I upgrade RedHat twice a year - I always run the most current. I look at the $60/machine as 2 purchases of a $30 edition (do they even make the $30 edition still). To have the machine update itself with a click of the mouse, even if I am away from the box out of town is a nice benefit as well.
Also the Instant ISO program. I hope they have the bandwidth, because I intend to take full advantage of it on release day. Saves me from a trip to the store, 2 or 3 weeks later.
I've come to love RedHat over the last 4 years of using it since switching from Slackware at RH 5.1. I'm pleased with the convenience this service offers, and I am quite happy to give them $5 a month to keep my server running well.
But for the lazy, the $30 is really targeted at Enterprise customers. It offers support for things like multiple admins, grouping systems to perform updates on a group, etc... It's suited for running more than 4 or 5 machines in your apartment. Think hundreds, or even thousands, in the workplace.
This seems like a HUGE liability. What happens when bugs in the game allow players to steal money? Or when someone DoS' the servers, and people can't play for days, or weeks? Many players would be quite angry that their personal finances would be interruped, perhaps even destroyed.
Of course it is not a good idea to rely on the game for your income, but there will be people that will do this, and they will complain loudly when problems arise.
I don't see how any lawyer would allow this - the liability is too great.
The need for 100% kosher drivers and apps is the real kicker here.
Lots and lots and lots of people don't have great (or even good) drivers for some hardware.
Apps suck even more - the whole Windows platform is full of the people doing X, Y, and Z in different ways to skirt different OS bugs or other pet peeves they didn't want to deal with.
I've never gotten Hibernate to work properly for just those reasons - apps and drivers on windows suck.
If my memory serves me correctly, one reason to release 2.4 a year ago is to get more people to use the damn thing.
There is a relatively small number of people that use the odd-numbered, experimental kernels. At the end of 2000, it was becoming clear that having the same people running the development kernels on their hardware wasn't fixing many more bugs - I remember a post from Linus to LKML to that effect.
2.4 was stable enough for mass consumption, and so it was released. However, it is important to remember that this is free software, and frequent incremental updates are the rule. Free software can't work if it is not constantly evaluated by users, bugs reported and fixed, and new versions shipped out.
Software is an evolutionary process; it is important to remember that free software (especially the Linux kernel) fully embraces this notion.
I actually thought Harry Potter was a fantastic book.
Sure it may not be as "serious" as other books, but lots of readers liked it, and that is all that matters right?
In my mind, it is a lot like the people that trash the GameCube for having a lot of games with cartoony graphics that just aren't as "serious" as Halo or DOA3. Apparently they don't care if the games are a lot of fun - they are bad because they break from the tradition of serious gaming. I see a lot of scifi/fantasy readers do the same to books, and it is disappointing to me.
I never watched TV before I got TiVo - when I had time, there was never anything interesting to me on, and I sure as hell am not going to make time for TV watching.
Once I got TiVo, I could watch what I want when I want - it gave me more control of that aspect of my liesure time. In addition to skipping commercials, it has made TV enjoyable for me.
Re:My next bump will be a(nother) iMac
on
New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
You know, I agree with you 100% on the concept of coming home to a working PC. I go to school and work as a software engineer during my week days and early evenings - the last thing I want to do when I come home is to deal with a broken computer. That is a large part of the reason why I hate Windows so much. The damn thing just seems to need lots of maintenance compared to my iBook running OSX or my Linux box.
I am really considering purchasing a new Power Mac when I need more speed again. I'm really sick of all the hassles of building X86 boxes myself.
The 1.5mbps cap bothers me because the service continues to get worse, but the price stays the same. I'm now paying the same amount of money for a dynamic IP, with slower speeds, and continued outages. Our area has had severe problems with outages since August - the cable modem loses signal and resets itself every 5 minutes. Despite repeated calls, emails, and chats to complain AT&T, they continue to not deal with the problem, they continue to charge us full price for the service, and it continues to get worse.
The 1.5mbps cap is just another straw on the camel's back.
I hate having to hit Control+Space all the time to do name completion - I find the name completion introduces a significant delay each time I have to use it. I'd rather just type the names myself, as I do in most every language.
Besides, name completion doesn't help me wade through code with really long method names.
The problem I see with Perl is a management problem. Everyone complains that Perl produces bad code, but in reality, programmers produce bad code. By our very nature as human beings, we all think differently.
I agree Perl provides a lot of freedom to solve problems in the way most suitable to you. However, to use Perl successfully, you still need to set standards for acceptable algorithms, approaches, and documentation. This is exactly what you would do in Java, and exactly what you would do in C++ (i.e., by saying no templates/operator overloading).
I'd argue that such standards are necessary for any significant development effort - its just the nature of the beast, when trying to get multiple people to work together to tackle a problem.
So how do you use Perl effectively in a structured environment with teams of programmers working together? Here's a few ideas:
1) Code reviews. All code written for a team msut be reviewed by the team. This is absolutely essential to keeping the system functioning. If the team rejects it, the code must be fixed.
2) Documentation. Perl provides POD, a simple and standardized way to document the code you write. Enforce a standard that code without *meaningful* POD is not acceptable.
Note that documentation also means you need to document more than the code - you need to document the design decisions, the requirements the code tries to satisfy, and the assumptions made for the system as a whole. Without proper system/process documentation, a development project will fail.
3) Create standards for acceptable approaches to solve the problem. For example, Perl provides eval for exception handling - you could mandate that all external error handling code make use of eval to keep error detection orthogonal to error handling. You could (and should) require team members encapsulate code in modules, and provide documented interfaces to those modules. Code not encapsulated in a module will not be accepted into the tree.
There are only a few examples to illustrate ways to make development in Perl successful for your organization. These are the same problems you tackle in developing a sizeable project in any language with a team of programmers - Perl is no different, and is not a panacea for those problems. However, if standard management and structured development techniques are applied, developing in Perl can (and will) work for large organizations.
Perl is no different from any other technology in this regard. that for a large project, it is essential to set standards
The only complains I have about ObjC are the obscenely long method names, and the memory management.
The infix notation for specifying method parameters is novel, since it allows for a message to read much like natural language. However, that tends to breed really long method names/parameters, which means the programmer is forced to type more. The collections libraries is evidence of that. I don't like typing that much. Its a minimal complaint, but it has dampened by initial enthusiasm for the language.
As for the memory management, I hate manual reference counting. It's one of the most egegious aspects of COM on Windows, and I was quite disappointed to discover it is an issue in Objective C.
I do still have much to learn about Cocoa and Objective C, but those two issues have been a source of frustration to me.
Re:"The code itself is fairly legible... "
on
Review: SliMP3
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· Score: 2
That's not entirely fair. Taco always acknowledged that Shash was ugly internally; he just didn't fix it. I'm sure he can recognize bad code when he sees it; afterall, he recognized HIS code was a pile...
Add to your list of communities with offensive users LISP and some parts of Java. I can't stand to read Java books that denounce other programmers and other technolgies, and too many of the LISP books I have read do the same.
Why can't they let the merits speak for themselves? Bashing others just turns users away - users like me who don't care for the politics.
Both of these games are amazing. My copy of Pikmin doesn't arrive until tomorrow, but the reviews look stellar.
As for Monkey Ball, if you have a GCN, you need this game. Hell, if you are an avid gamer at all, you need this. Mega fun with 4 people, and quite addictive and enjoyable just by yourself or with your spouse. My fiance and I wasted all of Thanksgiving weekend on this one, and she doesn't even like games much.
Gamecube is a lot of fun, but unfortunately, it hasn't gotten much attention from store employees and media with Xbox's release. But don't let the lack of enthusiasm from sales monkeys deter you; GCN is a boatload of fun (not to mention you can pick up the console AND these 2 games for the cost of one of the other consoles alone!) What a value!
Validation is a big concern for any mission-critical computing environment. Most organizations using Linux have validated 2.2 series long ago, and thus have certified it as acceptable for use in their production machines. Those machines can't afford much downtime, so if it works, don't fix it.
2.4 is still experiencing some evolution. Witness the VM changes lately. A production server running one of the builds with the bad VM would be in real trouble when it thrashed/etc... Thus, 2.4 is probably not validated for a lot of environments.
2.2 is rock solid at this point. Fix a few security bugs here and there, and you have a super stable kernel. Sure, it might not support all the latest features, and not have the absolute best performance when compared to some of the newer things being done, but for some applications, the stability is the most important goal.
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If only my Car's indash CD player supported OGG, I could be weaned from MP3. Alas, the Kenwood only supports MP3.
I upgrade RedHat twice a year - I always run the most current. I look at the $60/machine as 2 purchases of a $30 edition (do they even make the $30 edition still). To have the machine update itself with a click of the mouse, even if I am away from the box out of town is a nice benefit as well.
Also the Instant ISO program. I hope they have the bandwidth, because I intend to take full advantage of it on release day. Saves me from a trip to the store, 2 or 3 weeks later.
I've come to love RedHat over the last 4 years of using it since switching from Slackware at RH 5.1. I'm pleased with the convenience this service offers, and I am quite happy to give them $5 a month to keep my server running well.
Read the site.
But for the lazy, the $30 is really targeted at Enterprise customers. It offers support for things like multiple admins, grouping systems to perform updates on a group, etc... It's suited for running more than 4 or 5 machines in your apartment. Think hundreds, or even thousands, in the workplace.
I meant stuff like people starting law suits, web pages, etc... along the lines of
"Don't play this game because they lost my account and made me miss my mortgage payment..."
That sort of thing is quite likely to happen, and would become a huge problem.
This seems like a HUGE liability. What happens when bugs in the game allow players to steal money? Or when someone DoS' the servers, and people can't play for days, or weeks? Many players would be quite angry that their personal finances would be interruped, perhaps even destroyed.
Of course it is not a good idea to rely on the game for your income, but there will be people that will do this, and they will complain loudly when problems arise.
I don't see how any lawyer would allow this - the liability is too great.
The need for 100% kosher drivers and apps is the real kicker here.
Lots and lots and lots of people don't have great (or even good) drivers for some hardware.
Apps suck even more - the whole Windows platform is full of the people doing X, Y, and Z in different ways to skirt different OS bugs or other pet peeves they didn't want to deal with.
I've never gotten Hibernate to work properly for just those reasons - apps and drivers on windows suck.
Satellite isn't necessarily as good when it comes to local channels.
In some markets, you can only get a subset of the local stations, wheras with cable you get all the locals.
If my memory serves me correctly, one reason to release 2.4 a year ago is to get more people to use the damn thing.
There is a relatively small number of people that use the odd-numbered, experimental kernels. At the end of 2000, it was becoming clear that having the same people running the development kernels on their hardware wasn't fixing many more bugs - I remember a post from Linus to LKML to that effect.
2.4 was stable enough for mass consumption, and so it was released. However, it is important to remember that this is free software, and frequent incremental updates are the rule. Free software can't work if it is not constantly evaluated by users, bugs reported and fixed, and new versions shipped out.
Software is an evolutionary process; it is important to remember that free software (especially the Linux kernel) fully embraces this notion.
I actually thought Harry Potter was a fantastic book.
Sure it may not be as "serious" as other books, but lots of readers liked it, and that is all that matters right?
In my mind, it is a lot like the people that trash the GameCube for having a lot of games with cartoony graphics that just aren't as "serious" as Halo or DOA3. Apparently they don't care if the games are a lot of fun - they are bad because they break from the tradition of serious gaming. I see a lot of scifi/fantasy readers do the same to books, and it is disappointing to me.
I never watched TV before I got TiVo - when I had time, there was never anything interesting to me on, and I sure as hell am not going to make time for TV watching.
Once I got TiVo, I could watch what I want when I want - it gave me more control of that aspect of my liesure time. In addition to skipping commercials, it has made TV enjoyable for me.
You know, I agree with you 100% on the concept of coming home to a working PC. I go to school and work as a software engineer during my week days and early evenings - the last thing I want to do when I come home is to deal with a broken computer. That is a large part of the reason why I hate Windows so much. The damn thing just seems to need lots of maintenance compared to my iBook running OSX or my Linux box.
I am really considering purchasing a new Power Mac when I need more speed again. I'm really sick of all the hassles of building X86 boxes myself.
If somebody wants to do this, why should we stop them?
/.
I think the system is a great idea. I don't care if some moron abuses it such that he can't see any of
I just want to have the option to stop reading some of the more egregious trolls.
The 1.5mbps cap bothers me because the service continues to get worse, but the price stays the same. I'm now paying the same amount of money for a dynamic IP, with slower speeds, and continued outages. Our area has had severe problems with outages since August - the cable modem loses signal and resets itself every 5 minutes. Despite repeated calls, emails, and chats to complain AT&T, they continue to not deal with the problem, they continue to charge us full price for the service, and it continues to get worse.
The 1.5mbps cap is just another straw on the camel's back.
I hate having to hit Control+Space all the time to do name completion - I find the name completion introduces a significant delay each time I have to use it. I'd rather just type the names myself, as I do in most every language.
Besides, name completion doesn't help me wade through code with really long method names.
I'm sure FM radio isn't going anyway, but will FM become to XM what AM is to FM?
Funny you put it that way, because that is EXACTLY what the advertising campaign for XM said a few months ago when they launched in Dallas.
I agree with you 100%.
People seem to think that if they use Perl, they can ignore solid software engineering principles like code reviews, documentation, etc.
Poorly written code with too much use of $_ shouldn't pass a code review -- it should be rewritten to follow the organization's standards.
Perl is a fantastic tool, but it's not a panacea. You still have to back it up with a strong foundtion of software engineering.
The problem I see with Perl is a management problem. Everyone complains that Perl produces bad code, but in reality, programmers produce bad code. By our very nature as human beings, we all think differently.
I agree Perl provides a lot of freedom to solve problems in the way most suitable to you. However, to use Perl successfully, you still need to set standards for acceptable algorithms, approaches, and documentation. This is exactly what you would do in Java, and exactly what you would do in C++ (i.e., by saying no templates/operator overloading).
I'd argue that such standards are necessary for any significant development effort - its just the nature of the beast, when trying to get multiple people to work together to tackle a problem.
So how do you use Perl effectively in a structured environment with teams of programmers working together? Here's a few ideas:
1) Code reviews. All code written for a team msut be reviewed by the team. This is absolutely essential to keeping the system functioning. If the team rejects it, the code must be fixed.
2) Documentation. Perl provides POD, a simple and standardized way to document the code you write. Enforce a standard that code without *meaningful* POD is not acceptable.
Note that documentation also means you need to document more than the code - you need to document the design decisions, the requirements the code tries to satisfy, and the assumptions made for the system as a whole. Without proper system/process documentation, a development project will fail.
3) Create standards for acceptable approaches to solve the problem. For example, Perl provides eval for exception handling - you could mandate that all external error handling code make use of eval to keep error detection orthogonal to error handling. You could (and should) require team members encapsulate code in modules, and provide documented interfaces to those modules. Code not encapsulated in a module will not be accepted into the tree.
There are only a few examples to illustrate ways to make development in Perl successful for your organization. These are the same problems you tackle in developing a sizeable project in any language with a team of programmers - Perl is no different, and is not a panacea for those problems. However, if standard management and structured development techniques are applied, developing in Perl can (and will) work for large organizations.
Perl is no different from any other technology in this regard. that for a large project, it is essential to set standards
The only complains I have about ObjC are the obscenely long method names, and the memory management.
The infix notation for specifying method parameters is novel, since it allows for a message to read much like natural language. However, that tends to breed really long method names/parameters, which means the programmer is forced to type more. The collections libraries is evidence of that. I don't like typing that much. Its a minimal complaint, but it has dampened by initial enthusiasm for the language.
As for the memory management, I hate manual reference counting. It's one of the most egegious aspects of COM on Windows, and I was quite disappointed to discover it is an issue in Objective C.
I do still have much to learn about Cocoa and Objective C, but those two issues have been a source of frustration to me.
That's not entirely fair. Taco always acknowledged that Shash was ugly internally; he just didn't fix it. I'm sure he can recognize bad code when he sees it; afterall, he recognized HIS code was a pile...
Add to your list of communities with offensive users LISP and some parts of Java. I can't stand to read Java books that denounce other programmers and other technolgies, and too many of the LISP books I have read do the same.
Why can't they let the merits speak for themselves? Bashing others just turns users away - users like me who don't care for the politics.
Both of these games are amazing. My copy of Pikmin doesn't arrive until tomorrow, but the reviews look stellar.
As for Monkey Ball, if you have a GCN, you need this game. Hell, if you are an avid gamer at all, you need this. Mega fun with 4 people, and quite addictive and enjoyable just by yourself or with your spouse. My fiance and I wasted all of Thanksgiving weekend on this one, and she doesn't even like games much.
Gamecube is a lot of fun, but unfortunately, it hasn't gotten much attention from store employees and media with Xbox's release. But don't let the lack of enthusiasm from sales monkeys deter you; GCN is a boatload of fun (not to mention you can pick up the console AND these 2 games for the cost of one of the other consoles alone!) What a value!
I played DOA2 on Dreamcast, and it was fun for about 4 days.
Then we all switched to Soul Calibur, which is one of the best fighters ever.
I haven't played DOA3, but I haven't been motivated to either, since we got so bored with DOA2.
It seems that the cable companies' fear of customers dropping in 802.11 base stations is a fear of competing with their own customers.
If the cable company can't offer a competitive service, then nobody will use it.
It seems to me this is simple capitalism. Whats the problem here?
Yes they should release.....open source methodology is release early and often.
Validation is a big concern for any mission-critical computing environment. Most organizations using Linux have validated 2.2 series long ago, and thus have certified it as acceptable for use in their production machines. Those machines can't afford much downtime, so if it works, don't fix it.
2.4 is still experiencing some evolution. Witness the VM changes lately. A production server running one of the builds with the bad VM would be in real trouble when it thrashed/etc... Thus, 2.4 is probably not validated for a lot of environments.
2.2 is rock solid at this point. Fix a few security bugs here and there, and you have a super stable kernel. Sure, it might not support all the latest features, and not have the absolute best performance when compared to some of the newer things being done, but for some applications, the stability is the most important goal.