Whether it is "bloat" or not doesnt matter. What does matter is that AbiWord claims that it is comparable to Microsoft Word (feature wise), when really it isnt. They then release this disclaimer that says,"You Get what you pay for, so STFU!". I dont care if the development was done by Monkeys and typewriters (no offense to Abiword, in general Open Source development methods make high quality (from a technical point of view) software) as long as I can get the program to do what I want it to. If it doesnt, I am going to email the company whose software it is with a nasty email telling them what I think of their program.
How do you look at newsgroups, IRC, and websites when the only PC you have currently can't connect to the internet because you dont know how to configure your modem/adsl/video card/anything? I think this article hit the nail on the head about why I dont use Linux. I DO NOT LIKE TO TYPE INCOHERENT COMMANDS. I want to point and click everything. It doesnt matter if it is "faster and more flexible" to type everything. What matters is that I can't do what I want to do unless I learn a very arcane set of switches and commands that really have no connection to what I want to do with them. (GREP, AWK, etc.) Give me a picture any day.
Let me tell you a good reason not to use Linux where I work (A financial services company). The vendors laughed when we asked about support for running their apps on an Windows Emulator.
Short Story:
No Vendor support for Emulator == No Linux
Uh wait a second. Wasnt the nation of Israel created at the end of WWII? By the west. And didnt WWII create the Iron Curtain? (The 2 powers splitting up all the land they captu-er-"liberated")
I am just going to shoot this gun and if you are in the way, well that is too bad.
Listen man: 4 Civilians died. As to your argument of "they should have left", where exactly were they going to go? Everyone else around them have closed their borders. Allow them into the US, hmmmm?
I dont know alot about what is going on in Computer Science these days, but my sense is that all these new concepts (distributed computing, parrallel computing, OOP, etc) have been around since the 70's or so. The reason we havent ever seen anything like this before though is finally the hardware is powerful enough to put these theories into practice.
The problem with your Ferrari example, and others like it, is that there is a cost to produce every single automobile that rolls out of the factory. With electronic content, there is no per-unit cost, and so there is no starting-point upon which margins can be based. If we are indeed a capitalist society, our people probably know this innately, and so they begin to smell a rat when content providers, who traditionally have means of support (from advertising or fixed-rate subscription) start charging per unit of content.
So this is the "new economy" in action? People dont know how much it costs to serve up a web page? That totally explains the whole phenomenon of the last 3 years. The simple fact is, a good CFO (or someone with a brain in their head) can figure out what it costs to serve up a web page. (At the very least read your bank statement and add up all the checks that go out and divide that by how many pages you served up to get your cost per page). If you use Windows/IIS, it costs for the software and for a GOOD admin to maintain it. If you use Linux/Apache the software doesnt cost, but the GOOD admin still does. As does your pipe (regardless of the platform you serve the content from) and all the infrastructure that comes with running a business ( support staff, business license, legal fees, etc. A good accountant could list those fees for you). I think the problem with people not paying is the history of the internet. It has always been free (as in beer), so why shouldnt it be free still? The reason it shouldnt be free still, is that it costs money to create it. I am a regular reader of a "donation-based" internet site. When they went donation based (because they couldnt afford the hosting) two things happened: 1) They got a BOATLOAD of money because people didnt want the site to disapear, and 2) they seemed embarassed that they couldnt provide the content for free. Amazed me about point #2, but not about # 1 because I didnt get the quality of writing anywhere (thus I went to the site). Funny that a lot of people on slashdot consider themselves capitalists but balk when they are asked to pay for the resources they consume.
Either I am missing the boat or you guys are too paranoid. I was under the impression that.net is really only for Win32 systems. It is a framework that allows developers to seamlessly offer and utilize web services over the internet. These services are offered via SOAP (and thusly XML). SOAP is an open standard, XML is an open standard. Just because the web server will only show the site to IE5 doesnt mean that Unix systems will not be able to utilize the web services that are offered by the page. The reason for that is because the web server that only serves up to IE5 uses the web service as well but only displays the results of that service to IE5 browsers. If you have a competing passport service and can convince others to use it, then you too will be able to offer it via a custome perl solution. The only thing is you will have to have a soap server (which I think apache does now) and be able to create soap messages. The thing is its all SOAP underneath and.net is just Microsofts way to hide developers from the dreariness of coding SOAP messages.
This was SO a real company. This company made me a mint when I was day trading. I made $50k alone when they announced the product's name was "BIG YELLOW".
Here is also a valid question. Like it or not, Windows is the norm on the desktop(though not necessarily on the motorola chipset).So why should someone choose Linux over Windows?
Slashdot seems to be a little more eloquent version of "Windows suxxors and Linux rules". Please tell us why Linux is a good choice.
One of the points brought up about using the XBox for apache server farms was the commercial appearance. Imagine you are walking through a potential webhosting location that you are considering to host you new online business and you see your pages being served up by XBoxes. How fast would you be out of there?
Someone doing this would be a prime candidate for both fuckedcompany.com and the top 100 dumbest dot com moments.
There may not be a lot of free time on the job, but that is only 8 hours a day 5 days a week (if you get full time. Waiters in really busy places can get by on parttime. Tips ROCK). So you now have another 6-12 hours (depending on how much sleep you need and what grooming level you like to maintain) to think over problems without working 20 hour days many days in a row having to hit some artificial deadline set by some marketing weasel. As an added bonus, you get to work on stuff YOU think is important.
Its not so much about the "ease of use" of microsoft. I have never heard anyone say "Microsoft Windows is so HARD to use!". The isse with microsoft and why they are so villainized is because their "customer-centric" view does nothing to address MY needs. If I run into a bug that only happens when I do this one thing (but I do this one thing a lot), and I am in a small percentage of all the customers that MS has, there is no way to get it fixed! If a majority of customers want something fixed, it gets fixed very fast. (eg the email security patch from the article. That patch was out in what 1 day? 2 days?). With something so important to a lot of people as computers this is a very hard thing to accept. This rejection of the needs of the many over the needs of the individual is what we are seeing with the Open source revolution. Basically Open source is all about the empowerment of the individual over the group. You want that bug fixed? Hire someone to fix it for you! Or do it yourself! Its the same struggle that people have to grapple with everyday: The rights of the individual over the rights of the group. And as with every other struggle of this type, there is a lot of hostility and bitterness on both sides, and no real clear answer.
I always find 2nd ammendment debates interesting. It always seems to come down to the above scenario. However in the scenario you seem to villianize the Army and the police. Can we not remember that these are human beings like you and me? These people are not drones or robots, and if there was a good cross-section of people from different backgrounds and situations in your militia and police force, who truly protected what the US stood for, the government COULD NOT make them take over. Isnt that what democracy is all about? That a minority holds power only with the permission of the majority?
And as for the Nazi reference, 2 points: 1) Post WWI Germany did not have the checks and balances that the US has, 2) Post WW1 Germany was in such a Horrid Economic mess, that it was a lot easier for someone like Hitler to pop up and take power then it would be for him today.
May I also remind you that Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt were *also elected* into office?
After all, think about the invention of calculus. This has made physics possible, thus making many things that we take for granted possible (computers, etc.). Now, one could say that calculus is just a logical progression from algebra. However, think about the thought processes and the jumps that had to be made just to make that logical progression possible.
I do not really know history here, but how long after calculus was invented did more then 1000 people know and understand it? When was it realized that this was an innovative branch of mathematics?
I admire the person who can sit down for two days, learn the essential elements needed for the task at hand, pound out a bunch of code and have it running fairly smoothly. I admire even more the person who spends a month researching all aspects of a topic, thinks about several different solutions to his problem, laboriously works through his code, tweaking it thoroughly, develops a beautiful structure, excellent documentation and clear, elegant code
But who would you rather pay $100 a day to?
I use XML for the web applications I build. All my components return xml. I then write xslt documents for each type of browser I want to support. I add a couple lines of code to sniff for the new browser type and *blamm-o* I now support a new browser. If I need to change all the xslt documents to change how all the browsers are supposed to display the xml , I just write a one-off xslt document that transforms all the old xslt documents into new ones. Makes my life REALLY easy and all the people I develop for seem to think I am a programming GOD because I get changes done so freaking fast its not funny!
XML works wonders when I am doing conversions from flat file systems to RDBMS's. I just extract the data as xml then apply xslt documents to it and *blamm-o* I have SQL scripts to do conversions.
The perfect solution to this would be to not charge the kid for uttering those words. First would be to talk to the kid and have the parents involved. Tell the kid that these phrases spark fear in a "post columbine world". If the kid is reasonable, he will stop or watch how he expresses himself. If he is not, then you start with detention, then suspension, then expulsion, THEN involve the law. All the while the kids parents are part of this process. There is no need to have the authorities involved so soon. Having the police and the court system involved so soon only leads to situations like this. This is a simple solution but it is not always easy. There are poor school administrators, bad parents, and even bad kids. However, every attempt has to be made to educate the administrators, the parents AND the kids about what effect words have on people.
Interesting reply. All through the article you tell us how you are spending money then at the end you complain that the original poster was just focusing on money?
The simple truth is this: If you wanted to save a lot of money you could. You dont NEED to live in an apartment on your own, you could have roommates. You dont NEED to eat out several times a week, you could pack a lunch. You dont NEED a quality car, you can get a cheap $500 disposable one.
If you are using your kids and house as an excuse to keep from getting a better job, that is YOUR problem. Life is change. The sooner you realize that and your kids realize that, they better off you will all be.
I fully agree that unions had their place. There is a lot owed to the people who stood and took beatings from strikebreakers and all the other awful things that corporations did to their employees. But given a choice between me deciding what perks, benefits and wages are best for me and a union deciding which of those things is best for me, I will trust my decision first and foremost.
Unions do nothing but promote mediocrity. They dont reward for being a better worker and they DO reward for being "just good enough" (Which in a union shop, is usually pretty bad).
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it is "bloat" or not doesnt matter. What does matter is that AbiWord claims that it is comparable to Microsoft Word (feature wise), when really it isnt. They then release this disclaimer that says,"You Get what you pay for, so STFU!". I dont care if the development was done by Monkeys and typewriters (no offense to Abiword, in general Open Source development methods make high quality (from a technical point of view) software) as long as I can get the program to do what I want it to. If it doesnt, I am going to email the company whose software it is with a nasty email telling them what I think of their program.
How do you look at newsgroups, IRC, and websites when the only PC you have currently can't connect to the internet because you dont know how to configure your modem/adsl/video card/anything? I think this article hit the nail on the head about why I dont use Linux. I DO NOT LIKE TO TYPE INCOHERENT COMMANDS. I want to point and click everything. It doesnt matter if it is "faster and more flexible" to type everything. What matters is that I can't do what I want to do unless I learn a very arcane set of switches and commands that really have no connection to what I want to do with them. (GREP, AWK, etc.) Give me a picture any day.
Thats kind of funny.
Let me tell you a good reason not to use Linux where I work (A financial services company). The vendors laughed when we asked about support for running their apps on an Windows Emulator.
Short Story:
No Vendor support for Emulator == No Linux
Uh wait a second. Wasnt the nation of Israel created at the end of WWII? By the west. And didnt WWII create the Iron Curtain? (The 2 powers splitting up all the land they captu-er-"liberated")
I am just going to shoot this gun and if you are in the way, well that is too bad.
Listen man: 4 Civilians died. As to your argument of "they should have left", where exactly were they going to go? Everyone else around them have closed their borders. Allow them into the US, hmmmm?
My daddy has a saying that this post reminds me of:
Dont confuse me with facts, my mind is made up!
I dont know alot about what is going on in Computer Science these days, but my sense is that all these new concepts (distributed computing, parrallel computing, OOP, etc) have been around since the 70's or so. The reason we havent ever seen anything like this before though is finally the hardware is powerful enough to put these theories into practice.
Maybe not, but right now it seems to be the cheapest and most accessible to the masses.
The problem with your Ferrari example, and others like it, is that there is a cost to produce every single automobile that rolls out of the factory. With electronic content, there is no per-unit cost, and so there is no starting-point upon which margins can be based. If we are indeed a capitalist society, our people probably know this innately, and so they begin to smell a rat when content providers, who traditionally have means of support (from advertising or fixed-rate subscription) start charging per unit of content.
So this is the "new economy" in action? People dont know how much it costs to serve up a web page? That totally explains the whole phenomenon of the last 3 years. The simple fact is, a good CFO (or someone with a brain in their head) can figure out what it costs to serve up a web page. (At the very least read your bank statement and add up all the checks that go out and divide that by how many pages you served up to get your cost per page). If you use Windows/IIS, it costs for the software and for a GOOD admin to maintain it. If you use Linux/Apache the software doesnt cost, but the GOOD admin still does. As does your pipe (regardless of the platform you serve the content from) and all the infrastructure that comes with running a business ( support staff, business license, legal fees, etc. A good accountant could list those fees for you). I think the problem with people not paying is the history of the internet. It has always been free (as in beer), so why shouldnt it be free still? The reason it shouldnt be free still, is that it costs money to create it. I am a regular reader of a "donation-based" internet site. When they went donation based (because they couldnt afford the hosting) two things happened: 1) They got a BOATLOAD of money because people didnt want the site to disapear, and 2) they seemed embarassed that they couldnt provide the content for free. Amazed me about point #2, but not about # 1 because I didnt get the quality of writing anywhere (thus I went to the site). Funny that a lot of people on slashdot consider themselves capitalists but balk when they are asked to pay for the resources they consume.
Either I am missing the boat or you guys are too paranoid. I was under the impression that .net is really only for Win32 systems. It is a framework that allows developers to seamlessly offer and utilize web services over the internet. These services are offered via SOAP (and thusly XML). SOAP is an open standard, XML is an open standard. Just because the web server will only show the site to IE5 doesnt mean that Unix systems will not be able to utilize the web services that are offered by the page. The reason for that is because the web server that only serves up to IE5 uses the web service as well but only displays the results of that service to IE5 browsers. If you have a competing passport service and can convince others to use it, then you too will be able to offer it via a custome perl solution. The only thing is you will have to have a soap server (which I think apache does now) and be able to create soap messages. The thing is its all SOAP underneath and .net is just Microsofts way to hide developers from the dreariness of coding SOAP messages.
This was SO a real company. This company made me a mint when I was day trading. I made $50k alone when they announced the product's name was "BIG YELLOW".
Here is also a valid question. Like it or not, Windows is the norm on the desktop(though not necessarily on the motorola chipset).So why should someone choose Linux over Windows?
Slashdot seems to be a little more eloquent version of "Windows suxxors and Linux rules". Please tell us why Linux is a good choice.
on OSOpinion.
One of the points brought up about using the XBox for apache server farms was the commercial appearance. Imagine you are walking through a potential webhosting location that you are considering to host you new online business and you see your pages being served up by XBoxes. How fast would you be out of there?
Someone doing this would be a prime candidate for both fuckedcompany.com and the top 100 dumbest dot com moments.
This is a troll but:
Why is it that Linux is always "following" Microsoft in the marketplace?
How can something that is "following" be innovative?
There may not be a lot of free time on the job, but that is only 8 hours a day 5 days a week (if you get full time. Waiters in really busy places can get by on parttime. Tips ROCK). So you now have another 6-12 hours (depending on how much sleep you need and what grooming level you like to maintain) to think over problems without working 20 hour days many days in a row having to hit some artificial deadline set by some marketing weasel. As an added bonus, you get to work on stuff YOU think is important.
Its not so much about the "ease of use" of microsoft. I have never heard anyone say "Microsoft Windows is so HARD to use!". The isse with microsoft and why they are so villainized is because their "customer-centric" view does nothing to address MY needs. If I run into a bug that only happens when I do this one thing (but I do this one thing a lot), and I am in a small percentage of all the customers that MS has, there is no way to get it fixed! If a majority of customers want something fixed, it gets fixed very fast. (eg the email security patch from the article. That patch was out in what 1 day? 2 days?). With something so important to a lot of people as computers this is a very hard thing to accept. This rejection of the needs of the many over the needs of the individual is what we are seeing with the Open source revolution. Basically Open source is all about the empowerment of the individual over the group. You want that bug fixed? Hire someone to fix it for you! Or do it yourself! Its the same struggle that people have to grapple with everyday: The rights of the individual over the rights of the group. And as with every other struggle of this type, there is a lot of hostility and bitterness on both sides, and no real clear answer.
I always find 2nd ammendment debates interesting. It always seems to come down to the above scenario. However in the scenario you seem to villianize the Army and the police. Can we not remember that these are human beings like you and me? These people are not drones or robots, and if there was a good cross-section of people from different backgrounds and situations in your militia and police force, who truly protected what the US stood for, the government COULD NOT make them take over. Isnt that what democracy is all about? That a minority holds power only with the permission of the majority?
And as for the Nazi reference, 2 points: 1) Post WWI Germany did not have the checks and balances that the US has, 2) Post WW1 Germany was in such a Horrid Economic mess, that it was a lot easier for someone like Hitler to pop up and take power then it would be for him today.
May I also remind you that Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt were *also elected* into office?
After all, think about the invention of calculus. This has made physics possible, thus making many things that we take for granted possible (computers, etc.). Now, one could say that calculus is just a logical progression from algebra. However, think about the thought processes and the jumps that had to be made just to make that logical progression possible.
I do not really know history here, but how long after calculus was invented did more then 1000 people know and understand it? When was it realized that this was an innovative branch of mathematics?
I guess you have great users who always read the dialog boxes, eh? Bet they never open ILOVEYOU.jpg.vbs either.
I admire the person who can sit down for two days, learn the essential elements needed for the task at hand, pound out a bunch of code and have it running fairly smoothly. I admire even more the person who spends a month researching all aspects of a topic, thinks about several different solutions to his problem, laboriously works through his code, tweaking it thoroughly, develops a beautiful structure, excellent documentation and clear, elegant code But who would you rather pay $100 a day to?
I use XML for the web applications I build. All my components return xml. I then write xslt documents for each type of browser I want to support. I add a couple lines of code to sniff for the new browser type and *blamm-o* I now support a new browser. If I need to change all the xslt documents to change how all the browsers are supposed to display the xml , I just write a one-off xslt document that transforms all the old xslt documents into new ones. Makes my life REALLY easy and all the people I develop for seem to think I am a programming GOD because I get changes done so freaking fast its not funny! XML works wonders when I am doing conversions from flat file systems to RDBMS's. I just extract the data as xml then apply xslt documents to it and *blamm-o* I have SQL scripts to do conversions.
The perfect solution to this would be to not charge the kid for uttering those words. First would be to talk to the kid and have the parents involved. Tell the kid that these phrases spark fear in a "post columbine world". If the kid is reasonable, he will stop or watch how he expresses himself. If he is not, then you start with detention, then suspension, then expulsion, THEN involve the law. All the while the kids parents are part of this process. There is no need to have the authorities involved so soon. Having the police and the court system involved so soon only leads to situations like this. This is a simple solution but it is not always easy. There are poor school administrators, bad parents, and even bad kids. However, every attempt has to be made to educate the administrators, the parents AND the kids about what effect words have on people.
Interesting reply. All through the article you tell us how you are spending money then at the end you complain that the original poster was just focusing on money?
The simple truth is this: If you wanted to save a lot of money you could. You dont NEED to live in an apartment on your own, you could have roommates. You dont NEED to eat out several times a week, you could pack a lunch. You dont NEED a quality car, you can get a cheap $500 disposable one.
If you are using your kids and house as an excuse to keep from getting a better job, that is YOUR problem. Life is change. The sooner you realize that and your kids realize that, they better off you will all be.
I fully agree that unions had their place. There is a lot owed to the people who stood and took beatings from strikebreakers and all the other awful things that corporations did to their employees. But given a choice between me deciding what perks, benefits and wages are best for me and a union deciding which of those things is best for me, I will trust my decision first and foremost.
Unions do nothing but promote mediocrity. They dont reward for being a better worker and they DO reward for being "just good enough" (Which in a union shop, is usually pretty bad).