Sorry but this is not a complex equation and I think these guys are getting wrapped up in too many details and missing the big picture.
The harddrive is really, really, really, really fscking slow. In comparison Ram is really really really fast. As a result, you want to interact with the hard drive as little as you possibly can, and interact with ram instead as much as you possibly can (the only thing which beats that is interacting with only the cpu registers and avoiding ram and harddrive altogether).
As is, linux doesn't even begin touching the disk until there is only enough ram left to turn on VM. Now this has a negative impact when that limit is reached because there is overhead turning it on.. this impact is negligable and tweakable since you can wait and see if you hitting the limit, add more memory, see again and reevaluate until you simply aren't swapping. This is a good thing.
One of the worst things windows does is swap constantly. In fact beyond a certain point (read enough ram to run an XP desktop) the system swaps MORE if you have more ram. You boot the system with all uneeded services turned off and no startup processes and all the eyecandy turned off. And you've got 4gb of ram in the system, guess what, it's already using VM.
Maybe VM management itself could be tweaked more, but it certainly shouldn't be used unless it absolutely has to (and if you don't have enough ram and it has to all the time then it's not like you suffer that performance hit more than once).
The only exception to this I've found is a linux desktop running kde or gnome with about 256mb of ram, at that point the numbers seem to work out just about right(or wrong I should say) and the system is constantly turning VM on and off, encountering the performance hit again and again and again, with pretty much every operation you perform.
Umm yes, but they price the software as if this overhead were there (although they would recoup these costs and still have plenty of money to burn if they charged $5 a license instead of $200+).
They also are a firm example of why design IS needed since the result of their coding is a prime example of what happens if you don't. It's buggy, lacks any sort of consistancy, in general is very poorly designed and doesn't perform it's function well at all, and it's typically counter-intuitive.
To top it off, cutting corners obviously doesn't work well for them since their development is generally painfully slow. Most competiting companies with vastly inferior resources at their disposal produce superior software at a faster rate.
Microsoft typically only comes ahead when it utilizes a monopoly it was handed by ibm (windows never won, the cheap ibm pc-compatible won), to embrace and extend and then force competitors to play catch up reverse engineering their proprietary extensions to standards.
Excuse me sir, but only USians are permitted to mock US design practices. As dictated by us USians. We were easily able to pick out your non-USian status when this phrase was seen.
No icecream for you and we'll be canceling that next few billion of orders to your nations contractors for worthless crap we never needed and actually buy toilet paper produced here instead and spend less than 14 billion we were about to spend on the "cheap" $200 rolls we were going to buy from you guys. Better luck next year!
Not true, the software I've found which meets my customer's needs quickly, has near perfect uptime, and the fewest bugs (as well as the fastest resolution time of the bugs that are there) is open source software which is free.
This odd association between expensive and good is why Sony has so much money today. Incredibly overpriced POS products (Belive me I should know, I spend a good chunk of my time at Sony working on those products and seeing how the problems we knew about were handled) and lousy support and little acknowledgement of a warranty has worked for them. Why? Because they are immensely overpriced (and I'm talking often double the price of competing products with equivelent specs, with lower production standards and cheaper components) people assume it's good stuff.
I mean if it was a little more it'd be overpriced, if it's double there must be some reason it's so much more right? That laptop must be incredible in some fashion if it's $3,500 when the other guy here is selling one with the same specs for $800!
I could go on and on about Sony, but that's just an example. More expensive, even immensely more expensive doesn't == better. In fact it very rarely is better. In the case of software, a popular open source project is almost ALWAYS better than the commercial competing products.. at the very least it's better is some respects.
A couple examples, Apache for starters, there's not much in the commercial world to compare with it. While there are some commercial webservers that do certain things better or have a feature apache doesn't have, you'd really have to need it to justify the price since there aren't any that won't set you back several thousand a license.
Another example is Samba, while it may be debatable whether it does EVERYTHING better than a Windows domain controller (if it doesn't it's pretty clear why) it without a doubt yields much more solid uptime, and vastly superior performance in it's role. Samba servers are more stable, faster, and more efficient.
Particularly for a small buisness Samba is a no brainer over a windows server, a small buisness can't afford to throw away a grand on simple file and print services, let alone CALS, and the additional 10-20 grand annually of hardware upgrades and maintenance that Server will cost, the same server will continue working until the hardware dies or the company grows substantially (which will be awhile if you use the least hardware you would have purchased if making this a windows file server) perhaps 10yrs, the windows server will make it 2-5, averaging about 3yrs.
Really? Pretty much anything in which I've participated that's involved the government has started with them handing out a 500 page document of various specifications which will be tested under the guise of 200 redundant and useless forms.
Generally the 500 page document will spell out a complex and useless process such as:
Eat lunch at noon. Go home, eat in the cafeteria using plastic utencils, or go out. Be back in one hour and if late file these 250 forms which will be reviewed by at least 200 people before you get paid assuming we haven't lost the paperwork... in which case you must file these 500 forms which will be reviewed by at least 200 different people, if one of those people dies, you must file these 750 forms and.... you get the idea.
hmm ok, but what if the reason you don't know what it was, is because it was a fix for a security hole you personally don't even know exists. And thus you delete it, reintroduce the security hole (because there was no visible "breaking", or because there was and you rewrote the same flawed code as before).
Don't you see this as I don't know a problem? Or perhaps the reason you don't see anything break is the same reason that change was made to begin with, it's something broken which hasn't even occured to you and thus your tests didn't even look for it. So when you run them again, tada, again they don't find it.
Or probably the rarest case, it's worthless useless bloat which should be removed. (Unless you work in redmond, then this probably the most likely case based on the source code I've seen written there.)
Actually that's not true, IE breaks HTTP standard, I won't go into alot of detail because you can look it up easily (there was an article on it awhile back). But basically the browser immediately sends the request skipping the startup of negotiation with the webserver. IIS expects this an acts accordingly... with other webservers IE doesn't get the correct response back and begins normal negotiation.
As a result IIS is slower when you use other web browsers, and sites served by other webservers appear to be slower than IIS when you use IE.
Even so, I'm fairly sure Microsoft has never at any point in time held the webserver market. Actually their chunk of it could barely be called significant and really only can because most of the market is splintered among numerous *nix OS's, you know, what happens when there is proper competition.
I see a few problems with your assessment, the biggest is here:
"3. The cost of hiring systems administrators is pretty close of linux vs. windows, but the cost of deploying software and the simplification that microsoft has deployed in this area is still untouched."
While technically right, you are neglecting to mention the more critical parts of this aspect. Without a doubt it takes more to deploy linux solutions, the gap is smaller when competent hands are doing the deploying but lets face it, it takes longer to setup samba than a windows PDC.
However in the longterm, the Total cost of ownership for linux is much much lower. When you setup a linux server, short of hardware failure it doesn't go down. When you install a linux application, it takes more tweaking (depending on the app) but after tweaked and running the app doesn't have problems. There is no need to add a repair function in open office because the application corrupts itself routinely unlike *cough* some vendors office suites.
How do I know? Well personally administrating 16 linux servers (the most in a single organization is 3) and twice that number of windows servers helps. But I don't need to trust a potentially narrow view of my own experience. In recent internal memos released in the EU anti-trust hearing announcements Microsoft says their TCO compared to other systems such as linux are extremely high.
Samba 3 Domain controllers and file servers are also much much faster. Install one, try it, even on a two pc network you can really feel the difference. Opening a network share with 300 objects in it is instantaneous, opening network neighborhood is like openin a local file. And of course benchmark transfers. I'd estimate the samba servers are roughly 30% faster on a two workstation test network... in production, believe me, the gap is wider.
"1. Alot of corporations will cling to windows because 99.9% of their userbase is on windows right now. They realize that there is cheaper alternatives out there (linux) but they rather stay with what they are using because it will cause less headaches for the IT dept. and operations as a whole will run smoother without messing with the OS that they are using."
I'd say that depends on the corporation and how high up word of this linux thing goes. If it's in the windows based IT department's hands then your likely right. If management finds out that this linux thing is free, and that licensing costs will help offset the initial expense, and that over a term of just 5yrs they will have saved easily three to four times their initial investment... I'm not so sure it will be up to the IT department anymore.
I don't know, I personally think perl might be a better learning tool. Especially since it's much more efficient and powerful. You can go into very advanced programs without ever having to move to another language. Besides it does the hello world thing in fewer lines:
Your right of course, microsot is leveraging their windows monopoly to gain yet another monopoly. They've doubled this up by using the proceeds from their windows monopoly to hold out until they can gain enough market share.
"The rule is "Faster, Cheaper, Better" always wins. Cheaper by itself is not the whole answer."
Well that's optimal I'll give you that, but generally cheaper is enough. The reason Microsoft has a monopoly is that IBM hardware was cheaper but it was certainly neither faster or better in any other fashion than Amiga and Apple solutions in the days the battle was fought.
The same goes for the software, the Microsoft OS being sold wasn't faster or better in any fashion than either Amiga Dos or MacOS.
This is the same reason why people claiming Microsoft legitimately earned their monopoly and was successful in buisness are full of it. Microsoft was taken for the ride by the cheap IBM compatible hardware which won the market.
ok then lets start comparing notes. It's been significantly warmer for several years now in Central Illinois as compared to what it used to be. I've also been told it's been warmer in Florida as well.
I don't see any reason to abolish copyright law. I do however see reason to amend it, and the DMCA certainly has to go, everything legitimate that the DMCA covers was illegal before the DMCA after all.
We simply need an amendment stating that copyright is optional and conditional. Either you submit to rules of copyright and gain the protection and rights associated with it under law. OR your work is immediately part of the public domain and you can incorporate whatever vigilante technical measures to protect it you see fit.
Either the RIAA/MPAA/EVERYONE ELSE protects their creations themselves with technical measures or the law protects them with laws, take your pick but you can't have both.
"You've actually shone light on a fundamental misunderstanding that lots of Slashdotters have: this isn't up to Senator Leahy or even copyright law to tell you, but the copyright holder. You see, when you own the copyright on something, you typically have the right to say how people use it. If you write a book, you can freely authorize people to perform it publicly. You can authorize it to be performed only for groups up of up to fifty people, or only more than 50,000 people. You can require that it be performed only in that African language with the clicking sound, or only if the readers stand on their heads -- whatever you like. Copyright law generally doesn't go into this detail -- they keep it simple by generally letting the rightsholder choose how others may use their copyrighted work."
Well your almost right. Copyright law goes into a great deal of detail however, it goes into a great deal of detail in what exactly the copyright holder may restrict (in an unfortunately vague way). Meaning it defines classes of things the copyright holder may restrict. If the condition, restriction, etc is not in one of those classes, the copyright holder DOES NOT have the right to restrict it.
They don't after all own the material itself, the public does, they merely have been granted LIMITED copyright of certain specific aspects of how the material is used, for a LIMITED period of time by the owner, the public.
"or worse, use the same password on everything)????"
Umm single signon IS using the same password for everything, except instead of some or even most users, EVERY user is doing so including the administrator?
It's just the alternatives I suppose that have me truely confused.
A fully featured website (which needs it all), has several layers, at most:
The client-side dynamic content, javascript, vbscript, etc
The middle-ground dynamic content, SSI's, PHP, ASP
And the backend, Perl, C/C++, Java, (insert any true, full blown, fully featured, programming language here, which none of the above are).
There are places where these overlap, there are number of things you could do in Perl, PHP, ASP, or with SSI for instance, which it should be done with is a matter of efficientcy of course and preference when it's just as fast at 100,000 simultaneous connections either way (even if you only expect 5). But something like PHP is not a replacement for Perl anymore than Perl is for PHP.
It's apples and oranges guys, if you want to compare something go with the SQL database flames, at least there you are comparing pretty much the same thing to pretty much the same thing. And there that same thing and generally used for the same purposes.
I've coded cgi in c and perl both (not too big on C++ personally although I can work with it if suitably bribed). Both have their advantages and when your talking high enough volume perl is no longer than option, the interpreter consumes too much memory per instance.
Sometimes 4000 simultaneous instances just plain need to consume less than 256mb of RAM, it's just the way it is.
That's good and well, there's only one problem with it.
Perl isn't exactly in competition with php, they have different purposes and are used for different things. Might as well start comparing perl to SSI's. True they overlap, and there are many things you could do in either but generally, if it's the front, you want php, if it's the back, you want perl.
Perhaps your perl backend might output a little html/php but it's certainly not going to be the other way around;)
Perl is great for cgi's, php is great for dymanic web content, cgi's were never good for that.
PHP is actually an counter to something more like SSI's, or ASP
Let's assume for a minute all these claims are true and they have the perfect windows emulation for linux.
This is commercial development. They aren't going to open this code and it's not going to be free.
Like most commercial vendors they will be greedy of course and price it high, instead of dirt cheap like they need it.
If they price the oem non volume (or maybe even 10 pack) at about $5-15 then this will be a big winner all around. They will sell millions(or even billions) of copies and make a great return on their invesstment, every linux pc will be preloaded with this thing. Every linux user will have a copy.
On the other hand, if they are greedy like most companies and want more than that... all the sudden linux is as expensive or more so than windows per copy (like with crossover office). Vendors are going to sell box sets, not download distros and a box set is going to cost about $60-80, again simply too expensive. If this thing is even $20 and is basically prerequisite (and it would be) then it's just as expensive as windows.
Nope, our best hope is that this company has real technology, goes bankrupt and gpl's their code with their dying breath. It will do us little good for the same reason crossover office hasn't done nearly as much as it should... crossover office alone costs nearly as much per license as windows. If you combine it will a box distro it's more than an OEM XP Pro, let alone home.
Aye on the classic view thing. Have you ever seen an XP Desktop that isn't set to classic start menu and classic theme? During install before you've changed it doesn't count of course.
All that extra bloated UNintuitive crap goes by by.
"If it was truly the meat-and-potatoes of the game, it would be selectable from the start using something other than a (semi-obvious, granted) code. Like a menu option."
I know of very few games that let you skip levels from the main menu without a cheat code.
The second quest is basically Zelda lvl 2 and you encounter it in regular gameplay in proper sequence, right after finishing lvl 1.
I think you've got your terminology a bit confused here, there IS NO "main" quest in zelda, there's the first quest, and the second quest. The first quest is not the "main" quest, it's just the one you do first to warm up for the second one.
The first doesn't even really count, you can beat it faster than these guys just by naming your character Zelda. The second was much harder to find a cheat guide for, leaving most stuck actually having to find things for themselves (since the second quest actually had some scenes changed and had all the castles and items in different locations).
First quest walkthroughs were a dime a dozen and everyone knows you haven't beat a game if you used a walkthrough. And you certainly haven't beaten Zelda if you can't tell me where the silver arrow was in the second quest.
And no, it's like saying someone hasn't beaten Marios Bros. because they only beat the first level and not all the levels. It just happens that The Legend of Zelda only has two longish levels.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry but this is not a complex equation and I think these guys are getting wrapped up in too many details and missing the big picture.
The harddrive is really, really, really, really fscking slow. In comparison Ram is really really really fast. As a result, you want to interact with the hard drive as little as you possibly can, and interact with ram instead as much as you possibly can (the only thing which beats that is interacting with only the cpu registers and avoiding ram and harddrive altogether).
As is, linux doesn't even begin touching the disk until there is only enough ram left to turn on VM. Now this has a negative impact when that limit is reached because there is overhead turning it on.. this impact is negligable and tweakable since you can wait and see if you hitting the limit, add more memory, see again and reevaluate until you simply aren't swapping. This is a good thing.
One of the worst things windows does is swap constantly. In fact beyond a certain point (read enough ram to run an XP desktop) the system swaps MORE if you have more ram. You boot the system with all uneeded services turned off and no startup processes and all the eyecandy turned off. And you've got 4gb of ram in the system, guess what, it's already using VM.
Maybe VM management itself could be tweaked more, but it certainly shouldn't be used unless it absolutely has to (and if you don't have enough ram and it has to all the time then it's not like you suffer that performance hit more than once).
The only exception to this I've found is a linux desktop running kde or gnome with about 256mb of ram, at that point the numbers seem to work out just about right(or wrong I should say) and the system is constantly turning VM on and off, encountering the performance hit again and again and again, with pretty much every operation you perform.
Umm yes, but they price the software as if this overhead were there (although they would recoup these costs and still have plenty of money to burn if they charged $5 a license instead of $200+).
They also are a firm example of why design IS needed since the result of their coding is a prime example of what happens if you don't. It's buggy, lacks any sort of consistancy, in general is very poorly designed and doesn't perform it's function well at all, and it's typically counter-intuitive.
To top it off, cutting corners obviously doesn't work well for them since their development is generally painfully slow. Most competiting companies with vastly inferior resources at their disposal produce superior software at a faster rate.
Microsoft typically only comes ahead when it utilizes a monopoly it was handed by ibm (windows never won, the cheap ibm pc-compatible won), to embrace and extend and then force competitors to play catch up reverse engineering their proprietary extensions to standards.
"wicked fast"
Excuse me sir, but only USians are permitted to mock US design practices. As dictated by us USians. We were easily able to pick out your non-USian status when this phrase was seen.
No icecream for you and we'll be canceling that next few billion of orders to your nations contractors for worthless crap we never needed and actually buy toilet paper produced here instead and spend less than 14 billion we were about to spend on the "cheap" $200 rolls we were going to buy from you guys. Better luck next year!
Love,
Them, They, and Those damn yank bastards.
Not true, the software I've found which meets my customer's needs quickly, has near perfect uptime, and the fewest bugs (as well as the fastest resolution time of the bugs that are there) is open source software which is free.
This odd association between expensive and good is why Sony has so much money today. Incredibly overpriced POS products (Belive me I should know, I spend a good chunk of my time at Sony working on those products and seeing how the problems we knew about were handled) and lousy support and little acknowledgement of a warranty has worked for them.
Why? Because they are immensely overpriced (and I'm talking often double the price of competing products with equivelent specs, with lower production standards and cheaper components) people assume it's good stuff.
I mean if it was a little more it'd be overpriced, if it's double there must be some reason it's so much more right? That laptop must be incredible in some fashion if it's $3,500 when the other guy here is selling one with the same specs for $800!
I could go on and on about Sony, but that's just an example. More expensive, even immensely more expensive doesn't == better. In fact it very rarely is better. In the case of software, a popular open source project is almost ALWAYS better than the commercial competing products.. at the very least it's better is some respects.
A couple examples, Apache for starters, there's not much in the commercial world to compare with it. While there are some commercial webservers that do certain things better or have a feature apache doesn't have, you'd really have to need it to justify the price since there aren't any that won't set you back several thousand a license.
Another example is Samba, while it may be debatable whether it does EVERYTHING better than a Windows domain controller (if it doesn't it's pretty clear why) it without a doubt yields much more solid uptime, and vastly superior performance in it's role. Samba servers are more stable, faster, and more efficient.
Particularly for a small buisness Samba is a no brainer over a windows server, a small buisness can't afford to throw away a grand on simple file and print services, let alone CALS, and the additional 10-20 grand annually of hardware upgrades and maintenance that Server will cost, the same server will continue working until the hardware dies or the company grows substantially (which will be awhile if you use the least hardware you would have purchased if making this a windows file server) perhaps 10yrs, the windows server will make it 2-5, averaging about 3yrs.
Really? Pretty much anything in which I've participated that's involved the government has started with them handing out a 500 page document of various specifications which will be tested under the guise of 200 redundant and useless forms.
Generally the 500 page document will spell out a complex and useless process such as:
Eat lunch at noon. Go home, eat in the cafeteria using plastic utencils, or go out. Be back in one hour and if late file these 250 forms which will be reviewed by at least 200 people before you get paid assuming we haven't lost the paperwork... in which case you must file these 500 forms which will be reviewed by at least 200 different people, if one of those people dies, you must file these 750 forms and.... you get the idea.
hmm ok, but what if the reason you don't know what it was, is because it was a fix for a security hole you personally don't even know exists. And thus you delete it, reintroduce the security hole (because there was no visible "breaking", or because there was and you rewrote the same flawed code as before).
Don't you see this as I don't know a problem? Or perhaps the reason you don't see anything break is the same reason that change was made to begin with, it's something broken which hasn't even occured to you and thus your tests didn't even look for it. So when you run them again, tada, again they don't find it.
Or probably the rarest case, it's worthless useless bloat which should be removed. (Unless you work in redmond, then this probably the most likely case based on the source code I've seen written there.)
Actually that's not true, IE breaks HTTP standard, I won't go into alot of detail because you can look it up easily (there was an article on it awhile back). But basically the browser immediately sends the request skipping the startup of negotiation with the webserver. IIS expects this an acts accordingly... with other webservers IE doesn't get the correct response back and begins normal negotiation.
As a result IIS is slower when you use other web browsers, and sites served by other webservers appear to be slower than IIS when you use IE.
Even so, I'm fairly sure Microsoft has never at any point in time held the webserver market. Actually their chunk of it could barely be called significant and really only can because most of the market is splintered among numerous *nix OS's, you know, what happens when there is proper competition.
hmm I have 512mb of ram on my desktop and unless I open several memory hogs my system doesn't swap period, at all, ever.
I see a few problems with your assessment, the biggest is here:
"3. The cost of hiring systems administrators is pretty close of linux vs. windows, but the cost of deploying software and the simplification that microsoft has deployed in this area is still untouched."
While technically right, you are neglecting to mention the more critical parts of this aspect. Without a doubt it takes more to deploy linux solutions, the gap is smaller when competent hands are doing the deploying but lets face it, it takes longer to setup samba than a windows PDC.
However in the longterm, the Total cost of ownership for linux is much much lower. When you setup a linux server, short of hardware failure it doesn't go down. When you install a linux application, it takes more tweaking (depending on the app) but after tweaked and running the app doesn't have problems. There is no need to add a repair function in open office because the application corrupts itself routinely unlike *cough* some vendors office suites.
How do I know? Well personally administrating 16 linux servers (the most in a single organization is 3) and twice that number of windows servers helps. But I don't need to trust a potentially narrow view of my own experience. In recent internal memos released in the EU anti-trust hearing announcements Microsoft says their TCO compared to other systems such as linux are extremely high.
Samba 3 Domain controllers and file servers are also much much faster. Install one, try it, even on a two pc network you can really feel the difference. Opening a network share with 300 objects in it is instantaneous, opening network neighborhood is like openin a local file. And of course benchmark transfers. I'd estimate the samba servers are roughly 30% faster on a two workstation test network... in production, believe me, the gap is wider.
"1. Alot of corporations will cling to windows because 99.9% of their userbase is on windows right now. They realize that there is cheaper alternatives out there (linux) but they rather stay with what they are using because it will cause less headaches for the IT dept. and operations as a whole will run smoother without messing with the OS that they are using."
I'd say that depends on the corporation and how high up word of this linux thing goes. If it's in the windows based IT department's hands then your likely right. If management finds out that this linux thing is free, and that licensing costs will help offset the initial expense, and that over a term of just 5yrs they will have saved easily three to four times their initial investment... I'm not so sure it will be up to the IT department anymore.
As far as I know Microsoft OS's have NEVER held the dominate position in the webserver market?
I don't know, I personally think perl might be a better learning tool. Especially since it's much more efficient and powerful. You can go into very advanced programs without ever having to move to another language. Besides it does the hello world thing in fewer lines:
;)
print "hello world";
Even simpler
Your right of course, microsot is leveraging their windows monopoly to gain yet another monopoly. They've doubled this up by using the proceeds from their windows monopoly to hold out until they can gain enough market share.
"The rule is "Faster, Cheaper, Better" always wins. Cheaper by itself is not the whole answer."
Well that's optimal I'll give you that, but generally cheaper is enough. The reason Microsoft has a monopoly is that IBM hardware was cheaper but it was certainly neither faster or better in any other fashion than Amiga and Apple solutions in the days the battle was fought.
The same goes for the software, the Microsoft OS being sold wasn't faster or better in any fashion than either Amiga Dos or MacOS.
This is the same reason why people claiming Microsoft legitimately earned their monopoly and was successful in buisness are full of it. Microsoft was taken for the ride by the cheap IBM compatible hardware which won the market.
ok then lets start comparing notes. It's been significantly warmer for several years now in Central Illinois as compared to what it used to be. I've also been told it's been warmer in Florida as well.
They have one, it's called life. Haven't you figurd out that linux can run on damn near anything yet?
I don't see any reason to abolish copyright law. I do however see reason to amend it, and the DMCA certainly has to go, everything legitimate that the DMCA covers was illegal before the DMCA after all.
We simply need an amendment stating that copyright is optional and conditional. Either you submit to rules of copyright and gain the protection and rights associated with it under law. OR your work is immediately part of the public domain and you can incorporate whatever vigilante technical measures to protect it you see fit.
Either the RIAA/MPAA/EVERYONE ELSE protects their creations themselves with technical measures or the law protects them with laws, take your pick but you can't have both.
"You've actually shone light on a fundamental misunderstanding that lots of Slashdotters have: this isn't up to Senator Leahy or even copyright law to tell you, but the copyright holder. You see, when you own the copyright on something, you typically have the right to say how people use it. If you write a book, you can freely authorize people to perform it publicly. You can authorize it to be performed only for groups up of up to fifty people, or only more than 50,000 people. You can require that it be performed only in that African language with the clicking sound, or only if the readers stand on their heads -- whatever you like. Copyright law generally doesn't go into this detail -- they keep it simple by generally letting the rightsholder choose how others may use their copyrighted work."
Well your almost right. Copyright law goes into a great deal of detail however, it goes into a great deal of detail in what exactly the copyright holder may restrict (in an unfortunately vague way). Meaning it defines classes of things the copyright holder may restrict. If the condition, restriction, etc is not in one of those classes, the copyright holder DOES NOT have the right to restrict it.
They don't after all own the material itself, the public does, they merely have been granted LIMITED copyright of certain specific aspects of how the material is used, for a LIMITED period of time by the owner, the public.
"or worse, use the same password on everything)????"
Umm single signon IS using the same password for everything, except instead of some or even most users, EVERY user is doing so including the administrator?
It's just the alternatives I suppose that have me truely confused.
A fully featured website (which needs it all), has several layers, at most:
The client-side dynamic content, javascript, vbscript, etc
The middle-ground dynamic content,
SSI's, PHP, ASP
And the backend,
Perl, C/C++, Java, (insert any true, full blown, fully featured, programming language here, which none of the above are).
There are places where these overlap, there are number of things you could do in Perl, PHP, ASP, or with SSI for instance, which it should be done with is a matter of efficientcy of course and preference when it's just as fast at 100,000 simultaneous connections either way (even if you only expect 5). But something like PHP is not a replacement for Perl anymore than Perl is for PHP.
It's apples and oranges guys, if you want to compare something go with the SQL database flames, at least there you are comparing pretty much the same thing to pretty much the same thing. And there that same thing and generally used for the same purposes.
I've coded cgi in c and perl both (not too big on C++ personally although I can work with it if suitably bribed). Both have their advantages and when your talking high enough volume perl is no longer than option, the interpreter consumes too much memory per instance.
Sometimes 4000 simultaneous instances just plain need to consume less than 256mb of RAM, it's just the way it is.
That's good and well, there's only one problem with it.
;)
Perl isn't exactly in competition with php, they have different purposes and are used for different things. Might as well start comparing perl to SSI's. True they overlap, and there are many things you could do in either but generally, if it's the front, you want php, if it's the back, you want perl.
Perhaps your perl backend might output a little html/php but it's certainly not going to be the other way around
Perl is great for cgi's, php is great for dymanic web content, cgi's were never good for that.
PHP is actually an counter to something more like SSI's, or ASP
Let's assume for a minute all these claims are true and they have the perfect windows emulation for linux.
This is commercial development. They aren't going to open this code and it's not going to be free.
Like most commercial vendors they will be greedy of course and price it high, instead of dirt cheap like they need it.
If they price the oem non volume (or maybe even 10 pack) at about $5-15 then this will be a big winner all around. They will sell millions(or even billions) of copies and make a great return on their invesstment, every linux pc will be preloaded with this thing. Every linux user will have a copy.
On the other hand, if they are greedy like most companies and want more than that... all the sudden linux is as expensive or more so than windows per copy (like with crossover office). Vendors are going to sell box sets, not download distros and a box set is going to cost about $60-80, again simply too expensive. If this thing is even $20 and is basically prerequisite (and it would be) then it's just as expensive as windows.
Nope, our best hope is that this company has real technology, goes bankrupt and gpl's their code with their dying breath. It will do us little good for the same reason crossover office hasn't done nearly as much as it should... crossover office alone costs nearly as much per license as windows. If you combine it will a box distro it's more than an OEM XP Pro, let alone home.
Aye on the classic view thing. Have you ever seen an XP Desktop that isn't set to classic start menu and classic theme? During install before you've changed it doesn't count of course.
All that extra bloated UNintuitive crap goes by by.
"If it was truly the meat-and-potatoes of the game, it would be selectable from the start using something other than a (semi-obvious, granted) code. Like a menu option."
I know of very few games that let you skip levels from the main menu without a cheat code.
The second quest is basically Zelda lvl 2 and you encounter it in regular gameplay in proper sequence, right after finishing lvl 1.
I think you've got your terminology a bit confused here, there IS NO "main" quest in zelda, there's the first quest, and the second quest. The first quest is not the "main" quest, it's just the one you do first to warm up for the second one.
The first doesn't even really count, you can beat it faster than these guys just by naming your character Zelda. The second was much harder to find a cheat guide for, leaving most stuck actually having to find things for themselves (since the second quest actually had some scenes changed and had all the castles and items in different locations).
First quest walkthroughs were a dime a dozen and everyone knows you haven't beat a game if you used a walkthrough. And you certainly haven't beaten Zelda if you can't tell me where the silver arrow was in the second quest.
And no, it's like saying someone hasn't beaten Marios Bros. because they only beat the first level and not all the levels. It just happens that The Legend of Zelda only has two longish levels.