This identity server (and the defined protocols behind it) are a method of doing exactly what you are describing. The point of the Liberty Alliance and its working groups are to interact with local registries of people already in existence (or yet to be created) and coordinate their authentications and authorizations.
It is not a service like Passport. It is a product and protocol suite so you can run your own centralized identity system (as a company or personally).
Hmm. . . your Java count seems overblown to me. If you limited the Java container to only the services that Zope provided, then it probably would have taken about as much memory as Zope.
The problem with Java counts like these is that Java installations containers give you the "enterprise configuration" by default. . . with easy ways to turn off features. (rather than having you scrounge around the net looking for them and installing them after you find out that they are not there).
I can get PostgreSQL to master/slave replicate a database cluster over 5 servers in faster time
I'm looking to do exactly that! How? (I'm not kidding) I'll trade you, you show me the replication trick and I'll show you how to do simple things with sendmail;)
Don't keep disgruntled employees or employees that you keep hidden away in a back room and ignore. Management that keeps good relationships with its employees don't have as many problems with this sort of thing.
This means: 1) Help work to keep employees happily employed (not with bribes - with real career paths, personal interest, etc.). If you keep wage-slaves, expect mutiny. 2) Actively replace employees who can't be kept happily employed. Get others who are competent and glad to have the spot (which shouldn't be too hard in this economy). Keeping people around who don't want the position isn't doing them any favors. If no one who would be qualified would also be glad to have the spot, rethink the position.
"Management" should be helping manage situations like this. If this guy had been disgruntled for a long time, it seems to be their fault for keeping him (and keeping him unhappy and ultimately vengeful). Sounds like someone did a bad job at people-management . . . sounds like the type of willfull neglect that is inexcusable but all too common. Many people think that "management" is watching the bottom line -- that is a lazy, oversimplified way of looking at an important job.
A company like Ford would do anything they could to develop a substantial innovation over GM and DB.
You meant to say: A company like Ford would do anything they could to avoid having to develop a substantial innovation over GM and DB.
If maintaining the status-quo through legal and monopolistic means facing less risk than innovation (which it almost always is in mature industries), any fool could tell you that most companies would pay bribes (make donations to lobbying groups) to maintain the status quo.
Some savvy consumers come to this conclusion. Why pay more than an absolute minimum for products in a category which are obsolete or half-price in a year's time?
It's the old adage: value given for value received. What value is a high end, 1993 cd player? or that souped up 486?
Palladium has less to do with DRM than it has to do with Microsoft wanting to control the hardware manufacturers.
Think about it. Microsoft can punish Dell by disallowing their BIOS interoperability with their Palladium platform.
They've already dominated UP the stack (used their OS to monopolize the app vendors), now they are going DOWN the stack (using their OS monopoly to dominate the hardware vendors).
Palladium is the worst thing for computing freedom we've seen yet.
I think you will always miss the Franklin Planner. It's a great system. After 7 years of struggling with Palm, Zaurus, Psion, I'm back to the Franklin Planner - for a few simple reasons.
1) Ascriptive recall. I left my planner because it was a pain to copy my todo-list from day to day. After a few years of forgetting tasks, I realize that copying my tasks each day helped me remember them and the annoyance factor stirred me to get them done (i.e. there was a perceptible "cost" to not getting things done or not explicitly moving todos at a reasonable time in the future). 2) Palms are only good for large data-base type lookups for me. Addresses don't count. I can usually look up a paper-based address as fast as I can scrawl the graffiti search. For addresses, I'm back to paper. Now, I keep my addresses electronically, update/print new ones out periodically (Once or twice a quarter), and have an extra blank in my book for jotting down new ones.
3) Paper doesn't need to be "on". I don't miss the angst of running out of batteries and the hassle of worrying about flaky conduits and syncing.
4) You don't need a new "program" every time you have a new kind of data. If I want to keep birthdays on their own page, I do it. I don't have them hidden away in seperate contact sheets or hidden away as yet another "Note". If I want to add a tab for quick access. . . I do that.
Again, in my book, PDAs are good for databased information, but lousy for freeform thinking/planning. I'm not advocating that everyone go back to paper. . . it works MUCH better for me though.
You probably have a bad disk. I haven't had a problem like that ever, and I've run reiser on about twenty machines over the last 3 years.
Maybe Slashdot needs a Book Review Moderation
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Design Patterns - arguably one of the most important books of all time in software design got an "8". I figured it would get a "10" because of its relative importance. . . so
I went to look at other recent slashdot reviews to see what other books design patterns compares to. The results are hilarious:
7.5 - The Legends Of Dune - Volume 1: The Butlerian Jihad (Design patterns barely beats it, evidently I should be torn between these two books at the bookstore)
9 - Linux Prgramming by Example (A "by example book" blew away an architectual classic.)
10 - Dynamic HTML The Definitive Reference (2nd edition) [Evidently this groundbreaking tome on DHTML is in another class from "Design Patterns"]
8.7 - Extending and Embedding Perl (The message here is - if "Design Patterns" is on your shelf, may only be a bookend to "Extending and Embedding Perl".
I think that we should have a way to vote reviews "fair, underrated, or overrated" (and have that change the ranking) because it is clear that books with limited applicability (some only a blip on the technology horizon) often get rated better than truly groundbreaking pieces.
1) M$ released their SDK for free because Sun's was released for free. (Sun's existence helped you there).
2) M$ released.NET because Sun created Java. You benefited from M$'s copycat technology - the best of which Sun pioneered.
3) The reason that you can leave M$ and use another enterprise-class technology platform is because of Sun. (And they don't charge you for the freedom).
Sounds like you owe Sun a lot of gratitude. Cursing them for not making more money when you yourself benefited from their actions makes you look like an idiot.
Wait till your utopia bears out, Sun is gone, M$ starts charging for their SDK, there is no alternative in Linux (because Java/J2EE is gone), and you're taking out loans to pay for your beloved M$ non-evolving copy-cat technology.
A fool is someone who can't figure out who their friends are. . . until too late.
your comment "Corallary: it takes a lot longer to instantiate" makes no sense to me.
In a prefork model (most Apache configs), the instantiation happens once. . . at web-server startup. So if it takes 3 seconds longer to "boot-up" the webserver, so what? Mason is NO slower after startup, when the actual page-serving happens.
HTML::Mason / Perl fit every criteria they had perfectly. (Including allowing them to keep their 3 million lines of perl code untouched).Here is how I'd address the concerns:
There's more than one way to do it. Unless this is a coded way of saying "Perl is messy", I dont' understand why this is a con. PHP is based off of perl and has similiar issues.
Poor sandboxing, easy to screw up server. HTML::Mason takes care of this.
wasn't designed as a web scripting language. This is true, but it turns out that it can do web-scripting AND back-end processing well. One language for everyone to learn. PHP is enough like perl to confuse all of the backend people when they need to switch gears.
I live in New York. They put all of their selfish trash around my living space and I've decided to use it against them. I'm turning their advertisment vandalism into word-of-mouth sabotage. (word-of-mouth is the best way to get the message out, right?)
I have gone from disliking Microsoft to hating them for spoiling my living environment so to retaliate. . . Everytime someone brings up this abject vandalism in conversation, I make a very specific, understandable point about how Microsoft vandalizes the economic environment and acts as a regular sabateur and law-breaker when it serves their petty interest. It may be annoying to them (heck, I may seem annoying to them by doing it), but these people know that I know what I'm talking about and they start hating Microsoft too. They are reminded of it everytime they see that butterfly trash too. . . hundreds of times a day. I've even heard some people spread the word (of disgust);)
Is this the intended effect? Just because we remember it and talk about it, does that serve their intentions? Everyone recognizes and talks about swastikas at some time in their lives, but I wouldn't call that "buzz" positive.
Microsoft never abandons a product, period, they just repurpose it a few years later. The MSN network never died, MS is just trying to co-op the internet under their wing.
This is a fantasy that comes straight out of the M$ hype-machine. Microsoft abandons products ALL THE TIME. They just manage to kill them so thoroughly that they drop out of the public consciousness. Microsoft BOB does NOT live through Clippy. It was canned. Ever see Microsoft Task Manager? - I wasted a hell of a lot of time on that piece of junk. Didn't Microsoft have a Unix a while back? What about IE on Solaris? What about abandoning updates to Office on the Mac for EIGHT YEARS. What about Microsoft Passport's sidekick that was supposed to integrate EBay, etc. into the desktop (wasn't it called Sandstorm or something like that) - well that's gone. What about the Microsoft phone? How many versions of Word did they forcefully obsolete in the last 7 years without actually adding any new features?
Microsoft's product stability is a myth that I'm really tired of. They only thing you are really sure of in their lineup is Excel and Word. . . and even then you're only sure that they'll force you to pay for it again every year or so or else they'll fail to support you.
As a big Linux fan, I've wondered silently about this issue.
As linux overtakes Solaris, other Unices, and M$ Windows in the server and workstation tiers, it could be a huge boon to businesses that use this technology. At the same time, could it actually hurt those employed at various levels of the high-tech industry? For example if linux is more efficient and scalable, might it:
Hurt hardware sales: Since older hardware (using Linux) can suddenly be good enough for common tasks such as mailrouting, print queuing, and file serving won't there be a short-term dip in sales for chip/hw makers?
Hurt software sales: It is obvious that software sales would hurt if there are free (as in beer) alternatives available. It seems that since people can not figure out how to make software free (as in liberty) without making it free (as in beer) so that they can make money, then the software market might be hurt by this. It seems that people would be caught between M$'s bullying and the free retaliation. The combination would seem to suck all of the money out of the industry.
Hurt the sysadmin segment: It seems that there are thousands of MCSE's that would just be unemployeed because it takes many fewer SAs to take care of Linux. (remote administration + more reliable). Won't this cause a big displacement. What do those people do?
Have a ripple effect: New application software installs often-times prompt hardware installs. Following on the heels of both are hiring binges for new support-personell to take care of the new infrastructure. If Linux can work on older hardware, it has true standards that don't require retraining at every release, and it performs more reliably and robustly, then shouldn't we see a long-term cutback in IT?
Please note that I'm not decrying this potential effect of the use Linux or free software. If our industry is too fat (especially on the support side) then great. . . it should be cut down and people retrained. But it seems logical that the free software movement will cause efficiencies that will force a good percentage of this work-sector to "get with the program or get off the bus". The problem is that without consistent innovation at the business layer (businesses' use of technology) then the tech industry may not expand enough to allow retraining as a saviour for disenfranchised MCSEs, CNEs, etc. etc. If most businesses are content with basic file-serving, routing and printing without investing in technology then many people will just plain lose their jobs.
It seems to me that M$ has created a bubble with their inefficient and unreliable software. A LOT of people are employed to keep that junk working. In effect, businesses are subsidizing this "ill" part of the industry by throwing employees at a series of problems M$ has created. Similarly, forced dependence, and file incompatibilites, have allowed M$ to maintain a pricing bubble for software basics such as word-processing and simple spreadsheets. If they lose the OS war to free software and some of the office-turf to openoffice won't the air go out of a lot of balloons? Should people be bracing themselves for this?
I've wondered about these issues for a while and I'm sure you have much better insight into these topics than I do. What is your take?
I guess everyone figured that the software was working fine because the Big Dig web pages all said "Under Construction."
Re:Many Slashdotters NOT Linuxheads. OSX just bett
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2
An argument can be made that OSX is the perfect combination of Open Source and commercial interests. OS X finally does "Just Work" with a nifty geek-friendly back-end while many of its technologies are open.
I'm not interested in open-source. I'm interested in free. That's my problem with Apple. If apple shows you the source-code, but doesn't let you improve or change it, then it isn't free. Linux got where it is because it is free.
So what you're reading in this thread IS truly terrible for Linux development. OSX has beaten Linux at its own game. If we have true competition rather than Linux or open source zealotry, OS X will win, IMO.
I don't understand this comment. My understanding was that Linux' game was to provide a great free(dom) operating system. OSX hasn't done that and won't ever do that. I don't begrudge OSX users. . . and I don't think that we should just be "zealots" in the Linux camp -- but OSX simply won't "win" a game it never played.
Just being Unix is not enough to "win". . . there was plenty of Unix before OSX. Besides, I would prefer that we all "win", rather than have MacOSX "win".
Finally - just because open source development matured (birthed?) with Linux doesn't mean that it will die if Linux dies. In other words - it doesn't follow that future open source development will be dependent on Linux.
I certainly hope you are right. . . but a blow to Linux will CERTAINLY be a blow to the open-source and free-software movements. Free software has been around a lot longer than GNU/Linux, but its development _exploded_ when Linux became usable and the whole system could be free. Trying to create open-software on closed systems is just not as easy and will be subject to obstacles like vendor-interference and proprietary interests.
PS - I'm not sure I really like most of the open-source histories. . . I know that there are books like "Open Sources" and works like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but they are more rhetoric than responsible histories.
Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's why you should NOT switch to a MacOSx machine.
You are locked into the hardware. What if Apple does something you don't like in the future? What are you going to run, TurboLinux? Forget it. The only distro that treats all platforms the same is classic debian. If you think that getting packages/support on other platforms besides x86 is just as easy, think again.
Microsoft controls Mac adoption. Think I'm kidding? I was a HUGE mac fan and Mac administrator years ago. Macs started to get popular, so what does M$ do? They fail to release an update to Mac Office FOR EIGHT YEARS. Apple almost goes down the toilet. This will happen again if it is in M$'s best interest. I think that the only reason M$ supports Apple is that Apple can steal the Unix crowd's user-base. M$ is secretly happy about the "switch" ads because they sound so much like Linux advocacy and can confuse the Linux/BSD crowd into going with proprietary software. THEY WILL SWITCH LINUX USERS BEFORE M$ USERS. In most cases, M$ users have no choice, and hence no mobility towards MacOSX in most cases.
Open Office.org's health is good for everyone. Switching to the Mac enables people to use M$ Office blissfully without contributing bugfixes, comments etc. to OpenOffice --which we all own the rights to use. It just got good enough to replace M$ Office. Don't jump ship now - we are taking over - it just takes time. (You've seen the fruits of our the community's labor, so you know I'm not just blowing smoke).
The IPod doesn't support Ogg. No players will support Ogg unless people ask for it. IPod means MP3 or WMA formats ( I think ). If you are switching for the IPod, ask Apple to support linux first - or use gnupod. IPod is like a vote for proprietary codecs. We have just gotten free codecs for audio and video (The Ogg Family). . . we should support them.
You waited for: good, free GUI desktops, mozilla, OpenOffice, XMMS, etc. etc. etc. NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN CREATED IF WE HAD ALL BEEN MAC USERS ALL THIS TIME.
Believe it or not, Slashdot and linux are wedded. If there was no Linux talk here, a major percentage of the audience would be elsewhere. If Cmdr Taco and others are no longer going to "live the life", this forum will lose its credibility. I'm not here for the articles on space travel and I suspect MANY others aren't either.
I don't work for Sun, I don't work for RedHat or any other distro. My choice of helping out with linux works for everybody though. Please stay in the game.
That said, I still think more could be done with OpenBSD than Linux. Since it detects all hardware at startup, and loads drivers for hardware automatically, you would only need a very simple program that parses dmesg, then automatically reconfigures XFree86, and put up any messages, like "A new NIC was found, please type the IP address"
Mandrake 8.2 has all of these things. Mandrake Control Panel is the control panel you describe and they have a hardware scanner called "kudzu" that does exactly what you are describing ("New hardware has been found". . . etc).
The next version of Mandrake is almost out. . . you REALLY should give it a try if you value all of these features.
Slashdot Mirror
This identity server (and the defined protocols behind it) are a method of doing exactly what you are describing. The point of the Liberty Alliance and its working groups are to interact with local registries of people already in existence (or yet to be created) and coordinate their authentications and authorizations.
It is not a service like Passport. It is a product and protocol suite so you can run your own centralized identity system (as a company or personally).
Very scientific: Using your technology rating method, I've decided to use Windows, alt.sex and Brittany Spears for my next project.
Hmm. . . your Java count seems overblown to me.
If you limited the Java container to only the services that Zope provided, then it probably would have taken about as much memory as Zope.
The problem with Java counts like these is that Java installations containers give you the "enterprise configuration" by default. . . with easy ways to turn off features. (rather than having you scrounge around the net looking for them and installing them after you find out that they are not there).
it seems absurd to ruin the entire life of a foolish 15 year-old for committing the equivalent of graffiti
He's not just a "foolish 15 year-old", he was an ex-member of the website hacking club and he has a name. . . His name is Kevin Poulson.
His name is Kevin Poulson.
His name is Kevin Poulson. . .
I can get PostgreSQL to master/slave replicate a database cluster over 5 servers in faster time
;)
I'm looking to do exactly that! How? (I'm not kidding) I'll trade you, you show me the replication trick and I'll show you how to do simple things with sendmail
/
I know what you mean. . . I've been waiting for distros to realize that less is more for some time.
/bin/less /bin/more
ln -s
Can people possibly still prefer the old PAGER?
Don't keep disgruntled employees or employees that you keep hidden away in a back room and ignore. Management that keeps good relationships with its employees don't have as many problems with this sort of thing.
This means:
1) Help work to keep employees happily employed (not with bribes - with real career paths, personal interest, etc.). If you keep wage-slaves, expect mutiny.
2) Actively replace employees who can't be kept happily employed. Get others who are competent and glad to have the spot (which shouldn't be too hard in this economy). Keeping people around who don't want the position isn't doing them any favors. If no one who would be qualified would also be glad to have the spot, rethink the position.
"Management" should be helping manage situations like this. If this guy had been disgruntled for a long time, it seems to be their fault for keeping him (and keeping him unhappy and ultimately vengeful). Sounds like someone did a bad job at people-management . . . sounds like the type of willfull neglect that is inexcusable but all too common. Many people think that "management" is watching the bottom line -- that is a lazy, oversimplified way of looking at an important job.
You said:
A company like Ford would do anything they could to develop a substantial innovation over GM and DB.
You meant to say:
A company like Ford would do anything they could to avoid having to develop a substantial innovation over GM and DB.
If maintaining the status-quo through legal and monopolistic means facing less risk than innovation (which it almost always is in mature industries), any fool could tell you that most companies would pay bribes (make donations to lobbying groups) to maintain the status quo.
Some savvy consumers come to this conclusion. Why pay more than an absolute minimum for products in a category which are obsolete or half-price in a year's time?
It's the old adage: value given for value received. What value is a high end, 1993 cd player? or that souped up 486?
Palladium has less to do with DRM than it has to do with Microsoft wanting to control the hardware manufacturers.
Think about it. Microsoft can punish Dell by disallowing their BIOS interoperability with their Palladium platform.
They've already dominated UP the stack (used their OS to monopolize the app vendors), now they are going DOWN the stack (using their OS monopoly to dominate the hardware vendors).
Palladium is the worst thing for computing freedom we've seen yet.
I think you will always miss the Franklin Planner. It's a great system.
After 7 years of struggling with Palm, Zaurus, Psion, I'm back to the Franklin Planner - for a few simple reasons.
1) Ascriptive recall. I left my planner because it was a pain to copy my todo-list from day to day. After a few years of forgetting tasks, I realize that copying my tasks each day helped me remember them and the annoyance factor stirred me to get them done (i.e. there was a perceptible "cost" to not getting things done or not explicitly moving todos at a reasonable time in the future).
2) Palms are only good for large data-base type lookups for me. Addresses don't count. I can usually look up a paper-based address as fast as I can scrawl the graffiti search. For addresses, I'm back to paper. Now, I keep my addresses electronically, update/print new ones out periodically (Once or twice a quarter), and have an extra blank in my book for jotting down new ones.
3) Paper doesn't need to be "on". I don't miss the angst of running out of batteries and the hassle of worrying about flaky conduits and syncing.
4) You don't need a new "program" every time you have a new kind of data. If I want to keep birthdays on their own page, I do it. I don't have them hidden away in seperate contact sheets or hidden away as yet another "Note". If I want to add a tab for quick access. . . I do that.
Again, in my book, PDAs are good for databased information, but lousy for freeform thinking/planning. I'm not advocating that everyone go back to paper. . . it works MUCH better for me though.
Also, humans don't appear to have any innate flocking instinct.
Tell that to the people who invested in Boo.com or Dan Kamen's Segway Human Transporter.
You probably have a bad disk. I haven't had a problem like that ever, and I've run reiser on about twenty machines over the last 3 years.
I went to look at other recent slashdot reviews to see what other books design patterns compares to. The results are hilarious:
I think that we should have a way to vote reviews "fair, underrated, or overrated" (and have that change the ranking) because it is clear that books with limited applicability (some only a blip on the technology horizon) often get rated better than truly groundbreaking pieces.
1) M$ released their SDK for free because Sun's was released for free. (Sun's existence helped you there).
.NET because Sun created Java. You benefited from M$'s copycat technology - the best of which Sun pioneered.
2) M$ released
3) The reason that you can leave M$ and use another enterprise-class technology platform is because of Sun. (And they don't charge you for the freedom).
Sounds like you owe Sun a lot of gratitude. Cursing them for not making more money when you yourself benefited from their actions makes you look like an idiot.
Wait till your utopia bears out, Sun is gone, M$ starts charging for their SDK, there is no alternative in Linux (because Java/J2EE is gone), and you're taking out loans to pay for your beloved M$ non-evolving copy-cat technology.
A fool is someone who can't figure out who their friends are. . . until too late.
huh?
your comment "Corallary: it takes a lot longer to instantiate" makes no sense to me.
In a prefork model (most Apache configs), the instantiation happens once. . . at web-server startup. So if it takes 3 seconds longer to "boot-up" the webserver, so what? Mason is NO slower after startup, when the actual page-serving happens.
HTML::Mason / Perl fit every criteria they had perfectly. (Including allowing them to keep their 3 million lines of perl code untouched)
I live in New York. They put all of their selfish trash around my living space and I've decided to use it against them. I'm turning their advertisment vandalism into word-of-mouth sabotage. (word-of-mouth is the best way to get the message out, right?)
;)
I have gone from disliking Microsoft to hating them for spoiling my living environment so to retaliate. . . Everytime someone brings up this abject vandalism in conversation, I make a very specific, understandable point about how Microsoft vandalizes the economic environment and acts as a regular sabateur and law-breaker when it serves their petty interest. It may be annoying to them (heck, I may seem annoying to them by doing it), but these people know that I know what I'm talking about and they start hating Microsoft too. They are reminded of it everytime they see that butterfly trash too. . . hundreds of times a day. I've even heard some people spread the word (of disgust)
Is this the intended effect? Just because we remember it and talk about it, does that serve their intentions? Everyone recognizes and talks about swastikas at some time in their lives, but I wouldn't call that "buzz" positive.
Microsoft never abandons a product, period, they just repurpose it a few years later. The MSN network never died, MS is just trying to co-op the internet under their wing.
This is a fantasy that comes straight out of the M$ hype-machine. Microsoft abandons products ALL THE TIME. They just manage to kill them so thoroughly that they drop out of the public consciousness. Microsoft BOB does NOT live through Clippy. It was canned. Ever see Microsoft Task Manager? - I wasted a hell of a lot of time on that piece of junk. Didn't Microsoft have a Unix a while back? What about IE on Solaris? What about abandoning updates to Office on the Mac for EIGHT YEARS. What about Microsoft Passport's sidekick that was supposed to integrate EBay, etc. into the desktop (wasn't it called Sandstorm or something like that) - well that's gone. What about the Microsoft phone? How many versions of Word did they forcefully obsolete in the last 7 years without actually adding any new features?
Microsoft's product stability is a myth that I'm really tired of. They only thing you are really sure of in their lineup is Excel and Word. . . and even then you're only sure that they'll force you to pay for it again every year or so or else they'll fail to support you.
As linux overtakes Solaris, other Unices, and M$ Windows in the server and workstation tiers, it could be a huge boon to businesses that use this technology. At the same time, could it actually hurt those employed at various levels of the high-tech industry? For example if linux is more efficient and scalable, might it:
Please note that I'm not decrying this potential effect of the use Linux or free software. If our industry is too fat (especially on the support side) then great. . . it should be cut down and people retrained. But it seems logical that the free software movement will cause efficiencies that will force a good percentage of this work-sector to "get with the program or get off the bus". The problem is that without consistent innovation at the business layer (businesses' use of technology) then the tech industry may not expand enough to allow retraining as a saviour for disenfranchised MCSEs, CNEs, etc. etc. If most businesses are content with basic file-serving, routing and printing without investing in technology then many people will just plain lose their jobs.
It seems to me that M$ has created a bubble with their inefficient and unreliable software. A LOT of people are employed to keep that junk working. In effect, businesses are subsidizing this "ill" part of the industry by throwing employees at a series of problems M$ has created. Similarly, forced dependence, and file incompatibilites, have allowed M$ to maintain a pricing bubble for software basics such as word-processing and simple spreadsheets. If they lose the OS war to free software and some of the office-turf to openoffice won't the air go out of a lot of balloons? Should people be bracing themselves for this?
I've wondered about these issues for a while and I'm sure you have much better insight into these topics than I do. What is your take?
I guess everyone figured that the software was working fine because the Big Dig web pages all said "Under Construction."
An argument can be made that OSX is the perfect combination of Open Source and commercial interests. OS X finally does "Just Work" with a nifty geek-friendly back-end while many of its technologies are open.
I'm not interested in open-source. I'm interested in free. That's my problem with Apple. If apple shows you the source-code, but doesn't let you improve or change it, then it isn't free. Linux got where it is because it is free.
So what you're reading in this thread IS truly terrible for Linux development. OSX has beaten Linux at its own game. If we have true competition rather than Linux or open source zealotry, OS X will win, IMO.
I don't understand this comment. My understanding was that Linux' game was to provide a great free(dom) operating system. OSX hasn't done that and won't ever do that. I don't begrudge OSX users. . . and I don't think that we should just be "zealots" in the Linux camp -- but OSX simply won't "win" a game it never played.
Just being Unix is not enough to "win". . . there was plenty of Unix before OSX. Besides, I would prefer that we all "win", rather than have MacOSX "win".
Finally - just because open source development matured (birthed?) with Linux doesn't mean that it will die if Linux dies. In other words - it doesn't follow that future open source development will be dependent on Linux.
I certainly hope you are right. . . but a blow to Linux will CERTAINLY be a blow to the open-source and free-software movements. Free software has been around a lot longer than GNU/Linux, but its development _exploded_ when Linux became usable and the whole system could be free. Trying to create open-software on closed systems is just not as easy and will be subject to obstacles like vendor-interference and proprietary interests.
PS - I'm not sure I really like most of the open-source histories. . . I know that there are books like "Open Sources" and works like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but they are more rhetoric than responsible histories.
I don't work for Sun, I don't work for RedHat or any other distro. My choice of helping out with linux works for everybody though. Please stay in the game.
didn't anyone tell you? P = NP !
I have a very clever proof, but I can't fit it into this textbox.
That said, I still think more could be done with OpenBSD than Linux. Since it detects all hardware at startup, and loads drivers for hardware automatically, you would only need a very simple program that parses dmesg, then automatically reconfigures XFree86, and put up any messages, like "A new NIC was found, please type the IP address"
Mandrake 8.2 has all of these things. Mandrake Control Panel is the control panel you describe and they have a hardware scanner called "kudzu" that does exactly what you are describing ("New hardware has been found". . . etc).
The next version of Mandrake is almost out. . . you REALLY should give it a try if you value all of these features.