Come one, guys. This was just yet another "we are the good boys because we promote Linux so anything we do will be considered right even if it is against the law".
You are right but so what? When basketball teams or football teams battle it out on the field, do the fans of either team seem objective? Let us geeks have our fun in the sun. Most of us are slaving over some Windows box that we would rather just throw out the window.
When I was younger, I thought putting a few OS's on the same hard drive should/would be a snap. But little did I know the enemy MBR was silently laughing in my face! My eyes were opened when I tried to get LILO to boot NT, win9x, OS/2 and Linux all on the same HD. I learned about MBR alright! I then added more HD's and learned about Master, secondary Master, slave and more MBR issues! I learned about hardrive jumpers and why I would need tweasers to install a hard drive! Ever since, I have been trying to figure out who invented the whole MBR thing and SHOOT THEM. The next thing that has to go is master/slave nonsense on HD's.
You paint venture capitalist as people we should not care about. I disagree! Venture capitalist allow for people with good ideas to get a shot at making dreams come true. Venture capitalists take big risks and hope for big rewards in their investments. I pity all the money the VC's put into the dotcom bussinesses because all that capital was flushed down the toilet by the dotcomers instead of going to more viable investments that would have produced real revenue and opportunities for others!
The reason many people in the open source community dislike Microsoft so much is that their products don't "play well with others". The easiest example is.doc files. Any word processor that can't completely translate a.doc file is going nowhere fast in the business community (and Microsoft changes this undocumented format every couple of years) and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There was CORBA so they came out with COM. There was openGL so they came out with DirectX. There was Java so they came out with j++ and now C#. The list goes on and on. In each of those cases, the underlying fact is that if you chose the MS solution, you become locked down to their platform. And to open source people, freedom and choice are highly valued and Microsoft is constantly trying to marginalize anything that is not them or at least tied to them.
I am a rabid supporter of GNU/Linux and Open source in general, but my job is mostly Microsoft-Centric. Next time we budget new servers, will I purchase NT? No, forget about it...
You are one of the converted so of course you will suggest Linux, but your comments would be more interesting if you had said "I am a techy who only knows windows but all the games Microsoft is playing is making me interested in looking at linux." I am not saying you should lie but if a lot of post came up saying more people are dabling with linux now, it would really mean MS's ploys have not been working.
Nice ideas. I just wish you had proof read the spelling and grammar. It is obvious that you spent some time thinking about this analogy but you obviously didn't spend much time editing your "paper".
...and then go on to hardware. If the the linux community could make a developement kit that BEGED to be used and someone wrote an awsome book on how to use "the linux imaginary tool kit", it would only be a matter of time before games became popular on linux.
This is where Loki and open source game engine developers come in. If there is a future in games on Linux, it will probably be in some way due to to some hardworking people who do the ground breaking first few SERIOUS open source games. All this talk of a Linux game consoles just seems premature. Lets start with the software!
I don't see it that way... say you are a government agency and you want to run linux in A VERY SECURE enviroment... well "plug it in plug it in". Now say that you are me and hate messing with security- I will want something much easier to manage and much more open so I would want to plug in "The easy hacking" module. I think the module aproach is excelent because there is no way that any specific security system will match the needs of any particular enviroment or person. Best answer is to give people choice and the module aproach looks excelent.
What I was hoping is that he would speak for HIMSELF ("I") rather than speak for Microsoft. If he spoke as himself then he could say "yeah... I wish that had been done better but I know XYZ are working on that". Instead he spoke as "WE" in which case nothing interesting is ever said.
Microfocus cobol runs on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and UNIX... I even believe they have a linux version. Using Microfocus will not force you to stay on Windows.
(forget our current social security problems, if the avg. age shot up to 150 we would be sunk!)
Actually it is the governments potential sollution:
They can keep uping the social security age requirement due to continued average longevity... I can see it now... You can only retire when you are dead!
I don't know why they wanted to go with linux unless they were looking to go cheap and if that is the case, I would put a 266 mhz cpu with a cheap video card and throw it onto the market and give all sorts of incentives for people to hack it. Make it a internet appliance as well as a game console. Make it fun and make it in mass production! Make it between 50 and 75 dollars so that people buy it because they think "why not" and use hardware that is so cheap that they barely lose money on the sales of the damn thing. The idea of these new and expensive consoles seem stupid. Pay 300 - 400 dollars on a game console? No thanks! Game consoles don't have to be state of the art in hardware - they just have to have cool games and stuff. It is the only way this thing has a chance.
It runs on no less than four megs of ram and that alone is just monstrous! I admit I really don't know much about how XFree really works but I would think that this program should be broken into about 3 programs that are completely independent of each other:
1. The communication layer in X should be a seperate program that interfaces with X when that functionality is needed.
2. Device drives should be made into modules that can be loaded into an opperating systems kernel (when at all possibly feasable).
3. I am told that X has about a million and one ways to do the same things. Re-architect X so it has a uniform standard way of doing XYZ and have a compatibilty layer for older applications.
The things above would make X bigger and smaller but in both cases- better.
The impression I get though is that the XFree developers are not interested in downsizing X to be a simple graphical management system and breaking thier project into little pieces.
The problem with what I am saying is that it is a lot of work and pain for little apparent benifit. At first, that would be true, but eventually, it would lead to more flexible and simpler framework for which real developement would be easier.
I am told that XFree86v4.X has made a huge improvement in building a standard interface for graphics drivers which is a good start but it is only a start... This beast is huge and needs to get smaller.
As for forking X and having a small group do this on thier own... well there are forks but thier lack of popularity makes developer involvement minimal.
If you need to challenge a patent, it should be legal to put some random engineer (or even an undergrad) on the stand and tell him or her to solve the particular problem the patent addresses.
I could see it now...
At the PTO, a random undergrad student, is being selected from a hat:
Meanwhile... on the sidelines:
Corporation Stooge1: "I hope we get Charlie -isn't he failing thermo dynamics.
Corporate Stooge2: "What about Stacy?"
Corporate Stooge1: "Oh no... Stacy has been taking her classes much more seriously after Slashdot mocked her so bitterly about the new OIL formula she botched giving GM that silly patent."
Corporate Stooge2: "Well lets just hope we don't get Alex-
Corporate Stooge1: "Even Good patents get busted by him!"
Corporate Stooge2: "Alright we got CHARLIE- tell the CEO, we can tell the lawyers that it is A GO"
Mod cyberdonny up on this one... once you start giving up on "the principle of the matter", it gets harder and harder to stop. Once you cave in on your "principles" then it becomes very dificult to make a stand on the bases of principle.
YAHOO is making money, many e-tailers are doing well, and many smaller sites should be fine. The trick is that many sites really never understood what a budget was/is because they had venture capital or IPO cash as a constant imbilical cord. Amazon.com is a classic example of too much cash. They make a lot of money from selling books but they piss through it due to poor money management, excessively large staff, and irresponsibly inventory handling. I admit it is not fair to just pick on Amazon when SO MANY sites NEVER EVEN HAD/HAVE an achievable business model but used "its a new economy" as thier excuse for justifying stupid ideas.
I do not see an end to content providers but I do see:
1. content providers downsizing staff.
2. Geting pickier about developement. Less "fluff" and carefull choosing of "value added" features.
3. Less sites but those that survive be of higher quality (and staffed by people who know what a budget sheet looks like).
I also hope really annoying ads will be banned from these sites(because they are counter productive and cause people to filter ALL banners and/or get less hits) but alas my magic 8-ball says "no".
"Just because your paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" is very aptly applied here. Many people on slashdot don't trust M$ because they screwed so many of us over and over. When they say something, it is natural to ask "what's the catch" because historically, there always was one. A recent example is kerberos, which is just one in a long history of such stuff.
Wow- This is a great idea... add a command prompt somewhere on the directory window and get the best of both worlds! It is so simple and "obviously good" that it seems like it should be already a standard feature of all windowing managers today! Leverage the command prompt without losing the graphical interface... It is a merging of "the best of both worlds". Why has this not been widely done? And if someone has done it, where can I find this file manager?
There must be some real demand for this feature. Several venders have started saying that they will be binary compatable with Linux (IBM says they are working on AIX to have this feature, Sun said something about device drivers if not more; I think there was an imbedded operating system with it too) and now the BSD's. It will esculate the trend for developers to only write code for Linux (when writing *nix stuff of course).
I don't mean to start a flame war... I am sure the BSD's are great, but this is indicative of Linux taking over the *nix market.
People who think the NSA are up to something shady with this release are being way over paranoid. Come on folks- the source is available to everyone. It would be so embarassing for them to get caught with a backdoor that they would never try it.
The idea that the NSA is comprised of ONE mind with sinister intentions is just nuts. The NSA is mostly comprised of ordinary people trying to make government systems more secure. Sure some of them are trying to crack codes and working on monitoring equipement but even they think of thier job as "working to catch bad guys".
I would examine the NSA's code because it probably holds some really neat ideas and concepts. I am sure some X-Files fan will probably check it for the back doors anyway:) .
Crackers always feel a need to justify thier actions because few people wants to just say "I am a baaaaad boy".
Some excuses are:
"I am trying to show the weaknesses in thier security system"
"I am protesting THE MAN"
"If thier security is this weak, they deserve it"
"The net should be open for everything"
"I am only having fun but I never do any real harm"
It is a rare individual who says "I am trashing other peoples hard work because I like to". Which of course is what they are doing. It really bothers me when I hear about people cracking a system because it means some group of people are going to be getting little sleep and working overtime to fix "a problem" that really should not be an issue. I really hate the excuse "they deserved it" because it assumes that human beings can not be trusted to be good people and that everybody must be thought of as a potential "intruder".
The only "benefit" a cracker has ever had was to make people less trusting about giving computer access AND to produce a multi-billion dollar security industry. Thanks but NO THANKS.
The previous poster was probably just being humorous but I was thinking "Terse" is the only nice thing I can think to say. Ok I am biassed because I believe three things:
1) Make a program as easy to read/understand as possible(descriptive variables and procedure names, one command per line, etc...).
2) Document code that is not "self explanitory".
3) KISS - which stands for Keep It SIMPLE Stupid. The first S DOES NOT MEAN "SMALL".
IF programmers want to "prove" that computer languages are like any other language used by people, then I would not show them this code. Now that I think of it- don't ever show any Perl! It will only hurt your case:^)... use Python, Pascal, COBOL, Basic or any other "syntax intuitive" language to prove your case.
At work, I have written several apps to connect to a central database (in Access on an NT server). My concern is with the scalabilty of Access. I am thinking about converting the database to PostgreSQL on Linux. My company does not "give a rats ass" on how I get anything done as long as it is done fast. My office is mostly a Windows shop though. How should I approach converting the database I built to PostgreSQL? Do people think it is a good idea or should I just think about converting to SQL Server instead?
My issue is that some _tables alone_ will have 500,000+ rows (with posibly ten people accessing the database at the same time) by the end of the year (some tables are growing by 20,000 rows a month). I know it is not remarkable to have several tables of that size but can Access handle it and is PostgreSQL a good alternative solution?
Right now I have a 600MHZ athlon and it sounds like an airconditioner is running in my study. So if I got a 1.2 GHZ cpu and ran it at say 700-850 MHZ, I could theoretically take the fan out of my box (but keep the heatsink), use less electricity and it would last longer (besides being faster than my current cpu). Is there a downside to my logic that I am not seeing? My view of cpu's needing any/better cooling technology is to me an indication that cpu manufacturers ARE over-clocking thier cpus... just not as much as enthusiast do. Is there a reason why Intel/AMD/Cyrix etc... need better cooling besides the HZ war:
if (MyCPU.MHZ > Other.MHZ) {
BankAccount = (BankAccount + BetterSales)
}
Slashdot Mirror
You are right but so what? When basketball teams or football teams battle it out on the field, do the fans of either team seem objective? Let us geeks have our fun in the sun. Most of us are slaving over some Windows box that we would rather just throw out the window.
When I was younger, I thought putting a few OS's on the same hard drive should/would be a snap. But little did I know the enemy MBR was silently laughing in my face! My eyes were opened when I tried to get LILO to boot NT, win9x, OS/2 and Linux all on the same HD. I learned about MBR alright! I then added more HD's and learned about Master, secondary Master, slave and more MBR issues! I learned about hardrive jumpers and why I would need tweasers to install a hard drive! Ever since, I have been trying to figure out who invented the whole MBR thing and SHOOT THEM. The next thing that has to go is master/slave nonsense on HD's.
You paint venture capitalist as people we should not care about. I disagree! Venture capitalist allow for people with good ideas to get a shot at making dreams come true. Venture capitalists take big risks and hope for big rewards in their investments. I pity all the money the VC's put into the dotcom bussinesses because all that capital was flushed down the toilet by the dotcomers instead of going to more viable investments that would have produced real revenue and opportunities for others!
The reason many people in the open source community dislike Microsoft so much is that their products don't "play well with others". The easiest example is .doc files. Any word processor that can't completely translate a .doc file is going nowhere fast in the business community (and Microsoft changes this undocumented format every couple of years) and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There was CORBA so they came out with COM. There was openGL so they came out with DirectX. There was Java so they came out with j++ and now C#. The list goes on and on. In each of those cases, the underlying fact is that if you chose the MS solution, you become locked down to their platform. And to open source people, freedom and choice are highly valued and Microsoft is constantly trying to marginalize anything that is not them or at least tied to them.
You are one of the converted so of course you will suggest Linux, but your comments would be more interesting if you had said "I am a techy who only knows windows but all the games Microsoft is playing is making me interested in looking at linux." I am not saying you should lie but if a lot of post came up saying more people are dabling with linux now, it would really mean MS's ploys have not been working.
It is called Galeon. You can go to http://galeon.sourceforge.net and get the latest build.
Nice ideas. I just wish you had proof read the spelling and grammar. It is obvious that you spent some time thinking about this analogy but you obviously didn't spend much time editing your "paper".
...and then go on to hardware. If the the linux community could make a developement kit that BEGED to be used and someone wrote an awsome book on how to use "the linux imaginary tool kit", it would only be a matter of time before games became popular on linux.
This is where Loki and open source game engine developers come in. If there is a future in games on Linux, it will probably be in some way due to to some hardworking people who do the ground breaking first few SERIOUS open source games. All this talk of a Linux game consoles just seems premature. Lets start with the software!
I don't see it that way... say you are a government agency and you want to run linux in A VERY SECURE enviroment ... well "plug it in plug it in". Now say that you are me and hate messing with security- I will want something much easier to manage and much more open so I would want to plug in "The easy hacking" module. I think the module aproach is excelent because there is no way that any specific security system will match the needs of any particular enviroment or person. Best answer is to give people choice and the module aproach looks excelent.
What I was hoping is that he would speak for HIMSELF ("I") rather than speak for Microsoft. If he spoke as himself then he could say "yeah ... I wish that had been done better but I know XYZ are working on that". Instead he spoke as "WE" in which case nothing interesting is ever said.
Microfocus cobol runs on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and UNIX... I even believe they have a linux version. Using Microfocus will not force you to stay on Windows.
Actually it is the governments potential sollution:
They can keep uping the social security age requirement due to continued average longevity... I can see it now
I don't know why they wanted to go with linux unless they were looking to go cheap and if that is the case, I would put a 266 mhz cpu with a cheap video card and throw it onto the market and give all sorts of incentives for people to hack it. Make it a internet appliance as well as a game console. Make it fun and make it in mass production! Make it between 50 and 75 dollars so that people buy it because they think "why not" and use hardware that is so cheap that they barely lose money on the sales of the damn thing. The idea of these new and expensive consoles seem stupid. Pay 300 - 400 dollars on a game console? No thanks! Game consoles don't have to be state of the art in hardware - they just have to have cool games and stuff. It is the only way this thing has a chance.
It runs on no less than four megs of ram and that alone is just monstrous! I admit I really don't know much about how XFree really works but I would think that this program should be broken into about 3 programs that are completely independent of each other:
1. The communication layer in X should be a seperate program that interfaces with X when that functionality is needed.
2. Device drives should be made into modules that can be loaded into an opperating systems kernel (when at all possibly feasable).
3. I am told that X has about a million and one ways to do the same things. Re-architect X so it has a uniform standard way of doing XYZ and have a compatibilty layer for older applications.
The things above would make X bigger and smaller but in both cases- better.
The impression I get though is that the XFree developers are not interested in downsizing X to be a simple graphical management system and breaking thier project into little pieces.
The problem with what I am saying is that it is a lot of work and pain for little apparent benifit. At first, that would be true, but eventually, it would lead to more flexible and simpler framework for which real developement would be easier.
I am told that XFree86v4.X has made a huge improvement in building a standard interface for graphics drivers which is a good start but it is only a start... This beast is huge and needs to get smaller.
As for forking X and having a small group do this on thier own... well there are forks but thier lack of popularity makes developer involvement minimal.
I could see it now ...
At the PTO, a random undergrad student, is being selected from a hat:
Meanwhile... on the sidelines:
Corporation Stooge1: "I hope we get Charlie -isn't he failing thermo dynamics.
Corporate Stooge2: "What about Stacy?"
Corporate Stooge1: "Oh no... Stacy has been taking her classes much more seriously after Slashdot mocked her so bitterly about the new OIL formula she botched giving GM that silly patent."
Corporate Stooge2: "Well lets just hope we don't get Alex-
Corporate Stooge1: "Even Good patents get busted by him!"
Corporate Stooge2: "Alright we got CHARLIE- tell the CEO, we can tell the lawyers that it is A GO"
Corporate Stooge1: Starts dialing cell phone.
Mod cyberdonny up on this one... once you start giving up on "the principle of the matter", it gets harder and harder to stop. Once you cave in on your "principles" then it becomes very dificult to make a stand on the bases of principle.
YAHOO is making money, many e-tailers are doing well, and many smaller sites should be fine. The trick is that many sites really never understood what a budget was/is because they had venture capital or IPO cash as a constant imbilical cord. Amazon.com is a classic example of too much cash. They make a lot of money from selling books but they piss through it due to poor money management, excessively large staff, and irresponsibly inventory handling. I admit it is not fair to just pick on Amazon when SO MANY sites NEVER EVEN HAD/HAVE an achievable business model but used "its a new economy" as thier excuse for justifying stupid ideas.
I do not see an end to content providers but I do see:
1. content providers downsizing staff.
2. Geting pickier about developement. Less "fluff" and carefull choosing of "value added" features.
3. Less sites but those that survive be of higher quality (and staffed by people who know what a budget sheet looks like).
I also hope really annoying ads will be banned from these sites(because they are counter productive and cause people to filter ALL banners and/or get less hits) but alas my magic 8-ball says "no".
"Just because your paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" is very aptly applied here. Many people on slashdot don't trust M$ because they screwed so many of us over and over. When they say something, it is natural to ask "what's the catch" because historically, there always was one. A recent example is kerberos, which is just one in a long history of such stuff.
Wow- This is a great idea... add a command prompt somewhere on the directory window and get the best of both worlds! It is so simple and "obviously good" that it seems like it should be already a standard feature of all windowing managers today! Leverage the command prompt without losing the graphical interface... It is a merging of "the best of both worlds". Why has this not been widely done? And if someone has done it, where can I find this file manager?
There must be some real demand for this feature. Several venders have started saying that they will be binary compatable with Linux (IBM says they are working on AIX to have this feature, Sun said something about device drivers if not more; I think there was an imbedded operating system with it too) and now the BSD's. It will esculate the trend for developers to only write code for Linux (when writing *nix stuff of course).
... I am sure the BSD's are great, but this is indicative of Linux taking over the *nix market.
I don't mean to start a flame war
People who think the NSA are up to something shady with this release are being way over paranoid. Come on folks- the source is available to everyone. It would be so embarassing for them to get caught with a backdoor that they would never try it.
:) .
The idea that the NSA is comprised of ONE mind with sinister intentions is just nuts. The NSA is mostly comprised of ordinary people trying to make government systems more secure. Sure some of them are trying to crack codes and working on monitoring equipement but even they think of thier job as "working to catch bad guys".
I would examine the NSA's code because it probably holds some really neat ideas and concepts. I am sure some X-Files fan will probably check it for the back doors anyway
Crackers always feel a need to justify thier actions because few people wants to just say "I am a baaaaad boy".
Some excuses are:
"I am trying to show the weaknesses in thier security system"
"I am protesting THE MAN"
"If thier security is this weak, they deserve it"
"The net should be open for everything"
"I am only having fun but I never do any real harm"
It is a rare individual who says "I am trashing other peoples hard work because I like to". Which of course is what they are doing. It really bothers me when I hear about people cracking a system because it means some group of people are going to be getting little sleep and working overtime to fix "a problem" that really should not be an issue. I really hate the excuse "they deserved it" because it assumes that human beings can not be trusted to be good people and that everybody must be thought of as a potential "intruder".
The only "benefit" a cracker has ever had was to make people less trusting about giving computer access AND to produce a multi-billion dollar security industry. Thanks but NO THANKS.
The previous poster was probably just being humorous but I was thinking "Terse" is the only nice thing I can think to say. Ok I am biassed because I believe three things:
:^) ... use Python, Pascal, COBOL, Basic or any other "syntax intuitive" language to prove your case.
1) Make a program as easy to read/understand as possible(descriptive variables and procedure names, one command per line, etc...).
2) Document code that is not "self explanitory".
3) KISS - which stands for Keep It SIMPLE Stupid. The first S DOES NOT MEAN "SMALL".
IF programmers want to "prove" that computer languages are like any other language used by people, then I would not show them this code. Now that I think of it- don't ever show any Perl! It will only hurt your case
At work, I have written several apps to connect to a central database (in Access on an NT server). My concern is with the scalabilty of Access. I am thinking about converting the database to PostgreSQL on Linux. My company does not "give a rats ass" on how I get anything done as long as it is done fast. My office is mostly a Windows shop though. How should I approach converting the database I built to PostgreSQL? Do people think it is a good idea or should I just think about converting to SQL Server instead?
My issue is that some _tables alone_ will have 500,000+ rows (with posibly ten people accessing the database at the same time) by the end of the year (some tables are growing by 20,000 rows a month). I know it is not remarkable to have several tables of that size but can Access handle it and is PostgreSQL a good alternative solution?
Right now I have a 600MHZ athlon and it sounds like an airconditioner is running in my study. So if I got a 1.2 GHZ cpu and ran it at say 700-850 MHZ, I could theoretically take the fan out of my box (but keep the heatsink), use less electricity and it would last longer (besides being faster than my current cpu). Is there a downside to my logic that I am not seeing? My view of cpu's needing any/better cooling technology is to me an indication that cpu manufacturers ARE over-clocking thier cpus... just not as much as enthusiast do. Is there a reason why Intel/AMD/Cyrix etc... need better cooling besides the HZ war:
if (MyCPU.MHZ > Other.MHZ) {
BankAccount = (BankAccount + BetterSales)
}