Everyone always logs on through the same common username / password, so I can't identify a certain person anyway...Does this mean the responsibility is now mine?
Possibly. But what it really means is that you have a terrible security policy in place.
There have been surprisingly many people asking about the Hurd.
Questions like: "When the fuck is it going to be done?"
...of course I answered the latter question just by smiling and entering `startx'.
Which left the cursor blinking at a shiny bash prompt.
On sunday afternoon, I was giving a presentation about the Hurd, which
was scheduled to take one hour, of which I used only 35 minutes
Because the machine would spontaneously reboot every 30 seconds...
...plus
a few for answering questions from people coming to me after the
talk
Questions like: "Why the fuck does it reboot every 30 seconds?"
Three people told me that the talk was great (and one
said it was ``exciting'')
Ahem... somebody's a virgin.
We almost managed to have me give the presentation
on a GNU/Hurd system itself...
(Haha... I can't even think of a response to this, I am laughing too hard!)
Note for humor impaired: it is just too much damn fun to poke fun at HURD. Really, I mean no overt offense...
And thank you for a coherent and thought-out post.
You make reference to my "sources". My source is simple: empirical knowledge. If you were in Seattle between '94 and '99 you would have seen literally hundreds of "development shops" which *only* used MS technology, and some of them were quite large: Fine.com, Saltmine, etc, etc. Until fairly recently (say 2-3 years) you could not find a tech job listing in the Seattle area that did not specify something like "Visual C++/MFC/VB/ASP, etc...".
My point was not necessarily that Free Software is bad, or that jobs shouldn or shouldn't be shipped overseas, or that Microsoft is good or bad but rather that I find the economics of Free Software to not really add up... not if we want to maintain a comparable technology economy. You can't push for something to be essentially free (monetarily) and then kick and scream when companies that are in the business of making shrinkwrapped software start to lay people off or ship jobs overseas.
Some people in this thread cried "FUD!" at my remarks. In particular the person who cited that most jobs in IT are for the creation of custom systems, etc. I am not going to disagree with that, however, I will say that the effects of losing X number of jobs can lead to the loss of X*Y jobs. Take for example, an article in the Seattle Times several months ago that estimated that for every job at Boeing, 2 jobs in the local economy are dependent on that Boeing employee. Think about that for a second. Every employee at Boeing eats out, buys stuff, uses services, etc. When that employee no longer exercices their spending power, those 2 empoyees (or, rather their employers) lose out on that income. When that happens, people get laid off. I am not going to give a ringing endorsement of the Times' mathematics (or even reporting for that matter!), but their numbers are at least plausible.
BSD style licensing instead of GPL is needed to have a sustainable, innovative industry.
I adore the BSD license, but would like to add one clause:
Distribution of this software in its original or modified form requires a license fee to be paid to the creator.
It's like something I brought up on a free software mailing list a few years back:
"The GPL does *not* give users of my software the same rights that I have. In fact, it strips them of the most important right, in my opinion. That is the right to pay the money, blood, sweat and tears that I did to create the software." In other words, if I am a company that creates WidgetSoft for a living I would be very hard pressed to GPL WidgetSoft so that my competitors could benefit, without payment to me, from my work. Two words: "Fuck that".
That being said, I love the concept of Open Source. It's the rhetoric and economic shortcomings of Free Software that piss me off.;-)
What they have been doing, at least for the past, oh, at least 7 to ten years have been taking existing technology centers and investing in those areas.
That is true. It is also true that Microsoft writes products that work in dozens of languages and it makes sense for those products to be localized, tested and supported by people who speak a particular language.
That being said, I had an acquaintence who worked as a tester for the Thai version of Excel in Redmond. He neither spoke nor read Thai... nor did he have much knowledge of Excel. Draw your own conclusions.
After reading the usual bitching and moaning about tech jobs going overseas, it struck me odd that the same people who are proponents of Free (not necessarily *free*) software are some of the loudest whiners. Ok, so you can charge for Free software, but once it is in the wild, then what? Well, you are shit out of luck! Unless you can talk a user of your software into a maintenance contract or whatnot, you are never going to see another penny from your software unless some do-gooder decides to pay for it even when they can get it for free.
Guess what? If I am a large multinational that makes, say, CRM software, and along comes some Free and kickass version that my customers start using then I start fucking laying people off or shipping my work overseas. Why? Because I am not making as much money. That in itself may not be too bad -- a little competition is a good thing -- but in this case now *no one* is making any money. Whoohooo!
People may want to see MS go down, and I can't necessarily say I am not one of them. However, stop for a minute and think of the mind-numbing and crippling effects that would have on the entire worldwide software industry. There are thousands and thousands of companies that make their money from supporting MS products, writing add-ins, etc... In the Seattle-area I would venture to guess that about 95% of the solutions providers and about 80% of the development shops rely on MS. MS goes away? Thousands and thousands of jobs go away as well. Fun fun.
Ah... Super Jockey! I lived in Tokyo for a awhile and every Sunday was *glued* to my television at 3:00PM to watch Super Jockey. My absolute favorite episode had a guy with his legs up in the air, a brick on his crotch, and a man with a sledgehammer trying to break the brick. Hysterical.
It's things like this that make me want to pack up the family and head back...
Bellevue isn't suburban hell. It's generally a nice place to live.
The lack of a true downtown is what upsets me about Bellevue. I mean, even Kirkland has a downtown (with a biker bar, or at least it used to be a biker bar). Redmond has a downtown (kind of). Bellevue has a mall. Right at its heart. A mall. Like Lynnwood with a higher per-capita income and Nordstrom's instead of Mervyn's.
80's haired, cameltoed proles in that shithole area south of I90.
You are giving way too much credit to the Southend. Everyone worth anything knows that the biggest hair is in Lynnwood and the skankiest hoes are in Everett. Northend *rules*.
Actually, MS is one of the largest proponents of carpooling and bussing in the area. Employees and contractors alike receive free bus passes and they have several people working onsite to help create vanpools for employees.
You make a good point. MS never says (explicitely): "Linux sucks" , while on Slashdot we see more than our share of "M$ SUX!"... you will notice that the phrase is all the more scathing due to the use of the dollar sign in "MS". God forbid a goddamn public company make money! And, the use of the spelling challenged "SUX" goes a very long way towards affirming the poster's intellectual level.
Yeah, MS has pulled some pretty ugly things, been bitchslapped by the Justice Department, and been generally sleazy in dealing with OEMs, but I challenge you to name one 100+ million a year company that can't be accused of the same. I'm not condoning MS... far from it, but these things are unfortunately par for the course with *big* business.
Do you fully grasp the conspiracy necessary for SCO to pull that off? The entire chain of command from the CEO down to system administrator would have to be in on it! Not saying it's impossible, but highly unlikely.
I see five possible outcomes:
A developer at SCO "appropriated" some Linux kernel code, or,
A Linux kernel committer "appropriated" some SCO code,or,
A SCO employee planted SCO code in the kernel for some reason other than a directive from the SCO executive team, or,
An angry kernel hacker, perhaps upset about Linus' use of BitKeeper, planted some SCO code, or,
Like the million monkeys and infinity, somehow both a Linux developer and a SCO developer came up with "hundreds" (McBride's words) of lines of identical code.
Out of all of the above, I would place my bet on either 3 or 4. Chances are that neither the Linix team nor the SCO team, as wholes, would stoop to such behavior.
Reminds me of the RH8.0 install, was doing one today and noticed a package that was apparently to support "Brisish English"...
Which reminds me of a time when I helped a French guy install RedHat on his laptop. He had a French distro and I do not speak French. So, he's translating along and he suddenly looks confused, looks at me and says "The pit does not have the proper things". What the fuck? Turns out the "kernel did not have the proper options passed to it at boot time".
Typically the best Russian firms aren't bargain priced, while still being cheaper than traditional US contract labor. For example, on a long-term (6 month+) contract, you can get top-of-the-line developers for about $25/hr USD. That is a savings over $100/hr or $125/hr definitely. However, when you start to factor in things like travel to Russia (I demand to see the shop where my software is being produced!), communication gaps (even with the most fluent non-native speaker there are bound to be colloquialisms that slip through the cracks), and the time spent going over the turned-over code with a fine-toothed comb, those savings begin to evaporate pretty quickly.
MS has been involved in VOD practices for a long, long time. In fact, they had just pushed a huge amount of resources into "Interactive Television" when this new-fangled Internet thing began to reach maximum velocity, leaving them with their pants down. Read "The Microsoft Way" for more details.
Just do a simple: make world. If your kernel config file is propery set up (don't forget the "SIMULATE_EXISTENCE" flag!), upon reboot you will be living in a simulation.
are torturous. Honestly. You print out your code, in some cases hundreds of pages, and sit with 3 or 4 people and go through it *line by line*. Painful. I remember being asked questions such as "Why did you name this function that?" and "Tell me your thought process behind having the code flow this way" and, my favorite, "Why didn't you use the MFC CString class?". Icky icky icky.
Security holes at MS come from one of two sources:
Code reviewers with ADD
Developers trying to balance the idiotic amount of "user friendliness" demanded by the PM and good, clean, secure code.
There was one case where I had gone through a farily lenghty piece of code (ok, maybe not *that* large, but it was a good 25 pages of print-out). The next day I received a new print-out of the code with nearly each line annotated with a comment like "This should be like this" etc...
I do have to say that they were very thourough in their review, but that once the review was done nobody went back through the code to make sure that I had actually made the changes.
Ok... I can see that, having had the unfortunate experience of building a web server in VB in 1996 that did basically that (without, of course, actually following any standards... it was MS, man!).
But what about that Not Acceptable? You would think that Apache would spit that out for goatse.cx.
Re:People will want it, but will they be happy?
on
The Searchable Life
·
· Score: 1
Ted Nelson already writes down and records everything, for fear of forgetting things or losing his train of thought.
Not only does he write it all down, but in a meeting with him in Tokyo I was in the middle of a presentation to him when he pulled out a video camera and started recording. Then he would put it down and scribble something... then he would pick up the cam.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly. But what it really means is that you have a terrible security policy in place.
There have been surprisingly many people asking about the Hurd.
Questions like: "When the fuck is it going to be done?"
Which left the cursor blinking at a shiny bash prompt.
On sunday afternoon, I was giving a presentation about the Hurd, which was scheduled to take one hour, of which I used only 35 minutes
Because the machine would spontaneously reboot every 30 seconds...
Questions like: "Why the fuck does it reboot every 30 seconds?"
Three people told me that the talk was great (and one said it was ``exciting'')
Ahem... somebody's a virgin.
We almost managed to have me give the presentation on a GNU/Hurd system itself...
(Haha... I can't even think of a response to this, I am laughing too hard!)
Note for humor impaired: it is just too much damn fun to poke fun at HURD. Really, I mean no overt offense...
You make reference to my "sources". My source is simple: empirical knowledge. If you were in Seattle between '94 and '99 you would have seen literally hundreds of "development shops" which *only* used MS technology, and some of them were quite large: Fine.com, Saltmine, etc, etc. Until fairly recently (say 2-3 years) you could not find a tech job listing in the Seattle area that did not specify something like "Visual C++/MFC/VB/ASP, etc...".
My point was not necessarily that Free Software is bad, or that jobs shouldn or shouldn't be shipped overseas, or that Microsoft is good or bad but rather that I find the economics of Free Software to not really add up... not if we want to maintain a comparable technology economy. You can't push for something to be essentially free (monetarily) and then kick and scream when companies that are in the business of making shrinkwrapped software start to lay people off or ship jobs overseas.
Some people in this thread cried "FUD!" at my remarks. In particular the person who cited that most jobs in IT are for the creation of custom systems, etc. I am not going to disagree with that, however, I will say that the effects of losing X number of jobs can lead to the loss of X*Y jobs. Take for example, an article in the Seattle Times several months ago that estimated that for every job at Boeing, 2 jobs in the local economy are dependent on that Boeing employee. Think about that for a second. Every employee at Boeing eats out, buys stuff, uses services, etc. When that employee no longer exercices their spending power, those 2 empoyees (or, rather their employers) lose out on that income. When that happens, people get laid off. I am not going to give a ringing endorsement of the Times' mathematics (or even reporting for that matter!), but their numbers are at least plausible.
It's like something I brought up on a free software mailing list a few years back:
"The GPL does *not* give users of my software the same rights that I have. In fact, it strips them of the most important right, in my opinion. That is the right to pay the money, blood, sweat and tears that I did to create the software." In other words, if I am a company that creates WidgetSoft for a living I would be very hard pressed to GPL WidgetSoft so that my competitors could benefit, without payment to me, from my work. Two words: "Fuck that".
That being said, I love the concept of Open Source. It's the rhetoric and economic shortcomings of Free Software that piss me off. ;-)
That is true. It is also true that Microsoft writes products that work in dozens of languages and it makes sense for those products to be localized, tested and supported by people who speak a particular language.
That being said, I had an acquaintence who worked as a tester for the Thai version of Excel in Redmond. He neither spoke nor read Thai... nor did he have much knowledge of Excel. Draw your own conclusions.
After reading the usual bitching and moaning about tech jobs going overseas, it struck me odd that the same people who are proponents of Free (not necessarily *free*) software are some of the loudest whiners. Ok, so you can charge for Free software, but once it is in the wild, then what? Well, you are shit out of luck! Unless you can talk a user of your software into a maintenance contract or whatnot, you are never going to see another penny from your software unless some do-gooder decides to pay for it even when they can get it for free.
Guess what? If I am a large multinational that makes, say, CRM software, and along comes some Free and kickass version that my customers start using then I start fucking laying people off or shipping my work overseas. Why? Because I am not making as much money. That in itself may not be too bad -- a little competition is a good thing -- but in this case now *no one* is making any money. Whoohooo!
People may want to see MS go down, and I can't necessarily say I am not one of them. However, stop for a minute and think of the mind-numbing and crippling effects that would have on the entire worldwide software industry. There are thousands and thousands of companies that make their money from supporting MS products, writing add-ins, etc... In the Seattle-area I would venture to guess that about 95% of the solutions providers and about 80% of the development shops rely on MS. MS goes away? Thousands and thousands of jobs go away as well. Fun fun.
</RantingTangent>
Well, first of all, a laptop is a smaller and more portable computer...
It's things like this that make me want to pack up the family and head back...
The lack of a true downtown is what upsets me about Bellevue. I mean, even Kirkland has a downtown (with a biker bar, or at least it used to be a biker bar). Redmond has a downtown (kind of). Bellevue has a mall. Right at its heart. A mall. Like Lynnwood with a higher per-capita income and Nordstrom's instead of Mervyn's.
80's haired, cameltoed proles in that shithole area south of I90.
You are giving way too much credit to the Southend. Everyone worth anything knows that the biggest hair is in Lynnwood and the skankiest hoes are in Everett. Northend *rules*.
Actually, MS is one of the largest proponents of carpooling and bussing in the area. Employees and contractors alike receive free bus passes and they have several people working onsite to help create vanpools for employees.
Note: obscure reference to OP's URL.
M0n0wall is FreeBSD-based.
Yeah, MS has pulled some pretty ugly things, been bitchslapped by the Justice Department, and been generally sleazy in dealing with OEMs, but I challenge you to name one 100+ million a year company that can't be accused of the same. I'm not condoning MS... far from it, but these things are unfortunately par for the course with *big* business.
I see five possible outcomes:
- A developer at SCO "appropriated" some Linux kernel code, or,
- A Linux kernel committer "appropriated" some SCO code,or,
- A SCO employee planted SCO code in the kernel for some reason other than a directive from the SCO executive team, or,
- An angry kernel hacker, perhaps upset about Linus' use of BitKeeper, planted some SCO code, or,
- Like the million monkeys and infinity, somehow both a Linux developer and a SCO developer came up with "hundreds" (McBride's words) of lines of identical code.
Out of all of the above, I would place my bet on either 3 or 4. Chances are that neither the Linix team nor the SCO team, as wholes, would stoop to such behavior.Did you look at Proxim's Tsunami MP.11 line? They have some great features, such as provisioning directly from the base station, etc...
Which reminds me of a time when I helped a French guy install RedHat on his laptop. He had a French distro and I do not speak French. So, he's translating along and he suddenly looks confused, looks at me and says "The pit does not have the proper things". What the fuck? Turns out the "kernel did not have the proper options passed to it at boot time".
Typically the best Russian firms aren't bargain priced, while still being cheaper than traditional US contract labor. For example, on a long-term (6 month+) contract, you can get top-of-the-line developers for about $25/hr USD. That is a savings over $100/hr or $125/hr definitely. However, when you start to factor in things like travel to Russia (I demand to see the shop where my software is being produced!), communication gaps (even with the most fluent non-native speaker there are bound to be colloquialisms that slip through the cracks), and the time spent going over the turned-over code with a fine-toothed comb, those savings begin to evaporate pretty quickly.
Hahahahahahaha!
Ah hem... that would be "Kill 'em All". In other words, Metallica's first album title was spelled in much the same way that Slashdotters spell.
MS has been involved in VOD practices for a long, long time. In fact, they had just pushed a huge amount of resources into "Interactive Television" when this new-fangled Internet thing began to reach maximum velocity, leaving them with their pants down. Read "The Microsoft Way" for more details.
Exactly. Although now that my son is 2 I am not exactly the absolute center, but am definitey in the immediate periphery.
Just do a simple: make world. If your kernel config file is propery set up (don't forget the "SIMULATE_EXISTENCE" flag!), upon reboot you will be living in a simulation.
Security holes at MS come from one of two sources:
There was one case where I had gone through a farily lenghty piece of code (ok, maybe not *that* large, but it was a good 25 pages of print-out). The next day I received a new print-out of the code with nearly each line annotated with a comment like "This should be like this" etc...
I do have to say that they were very thourough in their review, but that once the review was done nobody went back through the code to make sure that I had actually made the changes.
But what about that Not Acceptable? You would think that Apache would spit that out for goatse.cx.
Not only does he write it all down, but in a meeting with him in Tokyo I was in the middle of a presentation to him when he pulled out a video camera and started recording. Then he would put it down and scribble something... then he would pick up the cam.
A very unique individual.