It's funny to see people try and come up with excuses for why they still use BIND.
1. It's not Free Software. That makes it useless for many people, either ideologically or practically.
2. It doesn't support IXFR. For many people (read: anyone who can't or doesn't want to run rsync, and people who don't control their peer servers), that takes it completely out of the running. Full stop. End of story.
It's equally funny to hear DJB fanboys who don't understand that a lot of people have needs over and above their own, or may be unable to use his stuff for legal reasons. If you're comfortable with the license restrictions and you don't need any of the functionality it lacks, then by all means give it a shot. I don't fit either of those criteria, though, and it has no place on my servers.
Although your post reads like flamebait, I think you're dead-on accurate. When I want to buy a home stereo, I don't care how much electricity it uses (which will be negligible when compared to the air conditioner anyway). I'm not interested in the behind-the-scenes details of toner recycling when I want to buy a printer. I couldn't care less which ice cream manufacturer has the best labor relations.
I trust their testing methodologies for the most part, but their subjective criteria diverged from my own until their opinions were no longer relevant to me. That's too bad, really; I wish their were a similar source that I could still trust.
Between you and me, the whole debate isn't interesting enough for me to have established a strong opinion on which neat category my beliefs fall in.
Except that at the same time there _were_ evolutionary accounts of origins.
To my knowledge, though, the biblical account ignores the issue of mechanism altogether. I don't see enough evidence to support the idea that the Bible either endorses or rejects evolution as the means of creation. Perhaps Moses didn't realize modern folk would spend energy debating such things and skipped the subject for the sake of brevity?
Yep, and I'd stake money that "thousand" is actually shepherd-speak for "a hugely vast number that my training has not prepared me to comprehend":
God to shepherd: "The universe is this many (gives a vision of the history of the universe and shows the shepherd's puny lifespan as a dot at one end) years old." Shepherd to others: "The universe is a thousand years old."
Same here, including being a Southern Baptist. I firmly believe that God created the universe, and it seems like the most likely means he used were the big bang and evolution.
Furthermore, I think that the creation story from Genesis is reasonably accurate, given that it was written by the son of slaves roughly 2300 years before the discovery of quantum physics. Let's see: there was nothing, then there was light, then land with oceans, then plants, then sea creatures, then birds, then mammals, then man. Given that birds are widely held to be directly evolved from dinosaurs, that seems like a pretty close fit to modern theory.
Replace "days" with "exponentially shrinking units of time" and the timeline doesn't even seem too far off. Really, I've lost track of what the supposed disconnect between biblical and scientific accounts was supposed to be.
Our little dog's knee surgery didn't cost anywhere near $3,000, but it was still more than I would have preferred to pay. It was any easy choice, though: the little guy was a loved family member and it was in our power to stop his pain so that he could enjoy his remaining time with us.
I'm sure that someone with a lot more money than we have might feel the same about their treasured pet.
That's very true. We had to get surgery for our Maltese's chronic knee displacement, which fortunately seems to have fixed the problem.
I think your point amplifies mine, though. When you buy from a breeder, you can at least theoretically check their reputation before buying. It's rare to know anything at all, though, about the background of a shelter animal. Maybe that sweet, beautiful hound using sad-dog eyes at you through the cage needs $3,000 in treatment to prevent a slow, painful death.
I have nothing whatsoever against the idea of getting a "used" animal, but that requires a certain level of commitment and preparation for the unknown. Not everyone is ready to make that commitment, but I don't think that makes them (or the breeders that cater to them) bad people.
We bought our Boston from a local couple that breeds their housepets once a year. He's not AKC, but he's a good little fellow from a healthy background. That's pretty much the ideal arrangement, in my opinion.
I hold nothing but extreme vitriol towards people that breed dogs
I hold nothing but comtempt for people that don't realize that some of us aren't don't want to experiment to find a housepet that won't freak out and mame our children. Yeah, that cur has pretty eyes, but do you know that he wasn't thrown out for biting kids?
I'm not much for "think of the children!", but given that pets are completely optional, it makes sense to pick one that is statistically most likely to fit in with your lifestyle. AKC breeds are pretty well known; if you buy a Boston Terrier from a reputably breeder, it will probably be a loving, tolerant pet. Random mutts from the shelter may also be loving, wonderful companions, but there's little reason to expect that of them.
Kim Jong-Il memorized the dog genome and used a gene sequencer he personally invented - shrewdly using the alias "Dovichi" to avoid deflecting the glory from his Workers' Paradise to himself.
His stated goal was to create a new golf club to allow every blissful, well-fed citizen to achieve holes-in-one, even on tricky dog legs.
Up next: Kim writes The Iliad and Beowulf in one afternoon, after using his psyonic powers to defeat Canada (in preparation for a crippling attack of their southern neighbor).
I have never received Free Beer that wasn't courtesy of an uncoerced private individual. I'm not sure where the National Open Kegs are, but wouldn't mind finding out.
My best friends are my coworkers, and our families get together on weekends to have cookouts while the kids play in our back yards. I don't look at these people as troubling reminders of a dysfunctional workplace, but as friends with similar talents, abilities, and interests.
You don't have to love everyone in your office, but if there's not one person there that you don't like well enough to forget about whatever employment annoyances you might have, then maybe it's time to find another job.
The remailers are still alive and well. The magic phrase is "nym", which is a way to create an email address that can be replied to.
For example, you could create the nym "johnsmith@nym.example.com". Whenever you send a specially-structured email to nym.example.net (signed with johnsmith's private key), the remailer will send it back out with the From: address changed to johnsmith@nym.example.com. Then, whenever someone replies to that email address, the remailer can redirect their reply (encrypted by the remailer with johnsmith's public key) to the newsgroup of your choice with the subject of your choice.
<plug>I wrote a program to automate the process.</plug> The original intent was to create a plugin for popular MUAs, but I never got that far.
Now, the neat trick is that you can send your control messages (like creating the nym, deleting it, etc.) and outbound messages (that you want to be rewritten and forwarded) through a chain of old-style anonymous remailers. As long as at least one entry in that chain is "pure", your messages are safe.
Yes, I know this is horridly complex for first-time users, but it works and it's available today. I wouldn't necessarily trust it to make anonymous tips to the NSA, but I think it'd be adequate protection for anything less critical.
a typical 3bed/1.5bath house in a decent neighborhood of a distressed upstate city like Schenectady pays $4,000-$5,000 (on an assessed value of ~$65,000).
You are joking, aren't you? Aren't you? Good God, man; that's insane. I pay $2500 on ~$195,000 and thought I was getting ripped off. My father-in-law lives in Buffalo, NY, and is always going on about all the "free" services that he gets from the gov'ment like trash pickup. I have to pay to have my trash hauled, but since I guess I'm saving about $10,000 per year in taxes, I can live with it.
I run a rather largish web application written in Zope, and it's not slow at all. All the computationally expensive stuff is handled by the databases or external programs, so Zope is mainly left with rendering the XHTML on the way out the door.
ZEO is a Godsend, though. We were having some scaling issues [0], so I decided to try moving our object database out of a Zope instance and into ZEO. The whole process, start to finish, including time to RTFM and triple-check everything, took less less than an hour. Once that was done, I made another five Zope instances that run off the same ZEO backend, and set each to listen on a different port. Finally, I set the Apache frontend that we'd been using since the beginning (to serve PHP out of different locations on our site) to pick a Zope port at random whenever a client request comes in.
The net result is that our server can now handle roughly six times the load with basically no penalty whatsoever other than the memory required to run the extra instances. It looked great on paper, and worked great in practice. Given how trivially easy it was to migrate to a ZEO setup, I'd never hesitate to use it again (and will probably start all new projects with a similar arrangement).
[0] Our site uses a Foxpro backend. No, really. Any way, I wrote SOAP interface to Foxpro so that we could access it through Zope. The problem was that some of the queries took so long to execute that the Zope instance was eventually blocking on the results and freezing the non-database parts of the site. Running several parallel Zope instances didn't guarantee that'll never happen, but it certainly decreased the odds.
Oh, I don't know. The bsdsocket.library that came with the copy of Amiga Forever I bought two days ago seems to do pretty well, although I admit that borrowing the stack of the host machine probably made it pretty easy to write.
I don't know how to say this, but computer salesman are right up their with door-to-door vacuum salesman in the "consumer trust" category. I don't doubt that you as an individual are competent, honest, and helpful, but I can definitely say that most of your peers aren't.
Remember, you're fighting against the reputation of people who try to sell gold-plated USB cables because they make the data go faster. Don't take it personally when people refuse to hear a word of what you're saying; computers have been commonplace long enough that the majority of the population have probably been burnt by a supposedly knowledgeable salesman at least once in the past.
You missed the point: that's not possible. Price is a result, not cause.
People are irrationally giving away software
Oh, please. My boss let me release my work under the GPL, not out of charity (although there is a certain sense of obligation to the community that made my projects possible in the first place), but so that others could use it and improve it. At the absolute worst, no one would've downloaded it: that case costs us nothing. In the best case, thousands of people could've adopted it as best-of-class and started submitting hundreds of patches to the benefit of all involved. The actual results were somewhere in the middle; we received enough feedback to make the experiment worthwhile.
I really don't see why he needs to keep years worth of email, I doubt he has ever, or would ever, need to pull up a message from a month ago, let alone 2 or more years ago.
Seriously? I search for old stuff all the time. Within the last week I've dug around for a serial number that was emailed to me 4 years ago - since it was my only copy, I'd be out the money I paid for it if I followed your plan.
The argument against that is that I could just store the important stuff somewhere. My counterargument is that I did - in my mailspool.
Rather, he believes that Open Source software leads corporations and consumers to undervalue the value of software.
He's wrong. If people are unwilling to pay for a particular class of software, then that means it has no monetary value (even though it may still have a tremendous utility value). The laws of economics say that an item is worth what people will pay for it. It's not really possible to undervalue software, although it's certainly common enough to overestimate its worth.
If Open Source software is being given away freely, he argues, people will feel that software is a commodity rather than a specialized product that requires a lot of hard work and brainpower to properly develop.
I guess I don't see the connection between the two. General purpose software is inevitably becoming a commodity. This is widely seen as a Good Thing except for the people losing money because they assumed no one would write a better implementation of their flagship project and then give it away.
However, bespoke software is (and will probably always be) the noble struggle of creation that your friend sees as the ideal. My boss hasn't paid a single penny for the software running his Internet services, but he's paid me quite a bit to write the applications running on them.
I think your friend needs to check his premises. People are willingly giving away software. If the rest of the world is moving in that direction, including the giant software houses like IBM, Sun, and Novell, then perhaps he should reevaluate his business plans.
I'd like to make a little extra beer money on the side
That implies that you're at least partially doing this for fun and personal enjoyment.
Don't.
There's a vast difference between fixing a friend's machine for fun and for money. Almost without exception, the kind of people who would need to pay someone to fix their system in the first place (ruling out those who want you to fix it so they can watch and learn) are the ones that cannot be made to understand causality and coincidence:
"You removed that virus last month, but it broke my monitor. You owe me a monitor."
"I was surfing t3h intarweb just like I had been before and now my computer's slow again. You didn't fix it right."
"What do you mean, I need to buy a computer? The hard drive is the only piece that caught on fire. Besides, new computers are disposable, unlike this tank I bought brand new nine years ago."
Trust me, friend: you really, really don't want to go there unless you're perfectly comfortable losing friendships by not giving people what they think their money's worth (which is patently impossible). Tell a man that he needs a new transmission and he'll believe you. Tell the same man that 64 MB of RAM isn't enough to run Office XP and he'll think you're trying to steal his hard-earned money.
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1. It's not Free Software. That makes it useless for many people, either ideologically or practically.
2. It doesn't support IXFR. For many people (read: anyone who can't or doesn't want to run rsync, and people who don't control their peer servers), that takes it completely out of the running. Full stop. End of story.
It's equally funny to hear DJB fanboys who don't understand that a lot of people have needs over and above their own, or may be unable to use his stuff for legal reasons. If you're comfortable with the license restrictions and you don't need any of the functionality it lacks, then by all means give it a shot. I don't fit either of those criteria, though, and it has no place on my servers.
I trust their testing methodologies for the most part, but their subjective criteria diverged from my own until their opinions were no longer relevant to me. That's too bad, really; I wish their were a similar source that I could still trust.
Between you and me, the whole debate isn't interesting enough for me to have established a strong opinion on which neat category my beliefs fall in.
Except that at the same time there _were_ evolutionary accounts of origins.
To my knowledge, though, the biblical account ignores the issue of mechanism altogether. I don't see enough evidence to support the idea that the Bible either endorses or rejects evolution as the means of creation. Perhaps Moses didn't realize modern folk would spend energy debating such things and skipped the subject for the sake of brevity?
God to shepherd: "The universe is this many (gives a vision of the history of the universe and shows the shepherd's puny lifespan as a dot at one end) years old."
Shepherd to others: "The universe is a thousand years old."
Furthermore, I think that the creation story from Genesis is reasonably accurate, given that it was written by the son of slaves roughly 2300 years before the discovery of quantum physics. Let's see: there was nothing, then there was light, then land with oceans, then plants, then sea creatures, then birds, then mammals, then man. Given that birds are widely held to be directly evolved from dinosaurs, that seems like a pretty close fit to modern theory.
Replace "days" with "exponentially shrinking units of time" and the timeline doesn't even seem too far off. Really, I've lost track of what the supposed disconnect between biblical and scientific accounts was supposed to be.
I'm sure that someone with a lot more money than we have might feel the same about their treasured pet.
I think your point amplifies mine, though. When you buy from a breeder, you can at least theoretically check their reputation before buying. It's rare to know anything at all, though, about the background of a shelter animal. Maybe that sweet, beautiful hound using sad-dog eyes at you through the cage needs $3,000 in treatment to prevent a slow, painful death.
I have nothing whatsoever against the idea of getting a "used" animal, but that requires a certain level of commitment and preparation for the unknown. Not everyone is ready to make that commitment, but I don't think that makes them (or the breeders that cater to them) bad people.
We bought our Boston from a local couple that breeds their housepets once a year. He's not AKC, but he's a good little fellow from a healthy background. That's pretty much the ideal arrangement, in my opinion.
I hold nothing but comtempt for people that don't realize that some of us aren't don't want to experiment to find a housepet that won't freak out and mame our children. Yeah, that cur has pretty eyes, but do you know that he wasn't thrown out for biting kids?
I'm not much for "think of the children!", but given that pets are completely optional, it makes sense to pick one that is statistically most likely to fit in with your lifestyle. AKC breeds are pretty well known; if you buy a Boston Terrier from a reputably breeder, it will probably be a loving, tolerant pet. Random mutts from the shelter may also be loving, wonderful companions, but there's little reason to expect that of them.
His stated goal was to create a new golf club to allow every blissful, well-fed citizen to achieve holes-in-one, even on tricky dog legs.
Up next: Kim writes The Iliad and Beowulf in one afternoon, after using his psyonic powers to defeat Canada (in preparation for a crippling attack of their southern neighbor).
I have never received Free Beer that wasn't courtesy of an uncoerced private individual. I'm not sure where the National Open Kegs are, but wouldn't mind finding out.
You don't have to love everyone in your office, but if there's not one person there that you don't like well enough to forget about whatever employment annoyances you might have, then maybe it's time to find another job.
For example, you could create the nym "johnsmith@nym.example.com". Whenever you send a specially-structured email to nym.example.net (signed with johnsmith's private key), the remailer will send it back out with the From: address changed to johnsmith@nym.example.com. Then, whenever someone replies to that email address, the remailer can redirect their reply (encrypted by the remailer with johnsmith's public key) to the newsgroup of your choice with the subject of your choice.
<plug>I wrote a program to automate the process.</plug> The original intent was to create a plugin for popular MUAs, but I never got that far.
Now, the neat trick is that you can send your control messages (like creating the nym, deleting it, etc.) and outbound messages (that you want to be rewritten and forwarded) through a chain of old-style anonymous remailers. As long as at least one entry in that chain is "pure", your messages are safe.
Yes, I know this is horridly complex for first-time users, but it works and it's available today. I wouldn't necessarily trust it to make anonymous tips to the NSA, but I think it'd be adequate protection for anything less critical.
s/ideologically more correct to me/actively addressing the problem/ and you're exactly correct.
Do you folk ever stop and wonder why no one listens to you?
Firefox's share is growing while IE's is falling. Looks like more people are listening to us than you'd hope.
You are joking, aren't you? Aren't you? Good God, man; that's insane. I pay $2500 on ~$195,000 and thought I was getting ripped off. My father-in-law lives in Buffalo, NY, and is always going on about all the "free" services that he gets from the gov'ment like trash pickup. I have to pay to have my trash hauled, but since I guess I'm saving about $10,000 per year in taxes, I can live with it.
I run a rather largish web application written in Zope, and it's not slow at all. All the computationally expensive stuff is handled by the databases or external programs, so Zope is mainly left with rendering the XHTML on the way out the door.
ZEO is a Godsend, though. We were having some scaling issues [0], so I decided to try moving our object database out of a Zope instance and into ZEO. The whole process, start to finish, including time to RTFM and triple-check everything, took less less than an hour. Once that was done, I made another five Zope instances that run off the same ZEO backend, and set each to listen on a different port. Finally, I set the Apache frontend that we'd been using since the beginning (to serve PHP out of different locations on our site) to pick a Zope port at random whenever a client request comes in.
The net result is that our server can now handle roughly six times the load with basically no penalty whatsoever other than the memory required to run the extra instances. It looked great on paper, and worked great in practice. Given how trivially easy it was to migrate to a ZEO setup, I'd never hesitate to use it again (and will probably start all new projects with a similar arrangement).
[0] Our site uses a Foxpro backend. No, really. Any way, I wrote SOAP interface to Foxpro so that we could access it through Zope. The problem was that some of the queries took so long to execute that the Zope instance was eventually blocking on the results and freezing the non-database parts of the site. Running several parallel Zope instances didn't guarantee that'll never happen, but it certainly decreased the odds.
Oh, I don't know. The bsdsocket.library that came with the copy of Amiga Forever I bought two days ago seems to do pretty well, although I admit that borrowing the stack of the host machine probably made it pretty easy to write.
Kids these days, I tell ya.
Remember, you're fighting against the reputation of people who try to sell gold-plated USB cables because they make the data go faster. Don't take it personally when people refuse to hear a word of what you're saying; computers have been commonplace long enough that the majority of the population have probably been burnt by a supposedly knowledgeable salesman at least once in the past.
It is to be expected that small, dense countries should be able to build infrastructure more quickly than larger, emptier ones.
You missed the point: that's not possible. Price is a result, not cause.
People are irrationally giving away software
Oh, please. My boss let me release my work under the GPL, not out of charity (although there is a certain sense of obligation to the community that made my projects possible in the first place), but so that others could use it and improve it. At the absolute worst, no one would've downloaded it: that case costs us nothing. In the best case, thousands of people could've adopted it as best-of-class and started submitting hundreds of patches to the benefit of all involved. The actual results were somewhere in the middle; we received enough feedback to make the experiment worthwhile.
Seriously? I search for old stuff all the time. Within the last week I've dug around for a serial number that was emailed to me 4 years ago - since it was my only copy, I'd be out the money I paid for it if I followed your plan.
The argument against that is that I could just store the important stuff somewhere. My counterargument is that I did - in my mailspool.
He's wrong. If people are unwilling to pay for a particular class of software, then that means it has no monetary value (even though it may still have a tremendous utility value). The laws of economics say that an item is worth what people will pay for it. It's not really possible to undervalue software, although it's certainly common enough to overestimate its worth.
If Open Source software is being given away freely, he argues, people will feel that software is a commodity rather than a specialized product that requires a lot of hard work and brainpower to properly develop.
I guess I don't see the connection between the two. General purpose software is inevitably becoming a commodity. This is widely seen as a Good Thing except for the people losing money because they assumed no one would write a better implementation of their flagship project and then give it away.
However, bespoke software is (and will probably always be) the noble struggle of creation that your friend sees as the ideal. My boss hasn't paid a single penny for the software running his Internet services, but he's paid me quite a bit to write the applications running on them.
I think your friend needs to check his premises. People are willingly giving away software. If the rest of the world is moving in that direction, including the giant software houses like IBM, Sun, and Novell, then perhaps he should reevaluate his business plans.
That implies that you're at least partially doing this for fun and personal enjoyment.
Don't.
There's a vast difference between fixing a friend's machine for fun and for money. Almost without exception, the kind of people who would need to pay someone to fix their system in the first place (ruling out those who want you to fix it so they can watch and learn) are the ones that cannot be made to understand causality and coincidence:
"You removed that virus last month, but it broke my monitor. You owe me a monitor."
"I was surfing t3h intarweb just like I had been before and now my computer's slow again. You didn't fix it right."
"What do you mean, I need to buy a computer? The hard drive is the only piece that caught on fire. Besides, new computers are disposable, unlike this tank I bought brand new nine years ago."
Trust me, friend: you really, really don't want to go there unless you're perfectly comfortable losing friendships by not giving people what they think their money's worth (which is patently impossible). Tell a man that he needs a new transmission and he'll believe you. Tell the same man that 64 MB of RAM isn't enough to run Office XP and he'll think you're trying to steal his hard-earned money.
Thank you for joining our conversation, Mr. Imus.
Oops - I forgot to close the tag.