Don't get your advice from Joel. Or Fred. Rather follow professional's like Robert C. MartinJoel's example is Netscape. Now IE is eating Mozilla's dust, thanks to the rewrite.
Ok, I'm not a C programmer myself, but I do know one thing: if you have to find out what you're going to write after you start writing it, there's something extremely wrong in your process.
What you're speaking of is the waterfall methodology, that's how it was done for many years, and as far as mainframe COBOL programming, that's how it was done. Analysis->Design->Construction, and no turning back. Works great as long as you got the requirements correct and you didn't uncover new requirements as you designed, etc. But it's a rather rigid style, inflexible. Rational and the '3 Amigos' (Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobson) and others are some of the folks behind RUP (rational unified process) and iterative programming. Also, Robert C. Martin is an excellent speaker and has many papers and talks on Agile Programming. But yeah, the "extreme programming" practices of folks like Torvalds, Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, and the rest of the gang behind Linux is one of the reasons Microsoft has to work a little harder these days, and adopt more "agile" programming. And oh yeah, has nothing to do with language, C programming or VB programming or Python..
This isn't Linux, where an open source project can't be killed.
Or Java either, which makes MSFTs offerings "small and irrelevant", even after 5 years of work and top talent like Anders Hjelsberg of Borland fame, and huge piles of money. Open source isn't the reason, it's more complex and has to do with scalability and ownership of the platform. Competing with Google will be very very hard since it simply isn't a desktop app, nor is Linux or Java. (So yeah, Ballmer didn't bury Schmidt or McNealy by any means). Buying an also-ran like AOL is a finger in the dike, like Borland buying Ashton-Tate to get DBASE, or IBM buying Lotus. It shows they don't have a clue, but they are trying.
Nope. Actually, Compaq (IIRC) "innovated" there... by reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS and producing compatible hardware.
Yes, it was Compaq's 386, and IBM's poor strategy, that benefited Microsoft. IBM made many mistakes, for great reading see Robert X. Cringley's Accidental Empires book. Among the problems - IBM underpowered the original IBM PC, and then was slow bringing out the 386. They tried to make the hardware proprietary, by using the 'Microchannel' architecture, the market didn't buy it and went with Compaq's 386 architecture instead.
So the whole innovation deal, that open source just copies, but doesn't innovate, is baloney, one only needs to look at Microsoft. Which came first, Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic? Mosaic or Internet Explorer? Java or C#? ln -s or Microsoft's smart links? etc etc.
But this whole innovation argument is annoying Microsoft FUD. Rather, Microsoft seems to follow the kaizen model, i.e. constant improvement - look at Windows 3.1 to Win 95 to Win XP. And Visual Studio is a great IDE. And this is exactly the situation with Google. I think we'll see Microsoft improve, just as Windows has improved with Linux competition, and C# is an improvement on VB with Java competition, however just like these apps won't be destroyed, neither will Google, since it's outside the realm of MSFTs desktop realm.
Uh, probably it was a joke - but don't laugh. And you wouldn't be if you were Apple and Microsoft patented the ipod technology. Which they did apparently.
Microsoft and other companies have a tendency of patenting everything they can, sometimes whether or not there was prior art etc. In fact, I bet we have patented hot-swappable modules, I'm going to send this over to the legal dept, Apache lawyers will be hearing from us soon...;)
Interestingly, Grid computing was the big marketing push by none other than IBM. This was after their very successful e-business push. Somehow you don't see much about Grid computing though, hasn't really taken off. Instead, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is the new new thing, and if you read Carl Zetie from Forester, this is all about keeping your capital investments in existing code, such as that running on the mainframe.
I asked a friend of mine, who got a masters at UCF in CS and now makes a good living doing mainframe and COBOL work for major companies all over the world, if he was going to get out of COBOL since that was a dead end. He laughed, and said people have been telling him that for years.
Also this points out that you can get a degree in CS and do just fine in COBOL. Funnily enough, we both studied COBOL at a community college we were talking calculus at, since, at the time, it was not offered at our high school. So maybe Universities don't teach these skill, but your community and tech colleges certainly do.
yes, an MS SQL Cluster of about 250 servers. This is still cheaper than buying a new mainframe and is arguably much more redundant.
Certainly Google, for example, uses thousands of servers, for speed, but whether that is cheaper to support and maintain than one fast mainframe is questionable.
Agreed, this doesn't makes sense to be charging someone $100 to get their soundcard working, nor does it make sense for you to spend 3 hours, trying to get their backup software to work, or calling the sound card manufacturer. However, there is money to be made, otherwise companies like Geek Squad wouldn't be doing very well, and according to several articles, they are in high demand. Probably because while some people consider the solution to a system full of spyware, or busted soundcard, etc, simply to toss it, there is also the significant investment in getting all your software installed and configured.
Could you post the quantitative speed analysis numbers, please?[snip]
Having used 98, NT4.x, 2K, and XP at work (digital content creation) and at home since about '97 I can say that I've not noticed any appreciable performance hit in XP compared to the previous versions.
No appreciable performance hit? Do you have any numbers? Thought so. Otherwise, here's a simple trick. If you installed your latest digital content creation software and XP on the same exact box as your Win 98 software, would it run as fast? Could you even install it? Probably the reason you don't notice any difference is your hardware is better. That's the 'tel' in the Win-Tel monopoly.
For your other question, over why companies would buy licenses for an old OS, AFAIK you can't, so if they want to install y2k, they buy the XP license. Now why would they want to do that? They might significant software investment in getting their myriad of software to work on 2K, and they have a business to run. You have to balance the benefit of keeping the software current with the cost of migration, possible bugs, new hardware, etc.
It is a potential hassle to upgrade to a newer OS - first you need to upgrade the hardware (yep - memory, CPU, etc) then you need to make sure you can either install the existing software or install newer versions, and then you need to make sure everything works like it used to. For example, if you're using Oracle 8i, will you have to upgrade that because only Oracle 11 is supported on XP? Etc etc.
Just because some notorious whiner can't get a soundcard working on a variant of Linux, but succeeds in getting it to work on a variant of FreeBSD, doesn't mean Linux doesn't support sound.
In fact, if he really wants compatibility, as other posters have already suggested, there's always Windows.
Here's a quote (I'm surprised he still has this link) about quitting Netscape:
My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out.
Now, granted he has some good points and good effort, but sometimes teams don't get anywhere with naysayers like jws. Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop of Auntie Smith, but no doubt, like Mozilla/Firebird, Linux can and will be used on the desktop.
Apple got the code to a rendering engine for free and gave back little to nothing
Again, you're distorting facts. Apple gave back all the code it was obligated to, and participated in an active dialog. If half of Apple's patches were integrated within less than a few months, that's a lot more than "little to nothing".
I think the key word is "obligated". Yes, after getting a free ride on KHTML, Apple dumped off a tarball, and only after the bad publicity, did they suddenly offer to communicate. Go back to the original e-mails from Apple to the KHTML folks, it's clear they implied there would be better cooperation. Yes the KHTML guy "whined", but it was directed at users who expected to instantly see Apple's 'fixes' in KHTML. That's the point everyone misses.
1/2 of Apples patches took less then a few months, and the other half had to be rewritten from scratch? Sorry, but that's some serious effort. This is called "merge hell" folks. Obvious most people have no clue of the difficulty this entails, especially with the poorly documented code from Apple. The sad thing is, only after this whole brouhaha, does Apple attempt to do a little better. Yes, they stuck to the license, they did made the minimum effort. And KHTML had to write half the patches from scratch (as Apple had done some platform specific code, again, to all the couch potatoes easy stuff, who haven't done this sort of work, eh?).
Kudos to the KHTML folks for coming up to the challenge.
Also take a look at Qt, this is used for building KDE apps, among others. It's got very good documentation. I also like Eclipse's SWT framework if you want to use Java.
You guys DO all realize that this is intended to piss us off and generate page hits, right?
And it worked.
But shame on McVoy for collaborating with Forbes on this. He's sort of a pseudo-traitor (BitKeeper wasn't even open source) that Lyons has pounced upon as an example.
One of the more interesting items is that Bill was looking through Google's want ads, and they were looking for the exact
same type of people Microsoft is. In fact many have jumped ship. It goes into some detail over why they are
afraid of the Google model, and the difficulties they have had in building a Google-killer.
Microsoft has certainly managed to turn it's battleship around and demolish competitors (Netscape), and perhaps that's
possible here, with their 34 Billion in cash, however I think the main difficulty will be that Google too is making
money. And they aren't standing still.
Space exploration and space science should be carried out on peaceful, scientific grounds only.
Given our not-so-stellar record, that's unlikely.
Serious science, and even pseudo-science like manned missions to the Moon or Mars, provides the West with the best means of fostering positive relations with China in the medium term, and I'd hate to see any opportunity for the betterment of mankind blown because some cowboy decides that putting nukes above our heads is a smarter move than making sure that nobody will want to do it.
China, except for small altercations with Taiwan and Japan, seems to be taking the 'speak softly and carry a big stick' approach. I agree that any move towards weaponization of space would be matched by them.
There is an excellent book by Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought : Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War about World War I and Britain's efforts to stay ahead of Germany, to maintain their sea advantage as their land army was weaker. IIRC, they wanted to maintain a 3:1 ratio over the Germans. Britain as this sort of weakening power, overextended, struggling to maintain it's colonies across all parts of the globe, the sun never setting on their empire, yet the hordes ready to crush their Hadrian's Wall.
Now the U.S. in a similar situation, relatively unopposed superpower, but it's unclear where the financial and technical ability to invest in Space technology would come from not too far in the future.
One would think it imperative for the U.S. to balance the budget, start paying off debt, and likewise continuing to keep it's schools (whether college or grade school) top notch.
Actually, not only is he a good coder, he's also good at documentation. Check out the site, and here's a quote
from one of his users:
I want to say that Shorewall documentation is the best I've ever found on the net.
It's helped me a lot in understanding how network is working. It is the best of breed. It contains
not only Shorewall specific topics with the assumption that all the rest is well known, but also
gives some very useful background information. Thank you very much for this wonderful piece of work.
--AS, Poland
As for support, if you check the mailing list he answers many of the posts. This is simple burnout,
I can't imagine working at HP, and putting the effort into a project of this magnitude. It seems he's had
to expend superhuman effort, to make up for the slackers, for example to assist users in getting
the code working on all varieties of Linux, yet like typical users, a few users seem to fail to bother to RTFM, and fail to
read the license even (it's not like he's got the money to maintain a call center). Perhaps if he could get paid support, he could quit his job at HP and devote full time
to the project
While I'm here, I've been wondering: why does MS bother developing IE?
Actually, they haven't been wasting any money developing IE, they've let it languish. They've only just recently reassembled a team to build a new version. Seems they are being attacked on all fronts, but competition is what Bill does best.
Besides, Microsoft has always been a build or buy company, that's one of the ways they achieve their goal of everybody using Microsoft software, by controlling the standards. If someone else builds the software, that's harder to do. If MS had been more on the ball as far as the internet, so that instead of everybody starting out writing perl scripts to Oracle databases on Sun servers, and instead, with the desktop locked up, and everybody writing ASP pages, requiring MS standard browsers, I think the server market today would be far different.
There's an interesting article from Fortune on the reasoning behind MS's strategy. It discusses Microsoft's efforts to build a Google killer, and how Google is keeping nimbly ahead of them.
while Domino runs on Linux, Lotus the client does not.
Lotus will run fairly well under Wine, here's some instructions.
You'd think by now IBM would provide a native version, here's an article
with various reasons - port is too hard, no market, Wine, etc, but one more reason is there are already decent Office-like products available on Linux, StarOffice/OpenOffice, KDE, etc.
What the Firefox guy is forgetting is that he wouldn't be where he is had he followed his own advice. Has everyone forgotten the beating Mozilla took when they scrapped the Netscape code and decided to rewrite the layout engine from scratch? While they strived for making their browser superior, IE blew past them in the marketplace, building on the existing (Spyglass?) foundation which was "good enough". Now finally the wisdom of that choice has come to fruition.
The original Mozilla browser, first released as Navigator 1.0, was developed rapidly by a small team that was passionate about creating the next killer app -- and they succeeded wildly. Now that the web has evolved, Netscape has assembed the finest team available to redesign and redevelop the next generation layout engine upon which it will build future products. Gecko enables a pioneering new class of dynamic content that is more interactive and offers greater presentation control to Web developers, using open and recommended Internet standards instead of proprietary APIs.
Basicly I could give you a turbo C++ compiler and tell you to build linux and it would not work.
Very true. For example, KDE builds with a specific versions of Qt and gcc compilers, if you are using Visual C++, you will even need the right fixpack.
Without a GCC version no one can tell if you are just building it with the wrong GCC.
Possibly, here's a link that might be useful, here the user is trying to build Linux and complains that it throws the 'conflicting types' error, and this didn't happen with the distros. Turns out the distros use the older, slower gcc-3.3 compilers. That is why sticking with one of the distros, might be a better idea. Otherwise you can try hitting the various support web sites.
The first thing that struck me about this article was the similarity between this idea, and the construction techniques of the Incans, who had much concern for earthquakes. (There was a program on PBSBasically they had mud bricks, with a woven fabric inside, that made them perform much better in earthquakes. Then the Spanish came along, bringing their new technologies (bricks), told them they were doing it all wrong, and promptly there was much more devastation when there were earthquakes (in Chile for example). Bricks are very brittle.
Furthermore, the two towers are located on a relatively 'soft' foundation -- they essentially 'float' on sea of soft land.
Interesting. There's some architectural info, Flash enabled, at PBS also on some of the new buildings (mainly the one at Shanghai), but not much detail.
But even that idea isn't relatively new, I believe it was one of the ideas proposed for the foundation of a nuclear power plant in Meehan's excellent book on this subject, The Atom and The Fault
But you shouldn't lose a repository if bdb corrupts -- you should just lose the commits since the last backup. If you're running without backups, then you'd better watch out for hardware failures, system theft, fires, floods, etc.
Well you shouldn't lose the repository, but you can:
But your backup suggestion is well taken - repositories should always be backed up. However, these sort of issues, are probably why so many folks are still using, and will continue to use, CVS. It simply works. I understand needing to go to backup if the hard drive crashes, but the database failing? I think, until SVN, or others, have major improvements over CVS, then we can switch. But this is sort of a point upgrade. Renaming files, directories - nice. Better merging would be great though. Monotone seems interesting, especially with the interest from Linus as a BitKeeper replacement.
Hot shot wet-behind-the-ears noobs don't understand that the purpose of the software is to support the business process. Unless there's a business case (i.e. an ROI) for making a change to a system that's working, you don't change the system. (Even if the code is ugly, and 20 years old, and written in an unfashionable language.)
To a COBOL programmer, Fortran *is* fashionable:)
I've seen companies that 'got by' with some pretty lousy inventory software (or whatever), decide they need to switch to better software, and that will solve all their problems. They make the switch, and then go out of business. Cost of the new software, and changing, but overall, poor management. And it sounds like for COMAIR (and probably many other airlines), the software is the least of their problems. They can buy the slickest, coolest crew management system, but it's no good if they can't fill the seats, or can't pay for fuel, are still running money-losing flights, etc.
What is more remarkable though, and unsaid, was that the vendor a) still existed, b) still supported and was able to respond to this system...at Christmas.
Damn straight. I've read a bunch of the modded up posts, most fall hook line & sinker for the 'old software' bit, apparently absorbed from the CIO article in a 'Snow Crash' way, i.e. stream of data right past the 'does this make sense' checker. I think there are certainly reasons to replace software, but I didn't like the fact that this article was such a sales pitch, in effect one should print the article, hand to their manager and request System X to be replaced, or suffer dire consequences.
But interestingly, they still haven't replaced the software - they've got a workaround, and a backup, and maybe some better documentation.
The fact that they didn't have a backupis almost unbelievable, especially for an airline. What seems to me always happens in these cases, is that the blame falls heavily on the software vendor, and not on the users.
What is more remarkable though, and unsaid, was that the vendor a) still existed, b) still supported and was able to respond to this system...at Christmas.
That is impressive, and kind of lost in the details in the article. I recall a similar issue with a bank.
I've forgotten the exact details, but apparently a the bank was running on a bunch of IBM controllers (or some sort of hardware). This hardware was redundant - if one CPU failed, there was a spare that would take over. But these folks, rather than replace the CPU when it failed, simply continued to run on the spare. Finally, the spare failed too, so they frantically call IBM , and somehow IBM managed to get them the required part (13 or 14 years old no less), so they were down for only 11 hours or so. Yet... they are still suing IBM! The bank apparently has no technical people, or won't hire any, but they will hire lawyers...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get your advice from Joel. Or Fred. Rather follow professional's like Robert C. MartinJoel's example is Netscape. Now IE is eating Mozilla's dust, thanks to the rewrite.
What you're speaking of is the waterfall methodology, that's how it was done for many years, and as far as mainframe COBOL programming, that's how it was done. Analysis->Design->Construction, and no turning back. Works great as long as you got the requirements correct and you didn't uncover new requirements as you designed, etc. But it's a rather rigid style, inflexible. Rational and the '3 Amigos' (Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobson) and others are some of the folks behind RUP (rational unified process) and iterative programming. Also, Robert C. Martin is an excellent speaker and has many papers and talks on Agile Programming. But yeah, the "extreme programming" practices of folks like Torvalds, Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, and the rest of the gang behind Linux is one of the reasons Microsoft has to work a little harder these days, and adopt more "agile" programming. And oh yeah, has nothing to do with language, C programming or VB programming or Python..
Or Java either, which makes MSFTs offerings "small and irrelevant", even after 5 years of work and top talent like Anders Hjelsberg of Borland fame, and huge piles of money. Open source isn't the reason, it's more complex and has to do with scalability and ownership of the platform. Competing with Google will be very very hard since it simply isn't a desktop app, nor is Linux or Java. (So yeah, Ballmer didn't bury Schmidt or McNealy by any means). Buying an also-ran like AOL is a finger in the dike, like Borland buying Ashton-Tate to get DBASE, or IBM buying Lotus. It shows they don't have a clue, but they are trying.
Yes, it was Compaq's 386, and IBM's poor strategy, that benefited Microsoft. IBM made many mistakes, for great reading see Robert X. Cringley's Accidental Empires book. Among the problems - IBM underpowered the original IBM PC, and then was slow bringing out the 386. They tried to make the hardware proprietary, by using the 'Microchannel' architecture, the market didn't buy it and went with Compaq's 386 architecture instead.
So the whole innovation deal, that open source just copies, but doesn't innovate, is baloney, one only needs to look at Microsoft. Which came first, Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic? Mosaic or Internet Explorer? Java or C#? ln -s or Microsoft's smart links? etc etc.
But this whole innovation argument is annoying Microsoft FUD. Rather, Microsoft seems to follow the kaizen model, i.e. constant improvement - look at Windows 3.1 to Win 95 to Win XP. And Visual Studio is a great IDE. And this is exactly the situation with Google. I think we'll see Microsoft improve, just as Windows has improved with Linux competition, and C# is an improvement on VB with Java competition, however just like these apps won't be destroyed, neither will Google, since it's outside the realm of MSFTs desktop realm.
Nope, there isn't, in fact the Harmony project is building an implementation of J2SE 5.
And Kaffe has been around for years, an open-source vm.
Uh, probably it was a joke - but don't laugh. And you wouldn't be if you were Apple and Microsoft patented the ipod technology. Which they did apparently.
Microsoft and other companies have a tendency of patenting everything they can, sometimes whether or not there was prior art etc. In fact, I bet we have patented hot-swappable modules, I'm going to send this over to the legal dept, Apache lawyers will be hearing from us soon... ;)
I asked a friend of mine, who got a masters at UCF in CS and now makes a good living doing mainframe and COBOL work for major companies all over the world, if he was going to get out of COBOL since that was a dead end. He laughed, and said people have been telling him that for years.
Also this points out that you can get a degree in CS and do just fine in COBOL. Funnily enough, we both studied COBOL at a community college we were talking calculus at, since, at the time, it was not offered at our high school. So maybe Universities don't teach these skill, but your community and tech colleges certainly do.
yes, an MS SQL Cluster of about 250 servers. This is still cheaper than buying a new mainframe and is arguably much more redundant.
Certainly Google, for example, uses thousands of servers, for speed, but whether that is cheaper to support and maintain than one fast mainframe is questionable.
Oh, *SPIN*! I thought you were talking about SPIM!
Having used 98, NT4.x, 2K, and XP at work (digital content creation) and at home since about '97 I can say that I've not noticed any appreciable performance hit in XP compared to the previous versions.
No appreciable performance hit? Do you have any numbers? Thought so. Otherwise, here's a simple trick. If you installed your latest digital content creation software and XP on the same exact box as your Win 98 software, would it run as fast? Could you even install it? Probably the reason you don't notice any difference is your hardware is better. That's the 'tel' in the Win-Tel monopoly.
For your other question, over why companies would buy licenses for an old OS, AFAIK you can't, so if they want to install y2k, they buy the XP license. Now why would they want to do that? They might significant software investment in getting their myriad of software to work on 2K, and they have a business to run. You have to balance the benefit of keeping the software current with the cost of migration, possible bugs, new hardware, etc.
It is a potential hassle to upgrade to a newer OS - first you need to upgrade the hardware (yep - memory, CPU, etc) then you need to make sure you can either install the existing software or install newer versions, and then you need to make sure everything works like it used to. For example, if you're using Oracle 8i, will you have to upgrade that because only Oracle 11 is supported on XP? Etc etc.
And for God sake Linux should support sound.
Just because some notorious whiner can't get a soundcard working on a variant of Linux, but succeeds in getting it to work on a variant of FreeBSD, doesn't mean Linux doesn't support sound.
In fact, if he really wants compatibility, as other posters have already suggested, there's always Windows.
Here's a quote (I'm surprised he still has this link) about quitting Netscape:
Now, granted he has some good points and good effort, but sometimes teams don't get anywhere with naysayers like jws. Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop of Auntie Smith, but no doubt, like Mozilla/Firebird, Linux can and will be used on the desktop.
Again, you're distorting facts. Apple gave back all the code it was obligated to, and participated in an active dialog. If half of Apple's patches were integrated within less than a few months, that's a lot more than "little to nothing".
I think the key word is "obligated". Yes, after getting a free ride on KHTML, Apple dumped off a tarball, and only after the bad publicity, did they suddenly offer to communicate. Go back to the original e-mails from Apple to the KHTML folks, it's clear they implied there would be better cooperation. Yes the KHTML guy "whined", but it was directed at users who expected to instantly see Apple's 'fixes' in KHTML. That's the point everyone misses.
1/2 of Apples patches took less then a few months, and the other half had to be rewritten from scratch? Sorry, but that's some serious effort. This is called "merge hell" folks. Obvious most people have no clue of the difficulty this entails, especially with the poorly documented code from Apple. The sad thing is, only after this whole brouhaha, does Apple attempt to do a little better. Yes, they stuck to the license, they did made the minimum effort. And KHTML had to write half the patches from scratch (as Apple had done some platform specific code, again, to all the couch potatoes easy stuff, who haven't done this sort of work, eh?).
Kudos to the KHTML folks for coming up to the challenge.
Also take a look at Qt, this is used for building KDE apps, among others. It's got very good documentation. I also like Eclipse's SWT framework if you want to use Java.
And it worked.
But shame on McVoy for collaborating with Forbes on this. He's sort of a pseudo-traitor (BitKeeper wasn't even open source) that Lyons has pounced upon as an example.
Fortune has an interesting article about why Google scares Microsoft.
One of the more interesting items is that Bill was looking through Google's want ads, and they were looking for the exact same type of people Microsoft is. In fact many have jumped ship. It goes into some detail over why they are afraid of the Google model, and the difficulties they have had in building a Google-killer.
Microsoft has certainly managed to turn it's battleship around and demolish competitors (Netscape), and perhaps that's possible here, with their 34 Billion in cash, however I think the main difficulty will be that Google too is making money. And they aren't standing still.
Space exploration and space science should be carried out on peaceful, scientific grounds only.
Given our not-so-stellar record, that's unlikely.
Serious science, and even pseudo-science like manned missions to the Moon or Mars, provides the West with the best means of fostering positive relations with China in the medium term, and I'd hate to see any opportunity for the betterment of mankind blown because some cowboy decides that putting nukes above our heads is a smarter move than making sure that nobody will want to do it.
China, except for small altercations with Taiwan and Japan, seems to be taking the 'speak softly and carry a big stick' approach. I agree that any move towards weaponization of space would be matched by them.
There is an excellent book by Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought : Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War about World War I and Britain's efforts to stay ahead of Germany, to maintain their sea advantage as their land army was weaker. IIRC, they wanted to maintain a 3:1 ratio over the Germans. Britain as this sort of weakening power, overextended, struggling to maintain it's colonies across all parts of the globe, the sun never setting on their empire, yet the hordes ready to crush their Hadrian's Wall.
Now the U.S. in a similar situation, relatively unopposed superpower, but it's unclear where the financial and technical ability to invest in Space technology would come from not too far in the future.
One would think it imperative for the U.S. to balance the budget, start paying off debt, and likewise continuing to keep it's schools (whether college or grade school) top notch.
As for support, if you check the mailing list he answers many of the posts. This is simple burnout, I can't imagine working at HP, and putting the effort into a project of this magnitude. It seems he's had to expend superhuman effort, to make up for the slackers, for example to assist users in getting the code working on all varieties of Linux, yet like typical users, a few users seem to fail to bother to RTFM, and fail to read the license even (it's not like he's got the money to maintain a call center). Perhaps if he could get paid support, he could quit his job at HP and devote full time to the project
Actually, they haven't been wasting any money developing IE, they've let it languish. They've only just recently reassembled a team to build a new version. Seems they are being attacked on all fronts, but competition is what Bill does best.
Besides, Microsoft has always been a build or buy company, that's one of the ways they achieve their goal of everybody using Microsoft software, by controlling the standards. If someone else builds the software, that's harder to do. If MS had been more on the ball as far as the internet, so that instead of everybody starting out writing perl scripts to Oracle databases on Sun servers, and instead, with the desktop locked up, and everybody writing ASP pages, requiring MS standard browsers, I think the server market today would be far different.
There's an interesting article from Fortune on the reasoning behind MS's strategy. It discusses Microsoft's efforts to build a Google killer, and how Google is keeping nimbly ahead of them.
Lotus will run fairly well under Wine, here's some instructions.
You'd think by now IBM would provide a native version, here's an article with various reasons - port is too hard, no market, Wine, etc, but one more reason is there are already decent Office-like products available on Linux, StarOffice/OpenOffice, KDE, etc.
Very true. For example, KDE builds with a specific versions of Qt and gcc compilers, if you are using Visual C++, you will even need the right fixpack.
Without a GCC version no one can tell if you are just building it with the wrong GCC.
Possibly, here's a link that might be useful, here the user is trying to build Linux and complains that it throws the 'conflicting types' error, and this didn't happen with the distros. Turns out the distros use the older, slower gcc-3.3 compilers. That is why sticking with one of the distros, might be a better idea. Otherwise you can try hitting the various support web sites.
Furthermore, the two towers are located on a relatively 'soft' foundation -- they essentially 'float' on sea of soft land.
Interesting. There's some architectural info, Flash enabled, at PBS also on some of the new buildings (mainly the one at Shanghai), but not much detail.
But even that idea isn't relatively new, I believe it was one of the ideas proposed for the foundation of a nuclear power plant in Meehan's excellent book on this subject, The Atom and The Fault
Well you shouldn't lose the repository, but you can:
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~henkm/svn.html
But your backup suggestion is well taken - repositories should always be backed up. However, these sort of issues, are probably why so many folks are still using, and will continue to use, CVS. It simply works. I understand needing to go to backup if the hard drive crashes, but the database failing? I think, until SVN, or others, have major improvements over CVS, then we can switch. But this is sort of a point upgrade. Renaming files, directories - nice. Better merging would be great though. Monotone seems interesting, especially with the interest from Linus as a BitKeeper replacement.
To a COBOL programmer, Fortran *is* fashionable :)
I've seen companies that 'got by' with some pretty lousy inventory software (or whatever), decide they need to switch to better software, and that will solve all their problems. They make the switch, and then go out of business. Cost of the new software, and changing, but overall, poor management. And it sounds like for COMAIR (and probably many other airlines), the software is the least of their problems. They can buy the slickest, coolest crew management system, but it's no good if they can't fill the seats, or can't pay for fuel, are still running money-losing flights, etc.
Damn straight. I've read a bunch of the modded up posts, most fall hook line & sinker for the 'old software' bit, apparently absorbed from the CIO article in a 'Snow Crash' way, i.e. stream of data right past the 'does this make sense' checker. I think there are certainly reasons to replace software, but I didn't like the fact that this article was such a sales pitch, in effect one should print the article, hand to their manager and request System X to be replaced, or suffer dire consequences.
But interestingly, they still haven't replaced the software - they've got a workaround, and a backup, and maybe some better documentation.
The fact that they didn't have a backupis almost unbelievable, especially for an airline. What seems to me always happens in these cases, is that the blame falls heavily on the software vendor, and not on the users.
What is more remarkable though, and unsaid, was that the vendor a) still existed, b) still supported and was able to respond to this system...at Christmas.
That is impressive, and kind of lost in the details in the article. I recall a similar issue with a bank. I've forgotten the exact details, but apparently a the bank was running on a bunch of IBM controllers (or some sort of hardware). This hardware was redundant - if one CPU failed, there was a spare that would take over. But these folks, rather than replace the CPU when it failed, simply continued to run on the spare. Finally, the spare failed too, so they frantically call IBM , and somehow IBM managed to get them the required part (13 or 14 years old no less), so they were down for only 11 hours or so. Yet... they are still suing IBM! The bank apparently has no technical people, or won't hire any, but they will hire lawyers...