>I'll take a shot at that. How about "the best package management system is the one that is the most versatile and easy to use, and least likely to cause dependency hell?"
Oh, like *that* helps. I'm sure Microsoft's mission is to "deliver good software" and look where we are.
It's darned hard to get a committee of developers to agree when everybody's got an opinion on what's best. I hope that a good unified package mangement system emerges from the efforts but I'm not exactly confident.
>By the way, don't call me zealot-boy! My opinions are temperate, considered, and intellectual! : P
>Why? If Microsoft would let us fix Windows, that would be fine. But since they don't, and are generally evil, they "[suck] and we hate them." I don't see any logical inconsistency there; do you?
Cool down, zealot-boy; the comment was not in defense of Windows. My comment was directed your advocating the removal of choice when your sig is, in part, a condemnation of the evil of taking away choice, leaving something viewed as sub-optimal by all.
Or to simplify, don't ask to everyone to unify behind one way; at the end of that path lies Microsoft.
>Also, although I didn't say it I meant that we should pick the best one to start with...<advocacy deleted>.
I challenge you to create a definition that all of the developers the developers and systems administrators will agree is the "best".
A good quote to break out when people claim that cluster supercomputers are "better" than vector supercomputers (when they're really two different types of systems with differing strengths that can't be directly compared):
>McCalpin: The majority of high-end systems are used for throughput workloads of one kind or another. The vector machines, both from NEC and Cray(TM), are very well-liked by the end users because vectorization is a relatively easy thing to understand, how to write code that will vectorize. And the machines -- with relatively little effort -- give you a good utilization, you'll get a good fraction of the peak theoretical performance without a whole lot of work. And customers find that comforting. You put the code on there, you get 35% of the theoretical peak performance and you say, "Well, that's pretty good and I don't need to mess with it anymore."
On the machines that IBM sells and that HP sells and AMD(TM) and all of the others, the costs are much lower, but it's harder to get very high utilization on those machines, in part because they don't have so much expensive memory bandwidth. So there's an interesting discrepancy between the end users who love vector machines because they're easy to use and then the purchasing manager who doesn't like vector machines because they cost too much.
>It seems to me that the way to fix this thing is to just pick one and then fix whatever shortcomings it has, instead of combining all the shortcomings of everything (except Portage, apparently).
I find this comment really amusing, in light of your.sig.
Everybody's seen Office Space already. Anyone who like it should run out immediately and find a copy of Bruce Bethke's novel, "Headcrash". Think of it as a cyberpunk-ish version of Office Space, only funnier.
The guy technically could be charged with several million counts of attempted fraud, which is a criminal offense. That would be enough to justifiably put him away for millenia.
>While I sympathize with the cries of "Off with their heads", I don't think jail time is really appropriate in this case. I think we need to save our prisons for people who have done something Really Bad, not something Really Annoying.
Just "annoying"? Attempted fraud is a criminal offense. What do you think the punishment for tens of millions of counts of attempted fraud should be?
>I hate spam as much as the next guy but 9 years is a bit excessive IMO.
Let's give them an absolutely fair punishment: they should spend as much time in prison as the people that received their spam collectively spent time dealing with it. That would be, oh, 5-6 consecutive life sentences at least, I would think.
>The title is a little interesting to me. The Return of the SUN Workstation. Does this mean to say that the current versions of UltraSPARC and Sun Blade systems shouldn't be considered workstations?
No, I think that it alludes to Sun's origins as a manufacturer of cheap UNIX workstations/servers based on the commodity processors of that era (Motorola 680x0).
There's another reason: I use Paypal where e-tailers provide the option because I have no idea how good their privacy policy and data security is. While it's arguable that PayPal may be no better in those regards, I'd rather have my credit card data in less places than more.
>My case, a lowly Sysadmin, just sheltering and feeding my family doesn't leave me with any means what-so-ever of avoiding paying any tax at all on my paltry salary.
A business is a structured organization of people with expertise in the functions of said business that make it function as part of the economy more effectively than the sum of the people that make it up if they worked as individuals. Up to a certain point (e.g: a large corporation we all know and hate), larger businesses are even more efficient because they have better economies of scale, like Dell and Wal-mart.
Let's put it this way: what makes *you* as an individual such a godsend to the economy that you deserve the same sort of tax breaks as the business that employs you?
>Think of programming as necessary infrastructure for a business, not as its core business. Businesses have a lot of costs that aren't related to the core business.
One thing I've wondered about this: It requires a fair amount of expertise to find and hire a competent software development programmer or consultancy, which is unlikely to be present in a small/medium business whose core business is not software. Will they really be better off hiring programmers to customize OSS rather than integrating off the shelf packages?
>But all of them? Even the ones of failing companies?
They get hired based on their percieved value to the company and get axed if they don't perform, same as anyone else. They get a golden parachute to ensure no public squabbling which would hurt public opinon/confidence in the company.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Tying pay to revenue/profit would be an incentive for short term thinking, as well as an impediment for finding someone to turn around an ailing business. Tying pay to the pay that the lowest paid worker gets is just an incentive to leave for greener pa$ture$ at the first opportunity.
>Years back, I heard Eisner's "total annual compensation" placed in the $100,000,000 range. If we guess that the guy serving the mouse-eared ice cream bars made $50,000 per year, that's not 40X, that 2000X. Further, I suspect the $50k estimate is generous.
Here is a rather informative discussion on Eisner's compensation history. Note that it points out that a lot of what he got is based on his gamble of taking stock options as a large part of his compensation, i.e. he got money based on his performance. As it should be.
As things started to go downhill, he got only direct pay plus a bonus based on meeting specific goals. (Here is a chart showing annual compensation after 1996 when things started to go downhill. (Note that the shown hypothetical stock option values are based on an accounting computation designed to estimate future value. As the Forbes article here points out, their actual value at the moment is zero.)
Now that things are really hitting the fan at Disney, people are trying to axe him. Also as it should be.
What's the problem?
>I still maintain that for most CEOs, outside of a few shining stars, they're in an overpay-ourselves club.
There's no doubt that there are outrageous compensation packages, but perhaps the people who hire CEOs are not as stupid as we think.
That it is worth THAT MUCH more (your example is 40X, I'm not going to quibble about numbers) indicates to me that the CEO is grabbing money.
One word: Steve Jobs. Whether you like Apple products or not, I think it's pretty much undeniable that if he wasn't at the helm, some other company would be picking over the remnants of Apple at this very moment instead of Apple currently employing however many thousands they have.
Damn straight the efforts of one person can be 40x or more than the efforts of another.
>A moment's pity, therefore. They may be rich. That does not make them either smart, or right.
I can't help but to laugh at this example of uninformed zealotry. Even if I weren't dubious about MS meriting any pity, this is rather like a 8 year old child patting itself on the back for outrunning a geriatric in a wheelchair.
OSS fits somewhere into MS's problems, but is hardly the dominant factor. Aside from OSS, their primary problems right now stem from the the worldwide wave of anti-monopoly lawsuits, being crushed between the need to maintain compatibility with their insecure legacy interfaces and the need to leave them behind to catch up on security, their poor public image caused by bugs on one front and the failed Sofware Assurance licensing program on the other, and last but hardly least, lack of new markets/product offering categories to expand into.
Come back and proclaim victory when MS is bankrupt and combined revenues for Linux and OSS support/products (i.e. IBM's non-Linux/OSS divisions don't count) approach that of the proprietary software world. The former may be inevitable, but, unless the OSS world changes radically, I'd give long odds against the latter occurring anytime soon.
I retract the last line of the above post as being excessively rude. I don't think much of your argument, nor of the person who modded it insightful, but that's not a reason to step over the line between sarcasm and rudness.
>Lines like that annoy me. Even though it does me no physical or financial harm, I'd still like you to never post tripe like that again.
>Please explain how then continuing against my wishes is not immoral.
Ah, but here the you has the choice of not being annoyed by not reading my post, whereas the person being copied from has no choice whatsoever in the matter.
>I'd guess your arguement as to why copyright infrindgement is immoral really should be longer than a single sentence to be compelling.
I love taking this one on: Let's suppose that some guy recorded a song and politely requested that no one make a digital copy of this song without paying him a dollar. Let's further suppose that making such a digital copy against his wishes causes no physical or financial harm to him whatsoever; it just annoys him. Please explain how then making a copy against his wishes is still not immoral.
Can you come up with a justification that won't be laughed at by all of Slashdot?
>IBM is out to undermine Microsoft to the point where it "appears" almost personal [from a corporate entity as a person perspective] This is only my opinion with no real facts other than my own observations - so I will concede this point to you though I feel differently than you do.
>This still does not change the fact that IBM is more trustworthy as a company [paradox?] than Microsoft is in relation to this thread and article subject. IBM used to be the 800 lb gorilla. It learned from its mistakes.
I think you are ascribing too much personality to IBM and Microsoft. They are not some sort of monolithic hive-minds battling it out for the sake of their respective "ideologies", nor are their employess monomaniacal cyborgs hell-bent on destroying each other while chanting "Open source will be assimilated!/Proprietary software! Exterminate!". (Though the latter would be vastly entertaining if it were.)
Speaking from my experience as a peon in another large corporation, senior executives are ultimately accountable to the bottom line for their division; they are forever explaining what strategic moves they will make to either become profitable or stay that way. There's not a lot of room for "making it personal" there, especially when dealing with a corporation as gigantic as IBM or Microsoft. Making it personal is likely to either disrupt your own efforts to be profitable (I point again to Scott McNealy, although the evidence is not as clear cut in this case.) or hinder future profitable relationships (e.g. when you need X zillion Windows licenses for your new Thinkpads/xSeries or when you need Y zillion PowerPC CPUs for Xbox 2).
Similarly, people who hold fast to inflexible ideologies are likely to fail to adapt well to changing business situations. I have little doubt that IBM executives have no immediate intention of open sourcing their crown jewels (e.g. DB2) and that Microsoft executives are contemplating any possibility of gaining a strategic advantage by tapping into OSS for their given products/areas.
>Regardless mindshare goes a lot further than it is given credit for. Hence the reason Microsoft still does not seem to "get it." Hence the reason Microsoft still does not seem to "get it." I have noticed Window developers even making comments along the lines of "...but everybody anymore wants cross-platform solutions." My experience may be unique in this regard but I can distinctly remember a time where not only was it not done but it was never considered. Developer mindshare in this regard will kill Microsofts stranglehold on technology [at least in the software sector].
I have to confess that this paragraph didn't make much sense to me. Can you clarify?
>The difference however is IBM, evil turned good, contributes, supports, and plays well with the open source community.
I am constantly amazed to hear that people actually believe this. IBM is in this solely for IBM's benefit; if they saw more financial advantage in sucking up to MS, they'd drop Linux in a hot second. (See Sun and ther $2 billion settlement for a milder example)
>how can copyrights and patents survive in a world where software is owned by everyone and by no one?
If there are no copyrights, the GPL goes away and everything becomes effetively public domain. Mind you, no copyrights is RMS's ultimate goal (as far as I understand it), but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.
Slashdot Mirror
>I'll take a shot at that. How about "the best package management system is the one that is the most versatile and easy to use, and least likely to cause dependency hell?"
:)
Oh, like *that* helps. I'm sure Microsoft's mission is to "deliver good software" and look where we are.
It's darned hard to get a committee of developers to agree when everybody's got an opinion on what's best. I hope that a good unified package mangement system emerges from the efforts but I'm not exactly confident.
>By the way, don't call me zealot-boy! My opinions are temperate, considered, and intellectual! : P
I'll take your word for it...
>Why? If Microsoft would let us fix Windows, that would be fine. But since they don't, and are generally evil, they "[suck] and we hate them." I don't see any logical inconsistency there; do you?
Cool down, zealot-boy; the comment was not in defense of Windows. My comment was directed your advocating the removal of choice when your sig is, in part, a condemnation of the evil of taking away choice, leaving something viewed as sub-optimal by all.
Or to simplify, don't ask to everyone to unify behind one way; at the end of that path lies Microsoft.
>Also, although I didn't say it I meant that we should pick the best one to start with...<advocacy deleted>.
I challenge you to create a definition that all of the developers the developers and systems administrators will agree is the "best".
A good quote to break out when people claim that cluster supercomputers are "better" than vector supercomputers (when they're really two different types of systems with differing strengths that can't be directly compared):
>McCalpin: The majority of high-end systems are used for throughput workloads of one kind or another. The vector machines, both from NEC and Cray(TM), are very well-liked by the end users because vectorization is a relatively easy thing to understand, how to write code that will vectorize. And the machines -- with relatively little effort -- give you a good utilization, you'll get a good fraction of the peak theoretical performance without a whole lot of work. And customers find that comforting. You put the code on there, you get 35% of the theoretical peak performance and you say, "Well, that's pretty good and I don't need to mess with it anymore."
On the machines that IBM sells and that HP sells and AMD(TM) and all of the others, the costs are much lower, but it's harder to get very high utilization on those machines, in part because they don't have so much expensive memory bandwidth. So there's an interesting discrepancy between the end users who love vector machines because they're easy to use and then the purchasing manager who doesn't like vector machines because they cost too much.
>It seems to me that the way to fix this thing is to just pick one and then fix whatever shortcomings it has, instead of combining all the shortcomings of everything (except Portage, apparently).
.sig.
I find this comment really amusing, in light of your
>Y'all want grits, right?
Can I get a side order of of Natalie Portman to go with that?
>...and rent Office Space.
Everybody's seen Office Space already. Anyone who like it should run out immediately and find a copy of Bruce Bethke's novel, "Headcrash". Think of it as a cyberpunk-ish version of Office Space, only funnier.
The guy technically could be charged with several million counts of attempted fraud, which is a criminal offense. That would be enough to justifiably put him away for millenia.
I have to give Sanrio kudos for what might be the cutest terms-of-service agreement. Almost makes all that lawyerese seem non-threatening.
>While I sympathize with the cries of "Off with their heads", I don't think jail time is really appropriate in this case. I think we need to save our prisons for people who have done something Really Bad, not something Really Annoying.
Just "annoying"? Attempted fraud is a criminal offense. What do you think the punishment for tens of millions of counts of attempted fraud should be?
>I hate spam as much as the next guy but 9 years is a bit excessive IMO.
Let's give them an absolutely fair punishment: they should spend as much time in prison as the people that received their spam collectively spent time dealing with it. That would be, oh, 5-6 consecutive life sentences at least, I would think.
In my opinion, they got off lightly.
>Actually, Cthulu Kart Racing sounds like fun..
Well, somebody's got the right character designs right here.
>The title is a little interesting to me. The Return of the SUN Workstation. Does this mean to say that the current versions of UltraSPARC and Sun Blade systems shouldn't be considered workstations?
No, I think that it alludes to Sun's origins as a manufacturer of cheap UNIX workstations/servers based on the commodity processors of that era (Motorola 680x0).
There's another reason: I use Paypal where e-tailers provide the option because I have no idea how good their privacy policy and data security is. While it's arguable that PayPal may be no better in those regards, I'd rather have my credit card data in less places than more.
>Is he running for office?
He does have a job, you know. He probably doesn't want to piss off his employer.
>My case, a lowly Sysadmin, just sheltering and feeding my family doesn't leave me with any means what-so-ever of avoiding paying any tax at all on my paltry salary.
A business is a structured organization of people with expertise in the functions of said business that make it function as part of the economy more effectively than the sum of the people that make it up if they worked as individuals. Up to a certain point (e.g: a large corporation we all know and hate), larger businesses are even more efficient because they have better economies of scale, like Dell and Wal-mart.
Let's put it this way: what makes *you* as an individual such a godsend to the economy that you deserve the same sort of tax breaks as the business that employs you?
>Think of programming as necessary infrastructure for a business, not as its core business. Businesses have a lot of costs that aren't related to the core business.
One thing I've wondered about this: It requires a fair amount of expertise to find and hire a competent software development programmer or consultancy, which is unlikely to be present in a small/medium business whose core business is not software. Will they really be better off hiring programmers to customize OSS rather than integrating off the shelf packages?
>But all of them? Even the ones of failing companies?
They get hired based on their percieved value to the company and get axed if they don't perform, same as anyone else. They get a golden parachute to ensure no public squabbling which would hurt public opinon/confidence in the company.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Tying pay to revenue/profit would be an incentive for short term thinking, as well as an impediment for finding someone to turn around an ailing business. Tying pay to the pay that the lowest paid worker gets is just an incentive to leave for greener pa$ture$ at the first opportunity.
>Years back, I heard Eisner's "total annual compensation" placed in the $100,000,000 range. If we guess that the guy serving the mouse-eared ice cream bars made $50,000 per year, that's not 40X, that 2000X. Further, I suspect the $50k estimate is generous.
Here is a rather informative discussion on Eisner's compensation history. Note that it points out that a lot of what he got is based on his gamble of taking stock options as a large part of his compensation, i.e. he got money based on his performance. As it should be.
As things started to go downhill, he got only direct pay plus a bonus based on meeting specific goals. (Here is a chart showing annual compensation after 1996 when things started to go downhill. (Note that the shown hypothetical stock option values are based on an accounting computation designed to estimate future value. As the Forbes article here points out, their actual value at the moment is zero.)
Now that things are really hitting the fan at Disney, people are trying to axe him. Also as it should be.
What's the problem?
>I still maintain that for most CEOs, outside of a few shining stars, they're in an overpay-ourselves club.
There's no doubt that there are outrageous compensation packages, but perhaps the people who hire CEOs are not as stupid as we think.
That it is worth THAT MUCH more (your example is 40X, I'm not going to quibble about numbers) indicates to me that the CEO is grabbing money.
One word: Steve Jobs. Whether you like Apple products or not, I think it's pretty much undeniable that if he wasn't at the helm, some other company would be picking over the remnants of Apple at this very moment instead of Apple currently employing however many thousands they have.
Damn straight the efforts of one person can be 40x or more than the efforts of another.
>A moment's pity, therefore. They may be rich. That does not make them either smart, or right.
I can't help but to laugh at this example of uninformed zealotry. Even if I weren't dubious about MS meriting any pity, this is rather like a 8 year old child patting itself on the back for outrunning a geriatric in a wheelchair.
OSS fits somewhere into MS's problems, but is hardly the dominant factor. Aside from OSS, their primary problems right now stem from the the worldwide wave of anti-monopoly lawsuits, being crushed between the need to maintain compatibility with their insecure legacy interfaces and the need to leave them behind to catch up on security, their poor public image caused by bugs on one front and the failed Sofware Assurance licensing program on the other, and last but hardly least, lack of new markets/product offering categories to expand into.
Come back and proclaim victory when MS is bankrupt and combined revenues for Linux and OSS support/products (i.e. IBM's non-Linux/OSS divisions don't count) approach that of the proprietary software world. The former may be inevitable, but, unless the OSS world changes radically, I'd give long odds against the latter occurring anytime soon.
I retract the last line of the above post as being excessively rude. I don't think much of your argument, nor of the person who modded it insightful, but that's not a reason to step over the line between sarcasm and rudness.
>Lines like that annoy me. Even though it does me no physical or financial harm, I'd still like you to never post tripe like that again.
>Please explain how then continuing against my wishes is not immoral.
Ah, but here the you has the choice of not being annoyed by not reading my post, whereas the person being copied from has no choice whatsoever in the matter.
Sorry, you lose. Next!
>I'd guess your arguement as to why copyright infrindgement is immoral really should be longer than a single sentence to be compelling.
I love taking this one on: Let's suppose that some guy recorded a song and politely requested that no one make a digital copy of this song without paying him a dollar. Let's further suppose that making such a digital copy against his wishes causes no physical or financial harm to him whatsoever; it just annoys him. Please explain how then making a copy against his wishes is still not immoral.
Can you come up with a justification that won't be laughed at by all of Slashdot?
>IBM is out to undermine Microsoft to the point where it "appears" almost personal [from a corporate entity as a person perspective] This is only my opinion with no real facts other than my own observations - so I will concede this point to you though I feel differently than you do.
>This still does not change the fact that IBM is more trustworthy as a company [paradox?] than Microsoft is in relation to this thread and article subject. IBM used to be the 800 lb gorilla. It learned from its mistakes.
I think you are ascribing too much personality to IBM and Microsoft. They are not some sort of monolithic hive-minds battling it out for the sake of their respective "ideologies", nor are their employess monomaniacal cyborgs hell-bent on destroying each other while chanting "Open source will be assimilated!/Proprietary software! Exterminate!". (Though the latter would be vastly entertaining if it were.)
Speaking from my experience as a peon in another large corporation, senior executives are ultimately accountable to the bottom line for their division; they are forever explaining what strategic moves they will make to either become profitable or stay that way. There's not a lot of room for "making it personal" there, especially when dealing with a corporation as gigantic as IBM or Microsoft. Making it personal is likely to either disrupt your own efforts to be profitable (I point again to Scott McNealy, although the evidence is not as clear cut in this case.) or hinder future profitable relationships (e.g. when you need X zillion Windows licenses for your new Thinkpads/xSeries or when you need Y zillion PowerPC CPUs for Xbox 2).
Similarly, people who hold fast to inflexible ideologies are likely to fail to adapt well to changing business situations. I have little doubt that IBM executives have no immediate intention of open sourcing their crown jewels (e.g. DB2) and that Microsoft executives are contemplating any possibility of gaining a strategic advantage by tapping into OSS for their given products/areas.
>Regardless mindshare goes a lot further than it is given credit for. Hence the reason Microsoft still does not seem to "get it." Hence the reason Microsoft still does not seem to "get it." I have noticed Window developers even making comments along the lines of "...but everybody anymore wants cross-platform solutions." My experience may be unique in this regard but I can distinctly remember a time where not only was it not done but it was never considered. Developer mindshare in this regard will kill Microsofts stranglehold on technology [at least in the software sector].
I have to confess that this paragraph didn't make much sense to me. Can you clarify?
>The difference however is IBM, evil turned good, contributes, supports, and plays well with the open source community.
I am constantly amazed to hear that people actually believe this. IBM is in this solely for IBM's benefit; if they saw more financial advantage in sucking up to MS, they'd drop Linux in a hot second. (See Sun and ther $2 billion settlement for a milder example)
>how can copyrights and patents survive in a world where software is owned by everyone and by no one?
If there are no copyrights, the GPL goes away and everything becomes effetively public domain. Mind you, no copyrights is RMS's ultimate goal (as far as I understand it), but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.