Wow... did we just have a reasonable discussion on slashdot? That's creepy.:)
But yeah, modifying production code on the fly was something that took me a while to get used to. I had come from a tradition "IT Environment" in which you had programmers coding in a dev environment, and test environments, and staging, and deployment... etc... And suddenly, I find myself in an environment where you *can't* really have a test environment. How do you test, for example, a mile long conveyor that diverts packages at 100 feet per second accross 250 diverts. Particularly when one of the primary things that goes wrong is that the electricians wire up motors backwards 1/2 the time:)
So yeah, it's been a bizarre transition, but even though I now have to routinely be *at work* by 5 a.m., I love ever second of it.
To be completely honest, I wish I could program (and have my staff program) in Common LISP or some similar language, but the fact of the matter it's that it's hard enough to find dependable programmers, much less dependable programmers willing to be at work at 5 a.m.... and even less dependable programmers willing to be up at 5 a.m. and hack functional paradigm:)
I actually agree completely regarding caching... The proliferation of "databases that seem quick enough" has led to an entire generation of programmers that think that it's perfectly reasonable to do a handful of database queries per page load.
However, in my particular case, I have different needs. My company writes "shop floor intelligence" systems in which PHP is my *middleware* language. We use Smarty/PHP to generate XML/[other streams] from proprietary interfaces to PLCs or embedded shop floor systems. This XML has to have whatever the state of the machine is *at that moment.* These systems are not neccesserally "Hard real time", but they need to be very performant. We feed the PHP systems XML configurations which tell the middleware which series of registers or memory locations on the "embedded controllers" to look for state, and how to package that state as a message to the decision support systems.
The maintenance engineers / technicians on these machines may go in during a plantwide shutdown and code a series of changes to the flow control logic of a foamer (for example) in ladder logic (or even by wiring relays) and our code has to be able to take the new internal state of these machines, and turn it into a consumable format quickly. Often times, I might add, we're not notified until 4:45 on a Monday after a plant shutdown when the 1st shift build engineers realize that their decision dashboard is giving data that doesn't map the expected state of the machine. Utilizing PHP/Smarty we are able to very quickly either change the XML / whatever template, as well as the actual feed information, and in next to no time, get the line back up and running.
One of the mantras which I used to abhor was: "there can be no unplanned system downtime on a production line" because it implied to me that everyone was lazy and simply didn't want to do their job. What it turns out happens, is that when you are retooling an entire line during a 5 day plant shutdown, sometimes little pieces don't get communicated, and one of the most prized assets of a system is the ability to dynamically reconfigure it to the changes on the line, while minimizing the downtime on the line.
As silly as this sounds, even the 5 minutes neccessary in packing a WAR file, redeploying it, and having the system bootstrap itself (after having compiled it and tested it on your system) are 5 minutes that the line doesn't want to lose.
So, in closing, I 100% agree with a great deal of your sentiment. PHP is most certainly not a splendid language for a great many applications, but I think it's a narrow point of view to believe that it's useful simply for quick one-offs... all the world is not a CRUD web app:)
(I forgot to add that we use DBs simply as a place to store data until the next time that we request it from the shop floor system... so for our needs, PEAR::DB is a reasonable tool.)
I guess that's sort of the point I wanted to make, is that with some foresight and proper discipline, those small projects, when they become big projects, don't need to be rewritten from scratch, if maintainability was in mind from day one. Take PEAR::DB or one of the more advanced O/R mapping PHP frameworks (such as Propel), throw a decent templating system on there (such as Smarty), keep your code highly cohesive and loosely coupled, and the benefits of the language and the libraries are *massive*.
I spent 4-5 years trying to get JSP to work as a "rapid development prototype to full scale application" environment, and I constantly ran into issues with Tomcat, Jasper, JAR file surprises, all of the warts that come with the Java language, etc... I switched to PHP for all "non-transactional" code when I did a study whereby I analyzed the amount of time it took one of my teams to react to "changing customer requirements" utilizing PHP/Apache as opposed to how much time it took another team of mine to react to similar requirement changes using JSP/Tomcat. I am not saying that JSP couldn't have worked, it's just that it seemed to not really have as many benefits as I would have liked for an environment that required as much agility as that which I found myself in.
I have to admit, my experience with ASP is nearly nill, as I have not been able to convince any clients to allow me to test out MS platforms controlling plant floor hardware.
All that being said, when my company writes something that requires "transactional integrity", we do pick Java for the backend... it's just that those situations in my field really are few and far between.
I have often remarked that a "Writing Maintainable Enterprise Class Systems in PHP" book would be the best thing since sliced bread for the PHP community. There is nothing so wrong with the language and the environment (although some have likened it to training wheels without the bycicle) that can't be remedied with discipline, communication, and the use of mindful quality software development discipline.
PHP has been a wonderful language in which to "put together quick solutions which grow into large projects" for me in fields from accounting to my current work in Industrial / Manufacturing! The interfaces you can write to control PLCs and generate plant floor intelligence using *good* PHP and a web server are light years beyond what is usually available on a shop floor with PanelViews and Vorne displays (Light bars...) Someone out there would be smart to write a PHP-for-software-engineering book.
If google really wants to do something worthwhile with email, they should go out and purchase hushmail. I happen to be a big fan of their service (web based PGP compatible email!) but I loathe how *few* people actually use encryption in email. If a powerhouse like google offered not just webmail, but *encrypted* webmail, I bet that the conversion rate would be pretty mind-blowing and voila, the huge bump encryption / PGP / GPG needed to get to the point of critical mass.
Can you imagine a world in which you can say to someone: "what you mean you don't encrypt your emails?" Please make it so google!
3) Avoid vender extensions to the basic shell. HP has done some aweful things there in its bourne shell and they are not compatible with Sun and in some cases Linux either. I.E. Always use `cat foo` and not $(cat foo) in sh scripts. There are other things like that.
And of course, if you've been following along for a week or two, you know that this (BING!) is a Useless Use of Cat!
Rememeber, nearly all cases where you have:
cat file | some_command and its args...
you can rewrite it as:
<file some_command and its args...
and in some cases, such as this one, you can move the filename to the arglist as in:
some_command and its args... file
Just another Useless Use of/.
Dangerous Backticks
A special idiom to pay attention to, because it's basically always wrong, is this:
for f in `cat file`; do ...
done
Apart from the classical Useless Use of Cat here, the backticks are outright dangerous, unless you know the result of the backticks is going to be less than or equal to how long a command line your shell can accept. (Actually, this is a kernel limitation. The constant ARG_MAX in your limits.h should tell you how much your own system can take. POSIX requires ARG_MAX to be at least 4,096 bytes.) Incidentally, this is also one of the Very Ancient Recurring Threads in comp.unix.shell so don't make the mistake of posting anything that resembles this.
The right way to do this is
while read f; do ...
done/etc/passwd, normal find/tmp -print would output
/tmp/moo /etc/passwd
and xargs would see two file names here. Changing the record separator to ASCII 0 means it's now valid for a file name to span multiple lines, so this becomes a non-issue.
Anyone interested in doing any type of quantum computing should check out Dr. Damian Conway's excellent Quantum::Superpositions. It is an extension to the perl language which adds the operators "any" and "all"... it's lets you do *incredible* things like:
use Quantum::Superpositions;
if ($x == any($a, $b, $c)) {... }
while ($nextval < all(@thresholds)) {... }
$max = any(@value) < all(@values);
A good place to go and discuss the in's and out's of the cooler aspects of the perl community is perlmonks.org, check it out some time...
I guess my favorite part of the link, is the first reply in the thread... by ac:
Before this page clutters up with 87 flames and counter-flames, I'm hoping to hear from other people with DIRECT experience like this. This kind of puts a damper on the positive things that happen.
I'm hoping Slashdot doesn't link this, and bring out the hoards of IE-using dual-boot armchair warriors (who only have Linux because they found an "ISO" on Gnutella).
:) This is posted with IE... I use Linux for my servers, thank you very much... I use MS Products to the peak of their abilities, browsing the web. And nothing else:)
Have you considered releasing this tool, (which would appear to be considerably useful) in some open source manner so that people like myself and the person who asked this Ask Slashdot could get ahold of it? I know I would *love* to be get my hands on this.
Just for my own curiosity, would you be able to give me a list of these extremely extremely successful scientists and none of them gave a damn about being charasmatic. Because, having known quite a few scientists in my day, I'm afraid I haven't met any of them... and most would agree whole heartedly with Mr. Donne:
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never seen to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."
You can also tell what children had friends, and what children didn't have friends by the way that they recite the Konami code. Those that had no friends will recite it: up up down down b a start and those with no friends will recite it: up up down down b a b a SELECT start. The select was how you set the game in 2 player mode:) Just another interesting way of knowing how people grew up.
Wasteland... oh dead god, wasteland... i can honestly say that i played that game since the year it came out... and i am not proud to admit this, i *just* beat it july of this year. It was the only role playing game i've ever played, and i would play it in binges, and then forget about it for 2 years... i have had some *really* screwed up wasteland dreams. About being trapped in the Guardian Citadel, about having to deal with the Serpedroids, the Sewers, the red ryder BB gun with compas in stock...
Just this july i beat it, i had proton axes, i had the power armor, i had it all... and i beat it. i can honestly say, that i can die a happy man now.
and Hemos spoke and he said: The word from Loki is that the actual game will roll off the presses sometime last week, and start shipping around then. at 7:27 a.m. on a Saturday. And lo, it became painfully obvious that he needed some more caffeine before he posted again:) (unless, of course, loki has mastered time travel.)
how many of you got a goofy grin when you got to this part of the story:
``With Linux rapidly becoming an industry standard, it's important that developers be able to create new applications across all platforms, including pervasive devices, and the intent of IBM's research is to further that work,'' IBM said.
i mean...:) linux rapidly becoming an industry standard... i can't wait.
anyone else as curious as I am as to whether having the slashdot effect on fermilabs network connection caused the world of neutrino science to be slowed down for one day? it makes you wonder... did slashdot just 'cause the next big thing to happen one day later just 'cause no one could use their email or their network?:)
I am definetly going to agree with you that is had been a double edged sword. Zealotry doesn't come without a price, here in Tennessee some of the most frightening people I have met a religious group called "snake handlers" i don't know if you've ever heard of them or not, but it's a religious group that goes around holding poisonous vipers because they feel that god wouldn't allow the viper to bite them, as long as they are pure of heart. Defenite zealotry.
The same parallel can almost be drawn to stallman, however one could almost consider him the viper:) for me personally, and for what I feel is at least a considerably sized portion of the current open source population, I would not have been introduced to open source had it not been for the FSF and for the radical push of Stallman. If the GNU tools had not been married to the Linux kernel at such an early age, and through magic, chance and coincidence, the linux kernel become the "golden child" of the open source movement (at least according to the media) then a great many of us would have never experienced free software.
As to whether he has hurt of helped commercial open source, well, let's face it, that's not his bag:) he's not interested in furthering commercial open source, he is interested in guaranteeing the existance and life of free software. And that is what I applaud him for, not for his business saavy or darned friendly personality;)
WRONG! RMS didn't invent source that is open! It existed a LONG LOGN LOGN LOGN LOGN LONG time before 1984! BSD for example started back in 1977, though not opensource by todays standard, anyone could get hold of the source if they wanted too.
Ok, so... just out of curiosity... where did I say that RMS invented "source that is open?" At no point in my argument did I make that logical jump? I didn't, you did. What I did say is that RMS did however champion the "source that is open" movement when it had hit a VERY low point in it's existance, and he saw a need for it. I also said that he has staid with it, pushed it, moved it, and spearheaded it since the day he decided to step forth and stand up for his ideals. I feel, that my point, and that which you replied are two completely and totally different points, and I would ask you to please explain to me what you were attempting to acheive with your comment.
What the hell? There are 7 comments on this story and already all that I hear are complaints about RMS complaining too much, or whining too much, etc... etc... etc... What is wrong with you people? Although I agree it may sometimes appear like this man is an extremist, that is what it takes to move and motivate a movement! If it were not for his zeal and his amazing drive, we would all still be using commercial software, without the source, without any hope of openness, without ANYTHING.
A lot of people feel that the movement has gotten to the point where we can now sit back, and that all of the benefits of an open software / free software world will come to us... we have not even begun to scratch the surface! Attitudes have barely changed, we do NOT live in a society where the average IT person understand the concept of free software (be it beer or speech!) We need someone to be a constant reminder, an unwavering word that reminds us that this fights isn't just about having the k-radest desktop at the office, or how fast our website is on Apache/Linux as compared to IIS/NT. It's about the freedom to chose, it's about the freedom to modify and to understand. It's about the freedom to not be tied to one vendors word, one commercial, closed, propietary solution. Yeah, he may sound like he is complaining and whining... it's because a great many people are getting lazy, fat, and complacent... and he sees this, and he will not give up, and he will not stop reminding us what the ideals were all about.
ok, now I am all for giving people advice, however I have got to say that I am quite annoyed at the quality of questions being posted on ask slashdot. This quesiton is by all intents and purposes, unanswerable! I mean, how do you build a 1 TB storage solution? You get 1TB worth of drives... ok, that was rather worthless, don't you think? now tell us, do you want striping, do you want mirroring, do you want redundancy? do you want hot-swappability, do you want the ability to walk up to 1/2 your storage, shoot it, and have the database not go down? Come on, we don't ask much, just give us enough to answer your question, and the great hoards of slashdotters will be happy to assist you! (me included)
I have used linux (along with GNU and a lot of other free software) for quite a while now... long enough that I can't quite remmember when was the last time that I used a not free operating system. As i have sat here and watched the growth of the linux industry over the last few years (and let's face it, 1999 will long be remmembered as the year of the penguin) I can't help but have this strong feeling towards the industry.
First, a bit of background, I work in the IT industry (obviously) but I have migrated to a job that does not really give me much time to program, I am mainly a big hovering brain, spitting out ideas and thoughts, however all of the lessons that I have learned (and am learning) from the open source movement, are ideas that I incorporate into any endeavor in which I am a part of. At the companies that I have been involved, we have used free software extensively, and we have built great products upon the foundations laid down by Linux, RMS, and the bunch.
However, I was doing this (along with a LOT of other people) way before the Linux craze hit! It isn't just in the last year that apache has become the "leading web server" it isn't just in the last year that BIND has become the "backbone of DNS on the internet." These products, this code, this art, was great and around way before VC money, and artificially inflated IPO money was around to fund it!
I can not help but have this feeling of "SO WHAT" towards the rises and falls of the open source INDUSTRY... the movement will always be here, as long as I can type, I plan on using open source software over closed source, I plan on submitting bug reports to open source software, and I plan on releasing (no matter how pathetic lately) any utilites, applications, ideas, etc... that I have in a manner which can be utilized by other programmers, by other developers, by other artists...
If people make money off of open source, WONDERFUL! more power to them! I am very much for people making money... if however 3 years from now the market fizzles and we realize that quite frankly, open source software did not become the cash cow that microsoft enjoyed in the 80's and early 90's... well, so be it! I have learned my lessons, so have most of you! The ideas have been spread, the concepts have been tought, the seeds have been planted... I am using a FREE o/s with a free web browser to post this comment... we might lose the battles of economic success, but the war of freedom, in my mind, has been won.
Slashdot Mirror
well this is great.
Wow... did we just have a reasonable discussion on slashdot? That's creepy. :)
:)
:)
But yeah, modifying production code on the fly was something that took me a while to get used to. I had come from a tradition "IT Environment" in which you had programmers coding in a dev environment, and test environments, and staging, and deployment... etc... And suddenly, I find myself in an environment where you *can't* really have a test environment. How do you test, for example, a mile long conveyor that diverts packages at 100 feet per second accross 250 diverts. Particularly when one of the primary things that goes wrong is that the electricians wire up motors backwards 1/2 the time
So yeah, it's been a bizarre transition, but even though I now have to routinely be *at work* by 5 a.m., I love ever second of it.
To be completely honest, I wish I could program (and have my staff program) in Common LISP or some similar language, but the fact of the matter it's that it's hard enough to find dependable programmers, much less dependable programmers willing to be at work at 5 a.m.... and even less dependable programmers willing to be up at 5 a.m. and hack functional paradigm
(by the way, Hibernate *is* awesome) :)
I actually agree completely regarding caching... The proliferation of "databases that seem quick enough" has led to an entire generation of programmers that think that it's perfectly reasonable to do a handful of database queries per page load.
:)
However, in my particular case, I have different needs. My company writes "shop floor intelligence" systems in which PHP is my *middleware* language. We use Smarty/PHP to generate XML/[other streams] from proprietary interfaces to PLCs or embedded shop floor systems. This XML has to have whatever the state of the machine is *at that moment.* These systems are not neccesserally "Hard real time", but they need to be very performant. We feed the PHP systems XML configurations which tell the middleware which series of registers or memory locations on the "embedded controllers" to look for state, and how to package that state as a message to the decision support systems.
The maintenance engineers / technicians on these machines may go in during a plantwide shutdown and code a series of changes to the flow control logic of a foamer (for example) in ladder logic (or even by wiring relays) and our code has to be able to take the new internal state of these machines, and turn it into a consumable format quickly. Often times, I might add, we're not notified until 4:45 on a Monday after a plant shutdown when the 1st shift build engineers realize that their decision dashboard is giving data that doesn't map the expected state of the machine. Utilizing PHP/Smarty we are able to very quickly either change the XML / whatever template, as well as the actual feed information, and in next to no time, get the line back up and running.
One of the mantras which I used to abhor was: "there can be no unplanned system downtime on a production line" because it implied to me that everyone was lazy and simply didn't want to do their job. What it turns out happens, is that when you are retooling an entire line during a 5 day plant shutdown, sometimes little pieces don't get communicated, and one of the most prized assets of a system is the ability to dynamically reconfigure it to the changes on the line, while minimizing the downtime on the line.
As silly as this sounds, even the 5 minutes neccessary in packing a WAR file, redeploying it, and having the system bootstrap itself (after having compiled it and tested it on your system) are 5 minutes that the line doesn't want to lose.
So, in closing, I 100% agree with a great deal of your sentiment. PHP is most certainly not a splendid language for a great many applications, but I think it's a narrow point of view to believe that it's useful simply for quick one-offs... all the world is not a CRUD web app
(I forgot to add that we use DBs simply as a place to store data until the next time that we request it from the shop floor system... so for our needs, PEAR::DB is a reasonable tool.)
I guess that's sort of the point I wanted to make, is that with some foresight and proper discipline, those small projects, when they become big projects, don't need to be rewritten from scratch, if maintainability was in mind from day one. Take PEAR::DB or one of the more advanced O/R mapping PHP frameworks (such as Propel), throw a decent templating system on there (such as Smarty), keep your code highly cohesive and loosely coupled, and the benefits of the language and the libraries are *massive*.
I spent 4-5 years trying to get JSP to work as a "rapid development prototype to full scale application" environment, and I constantly ran into issues with Tomcat, Jasper, JAR file surprises, all of the warts that come with the Java language, etc... I switched to PHP for all "non-transactional" code when I did a study whereby I analyzed the amount of time it took one of my teams to react to "changing customer requirements" utilizing PHP/Apache as opposed to how much time it took another team of mine to react to similar requirement changes using JSP/Tomcat. I am not saying that JSP couldn't have worked, it's just that it seemed to not really have as many benefits as I would have liked for an environment that required as much agility as that which I found myself in.
I have to admit, my experience with ASP is nearly nill, as I have not been able to convince any clients to allow me to test out MS platforms controlling plant floor hardware.
All that being said, when my company writes something that requires "transactional integrity", we do pick Java for the backend... it's just that those situations in my field really are few and far between.
I have often remarked that a "Writing Maintainable Enterprise Class Systems in PHP" book would be the best thing since sliced bread for the PHP community. There is nothing so wrong with the language and the environment (although some have likened it to training wheels without the bycicle) that can't be remedied with discipline, communication, and the use of mindful quality software development discipline.
PHP has been a wonderful language in which to "put together quick solutions which grow into large projects" for me in fields from accounting to my current work in Industrial / Manufacturing! The interfaces you can write to control PLCs and generate plant floor intelligence using *good* PHP and a web server are light years beyond what is usually available on a shop floor with PanelViews and Vorne displays (Light bars...) Someone out there would be smart to write a PHP-for-software-engineering book.
If google really wants to do something worthwhile with email, they should go out and purchase hushmail. I happen to be a big fan of their service (web based PGP compatible email!) but I loathe how *few* people actually use encryption in email. If a powerhouse like google offered not just webmail, but *encrypted* webmail, I bet that the conversion rate would be pretty mind-blowing and voila, the huge bump encryption / PGP / GPG needed to get to the point of critical mass.
Can you imagine a world in which you can say to someone: "what you mean you don't encrypt your emails?" Please make it so google!
3) Avoid vender extensions to the basic shell. HP has done some aweful things there in its bourne shell and they are not compatible with Sun and in some cases Linux either. I.E. Always use `cat foo` and not $(cat foo) in sh scripts. There are other things like that.
...
...
... file
/.
...
... /etc/passwd, normal find /tmp -print would output
go here...
And of course, if you've been following along for a week or two, you know that this (BING!) is a Useless Use of Cat!
Rememeber, nearly all cases where you have:
cat file | some_command and its args
you can rewrite it as:
<file some_command and its args
and in some cases, such as this one, you can move the filename to the arglist as in:
some_command and its args
Just another Useless Use of
Dangerous Backticks
A special idiom to pay attention to, because it's basically always wrong, is this:
for f in `cat file`; do
done
Apart from the classical Useless Use of Cat here, the backticks are outright dangerous, unless you know the result of the backticks is going to be less than or equal to how long a command line your shell can accept. (Actually, this is a kernel limitation. The constant ARG_MAX in your limits.h should tell you how much your own system can take. POSIX requires ARG_MAX to be at least 4,096 bytes.)
Incidentally, this is also one of the Very Ancient Recurring Threads in comp.unix.shell so don't make the mistake of posting anything that resembles this.
The right way to do this is
while read f; do
done
/tmp/moo
/etc/passwd
and xargs would see two file names here. Changing the record separator to ASCII 0 means it's now valid for a file name to span multiple lines, so this becomes a non-issue.
Ah... you can always tell who had friends growing up :)
Anyone interested in doing any type of quantum computing should check out Dr. Damian Conway's excellent Quantum::Superpositions. It is an extension to the perl language which adds the operators "any" and "all"... it's lets you do *incredible* things like:
... }
... }
use Quantum::Superpositions;
if ($x == any($a, $b, $c)) {
while ($nextval < all(@thresholds)) {
$max = any(@value) < all(@values);
A good place to go and discuss the in's and out's of the cooler aspects of the perl community is perlmonks.org, check it out some time...
Have you considered releasing this tool, (which would appear to be considerably useful) in some open source manner so that people like myself and the person who asked this Ask Slashdot could get ahold of it? I know I would *love* to be get my hands on this.
Just for my own curiosity, would you be able to give me a list of these extremely extremely successful scientists and none of them gave a damn about being charasmatic. Because, having known quite a few scientists in my day, I'm afraid I haven't met any of them... and most would agree whole heartedly with Mr. Donne:
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never seen to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."
You can also tell what children had friends, and what children didn't have friends by the way that they recite the Konami code. Those that had no friends will recite it: up up down down b a start and those with no friends will recite it: up up down down b a b a SELECT start. The select was how you set the game in 2 player mode :) Just another interesting way of knowing how people grew up.
Wasteland... oh dead god, wasteland... i can honestly say that i played that game since the year it came out... and i am not proud to admit this, i *just* beat it july of this year. It was the only role playing game i've ever played, and i would play it in binges, and then forget about it for 2 years... i have had some *really* screwed up wasteland dreams. About being trapped in the Guardian Citadel, about having to deal with the Serpedroids, the Sewers, the red ryder BB gun with compas in stock...
Just this july i beat it, i had proton axes, i had the power armor, i had it all... and i beat it. i can honestly say, that i can die a happy man now.
and Hemos spoke and he said: The word from Loki is that the actual game will roll off the presses sometime last week, and start shipping around then. at 7:27 a.m. on a Saturday. And lo, it became painfully obvious that he needed some more caffeine before he posted again :) (unless, of course, loki has mastered time travel.)
how many of you got a goofy grin when you got to this part of the story:
:) linux rapidly becoming an industry standard... i can't wait.
``With Linux rapidly becoming an industry standard, it's important that developers be able to create new applications across all platforms, including pervasive devices, and the intent of IBM's research is to further that work,'' IBM said.
i mean...
anyone else as curious as I am as to whether having the slashdot effect on fermilabs network connection caused the world of neutrino science to be slowed down for one day? it makes you wonder... did slashdot just 'cause the next big thing to happen one day later just 'cause no one could use their email or their network? :)
you will have to excuse my ignorance, but what is
so obsolete about the core that Sun uses? are sparc's not good procs?
I am definetly going to agree with you that is had been a double edged sword. Zealotry doesn't come without a price, here in Tennessee some of the most frightening people I have met a religious group called "snake handlers" i don't know if you've ever heard of them or not, but it's a religious group that goes around holding poisonous vipers because they feel that god wouldn't allow the viper to bite them, as long as they are pure of heart. Defenite zealotry.
:) for me personally, and for what I feel is at least a considerably sized portion of the current open source population, I would not have been introduced to open source had it not been for the FSF and for the radical push of Stallman. If the GNU tools had not been married to the Linux kernel at such an early age, and through magic, chance and coincidence, the linux kernel become the "golden child" of the open source movement (at least according to the media) then a great many of us would have never experienced free software.
:) he's not interested in furthering commercial open source, he is interested in guaranteeing the existance and life of free software. And that is what I applaud him for, not for his business saavy or darned friendly personality ;)
The same parallel can almost be drawn to stallman, however one could almost consider him the viper
As to whether he has hurt of helped commercial open source, well, let's face it, that's not his bag
WRONG! RMS didn't invent source that is open! It existed a LONG LOGN LOGN LOGN LOGN LONG time before 1984! BSD for example started back in 1977, though not opensource by todays standard, anyone could get hold of the source if they wanted too.
Ok, so... just out of curiosity... where did I say that RMS invented "source that is open?" At no point in my argument did I make that logical jump? I didn't, you did. What I did say is that RMS did however champion the "source that is open" movement when it had hit a VERY low point in it's existance, and he saw a need for it. I also said that he has staid with it, pushed it, moved it, and spearheaded it since the day he decided to step forth and stand up for his ideals. I feel, that my point, and that which you replied are two completely and totally different points, and I would ask you to please explain to me what you were attempting to acheive with your comment.
What the hell? There are 7 comments on this story and already all that I hear are complaints about RMS complaining too much, or whining too much, etc... etc... etc... What is wrong with you people? Although I agree it may sometimes appear like this man is an extremist, that is what it takes to move and motivate a movement! If it were not for his zeal and his amazing drive, we would all still be using commercial software, without the source, without any hope of openness, without ANYTHING.
A lot of people feel that the movement has gotten to the point where we can now sit back, and that all of the benefits of an open software / free software world will come to us... we have not even begun to scratch the surface! Attitudes have barely changed, we do NOT live in a society where the average IT person understand the concept of free software (be it beer or speech!) We need someone to be a constant reminder, an unwavering word that reminds us that this fights isn't just about having the k-radest desktop at the office, or how fast our website is on Apache/Linux as compared to IIS/NT. It's about the freedom to chose, it's about the freedom to modify and to understand. It's about the freedom to not be tied to one vendors word, one commercial, closed, propietary solution. Yeah, he may sound like he is complaining and whining... it's because a great many people are getting lazy, fat, and complacent... and he sees this, and he will not give up, and he will not stop reminding us what the ideals were all about.
ok, now I am all for giving people advice, however I have got to say that I am quite annoyed at the quality of questions being posted on ask slashdot. This quesiton is by all intents and purposes, unanswerable! I mean, how do you build a 1 TB storage solution? You get 1TB worth of drives... ok, that was rather worthless, don't you think? now tell us, do you want striping, do you want mirroring, do you want redundancy? do you want hot-swappability, do you want the ability to walk up to 1/2 your storage, shoot it, and have the database not go down? Come on, we don't ask much, just give us enough to answer your question, and the great hoards of slashdotters will be happy to assist you! (me included)
I have used linux (along with GNU and a lot of other free software) for quite a while now... long enough that I can't quite remmember when was the last time that I used a not free operating system. As i have sat here and watched the growth of the linux industry over the last few years (and let's face it, 1999 will long be remmembered as the year of the penguin) I can't help but have this strong feeling towards the industry.
First, a bit of background, I work in the IT industry (obviously) but I have migrated to a job that does not really give me much time to program, I am mainly a big hovering brain, spitting out ideas and thoughts, however all of the lessons that I have learned (and am learning) from the open source movement, are ideas that I incorporate into any endeavor in which I am a part of. At the companies that I have been involved, we have used free software extensively, and we have built great products upon the foundations laid down by Linux, RMS, and the bunch.
However, I was doing this (along with a LOT of other people) way before the Linux craze hit! It isn't just in the last year that apache has become the "leading web server" it isn't just in the last year that BIND has become the "backbone of DNS on the internet." These products, this code, this art, was great and around way before VC money, and artificially inflated IPO money was around to fund it!
I can not help but have this feeling of "SO WHAT" towards the rises and falls of the open source INDUSTRY... the movement will always be here, as long as I can type, I plan on using open source software over closed source, I plan on submitting bug reports to open source software, and I plan on releasing (no matter how pathetic lately) any utilites, applications, ideas, etc... that I have in a manner which can be utilized by other programmers, by other developers, by other artists...
If people make money off of open source, WONDERFUL! more power to them! I am very much for people making money... if however 3 years from now the market fizzles and we realize that quite frankly, open source software did not become the cash cow that microsoft enjoyed in the 80's and early 90's... well, so be it! I have learned my lessons, so have most of you! The ideas have been spread, the concepts have been tought, the seeds have been planted... I am using a FREE o/s with a free web browser to post this comment... we might lose the battles of economic success, but the war of freedom, in my mind, has been won.