For years already I have my mailserver configured to drop any message from hotmail.com because you get so much junk from it. And to people who try to send me a valid message from hotmail, I just say: get yourself something decent like gmail instead of insulting me by sending me messages from hotmail.
So I suppose it's only fair if they return the favour.
I don't know you, but I know what would work best for me in your situation.
Look for a friendly nerd in a company in your geographical area who is experienced with Linux.
Ask him to teach you the basics, agree a couple of days per week when you will just sit behind a Linux system together for an hour or so after work, and pay him some money for it. Then practise what you've learned during the day.
After that, ask what he's been up to during the day and ask him to show you how he did it, why he didn't do it another way, and just ask a thousand questions about everything.
This, together with practising with your O'Reilly books, will get you going I'm sure.
And don't forget to give your Friendly Nerd some geek toys now and again, like laser pointers, Linux t-shirts, lava lamps, swiss army knives with built in USB drives and so on! (thinkgeek.com)
I hope they find something really harmful about using cellphones on planes quick!
On the airplane has been the only place where you could still be free from the plague of people around you annoying you with their ringtones and phonecalls since the coming of cell phones. Or you yourself being harrassed with inconvenient phonecalls while you're sitting in a crowd of people.
This is going to make airline travel so much more of a nuisance than it already is..
Christianity in Narnia
I really hope the christian motives aren't going to be de-emphasised in the films. There's little "shoving down throats" and "religious propaganda" in the books, as others suggest.
Rather, the Narnia series is telling the story of christianity from an entirely different perspective (in an imaginary world), where the "stained glass images are removed" (as Lewis put it), and the beautiful story, the warmth, the miracles, the courage, love, hope and faith remain.
Tolkien & Lewis
Someone wrote that apart from Tolkien an Lewis being friends, and the stories happening in imaginary worlds, there's barely a comparison.
I beg to differ; they were also both classisists and classically educated scholars, avid christians, and both wrote a series of fantasy novels about a fight between Good and Evil.
Tolkien and Lewis were both members of "the Inklings", a gentlemens' club of Oxford scholars.
Later on their friendship became much weaker, much to Lewis' disappointment.
Allegories
This possibly also explains about Tolkien detesting allegories:
Lewis' books were overtly allegories. Tolkien's books are also about good and evil, his story is intrinsically religious.
Lewis and Tolkien were friends. Both their books were fantasy novels, and became wildly popular.
Of course this led people to believe Tolkien's books were also allegories, and start explaining things in LotR. Tolkien hated that idea, he had meant to do no more than imply religious hints. So he avoided being seen as being close to Lewis. It was reactionarily.
Shadowlands
There's a film about Lewis' life, "Shadowlands" [hollywoodjesus.com] which is excellent. One of the best and most moving films I've ever seen. The story is told and acted beautifully. There's a lot of very subtle symbolism in the film. I recommend watching it to anyone who'd like a bit more background about C.S. Lewis' life.
The BBC films
The BBC films of some of the Narnia books were mentioned earlier here. I've also seen them and I thought they were very disappointing.
Very low budget productions. Short films. Important bits left out. B-a-d special effects. And worst of all, none of the magic of the books.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe animation film
I hope when they start filming "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", they'll watch the American animation film that was made of that book instead. This was also a low budget production, but it was done beautifully. I must have watched it twenty or thirty times as a child.
It had all the magic of the written story, and some clever visual subtleties at that. For instance, Aslan was drawn larger in each scene where he was shown, hinting to an obscure reference in the book that Lewis makes to a verse in the gospel of st. John ("He should grow, and I become smaller.") Or the lamp post with the single stick ornament, as one was torn of by Jadis in Charn.
(Although I really hope the actors will be British children: American kids playing children in a British public school in the mid twentieth century would be so wrong!)
Seven
I really hope that they'll eventually turn all of the seven books into film. (Perhaps after the first five pay off.) I agree that some of the stories are easier to film than others, but after LotR this has ceased to be a valid argument. I remember when in the previous millenium I sometimes asked why a film was never made of LotR, people would always say it was much too long and complex a story to film..
Calling all software companies: Cordon Sanitaire!
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A few years ago in Belgium, when the "Vlaams Blok" (Flemish extreme right wing party) was gaining a lot of momentum, the established parties agreed to a "cordon sanitaire" (cord of cleanliness) around that party.
They agreed no one would cooperate with the Vlaams Blok to form a government, however profitable it might have been for each of them (practically or power-wise) separately.
With this "gentleman's agreement" they managed to keep the Vlaams Blok out of government. The agreement only worked on the basis of all partakers abiding by the agreement.
I hope the big software/consultancy companies out there will make up some sort of similar agreement between them, that no one will buy SCO whatever happens. Let them perish in shame, let the shareholders and management lose all their money. That'll teach them.
The "Rule of Six" says that every two people in the world are connected with each other through a maximum of six people. So you know somebody who is a bit closer to somebody else, who is a bit closer to somebody else... and within six "hops" you reach every citizen of the earth.
I wonder, does the same go for nodes on the internet? Or perhaps, the theoretical minimum number of hops is even lower, because routing tables in routers tend to be larger than people's circles of acquaintances, and there are much less nodes on the internet than people on earth.
If Slashdot is going to be recoded, I would like to ask for four features that are easy to implement, and that would be very nice to have.
1. When you click on your username, you see all of your comments, and next to your comments, you see the number of replies to your comments. It would be really nice if this number would be clickable, so you could immediately read the replies to your comments. (It's quite complicated to get to the replies now, especially when you've put a high comment threshold in place)
2. Can story submissions be placed (more logically & more conveniently) on people's slashdot-homepages, instead of on the page that you get when you click on "submit story"?
3. It would be nice if you could see your own story submissions (not just the subject, but also the body & other details) when you click on them. Just to see them back.
4. Could the default comment-submission mode be changed to "plain old text" instead of "html-formatted"? It is confusing that you have to write your own html in a text area on slashdot to get something as basic as newlines, where there is no other site that I can think of - not even a geeky one - that requires you to manually enter the BRs. It's just not useful, not intuitive and not nice this way.
Don't be too quick to assume..
I couldn't believe this myself when I first heard, but I recently learned that the majority of teller machines runs on Windows.
I agree, you can look at Flash as a very elegant GUI-building environment.
Sadly it's used for banners a lot, too. Hopefully this will be an incentive to more browser builders to customise Flash-playing in their browsers based on user preferences per domain.
Also, generally, Flash is still regarded by most web developers as (at the most) a nice, gadgetty program that is used to generate animations and small games, and not as a GUI-building environment.
But for web application developers, let's compare Flash with J2RE (runtime environment for Java applets) or DHTML (HTML/Javascript/CSS.)
EASE OF DEVELOPMENT Java: Very, very steep learning curve, you have to learn a lot about programming and OO before you can do anything useful with it. Which is strange, because what you'll mostly use it for, is so simple and straightforward that it can be done by something simple like HTML, especially when you extend it with a simple but powerful scripting language like PHP. Flash: Easy to develop for, with Macromedia Flash, or with Adobe Live Motion, or you can even dynamically generate.SWF-files with the open source Ming library (http://ming.sourceforge.net) Complex scripting is possible, and takes a while to learn, but it's still much easier than using Java. HTML/Javascript/CSS: Easy to learn the basics, but if you want to do complex layouts with stylesheets, or interaction with Javascript, it can become quite a headache. Nearly as bad as Java.
SIZE OF RUNTIME Java: Many, many megabytes of code, just for the runtime executable. Flash: A tiny runtime executable HTML/Javascript/CSS: No extra downloads or plugins necessary. Available in every major browser
PERFORMANCE Java: Horrible performance if you work with just the basic graphics classes, and if you want to work with the more sophisticated graphics libraries, the overhead becomes even more dramatic and renders it almost unusable Flash: The Flash-player is geared toward performance, and you'll notice this when you use complex graphics in a SWF-movie even on a slow system. Also, it has very smart and fine grained controlling of when and how to start playing files even while they're still being downloaded HTML/Javascript/CSS: Excellent performance, but little or no control over which files to download and execute first
SCRIPTING CAPABILITIES Java: The possibilities are enormous, only limited to the features of Java 2 and the security limitations imposed on the runtime by the browser Flash: Excellent scripting facilities by means of Actionscript (an ECMAscript), which has become a very resourceful and mature scripting language with a huge number of functions and full OO capabilities (you can even implement design patterns using it.) It can be used for Flash-movie-manipulation, user interaction and server interaction. HTML/Javascript/CSS: Quite extensive scripting possible with Javascript being the glue between HTML and CSS. Javascript is also an ECMAscript, but it has more limitations than Actionscript
VERSION SENSITIVITY Java: Terrible. The client has to have a player that plays your version of Java bytecode or higher, you have to avoid using deprecated methods because the clients runtime may not support them anymore, and Microsoft has to a large extent successfully broken cross-platform compatibility Flash: Excellent..SWF-files come in a limited number of versions, and it's easy to develop backwards-compatible SWFs. Also, SWFs will work identically on Windows, Linux and Macs. HTML/Javascript/CSS: Total Utter Hell. This is the main drawback of designing ANYTHING on the client side with HTML/Javascript/CSS (especially with Javascript.)
Basically, a different version of your application has to be developed for every build of version of every browser on every platform. Developmen
Arguably people don't need courses to learn working with a wordprocessor. Though it may be beneficial for some companies to promote that idea as part of a fud-campaign.
Us nerds of course never need courses to learn working with an application.
But even for ordinary mortals, changing to a different word processor only requires changing a couple of habits, not learning new skills..
I really hope this is a tactical PR move by Google to sell more stock when they start selling shares on the net.
It sure would work for me! The horrendous idea of Microsoft 0wning Google! Look at the ugly, bloated, slow, insecure, spamful and formerly nice, friendly, fast service that Hotmail has turned into since they were assimilated by the Evil One of Redmond.
Kernel 2.6 VirtualDub, and not a demo version:) NTFS write access Flash MX Something like Visual Basic for applications added onto Open Office (I heard the Qt people had something in the works?) Working DivX player Doom:) Gimp 2, when it's out of beta Perl 6, when it's there PHP 5, when it's out of beta PostgreSQL 7.4, when it's out of beta
So I suppose it'll be a year or two..
But it's good to see they're making progress. Even when it's sometimes in rather obsolete areas (e.g. winmodems:) DVD recording on the other hand is a big plus! Still a much better distribution than Red Hat with the ubiquitous Red Hat branding and bending things their way..
I read the tests and many of the comments on them.
I was very curious about the test, but very disappointed with everything after I read it.
The person who performed the tests was very naive when he said this ought to be the end of flamewars about network performance/scalability among the Linux/*BSD users. His test was just not good enough to be meaningful to anyone in the respect of offering acceptable conclusions.
A proper test would be
- Performed on proper hardware. I mean, doing a network performance test on an old laptop with inadequate harddisk size, with four very much server-oriented operating systems, one of which (OpenBSD) couldn't even be installed on the same part of the harddisk as the others! That's like organising a race between a Lamborghini, a Lotus, a Porsche and a Ferrari in downtown New York during rush hour, and disqualifying the Ferrari on the grounds that it is difficult to park backwards.
- Unbiased. This one was very much biased against OpenBSD, and in favour of Linux/'Leanux', as follows from many of the comments made by the tester.
- Performed by somebody who knew enough about installing and running all of the OS's involved to run tests on them (the tester seems knowledgeable about Linux, but is totally clueless as far as for instance OpenBSD is concerned.)
- Performed with a test programme that wasn't developed with a bias toward one of the OS's in the test (the test programme involved was developed on Linux, later 'ported to' *BSD.)
- Described plain fact, by someone who would be objective and who would avoid showing emotions about the subject, much less a general favour or disgust toward the OS's tested. This is especially important because of the sensitive nature of the test subject. There are so many flamewars already!
- Described withoud prejudice even/if/ the tester happened to be more familiar or friendly with one of the OS's tested. That would really help improve the value of the test. Unprejudiced==scientifical==professional==a virtue.
- Carefully giving minute details about the test conditions (hardware, software, test programme details, OS installation details..) This test wasn't remotely accurate, look how it even fails to mention at what time OpenBSD-CURRENT was downloaded. That's crucial information.
- Compare equally. The test is already invalid because it compares an ancient -STABLE NetBSD with a -CURRENT FreeBSD.
- Be clear about its subject. The test focuses exclusively on network performance/scalability, and then goes on to praise or totally disqualify the OS's tested solely on this ground. The test doesn't look at crucial aspects like security, maintainability, documentation, correctness of design, etcetera, but will still not hesitate to draw very un-subtle conclusions.
- Ask those who are in the know for comments on the test conclusions before making the results public. In this precise case, it would have prevented several stupid factual mistakes from being published (the OpenBSD installation problem and IPv6 idiosyncrasies for instance.)
- Call into the test all relevant players, or at least represent different groups properly. Much as I dislike it - I'm an open source adept as well - Windows is used as a server system on the public internet by many organisations. It should be compared with the other systems in this test, and be given a fair chance. I wouldn't have been surprised if it performed very well, seeing that the TCP/IP stack of modern Windows versions has been largely copied from FreeBSD.. Also I would have liked it if there were at least one proprietary Unix system (such as Solaris) in the test. Just for the sake of the comparison.
- Look closer into the reasons, backgrounds, pros and cons of faults that the tests find. Again, if the tester had done this, he would have found that some of the badness he found wasn't a design mistake, but a design decision based on healthily made trade-offs (security trade-offs in the case of, not surprisingly, OpenBSD.)
It all sounds very cool, but aren't the Slackware lot overdoing it a bit on 'stability', when they still include Apache 1.3 in the base install when 2 has been stable for what, two years now?
Arguably, 2 is more secure now than 1.3. Even if the 1.3 branch is still supported and patched, 2 has been the focus of most developers for a long time now.
With this response to everyone's genuine doubts and misgivings about their recent practices, I think Verisign has ultimately, definitely made it clear to everyone that they are unworthy of administering.com&.net. They have totally and utterly disqualified themselves.
One would have at least expected them to see what they did wrong and concede that Sitefinder was a stupid move.
Now that they are "setting up an independent committee" to contemplate this, I think everyone readily understands they lost touch with reality.
Can someone please change the insinuation in the text that Europe is a country?
For heavens' sake, I thought it was just braindead American tourists that visit our "country" who thought this, not Slashdot editors.
For fuck's sake man, you really don't get it do you. (sorry, but this posting really made me cross.)
One of the reasons people are into open source is because they can be totally free and exempt of all the marketdroid, management and salespeople bull shit.
They can just do what they like and build great software. They don't have to sell anything, so they can just be completely free and open about the downsides of their own software, so other people may offer to do something about it. Or creators of similar pieces of software (not "competitors") can offer advice about implementing a cool feature that your program doesn't have yet.
All this and more is part of the freedom as in "free software" and the openness as in "open source" - something you don't understand anything about. They are part of a benevolent system that is eventually beneficial for all parties involved and great to be a part of.
Nobody in open source software needs your brilliant "Marketing for Dummies" guidelines!
Slashdot Mirror
that would be overladies then, wouldn't it?
But people who in this day and age are still stupid enough to use Hotmail deserve things like this
Fine, whatever.
For years already I have my mailserver configured to drop any message from hotmail.com because you get so much junk from it. And to people who try to send me a valid message from hotmail, I just say: get yourself something decent like gmail instead of insulting me by sending me messages from hotmail.
So I suppose it's only fair if they return the favour.
Microsoft have their marketing organised alright, but not their diplomacy.
I don't know you, but I know what would work best for me in your situation.
Look for a friendly nerd in a company in your geographical area who is experienced with Linux.
Ask him to teach you the basics, agree a couple of days per week when you will just sit behind a Linux system together for an hour or so after work, and pay him some money for it.
Then practise what you've learned during the day.
After that, ask what he's been up to during the day and ask him to show you how he did it, why he didn't do it another way, and just ask a thousand questions about everything.
This, together with practising with your O'Reilly books, will get you going I'm sure.
And don't forget to give your Friendly Nerd some geek toys now and again, like laser pointers, Linux t-shirts, lava lamps, swiss army knives with built in USB drives and so on! (thinkgeek.com)
I hope they find something really harmful about using cellphones on planes quick!
On the airplane has been the only place where you could still be free from the plague of people around you annoying you with their ringtones and phonecalls since the coming of cell phones.
Or you yourself being harrassed with inconvenient phonecalls while you're sitting in a crowd of people.
This is going to make airline travel so much more of a nuisance than it already is..
Christianity in Narnia
I really hope the christian motives aren't going to be de-emphasised in the films. There's little "shoving down throats" and "religious propaganda" in the books, as others suggest. Rather, the Narnia series is telling the story of christianity from an entirely different perspective (in an imaginary world), where the "stained glass images are removed" (as Lewis put it), and the beautiful story, the warmth, the miracles, the courage, love, hope and faith remain.
Tolkien & Lewis
Someone wrote that apart from Tolkien an Lewis being friends, and the stories happening in imaginary worlds, there's barely a comparison.
I beg to differ; they were also both classisists and classically educated scholars, avid christians, and both wrote a series of fantasy novels about a fight between Good and Evil.
Tolkien and Lewis were both members of "the Inklings", a gentlemens' club of Oxford scholars.
Later on their friendship became much weaker, much to Lewis' disappointment.
Allegories
This possibly also explains about Tolkien detesting allegories:
Lewis' books were overtly allegories. Tolkien's books are also about good and evil, his story is intrinsically religious.
Lewis and Tolkien were friends. Both their books were fantasy novels, and became wildly popular.
Of course this led people to believe Tolkien's books were also allegories, and start explaining things in LotR. Tolkien hated that idea, he had meant to do no more than imply religious hints. So he avoided being seen as being close to Lewis. It was reactionarily.
Shadowlands
There's a film about Lewis' life, "Shadowlands" [hollywoodjesus.com] which is excellent. One of the best and most moving films I've ever seen. The story is told and acted beautifully. There's a lot of very subtle symbolism in the film. I recommend watching it to anyone who'd like a bit more background about C.S. Lewis' life.
The BBC films
The BBC films of some of the Narnia books were mentioned earlier here. I've also seen them and I thought they were very disappointing. Very low budget productions. Short films. Important bits left out. B-a-d special effects. And worst of all, none of the magic of the books.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe animation film
I hope when they start filming "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", they'll watch the American animation film that was made of that book instead. This was also a low budget production, but it was done beautifully. I must have watched it twenty or thirty times as a child. It had all the magic of the written story, and some clever visual subtleties at that. For instance, Aslan was drawn larger in each scene where he was shown, hinting to an obscure reference in the book that Lewis makes to a verse in the gospel of st. John ("He should grow, and I become smaller.") Or the lamp post with the single stick ornament, as one was torn of by Jadis in Charn.
(Although I really hope the actors will be British children: American kids playing children in a British public school in the mid twentieth century would be so wrong!)
Seven
I really hope that they'll eventually turn all of the seven books into film. (Perhaps after the first five pay off.) I agree that some of the stories are easier to film than others, but after LotR this has ceased to be a valid argument. I remember when in the previous millenium I sometimes asked why a film was never made of LotR, people would always say it was much too long and complex a story to film..
A few years ago in Belgium, when the "Vlaams Blok" (Flemish extreme right wing party) was gaining a lot of momentum, the established parties agreed to a "cordon sanitaire" (cord of cleanliness) around that party.
They agreed no one would cooperate with the Vlaams Blok to form a government, however profitable it might have been for each of them (practically or power-wise) separately.
With this "gentleman's agreement" they managed to keep the Vlaams Blok out of government. The agreement only worked on the basis of all partakers abiding by the agreement.
I hope the big software/consultancy companies out there will make up some sort of similar agreement between them, that no one will buy SCO whatever happens.
Let them perish in shame, let the shareholders and management lose all their money. That'll teach them.
The "Rule of Six" says that every two people in the world are connected with each other through a maximum of six people.
So you know somebody who is a bit closer to somebody else, who is a bit closer to somebody else... and within six "hops" you reach every citizen of the earth.
I wonder, does the same go for nodes on the internet?
Or perhaps, the theoretical minimum number of hops is even lower, because routing tables in routers tend to be larger than people's circles of acquaintances, and there are much less nodes on the internet than people on earth.
If Slashdot is going to be recoded, I would like to ask for four features that are easy to implement, and that would be very nice to have.
1. When you click on your username, you see all of your comments, and next to your comments, you see the number of replies to your comments.
It would be really nice if this number would be clickable, so you could immediately read the replies to your comments. (It's quite complicated to get to the replies now, especially when you've put a high comment threshold in place)
2. Can story submissions be placed (more logically & more conveniently) on people's slashdot-homepages, instead of on the page that you get when you click on "submit story"?
3. It would be nice if you could see your own story submissions (not just the subject, but also the body & other details) when you click on them. Just to see them back.
4. Could the default comment-submission mode be changed to "plain old text" instead of "html-formatted"?
It is confusing that you have to write your own html in a text area on slashdot to get something as basic as newlines, where there is no other site that I can think of - not even a geeky one - that requires you to manually enter the BRs.
It's just not useful, not intuitive and not nice this way.
Man, I can't wait to see the flamewar when Darl McBride is going to attack Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD!
That's going to be a classic, it'll take the title "Mother of all Flamewars" from Torvalds vs. Tanenbaum.
And there'll be a theme for the song of 3.5-release..
Don't be too quick to assume.. I couldn't believe this myself when I first heard, but I recently learned that the majority of teller machines runs on Windows.
I can't be the only geek who saw the quote from George Lukas [sic], and thought it would have been fun to write sik instead
I agree, you can look at Flash as a very elegant GUI-building environment.
.SWF-files with the open source Ming library (http://ming.sourceforge.net) Complex scripting is possible, and takes a while to learn, but it's still much easier than using Java.
.SWF-files come in a limited number of versions, and it's easy to develop backwards-compatible SWFs. Also, SWFs will work identically on Windows, Linux and Macs.
Sadly it's used for banners a lot, too. Hopefully this will be an incentive to more browser builders to customise Flash-playing in their browsers based on user preferences per domain.
Also, generally, Flash is still regarded by most web developers as (at the most) a nice, gadgetty program that is used to generate animations and small games, and not as a GUI-building environment.
But for web application developers, let's compare Flash with J2RE (runtime environment for Java applets) or DHTML (HTML/Javascript/CSS.)
EASE OF DEVELOPMENT
Java: Very, very steep learning curve, you have to learn a lot about programming and OO before you can do anything useful with it. Which is strange, because what you'll mostly use it for, is so simple and straightforward that it can be done by something simple like HTML, especially when you extend it with a simple but powerful scripting language like PHP.
Flash: Easy to develop for, with Macromedia Flash, or with Adobe Live Motion, or you can even dynamically generate
HTML/Javascript/CSS: Easy to learn the basics, but if you want to do complex layouts with stylesheets, or interaction with Javascript, it can become quite a headache. Nearly as bad as Java.
SIZE OF RUNTIME
Java: Many, many megabytes of code, just for the runtime executable.
Flash: A tiny runtime executable
HTML/Javascript/CSS: No extra downloads or plugins necessary. Available in every major browser
PERFORMANCE
Java: Horrible performance if you work with just the basic graphics classes, and if you want to work with the more sophisticated graphics libraries, the overhead becomes even more dramatic and renders it almost unusable
Flash: The Flash-player is geared toward performance, and you'll notice this when you use complex graphics in a SWF-movie even on a slow system. Also, it has very smart and fine grained controlling of when and how to start playing files even while they're still being downloaded
HTML/Javascript/CSS: Excellent performance, but little or no control over which files to download and execute first
SCRIPTING CAPABILITIES
Java: The possibilities are enormous, only limited to the features of Java 2 and the security limitations imposed on the runtime by the browser
Flash: Excellent scripting facilities by means of Actionscript (an ECMAscript), which has become a very resourceful and mature scripting language with a huge number of functions and full OO capabilities (you can even implement design patterns using it.) It can be used for Flash-movie-manipulation, user interaction and server interaction.
HTML/Javascript/CSS: Quite extensive scripting possible with Javascript being the glue between HTML and CSS. Javascript is also an ECMAscript, but it has more limitations than Actionscript
VERSION SENSITIVITY
Java: Terrible. The client has to have a player that plays your version of Java bytecode or higher, you have to avoid using deprecated methods because the clients runtime may not support them anymore, and Microsoft has to a large extent successfully broken cross-platform compatibility
Flash: Excellent.
HTML/Javascript/CSS: Total Utter Hell. This is the main drawback of designing ANYTHING on the client side with HTML/Javascript/CSS (especially with Javascript.) Basically, a different version of your application has to be developed for every build of version of every browser on every platform. Developmen
Arguably people don't need courses to learn working with a wordprocessor. Though it may be beneficial for some companies to promote that idea as part of a fud-campaign.
Us nerds of course never need courses to learn working with an application.
But even for ordinary mortals, changing to a different word processor only requires changing a couple of habits, not learning new skills..
I really hope this is a tactical PR move by Google to sell more stock when they start selling shares on the net.
It sure would work for me! The horrendous idea of Microsoft 0wning Google!
Look at the ugly, bloated, slow, insecure, spamful and formerly nice, friendly, fast service that Hotmail has turned into since they were assimilated by the Evil One of Redmond.
Want list before I'll install SuSE:
:) :)
:)
Kernel 2.6
VirtualDub, and not a demo version
NTFS write access
Flash MX
Something like Visual Basic for applications added onto Open Office (I heard the Qt people had something in the works?)
Working DivX player
Doom
Gimp 2, when it's out of beta
Perl 6, when it's there
PHP 5, when it's out of beta
PostgreSQL 7.4, when it's out of beta
So I suppose it'll be a year or two..
But it's good to see they're making progress. Even when it's sometimes in rather obsolete areas (e.g. winmodems
DVD recording on the other hand is a big plus!
Still a much better distribution than Red Hat with the ubiquitous Red Hat branding and bending things their way..
I read the tests and many of the comments on them.
/if/ the tester happened to be more familiar or friendly with one of the OS's tested. That would really help improve the value of the test. Unprejudiced==scientifical==professional==a virtue.
I was very curious about the test, but very disappointed with everything after I read it.
The person who performed the tests was very naive when he said this ought to be the end of flamewars about network performance/scalability among the Linux/*BSD users. His test was just not good enough to be meaningful to anyone in the respect of offering acceptable conclusions.
A proper test would be
- Performed on proper hardware. I mean, doing a network performance test on an old laptop with inadequate harddisk size, with four very much server-oriented operating systems, one of which (OpenBSD) couldn't even be installed on the same part of the harddisk as the others! That's like organising a race between a Lamborghini, a Lotus, a Porsche and a Ferrari in downtown New York during rush hour, and disqualifying the Ferrari on the grounds that it is difficult to park backwards.
- Unbiased. This one was very much biased against OpenBSD, and in favour of Linux/'Leanux', as follows from many of the comments made by the tester.
- Performed by somebody who knew enough about installing and running all of the OS's involved to run tests on them (the tester seems knowledgeable about Linux, but is totally clueless as far as for instance OpenBSD is concerned.)
- Performed with a test programme that wasn't developed with a bias toward one of the OS's in the test (the test programme involved was developed on Linux, later 'ported to' *BSD.)
- Described plain fact, by someone who would be objective and who would avoid showing emotions about the subject, much less a general favour or disgust toward the OS's tested. This is especially important because of the sensitive nature of the test subject. There are so many flamewars already!
- Described withoud prejudice even
- Carefully giving minute details about the test conditions (hardware, software, test programme details, OS installation details..) This test wasn't remotely accurate, look how it even fails to mention at what time OpenBSD-CURRENT was downloaded. That's crucial information.
- Compare equally. The test is already invalid because it compares an ancient -STABLE NetBSD with a -CURRENT FreeBSD.
- Be clear about its subject. The test focuses exclusively on network performance/scalability, and then goes on to praise or totally disqualify the OS's tested solely on this ground. The test doesn't look at crucial aspects like security, maintainability, documentation, correctness of design, etcetera, but will still not hesitate to draw very un-subtle conclusions.
- Ask those who are in the know for comments on the test conclusions before making the results public.
In this precise case, it would have prevented several stupid factual mistakes from being published (the OpenBSD installation problem and IPv6 idiosyncrasies for instance.)
- Call into the test all relevant players, or at least represent different groups properly.
Much as I dislike it - I'm an open source adept as well - Windows is used as a server system on the public internet by many organisations. It should be compared with the other systems in this test, and be given a fair chance. I wouldn't have been surprised if it performed very well, seeing that the TCP/IP stack of modern Windows versions has been largely copied from FreeBSD..
Also I would have liked it if there were at least one proprietary Unix system (such as Solaris) in the test. Just for the sake of the comparison.
- Look closer into the reasons, backgrounds, pros and cons of faults that the tests find. Again, if the tester had done this, he would have found that some of the badness he found wasn't a design mistake, but a design decision based on healthily made trade-offs (security trade-offs in the case of, not surprisingly, OpenBSD.)
Over 80% of Newton's work wasn't about physics at all, but about alchemism, which was a higly esteemed area of research in his day and age.
So now he would be rejected by any university on the grounds of being un-scientifical.
It all sounds very cool, but aren't the Slackware lot overdoing it a bit on 'stability', when they still include Apache 1.3 in the base install when 2 has been stable for what, two years now? Arguably, 2 is more secure now than 1.3. Even if the 1.3 branch is still supported and patched, 2 has been the focus of most developers for a long time now.
With this response to everyone's genuine doubts and misgivings about their recent practices, I think Verisign has ultimately, definitely made it clear to everyone that they are unworthy of administering .com&.net. They have totally and utterly disqualified themselves.
One would have at least expected them to see what they did wrong and concede that Sitefinder was a stupid move.
Now that they are "setting up an independent committee" to contemplate this, I think everyone readily understands they lost touch with reality.
Enough already. Out with Verisign.
This is a dupe. It was reported here a few months ago already.
Can someone please change the insinuation in the text that Europe is a country? For heavens' sake, I thought it was just braindead American tourists that visit our "country" who thought this, not Slashdot editors.
For fuck's sake man, you really don't get it do you. (sorry, but this posting really made me cross.)
One of the reasons people are into open source is because they can be totally free and exempt of all the marketdroid, management and salespeople bull shit.
They can just do what they like and build great software.
They don't have to sell anything, so they can just be completely free and open about the downsides of their own software, so other people may offer to do something about it. Or creators of similar pieces of software (not "competitors") can offer advice about implementing a cool feature that your program doesn't have yet.
All this and more is part of the freedom as in "free software" and the openness as in "open source" - something you don't understand anything about. They are part of a benevolent system that is eventually beneficial for all parties involved and great to be a part of.
Nobody in open source software needs your brilliant "Marketing for Dummies" guidelines!
Surnames starting with "Van" ("from") are Dutch, like Guido.
"Von" is the German version. Dutch people don't like to be taken for Germans, for historical reasons..