There's a fair bit of merit in what you say, that much is agreed. OTOH there is a large degree to which 'suitability for purpose' is apposite. In particular, there are stereotypes: Mac for graphics, Unix for servers, Windoze for desktops; and I have a suspicion that stereotypes come from/somewhere/, after all.
What you learn by advocacy is not that 'linux r00lz' but rather that the person advocating it for roll-out across a 1000-strong company as a desktop OS is an idiot.
OTOH there are also one or two OS-independent factors; I don't know of anything where reliability isn't key, I know security is generally favourable, and ease of *use*[0] is also probably a good thing.
[0] I said use, not installation. I'm more than prepared to spend 2 days installing a Debian GNU/Linux system if it makes my life easier for the next 6 months... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I hardly think that "It appears France is now defining censorship on US Web sites", complete with its connotations of "all international intervention is eeeeevil" is particularly fair comment, given, just *for example*, the US' continual involvement in Northern Ireland. In fact, the feeling "ha, don't like your own medicine??" comes to mind... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
OK, getting off-topic here, but I had some fun and games with an EtherExpress Pro in recent days...
For some bizarre reason, problems (TX: Transmit Timed Out) disappeared when I tried to tcpdump what was happening. As a total kludge, if you ifconfig eth0 arp promisc up, it doesn't happen anything like so often (if at all).
This was a Saturday afternoon workaround - thinking why is a week-day activity;8) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Er.. yoohoo... how do *you* tell whether a particular source tarball you receive was edited using the borland C++ IDE? Let alone by the particular one on the magazine?
Sorry, but you just can't claim "we need to know more" about that mess.
Although I'd agree about 'use gcc instead' though;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
OK, so how do you "secure" e.g. mysqld? You can restrict the host access down to "localhost" so that only locally-running CGIs can access it and you can put usernames and passwords on it so the port isn't wide-open at a 'logical/application' level, but even so, if someone gets into the one machine, they've still got the whole lot and they can examine your CGIs (`man strings` and slashdot uses perl, too!) and so on.
IOW, you can't secure mysqld properly if it's all on the same box. Apply the same for Oracle and just about everything else you want to run. There's a maximum level of security attainable by any one of these things (I won't say they're all "un-securable", merely "of limited securability"), and the closer to the box on which the service runs the cracker gets, the higher the risk.
So you put things on two boxes, yeah? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Maybe the UN should have police powers over the internet."
Maybe not;)
In practice, what's the difference between the UN and the US? The UN gets the flak, the US gets the credit and bosses everyone around. OK, so China / USSR[1] have a bit of a say in the UN too... yippee.
To combine the best of both kinds of suggestion here, what I think we need is to form a totally independent Net - something where the governments keep their paws off, that regulates itself by technological means *only*. This suing-everybody mentality is blatantly immature and solves nothing. This legislating to remove freedoms thing is evil. The only times any legal body should be involved is when a net.action adversly affects the 'real world' (whatever that is;) .
Excuse me while I invent utopia?:8)
[1] or whatever they're called today ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Why are you installing a Unix-based firewall in front of some Unix-based public servers? Why not secure the servers in the first place?"
It's called "security". The last thing you want is someone breaching your firewall and having instant access to your MySQL databases and everything. One (or more) sacrificial boxes facing forwards, critical stuff behind and an optional DMZ around the middle where you know exactly what's supposed to be going off.
It's also easier to administer these things if your logs are filterable on a per-hostname basis (if you want to do it that way) rather than having firewall things and local junk cluttering each other up on the same box. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
'The definitions keep getting muddier and muddier. '
No they don't. The definition of open-source is still as clear as ever it was. Something cannot be open-source if it discriminates against one class of users - ie this can't be, if commercial folks have to pay for it, yeah?
I've seen too many gratuitous abuses of this "open" word as a buzzword not to get extremely pissed off with it. Everyone, get it right!
Interesting idea... if something claims to be open source and yet isn't... if someone violates the [L]GPL... who do we get to fight for us? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I disagree. We have a disclaimer for a reason: it either stops idiots posting illegal stuff or at least transfers responsibility to them; and when some idiotic company like M$loth comes along, Slashdot is merely the messenger - no liability for comments whatsoever! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Where do Microsoft suppose the folks listed to have got this allegedly "proprietary information" from? (I.e., how different is this to "deep-linking" they're complaining about?)
Since when did this piece-of-crap "DMCA" have any validity outside the US? Slashdot is worldwide, don't even think about invoking law beyond your own state boundaries!
Roblimo! Quick - mail back to the listed sources in that email saying that without GPG-signed mail you can't verify that it's really from them. Just fling it in the bin and forget it without GPG.
It's time to fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cos Redmond is going Bye-byes! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
What is this concept of 'project'? Sounds far too organized to me.
"Releases" don't happen at all - you write code, it compiles, commit it to CVS, that'll do. Anything that says "let's hold it back until it's ready" really isn't wonderful.
(That's what distro-makers are for, in the linux world; to take mutually-consistent versions of lots of packages and make sure they work together.) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
There's something to iron out here: "critical" is not the same as "large". Keeping my credit card number safe is critical, but if no transaction/isolation problems are going to occur, then there's no reason not to keep it in MySQL. If your database is large *then* you can't afford the time between "transactions" (and if you don't even have transactions and your lowest level locking is per-table, *then* you're screwed). Of course, with size comes criticality anyway - if slashdot goes down then there are a lot of disappointed people around, but frankly my karma isn't worth worrying about;8) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Hmmm, yeah, there are plenty of arguments in all directions about bitrates and quality of MP3s and so on. I think ultimately you do end up with a subtly different sound - lots different in some cases.
So if it's not the same noise that the studio put on the CD, where the hell does copyright come in?;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I beg to disagree. How much bloat do you think there is *in the perl interpreter* itself between my $db = new dbd.odbc->("", "", ""); (or whatever the method is, I can never remember these things), and the relevant call to SQLConnect() in ODBC? I suggest that the extra layer of ODBC API pales into insignificance compared to that bloat.
To take an example: write a program with a subroutine that is empty apart one for() loop counting 0->a big number. Do this in both C and perl. The C one wins hands down by a factor of about 10.
Perl really is not the language of choice for speed freaks. If you're controlling and optimizing, of course, then you're aware that most performance is required when you're pulling back a large resultset, rather than the stop/start of individual queries. And I'd still bet that the differences in performance in the middle of a 'select * from ABigTable;' will be best in C with native API, followed closely by ODBC, followed a mile behind by perl. Of course, it's at that point you ask *why* you want to retrieve zillions of rows - most probably not for a web-DB application, at least. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
You seem unaware that message signing and encryption is already present in both MS OE and Netscrape?
Me, I think it's wrong - the government should not try to fob people off with "it'll allow us to catch more criminals". It's privacy, dammit, and it has every right to stay that way.
Maybe it's because they know they'll never get the RIP bill through parliament...
Why the hell do governments seek to mess with the 'Net, anyway??
Gravity, meaning the force experienced between two bodies, is effectively the same as local space-time curvature around them both. 'Curvature of the universe' doesn't really come into it - bigger scale, different thing. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I suspect that's a bit of a bogus start. The Schwarzschild radius is defined as the radius where to escape from gravity, the escape velocity is c, the speed of light. That implies that there is somewhere *out there* to escape to, doesn't it?:) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yup indeedie. There are also rules whereby you should be sent real-live certificates and stuff as proof of "ownership" (given the above) which certain companies aren't all that good at. And you should also theoretically be forwarded the mail saying the domain has been activated, too.
OTOH I'm not so sure about the advice on the site - the section "what about NET and ORG domains, do I want them as well as COM?" is awful! The namespace is confused enough already without people taking names which don't represent what they are. Like, how on earth is 'hotsexygirls' valid as a value-adder in the.net domain?!
Anyway. Feedback left about one of my domains. And boy it was not a nice experience! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"But is this initial CD one you bought or an ISO?"
Actually, I used ISOs for stormix so I had a nice consistent lump with everything-stormix I could ever want on it, to take home at the end of the day.
Similarly I had a local mirror of 'unstable' ("woody" as is the new name) on the machine at work, which also became a CD...
When I got home, install stormix: no problem. Insert 'unstable' CD, tell apt (one of the package-management toys in debian) that the local CD is a source, as is somewhere on mirror.ac.uk, and then update "what's available where", do an apt-get dist-upgrade and hey presto, one very uptodate installation, which I've kept uptodate daily (except when on holiday) since.
This answers the problem of "I only want 300M of the CD" - and if you have more than 1 machine on the LAN to install/upgrade, you sure don't want to be getting "that 300M" over and over again over the 56k link, like the 'install over 'net' options will; that's why I go for the local mirrors:) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I think it's all to do with the package management side of things. Your average (modal) distro is RPM-based and comes in box-sets for some strange reason (t-shirts, I gather, feature in it) and appeals to.. er.. the sort of person who buys box-sets; you've rightly spotted there's a 'hole' in who this kind of person actually is.
I'm in Europe and have an unmetered connection at 56k at home, and multi-T1 at work. I use CDs at work to get things like Stormix down because it represents a good block of useful stuff to kick-off a machine; however the box at home has long-since been dist-upgraded to run Debian 'unstable' via another initial CD and thereafter, it runs its own local mirror - because it can. With Debian I can maintain mirrors with standard apps for the purpose (apt-move) on the machines both at work and home, and use them to save the massive download times at home.
There's another use for an ISO image - if the distribution doesn't mirror easily, you can grab the whole ISO at a stroke and mount it (-o loop) and use it for a network install in your own LAN if you want. But I think a more flexible package system (with operations like "get things from here, here and there" and "update what's available where" and "install this and all dependencies from the nearest source") is the answer. And that's why I like Debian. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Here's a simple question, feel free to respond sensibly amidst the flames...
Why is "Your example (mysub(2) = 15) is unmaintainable"? Never mind the coders, with which I think you're making a step in the right direction; but if you don't know Perl, including 5.6.0, what are you doing trying to maintain it? Doesn't sound like a language misfeature to me, when you look at it like that.
Me, I'm looking to learn a bit of Scheme for those more orthogonal moments....:) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The hardest thing here was decided who had the best post to respond to. PigleT, you win. *blush*, thank you;8)
"Not controlled by obligation or the will of another." This I agree with, lots. Definitely applicable in the software scene.
Regarding rights and giving service back: I don't particularly like either approach, myself. "Rights" are a bit like "take", service is a bit like "give"; I'd prefer "giving" (a generalised state of play) and "receiving" (as distinct from take - ponder it a little), and the idea that it's more important to you to have your code out and about in the wild for all to enjoy and play with (this might be a more initial motivating factor but even so, I think it fun).
On companies: "Their "rights" are not being protected here." Indeed, and whole Usenet threads / wars on communism v capitalism ensue as a result!
[StarOffice] I also work in a split windoze/unix environment, and you're right about interoperability - I'm all for being able to read everything but having the decency to write in a lowest-common-denominator. But right now there are not-very-many not-very-good open-source.doc readers or.pdf readers. It's all very well saying "write in an open format doc" but you risk a lot of pressure to comply when someone's paying you to cope with their abominations. So no, porting another-msword-reader isn't a bad idea. What I think *is* a bad idea is (a) it still being closed like SO, and (b) it not using native GUI widget sets like gtk+ or qt (to taste), resulting in a bloated lump where the rest of linux is typical neat and nippy in comparison. Shall we distinguish between the build-up of GNU/Linux and the port-bloat-over from the commercial scene...?
FWIW I see open-source as saying "can do", contrasted in a quite polarised way with commercial "can't do, haven't written that, pay us lots to fix the bugs". As soon as open-source says "no can do" we have problems; this applies to MSWord-readers, PDF-readers, portable open-licensed XML/SGML GUI editors, and even popular well-developed web browsers (Big Hint(TM)!). Nice mentality but could always use a little work... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
He has some very strange ideas indeed about the use of the terms, and you've pointed out the "'free' v 'Free'" potential confusion he's fallen into already...
"Open-source" means anybody is free to take, hack, and re-distribute (this is a slight/working paraphrase of the open-source definition. "Proprietary" means the rest of the world can't get their paws on it beyond surface-layer functionality as intended - see parts 3 and 4 in the dictionary definition.
So if, by definition, the rest of the world can get at it, at the lowest and greatest access level possible (source), it can't be proprietary, can it? D'oh.
I think star office is a bloated abomination, I just don't need it in a day-to-day office environment, let alone at home, but that's just me...
"Love envisions Linux tools that will enable service providers to remotely administer Linux systems". Well apart from the split infinitive and ambiguity ("remotely administer" - speaks volumes for his own administrative abilities, thanks ZDnet), has he never heard of ssh? Oops. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Slashdot Mirror
There's a fair bit of merit in what you say, that much is agreed. /somewhere/, after all.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
OTOH there is a large degree to which 'suitability for purpose' is apposite. In particular, there are stereotypes: Mac for graphics, Unix for servers, Windoze for desktops; and I have a suspicion that stereotypes come from
What you learn by advocacy is not that 'linux r00lz' but rather that the person advocating it for roll-out across a 1000-strong company as a desktop OS is an idiot.
OTOH there are also one or two OS-independent factors; I don't know of anything where reliability isn't key, I know security is generally favourable, and ease of *use*[0] is also probably a good thing.
[0] I said use, not installation. I'm more than prepared to spend 2 days installing a Debian GNU/Linux system if it makes my life easier for the next 6 months...
~Tim
--
You have a good point.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I hardly think that "It appears France is now defining censorship on US Web sites", complete with its connotations of "all international intervention is eeeeevil" is particularly fair comment, given, just *for example*, the US' continual involvement in Northern Ireland.
In fact, the feeling "ha, don't like your own medicine??" comes to mind...
~Tim
--
OK, getting off-topic here, but I had some fun and games with an EtherExpress Pro in recent days...
;8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
For some bizarre reason, problems (TX: Transmit Timed Out) disappeared when I tried to tcpdump what was happening. As a total kludge, if you ifconfig eth0 arp promisc up, it doesn't happen anything like so often (if at all).
This was a Saturday afternoon workaround - thinking why is a week-day activity
~Tim
--
Er.. yoohoo... how do *you* tell whether a particular source tarball you receive was edited using the borland C++ IDE? Let alone by the particular one on the magazine?
;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Sorry, but you just can't claim "we need to know more" about that mess.
Although I'd agree about 'use gcc instead' though
~Tim
--
OK, so how do you "secure" e.g. mysqld? You can restrict the host access down to "localhost" so that only locally-running CGIs can access it and you can put usernames and passwords on it so the port isn't wide-open at a 'logical/application' level, but even so, if someone gets into the one machine, they've still got the whole lot and they can examine your CGIs (`man strings` and slashdot uses perl, too!) and so on.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
IOW, you can't secure mysqld properly if it's all on the same box.
Apply the same for Oracle and just about everything else you want to run. There's a maximum level of security attainable by any one of these things (I won't say they're all "un-securable", merely "of limited securability"), and the closer to the box on which the service runs the cracker gets, the higher the risk.
So you put things on two boxes, yeah?
~Tim
--
"Maybe the UN should have police powers over the internet."
;)
;) .
:8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Maybe not
In practice, what's the difference between the UN and the US? The UN gets the flak, the US gets the credit and bosses everyone around.
OK, so China / USSR[1] have a bit of a say in the UN too... yippee.
To combine the best of both kinds of suggestion here, what I think we need is to form a totally independent Net - something where the governments keep their paws off, that regulates itself by technological means *only*. This suing-everybody mentality is blatantly immature and solves nothing. This legislating to remove freedoms thing is evil. The only times any legal body should be involved is when a net.action adversly affects the 'real world' (whatever that is
Excuse me while I invent utopia?
[1] or whatever they're called today
~Tim
--
"Why are you installing a Unix-based firewall in front of some Unix-based public servers? Why not secure the servers in the first place?"
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
It's called "security". The last thing you want is someone breaching your firewall and having instant access to your MySQL databases and everything. One (or more) sacrificial boxes facing forwards, critical stuff behind and an optional DMZ around the middle where you know exactly what's supposed to be going off.
It's also easier to administer these things if your logs are filterable on a per-hostname basis (if you want to do it that way) rather than having firewall things and local junk cluttering each other up on the same box.
~Tim
--
Heh.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Sounds like Reagan was on the wacky baccy to me...
~Tim
--
'The definitions keep getting muddier and muddier. '
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
No they don't. The definition of open-source is still as clear as ever it was. Something cannot be open-source if it discriminates against one class of users - ie this can't be, if commercial folks have to pay for it, yeah?
I've seen too many gratuitous abuses of this "open" word as a buzzword not to get extremely pissed off with it. Everyone, get it right!
Interesting idea... if something claims to be open source and yet isn't... if someone violates the [L]GPL... who do we get to fight for us?
~Tim
--
I disagree. We have a disclaimer for a reason: it either stops idiots posting illegal stuff or at least transfers responsibility to them; and when some idiotic company like M$loth comes along, Slashdot is merely the messenger - no liability for comments whatsoever!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Have they not read the disclaimer on the bottom of all slashdot's pages? "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net."
Since when did this piece-of-crap "DMCA" have any validity outside the US? Slashdot is worldwide, don't even think about invoking law beyond your own state boundaries!
Roblimo! Quick - mail back to the listed sources in that email saying that without GPG-signed mail you can't verify that it's really from them. Just fling it in the bin and forget it without GPG.
It's time to fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cos Redmond is going Bye-byes!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
What is this concept of 'project'? Sounds far too organized to me.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Releases" don't happen at all - you write code, it compiles, commit it to CVS, that'll do. Anything that says "let's hold it back until it's ready" really isn't wonderful.
(That's what distro-makers are for, in the linux world; to take mutually-consistent versions of lots of packages and make sure they work together.)
~Tim
--
There's something to iron out here: "critical" is not the same as "large". Keeping my credit card number safe is critical, but if no transaction/isolation problems are going to occur, then there's no reason not to keep it in MySQL. If your database is large *then* you can't afford the time between "transactions" (and if you don't even have transactions and your lowest level locking is per-table, *then* you're screwed). Of course, with size comes criticality anyway - if slashdot goes down then there are a lot of disappointed people around, but frankly my karma isn't worth worrying about ;8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Hmmm, yeah, there are plenty of arguments in all directions about bitrates and quality of MP3s and so on. I think ultimately you do end up with a subtly different sound - lots different in some cases.
;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
So if it's not the same noise that the studio put on the CD, where the hell does copyright come in?
~Tim
--
I beg to disagree. How much bloat do you think there is *in the perl interpreter* itself between
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
my $db = new dbd.odbc->("", "", "");
(or whatever the method is, I can never remember these things), and the relevant call to SQLConnect() in ODBC?
I suggest that the extra layer of ODBC API pales into insignificance compared to that bloat.
To take an example: write a program with a subroutine that is empty apart one for() loop counting 0->a big number. Do this in both C and perl. The C one wins hands down by a factor of about 10.
Perl really is not the language of choice for speed freaks. If you're controlling and optimizing, of course, then you're aware that most performance is required when you're pulling back a large resultset, rather than the stop/start of individual queries. And I'd still bet that the differences in performance in the middle of a 'select * from ABigTable;' will be best in C with native API, followed closely by ODBC, followed a mile behind by perl.
Of course, it's at that point you ask *why* you want to retrieve zillions of rows - most probably not for a web-DB application, at least.
~Tim
--
OK, my $0.02's worth...
.. how's about a version of junkbuster for the kernel? ;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The kernel is open-source. You can edit the adverts out, can't you?
Next thing you know
~Tim
--
You seem unaware that message signing and encryption is already present in both MS OE and Netscrape?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Me, I think it's wrong - the government should not try to fob people off with "it'll allow us to catch more criminals". It's privacy, dammit, and it has every right to stay that way.
Maybe it's because they know they'll never get the RIP bill through parliament...
Why the hell do governments seek to mess with the 'Net, anyway??
~Tim
--
Gravity, meaning the force experienced between two bodies, is effectively the same as local space-time curvature around them both. 'Curvature of the universe' doesn't really come into it - bigger scale, different thing.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
I suspect that's a bit of a bogus start. The Schwarzschild radius is defined as the radius where to escape from gravity, the escape velocity is c, the speed of light. That implies that there is somewhere *out there* to escape to, doesn't it? :)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
OTOH I'm not so sure about the advice on the site - the section "what about NET and ORG domains, do I want them as well as COM?" is awful! The namespace is confused enough already without people taking names which don't represent what they are. Like, how on earth is 'hotsexygirls' valid as a value-adder in the .net domain?!
Anyway. Feedback left about one of my domains. And boy it was not a nice experience!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
"But is this initial CD one you bought or an ISO?"
:)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Actually, I used ISOs for stormix so I had a nice consistent lump with everything-stormix I could ever want on it, to take home at the end of the day.
Similarly I had a local mirror of 'unstable' ("woody" as is the new name) on the machine at work, which also became a CD...
When I got home, install stormix: no problem. Insert 'unstable' CD, tell apt (one of the package-management toys in debian) that the local CD is a source, as is somewhere on mirror.ac.uk, and then update "what's available where", do an apt-get dist-upgrade and hey presto, one very uptodate installation, which I've kept uptodate daily (except when on holiday) since.
This answers the problem of "I only want 300M of the CD" - and if you have more than 1 machine on the LAN to install/upgrade, you sure don't want to be getting "that 300M" over and over again over the 56k link, like the 'install over 'net' options will; that's why I go for the local mirrors
~Tim
--
I think it's all to do with the package management side of things. Your average (modal) distro is RPM-based and comes in box-sets for some strange reason (t-shirts, I gather, feature in it) and appeals to.. er.. the sort of person who buys box-sets; you've rightly spotted there's a 'hole' in who this kind of person actually is.
I'm in Europe and have an unmetered connection at 56k at home, and multi-T1 at work. I use CDs at work to get things like Stormix down because it represents a good block of useful stuff to kick-off a machine; however the box at home has long-since been dist-upgraded to run Debian 'unstable' via another initial CD and thereafter, it runs its own local mirror - because it can.
With Debian I can maintain mirrors with standard apps for the purpose (apt-move) on the machines both at work and home, and use them to save the massive download times at home.
There's another use for an ISO image - if the distribution doesn't mirror easily, you can grab the whole ISO at a stroke and mount it (-o loop) and use it for a network install in your own LAN if you want. But I think a more flexible package system (with operations like "get things from here, here and there" and "update what's available where" and "install this and all dependencies from the nearest source") is the answer. And that's why I like Debian.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Here's a simple question, feel free to respond sensibly amidst the flames...
:)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Why is "Your example (mysub(2) = 15) is unmaintainable"?
Never mind the coders, with which I think you're making a step in the right direction; but if you don't know Perl, including 5.6.0, what are you doing trying to maintain it?
Doesn't sound like a language misfeature to me, when you look at it like that.
Me, I'm looking to learn a bit of Scheme for those more orthogonal moments....
~Tim
--
*blush*, thank you
"Not controlled by obligation or the will of another."
This I agree with, lots. Definitely applicable in the software scene.
Regarding rights and giving service back: I don't particularly like either approach, myself. "Rights" are a bit like "take", service is a bit like "give"; I'd prefer "giving" (a generalised state of play) and "receiving" (as distinct from take - ponder it a little), and the idea that it's more important to you to have your code out and about in the wild for all to enjoy and play with (this might be a more initial motivating factor but even so, I think it fun).
On companies: "Their "rights" are not being protected here." Indeed, and whole Usenet threads / wars on communism v capitalism ensue as a result!
[StarOffice] I also work in a split windoze/unix environment, and you're right about interoperability - I'm all for being able to read everything but having the decency to write in a lowest-common-denominator. But right now there are not-very-many not-very-good open-source .doc readers or .pdf readers. It's all very well saying "write in an open format doc" but you risk a lot of pressure to comply when someone's paying you to cope with their abominations.
So no, porting another-msword-reader isn't a bad idea. What I think *is* a bad idea is (a) it still being closed like SO, and (b) it not using native GUI widget sets like gtk+ or qt (to taste), resulting in a bloated lump where the rest of linux is typical neat and nippy in comparison. Shall we distinguish between the build-up of GNU/Linux and the port-bloat-over from the commercial scene...?
FWIW I see open-source as saying "can do", contrasted in a quite polarised way with commercial "can't do, haven't written that, pay us lots to fix the bugs". As soon as open-source says "no can do" we have problems; this applies to MSWord-readers, PDF-readers, portable open-licensed XML/SGML GUI editors, and even popular well-developed web browsers (Big Hint(TM)!). Nice mentality but could always use a little work...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
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"Open-source" means anybody is free to take, hack, and re-distribute (this is a slight/working paraphrase of the open-source definition.
"Proprietary" means the rest of the world can't get their paws on it beyond surface-layer functionality as intended - see parts 3 and 4 in the dictionary definition.
So if, by definition, the rest of the world can get at it, at the lowest and greatest access level possible (source), it can't be proprietary, can it? D'oh.
I think star office is a bloated abomination, I just don't need it in a day-to-day office environment, let alone at home, but that's just me...
"Love envisions Linux tools that will enable service providers to remotely administer Linux systems". Well apart from the split infinitive and ambiguity ("remotely administer" - speaks volumes for his own administrative abilities, thanks ZDnet), has he never heard of ssh? Oops.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
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