I second that. Nothing like the same four commercials during an hour long show to make you glad you pvr'ed it and are fast fowarding through them.
I don't see why they do that, some brainer probably sat there and said "if they see our ad 23 times this hour they gotta buy our anal leakage cream for sure!".
I did that. My 300 page text on bignum math is freely available. Problem is lack of editors willing to work for free means the book sucks to read. That's the reality of the world.
I don't think you understand the scope of the "profitting". I stand to make no more than $2 [at best] and around $1.5 [on average] per book sold. This will not make me a rich man. It will however pay for a conference attendence [e.g. Toorcon] and a couple rounds at a pub.
Even if I donated my royalties to charity the book will still cost money because someone has to edit, print and distribute the book. They're not likely to do that for free.
Same thing with audio. You can be the best musician in the world but proper recording equipment and sound engineering takes time and money.
I'd like to point out that many publishers don't pay sustaining wages. But that's ok. The publisher I'm using uses authors who work in the field. So they get paid largely what amounts to a token sum. If I didn't have a day job my two book deals wouldn't pay enough to live off of.
Of course I'm authoring books that will sell in thousands per quarter instead of say the 100s of thousands (e.g. like those retarded "best sellers" you see on TV). So the publishers take isn't that great given they also have to edit, typeset, print, distribute and market the texts my behalf.
Like any work though people produce their best when they have nothing to gain except the satisfaction of a job well done. When you produce something for nothing more than the joy of having completed something of use then you end up with quality.
Most pop artists look at the art as a means to an end. Their goal isn't to be musical or talented but just plain ol' rich and powerful.
I'd like to think things are getting better. People like you should have been around in the early days of Linux where distros were installed off of floppy disks and WMs were usually crude [e.g. just enough to move windows around and what not].
What you have to realize is that the OSS community is not collectively working on the gui side of things. There are people working on the kernel, the compiler tools, the userland tools [e.g. ls, cp, cat, etc], the networking tools, the admin tools, the X11 system, the WM tools, the desktops, the browsers, the multimedia libraries, the media playing applications, the IMs, the image tools, the scanner tools, the games, the web servers, the file servers, the databases, etc...
So it isn't like all 100,000 OSS developers just get down in a convention centre and discuss how to make KDE more like WinXP.
Also if your logic is correct about the need for a shiny OS then the IBM PC would have been the LARGEST FINANCIAL DISASTER OF THE COMPUTING INDUSTRY.
Fact of the matter is the typical computer user today is not that of yesteryear. Perhaps that's good perhaps that bad.
I like to think that computers can be taught in schools [and are] and that not enough emphasis is placed on actually understanding at least fundamentally the technology behind a computer.
I think it's a bad thing to say "let's hide all those nitty gritties from the users". Sure, there is a limit to this, a line must be drawn. Should the average user know what page tables are? Or what an exception handler is? Perhaps not. But forcing them to know what a directory is or device driver is not such a bad thing.
Average home users were more interested back in the day. It wasn't just computer scientists buying the IBM PC, it was families who realized the potential and wanted to be part of something that was growing. They taught themselves how to use DOS when it was nothing but a single-user command line. They learned how to edit batch files and sort their files by themselves. They were not lazy.
But look where ease gets us today. Vendor locking with Office tools, drivers for PCI hardware that only works in windows, the inability to maintain our own computers [e.g. remove viruses, keep from getting them in the first place, add our own drivers, etc] and so on.
Is giving up your ability to really choose worth the fisher price GUI sitting on-top of an incompetent proprietary OS? It wasn't worth it in the 80s [hence FSF] and it sure as hell isn't worth it today.
The problem people like me have is people like you just keep saying Linux is hard, Linux doesn't work, Linux is bad.
Yet millions of people like me just go ahead and get work done efficiently on Linux based distros anyways.
And what is so hard or bad about OSS distros? Oh there are choices, you have to know how your computer works [at even the most basic levels] and you have to know what you want to do with the computer.
Wow, that's pretty bad -- I thought everybody was claiming Dells were cheaper. I guess they're not, since you're saying that the MacBook comes with a better CPU (Core Duo) for the same price.
No you missed that. That's with a 100GB disk upgrade, 1GB of ram and the full three year warranty for the same price as the lowest end Macbook WITHOUT upgrades or the warranty.
The Dell was cheaper.
This was in Dec'05 too. When I was looking to get a G4 laptop. Keep in mind the G4 at 1.5Ghz is significantly slower than a Pentium M at 2Ghz. So I'd take a huge performance hit and pocket hit just to be an Appler.
Who buys a Mac to run another OS other than developers who want access to the different architecture [which is now moot given it's x86]. If I was some sort of artist or just a plain old "user" and I wanted to buy a Mac it would be because I was attracted to MacOS and the sort of programs that are native to it. Not because I can dual-boot it.
It was a different thing when they were G4/G5 processors because then you could get access to different architectures for development and research. Now they're x86 and the same CPU that Dell is selling. What's the point?
My Dell 630m laptop is sturdy, last long on the battery, got a nice 2Ghz Pentium M, 100GB SATA disk, yada, yada. With a three year warranty it's actually the same price as a stock [non-upgraded] low end macbook.
It dual boots winxp and Gentoo Linux just fine. Last I checked it does support booting off USB [I'd have to double check that] so it's possible to boot of an external USB drive if I wanted to.
Or find stores willing to stock proper hardware. I went through a couple NICs in my day trying to find one that would work with one of the many OSS drivers in Linux.
Right now the champ are DLINK 530-T chips based on the sk98 or skge chipsets. They work out of the box without any tweaking or 3rd party drivers. And they're gigabit to boot.
As for sound, cmipci is one of the most common and simplest. Most [not all] AC'97 compliant cards/chips will work.
Video, get anything by nvidia if you want 3d.
Wireless, NetGear WG111 through ndis works fine, Intels wireless works ok too.
etc...
Oddly enough as a by-product of Dell boxes being so damn popular most if not all Dell laptops and desktops have fairly good coverage in Linux and BSD.
If you're building your own box it's trivial to build something that is Linux compatible. You just have to stop shopping at Gateway or BestBuy. Any competent local computer shop should be able to order you pretty much any of the things I mentioned in this post. If you become friends with the dealer and explain what you're upto they may let you try stuff you want to buy at the shop with a boot-cd just to make sure Linux can work it.
I guess Linux has that ancillary benefit too. Get to actually stop and talk with people:-)
No, wrong. Bruce is a "press whore". There is a difference.
He's the type who always has an opinion on something regardless as to his actual contribution to the discovery.... irony setting in...
He differs from me [for those who are going to reply to this] in that I don't seek media attention everytime SOMEONE does the hard work to figure something out (Sony rootkit anyone?).
Besides, why can't the MBR be on... A DIFFERENT drive and just have two disks? As I get the fear it's that if you put two OSes on one disk.
Well an 80GB disk is all of 64$ CDN at any nearby shop. I think people can swing putting two SATA drives in a computer if they really want to dual-boot.
Every new chip has a chance of requiring a new chipset but usually the chipsets are backwards compatible amongst a line of processors. For instance, a 945 chipset will run a 775-pin Prescott originally destined for a 915 chipset. If you got a 945, 955 or 975 you can essentially run every 775-pin processor Intel makes. If you bought a 915 you're SOL. [e.g. myself]
If they had a standard FSB (*cough* *cough* Hypertransport *cough*) they wouldn't have to tweak the damn thing with every new CPU.
Nothing is saying Intel has to copy AMD in that respect, it would be nice... if for example, you could plomp EITHER an AMD or Intel processor in a 940-pin [or the next series] of sockets. That would be REAL COMPETITION. As I understand it [I am likely wrong] the coherent bit of the HT link is mostly a logical concept. So Intel could use HT and invent their own damn coherent link.
To sum up: Diversity good, competition better, segregation bad.
Case sensitivity? What like having real file names? I guess you're a fan of 8.3.
Hardware support? That's funny because my workstations, laptops and servers all run Linux based distros. In the past five years I haven't had any problems with hardware that Windows handled any better. If you mean lack of drivers then you just have to be smarter about what you buy. There is plenty of performance and econimical hardware that is Linux supported.
Visual Inconsistencies? That's cute. I can't imagine any computer literate person having a significant problem moving from Gnome to KDE or vice versa. Also many applications are GTK based which means it doesn't really matter what your WM is.
Yes, moving to a Linux distro is work. But in the long run it's worth it. Having freedom of choice means you get "scary number of things to look at" but it also means that some asshat in a suit in Redmond can't tell you what you can and can't do with your computer.
1. You already likely have ID cards 2. Consolidating them makes it easier to issue, revoke and update 3. Single point of failure, usually in the lowest-bidder implementation of the DB backend 4. 1984 was 22 years ago. Get over it.
I'm personally in favour of a single ID card which replaces the SSN [or SIN for us cannucks], Health Card, Drivers License, Firearms License, etc.
It just makes sense that there be some sort of DB capable of holding a few keys about each citizen somewhere in a country with a GDP of several hundred BILLION DOLLARS!!!
30 million people x say 1MB each [how much does storing your life take?] is only 29.2TiB of storage. Spread that over the 13 provinces/territories and you'd see it's rather trivial to manage. Even if you keep detailed records of the dead for ~5 years you're still taking less than 40TiB of storage. In terms of the new 700GB Seagates that is 26 million dollars worth of storage. Keep in mind the Canadian government has spent two billion on the gun registry alone...
Now compare the [say tech+staff] 50 million dollars the federal government would spend on this plan to the dozens of independent and woefully illequipped agencies managing small pockets of your ID as it is.
It's probably easily a three-fold reduction in cost.
That bit about glibc breaking stuff is a classic open source problem that isn't even recognized as a problem. I can run Classic apps on OSX without recompiling anything. I can run Visicalc on Vista. No recompiling involved. "The source is available" is a lousy excuse for ABI breakage. (And don't quote me RHAT's intra-version ABI compatibility as a good example. IT guys might be okay with that (although I doubt it) -- it's completely unacceptable for end-users.)
For the most part from version to version glibc is backwards compatible. So no relinking required. But things change. When AMD64 came out the ABI had to change to accomodate the platform. That's unavoidable.
The point is though if there is an ABI change having access to the source lets you port things up.
And being able to run Visicalc from DOS 2.0 days on Vista is not always a "good thing". I can run that in Linux as well with DOSEMU but I have to choose to install that "baggage". Vista [or windows] gets it to you as a value-added bonus.
Most Fortune 50 companies I know of (about 20 of them, admittedly not a comprehensive sample) pay $18-$30 for their per-seat Windows licenses. At those prices it's not worth subjecting users with training on an unfamiliar system, especially when the unfamiliar system is also more expensive (OSX) or sub-par (Linux).
You're missing the whole "support" contract issue there. First off, when you have 50,000 employees even $30 per seat adds up. Then you add in the custom support you can only get from one place [e.g. MSFT] and things start looking like reality.
MSFT didn't get rich off of $30 per seat.
I like the jab at the end about "or sub-par (Linux)". Good to show you're not fighting any sort of OS holy war. Wouldn't want to see that.
Most people who buy, use and work with Microsoft products know the implications of using Microsoft products. If you insist on assuming everyone else is an idiot, more power to you. Meanwhile, I'll just get on with my work.
I don't think you grasp the implications here. You're saying you're free to use a binary only copy of a tool. I'm saying I'm free to DISTRIBUTE tools like Perl even with my own tweaks if I want. This is especially important after platform changes (e.g. say when glibc goes to 2.5 or something and I have to rebuild it).
Last I checked it (OO.o2 RC1 I think) it still ran _badly_ on several platforms I tried it on. For all the cribbing about bloat, Word/Excel etc start _fast_. OO makes my machine crawl.
I dunno where people get this but OpenOffice loads fairly quickly on both my WinXP laptop and my Gentoo desktop. Certainly not significantly slower than Office. It's entirely possible your HD is horribly fragmented or you're comparing a cold start of OO to a warm star of Office?
And besides, for all your implications about how Microsoft products are inferior because they only support one platform: here's a clue. Real users care about only one platform-- their own. Cross-platform is nice-to-have, but some folk on Slashdot (typically academic CS types and Unix geeks) have a _very_ overblown idea about its importance.
Um how about not? The inability to work with Office files in Linux an annoyance beyond belief for many Linux users who relunctantly boot Windows [and then get infected with CWS... thank you IE] to use the tools. I'm sure if you explained to your boss how you could save $100s per box by not installing Windows they might be interested.
Defeatists like you are horribly annoying. Oh, Linux isn't perfect so let's totally ignore all it's positive qualities in favour of the path of least resistance. Even though in the long run this just sends us down the path of servitude. Yeah, so much better.
bash is compatible one way or another with shells dating back to the "day". This is what we call a "de facto" standard.
A script I write for bash will likely work for tcsh or ksh. A script I write on my Gentoo box will likely work on a *BSD box with bash, etc, etc, etc.
One of the more annoying things about windows was the inability to run shells developed ELSEWHERE on it. It's bad enough none of the MSFT tools support gmake (which even *BSD and MacOS toolchains do) but not being able to script is annoying. Now they come out with a scripting language, which for all intents and purposes may be very elegant and useful, except it's totally incompatible with anything else.
For software vendors who target more than Windows this has always been a thorn. Let's not forget Windows still provides no POSIX.1 [or.2] compatible API for developers. So kiss things like pthreads goodbye. mmap? Who needs that. etc, etc.
This would be different if this was 1983 or something. Then you could say they're really trying to innovate since the alternatives are in proprietary UNIX OSes and not really that pretty (I think most shells before bash were painfully inept). But today? After all the other standards they have abused... it's hard to be accepting of yet another tool that is incompatible.
That's my point exactly though. Larry is free to turn Perl into whatever he wants. The code is freely accessible. I can keep giving Perl 5.xx to my customers and not care what 6.xx does.
Furthermore, if I'm so inclined [I'm not... but] I can fix and add to Perl 5.xx if Larry [and the others] decide to abandon it.
Whereas in the MSFT world you're basically fucked. Reported bugs [especially in IE] often go unattended for long periods of time [CWS virus anyone?] and newer versions are often ever so slightly incompatible with previous versions of the same tool.
If people really can't see MSFTs approach to "segment, divide and conquer" development then they really deserve what they get.
And the resulting binary is exactly 5,624 bytes with GCC 3.4.6-r1 on an AMD64 Gentoo box. Oh... I see he used -static... he's a moron.
What's better, 30 apps loaded with their own copy of libc or 30 apps loaded with one copy of libc. Shared objects exist for a reason.
That would be like appending the.NET VM to every application you write for.NET. I'm sure the 20MB or so of.NET you download for every hello world app would dominate by comparison.
This is what happens when you use mailing lists and random benchmark sites as authorative sources of information.
I work with MSVC and GCC fairly often and it has always been my experience that the code produced by GCC is faster. Specially when the code involves more complicated code structure like loops and pointer arithmetic.
um... for the bulk of my automated tasks I use perl and bash. I use perl for more "constructed" solutions and bash for the more automated ops (e.g. list of commands). Seems to work fine for my projects where I have to navigate random directories and what not.
Should point out that while MSVC is faster than GCC it isn't better. GCC supports more platforms [e.g. code you write with GNU tools has a better chance of working elsewhere, provided you're not using the w32api], has better optimizer algorithms and adheres better to the ISO specs for C and C++.
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I second that. Nothing like the same four commercials during an hour long show to make you glad you pvr'ed it and are fast fowarding through them.
I don't see why they do that, some brainer probably sat there and said "if they see our ad 23 times this hour they gotta buy our anal leakage cream for sure!".
Tom
I did that. My 300 page text on bignum math is freely available. Problem is lack of editors willing to work for free means the book sucks to read. That's the reality of the world.
I don't think you understand the scope of the "profitting". I stand to make no more than $2 [at best] and around $1.5 [on average] per book sold. This will not make me a rich man. It will however pay for a conference attendence [e.g. Toorcon] and a couple rounds at a pub.
Even if I donated my royalties to charity the book will still cost money because someone has to edit, print and distribute the book. They're not likely to do that for free.
Same thing with audio. You can be the best musician in the world but proper recording equipment and sound engineering takes time and money.
Tom
All good points.
I'd like to point out that many publishers don't pay sustaining wages. But that's ok. The publisher I'm using uses authors who work in the field. So they get paid largely what amounts to a token sum. If I didn't have a day job my two book deals wouldn't pay enough to live off of.
Of course I'm authoring books that will sell in thousands per quarter instead of say the 100s of thousands (e.g. like those retarded "best sellers" you see on TV). So the publishers take isn't that great given they also have to edit, typeset, print, distribute and market the texts my behalf.
Like any work though people produce their best when they have nothing to gain except the satisfaction of a job well done. When you produce something for nothing more than the joy of having completed something of use then you end up with quality.
Most pop artists look at the art as a means to an end. Their goal isn't to be musical or talented but just plain ol' rich and powerful.
Tom
I'm in the middle of two book deals [one to be released in June/July and the other in Sept] and neither of them will make me rich.
:-)
That doesn't matter.
Some people just want to get their work out there.
Tom
I'd like to think things are getting better. People like you should have been around in the early days of Linux where distros were installed off of floppy disks and WMs were usually crude [e.g. just enough to move windows around and what not].
What you have to realize is that the OSS community is not collectively working on the gui side of things. There are people working on the kernel, the compiler tools, the userland tools [e.g. ls, cp, cat, etc], the networking tools, the admin tools, the X11 system, the WM tools, the desktops, the browsers, the multimedia libraries, the media playing applications, the IMs, the image tools, the scanner tools, the games, the web servers, the file servers, the databases, etc...
So it isn't like all 100,000 OSS developers just get down in a convention centre and discuss how to make KDE more like WinXP.
Also if your logic is correct about the need for a shiny OS then the IBM PC would have been the LARGEST FINANCIAL DISASTER OF THE COMPUTING INDUSTRY.
Fact of the matter is the typical computer user today is not that of yesteryear. Perhaps that's good perhaps that bad.
I like to think that computers can be taught in schools [and are] and that not enough emphasis is placed on actually understanding at least fundamentally the technology behind a computer.
I think it's a bad thing to say "let's hide all those nitty gritties from the users". Sure, there is a limit to this, a line must be drawn. Should the average user know what page tables are? Or what an exception handler is? Perhaps not. But forcing them to know what a directory is or device driver is not such a bad thing.
Average home users were more interested back in the day. It wasn't just computer scientists buying the IBM PC, it was families who realized the potential and wanted to be part of something that was growing. They taught themselves how to use DOS when it was nothing but a single-user command line. They learned how to edit batch files and sort their files by themselves. They were not lazy.
But look where ease gets us today. Vendor locking with Office tools, drivers for PCI hardware that only works in windows, the inability to maintain our own computers [e.g. remove viruses, keep from getting them in the first place, add our own drivers, etc] and so on.
Is giving up your ability to really choose worth the fisher price GUI sitting on-top of an incompetent proprietary OS? It wasn't worth it in the 80s [hence FSF] and it sure as hell isn't worth it today.
Tom
Some of those [e.g. the fair] are good causes to get into. Others are not.
Intel wants to own the entire rig. Look at what they do with chipsets today. Imagine having to use Intel brand DDR2 or other storage, etc, etc.
That's not always a good thing as it drives down competition.
Tom
The problem people like me have is people like you just keep saying Linux is hard, Linux doesn't work, Linux is bad.
Yet millions of people like me just go ahead and get work done efficiently on Linux based distros anyways.
And what is so hard or bad about OSS distros? Oh there are choices, you have to know how your computer works [at even the most basic levels] and you have to know what you want to do with the computer.
Why are those bad things?
Tom
Wow, that's pretty bad -- I thought everybody was claiming Dells were cheaper. I guess they're not, since you're saying that the MacBook comes with a better CPU (Core Duo) for the same price.
No you missed that. That's with a 100GB disk upgrade, 1GB of ram and the full three year warranty for the same price as the lowest end Macbook WITHOUT upgrades or the warranty.
The Dell was cheaper.
This was in Dec'05 too. When I was looking to get a G4 laptop. Keep in mind the G4 at 1.5Ghz is significantly slower than a Pentium M at 2Ghz. So I'd take a huge performance hit and pocket hit just to be an Appler.
Tom
Who buys a Mac to run another OS other than developers who want access to the different architecture [which is now moot given it's x86]. If I was some sort of artist or just a plain old "user" and I wanted to buy a Mac it would be because I was attracted to MacOS and the sort of programs that are native to it. Not because I can dual-boot it.
It was a different thing when they were G4/G5 processors because then you could get access to different architectures for development and research. Now they're x86 and the same CPU that Dell is selling. What's the point?
My Dell 630m laptop is sturdy, last long on the battery, got a nice 2Ghz Pentium M, 100GB SATA disk, yada, yada. With a three year warranty it's actually the same price as a stock [non-upgraded] low end macbook.
It dual boots winxp and Gentoo Linux just fine. Last I checked it does support booting off USB [I'd have to double check that] so it's possible to boot of an external USB drive if I wanted to.
Or find stores willing to stock proper hardware. I went through a couple NICs in my day trying to find one that would work with one of the many OSS drivers in Linux.
:-)
Right now the champ are DLINK 530-T chips based on the sk98 or skge chipsets. They work out of the box without any tweaking or 3rd party drivers. And they're gigabit to boot.
As for sound, cmipci is one of the most common and simplest. Most [not all] AC'97 compliant cards/chips will work.
Video, get anything by nvidia if you want 3d.
Wireless, NetGear WG111 through ndis works fine, Intels wireless works ok too.
etc...
Oddly enough as a by-product of Dell boxes being so damn popular most if not all Dell laptops and desktops have fairly good coverage in Linux and BSD.
If you're building your own box it's trivial to build something that is Linux compatible. You just have to stop shopping at Gateway or BestBuy. Any competent local computer shop should be able to order you pretty much any of the things I mentioned in this post. If you become friends with the dealer and explain what you're upto they may let you try stuff you want to buy at the shop with a boot-cd just to make sure Linux can work it.
I guess Linux has that ancillary benefit too. Get to actually stop and talk with people
Tom
The usual solution is to make a FAT32 partition of a couple gigs, or use a remote SMB share or my personal favourite: just don't use windows.
Tom
No, wrong. Bruce is a "press whore". There is a difference.
... irony setting in ...
... A DIFFERENT drive and just have two disks? As I get the fear it's that if you put two OSes on one disk.
He's the type who always has an opinion on something regardless as to his actual contribution to the discovery.
He differs from me [for those who are going to reply to this] in that I don't seek media attention everytime SOMEONE does the hard work to figure something out (Sony rootkit anyone?).
Besides, why can't the MBR be on
Well an 80GB disk is all of 64$ CDN at any nearby shop. I think people can swing putting two SATA drives in a computer if they really want to dual-boot.
Tom
Yes and no.
Every new chip has a chance of requiring a new chipset but usually the chipsets are backwards compatible amongst a line of processors. For instance, a 945 chipset will run a 775-pin Prescott originally destined for a 915 chipset. If you got a 945, 955 or 975 you can essentially run every 775-pin processor Intel makes. If you bought a 915 you're SOL. [e.g. myself]
If they had a standard FSB (*cough* *cough* Hypertransport *cough*) they wouldn't have to tweak the damn thing with every new CPU.
Nothing is saying Intel has to copy AMD in that respect, it would be nice... if for example, you could plomp EITHER an AMD or Intel processor in a 940-pin [or the next series] of sockets. That would be REAL COMPETITION. As I understand it [I am likely wrong] the coherent bit of the HT link is mostly a logical concept. So Intel could use HT and invent their own damn coherent link.
To sum up: Diversity good, competition better, segregation bad.
Tom
Problems you listed are funny.
Case sensitivity? What like having real file names? I guess you're a fan of 8.3.
Hardware support? That's funny because my workstations, laptops and servers all run Linux based distros. In the past five years I haven't had any problems with hardware that Windows handled any better. If you mean lack of drivers then you just have to be smarter about what you buy. There is plenty of performance and econimical hardware that is Linux supported.
Visual Inconsistencies? That's cute. I can't imagine any computer literate person having a significant problem moving from Gnome to KDE or vice versa. Also many applications are GTK based which means it doesn't really matter what your WM is.
Yes, moving to a Linux distro is work. But in the long run it's worth it. Having freedom of choice means you get "scary number of things to look at" but it also means that some asshat in a suit in Redmond can't tell you what you can and can't do with your computer.
Tom
Bill wouldn't have millions of your dollars to donate to charity.
OH PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
hehehehe. I so hate that loser.
Tom
Summarize useful points
...
1. You already likely have ID cards
2. Consolidating them makes it easier to issue, revoke and update
3. Single point of failure, usually in the lowest-bidder implementation of the DB backend
4. 1984 was 22 years ago. Get over it.
I'm personally in favour of a single ID card which replaces the SSN [or SIN for us cannucks], Health Card, Drivers License, Firearms License, etc.
It just makes sense that there be some sort of DB capable of holding a few keys about each citizen somewhere in a country with a GDP of several hundred BILLION DOLLARS!!!
30 million people x say 1MB each [how much does storing your life take?] is only 29.2TiB of storage. Spread that over the 13 provinces/territories and you'd see it's rather trivial to manage. Even if you keep detailed records of the dead for ~5 years you're still taking less than 40TiB of storage. In terms of the new 700GB Seagates that is 26 million dollars worth of storage. Keep in mind the Canadian government has spent two billion on the gun registry alone
Now compare the [say tech+staff] 50 million dollars the federal government would spend on this plan to the dozens of independent and woefully illequipped agencies managing small pockets of your ID as it is.
It's probably easily a three-fold reduction in cost.
Tom
That bit about glibc breaking stuff is a classic open source problem that isn't even recognized as a problem. I can run Classic apps on OSX without recompiling anything. I can run Visicalc on Vista. No recompiling involved. "The source is available" is a lousy excuse for ABI breakage. (And don't quote me RHAT's intra-version ABI compatibility as a good example. IT guys might be okay with that (although I doubt it) -- it's completely unacceptable for end-users.)
For the most part from version to version glibc is backwards compatible. So no relinking required. But things change. When AMD64 came out the ABI had to change to accomodate the platform. That's unavoidable.
The point is though if there is an ABI change having access to the source lets you port things up.
And being able to run Visicalc from DOS 2.0 days on Vista is not always a "good thing". I can run that in Linux as well with DOSEMU but I have to choose to install that "baggage". Vista [or windows] gets it to you as a value-added bonus.
Most Fortune 50 companies I know of (about 20 of them, admittedly not a comprehensive sample) pay $18-$30 for their per-seat Windows licenses. At those prices it's not worth subjecting users with training on an unfamiliar system, especially when the unfamiliar system is also more expensive (OSX) or sub-par (Linux).
You're missing the whole "support" contract issue there. First off, when you have 50,000 employees even $30 per seat adds up. Then you add in the custom support you can only get from one place [e.g. MSFT] and things start looking like reality.
MSFT didn't get rich off of $30 per seat.
I like the jab at the end about "or sub-par (Linux)". Good to show you're not fighting any sort of OS holy war. Wouldn't want to see that.
Tom
OMG PONIES!!!
hehehehehe
Most people who buy, use and work with Microsoft products know the
... thank you IE] to use the tools. I'm sure if you explained to your boss how you could save $100s per box by not installing Windows they might be interested.
implications of using Microsoft products. If you insist on assuming
everyone else is an idiot, more power to you. Meanwhile, I'll just get
on with my work.
I don't think you grasp the implications here. You're saying you're free to use a binary only copy of a tool. I'm saying I'm free to DISTRIBUTE tools like Perl even with my own tweaks if I want. This is especially important after platform changes (e.g. say when glibc goes to 2.5 or something and I have to rebuild it).
Last I checked it (OO.o2 RC1 I think) it still ran _badly_ on several
platforms I tried it on. For all the cribbing about bloat, Word/Excel
etc start _fast_. OO makes my machine crawl.
I dunno where people get this but OpenOffice loads fairly quickly on both my WinXP laptop and my Gentoo desktop. Certainly not significantly slower than Office. It's entirely possible your HD is horribly fragmented or you're comparing a cold start of OO to a warm star of Office?
And besides, for all your implications about how Microsoft products are
inferior because they only support one platform: here's a clue. Real
users care about only one platform-- their own. Cross-platform is
nice-to-have, but some folk on Slashdot (typically academic CS types and
Unix geeks) have a _very_ overblown idea about its importance.
Um how about not? The inability to work with Office files in Linux an annoyance beyond belief for many Linux users who relunctantly boot Windows [and then get infected with CWS
Defeatists like you are horribly annoying. Oh, Linux isn't perfect so let's totally ignore all it's positive qualities in favour of the path of least resistance. Even though in the long run this just sends us down the path of servitude. Yeah, so much better.
Tom
bash is compatible one way or another with shells dating back to the "day". This is what we call a "de facto" standard.
.2] compatible API for developers. So kiss things like pthreads goodbye. mmap? Who needs that. etc, etc.
A script I write for bash will likely work for tcsh or ksh. A script I write on my Gentoo box will likely work on a *BSD box with bash, etc, etc, etc.
One of the more annoying things about windows was the inability to run shells developed ELSEWHERE on it. It's bad enough none of the MSFT tools support gmake (which even *BSD and MacOS toolchains do) but not being able to script is annoying. Now they come out with a scripting language, which for all intents and purposes may be very elegant and useful, except it's totally incompatible with anything else.
For software vendors who target more than Windows this has always been a thorn. Let's not forget Windows still provides no POSIX.1 [or
This would be different if this was 1983 or something. Then you could say they're really trying to innovate since the alternatives are in proprietary UNIX OSes and not really that pretty (I think most shells before bash were painfully inept). But today? After all the other standards they have abused... it's hard to be accepting of yet another tool that is incompatible.
Tom
Tom uses Perl 5. :-)
That's my point exactly though. Larry is free to turn Perl into whatever he wants. The code is freely accessible. I can keep giving Perl 5.xx to my customers and not care what 6.xx does.
Furthermore, if I'm so inclined [I'm not... but] I can fix and add to Perl 5.xx if Larry [and the others] decide to abandon it.
Whereas in the MSFT world you're basically fucked. Reported bugs [especially in IE] often go unattended for long periods of time [CWS virus anyone?] and newer versions are often ever so slightly incompatible with previous versions of the same tool.
If people really can't see MSFTs approach to "segment, divide and conquer" development then they really deserve what they get.
Tom
512KB for a hello world app?
... he's a moron.
.NET VM to every application you write for .NET. I'm sure the 20MB or so of .NET you download for every hello world app would dominate by comparison.
I copied that source code and ran it through
gcc -O2 test.c -o test -s
And the resulting binary is exactly 5,624 bytes with GCC 3.4.6-r1 on an AMD64 Gentoo box. Oh... I see he used -static
What's better, 30 apps loaded with their own copy of libc or 30 apps loaded with one copy of libc. Shared objects exist for a reason.
That would be like appending the
This is what happens when you use mailing lists and random benchmark sites as authorative sources of information.
I work with MSVC and GCC fairly often and it has always been my experience that the code produced by GCC is faster. Specially when the code involves more complicated code structure like loops and pointer arithmetic.
Tom
um ... for the bulk of my automated tasks I use perl and bash. I use perl for more "constructed" solutions and bash for the more automated ops (e.g. list of commands). Seems to work fine for my projects where I have to navigate random directories and what not.
Tom
You can grab things with "" quotes. So there is no reason why tools can't glob * themselves.
e.g.
mytool "*.txt"
Will not expand to all your files matching *.txt by bash.
Tom
Should point out that while MSVC is faster than GCC it isn't better. GCC supports more platforms [e.g. code you write with GNU tools has a better chance of working elsewhere, provided you're not using the w32api], has better optimizer algorithms and adheres better to the ISO specs for C and C++.
You sacrifice a lot to "just build quickly".
Tom