd like to see someone provide a feasible economic model of how the entire world could operate on open source and still keep its programmers fed and clothed.
-Brian