I can't see any reason to feel bothered about computers being able to do what you do, eg. write music in this case. After all, you'll still be able to compose and perform your own original material.
It's no different to the existence of other human musicians. They can do everything that you do as well, yet this doesn't in any way stop you from being original.
To suggest that bias should be avoided sounds sensible, but it may be impossible to achieve.
I could give a very even-handed and thoroughly professional assessment of the pros and cons of Solaris, Linux and Windows in the context of my company's type of application, sticking to facts and without emotive colouring, full of figures and with tight traceability between requirements, performance and conclusions, but how would you judge it for bias? It would be utterly critical of Windows in almost all areas that are relevant to my work (which is *not* office applications), so much so that I expect it would take a very unusual kind of Microsoft devotee to accept my analysis as being unbiased despite all my efforts.
I think you may be asking for the Holy Grail. When analysis condemns something so strongly, it's quite impossible to call for lack of bias, because bias will always be perceived by the side affected, regardless of safeguards.
Of course, you could avoid the accusation by accepting only luke-warm, greyish opinion, but where would that get you? I'm afraid this is not as simple an issue as it might at first appear.
They sense a weakness in people like a shark senses blood in the water, and they are every bit as amoral as sharks as they tear their people's better values and dignity to shreds in the quest for support and power.
The caring politician is a creature out of myth. If you are the former then you'll never make it as the latter.
It sounds bleak, but sadly that's the state of the world at present, and it'll remain so for as long as our dependency on material resources gives power to those who can muster control over material resourcing. Fortunately, that won't be forever.
Well, there's certainly something afoot otherwise why else would Bill Gates bother to talk to a politician? Certainly not to pick up typing skills.
However, you can't uproot a skilled workforce in any significant numbers without severe lossage, regardless of what you pay them, so I doubt that he would even consider moving the existing HQ elsewhere.
However, there is a related possibility that ties in quite nicely with a few other problems that plague him. If he were to set up a brand new cryptographic division in the UK then he'd get out from under the daft US regulations in that area.
He must know that security and thus strong encryption will be absolutely fundamental and huge on the Internet as soon as e-commerce hits the exponential ramp, yet he's prevented from offering killer products in that area to the world from the US at the present time. That must really piss him off because *now* is the time to establish a massive mindshare in that future commercial environment.
So, setting up a cryptographic R&D + development operation in the UK would allow him to thumb his nose at the crypto dinosaurs barring his way, gain him extra technical staff in a key area, and simultaneously send a message of some sort to the Dept of Justice.
Three birds with one stone?
[And Microsoft would almost certainly get both political and financial support from the UK government for that, because our politicians don't have the vision and knowledge in that sphere to see beyond an offer of investment and recognize a flawed infrastructure when they see one, let alone understand the more subtle dangers of a single-solution mindset for their people.]
I'm afraid we couldn't really expect any better from Jeremy Paxman, he's just not technical enough, and you could see him not wanting to push certain subjects because it might take him outside his area of competence. We did learn that Paxman can with great authority state that Gates earns a lot of money... we had that point thrust home again and again, ad nauseum.
I *was* slightly impressed that Paxman managed to say "Linus Torvalds" and "free software" without sneering. (Sneering is his forte.) And Gates responded very well, not by denigrating free software but simply by making the point that Microsoft is in the business of making money, so "free" wasn't relevant. [No, there's no way in which Paxman could have brought up the other meaning of "free". Wrong planet altogether.]
Bill Gates certainly came across as genuine. He even corrected Paxman's assertion that Microsoft was responsible for 90% of Internet machinery, clarifying that it was 90% only of the client side.
I agree that Gates thinks that he and Microsoft have taken the world into the information age almost single-handedly. While we know that that isn't anywhere near to being The Truth or even being representative, for people without our exposure to the history of the Internet and a wider view of computing then his arguments must seem very strong, at least statistically.
My take on BG is that maybe he's suffering from the worm's eye effect: he's so close to the ground in Microsoft that maybe he genuinely believes that Microsoft does only good and nothing bad. If this is so then that's a little sad in part, but it can also be exceedingly dangerous. There is no reasoning with people who "know" that they are in the right.
Fortunately, there is the little question of the Halloween documents to spoil that rosy picture. Nice interviews notwithstanding, we know that Microsoft is not populated with angels, so BG is either not Mr Nice Guy at all or else he's out of touch with ongoings at Microsoft. Either way, that's a million light years better than the messiah that Paxman appeared to be interviewing.
If you are convinced that you are poor because you don't have millions or billions in the bank then you have a narrow view of values and a very hard life ahead of you.
You are rich beyond your (current) wildest dreams. Possibly more so than Bill Gates. But you won't know that until you look beyond superficial things like the Rich List.
You mention a lot of good points, but the analysis is more emotional than scientifically dissective. I can't do the topic justice either, but others before us have done a fairly good job.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs gives a particularly good framework for considerations of the value of money in the scheme of things. In a nutshell, the items of maximum value to you as an individual are determined by what you need to satisfy your immediate requirements. Good hifi speakers are not relevant when you don't have a roof over your head, and shelter is meaningless when you are dying from starvation. Money is often considered a general enabler but it's far from being that: it's worth nothing when you're stuck on a rock in the middle of a crocodile reservoir. Even in more mundane circumstances, it can be unhelpful, and even a liability.
Financial riches are merely part of a larger picture. This doesn't come across in the media and on the stock market of course, but that doesn't really matter, because everyone knows it anyway. When we hear people say "Be happy with what you've got" it sounds like advice from a have to a have-not, but only if you accept that you are a have-not. If you're intelligent enough to understand the phrase, they you are clearly not a have-not. You may not have a lot of money (join the club), but that's not a reflection on much at all except on the amount of tax you'll be paying. The law of diminishing returns hits with a vengence in this area, and I'm not just talking about tax.
In summary, who cares whether we're on some Rich List or other. The taxman, for sure. For everyone else, if you care then I'd seriously worry about your quality of life, because you'll be *very* unhappy for the rest of it.
That was quite an interesting interview with Bill Gates. Predictably though, Jeremy Paxman concentrated on financial riches alone.
He didn't ask whether BG was rich enough to realize that his O/S was so buggy and underpowered as to be a liability to many people, and how he felt about that. He didn't ask whether BG was rich enough to throw away the Windows infrastructure if he felt that the lame horse needed shooting. Nor did he ask whether BG was rich enough to alter the perception of the the Dept of Justice. BG's own comments made the real situation quite clear, although you had to read between the lines: the advantages that his money gives him are limited (would *you* want the "privilege" of meeting politicians?), and he'd have most of them with him still even if he left Microsoft and gave all his money away. It was actually quite sad.
No, instead of asking deeper questions, Paxman just focussed on BG's money much of the time, which made the interview very superficial, predictable and boring, since there's nothing interestingly new in the property of having a lot of money.
There's a balance to be had, and money can be applied on one side of the scales alone.
Although that article was written with tongue very firmly in cheek, the author's affliction is rampantly clear: he's been brainwashed by the very system on which he's attempting to pass comment.
Fortunately for us though, we know that money is only one of the things you need to be rich, and that without the other things then you're not rich, you're just monetarily encumbered.
Let's take the case of the classic "rich" person we speak about here a lot, partly because he's about to come on UK telly in 12 minutes' time, interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC2.
Is Bill Gates rich? Er, it doesn't seem likely, otherwise he'd have enough of a clue to discard virtually everything in Windows right now and replace it with a *BSD or Linux infrastructure with just a Windows-compatible covering over the top. That would make Windows the undisputed king of O/S's, end of story. Having a clue is central to being rich.
Maybe he's got the clue to realize that he should do that, but instead he hasn't got the *freedom* to do so. Well, in that case then he's not rich either, because freedom is the other essential component of being rich.
One could go on and on. Nope, good ol' Bill isn't rich, he's just monetarily encumbered.
And I'm off to watch Jeremy Paxman, who, alas, doesn't know anything about technology so the interview won't be up to much, I expect.
On the other hand, the last time I looked, there weren't any trees in the rubbish bin.:-)
Although this wasn't intended to be serious, I guess propensity to catch fire is related to aeration and low water content, neither of which hold in the compacted and very wet environment of discarded vegetable trimmings.
Hey, maybe the Eat Healthy lobby should use this in their advertising: eat healthy or your house will burn down!:-)
Hackers are prone to their houses burning down ...
on
Hemos is Homeless
·
· Score: 3
... because most junk food comes in paper wrappers.:-)
The moral of the story is, change your diet to a healthy one. I never heard of vegetable waste catching fire.
And it was great to see Alan Cox there too at the Corel stand in Olimpia and chat with him about the "good ol' days" and common acquaintances back at Swansea University (he started his hacking while at a place in the business park attached to the Uni).
What absolutely astounded me though was discovering a Debian stand at the Expo! It's great to see what has been so far the least commercial of the distros be able to display its wares at such a well-regarded exhibition site. Well done guys, and I love the Debian t-shirt I brought back with me too!:-)
It was nice to see both Linux and the free BSDs represented at the recent Linux Expo 99 at Olimpia in the UK. I picked up a FreeBSD PowerPak and loads of books and a cuddly penguin, followed by a great chicken-chilli ramen at Wagamama's. Great day out!
It's nice to see that the occasional bickering witnessed here between the *BSD and Linux camps fortunately doesn't raise its head at conferences or expos, where everyone seems to realize that we're just different strains within one community and that there is only one real enemy, outside.
[I'm still trying to live within the limitations of not having an init.d directory in FreeBSD to allow easy stop/start of subsystems without rebooting... yeow, it seems mighty regressive not to have it!]
The bar against moderation AND posting in the same thread clearly *is* important otherwise the system would just spiral out of control, but alas it means that contributors end up posting little "Please moderate up" messages.
Maybe this means that there should be a second counter per article, holding a Please Up/Down count.
Be that as it may, it's good to read well-balanced items like that posted by Lord of the Files above.
That is a very clear and precise description of the main problem in ESR's writings --- well said, Jon.
ESR's role probably serves a useful function for those that believe that horses will die unless led to water, but it is a million miles away from the antiseptic dissection of a complex subject that one would and should expect in a rational scientific study. From what we've seen so far over the years, that won't change, so I suppose we'll just have to lower our expectations or look to more dispassionate commentators whose analyses are less dogmatically coloured by personal preferences in other areas.
None of this should really surprise us though. There has never been much in common between the popular press and the scientific press in other walks of life. We have our own popular press and our own self-styled popular writers, and we should acknowledge them as such and no more.
I think it's extremely unfortunate that Nikolai Bezroukov permeated his essay with political labelling laced with so much historical baggage that it was bound to cause from ESR a knee-jerk defensive reaction permeated with an equal and opposite amount of irrelevance. And it did.
It's unfortunate not because it caused aggravation in the community (we thrive on that), but because there were quite a few real points dotted around in Nikolai's article which could usefully have been presented as a well reasoned critique of CatB, but as a result of the political red herrings the opportunity to do so has been lost, at least to Nikolai. All it's done it to make ESR hopping mad and to provoke the standard response of the stereotypical indignant American accused of anything sounding vaguely non-capitalistic. Needless to say, it was not productive.
Political and sociological analogies of that sort are just *analogies*, not anything real. Even when the forms are totally congruent, the referrents are always utterly different and so the end result ranges from questionable to ridiculous. It's not meaningful, and it's certainly not helpful.
That little gem might well be the straw that broke the camel's back for Microsoft.
Imagine that you are a top technical employee at Microsoft, well clued up on Windows and on the free operating systems (probably running Linux or a BSD at home), and you read that heap of steaming incompetence being disseminated by your company. How would you feel about it? Professionally soiled by association with the Microsoft name, that's how.
And feeling that way about your employer is the first step towards seeking another. Microsoft may be in the process of losing a proportion of its best technical people, just because of their PR department's lack of analytic skills and a greater interest in good-sounding copy than in technical fact.
I doubt if people should get at all bothered about this. It shows Microsoft people to be either blatant liars or else utterly incompetent at understanding operating systems, or both. Anyone with the slightest clue about Unix or Linux and even the shortest experience of Windows (all Windows experiences are short anyway) is just going to get irritated to a smaller or greater degree at the misrepresentation, and that'll inevitably impact on Microsoft sales. And for those that have never heard about Linux in the first place, this free advertising might ensure that they do!
Another shot in the arm for Linux, from an unexpected source.:-)
Just because most managers and directors push paper and do nothing else doesn't mean that that is the only way things can be.
As a *technical* director or manager, there is no reason why you cannot delegate much of your paper-pushing to pure admin staff, effectively your personal assistants, so that the usual pyramid of paper-pushers-on-top is inverted under you. There will always remain a residue of paperwork that you have to do yourself, like reading others peoples' proposals and laying out your own, but then that's something that techies often do anyway within their own teams.
Although many teccies are doing well, especially those that have taken the step of going freelance/contracting (the main benefit is not money but having a peer relationship with the people who pay you), there is still a long way to go before our role in industry is properly appreciated.
The proportion of major companies in which there is no career progression to board level if "all" you do is provide technical infrastructure is still huge, and permanent technical staff are usually regarded as low-level grunts well below paper-pushing middlemen in most industries. This is usually even the case where the company's entire existence is founded on the technology, like in almost all the national PTTs.
You don't blame manufacturers of kitchen knives for domestic murder. A nuclear missile can be used to deflect an Earth-destroying asteroid as well as to perform genocide.
The technology is neutral. Where blame is required, place it where it is due, squarely on the people that put technology to bad use.
Yes, those are precisely the main areas of concern. You can definitely get good performance for a small number of large objects, but PC MMUs aren't really intended to cater for huge numbers of tiny objects directly.
However, creative design may be able to overcome the problem to some extent if some feature can be exploited to make a good tradeoff, rather like caches do in another problem area. Whether this is possible here remains to be seen.
Those are all good points, but you've missed something. Yes, software systems are often much more complex than hardware ones, but why? After all, hardware systems sprawl out across the entire globe in an interconnected mesh, yet when the hardware of a router in Paris goes down then the hardware of the rest of the Internet continues quite happily doing its thing. How come? Let's examine this a little more closely.
Add software to the equation: now the software in the router in Paris goes down and, excellent, the software in the rest of the Internet continues happily working away. So far so good.
Now consider that router again, except this time look inside it: its SNMP module (just one component of hundreds within the router's O/S) decides to express a coding bug, and what happens? Ooops, IOS has just trashed everything in memory and the router reboots or hangs indefinitely.
What's the difference between these scenarios, and especially between the two last ones in which it is software that has failed? Simple, in the first two cases, there is faultline isolation between the components of the system, whereas within the router's software there is no isolation between software components in the presence of a fault at all. So many years of structured programming, all for nought.
*That* is a key reason why software is more complex than hardware in so many cases. It's not just a matter of size and of the number of internal states. Complexity can be controlled by a simple strategy of divide and conquer, as long as black boxes can be made truly black. In standard computing, this is impossible in the presence of bugs, and all large systems have bugs. The approach is utterly flawed for computing in the large.
What I'm proposing is a little extra structure to control the chaos, because chaos is precisely what the software world is fighting, although it's rarely expressed in those terms.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see any reason to feel bothered about computers being able to do what you do, eg. write music in this case. After all, you'll still be able to compose and perform your own original material.
It's no different to the existence of other human musicians. They can do everything that you do as well, yet this doesn't in any way stop you from being original.
Oh, you mean you have the sound turned on?
To suggest that bias should be avoided sounds sensible, but it may be impossible to achieve.
I could give a very even-handed and thoroughly professional assessment of the pros and cons of Solaris, Linux and Windows in the context of my company's type of application, sticking to facts and without emotive colouring, full of figures and with tight traceability between requirements, performance and conclusions, but how would you judge it for bias? It would be utterly critical of Windows in almost all areas that are relevant to my work (which is *not* office applications), so much so that I expect it would take a very unusual kind of Microsoft devotee to accept my analysis as being unbiased despite all my efforts.
I think you may be asking for the Holy Grail. When analysis condemns something so strongly, it's quite impossible to call for lack of bias, because bias will always be perceived by the side affected, regardless of safeguards.
Of course, you could avoid the accusation by accepting only luke-warm, greyish opinion, but where would that get you? I'm afraid this is not as simple an issue as it might at first appear.
Heap the blame on politicians, all of it.
They sense a weakness in people like a shark senses blood in the water, and they are every bit as amoral as sharks as they tear their people's better values and dignity to shreds in the quest for support and power.
The caring politician is a creature out of myth. If you are the former then you'll never make it as the latter.
It sounds bleak, but sadly that's the state of the world at present, and it'll remain so for as long as our dependency on material resources gives power to those who can muster control over material resourcing. Fortunately, that won't be forever.
Well, there's certainly something afoot otherwise why else would Bill Gates bother to talk to a politician? Certainly not to pick up typing skills.
However, you can't uproot a skilled workforce in any significant numbers without severe lossage, regardless of what you pay them, so I doubt that he would even consider moving the existing HQ elsewhere.
However, there is a related possibility that ties in quite nicely with a few other problems that plague him. If he were to set up a brand new cryptographic division in the UK then he'd get out from under the daft US regulations in that area.
He must know that security and thus strong encryption will be absolutely fundamental and huge on the Internet as soon as e-commerce hits the exponential ramp, yet he's prevented from offering killer products in that area to the world from the US at the present time. That must really piss him off because *now* is the time to establish a massive mindshare in that future commercial environment.
So, setting up a cryptographic R&D + development operation in the UK would allow him to thumb his nose at the crypto dinosaurs barring his way, gain him extra technical staff in a key area, and simultaneously send a message of some sort to the Dept of Justice.
Three birds with one stone?
[And Microsoft would almost certainly get both political and financial support from the UK government for that, because our politicians don't have the vision and knowledge in that sphere to see beyond an offer of investment and recognize a flawed infrastructure when they see one, let alone understand the more subtle dangers of a single-solution mindset for their people.]
I'm afraid we couldn't really expect any better from Jeremy Paxman, he's just not technical enough, and you could see him not wanting to push certain subjects because it might take him outside his area of competence. We did learn that Paxman can with great authority state that Gates earns a lot of money ... we had that point thrust home again and again, ad nauseum.
I *was* slightly impressed that Paxman managed to say "Linus Torvalds" and "free software" without sneering. (Sneering is his forte.) And Gates responded very well, not by denigrating free software but simply by making the point that Microsoft is in the business of making money, so "free" wasn't relevant. [No, there's no way in which Paxman could have brought up the other meaning of "free". Wrong planet altogether.]
Bill Gates certainly came across as genuine. He even corrected Paxman's assertion that Microsoft was responsible for 90% of Internet machinery, clarifying that it was 90% only of the client side.
I agree that Gates thinks that he and Microsoft have taken the world into the information age almost single-handedly. While we know that that isn't anywhere near to being The Truth or even being representative, for people without our exposure to the history of the Internet and a wider view of computing then his arguments must seem very strong, at least statistically.
My take on BG is that maybe he's suffering from the worm's eye effect: he's so close to the ground in Microsoft that maybe he genuinely believes that Microsoft does only good and nothing bad. If this is so then that's a little sad in part, but it can also be exceedingly dangerous. There is no reasoning with people who "know" that they are in the right.
Fortunately, there is the little question of the Halloween documents to spoil that rosy picture. Nice interviews notwithstanding, we know that Microsoft is not populated with angels, so BG is either not Mr Nice Guy at all or else he's out of touch with ongoings at Microsoft. Either way, that's a million light years better than the messiah that Paxman appeared to be interviewing.
If you are convinced that you are poor because you don't have millions or billions in the bank then you have a narrow view of values and a very hard life ahead of you.
You are rich beyond your (current) wildest dreams. Possibly more so than Bill Gates. But you won't know that until you look beyond superficial things like the Rich List.
You mention a lot of good points, but the analysis is more emotional than scientifically dissective. I can't do the topic justice either, but others before us have done a fairly good job.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs gives a particularly good framework for considerations of the value of money in the scheme of things. In a nutshell, the items of maximum value to you as an individual are determined by what you need to satisfy your immediate requirements. Good hifi speakers are not relevant when you don't have a roof over your head, and shelter is meaningless when you are dying from starvation. Money is often considered a general enabler but it's far from being that: it's worth nothing when you're stuck on a rock in the middle of a crocodile reservoir. Even in more mundane circumstances, it can be unhelpful, and even a liability.
Financial riches are merely part of a larger picture. This doesn't come across in the media and on the stock market of course, but that doesn't really matter, because everyone knows it anyway. When we hear people say "Be happy with what you've got" it sounds like advice from a have to a have-not, but only if you accept that you are a have-not. If you're intelligent enough to understand the phrase, they you are clearly not a have-not. You may not have a lot of money (join the club), but that's not a reflection on much at all except on the amount of tax you'll be paying. The law of diminishing returns hits with a vengence in this area, and I'm not just talking about tax.
In summary, who cares whether we're on some Rich List or other. The taxman, for sure. For everyone else, if you care then I'd seriously worry about your quality of life, because you'll be *very* unhappy for the rest of it.
That was quite an interesting interview with Bill Gates. Predictably though, Jeremy Paxman concentrated on financial riches alone.
He didn't ask whether BG was rich enough to realize that his O/S was so buggy and underpowered as to be a liability to many people, and how he felt about that. He didn't ask whether BG was rich enough to throw away the Windows infrastructure if he felt that the lame horse needed shooting. Nor did he ask whether BG was rich enough to alter the perception of the the Dept of Justice. BG's own comments made the real situation quite clear, although you had to read between the lines: the advantages that his money gives him are limited (would *you* want the "privilege" of meeting politicians?), and he'd have most of them with him still even if he left Microsoft and gave all his money away. It was actually quite sad.
No, instead of asking deeper questions, Paxman just focussed on BG's money much of the time, which made the interview very superficial, predictable and boring, since there's nothing interestingly new in the property of having a lot of money.
There's a balance to be had, and money can be applied on one side of the scales alone.
Although that article was written with tongue very firmly in cheek, the author's affliction is rampantly clear: he's been brainwashed by the very system on which he's attempting to pass comment.
Fortunately for us though, we know that money is only one of the things you need to be rich, and that without the other things then you're not rich, you're just monetarily encumbered.
Let's take the case of the classic "rich" person we speak about here a lot, partly because he's about to come on UK telly in 12 minutes' time, interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC2.
Is Bill Gates rich? Er, it doesn't seem likely, otherwise he'd have enough of a clue to discard virtually everything in Windows right now and replace it with a *BSD or Linux infrastructure with just a Windows-compatible covering over the top. That would make Windows the undisputed king of O/S's, end of story. Having a clue is central to being rich.
Maybe he's got the clue to realize that he should do that, but instead he hasn't got the *freedom* to do so. Well, in that case then he's not rich either, because freedom is the other essential component of being rich.
One could go on and on. Nope, good ol' Bill isn't rich, he's just monetarily encumbered.
And I'm off to watch Jeremy Paxman, who, alas, doesn't know anything about technology so the interview won't be up to much, I expect.
Good point!
:-)
:-)
On the other hand, the last time I looked, there weren't any trees in the rubbish bin.
Although this wasn't intended to be serious, I guess propensity to catch fire is related to aeration and low water content, neither of which hold in the compacted and very wet environment of discarded vegetable trimmings.
Hey, maybe the Eat Healthy lobby should use this in their advertising: eat healthy or your house will burn down!
... because most junk food comes in paper wrappers. :-)
The moral of the story is, change your diet to a healthy one. I never heard of vegetable waste catching fire.
[Morgaine pushes pizza box deftly out of sight.]
So, what you're saying is that there is no mechanism actually available for subsystem stop/start control in *BSD.
Well, one can live with that for now, but it's clearly something that needs addressing.
And it was great to see Alan Cox there too at the Corel stand in Olimpia and chat with him about the "good ol' days" and common acquaintances back at Swansea University (he started his hacking while at a place in the business park attached to the Uni).
:-)
What absolutely astounded me though was discovering a Debian stand at the Expo! It's great to see what has been so far the least commercial of the distros be able to display its wares at such a well-regarded exhibition site. Well done guys, and I love the Debian t-shirt I brought back with me too!
It was nice to see both Linux and the free BSDs represented at the recent Linux Expo 99 at Olimpia in the UK. I picked up a FreeBSD PowerPak and loads of books and a cuddly penguin, followed by a great chicken-chilli ramen at Wagamama's. Great day out!
... yeow, it seems mighty regressive not to have it!]
It's nice to see that the occasional bickering witnessed here between the *BSD and Linux camps fortunately doesn't raise its head at conferences or expos, where everyone seems to realize that we're just different strains within one community and that there is only one real enemy, outside.
[I'm still trying to live within the limitations of not having an init.d directory in FreeBSD to allow easy stop/start of subsystems without rebooting
The bar against moderation AND posting in the same thread clearly *is* important otherwise the system would just spiral out of control, but alas it means that contributors end up posting little "Please moderate up" messages.
Maybe this means that there should be a second counter per article, holding a Please Up/Down count.
Be that as it may, it's good to read well-balanced items like that posted by Lord of the Files above.
That is a very clear and precise description of the main problem in ESR's writings --- well said, Jon.
ESR's role probably serves a useful function for those that believe that horses will die unless led to water, but it is a million miles away from the antiseptic dissection of a complex subject that one would and should expect in a rational scientific study. From what we've seen so far over the years, that won't change, so I suppose we'll just have to lower our expectations or look to more dispassionate commentators whose analyses are less dogmatically coloured by personal preferences in other areas.
None of this should really surprise us though. There has never been much in common between the popular press and the scientific press in other walks of life. We have our own popular press and our own self-styled popular writers, and we should acknowledge them as such and no more.
I think it's extremely unfortunate that Nikolai Bezroukov permeated his essay with political labelling laced with so much historical baggage that it was bound to cause from ESR a knee-jerk defensive reaction permeated with an equal and opposite amount of irrelevance. And it did.
It's unfortunate not because it caused aggravation in the community (we thrive on that), but because there were quite a few real points dotted around in Nikolai's article which could usefully have been presented as a well reasoned critique of CatB, but as a result of the political red herrings the opportunity to do so has been lost, at least to Nikolai. All it's done it to make ESR hopping mad and to provoke the standard response of the stereotypical indignant American accused of anything sounding vaguely non-capitalistic. Needless to say, it was not productive.
Political and sociological analogies of that sort are just *analogies*, not anything real. Even when the forms are totally congruent, the referrents are always utterly different and so the end result ranges from questionable to ridiculous. It's not meaningful, and it's certainly not helpful.
That little gem might well be the straw that broke the camel's back for Microsoft.
Imagine that you are a top technical employee at Microsoft, well clued up on Windows and on the free operating systems (probably running Linux or a BSD at home), and you read that heap of steaming incompetence being disseminated by your company. How would you feel about it? Professionally soiled by association with the Microsoft name, that's how.
And feeling that way about your employer is the first step towards seeking another. Microsoft may be in the process of losing a proportion of its best technical people, just because of their PR department's lack of analytic skills and a greater interest in good-sounding copy than in technical fact.
I doubt if people should get at all bothered about this. It shows Microsoft people to be either blatant liars or else utterly incompetent at understanding operating systems, or both. Anyone with the slightest clue about Unix or Linux and even the shortest experience of Windows (all Windows experiences are short anyway) is just going to get irritated to a smaller or greater degree at the misrepresentation, and that'll inevitably impact on Microsoft sales. And for those that have never heard about Linux in the first place, this free advertising might ensure that they do!
:-)
Another shot in the arm for Linux, from an unexpected source.
Just because most managers and directors push paper and do nothing else doesn't mean that that is the only way things can be.
As a *technical* director or manager, there is no reason why you cannot delegate much of your paper-pushing to pure admin staff, effectively your personal assistants, so that the usual pyramid of paper-pushers-on-top is inverted under you. There will always remain a residue of paperwork that you have to do yourself, like reading others peoples' proposals and laying out your own, but then that's something that techies often do anyway within their own teams.
Although many teccies are doing well, especially those that have taken the step of going freelance/contracting (the main benefit is not money but having a peer relationship with the people who pay you), there is still a long way to go before our role in industry is properly appreciated.
The proportion of major companies in which there is no career progression to board level if "all" you do is provide technical infrastructure is still huge, and permanent technical staff are usually regarded as low-level grunts well below paper-pushing middlemen in most industries. This is usually even the case where the company's entire existence is founded on the technology, like in almost all the national PTTs.
There's a long way to go still.
That wasn't a useful point at all.
You don't blame manufacturers of kitchen knives for domestic murder. A nuclear missile can be used to deflect an Earth-destroying asteroid as well as to perform genocide.
The technology is neutral. Where blame is required, place it where it is due, squarely on the people that put technology to bad use.
Yes, those are precisely the main areas of concern. You can definitely get good performance for a small number of large objects, but PC MMUs aren't really intended to cater for huge numbers of tiny objects directly.
However, creative design may be able to overcome the problem to some extent if some feature can be exploited to make a good tradeoff, rather like caches do in another problem area. Whether this is possible here remains to be seen.
Those are all good points, but you've missed something. Yes, software systems are often much more complex than hardware ones, but why? After all, hardware systems sprawl out across the entire globe in an interconnected mesh, yet when the hardware of a router in Paris goes down then the hardware of the rest of the Internet continues quite happily doing its thing. How come? Let's examine this a little more closely.
Add software to the equation: now the software in the router in Paris goes down and, excellent, the software in the rest of the Internet continues happily working away. So far so good.
Now consider that router again, except this time look inside it: its SNMP module (just one component of hundreds within the router's O/S) decides to express a coding bug, and what happens? Ooops, IOS has just trashed everything in memory and the router reboots or hangs indefinitely.
What's the difference between these scenarios, and especially between the two last ones in which it is software that has failed? Simple, in the first two cases, there is faultline isolation between the components of the system, whereas within the router's software there is no isolation between software components in the presence of a fault at all. So many years of structured programming, all for nought.
*That* is a key reason why software is more complex than hardware in so many cases. It's not just a matter of size and of the number of internal states. Complexity can be controlled by a simple strategy of divide and conquer, as long as black boxes can be made truly black. In standard computing, this is impossible in the presence of bugs, and all large systems have bugs. The approach is utterly flawed for computing in the large.
What I'm proposing is a little extra structure to control the chaos, because chaos is precisely what the software world is fighting, although it's rarely expressed in those terms.