For him, having someone who could code and also write coherent sentences and speak somewhat intelligently with people who might be inclined to invest in the company.
Edit: For him, it was important to have someone who could code and also write coherent sentences and speak somewhat intelligently with people who might be inclined to invest in the company.
In a free market, we would expect better coders to make more money than less good coders. The problem is that this is predicated on having perfect information (i.e. being able to actually rank coders by quality). In the marketplace, it's actually quite hard to know how good coders are relative to their peers. Sure, you could test everyone, but then that assumes your test is correct and that you have the time and money to administer it.
Therefore, employers look for discriminators. One of those discriminators is a four year degree. Though we anecdotally hear about impractical academic CS majors who can't code, most four year CS grads have a modicum of understanding.
Additionally, a friend of mine was recently in the position to hire. I asked him about the four year degree issue because my friend usually belongs to the school of "put up or shut up." His opinion was that a four year degree was important not just because of coding chops, but *because* of all the other classes that are typically required in a four year program. For him, having someone who could code and also write coherent sentences and speak somewhat intelligently with people who might be inclined to invest in the company.
Thoroughly testing one platform is hard enough. Testing against each and every current version of every popular distro is a lot of regression tests.
The situation with Linux isn't horrible for open source software--the load of testing all those system permutations is theoretically distributed across the teams of all those distros.
For commercial software (and open source if we were completely honest), testing on loads of platforms is just a lot of time and energy that companies like Adobe don't really have to dedicate to such a small percentage of their potential customer base.
BSD is a direct analog of academic attribution. Much of the US's modern economic and scientific expansion was fueled by public-private collaboration between universities and industry. Publicly funded research institutes create fundamental science that is turned into products by companies.
Public research institutes get grants from industry and govt to keep doing fundamental science. Companies keep making products based on said discovery.
A hell of a lot of software isn't interesting enough for volunteers to do anything more than a half-assed job maintaining it. Seriously, writing the stuff is fun. The other 90% of the job is boring.
For those things, corporate developed software can be a Good Thingâ. Public gets to buy nicely polished stuff or read the science. Scientists get scientist cred. Companies get company cred called money.
GPL short circuits the this and says, "Fuck you, we're *keeping* this software academic. There is no room for commercial development in our world." That's their right, but as one of the FOSS faithful, I'm getting more and more leery of projects that don't have some pretty clear inertia.
Well, I for one want the option to buy commercial software. Sure, I'd like all my software to be awesome quality, open source, also free-as-in-beer software. But children in hell want ice water.
BSD licensing doesn't force software to be undead. If a bit of BSD code is taken and extra features, quality, service, maintenance, etc. are added by a company, that original code is still BSD.
IF AND ONLY IF that code is worth it to the volunteers to maintain, someone will plug along with the original BSD code. If two years elapse and someone wants to pick it back up, that original BSD code is still there for the taking. Meanwhile, the original code has found some life running my systems and helping some coders make a living.
With GPL code, things tend to get left in a half-dead state. A developer produces some whizzbang code and then either loses interest, or the maintenance burden (the other 90% of the SDLC, remember) become too big for one lone guy.
In the case of the GPL, I never get the opportunity to wave money in someone's face to maintain the software unless I'm prepared to wave lots and lots of money in someone's face to maintain the software in its pure, blessed by The Stallman, state.
I respect what you've done with Open Source, Bruce. You've created an intellectual framework where software's source code can be a community resource. I like that. But not all licenses are created equal. The GPL is too unidirectional and doesn't facilitate evolutionary pruning of dead branches.
BSD and GPL are both models for sharing code. I like BSD better because BSD is more like academic attribution.
When a scientific discovery is made at a research institute, typically that knowledge gets shared in the form of academic papers to the entire world.
Those scientific discoveries are oftentimes turned into products by companies who. . . know how to take public science and turn it into products. Like it or not, public universities feeding fundamental science to companies has been enormously successful (look at Silicon Valley with Stanford and Berkeley).
The GPL doesn't protect freedom so much as it restricts profit driven development. Once code is BSD, it's BSD. If someone uses that code in a larger commercial work, the original code doesn't stop being free.
If that original code descends into obscurity because it wasn't maintained as well as some other bit of commercial code, well, good! If software is to evolve, some of it is going to have to die.
I can imagine the withering looks that any of my non-geek friends / family would give the people who are holding up their trip to the genius bar. "Couldn't you do something useful like volunteer at a women's shelter? Maybe donate some time to your community bike shop?"
Seriously, this is like crowding the checkout lines in the grocery store to protest cigarette sales. The FSF isn't going to make friends or influence people.
I've never thrown a PC away. I've been upgrading my trusty Radio Shack TRS-80 CoCo2 all this time. . . component by component. I've even kept the circuit boards.
Seriously, the ecologically worst parts of the computer are the circuit boards and the LCDs if I recall correctly. I don't see how swapping a big-ass motherboard in and out of your relatively benign metal case is that green.
This, on the other hand, is small and does consume very little power. I bet its footprint isn't much bigger than the average video card. If you want to be green it probably means not buying a computer, or making due with old / slow shit.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. IN THAT ORDER! How many geeks here follow the first and most ecologically beneficial part of that triad?
The grandparent asserted that BSD is a valid choice for software that intends to remain open (i.e. So what if a commercial company takes code, improves, and resells when the original free version is available?).
Then the parent tries to refute the point using Motif? WTF? Since when was Motif BSD-licensed?
Finally, the parent closes with a patently absurd statement:
For whatever reasons, the (L)GPL seems to do far more to discourage forking than the BSD or MIT licenses. To anyone who remembers the Unix wars of the eighties, that's definitely a Good Thing(tm).
1. Regarding forking, how many derivatives of BSD have been created since BSD 4.4-lite in 1994? BSDi, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and lately some small ones like Dragonfly and PCBSD (based on freebsd.) And how many Linux distributions since '91?
2. Regarding the Unix wars: How many of those Unixes were BSD licensed? Oh yeah, zero. (Okay, maybe one)
I don't think either the BSD, LGPL, or GPL is any more prone to forking than the others from a license perspective. I think it is the BSD *community* that has done a better job of not forking itself stupid.
We were clearly talking about general purpose filesystems here. Tell me again how AdvFS is any more applicable to flash than Ext3, NTFS, or JoeysBBQFS to the flash scenario you've outlined here?
While you're setting up strawmen, you forgot to include iso9660, UDF, 12 dozen network-based filesystems, half a dozen SAN filesystems, etc. etc.
There are a lot of problems with Windows, but one sentiment I've never heard from any Windows admin is, "Gee, I wish I could reformat all my servers to use ext3."
Accommodating the needs of different people is great, but maybe we could accommodate the needs of different people with fewer superfluous choices which ultimately degrade the experience of all of said choices.
Which list of subtle filesystem problems will plague this new entrant into the Linux filesystem melee?
Windows effectively has Old FS and New FS. Apple has Old FS and is moving toward New FS. Solaris has Old FS and New FS. This isn't rocket science.
Certainly the Linux community doesn't really need to burn energy supporting a half dozen filesystems.
Talk to six linux admins and you'll get at least that many "every filesystem but the one I'm using sucks!" responses.
I'd gladly stand up for a lack of choice on the filesystem front. Pick one, make sure it's absolutely tested, make sure it supports a nice range of features.
Integrating a filesystem into another OS is a decidedly non-trivial task unless you just want to read files.
Thanks, HP, but I don't really want your no-longer-commercially-viable undead zombieware.
While I agree with you on one level, on another level I actually like that people are equating Gnome to Ubuntu and KDE to Kubuntu. If they are coming to the conclusion that Gnome is better than KDE, all the better. I don't say that to disparage KDE. KDE is a fine piece of work in its own right. However, the "community" is tantalizingly close to making Gnome a de-facto standard.
Though I loves my F/OSS, I think we present an unreasonably difficult target for software development--especially commercial software. Some software, though it would be great to have a fully-baked FOSS version, is either excruciatingly boring to write, or realistically requires some top talent working full time to pull it off. In those cases, I really can't begrudge commercial software houses some cash.
For that reason, I think it would really be nice if, when Company X decides to write an application for Linux, they can have some reasonable assurances of what that means from a development perspective. I'm not just talking languages here. I'm talking password keychains, central address book stores, etc. All that comes from having a full environment that is reasonably standard.
Yes, choice is great, but so is critical mass. Though it may not be my personal first choice on Linux, go Gnome!
I'll withhold the snarky comments along the lines of "you've never used an app written in it or coded using it." Simply put, Motif is ugly. If its ugliness were only skin-deep, that would be one thing, but it's also a bear to code in.
Motif used to be a commercial product. By the time they open sourced it, there was nobody who wanted it. Modern GUI toolkits are much, much better.
When I first read that Apple was really, honestly going to start killing Carbon, my first thought was of Adobe's stuff. Adobe already seems to have some experience with QT in their products. Rather than create a fully Cocoa version of Photoshop, my bet is that they'll keep with C++ and use QT. They might even find that it's profitable to port to Linux in that situation.
Now, my geek wet dream definitely entails them porting to Cocoa, and building the missing support in GNUstep. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. QT is probably an easier path to getting apps that run on Windows and Mac (and Linux?).
Of course, something truly freaky could happen. Apple has already ported a good portion of Cocoa to Windows (and NeXT certainly had OpenStep running on lots of platforms before). Apple and Adobe could team up and send a 'fuck you' to Microsoft by working together to release a fully Cocoa version of Photoshop on Windows and OS X. That, I think, is quite a lot less likely. Apple and Adobe seem to have a bit of a strained relationship in certain areas. Adobe has Apple by the balls on certain key apps, and Apple has proved itself willing to compete head-to-head with Adobe when they've felt platform support was waning. Plus, Adobe wouldn't gain by pissing Microsoft off by making Cocoa their cross-platform toolkit.
If Adobe did decide to re-port to *nix / X11, I wonder how much of an effort it would be these days. I don't think the old codebase from the days when photoshop ran on Irix would be much use, as I believe they used Motif. I mean, they *could* use motif for a new port, but dear sweet merciful zombie jesus that would be stupid.
I read somewhere a while back that Adobe was using QT for certain bits of development here and there. I believe Skype and a few other popular commercial apps also use QT to deliver native-ish versions for Win/Linux/Mac.
We might not have to speculate too long on whether Adobe might be willing to port to Linux. With Apple aggressively killing Carbon, Adobe is going to either drop the Mac or get porting *somehow*. I don't see Adobe killing support for the Mac. Apple has already proved that they are willing to replace Adobe for certain key apps. I don't think Adobe wants to risk Apple sniping directly at their photoshop market. So, I suspect Adobe will refactor Photoshop. If they use something like QT to do it, a Linux version might not be an extreme additional effort.
In episodes I, II, & III, I got the impression that the jedi order had gotten a bit fossilized, entrenched, political, and maybe just a little too comfortable in their exalted position.
I think it's pretty regrettable that Lucas botched the execution so badly. A better director might have had us inwardly cheering when the revolution came and the old power structures were wiped away. That way, he could have fucked with us further when it turned out that the revolution replaced a necrotic corrupt regime with a despotic regime.
In my perfect world, Star Wars I, II, & III would have been rated R for strong language, nudity, and disturbing images. Then again, Lucas probably wouldn't have sold nearly as many plastic figurines along with Happy Meals or whatever.
If you think about the BSD license in terms of an academic citation, it makes more sense.
In the original patch, it appeared that some Linux folk took some code, stripped the BSD copyright notice and put it under a GPL license. Viewed through an academic mindset, it sounds less like "building on existing research" and more like plagiarism. Were they legally entitled to do what they did? I suspect probably so. Still, it seems like bad form not to cite your sources.
He was whining about the Symantec report showing that Vista's network stack had been vulnerable to classes of attacks that older TCP/IP stacks had long been fixed against. Afterward, I asked him why that sort of disclosure was so horribly irresponsible as he had asserted in his presentation. His reply was to ask me if I had kids? WTF? Basically he was trying to illustrate that it hurt Microsoft's feelings, and that ripping on Vista's early lackluster security was tantamount to insulting his children. Uh huh.
Overall, I wasn't that impressed by Steve Riley. He'd be a good gospel preacher. He's very charismatic. Unfortunately, I just wasn't impressed by the religion he was selling. Then again I tend to be more impressed by security scientists rather than security evangelists.
I've been a long time user of VMWare Workstation and have recently purchased Fusion (and I was using the betas). Fusion is a solid product if you want to just run an OS.
If, however, you want the advanced features of VMWare Workstation--multiple snapshots, simulated LANs with simulated packet loss, cheap clones, etc.--you will be disappointed with Fusion.
A lot of people don't need the features in VMWare Workstation. If you just need to "run Linux / OpenBSD / Solaris in Mac OS X" it's a slam dunk. If you need more, you're currently screwed. I personally hope that VMWare will make a workstation version for the Mac with all the whistles and bells. I'll pay for it.
Sorry I missed your message earlier. In the tarball, check out the INSTALL file. Short answer: run the setup.sh. It will ensure that the.desktop file gets added to the list of session types in gdm.
You, sir, get the prize for possessing a clue. Well said. GNUStep suffers because nobody makes cool stuff with it. Everything else suffers because they are using lesser frameworks:-)
I also agree with your assessment of ObjC / Cocoa as a technology. In terms of object orientation, Objective C isn't the best OOPL. Smalltalk, for one, seems like a marked improvement. Ruby and Python probably are too. But Objective C is still C. Interfacing C and C++ with ObjC / ObjC++ is much easier (and probably more elegant and robust) than many of the C-to-$FOO bridges that exist. So, in my estimation, ObjectiveC is nice because it combines a nice object model with the unbeatable compatibility of C. And the classes are a damn-sight better than the vast majority of the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Edit: For him, it was important to have someone who could code and also write coherent sentences and speak somewhat intelligently with people who might be inclined to invest in the company.
Jeez, talk about an ironic lapse in grammar.
In a free market, we would expect better coders to make more money than less good coders. The problem is that this is predicated on having perfect information (i.e. being able to actually rank coders by quality). In the marketplace, it's actually quite hard to know how good coders are relative to their peers. Sure, you could test everyone, but then that assumes your test is correct and that you have the time and money to administer it.
Therefore, employers look for discriminators. One of those discriminators is a four year degree. Though we anecdotally hear about impractical academic CS majors who can't code, most four year CS grads have a modicum of understanding.
Additionally, a friend of mine was recently in the position to hire. I asked him about the four year degree issue because my friend usually belongs to the school of "put up or shut up." His opinion was that a four year degree was important not just because of coding chops, but *because* of all the other classes that are typically required in a four year program. For him, having someone who could code and also write coherent sentences and speak somewhat intelligently with people who might be inclined to invest in the company.
Thoroughly testing one platform is hard enough. Testing against each and every current version of every popular distro is a lot of regression tests.
The situation with Linux isn't horrible for open source software--the load of testing all those system permutations is theoretically distributed across the teams of all those distros.
For commercial software (and open source if we were completely honest), testing on loads of platforms is just a lot of time and energy that companies like Adobe don't really have to dedicate to such a small percentage of their potential customer base.
My biggest argument for BSD is this:
BSD is a direct analog of academic attribution. Much of the US's modern economic and scientific expansion was fueled by public-private collaboration between universities and industry. Publicly funded research institutes create fundamental science that is turned into products by companies.
Public research institutes get grants from industry and govt to keep doing fundamental science. Companies keep making products based on said discovery.
A hell of a lot of software isn't interesting enough for volunteers to do anything more than a half-assed job maintaining it. Seriously, writing the stuff is fun. The other 90% of the job is boring.
For those things, corporate developed software can be a Good Thingâ. Public gets to buy nicely polished stuff or read the science. Scientists get scientist cred. Companies get company cred called money.
GPL short circuits the this and says, "Fuck you, we're *keeping* this software academic. There is no room for commercial development in our world." That's their right, but as one of the FOSS faithful, I'm getting more and more leery of projects that don't have some pretty clear inertia.
Well, I for one want the option to buy commercial software. Sure, I'd like all my software to be awesome quality, open source, also free-as-in-beer software. But children in hell want ice water.
BSD licensing doesn't force software to be undead. If a bit of BSD code is taken and extra features, quality, service, maintenance, etc. are added by a company, that original code is still BSD.
IF AND ONLY IF that code is worth it to the volunteers to maintain, someone will plug along with the original BSD code. If two years elapse and someone wants to pick it back up, that original BSD code is still there for the taking. Meanwhile, the original code has found some life running my systems and helping some coders make a living.
With GPL code, things tend to get left in a half-dead state. A developer produces some whizzbang code and then either loses interest, or the maintenance burden (the other 90% of the SDLC, remember) become too big for one lone guy.
In the case of the GPL, I never get the opportunity to wave money in someone's face to maintain the software unless I'm prepared to wave lots and lots of money in someone's face to maintain the software in its pure, blessed by The Stallman, state.
I respect what you've done with Open Source, Bruce. You've created an intellectual framework where software's source code can be a community resource. I like that. But not all licenses are created equal. The GPL is too unidirectional and doesn't facilitate evolutionary pruning of dead branches.
BSD and GPL are both models for sharing code. I like BSD better because BSD is more like academic attribution.
When a scientific discovery is made at a research institute, typically that knowledge gets shared in the form of academic papers to the entire world.
Those scientific discoveries are oftentimes turned into products by companies who. . . know how to take public science and turn it into products. Like it or not, public universities feeding fundamental science to companies has been enormously successful (look at Silicon Valley with Stanford and Berkeley).
The GPL doesn't protect freedom so much as it restricts profit driven development. Once code is BSD, it's BSD. If someone uses that code in a larger commercial work, the original code doesn't stop being free.
If that original code descends into obscurity because it wasn't maintained as well as some other bit of commercial code, well, good! If software is to evolve, some of it is going to have to die.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. "FSF's theories"? I like to consider them more as wild-eyed conjecture.
I can imagine the withering looks that any of my non-geek friends / family would give the people who are holding up their trip to the genius bar. "Couldn't you do something useful like volunteer at a women's shelter? Maybe donate some time to your community bike shop?"
Seriously, this is like crowding the checkout lines in the grocery store to protest cigarette sales. The FSF isn't going to make friends or influence people.
I've never thrown a PC away. I've been upgrading my trusty Radio Shack TRS-80 CoCo2 all this time. . . component by component. I've even kept the circuit boards.
Seriously, the ecologically worst parts of the computer are the circuit boards and the LCDs if I recall correctly. I don't see how swapping a big-ass motherboard in and out of your relatively benign metal case is that green.
This, on the other hand, is small and does consume very little power. I bet its footprint isn't much bigger than the average video card. If you want to be green it probably means not buying a computer, or making due with old / slow shit.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. IN THAT ORDER! How many geeks here follow the first and most ecologically beneficial part of that triad?
The grandparent asserted that BSD is a valid choice for software that intends to remain open (i.e. So what if a commercial company takes code, improves, and resells when the original free version is available?).
Then the parent tries to refute the point using Motif? WTF? Since when was Motif BSD-licensed?
Finally, the parent closes with a patently absurd statement:
For whatever reasons, the (L)GPL seems to do far more to discourage forking than the BSD or MIT licenses. To anyone who remembers the Unix wars of the eighties, that's definitely a Good Thing(tm).
1. Regarding forking, how many derivatives of BSD have been created since BSD 4.4-lite in 1994? BSDi, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and lately some small ones like Dragonfly and PCBSD (based on freebsd.) And how many Linux distributions since '91?
2. Regarding the Unix wars: How many of those Unixes were BSD licensed? Oh yeah, zero. (Okay, maybe one)
I don't think either the BSD, LGPL, or GPL is any more prone to forking than the others from a license perspective. I think it is the BSD *community* that has done a better job of not forking itself stupid.
We were clearly talking about general purpose filesystems here. Tell me again how AdvFS is any more applicable to flash than Ext3, NTFS, or JoeysBBQFS to the flash scenario you've outlined here?
While you're setting up strawmen, you forgot to include iso9660, UDF, 12 dozen network-based filesystems, half a dozen SAN filesystems, etc. etc.
Ignoring my grandmothers dying words advising me to not feed the trolls:
\sarcasm{Yes. This is precisely what I'm advocating.}
What part of "take one filesystem and make it good" warrants creating a strawman implying that I'm advocating for the total abolition of filesystems?
There are a lot of problems with Windows, but one sentiment I've never heard from any Windows admin is, "Gee, I wish I could reformat all my servers to use ext3."
Accommodating the needs of different people is great, but maybe we could accommodate the needs of different people with fewer superfluous choices which ultimately degrade the experience of all of said choices.
Which list of subtle filesystem problems will plague this new entrant into the Linux filesystem melee?
Windows effectively has Old FS and New FS. Apple has Old FS and is moving toward New FS. Solaris has Old FS and New FS. This isn't rocket science.
Certainly the Linux community doesn't really need to burn energy supporting a half dozen filesystems.
Talk to six linux admins and you'll get at least that many "every filesystem but the one I'm using sucks!" responses.
I'd gladly stand up for a lack of choice on the filesystem front. Pick one, make sure it's absolutely tested, make sure it supports a nice range of features.
Integrating a filesystem into another OS is a decidedly non-trivial task unless you just want to read files.
Thanks, HP, but I don't really want your no-longer-commercially-viable undead zombieware.
While I agree with you on one level, on another level I actually like that people are equating Gnome to Ubuntu and KDE to Kubuntu. If they are coming to the conclusion that Gnome is better than KDE, all the better. I don't say that to disparage KDE. KDE is a fine piece of work in its own right. However, the "community" is tantalizingly close to making Gnome a de-facto standard.
Though I loves my F/OSS, I think we present an unreasonably difficult target for software development--especially commercial software. Some software, though it would be great to have a fully-baked FOSS version, is either excruciatingly boring to write, or realistically requires some top talent working full time to pull it off. In those cases, I really can't begrudge commercial software houses some cash.
For that reason, I think it would really be nice if, when Company X decides to write an application for Linux, they can have some reasonable assurances of what that means from a development perspective. I'm not just talking languages here. I'm talking password keychains, central address book stores, etc. All that comes from having a full environment that is reasonably standard.
Yes, choice is great, but so is critical mass. Though it may not be my personal first choice on Linux, go Gnome!
I'll withhold the snarky comments along the lines of "you've never used an app written in it or coded using it." Simply put, Motif is ugly. If its ugliness were only skin-deep, that would be one thing, but it's also a bear to code in.
Motif used to be a commercial product. By the time they open sourced it, there was nobody who wanted it. Modern GUI toolkits are much, much better.
When I first read that Apple was really, honestly going to start killing Carbon, my first thought was of Adobe's stuff. Adobe already seems to have some experience with QT in their products. Rather than create a fully Cocoa version of Photoshop, my bet is that they'll keep with C++ and use QT. They might even find that it's profitable to port to Linux in that situation.
Now, my geek wet dream definitely entails them porting to Cocoa, and building the missing support in GNUstep. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. QT is probably an easier path to getting apps that run on Windows and Mac (and Linux?).
Of course, something truly freaky could happen. Apple has already ported a good portion of Cocoa to Windows (and NeXT certainly had OpenStep running on lots of platforms before). Apple and Adobe could team up and send a 'fuck you' to Microsoft by working together to release a fully Cocoa version of Photoshop on Windows and OS X. That, I think, is quite a lot less likely. Apple and Adobe seem to have a bit of a strained relationship in certain areas. Adobe has Apple by the balls on certain key apps, and Apple has proved itself willing to compete head-to-head with Adobe when they've felt platform support was waning. Plus, Adobe wouldn't gain by pissing Microsoft off by making Cocoa their cross-platform toolkit.
My bet? QT.
If Adobe did decide to re-port to *nix / X11, I wonder how much of an effort it would be these days. I don't think the old codebase from the days when photoshop ran on Irix would be much use, as I believe they used Motif. I mean, they *could* use motif for a new port, but dear sweet merciful zombie jesus that would be stupid.
I read somewhere a while back that Adobe was using QT for certain bits of development here and there. I believe Skype and a few other popular commercial apps also use QT to deliver native-ish versions for Win/Linux/Mac.
We might not have to speculate too long on whether Adobe might be willing to port to Linux. With Apple aggressively killing Carbon, Adobe is going to either drop the Mac or get porting *somehow*. I don't see Adobe killing support for the Mac. Apple has already proved that they are willing to replace Adobe for certain key apps. I don't think Adobe wants to risk Apple sniping directly at their photoshop market. So, I suspect Adobe will refactor Photoshop. If they use something like QT to do it, a Linux version might not be an extreme additional effort.
In episodes I, II, & III, I got the impression that the jedi order had gotten a bit fossilized, entrenched, political, and maybe just a little too comfortable in their exalted position.
I think it's pretty regrettable that Lucas botched the execution so badly. A better director might have had us inwardly cheering when the revolution came and the old power structures were wiped away. That way, he could have fucked with us further when it turned out that the revolution replaced a necrotic corrupt regime with a despotic regime.
In my perfect world, Star Wars I, II, & III would have been rated R for strong language, nudity, and disturbing images. Then again, Lucas probably wouldn't have sold nearly as many plastic figurines along with Happy Meals or whatever.
We heard that a number of NTP servers were synchronized to an atomic clock somewhere. Nuclear free NZ!
If you think about the BSD license in terms of an academic citation, it makes more sense.
In the original patch, it appeared that some Linux folk took some code, stripped the BSD copyright notice and put it under a GPL license. Viewed through an academic mindset, it sounds less like "building on existing research" and more like plagiarism. Were they legally entitled to do what they did? I suspect probably so. Still, it seems like bad form not to cite your sources.
-Peter
He was whining about the Symantec report showing that Vista's network stack had been vulnerable to classes of attacks that older TCP/IP stacks had long been fixed against. Afterward, I asked him why that sort of disclosure was so horribly irresponsible as he had asserted in his presentation. His reply was to ask me if I had kids? WTF? Basically he was trying to illustrate that it hurt Microsoft's feelings, and that ripping on Vista's early lackluster security was tantamount to insulting his children. Uh huh.
Overall, I wasn't that impressed by Steve Riley. He'd be a good gospel preacher. He's very charismatic. Unfortunately, I just wasn't impressed by the religion he was selling. Then again I tend to be more impressed by security scientists rather than security evangelists.
I've been a long time user of VMWare Workstation and have recently purchased Fusion (and I was using the betas). Fusion is a solid product if you want to just run an OS.
If, however, you want the advanced features of VMWare Workstation--multiple snapshots, simulated LANs with simulated packet loss, cheap clones, etc.--you will be disappointed with Fusion.
A lot of people don't need the features in VMWare Workstation. If you just need to "run Linux / OpenBSD / Solaris in Mac OS X" it's a slam dunk. If you need more, you're currently screwed. I personally hope that VMWare will make a workstation version for the Mac with all the whistles and bells. I'll pay for it.
Cheers,
Peter
Sorry I missed your message earlier. In the tarball, check out the INSTALL file. Short answer: run the setup.sh. It will ensure that the .desktop file gets added to the list of session types in gdm.
You, sir, get the prize for possessing a clue. Well said. GNUStep suffers because nobody makes cool stuff with it. Everything else suffers because they are using lesser frameworks :-)
I also agree with your assessment of ObjC / Cocoa as a technology. In terms of object orientation, Objective C isn't the best OOPL. Smalltalk, for one, seems like a marked improvement. Ruby and Python probably are too. But Objective C is still C. Interfacing C and C++ with ObjC / ObjC++ is much easier (and probably more elegant and robust) than many of the C-to-$FOO bridges that exist. So, in my estimation, ObjectiveC is nice because it combines a nice object model with the unbeatable compatibility of C. And the classes are a damn-sight better than the vast majority of the competition.
Cheers,
Peter
If you are on Intel rather than PPC you may want "libffi-dev" instead of "libffcall-dev"
Cheers,
Peter