His bio so in terms of why he gets to grade Linux as an F (IMO he was right, its improved since but it was poor, SMP, size of kernel, modularity, the only advantage was that NT and Windows scored a "Not Classified") its because he managed to understand Operating system design to such a level that his work was the BASIS from which Linus was "inspired".
Minix and his work are key reference works in writing pretty much any OS and his work in computer networking and distribution in paticular are top notch. His stuff is very much NOT Ivory Tower (I speak as someone who has had to do bespoke OS work) and very practical way to build operating systems and overcome networking challenges. Heard of the OSI model for networking? Most of the rest of us have heard of it thanks to Andy's work, because we couldn't afford the official reference from ANSI/ISO.
And a massive amount of US companies doing extremely dodgy deals with disreputable regimes, you know like Dick Cheney meeting Saddam Hussein.
So MySql (a relatively poor database before SapDB came in) have agreed to work with SCO to get a bit of cash. Not the most moral decisions but certainly against what those who dealt with Saddam Hussein or the Chinese Goverment its pretty small fry.
I've always liked Hubble, not only for pushing back the bounds of our knowledge (and more importantly our ignorance, its made us realise there is much more we don't understand) but also for the very very cool pictures that get people interested in science.
This is a very useful and productive use of Hubble... but will it help it get more funding? I'm not sure that the chaps in the Whitehouse will get excited about finding rocks on the Moon unless they can claim that THIS was where Saddam had is WMDs.
Rock A - No oxygen Rock B - No oxygen Rock C - No oxygen Rock D - A bit of metal Rock E - A bit of oxygen Rock F - No oxygen
When they find something the photo is going to be rubbish, even worse than when scientists try and get people excited about red dust on Mars.
I suggest that they do the colouring job on the Moon that they always do on the star systems, and make it look way cooler...
"Rock X not only has a large amount of gold, shown in gold, and oxygen, shown in blue, but also various other minerals, show in pretty rainbow colours and is resting on a mauve background which represents the futility of mans existance and the desire to expand our knowledge"
Decides that writers are all using Macs, are biased and of course must be wrong.... because they have no frame of reference unlike himself who works for a magazine that talks of Windows Vista as being the second coming.
This is a great advance but its unlikely to be massively successful until the point at which Gas Guzzlers are taxed at a rate based on their environmental impact. In otherwords until Gas is $6+ a gallon (about the UK price) there won't be the driver in the US to adopt green technologies, thus meaning there won't be the huge volumes of purchases to make the technology really affordable.
For anyone who wants to understand what I mean, go to Honolulu airport and look at the pollution "clocks".
Wow.... its amazing isn't it how the organisation that is responsible for some of the most effective global treaties, charities and welfare organisations. The UN has certainly done more than any single country to promote peace and equality and you are comparing it to a terrorist organisation and the enforcement arm of the media industry....
This is the organisation that is ABLE to do peace keeping in lots of countries around the world where ONE COUNTRY is unable to act as an independent between warring factions. (UN Peace keeping) This is the organisation that the US Goverment is DESPERATE to get more involved in Iraq for instance.
This is the organisation that can get countries together to discuss elements that matter to the whole planet (Desertification) and specific elements like helping out certain groups in countries ( helping out in Laos)
And then of course there is the REALLY bad stuff they do like UNHCR on landmines and of course the scum at UNICEF
This is just part of what the UN has done since the second world war, the vast vast majority of it very good and very effective.
And as for your corruption, "Aid for Food" was indeed bad corruption, how different this is of course from Halliburton and the open White House chequebook is a mute point.
The US has lagged lots of the "new economy" networks. Mobile phones in the US are behind the networks in Europe, and miles behind Japan. Even basic technologies like SMS are only just being adopted in the US. And now with broadband a similar picture is evolving of other markets seeing the opportunities for MASS adoption rather than trying to fleece people with a few high cost offerings.
Considering that the US is the leader of the market economies, something the French detest, its amazing to note that in many ways market economics is working more effectively for consumers in France than they are in the US.
Has the US gone too far towards corporate economics and too far from consumer economics?
I know this is a cheap shot but its an important one. On the site (excluding Perl 6)there are THREE references to design, none of these are about how you actually should go about designing in perl and what is good practice for design of Perl programmes.
For the Perl foundation to REALLY help its users out there it might want to promote more DESIGN and less CODE as a better way to approach Perl programming. I've wasted enough time debugging (and mainly binning) badly constructed Perl code, it would be great if the foundation addressed the issues of implementation (lack of design) rather than more bells and whistles for the inept to use.
Exactly the same argument that was used in the 60s and 70s by tobacco companies insisting that they didn't give you cancer.
As a science professor of mine once said
"A correlation does not always indicate direct cause, but ask yourself 'would a jury convict on this sort of evidence' if they would then you should probably starting think about HOW it causes it"
So in otherwords once its enough to indicate there could be a direct link then your move from measurement to theory and test the theory. This is also what scientists have been doing and CONSISTENTLY finding that their theories on global warming are backed up by the observations.
The jury is in on Global Warming.... the only problem is the judge is a crack addict.
When the AOL/TW merger happened I remember nearly borking when I saw how much it valued each AOL customer at. Even with $5bn we are talking of THOUSANDS of dollars per AOL subscriber which to my simple mind sounds like a ridiculous amount of money. Clearly TW is desperate to get something out of the waste of space it was saddled with, but I'm surprised that anyone would offer this much for it.
Of course part of the reality here is that MS want AOL to replace Google's search engine with their own, and Google want AOL to keep using it.
Could Google really get that much shareholder value out of targetting the AOL customer base? Or is this a great example of how the stupid valuations of 2000 are back.... probably with another "bang" down the road.
Less than 20mph in an SUV through the desert. These Robot control cars are worse than my Grandmother on an interstate.
Quite clearly these Robot controlled cars are part of a sophisticated plot to increase the amount of road rage in the US to enable the Robots to take over the country... and then the world.
It is not too late to stop them, we must insist that the next competition involves only Ford Broncos and takes place on the Freeways of Los Angeles during rush hour.
Its just another of their devilish plots to take over the world (again).
Don't listen to his decentralised ideas, it will be all about cups of tea and warm beer.... and there will be NO escape.
Java Enterprise System isn't all in Java...
on
Sun Eyes PostgreSQL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Sun's Java Enterprise System is about programming in Java rather than the tools in Java. The technology of the product isn't hugely important its the fact that the API and development is in Java. Databases are clearly easy with Java as JDBC makes the actual choice a pure commodity. So what Sun want is a solid database, for free, that rounds out their platform effort and means that in one download and license a client can "get started"... which often means it is all they use.
We have no adverts on the BBC. We pay a license fee for the right to watch TV and our reward is good quality programmes, no adverts and probably the worlds strongest news agency.
Iain M Banks (to be confused with the non-sci-fi writer Iain Banks) has written a lot of book about "The Culture" a man/machine symbiosis that has created a utopian society in which people get what they need.
Actually it sounds also like Robert Heinlein, Asimov and most other Sci-Fi writers I've ever read. But mostly like Iain M Banks who books are a cracking read.
Living to 300... of course we will, we'll have to work till we are 280 though.
1) An offline app. If it runs online, it's super easy to run offline. Anyway, I just got my 8thGen broudband cell-phone/life-organizer. It was free. I was told by the salesman that I could get online from any planet in the solar system. Seriously, is there such a thing as offline anymore? Wait, that's what happends during a hurricane when the power goes out. Just went through that. We didn't do much office document editing.
"if it runs online it's super easy to run offline" how is that when the documents are going to be stored on a server that is only accessible online? Or will this browser application actually store the documents locally and then upload them? At which points its MS Office with Web Dav/Sharepoint 2003 support.
Is printing really an issue? There's a million and one ways to solve this problem. Export to a format that you already can print in. PDF, DOC, or even HTML, but really printing should be a breeze.
You've not often had to produce professional documents for presentations, formal responses, marketing information et al have you? Printing is far from simple and when you want to create the right impression its very critical.
Easy, anyone with a free online office suite would attract HUGE amounts of traffic. Monetize it in any fashion you wish. Following Google's approach, you'd prolly get relevant text ads on the side.
Riiiight, because when people are editing documents the first thing they always want is ads because it helps them concentrate so well on the content of the document. As for a free online suite attracting HUGE amounts of traffic... why hasn't Open Office over-taken MS Office yet?
Ummm... Again that's why we have an open-standard. So, it can be opened by anyone, but it can even be easier than that. You could email the document as an HTML. You could export it as a DOC or PDF. Or for that matter, print it out and postal mail it (if your client doesn't have access to a computer).
And as soon as the client edits the doc (with track changes on of course) I have to merge it back in using the superb online merge tool they will be providing... A slight challenge of course as this requires the tracking tags from the online document to match an export and import when a 3rd party has been editing it.
The power on your desktop... That's for games, silly. Besides who said anything about getting online from your desktop. I was talking about using my phone, pda, new online gaming console, or my internet connected t-shirt (the same one you lost). Don't think so narrowly, it can cause tunnel vision.
Ahhh and now we have it... my PDA can already edit my documents when I wish it to, as can my smartphone, but now I understand, you aren't talking about any of this because its a sensible business idea (my point) you are just talking about it because you think it would be cool...
Kids are inevitably born, and a minimum-wage, immigrant nanny is hired, or the kid is shipped off to daycare, where he/she learns questionable value and is largely emotionally devoid of the individual attention he/she needs and deserves. But mom and dad, still working 8 - 10 hour days, only have to deal with Junior for a few hours a day, so they don't notice that Junior is starting to resent them. Feeling guilty, they buy him whatever he wants (after all, they're still "rich" enough to do so). Junior wants a cell phone. "It'll let us reach him wherever he is," the parents reason, and buy him the phone. Junior wants a car. "It'll free us from having to shuttle him around all the time," reason the parents. Junior wants GTA3. "It'll keep him out of our hair for a few hours a day," say the parents.
Then let the damned kid suffer... he turns into a whining brat prone to bursts of anger and will fail miserably in life unless he becomes a lawyer or a politician.
I'm fed up of seeing "society" in general legislating because people want everything and have no penalties for not wanting them. Both parents WANT to work (different to need), but they don't provide decent child-care... why the hell does that effect me and my wife when we've decided that one of us (her) will stay at home while I work. Do we get tax-breaks and child-care subsidies? Do we hell as like, we get legislation designed to ensure that the selfish people out there don't suffer the consequences of their actions.
If you both want to go out to work that is fine by me, just don't think it stops being YOUR job to look after YOUR kids.
1) The "online" bit. A large proportion of office document editing is done "off-line" either in-flight, on trains or in establishments with restricted internet access.
2) Printing - You need much tighter integration between the printer and the browser than currently available, its no good generating an A4 PDF when my printer is A3.
3) Its an ASP - Application Service Provider, there have been a few big successes (SalesForce.com for instance) but mainly they tanked. In the office apps perspective its hard to see the business driver, if its just a cost thing then Open Office would win.
4) What do my clients use? Any browser based solution has to have a standard integration and export to MS Office, this is the normal practice and made doubly so now that Google searches all those files on your desktop for you.
5) What is all the power on my desktop for? Dual Core AMD, 2GB RAM etc etc... Office isn't exactly a performance problem.
ASPing Office was suggested by Microsoft and it tanked, its been suggested before and it tanked. I think Google are spot on to not continue funding an idea that has tanked several times before.
I'd hoped that Linus was refering to "SPECmarks" et al as a bad basis for writing a kernel, but specifications are way off base as being a bad idea for any area of software let alone a kernel.
Sure BAD specifications are a bad idea, but so is bad code.
Its also not true to say that a specification can't be detailed and accurate and then implemented directly, IPv4 is a pretty clear specification that I'd be worried if the kernel writers had ignored when they wrote their IP stack.
I too have seen dreadful code written directly from specifications, normally because there was no design, but I've seen much worse code written from the basis of "I think this therefore it must be right".
I'm normally a big fan of Linus, but given that many of the major areas of Linux and Open Software are written against specifications (X, Samba, IPv4, 802.11x, BIOS etc etc) its hard to see where Linus is coming from. If two organisations or technologies want to communicate they need an agreed standard and specification on the inter-operation. Any other approach is just lobbing packets and hoping for the best.
Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable.
This sort of attitude doesn't help create a warm fuzzy feeling about the US in the rest of the world. Someone in the Government should really take a step back and ask themselves why this would actually matter at all. The UN is the ideal place to run the internet rules at the moment, its got the largest reach and global membership and a stated goal of being independent.
That of course in unacceptable as co-operation with other countries is just plain wrong.
"We've been very, very clear throughout the process that there are certain things we can agree to and certain things we can't agree to," Gross told reporters at U.N. offices in Geneva. "It's not a negotiating issue. This is a matter of national policy."
A matter of national policy that cannot be negotiated? I don't seem to recall the 132nd ammendment stating that internet domain ownership is the right of every american citizen.
He said the United States was "deeply disappointed" with the European Union's proposal Wednesday advocating a "new cooperation model," which would involve governments in questions of naming, numbering and addressing on the Internet.
Because co-operation is bad eh? Damn those pesky Europeans for wanting oversight on a random organisation like ICANN which has been so successful and caused no issues thanks to its openness and brilliant decision making.
The US Goverment does itself, or its citizens, no favours by continually persuing unilateral rather than multi-lateral approaches.
So 50GB is miles off, of course it is because we all know that HD-DVD is so real and there are so many devices whereas Blu-ray will only be shipping in potentially the biggest selling console of 2006.
Microsoft do XBox 360, Sony do PS3, XBox 360 hasn't gone for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. If HD-DVD was so real why didn't they pick it for XBox 360?
Its amazing how this talk of reality of Blu-ray (which I've actually seen demo'ed) over HD-DVD tends to ignore the fact that only one company (Sony) is producing a mass market player in 2006.
If PS3 wins, then Blu-ray will have significant volume in 2006 which will drive down costs and mean larger capacity disks arrive much earlier.
"Grand Theft Auto - Whole of the damned Continenal United States" anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
His bio so in terms of why he gets to grade Linux as an F (IMO he was right, its improved since but it was poor, SMP, size of kernel, modularity, the only advantage was that NT and Windows scored a "Not Classified") its because he managed to understand Operating system design to such a level that his work was the BASIS from which Linus was "inspired".
Minix and his work are key reference works in writing pretty much any OS and his work in computer networking and distribution in paticular are top notch. His stuff is very much NOT Ivory Tower (I speak as someone who has had to do bespoke OS work) and very practical way to build operating systems and overcome networking challenges. Heard of the OSI model for networking? Most of the rest of us have heard of it thanks to Andy's work, because we couldn't afford the official reference from ANSI/ISO.
Out of interest what is you have done?
Yahoo handing in a demonstrator....
Google agreeing to censor....
And a massive amount of US companies doing extremely dodgy deals with disreputable regimes, you know like Dick Cheney meeting Saddam Hussein.
So MySql (a relatively poor database before SapDB came in) have agreed to work with SCO to get a bit of cash. Not the most moral decisions but certainly against what those who dealt with Saddam Hussein or the Chinese Goverment its pretty small fry.
I've always liked Hubble, not only for pushing back the bounds of our knowledge (and more importantly our ignorance, its made us realise there is much more we don't understand) but also for the very very cool pictures that get people interested in science.
This is a very useful and productive use of Hubble... but will it help it get more funding? I'm not sure that the chaps in the Whitehouse will get excited about finding rocks on the Moon unless they can claim that THIS was where Saddam had is WMDs.
Rock A - No oxygen
Rock B - No oxygen
Rock C - No oxygen
Rock D - A bit of metal
Rock E - A bit of oxygen
Rock F - No oxygen
When they find something the photo is going to be rubbish, even worse than when scientists try and get people excited about red dust on Mars.
I suggest that they do the colouring job on the Moon that they always do on the star systems, and make it look way cooler...
"Rock X not only has a large amount of gold, shown in gold, and oxygen, shown in blue, but also various other minerals, show in pretty rainbow colours and is resting on a mauve background which represents the futility of mans existance and the desire to expand our knowledge"
Decides that writers are all using Macs, are biased and of course must be wrong.... because they have no frame of reference unlike himself who works for a magazine that talks of Windows Vista as being the second coming.
Hello Pot... have you met kettle?
This is a great advance but its unlikely to be massively successful until the point at which Gas Guzzlers are taxed at a rate based on their environmental impact. In otherwords until Gas is $6+ a gallon (about the UK price) there won't be the driver in the US to adopt green technologies, thus meaning there won't be the huge volumes of purchases to make the technology really affordable.
For anyone who wants to understand what I mean, go to Honolulu airport and look at the pollution "clocks".
In the last eight years I've heard airships proposed for
1) Carrying large loads over long distances (more energy efficient than planes and capable of carrying large cargo).
2) Mobile phone networks rather than masts (like this internet one)
3) "Air cruises"
4) Global survelliance (over using sats)
And to be honest a whole raft of other things, it just seems to be one of those things that researchers ALWAYS think is a good idea.
Getting a PhD 101
1) Find the problem
2) Define the Airship solution
UN is not far from Al Quaeda and RIAA
Wow.... its amazing isn't it how the organisation that is responsible for some of the most effective global treaties, charities and welfare organisations. The UN has certainly done more than any single country to promote peace and equality and you are comparing it to a terrorist organisation and the enforcement arm of the media industry....
This is the organisation that is ABLE to do peace keeping in lots of countries around the world where ONE COUNTRY is unable to act as an independent between warring factions. (UN Peace keeping) This is the organisation that the US Goverment is DESPERATE to get more involved in Iraq for instance.
This is the organisation that can get countries together to discuss elements that matter to the whole planet (Desertification) and specific elements like helping out certain groups in countries ( helping out in Laos)
This is the organisation tasked with sorting out the trials of Rwanda and Yugoslavia as well of some of the most important international treaties.
And then of course there is the REALLY bad stuff they do like UNHCR on landmines and of course the scum at UNICEF
This is just part of what the UN has done since the second world war, the vast vast majority of it very good and very effective.
And as for your corruption, "Aid for Food" was indeed bad corruption, how different this is of course from Halliburton and the open White House chequebook is a mute point.
The US has lagged lots of the "new economy" networks. Mobile phones in the US are behind the networks in Europe, and miles behind Japan. Even basic technologies like SMS are only just being adopted in the US. And now with broadband a similar picture is evolving of other markets seeing the opportunities for MASS adoption rather than trying to fleece people with a few high cost offerings.
Considering that the US is the leader of the market economies, something the French detest, its amazing to note that in many ways market economics is working more effectively for consumers in France than they are in the US.
Has the US gone too far towards corporate economics and too far from consumer economics?
I know this is a cheap shot but its an important one. On the site (excluding Perl 6)there are THREE references to design, none of these are about how you actually should go about designing in perl and what is good practice for design of Perl programmes.
For the Perl foundation to REALLY help its users out there it might want to promote more DESIGN and less CODE as a better way to approach Perl programming. I've wasted enough time debugging (and mainly binning) badly constructed Perl code, it would be great if the foundation addressed the issues of implementation (lack of design) rather than more bells and whistles for the inept to use.
Exactly the same argument that was used in the 60s and 70s by tobacco companies insisting that they didn't give you cancer.
As a science professor of mine once said
"A correlation does not always indicate direct cause, but ask yourself 'would a jury convict on this sort of evidence' if they would then you should probably starting think about HOW it causes it"
So in otherwords once its enough to indicate there could be a direct link then your move from measurement to theory and test the theory. This is also what scientists have been doing and CONSISTENTLY finding that their theories on global warming are backed up by the observations.
The jury is in on Global Warming.... the only problem is the judge is a crack addict.
When the AOL/TW merger happened I remember nearly borking when I saw how much it valued each AOL customer at. Even with $5bn we are talking of THOUSANDS of dollars per AOL subscriber which to my simple mind sounds like a ridiculous amount of money. Clearly TW is desperate to get something out of the waste of space it was saddled with, but I'm surprised that anyone would offer this much for it.
Of course part of the reality here is that MS want AOL to replace Google's search engine with their own, and Google want AOL to keep using it.
Could Google really get that much shareholder value out of targetting the AOL customer base? Or is this a great example of how the stupid valuations of 2000 are back
Less than 20mph in an SUV through the desert. These Robot control cars are worse than my Grandmother on an interstate.
Quite clearly these Robot controlled cars are part of a sophisticated plot to increase the amount of road rage in the US to enable the Robots to take over the country... and then the world.
It is not too late to stop them, we must insist that the next competition involves only Ford Broncos and takes place on the Freeways of Los Angeles during rush hour.
Its just another of their devilish plots to take over the world (again).
Don't listen to his decentralised ideas, it will be all about cups of tea and warm beer.... and there will be NO escape.
Sun's Java Enterprise System is about programming in Java rather than the tools in Java. The technology of the product isn't hugely important its the fact that the API and development is in Java. Databases are clearly easy with Java as JDBC makes the actual choice a pure commodity. So what Sun want is a solid database, for free, that rounds out their platform effort and means that in one download and license a client can "get started"... which often means it is all they use.
We have no adverts on the BBC. We pay a license fee for the right to watch TV and our reward is good quality programmes, no adverts and probably the worlds strongest news agency.
I know, hence the reason I said to be confused rather than not to be.
Last time I try to be subtle on Slashdot.
Have a read of the books, NEED != WANT and it explains the difference and why only an external observer (computers) can really make the distinction.
Indeed I do hence the reason I said "to be confused with the non-sci-fi writer Iain Banks)"
Iain M Banks (to be confused with the non-sci-fi writer Iain Banks) has written a lot of book about "The Culture" a man/machine symbiosis that has created a utopian society in which people get what they need.
Actually it sounds also like Robert Heinlein, Asimov and most other Sci-Fi writers I've ever read. But mostly like Iain M Banks who books are a cracking read.
Living to 300... of course we will, we'll have to work till we are 280 though.
1) An offline app. If it runs online, it's super easy to run offline. Anyway, I just got my 8thGen broudband cell-phone/life-organizer. It was free. I was told by the salesman that I could get online from any planet in the solar system. Seriously, is there such a thing as offline anymore? Wait, that's what happends during a hurricane when the power goes out. Just went through that. We didn't do much office document editing.
"if it runs online it's super easy to run offline" how is that when the documents are going to be stored on a server that is only accessible online? Or will this browser application actually store the documents locally and then upload them? At which points its MS Office with Web Dav/Sharepoint 2003 support.
Is printing really an issue? There's a million and one ways to solve this problem. Export to a format that you already can print in. PDF, DOC, or even HTML, but really printing should be a breeze.
You've not often had to produce professional documents for presentations, formal responses, marketing information et al have you? Printing is far from simple and when you want to create the right impression its very critical.
Easy, anyone with a free online office suite would attract HUGE amounts of traffic. Monetize it in any fashion you wish. Following Google's approach, you'd prolly get relevant text ads on the side.
Riiiight, because when people are editing documents the first thing they always want is ads because it helps them concentrate so well on the content of the document. As for a free online suite attracting HUGE amounts of traffic... why hasn't Open Office over-taken MS Office yet?
Ummm... Again that's why we have an open-standard. So, it can be opened by anyone, but it can even be easier than that. You could email the document as an HTML. You could export it as a DOC or PDF. Or for that matter, print it out and postal mail it (if your client doesn't have access to a computer).
And as soon as the client edits the doc (with track changes on of course) I have to merge it back in using the superb online merge tool they will be providing... A slight challenge of course as this requires the tracking tags from the online document to match an export and import when a 3rd party has been editing it.
The power on your desktop... That's for games, silly. Besides who said anything about getting online from your desktop. I was talking about using my phone, pda, new online gaming console, or my internet connected t-shirt (the same one you lost). Don't think so narrowly, it can cause tunnel vision.
Ahhh and now we have it... my PDA can already edit my documents when I wish it to, as can my smartphone, but now I understand, you aren't talking about any of this because its a sensible business idea (my point) you are just talking about it because you think it would be cool...
Its 2005 not 1998, cool doesn't cut it.
Kids are inevitably born, and a minimum-wage, immigrant nanny is hired, or the kid is shipped off to daycare, where he/she learns questionable value and is largely emotionally devoid of the individual attention he/she needs and deserves. But mom and dad, still working 8 - 10 hour days, only have to deal with Junior for a few hours a day, so they don't notice that Junior is starting to resent them. Feeling guilty, they buy him whatever he wants (after all, they're still "rich" enough to do so). Junior wants a cell phone. "It'll let us reach him wherever he is," the parents reason, and buy him the phone. Junior wants a car. "It'll free us from having to shuttle him around all the time," reason the parents. Junior wants GTA3. "It'll keep him out of our hair for a few hours a day," say the parents.
Then let the damned kid suffer... he turns into a whining brat prone to bursts of anger and will fail miserably in life unless he becomes a lawyer or a politician.
I'm fed up of seeing "society" in general legislating because people want everything and have no penalties for not wanting them. Both parents WANT to work (different to need), but they don't provide decent child-care... why the hell does that effect me and my wife when we've decided that one of us (her) will stay at home while I work. Do we get tax-breaks and child-care subsidies? Do we hell as like, we get legislation designed to ensure that the selfish people out there don't suffer the consequences of their actions.
If you both want to go out to work that is fine by me, just don't think it stops being YOUR job to look after YOUR kids.
Online document editing has many major draw-backs
1) The "online" bit. A large proportion of office document editing is done "off-line" either in-flight, on trains or in establishments with restricted internet access.
2) Printing - You need much tighter integration between the printer and the browser than currently available, its no good generating an A4 PDF when my printer is A3.
3) Its an ASP - Application Service Provider, there have been a few big successes (SalesForce.com for instance) but mainly they tanked. In the office apps perspective its hard to see the business driver, if its just a cost thing then Open Office would win.
4) What do my clients use? Any browser based solution has to have a standard integration and export to MS Office, this is the normal practice and made doubly so now that Google searches all those files on your desktop for you.
5) What is all the power on my desktop for? Dual Core AMD, 2GB RAM etc etc... Office isn't exactly a performance problem.
ASPing Office was suggested by Microsoft and it tanked, its been suggested before and it tanked. I think Google are spot on to not continue funding an idea that has tanked several times before.
I'd hoped that Linus was refering to "SPECmarks" et al as a bad basis for writing a kernel, but specifications are way off base as being a bad idea for any area of software let alone a kernel.
Sure BAD specifications are a bad idea, but so is bad code.
Its also not true to say that a specification can't be detailed and accurate and then implemented directly, IPv4 is a pretty clear specification that I'd be worried if the kernel writers had ignored when they wrote their IP stack.
I too have seen dreadful code written directly from specifications, normally because there was no design, but I've seen much worse code written from the basis of "I think this therefore it must be right".
I'm normally a big fan of Linus, but given that many of the major areas of Linux and Open Software are written against specifications (X, Samba, IPv4, 802.11x, BIOS etc etc) its hard to see where Linus is coming from. If two organisations or technologies want to communicate they need an agreed standard and specification on the inter-operation. Any other approach is just lobbing packets and hoping for the best.
Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable.
This sort of attitude doesn't help create a warm fuzzy feeling about the US in the rest of the world. Someone in the Government should really take a step back and ask themselves why this would actually matter at all. The UN is the ideal place to run the internet rules at the moment, its got the largest reach and global membership and a stated goal of being independent.
That of course in unacceptable as co-operation with other countries is just plain wrong.
"We've been very, very clear throughout the process that there are certain things we can agree to and certain things we can't agree to," Gross told reporters at U.N. offices in Geneva. "It's not a negotiating issue. This is a matter of national policy."
A matter of national policy that cannot be negotiated? I don't seem to recall the 132nd ammendment stating that internet domain ownership is the right of every american citizen.
He said the United States was "deeply disappointed" with the European Union's proposal Wednesday advocating a "new cooperation model," which would involve governments in questions of naming, numbering and addressing on the Internet.
Because co-operation is bad eh? Damn those pesky Europeans for wanting oversight on a random organisation like ICANN which has been so successful and caused no issues thanks to its openness and brilliant decision making.
The US Goverment does itself, or its citizens, no favours by continually persuing unilateral rather than multi-lateral approaches.
So 50GB is miles off, of course it is because we all know that HD-DVD is so real and there are so many devices whereas Blu-ray will only be shipping in potentially the biggest selling console of 2006.
Microsoft do XBox 360, Sony do PS3, XBox 360 hasn't gone for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. If HD-DVD was so real why didn't they pick it for XBox 360?
Its amazing how this talk of reality of Blu-ray (which I've actually seen demo'ed) over HD-DVD tends to ignore the fact that only one company (Sony) is producing a mass market player in 2006.
If PS3 wins, then Blu-ray will have significant volume in 2006 which will drive down costs and mean larger capacity disks arrive much earlier.
"Grand Theft Auto - Whole of the damned Continenal United States" anyone?