I wanted to read the responses to this article because I thought that maybe one Slashdotter could give a qualified explanation of Hilbert's 16th problem, and maybe even explain something about the partial solution. That was possible back when Andrew Wiles proved his theorem, you know.
And look at this, not a single post even gets started on the subject! At least not when you browse at +2, like I do. But we're all standing around slobbering over the thought of a hot Swedish math babe! And so am I!
Hey Taco, can we get this gal for an Ask Slashdot interview? She could explain her theorem, and tell us something about her lingerie.
... Sun's Java Desktop System is really an x86 Suse-based Linux distribution, complete with Gnome.
Ding! Right.
(Java Enterprise System is Solaris with Gnome.)
Bzzzt! Wrong.
Java Enterprise System is the re-branding of the Sun ONE server stack -- web, application, directory, identity portal and a few more things --, with a fixed, yearly per-employee license price and a synchronized quarterly upgrade schedule.
If I'm not mistaken, Java Desktop System will become the default desktop for Solaris as well.
Referring to organizations as plural is stilted, unpopular, and, in this case, inconsistent.
You're right about Taco being inconsistent, but in the British vernacular (encompassing not just the British Isles, but also such far-flung places as Australia and South Africa), it's neither stilted nor unpopular. That's just how they say it. Americans say that the committee meets, the British say that the committee meet.
The difference between British and American English is mostly just a matter of pronunciation and vocabulary, but this is one of the few truly grammatical differences.
Since Slashdot has featured a post about new SCO outrages almost every day for weeks now, it may be hard to realize that this is the moment that war has begun. SCO is violating the law, harming the authors of open source software, and attempting to destroy the GPL. They're stealing something that isn't theirs. This is Lexington & Concord, the sinking of the Lusitania, the invasion of Poland, the Golf of Tonkin incident.
For we all know, maybe this what SCO was planning all along. Maybe IBM never was their real target.
I'm not one of the kernel authors, but I'd like to help them. I'll donate cash, write a letter, join a picket, whatever, just give me something to do. It might be a good idea for the kernel authors to pool their efforts in response to SCO. Maybe the FSF lawyers would be willing to work on their collective behalf, or maybe some kind of class action will be necessary. And maybe Linus Torvalds personally will have to respond in some way, since he's the owner of the Linux trademark. In any case, the reponse to SCO might very well be costly in terms of effort, time and cold hard cash, and whoever's doing it could probably use some help. I think that the time is now for anyone who cares about these issues to do whatever they can.
I think it should be an animation of Neo on the roof, bent over backwards with his arms flailing, dodging bullets as the camera does a 360 around him in bullet time. Complete with sound effects.
Or maybe something with Natalie Portman...
And it should be distributed as assembler code, which gets Trojaned onto your machine and displays in native graphics, and can't be turned off until you pull the plug. This is supposed to symbolize hackers, after all.
There was ample evidence on record that MS is an incorrigible scofflaw, with numerous violations of court orders, and yet Kollar-Kelly let them go with a behavioral remedy. She finished off her decision about the punishment with a couple of paragraphs about "You better do what I said, or else I'll be really, really mad, and you'll be really, really sorry." I guess we get to find out now if she has any balls. It was going to happen sooner or later.
Nothing says "weasel" more than being AC. Unless your name is "Bob Smith" and your slashdot user id is "BobSmith", AC really has no benefit.
Rather than "Insightful", this is sheer nonsense, and it is very ironic coming from someone who calls himself "Call Me Black Cloud".
I don't why this fallacy about anonymity has so much currency on Slashdot, but it is manifestly illogical. A Slashdot post consists solely of words, and its value lies solely in the quality of arguments, evidence and wit that those words contain. The identity of the poster is almost never relevant.
The only situation in which the identity of the poster matters is when the content really has something to do with the poster. For example, if some poster asserts that Bill Gates sleeps in a wedding dress, and the poster says she knows this because she is Melinda Gates, well then it does matter who the poster is. But posts in which the identity of the poster is a relevant fact are rather common on Slashdot and most other discussion groups.
You can understand this best when you realize that everyone who posts on Slashdot is exactly as anonymous as the Anonymous Coward. This is obvious for people who use pseudonyms like me or "Call Me Black Cloud". But even if someone posts as "Bob Smith", most of us will never know, or care, whether the poster really is a person named Bob Smith. For all we know, it could be Hortense Magillacuddy from Peoria, but that doesn't matter, because all we care about is what the posters say, and not who's saying it.
My dear fellow Americans, take a deep breath, look at yourself in the mirror, and say it out loud: "The government of France was right about Iraq, and the government of the United States was wrong."
That's the truth, and if you can't admit it, then you are a weasel!
Does anyone know why Apple's support in Europe is so bad? I work as a sysadmin at a scientific institution in Germany...
The problem might not be Apple, and it might not be that bad in all of Europe. It might just be the general attitude about service in Germany, in many cases far less conscientious than what you're used to in the US. Look around in the media, and chances are you'll find soul-searching essays in the Op-Ed pages, in which the Germans wonder why this is so.
The extremely long delivery times is common for any product, not just an Apple computer. Try to buy a new car, and you might find that you have to wait months before the one you specified arrives. I have tried to explain to my German friends that this is madness, in the US you can often get a delivery within days, but many of them just don't understand me. It's always been this way for them, they can't conceive of anything different, and they can't perceive the problem.
In many multinational corporations, the German part (or other European part) is actually an independent company, except that it's wholly owned by the "mother" company, who also controls the products, trademarks and so forth. I don't know about Apple specifically, but it's highly likely that they are set up that way. If so, you're dealing with a company that's trying hard to look just like Apple as you know it at home, but in many respects is really a German firm; and that might be showing in their approach to service.
Unit testing, especially as a foundation for refactoring; continuous integration, read hourly builds; and the flexibility to revise design decisions when the need becomes obvious -- all of these principles are absolutely indispensible in any modern software project. Failing to do any of these things is an outrageous, inexcusable lapse. But these ideas are better understood and more obvious now than they were before Kent Beck came along with XP.
I see all the other posts in the thread so far claiming that some or all of these concepts were known earlier, before they were emphasized by XP. But that does not discredit the approach. Frankly, there's rarely anything new under the sun, but sometimes someone has to come up with a kind of philosophy just to help us realize how effective certain ideas can be. I think all programmatic software methodologies are like this -- they try to emphasize methods that are known to have worked well in the past, and try to draw useful generalizations about them.
Nowadays, most of the UP people are adopting many ideas emphasized by XP -- I attended a tutorial by Craig Larman last year in which he argued that no conflict between the UP and XP exists at all. But no one was saying these things before XP was articulated.
Incidentally, I think it's clear that the waterfall is an unmitigated disaster. I was once in a project that was managed that way, a big fat loser of millions, the worst nightmare of my career, took down a whole dot-com agency. Those were the days.
I don't agree with all of XP -- a complex system has to start with a fairly sophisticated analysis and design (but it better be designed flexibly enough to change over time if necessary). And I can't imagine pair programming, never tried it and don't want to. But even if the Emperor is not wearing purple and crimson ermine minks with linings of silver and gold, he's not naked either. On the contrary, his suit is fairly presentable.
It would be really nice to be able to take the documents in the OOo format and compare them with something like diff, and merge changes back. Ideally, it would be supported in CVS as well.
You can do this by unpacking the file -- an.sxw file is just a ZIP archive containing some XML documents -- and then running your diff, merges and CVS on the files from the archive.
The drawback is that you're dealing with several files at once, not just one, but then you're probably only interested in content.xml. And of course you have to convert back and forth from the archived and unarchived versions. But it can be done.
Seriously....if the news around he got any mroe biased it would probably suffocate itself. POST TECH STORIES AND DROP THIS WAR OF ATTRITION WITH MS! Good lord! Yes yes, we know, MS=evil! GET OVER IT....good lord.
This is like exclaiming in, say, mid 1943, that a newspaper should stop publishing so many stories about World War Two, and should publish "real" news instead.
Microsoft has by some estimates a 97% share on the desktop, with two debilitating effects on the computer industry. One is that the monoculture places us all at profound and increasing security risk; the viruses and worms in recent months have become more damaging and more frequent, but are still not as damaging and frequent as they could potentially be. The hackers are just warming up. The second effect is that Microsoft is in a position to bankrupt all but a few other companies in the industry if they so choose, and this has led to an atmosphere of intimidation that gets people fired for publishing critical articles.
Get over it yourself, because this is tech news. The computer industry is in a severe crisis, so severe that it is overwhelmingly more important than the latest Linux point release or kewl gaming console. You should be happy that any other news manages to get mentioned at all. At a site devoted to "news for nerds and stuff that matters", it's only logical that Microsoft's domination and the damage it causes gets covered very often, because there's harldy anything else that matters more.
The good news, I don't think you misspelled anything. The bad news is, your grammar and vocabulary seem to have gone over to the impenetrably flummoxed.
Did you mean to say that a gaseous orb exerts power on your laptop?
This missive contains a few blaring warning signs of a guy who has not learned best practices for Java programming, and indeed is very naive about the needs of enterprise software development.
He seems to equate Web application programming with programming JSP scripts. In fact, he doesn't seem to draw much of a distinction between JSP and everything else that Java encompasses.
In the context of Web application programming, he declares: "Mostly what you get with Java are reams of repetitive declarations at the top of every script so that the relevant code for serving a page is buried several screens down." The rationale for this statement is nowhere to be found, and it's anybody's guess what in the world he's talking about.
The only concrete complaint he brings up has to do with the way you assign values to bind variables in a prepared SQL statement in JDBC. Again, this is in the context of Web applications, which he conflates with JSPs (he talks about "script variables"). But first of all, one of the very first best practices anybody learns is that you don't include raw Java code in JSP scripts: instead, use actions, directives and custom tags to lay out the script like HTML, and delegate all programming to proper Java classes. Or better yet, use a framework like Struts. And second, a guy who dismisses JDBC altogether because of syntactical construct he dislikes, without considering all of the other benefits that it provides, is probably completely naive about the needs of DB programming for the enterprise.
He says: "People who are serious about getting the job done on time and under budget will use tools such as Visual Basic." No further comment necessary.
Also: "If a programmer is attacking a truly difficult problem he or she will generally have to use a language with systems programming and dynamic type extension capability, such as Lisp." Again, no further comment, except to note that no one, I mean no one in business computing considers using Lisp. (Now some smartass Slashdotter will come along and triumphantly cite some obscure exception, which only confirms the rule.) This to me is a sure sign of a guy stuck in academia.
Of JSP he says, "... still it seems to be too complex for seniors and graduate students in the MIT computer science program, despite the fact that they all had at least one semester of Java experience..." I expect that seniors and grads at MIT are very smart, but good software engineering discipline usually requires years to learn, even by the smartest cookies. To expect it after one semester is another clear sign of enormous naivete.
Plenty of legitimate criticisms can be formulated against Java, JSP and JDBC, but I think we can safely ignore what this guy has to say about it.
I regard it as very impolite to spell federal states like this. I also don't call New York, Neu York as they did in 189X.
If so, then you must think that Germans are an extremely impolite people. Because they call France Frankreich, they call Danmark Daenemark, they call Italia Italien, they call Espana Spanien, they call Sverige Schweden, they call Rossiya Russland, they misspell Canada as Kanada and Mexico as Mexiko, they call Australia Australien, they call Firenze Florenz, they call Milano Mailand, they call Roma Rom, they call Venezia Venedig, they call Sicilia Sizilien, they call Sardinia Sardinien, they call California Kalifornien, they call Moskva Moskau, they call Kobnhavn Kopenhagen, and on and on and on.
Actually, the whole world's full of impolite people, isn't it?
It seems that everyone in his right mind despises telemarketing. Spam too. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that there are few things they hate more in life. It seems as if there are no exceptions to this rule -- everyone, bar none, hates telemarketing and spam.
But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money. Because for some reason, telemarketers and spammers stay in business. Somehow, it must be worth it for them.
If everyone hated the stuff as much as they say they do, if everyone hung up on the unwanted calls and deleted the unwanted mails in nothing flat, like they say they do, then the problem would fizzle out before long. No one could make money doing it, so there would be no reason to keep trying. And yet, the crap just goes on and on and on.
I've read rumors that a certain small percentage of the people called or mailed actually do respond and end up buying something; usually the figure is put about 10%, or something similarly low. Hard to believe that such a business would be worthwhile if the response rate is so low; but whatever it is, it must be high enough that the incentive for telemarketing and spamming is maintained. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing.
A national no-call list is a nice idea, but I can't see the problem going away altogether as long as the telemarketers and spammer still believe there's a chance to make money. Certainly the spammers are not going to let some trivial thing like a Federal law stop them. (They'll just go on spamming from Antarctica, or wherever.) If we really want the problem solved, once and for all, we have to ensure that there is no future for those businesses, and that would require educating the public, right down to the last man, woman and child, to always follow this rule without exception: If someone calls you or emails you to sell you a product, then whatever you do, don't buy that product!
Please allow us to introduce ourselves We're a cartel of wealth and waste We've been around for a long long year Stole an industry's soul and grace
We were 'round when Brianna L. Had her moment of fear and shame Made damn sure the lawyers Took her money and gave her the blame
Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess our name But what's puzzling you Is whether we're insane
We hung around on the Internet When we saw it was a time for a change Killed Napster and its administrators Sean Fanning sued in vain
We wrote a hack Into the Britney tracks When the downloads raged Now it's on your Mac
Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess our name But what's puzzling you Is whether we're insane
We watched with glee While our attorneys Fought for a hundred grand From every music fan
We shouted out, "Who killed the Dead Kennedys?" When after all It was us, you see
Let us please introduce ourselves We're a cartel of wealth and waste And we've laid traps for the file swappers Who get sued before they press Escape
Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess our name But what's puzzling you Is whether we're insane
Just as every kid is a criminal And the corporate thieves are saints As heads is tails Just settle our lawsuit, sir Cause you're in need of some restraint
So if you meet us Have some courtesy Have some sympathy, and some taste Obey all our well-paid politicians Or we'll lay your life's savings to waste
Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess our name But what's puzzling you Is whether we're insane
The discussion further back in the thread suggests that McBride might very well know that ESR does not know the identity of the DDoS hacker.
McBride's statement, which may be widely passed along by the press, suggests that ESR condones the actions of someone who is committing a crime. This at least could tarnish his reputation, and may be tantamount to an accusation of aiding and abetting. As I recall the definition of libel, it encompasses making statements that you know to be false and that either accuse someone of a crime or significantly damage their reputation (IANAL).
Darl McBride deserves no mercy. If ESR chooses to seek legal action against him, and if he needs donations to pay attorney fees, I'm all set to write a check.
So you are basicly saying that we should dump all other unixes and unixlikes and all go to Apple.
No Bunky, that is precisely what I did not say. If you like, you can try reading my post again, especially the last sentence, especially the part about how I'd like to see a certain something or other succeed.
BTW, I don't know why you talk as if "unixes and unixlikes" are something different from "Apple". MacOS X is Unix (BSD to be precise).
A number of people have already pointed out the flaw in this article: Most people buy their Linux installation from one of the distros, and the distros all install a default desktop -- Gnome or KDE or whatever. As the author himself states, casual users rarely change their interface defaults, so these people will just stay with their default setup. And if they never know or care that they had a choice, then so what.
But I want to add something about the subject of open-source Unix and GUIs. Just a few weeks ago, I finally got my first box with MacOS X. I know, I'm way late saying this, but... a Unix kernel and a Mac GUI, the perfect computer! Absolute fucking paradise. For the first time in my life, I can work with a sophisticated, well thought-out user interface, and at the same time pop up a bash shell and exploit all of the technical power of a Unix command line.
I'm a big fan of the open-source efforts to build Unix systems, but I must say that they have struggled badly and unsuccessfully at their efforts to create good user interfaces. Sorry, but Gnome and KDE and all the rest really do suck (and don't even get me started on proprietary offerings like CDE). Then along comes Apple, big ol' proprietary closed-source look-n-feel-lawsuit Steve Jobs & Co., and puts them all to shame.
I think this guy with the article may be misunderstanding his own point. The trouble with the GUIs of open source Unix systems is not that there's too much choice. It is, unfortunately, that the open source developers have proven to be very, very bad at building GUIs.
Some of the posters so far have stated quite bluntly that open source developers just don't care about GUIs. So OK, score a point for honesty, I guess. I for one am certainly technically capable enough to deal with the likes of Gnome and KDE, but gawd, why would I want to if I can use something as good as MacOS X? Why make your life any more difficult than necessary? MacOS X is the proof, you see, that a Unix interface doesn't have to be so second-rate; if you try, and you know what you're doing, then you can make the user experience with Unix into something thrilling.
I think there's something else besides lack of developer interest that holds back the user interfaces in open source Unix. There's a whole class of people working a field called usability, who spend all their time figuring out how people work well with computers (and other devices). They've built up a whole field of research, and even run empirical experiments to test ideas, giving test subjects an interface to work with and observing what they do with it.
It seems to me that open source developers and the usability people live in almost wholly separate universes, hardly aware of one another's existence. Apple, on the other hand, has been working with these people for years and it shows. I would like to see Gnome & KDE and the rest succeed, but until they start taking usability issues much more seriously than they do now, corporations like Apple will remain way ahead of them.
Ugh, that reminds me. Some 15 years ago I was a poor American student living in Germany, doing odd free-lance technical translation jobs. Bad enough that I didn't understand most of the stuff I was translating anyway. But one time, I got instructions in English for some kind of chemical laboratory equipment, which had apparently been translated from Japanese already, and it read just like this, I kid you not. It could have passed as haiku. Now they wanted me to translate it into German (the opposite of what you usually do, since you usually translate into your own native language).
I pointed out that this was crazy, that I couldn't make heads or tails of it and couldn't possibly translate it into something sane. But they needed the job done and didn't care and I needed the money, so I did the best I could. As near as I can tell, it involved heating up some kind of liquid I had never heard of, and you better be sure to adjust this widget and calibrate that thingamabob correctly, or else, well, some bad thing would happen. I cringe at the thought that some German lab grunt might have actually tried to follow the instructions I wrote.
That seems to be a part of the Macintosh culture. Steve Dorner, the original author of the Eudora mail client (which was first implemented on the Mac), also like to include messages like these in his program.
One that I remember is: If you started pressing keys in a situation where there's no writable window and no place else to type, a dialogue would eventually pop up saying, "There's no one listening to keystrokes now. You might as well stop typing."
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to read the responses to this article because I thought that maybe one Slashdotter could give a qualified explanation of Hilbert's 16th problem, and maybe even explain something about the partial solution. That was possible back when Andrew Wiles proved his theorem, you know.
And look at this, not a single post even gets started on the subject! At least not when you browse at +2, like I do. But we're all standing around slobbering over the thought of a hot Swedish math babe! And so am I!
Hey Taco, can we get this gal for an Ask Slashdot interview? She could explain her theorem, and tell us something about her lingerie.
"... California is the land of fruits and nuts. The fruits are a little nutty, and the nuts are a little fruity!"
Ding! Right.
Bzzzt! Wrong.
Java Enterprise System is the re-branding of the Sun ONE server stack -- web, application, directory, identity portal and a few more things --, with a fixed, yearly per-employee license price and a synchronized quarterly upgrade schedule.
If I'm not mistaken, Java Desktop System will become the default desktop for Solaris as well.
You're right about Taco being inconsistent, but in the British vernacular (encompassing not just the British Isles, but also such far-flung places as Australia and South Africa), it's neither stilted nor unpopular. That's just how they say it. Americans say that the committee meets, the British say that the committee meet.
The difference between British and American English is mostly just a matter of pronunciation and vocabulary, but this is one of the few truly grammatical differences.
$3.6 million will buy an awful lot of Perdue chickens, it'll feed a lot of poor students for quite some time.
Since Slashdot has featured a post about new SCO outrages almost every day for weeks now, it may be hard to realize that this is the moment that war has begun. SCO is violating the law, harming the authors of open source software, and attempting to destroy the GPL. They're stealing something that isn't theirs. This is Lexington & Concord, the sinking of the Lusitania, the invasion of Poland, the Golf of Tonkin incident.
For we all know, maybe this what SCO was planning all along. Maybe IBM never was their real target.
I'm not one of the kernel authors, but I'd like to help them. I'll donate cash, write a letter, join a picket, whatever, just give me something to do. It might be a good idea for the kernel authors to pool their efforts in response to SCO. Maybe the FSF lawyers would be willing to work on their collective behalf, or maybe some kind of class action will be necessary. And maybe Linus Torvalds personally will have to respond in some way, since he's the owner of the Linux trademark. In any case, the reponse to SCO might very well be costly in terms of effort, time and cold hard cash, and whoever's doing it could probably use some help. I think that the time is now for anyone who cares about these issues to do whatever they can.
A bunch of black dots in a grid? Come on.
...
I think it should be an animation of Neo on the roof, bent over backwards with his arms flailing, dodging bullets as the camera does a 360 around him in bullet time. Complete with sound effects.
Or maybe something with Natalie Portman
And it should be distributed as assembler code, which gets Trojaned onto your machine and displays in native graphics, and can't be turned off until you pull the plug. This is supposed to symbolize hackers, after all.
There was ample evidence on record that MS is an incorrigible scofflaw, with numerous violations of court orders, and yet Kollar-Kelly let them go with a behavioral remedy. She finished off her decision about the punishment with a couple of paragraphs about "You better do what I said, or else I'll be really, really mad, and you'll be really, really sorry." I guess we get to find out now if she has any balls. It was going to happen sooner or later.
Rather than "Insightful", this is sheer nonsense, and it is very ironic coming from someone who calls himself "Call Me Black Cloud".
I don't why this fallacy about anonymity has so much currency on Slashdot, but it is manifestly illogical. A Slashdot post consists solely of words, and its value lies solely in the quality of arguments, evidence and wit that those words contain. The identity of the poster is almost never relevant.
The only situation in which the identity of the poster matters is when the content really has something to do with the poster. For example, if some poster asserts that Bill Gates sleeps in a wedding dress, and the poster says she knows this because she is Melinda Gates, well then it does matter who the poster is. But posts in which the identity of the poster is a relevant fact are rather common on Slashdot and most other discussion groups.
You can understand this best when you realize that everyone who posts on Slashdot is exactly as anonymous as the Anonymous Coward. This is obvious for people who use pseudonyms like me or "Call Me Black Cloud". But even if someone posts as "Bob Smith", most of us will never know, or care, whether the poster really is a person named Bob Smith. For all we know, it could be Hortense Magillacuddy from Peoria, but that doesn't matter, because all we care about is what the posters say, and not who's saying it.
My dear fellow Americans, take a deep breath, look at yourself in the mirror, and say it out loud: "The government of France was right about Iraq, and the government of the United States was wrong."
That's the truth, and if you can't admit it, then you are a weasel!
The problem might not be Apple, and it might not be that bad in all of Europe. It might just be the general attitude about service in Germany, in many cases far less conscientious than what you're used to in the US. Look around in the media, and chances are you'll find soul-searching essays in the Op-Ed pages, in which the Germans wonder why this is so.
The extremely long delivery times is common for any product, not just an Apple computer. Try to buy a new car, and you might find that you have to wait months before the one you specified arrives. I have tried to explain to my German friends that this is madness, in the US you can often get a delivery within days, but many of them just don't understand me. It's always been this way for them, they can't conceive of anything different, and they can't perceive the problem.
In many multinational corporations, the German part (or other European part) is actually an independent company, except that it's wholly owned by the "mother" company, who also controls the products, trademarks and so forth. I don't know about Apple specifically, but it's highly likely that they are set up that way. If so, you're dealing with a company that's trying hard to look just like Apple as you know it at home, but in many respects is really a German firm; and that might be showing in their approach to service.
Unit testing, especially as a foundation for refactoring; continuous integration, read hourly builds; and the flexibility to revise design decisions when the need becomes obvious -- all of these principles are absolutely indispensible in any modern software project. Failing to do any of these things is an outrageous, inexcusable lapse. But these ideas are better understood and more obvious now than they were before Kent Beck came along with XP.
I see all the other posts in the thread so far claiming that some or all of these concepts were known earlier, before they were emphasized by XP. But that does not discredit the approach. Frankly, there's rarely anything new under the sun, but sometimes someone has to come up with a kind of philosophy just to help us realize how effective certain ideas can be. I think all programmatic software methodologies are like this -- they try to emphasize methods that are known to have worked well in the past, and try to draw useful generalizations about them.
Nowadays, most of the UP people are adopting many ideas emphasized by XP -- I attended a tutorial by Craig Larman last year in which he argued that no conflict between the UP and XP exists at all. But no one was saying these things before XP was articulated.
Incidentally, I think it's clear that the waterfall is an unmitigated disaster. I was once in a project that was managed that way, a big fat loser of millions, the worst nightmare of my career, took down a whole dot-com agency. Those were the days.
I don't agree with all of XP -- a complex system has to start with a fairly sophisticated analysis and design (but it better be designed flexibly enough to change over time if necessary). And I can't imagine pair programming, never tried it and don't want to. But even if the Emperor is not wearing purple and crimson ermine minks with linings of silver and gold, he's not naked either. On the contrary, his suit is fairly presentable.
You can do this by unpacking the file -- an
The drawback is that you're dealing with several files at once, not just one, but then you're probably only interested in content.xml. And of course you have to convert back and forth from the archived and unarchived versions. But it can be done.
This is like exclaiming in, say, mid 1943, that a newspaper should stop publishing so many stories about World War Two, and should publish "real" news instead.
Microsoft has by some estimates a 97% share on the desktop, with two debilitating effects on the computer industry. One is that the monoculture places us all at profound and increasing security risk; the viruses and worms in recent months have become more damaging and more frequent, but are still not as damaging and frequent as they could potentially be. The hackers are just warming up. The second effect is that Microsoft is in a position to bankrupt all but a few other companies in the industry if they so choose, and this has led to an atmosphere of intimidation that gets people fired for publishing critical articles.
Get over it yourself, because this is tech news. The computer industry is in a severe crisis, so severe that it is overwhelmingly more important than the latest Linux point release or kewl gaming console. You should be happy that any other news manages to get mentioned at all. At a site devoted to "news for nerds and stuff that matters", it's only logical that Microsoft's domination and the damage it causes gets covered very often, because there's harldy anything else that matters more.
Say wha, Taco?
The good news, I don't think you misspelled anything. The bad news is, your grammar and vocabulary seem to have gone over to the impenetrably flummoxed.
Did you mean to say that a gaseous orb exerts power on your laptop?
Plenty of legitimate criticisms can be formulated against Java, JSP and JDBC, but I think we can safely ignore what this guy has to say about it.
If so, then you must think that Germans are an extremely impolite people. Because they call France Frankreich, they call Danmark Daenemark, they call Italia Italien, they call Espana Spanien, they call Sverige Schweden, they call Rossiya Russland, they misspell Canada as Kanada and Mexico as Mexiko, they call Australia Australien, they call Firenze Florenz, they call Milano Mailand, they call Roma Rom, they call Venezia Venedig, they call Sicilia Sizilien, they call Sardinia Sardinien, they call California Kalifornien, they call Moskva Moskau, they call Kobnhavn Kopenhagen, and on and on and on.
Actually, the whole world's full of impolite people, isn't it?
It seems that everyone in his right mind despises telemarketing. Spam too. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that there are few things they hate more in life. It seems as if there are no exceptions to this rule -- everyone, bar none, hates telemarketing and spam.
But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money. Because for some reason, telemarketers and spammers stay in business. Somehow, it must be worth it for them.
If everyone hated the stuff as much as they say they do, if everyone hung up on the unwanted calls and deleted the unwanted mails in nothing flat, like they say they do, then the problem would fizzle out before long. No one could make money doing it, so there would be no reason to keep trying. And yet, the crap just goes on and on and on.
I've read rumors that a certain small percentage of the people called or mailed actually do respond and end up buying something; usually the figure is put about 10%, or something similarly low. Hard to believe that such a business would be worthwhile if the response rate is so low; but whatever it is, it must be high enough that the incentive for telemarketing and spamming is maintained. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing.
A national no-call list is a nice idea, but I can't see the problem going away altogether as long as the telemarketers and spammer still believe there's a chance to make money. Certainly the spammers are not going to let some trivial thing like a Federal law stop them. (They'll just go on spamming from Antarctica, or wherever.) If we really want the problem solved, once and for all, we have to ensure that there is no future for those businesses, and that would require educating the public, right down to the last man, woman and child, to always follow this rule without exception: If someone calls you or emails you to sell you a product, then whatever you do, don't buy that product!
That ticklish feeling in my tummy
I first felt snuggling with my mummy
I feel it again when I hear that dummy
A belly laugh for that numbskull Rummy
Please allow us to introduce ourselves
... whoo whoo ... ... whoo whoo ...
We're a cartel of wealth and waste
We've been around for a long long year
Stole an industry's soul and grace
We were 'round when Brianna L.
Had her moment of fear and shame
Made damn sure the lawyers
Took her money and gave her the blame
Pleased to meet you!
Hope you guess our name
But what's puzzling you
Is whether we're insane
We hung around on the Internet
When we saw it was a time for a change
Killed Napster and its administrators
Sean Fanning sued in vain
We wrote a hack
Into the Britney tracks
When the downloads raged
Now it's on your Mac
Pleased to meet you!
Hope you guess our name
But what's puzzling you
Is whether we're insane
We watched with glee
While our attorneys
Fought for a hundred grand
From every music fan
We shouted out,
"Who killed the Dead Kennedys?"
When after all
It was us, you see
Let us please introduce ourselves
We're a cartel of wealth and waste
And we've laid traps for the file swappers
Who get sued before they press Escape
Pleased to meet you!
Hope you guess our name
But what's puzzling you
Is whether we're insane
Just as every kid is a criminal
And the corporate thieves are saints
As heads is tails
Just settle our lawsuit, sir
Cause you're in need of some restraint
So if you meet us
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Obey all our well-paid politicians
Or we'll lay your life's savings to waste
Pleased to meet you!
Hope you guess our name
But what's puzzling you
Is whether we're insane
Whoo whoo
Whoo whoo
The discussion further back in the thread suggests that McBride might very well know that ESR does not know the identity of the DDoS hacker.
McBride's statement, which may be widely passed along by the press, suggests that ESR condones the actions of someone who is committing a crime. This at least could tarnish his reputation, and may be tantamount to an accusation of aiding and abetting. As I recall the definition of libel, it encompasses making statements that you know to be false and that either accuse someone of a crime or significantly damage their reputation (IANAL).
Darl McBride deserves no mercy. If ESR chooses to seek legal action against him, and if he needs donations to pay attorney fees, I'm all set to write a check.
No Bunky, that is precisely what I did not say. If you like, you can try reading my post again, especially the last sentence, especially the part about how I'd like to see a certain something or other succeed.
BTW, I don't know why you talk as if "unixes and unixlikes" are something different from "Apple". MacOS X is Unix (BSD to be precise).
A number of people have already pointed out the flaw in this article: Most people buy their Linux installation from one of the distros, and the distros all install a default desktop -- Gnome or KDE or whatever. As the author himself states, casual users rarely change their interface defaults, so these people will just stay with their default setup. And if they never know or care that they had a choice, then so what.
... a Unix kernel and a Mac GUI, the perfect computer! Absolute fucking paradise. For the first time in my life, I can work with a sophisticated, well thought-out user interface, and at the same time pop up a bash shell and exploit all of the technical power of a Unix command line.
But I want to add something about the subject of open-source Unix and GUIs. Just a few weeks ago, I finally got my first box with MacOS X. I know, I'm way late saying this, but
I'm a big fan of the open-source efforts to build Unix systems, but I must say that they have struggled badly and unsuccessfully at their efforts to create good user interfaces. Sorry, but Gnome and KDE and all the rest really do suck (and don't even get me started on proprietary offerings like CDE). Then along comes Apple, big ol' proprietary closed-source look-n-feel-lawsuit Steve Jobs & Co., and puts them all to shame.
I think this guy with the article may be misunderstanding his own point. The trouble with the GUIs of open source Unix systems is not that there's too much choice. It is, unfortunately, that the open source developers have proven to be very, very bad at building GUIs.
Some of the posters so far have stated quite bluntly that open source developers just don't care about GUIs. So OK, score a point for honesty, I guess. I for one am certainly technically capable enough to deal with the likes of Gnome and KDE, but gawd, why would I want to if I can use something as good as MacOS X? Why make your life any more difficult than necessary? MacOS X is the proof, you see, that a Unix interface doesn't have to be so second-rate; if you try, and you know what you're doing, then you can make the user experience with Unix into something thrilling.
I think there's something else besides lack of developer interest that holds back the user interfaces in open source Unix. There's a whole class of people working a field called usability, who spend all their time figuring out how people work well with computers (and other devices). They've built up a whole field of research, and even run empirical experiments to test ideas, giving test subjects an interface to work with and observing what they do with it.
It seems to me that open source developers and the usability people live in almost wholly separate universes, hardly aware of one another's existence. Apple, on the other hand, has been working with these people for years and it shows. I would like to see Gnome & KDE and the rest succeed, but until they start taking usability issues much more seriously than they do now, corporations like Apple will remain way ahead of them.
Ugh, that reminds me. Some 15 years ago I was a poor American student living in Germany, doing odd free-lance technical translation jobs. Bad enough that I didn't understand most of the stuff I was translating anyway. But one time, I got instructions in English for some kind of chemical laboratory equipment, which had apparently been translated from Japanese already, and it read just like this, I kid you not. It could have passed as haiku. Now they wanted me to translate it into German (the opposite of what you usually do, since you usually translate into your own native language).
I pointed out that this was crazy, that I couldn't make heads or tails of it and couldn't possibly translate it into something sane. But they needed the job done and didn't care and I needed the money, so I did the best I could. As near as I can tell, it involved heating up some kind of liquid I had never heard of, and you better be sure to adjust this widget and calibrate that thingamabob correctly, or else, well, some bad thing would happen. I cringe at the thought that some German lab grunt might have actually tried to follow the instructions I wrote.
That seems to be a part of the Macintosh culture. Steve Dorner, the original author of the Eudora mail client (which was first implemented on the Mac), also like to include messages like these in his program.
One that I remember is: If you started pressing keys in a situation where there's no writable window and no place else to type, a dialogue would eventually pop up saying, "There's no one listening to keystrokes now. You might as well stop typing."