I suppose that's easier if the second computer is a laptop, or if they won't let you open it up, but it seems easier and faster to just... well, open it up and plug the drive in. Anything modern should have more than enough SATA ports.
Unless those twins all had identical lovers, I don't see how this is relevant. The question is whether it exists at all.
Unfortunately, I suspect a properly scientific study would require some scientist to learn to find it, and then attempt to find it on each of the women in the study. But that affects the sample population quite a lot, I'd think -- down to "women who like casual sex with scientists."
Right now, if you want to do something on the web, you need a web server.
Or a Google account. Or a Myspace/Facebook/etc account. Aside from renting one, there are tons of free ways to get your content up there.
I agree, it's not ideal. But I think the right approach here is to make it easier to run a server out of your house, and to upgrade to ipv6 so ISP's aren't tempted to NAT you. Beyond that, just about all the advantages you describe are available now, with existing techniques.
The model in a peer-to-peer content distribution network is more like if you need to put something up, you just do it by connecting your computer to the rest of the world. The network distributes the content according to demand. If your machine goes down, the content doesn't disappear.
Maybe you missed the part where I cited Freenet. In fact, you can have that reality right now, and you'll discover almost immediately why we don't do that.
Of course, someone still needs to run a computer somewhere, but the fact is that there's a gazillion of computers out there idling. If you can tap into them...
Then you'll be making those computers consume more power, shortening their life, using their bandwidth quotas, and quite possibly breaking some laws unless the users are aware of what's happening.
The current way of organising computers with DNS is really fairly static
More relevantly, even if you assume DNS is going to point to a relatively static IP, that's still something CDNs can deal with.
So it's about lower cost
By stealing the resources of "idle" computers...
seamless handling of failures
Already perfectly manageable -- you seem to be assuming one IP == one server, or even == one load balancer. That's simply not the case.
scaling
That's what virtual servers are for -- but again, it's scaling on your dime, not using my CPU/power/bandwidth.
It also seems like a lot of this is latching onto the perverse idea of reducing bandwidth by doing peer-to-peer. That doesn't reduce bandwidth, it increases it overall. It just reduces the bandwidth needed for any given node.
But Multicast does both.
Of course, this kind of thing is not going to happen overnight,
As evidenced by the awesome lack-of-success of Freenet.
Given what we know today, how could we redesign IP or DNS or the web to avoid some of their flaws?
I can think of a few things, but they are mostly much smaller, and incremental.
Unfortunately, just about every one of these proposals that I've seen has obvious flaws, so it's always a question of tradeoffs. For example, suppose we switch to looking things up by key, as Freenet does? But right now, it's at least possible for URLs to be memorable and meaningful, and it's possible to print your email address or domain on a business card and expect people to type it in. Or suppose we built ipsec into the protocol? But then that's extra overhead on everything, without improving anything unless you have an authentication mechanism -- which pushes the problem back to either keys-as-URLs or a scheme like SSL certificates.
And suppose I do want to access a specific machine? Suppose I want to go to http://192.168.1.1/ -- how do I do that?
I'm not saying there's no room for improvement. What I am saying is that the ideas presented are generally either technologies people are already playing with and using today, or they're minor improvements (and thus not worth the "you won't recognize it!!!" hype, or they're truly radical and thus will never see the light of day.
It doesn't matter how shiny and nice it is under the hood, if things are more complex than they should necessarily be.
I'd argue just the opposite. Say you're on shared hosting -- it's now your hosting provider's responsibility to admin the database. So you really don't care how difficult it is for them, you care how well the thing runs under the hood.
If you're on a VPS or a dedicated server, and you're managing it yourself, you've already made things more complicated than it needs to be.
There's a reason why everything Apple makes is so huge a success: Simplicity.
"Everything"? Enjoying your Apple Newton, I presume?
Techies and non-techies a like use them for that sake, despite it sucking completely as a phone.
Ok, first of all: Not everyone even likes the iPhone. Sorry to burst your Reality Distortion Field there, but it's true.
But if you're right, and Simplicity Is God, explain why every truly "visual" programming language ever has failed utterly? Even "Visual Basic" isn't -- it's still text under the hood.
The reason is simple: Power. I can do things in a few lines of text that'd take twenty clicks of drag-and-drop, and my text will be more maintainable, more readable, and easier for tools like version control to work with.
So, sorry, but the usability by non-techies of a database is right down there with the usability by non-techies of a programming language. To take your words, if you can't RTFM (or, worst case, buy a book) and figure it out yourself,
i really hope you aren't working a tech job, perhaps a store clerk would be more suitable.
Now, if Postgres was needlessly complex, I'd agree with you. If it can be made simpler while keeping the same feature set, sure, go for it -- it's open source, there's nothing stopping you.
But since people here are arguing that it's better than MySQL, it still makes sense. Yes, simple is good when I want to expose my Postgres app to users, but they won't be typing sql commands or admin-ing the database.
Did you even read the bits you quoted? URIs point to speciic servers,
Nope. Even if I grant this:
or at least to specific IP blocks behind the DNS lookup.
That's a URL, not a URI.
The content might be in multiple locations, but there's no guarantee you'll get the closest or least-congested one.
How would this other system "guarantee" that? As it is, CDNs do a pretty good job -- that IP will be routed to whatever's physically closest.
More importantly, once you have the content downloaded to your system, if your roommate goes looking for it (withint knowing you already have it) he or she will end up re-downloading that content from some distant machine identified by a URI, rather than asking the network for <structured-content-name> and having your computer announce the presence of a local copy.
That's a very good point -- though still not one which would make me not recognize the Internet.
I probably should've been clearer about this, but my beef isn't with the specific technology, it's with the hyperbole -- this stuff still isn't new. That specific feature can be enabled either by having you and your roommate be Freenet peers (assuming you use Freenet), or by setting up a caching proxy.
It would either require a distributed search approach, or a content registration approach (with centralized search servers). The first is probably preferable - extend the peer-to-peer approach to cover everything one might download...
The problem is, this is also painfully slow in practice. There's also a lot of cases where it doesn't make sense -- consider that if I'm only trying to grab a tiny chunk of XML from an API, or a few little images and scripts, I may well generate more traffic -- and it'll certainly take more time -- for me to query everything else around.
Want proof? Try Freenet.
Now, as a suppliment to the current system, it'd make sense. In fact, here's two ridiculously simple changes which could be made to facilitate this:
First, add a standard HTTP header which includes one or more checksums of the given content. Maybe add it to the conditional GET logic (like If-Modified-Since or If-None-Match), but when you're dealing with a single server, ETag is enough.
Next, add that checksum as an extra attribute to the various kinds of links in HTML. Thus, each server can serve common stuff like, say, jQuery, but it can be cached exactly once. But it's distributed, unlike, say, using the Google Javascript API.
Finally, add some sort of a local announce, or some extra headers which include potential peers -- probably using things like zeroconf or Bonjour to find local peers. The client can choose to hit the local network if the content in question is taking more than a certain amount of time to fetch.
I may have just described what they're doing -- but notice that this changes exactly nothing about the usage of the Web, and changes very little (and only incrementally) behind the scenes.
Add some form of security/authentication/verification techniques (I'll admit I wouldn't know how to go about this, but it's still in research) to ensure that the content is available to you (not private) and that it's what you were looking for in the first place.
That's pretty much covered by the checksum described above.
the point is the method by which you locate content.
And it still makes sense to start with a URI. The checksum is information about the given URI, which might facilitate other ways of getting at it -- just as proxies and caches do now -- but you're still identifying it with a URI, and you're still starting off with HTTP.
My main point is, it's going to be incremental. No one step will be radical, because the more radical it is, the less likely it is to be widely adopted, unless it dramatically changes things for the better (like BitTorrent or AJAX) -- and even then, it's still not universal (like BitTorrent or AJAX), and can actually make things worse when abused (also like BitTorrent or AJAX).
Another radical proposal to change the Internet infrastructure is content-centric networking, which is being developed at PARC.... Instead of using IP addresses to identify the machines that store content, content-centric networking uses file names and URLs to identify the content itself.
Kind of like how the Web works.
We're trying to work around the fact that machines-talking-to-machines isn't important anymore. Moving content is really important.
Which is done by machines-talking-to-machines.
Peer-to-peer networks, content distribution networks, virtual servers and storage are all trying to get around this fact.
Actually, no, they're the methods you'll have to use to build your utopian Internet, even if you hide it behind a new name. Also, how do virtual servers get around that fact?
Jacobson proposes that content — such as a movie, a document or an e-mail message — would receive a structured name that users can search for and retrieve. The data has a name, but not a location, so that end users can find the nearest copy.
There's a name for that "name" -- a URI.
Now, maybe what they're proposing will improve things, but if so, it's going to be incremental -- it's still going to talk IP under the hood. The bold claim that we "won't recognize" the Internet, that this is a "radical idea", is unwarranted hype.
I mean, if I understand what they're actually proposing, the most radical interpretation I could give it is ideas that have already been in Freenet for years.
Actually, no, I didn't. I made a point that authority can be wrong, sometimes very wrong.
Is it worth reading the rest of your comment if you're going to strawman me that badly in your very first sentence?
you had two references to Nazis in your post.
One after the other, on the very same point. So, no, that counts as one reference.
If I am arrested for a crime, for sure I am not going to talk, whether I am guilty or not.... On the other hand, if I am witness to a crime, I am going to help the police.
So, you very obviously didn't watch the video I linked to. It's not just whether you're arrested, it's in general a bad idea to talk to an on-duty police officer.
otherwise the criminals will go free.
False dichotomy. Just because you refuse to help doesn't mean they're completely out of options. They'll still do their job.
They have no need to...
Yes, I made it explicitly clear that it's not required of them. Nor is it required that you exercise your right to remain silent when arrested. It's just a good idea.
This seems to be your real problem. You don't like what the police do (arrest people for selling drugs), and so you want to make it as difficult as possible for the police. That's backwards...
No, that's actually probably the easiest form of civil disobedience, since it's not even illegal.
Since the thing you care about is drugs, let's talk about that for a second. Basically, drugs destroy lives, that's why they're illegal.
Then why isn't alcohol illegal? It sure as hell destroys a lot more lives than drugs.
There are two answers to that question, but I'll let you discover them on your own. I'll give you a hint, though: Prohibition, and essential liberties.
...even if it means a few potheads will be inconvenienced.
It's not even halfway through your post, and you drop to name-calling.
For the record: I don't even drink (and yes, I'm legal). The hardest drug I take is caffeine.
However, the mere use of a drug doesn't automatically transform you into a worthless reject. Ever hear of Carl Sagan? Google "Sagan Cannabis".
In addition to this loaded language ("pothead"), you're using language loaded the opposite way -- you're calling it an "inconvenience". Again, think of someone like Carl Sagan, an actual, productive member of society. Now imagine him in jail because the government decided cannabis was "ruining his life". Isn't it clear that a jail sentence would do far more to ruin his life than the drug ever could?
Now it is true that the current way drugs policy is enforced is causing problems, but that doesn't necessarily imply that drugs should be legalized, there are other options (mainly focusing more on cutting demand and less on destroying the supply chains).
And how, exactly, do you propose "cutting demand" short of imprisoning people doing something which, at worst, harms no one but themselves?
Now, yes, drug dealers are generally an unsavory, territorial bunch. Yes, there's generally going to be violence, prostitution, and other things... much of this more or less directly a result of the stuff being illegal. The profession of a drug dealer would pretty much evaporate if you could buy joints at a 7/11.
I didn't say the public is always right, I implied that if they public feels strongly about something, they tend to get their way, especially in a democracy. It follows naturally that if you want to get something, you should convince the public to feel strongly about it.
However, you are repeatedly saying that one should cooperate with the police, even if we don't agree with the law in question. And this is why N
The police are working for us, they are our employees.
Not really relevant.
they are not our enemies,
Ok, let me put it this way: Both the district attourney and the public defender are agents of the state. So, even looking only at those employed directly by the State, we find people who are set up to be adversaries.
Not literally enemies, no. If they're professional, they recognize that at the end of the day, they have the same goals, and they don't generally try to actually ruin each other's personal and professional lives out of spite and a desire to win.
But when they hit that courtroom, they are not friends.
So, similarly, police are not your friends. Their job may be "to serve and protect", but it is ultimately by arresting suspects and punishing people. Their incentive is not to help you, personally, but to help society in general by arresting you, and they are good at it.
Cooperating with the police to do a job we give them is not evil. Cooperating when they step outside their bounds is evil, and giving them an evil job to do is evil, but evil is very often no more than an opinion.
Well, first, you're using very loaded language for something that's "no more than an opinion". But let's consider: Giving them an evil job to do is evil.
Well, how about drug use? Can you give me a rational argument for why any substance, taken willingly, should be banned? And whatever argument you come up with, can it possibly justify the bloodbath that was Prohibition in the US, and is drug wars in Mexico?
If your point is that we should cooperate even though the "job" (specifically, the law) is evil, well, not to Godwin this or anything...
The fact is, the majority of the population favors keeping drugs illegal. If you want to change the law, all you have to do is convince people that drugs should be legalized.
Working on it. However, education of a population is a long, slow process, and politicians are the last to go. And again, Nazis.
It seems like you've got more or less an ad-populum fallacy -- even assuming the majority of the public agrees with what the government is doing, that doesn't mean the majority is right.
But even assuming drugs should be illegal, note that this was an alleged drug dealer. Key word: Alleged. TFA claims there was enough evidence for a subpoena, but instead, a "politely worded request" was sent. There's a reason we have a legal process for things like subpoenas -- so that when people are searched by law enforcement, it's legal, or at least with consent.
So Blizzard was entirely within their rights, perhaps -- better check that privacy policy -- but it was in no way the right approach. Remember, it's the job of the police to catch you, fine you, get information out of you, get a confession out of you, etc. It's not your job to make life easier on them, any more than it's the job of the public defender to make the district attourney's job easier.
I'm guessing the obvious solution is to make sure $current_year >= $header_year + 1
That would only hurt you when receiving mail from a machine with a clock wildly out of sync, and as all major OSes do NTP out of the box by default, I don't see how that's an excuse.
Re:One person's myth is another person's fact.
on
Myths About Code Comments
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· Score: 1, Insightful
There is a school of thought among programmers who consider themselves hotshots that if you are not a hotshot you have no business touching their code.
I don't see anyone claiming that here.
If you want to write perfect, comment free code in your perfect little world, go right ahead,
Nor that. At least Read The Fine Summary (attempting to increase my character-per-line count to avoid lameness filter):
documenting something that needs no documentation is universally a bad idea
And from The Fine Article:
Comments don't make code more readable. They are ways to compensate for code not being readable.
Which does happen. Again, from The Fine Summary:
would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments?
But probably the biggest thing you missed is right at the top of The Fine Article:
It seems to me getting good at writing comments is an under-appreciated part of a Programmer's development.
I actually agree with most of what you said, but I would fix this for you:
If you don't document your code, I won't pay you for it.
Self-documenting code is a reality. It does work. And if you're going to carry out all your threats simply because I didn't do this:
// Gets the id public int getId() {
return id; } // Sets the id public int setId() {
return id; }
In that case, yeah, it sucks that I don't get a reference, but I'd be glad to be unemployed again, looking for a job where I can do this instead:
attr_accessor:id
Part of the reason I suspect you have a problem:
What's really annoying is when they put comments that don't elucidate the code or their intent; they're just snide little messages from one know-it-all to another.
You seem to have a healthy dose of envy and disdain for the people who work under you. You're also missing the point:
/* yeah, I don't like this either */ # hack, to be fixed later
The first is a potential problem, but a little humor from one developer to another... Sometimes the code is a mess, and no amount of comments will help that. The best you could hope for is "I don't like this, and here's why:", or "This is how it works... I know, I don't like it either."
But that second comment, "hack, to be fixed later"? You should institutionalize that, because it is, in fact, a good practice. Make them do this:
TODO: fix this hack later.
Then have your CI system automagically create tickets for that -- they are indeed bugs, and should be fixed. But they aren't just bugs in documentation -- you should be removing hacks in the first place.
But if your developers feel they have to write a quick hack instead of Doing It Right, it's probably not their fault, it's your fault as a manager for setting unreasonable deadlines. Requiring them to thoroughly document their hacks isn't going to improve things, it's going to take time away from real work, resulting in less good code, and more hacks -- maybe ultimately reducing your program to a single 300 character long regular expression, but man, is it well-commented!
And you are again missing the point. The point is not that we are hotshot programmers who don't think non-hotshots should be messing with our code. Rather, we are competent professionals who expect people to understand the basics of the language before reading our code, and even then...
The more innovative your gadget, the more likely you'll have to write a driver, and the more likely you might be to want to keep that driver secret
Which you can do with Linux.
Smells like a GPL loophole, then.
??? That is not a 'private fork'. You seem to have changed subjects again...
That is: "if you insist they are irrelevant", here's another example of a loophole in the GPL.
Note that I never said 'surpass' or 'dominate'. Only that those for whom the licensing works better would switch to it eventually.
No, but you did say this:
I don't believe the BSDed OSes would 'win' just because they arrived first, and by the same reasoning I believe Linux is not as popular as it is just because it arrived first.
You definitely seem to be implying that Linux succeeded more because of its license than the fact that it arrived first.
Alright, then, what do you think would've happened, if BSD had been available? I already know you predict a GPL'd kernel would emerge, but what do you think would be different?
Becoming Webkit was never its goal, it was just KDE's internal HTML renderer, which was then taken by *others* and turned into something more than even its original designers had intended.
No, it seems quite obvious, based on the fact that Konqueror exists, that its original designers had always intended for it to be a fully-functional HTML renderer. That's the part where Webkit succeeded, and KHTML (pre-Webkit) failed. There was definitely a time when replacing KHTML with Webkit in Konqueror would've been an improvement.
But I'm not sure the goal is relevant here. The point is that it was very highly successful, and it was so successful because of its technical merits, not because of its license.
Sigh... when did I ever say the GPL worked for everyone?
I wasn't accusing you of that. Please, read the rest of the paragraph. At least read the rest of the sentence:
BSD does work better for other companies, but that hasn't resulted in significant progress in BSD...
That is, in BSD, the OS. The point I'm arguing (which I'm no longer sure you disagree with), is that the success of Linux is due mostly to the size of its developer base, which is due mostly to its head start -- that the license is completely secondary to both of those factors.
My point is only that you shouldn't expect Linux to die at the point, since, for some/many people, its licensing works better for them (again, a corollary)...
I never said it would.
And yet C has been eclipsed by many other languages since then, in terms of 'popularity'. On the other hand, its still around and being used because its still useful to some people. Really, I don't understand your point here.
Where are you getting this? It seems like C is still as popular as ever. Most of the languages which have come even close to it are indeed written in C, as are OS kernels, despite better technologies existing.
On Unix, at least, all language bindings and OS interaction tend to go through C at some point.
My point here is, quite simply, worse is better. Looking at the contenders, there's C++, which has most of the same flaws as C; Java, which is basically a castrated C++; C#, which is basically Java with some useful stuff added; and PHP and VB, which are both paper-bag ugly.
The best language that's even close to C is Javascript.
Where's Lisp in all this? Where's Erlang, or Haskell? There are dozens of other languages that would be better choices. The article is specifically about Lisp vs C, and yes, I would have preferred Lisp won.
So my point is, having something done first, and having it be simple to implement and improve, means it will acquire many more developers than the Right Way. HURD
It seems that Desilu didn't register the copyrights properly for the first season,
At least in the US, copyright is the automatic default. Anything you do is automatically copyrighted. Registering it is useful, especially if you want to prove it's yours, but not necessary.
Now, trademarks are different, as are patents. But these are completely different bodies of law.
I'm not 100% on this, but I believe the Y2K mess didn't effect Unix-y systems at all. The way Unix time works, if you're not familiar, is that it just counts the seconds after the epoch. Whether the year is represented as two of four digits doesn't matter, and doesn't cause problems.
Yes, assuming well-behaved programs. But it is a fact that Y2K doesn't affect this particular interface at all.
...than what? Remember, we're talking about an OS kernel. Especially if you're talking about embedded systems, what they're going to do first is strip out everything they don't need -- which is a lot.
Second, for gadget makers who need an embedded OS, the OS is just the foundation of a software stack, and its usually 'hidden', so gadget makers will have less of an issue with using an OS that their competitors can also use (and see).
Well, yes and no -- it's still bitten them in the past. For instance, Linux was used in a Linksys router, which forced them to release some code (though mostly blobs) related to the Broadcom drivers. The more innovative your gadget, the more likely you'll have to write a driver, and the more likely you might be to want to keep that driver secret -- so it again points to BSD winning.
The reason Linux dominates this space, I think, is because there are that many examples of Linux working, and because Linux has that much momentum elsewhere -- we know it's reliable, and there are probably existing products we can buy to make things easier on ourselves. This isn't the case for BSD, but it does seem like a better license for the "gadget maker".
private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.
They are very relevant, because they are a "loophole" in the GPL, and because most people don't seem to be bothered by them.
But if you insist, consider nVidia. They seem to have found a loophole which lets them insert their own code into the kernel. At that point, it seems to me that the Mozilla license makes more sense -- if you can violate the process boundary anyway, it at least "protects" individual source files.
Some companies will not consider it acceptable to risk contributing if their competitors are not also required to accept the exact same risks (and rewards).
The only difference here is that they are given a choice between the risks (and rewards) of contributing, and the risks (and rewards) of maintaining a separate branch. All such a company has to do is look at the costs they themselves would face by maintaining a separate branch.
It's also worth mentioning, though this is sometimes a hard point to make to a corporation: Your secret sauce is not Linux. Nor is it, say, Ruby on Rails. If those were the only things making you stand apart from the crowd, you wouldn't have a product.
Take Twitter, Livejournal, etc. They've both released open source projects. Not just contributing back when they don't have to, but releasing a brand-new project (memcached, redis, etc). But when you think about it, what sets twitter apart isn't their ability to scale -- indeed, when they have issues (the Fail Whale), that doesn't really seem to hurt them.
We're talking about a hypothetical here, the history doesn't help us.
Given the history, the entire motivation for Linux was that nothing like it existed -- if PC-BSD was usable, Linus probably wouldn't have written it.
So if you're a potential developer at the time, do you start a brand-new project, or do you contribute to BSD? If you see a fully-formed BSD and a fledgeling GPL'd kernel, which do you contribute to?
The only reason I can see wanting to contribute to something else, like HURD, is that it is technologically better, in theory -- I'd really like to see a good microkernel system. But HURD still hasn't made much progress.
That's a similar situation -- if HURD had been released, Linus probably would've contributed to it. Indeed, he more or less assumed (early on) that Linux was a stopgap until HURD was ready. But as I understand it, HURD was about as stalled then as it is now.
Basically, what you're claiming, hypothetically, is that something completely different -- not Linux, not HURD, and not BSD -- would've been invented, and woul
The dock at the bottom is entirely useless, it doesn't close programs, only minimizes them, and doesn't display the active programs clearly at all.
This is by design. If you really want to close something, command+Q will usually do it, and so will right-clicking on that icon. And I beg to differ -- it's clear, if you know what to look for, it's just very small and not intuitive, because it's not the point.
In fact, the Windows 7 bar seems to have stolen this idea -- the idea that when I want to go to Firefox, I don't care whether it's open or not, I just want to go there. But, if programs are mostly left open, it's usually going to be easier to switch to an open program than to re-open it. If you're low on RAM, there's always swap, at which point it really doesn't matter whether the program is open or not.
Plus the control bar (start bar, whatever) changing to the open program saves about 10 pixels of space,
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. If you mean the unified menu bar, I don't think that really saves much at all, but it is useful for other reasons -- for example, the fact that it's always flush with the top of the screen means you have a much bigger target, since you only need to find the menu horizontally, not vertically.
By the way: I'm not a fanboi, and as I've said elsewhere, I don't like the Apple UI. But these things in particular have solid design behind them. I do agree with the other things you said.
I'll put up with apple interfaces if they keep delivering on the hardware.
I won't. And unfortunately, one thing they deliver with the hardware is lock-in, in that for whatever reason, Apple hardware seems to have some of the worst Linux support.
So these days, I'll pay what's often literally half the price for a Dell with Ubuntu on it. Sure, I'll wipe the stock Ubuntu, but at least I can actually call support if something doesn't work -- at least I don't have to go over the hardware with a fine-tooth comb, making sure everything's supported.
None of your contrary examples are operating systems.
Is your point, then, that the GPL is crucial to the success of an operating system? What is special about operating systems that makes this the case?
You forgot the other group that has become very significant to the relative success of Linux: commercial companies that use Linux (and contribute code to it) because they know their competitors can't take anything they contribute, put it in a closed-source alternative, and use it against them.
Of course they can. Google maintains a proprietary fork of Linux, without violating the GPL, because they don't distribute, but they do try to keep pace with actual kernel development.
The nature of the open source development model is what encourages companies to contribute back, because there is a very real cost in doing what you describe, especially for an established open project. I think I've discussed this already -- any changes you keep private, you have to maintain, and this maintenance overhead is doubled if you want to actually track the public development. You're basically merging all the time.
This is the same cost as the cost of forking in the open source world, only more so, because forks can at least still see what each other are doing, maybe exchange code both ways, maybe even merge at some point.
Now, there is a group I'm neglecting -- the dual-licensing group, companies like MySQL and TrollTech, who have a business model that quite literally relies on people being willing to pay for a license that lets them do things the GPL won't. But even here, TrollTech now distributes Qt under the LGPL, meaning the only people who would need to commercially license it are people who make proprietary changes to Qt itself. I would guess they get more from support than from that.
There's probably some overlap between this group and the group you described -- for example, Quake 3 is released with the assumption that if your competitors are going to use it, they're either going to be open source (so you can see what they did), or they're going to pay you for a different license. I suspect this is where you'd have your strongest argument -- though I also suspect that licenses like the Mozilla Public License will be common.
as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).
Right -- agnostic, practical -- if you mean what I think you mean, they aren't choosing it for the license, they're choosing it because it's stable, mature, and does what they want.
Note that this argument would also apply to open source video codecs, standard libraries, GUI toolkits... I doubt there are many embedded systems which are complete except for a kernel.
if Linus hadn't of done it, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else released a GPLed OS kernel, and once that happened, I believe the same results would have happened as well
I don't see how you can look at the history and conclude that.
That is: Yes, there would have been a GPL'd OS kernel. By the time that happened, BSD would probably already have filled the niche pretty thoroughly. As you've said:
for some people, and for some companies in some markets, the GPL makes better sense for them.
And for other people, and other markets, the GPL makes less sense, or is a non-starter, so I don't really see what that proves.
You sound like you desperately want to believe the only reason the GPL and Linux is so widespread is because of zealotry,
Two identical houses, may be equally insecure. One of them is in a "nice" neighborhood and the other one in the crime-ridden section of town. The house in the nice section of town is no more secure...
No, location is part of security. So is social engineering -- the security of a house is also affected by whether the person looks through the peephole, then the chain, or whether they let just anyone in.
Because Mac owners in general are more affluent, they tend to keep their pricey computers out of the bad neighborhoods of the Internet.
Define "bad neighborhood"?
Everyone looks at porn. There was recently a study attempting to measure the effect of pornography on young people, especially young men -- they were unable to find a control group. That is, they were unable to find a group of young men who hadn't looked at porn.
If by "bad neighborhood", you instead mean downloading random crap, I'd say that problem is worse on the Mac, because everyone assumes their Mac is invincible -- you repeated the same line, actually. But in this case, you lose the bad with the good -- you lose the choice of running all those Windows apps. It's like taking a bus vs driving, in that respect -- the bus probably won't take you to a bad neighborhood, but your car will take you plenty of nice places the buses won't run.
If a Mac does get infected, it is easier to clean up.
That depends entirely on the effectiveness of the attack.
For one thing it lacks a convoluted registry
Instead, it uses convoluted XML files.
and the Byzantine file organization
It combines Unix, with its ages of crufty conventions (config files in/etc, but some in your home directory as dotfiles) with some purely Mac concepts, like/System,/Library, and so on, including a whole new set of places in your home directory to put things.
Windows, "byzantine" or not, is at least relatively consistent there -- programs go in Program Files, settings go in your profile directory, etc. A purely-Unix system is also fairly consistent, especially with package management.
Out-of-the-box, by default, Macs have fewer Internet facing services
But more potentially Internet-facing services. Every new Mac comes with Ruby on Rails preloaded, along with things like Apache, Postfix... Don't get me wrong, I love Rails, but you probably don't need it.
and its included browser, Safari, is not deeply embedded and part of the operating system.
Nor is IE. A specific part of IE, the Trident rendering engine, is part of Windows, and exposed as a library, but it can be replaced. I don't know whether Webkit is exposed the same way on OS X, but there's certainly a lot of built-in libraries.
But then, QuickTime makes up for that in spades. It's actually required, and used for things like html5 video in Safari. Not just the player -- top-to-bottom, if you want to add a codec, if you want to write your own custom player, pretty much anything you want to do with video, you're going to have to touch QuickTime.
Of course not! By now you should know me better than that. It is simply a fact that humans tend to be more careful with expensive objects.
Not always, and even if it were the case, I don't consider it to be worth spending more for it. For example:
It's not likely that someone would go hotrodding down a gravel or dirt road with a BMW, but may do so with a Chevy.
But there are many ways a BMW is likely better than a Chevy. I've driven my dad's BMW. It's a nice car.
But again, twice as much? It's hard to imagine many things where I'd pay twice as much as I'd need to, just for it to look better.
I'd also suggest that people tend to take the time to become more knowledge
Unlike a PC or Mac, the iPhone is an appliance, mainly a PHONE.
It's a PHONE that you pay hundreds of dollars for, instead of getting for free. You do that because, to some degree, you see it as a general-purpose device. Can you see why it's disappointing?
Contrast this to something like the iPod. I'm a little annoyed that it doesn't support formats like flac, but all in all, I have no big problem with that -- it was never sold as an application platform. It was always meant to be a music player, and nothing more.
If you don't need the phone with its attendant subscription expense, you can get an iPod touch. It also is not a general-purpose computer,
Making it even more useless. An iPod Touch is $200 for an 8 gig model, and $300 for a 32 gig model. An iPod Classic is $250 for 160 gigs.
You're not paying that extra to make it shiny, you're paying because you want it to run apps -- again, you're wanting something more or less like a general-purpose device.
Think about it -- if people didn't want a general-purpose device of some sort, the App Store would've failed immediately.
The Mac may not be more secure, but it is definitely much safer.
Please explain the difference between "safety" and "security".
Never, ever, has a virus or worm spread through the Mac community like fire through a barn full of hay.
No, only enough to make sizable botnets. Just like Windows.
Because Macs are indeed quite a bit more expensive than many PCs, their owners tend to be more careful and take better care of them.
Ok, now you're a bit off the deep end. Macs are better because they're overpriced?
I mean, I guess, if that's what floats your boat, but I don't see the point. It's a bit like the I Am Rich app -- I wish I wrote it, but I'd never buy it.
What I'm hearing from you about the iPhone seems to largely be a rhetoric of "it's actually good that you can't do that." It sounds quite a bit like Stockholm Syndrome. You could make a convincing case that most people don't need or want more than the App Store provides (and through the official Apple channel), but I don't see how you can argue that we shouldn't even have the option.
If that's not what you're arguing, I don't think we really have that much to disagree on about the iPhone.
What do you intend to study when you go back to school? Is it computers or something entirely different?
Computer science. There's a lot of gaps in my knowledge.
Right now, I'm also scheduled for a minor in philosophy, which looks like fun. I've also been trying to work in some science -- more than what's required, anyway.
the iPhone is not intended for Slashdot geeks who like to tinker, but for ordinary folks who just want a reliable device.
"Ordinary folks" also like to have the kind of freedom I'm talking about, even if they wouldn't use it themselves.
Would you buy a car which had the hood welded shut?
Apple has pretty much guaranteed that such garbage will not affect iPhone users.
Actually, no, they haven't. Specifically:
viruses, worms, Trojans...
Of those three, the only one this can possibly affect, by definition, is a trojan. Even here, it's not flawless -- Apple has been known to let things slip through in the past. At one time, there were a number of iPods shipping with a Windows virus on the hard drive.
The other two are not only physically possible, but have already been demonstrated -- a worm has indeed hit the iPhone.
Now, I have no problem with Apple providing the App Store and encouraging users to go through it -- that would indeed help avoid the problems you describe, though it wouldn't eliminate them. But to do so while also making it impossible to get an app on the iPhone except through the App Store is draconian.
Finally, I'd suggest looking into the design of Android. Google has actually put some effort into isolating apps from one another. Despite allowing multiple apps to run simultaneously, they are separated by standard Unix permissions (decades-old technology), and aren't allowed to step on each other's stuff. So even if you download an app from elsewhere, it can do limited damage.
Meanwhile, sales figures indicate that everybody else is pretty much satisfied with Apple's products.
Sales figures are not an indication of satisfaction, they are an indication of marketing success. How are the return rates? How do consumers rate their own satisfaction?
Also, the number of phones going to competitors -- particularly the simple, dumb Symbian phones -- are evidence that not everybody is satisfied with Apple's products. The number of developers who have left the iPhone as a platform, to develop for more open systems...
That's why I said the iTunes app store should be OPTIONAL for regular Mac users and the possible upcoming whatchamacallit from Apple.
I agree. There are still two problems with that scenario, though:
First, it doesn't address the problem with the iPhone. If it really is so good to make the iPhone more reliable, wouldn't you want to do the same thing to a desktop? Conversely, if it really is too limiting, shouldn't you make it optional on the iPhone as well?
Second, you didn't address the point I made about Linux repositories -- they already provide what you describe:
That way it can be ironclad for certain, that an ordinary computer user will never get their computer infected as long as they download only software from Apple.
Again, that's in no way ironclad. But I get exactly the same advantage from Ubuntu -- so long as I only download software from Canonical's official repositories, I'm fine.
What you're missing is that aside from being able to download software directly, I can also add other repositories. I can use the same slick, appstore-like interface (which predates the app store) for downloading, installing, updating, uninstalling, and letting it automagically handle dependencies, but I also have the option (though it's in no way required) of adding third-party repositories.
This is something which no one else has, by the way.
Apple should widely advertise this feature.
You mean the way they widely advertised the fact that Macs are just more secure, so they don't get viruses, so you don't need antivirus? Look how well that's working out.
That is a very good point. I'd mod you up, if I hadn't already posted.
I mean, ok, yes, you can hijack the plane -- you can also hijack a bus, or anything else. You could theoretically shoot a hole in the plane, depressurizing the cabin, but I don't really see how that causes that much more harm than hijacking it or randomly firing into a crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
...how many of these blatant abuses actually get overturned?
In particular, is there any way sanity can enter the process without having to challenge it in court?
I suppose that's easier if the second computer is a laptop, or if they won't let you open it up, but it seems easier and faster to just... well, open it up and plug the drive in. Anything modern should have more than enough SATA ports.
Unless those twins all had identical lovers, I don't see how this is relevant. The question is whether it exists at all.
Unfortunately, I suspect a properly scientific study would require some scientist to learn to find it, and then attempt to find it on each of the women in the study. But that affects the sample population quite a lot, I'd think -- down to "women who like casual sex with scientists."
Any women who haven't had it explored, drop me a line. :)
I suppose that's the downside of posting anonymously...
Right now, if you want to do something on the web, you need a web server.
Or a Google account. Or a Myspace/Facebook/etc account. Aside from renting one, there are tons of free ways to get your content up there.
I agree, it's not ideal. But I think the right approach here is to make it easier to run a server out of your house, and to upgrade to ipv6 so ISP's aren't tempted to NAT you. Beyond that, just about all the advantages you describe are available now, with existing techniques.
The model in a peer-to-peer content distribution network is more like if you need to put something up, you just do it by connecting your computer to the rest of the world. The network distributes the content according to demand. If your machine goes down, the content doesn't disappear.
Maybe you missed the part where I cited Freenet. In fact, you can have that reality right now, and you'll discover almost immediately why we don't do that.
Of course, someone still needs to run a computer somewhere, but the fact is that there's a gazillion of computers out there idling. If you can tap into them...
Then you'll be making those computers consume more power, shortening their life, using their bandwidth quotas, and quite possibly breaking some laws unless the users are aware of what's happening.
The current way of organising computers with DNS is really fairly static
Oh really?
More relevantly, even if you assume DNS is going to point to a relatively static IP, that's still something CDNs can deal with.
So it's about lower cost
By stealing the resources of "idle" computers...
seamless handling of failures
Already perfectly manageable -- you seem to be assuming one IP == one server, or even == one load balancer. That's simply not the case.
scaling
That's what virtual servers are for -- but again, it's scaling on your dime, not using my CPU/power/bandwidth.
It also seems like a lot of this is latching onto the perverse idea of reducing bandwidth by doing peer-to-peer. That doesn't reduce bandwidth, it increases it overall. It just reduces the bandwidth needed for any given node.
But Multicast does both.
Of course, this kind of thing is not going to happen overnight,
As evidenced by the awesome lack-of-success of Freenet.
Given what we know today, how could we redesign IP or DNS or the web to avoid some of their flaws?
I can think of a few things, but they are mostly much smaller, and incremental.
Unfortunately, just about every one of these proposals that I've seen has obvious flaws, so it's always a question of tradeoffs. For example, suppose we switch to looking things up by key, as Freenet does? But right now, it's at least possible for URLs to be memorable and meaningful, and it's possible to print your email address or domain on a business card and expect people to type it in. Or suppose we built ipsec into the protocol? But then that's extra overhead on everything, without improving anything unless you have an authentication mechanism -- which pushes the problem back to either keys-as-URLs or a scheme like SSL certificates.
And suppose I do want to access a specific machine? Suppose I want to go to http://192.168.1.1/ -- how do I do that?
I'm not saying there's no room for improvement. What I am saying is that the ideas presented are generally either technologies people are already playing with and using today, or they're minor improvements (and thus not worth the "you won't recognize it!!!" hype, or they're truly radical and thus will never see the light of day.
It doesn't matter how shiny and nice it is under the hood, if things are more complex than they should necessarily be.
I'd argue just the opposite. Say you're on shared hosting -- it's now your hosting provider's responsibility to admin the database. So you really don't care how difficult it is for them, you care how well the thing runs under the hood.
If you're on a VPS or a dedicated server, and you're managing it yourself, you've already made things more complicated than it needs to be.
There's a reason why everything Apple makes is so huge a success: Simplicity.
"Everything"? Enjoying your Apple Newton, I presume?
Techies and non-techies a like use them for that sake, despite it sucking completely as a phone.
Ok, first of all: Not everyone even likes the iPhone. Sorry to burst your Reality Distortion Field there, but it's true.
But if you're right, and Simplicity Is God, explain why every truly "visual" programming language ever has failed utterly? Even "Visual Basic" isn't -- it's still text under the hood.
The reason is simple: Power. I can do things in a few lines of text that'd take twenty clicks of drag-and-drop, and my text will be more maintainable, more readable, and easier for tools like version control to work with.
So, sorry, but the usability by non-techies of a database is right down there with the usability by non-techies of a programming language. To take your words, if you can't RTFM (or, worst case, buy a book) and figure it out yourself,
i really hope you aren't working a tech job, perhaps a store clerk would be more suitable.
Now, if Postgres was needlessly complex, I'd agree with you. If it can be made simpler while keeping the same feature set, sure, go for it -- it's open source, there's nothing stopping you.
But since people here are arguing that it's better than MySQL, it still makes sense. Yes, simple is good when I want to expose my Postgres app to users, but they won't be typing sql commands or admin-ing the database.
Did you even read the bits you quoted? URIs point to speciic servers,
Nope. Even if I grant this:
or at least to specific IP blocks behind the DNS lookup.
That's a URL, not a URI.
The content might be in multiple locations, but there's no guarantee you'll get the closest or least-congested one.
How would this other system "guarantee" that? As it is, CDNs do a pretty good job -- that IP will be routed to whatever's physically closest.
More importantly, once you have the content downloaded to your system, if your roommate goes looking for it (withint knowing you already have it) he or she will end up re-downloading that content from some distant machine identified by a URI, rather than asking the network for <structured-content-name> and having your computer announce the presence of a local copy.
That's a very good point -- though still not one which would make me not recognize the Internet.
I probably should've been clearer about this, but my beef isn't with the specific technology, it's with the hyperbole -- this stuff still isn't new. That specific feature can be enabled either by having you and your roommate be Freenet peers (assuming you use Freenet), or by setting up a caching proxy.
It would either require a distributed search approach, or a content registration approach (with centralized search servers). The first is probably preferable - extend the peer-to-peer approach to cover everything one might download...
The problem is, this is also painfully slow in practice. There's also a lot of cases where it doesn't make sense -- consider that if I'm only trying to grab a tiny chunk of XML from an API, or a few little images and scripts, I may well generate more traffic -- and it'll certainly take more time -- for me to query everything else around.
Want proof? Try Freenet.
Now, as a suppliment to the current system, it'd make sense. In fact, here's two ridiculously simple changes which could be made to facilitate this:
First, add a standard HTTP header which includes one or more checksums of the given content. Maybe add it to the conditional GET logic (like If-Modified-Since or If-None-Match), but when you're dealing with a single server, ETag is enough.
Next, add that checksum as an extra attribute to the various kinds of links in HTML. Thus, each server can serve common stuff like, say, jQuery, but it can be cached exactly once. But it's distributed, unlike, say, using the Google Javascript API.
Finally, add some sort of a local announce, or some extra headers which include potential peers -- probably using things like zeroconf or Bonjour to find local peers. The client can choose to hit the local network if the content in question is taking more than a certain amount of time to fetch.
I may have just described what they're doing -- but notice that this changes exactly nothing about the usage of the Web, and changes very little (and only incrementally) behind the scenes.
Add some form of security/authentication/verification techniques (I'll admit I wouldn't know how to go about this, but it's still in research) to ensure that the content is available to you (not private) and that it's what you were looking for in the first place.
That's pretty much covered by the checksum described above.
the point is the method by which you locate content.
And it still makes sense to start with a URI. The checksum is information about the given URI, which might facilitate other ways of getting at it -- just as proxies and caches do now -- but you're still identifying it with a URI, and you're still starting off with HTTP.
My main point is, it's going to be incremental. No one step will be radical, because the more radical it is, the less likely it is to be widely adopted, unless it dramatically changes things for the better (like BitTorrent or AJAX) -- and even then, it's still not universal (like BitTorrent or AJAX), and can actually make things worse when abused (also like BitTorrent or AJAX).
From TFA:
Another radical proposal to change the Internet infrastructure is content-centric networking, which is being developed at PARC.... Instead of using IP addresses to identify the machines that store content, content-centric networking uses file names and URLs to identify the content itself.
Kind of like how the Web works.
We're trying to work around the fact that machines-talking-to-machines isn't important anymore. Moving content is really important.
Which is done by machines-talking-to-machines.
Peer-to-peer networks, content distribution networks, virtual servers and storage are all trying to get around this fact.
Actually, no, they're the methods you'll have to use to build your utopian Internet, even if you hide it behind a new name. Also, how do virtual servers get around that fact?
Jacobson proposes that content — such as a movie, a document or an e-mail message — would receive a structured name that users can search for and retrieve. The data has a name, but not a location, so that end users can find the nearest copy.
There's a name for that "name" -- a URI.
Now, maybe what they're proposing will improve things, but if so, it's going to be incremental -- it's still going to talk IP under the hood. The bold claim that we "won't recognize" the Internet, that this is a "radical idea", is unwarranted hype.
I mean, if I understand what they're actually proposing, the most radical interpretation I could give it is ideas that have already been in Freenet for years.
You literally called every politician a Nazi,
Actually, no, I didn't. I made a point that authority can be wrong, sometimes very wrong.
Is it worth reading the rest of your comment if you're going to strawman me that badly in your very first sentence?
you had two references to Nazis in your post.
One after the other, on the very same point. So, no, that counts as one reference.
If I am arrested for a crime, for sure I am not going to talk, whether I am guilty or not.... On the other hand, if I am witness to a crime, I am going to help the police.
So, you very obviously didn't watch the video I linked to. It's not just whether you're arrested, it's in general a bad idea to talk to an on-duty police officer.
otherwise the criminals will go free.
False dichotomy. Just because you refuse to help doesn't mean they're completely out of options. They'll still do their job.
They have no need to...
Yes, I made it explicitly clear that it's not required of them. Nor is it required that you exercise your right to remain silent when arrested. It's just a good idea.
This seems to be your real problem. You don't like what the police do (arrest people for selling drugs), and so you want to make it as difficult as possible for the police. That's backwards...
No, that's actually probably the easiest form of civil disobedience, since it's not even illegal.
Since the thing you care about is drugs, let's talk about that for a second. Basically, drugs destroy lives, that's why they're illegal.
Then why isn't alcohol illegal? It sure as hell destroys a lot more lives than drugs.
There are two answers to that question, but I'll let you discover them on your own. I'll give you a hint, though: Prohibition, and essential liberties.
...even if it means a few potheads will be inconvenienced.
It's not even halfway through your post, and you drop to name-calling.
For the record: I don't even drink (and yes, I'm legal). The hardest drug I take is caffeine.
However, the mere use of a drug doesn't automatically transform you into a worthless reject. Ever hear of Carl Sagan? Google "Sagan Cannabis".
In addition to this loaded language ("pothead"), you're using language loaded the opposite way -- you're calling it an "inconvenience". Again, think of someone like Carl Sagan, an actual, productive member of society. Now imagine him in jail because the government decided cannabis was "ruining his life". Isn't it clear that a jail sentence would do far more to ruin his life than the drug ever could?
Now it is true that the current way drugs policy is enforced is causing problems, but that doesn't necessarily imply that drugs should be legalized, there are other options (mainly focusing more on cutting demand and less on destroying the supply chains).
And how, exactly, do you propose "cutting demand" short of imprisoning people doing something which, at worst, harms no one but themselves?
Now, yes, drug dealers are generally an unsavory, territorial bunch. Yes, there's generally going to be violence, prostitution, and other things... much of this more or less directly a result of the stuff being illegal. The profession of a drug dealer would pretty much evaporate if you could buy joints at a 7/11.
I didn't say the public is always right, I implied that if they public feels strongly about something, they tend to get their way, especially in a democracy. It follows naturally that if you want to get something, you should convince the public to feel strongly about it.
However, you are repeatedly saying that one should cooperate with the police, even if we don't agree with the law in question. And this is why N
A lot of drugs are banned because they make the user dangerous to other people while on them.
Like alcohol?
Other drugs are banned simply because they aren't novel at the time they are discovered. This means there is no chance for a patent...
Yes, but here, we're talking about illegal drugs. Are you suggesting marijuana, cocaine, etc are banned only because no one was able to patent them?
So let's see...
The police are working for us, they are our employees.
Not really relevant.
they are not our enemies,
Ok, let me put it this way: Both the district attourney and the public defender are agents of the state. So, even looking only at those employed directly by the State, we find people who are set up to be adversaries.
Not literally enemies, no. If they're professional, they recognize that at the end of the day, they have the same goals, and they don't generally try to actually ruin each other's personal and professional lives out of spite and a desire to win.
But when they hit that courtroom, they are not friends.
So, similarly, police are not your friends. Their job may be "to serve and protect", but it is ultimately by arresting suspects and punishing people. Their incentive is not to help you, personally, but to help society in general by arresting you, and they are good at it.
And that applies whether or not you have anything to hide. Watch this if you don't believe me.
Cooperating with the police to do a job we give them is not evil. Cooperating when they step outside their bounds is evil, and giving them an evil job to do is evil, but evil is very often no more than an opinion.
Well, first, you're using very loaded language for something that's "no more than an opinion". But let's consider: Giving them an evil job to do is evil.
Well, how about drug use? Can you give me a rational argument for why any substance, taken willingly, should be banned? And whatever argument you come up with, can it possibly justify the bloodbath that was Prohibition in the US, and is drug wars in Mexico?
If your point is that we should cooperate even though the "job" (specifically, the law) is evil, well, not to Godwin this or anything...
The fact is, the majority of the population favors keeping drugs illegal. If you want to change the law, all you have to do is convince people that drugs should be legalized.
Working on it. However, education of a population is a long, slow process, and politicians are the last to go. And again, Nazis.
It seems like you've got more or less an ad-populum fallacy -- even assuming the majority of the public agrees with what the government is doing, that doesn't mean the majority is right.
But even assuming drugs should be illegal, note that this was an alleged drug dealer. Key word: Alleged. TFA claims there was enough evidence for a subpoena, but instead, a "politely worded request" was sent. There's a reason we have a legal process for things like subpoenas -- so that when people are searched by law enforcement, it's legal, or at least with consent.
So Blizzard was entirely within their rights, perhaps -- better check that privacy policy -- but it was in no way the right approach. Remember, it's the job of the police to catch you, fine you, get information out of you, get a confession out of you, etc. It's not your job to make life easier on them, any more than it's the job of the public defender to make the district attourney's job easier.
Finally, read your own sig.
Guh. Is there a "-1 Spam" mod, or should I be emailing the admins?
I'm guessing the obvious solution is to make sure $current_year >= $header_year + 1
That would only hurt you when receiving mail from a machine with a clock wildly out of sync, and as all major OSes do NTP out of the box by default, I don't see how that's an excuse.
There is a school of thought among programmers who consider themselves hotshots that if you are not a hotshot you have no business touching their code.
I don't see anyone claiming that here.
If you want to write perfect, comment free code in your perfect little world, go right ahead,
Nor that. At least Read The Fine Summary (attempting to increase my character-per-line count to avoid lameness filter):
documenting something that needs no documentation is universally a bad idea
And from The Fine Article:
Comments don't make code more readable. They are ways to compensate for code not being readable.
Which does happen. Again, from The Fine Summary:
would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments?
But probably the biggest thing you missed is right at the top of The Fine Article:
It seems to me getting good at writing comments is an under-appreciated part of a Programmer's development.
I actually agree with most of what you said, but I would fix this for you:
If you don't document your code, I won't pay you for it.
Self-documenting code is a reality. It does work. And if you're going to carry out all your threats simply because I didn't do this:
In that case, yeah, it sucks that I don't get a reference, but I'd be glad to be unemployed again, looking for a job where I can do this instead:
Part of the reason I suspect you have a problem:
What's really annoying is when they put comments that don't elucidate the code or their intent; they're just snide little messages from one know-it-all to another.
You seem to have a healthy dose of envy and disdain for the people who work under you. You're also missing the point:
The first is a potential problem, but a little humor from one developer to another... Sometimes the code is a mess, and no amount of comments will help that. The best you could hope for is "I don't like this, and here's why:", or "This is how it works... I know, I don't like it either."
But that second comment, "hack, to be fixed later"? You should institutionalize that, because it is, in fact, a good practice. Make them do this:
Then have your CI system automagically create tickets for that -- they are indeed bugs, and should be fixed. But they aren't just bugs in documentation -- you should be removing hacks in the first place.
But if your developers feel they have to write a quick hack instead of Doing It Right, it's probably not their fault, it's your fault as a manager for setting unreasonable deadlines. Requiring them to thoroughly document their hacks isn't going to improve things, it's going to take time away from real work, resulting in less good code, and more hacks -- maybe ultimately reducing your program to a single 300 character long regular expression, but man, is it well-commented!
And you are again missing the point. The point is not that we are hotshot programmers who don't think non-hotshots should be messing with our code. Rather, we are competent professionals who expect people to understand the basics of the language before reading our code, and even then...
The more innovative your gadget, the more likely you'll have to write a driver, and the more likely you might be to want to keep that driver secret
Which you can do with Linux.
Smells like a GPL loophole, then.
??? That is not a 'private fork'. You seem to have changed subjects again...
That is: "if you insist they are irrelevant", here's another example of a loophole in the GPL.
Note that I never said 'surpass' or 'dominate'. Only that those for whom the licensing works better would switch to it eventually.
No, but you did say this:
I don't believe the BSDed OSes would 'win' just because they arrived first, and by the same reasoning I believe Linux is not as popular as it is just because it arrived first.
You definitely seem to be implying that Linux succeeded more because of its license than the fact that it arrived first.
Alright, then, what do you think would've happened, if BSD had been available? I already know you predict a GPL'd kernel would emerge, but what do you think would be different?
Becoming Webkit was never its goal, it was just KDE's internal HTML renderer, which was then taken by *others* and turned into something more than even its original designers had intended.
No, it seems quite obvious, based on the fact that Konqueror exists, that its original designers had always intended for it to be a fully-functional HTML renderer. That's the part where Webkit succeeded, and KHTML (pre-Webkit) failed. There was definitely a time when replacing KHTML with Webkit in Konqueror would've been an improvement.
But I'm not sure the goal is relevant here. The point is that it was very highly successful, and it was so successful because of its technical merits, not because of its license.
Sigh... when did I ever say the GPL worked for everyone?
I wasn't accusing you of that. Please, read the rest of the paragraph. At least read the rest of the sentence:
BSD does work better for other companies, but that hasn't resulted in significant progress in BSD...
That is, in BSD, the OS. The point I'm arguing (which I'm no longer sure you disagree with), is that the success of Linux is due mostly to the size of its developer base, which is due mostly to its head start -- that the license is completely secondary to both of those factors.
My point is only that you shouldn't expect Linux to die at the point, since, for some/many people, its licensing works better for them (again, a corollary)...
I never said it would.
And yet C has been eclipsed by many other languages since then, in terms of 'popularity'. On the other hand, its still around and being used because its still useful to some people. Really, I don't understand your point here.
Where are you getting this? It seems like C is still as popular as ever. Most of the languages which have come even close to it are indeed written in C, as are OS kernels, despite better technologies existing.
On Unix, at least, all language bindings and OS interaction tend to go through C at some point.
My point here is, quite simply, worse is better. Looking at the contenders, there's C++, which has most of the same flaws as C; Java, which is basically a castrated C++; C#, which is basically Java with some useful stuff added; and PHP and VB, which are both paper-bag ugly.
The best language that's even close to C is Javascript.
Where's Lisp in all this? Where's Erlang, or Haskell? There are dozens of other languages that would be better choices. The article is specifically about Lisp vs C, and yes, I would have preferred Lisp won.
So my point is, having something done first, and having it be simple to implement and improve, means it will acquire many more developers than the Right Way. HURD
It seems that Desilu didn't register the copyrights properly for the first season,
At least in the US, copyright is the automatic default. Anything you do is automatically copyrighted. Registering it is useful, especially if you want to prove it's yours, but not necessary.
Now, trademarks are different, as are patents. But these are completely different bodies of law.
I'm not 100% on this, but I believe the Y2K mess didn't effect Unix-y systems at all. The way Unix time works, if you're not familiar, is that it just counts the seconds after the epoch. Whether the year is represented as two of four digits doesn't matter, and doesn't cause problems.
Yes, assuming well-behaved programs. But it is a fact that Y2K doesn't affect this particular interface at all.
First, OSes are far more complex.
...than what? Remember, we're talking about an OS kernel. Especially if you're talking about embedded systems, what they're going to do first is strip out everything they don't need -- which is a lot.
Second, for gadget makers who need an embedded OS, the OS is just the foundation of a software stack, and its usually 'hidden', so gadget makers will have less of an issue with using an OS that their competitors can also use (and see).
Well, yes and no -- it's still bitten them in the past. For instance, Linux was used in a Linksys router, which forced them to release some code (though mostly blobs) related to the Broadcom drivers. The more innovative your gadget, the more likely you'll have to write a driver, and the more likely you might be to want to keep that driver secret -- so it again points to BSD winning.
The reason Linux dominates this space, I think, is because there are that many examples of Linux working, and because Linux has that much momentum elsewhere -- we know it's reliable, and there are probably existing products we can buy to make things easier on ourselves. This isn't the case for BSD, but it does seem like a better license for the "gadget maker".
private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.
They are very relevant, because they are a "loophole" in the GPL, and because most people don't seem to be bothered by them.
But if you insist, consider nVidia. They seem to have found a loophole which lets them insert their own code into the kernel. At that point, it seems to me that the Mozilla license makes more sense -- if you can violate the process boundary anyway, it at least "protects" individual source files.
Some companies will not consider it acceptable to risk contributing if their competitors are not also required to accept the exact same risks (and rewards).
The only difference here is that they are given a choice between the risks (and rewards) of contributing, and the risks (and rewards) of maintaining a separate branch. All such a company has to do is look at the costs they themselves would face by maintaining a separate branch.
It's also worth mentioning, though this is sometimes a hard point to make to a corporation: Your secret sauce is not Linux. Nor is it, say, Ruby on Rails. If those were the only things making you stand apart from the crowd, you wouldn't have a product.
Take Twitter, Livejournal, etc. They've both released open source projects. Not just contributing back when they don't have to, but releasing a brand-new project (memcached, redis, etc). But when you think about it, what sets twitter apart isn't their ability to scale -- indeed, when they have issues (the Fail Whale), that doesn't really seem to hurt them.
We're talking about a hypothetical here, the history doesn't help us.
Given the history, the entire motivation for Linux was that nothing like it existed -- if PC-BSD was usable, Linus probably wouldn't have written it.
So if you're a potential developer at the time, do you start a brand-new project, or do you contribute to BSD? If you see a fully-formed BSD and a fledgeling GPL'd kernel, which do you contribute to?
The only reason I can see wanting to contribute to something else, like HURD, is that it is technologically better, in theory -- I'd really like to see a good microkernel system. But HURD still hasn't made much progress.
That's a similar situation -- if HURD had been released, Linus probably would've contributed to it. Indeed, he more or less assumed (early on) that Linux was a stopgap until HURD was ready. But as I understand it, HURD was about as stalled then as it is now.
Basically, what you're claiming, hypothetically, is that something completely different -- not Linux, not HURD, and not BSD -- would've been invented, and woul
The dock at the bottom is entirely useless, it doesn't close programs, only minimizes them, and doesn't display the active programs clearly at all.
This is by design. If you really want to close something, command+Q will usually do it, and so will right-clicking on that icon. And I beg to differ -- it's clear, if you know what to look for, it's just very small and not intuitive, because it's not the point.
In fact, the Windows 7 bar seems to have stolen this idea -- the idea that when I want to go to Firefox, I don't care whether it's open or not, I just want to go there. But, if programs are mostly left open, it's usually going to be easier to switch to an open program than to re-open it. If you're low on RAM, there's always swap, at which point it really doesn't matter whether the program is open or not.
Plus the control bar (start bar, whatever) changing to the open program saves about 10 pixels of space,
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. If you mean the unified menu bar, I don't think that really saves much at all, but it is useful for other reasons -- for example, the fact that it's always flush with the top of the screen means you have a much bigger target, since you only need to find the menu horizontally, not vertically.
By the way: I'm not a fanboi, and as I've said elsewhere, I don't like the Apple UI. But these things in particular have solid design behind them. I do agree with the other things you said.
I'll put up with apple interfaces if they keep delivering on the hardware.
I won't. And unfortunately, one thing they deliver with the hardware is lock-in, in that for whatever reason, Apple hardware seems to have some of the worst Linux support.
So these days, I'll pay what's often literally half the price for a Dell with Ubuntu on it. Sure, I'll wipe the stock Ubuntu, but at least I can actually call support if something doesn't work -- at least I don't have to go over the hardware with a fine-tooth comb, making sure everything's supported.
None of your contrary examples are operating systems.
Is your point, then, that the GPL is crucial to the success of an operating system? What is special about operating systems that makes this the case?
You forgot the other group that has become very significant to the relative success of Linux: commercial companies that use Linux (and contribute code to it) because they know their competitors can't take anything they contribute, put it in a closed-source alternative, and use it against them.
Of course they can. Google maintains a proprietary fork of Linux, without violating the GPL, because they don't distribute, but they do try to keep pace with actual kernel development.
The nature of the open source development model is what encourages companies to contribute back, because there is a very real cost in doing what you describe, especially for an established open project. I think I've discussed this already -- any changes you keep private, you have to maintain, and this maintenance overhead is doubled if you want to actually track the public development. You're basically merging all the time.
This is the same cost as the cost of forking in the open source world, only more so, because forks can at least still see what each other are doing, maybe exchange code both ways, maybe even merge at some point.
Now, there is a group I'm neglecting -- the dual-licensing group, companies like MySQL and TrollTech, who have a business model that quite literally relies on people being willing to pay for a license that lets them do things the GPL won't. But even here, TrollTech now distributes Qt under the LGPL, meaning the only people who would need to commercially license it are people who make proprietary changes to Qt itself. I would guess they get more from support than from that.
There's probably some overlap between this group and the group you described -- for example, Quake 3 is released with the assumption that if your competitors are going to use it, they're either going to be open source (so you can see what they did), or they're going to pay you for a different license. I suspect this is where you'd have your strongest argument -- though I also suspect that licenses like the Mozilla Public License will be common.
as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).
Right -- agnostic, practical -- if you mean what I think you mean, they aren't choosing it for the license, they're choosing it because it's stable, mature, and does what they want.
Note that this argument would also apply to open source video codecs, standard libraries, GUI toolkits... I doubt there are many embedded systems which are complete except for a kernel.
if Linus hadn't of done it, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else released a GPLed OS kernel, and once that happened, I believe the same results would have happened as well
I don't see how you can look at the history and conclude that.
That is: Yes, there would have been a GPL'd OS kernel. By the time that happened, BSD would probably already have filled the niche pretty thoroughly. As you've said:
for some people, and for some companies in some markets, the GPL makes better sense for them.
And for other people, and other markets, the GPL makes less sense, or is a non-starter, so I don't really see what that proves.
You sound like you desperately want to believe the only reason the GPL and Linux is so widespread is because of zealotry,
Then let me clarify:
The reason Linux is so widespread is not
I'd suggest that you actually verify your implicit assumption that everyone who advocates the use of the GPL also advocates piracy,
I never explicitly said that, nor intended to imply it.
save the second half of your rant just for those to whom it actually applies.
Didn't I already do that? Here's what I said:
If you believe in the GPL, and you pirate anything...
Obviously, if you don't, that doesn't apply to you.
Two identical houses, may be equally insecure. One of them is in a "nice" neighborhood and the other one in the crime-ridden section of town. The house in the nice section of town is no more secure...
No, location is part of security. So is social engineering -- the security of a house is also affected by whether the person looks through the peephole, then the chain, or whether they let just anyone in.
Because Mac owners in general are more affluent, they tend to keep their pricey computers out of the bad neighborhoods of the Internet.
Define "bad neighborhood"?
Everyone looks at porn. There was recently a study attempting to measure the effect of pornography on young people, especially young men -- they were unable to find a control group. That is, they were unable to find a group of young men who hadn't looked at porn.
If by "bad neighborhood", you instead mean downloading random crap, I'd say that problem is worse on the Mac, because everyone assumes their Mac is invincible -- you repeated the same line, actually. But in this case, you lose the bad with the good -- you lose the choice of running all those Windows apps. It's like taking a bus vs driving, in that respect -- the bus probably won't take you to a bad neighborhood, but your car will take you plenty of nice places the buses won't run.
If a Mac does get infected, it is easier to clean up.
That depends entirely on the effectiveness of the attack.
For one thing it lacks a convoluted registry
Instead, it uses convoluted XML files.
and the Byzantine file organization
It combines Unix, with its ages of crufty conventions (config files in /etc, but some in your home directory as dotfiles) with some purely Mac concepts, like /System, /Library, and so on, including a whole new set of places in your home directory to put things.
Windows, "byzantine" or not, is at least relatively consistent there -- programs go in Program Files, settings go in your profile directory, etc. A purely-Unix system is also fairly consistent, especially with package management.
Out-of-the-box, by default, Macs have fewer Internet facing services
But more potentially Internet-facing services. Every new Mac comes with Ruby on Rails preloaded, along with things like Apache, Postfix... Don't get me wrong, I love Rails, but you probably don't need it.
and its included browser, Safari, is not deeply embedded and part of the operating system.
Nor is IE. A specific part of IE, the Trident rendering engine, is part of Windows, and exposed as a library, but it can be replaced. I don't know whether Webkit is exposed the same way on OS X, but there's certainly a lot of built-in libraries.
But then, QuickTime makes up for that in spades. It's actually required, and used for things like html5 video in Safari. Not just the player -- top-to-bottom, if you want to add a codec, if you want to write your own custom player, pretty much anything you want to do with video, you're going to have to touch QuickTime.
Of course not! By now you should know me better than that. It is simply a fact that humans tend to be more careful with expensive objects.
Not always, and even if it were the case, I don't consider it to be worth spending more for it. For example:
It's not likely that someone would go hotrodding down a gravel or dirt road with a BMW, but may do so with a Chevy.
But there are many ways a BMW is likely better than a Chevy. I've driven my dad's BMW. It's a nice car.
But again, twice as much? It's hard to imagine many things where I'd pay twice as much as I'd need to, just for it to look better.
I'd also suggest that people tend to take the time to become more knowledge
Unlike a PC or Mac, the iPhone is an appliance, mainly a PHONE.
It's a PHONE that you pay hundreds of dollars for, instead of getting for free. You do that because, to some degree, you see it as a general-purpose device. Can you see why it's disappointing?
Contrast this to something like the iPod. I'm a little annoyed that it doesn't support formats like flac, but all in all, I have no big problem with that -- it was never sold as an application platform. It was always meant to be a music player, and nothing more.
If you don't need the phone with its attendant subscription expense, you can get an iPod touch. It also is not a general-purpose computer,
Making it even more useless. An iPod Touch is $200 for an 8 gig model, and $300 for a 32 gig model. An iPod Classic is $250 for 160 gigs.
You're not paying that extra to make it shiny, you're paying because you want it to run apps -- again, you're wanting something more or less like a general-purpose device.
Think about it -- if people didn't want a general-purpose device of some sort, the App Store would've failed immediately.
The Mac may not be more secure, but it is definitely much safer.
Please explain the difference between "safety" and "security".
Never, ever, has a virus or worm spread through the Mac community like fire through a barn full of hay.
No, only enough to make sizable botnets. Just like Windows.
Because Macs are indeed quite a bit more expensive than many PCs, their owners tend to be more careful and take better care of them.
Ok, now you're a bit off the deep end. Macs are better because they're overpriced?
I mean, I guess, if that's what floats your boat, but I don't see the point. It's a bit like the I Am Rich app -- I wish I wrote it, but I'd never buy it.
What I'm hearing from you about the iPhone seems to largely be a rhetoric of "it's actually good that you can't do that." It sounds quite a bit like Stockholm Syndrome. You could make a convincing case that most people don't need or want more than the App Store provides (and through the official Apple channel), but I don't see how you can argue that we shouldn't even have the option.
If that's not what you're arguing, I don't think we really have that much to disagree on about the iPhone.
What do you intend to study when you go back to school? Is it computers or something entirely different?
Computer science. There's a lot of gaps in my knowledge.
Right now, I'm also scheduled for a minor in philosophy, which looks like fun. I've also been trying to work in some science -- more than what's required, anyway.
the iPhone is not intended for Slashdot geeks who like to tinker, but for ordinary folks who just want a reliable device.
"Ordinary folks" also like to have the kind of freedom I'm talking about, even if they wouldn't use it themselves.
Would you buy a car which had the hood welded shut?
Apple has pretty much guaranteed that such garbage will not affect iPhone users.
Actually, no, they haven't. Specifically:
viruses, worms, Trojans...
Of those three, the only one this can possibly affect, by definition, is a trojan. Even here, it's not flawless -- Apple has been known to let things slip through in the past. At one time, there were a number of iPods shipping with a Windows virus on the hard drive.
The other two are not only physically possible, but have already been demonstrated -- a worm has indeed hit the iPhone.
Now, I have no problem with Apple providing the App Store and encouraging users to go through it -- that would indeed help avoid the problems you describe, though it wouldn't eliminate them. But to do so while also making it impossible to get an app on the iPhone except through the App Store is draconian.
Finally, I'd suggest looking into the design of Android. Google has actually put some effort into isolating apps from one another. Despite allowing multiple apps to run simultaneously, they are separated by standard Unix permissions (decades-old technology), and aren't allowed to step on each other's stuff. So even if you download an app from elsewhere, it can do limited damage.
Meanwhile, sales figures indicate that everybody else is pretty much satisfied with Apple's products.
Sales figures are not an indication of satisfaction, they are an indication of marketing success. How are the return rates? How do consumers rate their own satisfaction?
Also, the number of phones going to competitors -- particularly the simple, dumb Symbian phones -- are evidence that not everybody is satisfied with Apple's products. The number of developers who have left the iPhone as a platform, to develop for more open systems...
That's why I said the iTunes app store should be OPTIONAL for regular Mac users and the possible upcoming whatchamacallit from Apple.
I agree. There are still two problems with that scenario, though:
First, it doesn't address the problem with the iPhone. If it really is so good to make the iPhone more reliable, wouldn't you want to do the same thing to a desktop? Conversely, if it really is too limiting, shouldn't you make it optional on the iPhone as well?
Second, you didn't address the point I made about Linux repositories -- they already provide what you describe:
That way it can be ironclad for certain, that an ordinary computer user will never get their computer infected as long as they download only software from Apple.
Again, that's in no way ironclad. But I get exactly the same advantage from Ubuntu -- so long as I only download software from Canonical's official repositories, I'm fine.
What you're missing is that aside from being able to download software directly, I can also add other repositories. I can use the same slick, appstore-like interface (which predates the app store) for downloading, installing, updating, uninstalling, and letting it automagically handle dependencies, but I also have the option (though it's in no way required) of adding third-party repositories.
This is something which no one else has, by the way.
Apple should widely advertise this feature.
You mean the way they widely advertised the fact that Macs are just more secure, so they don't get viruses, so you don't need antivirus? Look how well that's working out.
That is a very good point. I'd mod you up, if I hadn't already posted.
I mean, ok, yes, you can hijack the plane -- you can also hijack a bus, or anything else. You could theoretically shoot a hole in the plane, depressurizing the cabin, but I don't really see how that causes that much more harm than hijacking it or randomly firing into a crowd.