Beaten by at least both icc and VC++ in speed of generated code and speed of compilation. GCC cannot do precompiled headers. Better than it used to be, yes. (I use and love gcc, but it isn't best-of-breed.)
Glibc, you moron
Hmm. Actually, not sure about this one. Slower on at least some tests, but I've never seen glibc comprehensively benchmarked against competing libcs.
Bash
Not sure, again. Haven't seen any bash vs tcsh/sh benchmarks. Could potentially be faster.
automake
Hmm. Show me a competing system that's slower.
emacs
Um...the competition is what, vi? Emacs is damn well *not* faster.
make
Just ran a quick test -- Solaris make runs about four times as fast as gmake.
tar
Tough to tell. Runs about as fast as Solaris tar. Might be faster.
Besides, I said "stunning performance". Linux is significantly faster than the competition, not "neck and neck, and maybe a little bit faster".
who know what it really means
Oh, get off your high horse. If you wanted to have absolute meanings, you should have used Esperanto. The standard use of "hacker" today is "one who breaks into computer systems". There are plenty of archaic uses of lots of English words. Get over it.
Thanks to Balmer and our good Linux-friendly friend news.com, we have more wonderful Microsoft quotes.
Balmer Quote 1: The truth is, we probably made (.Net) a little harder to understand than we (should) have.
Balmer Quote 2 (in which Balmer makes it quite plain that he's going to drive home the point that the marketroids prepped him with -- that XML is Good, money should be spent on XML, and.Net is obviously XML): Well, the benefit of.Net is XML...We take the XML connection and we extended it across both client and server -- while other guys are only server-focused. It's about connecting people to people, people to information, businesses to businesses, businesses to information, and so on. That is the benefit....it's a set of code we ship that...people use to help build applications that process XML information....it's getting to be conventional wisdom that the future of IT is around XML. But I'd like conventional wisdom to be that XML brings benefits today, and the best way to participate in the XML revolution -- in terms of user benefits and productivity -- is Visual Studio.Net.
Balmer Quote 3 (in which Balmer shows himself happily living in his own world): A Yankee Group study says 40 percent of corporations surveyed were looking at operating system alternatives such as Linux, in part because of the Microsoft licensing program. But I think they are okay with where they are.
Balmer Quote 4: The Linux [platform] hardly runs any applications, except a bunch of shareware stuff that's not very good.
Balmer Quote 5: There has yet to be any innovation, new features or new capabilities out of the Linux platform. [Me -- so how the hell has *Microsoft* pushed technology forward?] But I don't think anyone should expect anything innovative coming out of that [Linux] world.
Balmer Quote 6: And we are going to have as or more a community as Linux does. [Me -- in your wet dreams, Balmer]
Balmer Quote 7 (in which Balmer discusses the buggy nature of Windows):...next major Windows release, called Longhorn. I'm sure we will have some service packs in between.
I didn't even know that Monty had also done cdparanoia until recently. Great coder.
Here's to Xiph -- singlehandledly taking on the tech-media companies (Real/Apple/MS and tons of failed companies) and steadily gaining ground.
We've had propriatary media formats for a long time. (Incidently, propriatary file formats are one of the strongest weapons incumbents have against upstart open source projects). This is a big movement that's starting to cascade, with more companies joining the Xiph bandwagon daily (and little interest in the MPEG4 people).
GCC is a much better tool than Visual Studio for most people.
You could drop $100-$2000 on your development system for a product that's limited to few languages, doesn't support C anymore, and can't run anywhere but Windows, and has a UI that keeps changing, rendering old skills obsolete.
You could also get a software package that's freely downloadable, supports lots of languages (and keeps getting more), and runs on just about every software package known to mankind.
for $6, I can have me a Legal copy of any of the preceeding OSes...is not a sign of a monopoly, its a sign of a competitive business
This is called predatory pricing (unless you really think that total costs in producing and shipping that product to you were under $6) is is not only illegal but one of the top warning signs for a monopoly.
The only computer science classes you're going to get on Windows at Carnegie Mellon University is if you're a non-CS major taking intro CS classes. These are done using Metrowerks' suite (as opposed to MS's).
Everything else is done on Linux or Solaris. I'm taking a *video games* course that is taught on Linux.
Couldn't be a better place if you like doing your work in a UNIX environment.
Students are told in their third CS course that while they can turn in proofs written in Microsoft Equation Editor, that it will be harder, and that they are strongly recommended to learn LaTeX.
I still remember a philosophy professor that handed out an assignment in Word format.
I thought about complaining, but thought that it wasn't worth it, so I just printed it out at one of the clusters that have Windows installed.
The next day, in class, the professor said "due to overwhelming demand, future assignments will be given in PDF format..."
There's no reliance within the university on Microsoft file formats, and serious animosity to moving to anything that's available only from Microsoft.
If you want a good CS curriculum that isn't a bunch of regurgitated "how to design foo in Visual Studio", and you like UNIX...you're likely to like CMU.
For this problem, all you need is a heirarchical system.
I see what you're saying, and often this is right, but I'm not sure that it really is "all I need". One of the most impressive things about P2P networks (around the time swarming downloading was introduced) was the ability of P2P clients to find local connections (at the university adjoining your own, or at other people on your broadband ISP) and use them heavily.
Squid cannot do that. It works reasonably well, but while the Internet *is* roughly hierarchical, there's enough divergence from a hierarchy to make exploiting the gridlike nature worthwhile.
The other reason I find Freenet more promising than an approach like Squid's is that Squid will only help you out with Web traffic. Freenet cuts into the P2P explosion, as well as providing some other nice distributed, secure, anonymous services like email.
Ship the browser pre-configured to use an opaque proxy. I'd deliberately configure my system to use a proxy *if* I had a license agreement that said that my ISP would not retain proxy logs. It also wreaks havoc with stuff that isn't expecting the cache, and can't be disabled.
Email is filtered or blocked, the https is proxied, and most other services are on the chopping block as "not used by most users".
The only remnant of the true peer-based Internet is most network environments is https.
I'd like to see a big jump in stuff being routed through VPNs tunneling through https.
Linus didn't just wake up one morning and write [snip]. He wrote a kernel.
Which, from looking at HURD, Stallman's folks can't do very well.
That isn't the point. Linus came up with "Linux" after someone else suggested it. He didn't run around promoting the word "Linux" as the name for the distros -- it just happened. If Stallman wanted to influence the name, he should have done something long, long ago, back before the name fell into common usage. Now, he'd be trying to change the behavior of the world, and it's just not going to happen, any more than the terms "hacker" or "Free Software" will be used the way Stallman wants.
Furthermore, I really, *really* hate Stallman's name choices. They're difficult to pronouce, and don't fit with standard English (their logo is a gnu, so why the hell isn't "GNU" pronounced the same way?) He wanted to name it "Lignux"? Ugh, no. I'll skip it.
Besides, what GNU tool can you think of, with the possible exception of grep, that has as stunning performance in its field as the Linux kernel does?
I agree wholeheartedly. I've felt much the same way through the whole series of "Linux" and "GNU" naming complaints, but I've never been able to phrase it this well.
Frankly, a Linux system would suck pretty much (at least as a main workstation) without any of a large number of components. X, the kernel, the UNIX utilities, a text editor, initscripts...
So if someone wants to credit the GNU folks for their software, great. If someone wants to credit Linus for his kernel, great. But don't try changing the names of the distros -- the distro, the collection of tested and documented things, is their *own* production with immense value of its own. The distro names shouldn't be dependent upon their components in any way.
I can see the argument for calling Linux systems in general GNU/Linux systems. The problem is that that's longer, and lots of *other* systems happen to use GNU tools -- using Solaris w/o the GNU tools sucks. Saying GNU/Solaris is just a pain. Yet there *is* no other toolset (that I know of) for Linux other than the GNU toolset.
What Stallman is missing is that names aren't there to give credit. Linus just came up with "Linus" after someone else suggested it. Names are meant to be a useful, unique, recognizable, *short* identifier. Not a credit-granter -- that can go inside the product on about boxes, (Microsoft and Netscape slapping their company names on their products notwithstanding). Names are for the user.
So all in all, I think that Linux boxes should be called "Linux boxes" rather than "GNU/Linux boxes". The two have equivalent effective meaning, and one is easier to use (yes, you can go around like Stallman and explain what you mean to every blasted person by "Free Software", "GNU/Linux", "hackers", and so on, or just use the common definitions).
There's GNU grep, the Linux kernel, and Red Hat Linux. All make sense, and I wouldn't want to see any change.
Red Hat needs to *stop* compiling ide-cd support into their damn kernels. IDE-CD is not sexy, it doesn't support burners, and it causes more support problems than anything else.
I'm not an Everquest player, but this seems quite unusual. I'm assuming both that the limitation you're talking about is imposed by video memory and that you do not have 512 MB of video memory.
Perhaps you aren't using AGP texturing for one reason or another?
and noted that most characters appeared at least partially nude
The problem is that there's been a sense of "damn the noise and heat, give me speed" among PC users for too long, and it's really caused a distortion in the market. Hot, noisy systems that run 50% faster.
The Barracudas are nice, but here are a couple of other thoughts:
Current x86 processors pretty much suck from a heat perspective. You can't really get below 40 watts. I believe there's still a fanless Cyrix processor in production, but it's kind of slow. You might consider a PPC box from Apple.
There are "quiet hard drive" cases. Unfortunately, they generally can't cope with the ventilation demands of 7200RPM drives -- another nice reason to get the Barracudas, which run cool. With 5400 RPM drives, though, you can use these.
There are cases designed to reduce noise. Haven't tried these. Also, haven't tried "silence mods" by adding sound-absorbing material like cork to the inside walls.
There are "quiet power supplies". Haven't tried these either...think they mostly just put a nicer fan in.
Stick with large, low-RPM fans. They're quieter. There are also a few expensive fans designed to be really, really quiet.
Akamai is nice, but it's not cheap, and even the enormous and far-flung Akamai network doesn't have the degree of coverage that a large P2P network could provide running on clients.
And squid, while closer to the holy grail, is much more limited. It's a hierarchical system, and can't act as a "grid" of computers. You always depend on your parents (well, if you're a real squid nut, you might have a few siblings).
Freenet has the most potential I've seen -- turns the whole network into a big, amorphous cache.
I really wish ISPs would deploy Freenet nodes.
Unfortunately, they seem to be happy with their damned transparent proxies (what the hell happened to *normal* proxies?)
I can only think of a single KDE/Qt app that blows the GNOME/GTK equivalent out of the water, and that's licq, which Red Hat *does* ship.
* Konqueror? Not as widely used as Moz. * Anything in the KDE office suite? Not even close to Open Office, even for the most die-hard KDE fans. * Kmail? Not as comfortable as Evolution for people used to Outlook, and doesn't have PIM/schedule management a la Outlook (frankly, I think everyone should be using mutt, which has the best PGP support of all time, but...:-) ).
Actually, I take it back. There is no GNOME/GTK equivalent at all to kcheat, a program designed to let you cheat in video games by editing memory. Kind of silly that there's nothing else like this for Linux, esp. since kcheat is KDE 1...
And obviously, a "sanitation engineer" is higher up on the food chain than a "trash man"?
No one where I've ever been expects a "coder" to do nothing but code. Everyone does some design, and unless they're strictly project management only, probably some coding and debugging.
"Coder" is just an informal term for "software engineer", which could be someone with a computer science, math, or hell, physics degree.
Seriously, do you know anyone that does nothing but "coding", that would qualify to be a "coder" under your definition? That does absolutely no design at all?
Technicians think engineers aren't in touch with the real world and are overpaid. Engineers think that scientists aren't practical. Scientists thing that engineers are a bit too dim-witted to do something lofty like "advancing their field".
It's all semantics, and if you let it go, you wind up a lot happier and getting along those "other classes" quite a bit better.
...I'd like to see US *students* being as smart as Indian students. At one US university I attended, the overwhelming majority of the computer science faculty were Indian. At my current one, about a third of the students are Indian, and many of the most impressive students are Indian.
India is beating the living crap out of the US in CS. Some damn fine intellectuals, and lots of software shops.
They're going to drive down our luxurious US salaries...:-(
You know, doing "warez" replacements on letters is awfully easy for a piece of software to do.
If I was writing a password cracker, the first thing I'd have it do is try substituting "3" for "E", etc.
Yet people always have this smug feeling that "warezifying" their password (where the original is often common English) has just made it unbreakably secure. Oh, or tacking a "1" on the end of it.
More importantly, if you're working with non-shadowed passwords and can glean *any* passwords from/etc/passwds, there are more serious security issues than some user choosing a weak password.
The GPL says that if you give someone a binary copy of a program, you need to also provide source upon request, at no more than a reasonable packaging fee.
There is absolutely no requirement to make a distro of Linux downloadable -- as a matter of fact, I believe SuSE does *not* let people download CD images (or at least they have a major lag time between shelf releases and ISO releases).
The *only* requirement is that if someone purchases a copy of your Linux distro *and* if they ask for a copy of the source, you have to get them a copy of your source at a low price. That's it. You can sell source CDs instead of allowing downloads if you want.
Remember, Linux is free as in speech. Any beer freeness is incidental.
Slashdot Mirror
Gcc, you jackass.
Beaten by at least both icc and VC++ in speed of generated code and speed of compilation. GCC cannot do precompiled headers. Better than it used to be, yes. (I use and love gcc, but it isn't best-of-breed.)
Glibc, you moron
Hmm. Actually, not sure about this one. Slower on at least some tests, but I've never seen glibc comprehensively benchmarked against competing libcs.
Bash
Not sure, again. Haven't seen any bash vs tcsh/sh benchmarks. Could potentially be faster.
automake
Hmm. Show me a competing system that's slower.
emacs
Um...the competition is what, vi? Emacs is damn well *not* faster.
make
Just ran a quick test -- Solaris make runs about four times as fast as gmake.
tar
Tough to tell. Runs about as fast as Solaris tar. Might be faster.
sed
super sed is faster.
patch
Could be. Haven't seen benchmarks of it.
nethack
Not a GNU project.
cvs
Not a GNU project.
Besides, I said "stunning performance". Linux is significantly faster than the competition, not "neck and neck, and maybe a little bit faster".
who know what it really means
Oh, get off your high horse. If you wanted to have absolute meanings, you should have used Esperanto. The standard use of "hacker" today is "one who breaks into computer systems". There are plenty of archaic uses of lots of English words. Get over it.
You can't stop the evolution of language.
Well, you can get 128MB for under $90 already, so it's going to go to 256MB pretty soon, and that's only one hop away...
Thanks to Balmer and our good Linux-friendly friend news.com, we have more wonderful Microsoft quotes.
.Net is obviously XML): Well, the benefit of .Net is XML...We take the XML connection and we extended it across both client and server -- while other guys are only server-focused. It's about connecting people to people, people to information, businesses to businesses, businesses to information, and so on. That is the benefit....it's a set of code we ship that...people use to help build applications that process XML information....it's getting to be conventional wisdom that the future of IT is around XML. But I'd like conventional wisdom to be that XML brings benefits today, and the best way to participate in the XML revolution -- in terms of user benefits and productivity -- is Visual Studio.Net.
...next major Windows release, called Longhorn. I'm sure we will have some service packs in between.
Balmer Quote 1: The truth is, we probably made (.Net) a little harder to understand than we (should) have.
Balmer Quote 2 (in which Balmer makes it quite plain that he's going to drive home the point that the marketroids prepped him with -- that XML is Good, money should be spent on XML, and
Balmer Quote 3 (in which Balmer shows himself happily living in his own world): A Yankee Group study says 40 percent of corporations surveyed were looking at operating system alternatives such as Linux, in part because of the Microsoft licensing program. But I think they are okay with where they are.
Balmer Quote 4: The Linux [platform] hardly runs any applications, except a bunch of shareware stuff that's not very good.
Balmer Quote 5: There has yet to be any innovation, new features or new capabilities out of the Linux platform. [Me -- so how the hell has *Microsoft* pushed technology forward?] But I don't think anyone should expect anything innovative coming out of that [Linux] world.
Balmer Quote 6: And we are going to have as or more a community as Linux does. [Me -- in your wet dreams, Balmer]
Balmer Quote 7 (in which Balmer discusses the buggy nature of Windows):
You also get what you pay for.
Unless, of course, you're a customer of buy.com, in which case you either get what you pay for quickly at low cost or don't get it at all...
I didn't even know that Monty had also done cdparanoia until recently. Great coder.
Here's to Xiph -- singlehandledly taking on the tech-media companies (Real/Apple/MS and tons of failed companies) and steadily gaining ground.
We've had propriatary media formats for a long time. (Incidently, propriatary file formats are one of the strongest weapons incumbents have against upstart open source projects). This is a big movement that's starting to cascade, with more companies joining the Xiph bandwagon daily (and little interest in the MPEG4 people).
I have to agree.
GCC is a much better tool than Visual Studio for most people.
You could drop $100-$2000 on your development system for a product that's limited to few languages, doesn't support C anymore, and can't run anywhere but Windows, and has a UI that keeps changing, rendering old skills obsolete.
You could also get a software package that's freely downloadable, supports lots of languages (and keeps getting more), and runs on just about every software package known to mankind.
The choice seems pretty straightforward to me.
That's ludicrous.
for $6, I can have me a Legal copy of any of the preceeding OSes...is not a sign of a monopoly, its a sign of a competitive business
This is called predatory pricing (unless you really think that total costs in producing and shipping that product to you were under $6) is is not only illegal but one of the top warning signs for a monopoly.
The only computer science classes you're going to get on Windows at Carnegie Mellon University is if you're a non-CS major taking intro CS classes. These are done using Metrowerks' suite (as opposed to MS's).
Everything else is done on Linux or Solaris. I'm taking a *video games* course that is taught on Linux.
Couldn't be a better place if you like doing your work in a UNIX environment.
Students are told in their third CS course that while they can turn in proofs written in Microsoft Equation Editor, that it will be harder, and that they are strongly recommended to learn LaTeX.
I still remember a philosophy professor that handed out an assignment in Word format.
I thought about complaining, but thought that it wasn't worth it, so I just printed it out at one of the clusters that have Windows installed.
The next day, in class, the professor said "due to overwhelming demand, future assignments will be given in PDF format..."
There's no reliance within the university on Microsoft file formats, and serious animosity to moving to anything that's available only from Microsoft.
If you want a good CS curriculum that isn't a bunch of regurgitated "how to design foo in Visual Studio", and you like UNIX...you're likely to like CMU.
For this problem, all you need is a heirarchical system.
I see what you're saying, and often this is right, but I'm not sure that it really is "all I need". One of the most impressive things about P2P networks (around the time swarming downloading was introduced) was the ability of P2P clients to find local connections (at the university adjoining your own, or at other people on your broadband ISP) and use them heavily.
Squid cannot do that. It works reasonably well, but while the Internet *is* roughly hierarchical, there's enough divergence from a hierarchy to make exploiting the gridlike nature worthwhile.
The other reason I find Freenet more promising than an approach like Squid's is that Squid will only help you out with Web traffic. Freenet cuts into the P2P explosion, as well as providing some other nice distributed, secure, anonymous services like email.
Ship the browser pre-configured to use an opaque proxy. I'd deliberately configure my system to use a proxy *if* I had a license agreement that said that my ISP would not retain proxy logs. It also wreaks havoc with stuff that isn't expecting the cache, and can't be disabled.
Email is filtered or blocked, the https is proxied, and most other services are on the chopping block as "not used by most users".
The only remnant of the true peer-based Internet is most network environments is https.
I'd like to see a big jump in stuff being routed through VPNs tunneling through https.
Linus didn't just wake up one morning and write [snip]. He wrote a kernel.
Which, from looking at HURD, Stallman's folks can't do very well.
That isn't the point. Linus came up with "Linux" after someone else suggested it. He didn't run around promoting the word "Linux" as the name for the distros -- it just happened. If Stallman wanted to influence the name, he should have done something long, long ago, back before the name fell into common usage. Now, he'd be trying to change the behavior of the world, and it's just not going to happen, any more than the terms "hacker" or "Free Software" will be used the way Stallman wants.
Furthermore, I really, *really* hate Stallman's name choices. They're difficult to pronouce, and don't fit with standard English (their logo is a gnu, so why the hell isn't "GNU" pronounced the same way?) He wanted to name it "Lignux"? Ugh, no. I'll skip it.
Besides, what GNU tool can you think of, with the possible exception of grep, that has as stunning performance in its field as the Linux kernel does?
I agree wholeheartedly. I've felt much the same way through the whole series of "Linux" and "GNU" naming complaints, but I've never been able to phrase it this well.
Frankly, a Linux system would suck pretty much (at least as a main workstation) without any of a large number of components. X, the kernel, the UNIX utilities, a text editor, initscripts...
So if someone wants to credit the GNU folks for their software, great. If someone wants to credit Linus for his kernel, great. But don't try changing the names of the distros -- the distro, the collection of tested and documented things, is their *own* production with immense value of its own. The distro names shouldn't be dependent upon their components in any way.
I can see the argument for calling Linux systems in general GNU/Linux systems. The problem is that that's longer, and lots of *other* systems happen to use GNU tools -- using Solaris w/o the GNU tools sucks. Saying GNU/Solaris is just a pain. Yet there *is* no other toolset (that I know of) for Linux other than the GNU toolset.
What Stallman is missing is that names aren't there to give credit. Linus just came up with "Linus" after someone else suggested it. Names are meant to be a useful, unique, recognizable, *short* identifier. Not a credit-granter -- that can go inside the product on about boxes, (Microsoft and Netscape slapping their company names on their products notwithstanding). Names are for the user.
So all in all, I think that Linux boxes should be called "Linux boxes" rather than "GNU/Linux boxes". The two have equivalent effective meaning, and one is easier to use (yes, you can go around like Stallman and explain what you mean to every blasted person by "Free Software", "GNU/Linux", "hackers", and so on, or just use the common definitions).
There's GNU grep, the Linux kernel, and Red Hat Linux. All make sense, and I wouldn't want to see any change.
If you've never configured from the console, I pity your skills.
Yeah...because obviously using a near-identical interface on a *console* makes one an uber-kernel-hacker.
Good point.
Red Hat needs to *stop* compiling ide-cd support into their damn kernels. IDE-CD is not sexy, it doesn't support burners, and it causes more support problems than anything else.
They should use ide-scsi by default.
I eagerly searched for open-source/free software alternatives that achieve the same integrated functionality, and came up lacking.
What, precisely, is it that you want "integrated"?
Administrators using Cygwin...
CygWin is awfully slow. When I'm on Windows, I stick with the native, though less capable (i.e. no usable alternative shell) UnxUtils and CygWin.
God, Windows has an *awful* virtual terminal, though. I keep wishing that I could use PuTTY's interface to talk to the local machine directly.
I cannot load all the models with 512 MB RAM
I'm not an Everquest player, but this seems quite unusual. I'm assuming both that the limitation you're talking about is imposed by video memory and that you do not have 512 MB of video memory.
Perhaps you aren't using AGP texturing for one reason or another?
and noted that most characters appeared at least partially nude
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Microsoft forking Win NT from the OS/2 effort
NT has OS/2 roots?
I'm in a class taught by one of the people that recently was doing work on the UT engine, and he seems to pretty strongly prefer OGL.
Come to think of it, Nvidia liked OGL over DX as well (easier to get support for new features in).
On my system, which (at one point) had WinNT 4.0 on it as well as my Linux install, running Q3A yielded slightly better frame rates under Linux.
I've been looking for this for a while.
The problem is that there's been a sense of "damn the noise and heat, give me speed" among PC users for too long, and it's really caused a distortion in the market. Hot, noisy systems that run 50% faster.
The Barracudas are nice, but here are a couple of other thoughts:
Current x86 processors pretty much suck from a heat perspective. You can't really get below 40 watts. I believe there's still a fanless Cyrix processor in production, but it's kind of slow. You might consider a PPC box from Apple.
There are "quiet hard drive" cases. Unfortunately, they generally can't cope with the ventilation demands of 7200RPM drives -- another nice reason to get the Barracudas, which run cool. With 5400 RPM drives, though, you can use these.
There are cases designed to reduce noise. Haven't tried these. Also, haven't tried "silence mods" by adding sound-absorbing material like cork to the inside walls.
There are "quiet power supplies". Haven't tried these either...think they mostly just put a nicer fan in.
Stick with large, low-RPM fans. They're quieter. There are also a few expensive fans designed to be really, really quiet.
I miss my (literally silent) Mac Plus.
Akamai is nice, but it's not cheap, and even the enormous and far-flung Akamai network doesn't have the degree of coverage that a large P2P network could provide running on clients.
And squid, while closer to the holy grail, is much more limited. It's a hierarchical system, and can't act as a "grid" of computers. You always depend on your parents (well, if you're a real squid nut, you might have a few siblings).
Freenet has the most potential I've seen -- turns the whole network into a big, amorphous cache.
I really wish ISPs would deploy Freenet nodes.
Unfortunately, they seem to be happy with their damned transparent proxies (what the hell happened to *normal* proxies?)
Slashdot is going to overload Fortune?
I can only think of a single KDE/Qt app that blows the GNOME/GTK equivalent out of the water, and that's licq, which Red Hat *does* ship.
* Konqueror? Not as widely used as Moz.
* Anything in the KDE office suite? Not even close to Open Office, even for the most die-hard KDE fans.
* Kmail? Not as comfortable as Evolution for people used to Outlook, and doesn't have PIM/schedule management a la Outlook (frankly, I think everyone should be using mutt, which has the best PGP support of all time, but...:-) ).
Actually, I take it back. There is no GNOME/GTK equivalent at all to kcheat, a program designed to let you cheat in video games by editing memory. Kind of silly that there's nothing else like this for Linux, esp. since kcheat is KDE 1...
Oh, for Chrissake.
And obviously, a "sanitation engineer" is higher up on the food chain than a "trash man"?
No one where I've ever been expects a "coder" to do nothing but code. Everyone does some design, and unless they're strictly project management only, probably some coding and debugging.
"Coder" is just an informal term for "software engineer", which could be someone with a computer science, math, or hell, physics degree.
Seriously, do you know anyone that does nothing but "coding", that would qualify to be a "coder" under your definition? That does absolutely no design at all?
Technicians think engineers aren't in touch with the real world and are overpaid. Engineers think that scientists aren't practical. Scientists thing that engineers are a bit too dim-witted to do something lofty like "advancing their field".
It's all semantics, and if you let it go, you wind up a lot happier and getting along those "other classes" quite a bit better.
...I'd like to see US *students* being as smart as Indian students. At one US university I attended, the overwhelming majority of the computer science faculty were Indian. At my current one, about a third of the students are Indian, and many of the most impressive students are Indian.
India is beating the living crap out of the US in CS. Some damn fine intellectuals, and lots of software shops.
They're going to drive down our luxurious US salaries...:-(
You know, doing "warez" replacements on letters is awfully easy for a piece of software to do.
/etc/passwds, there are more serious security issues than some user choosing a weak password.
If I was writing a password cracker, the first thing I'd have it do is try substituting "3" for "E", etc.
Yet people always have this smug feeling that "warezifying" their password (where the original is often common English) has just made it unbreakably secure. Oh, or tacking a "1" on the end of it.
More importantly, if you're working with non-shadowed passwords and can glean *any* passwords from
The GPL says that if you give someone a binary copy of a program, you need to also provide source upon request, at no more than a reasonable packaging fee.
There is absolutely no requirement to make a distro of Linux downloadable -- as a matter of fact, I believe SuSE does *not* let people download CD images (or at least they have a major lag time between shelf releases and ISO releases).
The *only* requirement is that if someone purchases a copy of your Linux distro *and* if they ask for a copy of the source, you have to get them a copy of your source at a low price. That's it. You can sell source CDs instead of allowing downloads if you want.
Remember, Linux is free as in speech. Any beer freeness is incidental.