Sort of like Microsoft naming their operating system Windows.
I think a better analogy would be, Microsoft named their SQL database server "SQL Server". Now whenever anyone says SQL server, they actually meant the Microsoft SQL Server...
It is not about the business people. It is about ReiserFS being tainted amongst the moral-conscious geeks. They'll stop implementing ReiserFS in their Linux boxes because it is closely related to an accused murderer.
After all, open source/free software is an ideology to some. They will not use a piece of software that limits one's freedom, nor will they used a piece of software created by someone who has severely limited another person's freedom, i.e. murder.
No. Not hosting. The link you clicked on is an affiliation link to DreamHost, which he'll get money if you sign up with their hosting plans. I presume he has nothing to do with running DreamHost, other than making money from it. See DreamHost promo-code.
In my book, people who posted direct affiliation link on Slashdot should have their creditibility discounted. Because of his affiliation link, I can wildly guess his industry might be affiliation related. Because of his high proportion of advertisement cost, he might be running AdWords to redirect visitors to his other web sites that show nothing but more ads. I am pretty sure many of us have seen these popping up in search results. They provide no content, and visitor usually have to click on an ad or affiliated link to get out.
If that's the case, I am happy that Google has made his work more difficult.
Re:PHP vs. Java
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If PHP is so scalable, then why use Java for enterprise applications?:-)
There are more than just web applications in this world, which is apparently what PHP is only good at. When you start adding desktop interface, interpolating with other entities with COM, CORBA or other customised RPC mechanism -- find me a PHP app that does all that.
Worse. They don't just log your IP address, your referrer info, your user agent and the colour of underwear you are wearing today, they also send back cookies so that they can identify it is you again, when your browser opens up another of their ads.
They can keep track of all the pages (with their ads on) you have been and all different ads you have seen and clicked on, and deduce your personality, your habbits, your interests and the kinds of niches you are into.
I think Joel is arguing that, by having your average cheap programmers, you will *never* accomplish that "fully functional" stage, no matter how long it takes.
Open source projects? Or commercial projects heavily rely on open source components? Software development model on FOSS is surely slow - lots of varying programmers working in their spare time that can sometimes take ages to achieve that holy grail of one point oh. However, once they reached it, it is usually very functional.
WordPress' patch has nothing to do with vulnerability in Userful Inc's XML-RPC library. WordPress uses IXR. However, the fixes in WP 1.5.13 is related, i.e. not escaping the data coming from XMLRPC calls, which might result SQL inject, but not PHP script injection like Userful Inc's one.
PHP itself is an alternative to Zope, not Drupal. As you have stated it is a web application development framework in a specific language (Python), and things like Plone is only a "product" built on top of Zope, just like Drupal is built on top of PHP.
So, instead of spending time on the Internet reading Slashdot, geeks around the world would be spending time hacking it during business hours so that they can bragg about how ineffective it is on Slashdot...
Users would just be so annonyed by the random firewall notification dialog box triggered by zillions of spyware on their machine, and click on the 'Unblock' or 'Ok' button without thinking. Microsoft is doing the right thing here, but unfortunately nothing can fix idiots.
Looking at the tech spec of the PowerBook, the new 867Mhz 12" does not have 1Mb L3 cache like the rest. However, both 12" and 17" versions are now using DDR SDRAM.
Replacing Microsoft Word with LaTeX and Emacs - possible I believe, after you spend time learning all the markup in LaTeX. I actually prefer Vim but that's not the point, and I used to use LaTeX to do all my reports and thesis awhile ago when I was still in uni. However I don't even know how to get my document skeleton right in LaTeX now, since I have not been using it for a few years! You see - something that takes time to pick up, you can loose it easily as well. Whereas I can fire up OpenOffice/MS Word anyday and use it without much prior knowledge.
And I just cannot understand how people can replace Excel/OpenOffice Calc with join(1), sort(1) and grep(1)!! I am working with some financial advisers who have spreadsheets of a few thousand cells with lots of interdependency and different data sources. The re-calculation of the sheet itself might take a few minutes (maybe because it is in Excel). However, people don't just use spreadsheet to represent data in simple tabular format! People don't just use spreadsheet as a simple 2 dimentional database! There are lots of different uses of spreadsheet that just cannot be replaced with command line utilities.
Actually, "ROM" is not really correct, either. It should be translated into "Flash Memory". "Flash" --> "Dodge" and "Memory" --> "Save". Well you get the point.
I went and browse the Golden Global View's Taiwanese website, and found more information there (the web pages are in Chinese).
Funny that big the blue'ish text across the top of the page, with "blood" dripping from above, says "Even Bill Gates is scared".:)
Anyway, it appears to be using some 32-bit RISC processor running at 58Mhz, weight at 139g, with a jog dial, and there's lots of emphasis on the freedom Linux has given you. It *is* charged from its USB cable. However, it does not seem to have any external expansion capability, i.e. more memory via SD or CF.
[Main Functions] * Linux System: Chinese Linux system first in the world! More stable and more free (in the liberal sense) * Infrared: International standard infrared transmission for short distance communication. * Networking: Portable Internet access allows you to send emails from your palm (literally). * Usb: High speed USB transmission. (It sounds like that it can be recharged from the USB cable, hmmm...) * eXpandable: Highly expandable that give you space for upgrade. * 32Mb Flash memory, 16Mb RAM, usable space up to 8.4 million Chinese character. * MP3 play-back ability. Digital recording. * Portable detachable (??) keyboard. * Digital (??) library. * Powerful dictionary with 110,000 English -> Chinese and 60,000 Chinese -> English dictionary. Other dictionaries are available for download. * Personalised reminder/notification in voice, vibration and flashing lights (or something like that).
Note that I've removed some marketing terms 'coz I have no idea how to translate them, and they are nothing useful than praising how good/great/powerful it is.
Re:Luke, use the source...
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
We too tried to standardise all our boxes to Mandrake Linux at work, and tried to install nothing but mdk-rpms. If we cannot find the packages we need in the standard distribution, we will then try to download the SRPM from Mandrake cooker and then build it (which is not always stable). If no SRPM is available, we will still try to write our own spec to build the SRPM from tarballs. But we will NEVER install from the source directly. Two things I really like about Mandrake - urpmi and cooker.
Normally Google has this 4 weeks spider/update cycle - sites will only receive a deep crawl every 4 weeks, and Google will only update its index/cached content every 4 weeks. However, since late last year, Google has been indexing the index page of the sites with high PageRank *daily*, and you will see a date next to the search result for the sites that have been indexed more frequently. For example, search for slashdot on Google revealed that the index page has been updated on the 13th of March.
Consequently, if there is a link to a new page appearing on the index page, and you happen to have (very) high PageRank, the new page might get indexed as well, outside the 4-week frame.
Coolest feature of Google Toolbar - Distribute Computing[toolbar.google.com]!!!! I found it a couple weeks ago, but wonder why it has never been brought up in Slashdot... Basically it is something similar to dnet that uses your computers' free time to do some computational work for Stanford.
Re:A language with even more class features
on
Python 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well, Python is not a dynamic-typed language like PHP, and variables are actually quite strictly typed. However, just as you have mentioned, the references are not typed so that you end up with quite a lot of assert(type(foo) == types.IntType) in the code. That definitely bites when you need to integrate Python with some strong typed language, like passing stuff into CORBA or C extensions.
But I disagree that Python is not suitable for large projects. In fact, I found it has good package/module structure (like Module-2/Pascal), and IMHO is easier to manage than header files in C/C++. In my current job, I'll say 75% of our financial planning software product is coded in Python.
Where down the line, it is going to hurt the guy next door. Well, I do work for a commercial ISV that runs on a tight margin. If people started to pirate our software so that we make a loss at the end, what should we do? We can either close our door, say bye bye to our customers, and no longer provide supports to our product. We can also try to rip off our creditors, like pirating our development tools, stealing bandwidth from the network company, etc. We can also increase the price of the software we are selling, so that the existing customers suffer (which might mean more piracy).
That's why I think piracy *is* of the capitalist because the centre of the universe according to the pirates are themselves. As long as *I* am okay, *I* can do whatever I want, including ripping off software, network, and credit card companies, and all the individuals working in those companies.
But then, what is *right*? Whatever you think is right will be right to the others? Or whatever those anti-captalists think is right will become the absolute correctness?
Thou shall not steal, says the LORD.
If the evil software companies think it is stealing that you make a copy of their software, then don't do it! If you don't agree with their moral, use Free Software.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a better analogy would be, Microsoft named their SQL database server "SQL Server". Now whenever anyone says SQL server, they actually meant the Microsoft SQL Server...
It is not about the business people. It is about ReiserFS being tainted amongst the moral-conscious geeks. They'll stop implementing ReiserFS in their Linux boxes because it is closely related to an accused murderer.
After all, open source/free software is an ideology to some. They will not use a piece of software that limits one's freedom, nor will they used a piece of software created by someone who has severely limited another person's freedom, i.e. murder.
No. Not hosting. The link you clicked on is an affiliation link to DreamHost, which he'll get money if you sign up with their hosting plans. I presume he has nothing to do with running DreamHost, other than making money from it. See DreamHost promo-code.
In my book, people who posted direct affiliation link on Slashdot should have their creditibility discounted. Because of his affiliation link, I can wildly guess his industry might be affiliation related. Because of his high proportion of advertisement cost, he might be running AdWords to redirect visitors to his other web sites that show nothing but more ads. I am pretty sure many of us have seen these popping up in search results. They provide no content, and visitor usually have to click on an ad or affiliated link to get out.
If that's the case, I am happy that Google has made his work more difficult.
Worse. They don't just log your IP address, your referrer info, your user agent and the colour of underwear you are wearing today, they also send back cookies so that they can identify it is you again, when your browser opens up another of their ads.
They can keep track of all the pages (with their ads on) you have been and all different ads you have seen and clicked on, and deduce your personality, your habbits, your interests and the kinds of niches you are into.
That's called invasion of privacy.
So I usually surf in w3m.
I think Joel is arguing that, by having your average cheap programmers, you will *never* accomplish that "fully functional" stage, no matter how long it takes.
Open source projects? Or commercial projects heavily rely on open source components? Software development model on FOSS is surely slow - lots of varying programmers working in their spare time that can sometimes take ages to achieve that holy grail of one point oh. However, once they reached it, it is usually very functional.
WordPress' patch has nothing to do with vulnerability in Userful Inc's XML-RPC library. WordPress uses IXR. However, the fixes in WP 1.5.13 is related, i.e. not escaping the data coming from XMLRPC calls, which might result SQL inject, but not PHP script injection like Userful Inc's one.
I use CTorrent, a console torrent client in plain C. Feature is a bit limited, but it works and has relatively small footprint.
Nor can anyone search anything on your blog through MT's search CGI script. D'oh.
PHP itself is an alternative to Zope, not Drupal. As you have stated it is a web application development framework in a specific language (Python), and things like Plone is only a "product" built on top of Zope, just like Drupal is built on top of PHP.
So, instead of spending time on the Internet reading Slashdot, geeks around the world would be spending time hacking it during business hours so that they can bragg about how ineffective it is on Slashdot...
Still no real work done.
Agree.
Users would just be so annonyed by the random firewall notification dialog box triggered by zillions of spyware on their machine, and click on the 'Unblock' or 'Ok' button without thinking. Microsoft is doing the right thing here, but unfortunately nothing can fix idiots.
It looks like the default SP2 firewall also blocks packets and signals going to the TV out port to me :)
Looking at the tech spec of the PowerBook, the new 867Mhz 12" does not have 1Mb L3 cache like the rest. However, both 12" and 17" versions are now using DDR SDRAM.
Replacing Microsoft Word with LaTeX and Emacs - possible I believe, after you spend time learning all the markup in LaTeX. I actually prefer Vim but that's not the point, and I used to use LaTeX to do all my reports and thesis awhile ago when I was still in uni. However I don't even know how to get my document skeleton right in LaTeX now, since I have not been using it for a few years! You see - something that takes time to pick up, you can loose it easily as well. Whereas I can fire up OpenOffice/MS Word anyday and use it without much prior knowledge.
And I just cannot understand how people can replace Excel/OpenOffice Calc with join(1), sort(1) and grep(1)!! I am working with some financial advisers who have spreadsheets of a few thousand cells with lots of interdependency and different data sources. The re-calculation of the sheet itself might take a few minutes (maybe because it is in Excel). However, people don't just use spreadsheet to represent data in simple tabular format! People don't just use spreadsheet as a simple 2 dimentional database! There are lots of different uses of spreadsheet that just cannot be replaced with command line utilities.
Actually, "ROM" is not really correct, either. It should be translated into "Flash Memory". "Flash" --> "Dodge" and "Memory" --> "Save". Well you get the point.
I went and browse the Golden Global View's Taiwanese website, and found more information there (the web pages are in Chinese).
:)
Funny that big the blue'ish text across the top of the page, with "blood" dripping from above, says "Even Bill Gates is scared".
Anyway, it appears to be using some 32-bit RISC processor running at 58Mhz, weight at 139g, with a jog dial, and there's lots of emphasis on the freedom Linux has given you. It *is* charged from its USB cable. However, it does not seem to have any external expansion capability, i.e. more memory via SD or CF.
It goes something like this...
[Specification]
* Model: Retail Price: 1498 Yun (~ USD$181)
* CPU: Toshiba TX3911 (MIPS Architecture) 58MHZ 32bits
* ROM: 32M NANDFlash
* RAM: 16M SDRAM
* Screen: 160*240 STN16 Grey Scale, Hand writing recognition
* IrDA: 115200bps max
* Backlite: EL Backlite (??)
* Battery: Lithium Battery, 680mAh, 8 hours, stand-by 1 month
[Main Functions]
* Linux System: Chinese Linux system first in the world! More stable and more free (in the liberal sense)
* Infrared: International standard infrared transmission for short distance communication.
* Networking: Portable Internet access allows you to send emails from your palm (literally).
* Usb: High speed USB transmission. (It sounds like that it can be recharged from the USB cable, hmmm...)
* eXpandable: Highly expandable that give you space for upgrade.
* 32Mb Flash memory, 16Mb RAM, usable space up to 8.4 million Chinese character.
* MP3 play-back ability. Digital recording.
* Portable detachable (??) keyboard.
* Digital (??) library.
* Powerful dictionary with 110,000 English -> Chinese and 60,000 Chinese -> English dictionary. Other dictionaries are available for download.
* Personalised reminder/notification in voice, vibration and flashing lights (or something like that).
Note that I've removed some marketing terms 'coz I have no idea how to translate them, and they are nothing useful than praising how good/great/powerful it is.
We too tried to standardise all our boxes to Mandrake Linux at work, and tried to install nothing but mdk-rpms. If we cannot find the packages we need in the standard distribution, we will then try to download the SRPM from Mandrake cooker and then build it (which is not always stable). If no SRPM is available, we will still try to write our own spec to build the SRPM from tarballs. But we will NEVER install from the source directly. Two things I really like about Mandrake - urpmi and cooker.
Normally Google has this 4 weeks spider/update cycle - sites will only receive a deep crawl every 4 weeks, and Google will only update its index/cached content every 4 weeks. However, since late last year, Google has been indexing the index page of the sites with high PageRank *daily*, and you will see a date next to the search result for the sites that have been indexed more frequently. For example, search for slashdot on Google revealed that the index page has been updated on the 13th of March.
Consequently, if there is a link to a new page appearing on the index page, and you happen to have (very) high PageRank, the new page might get indexed as well, outside the 4-week frame.
Coolest feature of Google Toolbar - Distribute Computing[toolbar.google.com]!!!! I found it a couple weeks ago, but wonder why it has never been brought up in Slashdot... Basically it is something similar to dnet that uses your computers' free time to do some computational work for Stanford.
Well, Python is not a dynamic-typed language like PHP, and variables are actually quite strictly typed. However, just as you have mentioned, the references are not typed so that you end up with quite a lot of assert(type(foo) == types.IntType) in the code. That definitely bites when you need to integrate Python with some strong typed language, like passing stuff into CORBA or C extensions.
But I disagree that Python is not suitable for large projects. In fact, I found it has good package/module structure (like Module-2/Pascal), and IMHO is easier to manage than header files in C/C++. In my current job, I'll say 75% of our financial planning software product is coded in Python.
Well said...
Where down the line, it is going to hurt the guy next door. Well, I do work for a commercial ISV that runs on a tight margin. If people started to pirate our software so that we make a loss at the end, what should we do? We can either close our door, say bye bye to our customers, and no longer provide supports to our product. We can also try to rip off our creditors, like pirating our development tools, stealing bandwidth from the network company, etc. We can also increase the price of the software we are selling, so that the existing customers suffer (which might mean more piracy).
That's why I think piracy *is* of the capitalist because the centre of the universe according to the pirates are themselves. As long as *I* am okay, *I* can do whatever I want, including ripping off software, network, and credit card companies, and all the individuals working in those companies.
But then, what is *right*? Whatever you think is right will be right to the others? Or whatever those anti-captalists think is right will become the absolute correctness?
Thou shall not steal, says the LORD.
If the evil software companies think it is stealing that you make a copy of their software, then don't do it! If you don't agree with their moral, use Free Software.