We already have enough leftwing liberals in politics.
Let's leave aside your Bruce-confusion, and get into a totally off-topic discussion about american politics. I mean, damn, finally someone who recognizes Geo. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld,
et al. as the left wing commie pinkos that they are.
Seriously, though, you need to broaden your perspective a little bit if you find the current
politicians (Democrats most emphatically included) in the US (and I can only assume from
the rest of your comment that you are a USAan)
left wing.
Actually I agree with your general point about groupthink, but I wish you would choose someone more credible than Daniel Lyons (Forbes) to support your post. Mr. Lyons is as guilty of "reinforcing each other's narrow world views" as the worst slashbot.
Yes, I read the article you quote.
Re:Spam by Any Other name will not sound so Odius
on
The Life of a Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course the economics are tempting, because
it is theft.
The central issue is not whether endusers are annoyed by spam; there are mostly effective technical solutions.
The difference between advertising and spam could not be more startling:
advertising makes free tv (for what its worth possible); on the other hand, spam increases the cost of internet service.
I don't understand why you want to leave gcc off.
It's not like there is a little clippy jumping
out at you and asking you if you would like to
compile a C program instead of run the word processor you just clicked. Is it just a disk space
issue for fitting things on a live CD?
This is only a personal example that culled any interest in continuing a life of professional programming after being subjected to a couple years of zero-worth coding assignments.
Heh. I didn't want to suggest computer science
education was perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But the sugggestion that there
is a disconnect between academe and practice is
much less surprising to me than the idea that
university CS departments are actively supporting the software monoculture (I guess hackus clarified that he meant they are in danger of doing so).
My previous post was only to claim that
people with Ph.D.s in computer science (Full disclosure: I am one, so that probably biases my view) are much more likely to be scheme teaching maniacs than Microsoft promoters.
I guess both extremes of behaviour probably
exist. To be honest though, for a lot of CS Faculty, these slashdot-hot-button-issues are just not central to their professional lives. People
are focussed on doing their research (the balance
between teaching and research is _another_ debate) , and most software development/system managment
issues are just not publishable research.
It seems a little strange to blame the Universities for the state of software (business I don't know about. MBA's aren't real degrees anyway:-)
Exhibit 1. You do realize that a substantial
portion of open source software development is
supported by Universities? Off hand I can think of, oh, BSD, exim directly, and many other projects where the Universities are partners.
Exhibit 2. Do you know people with a Ph.D. in
computer science? They are not on the front lines
of marketing or programming for Microsoft (or anyone else for the most part). Heck,
half of them refuse/can't to program as a matter of principle. At Microsoft they are mostly
kept out of harm's way at MS Research as far
as I can tell.
Anyway, obviously your university experience
has been different than mine.
I think the interesting question is how corporate culture continually tries to infiltrate/control
universities. But I don't think Microsoft's failings (or, to be fair, its strengths) can be
attributed to Universities that the Bill dropped out of and now likes to drop money on.
Of course, university administrations try to be
friendly to anyone with lots of money, but in my
view (from the inside) there is lots of resistence
left in the rank and file.
I disagree that you should keep elements similar. You should use what is readily available for purchase in the marketplace. Nobody compiles performance sensitive code with gcc on an x86, they either use Microsoft's compiler or Intel's compiler which have several hundred man-years of engineering put into making efficient x86 code.
Well, I agree that the issue of whose CPU is
faster is boring. After all, I buy computers to
do things. And on my alphas (We're not dead yet!)
I use the compaq C compiler, because it gets
upto 25% faster on my (integer) applications.
But I do think gcc specmarks are interesting,
because if I am buying a one off box in
research land, then I realistically have to
price in the cost of Intel's compiler, and
put up with all the bullshit of using a
closed source compiler (no politics here, it is
just a matter of convenience).
So I don't disagree that Apple's marketing people are, err, marketing people, I do
think the numbers are interesting for people like me.
In the opteron case, I have this vague memory
intel compiler will work on the host, you
might need two computers!
I also agree with those of you who are
about to say that people like me who want
a 64 bit box to crunch numbers are probably
the target market apple is trying to impress.
Now hot grits, I know that was a joke, but
seriously, what can one get in a 2 processor
opteron system for USD 3K? One place
a checked wanted about $750 for each Opteron 242.
That does not leave much of a budget left.
Before people jump on me about comparing a
Linux server to a Mac, this is really what I want
to buy, a cheap (err, relatively speaking) 64bit
box with at least 6G of memory. If it has to
come with pretty box and a religon (well,
true in both cases I suppose).
The opterons are a bit faster, at least at the
top end, but the 970s seem ok. And the Macs are
much easier to buy for a University (as in one
phone call, compared to chasing down 3 quotes and
filling out extra paperwork).
So here is a partial answer to my own question.
Looking at one vendor (www.einux.com)
then a server with twin opteron 240 (1.4GHz, right?) and 512M memory (for comparison),
120 G disk, prices out at $2500 w/o OS.
So the extra $500 is not so bad considering
what you get.
My back of the envelope calculations
suggest the fastest 970 (2GHz) is about the same speed as the slowest opteron (that I quoted above). Namely, take the Linux gcc specint 2000
1045. Scale down by 0.77 to get a number for 1.4 GHz of 811.
Then of course you have to spend about the same amount on RAM. Sigh.
Want a faster BIOS? Perhaps you want
LinuxBIOS
From the link
It does a minimal amount of hardware initialization before jumping to the kernel start and lets Linux do the rest. As a result, it is much faster (current record 3 seconds)
I'll quote my friend who still works there when I asked him about how he felt about/. persecution since the lawsuit: "Well, there's deffinately no love lost between SCO and the OS community. Things are no different now than they were before the lawsuit."
Your friend is an optimist. On my side, before the
lawsuit I had no opinion on Caldera. I wasn't in their target market I suppose since I use FreeBSD and Debian. The occasional story about Caldera on
Slashdot would be mildly interesting, but
made no lasting impression.
But, now, congratulations you (Caldera) got
my attention. And you are never getting any of
my money. Over the last 3 years that amounts
to a budget of USD100000. Most of that is
on hardware, but yes FreeBSD and (now that
I started use it) Debian benefit.
Maybe I wouldn't have bought anything from
you anyway. But I wouldn't have devoted effort
to making sure nobody I knew did either.
You can bet that if they do prevail, they are going to make you suffer as MUCH AS THEY CAN with no remorse, since you all have had no remorse for them in the past.
No remorse? We were just ignoring you (Caldera)
before. Now we are pissed off.
Apparently amoung the evidence presented by Caldera/SCO
is that there are comments allegedly copied from
SysV to Linux.
Well, for those of you who believe analysts, that
pretty much settles it. Mind you, you probably
lost all your money on Telecom stocks, so SCO is
unlikely to sue you anyway:-)
I'm confused about this bloat issue. I can sit down at my kde desktop....which loads quickly (athlon 1.4ghz, 256 megs RAM)
Well, right off you don't sound like you are in
the market for minimalist anything. But in some
cases, typically outside of the (first-world) home, upgrading is not an option.
I DON'T have to memorize keystrokes or use the keyboard for things when the mouse would suffice
Fine. Swell. The KDE gang thanks you for your
support. Different strokes for different folks,
as it were.
There are also a bunch (well, me and one
other guy I know, anyway)
of us who prefer use the keyboard, and whose
main use for a window manager is to start a
terminal or 4. In this case, it is more
important that the window manager not
interfere with the applications (OK, really
just emacs and phoenix).
The clarification I read from Novell is that
the 95% figure is only for an existing set
of contracts at the time of the deal with
SCO. So the gist of the article was that
this was not as much of a smoking gun
as Slashdot (or Bruce Perens) thought.
Note that this is not making any claim about
who owns the copyrights to the Unix code, just
what the SCO 10k statement means.
Think about that the next time you Bittorrrent the latest release of Redhat instead of purchasing it. What would you do if they decided to switch over to Microsoft? You'd all be screwed then.
Err. Does not compute. Other people have
pointed out (once again!) that one company
is not going to make or break Linux. But really,
the idea of Red Hat switching to linux makes
to little sense as to not even deserve a response.
Err, yeah, I'm ignoring you. So there.
Coda [cmu.edu] seems promising, but I've never found a distro that actually supports it, and there's a fair amount of manual stuff you have to do to use it. I've never managed to get it working properly, but from what I understand, it's somewhat similar to CVS in that you have to update/commit. This has the advantage of working when disconnected.
Or, you could just use CVS over SSH like I do.
This has its pluses and minuses.
On the good side, it is low tech and robust.
It requires no root level support on either end
(assuming all your machines are SSH accessible).
If I screw up and modify things in two different
places, then CVS is happy to merge them.
It works on dialup.
On the the other hand, it requires I manually
synch things. Once in a blue moon, I put this
off till the next morning, then forget.
Also, it does not deal well with binary files.
For me, this is not an issue, but I can
easily imagine people who care about things
other than Perl, C, and TeX.
It requires network access. I have talked to
someone who uses a CF card as a portable
CVS repository to get around this problem.
TMDA (www.tmda.net) is pretty similar in spirit to ASK. But I actually use TMDA, so talk about it.
These problems can be solved by the
use of tagged addresses, supported by sendmail,
exim, qmail etc.
Basically you give your address as genius+dated+E7ABC@foo.com (instead of genius@foo.com), and tmda
passes it on to you automatically until it times
out (typically in a week).
Is it a bit of a hassle? Yeah.
Does it beat 100 spam messages a day? Also Yeah.
The technical hassle could be overcome by
yet another mozilla hack to generate addresses
on the fly much like my mail and news clients
already do.
What is an object? Behavior and data tied together. If they are inextricably related (like the red-black tree algorithm and the colorable tree nodes), work on them together, rather than trying to create artificial separations between them. That's just good software engineering.
I think this is the essence of where we agree
and disagree. Immersing people in OOP from
the beginning is a good way to create software
engineers, but...
At Brown, it was a success, and led to algorithms textbooks written from an OOP perspective (written by faculty members that were originally some of the strongest critics of the OOP approach to the curriculum).
If these are the same algorithms textbooks by
Brown authors that I am thinking of,
(Data Structures in Java?), then they
precisely exemplify what I think is wrong with
this method of teaching. They take Binary Search
Trees and bury them beneath something like
six pages of classes.
No doubt the result is "industrial strength",
but it takes some kind of archeology to extract
the key ideas.
The real problem was retraining the faculty. Even though they knew OOP was a good thing, it took them a while before they had internalized OOP enough to present, e.g., algorithms and data structures in an object-oriented style. No one believed that you could teach inheritance and polymorphism before you taught loops, conditionals, and arithmetic.
Of course you can teach polymorphism first. I'm just not (yet) convinced it is a good idea.
The problem is that algorithms are all about loops, conditionals, and arithmetic. The other stuff is completely orthogonal. You might not agree about which is more important, but it turns out that students really lack basic algorithmic thinking when they are immersed in OO first. The theory people think they don't understand algorithms. The systems people think they don't understand computers.
I think OOPS is good, useful stuff. I'm not sure if it is how people should start.
..but these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives.
Yikes. Are you saying that listing to telemarketers
is a tax to support the down and out? Or a charity?
Thanks, but I already pay plenty of taxes
for just that purpose (but I'm not a USAan).
OTOH, a charity is something you choose to give to; otherwise it just being mugged in some minor
way.
They also leave a nice looking, refreshing bottle of Evian spring water in your room, with a little tag on it saying "drink me and pay $4.50".. fortunately the tap water was drinkable. I did not appreciate being teased. Also, although they gave me tasty little chocolates in the first room, I did not get another two tasty little chocolates when they moved me to the second room.
Oh the agony! No tasty chocolates in the second
room!
Seriously though, complaining about the bottled
water is like complaining about the prices
in the mini-bar. Hotels are like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, you need to broaden your perspective a little bit if you find the current politicians (Democrats most emphatically included) in the US (and I can only assume from the rest of your comment that you are a USAan) left wing.
Actually I agree with your general point about
groupthink, but I wish you would choose someone
more credible than Daniel Lyons (Forbes) to
support your post. Mr. Lyons is as guilty of
"reinforcing each other's narrow world views"
as the worst slashbot.
Yes, I read the article you quote.
The central issue is not whether endusers are annoyed by spam; there are mostly effective technical solutions.
The difference between advertising and spam could not be more startling: advertising makes free tv (for what its worth possible); on the other hand, spam increases the cost of internet service.
I don't understand why you want to leave gcc off. It's not like there is a little clippy jumping out at you and asking you if you would like to compile a C program instead of run the word processor you just clicked. Is it just a disk space issue for fitting things on a live CD?
Heh. I didn't want to suggest computer science education was perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But the sugggestion that there is a disconnect between academe and practice is much less surprising to me than the idea that university CS departments are actively supporting the software monoculture (I guess hackus clarified that he meant they are in danger of doing so).
My previous post was only to claim that people with Ph.D.s in computer science (Full disclosure: I am one, so that probably biases my view) are much more likely to be scheme teaching maniacs than Microsoft promoters.
I guess both extremes of behaviour probably exist. To be honest though, for a lot of CS Faculty, these slashdot-hot-button-issues are just not central to their professional lives. People are focussed on doing their research (the balance between teaching and research is _another_ debate) , and most software development/system managment issues are just not publishable research.
It seems a little strange to blame the Universities for the state of software (business I don't know about. MBA's aren't real degrees anyway :-)
Exhibit 1. You do realize that a substantial portion of open source software development is supported by Universities? Off hand I can think of, oh, BSD, exim directly, and many other projects where the Universities are partners.
Exhibit 2. Do you know people with a Ph.D. in computer science? They are not on the front lines of marketing or programming for Microsoft (or anyone else for the most part). Heck, half of them refuse/can't to program as a matter of principle. At Microsoft they are mostly kept out of harm's way at MS Research as far as I can tell.
Anyway, obviously your university experience has been different than mine.
I think the interesting question is how corporate culture continually tries to infiltrate/control universities. But I don't think Microsoft's failings (or, to be fair, its strengths) can be attributed to Universities that the Bill dropped out of and now likes to drop money on.
Of course, university administrations try to be friendly to anyone with lots of money, but in my view (from the inside) there is lots of resistence left in the rank and file.
Well, I agree that the issue of whose CPU is faster is boring. After all, I buy computers to do things. And on my alphas (We're not dead yet!) I use the compaq C compiler, because it gets upto 25% faster on my (integer) applications.
But I do think gcc specmarks are interesting, because if I am buying a one off box in research land, then I realistically have to price in the cost of Intel's compiler, and put up with all the bullshit of using a closed source compiler (no politics here, it is just a matter of convenience).
So I don't disagree that Apple's marketing people are, err, marketing people, I do think the numbers are interesting for people like me.
In the opteron case, I have this vague memory intel compiler will work on the host, you might need two computers!
I also agree with those of you who are about to say that people like me who want a 64 bit box to crunch numbers are probably the target market apple is trying to impress.
Now hot grits, I know that was a joke, but seriously, what can one get in a 2 processor opteron system for USD 3K? One place a checked wanted about $750 for each Opteron 242. That does not leave much of a budget left.
Before people jump on me about comparing a Linux server to a Mac, this is really what I want to buy, a cheap (err, relatively speaking) 64bit box with at least 6G of memory. If it has to come with pretty box and a religon (well, true in both cases I suppose).
The opterons are a bit faster, at least at the top end, but the 970s seem ok. And the Macs are much easier to buy for a University (as in one phone call, compared to chasing down 3 quotes and filling out extra paperwork).
So here is a partial answer to my own question. Looking at one vendor (www.einux.com) then a server with twin opteron 240 (1.4GHz, right?) and 512M memory (for comparison), 120 G disk, prices out at $2500 w/o OS. So the extra $500 is not so bad considering what you get.
My back of the envelope calculations suggest the fastest 970 (2GHz) is about the same speed as the slowest opteron (that I quoted above). Namely, take the Linux gcc specint 2000 1045. Scale down by 0.77 to get a number for 1.4 GHz of 811.
Then of course you have to spend about the same amount on RAM. Sigh.
Your friend is an optimist. On my side, before the lawsuit I had no opinion on Caldera. I wasn't in their target market I suppose since I use FreeBSD and Debian. The occasional story about Caldera on Slashdot would be mildly interesting, but made no lasting impression.
But, now, congratulations you (Caldera) got my attention. And you are never getting any of my money. Over the last 3 years that amounts to a budget of USD100000. Most of that is on hardware, but yes FreeBSD and (now that I started use it) Debian benefit.
Maybe I wouldn't have bought anything from you anyway. But I wouldn't have devoted effort to making sure nobody I knew did either.
No remorse? We were just ignoring you (Caldera) before. Now we are pissed off.Apparently amoung the evidence presented by Caldera/SCO is that there are comments allegedly copied from SysV to Linux.
Well, for those of you who believe analysts, that pretty much settles it. Mind you, you probably lost all your money on Telecom stocks, so SCO is unlikely to sue you anyway :-)
Well, right off you don't sound like you are in the market for minimalist anything. But in some cases, typically outside of the (first-world) home, upgrading is not an option.
Fine. Swell. The KDE gang thanks you for your support. Different strokes for different folks, as it were.There are also a bunch (well, me and one other guy I know, anyway) of us who prefer use the keyboard, and whose main use for a window manager is to start a terminal or 4. In this case, it is more important that the window manager not interfere with the applications (OK, really just emacs and phoenix).
Here is the link to the article I mentioned, for the google-challenged.
Note that this is not making any claim about who owns the copyrights to the Unix code, just what the SCO 10k statement means.
I saw opteron 242 processors on www.ncix.com
(a canadian company) for about euro 290 for
the retail box.
(For you norteamericanos, that is CAD 468)
TMDA (www.tmda.net) is pretty similar in spirit to ASK. But I actually use TMDA, so talk about it.
These problems can be solved by the use of tagged addresses, supported by sendmail, exim, qmail etc.
Basically you give your address as genius+dated+E7ABC@foo.com (instead of genius@foo.com), and tmda passes it on to you automatically until it times out (typically in a week).
Is it a bit of a hassle? Yeah.
Does it beat 100 spam messages a day? Also Yeah.
The technical hassle could be overcome by yet another mozilla hack to generate addresses on the fly much like my mail and news clients already do.
So I suppose it depends on your priorities.
That looks a lot like an accusation of
copyright infringment. Hmm. I wonder if that
statement is in itself actionable.
the complaint and some exhibits ( A B C D E can be found on SCO web site
There is a press release on the same page, in case you wondered who writes the ZDNet articlesYikes. Are you saying that listing to telemarketers is a tax to support the down and out? Or a charity?
Thanks, but I already pay plenty of taxes for just that purpose (but I'm not a USAan). OTOH, a charity is something you choose to give to; otherwise it just being mugged in some minor way.
Seriously though, complaining about the bottled water is like complaining about the prices in the mini-bar. Hotels are like that.