Blender Measured in features compared to other programms of the same type, Blender is easyly the most bloat-free software ever. Version 2.0 fit on two 3.5" HD Disks and had an incredible featureset. The GUI uses OpenGL and is blazingly fast compared to other 3D progamms. It has gotten larger (ca. 10MB to download) but still beats others hands down.
Emacs Once the most bloated piece of software in existance, Emacs now is the leanest Work enviroment available with the most power. After 10 years I've finally started to learn Emacs and it's all I expected it to be. Usage and control is far-out bizar at some points (marking a section takes several steps that are so counter intuitive it's unbelievable) but the power and available featureset is impressive.
Fluxbox My favorite non-bloat Window Manager on X. Fast, neat and unique features, looks good. My prime choice for non-KDE/Gnome setups.
This combined with bizar internet laws could easyly mean a renaissance of the Non-Internets of old. In a way I'm partly hoping for this. A FidoNet V.2 world-wide citizen offline-net with a modern grafik oriented interface and protocol would probably be the best alternative to a future bug-worm-viri ridden, non-neutral and DMCA/Patriot Act controlled internet.
Mounting Nukes (armed or not) to a planes wing - as they *say* it happend - is a mistake. However, this whole thing could just be some 'sword-rattling' (as we call it in Germany) towards we-own-the-northpole Russia, we're-building-nukes Iran or both. Maybe it's just as someone here said: Someone leaked that somebody is rearanging the US nukes and they molded a PR stunt out of it. "OMFG, if someone would've dropped them, OMFG they are so dangerous, our (and this is an actual quote) potential enemies need to know that we can handle our nukes professionally." I smell lot's of proactive appliance of psychology here.
Curiously, in Germany the Katholic curch would get into the very same trouble Scientology has gotten if the would fall back to the same methods. It's rather hard to seriously p*ss off German authorities and agencies, especially the ones normally reserved for Neo-Nazis, Right-Wing/Left-Wing Terrorists and ultra-extremist Islamic fundamentalists. But if you try hard enough you'll have Verfassungsschutz around the clock watching your every move. And for good reasons too. Scientology is a potentially dangerous cult which has officially stated multiple times that one of it's mid-to-long-term goals is to effectively topple the constitution of Germany and other democratic nations *including* that of the US. On top of that there are manyfold instances where there is federal court lawsuit tested proof in various countries that Scientology has repeatedly and proactively done the crimes stated in the summary. And that these methods are applicable as standard means of procedure through out the organisation if someone high enough in the food-chain should decive to resort to them. Europe (including Germany) is generally notably tolerant towards Religion and personal confessional preference, but just as humorless when it comes to defending that tolerance and freedom. Belgian officials making this move toward the Scientology Organisation comes as no suprise to me.
1.) Ditch the inhouse CLI tools - they suck and will never catch up with GNU. Maintaining them is pointless. Use the full spectrum of GNU CLI tools. 2.) Use a pimped zshell as shell with a prime quality default setup and some good-looking, neat tutorials to get the Bash crowd in line for it. 3.) De-suckify the entire grafical desktop stack, unifing GTK and QT with the same, one and only default theme that looks good. 4.) Use APT as distribution system. 5.) GPL Solaris and remove the distinction between Solaris and OpenSolaris. 6.) Build a marketing army to push Solaris as "Mac OS X" for all non-Apple computers and 'the better open Unix variant / the better Linux' at the same time.
There's only one big problem in all this: Sun. They are a technology driven company. Gigs like Apple or Canonical (Ubuntu) are vision driven and have a single boss who's considered king. They have a vision and they convey it to any opinion leader in the industry they care about. Suns staff wouldn't know a well designed desktop or a constently marketed brand if you showed it in their face. Just look at the video presentations from JavaOne. Anyone delivering such a presentation at Apples MacWorld would lose his job the next day. Sun is putting out CEO computable marketing babble and if at all they will only come through half way.
Mind you, Solaris overtaking Linux is possible. Theoretically. Solaris has the prime advantage of not having an image torn to tiny bits and pieces by a thousand distributions - if Sun would do all the things mentioned above they could seriously capitalize on this distinction to Linux. But as I mentioned allready, they lack the vision and conceptual consitency to really pull through with it. That's my experience anyway.
I think conservatives (I mean real conservatives, not crooks) are more likely to be pratical oriented because they have to deal with practical issues and solve them. Absolutely not a Geek/Nerd area of general expertise. As soon as Geeks grown up, have a wife and family of their own they usually become more conservative/pragmatic on their own. And less prone to romantic idealistic but unrealistic models of society. I once read a phrase that went sort of like this: For a lib to become a rep just have him grow up, earn his own money and pay taxes. While it's cliche, there is some truth to it. The differences between Lib and Rep in the US are mostly cosmetic anyway. If you look at truely conservative people you'll also notice that these types are much more emotionally independant of a regulated gouvernation than libs (the real ones, not the propagandist 1968 losers).
In Germany (State of Bavaria) we have the strange effect of local goverment coalitions between ultra-conservative Christian-Social-Union and heavyly left-leaning Greens for that exact reason.
People would call me a leftist geek, but I share some views that people, outside of the context, would consider extreme right conservative. I personally like to think of my self as an above average intelligent person who is unlikely to fall for the left-vs-right petty turf war that so many people around the political globe endorse.
BTW: Machiavelli is an all-time classic and a nice read and can help to emancipate oneself from the standard political debate and get a more insightfull perspective on these things.
The reprogrammed Voyager 2 to send color pictures while it had been en route for 15 years allready. Mind you, they reprogrammed Voyager 2 to send *color pictures* made with a system that was built to make b/w pictures. Using a single digit amount of registers to push single bits around a 30 year old computer that has less oomph than todays cheapest calculators aboard a space probe that is a kazillion-billion miles away is quite a stunt. Let alone updating the OS this way to generate color images.
I think these guys know what they are doing and if they choose to keep the old equipment running in order to communicate more relyably with the Voyagers, I trust they have perfectly valid reasons for it. And no, an off-the-shelf Dell is most probably not a feasable replacement. No matter how powerfull it is.
Oh, and by the way: A modern computer would drain voyagers batteries so fast, they'd be dead in a few hours. My old Sharp 1403 H Pocket Computer, built with technology from the early-to-mid 80s runs 200+ hours under full load on a pair of button-cells. I haven't replaced them in 10 years and it still runs on them. I have yet to find a modern handheld computer that can do this.
My experience is that companies that actually deliver real products are far to entangled in the real world to care to much about licences one way or the other. All I ever hear from my clients when I'm deploying a GPLd product for them is if they will lose control over the hard work they are doing or paying me to do. Once I tell them that as long as they don't redistribute 3rd party code nobody cares. And as soon as companies DO redistribute 3rd (or first) party code they are often quite open to the idea of GPLing it. Or, as the case apparently is, BSDing it. In theory the GPL is gives more 'enforcing' power but also is more difficult to handle (mentally). In practice companies and people making money on software very rarely care about such details as long as nobody goes on to exploit their branding or a featureset built on ripped code. And then usually more laws are broken than just some OSS licence violation.
I think both the noisy GPL faction and the noisy BSD faction should tune down a little. Licences and their mechanisims are important but once you've really understood them there's no need to argue oneself into a hissy-fit pen*s-length contest over it.
1.) Contribute something critical to one of the projects. 2.) Add a GPL violations fee notice for commercial exploitation of GPL violation for code you commited. Something like half a million dollars or something. 3.) Wait till they update their product with your code. 4.) Sue them into next wednesday. 5.) Profit.
If you get a lawyer with some advice to join you before you rev up your code contributions you could easyly prep a lawsuit that kills of the entire company and leaves you both with a nice mound of cash.
Pretend you're software developers, for just a minute, and not OS kooks obsessed with ridiculous ideals.... *chuckle*...
How about you pretend for once you're a software developer and not some MS user who doesn't give a damn about lock-in and plattform independance?
If I have to go back to developing in Perl/Python/PHP or even Java I'm going to put a pencil through my eyeball - most of it's just sloppy, primitive shit compared to what MS is doing.
Where I come from, we do out code ourselves. And AFAICT it's not sloppy at all. Not that I'd want to poke my eye out over that quick hack I did this morning anyway. Must be tough.... I have to admit, I feel a bit sorry for you.
Cry all you want about their OS's [...]
Personally, I actually piss my pants laughing about their OS's most of the time.
[...]they'd port an industrial strength CLR env to Linux along with all their class libraries, and Visual Studio/Orcas[...]
You MS folk seem to have it with eye-pocking, so let me put it this way: I'm 120% sure Balmer & Gates would rather have both their eyes poked out than have that happen. Would be interesting though. A nice 'what-if' anyway. Both the MS-Exec eye-poking and those IDE's you were talking about.
On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.
The truth is: Proprietary or not isn't the question or even a big problem. It never was, even during and after the browser wars. Nobody gives a shit about any monopoly as long as the people holding it don't screw and mess around with everybody else. Imagine MS delivering a rock solid 100% css2 cross-plattform IE 5.0 for Windows, OS X and Linux back in 2001. They'd've owned the web and people would have loved them for it. MS kept screwing around *and* abusing their monopoly and got their payback for it. Firefox at 20%+ and rising. There you go.
Flash is the prime Rich Client VM on the web for a very simple reason: It is to date by far the very best and it tries very hard not to suck. The Flash team is so ultra conservative about security it needs MS Active X conector enforcement to make it unsafe on Windows. The plugin is even easier to install than most browsers or any other type of programm. The closest potential competitor - Java - is lagging lightyears behind in what was initially intended to be Javas key market. Even their latest semi-JMF-rebrand'n'recycle named JavaFX is way to cumbersome to use to ever gain foothold unless Sun finally get's their shit together and builds a Rich Media Client kit that doesn't suck.
Ever since ActionScript 2 Flash has been the most widespread turing complete plattform out there and just because many people can't handle it doesn't mean its evil. If Adobe would ever start to f*ck around to much after gaining a factual monopoly (which they sort of have allready) there'd be OSS alternatives almost instantly. Remember when IE owned the web? MS started screwing with the Linux, OSS and Webdev community and - Bingo! - along came Mozilla with rock-solid CSS. And suddenly nobody cared that it was a performance hog. IE had gotten so bad that Mozilla was the best. And all of a sudden we could do halfway relyable Layout without needing Flash or relying on an IE as client. Likewise with print: Adobe can own print for all eternity - as soon as they start screwing around (the still very good) Corel Draw would get a new chance in an instant.
It sure isn't very nice that there is no viable open-source, truely cross-plattform rich client that is up to what Flash can do. But frankly, people - even the OSS advocates - don't care wether software is OSS or not. If a company treats it's users and developers fair, nobody gives a hoot about that. OSS is rarely a value in itself for things other than preventing lock-in on mission critical components. Or does it really bug the p*ss out of you that your Nvidia Linux GFX drivers and the Linux binary of Unreal Tournament 3 are both non-OSS? Didn't think so.
Flash is the king of the rich client hill. And if Adobe improves on their delivery of x-plattform compatibility, performance and featureset, and doesn't water down their stuff with to much Windows-only+OS-X-late+Linux-next-millenium Apollo, Air or whatnot stunts, then Flash will continue to stay in that position. And for good reasons too. I'm also a professional Flash developer since 2001 and am allways on my toes. As soon as Adobe starts messing with me I'm outa here and telling my clients that sound + neat litte anims gotta stand back behind todays usual Ajax fare until Gnash gains some foothold (and a project site that doesn't look retarded). But as long as they play nice, deliver video that is even easyer to deploy and deliver than the entire Real pipeline I don't care very much if they own RIA, web-video and the only feasable solution for everything other that classic websites.
That's my experience from since the dot-boom anyway.
Contrary to what this theory says, computing power has no value in itself. I can think of no scenario where one company wins over by simply 'outcomputing' competition. It may be that global companies with a versatile infrastructure and the neccesary computing power to control it may have a competitive advantage - but that's just like saying Coca Cola has a competitive advantage over Bobs Village Brewery. Killer App Software are built by small teams of knowlegeable people on affordable hardware with relatively standard processing power. And however well that scales is mostly dependant on having the right people with the right knowledge in key IT decision-making positions (rather than having a higher cap on the IT budget). A thing more unlikely to happen in larger companies.
I actually would think it's the other way, with large operations wasting huge amounts of CPU cycles because of bizar IT-business decisions and thus requiring more of it per dollar of turnover than smaller companies. A prime example that play in the same direction for this is the developement of the telecom market in Germany in the last few years. Within just a few years all companies have gone from wide ranges of Über-complex billing rates and tarif models to simple phone flatrates. This trend was started by new kids on the block like Arcor who quickly figured that the billing infrastructure would be far to expensive to compensate for the potential gain in income it would provide. So they introduced phone flatrates which are by orders of magnatude simpler to bill and process. And others followed suit.
Bottom line: The theory sounds interesting, but I don't think it sticks. If it does, then only under special isolated circumstances.
More and more I see OSS winning over in key markets. In fact I see the major conflict not in 'which Vendor do you use?' but in 'which technology do you use?'. Which is actually the way it should be. For instance: I've got a medium size web project comming up - a web-based B2B/CRM plattform - and the big figtht wasn't "proprietary" vs. "OSS" but "Symfony" vs. "CakePHP". The customer has some buddy companies who all use Cake, so I'm suposed to build the thing in CakePHP aswell.
What I find interesting is that throughout the entire evaluation and preperation phase the entire 'OSS or not' question wasn't even being discussed and allready had been decided in favour of OSS. Shrinkwrap software business is mostly a thing of the past. It's about how and with what extras and service you can deliver you software.
Emacs, maybe? Honestly, if all that a purely Mac OS X oriented editor is gonna come up with is some obscure, yet-another-programm-specific configuration and automation language that I have to learn to automate and speed up my everyday tasks, then I might aswell use the CLI version of Emacs right away. Ok, the 20 basic commands are really bizar (Crtl+V == Page down; Alt+V == Page up, Ctrl+x (for 'eXecute') Ctrl+s == Save, etc... ) but when I then go on to learn automation via Lisp, at least then I know my programm is free and runs on anything that uses electricity. And it's not more difficult to use than TestMate (apart from the first 20 I mentioned). And the OS X Terminal Fonts look just as good as everything else on the Mac.
Frankly the best editor in existance (OSS or not) is jEdit. The only problem I have with it is that it can be a performance hog and it bogs down my 1Ghz iBook with a mere 512MB (I know, I should've gotten 1GB) to much when I'm running other stuff in parallel. Aside from that, jEdit is way beyond any other editor out there (features and ease-of-use), including TextMate. However, if I ever should get so far as to start automating my programming and editor functions I'm not gonna use BeanShell (jEdits Script) or some strange proprietary TextMate Script PL. I'd rather use lisp for that. And be sure it runs on every enviroment I'll ever encounter for the rest of my life.
Why people think that a proprietary 2006 Emacs clone is the cream of Editors just because it uses the neat looking Aqua tray is beyond me. Use Emacs if you like that sort of stuff. Its plattform independant and it's so insanely fast on our modern computers that you'll finally know how much crunching power those 2Ghz+ really have.
The big problem here is that most people and most politians in Germany (and probably elsewhere aswell) couldn't care less about this sort of law and its effects. I've explained to academics the effects of the German law for protection of copyright on the internet and they said that nobody would pass such a law. I couldn't get them to realize that the law allready has been passed. It's the same with this one. Politicians couldn't care less. If major software companies with lots of employees would start to move out of Germany due to such laws, then they would react. If this law should ever be applied I don't think it would last long.
The last thing you want to hear about a DBMS is this line from MySQL: "the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities"
Yepp, that's the last thing you want to hear. However this is most likely to be marketing/buy-our-enterprise-version-to-be-safe marketing FUD targeted at MySQL experienced developers who want to keep a strait face when their boss asks them about the real true stability of MySQL. "Are you really really sure it's stable? How can you guarantee it?" - "Well, we could get this new Enterprise super-safe version..."
MySQL AB wants to morph into a company more like Oracle or SAP, which for a decade now have not been paid bucketoads of cash for technology (that's everywhere by now) but for taking over responability. I can't really blame them, as it's the safest and fastest way to make money in the industry. "Look, the OSS version is (at Version 5.x) suddenly starting to get a bit buggy, you better get our neat Enterprise version.... Oh, and look what we got here, a real company with stockshares and all to back it up!... Btw, I happen to have this neat bargain for you right here..."
I cry FUD. The truth is MySQL is a very mature product (as much as you can call a product that uses SQL 'mature'). It's not really been a classic RDBMS until 5.x which makes being mature a tad moot, but the people are used to using it and *are* using it for tons of products. If someone introduces hacks that cause serious trouble, people would notice right away. It's not that if Linus puts hacks into the kernel that everything comes crashing down in an instant (recent Scheduler debate anyone?). It's most likely to be the exact same with MySQL and other projects.
Have you considered OS X with X11 and KDE? If you want both Aqua/OS X & KDE, that's the way to go, as it means nearly zero overhead for your Mac compared to some virtualisation or dual-boot solution. Don't forget that OS X is a full-blown Unix (bash Terminal, GNU Toolkit and all) that can easyly provide all the Linux goodies you want. It's even got this OSS project called Fink which offers a full apt-get (as in Debian Package Management) enviroment including a usefull GUI tool (Fink Commander) to operate it. Here's a post on KDE support in Fink
This is what annoys me the most about the iMac and they didn't fix it. I'm using a 20" iMac at my current client and the screen is about 8-10cm to high for my tast. And you can only pivot it on the iMacs, not raise or lower it. I'd've thought they'd've fixed that with this release. Shame they didn't.
I don't see any disagreement here. I consider Zope the measure for any other web application solution of today. Back in 1999 it had what Rails and other can only hope to have in a few years to come. It was literally 10 years ahead of it's time and it still sets the bar. It's way ahead of anything else I know and I do web-developement for a living. It's only for it's ugly backend, the lack of a flashy website and some witty screencasts that it didn't pick up as much hype as Rails did 2 years ago. Goes to show that marketing is more important for OSS projects that developers care to realize.
Apache is neat. Very neat. PHP is neat. Very neat. Compared to any other SSI solution that is.
...etc....
There is but one problem. The world and especially the web and it's technologies is moving along at a breathtaking pace. Apache is neat, but it's style of configuration is nearly 10 years old from back when XML was considered the hottest thing since sliced bread. Why isn't there a zero-fuss web interface backend built into Apache that enables me to configure anything I want with 3 clicks of a mouse (with a backend deactivation option of course). Why isn't there a version of PHP with a MySQL driven persistance layer and SQL-free serialisation built right into it? How come a little bit of marketing, screencasts and a website which, for once, doesn't look like shit, and suddenly people think Rails is the holy grail of webdeving? Rails and the hip project hype they kicked off is a very good thing, but it shouldn't stop just there.
Don't get me wrong. I'm convinced that Microsoft, in terms of available software technology, is an incarnation of evil and should be avoided at all costs unless there is a solid reason not to. 'Client wants Exchange' could be one. But we have to be realistic about this. It takes only a handfull of people at MS with 2 or more braincells, freshly assigned decision power and half a billion out of Microsofts piggybank to build an entire webstack that blows any OSS solution (Zope, Rails, Django and whatnot included) out of the water and into next wednesday, technology wise. Even the most advanced OSS webstack today has superfluos installation fuss one has to go through that should disapear ASAP. There is a lure of a truely zero-fuss.Net. Look at the countless Linux people flocking to Mac OS X to see what I mean.
IIS,.Net and whatever from MS not sucking to much is a reaction to the pressure the feel from OSS. They may be reacting to this, thus the rise in IIS hits.
Then again, MS bought Godaddy just to raise their level of IIS installs by a few percent, and LAMP machines are extremely Multi-Domain friendly. This Necraft study might just be reflecting this. And I have no doubt that should Apache drop to a real 30%, they'd get their shit together and start building a full integrated OSS webstack that picks up where Zope ends. And not only halfway there. I hope so anyway.
Your crashing problems sound like bad RAM. Given, all apps crash once in a while and also Ubuntu 7 can be configured in such a way that KDE or Gnome grind to a halt. But there are only a very few things left where Windows is more hassle free than Ubuntu Linux (watching DVDs being one). For every anoyance you mention that doesn't cover obvious faults I can name 3 on Windows. It's mostly just about what you are used to.
So you are a Senior Developer in a 100% LAMP Shop? Howcome you think OSS is free? OSS isn't free. As everybody knows within serious business, licencing is the least expensive. It's developement, deployment, service and maintainance that cost the most. With or without OSS. But it's proprietary that causes lock-in and a recharging of licencing costs in the long run. There's the problem.
What most people considering MS don't get is that MS means lock-in. That needs to be conveyed. It could very well be that someone higher up is being bribed by some MS Gold Partner to lead the way into MS lock-in (stuff like that happens). See if you can get together with a reliable Linux Shop that offers service and make a deal with them. If you help them pitch and they make a good pitch it's very easy to outrun MS in the money and performance game. It doesn't matter if you could do it all on your own. The big man might just want to know that he's got externals that can help in a pinch - or when he kicks you and your team (:-) ).
BTW: MS by now is - except maybe for niche markets such as Exchange hosting or something - a severe competitive *disadvantage* in the web industry. The only thing holding MS is home users (read: gaming) and their experience with Windows. The LAMP Stack takes minutes to install on everything that runs on electricity and offers all features one could ever want. Linux server configs are a dime-a-dozen and as safe as operating systems can get. Not continueing to take advantage of in an all-out LAMP shop is insane.
...
Are you sure your a Senior Webdev or are you maybe some MS marketing analysis drone probing the market for all the pro OSS arguments? If so the latter, I suggest you guys get going and start building Explorer, DX and.Net Kernel Modules for Linux before your next Windows becomes a total bummer. Call you distro Window Ultra or something but please quit bogging down the industry. Thankyou. Just a little free tip from an OSS freelancer.
Slashdot Mirror
Blender
Measured in features compared to other programms of the same type, Blender is easyly the most bloat-free software ever. Version 2.0 fit on two 3.5" HD Disks and had an incredible featureset. The GUI uses OpenGL and is blazingly fast compared to other 3D progamms. It has gotten larger (ca. 10MB to download) but still beats others hands down.
Emacs
Once the most bloated piece of software in existance, Emacs now is the leanest Work enviroment available with the most power. After 10 years I've finally started to learn Emacs and it's all I expected it to be. Usage and control is far-out bizar at some points (marking a section takes several steps that are so counter intuitive it's unbelievable) but the power and available featureset is impressive.
Fluxbox
My favorite non-bloat Window Manager on X. Fast, neat and unique features, looks good. My prime choice for non-KDE/Gnome setups.
This combined with bizar internet laws could easyly mean a renaissance of the Non-Internets of old. In a way I'm partly hoping for this. A FidoNet V.2 world-wide citizen offline-net with a modern grafik oriented interface and protocol would probably be the best alternative to a future bug-worm-viri ridden, non-neutral and DMCA/Patriot Act controlled internet.
Mounting Nukes (armed or not) to a planes wing - as they *say* it happend - is a mistake. However, this whole thing could just be some 'sword-rattling' (as we call it in Germany) towards we-own-the-northpole Russia, we're-building-nukes Iran or both. Maybe it's just as someone here said: Someone leaked that somebody is rearanging the US nukes and they molded a PR stunt out of it. "OMFG, if someone would've dropped them, OMFG they are so dangerous, our (and this is an actual quote) potential enemies need to know that we can handle our nukes professionally."
I smell lot's of proactive appliance of psychology here.
Sue the Pope? Good luck with that.
Curiously, in Germany the Katholic curch would get into the very same trouble Scientology has gotten if the would fall back to the same methods. It's rather hard to seriously p*ss off German authorities and agencies, especially the ones normally reserved for Neo-Nazis, Right-Wing/Left-Wing Terrorists and ultra-extremist Islamic fundamentalists. But if you try hard enough you'll have Verfassungsschutz around the clock watching your every move. And for good reasons too. Scientology is a potentially dangerous cult which has officially stated multiple times that one of it's mid-to-long-term goals is to effectively topple the constitution of Germany and other democratic nations *including* that of the US. On top of that there are manyfold instances where there is federal court lawsuit tested proof in various countries that Scientology has repeatedly and proactively done the crimes stated in the summary. And that these methods are applicable as standard means of procedure through out the organisation if someone high enough in the food-chain should decive to resort to them.
Europe (including Germany) is generally notably tolerant towards Religion and personal confessional preference, but just as humorless when it comes to defending that tolerance and freedom. Belgian officials making this move toward the Scientology Organisation comes as no suprise to me.
1.) Ditch the inhouse CLI tools - they suck and will never catch up with GNU. Maintaining them is pointless. Use the full spectrum of GNU CLI tools.
2.) Use a pimped zshell as shell with a prime quality default setup and some good-looking, neat tutorials to get the Bash crowd in line for it.
3.) De-suckify the entire grafical desktop stack, unifing GTK and QT with the same, one and only default theme that looks good.
4.) Use APT as distribution system.
5.) GPL Solaris and remove the distinction between Solaris and OpenSolaris.
6.) Build a marketing army to push Solaris as "Mac OS X" for all non-Apple computers and 'the better open Unix variant / the better Linux' at the same time.
There's only one big problem in all this: Sun. They are a technology driven company. Gigs like Apple or Canonical (Ubuntu) are vision driven and have a single boss who's considered king. They have a vision and they convey it to any opinion leader in the industry they care about.
Suns staff wouldn't know a well designed desktop or a constently marketed brand if you showed it in their face. Just look at the video presentations from JavaOne. Anyone delivering such a presentation at Apples MacWorld would lose his job the next day. Sun is putting out CEO computable marketing babble and if at all they will only come through half way.
Mind you, Solaris overtaking Linux is possible. Theoretically. Solaris has the prime advantage of not having an image torn to tiny bits and pieces by a thousand distributions - if Sun would do all the things mentioned above they could seriously capitalize on this distinction to Linux. But as I mentioned allready, they lack the vision and conceptual consitency to really pull through with it. That's my experience anyway.
I think conservatives (I mean real conservatives, not crooks) are more likely to be pratical oriented because they have to deal with practical issues and solve them. Absolutely not a Geek/Nerd area of general expertise.
As soon as Geeks grown up, have a wife and family of their own they usually become more conservative/pragmatic on their own. And less prone to romantic idealistic but unrealistic models of society.
I once read a phrase that went sort of like this: For a lib to become a rep just have him grow up, earn his own money and pay taxes. While it's cliche, there is some truth to it.
The differences between Lib and Rep in the US are mostly cosmetic anyway.
If you look at truely conservative people you'll also notice that these types are much more emotionally independant of a regulated gouvernation than libs (the real ones, not the propagandist 1968 losers).
In Germany (State of Bavaria) we have the strange effect of local goverment coalitions between ultra-conservative Christian-Social-Union and heavyly left-leaning Greens for that exact reason.
People would call me a leftist geek, but I share some views that people, outside of the context, would consider extreme right conservative. I personally like to think of my self as an above average intelligent person who is unlikely to fall for the left-vs-right petty turf war that so many people around the political globe endorse.
BTW: Machiavelli is an all-time classic and a nice read and can help to emancipate oneself from the standard political debate and get a more insightfull perspective on these things.
The reprogrammed Voyager 2 to send color pictures while it had been en route for 15 years allready. Mind you, they reprogrammed Voyager 2 to send *color pictures* made with a system that was built to make b/w pictures. Using a single digit amount of registers to push single bits around a 30 year old computer that has less oomph than todays cheapest calculators aboard a space probe that is a kazillion-billion miles away is quite a stunt. Let alone updating the OS this way to generate color images.
I think these guys know what they are doing and if they choose to keep the old equipment running in order to communicate more relyably with the Voyagers, I trust they have perfectly valid reasons for it. And no, an off-the-shelf Dell is most probably not a feasable replacement. No matter how powerfull it is.
Oh, and by the way: A modern computer would drain voyagers batteries so fast, they'd be dead in a few hours. My old Sharp 1403 H Pocket Computer, built with technology from the early-to-mid 80s runs 200+ hours under full load on a pair of button-cells. I haven't replaced them in 10 years and it still runs on them. I have yet to find a modern handheld computer that can do this.
My experience is that companies that actually deliver real products are far to entangled in the real world to care to much about licences one way or the other. All I ever hear from my clients when I'm deploying a GPLd product for them is if they will lose control over the hard work they are doing or paying me to do.
Once I tell them that as long as they don't redistribute 3rd party code nobody cares. And as soon as companies DO redistribute 3rd (or first) party code they are often quite open to the idea of GPLing it. Or, as the case apparently is, BSDing it. In theory the GPL is gives more 'enforcing' power but also is more difficult to handle (mentally). In practice companies and people making money on software very rarely care about such details as long as nobody goes on to exploit their branding or a featureset built on ripped code. And then usually more laws are broken than just some OSS licence violation.
I think both the noisy GPL faction and the noisy BSD faction should tune down a little. Licences and their mechanisims are important but once you've really understood them there's no need to argue oneself into a hissy-fit pen*s-length contest over it.
1.) Contribute something critical to one of the projects.
2.) Add a GPL violations fee notice for commercial exploitation of GPL violation for code you commited. Something like half a million dollars or something.
3.) Wait till they update their product with your code.
4.) Sue them into next wednesday.
5.) Profit.
If you get a lawyer with some advice to join you before you rev up your code contributions you could easyly prep a lawsuit that kills of the entire company and leaves you both with a nice mound of cash.
Have Schools Orchestra play the Imperial March when he pulls into the driveway.
Pretend you're software developers, for just a minute, and not OS kooks obsessed with ridiculous ideals. ... ...
... I have to admit, I feel a bit sorry for you.
*chuckle*
How about you pretend for once you're a software developer and not some MS user who doesn't give a damn about lock-in and plattform independance?
If I have to go back to developing in Perl/Python/PHP or even Java I'm going to put a pencil through my eyeball - most of it's just sloppy, primitive shit compared to what MS is doing.
Where I come from, we do out code ourselves. And AFAICT it's not sloppy at all. Not that I'd want to poke my eye out over that quick hack I did this morning anyway. Must be tough.
Cry all you want about their OS's [...]
Personally, I actually piss my pants laughing about their OS's most of the time.
[...]they'd port an industrial strength CLR env to Linux along with all their class libraries, and Visual Studio/Orcas[...]
You MS folk seem to have it with eye-pocking, so let me put it this way: I'm 120% sure Balmer & Gates would rather have both their eyes poked out than have that happen. Would be interesting though. A nice 'what-if' anyway. Both the MS-Exec eye-poking and those IDE's you were talking about.
On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.
The truth is: Proprietary or not isn't the question or even a big problem. It never was, even during and after the browser wars. Nobody gives a shit about any monopoly as long as the people holding it don't screw and mess around with everybody else. Imagine MS delivering a rock solid 100% css2 cross-plattform IE 5.0 for Windows, OS X and Linux back in 2001. They'd've owned the web and people would have loved them for it. MS kept screwing around *and* abusing their monopoly and got their payback for it. Firefox at 20%+ and rising. There you go.
Flash is the prime Rich Client VM on the web for a very simple reason:
It is to date by far the very best and it tries very hard not to suck.
The Flash team is so ultra conservative about security it needs MS Active X conector enforcement to make it unsafe on Windows. The plugin is even easier to install than most browsers or any other type of programm. The closest potential competitor - Java - is lagging lightyears behind in what was initially intended to be Javas key market. Even their latest semi-JMF-rebrand'n'recycle named JavaFX is way to cumbersome to use to ever gain foothold unless Sun finally get's their shit together and builds a Rich Media Client kit that doesn't suck.
Ever since ActionScript 2 Flash has been the most widespread turing complete plattform out there and just because many people can't handle it doesn't mean its evil. If Adobe would ever start to f*ck around to much after gaining a factual monopoly (which they sort of have allready) there'd be OSS alternatives almost instantly. Remember when IE owned the web? MS started screwing with the Linux, OSS and Webdev community and - Bingo! - along came Mozilla with rock-solid CSS. And suddenly nobody cared that it was a performance hog. IE had gotten so bad that Mozilla was the best. And all of a sudden we could do halfway relyable Layout without needing Flash or relying on an IE as client. Likewise with print: Adobe can own print for all eternity - as soon as they start screwing around (the still very good) Corel Draw would get a new chance in an instant.
It sure isn't very nice that there is no viable open-source, truely cross-plattform rich client that is up to what Flash can do. But frankly, people - even the OSS advocates - don't care wether software is OSS or not. If a company treats it's users and developers fair, nobody gives a hoot about that. OSS is rarely a value in itself for things other than preventing lock-in on mission critical components. Or does it really bug the p*ss out of you that your Nvidia Linux GFX drivers and the Linux binary of Unreal Tournament 3 are both non-OSS? Didn't think so.
Flash is the king of the rich client hill. And if Adobe improves on their delivery of x-plattform compatibility, performance and featureset, and doesn't water down their stuff with to much Windows-only+OS-X-late+Linux-next-millenium Apollo, Air or whatnot stunts, then Flash will continue to stay in that position. And for good reasons too. I'm also a professional Flash developer since 2001 and am allways on my toes. As soon as Adobe starts messing with me I'm outa here and telling my clients that sound + neat litte anims gotta stand back behind todays usual Ajax fare until Gnash gains some foothold (and a project site that doesn't look retarded). But as long as they play nice, deliver video that is even easyer to deploy and deliver than the entire Real pipeline I don't care very much if they own RIA, web-video and the only feasable solution for everything other that classic websites.
That's my experience from since the dot-boom anyway.
Contrary to what this theory says, computing power has no value in itself. I can think of no scenario where one company wins over by simply 'outcomputing' competition. It may be that global companies with a versatile infrastructure and the neccesary computing power to control it may have a competitive advantage - but that's just like saying Coca Cola has a competitive advantage over Bobs Village Brewery. Killer App Software are built by small teams of knowlegeable people on affordable hardware with relatively standard processing power. And however well that scales is mostly dependant on having the right people with the right knowledge in key IT decision-making positions (rather than having a higher cap on the IT budget). A thing more unlikely to happen in larger companies.
I actually would think it's the other way, with large operations wasting huge amounts of CPU cycles because of bizar IT-business decisions and thus requiring more of it per dollar of turnover than smaller companies. A prime example that play in the same direction for this is the developement of the telecom market in Germany in the last few years. Within just a few years all companies have gone from wide ranges of Über-complex billing rates and tarif models to simple phone flatrates. This trend was started by new kids on the block like Arcor who quickly figured that the billing infrastructure would be far to expensive to compensate for the potential gain in income it would provide. So they introduced phone flatrates which are by orders of magnatude simpler to bill and process. And others followed suit.
Bottom line: The theory sounds interesting, but I don't think it sticks. If it does, then only under special isolated circumstances.
More and more I see OSS winning over in key markets. In fact I see the major conflict not in 'which Vendor do you use?' but in 'which technology do you use?'. Which is actually the way it should be. For instance: I've got a medium size web project comming up - a web-based B2B/CRM plattform - and the big figtht wasn't "proprietary" vs. "OSS" but "Symfony" vs. "CakePHP". The customer has some buddy companies who all use Cake, so I'm suposed to build the thing in CakePHP aswell.
What I find interesting is that throughout the entire evaluation and preperation phase the entire 'OSS or not' question wasn't even being discussed and allready had been decided in favour of OSS. Shrinkwrap software business is mostly a thing of the past. It's about how and with what extras and service you can deliver you software.
Emacs, maybe?
Honestly, if all that a purely Mac OS X oriented editor is gonna come up with is some obscure, yet-another-programm-specific configuration and automation language that I have to learn to automate and speed up my everyday tasks, then I might aswell use the CLI version of Emacs right away. Ok, the 20 basic commands are really bizar (Crtl+V == Page down; Alt+V == Page up, Ctrl+x (for 'eXecute') Ctrl+s == Save, etc... ) but when I then go on to learn automation via Lisp, at least then I know my programm is free and runs on anything that uses electricity. And it's not more difficult to use than TestMate (apart from the first 20 I mentioned). And the OS X Terminal Fonts look just as good as everything else on the Mac.
Frankly the best editor in existance (OSS or not) is jEdit. The only problem I have with it is that it can be a performance hog and it bogs down my 1Ghz iBook with a mere 512MB (I know, I should've gotten 1GB) to much when I'm running other stuff in parallel. Aside from that, jEdit is way beyond any other editor out there (features and ease-of-use), including TextMate. However, if I ever should get so far as to start automating my programming and editor functions I'm not gonna use BeanShell (jEdits Script) or some strange proprietary TextMate Script PL. I'd rather use lisp for that. And be sure it runs on every enviroment I'll ever encounter for the rest of my life.
Why people think that a proprietary 2006 Emacs clone is the cream of Editors just because it uses the neat looking Aqua tray is beyond me. Use Emacs if you like that sort of stuff. Its plattform independant and it's so insanely fast on our modern computers that you'll finally know how much crunching power those 2Ghz+ really have.
It's not an exclaimation point. It's an upsidedown 'i'. It's better than the other option iJoomla, if you ask me. :-)
The big problem here is that most people and most politians in Germany (and probably elsewhere aswell) couldn't care less about this sort of law and its effects. I've explained to academics the effects of the German law for protection of copyright on the internet and they said that nobody would pass such a law. I couldn't get them to realize that the law allready has been passed. It's the same with this one. Politicians couldn't care less. If major software companies with lots of employees would start to move out of Germany due to such laws, then they would react. If this law should ever be applied I don't think it would last long.
The last thing you want to hear about a DBMS is this line from MySQL: "the company has introduced features into the Community edition of the software that "[weren't] as robust as we thought, and created some instabilities"
..."
... Oh, and look what we got here, a real company with stockshares and all to back it up! ... Btw, I happen to have this neat bargain for you right here ..."
Yepp, that's the last thing you want to hear. However this is most likely to be marketing/buy-our-enterprise-version-to-be-safe marketing FUD targeted at MySQL experienced developers who want to keep a strait face when their boss asks them about the real true stability of MySQL. "Are you really really sure it's stable? How can you guarantee it?" - "Well, we could get this new Enterprise super-safe version
MySQL AB wants to morph into a company more like Oracle or SAP, which for a decade now have not been paid bucketoads of cash for technology (that's everywhere by now) but for taking over responability. I can't really blame them, as it's the safest and fastest way to make money in the industry.
"Look, the OSS version is (at Version 5.x) suddenly starting to get a bit buggy, you better get our neat Enterprise version.
I cry FUD.
The truth is MySQL is a very mature product (as much as you can call a product that uses SQL 'mature'). It's not really been a classic RDBMS until 5.x which makes being mature a tad moot, but the people are used to using it and *are* using it for tons of products. If someone introduces hacks that cause serious trouble, people would notice right away. It's not that if Linus puts hacks into the kernel that everything comes crashing down in an instant (recent Scheduler debate anyone?). It's most likely to be the exact same with MySQL and other projects.
Have you considered OS X with X11 and KDE?
If you want both Aqua/OS X & KDE, that's the way to go, as it means nearly zero overhead for your Mac compared to some virtualisation or dual-boot solution. Don't forget that OS X is a full-blown Unix (bash Terminal, GNU Toolkit and all) that can easyly provide all the Linux goodies you want. It's even got this OSS project called Fink which offers a full apt-get (as in Debian Package Management) enviroment including a usefull GUI tool (Fink Commander) to operate it. Here's a post on KDE support in Fink
... Or to powerfull."
But your integrated screen can still be to high!
This is what annoys me the most about the iMac and they didn't fix it. I'm using a 20" iMac at my current client and the screen is about 8-10cm to high for my tast. And you can only pivot it on the iMacs, not raise or lower it. I'd've thought they'd've fixed that with this release. Shame they didn't.
I definitely don't agree with you about zope.
I don't see any disagreement here. I consider Zope the measure for any other web application solution of today. Back in 1999 it had what Rails and other can only hope to have in a few years to come. It was literally 10 years ahead of it's time and it still sets the bar. It's way ahead of anything else I know and I do web-developement for a living. It's only for it's ugly backend, the lack of a flashy website and some witty screencasts that it didn't pick up as much hype as Rails did 2 years ago.
Goes to show that marketing is more important for OSS projects that developers care to realize.
Apache is neat. Very neat.
...
.Net. Look at the countless Linux people flocking to Mac OS X to see what I mean.
.Net and whatever from MS not sucking to much is a reaction to the pressure the feel from OSS. They may be reacting to this, thus the rise in IIS hits.
PHP is neat. Very neat.
Compared to any other SSI solution that is.
...etc.
There is but one problem. The world and especially the web and it's technologies is moving along at a breathtaking pace. Apache is neat, but it's style of configuration is nearly 10 years old from back when XML was considered the hottest thing since sliced bread.
Why isn't there a zero-fuss web interface backend built into Apache that enables me to configure anything I want with 3 clicks of a mouse (with a backend deactivation option of course). Why isn't there a version of PHP with a MySQL driven persistance layer and SQL-free serialisation built right into it?
How come a little bit of marketing, screencasts and a website which, for once, doesn't look like shit, and suddenly people think Rails is the holy grail of webdeving? Rails and the hip project hype they kicked off is a very good thing, but it shouldn't stop just there.
Don't get me wrong. I'm convinced that Microsoft, in terms of available software technology, is an incarnation of evil and should be avoided at all costs unless there is a solid reason not to. 'Client wants Exchange' could be one. But we have to be realistic about this. It takes only a handfull of people at MS with 2 or more braincells, freshly assigned decision power and half a billion out of Microsofts piggybank to build an entire webstack that blows any OSS solution (Zope, Rails, Django and whatnot included) out of the water and into next wednesday, technology wise. Even the most advanced OSS webstack today has superfluos installation fuss one has to go through that should disapear ASAP. There is a lure of a truely zero-fuss
IIS,
Then again, MS bought Godaddy just to raise their level of IIS installs by a few percent, and LAMP machines are extremely Multi-Domain friendly. This Necraft study might just be reflecting this. And I have no doubt that should Apache drop to a real 30%, they'd get their shit together and start building a full integrated OSS webstack that picks up where Zope ends. And not only halfway there. I hope so anyway.
My 2 Eurocents.
Your crashing problems sound like bad RAM. Given, all apps crash once in a while and also Ubuntu 7 can be configured in such a way that KDE or Gnome grind to a halt. But there are only a very few things left where Windows is more hassle free than Ubuntu Linux (watching DVDs being one). For every anoyance you mention that doesn't cover obvious faults I can name 3 on Windows. It's mostly just about what you are used to.
So you are a Senior Developer in a 100% LAMP Shop? Howcome you think OSS is free? OSS isn't free. As everybody knows within serious business, licencing is the least expensive. It's developement, deployment, service and maintainance that cost the most. With or without OSS. But it's proprietary that causes lock-in and a recharging of licencing costs in the long run. There's the problem.
:-) ).
...
.Net Kernel Modules for Linux before your next Windows becomes a total bummer. Call you distro Window Ultra or something but please quit bogging down the industry. Thankyou.
What most people considering MS don't get is that MS means lock-in. That needs to be conveyed. It could very well be that someone higher up is being bribed by some MS Gold Partner to lead the way into MS lock-in (stuff like that happens). See if you can get together with a reliable Linux Shop that offers service and make a deal with them. If you help them pitch and they make a good pitch it's very easy to outrun MS in the money and performance game. It doesn't matter if you could do it all on your own. The big man might just want to know that he's got externals that can help in a pinch - or when he kicks you and your team (
BTW: MS by now is - except maybe for niche markets such as Exchange hosting or something - a severe competitive *disadvantage* in the web industry. The only thing holding MS is home users (read: gaming) and their experience with Windows. The LAMP Stack takes minutes to install on everything that runs on electricity and offers all features one could ever want. Linux server configs are a dime-a-dozen and as safe as operating systems can get. Not continueing to take advantage of in an all-out LAMP shop is insane.
Are you sure your a Senior Webdev or are you maybe some MS marketing analysis drone probing the market for all the pro OSS arguments? If so the latter, I suggest you guys get going and start building Explorer, DX and
Just a little free tip from an OSS freelancer.
I'm a Webdesigner and I actually like Trebuchet. ... Does that make me a follower of the antichrist?