You're misinformed. (Internet rumor? Read Hodges's book.) Turing had been forced to undergo hormone therapy that was supposed to "cure" his sexual orientation.
I have personally worked with two people who worked with Turing and knew him well. I didn't of course know him myself because he died before I was born. You're right that he was castrated by chemical injection. It doesn't make it any better and it doesn't change the psychological impact it had on him. Yes, that's rumour, but it's rumour told to me personally be people who knew him personally.
But here's another bummer. It seems pretty obvious that the security bozos murdered Turing because they couldn't stand the idea of faggot with all those state secrets in his head. I should emphasize that this is my paranoid theory, not Hodges's -- as a UK citizen, he could get in trouble just for suggesting the possibility.
Speaking as a UK citizen, I think your theory is a load of codds. Turing had just been forcibly castrated by court order for the heinous crime of being homosexual, and his private life was all over the tabloids. He committed suicide. I don't think that's very surprising - being castrated is scarcely a happy and cheerful event.
The fact that Britain chose to castrate it's greatest scientific thinker of the century is a profound commentary on British society, of course.
I haven't seen the extended FOTR but I have the 'regular' version on DVD. Is the extended version really cool? Is it worth getting the extended FOTR and should I wait for the extended TTT?
In my opinion the extended Fellowship is a completely different and much better movie. It has much more character development, and, although all the action is still there, because it's more spaced out the whole movie feels less frentic, more character driven and less action driven.
Also, the commentaries (particularly the director's and the designer's commentaries) and the background footage are excellent and really add to your understanding of the movie. Definitely worth while.
I may get the theatrical release of the Two Towers, but I shall get the extended cut.
I think Debian take all this licencing stuff far too seriously. They have some insane clause about the kind of software they can include in their distros. Personally, I think they should include anything that they are legally allowed to.
If you don't like Debian politics, don't use Debian. There are plenty of other distributions. I use Debian because I do care about the political ideal that Debian represents - even if sometimes the side-effects of that political ideal frustrate me.
But Debian are the guardians of our liberty, in my mind to a greater degree even than the Free Software Foundation. The Debian distributions - of Linux and, in future, of the Hurd - guarantee that there is a complete, working software system which ordinary people can use which is completely free-as-in-speech. Without it, the erosion of the free software ideal by companies gradually replacing free software in their distributions with proprietary would be much easier.
Write up something on the Lotus Elise when it arrives in the U.S. and I'll be pleased.:)
Bah. I'm waiting for Koenigsegg [koenigsegg.com] to come to the U.S.
You're missing the point.
An Elise probably has less power than anything else that's mentioned on this page. But it's quicker then 90% of things mentioned on this page in a straight line, and much faster than anything else on this page round corners.
Anyone can heave more and more power into a car. What's great about the Elise is that it's all about doing more with less. It's the scalpel to your V8 powered gass guzzling chainsaw - delicate, precise, accurate. It's elegant in the hacker's sense of elegant.
OK,this whole discussion is just semantic, and it is happening because contract programmers like to call themselves 'software consultants' in the same way that garbage collectors like to call themselves sanitory engineers. If you're hired to hack a piece of code, you're a contract programmer. If you're hired to give advice, you're a consultant. Of course, in a lot of cases you're hired to do both. If you are being hired as a consultant - to give advice - then give advice. Give the best advice you can. Obviously, the client won't always follow your advice but if the client asks you to do something which you believe is against their best interests then give them, in writing, a report clearly explaining why it's the wrong thing to do and what you believe would be a better solution. And then, if they still want you to do it, do it as well as you can.
The scary things is, that this is a damn good idea...
Mhmmmm... I looked at the article hoping against hope that it wasn't and april fool. Never mind, now we've got multiple competing incompatible XFree projects as well... <sigh/>
Our military aren't under orders to shoot anything that moves.. They're given legitimate military targets.. Our soldiers always have the option of not shooting, if it doesn't seem like a valid target. They don't waste bullets shooting into empty shacks. They spend them on targets that are very potentially out to kill them.
I have friends who are glassblowers, shoemakers, basket weavers and furniture makers. We all do creative work, usually bespoke, for customers; our work all involves the application of our skills to create something which will be servicable, functional and hopefully elegant; we all work more or less alone. I'll settle for the designation 'artisan', or even, possibly, 'craftsman'.
I aspire to create work of engineering quality - robust and reliable - and I am inevitably in the original sense an engineer (someone who applies ingenuity to problems); but I know that my work is not of comparable reliability to that of people who work in more established areas of engineering. I would like it to be and strive to make it so, but the reality is that if software became as disciplined and regimented as structural engineering is, I'd go looking for something a little bit closer to the edge, a little bit more raw.
OK, you're all taking the piss out of the guy who said his desktop choice was between Transmeta and AMD. Well, so is mine. It's partly about elegance, it's partly about supporting the smaller guy, but it's mainly about price/performance.
My present desktop is a dual Athlon, and it is most pleasingly quick. My work is largely building big server-side stuff in Java, and this machine just zips through big Java compiles. I like it very much. But it is noisy. When I was building it I did think about a quad processor Crusoe, but I couldn't get the motherboard. It sounds as if a dual Astro will make the basis of a very nice desktop.
In all fairness, MS had it first and the OSS people adopted it. (IIRC - I may be wrong about this.)
In fact, it's one of two innovations that I respect from the MS folks - this and ODBC.
You're wrong about this - it was part of Tim Berners Lee's original proposal for HTTP, and the RFC is cosigned by authors from Microsoft, UC Irvine, Netscape and Novell.
No, it is clear that *you* don't understand security. Specifically:
WebDAV is nothing like a VPN.
"using any number of authentication schemes" does not "lock down" anything at all.
It doesn't matter if you are running it over HTTP or HTTPS. Both are the wrong protocol to use for filesharing. Just like using SOAP over HTTP(S).
I could not agree with you more. Conventional Internet style network security is based on the convention that we expose different services on different well known ports. To control access to those services we simply control access to these ports. Consequently a firewall doesn't have to parse the content of packets or understand the details of higher level protocols, it simply has to know which ports to allow and which to block. This means that firewall processes can be lightweight and efficient.
If you overload a port to provide many different services on the same port this security model doesn't work any longer. You can no longer trust any traffic to any port. Instead, you need a much more complex firewall which (inter alia) can parse soap packets and decide which soap packets to pass and which to block. This makes the firewall much more complex and much more processor (and memory) intensive.
Web applications are irrevalent to network security.
I could not agree with you less. Port overloading is completely inimical to nerwork security. Once undereducated code monkeys are able to put J Random Soap Handler on port 80, either you block port 80 or you have no network security left.
One reason why so many developers use Linux is that Linux is much more frequently used to deliver custom solutions, whereas Windows is typically used to deliver packaged solutions which need relatively little developer input.
Rolling out 1,000 desktops requires virtually no developer input. Rolling out a unified health and social care workflow system (which is what I'm working on now) takes a lot of developer man hours - but when it's finished it will sit on one (Linux) server (and be accessed by hundreds of desktops, most of which will almost certainly run Windows).
This does not matter
We are not playing a numbers game. We don't need to take over the world. The fact that most users still prefer to use something else on their desktops doesn't make Linux a bad operating system, or a failure, or anything like that. Linux is very successful in a lot of niches. If it ultimately becomes more widely used than Windows, well, that will be interesting; but it won't make Linux any better (or Windows any worse).
This is a competition to get an autonomous vehicle 250 miles over mixed terrain in 10 hours - i.e. an average speed of 25 miles an hour. The vehicle explicitly mustn't carry a crew and it doesn't seem to have to carry any payload.
The heavier the vehicle is the more kinetic energy it has so the more problems you have negotiating obstacles. Furthermore, the heavier it is the more likelihood that it will damage itself in collisions or rollovers. Also, the heavier the vehicle is, the more energy it will consume, so the more fuel it needs to carry, so the heavier it is...
The solution to this problem, from a chasis point of view, is to build the lightest machine possible consistent with carrying a laptop computer, two video cameras and a small radar. If I were building it I'd aim for a lightweight carbon-fibre moncoque shell with a generally curved shape; large, lightweight wheels like mountain bike wheels; a small air-cooled four-stroke engine - say 100 to 250cc; a cone type continuously variable transmission; and a robot wars style self righting mechanism. I'd aim for at least 100 miles per gallon on-road fuel economy and carry four gallons of fuel in an underslung fuel tank for a fully fueled up weight of under 150 pounds.
Structurally the key thing would be to protect the cameras and the radar. Not only do you not want them to be damaged, you don't want their mounts to get bent even the slightest bit out of alignment.
On the road sections of the course you'd use stereoscopic vision to establish road position as with the Italian ARGO project mentioned earlier, possibly with the object detection assisted with radar. You'd go as fast as you possibly could on road sections to build up average speed.
Off road you'd use primarily radar to assess forward obstacles. The strategy would be to steer a near direct course deviating around small obstacles. If a large obstacle was encountered, you'd backtrack 100 yards, turn 30 degrees one way, and go forward; if that didn't work you'd recursively back up more, turn the other way, and try, until you had passed the obstruction, at which point you'd plot a new direct course and carry on.
But the key things, it seems to me, are keep it small, keep it light, keep it simple.
Microsoft (and Apple) make operating systems for people like you who don't understand computers, aren't interested in them and don't want to be.
You better shut your filthy mouth and should be shamed of yourself for making a sweeping statement like that. I don't who the hell you are, but many of the alpha geeks like Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD lead programmer), James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Tomcat and Ant), James Gosling (Inventor of Java) and the core Perl 6 team have all switched to Mac OS X. Even CmdrTaco himself and at least 4 other/. editors are all using Apple laptops as their main production tools!
Do you read? I didn't say there was anything wrong with Microsoft, and I didn't say there was anything wrong with Mac OS X. I said that these operating systems have commercial organisations behind them which maintain them, and so don't need a cadre of dedicated geek users. There's nothing necessarily or inherently better about a user maintained operating system, but one thing is certain - it suits the users who use it.
I had also made a previous post regarding how to improve Linux, and that was to basically migrate to the DLL and registry paradigms of Windows. The dependencies of packages you have to compile are ridiculous. Compiling is cool for those of us who have nothing better to do or want to modify or repair code. The rest of us just want a usable system. If I can't double-click on an RPM to install it, I don't even want to bother 99.9% of the time.
Look, that's what I'm saying. Microsoft (and Apple) make operating systems for people like you who don't understand computers, aren't interested in them and don't want to be. That's fine, there's no reason why you should be. If an operating system with DLLs and a registry is what cooks your goose, Microsoft will be happy to supply you with one. If an operating system with a Windows XP GUI is what you want, hey, Microsoft makes the original.
Of course it's possible to make Linux behave more or less like Windows, but only be crippling Linux.
Particularly if Mandrake, with its outstanding installer, can integrate XPde and WINE, this could be the big break all the Linux geeks have been looking for. And the best part is that you don't have to give up your cron tab or ability to script operations easily in the back end when you want to. That's also partly the power of OSX (evolutionary gui, BSD back end), though there are other issues there that I won't get into.
Look, you profoundly misunderstand two things.
There is no war and we aren't intersted in winning. Linux geeks want a powerful operating system which enables us to do the things we want to do better, easier and quicker. There are enough of us to maintain it, and adding an army of Joe Sixpacks wouldn't make it any better, because Joe Sixpack doesn't have the technological knowledge to contribute anything. Bastardising or crippling the operating system which already does what we want so that it is easier for Joe Sixpack to use doesn't benefit the people who actually build Linux one bit, and the geeks won't do it.
Hiding complexity behind point-and-drool interfaces doesn't stop it being complex. Computers are inherently complex and it is in their complexity and flexibility that their power lies. I used to administer a network which, among other things, included NeXT boxes (the real ancestors of OS X), and I hate them with a passion, because the users could get their boxes into a mess with their pointy, clicky interfaces which you could not get back out of with the pointy, clicky interface, and when the machine was so screwed that it couldn't launch it's windowing system and couldn't talk to it's network and you had to get in under the hood to fix things, you found that all the sensible text configuration files in/etc had been replaced by binary config files which were totally opaque.
If you want to change Linux to make it more like Windows, that tells you two things: the first is that you don't understand UN*X; and the second is you are better off using Windows.
Linux isn't for everyone. It isn't meant to be for everyone. Dumbing it down so that everyone can use it would not make it better, it would destroy it. Once you turn Linux into an operating system for pointers and droolers, who is going to maintain it? The geeks who know how will all move off to *BSD or the HURD or something, and the people who are left will not know how.
Microsoft make an operating system for the masses. They're paid to. Because they're paid to, they'll carry on making it and supporting it whether or not it's fun to do and whether or not the people who actually do the work think it's much use to them personally.
No-one has to be an expert in anything. I pay someone else to fix my car, and when I need a new one, I don't even think about building my own. I'm not ashamed about that, cars aren't my thing. Microsoft make an operating s
This sort of thing is not merely pointless but (in my view) actually destructive. There are plenty of good window managers out there; the only sensible reason to build a new one is to innovate.
There's plenty of possible innovation in window managers. Radial menus show real promise, but we don't yet have a decent radial menu window manager, for example. And there are a lot of other examples.
Slavish imitation of somebody else's system is just stupid. If you prefer that system, go out and get it.
My house was built when New England was still a colony. It's in fine condition and will probably still be here in another two hundred and fifty years. Not, of course, that there's anything odd about this - there are houses hereabouts which were five hundred years old when my house was built.
Indeed, if you look at pretty much any village anywhere in Europe you'll find the same. A stone structure given a modest amount of maintenance will stand indefinitely. Given no maintenance at all, the walls will stand for three or four hundred years, even if the roof falls in.
There are downsides. 802.11b does not work through metre thick granite walls. Drilling holes in those walls to run cables through is not for the faint-hearted.
What do all these companies have in common? They're geek companies. They employ geeks, and they sell to geeks. What geeks think of them matters to them and can hurt them. If you're doing business with any of these companies, tell the people you're dealing with that you're not happy with SCO's behaviour, and that your unhappiness is sufficient to start you re-evaluating their competitors.
It's also worth pointing out that several of these companies are making use of the Linux[tm] brand, including one of them using it in it's name. The owner of the Linux[tm] brand has it within his power to have a quiet word with them, although, of course, that's entirely up to him.
This all scares me, it seems that the community has an important decision to make right now, between KDE and Gnome.
We don't have a decision to make. If 'communities' made 'decisions' then 'the community' would have decided to use MS Windows and the Linux project would be dead. But it isn't like that. The (computing) world is an ecosystem with niches; and it's an ecosystem made and sustained by individual choice.
We do not want a world in which there is one true operating system, or one true desktop, excluding variety, innovation, tinkering and blatant out-and-out eccentricity. In such a world the non-mainstream choices by which we create our own individuality would be unavailable.
Let a thousand flowers bloom. A strong Gnome is good because it keeps the KDE people on their toes, and vice versa. But a computing environment in which there is also room for sawmill, enlightenment, wm2 is a healthy environment in which there is room for the next innovation to happen.
Personally, I am tired of drop-down menus. I thought the RISC-OS pop-up menu was a much better idea (no screen clutter until you ask for it), and think that radial, gestural menus would be better still.
They are safer. IIRC, they haven't lost any cosmonauts since 1971 when three died from lack of oxygen because of a stuck air valve on reentry. They learned their lesson and started using space suits on reentry after that.
So whay you're saying is, 'In Soviet Russia spacectaft keep on working'. Diabolical!
I draw the line at my name. If that, and Google, isn't enough for a potential employer to know if they are interested enough to interview me, I'm not interested in working for them.
D Phil at Oxford in Computational Number Theory, eh? You're probably right. Lesser mortals, however, may not be so lucky.
OK, OK, so I under-estimated you. Canuck Boy Wonder who first enrolled at his home town University to study maths at age 13, violin virtuoso, holder of at least one record for finding digits in the value of PI, 6th best mathematical student in the whole of North America... I thought at first glance that there were several Colin Percivals being described by Google, but now I see it's just one.
I thought you were a bit young to be doing a D Phil.
No, I don't think you need ever bother to write a CV. Other people's mileage, however, will differ.
I draw the line at my name. If that, and Google, isn't enough for a potential employer to know if they are interested enough to interview me, I'm not interested in working for them.
D Phil at Oxford in Computational Number Theory, eh? You're probably right. Lesser mortals, however, may not be so lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
I have personally worked with two people who worked with Turing and knew him well. I didn't of course know him myself because he died before I was born. You're right that he was castrated by chemical injection. It doesn't make it any better and it doesn't change the psychological impact it had on him. Yes, that's rumour, but it's rumour told to me personally be people who knew him personally.
Speaking as a UK citizen, I think your theory is a load of codds. Turing had just been forcibly castrated by court order for the heinous crime of being homosexual, and his private life was all over the tabloids. He committed suicide. I don't think that's very surprising - being castrated is scarcely a happy and cheerful event.
The fact that Britain chose to castrate it's greatest scientific thinker of the century is a profound commentary on British society, of course.
In my opinion the extended Fellowship is a completely different and much better movie. It has much more character development, and, although all the action is still there, because it's more spaced out the whole movie feels less frentic, more character driven and less action driven.
Also, the commentaries (particularly the director's and the designer's commentaries) and the background footage are excellent and really add to your understanding of the movie. Definitely worth while.
I may get the theatrical release of the Two Towers, but I shall get the extended cut.
If you don't like Debian politics, don't use Debian. There are plenty of other distributions. I use Debian because I do care about the political ideal that Debian represents - even if sometimes the side-effects of that political ideal frustrate me.
But Debian are the guardians of our liberty, in my mind to a greater degree even than the Free Software Foundation. The Debian distributions - of Linux and, in future, of the Hurd - guarantee that there is a complete, working software system which ordinary people can use which is completely free-as-in-speech. Without it, the erosion of the free software ideal by companies gradually replacing free software in their distributions with proprietary would be much easier.
You're missing the point.
An Elise probably has less power than anything else that's mentioned on this page. But it's quicker then 90% of things mentioned on this page in a straight line, and much faster than anything else on this page round corners.
Anyone can heave more and more power into a car. What's great about the Elise is that it's all about doing more with less. It's the scalpel to your V8 powered gass guzzling chainsaw - delicate, precise, accurate. It's elegant in the hacker's sense of elegant.
OK,this whole discussion is just semantic, and it is happening because contract programmers like to call themselves 'software consultants' in the same way that garbage collectors like to call themselves sanitory engineers. If you're hired to hack a piece of code, you're a contract programmer. If you're hired to give advice, you're a consultant. Of course, in a lot of cases you're hired to do both. If you are being hired as a consultant - to give advice - then give advice. Give the best advice you can. Obviously, the client won't always follow your advice but if the client asks you to do something which you believe is against their best interests then give them, in writing, a report clearly explaining why it's the wrong thing to do and what you believe would be a better solution. And then, if they still want you to do it, do it as well as you can.
Mhmmmm... I looked at the article hoping against hope that it wasn't and april fool. Never mind, now we've got multiple competing incompatible XFree projects as well... <sigh/>
Like British tanks and buses full of unarmed women and children.
I aspire to create work of engineering quality - robust and reliable - and I am inevitably in the original sense an engineer (someone who applies ingenuity to problems); but I know that my work is not of comparable reliability to that of people who work in more established areas of engineering. I would like it to be and strive to make it so, but the reality is that if software became as disciplined and regimented as structural engineering is, I'd go looking for something a little bit closer to the edge, a little bit more raw.
My present desktop is a dual Athlon, and it is most pleasingly quick. My work is largely building big server-side stuff in Java, and this machine just zips through big Java compiles. I like it very much. But it is noisy. When I was building it I did think about a quad processor Crusoe, but I couldn't get the motherboard. It sounds as if a dual Astro will make the basis of a very nice desktop.
You're wrong about this - it was part of Tim Berners Lee's original proposal for HTTP, and the RFC is cosigned by authors from Microsoft, UC Irvine, Netscape and Novell.
I could not agree with you more. Conventional Internet style network security is based on the convention that we expose different services on different well known ports. To control access to those services we simply control access to these ports. Consequently a firewall doesn't have to parse the content of packets or understand the details of higher level protocols, it simply has to know which ports to allow and which to block. This means that firewall processes can be lightweight and efficient.
If you overload a port to provide many different services on the same port this security model doesn't work any longer. You can no longer trust any traffic to any port. Instead, you need a much more complex firewall which (inter alia) can parse soap packets and decide which soap packets to pass and which to block. This makes the firewall much more complex and much more processor (and memory) intensive.
I could not agree with you less. Port overloading is completely inimical to nerwork security. Once undereducated code monkeys are able to put J Random Soap Handler on port 80, either you block port 80 or you have no network security left.
Rolling out 1,000 desktops requires virtually no developer input. Rolling out a unified health and social care workflow system (which is what I'm working on now) takes a lot of developer man hours - but when it's finished it will sit on one (Linux) server (and be accessed by hundreds of desktops, most of which will almost certainly run Windows).
This does not matter
We are not playing a numbers game. We don't need to take over the world. The fact that most users still prefer to use something else on their desktops doesn't make Linux a bad operating system, or a failure, or anything like that. Linux is very successful in a lot of niches. If it ultimately becomes more widely used than Windows, well, that will be interesting; but it won't make Linux any better (or Windows any worse).
The heavier the vehicle is the more kinetic energy it has so the more problems you have negotiating obstacles. Furthermore, the heavier it is the more likelihood that it will damage itself in collisions or rollovers. Also, the heavier the vehicle is, the more energy it will consume, so the more fuel it needs to carry, so the heavier it is...
The solution to this problem, from a chasis point of view, is to build the lightest machine possible consistent with carrying a laptop computer, two video cameras and a small radar. If I were building it I'd aim for a lightweight carbon-fibre moncoque shell with a generally curved shape; large, lightweight wheels like mountain bike wheels; a small air-cooled four-stroke engine - say 100 to 250cc; a cone type continuously variable transmission; and a robot wars style self righting mechanism. I'd aim for at least 100 miles per gallon on-road fuel economy and carry four gallons of fuel in an underslung fuel tank for a fully fueled up weight of under 150 pounds.
Structurally the key thing would be to protect the cameras and the radar. Not only do you not want them to be damaged, you don't want their mounts to get bent even the slightest bit out of alignment.
On the road sections of the course you'd use stereoscopic vision to establish road position as with the Italian ARGO project mentioned earlier, possibly with the object detection assisted with radar. You'd go as fast as you possibly could on road sections to build up average speed.
Off road you'd use primarily radar to assess forward obstacles. The strategy would be to steer a near direct course deviating around small obstacles. If a large obstacle was encountered, you'd backtrack 100 yards, turn 30 degrees one way, and go forward; if that didn't work you'd recursively back up more, turn the other way, and try, until you had passed the obstruction, at which point you'd plot a new direct course and carry on.
But the key things, it seems to me, are keep it small, keep it light, keep it simple.
Do you read? I didn't say there was anything wrong with Microsoft, and I didn't say there was anything wrong with Mac OS X. I said that these operating systems have commercial organisations behind them which maintain them, and so don't need a cadre of dedicated geek users. There's nothing necessarily or inherently better about a user maintained operating system, but one thing is certain - it suits the users who use it.
So don't change it.
Look, that's what I'm saying. Microsoft (and Apple) make operating systems for people like you who don't understand computers, aren't interested in them and don't want to be. That's fine, there's no reason why you should be. If an operating system with DLLs and a registry is what cooks your goose, Microsoft will be happy to supply you with one. If an operating system with a Windows XP GUI is what you want, hey, Microsoft makes the original.
Of course it's possible to make Linux behave more or less like Windows, but only be crippling Linux.
Look, you profoundly misunderstand two things.
If you want to change Linux to make it more like Windows, that tells you two things: the first is that you don't understand UN*X; and the second is you are better off using Windows.
Linux isn't for everyone. It isn't meant to be for everyone. Dumbing it down so that everyone can use it would not make it better, it would destroy it. Once you turn Linux into an operating system for pointers and droolers, who is going to maintain it? The geeks who know how will all move off to *BSD or the HURD or something, and the people who are left will not know how.
Microsoft make an operating system for the masses. They're paid to. Because they're paid to, they'll carry on making it and supporting it whether or not it's fun to do and whether or not the people who actually do the work think it's much use to them personally.
No-one has to be an expert in anything. I pay someone else to fix my car, and when I need a new one, I don't even think about building my own. I'm not ashamed about that, cars aren't my thing. Microsoft make an operating s
There's plenty of possible innovation in window managers. Radial menus show real promise, but we don't yet have a decent radial menu window manager, for example. And there are a lot of other examples.
Slavish imitation of somebody else's system is just stupid. If you prefer that system, go out and get it.
Indeed, if you look at pretty much any village anywhere in Europe you'll find the same. A stone structure given a modest amount of maintenance will stand indefinitely. Given no maintenance at all, the walls will stand for three or four hundred years, even if the roof falls in.
There are downsides. 802.11b does not work through metre thick granite walls. Drilling holes in those walls to run cables through is not for the faint-hearted.
But it isn't going to fall down any time soon.
And, of course, the Trolls.
What do all these companies have in common? They're geek companies. They employ geeks, and they sell to geeks. What geeks think of them matters to them and can hurt them. If you're doing business with any of these companies, tell the people you're dealing with that you're not happy with SCO's behaviour, and that your unhappiness is sufficient to start you re-evaluating their competitors.
It's also worth pointing out that several of these companies are making use of the Linux[tm] brand, including one of them using it in it's name. The owner of the Linux[tm] brand has it within his power to have a quiet word with them, although, of course, that's entirely up to him.
We don't have a decision to make. If 'communities' made 'decisions' then 'the community' would have decided to use MS Windows and the Linux project would be dead. But it isn't like that. The (computing) world is an ecosystem with niches; and it's an ecosystem made and sustained by individual choice.
We do not want a world in which there is one true operating system, or one true desktop, excluding variety, innovation, tinkering and blatant out-and-out eccentricity. In such a world the non-mainstream choices by which we create our own individuality would be unavailable.
Let a thousand flowers bloom. A strong Gnome is good because it keeps the KDE people on their toes, and vice versa. But a computing environment in which there is also room for sawmill, enlightenment, wm2 is a healthy environment in which there is room for the next innovation to happen.
Personally, I am tired of drop-down menus. I thought the RISC-OS pop-up menu was a much better idea (no screen clutter until you ask for it), and think that radial, gestural menus would be better still.
So whay you're saying is, 'In Soviet Russia spacectaft keep on working'. Diabolical!
(Following my own post. Bad karma.)
OK, OK, so I under-estimated you. Canuck Boy Wonder who first enrolled at his home town University to study maths at age 13, violin virtuoso, holder of at least one record for finding digits in the value of PI, 6th best mathematical student in the whole of North America... I thought at first glance that there were several Colin Percivals being described by Google, but now I see it's just one.
I thought you were a bit young to be doing a D Phil.
No, I don't think you need ever bother to write a CV. Other people's mileage, however, will differ.
D Phil at Oxford in Computational Number Theory, eh? You're probably right. Lesser mortals, however, may not be so lucky.
Still, I like your arrogance.
My milage varies. Linux (and nothing else) has been on my desktop for eight years now. If it isn't on your desktop, that isn't a problem with Linux.
I'm sorry? How much do you pay for g++? This is the GNU Network Object Model Environment, isn't it?