Baloney -- you're just good at what you know
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 3
This enormous hyperbole, all 4697 words of it, IMO all boils to a few simple truths: Tom C. has been using certain tools for many years, knows them, likes them and can operate them well. But he has a peculiar need to demonstrate that his irrational preferences are somehow superior, and hence has confabulated all of these overstated arguments. In fact, it's all just a fluke of history. If emacs had come before vi, and hence Tom had learned and mastered emacs instead, we'd be reading an essay about "evil" design decisions inherent in vi.
Contrary to Tom's assertions, I can and do "Zen out" while using Emacs to write programs all the time. And I think that vi is an astonishing example of brain-death. (And yes, I know enough of vi to cope with it, because it's the only editor you can be certain to find on J. Random Customer's Unix machine.) But I'm not going to subject you to some dogmatic rationalizations for my tastes; I simply learned Emacs first, mastered it, and by now I can become "one with it". vi just frustrates me, because I haven't learned it and can't grok it. And that's all there is to it -- it's certainly nothing that needs 4697 words to explain.
Apple Works 5 does.doc format IIRC. $99. Quick and painless too. It's a nice Office Suite.
A lot of people have recommended AppleWorks so far, and I suppose it may be the solution. Or maybe one of the other conversion techniques that have been mentioned. I'm just skeptical, I guess, because I've seen so many other word processing programs that don't manage the conversion to the MS-Word very well. No doubt that Microsoft deliberately creates this problem by constantly changing the format. I guess I ought to be skeptical of StarOffice for the same reason, but it is free (as in beer), so at least I won't feel ripped off.
I don't care, I'll take it. I'll pay money for it. I'll let them screw me with the license. I'll tolerate the bloat. I'll let them fill up my RAM until it chokes. I don't care. I run MacOS and LinuxPPC, and I am desperate. I have to have a program, any program, that will satisfy the endless, arrogant and incessant demands for Word-compatible documents to which I am constantly subjected.
I got an old version of ClarisWorks pre-installed on the MacOS side, and it's perfectly fine with me, because I Just Don't Care (TM) about all the feature bloat that most Office suites supply. Once in a while, I need to cut a letter to the utility company or some damn thing. I want to type it up, print it, and stuff it an envelope. Cheap, ratty software is all I need for that.
But when I want to send someone a document electronically, or they want to send one to me, almost everyone expects MICROSOFT WORD !!! People treat me like a circus freak when I tell them I don't have it (and don't want it). I've met people who literally cannot conceive of a computer that doesn't have MS Office anywhere on it. I try to use RTF translators, or use the built-in filters in ClarisWorks to read the.docs they send me, but the results look like sheep dip.
Of course, the ideal solution to this nonsense would be to end these proprietary formats and establish industry norms for document exchange. You know, like they've had in normal industries for decades. But then, that would mean that the software industry would have to become normal. Oh well.
So beat me, whip me, feature-bloat me, take my money, exhaust my RAM, and license me into slavery, but just gimme StarOffice for the Mac and make the pain go away.
I'm on salary, and although my contract actually does say something about OT compensation, my bosses told me rather bluntly before I took the position that they don't pay OT.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, my situation is easily exploited. OT gives your project managers an incentive to plan projects rationally and well, so you're less likely to end up with a week of all-nighters just before the deadline. And I sure have had weeks like that. Those are the days that you're certain you don't get paid enough.
On the other hand, the salary is pretty good and takes OT into account (although I suspect that an hourly wage would turn out better during those murder weeks). And after the deadline has passed and the crunch is over, I can always take some time off. The bosses have always known what was going on and were more than happy to let me rest up. And I would hate a timeclock. I was rented out for a year to a company where I had to punch in and out, and it taught to just Not Give a Damn about what wasn't finished at quittin' time.
I think a lot of us programmers have to admit that we don't pull those all-nighters just for the money we're making. As much as I hate them, I just don't want a project I'm working on to fail, and feel that it will reflect on me even if the problem was caused by someone else's poor planning. (*I* know that, but outsiders, including the customer, might not.)
Well, there was that hack that me and my buddies did about ten years ago, which brought down the Berlin Wall, all of communist Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
Uh, but I'm not really supposed to be talking about it...
It took me about fifteen minutes just to download the "board" page with all the images. Click on one of the squares, and it takes a minute for the Javascript window to pop up.
Granted, the site is probably being Slashdotted. Still, it's a bit embarassing to see the Apache, PHP3 and MySQL logos displayed so prominently when the site evidently can't handle the load. Someone at Microsoft is probably thinking that they're getting the last laugh here.
Remember Windows Refund Day? How many people have successfully obtained their refunds for unused MS software? Is MS still throwing up barriers against collection of refunds? Are they still hoping that no one notices that they ever promised any such thing?
I think that Linux users ought to bring a class action suit to force MS to pay their refunds.
Judging from the posts made so far, I suppose a lot you will say, "No way, I'll never do that, class action suits and anything involving lawyers are Inherently EVIL, and I'll have nothing to do with it." I think this is ideological and naive. MS has collected about a hundred bucks from you for absolutely nothing. If you're willing to tolerate something like that, then would you please send some of your money to me, too? After all, I haven't done anything for you either.
Seems to me that this is a no-brainer. The EULA specifically states that those who choose not to use Windows are entitled to a refund, and yet experience has shown that people trying to exercise that right are systematically hindered. MS has no right to money for nothing. If contracts are to mean anything at all in this world, then MS should be forced to pay.
Once again, someone who has posted a pro-MS message on Slashdot gets moderated down, although the message is no less appropriate than most of the other ones around here.
For the record: I think MS is a band of gangsters and that both the anti-trust suit and the coming class action suits are richly deserved justice.
Nevertheless, this guy is entitled to his opinion, and stated it with arguments and no more flamage than most of the anti-MS posters. Moderation is not meant to be censorhip for unpopular viewpoints.
Will someone please moderate it back up? Meanwhile, I'm going meta-moderating until I can find this one.
Some of my favorites, all of them true stories about code I had to maintain:
If your program executes one of many different unrelated functions on each run, don't use any of them steenkin' Commie pinko data structures like a dispatcher table, and for Pete's sake don't split the various functions into different source files. Put it all into one enormous if... else if... else if... statement that extends across 10,000 lines. Hey, if they want to change a line of your code, they better be sure that the whole thing still compiles.
If you must break up functionality into subroutines, use global variables with reckless abandon!
Whitespace slows down your compiler or your interpreter! So cram that code into as few characters as possible! (I had a colleague who really believed this.)
Are you worried that upgrades to system libraries will break existing programs? No problem, just install them on some non-standard path, like in your home directory, and link them in from there. You don't need to tell your colleagues where to find them, because surely you'll get around to re-installing them in the right place Real Soon Now. Say you're programming CGIs in Perl using modules. Whatever you do, don't install new modules in the system-wide site library, because that could cause all kinds of trouble! Better to put them all in/cgi-bin/lib/ and use use lib '../lib'; to bind them in. But what if you have test scripts in/cgi-bin/test/? No problem, just install the same modules all over again into/cgi-bin/test/lib/ (don't be too picky about whether you're using the same module versions). And if you have mod_perl registry scripts under/perl/, then install all those suckers under/perl/lib/ and under/perl/lib/test/ all over again! So what if you end up with four different versions of the same modules, at least you didn't take any chances the system-wide installation.
Commenting as a long-time Perl coder who likes a Perl a lot, but who has recently discovered PHP and likes it, too:
DBI is database interface independent PHP not
Bingo. This IMO is the biggest problem that needs to be solved with PHP. It supports a wide variety of databases with APIs that are very similar in function, but they're all different. We do a lot of work with MySQL and Oracle around here, and with Perl/DBI you can often go from one to the other with no changes at all (except the connection string). It couldn't possibly be easier.
Something like DBI could probably be done in PHP. It would be an enormous advantage.
Great Perl Module (DBI, CGI, IRC, FTP,...) Few library un PHP [sic]
That's not true. The standard distribution in PHP has far more libraries than I'll ever need. To be sure, it's not nearly as big as CPAN, but as you pointed out, Perl is more general purpose than PHP. And note that you don't need something like the CGI.pm module (an HTML-generating library) in PHP. You're programming right into the HTML file anyway, that's the whole point.
Somebody said: Bill Gates may be a lot of things but to compare him to Hitler is just bad taste.
Then somebody else said: Why? One operated in the political arena, the other the business. They are both meglomaniacs, and I imagine history would unfold the same way if they switched places.
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? Hitler was a mass murderer, a wildly fanatic racist, a man comsumed with hate who unleashed war against the entire world. He may be responsible for more suffering and death than anyone who has ever lived. You are loathsome for suggesting any such parallel.
I think Bill Gates is rotten, and that his comeuppance in federal court was richly deserved. But this kind of talk is disgraceful. Will somebody please moderate this idiot to negative infinity?
Some of you are saying that Gore went to MS to imply that he supports them in the anti-trust case, presumably to get campaign donations. Excuse me, but can you read? He tried to avoid commenting on the subject, but the general remarks that he did make indicate that he is not on Microsoft's side. Here's another article at the Washington Post that makes this point more clearly.
The most I think you can criticize him for IMO is his unwillingness to speak out more clearly on the case, but the argument can be made that the Vice President should reserve his comments on a pending lawsuit. And it did take some nerve for him to show up there, seeing as how he is second in charge of an administration whose DoJ is their opponent. To be sure, Al Gore is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but this is one of the most gutsy things he's done since taking on Ross Perot. (Of course, that doesn't say much for his Vice Presidency so far.)
Here's the other thing I don't get: Some of you are all upset and surprised at the idea that the White House might have any role at all in this lawsuit. I'm embarassed to have to explain something that ought to be obvious, but the DoJ is a part of the executive branch and as such reports to the President. You can be certain that at some point while the DoJ was investigating MS and considering a lawsuit, Janet Reno briefed Bill Clinton on what was up. If he had insisted that they knock it off, it wouldn't have happened. At the very least, he didn't do that; and there may have been extensive discussions in the White House about the consequences of the trial. Indeed, Clinton probably asked Gore what he thought about it, particularly considering that it might affect Gore's presidential campaign.
If you don't think it should be that way, what in the world do you want as an alternative? Do you think that the Department of Justice shouldn't be under the ultimate control of an elected official? Sorry, but that's crazy.
Many commentators have remarked that the tone of Judge Jackson's findings was unusually harsh, especially the last few paragraphs. Since you have more experience with anti-trust court rulings, can you confirm that the judge's tone was out of the ordinary? If so, what does it signify?
not all conservatives are lassez-faire entirely... some prominent conservatives are quite in favor of the antitrust lawsuit against MS...
Indeed. Bear in mind that Robert Bork, that behemoth of conservatism, he of "slouching towards Gomorrah" and a bitter hater of "modern liberalism", has become Netscape's lawyer!
Why don't you write back and tell them what you've told us Slashdotters? You don't have to be comabtive about it, just tell them that you've checked for evidence that they hold such a trademark and couldn't find any. Ask them to give you a thingy with a number or something -- there's probably a technical term for that. %^) At least you'll find out whether they stand on firm ground.
Some posters seem to assume, as if it were some kind of law of nature, that anything the government does is inherently incompetent and unethical; and that whatever happens in the market is by definition exactly what's best for everyone. So they infer from this that the DOJ, the judge and the legislatures that wrote the anti-trust laws are just wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter what they've done or how they've done it; and that any remedy they seek againt Microsoft, whatever it may be, will be a certain and automatic disaster.
But that's just as ideological and extreme as the assumption that the government is always right and big business is always bad. To be sure, government has blundered in astonishing ways many times, and markets do indeed tend to serve consumers very efficiently. But nothing in this universe, except perhaps the deity, is perfect, and so neither are markets. And especially in a democracy, a government is obliged to do what's best for its citizens, and undoubtedly most people working in government take that obligation very seriously. At least some of them are likely to be good at it, too.
This is a time when the government has done exactly what is must do to serve the interests of its citizens. The anti-trust laws are there to address one of the flaws in that imperfect thing called the market -- namely that monopolies can arise, who can stifle the competition that is exactly what ought to make markets so beneficial to everyone. Microsoft could hardly have been a more brazen violator of those laws. If they were never prosecuted, then we might just as well have taken the Sherman act off the books and given Bill Gates a cabinet seat as Secretary of Software. If anything, the government's error lied in waiting so long to bring the suit -- they should have done it ten years ago.
The DoJ, in particular the Anti-Trust Division and especially Joel Klein and David Boies, deserve great praise for what they've accomplished. If they can end the fear and intimidation created by Microsoft, they may have helped bring along a huge boom in competition in the software industry. (People keep saying it's booming already. Which is true, but I think you ain't seen nothin' yet.) Let's leave the ideological prejudices behind and give credit whare it's due.
our goal was to study one long running, since 1993, open source community. i think that too much data-mingling would be a bad idea.
Fine, nothing wrong with that, the study just needs to be presented for what it is. I really don't know if you've done anything objectionable, because I haven't seen what you've written. My objection is to the headlines at ZDNet and Slashdot, which described it as a study of "open source"; that's overbroad.
... the results would be seriously skewed toward certain types of programming (which I, as a kernel hacker, generally refer to as the "lightweight" side).
So what? A study that only includes Linux programmers is excessively skewed toward kernel hacing. If you're interested in the demographics of open source programmers, and this is what they're doing, then that's what you should be investigating. You do know that kernel hacking is not the whole universe of open source, don't you?
Nobody ever wrote a filesystem or device driver in perl, nobody ever will, and there are many more programming categories where it's almost equally unusable. The findings would be overly weighted toward text munging and web crap.
Uh, while it's true that no one would use Perl for kernel hacking, file systems or device drivers, I think you have a very narrow and uninformed view of the things people do use it for. Have a look at the list of module categories, you'll see many different kinds of applications, including system-level stuff (in fact, there are modules that access the filesystem and an interface to Windows serial device drivers there). Note that Perl modules don't have to be written in Perl; they can be written in the C API, which is often done to create a Perl interface to the operating system level.
I think your conclusion has it completely backwards. Perl may be the project that covers the widest variety of programming categories, because it's used for so many different purposes.
If you're going to follow up on the study, why don't you try to find out what you can from the authors list of the CPAN archive for contributions to Perl? It's a large list, and although it does not include information about their locations, most of them at least provide their email addresses.
But above all, please try to include more projects next time. I'm bothered that the headlines on ZDNet and Slashdot said "Open Source", when in fact the study was just about Linux.
This is not quite the same procedure, but you might be interested in the diary kept by Larry Wall Author of Perl Busy Man last year about his cornea transplant.
In some of the later entries, Larry writes that he might consider LASIK in the future, but evidently that hasn't happened so far.
Speaking as a US citizen who has lived in Europe and worked in the Internt business for years now, I'd say it's about time the US was taken down a few notches. Rep. Bliley's reaction is rather typical of US politicians and their assumptions about governing the Internet. Maybe this development at ICANN will teach people like him a long overdue lesson about better international co-operation.
Slashdot Mirror
This enormous hyperbole, all 4697 words of it, IMO all boils to a few simple truths: Tom C. has been using certain tools for many years, knows them, likes them and can operate them well. But he has a peculiar need to demonstrate that his irrational preferences are somehow superior, and hence has confabulated all of these overstated arguments. In fact, it's all just a fluke of history. If emacs had come before vi, and hence Tom had learned and mastered emacs instead, we'd be reading an essay about "evil" design decisions inherent in vi.
Contrary to Tom's assertions, I can and do "Zen out" while using Emacs to write programs all the time. And I think that vi is an astonishing example of brain-death. (And yes, I know enough of vi to cope with it, because it's the only editor you can be certain to find on J. Random Customer's Unix machine.) But I'm not going to subject you to some dogmatic rationalizations for my tastes; I simply learned Emacs first, mastered it, and by now I can become "one with it". vi just frustrates me, because I haven't learned it and can't grok it. And that's all there is to it -- it's certainly nothing that needs 4697 words to explain.
Apple Works 5 does .doc format IIRC. $99. Quick and painless too. It's a nice Office Suite.
... Give them the doc in .pdf.
.doc.
A lot of people have recommended AppleWorks so far, and I suppose it may be the solution. Or maybe one of the other conversion techniques that have been mentioned. I'm just skeptical, I guess, because I've seen so many other word processing programs that don't manage the conversion to the MS-Word very well. No doubt that Microsoft deliberately creates this problem by constantly changing the format. I guess I ought to be skeptical of StarOffice for the same reason, but it is free (as in beer), so at least I won't feel ripped off.
OR
Doesn't help if they give it to me as
I don't care, I'll take it. I'll pay money for it. I'll let them screw me with the license. I'll tolerate the bloat. I'll let them fill up my RAM until it chokes. I don't care. I run MacOS and LinuxPPC, and I am desperate. I have to have a program, any program, that will satisfy the endless, arrogant and incessant demands for Word-compatible documents to which I am constantly subjected.
.docs they send me, but the results look like sheep dip.
I got an old version of ClarisWorks pre-installed on the MacOS side, and it's perfectly fine with me, because I Just Don't Care (TM) about all the feature bloat that most Office suites supply. Once in a while, I need to cut a letter to the utility company or some damn thing. I want to type it up, print it, and stuff it an envelope. Cheap, ratty software is all I need for that.
But when I want to send someone a document electronically, or they want to send one to me, almost everyone expects MICROSOFT WORD !!! People treat me like a circus freak when I tell them I don't have it (and don't want it). I've met people who literally cannot conceive of a computer that doesn't have MS Office anywhere on it. I try to use RTF translators, or use the built-in filters in ClarisWorks to read the
Of course, the ideal solution to this nonsense would be to end these proprietary formats and establish industry norms for document exchange. You know, like they've had in normal industries for decades. But then, that would mean that the software industry would have to become normal. Oh well.
So beat me, whip me, feature-bloat me, take my money, exhaust my RAM, and license me into slavery, but just gimme StarOffice for the Mac and make the pain go away.
I'm on salary, and although my contract actually does say something about OT compensation, my bosses told me rather bluntly before I took the position that they don't pay OT.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, my situation is easily exploited. OT gives your project managers an incentive to plan projects rationally and well, so you're less likely to end up with a week of all-nighters just before the deadline. And I sure have had weeks like that. Those are the days that you're certain you don't get paid enough.
On the other hand, the salary is pretty good and takes OT into account (although I suspect that an hourly wage would turn out better during those murder weeks). And after the deadline has passed and the crunch is over, I can always take some time off. The bosses have always known what was going on and were more than happy to let me rest up. And I would hate a timeclock. I was rented out for a year to a company where I had to punch in and out, and it taught to just Not Give a Damn about what wasn't finished at quittin' time.
I think a lot of us programmers have to admit that we don't pull those all-nighters just for the money we're making. As much as I hate them, I just don't want a project I'm working on to fail, and feel that it will reflect on me even if the problem was caused by someone else's poor planning. (*I* know that, but outsiders, including the customer, might not.)
Well, there was that hack that me and my buddies did about ten years ago, which brought down the Berlin Wall, all of communist Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
...
Uh, but I'm not really supposed to be talking about it
It took me about fifteen minutes just to download the "board" page with all the images. Click on one of the squares, and it takes a minute for the Javascript window to pop up.
Granted, the site is probably being Slashdotted. Still, it's a bit embarassing to see the Apache, PHP3 and MySQL logos displayed so prominently when the site evidently can't handle the load. Someone at Microsoft is probably thinking that they're getting the last laugh here.
For some people, "I was wrong" is the hardest thing to say. Can't say that I'm good at it, either. If posters had karma, Justin's should be bumped up.
Remember Windows Refund Day? How many people have successfully obtained their refunds for unused MS software? Is MS still throwing up barriers against collection of refunds? Are they still hoping that no one notices that they ever promised any such thing?
I think that Linux users ought to bring a class action suit to force MS to pay their refunds.
Judging from the posts made so far, I suppose a lot you will say, "No way, I'll never do that, class action suits and anything involving lawyers are Inherently EVIL, and I'll have nothing to do with it." I think this is ideological and naive. MS has collected about a hundred bucks from you for absolutely nothing. If you're willing to tolerate something like that, then would you please send some of your money to me, too? After all, I haven't done anything for you either.
Seems to me that this is a no-brainer. The EULA specifically states that those who choose not to use Windows are entitled to a refund, and yet experience has shown that people trying to exercise that right are systematically hindered. MS has no right to money for nothing. If contracts are to mean anything at all in this world, then MS should be forced to pay.
Once again, someone who has posted a pro-MS message on Slashdot gets moderated down, although the message is no less appropriate than most of the other ones around here.
For the record: I think MS is a band of gangsters and that both the anti-trust suit and the coming class action suits are richly deserved justice.
Nevertheless, this guy is entitled to his opinion, and stated it with arguments and no more flamage than most of the anti-MS posters. Moderation is not meant to be censorhip for unpopular viewpoints.
Will someone please moderate it back up? Meanwhile, I'm going meta-moderating until I can find this one.
I have never seen much evidence of a sense of humor on the part of RMS and the FSF. Now I know that there's none to be found.
Say you're programming CGIs in Perl using modules. Whatever you do, don't install new modules in the system-wide site library, because that could cause all kinds of trouble! Better to put them all in
Commenting as a long-time Perl coder who likes a Perl a lot, but who has recently discovered PHP and likes it, too:
...)
DBI is database interface independent
PHP not
Bingo. This IMO is the biggest problem that needs to be solved with PHP. It supports a wide variety of databases with APIs that are very similar in function, but they're all different. We do a lot of work with MySQL and Oracle around here, and with Perl/DBI you can often go from one to the other with no changes at all (except the connection string). It couldn't possibly be easier.
Something like DBI could probably be done in PHP. It would be an enormous advantage.
Great Perl Module (DBI, CGI, IRC, FTP,
Few library un PHP [sic]
That's not true. The standard distribution in PHP has far more libraries than I'll ever need. To be sure, it's not nearly as big as CPAN, but as you pointed out, Perl is more general purpose than PHP. And note that you don't need something like the CGI.pm module (an HTML-generating library) in PHP. You're programming right into the HTML file anyway, that's the whole point.
Somebody said: Bill Gates may be a lot of things but to compare him to Hitler is just bad taste.
Then somebody else said: Why? One operated in the political arena, the other the business. They are both meglomaniacs, and I imagine history would unfold the same way if they switched places.
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? Hitler was a mass murderer, a wildly fanatic racist, a man comsumed with hate who unleashed war against the entire world. He may be responsible for more suffering and death than anyone who has ever lived. You are loathsome for suggesting any such parallel.
I think Bill Gates is rotten, and that his comeuppance in federal court was richly deserved. But this kind of talk is disgraceful. Will somebody please moderate this idiot to negative infinity?
I am mystified at some of the comments so far.
Some of you are saying that Gore went to MS to imply that he supports them in the anti-trust case, presumably to get campaign donations. Excuse me, but can you read? He tried to avoid commenting on the subject, but the general remarks that he did make indicate that he is not on Microsoft's side. Here's another article at the Washington Post that makes this point more clearly.
The most I think you can criticize him for IMO is his unwillingness to speak out more clearly on the case, but the argument can be made that the Vice President should reserve his comments on a pending lawsuit. And it did take some nerve for him to show up there, seeing as how he is second in charge of an administration whose DoJ is their opponent. To be sure, Al Gore is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but this is one of the most gutsy things he's done since taking on Ross Perot. (Of course, that doesn't say much for his Vice Presidency so far.)
Here's the other thing I don't get: Some of you are all upset and surprised at the idea that the White House might have any role at all in this lawsuit. I'm embarassed to have to explain something that ought to be obvious, but the DoJ is a part of the executive branch and as such reports to the President. You can be certain that at some point while the DoJ was investigating MS and considering a lawsuit, Janet Reno briefed Bill Clinton on what was up. If he had insisted that they knock it off, it wouldn't have happened. At the very least, he didn't do that; and there may have been extensive discussions in the White House about the consequences of the trial. Indeed, Clinton probably asked Gore what he thought about it, particularly considering that it might affect Gore's presidential campaign.
If you don't think it should be that way, what in the world do you want as an alternative? Do you think that the Department of Justice shouldn't be under the ultimate control of an elected official? Sorry, but that's crazy.
Many commentators have remarked that the tone of Judge Jackson's findings was unusually harsh, especially the last few paragraphs. Since you have more experience with anti-trust court rulings, can you confirm that the judge's tone was out of the ordinary? If so, what does it signify?
not all conservatives are lassez-faire entirely... some prominent conservatives are quite in favor of the antitrust lawsuit against MS...
Indeed. Bear in mind that Robert Bork, that behemoth of conservatism, he of "slouching towards Gomorrah" and a bitter hater of "modern liberalism", has become Netscape's lawyer!
Why don't you write back and tell them what you've told us Slashdotters? You don't have to be comabtive about it, just tell them that you've checked for evidence that they hold such a trademark and couldn't find any. Ask them to give you a thingy with a number or something -- there's probably a technical term for that. %^) At least you'll find out whether they stand on firm ground.
Some posters seem to assume, as if it were some kind of law of nature, that anything the government does is inherently incompetent and unethical; and that whatever happens in the market is by definition exactly what's best for everyone. So they infer from this that the DOJ, the judge and the legislatures that wrote the anti-trust laws are just wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter what they've done or how they've done it; and that any remedy they seek againt Microsoft, whatever it may be, will be a certain and automatic disaster.
But that's just as ideological and extreme as the assumption that the government is always right and big business is always bad. To be sure, government has blundered in astonishing ways many times, and markets do indeed tend to serve consumers very efficiently. But nothing in this universe, except perhaps the deity, is perfect, and so neither are markets. And especially in a democracy, a government is obliged to do what's best for its citizens, and undoubtedly most people working in government take that obligation very seriously. At least some of them are likely to be good at it, too.
This is a time when the government has done exactly what is must do to serve the interests of its citizens. The anti-trust laws are there to address one of the flaws in that imperfect thing called the market -- namely that monopolies can arise, who can stifle the competition that is exactly what ought to make markets so beneficial to everyone. Microsoft could hardly have been a more brazen violator of those laws. If they were never prosecuted, then we might just as well have taken the Sherman act off the books and given Bill Gates a cabinet seat as Secretary of Software. If anything, the government's error lied in waiting so long to bring the suit -- they should have done it ten years ago.
The DoJ, in particular the Anti-Trust Division and especially Joel Klein and David Boies, deserve great praise for what they've accomplished. If they can end the fear and intimidation created by Microsoft, they may have helped bring along a huge boom in competition in the software industry. (People keep saying it's booming already. Which is true, but I think you ain't seen nothin' yet.) Let's leave the ideological prejudices behind and give credit whare it's due.
our goal was to study one long running, since 1993, open source community. i think that too much data-mingling would be a bad idea.
Fine, nothing wrong with that, the study just needs to be presented for what it is. I really don't know if you've done anything objectionable, because I haven't seen what you've written. My objection is to the headlines at ZDNet and Slashdot, which described it as a study of "open source"; that's overbroad.
So what? A study that only includes Linux programmers is excessively skewed toward kernel hacing. If you're interested in the demographics of open source programmers, and this is what they're doing, then that's what you should be investigating. You do know that kernel hacking is not the whole universe of open source, don't you?
Nobody ever wrote a filesystem or device driver in perl, nobody ever will, and there are many more programming categories where it's almost equally unusable. The findings would be overly weighted toward text munging and web crap.
Uh, while it's true that no one would use Perl for kernel hacking, file systems or device drivers, I think you have a very narrow and uninformed view of the things people do use it for. Have a look at the list of module categories, you'll see many different kinds of applications, including system-level stuff (in fact, there are modules that access the filesystem and an interface to Windows serial device drivers there). Note that Perl modules don't have to be written in Perl; they can be written in the C API, which is often done to create a Perl interface to the operating system level.
I think your conclusion has it completely backwards. Perl may be the project that covers the widest variety of programming categories, because it's used for so many different purposes.
All right Mr. Whipple, you were the first one who didn't mention a search engine (doesn't anyone use their heads any more?).
Gave that man a virtual Weizenbier, put it on my tab.
Got a twenty-seven B stroke six?
If you're going to follow up on the study, why don't you try to find out what you can from the authors list of the CPAN archive for contributions to Perl? It's a large list, and although it does not include information about their locations, most of them at least provide their email addresses.
There is public biographical info about many of the contributors to the Apache server.
But above all, please try to include more projects next time. I'm bothered that the headlines on ZDNet and Slashdot said "Open Source", when in fact the study was just about Linux.
I'll buy a virtual beer for whoever figures out the reference of the second list.
This is not quite the same procedure, but you might be interested in the diary kept by Larry Wall Author of Perl Busy Man last year about his cornea transplant.
In some of the later entries, Larry writes that he might consider LASIK in the future, but evidently that hasn't happened so far.
Speaking as a US citizen who has lived in Europe and worked in the Internt business for years now, I'd say it's about time the US was taken down a few notches. Rep. Bliley's reaction is rather typical of US politicians and their assumptions about governing the Internet. Maybe this development at ICANN will teach people like him a long overdue lesson about better international co-operation.