Setting up the network is a part of the install process. Debian's install sucks. Mandrakes is way better. Nobody denies that.
I deny it.
Mandrake 7.2 (haven't tried 8) won't install on three of my nine Linux boxes - at all. 33% failure rate. Different reasons, but essentially if you have interesting or unusual hardware Mandrake install just doesn't want to know. Debian installs without problems on every one of my boxes. Mandrake's install sucks. Debian's install is way better.
I switched from Mandrake to Debian about a year ago. I switched my baby laptop first - having funny hardware and no floppy drive it's always a pain to get a new distro on to it, but Debian was extremely easy. And I got blown away by how slick dselect was (yes, I know hard core Debian users are snobby about dselect and prefer command-line apt commands; but dselect still hugely impresses me with how good it is).
Then I went to upgrade my desktop box to Mandrake 7.2, and the install just croaked, repeatedly. It just would not load on my SMP, all SCSI machine. After two days of messing about without any success, I just got pissed off with it. Mandrake seemed to me to have put all the effort into surface glitz while ignoring the underlying engineering. Then I stuck a Debian CD into the drive, and it just booted, loaded, and ran, and I've never looked back.
I don't want glitzy GUI interfaces; I want solid engineering that works every day. Although I've been bitten a couple of times with Debian 'unstable' and now stick to 'testing', I'm still hugely impressed with the overall feeling of solid quality with Debian. All my new servers this year are Debian (most of my older servers are still Mandrake, because they are working and there hasn't - yet - been any need to reinstall them).
Mandrake and the other commercial distributions, like AIX and Solaris and SCO, are essentially maintained by small groups of people working for pay to targets and deadlines set by masrketing. Debian, like Linux, is maintained by a large group of people working for the fun of it to deadlines they set themselves. I believe that the reason Debian is better than Mandrake is the same as the reason Linux is better than AIX and Solaris (yes, I have AIX and Solaris boxes too): fun is a better motivator than pay.
Attention, We-Want-Linux-On-The-Desktop crowd: Support this and help out, it is a big step in the right direction.
While I agree that short, informative messages are a step in the right direction, a splash screen or other sweeping under the carpet is not. People who want to make money out of Linux products may want Linux on Joe Ordinary's desktop, but those of us who use Linux now should not - or at least, should not be prepared to make compromises in the features we value to do so.
Linux is high quality, very stable, rapidly developing system because it is a hackers operating system. When it doesn't work, hackers are motivated to fix it, and have the ability to fix it. Joe Ordinary will never have the ability to fix an operating system. If you compromise Linux to suit Joe Ordinary in a away that doesn't suit the hacker community, the hacker community will drift off to the next cool operating system, and Linux will start to suffer from bit-rot.
It is the "proper" pronounciation (sic) tought (sic) in public school to children. Until the late 80's the BBC would not let anyone on their news broadcasts who could not speak in this way. It is also called "BBC English".
I was brought up speaking received pronunciation. I still can, when I want to put down some under-educated oik, such as now. But in Britain today, no-one who does not wish to be deliberately offensive uses RP - it's a great accent to be offensive in.
I haven't actually seen this movie - yet, although on the basis of these reviews I probably shall; but if Jolie does speak RP in it that is - shall we say - not a very probable representation of modern Britain. Not, of course, that this film is seeking to be probable, so why pick nits?
Re:Lets not do anything cause it could get worse?
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Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
I assert that where we see a vacuum of competence and fairness, others see a vacuum of power and revenue. In any throw-it-away-and-start-over model, the 'others' will most likely win.
That is, unfortunately, the most sensible response to this story so far.
Re:ICANN == UN and the UN overrides US Constitutio
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Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
ICANN derives its authority purely from a contract with the United States government.
No, it doesn't. ICANN was created precisely because the United States Government (under pressure from the rest of the world) wanted to get out of Internet governance. ICANN derives it's legitimacy (such as it has) from the IFWP.
Essentially, ICANN was created to replace IANA (Jon Postel r.i.p.)
Amen to that. Jon did the job a lot better, a lot more efficiently, at far less expense. And if he made a decision you disagreed with, he'd listen to your arguments about it. However, Jon was more or less unique, and truely benevolent dictators are in very short supply.
Seriously, though, ICANN was created by a few folks back before most country codes were even used, and may have outgrown itself.
I was using the Internet with a.uk address in 1985, which is to say seventeen years before ICANN was founded. It was created (as I've detailed in another post) following an extensive open international consultation process in which I took part - and you could have, too, if you'd been bothered. Certainly it's a mess; certainly it needs to be changed. Join ISOC and campaign!
It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say.
Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.
Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.
What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!
Re:Japanese (and American) revisionist history
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Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
In peace, there was one fatal accident in more than forty years of nuclear energy use, with thirty people dying of the radiation and four others dying later of cancer (source: "Science" magazine, April 20, 2001, vol. 292, number 5516, page 420, "Nuclear Radiation: Living in the Shadow of Chornobyl", by Richard Stone and others).
Which ignores the enormous excess of cancer rates surrounding many nuclear installations. In this village of 250 people alone four people have died of cancer in three years; we have plutonium and americium dust blowing in from the sand in the bay during the summer - and no, that's not 'natural' plutonium.
It also ignores the many hundreds of people who have died of cancer in Ukraine and Byeloruss over the past couple of decades. The trick which allows people to draw up these entirely phony statistics is that it's impossible to prove that any single cancer has been caused by nuclear waste. That may be true, but the fact that a great many nuclear installations - certainly the majority of those in Britain - have associated cancer 'hot spots' proves that some are.
Furthermore, no technology is 'safe' where the sites on which it is uses remain contaminated for many thousands of years. No civilisation, no human institution, has ever lasted more than a very few thousand years, and we've no reason to believe that our present civilisation will. After the money to pay the guards has run out, how are we to keep people away from nuclear waste?
This is just another technology which mortgages the future - we get energy now, and our children pay for it for a hundred generations.
How can he claim to know enough about the game to give it a 0 in gameplay, graphics, and sound if he didn't even play it?
If the game won't install, won't load and won't run, it doesn't have any graphics or any sound. 0/10 is just telling it like it is, or so it seems to me.
A Net Engineer friend of mine claims that Cisco are reluctant to support IPV6 because the amount of memory required to hold the routing tables for IPV6 is huge...
I was wondering that myself, but I had heard that proccessing power was a large part as well.
In Japan last year I saw native IPv6 routers on sale from lots of different makers. Yamaha had them from the equivalent of US$400 upwards. The interesting thing about this is that the prototype was built for Yamaha by some students at a technical university as part of a (?) Masters course.
CISCO aren't making them because they don't want to, not because they can't - and if they don't move fast they'll lose this market to the Japanese.
We've been hearing stories for a while now (3 years? longer?) that IPv4 addresses in certain ranges will be running out. Has anyone actually had any problems getting one. Does anyone have a public IPv6 address yet.
No-one in the States, no, because the States has grabbed more than half of the world total. Plenty of people in East Asia and Africa, because they came late to the table and got hardly any. There are more people in China alone than there are addressable IPv4 addresses.
I am not a hippy. The Hippies were a bunch of rich assholes who dodged the draft and took drugs. Those Hippies that survived are the gerks responsible for the power outages in California today.
Well, I was a hippy (and arguably still am). I'm not rich, and in those days I was a lot poorer. I rarely take drugs, even legal ones. I've never dodged any draft. I write quite a lot of open source software, and some of it quite a lot of people use.
Yes, hippies (like open source people) were about idealism. I don't see much hypocisy, and I don't see any disrespect (except, perhaps, from you). So what's your point? You don't want to be assoicated with idealism? That's fine, you don't have to be. The exit door is here. Close it behind you on your way out.
I think the article made that clear. Sun doesn't use MS office, but it hinders their productivity and makes it more difficult for their customers. MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
The only thing the article suggested was a problem for Sun employees with StarOffice was exchanging files with shops which used other proprietary 'office productivity' programs, specifically MS Office. The lesson is, don't use proprietary file formats.
No 'office productivity' suite enhances office productivity, rather the opposite. Nothing in the article (or in anything else I've seen) suggests that a StarOffice shop is more (or less) productive than an MS Office shop. Interchange of proprietary data formats has always been a problem. The solution is not to use them.
Put it another way: if it isn't raw ASCII or valid SGML or XML, sending it out of your shop to another shop is just asking for trouble, and it's your fault.
However GPL/RMS hardliners such as yourself have a hard time digesting the concept. You ought to look a little deeper into the dogma of your source code religion, you'll sacrifice functionality over licensing issues
To be honest, I don't believe (and have never believed) that the KDE/Gnome row had much to do with licences. I think it is fundamentally about geography. The KDE team started in Germany and is still largely European; the Gnome team is largely based in the American continent. I think what we're seeing is American users of a Finnish operating system geting flustered because these upstart Europeans think they can build a desktop. People are very odd...
This sort of thing is exactly why I've decided I don't want to be part of the KDE Community (should that be Kommunity?). The pro-KDE stuff I can live with, but the GNOME bashing seems to be getting worse all the time and it puts me off. Maybe it's because KDE seems to be gaining support and the more people that use it the more vocal advocates there are.
Look, get real here. I'm not a member of either camp - I program in Java. I happen to use KDE as a desktop because it's stable and functional and looks good and works for me. But I've been using Linux since before either of these projects started and I do remember my history. Gnome was founded purely and simply as an ideological KDE bashing exercise, and it's gone on being more offensively political ever since (such as when Ximian bought 'KDE' as a keyword on Google, so that anyone who did a search for KDE would get an advert for Gnome).
Yes, some KDE 'supporters' have bashed back against the persistent KDE bashing from senior members of the Gnome camp, and it would have been better if they hadn't.
But to claim that KDE are the ones guilty of bashing in this saga is a weird distortion of history.
Let's face it, there's always been room for several window managers. There's plenty of room for more than one desktop environment. Linux is not forced into a homogenous straight-jacket, and thank $DEITY for that.
If you like Gnome, use Gnome. If (like me) you prefer KDE, use KDE. But for heaven's sake stop bashing!
Re:Good riddance to yet another bad business model
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Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 2
QT is not the best way to go for some people. QT is GPL on Linux doesn't make it the preferable platform. Poor people want to develop commercial products and sell them. They can't do it with QT, and not everybody is willing to spend their liife writing GPL programs.
They can't do it with Gnome, because Gnome is GPL and only GPL, and stuff you develop using GPL licensed libraries has to be GPL. They can do it with QT, because the nice people at Trolltech will happily sell them a commercial license.
Or are you one of the people who think you should be able to take the Trolltech people's work and make money out of it, without giving any of the money back?
So why worry about all the other users. I just worry about myself. I don't use MS products heavily, so this won't affect me.
Don't be so sure.
The Web - and the 'Net - exist as they are today because they started life as open systems. Microsoft (MSN) and AQL both started off with closed systems for distributed content. They would both prefer closed systems. But the unexpected growth of the Net has persuaded them - probably temporarily - that they have to pay lip-service to open systems.
Currently, Microsoft controls the majority browser out there, and AOL control the other browser that most users have heard of. Netscape has a long history of inventing 'enhancements' to published standards which make documents written for their software work more poorly (or not at all) with other people's. Microsoft are also past masters of that art.
One of the quite possible outcomes of this is that the Web breaks up into a Microsoft-only space and an AOL only space, with no one browser able to access all the information, and, in the worst scenario, with open source browsers unable to access any of it. If methods of accessing the next generation Web servers from Microsoft and AOL are subject to software patents, this could become a reality, at least for users in the US.
Don't get me wrong - I think the best case outcomes from this battle could be very good for the open source movement, with many users seeking refuge in platforms on which they can't
be messed around by corporate interests... but this is a very unstable situation, and the difference between the best-case outcome and the worst is quite dramatic
LISP has a fairly steep initial learning curve, and then suddenly you start to think in LISP and it all becomes very easy. To someone used to reading C, LISP looks weird, and you can't see how anyone could read it. But actually, when you're used to it, it's extremely natural and easy to read.
the secret is that it doesn't have 'bizarre syntax'. It has extremely simple syntax - much, much more simple than anything you've ever seen before. You are looking for complexity that simply isn't there.
LISP has had highly sophisticated I/O for many decades. This is why it's so widely used in parsers, text processors, editors and so on. The (Common LISP) I/O specification is here.
...and how hard it is to properly handle the myriad possible errors a program has to handle gracefully when working with humans
in fact, of course, LISP has a condition handling system at least as sophisticated as any other language. The specification is here.
Also, most lisp engines I've seen are interpreted (save for things like the Lisp Machine).
Originally LISP was a compiled language. However it is extremely easy to write a LISP interpreter in LISP, so most LISP systems area able to execute both interpreted source and compiled code. Furthermore, interpreted code can call compiled code and vice-versa. Documentation on the Common LISP compiler is here.
Only a few toy LISP systems lack a compiler.
Now this doesn't prevent you from doing very powerful very high level things with Lisp, but for the most part you can do them easier and faster with C
You really never have used the language, have you? If a programming problem can be solved easier by a good C programmer in C than it can by a good LISP programmer in LISP, it wasn't a problem in the first place. For example, I wrote a CASE tool for expert system design in LISP by myself in three months; it took a team of four programmers two years to produce the production C version of the same program.
The rub lies in the companies who provide the actual physical circuits -- the MCIs and Sprints of the world.
Get real, will you? I knew Jon Postel - I had a beer with him in Geneva the year he died - and I knew his long and close friendship with Vint Cerf, whom I also know. And Vint is now Senior Vice President for Technology at MCI WorldCom.
One of the things that tied Vint and Jon together (apart from being close friends for thirty years) was that both of them cared passionately about a free and open Internet. Vint still does. You only need to look at his page on Social, Economic and Regulatory Issues to see that. ISOC's slogan 'The Internet is for Everyone' is very much his slogan.
I think everyone agrees that ICANN is a mess - but it's a mess brought about by lawyers (mainly American lawyers), not by the Internet pioneers. Also, and this is what makes me most worried about articles like this one, is that the people who are doing most to damage the concept of a free, open Internet for everyone are not the pioneers - they're the get-rich-quick sleazoids who come in on the back of the pioneer's work and try to grab a chunk of the territory for themselves. We can all see that people who register patents for old and obvious ideas just by tagging 'Internet' onto the end of them are sleazoids. Can you not see that alternate TLD registrar wannabes are also sleazoids?
Yes, ICANN stinks. Yes, we need a more open, democratic authority controlling the top-level domains. But the Internet pioneers are not the enemy, and MCI is not the enemy. And in my opinion, the second thing that needs doing to ICANN (after making it democratic) is to move it out of American legal jurisdiction.
if you configure Konqueror to pretend to be Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0) it renders just fine.
Yes, I know, following up to yourself. Really sad.
However, the funny thing is my girlfriend had a look with (real) Internet Explorer 5.5... and while the page renders fine in Konqueror pretending to be IE 5.5, two times in three it won't render on the real thing!
Interestingly, it redirects Konqueror 2.1 to 'badbrowser.psp'; but if you configure Konqueror to pretend to be Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0) it renders just fine. I'm seeing this more and more frequently with commercial sites - if they don't recognise the browser, they don't make any attempt to render a page for it. I think this is professional incompetence, frankly.
Slashdot Mirror
I deny it.
Mandrake 7.2 (haven't tried 8) won't install on three of my nine Linux boxes - at all. 33% failure rate. Different reasons, but essentially if you have interesting or unusual hardware Mandrake install just doesn't want to know. Debian installs without problems on every one of my boxes. Mandrake's install sucks. Debian's install is way better.
Then I went to upgrade my desktop box to Mandrake 7.2, and the install just croaked, repeatedly. It just would not load on my SMP, all SCSI machine. After two days of messing about without any success, I just got pissed off with it. Mandrake seemed to me to have put all the effort into surface glitz while ignoring the underlying engineering. Then I stuck a Debian CD into the drive, and it just booted, loaded, and ran, and I've never looked back.
I don't want glitzy GUI interfaces; I want solid engineering that works every day. Although I've been bitten a couple of times with Debian 'unstable' and now stick to 'testing', I'm still hugely impressed with the overall feeling of solid quality with Debian. All my new servers this year are Debian (most of my older servers are still Mandrake, because they are working and there hasn't - yet - been any need to reinstall them).
Mandrake and the other commercial distributions, like AIX and Solaris and SCO, are essentially maintained by small groups of people working for pay to targets and deadlines set by masrketing. Debian, like Linux, is maintained by a large group of people working for the fun of it to deadlines they set themselves. I believe that the reason Debian is better than Mandrake is the same as the reason Linux is better than AIX and Solaris (yes, I have AIX and Solaris boxes too): fun is a better motivator than pay.
While I agree that short, informative messages are a step in the right direction, a splash screen or other sweeping under the carpet is not. People who want to make money out of Linux products may want Linux on Joe Ordinary's desktop, but those of us who use Linux now should not - or at least, should not be prepared to make compromises in the features we value to do so.
Linux is high quality, very stable, rapidly developing system because it is a hackers operating system. When it doesn't work, hackers are motivated to fix it, and have the ability to fix it. Joe Ordinary will never have the ability to fix an operating system. If you compromise Linux to suit Joe Ordinary in a away that doesn't suit the hacker community, the hacker community will drift off to the next cool operating system, and Linux will start to suffer from bit-rot.
I was brought up speaking received pronunciation. I still can, when I want to put down some under-educated oik, such as now. But in Britain today, no-one who does not wish to be deliberately offensive uses RP - it's a great accent to be offensive in.
I haven't actually seen this movie - yet, although on the basis of these reviews I probably shall; but if Jolie does speak RP in it that is - shall we say - not a very probable representation of modern Britain. Not, of course, that this film is seeking to be probable, so why pick nits?
That is, unfortunately, the most sensible response to this story so far.
No, it doesn't. ICANN was created precisely because the United States Government (under pressure from the rest of the world) wanted to get out of Internet governance. ICANN derives it's legitimacy (such as it has) from the IFWP.
Amen to that. Jon did the job a lot better, a lot more efficiently, at far less expense. And if he made a decision you disagreed with, he'd listen to your arguments about it. However, Jon was more or less unique, and truely benevolent dictators are in very short supply.
I was using the Internet with a .uk address in 1985, which is to say seventeen years before ICANN was founded. It was created (as I've detailed in another post) following an extensive open international consultation process in which I took part - and you could have, too, if you'd been bothered. Certainly it's a mess; certainly it needs to be changed. Join ISOC and campaign!
This is untrue. There was an extended process of consultation, involving meetings in Geneva (which I attended), Singapore, and Buenos Aires.
Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.
What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!
Yes.
If the game won't install, won't load and won't run, it doesn't have any graphics or any sound. 0/10 is just telling it like it is, or so it seems to me.
In Japan last year I saw native IPv6 routers on sale from lots of different makers. Yamaha had them from the equivalent of US$400 upwards. The interesting thing about this is that the prototype was built for Yamaha by some students at a technical university as part of a (?) Masters course.
CISCO aren't making them because they don't want to, not because they can't - and if they don't move fast they'll lose this market to the Japanese.
No-one in the States, no, because the States has grabbed more than half of the world total. Plenty of people in East Asia and Africa, because they came late to the table and got hardly any. There are more people in China alone than there are addressable IPv4 addresses.
Well, I was a hippy (and arguably still am). I'm not rich, and in those days I was a lot poorer. I rarely take drugs, even legal ones. I've never dodged any draft. I write quite a lot of open source software, and some of it quite a lot of people use.
Yes, hippies (like open source people) were about idealism. I don't see much hypocisy, and I don't see any disrespect (except, perhaps, from you). So what's your point? You don't want to be assoicated with idealism? That's fine, you don't have to be. The exit door is here. Close it behind you on your way out.
Oh, for $DEITY's sake!
The only thing the article suggested was a problem for Sun employees with StarOffice was exchanging files with shops which used other proprietary 'office productivity' programs, specifically MS Office. The lesson is, don't use proprietary file formats.
No 'office productivity' suite enhances office productivity, rather the opposite. Nothing in the article (or in anything else I've seen) suggests that a StarOffice shop is more (or less) productive than an MS Office shop. Interchange of proprietary data formats has always been a problem. The solution is not to use them.
Put it another way: if it isn't raw ASCII or valid SGML or XML, sending it out of your shop to another shop is just asking for trouble, and it's your fault.
To be honest, I don't believe (and have never believed) that the KDE/Gnome row had much to do with licences. I think it is fundamentally about geography. The KDE team started in Germany and is still largely European; the Gnome team is largely based in the American continent. I think what we're seeing is American users of a Finnish operating system geting flustered because these upstart Europeans think they can build a desktop. People are very odd...
Look, get real here. I'm not a member of either camp - I program in Java. I happen to use KDE as a desktop because it's stable and functional and looks good and works for me. But I've been using Linux since before either of these projects started and I do remember my history. Gnome was founded purely and simply as an ideological KDE bashing exercise, and it's gone on being more offensively political ever since (such as when Ximian bought 'KDE' as a keyword on Google, so that anyone who did a search for KDE would get an advert for Gnome).
Yes, some KDE 'supporters' have bashed back against the persistent KDE bashing from senior members of the Gnome camp, and it would have been better if they hadn't.
But to claim that KDE are the ones guilty of bashing in this saga is a weird distortion of history.
Let's face it, there's always been room for several window managers. There's plenty of room for more than one desktop environment. Linux is not forced into a homogenous straight-jacket, and thank $DEITY for that.
If you like Gnome, use Gnome. If (like me) you prefer KDE, use KDE. But for heaven's sake stop bashing!
They can't do it with Gnome, because Gnome is GPL and only GPL, and stuff you develop using GPL licensed libraries has to be GPL. They can do it with QT, because the nice people at Trolltech will happily sell them a commercial license.
Or are you one of the people who think you should be able to take the Trolltech people's work and make money out of it, without giving any of the money back?
Don't be so sure.
The Web - and the 'Net - exist as they are today because they started life as open systems. Microsoft (MSN) and AQL both started off with closed systems for distributed content. They would both prefer closed systems. But the unexpected growth of the Net has persuaded them - probably temporarily - that they have to pay lip-service to open systems.
Currently, Microsoft controls the majority browser out there, and AOL control the other browser that most users have heard of. Netscape has a long history of inventing 'enhancements' to published standards which make documents written for their software work more poorly (or not at all) with other people's. Microsoft are also past masters of that art.
One of the quite possible outcomes of this is that the Web breaks up into a Microsoft-only space and an AOL only space, with no one browser able to access all the information, and, in the worst scenario, with open source browsers unable to access any of it. If methods of accessing the next generation Web servers from Microsoft and AOL are subject to software patents, this could become a reality, at least for users in the US.
Don't get me wrong - I think the best case outcomes from this battle could be very good for the open source movement, with many users seeking refuge in platforms on which they can't
be messed around by corporate interests... but this is a very unstable situation, and the difference between the best-case outcome and the worst is quite dramaticPosted with Konqueror 2.1.1
the secret is that it doesn't have 'bizarre syntax'. It has extremely simple syntax - much, much more simple than anything you've ever seen before. You are looking for complexity that simply isn't there.
LISP has had highly sophisticated I/O for many decades. This is why it's so widely used in parsers, text processors, editors and so on. The (Common LISP) I/O specification is here.
in fact, of course, LISP has a condition handling system at least as sophisticated as any other language. The specification is here.
Originally LISP was a compiled language. However it is extremely easy to write a LISP interpreter in LISP, so most LISP systems area able to execute both interpreted source and compiled code. Furthermore, interpreted code can call compiled code and vice-versa. Documentation on the Common LISP compiler is here.
Only a few toy LISP systems lack a compiler.
You really never have used the language, have you? If a programming problem can be solved easier by a good C programmer in C than it can by a good LISP programmer in LISP, it wasn't a problem in the first place. For example, I wrote a CASE tool for expert system design in LISP by myself in three months; it took a team of four programmers two years to produce the production C version of the same program.
Get real, will you? I knew Jon Postel - I had a beer with him in Geneva the year he died - and I knew his long and close friendship with Vint Cerf, whom I also know. And Vint is now Senior Vice President for Technology at MCI WorldCom.
One of the things that tied Vint and Jon together (apart from being close friends for thirty years) was that both of them cared passionately about a free and open Internet. Vint still does. You only need to look at his page on Social, Economic and Regulatory Issues to see that. ISOC's slogan 'The Internet is for Everyone' is very much his slogan.
I think everyone agrees that ICANN is a mess - but it's a mess brought about by lawyers (mainly American lawyers), not by the Internet pioneers. Also, and this is what makes me most worried about articles like this one, is that the people who are doing most to damage the concept of a free, open Internet for everyone are not the pioneers - they're the get-rich-quick sleazoids who come in on the back of the pioneer's work and try to grab a chunk of the territory for themselves. We can all see that people who register patents for old and obvious ideas just by tagging 'Internet' onto the end of them are sleazoids. Can you not see that alternate TLD registrar wannabes are also sleazoids?
Yes, ICANN stinks. Yes, we need a more open, democratic authority controlling the top-level domains. But the Internet pioneers are not the enemy, and MCI is not the enemy. And in my opinion, the second thing that needs doing to ICANN (after making it democratic) is to move it out of American legal jurisdiction.
Yes, I know, following up to yourself. Really sad.
However, the funny thing is my girlfriend had a look with (real) Internet Explorer 5.5... and while the page renders fine in Konqueror pretending to be IE 5.5, two times in three it won't render on the real thing!
Interestingly, it redirects Konqueror 2.1 to 'badbrowser.psp'; but if you configure Konqueror to pretend to be Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0) it renders just fine. I'm seeing this more and more frequently with commercial sites - if they don't recognise the browser, they don't make any attempt to render a page for it. I think this is professional incompetence, frankly.