Just FYI, most of Ubunut's ease of use comes from Gnome, not from Ubunutu. Most of Gnome is coded by Fedora/Red Hat devs with a large foundation from Ximian.
Just curious where you got your numbers from? Last I checked, Gentoo had no significant part of the Desktop market and the 4 largest players were Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, and Ubuntu in that order. RedHat+Fedora clearly has the lead in the server arena with over 2 million active servers according to Netcraft, Debain trailing in second with 750,000, and then Suse with around 450,000 (the other distros are all much less). Fedora has ridiculously high percentages in the desktop arena and server arena, it has something like 400,000 active servers according to netcraft, and this was in march. Assuming its growth rate stayed the same, its already overtaken Suse. As far as desktop numbers go, Fedora has high percentage of the market, over 30% iirc, unfortunately I can't seem to find a reference for that right now. e (Granted most surveys and/or percentages are skewed in all of the linux related things i've read and so its really hard to judge this desktop percentage number) Ubuntu is certainly making headway, but its mostly a bunch of noise by a smaller group of people (similar to gentoo). Not saying that is a bad thing, if people want to pride themselves on their distro, go for it. But just because you see a bunch of posts on slashdot or on some other forum screaming about how great ubuntu is, doesn't necessarily mean that it has huge market share. Regards, Steve
Firefox already has a few projects underway for BT support, not sure what their status is, but google for them. This has been discussed for over a year now, Opera isnt a first mover, they just like to add any features they can to the browser whereas firefox is minimalistic. Regards, Steve
An integrated bittorrent client in the official firefox build has been discussed for over a year now, it's more or less been dismissed as bloat and that it should be implemented as an extension or plugin. Firefox is trying to stick to the minimalistic approach, Opera is trying to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it (I have no problem with either philosophy). I would personally like to see the next release of firefox natively support bit torrent, with a streamlined client it would only add a few hundred Kb at worst. Regards, Steve
Anyone else find it ironic that OSes like SkyOS depend on OSS software, in fact most screenshots are showing OSS software in use, yet the developer refuses to share his code for the OS with the world? Regards, Steve
Thats all great and what not...I agree with everything, but this is in Russia which simply means that those lawyers have learned to swim and spread across the continents. (..has a flashback to the scene in land of the dead where the zombies learn they can go in water). Regards, Steve
Re:Hardware Translucency in Linux
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
It already does, its a little crappy, but on par with window's current alpha blending capabilities. Linux users are just keen on usability and realize that translucent things are a pain in the ass to work with, try reading a page of text on transparent paper as opposed to regular opaque paper. Regards, Steve
Except if you've ever read "The age of intelligent machines" or other essays of his from the 80's you'd be amazed at how accurate he is, mostly because he takes part in most of the innovations spawning companies to make them realities and profiting from them. Another more recent book of his, "The age of spiritual machines" also makes quite a few interesting statements, but they are all backed with reasonable logic and if he's only half as accurate as he's previously been, then our future still holds many interesting things in store for us. Ray Kurzweil is no joke, knows exactly what he is talking about and is extremely intelligent. In fact quite a few technology centered corporations have used him as a consultant, the first company off the top of my head is Lockheed Martin. Regards, Steve
Are the mods serious that the parent is a troll???!!! It's an expression of freedom of speech using a word that has existed since 1250 A.D.! Stealth stealth stealth and stealth. Regards, Steve
This may just be my ignorance speaking, but last time I checked Windows had horrific High Performance Clustering capabilities, so there is no comparison to make. In addition, the licensing issues to go along with Windows 2003 advanced server or whatever you need to get HPC is ridiculous. Meanwhile, Red Hat has great clustering capabilitiesn enterprise support for it, and the clusters work well and are integrated giving high ease of use and great performance. Thats why this CIO went with them and if you read the article, he is sticking with them because he's been so impressed by them. Microsoft has no game in HPC. Regards, Steve
Well exactly what government would you prefer controlling it? With so many different cultures, if they started some NATO like organization for DNS servers you'd see countries voting to ban all kinds of domains, and you'd see no progress or enhancements simply because 40 or so countries would have to agree before any changes are made. The whole point of DNS is to have a central point for this kind of stuff. Distributing authority is possibly the worst thing that could happen to it. The U.S. has handled it fine so far, and hell they did design the internet, so leave well enough alone. Regards, Steve
Thanks for grabbing more accurate numbers, I'm not sure where I got the Netbeans numbers from, I might have mixed them up with another IDE:) Regardless, JBuilder is crap, Eclipse is good but when compared to Netbeans, Eclipse looks like crap. My company was kind of standardized on Eclipse for god knows how long, but they always have let developers choose any IDE they want (just most used to choose Eclipse). In the past 3 or 4 months I've seen a lot of developers switching to NetBeans. I used to be an eclipse fan boy, but NetBeans really made a huge turn around from its old crappy self. It is literally years past Eclipse now. If word spreads enough about it, I can be pretty sure it'll beat any competition. If you've never used NetBeans please go give it a shot. I still use eclipse all the time in a mixed envrionment with NetBeans, simply because our dev environment has some custom eclipse stuff that we wrote that makes certain things easier. Eclipse is crap unless you just want basic editing capabilites with code completion, etc.. I know lots of folks who write java code using vim or jedit, I do myself sometimes. If you like writing java code in tools like vim, then you probably like the grunt work stuff and eclipse will be great for you. However, an IDE can be much more then what Eclipse provides and I didn't really realize that until recently when I started finding out all this great functionality that NetBeans has. Regards, Steve
Eclipse claims to have about 45% of the Java IDE market, however that is about as accruate claiming that Firefox has 67 millions users. Eclipse uses the download count to get an estimate, I'd guess its closer to maybe 30%. I believe Netbeans is around 15%-25% and rising fast. Netbeans has won multiple awards in many areas for IDE design. Eclipse is really just a foundation and corporations pay big bucks to get in on it. Eclipse's drive isn't the community, the foundation members decide where eclipse is going. Eclipse is a good basic IDE but for anything extensive, you need to download a ton of plugins and/or buy proprietary ones.
With a default install of Netbeans, you get a full IDE with regular java programming capabilites and standard features (code completion, java doc, etc...), GUI application tools, it includes a great RAD for gui interfaces. You get WebServices programming capabilities with a fully integrated IDE and application server. With 2 other downloads on netbeans.org, you get a full J2ME development environment,including a gui tool to create interfaces for mobile phones, along with about 10 different phone emulators. You also get an enterprise level memory and performance profiler.
All in all, Netbeans is much better integrated and provides many more features. Eclipse hasn't really innovated for well over a year now, and many of its sub projects are hardly under development anymore. Netbeans used to have a bad reputation because it was a memory hog, slow, and for many years it was under stagnant development. In the past 2 years though, its made a complete 180 and is fast, full featured, and probably the best IDE in the market. Give it a shot if you haven't and use it for a bit. Its free, so its not like you're losing anything. Regards, Steve
Not to insult your employer or anything but I have a feeling that they are using the term "open" purely from a marketing point of view. Are the full microsoft docx/xlsx/pptx specs going to be patent free and have some sort of full public specification accessible by anyone who wishes to implement a compatible word processor? Is the spec going to use encrypted binary data in the xml or use some sort of drm to prevent 3rd party readers? It would be really great if it was fully open, and I'm not going to bash MS until they show otherwise, but I doubt it will be. Being able to unzip some xml files and change strings you find in tags does not make it open. Regards, Steve
I currently work on 2 classified projects for the Department of Defense. I've got 5 close family members who were in the forces. I was very close to joining, and no recruiters ever bothered me.I decided that I can make bigger impacts in other ways. The way I worded my post, I sounded like a dick, I wasn't saying that the poor should die. ( I help out at soup kitchens all the time.) I guess I was trying to point out that despite whatever the intentions of the recruiters are, if someone has the odds against them in life then joining the forces can have quite a few advantages and move them from being viewed as in the lower spectrum of society into a much more respectable spectrum. That lasts a lifetime. It also opens up many oppurtunities that weren't on the table for them before. And just FYI, I never said that those who are well off shouldn't join, just simply that they can often impact society in bigger ways.What good is defense, if there is nothing worth defending. Regards, Steve
Well, although it might seem inhumane, the kids more likely to succeed in life *should* be left alone because they will form the economic and technological backbone of the country in decades to come. Those who are already "poor" and will most likely "fail" while being a drain on society will be better off fighting. If nothing else, they'll learn a thing or two. It is kind of like, "You can spend the rest of your life living in mediocrity and most likely wasting tax dollars through programs like welfare, or join us, learn to shape up, fight well, hopefully survive and leave in a few years with knowledge that you've never had before, which will help you get a better job and thus live a better life. We'll even help pay for college if you want." A lot of kids would be better off joining the forces (not everyone is infantry btw, there is alot more to do then just shoot at the enemy). Alot of other people are better off staying away from joining the forces and are better off either strengthening the country economically or even just regular programmers who are most likely going to be of more use coding some application to assist in fighting rather then actually fighting. Regards, Steve
Well I might not be in the majority but I prefer the mac hardware way over the OS. Perhaps its just me, but the OS doesn't feel intuitive at all, and I've really tried to get along with it. The hardware, however, is designed beautifully, runs quiet, and is laid out in a compact and efficient manner while keeping the welfare of the hardware a priority. To me, a Mac with the Mac OS is useless, and a Mac with Linux on it is one of the best utilizable personal machines I've ever had to the pleasure of working with:) Not to mention that the sheer amount of software for linux makes the mac's software library look miniscule. Regards, Steve
Whole solar system? Hell we still aren't even sure about everything on this planet! Especially in the depths of the ocean. Just because we haven't discovered everything about our planet doesn't mean we shouldn't explore outside of it. Exploring for the sake of exploring:) Regards, Steve
Re:At least Jim Anchower is still there
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 1
That was satire over at the Onion and meant to exaggerate, but regardless, please go back 50 years from now and tell people that we'll regularyl be visiting space, infact building core communication infastructures orbiting earth. Tell them that the entire world would be connected instantaneously and that machines are going to start interacting with humans and are in the early stages of understanding speech and visual recognition (ASIMO). Tell them that just by pressing a few keys on a little box that you'll be able to search for just about anything you want in the world and get that information returned to you in a second. Or how about my favorite, tell them they'll be able to fit tens of thousands of songs in their pocket and be able to listen to them anywhere they want. The world is changing and very rapidly, your just a part of it so you don't necessarily realize it. Step back and take an objective view of it all. It might not be as futuristci and glamorous as many in the past have predicted, but its damn cool. Now we're on the verge of being able to grow people replacement organs and using nanobots to do everything from cure diseases to building structures. The really cool part is that intelligence and technology tend to grow exponentially with a civilization. Ideally, we've achieved as much in the past 100 years, as we did in the previous 1000, and ideally over the next few decades we'll have more then doubled the great acheivements of the 20th century. Regarding, Steve
But unfortunately, sometimes the masses are so dumb that they don't know what is good for them. This is where the government steps in, more or less protecting the people from their own stupidity. At least someone is. (I am in no way saying that the government is always in the right) Regards, Steve
The MS researchers are typical academics. Bram pointed out some excellent points including that tit-for-tat has been ripped out of the BT code for 5 years now simply because in the real world it doesn't work, even on his little 6 machine network. He devised better methodologies. Also the researchers are assuming too much consistency about the internet and assume that each peer is out for the total good of the network rather then being selfish and out for their own good. The researchers also assumed that only 4-6 peers would be needed and thats what they compared BT using (BT uses 30-50). I'm a computer science major and deal with this type of academic bullshit all the time. These PHDs go "Oh look my algorithm runs in 100000000*n time, that is O(n)! I have a great linear algorithm!" and they completely ignore facts like the network on average will be 10 to 20 million people and that in such a case the constant (100000000) outweights the benefits of the algorithm. An exponential function might work better in such a case but I've seen professors just outright refuse to acknowledge such things simply because the constant is a constant and so it can be ignored. Unfortunately, in the real world, constants are constant and can't be ignored. Academics have a wierd way of thinking of things, they like things to work out perfectly, everything has to be a mathematical absolute. The network simulation the researches used had everything ideal and consistent. Please show me a large network where such is true. Regards, Steve
You make some exellent points and do a great job of pointing out my ignorance;) Regardless, shell scripting is ideally for system administrators, not for programmers (despite the fact that they often use it). A system administrator should not have to learn about object oriented programming or.Net just to automate administration of the system. In bash, its more or less "Run these commands in this order, oh yea you can also make this command use this other command's output for it's input. If you want you can add some logic and loops too if you can wrap your mind around those concepts" and that will cover 95% of scripts. The system administrator needs to learn minimal programming skills at best (no more then a BASIC programmer in most cases). With this Monad stuff, it seems to me that they are requiring the system administrator to learn a heck of alot more, in fact, more or less becoming a rudimentary.Net programmer. Also, scripts are typically meant to be small and maintainable. If you know my posting history then you know that I'm a huge fan of Java and C++, but the complexity of their language syntax is not necessary for small scale maintainence of the type of scripts most admin I've seen write. It just seems to me that Microsoft is forcing.Net into places it doesn't belong. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI, most of Ubunut's ease of use comes from Gnome, not from Ubunutu. Most of Gnome is coded by Fedora/Red Hat devs with a large foundation from Ximian.
Just curious where you got your numbers from? Last I checked, Gentoo had no significant part of the Desktop market and the 4 largest players were Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, and Ubuntu in that order. RedHat+Fedora clearly has the lead in the server arena with over 2 million active servers according to Netcraft, Debain trailing in second with 750,000, and then Suse with around 450,000 (the other distros are all much less). Fedora has ridiculously high percentages in the desktop arena and server arena, it has something like 400,000 active servers according to netcraft, and this was in march. Assuming its growth rate stayed the same, its already overtaken Suse. As far as desktop numbers go, Fedora has high percentage of the market, over 30% iirc, unfortunately I can't seem to find a reference for that right now. e (Granted most surveys and/or percentages are skewed in all of the linux related things i've read and so its really hard to judge this desktop percentage number) Ubuntu is certainly making headway, but its mostly a bunch of noise by a smaller group of people (similar to gentoo). Not saying that is a bad thing, if people want to pride themselves on their distro, go for it. But just because you see a bunch of posts on slashdot or on some other forum screaming about how great ubuntu is, doesn't necessarily mean that it has huge market share.
Regards,
Steve
Firefox already has a few projects underway for BT support, not sure what their status is, but google for them. This has been discussed for over a year now, Opera isnt a first mover, they just like to add any features they can to the browser whereas firefox is minimalistic.
Regards,
Steve
An integrated bittorrent client in the official firefox build has been discussed for over a year now, it's more or less been dismissed as bloat and that it should be implemented as an extension or plugin. Firefox is trying to stick to the minimalistic approach, Opera is trying to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it (I have no problem with either philosophy). I would personally like to see the next release of firefox natively support bit torrent, with a streamlined client it would only add a few hundred Kb at worst.
Regards,
Steve
Anyone else find it ironic that OSes like SkyOS depend on OSS software, in fact most screenshots are showing OSS software in use, yet the developer refuses to share his code for the OS with the world?
Regards,
Steve
Thats all great and what not...I agree with everything, but this is in Russia which simply means that those lawyers have learned to swim and spread across the continents. (..has a flashback to the scene in land of the dead where the zombies learn they can go in water).
Regards,
Steve
It already does, its a little crappy, but on par with window's current alpha blending capabilities. Linux users are just keen on usability and realize that translucent things are a pain in the ass to work with, try reading a page of text on transparent paper as opposed to regular opaque paper.
Regards,
Steve
Except if you've ever read "The age of intelligent machines" or other essays of his from the 80's you'd be amazed at how accurate he is, mostly because he takes part in most of the innovations spawning companies to make them realities and profiting from them. Another more recent book of his, "The age of spiritual machines" also makes quite a few interesting statements, but they are all backed with reasonable logic and if he's only half as accurate as he's previously been, then our future still holds many interesting things in store for us. Ray Kurzweil is no joke, knows exactly what he is talking about and is extremely intelligent. In fact quite a few technology centered corporations have used him as a consultant, the first company off the top of my head is Lockheed Martin.
Regards,
Steve
Are the mods serious that the parent is a troll???!!! It's an expression of freedom of speech using a word that has existed since 1250 A.D.! Stealth stealth stealth and stealth.
Regards,
Steve
This may just be my ignorance speaking, but last time I checked Windows had horrific High Performance Clustering capabilities, so there is no comparison to make. In addition, the licensing issues to go along with Windows 2003 advanced server or whatever you need to get HPC is ridiculous. Meanwhile, Red Hat has great clustering capabilitiesn enterprise support for it, and the clusters work well and are integrated giving high ease of use and great performance. Thats why this CIO went with them and if you read the article, he is sticking with them because he's been so impressed by them. Microsoft has no game in HPC.
Regards,
Steve
Well exactly what government would you prefer controlling it? With so many different cultures, if they started some NATO like organization for DNS servers you'd see countries voting to ban all kinds of domains, and you'd see no progress or enhancements simply because 40 or so countries would have to agree before any changes are made. The whole point of DNS is to have a central point for this kind of stuff. Distributing authority is possibly the worst thing that could happen to it. The U.S. has handled it fine so far, and hell they did design the internet, so leave well enough alone.
Regards,
Steve
Anyone interested in more, take a look here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_ root
Regards,
Steve
Thanks for grabbing more accurate numbers, I'm not sure where I got the Netbeans numbers from, I might have mixed them up with another IDE :) Regardless, JBuilder is crap, Eclipse is good but when compared to Netbeans, Eclipse looks like crap. My company was kind of standardized on Eclipse for god knows how long, but they always have let developers choose any IDE they want (just most used to choose Eclipse). In the past 3 or 4 months I've seen a lot of developers switching to NetBeans. I used to be an eclipse fan boy, but NetBeans really made a huge turn around from its old crappy self. It is literally years past Eclipse now. If word spreads enough about it, I can be pretty sure it'll beat any competition. If you've never used NetBeans please go give it a shot. I still use eclipse all the time in a mixed envrionment with NetBeans, simply because our dev environment has some custom eclipse stuff that we wrote that makes certain things easier. Eclipse is crap unless you just want basic editing capabilites with code completion, etc.. I know lots of folks who write java code using vim or jedit, I do myself sometimes. If you like writing java code in tools like vim, then you probably like the grunt work stuff and eclipse will be great for you. However, an IDE can be much more then what Eclipse provides and I didn't really realize that until recently when I started finding out all this great functionality that NetBeans has.
Regards,
Steve
Eclipse claims to have about 45% of the Java IDE market, however that is about as accruate claiming that Firefox has 67 millions users. Eclipse uses the download count to get an estimate, I'd guess its closer to maybe 30%. I believe Netbeans is around 15%-25% and rising fast. Netbeans has won multiple awards in many areas for IDE design. Eclipse is really just a foundation and corporations pay big bucks to get in on it. Eclipse's drive isn't the community, the foundation members decide where eclipse is going. Eclipse is a good basic IDE but for anything extensive, you need to download a ton of plugins and/or buy proprietary ones.
With a default install of Netbeans, you get a full IDE with regular java programming capabilites and standard features (code completion, java doc, etc...), GUI application tools, it includes a great RAD for gui interfaces. You get WebServices programming capabilities with a fully integrated IDE and application server. With 2 other downloads on netbeans.org, you get a full J2ME development environment,including a gui tool to create interfaces for mobile phones, along with about 10 different phone emulators. You also get an enterprise level memory and performance profiler.
All in all, Netbeans is much better integrated and provides many more features. Eclipse hasn't really innovated for well over a year now, and many of its sub projects are hardly under development anymore. Netbeans used to have a bad reputation because it was a memory hog, slow, and for many years it was under stagnant development. In the past 2 years though, its made a complete 180 and is fast, full featured, and probably the best IDE in the market. Give it a shot if you haven't and use it for a bit. Its free, so its not like you're losing anything.
Regards,
Steve
Not to insult your employer or anything but I have a feeling that they are using the term "open" purely from a marketing point of view. Are the full microsoft docx/xlsx/pptx specs going to be patent free and have some sort of full public specification accessible by anyone who wishes to implement a compatible word processor? Is the spec going to use encrypted binary data in the xml or use some sort of drm to prevent 3rd party readers? It would be really great if it was fully open, and I'm not going to bash MS until they show otherwise, but I doubt it will be. Being able to unzip some xml files and change strings you find in tags does not make it open.
Regards,
Steve
With a simple loop, they will never stop.
I currently work on 2 classified projects for the Department of Defense. I've got 5 close family members who were in the forces. I was very close to joining, and no recruiters ever bothered me.I decided that I can make bigger impacts in other ways. The way I worded my post, I sounded like a dick, I wasn't saying that the poor should die. ( I help out at soup kitchens all the time.) I guess I was trying to point out that despite whatever the intentions of the recruiters are, if someone has the odds against them in life then joining the forces can have quite a few advantages and move them from being viewed as in the lower spectrum of society into a much more respectable spectrum. That lasts a lifetime. It also opens up many oppurtunities that weren't on the table for them before. And just FYI, I never said that those who are well off shouldn't join, just simply that they can often impact society in bigger ways.What good is defense, if there is nothing worth defending.
Regards,
Steve
The truly selfless give without expectations.
Regards,
Steve
Well, although it might seem inhumane, the kids more likely to succeed in life *should* be left alone because they will form the economic and technological backbone of the country in decades to come. Those who are already "poor" and will most likely "fail" while being a drain on society will be better off fighting. If nothing else, they'll learn a thing or two. It is kind of like, "You can spend the rest of your life living in mediocrity and most likely wasting tax dollars through programs like welfare, or join us, learn to shape up, fight well, hopefully survive and leave in a few years with knowledge that you've never had before, which will help you get a better job and thus live a better life. We'll even help pay for college if you want." A lot of kids would be better off joining the forces (not everyone is infantry btw, there is alot more to do then just shoot at the enemy). Alot of other people are better off staying away from joining the forces and are better off either strengthening the country economically or even just regular programmers who are most likely going to be of more use coding some application to assist in fighting rather then actually fighting.
Regards,
Steve
Well I might not be in the majority but I prefer the mac hardware way over the OS. Perhaps its just me, but the OS doesn't feel intuitive at all, and I've really tried to get along with it. The hardware, however, is designed beautifully, runs quiet, and is laid out in a compact and efficient manner while keeping the welfare of the hardware a priority. To me, a Mac with the Mac OS is useless, and a Mac with Linux on it is one of the best utilizable personal machines I've ever had to the pleasure of working with:) Not to mention that the sheer amount of software for linux makes the mac's software library look miniscule.
Regards,
Steve
Whole solar system? Hell we still aren't even sure about everything on this planet! Especially in the depths of the ocean. Just because we haven't discovered everything about our planet doesn't mean we shouldn't explore outside of it. Exploring for the sake of exploring:)
Regards,
Steve
That was satire over at the Onion and meant to exaggerate, but regardless, please go back 50 years from now and tell people that we'll regularyl be visiting space, infact building core communication infastructures orbiting earth. Tell them that the entire world would be connected instantaneously and that machines are going to start interacting with humans and are in the early stages of understanding speech and visual recognition (ASIMO). Tell them that just by pressing a few keys on a little box that you'll be able to search for just about anything you want in the world and get that information returned to you in a second. Or how about my favorite, tell them they'll be able to fit tens of thousands of songs in their pocket and be able to listen to them anywhere they want. The world is changing and very rapidly, your just a part of it so you don't necessarily realize it. Step back and take an objective view of it all. It might not be as futuristci and glamorous as many in the past have predicted, but its damn cool. Now we're on the verge of being able to grow people replacement organs and using nanobots to do everything from cure diseases to building structures. The really cool part is that intelligence and technology tend to grow exponentially with a civilization. Ideally, we've achieved as much in the past 100 years, as we did in the previous 1000, and ideally over the next few decades we'll have more then doubled the great acheivements of the 20th century.
Regarding,
Steve
But unfortunately, sometimes the masses are so dumb that they don't know what is good for them. This is where the government steps in, more or less protecting the people from their own stupidity. At least someone is. (I am in no way saying that the government is always in the right)
Regards,
Steve
The MS researchers are typical academics. Bram pointed out some excellent points including that tit-for-tat has been ripped out of the BT code for 5 years now simply because in the real world it doesn't work, even on his little 6 machine network. He devised better methodologies. Also the researchers are assuming too much consistency about the internet and assume that each peer is out for the total good of the network rather then being selfish and out for their own good. The researchers also assumed that only 4-6 peers would be needed and thats what they compared BT using (BT uses 30-50). I'm a computer science major and deal with this type of academic bullshit all the time. These PHDs go "Oh look my algorithm runs in 100000000*n time, that is O(n)! I have a great linear algorithm!" and they completely ignore facts like the network on average will be 10 to 20 million people and that in such a case the constant (100000000) outweights the benefits of the algorithm. An exponential function might work better in such a case but I've seen professors just outright refuse to acknowledge such things simply because the constant is a constant and so it can be ignored. Unfortunately, in the real world, constants are constant and can't be ignored. Academics have a wierd way of thinking of things, they like things to work out perfectly, everything has to be a mathematical absolute. The network simulation the researches used had everything ideal and consistent. Please show me a large network where such is true.
Regards,
Steve
You make some exellent points and do a great job of pointing out my ignorance ;) Regardless, shell scripting is ideally for system administrators, not for programmers (despite the fact that they often use it). A system administrator should not have to learn about object oriented programming or .Net just to automate administration of the system. In bash, its more or less "Run these commands in this order, oh yea you can also make this command use this other command's output for it's input. If you want you can add some logic and loops too if you can wrap your mind around those concepts" and that will cover 95% of scripts. The system administrator needs to learn minimal programming skills at best (no more then a BASIC programmer in most cases). With this Monad stuff, it seems to me that they are requiring the system administrator to learn a heck of alot more, in fact, more or less becoming a rudimentary .Net programmer. Also, scripts are typically meant to be small and maintainable. If you know my posting history then you know that I'm a huge fan of Java and C++, but the complexity of their language syntax is not necessary for small scale maintainence of the type of scripts most admin I've seen write. It just seems to me that Microsoft is forcing .Net into places it doesn't belong.
Regards,
Steve