Enought people here seem to not know why country codes exist, that I feel it makes sense to go over the reasoning. I'm not saying that this is sound business practice, or that it's justified. I'm just explaining the reasoning.
The basic problem is that most of the worlds most popular Enlgish-speaking movies are made in the United States (some of that is changing with Canada, New Zealand and the UK producing more and more winners). Because of this, movies tend to be released in the US first. Now, they can't really release them in more than one to three countries at a time (just doing the whole US is quite a strain) because of the logistics. You really want to have a big media event surrounding the release, so you gather up some of your actors and crew and screen the movie for select folk with a red carpet and lots of photographers.
Ok, given that you do that one to three countries at a time, and schedules are hard to sync up, you very often wind up in the situation that by the time the film is opening in some late-on-the-list part of the world, the video release has hit shelves in the US. So, you show up to do your premier and everyone yawns, 'cause they've been buying import versions for weeks.
What's worse, the money that a movie makes tends to be in the form of 1/2 of a bell-curve (the descending part) for the theater release and a much more gradual, but simmilarly shaped curve when the video comes out. So, if you reduce the impact of opening weekend, you might easily lose a major chunk of the sales for the box-office, and that sales boost you were expecting from the video release is now moot.
There are holes in this theory, and let's face it, Hollywood is not run on quality data-gathering operations. Personally, I think that staging one huge opening per movie and broadcasting it to the world simultaneous with the release of the film in theaters would make more sense, at least for the english-speaking countries. It would require more pre-release work because you have to go through the censorship machinery of all of those countries before your release, but the impact would be greater, I suspect. You could move around, and have the opening for each film be in a different country, thus allowing people in those countries to get access. Certainly the first bunch of films that did this would get huge amounts of press.
But, it's probably better to just let Hollywood die under the weight of foriegn competition. More and more work is moving out to Canada and NZ, and this is good. Hollywood will have to develop new ways of coping. In a way, what's going on now reflects what happened in the comic book industry in the late 80's and early 90's. Back then independants were becoming wildly popular, because they dared to have original content. In the end, the result was that most of the indies went broke when the market consolidated, a few strengthened and did well (e.g. Dark Horse) and DC (Superman, Batman, et al.) ended up creating a whole section just for doing interesting adult-themed, story-focused "comics" that didn't all center on super-heroes (e.g. Sandman, which has been mentioned a couple of times on Slashdot). This is essentially what Hollywood is in the middle of. Content is slowly winning.
As for country codes, it's just an artifact, a minor spin-off of these industry forces. The whole idea will seem foolish in 10 years. How can country codes prevail once movies are delivered over the Internet? I'm waiting for the day when every theater has 2 screens dedicated to showing whatever an on-line vote picked for the day. Once theaters can download movies and pay on a per-play basis instead of locking in weeks at a time, they will be able to offer whatever non-in-first-run movies will fill a theater. This will allow popular movies to keep making money in the theater even after they're on video. Right now, theater owners don't want to lock-in to a movie that's already on video, 'cause they can't guarantee that people will come see it in the theater vs. watching it on video.
Wow, this rambled a bit more than I had wanted. I think I'll stop now.
B.) Honestly, if you designed an operating system and someone else designed an OS (over even a theme) that LOOKED like yours, down to the logos - wouldn't you be a little upset too?
Absolutely not! I would do exactly what Apple did, but I'd never be upset about it.
US trademark law requires that Apple do this in order to defend their trademark and copyright interests. If they don't Microsoft could then use the Apple logo and successfully argue that Apple is being selective about who it goes after, and Apple might lose the trademark.
On the other hand, if I had designed the Mac look and feel, I would be thrilled that it was so instantly adopted by so much of my competition! The rapid adoption of the Aqua look and feel means that Apple did good user-interface wise. I use Aqua under Sawmill and Gtk+ (actually AquaX under Sawmill) and I think it's one of the best innovations in desktop look-and-feel so far. First off, why did it take this long for people to think of color-coding window baubles? It certainly improves the ease-of-use for me. Also, horizontal pin-striping struck me as a bad idea at first, but somehow it adds something to my desktop. It almost seems as if the applications are more "crafted".
Apple did a great job here, and they know that every innovation will be coppied by the rest of the market. In a way, I'm sure this is why they went for such a radical look. They want everyone to say "oh yeah, that's the new Mac look". Microsoft would call this "mindshare".
The "problem" is that many women simply don't find computer programming to be interesting. Is that bad? Of course not! At the very least it means that those who do will be sought after by colleges.
There are some damn fine female programmers out there (just as there are some really bad ones on both sides of the gender fence), but that doesn't mean that half of the programmers need to be women. If, on average, more men are inclined to be programmers, why not accept the ratios and go on with your life?
Some of the joys I found while learning Python and coding this thing were (no I'm not into abusing buzzwords) ease in RPC communication and data marshalling, thread control, bidirectional pipes, code-reuse, architecture independence, exception handling, and the easy ability of going back into what I wrote and being able to read my own code - not to mention a great debugging environment.
Ok, cool. What part of this is Perl lacking?
One thought: if you have trouble reading your own code in *any* language (even assembly) I suggest you start commenting your code and being a little bit more verbose. People who want to maintain your code will thank you for it.
I'm a Perl guy (note the sig), but this article really pushed me in my long-standing desire to learn more about Python.
Zope sounded interesting, but I'm also checking out Mason, a Perl-based system that is tied into mod_perl. mod_perl was perl's six or seventh killer application (and I mean application as in applying a tool to a job, not as in a packaged program). First came the power of Perl regex for text processing. Then CGI (remember CGI was pretty much born in Perl). Then came LWP, and a splash was heard round the world. How many robots and spiders are written in anything else?
Perl is slowing, though. There is a consolidation and honing of features that needs to take place, and perl resists that. In some ways, this makes me long for something like Python, but I've actually been thinking of writing a Perl variant that accomplishes some of the same goals, but aimed more at large-scale programming in performance-oriented environments. I see the main benefits of a new language design being:
Can pick and choose the "best of" Perl.
Some odd Perl tics (e.g. bareword IO handles) can be dropped.
Byte and native compilation of modules and programs would be a primary goal. I won't be happy with Perl byte-compilation until everything in the library can be byte-compiled and used from non-byte-compiled programs. But, there are some very compelling reasons not to re-tool Perl's core to allow for this (it would break too much).
I dunno. I'll probably spend a couple of months scoping other languages before making any real investment of time.
As for whitespace and style issues, I dislike Python's way so much that I've put off learning the language for years. It's just so... FORTRAN. Why, of all things would you, in this day and age, subject people to a DEFINITION of TABS?! Why not enforce variable-naming at the same time?
Your points are all good, but the bottom line is that I've been in this biz for quite a while, and I find autoconf pretty daunting for the average project. That needs to change. Yes many of the problems are hard, but they need solutions that present ease-of-use for the general case. autoconf does not do this.
When I first saw autoconf, I'd already dealt with metaconfig a bit, and autoconf seemed to be promissing a bit more modular and maintainable strucutre. It also was (at the time) a lot less interactive, which was good for a software configuration system.
Now, I long for what might have been if metaconfig had taken off. autoconf just isn't what it was craked up to be. There are an awful lot of one-off hacks that have no real internal consistancy. I once made the mistake of asking someone how I locate the Motif libraries in autoconf. I got several answers from "it should be where X is" to "you'll have to write your own command-line arguments, try doing something like what EMACS does". Granted, Motif is not at the heart of free software coding, but it seemed odd that a) such a popular library was not easy to locate and b) there was no standard way to say "search in these directories or as directed by these environment variables/command-line args for this library containting these headers and these functions". Many pieces of this exist, but none of it's coherent or complete.
I'd love to see two things:
A complete "capabilities" API for UNIX-like systems. In other words, a programmatic way (from the language of choice) to determine how the local system compares to a set of metrics like "do I have gcc" or "is this Red Hat 6.1 or later" or "what is the standard include directory list for C++".
A configuration language (preferably built on something a little more powerful and flexibility than m4) which can be used to generate headers, Makefiles and other pre-processed items by using the above API.
If someone were to ask my opinion, it should probably be based on one of the popular scripting languages (e.g. Perl, Python, Scheme, etc).
Realistically, your average project should not have to look like more than:
I suspect that some of the people who do the flaming are actually not advocates. Some of them are just trolls. Some are likely anti-Linux. There are, of course, some quantity who are just clueless Linux bigots who don't understand that they're huring the OS more than helping.
Either way, it won't change the facts. Linux has soft-spots (e.g. documentation) as does every OS. Those need to be addressed and those who write well thought-out, clear articles about those problems will get MY paise.
Ok, I know who did it. It was my cousin's sister's broker's dealer's aunt's friend who told me that they knew a guy who happened to have the next ASN up from this girl who once exchanged Email with a cypherpunk who was loosely refered to in Cryptonomicon which was secretly a true story about this guy who towed my car for me.... um, where was I?
There really is no but. He's touting Linux and Open Source on one side, and working for and touting Transmeta on the other. The two worlds really only touch in that Transmeta wants him to make Linux work on their chip. He's not in charge of Transmeta, and you cannot call the company hypocritical for saying one thing and doing another when Linus' comments are not the company's comments. They are completely consistant in their approach. They simply hired Linus because he was good (remember he wasn't a superstar then) and they wanted to control the OS.
Firmware is software
Firmware is a type of software. A very specific type. And, in this case, I think that the Open Source dynamic has not been proven. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it has not been proven. Thus, I can understand these guys being careful. They want to get the chip out the door.
Even still. Let's say they get the chip out the door and never release the source to the firmware. Is that a bad thing? Perhaps the Open Source community will think so, but why is it worse than Phonix not releasing BIOS source? Because Linus is an employee? I think not. Asking them to release source is one thing, but expecting it is quite another....
... the Crusoe is optimized for Windows...
Yes, it is.
My point was not that Crusoe was not optimized for Windows, but that it was not a Windows-specific chip. You could run Linux on it, or Solaris, or whatever just like you can on the Athalon.
Basically Metcalf's article was trying to imply that you have this Linux company and they have to stoop to Windows. I was trying to point out that Transmeta is not a Linux company, though they do employ Linus. This is where Metcalf doesn't get Open Source. He's still thinking in terms were employing the leader of a project gives you control of that project, and makes it an integral part of your business.
In reality Linus could leave Transmeta tomorrow, go work for their competition, and they could go right on using his OS. *This* is the power of Open Source. Metcalf has not yet seen this.
And Metcalf a troll? Uh huh, he didn't exactly post it here on/. did he?
You're right, he didn't. On the other hand, he knows damn well (now) that any inflamitory article that he publishes will end up being a Slashdot headline and generate tons of hits for his site.
I hypothisize that he wrote this article specifically to troll the Slashdot effect. Thus, he is a troll. If I'm wrong, I appologize, but the fact that he mentions Slashdot by name, certainly implies that he has it in mind....
Unless everyone who dares say anything bad about Linus or Linux (even off/.) is now considered a troll.
Oh, no not at all! Watch, I'll prove it:
Linux has really poor structure to it's on-line documentation, and finding information about any given file or program can be like pulling teeth. Witness the difficulty in trying to figure out if documentation is in man, info, ps, text, sgml, html, tex or some other format. And where?/usr/doc?/usr/man?/usr/info? On the web? Quick: where's the documentation for the "ip" command, and how do I read it?
I do not consider that a troll. It is, however a negative comment about Linux (the distributions of Linux, not the kernel specifically). I even through in a hook at the end to get people to respond, but that's now what trolling is. Trolling is trying to make people mad enough to shout back at you. It's pushing a point of view, not because it's right or wrong, but because it will get you paid attention to. In the comming war for page views, you will see more and more Trolling of this sort. Trolling not for replies or moderation (some people get off on getting negative moderation on Slashdot, it makes them feel important), but for hits.
Please check out the definition of ad hominem fallacies. I think you will find that constructing a set of arguments with evidence based in fact about the matter at hand and then using those conclusions to draw inference as to the motivations of the debater in question and the value in further debate with that individual does not constitute a logical fallacy of the type you suggest.
On the other hand, the body of your post made a point, and if you re-read my posting you will find that you and I are in agreement. I was simply saying that before shipping a hardware product is not the time to go testing new business models in firmware distribution. Let them get the darn chip out the door and then chat them up about releasing the source. Of course it will be harmless for them to do so (they have patents on the hardware to take advantage of that source) and Linus will probably be quite happy that way, as he can start blurring the line between Linux and Crusoe by having the kernel modify the instruction set to suit its needs.... Could be fun. Obviously such an effort would require that the Linux kernel developers have a clear idea of how the Crusoe firmware works, and given the distributed nature of Linux development, releasing the source would be the best way to bootstrap this.
You see, I actually did think about what I was posting.
OB off-topic thought: can someone write an HCF instruction for this sucker?;-)
As I pointed out. There are very few examples of open source firmware development. You have pointed out one of the few. There will be more, I'm sure. This is a good thing. Transmeta may be on the bandwagon with that effort at some point (and PR-wise, I think a later announcement on that front would make more sense than an earlier one). Either way, they've done much for Linus, and by proxy (and maybe even directly) for Linux. I for one am anxious to get my hands on one of those bad boys....
Do you really think that Bob wanted Transmeta to open the source to their firmware, though? No, he's just trying to get a bunch of geeks on Slashdot in a lather about this so that he can sell hits. Guess it worked.
At first, I had just skimmed the article. Now I've read the whole thing, and WOW! I have to say, Slashdot has done a disservice to the community by even linking to this man. His rant is so innane, I can only imagine that he hoped that by being this inflamitory, he would get top-billing on Slashdot. Sad when Infoworld is hurting so badly for hits that they have to go rattle Slashdot.
As for content.... Where to beign. He's just wrong on so many points. As I pointed out before, he keeps trying to imply that Linus is senior management at Transmeta. He knows this is wrong, doesn't he? For another point, what precident is there for Open Source firmware? Certainly no where near as much as in the software world. I could see Transmeta treading those waters in order to capitolize on the good-will of the Linux community, but not before getting the product out the door! Bob seems to not even know there is a distinction.
He also drops the ball on what it means to be X86 compatible. That means you can run Windows, SCO, Solaris x86, Netware, Linux, *BSD and any number of other OSes. Transmeta is not making a WinCPU(tm), they're making an Intel x86 compatible chip. This is neatly glossed over in the article.
Hemos, next time do yourself a favor and just ignore anything Bob Metcalf has to say. This guy is just a troll. I've now seen the ultimate argument for article moderation....
You are falling into a trap that the software companies are well aware of! The "we don't have to worry, they only go after big companies" theory is fine until this law goes into effect. The goal here is to make it legal for the software to break when and how Microsoft (do we have any illusions that anyone else is behind this) wants it to. That means that the next time you hit the MS site with IE, it's quite legal for them to nuke every copy of MS products on your hard drive that you didn't license. They'll have standard plug-ins in every app you buy before you can blink. There won't be any such thing as "good guy" companies because the ones that are traded publicly will not be able to justify NOT doing it to their shareholders and the ones that are not public will feel the squeeze when most of the industry goes this way.
Ok, so I see several things odd about the way this is being emphasised:
No one is looking BACK to say "hey, is it even a reasonable starting point that software vendors don't take responsibility for the software they write?
The restrictions on reviews and benchmarks needs to be challenged so badly that I can't even thing straight when considering them. This is blatently bad for the consumer! But, very little emphasis is placed on this.
There is also very little said (only toward the end of *this* article) of the remote shut-down "features".
If this bill were simply:
Software shrink-wrap licenses are binding contracts as long as (a) they do not restrict more than the installation and coppying of software and introduce warantee terms (b) the consumer has a right to recieve their money back if they do not agree with the terms
I would still have problem #1, but I would be happy to let the market decide. But, the controversy over this bit seems to be drowning out the truly scary parts of the debate, so people like the Gov. of Virginia thinks this is an OK law. He never hears anyone telling him how truly awful this will be, just "I don't want to be bound by shrink-wrap licenses."
A side note: MS is pushing for refund rights huh? Can't wait for the next refund day!;-)
This is what you have to expect. Microsoft wants customers to not abandon them, so they're going to spend every marketing dollar that they can saying "we're the best!" They see Sun as their biggest competition in the Web space (this is arguable, but certainly for the trendy e-commerce/.com sites the trend is to assume that Sun is *the* "enterprise OS", whatever that means). As such, they need to make customers percieve that other customers are leaving Sun for Microsoft.
What I want to see is Sun's advertizing campaign in 2 months that shows all of the people who were in this add campaign and are now switching back to Sun after comparing uptime #s.
I have to say, though that the recent security fix latency time numbers were quite embarasing for Sun, and customer service has always been their weak point. This needs to change if Sun is to keep its market share out of the hands of Linux, which for all of its failings is actually better supported than Solaris. The high-end SMP is still getting there, but the majority of the market is on 1-4 processors. I'd actually be interested in seeing hard numbers on how many Sun customers use more than that. I suspect that it's a very small number.
As a stockholder in both VA (LNUX) and Andover (ANDN), I'm quite happy. For starters the moderation system that prevented me from seeing the foolishness that you were posting about is *the best* web-based forum moderation software on the planet, and while Slash has been released in semi-functional chunks over time, VA now owns the developers and the code. They could, for example (Dr. Larry, you'd better be listening) ship every VA box with a pre-installed apache/mod-perl/Slash engine for managing discussion forums. I think it'd be about US$1B in hardware sales and software support later that they could start chuckling about the ANDN purchase....
This is not to mention that ANDN owns Think Geek, GIFWorks (which is used by the likes of Lycos) and many other useful sites and products.
VA paid a premium, and the market knows that. However, those of us in VA and Andover for the long haul understand that this purchase was far more brilliant than anyone's publicly been giving them credit for.
When MSNBC was created, everyone assumed that Microsoft would muck with the content. Over the time that it has been around, how many Slashdot stories have referenced positive Linux or negative MS stories at MSNBC? I can remember 3 rather devestating ones right off the top (including an entire series on how easy Linux was to install and use).
Slashdot will continue the way it is now for a while. If and when it gets unpleasant, I suspect that we'll see the original people leave and the "info for the new users" to start showing up. It won't be VA touting their own strengths, that would make them stupider than MS, but I could certainly see a watering down of content in the next 2-5 years. For now, though, Slashdot is the best geek site on the net!
Thanks Roblimo, CmdrTaco, Jon, et al! It's been a fun ride (I say this as a reader, submitter, followup contributor, stockholder and geek), and I trust your standards enough to keep reading, learning and sharing.
That's BS. The first glow from transmeta has faded [...] In order to steal some light from transmeta, Intel would have done this within a couple days of the announcement, dont you think?
I dunno. Do you think that after this announcement people (not slashdotters) will be asking "Yeah, but what about that Transmeta" or saying "Gee, Intel is stepping up the portable market". If they'd timed it a few days earlier, I think it would have been the former. Now, it's the latter. Trust me PR and marketing folk stay up late thinking about this kind of crap, and Intel's are very good.
I would suggest that while automation is a good thing, the danger is in tossing choices in favor of ease of automation. What might work well is if there was a documentation system where I could read a HOWTO, decide that a particular solution was appropriate and click on it to "activate". The activation might be a script that does some sanity checking to make sure I'm on the right track, but ultimately it would do exactly what the documentation just told me how to do (perhaps showing me the commands that I could type in the future).
This sort of educational configuration management is what I miss in tools like linuxconf and cfengine.
CORL stock dropped on the news. I'm not sure why. They seem to be all the right stuff right now for the big desktop Linux distribution. I could see them becoming the largest supplier of Linux to corporate desktops in the US, and perhaps even take a good fraction out of MS in the next couple of years.
As an investor, let me assure you that I'm quite pleased. VA's revenue streams now include hardware sales, advertizing and e-commerce through Think Geek. But that's not the important part. The reason I'm an investor (and that I keep kicking myself for passing up The Letter) is that they're doing all of the right things to build the community. They're trying to be the next Sun Microsystems, and just take a look at what Sun's done over the last 10 years....
Slashdot Mirror
Enought people here seem to not know why country codes exist, that I feel it makes sense to go over the reasoning. I'm not saying that this is sound business practice, or that it's justified. I'm just explaining the reasoning.
The basic problem is that most of the worlds most popular Enlgish-speaking movies are made in the United States (some of that is changing with Canada, New Zealand and the UK producing more and more winners). Because of this, movies tend to be released in the US first. Now, they can't really release them in more than one to three countries at a time (just doing the whole US is quite a strain) because of the logistics. You really want to have a big media event surrounding the release, so you gather up some of your actors and crew and screen the movie for select folk with a red carpet and lots of photographers.
Ok, given that you do that one to three countries at a time, and schedules are hard to sync up, you very often wind up in the situation that by the time the film is opening in some late-on-the-list part of the world, the video release has hit shelves in the US. So, you show up to do your premier and everyone yawns, 'cause they've been buying import versions for weeks.
What's worse, the money that a movie makes tends to be in the form of 1/2 of a bell-curve (the descending part) for the theater release and a much more gradual, but simmilarly shaped curve when the video comes out. So, if you reduce the impact of opening weekend, you might easily lose a major chunk of the sales for the box-office, and that sales boost you were expecting from the video release is now moot.
There are holes in this theory, and let's face it, Hollywood is not run on quality data-gathering operations. Personally, I think that staging one huge opening per movie and broadcasting it to the world simultaneous with the release of the film in theaters would make more sense, at least for the english-speaking countries. It would require more pre-release work because you have to go through the censorship machinery of all of those countries before your release, but the impact would be greater, I suspect. You could move around, and have the opening for each film be in a different country, thus allowing people in those countries to get access. Certainly the first bunch of films that did this would get huge amounts of press.
But, it's probably better to just let Hollywood die under the weight of foriegn competition. More and more work is moving out to Canada and NZ, and this is good. Hollywood will have to develop new ways of coping. In a way, what's going on now reflects what happened in the comic book industry in the late 80's and early 90's. Back then independants were becoming wildly popular, because they dared to have original content. In the end, the result was that most of the indies went broke when the market consolidated, a few strengthened and did well (e.g. Dark Horse) and DC (Superman, Batman, et al.) ended up creating a whole section just for doing interesting adult-themed, story-focused "comics" that didn't all center on super-heroes (e.g. Sandman, which has been mentioned a couple of times on Slashdot). This is essentially what Hollywood is in the middle of. Content is slowly winning.
As for country codes, it's just an artifact, a minor spin-off of these industry forces. The whole idea will seem foolish in 10 years. How can country codes prevail once movies are delivered over the Internet? I'm waiting for the day when every theater has 2 screens dedicated to showing whatever an on-line vote picked for the day. Once theaters can download movies and pay on a per-play basis instead of locking in weeks at a time, they will be able to offer whatever non-in-first-run movies will fill a theater. This will allow popular movies to keep making money in the theater even after they're on video. Right now, theater owners don't want to lock-in to a movie that's already on video, 'cause they can't guarantee that people will come see it in the theater vs. watching it on video.
Wow, this rambled a bit more than I had wanted. I think I'll stop now.
You will note that the Knuth quote you dredged up is from 1974....
That was exactly my point.
Anyone offering a bounty for an Intercal version? I thought of doing so, but the last thing I need is a mailbox full of Intercal ;-)
B.) Honestly, if you designed an operating system and someone else designed an OS (over even a theme) that LOOKED like yours, down to the logos - wouldn't you be a little upset too?
Absolutely not! I would do exactly what Apple did, but I'd never be upset about it.
US trademark law requires that Apple do this in order to defend their trademark and copyright interests. If they don't Microsoft could then use the Apple logo and successfully argue that Apple is being selective about who it goes after, and Apple might lose the trademark.
On the other hand, if I had designed the Mac look and feel, I would be thrilled that it was so instantly adopted by so much of my competition! The rapid adoption of the Aqua look and feel means that Apple did good user-interface wise. I use Aqua under Sawmill and Gtk+ (actually AquaX under Sawmill) and I think it's one of the best innovations in desktop look-and-feel so far. First off, why did it take this long for people to think of color-coding window baubles? It certainly improves the ease-of-use for me. Also, horizontal pin-striping struck me as a bad idea at first, but somehow it adds something to my desktop. It almost seems as if the applications are more "crafted".
Apple did a great job here, and they know that every innovation will be coppied by the rest of the market. In a way, I'm sure this is why they went for such a radical look. They want everyone to say "oh yeah, that's the new Mac look". Microsoft would call this "mindshare".
The "problem" is that many women simply don't find computer programming to be interesting. Is that bad? Of course not! At the very least it means that those who do will be sought after by colleges.
There are some damn fine female programmers out there (just as there are some really bad ones on both sides of the gender fence), but that doesn't mean that half of the programmers need to be women. If, on average, more men are inclined to be programmers, why not accept the ratios and go on with your life?
Some of the joys I found while learning Python and coding this thing were (no I'm not into abusing buzzwords) ease in RPC communication and data marshalling, thread control, bidirectional pipes, code-reuse, architecture independence, exception handling, and the easy ability of going back into what I wrote and being able to read my own code - not to mention a great debugging environment.
Ok, cool. What part of this is Perl lacking?
One thought: if you have trouble reading your own code in *any* language (even assembly) I suggest you start commenting your code and being a little bit more verbose. People who want to maintain your code will thank you for it.
Zope sounded interesting, but I'm also checking out Mason, a Perl-based system that is tied into mod_perl. mod_perl was perl's six or seventh killer application (and I mean application as in applying a tool to a job, not as in a packaged program). First came the power of Perl regex for text processing. Then CGI (remember CGI was pretty much born in Perl). Then came LWP, and a splash was heard round the world. How many robots and spiders are written in anything else?
Perl is slowing, though. There is a consolidation and honing of features that needs to take place, and perl resists that. In some ways, this makes me long for something like Python, but I've actually been thinking of writing a Perl variant that accomplishes some of the same goals, but aimed more at large-scale programming in performance-oriented environments. I see the main benefits of a new language design being:
I dunno. I'll probably spend a couple of months scoping other languages before making any real investment of time.
As for whitespace and style issues, I dislike Python's way so much that I've put off learning the language for years. It's just so... FORTRAN. Why, of all things would you, in this day and age, subject people to a DEFINITION of TABS?! Why not enforce variable-naming at the same time?
Your points are all good, but the bottom line is that I've been in this biz for quite a while, and I find autoconf pretty daunting for the average project. That needs to change. Yes many of the problems are hard, but they need solutions that present ease-of-use for the general case. autoconf does not do this.
Now, I long for what might have been if metaconfig had taken off. autoconf just isn't what it was craked up to be. There are an awful lot of one-off hacks that have no real internal consistancy. I once made the mistake of asking someone how I locate the Motif libraries in autoconf. I got several answers from "it should be where X is" to "you'll have to write your own command-line arguments, try doing something like what EMACS does". Granted, Motif is not at the heart of free software coding, but it seemed odd that a) such a popular library was not easy to locate and b) there was no standard way to say "search in these directories or as directed by these environment variables/command-line args for this library containting these headers and these functions". Many pieces of this exist, but none of it's coherent or complete.
I'd love to see two things:
If someone were to ask my opinion, it should probably be based on one of the popular scripting languages (e.g. Perl, Python, Scheme, etc).
Realistically, your average project should not have to look like more than:
buildmode: gnome_coding_standard
require: c(ansi,longlong), gtk
build_lib: fizzle(fizzle.c)
build: fazzle(fizzle, fazzle.c)
That would indeed be sweet.
I suspect that some of the people who do the flaming are actually not advocates. Some of them are just trolls. Some are likely anti-Linux. There are, of course, some quantity who are just clueless Linux bigots who don't understand that they're huring the OS more than helping.
Either way, it won't change the facts. Linux has soft-spots (e.g. documentation) as does every OS. Those need to be addressed and those who write well thought-out, clear articles about those problems will get MY paise.
Ok, I know who did it. It was my cousin's sister's broker's dealer's aunt's friend who told me that they knew a guy who happened to have the next ASN up from this girl who once exchanged Email with a cypherpunk who was loosely refered to in Cryptonomicon which was secretly a true story about this guy who towed my car for me.... um, where was I?
;-)
Oh yeah, Hemos did it.
There really is no but. He's touting Linux and Open Source on one side, and working for and touting Transmeta on the other. The two worlds really only touch in that Transmeta wants him to make Linux work on their chip. He's not in charge of Transmeta, and you cannot call the company hypocritical for saying one thing and doing another when Linus' comments are not the company's comments. They are completely consistant in their approach. They simply hired Linus because he was good (remember he wasn't a superstar then) and they wanted to control the OS.
Firmware is software
Firmware is a type of software. A very specific type. And, in this case, I think that the Open Source dynamic has not been proven. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it has not been proven. Thus, I can understand these guys being careful. They want to get the chip out the door.
Even still. Let's say they get the chip out the door and never release the source to the firmware. Is that a bad thing? Perhaps the Open Source community will think so, but why is it worse than Phonix not releasing BIOS source? Because Linus is an employee? I think not. Asking them to release source is one thing, but expecting it is quite another....
Yes, it is.
My point was not that Crusoe was not optimized for Windows, but that it was not a Windows-specific chip. You could run Linux on it, or Solaris, or whatever just like you can on the Athalon.
Basically Metcalf's article was trying to imply that you have this Linux company and they have to stoop to Windows. I was trying to point out that Transmeta is not a Linux company, though they do employ Linus. This is where Metcalf doesn't get Open Source. He's still thinking in terms were employing the leader of a project gives you control of that project, and makes it an integral part of your business.
In reality Linus could leave Transmeta tomorrow, go work for their competition, and they could go right on using his OS. *This* is the power of Open Source. Metcalf has not yet seen this.
And Metcalf a troll? Uh huh, he didn't exactly post it here on
You're right, he didn't. On the other hand, he knows damn well (now) that any inflamitory article that he publishes will end up being a Slashdot headline and generate tons of hits for his site.
I hypothisize that he wrote this article specifically to troll the Slashdot effect. Thus, he is a troll. If I'm wrong, I appologize, but the fact that he mentions Slashdot by name, certainly implies that he has it in mind....
Unless everyone who dares say anything bad about Linus or Linux (even off
Oh, no not at all! Watch, I'll prove it:
I do not consider that a troll. It is, however a negative comment about Linux (the distributions of Linux, not the kernel specifically). I even through in a hook at the end to get people to respond, but that's now what trolling is. Trolling is trying to make people mad enough to shout back at you. It's pushing a point of view, not because it's right or wrong, but because it will get you paid attention to. In the comming war for page views, you will see more and more Trolling of this sort. Trolling not for replies or moderation (some people get off on getting negative moderation on Slashdot, it makes them feel important), but for hits.
Please check out the definition of ad hominem fallacies. I think you will find that constructing a set of arguments with evidence based in fact about the matter at hand and then using those conclusions to draw inference as to the motivations of the debater in question and the value in further debate with that individual does not constitute a logical fallacy of the type you suggest.
;-)
On the other hand, the body of your post made a point, and if you re-read my posting you will find that you and I are in agreement. I was simply saying that before shipping a hardware product is not the time to go testing new business models in firmware distribution. Let them get the darn chip out the door and then chat them up about releasing the source. Of course it will be harmless for them to do so (they have patents on the hardware to take advantage of that source) and Linus will probably be quite happy that way, as he can start blurring the line between Linux and Crusoe by having the kernel modify the instruction set to suit its needs.... Could be fun. Obviously such an effort would require that the Linux kernel developers have a clear idea of how the Crusoe firmware works, and given the distributed nature of Linux development, releasing the source would be the best way to bootstrap this.
You see, I actually did think about what I was posting.
OB off-topic thought: can someone write an HCF instruction for this sucker?
As I pointed out. There are very few examples of open source firmware development. You have pointed out one of the few. There will be more, I'm sure. This is a good thing. Transmeta may be on the bandwagon with that effort at some point (and PR-wise, I think a later announcement on that front would make more sense than an earlier one). Either way, they've done much for Linus, and by proxy (and maybe even directly) for Linux. I for one am anxious to get my hands on one of those bad boys....
Do you really think that Bob wanted Transmeta to open the source to their firmware, though? No, he's just trying to get a bunch of geeks on Slashdot in a lather about this so that he can sell hits. Guess it worked.
At first, I had just skimmed the article. Now I've read the whole thing, and WOW! I have to say, Slashdot has done a disservice to the community by even linking to this man. His rant is so innane, I can only imagine that he hoped that by being this inflamitory, he would get top-billing on Slashdot. Sad when Infoworld is hurting so badly for hits that they have to go rattle Slashdot.
As for content.... Where to beign. He's just wrong on so many points. As I pointed out before, he keeps trying to imply that Linus is senior management at Transmeta. He knows this is wrong, doesn't he? For another point, what precident is there for Open Source firmware? Certainly no where near as much as in the software world. I could see Transmeta treading those waters in order to capitolize on the good-will of the Linux community, but not before getting the product out the door! Bob seems to not even know there is a distinction.
He also drops the ball on what it means to be X86 compatible. That means you can run Windows, SCO, Solaris x86, Netware, Linux, *BSD and any number of other OSes. Transmeta is not making a WinCPU(tm), they're making an Intel x86 compatible chip. This is neatly glossed over in the article.
Hemos, next time do yourself a favor and just ignore anything Bob Metcalf has to say. This guy is just a troll. I've now seen the ultimate argument for article moderation....
You are falling into a trap that the software companies are well aware of! The "we don't have to worry, they only go after big companies" theory is fine until this law goes into effect. The goal here is to make it legal for the software to break when and how Microsoft (do we have any illusions that anyone else is behind this) wants it to. That means that the next time you hit the MS site with IE, it's quite legal for them to nuke every copy of MS products on your hard drive that you didn't license. They'll have standard plug-ins in every app you buy before you can blink. There won't be any such thing as "good guy" companies because the ones that are traded publicly will not be able to justify NOT doing it to their shareholders and the ones that are not public will feel the squeeze when most of the industry goes this way.
Isn't a free market driven by investment fun?
If this bill were simply:
I would still have problem #1, but I would be happy to let the market decide. But, the controversy over this bit seems to be drowning out the truly scary parts of the debate, so people like the Gov. of Virginia thinks this is an OK law. He never hears anyone telling him how truly awful this will be, just "I don't want to be bound by shrink-wrap licenses."
A side note: MS is pushing for refund rights huh? Can't wait for the next refund day!
This is what you have to expect. Microsoft wants customers to not abandon them, so they're going to spend every marketing dollar that they can saying "we're the best!" They see Sun as their biggest competition in the Web space (this is arguable, but certainly for the trendy e-commerce/.com sites the trend is to assume that Sun is *the* "enterprise OS", whatever that means). As such, they need to make customers percieve that other customers are leaving Sun for Microsoft.
What I want to see is Sun's advertizing campaign in 2 months that shows all of the people who were in this add campaign and are now switching back to Sun after comparing uptime #s.
I have to say, though that the recent security fix latency time numbers were quite embarasing for Sun, and customer service has always been their weak point. This needs to change if Sun is to keep its market share out of the hands of Linux, which for all of its failings is actually better supported than Solaris. The high-end SMP is still getting there, but the majority of the market is on 1-4 processors. I'd actually be interested in seeing hard numbers on how many Sun customers use more than that. I suspect that it's a very small number.
As a stockholder in both VA (LNUX) and Andover (ANDN), I'm quite happy. For starters the moderation system that prevented me from seeing the foolishness that you were posting about is *the best* web-based forum moderation software on the planet, and while Slash has been released in semi-functional chunks over time, VA now owns the developers and the code. They could, for example (Dr. Larry, you'd better be listening) ship every VA box with a pre-installed apache/mod-perl/Slash engine for managing discussion forums. I think it'd be about US$1B in hardware sales and software support later that they could start chuckling about the ANDN purchase....
This is not to mention that ANDN owns Think Geek, GIFWorks (which is used by the likes of Lycos) and many other useful sites and products.
VA paid a premium, and the market knows that. However, those of us in VA and Andover for the long haul understand that this purchase was far more brilliant than anyone's publicly been giving them credit for.
When MSNBC was created, everyone assumed that Microsoft would muck with the content. Over the time that it has been around, how many Slashdot stories have referenced positive Linux or negative MS stories at MSNBC? I can remember 3 rather devestating ones right off the top (including an entire series on how easy Linux was to install and use).
Slashdot will continue the way it is now for a while. If and when it gets unpleasant, I suspect that we'll see the original people leave and the "info for the new users" to start showing up. It won't be VA touting their own strengths, that would make them stupider than MS, but I could certainly see a watering down of content in the next 2-5 years. For now, though, Slashdot is the best geek site on the net!
Thanks Roblimo, CmdrTaco, Jon, et al! It's been a fun ride (I say this as a reader, submitter, followup contributor, stockholder and geek), and I trust your standards enough to keep reading, learning and sharing.
I dunno. Do you think that after this announcement people (not slashdotters) will be asking "Yeah, but what about that Transmeta" or saying "Gee, Intel is stepping up the portable market". If they'd timed it a few days earlier, I think it would have been the former. Now, it's the latter. Trust me PR and marketing folk stay up late thinking about this kind of crap, and Intel's are very good.
I would suggest that while automation is a good thing, the danger is in tossing choices in favor of ease of automation. What might work well is if there was a documentation system where I could read a HOWTO, decide that a particular solution was appropriate and click on it to "activate". The activation might be a script that does some sanity checking to make sure I'm on the right track, but ultimately it would do exactly what the documentation just told me how to do (perhaps showing me the commands that I could type in the future).
This sort of educational configuration management is what I miss in tools like linuxconf and cfengine.
CORL stock dropped on the news. I'm not sure why. They seem to be all the right stuff right now for the big desktop Linux distribution. I could see them becoming the largest supplier of Linux to corporate desktops in the US, and perhaps even take a good fraction out of MS in the next couple of years.
As an investor, let me assure you that I'm quite pleased. VA's revenue streams now include hardware sales, advertizing and e-commerce through Think Geek. But that's not the important part. The reason I'm an investor (and that I keep kicking myself for passing up The Letter) is that they're doing all of the right things to build the community. They're trying to be the next Sun Microsystems, and just take a look at what Sun's done over the last 10 years....