2) Judge Harris' overriding characteristic is an extreme hostility to patents. I've been before him a number of times and he has upheld a patent precisely once.
In my day job I'n Technical Director (CTO in American parlance) of a software company; I've had to take two days out of a very busy period recently to put together our objections to software patrents being allowed in Europe.
The situation which the US Patent Office has allowed to develop on your side of the water is an atrocious scandal, utterly destructive to technical innovation and of benefit only to parasitic lawyers. Patents are given for trivia, and often granted not to the originator of the trivia but to some quite spurious plagiarist. So if Judge Harris is hostile to patents, that shows he's in tune with the technologists, even if he's out of tune with the venial, parasitic drones of the 'intellectual property' industry.
For all the fawning and drooling in the linked article over how small and light the demonstrated devices are, the world doesn't want a 6", 2lb notebook. The world largely ignored the Toshiba Libretto and the Sony PictureBook, presumably because small keyboards and small screens do not make for happy users.
The world may not, but a substantial number of people in it do -- enough to account for a lot of sales. I adore my Libretto 100CT, which runs Debian with KDE2 and has on occasion run Oracle 8 server in order to astound customers in presentations. I adore it precisely because it is so small and light - you can stick it in a coat pocket or a bag and have it with you at times you didn't expect or plan to need it. So if a cool idea or the solution to a bug just occurs to you when you're out on a hike or whatever, it's there. It isn't a hassle to have it with you.
And these new, small Transmeta machines are just what I'm looking for for a replacement. I don't need shedloads of horsepower, but more battery life would be very nice.
Sure, a keyboard with different pitch takes some getting used to, and you make a few more mistakes at first; but the advantage small size more than outweighs the disadvantage of different keyboard pitch.
Within MacOS, you can assign any key to be any key.
<rant mode="intemperate">
I am continuously amazed about the number of MacOS users who think there is anything interesting or innovative about their operating system. Guess what? Earlier this week I needed to remap my keyboard, so I pulled off the shelf a copy of the X Window System User's Guide and read the xmodmap documentation. I bought that user guide in 1988 (eighty-eight), but my memory is that xmodmap goes back a lot further than that.
MacOS is not interesting; it's not clever; it's not cool. It's the operating system for people who prefer glitz to function, image to substance -- the operating system for poseurs, advertising account executives and 'web designers'; the identifying badge of the know-nothings and contribute-nothings of the electronic age.
Nader took 100 000 of the Florida vote! That vote could have been Gore's and this whole thing would be over with Gore for President!
Look, I'm Scots so it's nothing to do with me. But one of the things that it looks like from here is that the Republocrat and Demoblican parties are occupying a narrower and narrower space in the centre of the political spectrum. For people who in European terms are on the Left, the difference between Gush and Bore is vanishingly small. There's no reason to believe that the people who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore if Nader hadn't stood; just as probably, they would have felt disenfranchised and not voted at all.
Is there any evidence of tactical voting in this election?
Seriously, not just standard Slashdot Microsoft bashing. Look at Netcraft's uptime statistics. At the time of writing none of the top fifty most reliable sites are running on NT. That's no accident: NT just isn't robust enough for this sort of application.
I highly suggest having a Win2k box for web browsing. I'm a Unix bigot while I'm at work, but when I come home, want to put my brain back in the protective jar in the fridge, and vege out and browse, Win2k is *the* perfect OS to meet my needs. IE5.5 is absolutely wonderful and combined with the host of multimedia players available for Windows you have a platform that is fantastic for browsing the web.
Now, before you call me a Windoze luser...
I wouldn't call you a Windows luser, I would call you crazy. Are you serious? Have you used Konqueror or Mozilla M18? And you still prefer IE5.5? Yes, I acknowledge IE5.5 is mostly a good browser. But every time I use Windows I end up tearing my hair -- how anyone can get anything useful done with such a balky, fragile, user-hostile system completely defeats me. I might use IE5.5 - because it is a good browser - if it ran on a usable operating system. But it certainly isn't better enough than Moz or Konq to make up for how much Widnows is worse than UN*X.
I'm forty-five. Middle aged. Moderately successful. And still the damage that was done to me in school scars me, leaves me less able to be the person I might have been. This isn't new; the bright, socially awkward child has always been excluded, bullied, assaulted, traumatised.
The thing about schools which makes this unbearable is that schools is a closed institution: in effect, a prison. Your freedom is taken from you. You cannot get away from your tormentors. You cannot not go. In these days of 'human rights' where is the liberty of the child forced to go to school against his or her will? Where is the security of person of the child exposed to the schoolyard bullies?
For me, this is all thirty years ago. I don't want to still be feeling bitter about it, but I am. I don't want to still be feeling angry about it, but I am. I don't want my self-confidence to still be damaged by it, but it is. I would have liked to have had children, but I never have had, because I could not face putting anyone through the hell that was my childhood.
Guys, please publish this book. Publish it in the old-fashioned way on flattened dead trees, so that the teachers, the governors, the parents can read it. It's no use publishing it here. We have been through the baptism of blood and fire and pain. We are the converted. We don't need to read this message (and in truth I can scarcely bear to). The people out there who do need to read it are mostly still not adapted to reading online. For the sake of all the kids out there who are going through now what I went through thirty-five years ago, publish it.
4 weeks ago Alan Cox spend a weekend i Denmark and Sweden giving talks in Stockholm and Lund to the local LUG he speeks very well!
Absolutely. He's brilliant. In fact, it seems like all the top people in Linux are brilliant speakers. Which came first, the brilliant speaking or the high position in the meritocracy?
This week at ApacheCon Europe I listened to Ralph Engelschall (mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, etc) speak. He was speaking in English, which (seeing he's Swiss) must be his third or fourth language. He was talking about SSL and security, which is a deep technical topic. He was lively, witty, inspiring, fun. He obviously enjoyed himself. He obviously knew his topic inside out. And he was able to communicate both his enjoyment and his knowledge.
I think what it comes down to is the meritocracy. Ralph Engelschall, like Alan Cox, got to his position in the meritocracy because he produces exceedingly could code ('damned cool voodoo'). You need to be pretty brilliant to produce code at that level, and many (though not all) pretty brilliant people are good speakers.
It's worth noting that this ad was run in Germany, where non-Microsoft operating systems have traditionally done better than in English-speaking markets. Both the Atari ST series and Amigas had good penetration in the German market including into business. Now Linux (thanks largely to SuSE) is becoming very well accepted in German businesses. Consequently it is reasonable for Microsoft to see Linux as a credible threat in Germany - it is a credible threat in Germany.
It's also possible that MSoft Germany ran this add of their own initiative without consulting head-office - although I agree that's not very likely.
It really is time to let go of the C myths. There are two which really get to me:
C is faster than higher level languages.
This hasn't been true since the mid-eighties at least, when repeated actual tests showed that the best LISP compilers produced faster, tighter code than the best C compilers.
More recently the myth is that C is faster than Java, usually justified by people who include the startup overhead of the JVM in their Java timings. In fact, careful benchmarking shows that with the best current JITs, Java performs as well as the best C compilers at most tasks, and better at some.
C is somehow uniquely good for writing operating systems. This view is based on the fact that UN*X was written in C, and UN*X actually is a rather good operating system; and because BSD was available with source early on, UN*X has typically been used as the example when teaching OS design.
But operating systems can be written in a wide number of languages. A number of the operating systems I've used over the years have been written in LISP (a good language for the purpose), a number in BCPL (not something I'd recommend) and two (UN*X and Linux) in C.
C is a language which is extremely good for creating hard to trace bugs - memory leaks, data corruption and so on - and extremely poor for programmer productivity.
RTL is the intermediate representation that GCC uses. The different front-ends for GCC (C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, and Pascal, I think) all compile into RTL, and then on that level optimizations are done and ultimately binaries created.
Now, as bytecodes, RTL would probably be very slow. It seems (to my most uninformed eye) to be very low-level: appropriate for compiling, but not for interpreting. But if you can make the entire compiling process robust, there's no reason that compiling should make something less portable, as long as you are willing to replace non-conformant OS-level code with your own (standardized) code. Lo and behold, such code even exists! GNU has been writing just this distributable code for a long time.
Actually, if combined with 'Just In Time' native code compilers, or Transmeta-like code-morphers, this sounds like an exceedingly good idea. Furthermore, the native-compilation elements of those JITs and morphers already exist for a wide range of processors, because they're part of GCC. So all that's actually needed (if it doesn't currently exist) is an RTL virtual machine and code-profiler. That way you could have a long step towards 'compile once in any language and run anywhere' fairly cheaply.
It has to be recognised, though, that part of 'run anywhere' (and part that Java has actually provided fairly well) is universally available libraries. For this to really fly you'd need something equivalent to the Abstract Window Toolkit (the Java UI toolkit which maps UI requests to functions of the native GUI of the OS it's running under, not Swing which invents a whole new GUI different from every other).
I think you're underplaying the performance problems of Java. I've been using some XML libraries, and was absolutely shocked by the bad performance. In this application at least, Java is at least 10-100 times slower than C++ code.
Bad Java is slower than good C. Good Java is faster than bad C. In actual comparative benchmarking, Java is faster than C in two of the three tests done. I'm not aware of any recent benchmarking which has come to the opposite conclusion. If your Java is slower than your C, that's your coding, not Java.
The JVM is not a millstone; on the contrary it is extraordinary powerful technology. JITs are better, of course. But static native compilation is not only not necessary, in real testing it confers no benefit.
Sice most of the code is in a difficult to understand file with over 200000 lines, how can it be consdered open?
Just because something is too hard for you to understand, doesn't mean it isn't open. Some things are intrinsically hard. Some things are badly written but open; provided they're open, we can study them and rewrite them better.
Open Source is not the same as Dumbed Down Source; if you want to take part, you may have to work.
Uhhmmm.... why are we worried about patents, here? The guy works in Berlin. No European country currently allows patents on software (although we've a fight on our hands to keep things that way). Oh, you mean you lot in the benighted US of A won't be able to (legally) use it? Write to your representative and get the law changed. Software should not be patentable, and you (and, I think, the Japanese) are about the only places where it is.
Libraries? (was Re:Usenet C-SPAN?)
on
Deja For Sale
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· Score: 2
It seems to me reasonable that one of the major public libraries (British Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, Library of Congress, whatever) should take on the archiving of Usenet.
From a user perspective, if your phone supports TCP/IP as well as UDP/IP, then protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 are available directly from the phone. Users don't need to go through the carrier's WAP gateway and read mail in the browser. You can see why that's convenient.
This is what I'm saying for years. Once the froth settles down, the market is not going to accept phones which offer a restricted service for which you have have to pay a premium over the unrestricted equivalent. It's like paying extra to peer through the letterbox in a glass door.
If phones which offer TCP/IP to the device are available in the same market as phones which offer WAP to the device, the WAP phones will die -- they cannot possibly succeed. Phones which offer TCP/IP to the phone are available, therefore WAP will die.
Unfortunately, when you're dealing with Big Media, you are at an incredible
disadvantage, as they hold almost all of the cards in the deck when it comes
to dissemination of information to the populace.
Look, I don't want to sound arrogant but I think you may have the boot on the wrong foot. Try looking at it this way. Every newspaper the media produce, every television channel, and certainly every Website, depends on a great deal of electronic technology and computer systems. If there were an Amagamated Union of Geeks which could call all the geeks who look after those systems out, the all-powerful media would just stop.
Of course we don't and won't have an Amalgamated Union, because geeks just aren't like that -- we're too individualistic. But we do have a lot of common views and an emergent group identity, and we could easily move to a situation where a geek who worked for the Big Media was socially ostracised by other geeks; while the comparison with old-style labour organisation doesn't fit exactly, they could become the equivalent of 'black-legs'. And then you would move to a situation where Big Media just could not hire and retain the geek labour it needs in order to operate. Given the full employment and high labour mobility in the geek labour market, if geeks as a community came to see working for Big Media as uncool and morally repugnant, they could in practice all vote with their feet remarkably quickly - the geek economy is so strong it could quickly absorb all that labour.
I've often seen us geeks as the modern equivalent of the medieval masons - people with actually immense power - power to topple governments - if we choose to use it, because no large organisation, be it a movie company or a television channel or a government - can operate at all if we choose to boycott it.
So I would rephrase your quote:
Unfortunately, when you're dealing with geeks, you are at an incredible
disadvantage, as they hold almost all of the cards in the deck when it comes
to dissemination of information to the populace.
Mozilla is a failed project. It's not a useful browser, that is if you do more then read slashdot. Yow want to click on a link on shoutcast and have xmms load? You want Java? You want a browser that doesn't take up more memory then Homer does food at the all you can eat buffet? Then don't use Mozilla. Not now, not ever.
Sorry, laddie; I understand your rant, but you're out of date. Mozilla may have fragile, slow, greedy; it isn't greatly so any more (yes, it's still greedier than I like). M16 was about as stable as (but much more standards-compliant than) Netscape 4.6. M17 is the best browser I've used on a UN*X platform bar none. In a week's hard use it has crashed once, so it isn't perfect. On the standards side it's up there with IE5; the stability still needs a little bit of work, but not very much.
Mozilla may have been a 'failed project'; it isn't any more.
I created a tabbed widget in 1986, and have documentation to prove it. Furthermore, I was divinely inspired -- the idea came to me in a Quaker Meeting, when I should have been thinking about something else entirely.
So, you don't like Netscape, that's fine, go out and find a copy of Opera or
something. If you use Internet Explorer, you're being incredibly short-sighted,
and you deserve the world you're going to get.
Sorry, but that is incredibly short-sighted. I'm an anti-Microsoft fundamentalist. I don't have any Microsoft products on my machine. But I have to admit that at this moment IE is a better, more stable, more standards-compliant, easier to use browser than anything we've currently got on Linux (except possibly Konqueror, which I hope to try soon). Mozilla M16 is almost as good, but not nearly stable enough.
It's a bad mistake when you're so blinded by your dislike of the opposition that you can't recognise where they actually are doing better stuff than we are.
"Apple will be the first company to bundle an optical mouse with all its desktop systems."
Nope. Sun was selling optical mice with the SparcStations LONG ago.
I think the keyword here is that Apple is bundling the new mouse with all its desktop machines. On Sun workstations, it was an expensive option.
Whereas on Xerox D-Machines the (excellent, three button) optical mouse was standard from 1984 onwards. That's eighty-four, not ninety-four. And it was far better than any other mouse I've used since (and yes, that does include Sun opticals).
Excuse my apparent lack of knowledge on the subject, but are there that many differences in the databases? I mean, isn't SQL SQL?
SQL is SQL, but neither Postgres nor MySQL are. There are a few small differences between Postgres and ANSI 92 SQL, and they get smaller with every release. MySQL lacks many important features of ANSI 92 (transactions, roolback, sub-queries...) and doesn't intend to change. Futhermore, MySQL lacks many features below the API which real databases need, like good query optimisation; although MySQL is very fast for simple queries, it is very slow for complex ones. For applications which don't really need a database at all, MySQL is fine; for applications which do, Postgres is better.
My company develops data driven, web delivered applications mainly for corporate intranets. Our products are based on an in-house Servlet toolkit, Jacquard. The board paper I prepared which lead to us putting Jaquard Open Source (actually BSD licence) is here.
Brief summary of the argument: our customers are not the people who buy toolkits and components, they're people who buy completed applications. But in order to deliver completed applications we need a toolkit to build on. If we try to keep our toolkit proprietary, it will fall behind competing toolkits (such as, e.g., Enhydra) because we don't have, inside the team, enough people to develop it and debug it fast enough.
We could adopt another toolkit (such as Enhydra) but if we do we become just another user of the toolkit, with little control over its direction and no particular reason for people who want things built with it to come to us. By being the core of an Open Source project we get potential for kudos, the ability to steer the project, and, hopefully, a wider user base for the toolkit contributing patches and extensions.
I am amazed at the degree of ignorance that Slashdot readers show on this subject. Do the math! Suppose I want to visit a website I've never visited before, in a GTLD domain. My client makes a call to my DNS server. If it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries my ISPs DNS server; if it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries a root name server. The root name server issues it the NS record for the domain, and my ISP's DNS server then queries the authoritative name server for the domain. That's a maximum of four lookups. A CCTLD domain adds one, and each level of delegated subdomain adds another. But you're looking at a very small numbers of lookups.
By contrast in a peer to peer DNS network, in a world with many hundreds of thousands of DNS servers, to find an unknown, not commonly accessed domain would require tens of thousands of lookups if it were possible at all. At a tenth of a second per lookup, it would take about two hours to resolve the average domain name. In the mean time, because the load on DNS servers would have increased by three orders of magnitude, either far mor powerful servers would have to be used, or the DNS system would grind to a halt.
It's a technologically illiterate suggestion. Anyone who made it, go back and do maths 101.
Slashdot Mirror
In my day job I'n Technical Director (CTO in American parlance) of a software company; I've had to take two days out of a very busy period recently to put together our objections to software patrents being allowed in Europe.
The situation which the US Patent Office has allowed to develop on your side of the water is an atrocious scandal, utterly destructive to technical innovation and of benefit only to parasitic lawyers. Patents are given for trivia, and often granted not to the originator of the trivia but to some quite spurious plagiarist. So if Judge Harris is hostile to patents, that shows he's in tune with the technologists, even if he's out of tune with the venial, parasitic drones of the 'intellectual property' industry.
The world may not, but a substantial number of people in it do -- enough to account for a lot of sales. I adore my Libretto 100CT, which runs Debian with KDE2 and has on occasion run Oracle 8 server in order to astound customers in presentations. I adore it precisely because it is so small and light - you can stick it in a coat pocket or a bag and have it with you at times you didn't expect or plan to need it. So if a cool idea or the solution to a bug just occurs to you when you're out on a hike or whatever, it's there. It isn't a hassle to have it with you.
And these new, small Transmeta machines are just what I'm looking for for a replacement. I don't need shedloads of horsepower, but more battery life would be very nice.
Sure, a keyboard with different pitch takes some getting used to, and you make a few more mistakes at first; but the advantage small size more than outweighs the disadvantage of different keyboard pitch.
<rant mode="intemperate"> I am continuously amazed about the number of MacOS users who think there is anything interesting or innovative about their operating system. Guess what? Earlier this week I needed to remap my keyboard, so I pulled off the shelf a copy of the X Window System User's Guide and read the xmodmap documentation. I bought that user guide in 1988 (eighty-eight), but my memory is that xmodmap goes back a lot further than that.
MacOS is not interesting; it's not clever; it's not cool. It's the operating system for people who prefer glitz to function, image to substance -- the operating system for poseurs, advertising account executives and 'web designers'; the identifying badge of the know-nothings and contribute-nothings of the electronic age.
Go out. Buy yourself a copy of In The Beginning Was The Command Line. Become enlightened.</rant>
Look, I'm Scots so it's nothing to do with me. But one of the things that it looks like from here is that the Republocrat and Demoblican parties are occupying a narrower and narrower space in the centre of the political spectrum. For people who in European terms are on the Left, the difference between Gush and Bore is vanishingly small. There's no reason to believe that the people who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore if Nader hadn't stood; just as probably, they would have felt disenfranchised and not voted at all.
Is there any evidence of tactical voting in this election?
Seriously, not just standard Slashdot Microsoft bashing. Look at Netcraft's uptime statistics. At the time of writing none of the top fifty most reliable sites are running on NT. That's no accident: NT just isn't robust enough for this sort of application.
I wouldn't call you a Windows luser, I would call you crazy. Are you serious? Have you used Konqueror or Mozilla M18? And you still prefer IE5.5? Yes, I acknowledge IE5.5 is mostly a good browser. But every time I use Windows I end up tearing my hair -- how anyone can get anything useful done with such a balky, fragile, user-hostile system completely defeats me. I might use IE5.5 - because it is a good browser - if it ran on a usable operating system. But it certainly isn't better enough than Moz or Konq to make up for how much Widnows is worse than UN*X.
The thing about schools which makes this unbearable is that schools is a closed institution: in effect, a prison. Your freedom is taken from you. You cannot get away from your tormentors. You cannot not go. In these days of 'human rights' where is the liberty of the child forced to go to school against his or her will? Where is the security of person of the child exposed to the schoolyard bullies?
For me, this is all thirty years ago. I don't want to still be feeling bitter about it, but I am. I don't want to still be feeling angry about it, but I am. I don't want my self-confidence to still be damaged by it, but it is. I would have liked to have had children, but I never have had, because I could not face putting anyone through the hell that was my childhood.
Guys, please publish this book. Publish it in the old-fashioned way on flattened dead trees, so that the teachers, the governors, the parents can read it. It's no use publishing it here. We have been through the baptism of blood and fire and pain. We are the converted. We don't need to read this message (and in truth I can scarcely bear to). The people out there who do need to read it are mostly still not adapted to reading online. For the sake of all the kids out there who are going through now what I went through thirty-five years ago, publish it.
This week at ApacheCon Europe I listened to Ralph Engelschall (mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, etc) speak. He was speaking in English, which (seeing he's Swiss) must be his third or fourth language. He was talking about SSL and security, which is a deep technical topic. He was lively, witty, inspiring, fun. He obviously enjoyed himself. He obviously knew his topic inside out. And he was able to communicate both his enjoyment and his knowledge.
I think what it comes down to is the meritocracy. Ralph Engelschall, like Alan Cox, got to his position in the meritocracy because he produces exceedingly could code ('damned cool voodoo'). You need to be pretty brilliant to produce code at that level, and many (though not all) pretty brilliant people are good speakers.
It's also possible that MSoft Germany ran this add of their own initiative without consulting head-office - although I agree that's not very likely.
C is a language which is extremely good for creating hard to trace bugs - memory leaks, data corruption and so on - and extremely poor for programmer productivity.
Actually, if combined with 'Just In Time' native code compilers, or Transmeta-like code-morphers, this sounds like an exceedingly good idea. Furthermore, the native-compilation elements of those JITs and morphers already exist for a wide range of processors, because they're part of GCC. So all that's actually needed (if it doesn't currently exist) is an RTL virtual machine and code-profiler. That way you could have a long step towards 'compile once in any language and run anywhere' fairly cheaply.
It has to be recognised, though, that part of 'run anywhere' (and part that Java has actually provided fairly well) is universally available libraries. For this to really fly you'd need something equivalent to the Abstract Window Toolkit (the Java UI toolkit which maps UI requests to functions of the native GUI of the OS it's running under, not Swing which invents a whole new GUI different from every other).
Bad Java is slower than good C. Good Java is faster than bad C. In actual comparative benchmarking, Java is faster than C in two of the three tests done. I'm not aware of any recent benchmarking which has come to the opposite conclusion. If your Java is slower than your C, that's your coding, not Java.
The JVM is not a millstone; on the contrary it is extraordinary powerful technology. JITs are better, of course. But static native compilation is not only not necessary, in real testing it confers no benefit.
Just because something is too hard for you to understand, doesn't mean it isn't open. Some things are intrinsically hard. Some things are badly written but open; provided they're open, we can study them and rewrite them better.
Open Source is not the same as Dumbed Down Source; if you want to take part, you may have to work.
Uhhmmm.... why are we worried about patents, here? The guy works in Berlin. No European country currently allows patents on software (although we've a fight on our hands to keep things that way). Oh, you mean you lot in the benighted US of A won't be able to (legally) use it? Write to your representative and get the law changed. Software should not be patentable, and you (and, I think, the Japanese) are about the only places where it is.
It seems to me reasonable that one of the major public libraries (British Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, Library of Congress, whatever) should take on the archiving of Usenet.
This is what I'm saying for years. Once the froth settles down, the market is not going to accept phones which offer a restricted service for which you have have to pay a premium over the unrestricted equivalent. It's like paying extra to peer through the letterbox in a glass door.
If phones which offer TCP/IP to the device are available in the same market as phones which offer WAP to the device, the WAP phones will die -- they cannot possibly succeed. Phones which offer TCP/IP to the phone are available, therefore WAP will die.
Look, I don't want to sound arrogant but I think you may have the boot on the wrong foot. Try looking at it this way. Every newspaper the media produce, every television channel, and certainly every Website, depends on a great deal of electronic technology and computer systems. If there were an Amagamated Union of Geeks which could call all the geeks who look after those systems out, the all-powerful media would just stop.
Of course we don't and won't have an Amalgamated Union, because geeks just aren't like that -- we're too individualistic. But we do have a lot of common views and an emergent group identity, and we could easily move to a situation where a geek who worked for the Big Media was socially ostracised by other geeks; while the comparison with old-style labour organisation doesn't fit exactly, they could become the equivalent of 'black-legs'. And then you would move to a situation where Big Media just could not hire and retain the geek labour it needs in order to operate. Given the full employment and high labour mobility in the geek labour market, if geeks as a community came to see working for Big Media as uncool and morally repugnant, they could in practice all vote with their feet remarkably quickly - the geek economy is so strong it could quickly absorb all that labour.
I've often seen us geeks as the modern equivalent of the medieval masons - people with actually immense power - power to topple governments - if we choose to use it, because no large organisation, be it a movie company or a television channel or a government - can operate at all if we choose to boycott it.
So I would rephrase your quote: Unfortunately, when you're dealing with geeks, you are at an incredible disadvantage, as they hold almost all of the cards in the deck when it comes to dissemination of information to the populace.
Sorry, laddie; I understand your rant, but you're out of date. Mozilla may have fragile, slow, greedy; it isn't greatly so any more (yes, it's still greedier than I like). M16 was about as stable as (but much more standards-compliant than) Netscape 4.6. M17 is the best browser I've used on a UN*X platform bar none. In a week's hard use it has crashed once, so it isn't perfect. On the standards side it's up there with IE5; the stability still needs a little bit of work, but not very much.
Mozilla may have been a 'failed project'; it isn't any more.
I created a tabbed widget in 1986, and have documentation to prove it. Furthermore, I was divinely inspired -- the idea came to me in a Quaker Meeting, when I should have been thinking about something else entirely.
Sorry, but that is incredibly short-sighted. I'm an anti-Microsoft fundamentalist. I don't have any Microsoft products on my machine. But I have to admit that at this moment IE is a better, more stable, more standards-compliant, easier to use browser than anything we've currently got on Linux (except possibly Konqueror, which I hope to try soon). Mozilla M16 is almost as good, but not nearly stable enough.
It's a bad mistake when you're so blinded by your dislike of the opposition that you can't recognise where they actually are doing better stuff than we are.
Whereas on Xerox D-Machines the (excellent, three button) optical mouse was standard from 1984 onwards. That's eighty-four, not ninety-four. And it was far better than any other mouse I've used since (and yes, that does include Sun opticals).
SQL is SQL, but neither Postgres nor MySQL are. There are a few small differences between Postgres and ANSI 92 SQL, and they get smaller with every release. MySQL lacks many important features of ANSI 92 (transactions, roolback, sub-queries...) and doesn't intend to change. Futhermore, MySQL lacks many features below the API which real databases need, like good query optimisation; although MySQL is very fast for simple queries, it is very slow for complex ones. For applications which don't really need a database at all, MySQL is fine; for applications which do, Postgres is better.
Brief summary of the argument: our customers are not the people who buy toolkits and components, they're people who buy completed applications. But in order to deliver completed applications we need a toolkit to build on. If we try to keep our toolkit proprietary, it will fall behind competing toolkits (such as, e.g., Enhydra) because we don't have, inside the team, enough people to develop it and debug it fast enough.
We could adopt another toolkit (such as Enhydra) but if we do we become just another user of the toolkit, with little control over its direction and no particular reason for people who want things built with it to come to us. By being the core of an Open Source project we get potential for kudos, the ability to steer the project, and, hopefully, a wider user base for the toolkit contributing patches and extensions.
We don't have that problem. Other problems, maybe, but not that one.
I am amazed at the degree of ignorance that Slashdot readers show on this subject. Do the math! Suppose I want to visit a website I've never visited before, in a GTLD domain. My client makes a call to my DNS server. If it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries my ISPs DNS server; if it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries a root name server. The root name server issues it the NS record for the domain, and my ISP's DNS server then queries the authoritative name server for the domain. That's a maximum of four lookups. A CCTLD domain adds one, and each level of delegated subdomain adds another. But you're looking at a very small numbers of lookups.
By contrast in a peer to peer DNS network, in a world with many hundreds of thousands of DNS servers, to find an unknown, not commonly accessed domain would require tens of thousands of lookups if it were possible at all. At a tenth of a second per lookup, it would take about two hours to resolve the average domain name. In the mean time, because the load on DNS servers would have increased by three orders of magnitude, either far mor powerful servers would have to be used, or the DNS system would grind to a halt.
It's a technologically illiterate suggestion. Anyone who made it, go back and do maths 101.