First, let me say that this is a far, far better science fiction adaptation than I expect from Hollywood.
Now, let me start with the down points (a littl more refined a list than I put in yesterday's story):
Casting was ok to horrible. Hurt is a good actor, but should never have been made to play Leto. The guy playing Paul was good (see below), but the Barron was just not imposing enough.
Paul was written all wrong. Read the book and pay attention to the turmoil that Paul's going through. He senses his destiny, but can't put his finger on it. He's moody, but he's also a brilliant leader by nature. Not much of this comes through in the character in this miniseries.
There are some thing I would liked to have seen, but most of it is secondary to those points.
On the good side I point to everything that I liked about the book. The fremen are still a mystery at this point in the story, but I love the whole guild idea and the machinations between house Attradies and the rest of the empire. Jessica is weakened slightly in this telling, but I still love her character.
Feyd is well done, here. A real mad wolf the way he comes across in the book. Can't wait to see how they handle the final fight.
Some odd choices were made. Paul voicing lines that were his father's in the book (about how to deal with the smugglers). The princess showing up early and playing nice with Paul. Some of it, I'm sure, was because he felt that the audience couldn't keep up with the story, given how much he had to cut out, but I'm not sure I like the changes.
There's still some questions that I have. Without doing the David Lynch style voice-overs, how do they intend to handle the water of life? For that matter, what about the confrontation with the emperor at the end where about 50% of what's going on is in Paul's head? That could be handled very badly, but we'll see.
So far so good. I'm actually excited to see what this guy does with the rest of the series.
Casting: Hurt's too soft, Gurney's too nice and The Barron can't deliver the lines strongly enough.
Writing: They just don't get Maud Dib. He's supposed to be riding a river of internal turmoil over the destiny he can sense. He's supposed to be one of the best natural leaders ever born with the training of a Bene Geserit. What do we get? A boy who is a passable dukes son. Oops.
Skipping neccessary parts. We need to know who Yueh is before he's revealed as a traitor. One quick flash of a knife and an off-hand mention of his Suk training is not enough. We probably needed a bit more form the Reverend Mother.
Ok, that's it for the bad. I liked this movie. Here's why:
Paul is well played, even if poorly written.
The Barron is well written if poorly played.
The attention to detail from the book is very good for a movie.
The film stands well on it's own if you have not read the book (I think).
the more OO the language, the slower it runs and the more memory it takes up.
This is untrue, of course. The question is: how do you define "OO language". That's really hard, and I don't think anyone has answered it well (smalltalk was a great attempt and even C++ and Java have added a few good thoughts, but no one has really achived consensus).
Now, if we're talking about what constitutes object oriented programming I'll buy that there's a definition, but OO programming need not slow your program (see Gtk+, which is very fast and very OO, but not in an OO language).
An OO language need not be inefficient, but modern language design favors highly inefficient constructs (e.g. garbage collection) to efficient alternatives that are less flexible (e.g. simple reference counting).
C++, for example, was an OO language beforeRTTI was added. RTTI just made it higher level.
I don't think that OO programming is well suited to a great many tasks. Functional programming, IMHO, should be the default. However, some tasks are much easier and cleaner when an OO model is used.
Choose the right tool for the task.
If you want fast small programs, use assembler. It'll take you a week to write Hello World but it'll only take a single clock cycles to run.
For starters, I can't imagine an implimentation of Hello World that would take a single clock cycle to run. What did you have in mind?
I was trying to keep this from being a personal in-fight, and keep it to specifics of code-sharing.
And, hate to say this, but 'outsiders' see bad blood between YOU and Charles.
Keep in mind that Mycroft (and no, he's not the only one I've spoken to) is not the only person who can get hot under the collar, though he is good at it. He and I have had our share of good-natured shout-fests.
And people like AJS need to remember that just because 2
highly technical people do not like one another, that doesn't mean they won't share.
Oh, on the contrary, I have tremendous faith in the idea that even people who dispise eachother can share huge amounts of excellent code (read some of the comments in the Emacs elisp sources). I want to provoke the kind of discussion that will help people see that BSD is BSD. Yeah, your VM might work better than mine, but my paging strategy might be worth integrating into what you've got. No one solution is 100% correct, IMHO.
I totally agree with your suggestions (I really have to wonder who this is), but keep in mind that I wasn't saying the factions are at eachother's throats, just that they could share more. I'd love for there to be more cooperation, not just between Net and FreeBSD, but between the BSDs and Linux and every other open source / free software / source code enabled OS out there. Hell, I want to live in a world where OSes like BSD and Linux are so much better than the for-pay OSes that companies like Sun are shamed into throwing out things like Solaris! Wouldn't that be something.... If I'm wrong, and the BSDs are already sharing code to the extent that it makes sense, then I appologize to everyone involved. Either way, I think this is a good place for me to politely bow out of this thread. Good luck all!
no GPL advocate has ever demonstrated that relicensing has had a negative effect on BSD code.
You are right, of course. It's irrelevant, but you're right. No BSD license advocate has ever demonstrated that the GPL makes cookies.
Depending on your purposes, the GPL is a damn fine license. Unfortunately, most people
who advocate the GPL advocate split the world down the middle between the dark side
and the light side.
Yes to the first point (as is the BSD license). Yes to the second point, but with a proviso: most people who support the BSD license or the GPL have not read either fully.... I have read both. I am not most people, and I think that you need to go back and look at the original statement.
The BSD license allows for closed licensing around the licensed code. Releasing something under the BSD license is tacitly approving of such a thing. I'm not saying that's bad, nor, I think, did the original poster. It's just that you do accept that, and you have to in turn accept the concequences. That is, you will have to accept the fact that Microsoft is going to use your code and never contribute back. You have to accept that if Corel decides to make a product out of your code and it flops, you'll likely never see their changes (unlike what happened with Debian and XFree86).
The GPL is a tool that accomplishes a set of goals. The BSD license is a tool that accomplishes a very different, but related set of goals. When you're choosing, you should decide which set of goals you want to achive and choose your license accordingly.
The folks I spoke with at The Bazaar were members of the core development teams for both OSes. If they want to speak out, I'm happy to let them, but here are some quotes as best as I can recall:
"[the person doing the VM work for FreeBSD] is very resistant to the NetBSD code. He has gone off on his own and tried to come up with another way to do it." When I asked why, they said that he didn't want to take code from NetBSD because of creative differences between them on other topics.
"OpenBSD is not more secure and FreeBSD is not faster on the X86 than NetBSD, but they keep lying."
Mind you, I also heard a lot of things like the FreeBSD folks saying that the NetBSD work is really good and they'd like to have more time to integrate some of it. It seems like there's just a few "my camp is better than your camp" folks in each camp.
On the Linux side, we see the same thing. I can't count the number of times that I've heard some RedHat supporter putting down Debian or visa versa with no real reason. There are many core people who can't be bothered with animosity, but a few make it hard to have that air of cooperation shine through.
Personally, I was looking forward to the effort to put the BSD kernel under Debian's distribution to see how that would affect the various wars. I wanted to see everyone suddenly come to the realization that it's all Open Source and it's all good all the time (to quote a popular TV series).
I've spoken with people in the core of both the NetBSD and FreeBSD efforts (never had a chance to chat with OpenBSD folks). When I asked if there was a chance of merging the efforts and bringing the advantages of each into a single OS, I was sort of laughed at. Basically, the response was: there's way too much bad blood between us, and many of the core developers will spend weeks or months working on solutions to problems rather than even incorporate the idea that solved the problem in the other OS (e.g. the VM advances made in NetBSD vs. the VM work being done about a year ago in FreeBSD).
This is a sad state of affairs, and hurts BSD a lot.
the BSD'ers have no problems with restrictive liscences.
Ha ha! This is a good one! Please feel free to explain exactly how the BSD license is
restrictive. Which you probably won't, because that is a pretty baseless claim if I ever
saw one.
It's amazing how no one on the BSD side ever gets this argument. The comment wasn't that the BSD license was restrictive, but that the BSD people have no problem with restrictive licenses. Licenses like the GPL are, at their heart saying, "you can do anything except re-license this code." BSD license advocates take exception to not being able to re-license. This implicitly gives a nod of acceptance to restrictive licenses (e.g. Microsoft's NT license on code that comes from BSD's networking).
I'm not taking sides here. I develop GPLed code because I have always done so (since the late 80s), but have never really disliked the BSD license. I do, however, acknowledge that accepting the BSD license is accepting restrictive re-licensing.
On the point of using BSD because it's not trendy, I have to agree with the original poster. Most BSD users that I know use it for that reason. Perhaps there are a sacred few that use BSD for technical reasons, but I know a lot of counter-examples. Some use it because the lack of popularity means that less security exploits will be targeted for it. Some use it because they simply cannot bear to use what the majority of the PC-UNIX subculture consider cool.
I don't understand all this fuss over retraining tamed employees. Why are we taming them in the first place? Doesn't anyone else think this is a dubious use of psychoactive drugs?
And one more thing. There's the question of retraining at all. If you hire these people to do what they're good at, why not let them keep doing it? You're throwing away years of...
First, Linux is not the only system which GNOME and KDE target.
Second, I disagree that there needs to be one API at the desktop level right now. The right way to go, IMHO, is the same way that graphics went in the 80s. Let the competing standards prove themselves, and then when one is clearly THE choice, port everyone else's applications to it. This is what happened to X, News, Domain, etc. X won and slowly everything was moved over. GNOME really already won, in my opinion because of the choice of going with C. C++ just doesn't let you play nice in the sandbox with everyone else's pet language. But, if KDE wins out in the long-run, I'll port my Gimp plugins over to Qt someday.
As for having one API now by having the KDE and GNOME folks work together, I just don't see how. There's just so little similarity between how the two groups work. For example, Qt and Gtk+ have a totally different event structure.
There was some work in that direction, and this was where some of the Window manager cooperation came from. But, beyond those basic steps, anything else would require one project to step down as the primary creative force deciding how a desktop works, and that just won't happen anytime too soon.
"To establish KDE as a desktop standard for PCs, workstations, and mobile devices,
to promote software development for KDE and to promote the use of KDE by
enterprises and individuals."
The goals of the GNOME Foundation according to foundation.gnome.org:
the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME and determine which projects
are part of GNOME. The Foundation will act as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a
means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested
in GNOME software. The foundation may produce educational materials and documentation to help the
public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical conferences,
represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, help create technical standards for the
project and promote the use and development of GNOME software.
Do you see the difference between these two organizations? KDE has, as far as I can tell, always focused on taking over as the one standard desktop. Why? Why are they so non-inclusive?
KDE can claim 70% of the desktops (where do they get this figure anyway), in the end they're yet another desktop, and people are welcome to use it.
For me, until there are bindings for Perl (their Web site claims there are, but only Qt is supported, and it's 6 months old) or C, I'll stay away from developing for it. To the rest of you who choose KDE: good for you! At least we've moved beyond the day of Motif/CDE and other such crap. KDE is much more of a modern desktop which earns my respect if not use.
Ok, so AOL is sinking LOTS of money into coming up with a browser (as someone on the project stated 70-90% of the work on Mozilla is done by Netscape engineers). So, why would AOL do this? Are they going to make money selling the browser? Some, but only a small amount (I expect to see a Netscape 6 shrinkwrap package if only as an advertizing element). But, no, what AOL wants is an AOL browser that is not beholden to Microsoft. They want to be able to add support for the extensions that AOL is interested in, and add the sorts of AOL promotion features that AOL feels they need.
None of this should come as a shock, and what's more, none of this is terribly off-putting. If you don't like Netscape, you can use Mozilla. If you don't because you appreciate things like the real-player plugin or any of the other Netscape-only features, you go with Netscape and pay the price. Your choice. Isn't that what open source/free software is supposed to be all about? The choice to fix bugs or make your own version or take out a feature you don't like? Hell, make your own Mozilla-based product, or choose a different one.
I'm posting this from Netscape 6, and I have to say that I will work quite hard to find a way to get rid of "My Netscape" and "Net2Phone" from the shortcut bar, but otherwise it's exactly the browser I want.
I have a friend who finds large, very hairy guys to be attractive in the extreme. Most of this class of software checks for skin-tones, so won't it consider a mostly textured, brown pattern (as opposed to smooth, dark skin) to be "clothes"? Also, the shape tends to be all wrong in larger men. This kind of variance from the "norm" is really only unusual when studdied in a vacuum. For example, I know people for whom a picture of a large-chested woman in a tight shirt could be classed as "porn". Or for others, a thin woman in a swim-suit. Or, anyone as long as they're bare-footed. There are as many sexual special-interests as there are people (and probably more), so what's "porn"?
It would be interesting if those who are generally thought of as "fringe" suddenly are the only ones whose porn is considered "work/schoolplace safe" because our porn-scanning software tackles only the "standard" sexual interests.
Still, it doesn't matter. 1) I don't much other than Slashdot and stock quotes of a personal nature from work. Most of my browsing is technical 2) if I did want to do personal stuff from work, it'd be through my accounts on non-work machines, and over an encrypted tunnel. Not much you can do to scan those encrypted bits for porn (other than volume;-)
Well, I just recently attended the Boston.pm group meeting which this time around was hosted by NuSphere. These are the folks that are doing MySQL modifications for their release of MySQL/Perl/Apache and PHP.
The big news was that a re-worked version of the *Progress* database back-end would be turned into an open-source MySQL-compatible back-end called Genie. This would be pretty huge, as Progress is everything that people complain that MySQL isn't. Also, MySQL is adding (either in their next release or the one after that, depending on the feature):
* Subqueries
* A boolean type
* Foriegn key constraints
They probably offer big deals, since usage is what they really want. Think about it. The big win here is that they're turning into a demographic database of what people listen to on the radio. They can then turn around and:
* Sell info to the stations on *when* people listen.
* Sell info to the labels on what radio stations sell the most CDs
Oh yeah, this is a great business model for them. For the consumer, it's only a lose becuase it's one more thing feeding the cycle that's homogenizing entertainment "content" down to a gruel that doesn't offend anyone "much".
"Don't bother wasting your time trying to teach these kinds of people how to live in society."
Great. Let's start with you, since you seem to not have the same sort of social graces as I. I recommend something between prison an a concentration camp... or, did you mean "other people".
"Weither they are 10 or 30, they should have learned this kind of anti-social behavior is inrolerable."
Well, let's see. When I was 10, I was shop-lifting (seemed harmless enough to *me*) and getting in fights at school. Would I have been a script kiddie? Probably. Would saving my future by showing me the concequences of my actions have been useful? Certainly!
"[If they had good parents] maybe we wouldn't have so many mentally unstable people."
Woah! There's a whole lot of mistakes all in one phrase. What makes you think that your average script kiddie is "mentally unstable"? I think most of them are just a) currious and unaware of the damage their doing, b) bored and/or c) trying to get a little attention from their peers (which even the most "mentally stable" among us do).
These are mostly younger people who have no real idea of what they're playing around with or why. Many of them are our future sysadmins and security experts. Treating them like rapists and murderers is not the correct solution. I proposed a way to deal with the problem which could probably even MAKE a little money, and CERTAINLY cost less than prison (community service always does, as you don't have to house, feed and provide medical services for your convicts).
What exactly was your problem with my proposal, or were you just looking for a place to flame?
Being in network security, I can say that this impression comes from the fact that everyone that I have ever had contact with, and did this kind of thing, was under 20. Kids (and by this I really mean teenagers) have the double problem that they are just finding out that one of the largest technical achievements of the human race is available for them to play with and they also have the sense of adventure of... well... teenagers.
A lot of the "script kiddies" and "DoS weenies" out there are doing what they're doing because it seems cool. As they grow older, most of them smarten up and a) put those skills to work in industry b) get a lot more selective and careful or c) end up in prison. The latter is less common, but getting more common, woefully.
What I'd love to see is a computer security service where kids that get caught are put to work doing "community service". Nothing that they could exploit, but simple things like cross-checking log files; manning snail-mail campaigns to send out security bullitens and so on.
Now, that would be a political program that I could get behind. But, of course, it's not the "throw the bastards in jail" approach that's so common these days....
Yep, one hell of a smart maneuver. Of course, they knew that claiming IE is a better browser than Mozilla would spark a flame-war, and let's face it: every time you click on "reply" you see a new banner ad.
Politics of page-views asside, however, they're simply right. IE has some huge problems in the credibility department (someone else pointed the way to the slashdot article about the built-in MSN cookies), but it's a solid browser, that while not 100% standards-compliant, has been ahead in that department for quite some time. The UI is not to my liking, but at least has some of the basic gaffs of Netscape covered.
If IE was ported cleanly to UNIX platforms, I think Netscape could safely crawl into a hole and die. Geko-based browsers are still a good idea, but Mozilla has a terrible UI, lots of standards problems, it's bloated and slow and most of the in-your-face features are driven by Netscape/AOL marketing as far as I can tell.
Heresy? Perhaps. But, a little heresy goes a long way to allowing one to apply reason instead of dogma to a debate.
Amiga has always been ahead of the curve. I remember back in 89 or so having to write a serial-based communications program that talked between a VAX (running VMS) and an Amiga.
Thought the VMS part would be easy and the Amiga a pain of stupid little PC-like low-level calls.
Well, it was the opposite. VMS required me to learn QIO calls that had 13 parameters each, and took about 200 lines of code.
The Amiga side was about 50 lines of code and was basically a simple wrapper around the firmware routines that already did everything I wanted. They had tripple-indirect semephores in firmware on a dinky little game platform in the 80s. I hear the UNIX port was nice as most of the low-level including task management, VM (much more than just page tables), and many other features were all in hardware.
Has anyone ever come up with the mods to Linux or one of the BSDs to allow for OS-level triggers on the filesystem? I would much prefer to have a syslog entry get fired off the moment that anyone opens/bin/login in O_RDWR mode than have tripwire discover it minutes later.
I know there was a commercial product that did this (and much more) for Solaris back about 3-4 years ago, but I haven't heard about it since. There are some other triggers that would be nice:
On any of unlink, rename, creat, mkdir
On failed system calls that fail due to permissions (e.g. the above calls as well as kill, socket, etc)
I know you could do most of this in libc, but I don't think that would be wise, as someone with enough smarts could always do the syscalls directly using asm().
So, what happens if someone posts a review of the way MS did, say, real-time prioritization. Clearly the person who wrote this is treading thin ice, and MS will likely go after them.
On the other hand, does the person who reads this review have any obligation not to use the info? It seems to me that there's no copyright OR trade secret protection for a method that you came across this way. Unless MS has patented the particular method, you SHOULD be free and clear.
Lawyers? Thoughts?
I, however, am most interested in just how bad the code is. I'd love to look at it, not because I think they have any good ideas, but because I want some humor in my life;-)
"When they don't he whines about how it's real-world experience which show them as being better."
I've never known Ellison to push benchmark results. When did you hear him doing this? Certainly the topic of this story is a situation where he specifically does a demo INSTEAD of citing benchmarks....
"This fucked up company is also purposefully crippling their database as a server platform with WinNT/2k clients"
Um... as I understand it, they drew the line at using MS' API. They refused to do what everyone else does: code to undocumented calls so that MS can break their software every service-pack. I have a hard time calling this "crippling".
First off, you have to determine how much coverage you need. If you're getting more than 1-3 calls per night, you need to eliminate some useless calls or (if they're all real) hire off-hours support people for 3rd and/or 2nd shift.
Next, you need to figure out a way to compensate people for the extra time. One tactic that works quite well is to establish service levels and testing to monitor the service levels (e.g. you can monitor system uptime and then require that the system be up 99.8% of the time).
Once you have that in place, I recommend a quarterly bonus structure based on meeting the service levels. You get to answer questions like: how much? Do you pay for partial success? How do you measure things like "customer experience" and what constitutes downtime?
Slashdot Mirror
Now, let me start with the down points (a littl more refined a list than I put in yesterday's story):
- Casting was ok to horrible. Hurt is a good actor, but should never have been made to play Leto. The guy playing Paul was good (see below), but the Barron was just not imposing enough.
- Paul was written all wrong. Read the book and pay attention to the turmoil that Paul's going through. He senses his destiny, but can't put his finger on it. He's moody, but he's also a brilliant leader by nature. Not much of this comes through in the character in this miniseries.
There are some thing I would liked to have seen, but most of it is secondary to those points.On the good side I point to everything that I liked about the book. The fremen are still a mystery at this point in the story, but I love the whole guild idea and the machinations between house Attradies and the rest of the empire. Jessica is weakened slightly in this telling, but I still love her character.
Feyd is well done, here. A real mad wolf the way he comes across in the book. Can't wait to see how they handle the final fight.
Some odd choices were made. Paul voicing lines that were his father's in the book (about how to deal with the smugglers). The princess showing up early and playing nice with Paul. Some of it, I'm sure, was because he felt that the audience couldn't keep up with the story, given how much he had to cut out, but I'm not sure I like the changes.
There's still some questions that I have. Without doing the David Lynch style voice-overs, how do they intend to handle the water of life? For that matter, what about the confrontation with the emperor at the end where about 50% of what's going on is in Paul's head? That could be handled very badly, but we'll see.
So far so good. I'm actually excited to see what this guy does with the rest of the series.
- Casting: Hurt's too soft, Gurney's too nice and The Barron can't deliver the lines strongly enough.
- Writing: They just don't get Maud Dib. He's supposed to be riding a river of internal turmoil over the destiny he can sense. He's supposed to be one of the best natural leaders ever born with the training of a Bene Geserit. What do we get? A boy who is a passable dukes son. Oops.
- Skipping neccessary parts. We need to know who Yueh is before he's revealed as a traitor. One quick flash of a knife and an off-hand mention of his Suk training is not enough. We probably needed a bit more form the Reverend Mother.
Ok, that's it for the bad. I liked this movie. Here's why:Now, if we're talking about what constitutes object oriented programming I'll buy that there's a definition, but OO programming need not slow your program (see Gtk+, which is very fast and very OO, but not in an OO language).
An OO language need not be inefficient, but modern language design favors highly inefficient constructs (e.g. garbage collection) to efficient alternatives that are less flexible (e.g. simple reference counting).
C++, for example, was an OO language beforeRTTI was added. RTTI just made it higher level.
I don't think that OO programming is well suited to a great many tasks. Functional programming, IMHO, should be the default. However, some tasks are much easier and cleaner when an OO model is used.
Choose the right tool for the task.
For starters, I can't imagine an implimentation of Hello World that would take a single clock cycle to run. What did you have in mind?Second, try:
That should produce a pretty reasonable ~22-line assembly program which you could have written by hand in about 5 minutes.I totally agree with your suggestions (I really have to wonder who this is), but keep in mind that I wasn't saying the factions are at eachother's throats, just that they could share more. I'd love for there to be more cooperation, not just between Net and FreeBSD, but between the BSDs and Linux and every other open source / free software / source code enabled OS out there. Hell, I want to live in a world where OSes like BSD and Linux are so much better than the for-pay OSes that companies like Sun are shamed into throwing out things like Solaris! Wouldn't that be something.... If I'm wrong, and the BSDs are already sharing code to the extent that it makes sense, then I appologize to everyone involved. Either way, I think this is a good place for me to politely bow out of this thread. Good luck all!
The BSD license allows for closed licensing around the licensed code. Releasing something under the BSD license is tacitly approving of such a thing. I'm not saying that's bad, nor, I think, did the original poster. It's just that you do accept that, and you have to in turn accept the concequences. That is, you will have to accept the fact that Microsoft is going to use your code and never contribute back. You have to accept that if Corel decides to make a product out of your code and it flops, you'll likely never see their changes (unlike what happened with Debian and XFree86).
The GPL is a tool that accomplishes a set of goals. The BSD license is a tool that accomplishes a very different, but related set of goals. When you're choosing, you should decide which set of goals you want to achive and choose your license accordingly.
The folks I spoke with at The Bazaar were members of the core development teams for both OSes. If they want to speak out, I'm happy to let them, but here are some quotes as best as I can recall:
"[the person doing the VM work for FreeBSD] is very resistant to the NetBSD code. He has gone off on his own and tried to come up with another way to do it." When I asked why, they said that he didn't want to take code from NetBSD because of creative differences between them on other topics.
"OpenBSD is not more secure and FreeBSD is not faster on the X86 than NetBSD, but they keep lying."
Mind you, I also heard a lot of things like the FreeBSD folks saying that the NetBSD work is really good and they'd like to have more time to integrate some of it. It seems like there's just a few "my camp is better than your camp" folks in each camp.
On the Linux side, we see the same thing. I can't count the number of times that I've heard some RedHat supporter putting down Debian or visa versa with no real reason. There are many core people who can't be bothered with animosity, but a few make it hard to have that air of cooperation shine through.
Personally, I was looking forward to the effort to put the BSD kernel under Debian's distribution to see how that would affect the various wars. I wanted to see everyone suddenly come to the realization that it's all Open Source and it's all good all the time (to quote a popular TV series).
I've spoken with people in the core of both the NetBSD and FreeBSD efforts (never had a chance to chat with OpenBSD folks). When I asked if there was a chance of merging the efforts and bringing the advantages of each into a single OS, I was sort of laughed at. Basically, the response was: there's way too much bad blood between us, and many of the core developers will spend weeks or months working on solutions to problems rather than even incorporate the idea that solved the problem in the other OS (e.g. the VM advances made in NetBSD vs. the VM work being done about a year ago in FreeBSD).
This is a sad state of affairs, and hurts BSD a lot.
I'm not taking sides here. I develop GPLed code because I have always done so (since the late 80s), but have never really disliked the BSD license. I do, however, acknowledge that accepting the BSD license is accepting restrictive re-licensing.
On the point of using BSD because it's not trendy, I have to agree with the original poster. Most BSD users that I know use it for that reason. Perhaps there are a sacred few that use BSD for technical reasons, but I know a lot of counter-examples. Some use it because the lack of popularity means that less security exploits will be targeted for it. Some use it because they simply cannot bear to use what the majority of the PC-UNIX subculture consider cool.
[In a high-pitched, nasal voice]
I don't understand all this fuss over retraining tamed employees. Why are we taming them in the first place? Doesn't anyone else think this is a dubious use of psychoactive drugs?
And one more thing. There's the question of retraining at all. If you hire these people to do what they're good at, why not let them keep doing it? You're throwing away years of...
[Whisper from off-screen]
Oh, "retaining trained" employees.... Nevermind.
First, Linux is not the only system which GNOME and KDE target.
Second, I disagree that there needs to be one API at the desktop level right now. The right way to go, IMHO, is the same way that graphics went in the 80s. Let the competing standards prove themselves, and then when one is clearly THE choice, port everyone else's applications to it. This is what happened to X, News, Domain, etc. X won and slowly everything was moved over. GNOME really already won, in my opinion because of the choice of going with C. C++ just doesn't let you play nice in the sandbox with everyone else's pet language. But, if KDE wins out in the long-run, I'll port my Gimp plugins over to Qt someday.
As for having one API now by having the KDE and GNOME folks work together, I just don't see how. There's just so little similarity between how the two groups work. For example, Qt and Gtk+ have a totally different event structure.
There was some work in that direction, and this was where some of the Window manager cooperation came from. But, beyond those basic steps, anything else would require one project to step down as the primary creative force deciding how a desktop works, and that just won't happen anytime too soon.
KDE can claim 70% of the desktops (where do they get this figure anyway), in the end they're yet another desktop, and people are welcome to use it.
For me, until there are bindings for Perl (their Web site claims there are, but only Qt is supported, and it's 6 months old) or C, I'll stay away from developing for it. To the rest of you who choose KDE: good for you! At least we've moved beyond the day of Motif/CDE and other such crap. KDE is much more of a modern desktop which earns my respect if not use.
Ok, so AOL is sinking LOTS of money into coming up with a browser (as someone on the project stated 70-90% of the work on Mozilla is done by Netscape engineers). So, why would AOL do this? Are they going to make money selling the browser? Some, but only a small amount (I expect to see a Netscape 6 shrinkwrap package if only as an advertizing element). But, no, what AOL wants is an AOL browser that is not beholden to Microsoft. They want to be able to add support for the extensions that AOL is interested in, and add the sorts of AOL promotion features that AOL feels they need.
None of this should come as a shock, and what's more, none of this is terribly off-putting. If you don't like Netscape, you can use Mozilla. If you don't because you appreciate things like the real-player plugin or any of the other Netscape-only features, you go with Netscape and pay the price. Your choice. Isn't that what open source/free software is supposed to be all about? The choice to fix bugs or make your own version or take out a feature you don't like? Hell, make your own Mozilla-based product, or choose a different one.
I'm posting this from Netscape 6, and I have to say that I will work quite hard to find a way to get rid of "My Netscape" and "Net2Phone" from the shortcut bar, but otherwise it's exactly the browser I want.
I have a friend who finds large, very hairy guys to be attractive in the extreme. Most of this class of software checks for skin-tones, so won't it consider a mostly textured, brown pattern (as opposed to smooth, dark skin) to be "clothes"? Also, the shape tends to be all wrong in larger men. This kind of variance from the "norm" is really only unusual when studdied in a vacuum. For example, I know people for whom a picture of a large-chested woman in a tight shirt could be classed as "porn". Or for others, a thin woman in a swim-suit. Or, anyone as long as they're bare-footed. There are as many sexual special-interests as there are people (and probably more), so what's "porn"?
;-)
It would be interesting if those who are generally thought of as "fringe" suddenly are the only ones whose porn is considered "work/schoolplace safe" because our porn-scanning software tackles only the "standard" sexual interests.
Still, it doesn't matter. 1) I don't much other than Slashdot and stock quotes of a personal nature from work. Most of my browsing is technical 2) if I did want to do personal stuff from work, it'd be through my accounts on non-work machines, and over an encrypted tunnel. Not much you can do to scan those encrypted bits for porn (other than volume
Well, I just recently attended the Boston.pm group meeting which this time around was hosted by NuSphere. These are the folks that are doing MySQL modifications for their release of MySQL/Perl/Apache and PHP.
The big news was that a re-worked version of the *Progress* database back-end would be turned into an open-source MySQL-compatible back-end called Genie. This would be pretty huge, as Progress is everything that people complain that MySQL isn't. Also, MySQL is adding (either in their next release or the one after that, depending on the feature):
* Subqueries
* A boolean type
* Foriegn key constraints
They probably offer big deals, since usage is what they really want. Think about it. The big win here is that they're turning into a demographic database of what people listen to on the radio. They can then turn around and:
* Sell info to the stations on *when* people listen.
* Sell info to the labels on what radio stations sell the most CDs
Oh yeah, this is a great business model for them. For the consumer, it's only a lose becuase it's one more thing feeding the cycle that's homogenizing entertainment "content" down to a gruel that doesn't offend anyone "much".
"Don't bother wasting your time trying to teach these kinds of people how to live in society."
Great. Let's start with you, since you seem to not have the same sort of social graces as I. I recommend something between prison an a concentration camp... or, did you mean "other people".
"Weither they are 10 or 30, they should have learned this kind of anti-social behavior is inrolerable."
Well, let's see. When I was 10, I was shop-lifting (seemed harmless enough to *me*) and getting in fights at school. Would I have been a script kiddie? Probably. Would saving my future by showing me the concequences of my actions have been useful? Certainly!
"[If they had good parents] maybe we wouldn't have so many mentally unstable people."
Woah! There's a whole lot of mistakes all in one phrase. What makes you think that your average script kiddie is "mentally unstable"? I think most of them are just a) currious and unaware of the damage their doing, b) bored and/or c) trying to get a little attention from their peers (which even the most "mentally stable" among us do).
These are mostly younger people who have no real idea of what they're playing around with or why. Many of them are our future sysadmins and security experts. Treating them like rapists and murderers is not the correct solution. I proposed a way to deal with the problem which could probably even MAKE a little money, and CERTAINLY cost less than prison (community service always does, as you don't have to house, feed and provide medical services for your convicts).
What exactly was your problem with my proposal, or were you just looking for a place to flame?
Being in network security, I can say that this impression comes from the fact that everyone that I have ever had contact with, and did this kind of thing, was under 20. Kids (and by this I really mean teenagers) have the double problem that they are just finding out that one of the largest technical achievements of the human race is available for them to play with and they also have the sense of adventure of... well... teenagers.
A lot of the "script kiddies" and "DoS weenies" out there are doing what they're doing because it seems cool. As they grow older, most of them smarten up and a) put those skills to work in industry b) get a lot more selective and careful or c) end up in prison. The latter is less common, but getting more common, woefully.
What I'd love to see is a computer security service where kids that get caught are put to work doing "community service". Nothing that they could exploit, but simple things like cross-checking log files; manning snail-mail campaigns to send out security bullitens and so on.
Now, that would be a political program that I could get behind. But, of course, it's not the "throw the bastards in jail" approach that's so common these days....
Yep, one hell of a smart maneuver. Of course, they knew that claiming IE is a better browser than Mozilla would spark a flame-war, and let's face it: every time you click on "reply" you see a new banner ad.
Politics of page-views asside, however, they're simply right. IE has some huge problems in the credibility department (someone else pointed the way to the slashdot article about the built-in MSN cookies), but it's a solid browser, that while not 100% standards-compliant, has been ahead in that department for quite some time. The UI is not to my liking, but at least has some of the basic gaffs of Netscape covered.
If IE was ported cleanly to UNIX platforms, I think Netscape could safely crawl into a hole and die. Geko-based browsers are still a good idea, but Mozilla has a terrible UI, lots of standards problems, it's bloated and slow and most of the in-your-face features are driven by Netscape/AOL marketing as far as I can tell.
Heresy? Perhaps. But, a little heresy goes a long way to allowing one to apply reason instead of dogma to a debate.
Amiga has always been ahead of the curve. I remember back in 89 or so having to write a serial-based communications program that talked between a VAX (running VMS) and an Amiga.
Thought the VMS part would be easy and the Amiga a pain of stupid little PC-like low-level calls.
Well, it was the opposite. VMS required me to learn QIO calls that had 13 parameters each, and took about 200 lines of code.
The Amiga side was about 50 lines of code and was basically a simple wrapper around the firmware routines that already did everything I wanted. They had tripple-indirect semephores in firmware on a dinky little game platform in the 80s. I hear the UNIX port was nice as most of the low-level including task management, VM (much more than just page tables), and many other features were all in hardware.
Nice box, hope they do as well with the new one!
I know there was a commercial product that did this (and much more) for Solaris back about 3-4 years ago, but I haven't heard about it since. There are some other triggers that would be nice:
- On any of unlink, rename, creat, mkdir
- On failed system calls that fail due to permissions (e.g. the above calls as well as kill, socket, etc)
I know you could do most of this in libc, but I don't think that would be wise, as someone with enough smarts could always do the syscalls directly using asm().So, it looks like the open source version is linux-only. Are there porting efforts under way to Solaris and BSD (AKA "The Other OSes")?
So, what happens if someone posts a review of the way MS did, say, real-time prioritization. Clearly the person who wrote this is treading thin ice, and MS will likely go after them.
;-)
On the other hand, does the person who reads this review have any obligation not to use the info? It seems to me that there's no copyright OR trade secret protection for a method that you came across this way. Unless MS has patented the particular method, you SHOULD be free and clear.
Lawyers? Thoughts?
I, however, am most interested in just how bad the code is. I'd love to look at it, not because I think they have any good ideas, but because I want some humor in my life
"When they don't he whines about how it's real-world experience which show them as being better."
I've never known Ellison to push benchmark results. When did you hear him doing this? Certainly the topic of this story is a situation where he specifically does a demo INSTEAD of citing benchmarks....
"This fucked up company is also purposefully crippling their database as a server platform with WinNT/2k clients"
Um... as I understand it, they drew the line at using MS' API. They refused to do what everyone else does: code to undocumented calls so that MS can break their software every service-pack. I have a hard time calling this "crippling".
First off, you have to determine how much coverage you need. If you're getting more than 1-3 calls per night, you need to eliminate some useless calls or (if they're all real) hire off-hours support people for 3rd and/or 2nd shift.
Next, you need to figure out a way to compensate people for the extra time. One tactic that works quite well is to establish service levels and testing to monitor the service levels (e.g. you can monitor system uptime and then require that the system be up 99.8% of the time).
Once you have that in place, I recommend a quarterly bonus structure based on meeting the service levels. You get to answer questions like: how much? Do you pay for partial success? How do you measure things like "customer experience" and what constitutes downtime?