I read his comment history before my post, I know he's not who he appears to be and I don't care. I decide which comments to reply to and I'm not looking for any advice. Got it?
"Because in contrast to the GPL, there's not much the average system adminstrator can do about poverty, war, and the like."
There are many people who are taking action against things like poverty and war, but it's far easier to simply indulge yourself by jamming your world view of software development down the throats of the users you're paid to provide service to.
"Most system administrators also have a strong social conscience."
Some do and some don't just like everybody else. Of course, some people would argue that a strong social conscience has more to do with things like poverty, war and the like than it does with the GPL.
I wasn't thinking about gaming. My point was that if you're going to change OS's, shouldn't there be a reason? Despite the "offtopic" moderation it's just common sense that one investigate the difficulty of making a switch before rather than after a purchase.
Isn't this the sort of question one should ask before ordering the machine? What if the answer indicates that you were better off sticking with Windows? (I know, on Slashdot that conclusion isn't possible.)
Well, my point is that I believe the most companies feel there is less risk in buying cheap PC's than in adopting new OS's and desktop environments that their employees have to be trained in from vendors that may not be in business in a few years.
I'm not saying that all companies think like that, just that most do. You're not seriously suggesting that thin clients currently outnumber PC's are you?
Thin clients are probably popular in POS and other applications where repeatitive and limited functionality is being excercised. In these applications, employees only need to learn a limited set of activities and centralized processing is required anyway.
So your management is conservative when it comes to industry standard PC clones that hundreds of companies have produced successfully, but they're liberal when it comes to non-standard desktop environments. Sounds ideal for your preferred solution, but I don't think most companies think like that.
I'm sure IBM does have a lot of HW patents as well, although that fact doesn't weaken my point in any way.
Yes, the technologies that IBM believes they can benefit more from by making free (as in beer and as in GPL) they make free. Those they believe they can make more profit from selling (like WebSphere) they keep closed.
What I meant was that if IBM determines that an OSS product like Linux undermines their business rather than supports it (by helping to sell expensive hardware and software products), they'll stop promoting it.
Unix is a commodity OS that IBM has offered for a long time, it costs them very little to switch to the politically-correct version (i.e. Linux).
How clever of IBM to anticipate SCO's attack by filing for thousands of software patents many years before SCO's existence. IBM may be using software patents as part of their court case against SCO, but it's just business as usual for IBM.
IBM isn't fighting for OSS and they were second only to AT&T in the monopoly department. IBM is the SW patent leader and hasn't taken any steps to reduce their new patent filings or release they current ones into the public domain. IBM is looking out for number one just as it always has and will drop OSS like a bad habit if the winds change.
Your number 3 point suggests that your QUALITY commodity box can fail without you losing your job. It sounds like you're making excuses for the relative overexpense of thin clients.
"If it involves a senior developer going line by line over all of the code, this will both be time consuming and anger the senior developer with the repetitive code correction."
It's not fun, but I think that's why they call it work. Of course, if the senior developer is checking lines of code for naming conventions and the like, then it's a waste of time.
Unit testing is a good idea, but if the same developer is writing the product code and the unit test, why should you believe that his product code is bad but his unit test is good?
OK, I admit it's not quite that simple, but I believe there's a lot of value in independent inspections or testing.
"This sounds like one of those arguments between those who think that the "free" part of the GPL refers to cost ("free beer") and those who realize that it has nothing at all to do with cost and everything to do with freedom ("free speech")"
I don't think there are many people that are still confused about the GNU definition off "free" on Slashdot. On the other hand, a lot of this confusion was created by RMS himself by not using terms in a conventional way.
The fact that non-programmers think "free software" means "free as in beer" and the fact that most of it is available at zero cost has been a great boon to the success of "free software" and the primary reason anybody in the outside world has any interest in it.
You're probably more than 100 miles from a Slashdot server and yet you were able to post. As long as you can buy a Windows-free laptop over the Internet, I think this 100 mile argument is moot.
You'll have to elaborate, I not familiar with the history of ASN.1. If people choose not to fully implement a standard, it's more likely a cultural or marketing problem than a technical one. If very few systems supported an ASCII compatible text editor, ASCII wouldn't be successful either.
XML is relatively new, but my point was that people want to stick with their old way of editing, i.e. with a text editor. A binary standard would require them to use a new tool.
What's odd to me about many programmers is that they are perfectly willing to adopt a system that requires special tools for viewing, but they don't want special tools for creating (e.g. using a browser to view web content is OK, but it's a good thing HTML is in ASCII so you can edit it with a text editor.)
The problems you describe are due to the fact that you are using a lot of incompatible binary representations. A real binary standard will fully document floating point standards etc. ASCII text is not endian-free, it's typically character-by-character big endian, but you could certainly represent it differently and it would still be ASCII. People either adopt the standard or they don't, this is equally true for ASCII or binary representations.
In the case of XML, the decision was made that being able to edit a document using a simple text editor was more important than being efficient. I think this was more of a marketing decision than a technical one.
By the way, shouldn't a zipped file be in ASCII so we can edit it with a text editor?
Well, there is a long history of ASCII zealots trying to elevate file formats to languages so it's not surprising that people might expect XML to be the same.
Parsing text is not inherently easier than parsing binary, but there's a cultural bias in favor of using a text editor for editing "as God intended".
XML was introduced as a new standard and a lot of new code has been developed to support it. If a binary standard had been introduced instead, the tools required to edit it would not add a lot of additional work. The editor would have been just another part of the standard that platforms would have to adopt to be complient.
The development of programming languages has always been about increasing productivity not about being cool. C was created so system programming could be performed without resorting to the more difficult assembly. In the preface to K&R's "The C programming language" C is described "easy to learn".
Perhaps we should check the "real hackers'" Harley for training wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
I read his comment history before my post, I know he's not who he appears to be and I don't care. I decide which comments to reply to and I'm not looking for any advice. Got it?
"Because in contrast to the GPL, there's not much the average system adminstrator can do about poverty, war, and the like."
There are many people who are taking action against things like poverty and war, but it's far easier to simply indulge yourself by jamming your world view of software development down the throats of the users you're paid to provide service to.
"Most system administrators also have a strong social conscience."
Some do and some don't just like everybody else. Of course, some people would argue that a strong social conscience has more to do with things like poverty, war and the like than it does with the GPL.
I wasn't thinking about gaming. My point was that if you're going to change OS's, shouldn't there be a reason? Despite the "offtopic" moderation it's just common sense that one investigate the difficulty of making a switch before rather than after a purchase.
Isn't this the sort of question one should ask before ordering the machine? What if the answer indicates that you were better off sticking with Windows? (I know, on Slashdot that conclusion isn't possible.)
Well, my point is that I believe the most companies feel there is less risk in buying cheap PC's than in adopting new OS's and desktop environments that their employees have to be trained in from vendors that may not be in business in a few years.
I'm not saying that all companies think like that, just that most do. You're not seriously suggesting that thin clients currently outnumber PC's are you?
Thin clients are probably popular in POS and other applications where repeatitive and limited functionality is being excercised. In these applications, employees only need to learn a limited set of activities and centralized processing is required anyway.
So your management is conservative when it comes to industry standard PC clones that hundreds of companies have produced successfully, but they're liberal when it comes to non-standard desktop environments. Sounds ideal for your preferred solution, but I don't think most companies think like that.
I'm sure IBM does have a lot of HW patents as well, although that fact doesn't weaken my point in any way.
Yes, the technologies that IBM believes they can benefit more from by making free (as in beer and as in GPL) they make free. Those they believe they can make more profit from selling (like WebSphere) they keep closed.
What I meant was that if IBM determines that an OSS product like Linux undermines their business rather than supports it (by helping to sell expensive hardware and software products), they'll stop promoting it.
Unix is a commodity OS that IBM has offered for a long time, it costs them very little to switch to the politically-correct version (i.e. Linux).
How clever of IBM to anticipate SCO's attack by filing for thousands of software patents many years before SCO's existence. IBM may be using software patents as part of their court case against SCO, but it's just business as usual for IBM.
IBM isn't fighting for OSS and they were second only to AT&T in the monopoly department. IBM is the SW patent leader and hasn't taken any steps to reduce their new patent filings or release they current ones into the public domain. IBM is looking out for number one just as it always has and will drop OSS like a bad habit if the winds change.
Your number 3 point suggests that your QUALITY commodity box can fail without you losing your job. It sounds like you're making excuses for the relative overexpense of thin clients.
"If it involves a senior developer going line by line over all of the code, this will both be time consuming and anger the senior developer with the repetitive code correction."
It's not fun, but I think that's why they call it work. Of course, if the senior developer is checking lines of code for naming conventions and the like, then it's a waste of time.
Unit testing is a good idea, but if the same developer is writing the product code and the unit test, why should you believe that his product code is bad but his unit test is good?
OK, I admit it's not quite that simple, but I believe there's a lot of value in independent inspections or testing.
"This sounds like one of those arguments between those who think that the "free" part of the GPL refers to cost ("free beer") and those who realize that it has nothing at all to do with cost and everything to do with freedom ("free speech")"
I don't think there are many people that are still confused about the GNU definition off "free" on Slashdot. On the other hand, a lot of this confusion was created by RMS himself by not using terms in a conventional way.
The fact that non-programmers think "free software" means "free as in beer" and the fact that most of it is available at zero cost has been a great boon to the success of "free software" and the primary reason anybody in the outside world has any interest in it.
Wow, there's so many straw man arguments in your post you should be cited by the fire department.
You're probably more than 100 miles from a Slashdot server and yet you were able to post. As long as you can buy a Windows-free laptop over the Internet, I think this 100 mile argument is moot.
You'll have to elaborate, I not familiar with the history of ASN.1. If people choose not to fully implement a standard, it's more likely a cultural or marketing problem than a technical one. If very few systems supported an ASCII compatible text editor, ASCII wouldn't be successful either.
No. I don't even know enough about MacOS 9 to get the point (or the joke, if there was one). What's the connection?
XML is relatively new, but my point was that people want to stick with their old way of editing, i.e. with a text editor. A binary standard would require them to use a new tool.
What's odd to me about many programmers is that they are perfectly willing to adopt a system that requires special tools for viewing, but they don't want special tools for creating (e.g. using a browser to view web content is OK, but it's a good thing HTML is in ASCII so you can edit it with a text editor.)
You insist that every computer language you use has a C-like syntax.
You insist that every document or format be readable in a simple text editor.
You prefer piping between primitive programs over using a more powerful integrated one.
You always use the same tools because you can't memorize any more CLI commands and you consider menus to be unmanly.
The problems you describe are due to the fact that you are using a lot of incompatible binary representations. A real binary standard will fully document floating point standards etc. ASCII text is not endian-free, it's typically character-by-character big endian, but you could certainly represent it differently and it would still be ASCII. People either adopt the standard or they don't, this is equally true for ASCII or binary representations.
In the case of XML, the decision was made that being able to edit a document using a simple text editor was more important than being efficient. I think this was more of a marketing decision than a technical one.
By the way, shouldn't a zipped file be in ASCII so we can edit it with a text editor?
Well, there is a long history of ASCII zealots trying to elevate file formats to languages so it's not surprising that people might expect XML to be the same.
Parsing text is not inherently easier than parsing binary, but there's a cultural bias in favor of using a text editor for editing "as God intended".
XML was introduced as a new standard and a lot of new code has been developed to support it. If a binary standard had been introduced instead, the tools required to edit it would not add a lot of additional work. The editor would have been just another part of the standard that platforms would have to adopt to be complient.
Shouldn't this be modded as funny? As in "I can always view the 3D image with just a text editor."
Well, if a language is truly WORE it should be impossible to write a non-portable program by definition, no matter how bad the developer is.
The development of programming languages has always been about increasing productivity not about being cool. C was created so system programming could be performed without resorting to the more difficult assembly. In the preface to K&R's "The C programming language" C is described "easy to learn".
Perhaps we should check the "real hackers'" Harley for training wheels.