I doubt that the analyst had anything to do with the writing in the interview -- I would imagine that, y'know, the interviewer did it.
The errors seemed to be typos of the sort that I make on Slashdot when revising my sentences, rather than spelling or grammatical errors -- it seemed to be more an unproofread draft than an incompetently produced final.
I can respect, say, IBM, and still respect someone that left (or was fired).
As for her knowledge base, she is not a developer. I'm going to bet that you come up short on knowledge of Linux relative to Linus and his lieutenants. That's life -- some folks are going to know more about something than other folks. However, scorning someone because they're currently below you in knowledge of something is just plain ridiculous. I know that I'd be called "washed up" and a "quack" in almost all areas -- I think that there are not many things that I'm the best person in the world at. However, I have no reason to think that she is not technically very competent for an analyst. The fact that she is taking Linux seriously and objectively is enough for me to give her credibility (if anything, she seems to be a bit too generous when it comes to Linux).
Furthermore, I'm quite pleased that her estimates almost exactly mirror my own for Linux desktop market share growth -- extremely gratifying that someone who does market share research has come up with the same estimates that I have (and naturally, since I believe my own predictions to be the best available estimates, or I wouldn't have made them, I can only accord her the same respect of giving her prediction the same credit:-) ):
Parity takes a long time... and especially against a convicted monopolist. I think the milestone to look for is when Linux takes 10% of the market. It's all about when corporate IT says that they will use Linux as their primary desktop operating system. This doesn't mean that users have to give up on Windows applications, but I think we will see a decline in the use of the Windows operating system on the desktop.
A number of companies are doing pilots right now, but I think the timeframe is more like the next two years. In that time we'll see tremendous growth in the Linux desktop. "Tremendous" means that we're going to see it move from being a fringe market to something that ISVs and hardware vendors are porting to and supporting.
Because analysts tend to play the role of pundit they can come across as insightful or just plain idiotic. [note: fixed typo on "plain"]
Best quote ever. Darn, it's refreshing to find an honest, non-pompous analyst.
Yes, one thing. I go to a lot of events where I can be the only woman in the room with a bunch of guys, and that's fine. I have no issues with that, really, except that I just think that more diversity in the Linux ecosystem is always good. I think it is great that Pamela Jones created Groklaw. It would be great to see more women developers involved too- there are a few, but seeing more of them would actually be better. The growth of Linux in India, Brazil, China and other countries may foster an increase of women in the community. I think that's probably one of the things that, if I could effect any change, it would be to encourage more women to enter the Linux ecosystem.
I've tended to find that as a very rough, general rule, women tend to do a better job of getting along with people than men, and take longer to get angry. If I had a choice between a male or female manager, and was choosing only based on ability to get people to work together and only with knowledge of the gender, I'd probably pick the female manager.
This is especially true for the open-source world, where nobody is *made* to work together. Communities form around how well people deal with each other and work together.
My guess as to why there are few female developers comes down to drive. This isn't that there aren't driven females, but there is a difference in the psychology here. I was reading an article (listed on fark and Metafilter) on why many fields of science generally have breakthroughs done by relatively young people -- developments and interest in work for the sake of work and glory fall off after a certain point. The article drew a link between drive to impress females and the attempt to rack up accomplishments under ones name. (I got a kick out of this, and it stuck in my head -- apparently, my subconscious has been trying hard to improve my sex life by convincing me to code up new algorithms). Anyway, point is that there's at least some research evidence for the male personality being an easier fit for OSS.
Linus' claim for support of "a law to get geeks laid" could have been OSS's undoing.:-)
I find it funny that you say gentoo cannot get grub to work on the first boot on your systems when gentoo does not in fact install grub... you do.
What you actually mean is that left to install grub on your own you can't make it work. Personal problem? I think so.
The question is whether it is reasonable to insult him for it.
I do not consider myself an inept Linux user. I am certainly not the most knowledgeable person out there, but I have been using Linux heavily and exclusively for about five years now. I contribute to a number of open-source projects, have done some driver and other low-level work, and am pretty familiar with how my system and OS work compared to most of the people I know. I've blown away my system pretty severely and repaired it by hand many times. I set up newer kernels, debugged many a nasty problem with diagnostic tools, and learned a lot of the interesting quirks of Linux. This doesn't mean that I'm the greatest tech guru out there -- it does mean that I have an interest in learning how things work and have done so for some time. I would even venture to guess that I probably know my way around a Linux box better than you do.
I started playing around with grub a while back -- I wanted to see what it was like. I could not get it working the first time I started poking at it, and ended up putting it off for ages until I decided to go back and spent several days getting it to work.
Grub is not trivial to learn or use, even if it is "just a bootloader". Insulting someone because they have difficulty using it seems quite ridiculous.
Among the pitfalls I ran into with grub:
* Grub uses a completely different system for naming devices than Linux does. In Linux, my ATA drives are named/dev/hda,/dev/hdb, etc. This is the same naming convention lilo uses. In Grub, my drives are named (hd0, hd1), etc. This is quite unintutitive to Linux folks.
* Grub was neither (at the time I first started playing with it) very well documented nor long on good Linux-specific tutorials.
* Grub has a concept of "/" (generally starting in/boot) that is different from the Linux concept of "/". This was not obvious to me the first time I started poking away.
* Grub does not provide the best diagnostic output in the world. It is a bootloader, so it's not easy to use diagnostic tools on it to figure out what exactly it might be using wrong.
* When playing around with a bootloader (or anything that mucks around with the disk at a raw level) you generally want to be terribly careful if you have anything already on the disk. This makes experimentation even more difficult.
* Red Hat builds grub with a different setup than the default mode of grub operation -- I have a/boot/grub and a/boot/boot/grub symlinked to/boot/grub to convince things to work properly. This was not immediately obvious to me.
* I had a motherboard with an old BIOS at the time that happened to hang if it detected a particular hard drive at boot. I worked around the problem in the only way possible -- by telling the BIOS to ignore the drive size and letting Linux detect it on its own way. Possibly as a result, grub worked with an entirely different set of hard drive numbers when I ran it in Linux and when I ran it as a bootloader-initiated stand alone shell (i.e. in a situation where I had essentially no way to troubleshoot problems). Lilo, which uses Linux drive names, cruised right along with no difficulties, unlike grub.
* grub uses many similar-but-different features relative to lilo. My grub.conf contains "default=0", where I number potential choices. My lilo.conf contains "default=linux.bak" -- I name potential choices.
Finally, grub provides some nice features that lilo doesn't, but the functionality that I gained was probably not worth the effort that I put into getting grub working properly on a s
No offense but as soon as LucasArt steps out of the starwars zone, they are plain aweful.
Lucasarts and Sierra were the two main developers advancing the adventure game genre for many years, and the list of best classic adventure games reads like a list of their titles. I'm not sure what non-Star Wars Lucasarts games you dislike so much, but I'm doubtful that you're thinking of their adventure games -- which FT2 and S&M2 would have been.
I can believe that Lucasarts published poor games at some point in time, but they have an extremely strong reputation in the adventure game arena. I do not know of any poor adventure games that they produced. Honestly, I cannot think of another game company that is as known for such long-term good leadership in their field. Perhaps id Software for FPS-style games.
Now, this doesn't mean that S&M2 and FT2 would have been good. It does, however, mean that any bias toward their new games based on their history should really be positive, not negative.
I can't understand why they can't make *both* games. It's not as if Star Wars games and Lucasarts adventure games compete against each other for the same demographic. If Lucasarts was losing money on their adventure games, that would be one thing.
The justification for cancelling Sam and Max 2 was that the game wasn't turning out well, that it wasn't fun. *That* might be reasonable. I'm more than a little surprised that FT2 could also be bad, though.
It's not a huge deal. Like Bioware transforming like a phoenix into Obsidian, Lucasarts' adventure team will wind up at a new company or companies somewhere. I feel for them, but they have a solid reputation to bank on.
Thank you for the link -- but this doesn't support his statement. I was guessing that that might have been what he was thinking of, but that is not for regular wiretap requests. That is an explicit set of cases that are limited for intelligence use, and such use is subject to oversight.
Furthermore, FISA was just in the news two years ago for denying a request for a wiretap (and criticising Department of Justice people involved with requesting it as being involved with surveillance abuses).
But you're still missing the point. If its so bad then why the almost unanimous support for it from the House and Senate regardless of party affiliation? If it is so bad, then wouldn't you think some Democrat or Republican senator would rally against it? Even Ted Kennedy voted for it!
You can almost always push something like this through in a time of national fear. In a national emergency, there is tremendous pressure put on legislators to "stand together" with the President and legislative branch. Yes, legislators shouldn't do this, but they *do* do so, and it's not as if the Executive Branch is unaware of it -- 9/11 provided a fabulous opportunity to push through bills relating to limiting civil rights and increasing police powers. The Executive Branch bears significant responsibility here, in my mind, because it was the easiest place to avoid the law modification that took place.
Would the PATRIOT Act pass today, in a more cool-headed environment? I doubt it.
Should the legislators who voted on the PATRIOT Act take some blame? Of course. However, many legislators (from both parties) are now taking the embarassing stance that, yes, they should not have allowed the PATRIOT Act through. It takes a lot to make legislators willing to publically accept blame and reverse positions, and I can't ask for much more from them to be done than what appears to be happening. I have not seen that degree of public support for the limitation or elimination of the PATRIOT Act from the Bush administration.
What if it were written with strict guidlines, would you still not like it?
I'd have to see a revised version. I can't make a claim of support or non-support without seeing what might go through.
I *do* think that there would probably have to be a couple of changes made:
* A replacement PATRIOT Act should be several broken-up bills, where individual power grants are each voted on. The bundling of elements in acts is where most of the abuses of our current legislative system seem to come from, and something that is very disturbing when it comes to altering protections civilians have against governmental abuse.
* I do not think I would agree to an act that allowed judicial bypass for wiretaps, with the following possible single proviso: If the FBI must obtain data *immediately*, the delay of which might pose grievious harm to the Unitd States and cannot afford judicial review, they may obtain the data now and undergo regular judicial review later. Such use would have to be periodically subject to an overview board, and could not be held secret. I doubt that this is a valid complaint, given that current wiretap orders can be granted within the day, but it's one of the few ways I can think of that PATRIOT might fail.
DAldredge, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You're a partisan mudslinger first, and an American second. I doubt that there's any room in there for much appreciation of the Bill of Rights, and the affirmative good that the ACLU has brought to its defense.
DAldredge is a long-term troll. He's had a well-earned place on my foes list for quite some time now. He was just trying to provoke a response.
They would. I can't imagine they'd feel good about it, but anyone would in that position.
There are cases in which I would be willing to make the effort to withhold information. They would be extreme, such as a major whistleblower on administration actions that I felt was acting ethically. If you had the identity of, say, Deep Throat, would *you* release it?
The problem is that the FBI very deliberately puts on on the spot when they demand data. They don't send you a nice letter that you can read and ponder about, and maybe go with to a lawyer or the EFF/ACLU.
I *would* raise a stink about what they've done, though. I think it's terribly nasty and clever, how the PATRIOT Act makes a nice PR move by preventing people from revealing that there has been information demanded of them. You can't reveal abuses, because otherwise you wind up in jail.
You may believe that the Patriot Act is G.W's tyrrany and that Conservatives are "evil", but I assure you, there are very few people in Congress right now who are opposed to it, regardless of party affiliation.
The PATRIOT Act got a lot of people pissed off -- ordinary folks, even. It contains a lot of rather Orwellian bits. A bunch of organizations were very vocal about it, and there was a TV campaign run against it.
Because John Kerry firghtens the hell out of me on so many different levels, and I am convinced that if Congress re-ratified the Patriot Act, Kerry would _NOT_ veto it.
First, we already know what Bush did -- he *didn't* veto it. Kerry is an unknown.
I would be interested in hearing your support of your claim that Kerry would be more in favor of expanding ease of government surveillance than Bush. The only Kerry input I've heard on the issue has been regarding revalations that the FBI was building a file on Kerry for his antiwar work during Vietnam. Kerry stated that he was disturbed about the extent to which the FBI was able to monitor and build up such a complete file.
I feel lucky today that 9/11 was an attack by planes and not a nuclear weapon. Until Islamic Societies mellow out, we _WILL_ have that risk. I personally am convinced that its not a matter of "if", but rather "when".
This is one thing I have a problem with. You have people in a large number of places that are frightened of US oppression, have little means of fighting back conventionally, and have reached the point of desperation that they are willing to give up their own lives to try to advance anti-US efforts. I cannot understand how invading a country, occupying it, establishing martial law, suppressing the press, and placing in power a puppet government is going to solve this problem. Iraq never attacked us. Individuals living in the Middle East did because of fear and dislike. Bush has, instead of solving the problem, made things worse with Iraq.
Taking on Saddam Hussein is not an easy thing to do. In fact, attacking Saddam has already knocked one President out of office and it may very well knock another out. The Bush Administration was fully aware of this when they made the decision to invade.
That's not the point. I have issues with:
* A president misleading the American people, the people who hired *him* to do his job. Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, and in taking the move to attack Iraq, Bush severely damaged America's reputation abroad -- the US has not caused negative waves like this for a long time. Clinton was impeached for lying about a blowjob. I think that Bush could at least be held to the standard of being honest when it comes to issues relating to leading the country (and issues germane to us forcing young men and women of our country to die -- if we do so, it should damned well be with honest information).
* True value of his decisions -- whether they really damaged the United States. Bush has tried (and failed) to support invading Iraq with each of the following claims or implications: "Saddamn backed terrorists", "Saddam is building weapons of mass destruction", and "Saddam is a clear and present danger to the United States". Every single one of these was shot down. The latest that I've heard from the pro-war movement is "the world is better off without Saddam". I'm not entirely sure that this is true. The man was definitely a hard man, and had at one point in history flaunted the United States. He invaded another country for their resources. However, he had been slapped back, and showed no signs of trying to do the same thing again. Iraq is not a gentle place, and there is no guarantee that whatever structure eventually takes place will be better, for either the people of Iraq or of the people of the United States. We had spent a good deal of effort and money understanding Saddam. Saddam
Screw semantics -- the article says that seventy thousand phone connections were intercepted. I find that damned unacceptable. The FBI could not close their case without listening to *seventy thousand phone calls*?
even though most of you have never read it, nor have any idea what it actually does.
I'd be willing to bet that the typical Slashdot reader is more informed than the typical Joe on what the PATRIOT Act is and means from the articles here. I am also willing to bet that the typical Slashdot reader opposes (more strongly than the average Joe, at least) the PATRIOT Act. This is an interesting correlation.
As for reading it -- the PATRIOT Act is a very large piece of legal text, and reading the thing in its entirety and original form is not, I think, reasonable to expect everyone to do. It might be a good thing, but I have never read my state's full legal code, even though I am governed by it and could go to jail for violating it.
If there was no Patriot Act, you guys would bash the President for not having something in place.
Well, I can't speak for everyone on Slashdot, but I personally would not be complaining about the lack of PATRIOT.
I hope you understand that the Patriot Act passed with only 3 no votes. So even if he did veto it, it would still be enacted. So you all should be bashing your local congress/senate person for voting for it
I can't agree, for a number of reasons.
a) The Bush administration was the originator of the PATRIOT Act. Congress didn't get together and say "gee, it would be really great if judges were cut out of the law enforcement loop...let's make an act allowing this!" That's all Ashcroft.
b) Saying that "because element X also did something wrong, you should not complain about element Y" is not correct reasoning. Perhaps they should be recieving flak that they are currently not; that does not mean that Bush should not be complained at.
c) Just because they voted for it does *not* mean that they would override a veto of it -- that Bush vetoing the vote would not have stopped PATRIOT. There's a significant political difference between the two.
It is interesting seeing a Bush supporter on Slashdot, though.
I admit that my Eastern history is not really up to snuff, but I don't remember any point in history where Japan took chunks of China long enough to both worry about defending it to the north *and* worried about improving northern defenses (much less decorating them).
I can't even figure out what major Tokugawa construction project you might be referring to. I can't find anything other than a number of castles that were built.
Apparently, one of the edicts of the Tokugawa era (not sure which Lord Tokugawa you're referring to) was that each province was required to have a castle. This resulted in a lot of castle-building, so it's hard to figure out exactly which one you're thinking of. I can't easily find any reference to a building at the end of a region.
Anyone who is inteligent and bored can crack just about anything in relatively short order.
I do not think that you could teach an intelligent but bored person with no technical experience to "crack just about anything" in even a year, and while "relatively short order" isn't that well-defined, at least for me a year does not fit into that category.
1) Miguel recognizes the fact that Microsoft is big, doesn't play nicely, and doesn't like having other people in its sandbox.
2) Miguel presumably believes that Linux is a superior system -- that given the opportunity, users will prefer Linux.
3) Miguel presumably believes that a primary reason Microsoft retains its position is because of barriers to interoperability established by Microsoft. By promoting their own, closed file formats and protocols, Microsoft makes it difficult for customers to move to other systems.
4) Miguel improves interoperability between Windows and Linux, reducing the barriers that Microsoft has worked so hard to establish, that prevent people from using Linux as a full or partial subsitute for their own products.
Then, once barriers to transition have been eliminated, as long as OSS developers and distro providers are providing a superior alternative, users can and will switch.
Open source is _not_ about competing with anybody else. It is _not_ the goal to create a competing technology to win market share or anything. Open source is an exercise in technology, invention and freedom.
In a competitive world, that would be true. The problem is that the company in question is Microsoft, and traditionally, if Microsoft gets control of a market, they use it to club everyone else to death and establish barriers to entry.
It's *much* easier if they never establish a solid foothold in the first place.
It's not pure chance that so many people dislike Microsoft.
In the last 6 months he gave more interviews and opinions (even when not asked) than ever before, combined. Apparently, he enjoys the spotlight.
Understandable, but not necessarily very professional.
He's been dealing with a year and more of rampant misinterpretation of what he's doing and working on. If I were him, I'd be giving explanatory interviews left and right as well.
Which means that - guess what? - he knows how to do things that you don't.
I took an intro to electrical/computer engineering class with Keith five years ago when he was at Carnegie Mellon University pre-college. He had an amazing depth of understanding of material that he had clearly studied on his own.
The interview reminded me a lot of him -- extremely motivated, very intelligent and knowledgeable, but also very abrasive. He is probably one of the brightest students that I have ever met, and I have met some very bright people. However, I remember a lot of people getting upset with him because of his insistence on publically shattering the other person's point of view. At one point, he got in a near-yelling match with a researcher during that speaker's guest lecture on optical storage media, when Keith was convinced that the researcher was wrong about the current limits of multilayer storage.
There were plenty of (unfair, and generally nasty) snide remarks about Keith behind his back from people that were probably partly intimidated by him, and partly just didn't like his attitude. They didn't make his time there any easier.
Another time, Keith was the *only* student who chose to electrically redesign the stock robot design that the class was building. Everyone else just chose to do the basic work to get their grade. Unfortunately, he misestimated the limits of a component and burned himself -- the course TAs, who had gotten fed up with him, just laughed nastily at him, rather than being worried about his injury, or consolitory.
Keith will, I'm sure, never know it, but he ended up having one of the largest personal impacts anyone has ever had on me. I was amazed that someone so knowledgeable and so competent could be given such a hard time *just* because they tended to be abrasive, and resolved to get along with people, and avoid getting angry or trying to knock people down for being wrong or making mistakes, regardless of the effort involved. I am convinced that this ended up being one of the largest factors in making my university experience pleasant, and has helped me enormously throughout life.
I listened and talked with Keith during some of my free time during pre-college, and learned a great deal from him -- he introduced me to "wavelet compression" beyond just the term, and was the first to describe *IX shell pipe redirection to me. He was never stingy with his amassed wealth of knowledge, and I am sure that he will do will in whatever area he chooses to do work in. I am, however, saddened that he still seems to be as aggressive as ever -- I think that his life would be much easier if he went on the attack less often.
No matter what, he has my best wishes -- he is one of a breed of people that we could use more of, with truly inquisitive minds.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that the analyst had anything to do with the writing in the interview -- I would imagine that, y'know, the interviewer did it.
The errors seemed to be typos of the sort that I make on Slashdot when revising my sentences, rather than spelling or grammatical errors -- it seemed to be more an unproofread draft than an incompetently produced final.
You know...
:-) ):
I can respect, say, IBM, and still respect someone that left (or was fired).
As for her knowledge base, she is not a developer. I'm going to bet that you come up short on knowledge of Linux relative to Linus and his lieutenants. That's life -- some folks are going to know more about something than other folks. However, scorning someone because they're currently below you in knowledge of something is just plain ridiculous. I know that I'd be called "washed up" and a "quack" in almost all areas -- I think that there are not many things that I'm the best person in the world at. However, I have no reason to think that she is not technically very competent for an analyst. The fact that she is taking Linux seriously and objectively is enough for me to give her credibility (if anything, she seems to be a bit too generous when it comes to Linux).
Furthermore, I'm quite pleased that her estimates almost exactly mirror my own for Linux desktop market share growth -- extremely gratifying that someone who does market share research has come up with the same estimates that I have (and naturally, since I believe my own predictions to be the best available estimates, or I wouldn't have made them, I can only accord her the same respect of giving her prediction the same credit
Parity takes a long time... and especially against a convicted monopolist. I think the milestone to look for is when Linux takes 10% of the market. It's all about when corporate IT says that they will use Linux as their primary desktop operating system. This doesn't mean that users have to give up on Windows applications, but I think we will see a decline in the use of the Windows operating system on the desktop.
A number of companies are doing pilots right now, but I think the timeframe is more like the next two years. In that time we'll see tremendous growth in the Linux desktop. "Tremendous" means that we're going to see it move from being a fringe market to something that ISVs and hardware vendors are porting to and supporting.
Because analysts tend to play the role of pundit they can come across as insightful or just plain idiotic. [note: fixed typo on "plain"]
:-)
Best quote ever. Darn, it's refreshing to find an honest, non-pompous analyst.
Yes, one thing. I go to a lot of events where I can be the only woman in the room with a bunch of guys, and that's fine. I have no issues with that, really, except that I just think that more diversity in the Linux ecosystem is always good. I think it is great that Pamela Jones created Groklaw. It would be great to see more women developers involved too- there are a few, but seeing more of them would actually be better. The growth of Linux in India, Brazil, China and other countries may foster an increase of women in the community. I think that's probably one of the things that, if I could effect any change, it would be to encourage more women to enter the Linux ecosystem.
That is actually a facinating point.
I've tended to find that as a very rough, general rule, women tend to do a better job of getting along with people than men, and take longer to get angry. If I had a choice between a male or female manager, and was choosing only based on ability to get people to work together and only with knowledge of the gender, I'd probably pick the female manager.
This is especially true for the open-source world, where nobody is *made* to work together. Communities form around how well people deal with each other and work together.
My guess as to why there are few female developers comes down to drive. This isn't that there aren't driven females, but there is a difference in the psychology here. I was reading an article (listed on fark and Metafilter) on why many fields of science generally have breakthroughs done by relatively young people -- developments and interest in work for the sake of work and glory fall off after a certain point. The article drew a link between drive to impress females and the attempt to rack up accomplishments under ones name. (I got a kick out of this, and it stuck in my head -- apparently, my subconscious has been trying hard to improve my sex life by convincing me to code up new algorithms). Anyway, point is that there's at least some research evidence for the male personality being an easier fit for OSS.
Linus' claim for support of "a law to get geeks laid" could have been OSS's undoing.
I find it funny that you say gentoo cannot get grub to work on the first boot on your systems when gentoo does not in fact install grub... you do.
/dev/hda, /dev/hdb, etc. This is the same naming convention lilo uses. In Grub, my drives are named (hd0, hd1), etc. This is quite unintutitive to Linux folks.
/boot) that is different from the Linux concept of "/". This was not obvious to me the first time I started poking away.
/boot/grub and a /boot/boot/grub symlinked to /boot/grub to convince things to work properly. This was not immediately obvious to me.
What you actually mean is that left to install grub on your own you can't make it work. Personal problem? I think so.
The question is whether it is reasonable to insult him for it.
I do not consider myself an inept Linux user. I am certainly not the most knowledgeable person out there, but I have been using Linux heavily and exclusively for about five years now. I contribute to a number of open-source projects, have done some driver and other low-level work, and am pretty familiar with how my system and OS work compared to most of the people I know. I've blown away my system pretty severely and repaired it by hand many times. I set up newer kernels, debugged many a nasty problem with diagnostic tools, and learned a lot of the interesting quirks of Linux. This doesn't mean that I'm the greatest tech guru out there -- it does mean that I have an interest in learning how things work and have done so for some time. I would even venture to guess that I probably know my way around a Linux box better than you do.
I started playing around with grub a while back -- I wanted to see what it was like. I could not get it working the first time I started poking at it, and ended up putting it off for ages until I decided to go back and spent several days getting it to work.
Grub is not trivial to learn or use, even if it is "just a bootloader". Insulting someone because they have difficulty using it seems quite ridiculous.
Among the pitfalls I ran into with grub:
* Grub uses a completely different system for naming devices than Linux does. In Linux, my ATA drives are named
* Grub was neither (at the time I first started playing with it) very well documented nor long on good Linux-specific tutorials.
* Grub has a concept of "/" (generally starting in
* Grub does not provide the best diagnostic output in the world. It is a bootloader, so it's not easy to use diagnostic tools on it to figure out what exactly it might be using wrong.
* When playing around with a bootloader (or anything that mucks around with the disk at a raw level) you generally want to be terribly careful if you have anything already on the disk. This makes experimentation even more difficult.
* Red Hat builds grub with a different setup than the default mode of grub operation -- I have a
* I had a motherboard with an old BIOS at the time that happened to hang if it detected a particular hard drive at boot. I worked around the problem in the only way possible -- by telling the BIOS to ignore the drive size and letting Linux detect it on its own way. Possibly as a result, grub worked with an entirely different set of hard drive numbers when I ran it in Linux and when I ran it as a bootloader-initiated stand alone shell (i.e. in a situation where I had essentially no way to troubleshoot problems). Lilo, which uses Linux drive names, cruised right along with no difficulties, unlike grub.
* grub uses many similar-but-different features relative to lilo. My grub.conf contains "default=0", where I number potential choices. My lilo.conf contains "default=linux.bak" -- I name potential choices.
Finally, grub provides some nice features that lilo doesn't, but the functionality that I gained was probably not worth the effort that I put into getting grub working properly on a s
No offense but as soon as LucasArt steps out of the starwars zone, they are plain aweful.
Lucasarts and Sierra were the two main developers advancing the adventure game genre for many years, and the list of best classic adventure games reads like a list of their titles. I'm not sure what non-Star Wars Lucasarts games you dislike so much, but I'm doubtful that you're thinking of their adventure games -- which FT2 and S&M2 would have been.
I can believe that Lucasarts published poor games at some point in time, but they have an extremely strong reputation in the adventure game arena. I do not know of any poor adventure games that they produced. Honestly, I cannot think of another game company that is as known for such long-term good leadership in their field. Perhaps id Software for FPS-style games.
Now, this doesn't mean that S&M2 and FT2 would have been good. It does, however, mean that any bias toward their new games based on their history should really be positive, not negative.
I can't understand why they can't make *both* games. It's not as if Star Wars games and Lucasarts adventure games compete against each other for the same demographic. If Lucasarts was losing money on their adventure games, that would be one thing.
The justification for cancelling Sam and Max 2 was that the game wasn't turning out well, that it wasn't fun. *That* might be reasonable. I'm more than a little surprised that FT2 could also be bad, though.
It's not a huge deal. Like Bioware transforming like a phoenix into Obsidian, Lucasarts' adventure team will wind up at a new company or companies somewhere. I feel for them, but they have a solid reputation to bank on.
Thank you for the link -- but this doesn't support his statement. I was guessing that that might have been what he was thinking of, but that is not for regular wiretap requests. That is an explicit set of cases that are limited for intelligence use, and such use is subject to oversight.
Furthermore, FISA was just in the news two years ago for denying a request for a wiretap (and criticising Department of Justice people involved with requesting it as being involved with surveillance abuses).
But you're still missing the point. If its so bad then why the almost unanimous support for it from the House and Senate regardless of party affiliation? If it is so bad, then wouldn't you think some Democrat or Republican senator would rally against it? Even Ted Kennedy voted for it!
You can almost always push something like this through in a time of national fear. In a national emergency, there is tremendous pressure put on legislators to "stand together" with the President and legislative branch. Yes, legislators shouldn't do this, but they *do* do so, and it's not as if the Executive Branch is unaware of it -- 9/11 provided a fabulous opportunity to push through bills relating to limiting civil rights and increasing police powers. The Executive Branch bears significant responsibility here, in my mind, because it was the easiest place to avoid the law modification that took place.
Would the PATRIOT Act pass today, in a more cool-headed environment? I doubt it.
Should the legislators who voted on the PATRIOT Act take some blame? Of course. However, many legislators (from both parties) are now taking the embarassing stance that, yes, they should not have allowed the PATRIOT Act through. It takes a lot to make legislators willing to publically accept blame and reverse positions, and I can't ask for much more from them to be done than what appears to be happening. I have not seen that degree of public support for the limitation or elimination of the PATRIOT Act from the Bush administration.
What if it were written with strict guidlines, would you still not like it?
I'd have to see a revised version. I can't make a claim of support or non-support without seeing what might go through.
I *do* think that there would probably have to be a couple of changes made:
* A replacement PATRIOT Act should be several broken-up bills, where individual power grants are each voted on. The bundling of elements in acts is where most of the abuses of our current legislative system seem to come from, and something that is very disturbing when it comes to altering protections civilians have against governmental abuse.
* I do not think I would agree to an act that allowed judicial bypass for wiretaps, with the following possible single proviso: If the FBI must obtain data *immediately*, the delay of which might pose grievious harm to the Unitd States and cannot afford judicial review, they may obtain the data now and undergo regular judicial review later. Such use would have to be periodically subject to an overview board, and could not be held secret. I doubt that this is a valid complaint, given that current wiretap orders can be granted within the day, but it's one of the few ways I can think of that PATRIOT might fail.
DAldredge, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You're a partisan mudslinger first, and an American second. I doubt that there's any room in there for much appreciation of the Bill of Rights, and the affirmative good that the ACLU has brought to its defense.
DAldredge is a long-term troll. He's had a well-earned place on my foes list for quite some time now. He was just trying to provoke a response.
They would. I can't imagine they'd feel good about it, but anyone would in that position.
There are cases in which I would be willing to make the effort to withhold information. They would be extreme, such as a major whistleblower on administration actions that I felt was acting ethically. If you had the identity of, say, Deep Throat, would *you* release it?
The problem is that the FBI very deliberately puts on on the spot when they demand data. They don't send you a nice letter that you can read and ponder about, and maybe go with to a lawyer or the EFF/ACLU.
I *would* raise a stink about what they've done, though. I think it's terribly nasty and clever, how the PATRIOT Act makes a nice PR move by preventing people from revealing that there has been information demanded of them. You can't reveal abuses, because otherwise you wind up in jail.
You may believe that the Patriot Act is G.W's tyrrany and that Conservatives are "evil", but I assure you, there are very few people in Congress right now who are opposed to it, regardless of party affiliation.
Sure?
The PATRIOT Act got a lot of people pissed off -- ordinary folks, even. It contains a lot of rather Orwellian bits. A bunch of organizations were very vocal about it, and there was a TV campaign run against it.
Because John Kerry firghtens the hell out of me on so many different levels, and I am convinced that if Congress re-ratified the Patriot Act, Kerry would _NOT_ veto it.
First, we already know what Bush did -- he *didn't* veto it. Kerry is an unknown.
I would be interested in hearing your support of your claim that Kerry would be more in favor of expanding ease of government surveillance than Bush. The only Kerry input I've heard on the issue has been regarding revalations that the FBI was building a file on Kerry for his antiwar work during Vietnam. Kerry stated that he was disturbed about the extent to which the FBI was able to monitor and build up such a complete file.
I feel lucky today that 9/11 was an attack by planes and not a nuclear weapon. Until Islamic Societies mellow out, we _WILL_ have that risk. I personally am convinced that its not a matter of "if", but rather "when".
This is one thing I have a problem with. You have people in a large number of places that are frightened of US oppression, have little means of fighting back conventionally, and have reached the point of desperation that they are willing to give up their own lives to try to advance anti-US efforts. I cannot understand how invading a country, occupying it, establishing martial law, suppressing the press, and placing in power a puppet government is going to solve this problem. Iraq never attacked us. Individuals living in the Middle East did because of fear and dislike. Bush has, instead of solving the problem, made things worse with Iraq.
Taking on Saddam Hussein is not an easy thing to do. In fact, attacking Saddam has already knocked one President out of office and it may very well knock another out. The Bush Administration was fully aware of this when they made the decision to invade.
That's not the point. I have issues with:
* A president misleading the American people, the people who hired *him* to do his job. Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, and in taking the move to attack Iraq, Bush severely damaged America's reputation abroad -- the US has not caused negative waves like this for a long time. Clinton was impeached for lying about a blowjob. I think that Bush could at least be held to the standard of being honest when it comes to issues relating to leading the country (and issues germane to us forcing young men and women of our country to die -- if we do so, it should damned well be with honest information).
* True value of his decisions -- whether they really damaged the United States. Bush has tried (and failed) to support invading Iraq with each of the following claims or implications: "Saddamn backed terrorists", "Saddam is building weapons of mass destruction", and "Saddam is a clear and present danger to the United States". Every single one of these was shot down. The latest that I've heard from the pro-war movement is "the world is better off without Saddam". I'm not entirely sure that this is true. The man was definitely a hard man, and had at one point in history flaunted the United States. He invaded another country for their resources. However, he had been slapped back, and showed no signs of trying to do the same thing again. Iraq is not a gentle place, and there is no guarantee that whatever structure eventually takes place will be better, for either the people of Iraq or of the people of the United States. We had spent a good deal of effort and money understanding Saddam. Saddam
Screw semantics -- the article says that seventy thousand phone connections were intercepted. I find that damned unacceptable. The FBI could not close their case without listening to *seventy thousand phone calls*?
even though most of you have never read it, nor have any idea what it actually does.
I'd be willing to bet that the typical Slashdot reader is more informed than the typical Joe on what the PATRIOT Act is and means from the articles here. I am also willing to bet that the typical Slashdot reader opposes (more strongly than the average Joe, at least) the PATRIOT Act. This is an interesting correlation.
As for reading it -- the PATRIOT Act is a very large piece of legal text, and reading the thing in its entirety and original form is not, I think, reasonable to expect everyone to do. It might be a good thing, but I have never read my state's full legal code, even though I am governed by it and could go to jail for violating it.
If there was no Patriot Act, you guys would bash the President for not having something in place.
Well, I can't speak for everyone on Slashdot, but I personally would not be complaining about the lack of PATRIOT.
I hope you understand that the Patriot Act passed with only 3 no votes. So even if he did veto it, it would still be enacted. So you all should be bashing your local congress/senate person for voting for it
I can't agree, for a number of reasons.
a) The Bush administration was the originator of the PATRIOT Act. Congress didn't get together and say "gee, it would be really great if judges were cut out of the law enforcement loop...let's make an act allowing this!" That's all Ashcroft.
b) Saying that "because element X also did something wrong, you should not complain about element Y" is not correct reasoning. Perhaps they should be recieving flak that they are currently not; that does not mean that Bush should not be complained at.
c) Just because they voted for it does *not* mean that they would override a veto of it -- that Bush vetoing the vote would not have stopped PATRIOT. There's a significant political difference between the two.
It is interesting seeing a Bush supporter on Slashdot, though.
Would you provide a link, please?
I admit that my Eastern history is not really up to snuff, but I don't remember any point in history where Japan took chunks of China long enough to both worry about defending it to the north *and* worried about improving northern defenses (much less decorating them).
I can't even figure out what major Tokugawa construction project you might be referring to. I can't find anything other than a number of castles that were built.
Apparently, one of the edicts of the Tokugawa era (not sure which Lord Tokugawa you're referring to) was that each province was required to have a castle. This resulted in a lot of castle-building, so it's hard to figure out exactly which one you're thinking of. I can't easily find any reference to a building at the end of a region.
Anyone who is inteligent and bored can crack just about anything in relatively short order.
I do not think that you could teach an intelligent but bored person with no technical experience to "crack just about anything" in even a year, and while "relatively short order" isn't that well-defined, at least for me a year does not fit into that category.
Nor, I feel compelled to point out, do most of the smart people in the world crack DRM schemes.
I do agree that in general, implementing DRM is harder than cracking it, and that I don't think DRM on the computer is going to happen.
Oh, is *that* what they're up to?
I was listening to a friend being incredibly annoyed that he couldn't use user:pass@host in an URL with IE any more.
Here's how I'd guess at the state of things:
1) Miguel recognizes the fact that Microsoft is big, doesn't play nicely, and doesn't like having other people in its sandbox.
2) Miguel presumably believes that Linux is a superior system -- that given the opportunity, users will prefer Linux.
3) Miguel presumably believes that a primary reason Microsoft retains its position is because of barriers to interoperability established by Microsoft. By promoting their own, closed file formats and protocols, Microsoft makes it difficult for customers to move to other systems.
4) Miguel improves interoperability between Windows and Linux, reducing the barriers that Microsoft has worked so hard to establish, that prevent people from using Linux as a full or partial subsitute for their own products.
Then, once barriers to transition have been eliminated, as long as OSS developers and distro providers are providing a superior alternative, users can and will switch.
He's the most visible member of the Linux community who does stuff related to MS technologies.
.NET stuff is pretty recent. I think Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has to get the nod on this point.
Miguel's
Open source is _not_ about competing with anybody else. It is _not_ the goal to create a competing technology to win market share or anything. Open source is an exercise in technology, invention and freedom.
In a competitive world, that would be true. The problem is that the company in question is Microsoft, and traditionally, if Microsoft gets control of a market, they use it to club everyone else to death and establish barriers to entry.
It's *much* easier if they never establish a solid foothold in the first place.
It's not pure chance that so many people dislike Microsoft.
In the last 6 months he gave more interviews and opinions (even when not asked) than ever before, combined. Apparently, he enjoys the spotlight.
Understandable, but not necessarily very professional.
He's been dealing with a year and more of rampant misinterpretation of what he's doing and working on. If I were him, I'd be giving explanatory interviews left and right as well.
The future 4GL "application platform" is being decided. Will Microsoft own the platform or will
it be open source.
I'm going to guess that, whoever wins, stuff being sold as such will be incredibly slow and RAM-hungry.
Which means that - guess what? - he knows how to do things that you don't.
I took an intro to electrical/computer engineering class with Keith five years ago when he was at Carnegie Mellon University pre-college. He had an amazing depth of understanding of material that he had clearly studied on his own.
The interview reminded me a lot of him -- extremely motivated, very intelligent and knowledgeable, but also very abrasive. He is probably one of the brightest students that I have ever met, and I have met some very bright people. However, I remember a lot of people getting upset with him because of his insistence on publically shattering the other person's point of view. At one point, he got in a near-yelling match with a researcher during that speaker's guest lecture on optical storage media, when Keith was convinced that the researcher was wrong about the current limits of multilayer storage.
There were plenty of (unfair, and generally nasty) snide remarks about Keith behind his back from people that were probably partly intimidated by him, and partly just didn't like his attitude. They didn't make his time there any easier.
Another time, Keith was the *only* student who chose to electrically redesign the stock robot design that the class was building. Everyone else just chose to do the basic work to get their grade. Unfortunately, he misestimated the limits of a component and burned himself -- the course TAs, who had gotten fed up with him, just laughed nastily at him, rather than being worried about his injury, or consolitory.
Keith will, I'm sure, never know it, but he ended up having one of the largest personal impacts anyone has ever had on me. I was amazed that someone so knowledgeable and so competent could be given such a hard time *just* because they tended to be abrasive, and resolved to get along with people, and avoid getting angry or trying to knock people down for being wrong or making mistakes, regardless of the effort involved. I am convinced that this ended up being one of the largest factors in making my university experience pleasant, and has helped me enormously throughout life.
I listened and talked with Keith during some of my free time during pre-college, and learned a great deal from him -- he introduced me to "wavelet compression" beyond just the term, and was the first to describe *IX shell pipe redirection to me. He was never stingy with his amassed wealth of knowledge, and I am sure that he will do will in whatever area he chooses to do work in. I am, however, saddened that he still seems to be as aggressive as ever -- I think that his life would be much easier if he went on the attack less often.
No matter what, he has my best wishes -- he is one of a breed of people that we could use more of, with truly inquisitive minds.