Are Agenda out of business? I just went to the Agenda Computing site, and it's still up. Bummer--I was hoping to get one of those to play with, and have for awhile.
I am happy to be an Epsilon. Epsilons work for others. Alphas are so smart, but they work so hard. I'm glad I'm not an Alpha...
Incidentally, I always considered BNW far, far scarier than 1984. Huxley's dystopia was more frightening and more bleak than was Orwell's. More realistic, too--I can see it happening. Rule them with pleasure, and they will not revolt.
I have had a dream in which I am in charge for as long as I live.
That may very well be true. Especially considering that he's not much longer to live. After all, the man is facing the combined wrath of both his brother Afghans and the most powerful nation on earth...
In line with suggestion #3, folks may wish to try out a dream pillow. These consist of a number of a soporific (i.e. sleep-inducing) herbs. The recipe I have is 2 oz. dried whole hops, 2 oz. dried chamomile flowers, 2 oz. crushed dried rosebuds (rosehips?), 1 oz. dried mugwort, 1 oz. dried lemongrass and 1/2 oz. benzoin as a preservative. Mix everything together in a double-bag of cheesecloth, then cover with something appropriately pillowish.
I'm told that many folks stop using these, so vivid are the dreams thereby created. I've not gotten together the ingredients to try it out yet, so cannot offer my own experiences.
An idea I've had is to brew up a batch of mead with the herbs as flavouring. It could then be distilled and another batch of herbs steeped in it to make a tincture. This tincture could then be used to fortify a second batch of the mead. One could then drink several glasses of the mead and go to sleep with the pillow at one's head. I can only imagine the dreams which might be produced thereby.
The recipe is from The Home Brewer's Companion, by Charlie Papazian. Excellent book.
Another interesting point: as I mentioned earlier, people out of the Backstreet Boys' target audience don't buy as much music. They don't have as much disposable income.
Hah! My fifteen year old brother cannot get together 20 bucks for dinner; I, a 23 year old Unix sysadmin, just bought myself a set of fencing equipment. A few days ago I bought three Pulp CDs. A few weeks ago I bought 2 HP calculators. A few weeks before that I bought tyres. A few weeks before that a car radio/CD player. A few weeks before that an utterly beautiful Beretta.40 handgun. Who d'you think has more disposable income?
As a young, single adult I have more disposable income than I could ever have dreamed of. I live frugally, save a lot and still have some very nice posessions. What child could possibly hope to compare? I know that I certainly could not, back in the day.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Save a life instead--it might be yours! Do the Math!
And over a 550 mile trip (e.g. from my home to that of a friend) it's more than an hour. And 59 seconds=approximately one minute=time I'd rather be somewhere than in a car. It's also about 1/4 of one percent of the time one has in the day (assuming 8 sleep, 8 work and 8 personal). Why should anyone give that up because some thickwit wants to go slow?
You've a very odd way of looking at insurance companies. They are in the business of risk-sharing, that's all: they compile tables of risk, figure the average cost per individual {man, company, state, &c.}, add in their own cut, and go for it. They make a simple bet: that statistics will prove true, and they will take in more money than they pay out. Customers make a reverse bet: that the insurance company will take in less than it pays out. Who do you think will win?
Anyway, the only data they have to work on are just that: data. Every incident, every occurrence, is fed into the database and correlated with as many factors as possible and realistic. There is a problem when the insurance benefit is high dollar (as æroplane insurance must be) and there is relatively little data to collect. On 11 Septemeber we had four commercial plane crashes. That's probably more than in the continental US in the previous dozen years, and certainly more than in the past half-dozen. Suddenly their actuarial tables were thrown all out of whack. So they corrected them.
The intelligent corporation self-insures as much as possible. When large enough, one may collect one's actuarial data, and put aside as much as one would have put into insurance premiums, and come out ahead of the game. Insurance is a sucker's bet, in the real world as much as in Vegas. Anyone who takes it deserves the reaming he will most certainly receive.
Traveller is still going strong. The Traveller Mailing List is extraordinarily active. There are many sites dealing with it. Steve Jackson Games have even come out with GURPS Traveller, an excellent port of Traveller to the superlative GURPS system.
I myself am working on software for Traveller. Called travtrack, it is in the middling stages. It's very cool, using gtk+ and glib for data structures, classes, inheritance &c. and guile for its scripting language. Ideally, I'd like it to someday be the emacs of interstellar science-fiction RPGs.
Right now it's surprisingly far along, and is doing fairly well on the SourceForge ratings. It's just me working on it, but I'm hoping that once I get release 1.0 of both travtrack (the actual galaxy-tracking software) and travlib (the library which implements Traveller objects) more developers will pitch in.
How was this a stupid experiment? If one could use animals to gather ground-level surveillance, it would save human operative's lives. It's a dashed good idea. Like animal testing: would you rather cosmetics be tested on rabbits or Little Susan? Given that intelligence must be collected (which is a fact), and given that animals could collect that intelligence (which was hoped), it would have made a lot of sense.
Although it is a humourous idea naetheless. After all, in all the movies the guards don't worry about the noise when they see the cat. I can see the new scene:
*tinkle*
Guard 1: What's that?!
Guard 2: dunno
Guards see cat
Guards: Holy Sh*t!
Guards open fire onto poor mouser
Everyone on secret base dies from an attack of plague carried my mice no longer kept down by local cat population.
Well, obviously anyone who thinks poorly of Unix should be made a eunuch. In a few generation's time imagine how much better the world might be. Although the suspender manufacturers, beard-oil makers and tobacconists might possibly then rule the world:-)
Our own values are being co-opted by our working selves.. in the same way that its difficult to say "Thank you" to someone who steps to the right on an elevator without sounding sarcastic anymore (just try being 20, in fasionable clothes and doing this.. i dare you)...
Well, I do it. But until April I wore tweed-and-tie--yes, even in college. And still smoke a pipe. My theory has always that if it is right it should be done, and if it is not, it should not. Custom, social standard and law mean nothing: Right and Wrong mean everything. So feel free to do as seems correct and proper. You may be persecuted, you may be punished--but you will be Correct. Correctness Above All Else: this is our motto. If we follow it, we are secure. If we fail to, we shall surely fail utterly.
And, incidentally, tweed-and-tie is the perfect winter wear. Warm when it's cold, cool when it's warm, there's nothing better. No polypropylnylon-nonsense can match it. Try it sometime: don a tweed coat, a sweater vest, a pair of slacks and a tie. It's an utterly excellent mode of dress. Of course, I now wear the standard clothing, because I've this mad fantasy of marrying, and marrying requires dating, which apparently requires a lack of tweed and tie alike. Sigh...
I'll respond to this glorification of the September that Never Ended right after I delete another seven pieces of spam from my inbox and close a few airline-trust megapopup ads.
Who else remembers the Beginning of the End? I recall seeing the Canter & Siegel spam on either alt.netgames.bolo or rec.games.bolo (forget exactly when we all switched over), and deleting it, thinking to myself `How odd.' How sad, how very sad indeed, the depths to which we have since sunk.
Someone who knows what he's talking about--please read the parent and mod up if at all reasonable. I don't know about the feasability of writing command-line frontend apps in OS X. I will say, though, that if Cygwin's XFree86 port were at all usable then I would be a much happier man. Right now I am looking at Citrix MetaFrame to do the evil Windowsish things I need, and a Linux desktop for actual work. Atm I've a Windows desktop, which is completely and totally unusable for the sort of work I do (I'm a Unix admin, and Exceed is not a good solution to what ails me). Unfortunately, I am stuck with some Windows apps for the moment (namely, Outlook, Notes and Aventail Connect, a SOCKSv5 client which does some hairy things of its own).
I still believe that POSIX should be made a standard by the US Congress and support be required of all OSes sold. Just as we require support of the Real Honest True and Good Measurement system...
People buy Sun because it WORKS. If you think I'm biased, replace Sun with IBM or SGI or Compaq or any other corporate entity that builds server hardware. You don't base your $$$ infrastructure on a $2k LinTel machine.
Of course not. But, really, much as I prefer Solaris (AIX being brain-dead in many ways), I'd rather use AIX. Sure, the boxes are a chore to set up at first. I don't believe that we've had a single AIX install/setup/test cycle go as smoothly as any Solaris instal/setup/test run. OTOH, the AIX boxen, once configured, just run. Resources get a tad tight--we slap in some more memory. Cycles get a tad scarce--we through in another CPU card. But the machines themselves are remarkably self-tuning, far more so than Solaris. I hate to admit it, because I hate AIX on several fronts. But it's simply a much stabler OS than Solaris.
Yes, I work for IBM. But I'm primarily a Sun/HP-UX admin. And I hate the non-Unix AIX mindset. But oh do I love the fact that it gets out of my hair and lets me concentrate on important things, like my nethack game:-)
'Frankly,' you're utterly wrong. Not only is Solaris just fine and dandy, it has features for programmers which aren't anywhere near to showing up on Linux. For example:
You completely misunderstood the point of the previous poster. Solaris is a fine OS--much better in many ways than Linux. But its userland utilities are primitive beyond beliefs. Why can I not simply run route to get, say, the routing table? Why must it be netstat -rn? Why can Sun not ship a post-1984 shell? Why does ifconfig not do anything without a little -a tacked on the end?
There's no reason that Solaris (and HP-UX, and AIX) could not ship real tools--they simply do not want to. And their lack of wanting makes the admin's (and programmer's, and user's) job that much more unhappy. Not really harder; we can all memorise the incantations we need to force the system into behaving. Not even, really, more difficult (except when moving from an intelligent system to a brain-dead one, when we expect the fool to behave as the genius). But simply less happy and less joyful. The proprietary Unices suck the life out of one, misbegotten command after misdesigned `feature.'
Linux may be an awful OS (it's really not, of course), but it's an incredibly operating environment. I understand that the BSDs are much the same. Imagine, we let programmers do their thing and they write the systems they want to use!
Frankly, without adding the GNU tools, Solaris is virtually unusable!
I'm a Unix sysadmin with IBM Global Services (my opinions are my own, not those of IBM &c. &c. &c.). This is so terribly true that it's not even funny. What's more important is that every proprietary Unix is unusable without the GNU tools. They are each and every one complete and utter dog's dirt when compared to a Linux (or, I imagine, BSD) box. Kernel-wise, they are all superior--laughably so, I'm certain. But their userlands are unusable. Administering them is an exercise in masochistic abandon. E.g. AIX tries to be helpful with a Korn shell which offers--get ready to be blown away--vi command line editing! Yes, that's right kids, you get the joy of hitting Esc h to move left--naturally the bloody left arrow key doesn't work!
Don't get me started about the brain-dead qualities of such things as Solaris's umpteen-quatrillion version of standard utilities such as make, each subtly different from the rest. Or what about the fact that, when presented with the command ifconfig, both Solaris and HP-UX error out? Solaris will accept ifconfig -a to do what it is obvious you wanted in the first place. HP-UX, though, won't even do that. You get the joy of guessing what your interface are. Better fire up sam. Which, of course, uses $DISPLAY if available, unlike smit with its handy smitty TTY version (there may be an option buried somewhere, but I've not found it--not really looked, I'll admit).
You too can experience the joy of needing to perform hours' worth of manual install work, just to get a usable system. You too can run tar xzf and realise that it won't work, and you get to hunt down an unsupported binary package of gzip. If that fails, you can always hunt down the unsupported binary package of gcc--which you can then use to compile gcc, first, hoping that there are no undocumented trojans (wouldn't that suck), then try to get gzip to compile--of course, with any luck, some dead-simple thing which should be a standard, but isn't, because some half-wit of a marketroid wants to sell it to you for $$$$, is missing, and you get to find some bootleg version or, as in the case of none-broken/dev/randoms and/dev/urandoms, roll your own. Yee-frickin-hah.
Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are surviving solely because they are, for the moment, better OSes than Linux. Their deaths are inevitable because they are worse user environments than Linux. That, and the fact that every day Linux becomes a far better OS, while their half-hearted attempts at becoming better environments fail miserably (I love how gnome-cc crashes in AIX 5--that's an impressive feat!).
And before anyone tries to be clever, Microsoft's pap is neither a better OS (well, perhaps the NT kernel, beneath the layers of cruft, misdesign, maldesign and just plain folly, is--but no-one ever sees it, so it doesn't matter) nor a better environment. Unix makes sense. There's a learning curve. It's not user-friendly in some ways (rm being a chief example--users expect deletion to be undoable, and this is so achievable through several different methods), but it is extraordinarily user-friendly in others (e.g.: one app won't take down the entire machine; all basic utilites may be munged with stdin, stout and xargs; the learning curve is full of aha! moments, such as that glorious day that the full beauty of grep and, later, find is revealed in all its majesty).
Unix is great. The Unix culture is magnificent. Life in a Unix without the GNU utilities is the kind of hell I'd not wish on my worst enemy. It is an exercise in feeble-mindedness. Hello, Sun, IBM and HP: it's the third millenium--may I please have tab-completion now? While you're at it, can I have a make, a cc and a vi which are decent? Hell, can you just give me emacs and make both our lives more pleasant (mine, because I can get my work done, and yours, because I--and a thousand thousand other admins--won't be smacking you upside the head with the aluminium baseball bat quite so often)? Is it so difficult to master your bloody pride and admit that yes, a bunch of hackers turned out a better suite of utilities than your teams of engineers ever could?
Incidentally, the feeble-minded keybindings of AIX's smit are a direct result of engineers exposed to that most Unix-like of systems, VM. Hence the use of either function keys (which very often don't work across platforms) or ESC combinations (which take forever to type) instead of nice, simple, straightforward keys. Remember, PAUSE means scroll!
Sun, HP and IBM would do well to simply open-source their OSes and essentially abandon development. The Free Software community would do so much better with their code than they have ever done. Keep a dozen or so employees working on the code and co-ordinating development, and let things slowly merge into an OS which is already enjoyable to use.
And note that this is, indeed, a valid area for the government. After all, we already enforce various standards: feet, pounds and gallons (in civilised countries--you wogs must do with the vastly inferior metres, grammes and litres); the national language; hazardous materials transportation; &c. There's no libertarian objection to the government requiring POSIX compatibility in OSes. The only objection is where a market is sufficiently new that a poorly thought-out standard is likely to cripple development and (genuine) innovation.
Don't stop at making HTTP a W3C standard, but rather make the W3C standards US Standards. Then fine every HTTP browser which does not properly implement them:-)
It renders beautifully in Mozilla/Windows (yes, I know--I'm at work; my home desktop runs Linux and Linux alone). Mozilla really has become a very nice little browser.
I find that quite remarkable: here is a country where the government would probably face an armed revolution if it were to attempt to take away Gun Rights...
Hah--it's been going on since the after the Civil War, especially since the 1920s. No revolutions yet.
My god! What happened to America?
The Founders died. The revolutionaries died. Americans became like other people--small-minded and willing to compromise. This happened very early on--remember that even in the beginnings we had such atrocities as the Alien & Sedition Acts. The War Between the States was the death-blow for federalism and freedom, the beginning of the Imperial Presidency and the all-powerful national government.
It's not the last twenty years--it's the last 150 years. We, like the Europeans before us, are willing to trade freedom for safety. What is unfortunate is that there is no New World for those of us who treasure our liberty to escape to--no safe haven from the ravages of our rapacious rulers.
The sad fact of the matter is that most people don't care about their liberties. They don't want to own a weapon, they don't want to copy music, they don't want to do drugs. They're willing to let the police protect them (maybe, if they get around to it, perhaps); they're willing to buy 14 copies of the same song; they're content to drink themselves into oblivion rather than inject or toke their way there. They don't want to use Free Software; they're willing to use the software that came `free' with their computer.
Everyone cares when he realises that his liberties are endangered. No-one cares when others' are endangered, or when liberties he doesn't use are endangered. Most people are sheep, with a very simple, straightforward and incorrect view of right and wrong.
Why do I hate emacs? I have already an OS--I need just a text editor!
I used to think this. I used to be an intense vim junkie. I loved it, and was good at it. But then I figured that so many folks using emacs must have some reason for doing so. So I started to teach myself. It's taken some time, but now I realise just why emacs is so popular.
First of all, the C major mode is incredibly useful when writing code. Parentheses balancing, syntax colouring--all these are little clues about what one is doing, and what one may be doing wrong. Yes, I know that vim has syntax modes--and they're nice--but they're not quite so powerful.
Then there is the CVS interface. Whenever I've compiled my code, and it works, I check in every buffer with a simple C-c v v. This pops up a window in which I write my changes. I type C-c C-c, and the new version is sent to the SourceForge server, to be permanently stored for me, and I'm returned to my buffer. If the version is the same as the previous one, vc simply tells me that it is, without popping up the comment window. Then I C-x k RET and kill that buffer, going to the next one, which I C-c v v in. This continues until I've checked everything in.
Remember that compile? I type M-x compile, then hit RET to accept the default make -k. What this does is pop up a window in which make is run on my source, without stopping for errors. I type C-x ` while it is compiling, and emacs finds the first error, determines the file and line number which offended, then opens the file and sets the point to that line. I can then correct the error and type C-x ` to go to the next one. BTW, the compile is still runnning. For a large project, this compile may take twenty minutes--instead of those twenty minutes being downtime, they are productive, in which I find and fix every error as it is discovered--while I'm fixing an error, non-erroneous source is compiled anyway. This is Useful with a Capital U.
Did I mention that I run my programme from the command line
As my project grows and the need to debug grows with it, I hope to soon take advantage of the gdb mode of emacs--integrated debugging, with all my source a quick check away.
Believe it or not, there really is a reason that folks use emacs. I didn't believe it, but now I know. Much of this simply would not be as pleasant with vi. I used to be great at the:w,:!! method of compiling--but it lacks much. Vi excels at certain tasks--e.g. editing config files, where its . command and quick regexp searches (slightly faster to access than in emacs) are invaluable. But emacs excels at what it does--and what it does vi simply cannot do.
Yet. The latest version of vim, I am told, are extensible with python. Python, incidentally, has been called Lisp with newbie-friendly syntax. I don't think that I need to spell out the obvious conclusion, but I will. In ten years, vi will be emacs:-)
If all programmes were as well-tuned for what they do as is emacs, I would be a truly happy man indeed. Imagine how nice it would be. Yes, there'd be a learning curve. But do you remember learning to write? Practicing line after line after line after line for days? Then practicing circle after circle after circle for days? Then practicing your Bs, then your Ds &c until finally you had mastered the art? If you fence, do you remember the long sequence of drills you had to go through to teach your arms and legs how to act, before ever you crossed blades with an opponent?
Maybe, just maybe, a product which has been around in one form or another for 25 years, and which is now at its 21st version, has something to offer us. Maybe we should focus on its lessons and its mistakes, integrating the lessons and avoiding the mistakes in our own products.
Democracy == mob rule. The word comes from the Greek demos, which means mob. Seperation of powers is anti-democratic. This is a Good Thing, as mob rule (i.e. democracy) is a bad and dangerous thing. It's amusing how the propaganda for our system is misunderstood.
This has occasionally backfired. In South America, particularly, we were often castigated for not supporting dmeocratic regimes. Of course we didn't--they're awful, with no concept of a rule of law. Unfortunately, we typically did not support republican regimes either, but simply various dictatorships. We threw the baby of republicanism out with the bathwater of democracy. Amusing 'twould be, save for all the various lifes cut short thereby.
I know. I also know that it's pronounced `ee polee,' not `hoy poloy.' However, in the Anglicised usage, it is pronounced that way, and it is used as a two-word collective noun, which may take an article. Awful silly, ain't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Are Agenda out of business? I just went to the Agenda Computing site, and it's still up. Bummer--I was hoping to get one of those to play with, and have for awhile.
grep us\$ /usr/share/dict/words
You may wish to pipe the output into less, or redirect it into a file.
Incidentally, I always considered BNW far, far scarier than 1984. Huxley's dystopia was more frightening and more bleak than was Orwell's. More realistic, too--I can see it happening. Rule them with pleasure, and they will not revolt.
That may very well be true. Especially considering that he's not much longer to live. After all, the man is facing the combined wrath of both his brother Afghans and the most powerful nation on earth...
I'm told that many folks stop using these, so vivid are the dreams thereby created. I've not gotten together the ingredients to try it out yet, so cannot offer my own experiences.
An idea I've had is to brew up a batch of mead with the herbs as flavouring. It could then be distilled and another batch of herbs steeped in it to make a tincture. This tincture could then be used to fortify a second batch of the mead. One could then drink several glasses of the mead and go to sleep with the pillow at one's head. I can only imagine the dreams which might be produced thereby.
The recipe is from The Home Brewer's Companion, by Charlie Papazian. Excellent book.
Hah! My fifteen year old brother cannot get together 20 bucks for dinner; I, a 23 year old Unix sysadmin, just bought myself a set of fencing equipment. A few days ago I bought three Pulp CDs. A few weeks ago I bought 2 HP calculators. A few weeks before that I bought tyres. A few weeks before that a car radio/CD player. A few weeks before that an utterly beautiful Beretta .40 handgun. Who d'you think has more disposable income?
As a young, single adult I have more disposable income than I could ever have dreamed of. I live frugally, save a lot and still have some very nice posessions. What child could possibly hope to compare? I know that I certainly could not, back in the day.
Hot damn! I need to move out there. I could live like a king. What sort of gun/speech/other civil liberties laws do y'all have? How are taxes?
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Save a life instead--it might be yours! Do the Math! And over a 550 mile trip (e.g. from my home to that of a friend) it's more than an hour. And 59 seconds=approximately one minute=time I'd rather be somewhere than in a car. It's also about 1/4 of one percent of the time one has in the day (assuming 8 sleep, 8 work and 8 personal). Why should anyone give that up because some thickwit wants to go slow?
Anyway, the only data they have to work on are just that: data. Every incident, every occurrence, is fed into the database and correlated with as many factors as possible and realistic. There is a problem when the insurance benefit is high dollar (as æroplane insurance must be) and there is relatively little data to collect. On 11 Septemeber we had four commercial plane crashes. That's probably more than in the continental US in the previous dozen years, and certainly more than in the past half-dozen. Suddenly their actuarial tables were thrown all out of whack. So they corrected them.
The intelligent corporation self-insures as much as possible. When large enough, one may collect one's actuarial data, and put aside as much as one would have put into insurance premiums, and come out ahead of the game. Insurance is a sucker's bet, in the real world as much as in Vegas. Anyone who takes it deserves the reaming he will most certainly receive.
I myself am working on software for Traveller. Called travtrack, it is in the middling stages. It's very cool, using gtk+ and glib for data structures, classes, inheritance &c. and guile for its scripting language. Ideally, I'd like it to someday be the emacs of interstellar science-fiction RPGs.
Right now it's surprisingly far along, and is doing fairly well on the SourceForge ratings. It's just me working on it, but I'm hoping that once I get release 1.0 of both travtrack (the actual galaxy-tracking software) and travlib (the library which implements Traveller objects) more developers will pitch in.
Traveller's very, very far from dead.
Although it is a humourous idea naetheless. After all, in all the movies the guards don't worry about the noise when they see the cat. I can see the new scene:
Wow, it was a wonder-weapon!
In today's news, more things fall from sky, again destroying Middle East civilisation.
</obvious-joke>
Although it may be stretching to call the Taliban civilised...
I'm a Unix admin, naturally.
Well, I do it. But until April I wore tweed-and-tie--yes, even in college. And still smoke a pipe. My theory has always that if it is right it should be done, and if it is not, it should not. Custom, social standard and law mean nothing: Right and Wrong mean everything. So feel free to do as seems correct and proper. You may be persecuted, you may be punished--but you will be Correct. Correctness Above All Else: this is our motto. If we follow it, we are secure. If we fail to, we shall surely fail utterly.
And, incidentally, tweed-and-tie is the perfect winter wear. Warm when it's cold, cool when it's warm, there's nothing better. No polypropylnylon-nonsense can match it. Try it sometime: don a tweed coat, a sweater vest, a pair of slacks and a tie. It's an utterly excellent mode of dress. Of course, I now wear the standard clothing, because I've this mad fantasy of marrying, and marrying requires dating, which apparently requires a lack of tweed and tie alike. Sigh...
Who else remembers the Beginning of the End? I recall seeing the Canter & Siegel spam on either alt.netgames.bolo or rec.games.bolo (forget exactly when we all switched over), and deleting it, thinking to myself `How odd.' How sad, how very sad indeed, the depths to which we have since sunk.
Life Stinks. And the Web Reeks.
I still believe that POSIX should be made a standard by the US Congress and support be required of all OSes sold. Just as we require support of the Real Honest True and Good Measurement system...
Of course not. But, really, much as I prefer Solaris (AIX being brain-dead in many ways), I'd rather use AIX. Sure, the boxes are a chore to set up at first. I don't believe that we've had a single AIX install/setup/test cycle go as smoothly as any Solaris instal/setup/test run. OTOH, the AIX boxen, once configured, just run. Resources get a tad tight--we slap in some more memory. Cycles get a tad scarce--we through in another CPU card. But the machines themselves are remarkably self-tuning, far more so than Solaris. I hate to admit it, because I hate AIX on several fronts. But it's simply a much stabler OS than Solaris.
Yes, I work for IBM. But I'm primarily a Sun/HP-UX admin. And I hate the non-Unix AIX mindset. But oh do I love the fact that it gets out of my hair and lets me concentrate on important things, like my nethack game:-)
You completely misunderstood the point of the previous poster. Solaris is a fine OS--much better in many ways than Linux. But its userland utilities are primitive beyond beliefs. Why can I not simply run route to get, say, the routing table? Why must it be netstat -rn? Why can Sun not ship a post-1984 shell? Why does ifconfig not do anything without a little -a tacked on the end?
There's no reason that Solaris (and HP-UX, and AIX) could not ship real tools--they simply do not want to. And their lack of wanting makes the admin's (and programmer's, and user's) job that much more unhappy. Not really harder; we can all memorise the incantations we need to force the system into behaving. Not even, really, more difficult (except when moving from an intelligent system to a brain-dead one, when we expect the fool to behave as the genius). But simply less happy and less joyful. The proprietary Unices suck the life out of one, misbegotten command after misdesigned `feature.'
Linux may be an awful OS (it's really not, of course), but it's an incredibly operating environment. I understand that the BSDs are much the same. Imagine, we let programmers do their thing and they write the systems they want to use!
I'm a Unix sysadmin with IBM Global Services (my opinions are my own, not those of IBM &c. &c. &c.). This is so terribly true that it's not even funny. What's more important is that every proprietary Unix is unusable without the GNU tools. They are each and every one complete and utter dog's dirt when compared to a Linux (or, I imagine, BSD) box. Kernel-wise, they are all superior--laughably so, I'm certain. But their userlands are unusable. Administering them is an exercise in masochistic abandon. E.g. AIX tries to be helpful with a Korn shell which offers--get ready to be blown away--vi command line editing! Yes, that's right kids, you get the joy of hitting Esc h to move left--naturally the bloody left arrow key doesn't work!
Don't get me started about the brain-dead qualities of such things as Solaris's umpteen-quatrillion version of standard utilities such as make, each subtly different from the rest. Or what about the fact that, when presented with the command ifconfig, both Solaris and HP-UX error out? Solaris will accept ifconfig -a to do what it is obvious you wanted in the first place. HP-UX, though, won't even do that. You get the joy of guessing what your interface are. Better fire up sam. Which, of course, uses $DISPLAY if available, unlike smit with its handy smitty TTY version (there may be an option buried somewhere, but I've not found it--not really looked, I'll admit).
You too can experience the joy of needing to perform hours' worth of manual install work, just to get a usable system. You too can run tar xzf and realise that it won't work, and you get to hunt down an unsupported binary package of gzip. If that fails, you can always hunt down the unsupported binary package of gcc--which you can then use to compile gcc, first, hoping that there are no undocumented trojans (wouldn't that suck), then try to get gzip to compile--of course, with any luck, some dead-simple thing which should be a standard, but isn't, because some half-wit of a marketroid wants to sell it to you for $$$$, is missing, and you get to find some bootleg version or, as in the case of none-broken /dev/randoms and /dev/urandoms, roll your own. Yee-frickin-hah.
Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are surviving solely because they are, for the moment, better OSes than Linux. Their deaths are inevitable because they are worse user environments than Linux. That, and the fact that every day Linux becomes a far better OS, while their half-hearted attempts at becoming better environments fail miserably (I love how gnome-cc crashes in AIX 5--that's an impressive feat!).
And before anyone tries to be clever, Microsoft's pap is neither a better OS (well, perhaps the NT kernel, beneath the layers of cruft, misdesign, maldesign and just plain folly, is--but no-one ever sees it, so it doesn't matter) nor a better environment. Unix makes sense. There's a learning curve. It's not user-friendly in some ways (rm being a chief example--users expect deletion to be undoable, and this is so achievable through several different methods), but it is extraordinarily user-friendly in others (e.g.: one app won't take down the entire machine; all basic utilites may be munged with stdin, stout and xargs; the learning curve is full of aha! moments, such as that glorious day that the full beauty of grep and, later, find is revealed in all its majesty).
Unix is great. The Unix culture is magnificent. Life in a Unix without the GNU utilities is the kind of hell I'd not wish on my worst enemy. It is an exercise in feeble-mindedness. Hello, Sun, IBM and HP: it's the third millenium--may I please have tab-completion now? While you're at it, can I have a make, a cc and a vi which are decent? Hell, can you just give me emacs and make both our lives more pleasant (mine, because I can get my work done, and yours, because I--and a thousand thousand other admins--won't be smacking you upside the head with the aluminium baseball bat quite so often)? Is it so difficult to master your bloody pride and admit that yes, a bunch of hackers turned out a better suite of utilities than your teams of engineers ever could?
Incidentally, the feeble-minded keybindings of AIX's smit are a direct result of engineers exposed to that most Unix-like of systems, VM. Hence the use of either function keys (which very often don't work across platforms) or ESC combinations (which take forever to type) instead of nice, simple, straightforward keys. Remember, PAUSE means scroll!
Sun, HP and IBM would do well to simply open-source their OSes and essentially abandon development. The Free Software community would do so much better with their code than they have ever done. Keep a dozen or so employees working on the code and co-ordinating development, and let things slowly merge into an OS which is already enjoyable to use.
Don't stop at making HTTP a W3C standard, but rather make the W3C standards US Standards. Then fine every HTTP browser which does not properly implement them:-)
It renders beautifully in Mozilla/Windows (yes, I know--I'm at work; my home desktop runs Linux and Linux alone). Mozilla really has become a very nice little browser.
Hah--it's been going on since the after the Civil War, especially since the 1920s. No revolutions yet.
My god! What happened to America?
The Founders died. The revolutionaries died. Americans became like other people--small-minded and willing to compromise. This happened very early on--remember that even in the beginnings we had such atrocities as the Alien & Sedition Acts. The War Between the States was the death-blow for federalism and freedom, the beginning of the Imperial Presidency and the all-powerful national government.
It's not the last twenty years--it's the last 150 years. We, like the Europeans before us, are willing to trade freedom for safety. What is unfortunate is that there is no New World for those of us who treasure our liberty to escape to--no safe haven from the ravages of our rapacious rulers.
The sad fact of the matter is that most people don't care about their liberties. They don't want to own a weapon, they don't want to copy music, they don't want to do drugs. They're willing to let the police protect them (maybe, if they get around to it, perhaps); they're willing to buy 14 copies of the same song; they're content to drink themselves into oblivion rather than inject or toke their way there. They don't want to use Free Software; they're willing to use the software that came `free' with their computer.
Everyone cares when he realises that his liberties are endangered. No-one cares when others' are endangered, or when liberties he doesn't use are endangered. Most people are sheep, with a very simple, straightforward and incorrect view of right and wrong.
Is there hope? Nope, not really. C'est la vie.
I used to think this. I used to be an intense vim junkie. I loved it, and was good at it. But then I figured that so many folks using emacs must have some reason for doing so. So I started to teach myself. It's taken some time, but now I realise just why emacs is so popular.
First of all, the C major mode is incredibly useful when writing code. Parentheses balancing, syntax colouring--all these are little clues about what one is doing, and what one may be doing wrong. Yes, I know that vim has syntax modes--and they're nice--but they're not quite so powerful.
Then there is the CVS interface. Whenever I've compiled my code, and it works, I check in every buffer with a simple C-c v v. This pops up a window in which I write my changes. I type C-c C-c, and the new version is sent to the SourceForge server, to be permanently stored for me, and I'm returned to my buffer. If the version is the same as the previous one, vc simply tells me that it is, without popping up the comment window. Then I C-x k RET and kill that buffer, going to the next one, which I C-c v v in. This continues until I've checked everything in.
Remember that compile? I type M-x compile, then hit RET to accept the default make -k. What this does is pop up a window in which make is run on my source, without stopping for errors. I type C-x ` while it is compiling, and emacs finds the first error, determines the file and line number which offended, then opens the file and sets the point to that line. I can then correct the error and type C-x ` to go to the next one. BTW, the compile is still runnning. For a large project, this compile may take twenty minutes--instead of those twenty minutes being downtime, they are productive, in which I find and fix every error as it is discovered--while I'm fixing an error, non-erroneous source is compiled anyway. This is Useful with a Capital U.
Did I mention that I run my programme from the command line
As my project grows and the need to debug grows with it, I hope to soon take advantage of the gdb mode of emacs--integrated debugging, with all my source a quick check away.
Believe it or not, there really is a reason that folks use emacs. I didn't believe it, but now I know. Much of this simply would not be as pleasant with vi. I used to be great at the :w, :!! method of compiling--but it lacks much. Vi excels at certain tasks--e.g. editing config files, where its . command and quick regexp searches (slightly faster to access than in emacs) are invaluable. But emacs excels at what it does--and what it does vi simply cannot do.
Yet. The latest version of vim, I am told, are extensible with python. Python, incidentally, has been called Lisp with newbie-friendly syntax. I don't think that I need to spell out the obvious conclusion, but I will. In ten years, vi will be emacs:-)
If all programmes were as well-tuned for what they do as is emacs, I would be a truly happy man indeed. Imagine how nice it would be. Yes, there'd be a learning curve. But do you remember learning to write? Practicing line after line after line after line for days? Then practicing circle after circle after circle for days? Then practicing your Bs, then your Ds &c until finally you had mastered the art? If you fence, do you remember the long sequence of drills you had to go through to teach your arms and legs how to act, before ever you crossed blades with an opponent?
Maybe, just maybe, a product which has been around in one form or another for 25 years, and which is now at its 21st version, has something to offer us. Maybe we should focus on its lessons and its mistakes, integrating the lessons and avoiding the mistakes in our own products.
Just a thought.
This has occasionally backfired. In South America, particularly, we were often castigated for not supporting dmeocratic regimes. Of course we didn't--they're awful, with no concept of a rule of law. Unfortunately, we typically did not support republican regimes either, but simply various dictatorships. We threw the baby of republicanism out with the bathwater of democracy. Amusing 'twould be, save for all the various lifes cut short thereby.
I know. I also know that it's pronounced `ee polee,' not `hoy poloy.' However, in the Anglicised usage, it is pronounced that way, and it is used as a two-word collective noun, which may take an article. Awful silly, ain't it?