Chomsky's and Stallman's political opinions are so extreme that they can indeed be dismissed out of hand. On the other side of the coin, we would all dismiss the political opinions of a Nazi or, say, the president of Iran, out of hand. OK, nearly all of us would. I few people actually agree with people like that.
Chomsky and Stallman may not be quite as far over the edge on the left as Nazis or Islamic terrorists, but they're not all that far behind.
I never said or implied that "I disagree with their politics and you should too." What I said is that you should dismiss out of hand everything they say, which you should. They are extremists. Once you've done that, go ahead and look at the facts. It's always possible you might come to the same conclusions they have, but not likely if you're a thinking person.
Chomsky is a crackpot, communist apologist, and general hater of western democracy. You sound like a person who hasn't read him, or you'd be agreeing with me. RMS isn't as bad, but seems cut from the same bolt of cloth anyway.
It's a shame that two people so brilliant in their fields are so incompetent outside of their fields, but hardly unusual. As I said before, look at the entertainment industry. Very few of them know squat about anything besides acting, but that doesn't stop them for a second from becoming activists anyway.
I'm a big Free Software supporter and all, but I think modding the parent troll was both uncalled for and wrong.
Here's why.
I did a degree in linguistics at a major university with a well-respected linguistics department. There was a whole lotta Noam Chomsky Goin' On, not just about generative grammar, but about various political and economic topics as well.
One of the things that I learned during those four years, after initially falling for a lot of that, is that caring what Chomsky says about anything other than linguistics is a big mistake. During the ten years I've been a Linux user and booster of Free Software for both its ideals and its practicality, I have also learned that caring what RMS says about anything other than Free Software, software patents, and related topics, is also a big mistake. Or, if you do pay attention to what Chomsky and Stallman have to say on topics outside of their actual areas of expertise (linguistics and free software, respectively), you should be using their positions as a guide on how *NOT* to think, or a guide of what you should be opposing, for there is little likelihood of their being right when the topic is something other than linguistics or free software.
I will not be surprised if someone comes along and mods me flamebait or a troll for saying these things, rather than reflecting on their merits (by which I do not mean deciding if you agree with me or not and modding me down if you don't or up if you do), but who knows, I might get lucky. The fact of the matter is that the most outspoken celebrities are usually the ones least qualified to be outspoken on topics other than those of their professions. Chomsky and RMS both seem to fall into this category, although they are far from alone.
IANAL, but generally, no. First of all, there is no such thing as absolute proof in patent law.
Secondly, if two people skilled in the art (hereafter referred to as "geniuses") come up with the same thing independently and with no knowledge of the other's research or patents, that is proof of nothing but the fact that two geniuses independently came up with the same, or substantially the same, idea. It may, however, be useful for the patent holder to argue against obvious, on the grounds that if it took a genius to devise it, then it's not obvious.
However, if two very average people (herafter referred to as "idiots") both independently come up with the same idea with no knowledge of the other's work, then you probably have something obvious. If any idiot could think of it, and at least two did so independently, it probably should not be patentable.
Again, IANAL, but one of the challenges in defending an infringement suit or in trying to invalidate a patent based on obviousness and/or prior art may that the work of geniuses has historically been much easier to find than the work of idiots. Google changes that more than a little, but it's still easier to find the work of geniuses, I suspect.
I'm a former employee of a certain large software company related to TFA, and interestingly, one thing they tell you when you go to work there (and I suspect other large companies that file lots of patents also do this) is that you should not - never, ever, ever - do any research into patents to try and find out if something you're developing or have developed and may be filing a patent application on might infringe any existing patents.
The reason for this is that if you do, infringement becomes easier to prove for anyone who does happen to sue you, because they can point at you and say "See, these programmers did patent research in this area, then produced a product and/or filed a patent on stuff that does what my stuff does" and if they win, then they will do better in the damages phase because they can present evidence showing willful infringement.
The bottom line was, leave any patent research, including the decision of whether or not to do it, up to the legal department. Don't get anywhere near it yourself.
I'm in my forties, have been in the computer business since I was 18 and a geek longer than that, and I've never seen a Dvorak keyboard, either. The OP just into a den of Dvorak iniquity, IMO:)
I've never felt motivated to try a Dvorak because:
- I would have to either carry one with me everywhere or constantly move back and forth between the two, and IMO the only way to be really good at typing on a Dvorak is to use nothing else. When I lived in Japan, I tried using a kana for a while, on the rationale that it would be faster to type Japanese because it would require half as many keystrokes. I only ever met one Japanese native speaker who did that, and he couldn't really say if it helped him or not. I used kana->kanji input for a few months and eventually dropped it and went back to romaji->kanji input b/c not only did it not help me, it was slower b/c of switching issues with typing QWERTY in English and kana layout in Japanese
- It tremendously limits your choice of keyboards or makes you move all your keycaps around
- A large study some years ago found no signficant speed difference between Dvorak and Qwerty users. In other words, I'd spend all that hard work learning to be good at Dvorak, carry one with me everywhere I go, and probably gain little or nothing
I don't doubt that some people see speed and/or ergonomic benefits, but the likelihood of it for most people seemed to low to make it worth my while to try it.
Believe it or not, Microsoft actually cares a lot more about that stuff than it looks like from the outside. I worked for Microsoft for a couple of years when they acquired my former employer, and I was surprised by the extent to which Microsoft beats the security drum. We had a senior programmer on our team whose responsibility was nothing but security and code review.
Do they tend to execute poorly on stability, and especially security, anyway? Without doubt. But believe it or, it isn't because they don't care.
That hits the nail very squarely on the head, someone needs to mod you up. I work at a very Unix-friendly company. More than half of our engineering department uses a Mac or some flavor of BSD or Linux on the desktop, and the balance is tipping farther in that direction all the time. Every new hire this year has chosen a Mac. Even in the non-engineering/non-IT part of the company, there are some *nix users, chiefly Mac.
Our dev boxes are all FreeBSD. In fact, all of our server infrastructure is nix-based, with one exception: we have an Exchange server.
Why?
While I wasn't here when it was chosen, I'm pretty sure "It's the best groupeware technology out there" wasn't the reason. Lotus may be no better, but at least IMO Groupwise is, and some Free solutions probably are, too. However, we are a company that sells products into the Global 2000 and makes a lot of money doing it. We conduct frequent customer training sessions at our site and our account managers, products managers, SEs, etc., frequently meet with customers either at our site or theirs. Guess what groupware server is used at most of the global 2000? Uh-huh. Exchange. So my theory is that whether we like Exchange or not, it's the thing that gives us maximum compatibility with our customers.
You are absolutely right that an Exchange replacement is needed, but even then it'll be tough. The replacement will need to be perfect. So perfect it can be used in a cluster with other Exchange boxes. Deal with all Outlook versions, etc. Since Exchange is a proprietary product, this will require some reverse engineering, and making reverse-engineered products perfect is really hard. Microsoft will fight it with every fiber of their being, and I'm confident (as only a former Microsoft employee who worked in the Exchange team can be) that they will in no way welcome it. They will use FUD, lock-in, and if necessary, law suits.
An Exchange killer/clone/replacement has been a grail of the free software movement (or at least some parts of it) for the entire 10 years I've been a Linux user. We're not much closer to that than we were in 1997 (yes, I know about Kolab and use Kontact myself, but how often do you actually see a Kolab server at a company; I never have. I've never even met anyone who claimed to have see one, or even claimed to know someone who had). If free software overtakes Microsoft and other proprietary vendors in every category and becomes the market leader across the board, I believe that even then, Exchange will be Microsoft's last great holdout product. Exchange is very hard to clone and very hard to replace in an environment that uses it.
In conclusion, then, a warning to anyone who does not now have Exchange and is thinking of it: don't. You'll be using it forever, or if not, it will be hard, painful, and expensive to get rid of it. Look at other open source and closed source products first. You'll probably find one that meets your needs and be able to run it on Linux or BSD, thus making it cheaper and more reliable than Windows Server, too.
There's a simple, easy to implement solution to this problem that can be done not only without taxpayer expense but will actually enhance city revenues: put a doughnut shop at every traffic light. No cop will ever run a light again, not even on an emergency call.
Unbelievably, my spellchecker doesn't have an entry for the correct spelling, "doughnut," but does have one for the shortcut, "donut":p
I've tried Opera so many times (every new major rev) and every time, found nothing compelling enough to get me to switch. When it was pay Vs. ad-supported, I thought "OK, this is pretty good, but it's not so good that it's worth the money or the ads."
After it became free, it was just "This is pretty good, but it's no longer better than Firefox, esp. in light of all the Firefox extensions."
I actually prefer Konqueror above all for its speed and fine-grained security controls. Overall, though, I still rate Firefox above it because it renders better (which is huge, of course), and all the plug-ins. That said, in Linux I use Konqueror mostly and FF for sites that don't render correctly in Konq.
Whoever modded you flamebait for saying this is wrong (it's not flamebait), but so are you (you're just not correct).
If a state passes a law requiring that any software it uses support ODF, that is not preferring one technology over another. It makes no comment on the technology to be used. It just says that whatever technology or technologies we use, they must be fully interoperable with each other by way of using an open document format. ODF itself is not FOSS. OSF is a standard used by some FOSS programs and which can be used by Microsoft Office as well. If California requires that all state documents be saved in ODF, the only requirement this places on Microsoft is that its products must support ODF to be eligible for state purchase.
This law is not designed in any way to force anyone from the market or to favor or require any particular technology, such as OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office. If Microsoft Office has full support for ODF, then California could make a business decision to use MS Office as its office suite. It could also make a business decision to use OO.o. Or both. Or leave it up to each individual department.
Requiring ODF for all public documents does not favor any technology over any other. Rather, it provides a level playing field on which each technology may and must compete on its merits. If Office 2007 is as good as Microsoft says, it will still win on its merits on a level playing field. If its merits do not justify its price, then it may fail. Either way, requiring the use of an open standard does not favor any product over any other. Indeed, requiring, or even permitting, the use of a closed standard is what does this. Allowing or requiring MS Office format as the format for public documents gives an unfair advantage to MS Office b/c its closed nature makes Microsoft better able than anyone else to support that file format. You've got it all backwards.
I saw the O'Reilly name on the programs and thought this could be really good. When I saw the actual course offerings, though, I was rather disappointed. A course on Unix file systems? Come on. Most of the people reading this are already quite familiar with Unix file systems.
Next, the web programming and open source programming certs are so similar that I can't see why you have them both. When I looked at the open source programming cert, I was expecting to see perl and/or shell scripting, possibly python, and followed by C and/or C++ using GCC and GNU Make.
Instead, we get perl for CGI development, Unix file systems, OO programming using Java, Intro to DB programming, and Intro to PHP.
This overlaps heavily with the web programming cert, to the point where I don't get why you even offer both. For someone like me, who has a lot of sysadmin experience, some neteng experience, and some perl background (I'm an expert at regexes, although my overall perl skills are lower intermediate at best), and whose job involves no web programming, that entire course of study would be rather non-productive. And of course, there are those who would argue that the Java isn't the best choice of an OO language for a program calling itself an open source programming certificate, Sun's recent decision to open-source Java notwithstanding.
What would I like to see in that program?
1) Perl for (non-CGI) application development 2) Shell scripting (incorporating the use of awk and sed heavily, and laying the groundwork for writing make files) 3) OO programming with python 4) Beginning C using GCC 5) Intermediate C using GCC/using GNU make 6) Beginning C++ using GCC 7) Intermediate C++
Mix and match how those go together, but an open source programming cert with that kind of content would have me reaching for my credit card right now. Your current offerings and those you list as being in development, however, just have me thinking of how this program could have been.
While I do not dispute this, one thing that needs to be remembered is that many of the people now being paid to work on Linux by Red Hat, IBM, et al, are the same people who worked on Linux for free for a long time and brought it to the point where those companies thought it worth paying people to work on it.
If you look at the percentage of code in Linux that was written by people now being paid to work on Linux but who were volunteers when they contributed it, a different picture might emerge. This doesn't discount wholesale contributions of code such as XFS by SGI or JFS by IBM, but without the work of volunteers, including those now being paid, Linux would simply not exist.
Quite so. On the one hand, ISPs want to be treated as common carriers, on the other hand, (some of them) want to do things like Rogers is doing.
As a former ISP sysadmin myself, I believe that the answer here is
1) Not to penalize good and bad traffic together (I use bit torrent from time to time, but only for things such as Linux ISOs or NeoOffice which may be legally shared in that matter) and a VPN to connect to my office, and I'd be pretty unhappy if my ISP (who I don't like much anyway) was traffic shaping so as to screw those things up.
2) As long as someone is withing the traffic limits in the AUP, what they are transferring is their business. If your AUP and/or advertising says Unlimited, then your practice had better reflect that. If it has a limit, then bill them for traffic over the limit, but again, the nature of their traffic is none of the ISPs business.
I doubt our neighbors would complain (like most other business, the only thing around our parking lot is other businesses and parking lots), but last week a phone company truck managed to hit not one, but two, parked cars in our parking lot. Happily, mine was not one of them.
That's all I need to know to 86 the idea of putting a portable data center in my parking lot. Oh, and there are all those 50+ foot tall eucalyptus trees, too. Hate to have one of those fall on my portable data center.
I know Hamilton, he's a very smart guy and was once my boss, but I think I'll have to pass on this one:)
True enough, and I think the usual received wisdom applies here: don't get a new Windows release until it has matured to at least the SP1 level. By then, most of the most serious bugs and security flaws have been ironed out. Or at least, you hope so.
That said, Vista was in development for 4 - 5 years, and lost very highly-touted features along the way, such as WinFS. For it to take that long to develop, steadily reduce its goals along the way, and still be this buggy and generally underwhelming at RTM speaks very poorly of Vista, IMO.
Whether it saved any energy or not, That's six more weeks in the year when it will be light out when I (and a lot of the rest of you) go home from work.
IMO, that alone makes it a win and makes it worth the patching efforts.
And maybe, just maybe, it will teach people to not hardcode values like the start and end of DST, so that patches aren't required:)
My dev environment is *nix, my workstation is a MacBook Pro. My company's policy is you can run pretty much whatever you want - even Windows - but if it's not Win or Mac, you mostly need to support it yourself. In Engineering, Macs are probably the number one choice, with most other people running FreeBSD or Linux on a Dell. Recently, we've been getting Thinkpad T-60s. If they'd been available when I started I would have taken one and put Linux on it, but with a choice of a Dell or a Mac, the Mac was the clear winner.
I mean, I agree that politicians generally suck and corruption is rampant, but you're suggesting that scientists not have oversight from anyone (except maybe other scientists?).
It's not like there isn't plenty of corruption in scientific circles as well (remember cold fusion, anyone?). Corruption in pursuit of research dollars (some govt, some VC), and just plain corruption as in "Anyone who doesn't agree with the accepted position must be a crackpot." Remember when the accepted position was that dinosaurs died out because of the rise of mammals and they just failed to compete and evolve? And anyone who didn't go along with that wasn't taken seriously? And later, when the impact/mass extinction theory began to emerge and people were considered crackpots for advancing it? Why was that? Because they threatened the status quo.
Now, that isn't an argument for oversight of science per se, but it does point out that science and scientists are far from the objective defenders of truth we'd like to believe.
In the case of global warming (which may or may not be going on, and may or may not be a long term trend and may or may not be caused mostly by humans or mostly by increased solar radiation and who cares if it is? It'll make my house near Disneyland into ocean-front property maybe ), a lot of scientists are pressured to go along with it. By peer pressure. By "step up to the research grant" pork barrel" pressure. Meanwhile, some pretty prominent scientists don't buy it.
Whatever the problems of government may be, at the end of the day, it is the people, through our elected officials, are in charge, and should be in charge. Scientists at the Dept. of the Interior or anywhere else are not elected and should not be in charge. They make recommendations, which may or may not be accepted.
As for the yellow-tailed-can't-adapt-to-a-changing-environmen t-whatever-bird, maybe the real question is whether or not it's worth protecting. Most species that ever existed are now extinct, as a result of being unable to adapt to changing conditions. That's called evolution.
Microkernel, Shmicrokernel, I love my Mac but it's nowhere near as stable as my monolithic kernel Linux systems. That's without even going into the fact that so many Apple updates require a reboot to take effect, which is beyond stunningly stupid and ridiculous on a *nix-based system. The only Linux (or *BSD) upgrade that requires a reboot is a kernel upgrade, and even that can be done at your leisure after installing the new kernel.
In Solaris, even a kernel upgrade doesn't require a full reboot of the machine, at least as long as you have a Sun machine big enough to allow you to partition it.
I'm a Mac n00b coming from a Linux background and was stunned the first time my MacBook Pro asked to reboot after applying a security update. Didn't those schmucks at Apple learn anything from A) the bad example that is Windows, and B) the good example of BSD userland upon which they based their system? Apparently not.
I am primarily a Linux user, and have been since the late 1990s. In fact, I am exclusively a Linux user at home, with one exception: I have an XP box b/c I've had poor success with TurboTax under Wine. My wife runs XP on her laptop, but only b/c her most important app is Yahoo Messenger, and her most important use of it is voice, which is supported only in the Windows version.
At work, I'm a Mac user (my "desktop" is a MacBook Pro) and FreeBSD user (the OS on our dev boxes). The Mac came from our IT dept. with Parallels and XP on it, but the only thing I usually use Parallels for is to run a Kubuntu Edgy VM, not XP.
This is my first Mac, and I'm still a Mac n00b, having had this job and this computer for a little over two months. However, that has been more than enough time for me to figure out this much: if you can't see a reason to buy a Mac, it's because you've probably spent little or no time with one. I still prefer Linux overall, and I generally prefer KDE to the Mac UI, but it's obvious that KDE in general and Kubuntu in particular have taken some pages from the Mac playbook. What I like best about the Mac is probably something that it took me a month or so to realize: it makes me cuss less than any OS I've ever used. Windows makes me cuss *a lot* more. Linux is pretty close, but the Mac seems to have the edge.
I like this Mac because it doesn't get in my way, while having the tools I need available.
What could make it better?
If they'd based the *nix side of things on apt rather than BSD ports. Being able to open up a terminal and apt-get install a port (or apt-cache pkgnames for a list), for example, would be better than having to use Ports, IMO.
If it had virtual desktops natively (coming in Leopard, finally!)
If Apple had used X11 for their GUI, so I might have a chance of trying to build Evolution on a Mac and having it work.
But, those things notwithstanding, OS X is very, very good, and the hardware is topnotch. I like this Mac enough that I would probably buy one for myself, and will almost certainly buy one for my wife when Yahoo releases a Mac client that supports voice (coming in the next beta, they claim).
If people ask me what kind of computer they should get, I suppress my urge to just say "Linux" and instead ask them this question:
Are you looking for a computer that just works and stays out of your way, with minimal effort on your part, or do you like to get "under the hood" and tinker a bit?
If they say they just want it to work, I recommend a Mac. If they like to tinker, and esp. if they also have some experience already, I will recommend running Linux on a PC and may (depending on who it is), offer to install and set it up for them. Either way, I don't recommend Windows.
I think you and I will agree on at least this much: whether a person goes Mac or goes (K)Ubuntu, either way, there's something better than XP (or Vista) out there. The only reason I can think of to buy Windows is if a person is a hard-core gamer, and for those who are, I can't help thinking they might be better served by an Xbox or P/S 3 for games and Mac or Linux for computing.
That sounds *exactly* like my experience with them in 2003. They sent me the DSL kit, I hooked it all up, didn't work, I thought they just hadn't gotten their end activated yet. A couple days later, they call me up and ask how the DSL is working (very thoughtful, actually). I say "Huh? It doesn't work at all." A lot of troubleshooting led to an SBC guy coming out and testing the line at the demarc. He told me "I can sync my meter here, but there's no way an ordinary cable modem would get that signal. You're just too far from the CO."
This was reported back to Speakeasy, which then lead to a week of fingerpointing, denial, and "he said/she said" between Speakeasy and Covad. At the end of that week, I was supposed to get talk to a higher-level support tech. He didn't even bother showing up for the conference call. I called Roadrunner Business Class and said "I want static IP service, how soon can you hook me up?" They said "three days." I then asked a bunch of technical questions, got answers (the right ones), and said "Do it."
I never had a problem with Time Warner/Roadrunner and wish I still lived in their service area.
For me, 3 kbps - 6 kbps down translates to "at least as fast as my current best-case throughput, and maybe up to twice as fast" and it costs less than San Bruno Cable service, so as long as their service quality is >= San Bruno Cable's, I can't lose. Plus, the fact that they use the word "Linux" right on their top page can only be a good sign:)
We live pretty near each other. I'm in San Bruno and have become pretty unhappy with San Bruno Cable in the short time I've been using them. I used to live in a Time-Warner/Roadrunner area and after I moved to San Bruno found myself paying 10 bucks more for half the bandwidth, a pathetic excuse for a usenet server, and power-cycling the cable modem at least once a week (used to happen about every 6 weeks on TW). Oh, and they charge you for installation. TW didn't.
I was looking into DSL and considering Speakeasy despite a bad experience with them a few years ago, and then the Best Buy news came out. Speakeasy is no longer under consideration, but some other poster mentioned sonic.net. They sound pretty good and are based in Santa Rosa. You might want to check them out.
This is a Bad Thing, no question, but I'm glad it happened now. I live in a place "served" by a municipal cable company (anyone ever meet a government corporation that didn't suck?) and pay more money for half the bandwidth and fewer services than I did where I used to live (Roadrunner there, they were very good). I was thinking of going to DSL and Speakeasy was a candidate, but they're off the list now.
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Chomsky's and Stallman's political opinions are so extreme that they can indeed be dismissed out of hand. On the other side of the coin, we would all dismiss the political opinions of a Nazi or, say, the president of Iran, out of hand. OK, nearly all of us would. I few people actually agree with people like that.
Chomsky and Stallman may not be quite as far over the edge on the left as Nazis or Islamic terrorists, but they're not all that far behind.
I never said or implied that "I disagree with their politics and you should too." What I said is that you should dismiss out of hand everything they say, which you should. They are extremists. Once you've done that, go ahead and look at the facts. It's always possible you might come to the same conclusions they have, but not likely if you're a thinking person.
Chomsky is a crackpot, communist apologist, and general hater of western democracy. You sound like a person who hasn't read him, or you'd be agreeing with me. RMS isn't as bad, but seems cut from the same bolt of cloth anyway.
It's a shame that two people so brilliant in their fields are so incompetent outside of their fields, but hardly unusual. As I said before, look at the entertainment industry. Very few of them know squat about anything besides acting, but that doesn't stop them for a second from becoming activists anyway.
I'm a big Free Software supporter and all, but I think modding the parent troll was both uncalled for and wrong.
Here's why.
I did a degree in linguistics at a major university with a well-respected linguistics department. There was a whole lotta Noam Chomsky Goin' On, not just about generative grammar, but about various political and economic topics as well.
One of the things that I learned during those four years, after initially falling for a lot of that, is that caring what Chomsky says about anything other than linguistics is a big mistake. During the ten years I've been a Linux user and booster of Free Software for both its ideals and its practicality, I have also learned that caring what RMS says about anything other than Free Software, software patents, and related topics, is also a big mistake. Or, if you do pay attention to what Chomsky and Stallman have to say on topics outside of their actual areas of expertise (linguistics and free software, respectively), you should be using their positions as a guide on how *NOT* to think, or a guide of what you should be opposing, for there is little likelihood of their being right when the topic is something other than linguistics or free software.
I will not be surprised if someone comes along and mods me flamebait or a troll for saying these things, rather than reflecting on their merits (by which I do not mean deciding if you agree with me or not and modding me down if you don't or up if you do), but who knows, I might get lucky. The fact of the matter is that the most outspoken celebrities are usually the ones least qualified to be outspoken on topics other than those of their professions. Chomsky and RMS both seem to fall into this category, although they are far from alone.
IANAL, but generally, no. First of all, there is no such thing as absolute proof in patent law.
Secondly, if two people skilled in the art (hereafter referred to as "geniuses") come up with the same thing independently and with no knowledge of the other's research or patents, that is proof of nothing but the fact that two geniuses independently came up with the same, or substantially the same, idea. It may, however, be useful for the patent holder to argue against obvious, on the grounds that if it took a genius to devise it, then it's not obvious.
However, if two very average people (herafter referred to as "idiots") both independently come up with the same idea with no knowledge of the other's work, then you probably have something obvious. If any idiot could think of it, and at least two did so independently, it probably should not be patentable.
Again, IANAL, but one of the challenges in defending an infringement suit or in trying to invalidate a patent based on obviousness and/or prior art may that the work of geniuses has historically been much easier to find than the work of idiots. Google changes that more than a little, but it's still easier to find the work of geniuses, I suspect.
I'm a former employee of a certain large software company related to TFA, and interestingly, one thing they tell you when you go to work there (and I suspect other large companies that file lots of patents also do this) is that you should not - never, ever, ever - do any research into patents to try and find out if something you're developing or have developed and may be filing a patent application on might infringe any existing patents.
The reason for this is that if you do, infringement becomes easier to prove for anyone who does happen to sue you, because they can point at you and say "See, these programmers did patent research in this area, then produced a product and/or filed a patent on stuff that does what my stuff does" and if they win, then they will do better in the damages phase because they can present evidence showing willful infringement.
The bottom line was, leave any patent research, including the decision of whether or not to do it, up to the legal department. Don't get anywhere near it yourself.
I'm in my forties, have been in the computer business since I was 18 and a geek longer than that, and I've never seen a Dvorak keyboard, either. The OP just into a den of Dvorak iniquity, IMO :)
I've never felt motivated to try a Dvorak because:
-
I would have to either carry one with me everywhere or constantly move back and forth between the two, and IMO the only way to be really good at typing on a Dvorak is to use nothing else. When I lived in Japan, I tried using a kana for a while, on the rationale that it would be faster to type Japanese because it would require half as many keystrokes. I only ever met one Japanese native speaker who did that, and he couldn't really say if it helped him or not. I used kana->kanji input for a few months and eventually dropped it and went back to romaji->kanji input b/c not only did it not help me, it was slower b/c of switching issues with typing QWERTY in English and kana layout in Japanese
- It tremendously limits your choice of keyboards or makes you move all your keycaps around
- A large study some years ago found no signficant speed difference between Dvorak and Qwerty users. In other words, I'd spend all that hard work learning to be good at Dvorak, carry one with me everywhere I go, and probably gain little or nothing
I don't doubt that some people see speed and/or ergonomic benefits, but the likelihood of it for most people seemed to low to make it worth my while to try it.
Believe it or not, Microsoft actually cares a lot more about that stuff than it looks like from the outside. I worked for Microsoft for a couple of years when they acquired my former employer, and I was surprised by the extent to which Microsoft beats the security drum. We had a senior programmer on our team whose responsibility was nothing but security and code review.
Do they tend to execute poorly on stability, and especially security, anyway? Without doubt. But believe it or, it isn't because they don't care.
That hits the nail very squarely on the head, someone needs to mod you up. I work at a very Unix-friendly company. More than half of our engineering department uses a Mac or some flavor of BSD or Linux on the desktop, and the balance is tipping farther in that direction all the time. Every new hire this year has chosen a Mac. Even in the non-engineering/non-IT part of the company, there are some *nix users, chiefly Mac.
Our dev boxes are all FreeBSD. In fact, all of our server infrastructure is nix-based, with one exception: we have an Exchange server.
Why?
While I wasn't here when it was chosen, I'm pretty sure "It's the best groupeware technology out there" wasn't the reason. Lotus may be no better, but at least IMO Groupwise is, and some Free solutions probably are, too. However, we are a company that sells products into the Global 2000 and makes a lot of money doing it. We conduct frequent customer training sessions at our site and our account managers, products managers, SEs, etc., frequently meet with customers either at our site or theirs. Guess what groupware server is used at most of the global 2000? Uh-huh. Exchange. So my theory is that whether we like Exchange or not, it's the thing that gives us maximum compatibility with our customers.
You are absolutely right that an Exchange replacement is needed, but even then it'll be tough. The replacement will need to be perfect. So perfect it can be used in a cluster with other Exchange boxes. Deal with all Outlook versions, etc. Since Exchange is a proprietary product, this will require some reverse engineering, and making reverse-engineered products perfect is really hard. Microsoft will fight it with every fiber of their being, and I'm confident (as only a former Microsoft employee who worked in the Exchange team can be) that they will in no way welcome it. They will use FUD, lock-in, and if necessary, law suits.
An Exchange killer/clone/replacement has been a grail of the free software movement (or at least some parts of it) for the entire 10 years I've been a Linux user. We're not much closer to that than we were in 1997 (yes, I know about Kolab and use Kontact myself, but how often do you actually see a Kolab server at a company; I never have. I've never even met anyone who claimed to have see one, or even claimed to know someone who had). If free software overtakes Microsoft and other proprietary vendors in every category and becomes the market leader across the board, I believe that even then, Exchange will be Microsoft's last great holdout product. Exchange is very hard to clone and very hard to replace in an environment that uses it.
In conclusion, then, a warning to anyone who does not now have Exchange and is thinking of it: don't. You'll be using it forever, or if not, it will be hard, painful, and expensive to get rid of it. Look at other open source and closed source products first. You'll probably find one that meets your needs and be able to run it on Linux or BSD, thus making it cheaper and more reliable than Windows Server, too.
There's a simple, easy to implement solution to this problem that can be done not only without taxpayer expense but will actually enhance city revenues: put a doughnut shop at every traffic light. No cop will ever run a light again, not even on an emergency call.
:p
Unbelievably, my spellchecker doesn't have an entry for the correct spelling, "doughnut," but does have one for the shortcut, "donut"
I've tried Opera so many times (every new major rev) and every time, found nothing compelling enough to get me to switch. When it was pay Vs. ad-supported, I thought "OK, this is pretty good, but it's not so good that it's worth the money or the ads."
After it became free, it was just "This is pretty good, but it's no longer better than Firefox, esp. in light of all the Firefox extensions."
I actually prefer Konqueror above all for its speed and fine-grained security controls. Overall, though, I still rate Firefox above it because it renders better (which is huge, of course), and all the plug-ins. That said, in Linux I use Konqueror mostly and FF for sites that don't render correctly in Konq.
Whoever modded you flamebait for saying this is wrong (it's not flamebait), but so are you (you're just not correct).
If a state passes a law requiring that any software it uses support ODF, that is not preferring one technology over another. It makes no comment on the technology to be used. It just says that whatever technology or technologies we use, they must be fully interoperable with each other by way of using an open document format. ODF itself is not FOSS. OSF is a standard used by some FOSS programs and which can be used by Microsoft Office as well. If California requires that all state documents be saved in ODF, the only requirement this places on Microsoft is that its products must support ODF to be eligible for state purchase.
This law is not designed in any way to force anyone from the market or to favor or require any particular technology, such as OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office. If Microsoft Office has full support for ODF, then California could make a business decision to use MS Office as its office suite. It could also make a business decision to use OO.o. Or both. Or leave it up to each individual department.
Requiring ODF for all public documents does not favor any technology over any other. Rather, it provides a level playing field on which each technology may and must compete on its merits. If Office 2007 is as good as Microsoft says, it will still win on its merits on a level playing field. If its merits do not justify its price, then it may fail. Either way, requiring the use of an open standard does not favor any product over any other. Indeed, requiring, or even permitting, the use of a closed standard is what does this. Allowing or requiring MS Office format as the format for public documents gives an unfair advantage to MS Office b/c its closed nature makes Microsoft better able than anyone else to support that file format. You've got it all backwards.
I saw the O'Reilly name on the programs and thought this could be really good. When I saw the actual course offerings, though, I was rather disappointed. A course on Unix file systems? Come on. Most of the people reading this are already quite familiar with Unix file systems.
Next, the web programming and open source programming certs are so similar that I can't see why you have them both. When I looked at the open source programming cert, I was expecting to see perl and/or shell scripting, possibly python, and followed by C and/or C++ using GCC and GNU Make.
Instead, we get perl for CGI development, Unix file systems, OO programming using Java, Intro to DB programming, and Intro to PHP.
This overlaps heavily with the web programming cert, to the point where I don't get why you even offer both. For someone like me, who has a lot of sysadmin experience, some neteng experience, and some perl background (I'm an expert at regexes, although my overall perl skills are lower intermediate at best), and whose job involves no web programming, that entire course of study would be rather non-productive. And of course, there are those who would argue that the Java isn't the best choice of an OO language for a program calling itself an open source programming certificate, Sun's recent decision to open-source Java notwithstanding.
What would I like to see in that program?
1) Perl for (non-CGI) application development
2) Shell scripting (incorporating the use of awk and sed heavily, and laying the groundwork for writing make files)
3) OO programming with python
4) Beginning C using GCC
5) Intermediate C using GCC/using GNU make
6) Beginning C++ using GCC
7) Intermediate C++
Mix and match how those go together, but an open source programming cert with that kind of content would have me reaching for my credit card right now. Your current offerings and those you list as being in development, however, just have me thinking of how this program could have been.
While I do not dispute this, one thing that needs to be remembered is that many of the people now being paid to work on Linux by Red Hat, IBM, et al, are the same people who worked on Linux for free for a long time and brought it to the point where those companies thought it worth paying people to work on it.
If you look at the percentage of code in Linux that was written by people now being paid to work on Linux but who were volunteers when they contributed it, a different picture might emerge. This doesn't discount wholesale contributions of code such as XFS by SGI or JFS by IBM, but without the work of volunteers, including those now being paid, Linux would simply not exist.
Quite so. On the one hand, ISPs want to be treated as common carriers, on the other hand, (some of them) want to do things like Rogers is doing.
As a former ISP sysadmin myself, I believe that the answer here is
1) Not to penalize good and bad traffic together (I use bit torrent from time to time, but only for things such as Linux ISOs or NeoOffice which may be legally shared in that matter) and a VPN to connect to my office, and I'd be pretty unhappy if my ISP (who I don't like much anyway) was traffic shaping so as to screw those things up.
2) As long as someone is withing the traffic limits in the AUP, what they are transferring is their business. If your AUP and/or advertising says Unlimited, then your practice had better reflect that. If it has a limit, then bill them for traffic over the limit, but again, the nature of their traffic is none of the ISPs business.
I doubt our neighbors would complain (like most other business, the only thing around our parking lot is other businesses and parking lots), but last week a phone company truck managed to hit not one, but two, parked cars in our parking lot. Happily, mine was not one of them.
:)
That's all I need to know to 86 the idea of putting a portable data center in my parking lot. Oh, and there are all those 50+ foot tall eucalyptus trees, too. Hate to have one of those fall on my portable data center.
I know Hamilton, he's a very smart guy and was once my boss, but I think I'll have to pass on this one
True enough, and I think the usual received wisdom applies here: don't get a new Windows release until it has matured to at least the SP1 level. By then, most of the most serious bugs and security flaws have been ironed out. Or at least, you hope so.
That said, Vista was in development for 4 - 5 years, and lost very highly-touted features along the way, such as WinFS. For it to take that long to develop, steadily reduce its goals along the way, and still be this buggy and generally underwhelming at RTM speaks very poorly of Vista, IMO.
Not if you go to work late enough :)
Whether it saved any energy or not, That's six more weeks in the year when it will be light out when I (and a lot of the rest of you) go home from work.
:)
IMO, that alone makes it a win and makes it worth the patching efforts.
And maybe, just maybe, it will teach people to not hardcode values like the start and end of DST, so that patches aren't required
My dev environment is *nix, my workstation is a MacBook Pro. My company's policy is you can run pretty much whatever you want - even Windows - but if it's not Win or Mac, you mostly need to support it yourself. In Engineering, Macs are probably the number one choice, with most other people running FreeBSD or Linux on a Dell. Recently, we've been getting Thinkpad T-60s. If they'd been available when I started I would have taken one and put Linux on it, but with a choice of a Dell or a Mac, the Mac was the clear winner.
Think of what you're saying, though.
n t-whatever-bird, maybe the real question is whether or not it's worth protecting. Most species that ever existed are now extinct, as a result of being unable to adapt to changing conditions. That's called evolution.
I mean, I agree that politicians generally suck and corruption is rampant, but you're suggesting that scientists not have oversight from anyone (except maybe other scientists?).
It's not like there isn't plenty of corruption in scientific circles as well (remember cold fusion, anyone?). Corruption in pursuit of research dollars (some govt, some VC), and just plain corruption as in "Anyone who doesn't agree with the accepted position must be a crackpot." Remember when the accepted position was that dinosaurs died out because of the rise of mammals and they just failed to compete and evolve? And anyone who didn't go along with that wasn't taken seriously? And later, when the impact/mass extinction theory began to emerge and people were considered crackpots for advancing it? Why was that? Because they threatened the status quo.
Now, that isn't an argument for oversight of science per se, but it does point out that science and scientists are far from the objective defenders of truth we'd like to believe.
In the case of global warming (which may or may not be going on, and may or may not be a long term trend and may or may not be caused mostly by humans or mostly by increased solar radiation and who cares if it is? It'll make my house near Disneyland into ocean-front property maybe ), a lot of scientists are pressured to go along with it. By peer pressure. By "step up to the research grant" pork barrel" pressure. Meanwhile, some pretty prominent scientists don't buy it.
Whatever the problems of government may be, at the end of the day, it is the people, through our elected officials, are in charge, and should be in charge. Scientists at the Dept. of the Interior or anywhere else are not elected and should not be in charge. They make recommendations, which may or may not be accepted.
As for the yellow-tailed-can't-adapt-to-a-changing-environme
Microkernel, Shmicrokernel, I love my Mac but it's nowhere near as stable as my monolithic kernel Linux systems. That's without even going into the fact that so many Apple updates require a reboot to take effect, which is beyond stunningly stupid and ridiculous on a *nix-based system. The only Linux (or *BSD) upgrade that requires a reboot is a kernel upgrade, and even that can be done at your leisure after installing the new kernel.
In Solaris, even a kernel upgrade doesn't require a full reboot of the machine, at least as long as you have a Sun machine big enough to allow you to partition it.
I'm a Mac n00b coming from a Linux background and was stunned the first time my MacBook Pro asked to reboot after applying a security update. Didn't those schmucks at Apple learn anything from A) the bad example that is Windows, and B) the good example of BSD userland upon which they based their system? Apparently not.
I am primarily a Linux user, and have been since the late 1990s. In fact, I am exclusively a Linux user at home, with one exception: I have an XP box b/c I've had poor success with TurboTax under Wine. My wife runs XP on her laptop, but only b/c her most important app is Yahoo Messenger, and her most important use of it is voice, which is supported only in the Windows version.
At work, I'm a Mac user (my "desktop" is a MacBook Pro) and FreeBSD user (the OS on our dev boxes). The Mac came from our IT dept. with Parallels and XP on it, but the only thing I usually use Parallels for is to run a Kubuntu Edgy VM, not XP.
This is my first Mac, and I'm still a Mac n00b, having had this job and this computer for a little over two months. However, that has been more than enough time for me to figure out this much: if you can't see a reason to buy a Mac, it's because you've probably spent little or no time with one. I still prefer Linux overall, and I generally prefer KDE to the Mac UI, but it's obvious that KDE in general and Kubuntu in particular have taken some pages from the Mac playbook. What I like best about the Mac is probably something that it took me a month or so to realize: it makes me cuss less than any OS I've ever used. Windows makes me cuss *a lot* more. Linux is pretty close, but the Mac seems to have the edge.
I like this Mac because it doesn't get in my way, while having the tools I need available.
What could make it better?
If they'd based the *nix side of things on apt rather than BSD ports. Being able to open up a terminal and apt-get install a port (or apt-cache pkgnames for a list), for example, would be better than having to use Ports, IMO.
If it had virtual desktops natively (coming in Leopard, finally!)
If Apple had used X11 for their GUI, so I might have a chance of trying to build Evolution on a Mac and having it work.
But, those things notwithstanding, OS X is very, very good, and the hardware is topnotch. I like this Mac enough that I would probably buy one for myself, and will almost certainly buy one for my wife when Yahoo releases a Mac client that supports voice (coming in the next beta, they claim).
If people ask me what kind of computer they should get, I suppress my urge to just say "Linux" and instead ask them this question:
Are you looking for a computer that just works and stays out of your way, with minimal effort on your part, or do you like to get "under the hood" and tinker a bit?
If they say they just want it to work, I recommend a Mac. If they like to tinker, and esp. if they also have some experience already, I will recommend running Linux on a PC and may (depending on who it is), offer to install and set it up for them. Either way, I don't recommend Windows.
I think you and I will agree on at least this much: whether a person goes Mac or goes (K)Ubuntu, either way, there's something better than XP (or Vista) out there. The only reason I can think of to buy Windows is if a person is a hard-core gamer, and for those who are, I can't help thinking they might be better served by an Xbox or P/S 3 for games and Mac or Linux for computing.
That sounds *exactly* like my experience with them in 2003. They sent me the DSL kit, I hooked it all up, didn't work, I thought they just hadn't gotten their end activated yet. A couple days later, they call me up and ask how the DSL is working (very thoughtful, actually). I say "Huh? It doesn't work at all." A lot of troubleshooting led to an SBC guy coming out and testing the line at the demarc. He told me "I can sync my meter here, but there's no way an ordinary cable modem would get that signal. You're just too far from the CO."
This was reported back to Speakeasy, which then lead to a week of fingerpointing, denial, and "he said/she said" between Speakeasy and Covad. At the end of that week, I was supposed to get talk to a higher-level support tech. He didn't even bother showing up for the conference call. I called Roadrunner Business Class and said "I want static IP service, how soon can you hook me up?" They said "three days." I then asked a bunch of technical questions, got answers (the right ones), and said "Do it."
I never had a problem with Time Warner/Roadrunner and wish I still lived in their service area.
For me, 3 kbps - 6 kbps down translates to "at least as fast as my current best-case throughput, and maybe up to twice as fast" and it costs less than San Bruno Cable service, so as long as their service quality is >= San Bruno Cable's, I can't lose. Plus, the fact that they use the word "Linux" right on their top page can only be a good sign :)
We live pretty near each other. I'm in San Bruno and have become pretty unhappy with San Bruno Cable in the short time I've been using them. I used to live in a Time-Warner/Roadrunner area and after I moved to San Bruno found myself paying 10 bucks more for half the bandwidth, a pathetic excuse for a usenet server, and power-cycling the cable modem at least once a week (used to happen about every 6 weeks on TW). Oh, and they charge you for installation. TW didn't.
I was looking into DSL and considering Speakeasy despite a bad experience with them a few years ago, and then the Best Buy news came out. Speakeasy is no longer under consideration, but some other poster mentioned sonic.net. They sound pretty good and are based in Santa Rosa. You might want to check them out.
This is a Bad Thing, no question, but I'm glad it happened now. I live in a place "served" by a municipal cable company (anyone ever meet a government corporation that didn't suck?) and pay more money for half the bandwidth and fewer services than I did where I used to live (Roadrunner there, they were very good). I was thinking of going to DSL and Speakeasy was a candidate, but they're off the list now.