>> you'll be enlightened to find that it was supposed to be kind of obscure and somewhat nonsensical.
Maybe that's true from a historical POV, but I believe (sorry, no stats available) that most people were at the end just driven by the classic "News for nerds, stuff that matters". So "idle" is misplaced.
Yeah, I don't care when I'm being modded as troll for a bad joke, but I hate when somebody is marked troll/-1 because of:
* being critic to Linux/Unix/FSF/Distros as if they were totems * discovering something positive in/from the proprietary businesses (exception of google or IBM)
so I'm forced to read at lower mod level, and normally I don't have the time for it. Maybe it calls for a new mod tag with neutral punctuation: "Troll because of Atheism".
NOTE: the 'rant' above is work of Eric S. Raymond.
Well, I don't like to say it, but the Windows printing wizards let you print remotely without being a network expert (with a little training Aunt Tillie may be in its way.) I admit that for at least two years didn't tried again to configure something with CUPS (and never want to try again:); and that's because my Ubuntu boxes provided a clearer interface to resolve the requirements of most people, and mines are not really complex. BTW, some people argues that distros have the duty of hiding the weirdness of the real Linux utilities... I think that's just duplication of effort (or multiplication, considering the number of distros.)
Doing trivial things manually with CUPS (and related drivers not necessarily developed by the CUPS team) was always a PITA (at least for me), despite (or because the need of?) nice fat manuals, and the annoying logic commented by ESR.
It is true that software is always growing, but the main driver is actually the fast internet speeds that let users to download big video files and/or music or whatever trash. Most people, even programmers, do not download eclipse in a daily basis (nor need to store all the downloaded past versions.)
BTW, for computing geeks IMHO the big factor is the virtualization facilities that let you quickly install lots of test operating systems and snapshoots.
I was about to buy a netbook (mini 9) from Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, but just provide up to 32 GB SSD (the base model just provide 4Gb), so I'll wait the next year... maybe they come with a more power efficient chipset too.
Good advise... and be yourself. Once I was working for a software company where the manager I reported was well trained in Project Mgmt while he didn't really understand anything about the technical issues... but he tried to look as he did!!! at the end he was by large considered just a "poor dumb guy", and he never (because of shyness) could ask the standard (yet basic for a programmer) questions he would need to take actions.
The result was always out of schedule and low quality products.
BTW, that guy always managed to look good in the global project scores (for example, filling the correct forms in order to officially extend a project), and the "quality" was supposedly well assured because we complied with all the boring and useless ISO documentation.
If an article needs those corrections in its premises, what a crap would be the conclusions.
Note for editors: Drop every article that matches the pattern "watts per hour"... maybe you can automate that process with your handy Perl tools.
Would be cute to have a "preferences" option to hide articles that match some regex... for example (another)"AIDS possible cure", "year of Linux desktop", "filesystem benchmark", "faster than (Windows)? Vista", etc...
>> Oh, and you repeat the commonly believed false claim that a GPL violator can be forced to open his or her own code.
Maybe I expressed incorrectly about some (many) people's fears. Now, that belief is typically (albeit incorrectly) deduced from the "GPL-viral-quality" propaganda that RMS and others (with other intentions) have expressed and repeated.
>> These very same companies would vigorously prosecute anyone who violates their own intellectual property rights
Yes... but now the FSF is applying eye by eye, and that's maybe right. Just sounds a bit weird that always it is a GPL issue... never Free BSD/MIT/CC/etc. Of course FSF can argue that these licenses are stupid but I'm just not sure about their perfection.
The existence of this kind of discussion (regardless who has the reason) is what scares a lot to many managers that are not interested (or are not able) to get the correct-freedom-flavor philosophy, so they end avoiding free software as a whole....
In their minds, everything, if free, has a catch... well, the catch is that legalese with the freedom concept, that after a long time can return and "destroy" (that is, force to open your code) the competitive advantage secrets or whatever is called.
I'm really not sure at the end what approach will provide more benefits to the users, the developers, the proprietary software enterprises (yes, they pay the checks for a lot of people), or humanity as a whole.
Right... despite PAM is a powerful system and concept for a lot of things, for people that 1) is just learning the OS and 2) really wants to have full control of a handy and simple OS, PAM is overkill, as a lot of other subsystems on most distros.
The last Slackware distro I used was 3.4 (in 1997/98) and the tgz packages, few boot scripts, etc. were a nice (and attainable) challenge for anybody interested in understanding the main user level OS components.
Now I use Ubuntu, and I will continue using it (specially since I no longer do sysadmin) but the last time I tried to change some static IP route, it was a real mess with all those DHCP daemons and network applets trying to be too wise and resetting my manual changes... I missed a "plain" Linux like Slackware.
The future of those kids is not necessarily web page design, enterprise application development, device drivers, database query's or that sort of things... so please avoid thinking on java vs C# or that kind of things.
Following the ideas from Why nerds are unpopular, maybe the best thing you can do is to provide a big spectrum of technologies, some (the math oriented) may want to develop a Fortran application for numerical methods related to their algebra courses, others (artistically oriented) may want to use your quick basic (or postscript?) to draw geometrical landscapes, a bit of assembler for the interested in the internals, etc...
In sum, better avoid regarding them as idiots that just deserve a toy or "turtle" language like Logo.
>> Beyond that, what good programmers want is respect, appreciation, and freedom to do great things
Most companies do not have many cute projects to do, just "the same dirty work" they have to. Of course a very good manager can disguise that as a awesome project, but just for a while.
>> they also want to work with other smart people who they can learn from and build great stuff with
The real smart programmers (also, the pedantic ones) soon will be feeling they do not have more people around to learn from. From that point it is just money what drives the future.
A nice place is really useful, but not for retaining people. From my experience, too few people really thinks about it: When people get an big$ offer, rarely do a "future workplace environment" investigation.
BTW, I would add another factor: current firm prestige and reputation (nobody will quit from google to yahoo for a 10% rise at this time.)
As somebody living in a coca-plant producer (Perú), I could not agree more. USA gives big bucks for the DEA program but there is general knowledge (specially when you talk with people from the producer valleys) that most drug seizures are 1) fakes (with real substance) in order to justify the program, and 2) punishment to producers with "bad-behavior" to authorities. Of course you could argue that this is just "public opinion", but it is the most logical one for the astonishing futility of several decades of permanent localized "problematic militarized zones".
Of course, from time to time as the politics change, real pressure makes that people move its business (or part of it) to other departments (states) or to Colombia or Bolivia, but in general there is by no means any little hope that this production/process/traffic is going to be eliminated, nor any single statistic that it is was globally reduced (but yes on the contrary), except in localized zones because of regional displacement as told before; but again this is used to show that the "war against drugs" is producing results.
1) Freelance for most successful people means turning into small business in the mid and long term. So read the material pertaining starting businesses -there are a lot of books/ebooks- and try to get the most from it (specially the marketing issues)
2) You do not say in what country/area are you planning to operate. Assuming US the contractual advice is right, in other ways there may be other customs depending on your target market
3) The issue of fixed cost is tied to the possibility of fixed work amounts. You CAN provide some fixed "packages", and clearly state that any customization has additional cost. Good managed, this could be a win-win situation
>> If you want to run Python on Perl instead, you can
That you can run Python from other languages (not only Perl) talks very good about the Python's modularity and adaptability. BTW, I understand that Perl programmers logically would want to call and use Python, so this module has a lot of sense.
>> Python can run Perl?
From your interesting link: "perl is a Python module bundled with Inline::Python that gives you access to Perl from inside your Python code."
BTW, I don't see the need to call Perl from Python, besides using legacy scripts.
>> First, let me start by saying that the definition of an experienced programmer is that they don't care about the particulars of any given language.
That maybe true at some extent, but remember that the definition of an experienced software architect (or corresponding title) has a lot to do with using the right tool for the current situation. Of course what's the right tool is not too easy to decide... more often than not, it is just the one that you (and your team) feels more comfortable with, and almost never that new fancy technology that suddenly turned popular in all the blogs.
Now the original question... developing "for Linux" almost always means automatically developing for any platform (almost any language "for Linux" is open and available everywhere.) The only "linux-specific" exceptions maybe are the kernel and drivers(using C/ASM), but I think you're just thinking of standard use of the languages. From that point of view, the original question turns irrelevant, and you can just select any open language for other desired features; typically application domain, learning curve, fan club, etc...
In a sense, it can be: if we start rewriting Java/C#/VB apps in assembler, I'm pretty sure the performance will at least double each year, and we can forget about those cores for good.
I'm pretty sure the/. team never reads this "idle" thing, but whatever....
>>a guy who is sick of US imperialism and his low karma
Please, how that guy could be angry because of low karma??? if Karma has gone forever, replaced by those silly words "good, excelent" that can't express the pride narcicism of an old big exponential number!!! I'd suggest the./ team to return the numeric karma scale as a totally unrelated "just show" number, in order to encourage pendantic geeks, and wannabe writers, while maintaining their silly "three-adjetive-scale" for the mod system or whatever they consider important.
>>> 4. If an OS supports IPv6 (and which popular operating systems do not? Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista, and all desktop and server distributions of GNU/Linux I've seen lately support it out of the box, no special configuration required), then adding IPv6 support to your network is just a matter of adding a gateway/router that falls back to 6to4 if it can't get a valid IPv6 netblock. How is uPNP or NAT easier than that?
Remember Y2K? how many apps (specially in-house) are there hoping to read/parse/use/backresolve those neat 4 decimal numbers? Yes... those are broken and should never have used plain ip addresses at all, but well, there are.
Yeah, It would be nice to see that Quantum Computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computer ) finally adds a couple of arbitrary integers. Despite the many publications in the subject, it smells like the superstrings theory of computing. Hope that's not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
>> you'll be enlightened to find that it was supposed to be kind of obscure and somewhat nonsensical.
Maybe that's true from a historical POV, but I believe (sorry, no stats available) that most people were at the end just driven by the classic "News for nerds, stuff that matters". So "idle" is misplaced.
Yeah, I don't care when I'm being modded as troll for a bad joke, but I hate when somebody is marked troll/-1 because of:
* being critic to Linux/Unix/FSF/Distros as if they were totems
* discovering something positive in/from the proprietary businesses (exception of google or IBM)
so I'm forced to read at lower mod level, and normally I don't have the time for it. Maybe it calls for a new mod tag with neutral punctuation: "Troll because of Atheism".
From TFA:
"during descents, the mortality rate for climbers was six time that of sherpas"
The article do not elaborates more. The summary's affirmation may be flawed.
NOTE: the 'rant' above is work of Eric S. Raymond.
Well, I don't like to say it, but the Windows printing wizards let you print remotely without being a network expert (with a little training Aunt Tillie may be in its way.) I admit that for at least two years didn't tried again to configure something with CUPS (and never want to try again:); and that's because my Ubuntu boxes provided a clearer interface to resolve the requirements of most people, and mines are not really complex. BTW, some people argues that distros have the duty of hiding the weirdness of the real Linux utilities... I think that's just duplication of effort (or multiplication, considering the number of distros.)
Doing trivial things manually with CUPS (and related drivers not necessarily developed by the CUPS team) was always a PITA (at least for me), despite (or because the need of?) nice fat manuals, and the annoying logic commented by ESR.
XFCE??? when the "average citizen" was exposed to that? (BTW, I'm not implying that XFCE is a bad option.)
When talking about the need to improve the GUI, I'm thinking on this:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
regards,
1) a clear profitability from Linux netbooks
Dell is ready with this interesting product, of course only with Ubuntu and XP (no Vista):
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
>>2) there is a ton of volunteer army of Linux geeks willing to help the average citizens
No... there must be an army of geeks able to design GUIs for average citizens.
>>3) there is a great consumer "Killer App" only available to Linux
For me, the "lack" of a really "Killer consumer App" is enough: antivirus!
>> 4) Google come out with a gNetbook.
sorry, I didn't got this.
It is true that software is always growing, but the main driver is actually the fast internet speeds that let users to download big video files and/or music or whatever trash. Most people, even programmers, do not download eclipse in a daily basis (nor need to store all the downloaded past versions.)
BTW, for computing geeks IMHO the big factor is the virtualization facilities that let you quickly install lots of test operating systems and snapshoots.
I was about to buy a netbook (mini 9) from Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, but just provide up to 32 GB SSD (the base model just provide 4Gb), so I'll wait the next year... maybe they come with a more power efficient chipset too.
Good advise... and be yourself. Once I was working for a software company where the manager I reported was well trained in Project Mgmt while he didn't really understand anything about the technical issues... but he tried to look as he did!!! at the end he was by large considered just a "poor dumb guy", and he never (because of shyness) could ask the standard (yet basic for a programmer) questions he would need to take actions.
The result was always out of schedule and low quality products.
BTW, that guy always managed to look good in the global project scores (for example, filling the correct forms in order to officially extend a project), and the "quality" was supposedly well assured because we complied with all the boring and useless ISO documentation.
If an article needs those corrections in its premises, what a crap would be the conclusions.
Note for editors: Drop every article that matches the pattern "watts per hour"... maybe you can automate that process with your handy Perl tools.
Would be cute to have a "preferences" option to hide articles that match some regex... for example (another)"AIDS possible cure", "year of Linux desktop", "filesystem benchmark", "faster than (Windows)? Vista", etc...
regards,
>> Oh, and you repeat the commonly believed false claim that a GPL violator can be forced to open his or her own code.
Maybe I expressed incorrectly about some (many) people's fears. Now, that belief is typically (albeit incorrectly) deduced from the "GPL-viral-quality" propaganda that RMS and others (with other intentions) have expressed and repeated.
>> These very same companies would vigorously prosecute anyone who violates their own intellectual property rights
Yes... but now the FSF is applying eye by eye, and that's maybe right. Just sounds a bit weird that always it is a GPL issue... never Free BSD/MIT/CC/etc. Of course FSF can argue that these licenses are stupid but I'm just not sure about their perfection.
The existence of this kind of discussion (regardless who has the reason) is what scares a lot to many managers that are not interested (or are not able) to get the correct-freedom-flavor philosophy, so they end avoiding free software as a whole....
In their minds, everything, if free, has a catch... well, the catch is that legalese with the freedom concept, that after a long time can return and "destroy" (that is, force to open your code) the competitive advantage secrets or whatever is called.
I'm really not sure at the end what approach will provide more benefits to the users, the developers, the proprietary software enterprises (yes, they pay the checks for a lot of people), or humanity as a whole.
Right... despite PAM is a powerful system and concept for a lot of things, for people that 1) is just learning the OS and 2) really wants to have full control of a handy and simple OS, PAM is overkill, as a lot of other subsystems on most distros.
The last Slackware distro I used was 3.4 (in 1997/98) and the tgz packages, few boot scripts, etc. were a nice (and attainable) challenge for anybody interested in understanding the main user level OS components.
Now I use Ubuntu, and I will continue using it (specially since I no longer do sysadmin) but the last time I tried to change some static IP route, it was a real mess with all those DHCP daemons and network applets trying to be too wise and resetting my manual changes... I missed a "plain" Linux like Slackware.
The future of those kids is not necessarily web page design, enterprise application development, device drivers, database query's or that sort of things... so please avoid thinking on java vs C# or that kind of things.
Following the ideas from Why nerds are unpopular, maybe the best thing you can do is to provide a big spectrum of technologies, some (the math oriented) may want to develop a Fortran application for numerical methods related to their algebra courses, others (artistically oriented) may want to use your quick basic (or postscript?) to draw geometrical landscapes, a bit of assembler for the interested in the internals, etc...
In sum, better avoid regarding them as idiots that just deserve a toy or "turtle" language like Logo.
Not contradicting your ideas. But complementing:
>> Beyond that, what good programmers want is respect, appreciation, and freedom to do great things
Most companies do not have many cute projects to do, just "the same dirty work" they have to. Of course a very good manager can disguise that as a awesome project, but just for a while.
>> they also want to work with other smart people who they can learn from and build great stuff with
The real smart programmers (also, the pedantic ones) soon will be feeling they do not have more people around to learn from. From that point it is just money what drives the future.
A nice place is really useful, but not for retaining people. From my experience, too few people really thinks about it: When people get an big$ offer, rarely do a "future workplace environment" investigation.
BTW, I would add another factor: current firm prestige and reputation (nobody will quit from google to yahoo for a 10% rise at this time.)
regards,
As somebody living in a coca-plant producer (Perú), I could not agree more. USA gives big bucks for the DEA program but there is general knowledge (specially when you talk with people from the producer valleys) that most drug seizures are 1) fakes (with real substance) in order to justify the program, and 2) punishment to producers with "bad-behavior" to authorities. Of course you could argue that this is just "public opinion", but it is the most logical one for the astonishing futility of several decades of permanent localized "problematic militarized zones".
Of course, from time to time as the politics change, real pressure makes that people move its business (or part of it) to other departments (states) or to Colombia or Bolivia, but in general there is by no means any little hope that this production/process/traffic is going to be eliminated, nor any single statistic that it is was globally reduced (but yes on the contrary), except in localized zones because of regional displacement as told before; but again this is used to show that the "war against drugs" is producing results.
That was good advice.
Now I want to put some of additional ideas:
1) Freelance for most successful people means turning into small business in the mid and long term. So read the material pertaining starting businesses -there are a lot of books/ebooks- and try to get the most from it (specially the marketing issues)
2) You do not say in what country/area are you planning to operate. Assuming US the contractual advice is right, in other ways there may be other customs depending on your target market
3) The issue of fixed cost is tied to the possibility of fixed work amounts. You CAN provide some fixed "packages", and clearly state that any customization has additional cost. Good managed, this could be a win-win situation
regards,
>> If you want to run Python on Perl instead, you can
That you can run Python from other languages (not only Perl) talks very good about the Python's modularity and adaptability. BTW, I understand that Perl programmers logically would want to call and use Python, so this module has a lot of sense.
>> Python can run Perl?
From your interesting link:
"perl is a Python module bundled with Inline::Python that gives you access to Perl from inside your Python code."
BTW, I don't see the need to call Perl from Python, besides using legacy scripts.
regards,
>> Free Resources for Windows Perl Development
The definitive one: http://python.org/
>> First, let me start by saying that the definition of an experienced programmer is that they don't care about the particulars of any given language.
That maybe true at some extent, but remember that the definition of an experienced software architect (or corresponding title) has a lot to do with using the right tool for the current situation. Of course what's the right tool is not too easy to decide... more often than not, it is just the one that you (and your team) feels more comfortable with, and almost never that new fancy technology that suddenly turned popular in all the blogs.
Now the original question... developing "for Linux" almost always means automatically developing for any platform (almost any language "for Linux" is open and available everywhere.) The only "linux-specific" exceptions maybe are the kernel and drivers(using C/ASM), but I think you're just thinking of standard use of the languages. From that point of view, the original question turns irrelevant, and you can just select any open language for other desired features; typically application domain, learning curve, fan club, etc...
regards,
Enough for passing the post to quantum computing right?
>>> though not every year, just once), but the number of bugs will increase 1000-fold.
Of course that full year is needed for debugging...!
>> How can Moore's Law ever be a software issue?
In a sense, it can be: if we start rewriting Java/C#/VB apps in assembler, I'm pretty sure the performance will at least double each year, and we can forget about those cores for good.
I'm pretty sure the /. team never reads this "idle" thing, but whatever....
>>a guy who is sick of US imperialism and his low karma
Please, how that guy could be angry because of low karma??? if Karma has gone forever, replaced by those silly words "good, excelent" that can't express the pride narcicism of an old big exponential number!!! I'd suggest the ./ team to return the numeric karma scale as a totally unrelated "just show" number, in order to encourage pendantic geeks, and wannabe writers, while maintaining their silly "three-adjetive-scale" for the mod system or whatever they consider important.
I Agree with your others points but:
>>> 4. If an OS supports IPv6 (and which popular operating systems do not? Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista, and all desktop and server distributions of GNU/Linux I've seen lately support it out of the box, no special configuration required), then adding IPv6 support to your network is just a matter of adding a gateway/router that falls back to 6to4 if it can't get a valid IPv6 netblock. How is uPNP or NAT easier than that?
Remember Y2K? how many apps (specially in-house) are there hoping to read/parse/use/backresolve those neat 4 decimal numbers? Yes... those are broken and should never have used plain ip addresses at all, but well, there are.
>> I'd love to see some new technologies.
Yeah, It would be nice to see that Quantum Computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computer ) finally adds a couple of arbitrary integers. Despite the many publications in the subject, it smells like the superstrings theory of computing. Hope that's not the case.