Superintendent Davis said that if Griffiths didn't like the homecoming court selectioin process, he could have spoken to student government leaders, the school newspaper or any adminstrator on campus.
"There are many opportunities for any student to express disatisfaction at Mira Costa," he said. "(Grifiths) was within the organization that plans homecoming. At no time did he express dissatisfaction with the process or the program. That's where it should have been expressed and dealt with."
In other words, its fine to express disatisfaction when no one will listen and only a small group will hear. But if you want to make a statement that the whole school will hear, you aren't allowed to express your opinion in the means that you desire.
Its people like superintendent Davis that want to destroy freedom of speech.
No violence was involved. No insults were involved. Nothing libelous or slanderous was said. The kid made a statement by not saying anything and walking away and the school administration isn't mature enough to just deal with it. They feel the need to retaliate like spurned high school socialites.
What will you do to protect the rights of athiests and those who hold minority faiths, such as Wicca, Santaria, Shinto, et al?
Bush: I am committed to the First Amendment principles of religious freedom, tolerance, and diversity. Whether Mormon, Methodist, Jewish,
or Muslim, Americans should be able to participate in their constitutional free exercise of religion.
It seems to me that George W. Bush has purposefully not-answered the question with a careful, purposefully deceptive response. Here is another analysis of Bush's views on minority religions from the context of the decision of the US Military to accept Wicca as a bona fide religion.
Last week George W. Bush, governor of Texas and 2000 GOP presidential frontrunner, was asked by ABC News about Barr's concerns on Wicca in the military as well as the posting of
the Ten Commandments in public buildings.
Bush said that he did not believe "witchcraft is a religion," and he hoped "the military would rethink this decision."
I seem to recall seeing in print when 100 developers were added to the IE developer team. I bet the IE team for the Mac alone has more than the 50 people the Bill Gates of the Halloween III stated.
The quote from Linus you are likely remembering is this:
True, linux is monolithic, and I agree that microkernels are nicer. With
a less argumentative subject, I'd probably have agreed with most of what
you said. From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint linux looses.
If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to
even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux
wins heavily on points of being available now.
However, Linus had some other points as well, like multi-threaded filesystems on a microkernel being a hack:
>A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack.
Not true. It's a performance hack/on a microkernel/, but it's an
automatic feature when you write a monolithic kernel - one area where
microkernels don't work too well (as I pointed out in my personal mail
to ast). When writing a unix the "obsolete" way, you automatically get
a multithreaded kernel: every process does it's own job, and you don't
have to make ugly things like message queues to make it work
efficiently.
My perception is that Linus' view at the time of this exchange was that Microkernels have a theoretically superior design but monolithic kernels have a practically better design. I don't know if Linus' views on this has changed in the nine year interval since this debate.
In your interview with LinuxSecurity.com, you mention that Bastille has some great forthcoming architectural changes. What is the nature of these upcoming features?
Currently Bastille seems aimed at shutting off unneeded services, making sure services don't run as root, and updating known security holes. It seems to me that this is a very good start, but is really only half of the story. Does Bastille have any plans to start an audit of the Linux kernel and userland for vulnerabilities ala OpenBSD? It seems to me that making Linux "theoretically" secure requires such an audit. Do you agree or disagree?
Was it ethically correct to copy this post? Perhaps. If you follow Kantz' ethical model and believe a greater justice is being done in repeating this story to a larger
audience than the perceived injustice done to the original poster, then yes. On the other hand, if you think karma is so valuable -- a game -- then I suppose you
should go ahead and mod him down, and "teach him a lesson".
These are not the only alternatives and it is fallacious to assert that the judgement of whether intellectual dishonesty is such a cut and dried choice between Kantzian ethics and viewing karma as a game.
If Th3 D0t had given a link to the original post, or at least some sort of indication that it was from another source, I doubt there would have been a backlash. Many people have cut and pasted posts from other web logs, articles, books, writings, etc. and have been modded up with no backlash. The difference is that these people have always attributed the quotation to the author and have not attempted to take credit for someone else's work.
Even in an 'open' discussion forum such as/. intellectual integrity is important.
Even if we evaluate what happened completely along your stated lines, the conclusion that allowing intellectual dishonesty into a discussion is a good thing is quite arguable.
Given that kennedy's k5 post is time stamped about an hour prior to Th3 D0t's/. post, it seems to me to be a clear case of plagarism. Consider moderating it accordingly.
if you had a SOCIAL LIFE you would not be REPLYING point by point to my post.
Is that so?
Let's me think. This past weekend I went to the symphony to see a rendition of one of Alexander Zemlinksky's works, had hot passionate sex with a woman, turned down on offer to go out to lunch to attend a birthday party and was suprised by two different friends paying unexpected visits (one Friday night, one Saturday night).
What does having or not having a social life have to do with replying to a post on/. late Monday morning?
you also have a
quote from SIGNAL 11 who is a FUCKING CUNT anyway, so i must conclude that YOU TOO are an
IDIOT.
If I am an idiot, at least I am an idiot that can compose a post that is coherent and displays an understanding of logic. Too bad the same can not be said for you.
your POOR ATTEMPT at HUMOUR is also LAUGHABLE and shows how LACKING your SOCIAL
SKILLS are.
Not unlike your uncouth use of capital letters to display emphasis in a web forum at the dawn of the 21st century.
Object Orientated Programing is seriouslt FUCKED UP concept from the start (Since when did your
CPU work in Objects and Methods?),
The last I checked, CPUs were much, much cheaper than programmers. Given that virtually every study down on programmer productivity and programming paradigms has found a correlation between high level languages using paradigms such as OO and higher productivity, a cost/benefit analysis will result in a positive verdict for OO programming.
Perl is also a seriously FUCKED UP language.
This is an accurate statement. I would certainly consider Perl to be be an extremely esoteric language. That said, if people are highly productive with it, what does it matter?
Therefore, OOP
Perl is only used by fucked up crack heads who want to be cool, but are actually to FUCKING
STUPID too use a proper language that is actually SUITED TOO THE JOB.
Someone seems to a have a very poor grasp of logic.
1. OOP is FU.
2. Perl is FU.
.:
3. People who use Perl are crackheads and too stupid to use a proper language.
Your conclusion certainly does not result from your premises. The only person apparently on crack is the anonymous author of the reply to my post.
What Winston Churchill said of democracy in relation to other forms of government can be said of OOP in relation to other forms of programming paradigms. OOP is the worst programming paradigm, except for all of the other programming paradigms.
The bottom line is that thinking in OOP is typically easier than thinking in other paradigms. The result is that programmers can typically solve problems faster with OOP than with other languages.
But one of the beautiful things about Perl is that one does not have to use OOP. Perl can use just about any programming paradigm one desires.
Also, your use of the word "Grok" implies that you have done a couple of computer courses (MCSE
perhaps?) and have read the Hacker Dictionary, and now consider yourself a Geek.
Really? What about the word grok implies that I've had any computer courses.
For the record, I'm not an MCSE, nor have I ever even read the Hacker's Dictionary. I came across the word 'grok' when I read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land while in seventh grade. In the crowd I hung around with in high school, the word 'grok' was in everyday usage. This crowd only ended up producing two computer geeks out of about twenty people, so I don't really get how using 'grok' implies anything to do with computers.
Get yourself a
FUCKING LIFE buddy, and learn A REAL LANGUAGE!
Sure, I'll learn a real language, with the provision that you learn logic. Of course not everyone has the mental capacity to understand logic, so it might be a bit beyond you. Then again, you never know unless you try.
As for getting a life, I have one thank you. If I didn't, I couldn't have composed this reply could I? The non-living don't read/.
I've been using Perl for about three years and have loved every minute of it.
About six months ago I picked up Dr. Conway's Object Oriented Perl. Reading that book really took my understanding of Perl to a whole new level. Dr. Conway has a gift for truly grokking the heart of a matter and explaing it in a comprehensible manner. I've learned how to use Perl from the standard sources, the man pages, the FAQs, the camel and llama books. OOP taught me to understand Perl. I can not reccomend OOP highly enough for people that want to deeply understand Perl.
I really look forward to seeing what Dr. Conway will do with his year sabbatical to work on things Perl. He has a great mind.
On a tangent, I also think this is part of a growing wave of programming going in the right direction. Using public calls for money to put competent people to work on free software is a great way make free software a more intrical part of people's every day lives. It would be funny to look at sources of Perl or the Linux kernel and see:
/* the following code was made possible by a sponsorship from John Doe */
The venerable speak and spell was capable of uttering obscenities. The trick was to know the secret code, a string of about twenty key-presses that resulted in the unique sound of the F-word.
In this particular case, is there some qualitative difference between me borrowing my friend's power tools and the previous poster borrowing a friend's CAD/CAM software license that I am missing? Is a short time duration borrowing of a software license really pirating software?
The biggest part of the problem was that despite the/. crew posting links to four or five previous interviews with Gildred, nobody bothered to read the fscking interviews and kept asking the same questions that had already been answered more than a few times.
It didn't help that even the moderators didn't seem to have read the previous interviews and kept modding up questions that had not only been asked in the prior interviews, but were also repeats.
What I really want to know is how my question that only got modded up one measly point ended up being included when it has a rating of 3 which included the +1 Bonus.
Fact is that not a single ISP uses S/390 systems for serving web content. If the IO of these
machines would be so excellent, why don't they use them?
Bzzt. Wrong answer.
Granted, S/390 is not the most popular hardware for ISP's, plenty use S/390. Here's an article about one.
Here's an article where ebay discsses the possibility of moving to the S/390 platform.
This article discusses how some government agencies are web-enabling their mainframes.
I'll grant that traditionally IBM mainframes can be a bear from the usability perspective. However, things are changing quite quickly, especially with the advent of Linux on the S/390.
The premis of the disguised circuit board (in the novel, I haven't seen the movie) was that the real circuit board would exist in some sort of field that would completely wipe the real circuitry if the device was opened improperly. The fake board consisted of circuitry that was already blown, leaving the opener of the device to find a blown board that the opener would apparently assume was the real board that self destructed in the opening of the device.
A bit more clever than the original poster suggested, but still prone to getting hacked. In the book they just installed a hidden camera to watch the alien build the magic black box. In real life, I'd imagine there would be all sorts of non-intrusive scans that could find the "hidden" board.
Thanks for the input. It is good to get insight from a place that has mandatory enlistment. I do think you have some misconceptions about the US military.
You see, the problem is that unless the military is completely professional, it gets built up on the principle of assuming that you're a complete idiot who can
barely eat without separate instructions and oversight.
As a disclaimer, I've never served in the military. However, I have had friends and family that have. For the most part what I've heard is that incoming drill instructors always assume that everyone comes in as a completel idiot who can barely eat without seperate instructions and oversight. This is in the current 'small but trained and well equipped professional army' of the US.
On the other hand, I do know that Israel has on e of the most effective armies in the world (withholding judgement on whether or not Israel is properly using their army). The biggest difference between the Israeli army and the US army is mandatory service.
Though, I'd love to hear some voices contrary to mine. Admittedly, I know very little about this topic.
I find it interesting that you would ask about a non-wartime draft.
While I am philosophically opposed to all war, I do see that war (at the present state of humanity) is inevitable. As such, it seems to me that a mandatory (akin to nations such as Israel) would do wonders for the nation.
If after high school, everyone would serve a two or three year term in one of the armed services, I'd be willing that we would see far less of the shortage of technical workers we see now. Not to mention that quite a larger segment of the population would see the importance of voting. Serving a tour of duty can (but necessarily will) instill a much better sense of civic duty.
As an alternative, what I think would really kick butt, is to send all non-violent criminal offenders to boot camp for varying lengths of military service.
Portions of NT Server are actually old MS Lan Server, which, IIRC did have chunks of OS/2 code in it. Big whoopee. I'm not privy to MS agreement with IBM so I can't tell you whether or not they have to legally pay royalties to use bits and pieces of a joint project in NT. Just because OS/2 was at one point a joint project does not mean that NT has to be encumbered if it includes any OS/2 code.
At least until NT 4.0, NT contained an OS/2 compatibility layer that undoubtedly contained portions of the OS/2 code base. Again, this means diddley-squat unless you know the actual agreement between IBM and MS.
More interesting is that many of the features that made OS/2 so popular with techies (such as the HPFS file system) were actually designed and coded by the code monkeys at Microsoft. Funny, no?
Also largely unknown is that at one point MS Office was ported to OS/2.
Lastly, given that MS has licensed so many different third party bits of code to pack into NT and W2K, why would it be any different to pay IBM for bits and pieces of OS/2 if that was the case?
Personally, I'm still holding out for IBM to bring the Workplace Shell to Linux. Perhaps with everyone and their brother jumping on the Gnome bandwagon it will start to happen.
Sure, there will be power users who desparately need every whiz-bang Office feature crammed in there in the last two versions.
But does Mom really need "improved table drawing","intelligent multilingual support", "collaborative sharing", or any of the other buzzwords on the MS Word
site? Does she really need to expend the time wading through all these features?
I will gladly concede that 80% of users only use %20 of the functionality in MS Office. The problem with transitioning away from Microsoft Office is that each user will use a slightly different 20%. Further, far from arcane seldom used features, many of the missing features are no really what I'd consider esoteric.
For example, Star Office 5.1 doesn't handle most formatting in headers and footers. I can't believe that the company I'm onsite at is the only one that has standard sets of documentation with the company logo in the header of almost all of their documents.
That's not the only feature missing, that I would consider to be needed for a non-MS office suite to catch on in the business place. I could be wrong, but my perception is that Windows and Office caught on at home because it caught on in the business world. People want to use at home what they use at work.
I don't know if a reverse-invasion can take place (at most corporations) where people want at work what they have at home. Too many places have standard software packages that are mandated for use for Mom to convince management to allow her to use her whiz-bang free software at work. Of course there are some exceptions to this.
As a collary of this notion, companies that have large numbers of technical documents in.rtf or.doc format will not switch software until a solution exists that reasonably converts the legacy documents. I've spoken to a former manager of the company I'm on site at about reccomending a switch to Star Office once Sun released it as 'free beer.' Her response is that the cost of converting legacy documents to a usable state with new software is too high. She was right. I looked at what Star Office presented some of these documents like and it was pretty ugly. And these weren't incredibly complicated documents.
The death of Open Source is inevitable. It will be caused by complexity and simple economics. In fact in the real world, outside the insular hive mind of Slashdot, it never
really lived. And if you anyone doesn't agree with that, explain how Sun could develop an Open Source Star Office without a thriving business based on proprietary
hardware.
I think you misunderstand the free software business model. Aside from the existence of many companies have managed to profit quite handsomely from various free and open source products and aside from the existence of many successful free software projects, you are asking the wrong questions.
What needs to be explained is not how Sun could develop an open source project on the magnitude of Star Office without other income. What needs to be explained is how open sourcing a product like Star Office is more beneficial to Sun than keeping the product proprietary.
For a hardware company like Sun (or IBM or SGI) certain types of software are necessary but unprofitable. IBM, Sun, and SGI do not make any money off of much of their flagship software (AIX, MVS, Solaris, IRIX, etc.). This flagship software is necessary to sell their hardware. The question one needs to asks is can these companies create better software at a lower cost by using the free software or open source software development models. These companies are already going to lose money on these products. That is simply not the issue.
An excellent example is that IBM is selling many more mainframes because Linux now runs on their S/390 machines. This is not conjecture. The ability for an ISP to run thousands of instances of Linux on one box is incredibly appealing. One S/390 costs less and takes up much less space than tens of thousands of rack mount Linux or NT boxes that would be needed to provide the same service. Like this article mentions:
instead of having a huge data center filled with up to 20,000 rack-mount servers, Metahost.net is refining its
applications to run on two S/390s, 17 terabytes of storage and 1,200 "pizza box" servers (so named for their size), all
fitting into a 500-square-foot facility. "That would be acres of space in traditional data centers with servers, air
conditioners and so on," says Rogers.
In the case of Star Office we have a slight difference. Sun's goal with a free office suite is not to sell hardware but to kill off an enemy's product that is both a cash cow (Microsoft Office) and the major means by which the enemy maintains its desktop monopoly. Maybe no one without the resources of Sun could afford to set free a product like Star Office. So what? It doesn't matter. What does matter is whether or not the freeing of Star Office will help or hinder Sun. Will the benfefits of freeing Star Office to Sun outweigh the cost of freeing Star Office to Sun? That is the only question that needs to be answered.
But if you want non-trivial free software success stories that were not started by companies with enourmous cash reserves, there are plenty:
The Gimp
Linux
Apache
Nethack
Emacs
And these are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head. I'm sure that there are many, many more non-trivial free software and open source software projects that were not started or driven by large corporations.
The free software revolution is upon us. I don't really care whether or not you join us because the only person you're hurting by not joining is yourself. While I and others will have the freedom to choose whatever products we want at no cost and with the freedom to change them to suit our needs, you will still be paying too much for a product you have little or no control over.
I found out the hard way that (1) you need admin priveledges on NT to remove the office assistants from MS Office once they've been installed and (2) I don't have admin privs on my workstation at work.
So I did some poking around and I noticed the.act files (or whatever extension they were) in the office assistant directory of MSOFFICE. So I deleted them.
I remember when Caldera first decided to open up the product formerly known as DR DOS. It turned out that in order to compile, a person needed something like 7 different commercial compilers, at least 4 of which were different assemblers. You'd thinkt that they could stick to one assembler! The worse part was that the whole thing was stuck inside some sort of in-house database source code control system. ugly! It took months and months to get the code into anything resembling a publishable state.
At 20 hours of compilation time, I wonder why they don't use a cross compiler on some insane mulit-cpu Sun box. That reminds me of when IBM used to refuse to compile OS/2 on the SMP enable version even though it cut down compile time from nine hours to forty-minutes.
Of course hopefully, a developer only needs to compile from scratch once and once the majority of object files are created only has to compile in changes to the current module.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, its fine to express disatisfaction when no one will listen and only a small group will hear. But if you want to make a statement that the whole school will hear, you aren't allowed to express your opinion in the means that you desire.
Its people like superintendent Davis that want to destroy freedom of speech.
No violence was involved. No insults were involved. Nothing libelous or slanderous was said. The kid made a statement by not saying anything and walking away and the school administration isn't mature enough to just deal with it. They feel the need to retaliate like spurned high school socialites.
have a day,
-l
It seems to me that George W. Bush has purposefully not-answered the question with a careful, purposefully deceptive response. Here is another analysis of Bush's views on minority religions from the context of the decision of the US Military to accept Wicca as a bona fide religion.
have a day,
-l
Would some one kindly explain what is so notorious about Presto Studios? I've never even heard of them.
have a day,
-l
I seem to recall seeing in print when 100 developers were added to the IE developer team. I bet the IE team for the Mac alone has more than the 50 people the Bill Gates of the Halloween III stated.
have a day,
-l
One place to read the debate is here.
The quote from Linus you are likely remembering is this:
However, Linus had some other points as well, like multi-threaded filesystems on a microkernel being a hack:
My perception is that Linus' view at the time of this exchange was that Microkernels have a theoretically superior design but monolithic kernels have a practically better design. I don't know if Linus' views on this has changed in the nine year interval since this debate.
have a day,
-l
In your interview with LinuxSecurity.com, you mention that Bastille has some great forthcoming architectural changes. What is the nature of these upcoming features?
have a day,
-l
Currently Bastille seems aimed at shutting off unneeded services, making sure services don't run as root, and updating known security holes. It seems to me that this is a very good start, but is really only half of the story. Does Bastille have any plans to start an audit of the Linux kernel and userland for vulnerabilities ala OpenBSD? It seems to me that making Linux "theoretically" secure requires such an audit. Do you agree or disagree?
have a day,
-l
These are not the only alternatives and it is fallacious to assert that the judgement of whether intellectual dishonesty is such a cut and dried choice between Kantzian ethics and viewing karma as a game.
If Th3 D0t had given a link to the original post, or at least some sort of indication that it was from another source, I doubt there would have been a backlash. Many people have cut and pasted posts from other web logs, articles, books, writings, etc. and have been modded up with no backlash. The difference is that these people have always attributed the quotation to the author and have not attempted to take credit for someone else's work.
Even in an 'open' discussion forum such as /. intellectual integrity is important.
Even if we evaluate what happened completely along your stated lines, the conclusion that allowing intellectual dishonesty into a discussion is a good thing is quite arguable.
have a day,
-l
This post by Th3 D0t appears to be a clear cut case of plagarism.
Over at k5, user kennedy made this exact same post.
Given that kennedy's k5 post is time stamped about an hour prior to Th3 D0t's /. post, it seems to me to be a clear case of plagarism. Consider moderating it accordingly.
have a day,
-l
It looks to me that you mis-interpreted the phrase "sources of Perl" as "sources written in Perl."
I think most people when encountering the phrase "sources of Perl" would interpret the statement as "sources of the Perl interpreter."
I suppose for pedantry's sake, I ought to have stated the latter.
have a day,
-l
I really ought not to feed the trolls ....
Is that so?
Let's me think. This past weekend I went to the symphony to see a rendition of one of Alexander Zemlinksky's works, had hot passionate sex with a woman, turned down on offer to go out to lunch to attend a birthday party and was suprised by two different friends paying unexpected visits (one Friday night, one Saturday night).
What does having or not having a social life have to do with replying to a post on /. late Monday morning?
If I am an idiot, at least I am an idiot that can compose a post that is coherent and displays an understanding of logic. Too bad the same can not be said for you.
Not unlike your uncouth use of capital letters to display emphasis in a web forum at the dawn of the 21st century.
have a day,
-l
The last I checked, CPUs were much, much cheaper than programmers. Given that virtually every study down on programmer productivity and programming paradigms has found a correlation between high level languages using paradigms such as OO and higher productivity, a cost/benefit analysis will result in a positive verdict for OO programming.
This is an accurate statement. I would certainly consider Perl to be be an extremely esoteric language. That said, if people are highly productive with it, what does it matter?
Someone seems to a have a very poor grasp of logic.
1. OOP is FU.
2. Perl is FU.
3. People who use Perl are crackheads and too stupid to use a proper language.
Your conclusion certainly does not result from your premises. The only person apparently on crack is the anonymous author of the reply to my post.
What Winston Churchill said of democracy in relation to other forms of government can be said of OOP in relation to other forms of programming paradigms. OOP is the worst programming paradigm, except for all of the other programming paradigms.
The bottom line is that thinking in OOP is typically easier than thinking in other paradigms. The result is that programmers can typically solve problems faster with OOP than with other languages.
But one of the beautiful things about Perl is that one does not have to use OOP. Perl can use just about any programming paradigm one desires.
Really? What about the word grok implies that I've had any computer courses.
For the record, I'm not an MCSE, nor have I ever even read the Hacker's Dictionary. I came across the word 'grok' when I read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land while in seventh grade. In the crowd I hung around with in high school, the word 'grok' was in everyday usage. This crowd only ended up producing two computer geeks out of about twenty people, so I don't really get how using 'grok' implies anything to do with computers.
Sure, I'll learn a real language, with the provision that you learn logic. Of course not everyone has the mental capacity to understand logic, so it might be a bit beyond you. Then again, you never know unless you try.
As for getting a life, I have one thank you. If I didn't, I couldn't have composed this reply could I? The non-living don't read /.
have a day,
-l
I've been using Perl for about three years and have loved every minute of it.
About six months ago I picked up Dr. Conway's Object Oriented Perl. Reading that book really took my understanding of Perl to a whole new level. Dr. Conway has a gift for truly grokking the heart of a matter and explaing it in a comprehensible manner. I've learned how to use Perl from the standard sources, the man pages, the FAQs, the camel and llama books. OOP taught me to understand Perl. I can not reccomend OOP highly enough for people that want to deeply understand Perl.
I really look forward to seeing what Dr. Conway will do with his year sabbatical to work on things Perl. He has a great mind.
On a tangent, I also think this is part of a growing wave of programming going in the right direction. Using public calls for money to put competent people to work on free software is a great way make free software a more intrical part of people's every day lives. It would be funny to look at sources of Perl or the Linux kernel and see:
/* the following code was made possible by a sponsorship from John Doe */
have a day,
-l
The venerable speak and spell was capable of uttering obscenities. The trick was to know the secret code, a string of about twenty key-presses that resulted in the unique sound of the F-word.
have a day,
-l
In this particular case, is there some qualitative difference between me borrowing my friend's power tools and the previous poster borrowing a friend's CAD/CAM software license that I am missing? Is a short time duration borrowing of a software license really pirating software?
have a day,
-l
The biggest part of the problem was that despite the /. crew posting links to four or five previous interviews with Gildred, nobody bothered to read the fscking interviews and kept asking the same questions that had already been answered more than a few times.
It didn't help that even the moderators didn't seem to have read the previous interviews and kept modding up questions that had not only been asked in the prior interviews, but were also repeats.
What I really want to know is how my question that only got modded up one measly point ended up being included when it has a rating of 3 which included the +1 Bonus.
have a day,
-l
Bzzt. Wrong answer.
Granted, S/390 is not the most popular hardware for ISP's, plenty use S/390. Here's an article about one.
Here's an article where ebay discsses the possibility of moving to the S/390 platform.
This article discusses how some government agencies are web-enabling their mainframes.
I'll grant that traditionally IBM mainframes can be a bear from the usability perspective. However, things are changing quite quickly, especially with the advent of Linux on the S/390.
have a day,
-l
The premis of the disguised circuit board (in the novel, I haven't seen the movie) was that the real circuit board would exist in some sort of field that would completely wipe the real circuitry if the device was opened improperly. The fake board consisted of circuitry that was already blown, leaving the opener of the device to find a blown board that the opener would apparently assume was the real board that self destructed in the opening of the device.
A bit more clever than the original poster suggested, but still prone to getting hacked. In the book they just installed a hidden camera to watch the alien build the magic black box. In real life, I'd imagine there would be all sorts of non-intrusive scans that could find the "hidden" board.
have a day,
-l
Thanks for the input. It is good to get insight from a place that has mandatory enlistment. I do think you have some misconceptions about the US military.
As a disclaimer, I've never served in the military. However, I have had friends and family that have. For the most part what I've heard is that incoming drill instructors always assume that everyone comes in as a completel idiot who can barely eat without seperate instructions and oversight. This is in the current 'small but trained and well equipped professional army' of the US.
On the other hand, I do know that Israel has on e of the most effective armies in the world (withholding judgement on whether or not Israel is properly using their army). The biggest difference between the Israeli army and the US army is mandatory service.
Though, I'd love to hear some voices contrary to mine. Admittedly, I know very little about this topic.
have a day,
-l
I find it interesting that you would ask about a non-wartime draft.
While I am philosophically opposed to all war, I do see that war (at the present state of humanity) is inevitable. As such, it seems to me that a mandatory (akin to nations such as Israel) would do wonders for the nation.
If after high school, everyone would serve a two or three year term in one of the armed services, I'd be willing that we would see far less of the shortage of technical workers we see now. Not to mention that quite a larger segment of the population would see the importance of voting. Serving a tour of duty can (but necessarily will) instill a much better sense of civic duty.
As an alternative, what I think would really kick butt, is to send all non-violent criminal offenders to boot camp for varying lengths of military service.
have a day,
-l
Portions of NT Server are actually old MS Lan Server, which, IIRC did have chunks of OS/2 code in it. Big whoopee. I'm not privy to MS agreement with IBM so I can't tell you whether or not they have to legally pay royalties to use bits and pieces of a joint project in NT. Just because OS/2 was at one point a joint project does not mean that NT has to be encumbered if it includes any OS/2 code.
At least until NT 4.0, NT contained an OS/2 compatibility layer that undoubtedly contained portions of the OS/2 code base. Again, this means diddley-squat unless you know the actual agreement between IBM and MS.
More interesting is that many of the features that made OS/2 so popular with techies (such as the HPFS file system) were actually designed and coded by the code monkeys at Microsoft. Funny, no?
Also largely unknown is that at one point MS Office was ported to OS/2.
Lastly, given that MS has licensed so many different third party bits of code to pack into NT and W2K, why would it be any different to pay IBM for bits and pieces of OS/2 if that was the case?
Personally, I'm still holding out for IBM to bring the Workplace Shell to Linux. Perhaps with everyone and their brother jumping on the Gnome bandwagon it will start to happen.
have a day,
-l
I will gladly concede that 80% of users only use %20 of the functionality in MS Office. The problem with transitioning away from Microsoft Office is that each user will use a slightly different 20%. Further, far from arcane seldom used features, many of the missing features are no really what I'd consider esoteric.
For example, Star Office 5.1 doesn't handle most formatting in headers and footers. I can't believe that the company I'm onsite at is the only one that has standard sets of documentation with the company logo in the header of almost all of their documents.
That's not the only feature missing, that I would consider to be needed for a non-MS office suite to catch on in the business place. I could be wrong, but my perception is that Windows and Office caught on at home because it caught on in the business world. People want to use at home what they use at work.
I don't know if a reverse-invasion can take place (at most corporations) where people want at work what they have at home. Too many places have standard software packages that are mandated for use for Mom to convince management to allow her to use her whiz-bang free software at work. Of course there are some exceptions to this.
As a collary of this notion, companies that have large numbers of technical documents in .rtf or .doc format will not switch software until a solution exists that reasonably converts the legacy documents. I've spoken to a former manager of the company I'm on site at about reccomending a switch to Star Office once Sun released it as 'free beer.' Her response is that the cost of converting legacy documents to a usable state with new software is too high. She was right. I looked at what Star Office presented some of these documents like and it was pretty ugly. And these weren't incredibly complicated documents.
have a day,
-l
I think you misunderstand the free software business model. Aside from the existence of many companies have managed to profit quite handsomely from various free and open source products and aside from the existence of many successful free software projects, you are asking the wrong questions.
What needs to be explained is not how Sun could develop an open source project on the magnitude of Star Office without other income. What needs to be explained is how open sourcing a product like Star Office is more beneficial to Sun than keeping the product proprietary.
For a hardware company like Sun (or IBM or SGI) certain types of software are necessary but unprofitable. IBM, Sun, and SGI do not make any money off of much of their flagship software (AIX, MVS, Solaris, IRIX, etc.). This flagship software is necessary to sell their hardware. The question one needs to asks is can these companies create better software at a lower cost by using the free software or open source software development models. These companies are already going to lose money on these products. That is simply not the issue.
An excellent example is that IBM is selling many more mainframes because Linux now runs on their S/390 machines. This is not conjecture. The ability for an ISP to run thousands of instances of Linux on one box is incredibly appealing. One S/390 costs less and takes up much less space than tens of thousands of rack mount Linux or NT boxes that would be needed to provide the same service. Like this article mentions:
In the case of Star Office we have a slight difference. Sun's goal with a free office suite is not to sell hardware but to kill off an enemy's product that is both a cash cow (Microsoft Office) and the major means by which the enemy maintains its desktop monopoly. Maybe no one without the resources of Sun could afford to set free a product like Star Office. So what? It doesn't matter. What does matter is whether or not the freeing of Star Office will help or hinder Sun. Will the benfefits of freeing Star Office to Sun outweigh the cost of freeing Star Office to Sun? That is the only question that needs to be answered.
But if you want non-trivial free software success stories that were not started by companies with enourmous cash reserves, there are plenty:
And these are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head. I'm sure that there are many, many more non-trivial free software and open source software projects that were not started or driven by large corporations.
The free software revolution is upon us. I don't really care whether or not you join us because the only person you're hurting by not joining is yourself. While I and others will have the freedom to choose whatever products we want at no cost and with the freedom to change them to suit our needs, you will still be paying too much for a product you have little or no control over.
have a day,
-l
I found out the hard way that (1) you need admin priveledges on NT to remove the office assistants from MS Office once they've been installed and (2) I don't have admin privs on my workstation at work.
So I did some poking around and I noticed the .act files (or whatever extension they were) in the office assistant directory of MSOFFICE. So I deleted them.
No more Clippy.
Ever.
have a day,
-l
I remember when Caldera first decided to open up the product formerly known as DR DOS. It turned out that in order to compile, a person needed something like 7 different commercial compilers, at least 4 of which were different assemblers. You'd thinkt that they could stick to one assembler! The worse part was that the whole thing was stuck inside some sort of in-house database source code control system. ugly! It took months and months to get the code into anything resembling a publishable state.
At 20 hours of compilation time, I wonder why they don't use a cross compiler on some insane mulit-cpu Sun box. That reminds me of when IBM used to refuse to compile OS/2 on the SMP enable version even though it cut down compile time from nine hours to forty-minutes.
Of course hopefully, a developer only needs to compile from scratch once and once the majority of object files are created only has to compile in changes to the current module.
have a day,
-l