The technology world was not born with microsoft in its mouth. They did get there somehow and I dont think it was only through illegal and unethical business practices otherwise SCO would have been the monopoly.
I do agree with you that software can be built for security, stability, and interoperability. I don't think, however, that you can do that quickly _and_ have lots of bells and whistles _and_ be cheap.
Open source is not immune to this. The laws of scarcity still apply. We usually have the luxury of doing things right and not being driven by sales (unlike a business which _has_ to sell to survive).
POSIX and unix in general has had 30 years and huge R&D budgets and companies behind it (AT+T, IBM, XEROX, SUN, Bell, SGI, etc. etc.). MS started with DOS and a floppy and consumer grade equipment and market (and some R&D from IBM and Apple). Very different focusses and very different products.
I dont think the market is entirely ignorant in their decisions, either. When PCs first arrived the key obstacles were "user friendliness", design, and accessibility. These design criteria are often at odds with concepts like security and stability under the best of circumstances. When you face constraints of time and money (like a business does) those two classes are very much in conflict.
Now, fast forward 10 cycles of Moores Law and presto, you have a cheap piece of consumer grade equipment that can run POSIX code and an entrenched monopoly with a trained market and semi-disgruntled user acceptance.
I am not making excuses for MS and I have always refused to work with their crap, but I also am not ready to make excuses for the POSIX world and say that there is no reason why we face a battle in the market now.
Its an interseting dillema, because they very likely would _not_ be a $40bil if they didt release awfull software.
If they were to follow a very strict engineering process similar to what defense, nasa, and energy depts follow, their software would cost more then it already does, be years behind on "features", and make it very difficult to have the knee-jerk reactions to market desires it currently does.
I would argue that their success, aside from their edgy, sometimes illegal business practices, came from focussing more on UI and integration (or lock in depending on perspective) then on things people didnt understand at the time (security, stability, standards, interoperability, etc.).
Software has thus far been treated and behaved very differently from traditional engineering and manufacturing as there is no entity like UL (Underwriters Lab), FDA, FCC, DOT, etc. enforcing standrds of safety and allowing users to sue them for selling sub-par products. MS could move quick with a shoddy product and say they clicked "agree" on the EULA, security or stability be damned.
Actually I think the problem is that Democrats spend all their time postulating about their superior intellect and obvious rightness and looking for excuses for why people disagree with them. They lost this election because they became the "hate mongers" that they were so righteously condemning as evil.
Open-source approaches may or may not have helped with that issue but, being one myself, foaming-mouth linux fanatics haven't really helped OS adoption.
What really pisses me off is the assumption that because I dont agree with every thing you say that I dont want the same things as you and that you have a monopoly on both compassion and intelligence. I try very hard to remind myself that just because I think you may not see all of the picture of an issue doesn't mean you are ignorant and without morals or compassion. The same respect would go a long way.
Regarding your points about Air America and other windmills that Democrats are battling, I would say that they are not lacking for media attention, sympathy, and bias, nor are they lacking pop-culture icons on their campaign trail.
What I would like to see is Democrats understand that on many issues both sides agree on the objective, we all want peace, we all want to get along with the world, and we want everyone in our country to have good lives. Now lets debate how we get there. What are pragmatic approaches to solving the problems we agree on? And lets solve what we can, and then debate what we disagree on.
Wealth is usually created not stolen. There isnt an absolute limit on the amount of money or products in an economy and so it doesn't have to be based on "victims" and "predators".
Not to say that there aren't a lot of thieves on wall street but they generally are not the ones creating the wealth, just pooling money for others to create wealth with.
The priniciple is sound but you are oversimplifying a bit. Many nations who are not really our friends at all and had economic interests in keeping Iraq in the state it was in screemed "No". The Chinese, Russians, and French are not what many call friends. Other nations said the premise might be not right and it was not politically feasible with their constituents, but that it was a good thing in generall. And a few of our friends said it was a very good thing and helped.
As to lying, I would say your memory is very short. I served under Pres. Clinton's administration and saw first hand many lies as well as read about many more in other areas. I would say that both Pres's Clinton and Bush have garnered a fair share of animosity from the other side and in neither case did the inflamed rhetoric and emotional whining really serve the greater good.
If 51% of the vote says its OK to put hippies in concentration camps and burn them with bibles is that OK with you? 51% of the population should have that much of a deterministic influence?
Your shortsightedness is totally innapropriate for self-governance and the responsibilities it entails.
sadly, that is often the case. In the last election less then 9% of the San Fran population voted for Pres. Bush. The numbers were also very lopsided in most other cities.
The demographics are just not evenly spread out. Some other posters have made the point that popular vote is popular vote but it would put the urbanists in the driving seat as far as driving the agendas and voting issues and many other things.
You could argue that democracy is democracy and if 51% says that its OK to mary gays, gas jews, murder babies but not criminals, plunder the environement, invade countries or any other issue that is really repugnent to you then you are out of luck. But our founding fathers did not create a direct democracy for precisely that reason. We have a republic and the attempt was to not setup a system that could be too easily dominated by a slim majority.
The electoral college, for all its faults, is still a better solution then straight popular vote. Worst still would be a popular vote with a multy party system. Then you would only need 34% in a three party system to elect a Hitler or Stalin.
you must be a conservative, no emotional tirades about moving to canada, no epocalyptic predictions of the french turning their nose up at us, no groping for ways to deny reality..
I have to say, although I am not a fan of President Bush, I do not have the same emotional urge to make Senator Kerry out to be a communist infiltrator and flame on about how horrid of a person he is.
I really would like to debate how to solve problems and I am more disturbed by the divisiveness and the cultural war going on then wether Pres. Bush or Sen. Kerry won. They both had their strengths and weaknesses and neither was going to address the problems in our way of debating issues.
I didn't realize governance and national security was a popularity contest. It is good to have trade and diplomatic relations with other nations and isolationaism isn't a good strategy but niether is focussing on the opinions of others. You would be a fool and a liar to say that other countries put global opinion ahead of their interests, why it is expected of the US I dont know.
Standards and markup language usage is a tricky thing. I can sympathize with the site designer who is trying to serve many masters and apeal to a diverse audience. As an example, the use of tables to control page content placement and flow is often criticized, however, if you are trying to design a page that can be viewed well in all browsers from netscape 4 on solaris, to lynx, to blazer on the palm, to IE and Firefox, sometimes tables turn out to be the best way.
A previous article posted here about the evils of backwards compatibility in web standards was a good piece but I can understand why people would design sites with a broader, non-standard audience in mind.
well, as the site is/.ed I cant look at the code for sure, but theoretically, you could achieve an ugly version of fade with CSS+JS and timed color changes. For images you would have to have pre-constructed "fade" images that could be changed with js at the same timing as the color changes.
I dont think it would be snappy or pretty but it could be done.
I cant remember if CSS had an attribute for opacity or transparency with images or bg colors. That might also work with a div overlay..
As I can't imagine many web applications that dont involve the above mentioned functions, I think there is going to be more impact for a larger audience then people realize.
At one point I was doing metrics for a highly sensitive financial trading application we were working on and did a break down of the response time (we had 3 seconds to create, transmit, render, and get user reply on a trade decision and we had to hop the pacific and atlantic for our international users). The results were that we took a ~10% hit for SSL, which was a big deal when the latency over the oceans was non-negotiable.
In that case it was hardware SSL accelerators but for my own company it helps to know that I can start to do things more cost-effectively.
I should say that from in investment standpoint, having 2-3 different algorithms in hardware would mitigate the obselecence issue with discovered weaknesses.
Excuse my ignorance here, but are these chips on an expansion card or can you find motherboards with them?
mem footprint does make a diffierence, as well as security. The less packages you have, the less code you have. the less code you have, the less exploits. As a general rule, anyways. as well, its less bandwidth and download time to update useless package dependencies that I never wanted.
the idea is not that saving 50k of memory on one process will make a huge difference, unless it is an old-style forking daemon process and I am trying to serve more users with the 4gig memory limit I have per server. or other examples along those lines.
The idea that I dont have to go after every package in my system by hand to reduce bloat and can rely on the package manager to do a reasonably good job of it is a huge savings in time for me.
Actually shortcomings with RPM are exactly why I ditched RH.
I wanted to be able to build a server optimized for... serving. Yet with RPM invariably it would install packages that were compiled for desktop or server use, install (and add to startup) stupid dependencies to support the desktop case, and a host of other wastefull things. Yes I could fix all those things and I used SRPMs to add the code tweaks I needed but it was a pain in the ass.
Getnoo, just has this right, better even then debian.
Is that the primary benefit people site for gentoo?
I have just moved my production servers to Gentoo from RedHat more for the package manager and the ability to strip out unwanted features in packages as they are being merged (USE flag). RedHat's SRPM system was such a pain to do this with.
The little optimizations are nice, and no I haven't measured them discreetly, but I have measured the capacity and responsiveness of my applications (which is what matters to me) and there was a very obvious difference between RedHat and Gentoo.
In the end, a rather customized redhat build vs. a stage1 build with a reasonable amount of tweaks (was going for stable not speed) and draconian use of the USE flags my production servers responded quite a bit faster and had more capacity due to more available memory (all exe's had smaller footprints).
In addition I am now looking into adding the SELinux policy's and beginning the move to 64bit platform.
Oh, I also have a Subaru WRX that I rally race. I guess I am a ricer..
viable in a developed market.. you are describing our market but not one in a developing country.
If you build a functional computing appliance for a cheap price and sell it in those markets I think you would find a longer shelf life for them.. you build with whats cheapest at the time and in a year the next model might use better CPU/RAM if the prices drop on the newer stuff.
I don't know, I think there may be a niche market there..
Help get Firefox full-page ad in The New York Times!
Please bear with us while we weather a Slashdotting!
Let's mark the launch of Firefox 1.0 with a community marketing campaign that will take the buzz around Firefox to the next level: the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.
Here is how it works:
* The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.
* The campaign will act as a fundraiser to support all Firefox 1.0 launch activities, not just the ad itself.
* An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
* Special recognition -- Community Champion -- will be given to people who enlist 10 of their friends in this campaign. (These folks have a shot at having their name in the lower half of the ad.)
* There are also two packages available for businesses to participate.
* If you have a Spread Firefox account, you will receive 100 sfx points per name slot that you purchase or refer.
* The goal: sign up 2500 names!
* More questions? Check the FAQ.
* Ready? Click the newspaper on the upper right to join in!
We (sfx members and Firefox users) will only ever have one Firefox 1.0 launch -- this is it! Let's take the world by storm.
PS: The buzz about this campaign is already starting. Check out the story on eWeek!
Yes, but how it is refused is the question. I agree with the principle that you should stop parsing the invalid data but not crash the application. Refuse to parse a page and give the user an error message saying sorry this page cannot be displayed, would you like to view it as plain text or some such.
I also realize that sometimes you cant always do that easily and sanity checks of exit (possibly with dumps or debug data) are better then nothing. When you get to this point it does start to beg architectural and design questions but it is still reasonable to exit ungracefully at times.
"As such, applications written with Xamlon's tool will only run on Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser on Windows. But the company is considering ways to make its software work with other operating systems, Colton said."
Slashdot Mirror
The technology world was not born with microsoft in its mouth. They did get there somehow and I dont think it was only through illegal and unethical business practices otherwise SCO would have been the monopoly.
I do agree with you that software can be built for security, stability, and interoperability. I don't think, however, that you can do that quickly _and_ have lots of bells and whistles _and_ be cheap.
Open source is not immune to this. The laws of scarcity still apply. We usually have the luxury of doing things right and not being driven by sales (unlike a business which _has_ to sell to survive).
POSIX and unix in general has had 30 years and huge R&D budgets and companies behind it (AT+T, IBM, XEROX, SUN, Bell, SGI, etc. etc.). MS started with DOS and a floppy and consumer grade equipment and market (and some R&D from IBM and Apple). Very different focusses and very different products.
I dont think the market is entirely ignorant in their decisions, either. When PCs first arrived the key obstacles were "user friendliness", design, and accessibility. These design criteria are often at odds with concepts like security and stability under the best of circumstances. When you face constraints of time and money (like a business does) those two classes are very much in conflict.
Now, fast forward 10 cycles of Moores Law and presto, you have a cheap piece of consumer grade equipment that can run POSIX code and an entrenched monopoly with a trained market and semi-disgruntled user acceptance.
I am not making excuses for MS and I have always refused to work with their crap, but I also am not ready to make excuses for the POSIX world and say that there is no reason why we face a battle in the market now.
Its an interseting dillema, because they very likely would _not_ be a $40bil if they didt release awfull software .
If they were to follow a very strict engineering process similar to what defense, nasa, and energy depts follow, their software would cost more then it already does, be years behind on "features", and make it very difficult to have the knee-jerk reactions to market desires it currently does.
I would argue that their success, aside from their edgy, sometimes illegal business practices, came from focussing more on UI and integration (or lock in depending on perspective) then on things people didnt understand at the time (security, stability, standards, interoperability, etc.).
Software has thus far been treated and behaved very differently from traditional engineering and manufacturing as there is no entity like UL (Underwriters Lab), FDA, FCC, DOT, etc. enforcing standrds of safety and allowing users to sue them for selling sub-par products. MS could move quick with a shoddy product and say they clicked "agree" on the EULA, security or stability be damned.
Still, quite impressive work. As DOS and WinCE are still rather large shares of the embedded market I hope you guys keep going.
Depending on the population density, the external holster. It would do a better job of serving its purpose if it was in plain sight.
Of course as the number of people per square mile goes up, things get quite a bit more complicated.
Actually I think the problem is that Democrats spend all their time postulating about their superior intellect and obvious rightness and looking for excuses for why people disagree with them. They lost this election because they became the "hate mongers" that they were so righteously condemning as evil.
Open-source approaches may or may not have helped with that issue but, being one myself, foaming-mouth linux fanatics haven't really helped OS adoption.
What really pisses me off is the assumption that because I dont agree with every thing you say that I dont want the same things as you and that you have a monopoly on both compassion and intelligence. I try very hard to remind myself that just because I think you may not see all of the picture of an issue doesn't mean you are ignorant and without morals or compassion. The same respect would go a long way.
Regarding your points about Air America and other windmills that Democrats are battling, I would say that they are not lacking for media attention, sympathy, and bias, nor are they lacking pop-culture icons on their campaign trail.
What I would like to see is Democrats understand that on many issues both sides agree on the objective, we all want peace, we all want to get along with the world, and we want everyone in our country to have good lives. Now lets debate how we get there. What are pragmatic approaches to solving the problems we agree on? And lets solve what we can, and then debate what we disagree on.
Wealth is usually created not stolen. There isnt an absolute limit on the amount of money or products in an economy and so it doesn't have to be based on "victims" and "predators".
Not to say that there aren't a lot of thieves on wall street but they generally are not the ones creating the wealth, just pooling money for others to create wealth with.
The priniciple is sound but you are oversimplifying a bit. Many nations who are not really our friends at all and had economic interests in keeping Iraq in the state it was in screemed "No". The Chinese, Russians, and French are not what many call friends. Other nations said the premise might be not right and it was not politically feasible with their constituents, but that it was a good thing in generall. And a few of our friends said it was a very good thing and helped.
As to lying, I would say your memory is very short. I served under Pres. Clinton's administration and saw first hand many lies as well as read about many more in other areas. I would say that both Pres's Clinton and Bush have garnered a fair share of animosity from the other side and in neither case did the inflamed rhetoric and emotional whining really serve the greater good.
The rural population is moer then 1%.
They feed you and many parts of the world.
If 51% of the vote says its OK to put hippies in concentration camps and burn them with bibles is that OK with you? 51% of the population should have that much of a deterministic influence?
Your shortsightedness is totally innapropriate for self-governance and the responsibilities it entails.
sadly, that is often the case. In the last election less then 9% of the San Fran population voted for Pres. Bush. The numbers were also very lopsided in most other cities.
The demographics are just not evenly spread out. Some other posters have made the point that popular vote is popular vote but it would put the urbanists in the driving seat as far as driving the agendas and voting issues and many other things.
You could argue that democracy is democracy and if 51% says that its OK to mary gays, gas jews, murder babies but not criminals, plunder the environement, invade countries or any other issue that is really repugnent to you then you are out of luck. But our founding fathers did not create a direct democracy for precisely that reason. We have a republic and the attempt was to not setup a system that could be too easily dominated by a slim majority.
The electoral college, for all its faults, is still a better solution then straight popular vote. Worst still would be a popular vote with a multy party system. Then you would only need 34% in a three party system to elect a Hitler or Stalin.
you must be a conservative, no emotional tirades about moving to canada, no epocalyptic predictions of the french turning their nose up at us, no groping for ways to deny reality..
I have to say, although I am not a fan of President Bush, I do not have the same emotional urge to make Senator Kerry out to be a communist infiltrator and flame on about how horrid of a person he is.
I really would like to debate how to solve problems and I am more disturbed by the divisiveness and the cultural war going on then wether Pres. Bush or Sen. Kerry won. They both had their strengths and weaknesses and neither was going to address the problems in our way of debating issues.
I didn't realize governance and national security was a popularity contest. It is good to have trade and diplomatic relations with other nations and isolationaism isn't a good strategy but niether is focussing on the opinions of others. You would be a fool and a liar to say that other countries put global opinion ahead of their interests, why it is expected of the US I dont know.
Standards and markup language usage is a tricky thing. I can sympathize with the site designer who is trying to serve many masters and apeal to a diverse audience. As an example, the use of tables to control page content placement and flow is often criticized, however, if you are trying to design a page that can be viewed well in all browsers from netscape 4 on solaris, to lynx, to blazer on the palm, to IE and Firefox, sometimes tables turn out to be the best way.
A previous article posted here about the evils of backwards compatibility in web standards was a good piece but I can understand why people would design sites with a broader, non-standard audience in mind.
well, as the site is /.ed I cant look at the code for sure, but theoretically, you could achieve an ugly version of fade with CSS+JS and timed color changes. For images you would have to have pre-constructed "fade" images that could be changed with js at the same timing as the color changes.
I dont think it would be snappy or pretty but it could be done.
I cant remember if CSS had an attribute for opacity or transparency with images or bg colors. That might also work with a div overlay..
As I can't imagine many web applications that dont involve the above mentioned functions, I think there is going to be more impact for a larger audience then people realize.
At one point I was doing metrics for a highly sensitive financial trading application we were working on and did a break down of the response time (we had 3 seconds to create, transmit, render, and get user reply on a trade decision and we had to hop the pacific and atlantic for our international users). The results were that we took a ~10% hit for SSL, which was a big deal when the latency over the oceans was non-negotiable.
In that case it was hardware SSL accelerators but for my own company it helps to know that I can start to do things more cost-effectively.
I should say that from in investment standpoint, having 2-3 different algorithms in hardware would mitigate the obselecence issue with discovered weaknesses.
Excuse my ignorance here, but are these chips on an expansion card or can you find motherboards with them?
mem footprint does make a diffierence, as well as security. The less packages you have, the less code you have. the less code you have, the less exploits. As a general rule, anyways. as well, its less bandwidth and download time to update useless package dependencies that I never wanted.
the idea is not that saving 50k of memory on one process will make a huge difference, unless it is an old-style forking daemon process and I am trying to serve more users with the 4gig memory limit I have per server. or other examples along those lines.
The idea that I dont have to go after every package in my system by hand to reduce bloat and can rely on the package manager to do a reasonably good job of it is a huge savings in time for me.
Actually shortcomings with RPM are exactly why I ditched RH.
I wanted to be able to build a server optimized for... serving. Yet with RPM invariably it would install packages that were compiled for desktop or server use, install (and add to startup) stupid dependencies to support the desktop case, and a host of other wastefull things. Yes I could fix all those things and I used SRPMs to add the code tweaks I needed but it was a pain in the ass.
Getnoo, just has this right, better even then debian.
Is that the primary benefit people site for gentoo?
I have just moved my production servers to Gentoo from RedHat more for the package manager and the ability to strip out unwanted features in packages as they are being merged (USE flag). RedHat's SRPM system was such a pain to do this with.
The little optimizations are nice, and no I haven't measured them discreetly, but I have measured the capacity and responsiveness of my applications (which is what matters to me) and there was a very obvious difference between RedHat and Gentoo.
In the end, a rather customized redhat build vs. a stage1 build with a reasonable amount of tweaks (was going for stable not speed) and draconian use of the USE flags my production servers responded quite a bit faster and had more capacity due to more available memory (all exe's had smaller footprints).
In addition I am now looking into adding the SELinux policy's and beginning the move to 64bit platform.
Oh, I also have a Subaru WRX that I rally race. I guess I am a ricer..
I think the last item might be less of an issue as the target market is the developing countries that cant afford a new PC to start with.
I think some assembly cost could be reduced through better manufacturing (no expansion slots, everything on motherboard, etc.).
I read a while back about an open-source chip design project. Perhaps that could reduce some cost in design...
viable in a developed market.. you are describing our market but not one in a developing country.
If you build a functional computing appliance for a cheap price and sell it in those markets I think you would find a longer shelf life for them.. you build with whats cheapest at the time and in a year the next model might use better CPU/RAM if the prices drop on the newer stuff.
I don't know, I think there may be a niche market there..
Here is their page:
Help get Firefox full-page ad in The New York Times!
Please bear with us while we weather a Slashdotting!
Let's mark the launch of Firefox 1.0 with a community marketing campaign that will take the buzz around Firefox to the next level: the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.
Here is how it works:
* The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.
* The campaign will act as a fundraiser to support all Firefox 1.0 launch activities, not just the ad itself.
* An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
* Special recognition -- Community Champion -- will be given to people who enlist 10 of their friends in this campaign. (These folks have a shot at having their name in the lower half of the ad.)
* There are also two packages available for businesses to participate.
* If you have a Spread Firefox account, you will receive 100 sfx points per name slot that you purchase or refer.
* The goal: sign up 2500 names!
* More questions? Check the FAQ.
* Ready? Click the newspaper on the upper right to join in!
We (sfx members and Firefox users) will only ever have one Firefox 1.0 launch -- this is it! Let's take the world by storm.
PS: The buzz about this campaign is already starting. Check out the story on eWeek!
This was exactly my question. I hope salaries and other perks are not part of the expenses, or if they are, that they be more up-front about it.
OpenSource accounting and books.. hmm.. no more Enron?
Yes, but how it is refused is the question. I agree with the principle that you should stop parsing the invalid data but not crash the application. Refuse to parse a page and give the user an error message saying sorry this page cannot be displayed, would you like to view it as plain text or some such.
I also realize that sometimes you cant always do that easily and sanity checks of exit (possibly with dumps or debug data) are better then nothing. When you get to this point it does start to beg architectural and design questions but it is still reasonable to exit ungracefully at times.
no OSX has the root account disabled. their netInfo package seems to be acting as root but access to that requires use of password.
When I got my powerbook i had to go through a lot of hassle to be able to get to a root privelaged shell.
From the cnet article in the post:
"As such, applications written with Xamlon's tool will only run on Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser on Windows. But the company is considering ways to make its software work with other operating systems, Colton said."