However, the "Java is slow" assumption made by many people is quite exaggerated, mainly because most people don't understand how Java works. People like the original poster think "bytecode = interpreted = slow". I guess the concept of translating bytecode to native code just never occured to them. As I am currently developing a language which will, among other things, use bytecode, I'd like for this myth to die sometime soon.:)
Perhaps the bytecode issue isn't the cause of the "Java is slow" myth. Perhaps instead it has something to do with "I click on a Java application and oh my God it takes ages to start". Sure, I exagerate, but by the basics of it it's still true today, even if only in the form of a small delay. It's probably not even Java's fault, but of the virtual machine. When you run Java as a server application it will be fast, but the desktop user still notices the delay. Hence the myth lives.
Re:is this just an excuse to write sloppy code
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Besides the dangers of bad code in general, PHP is particularly dangerous, with it's very flexible and network enabled features. It only gets worse because it is (apparently) so easy to learn and use and it makes everybody feel like a God of website making in no time flat. [Insert boss saying "hey, secretaries could write PHP without a problem" here].
The solution would be a very restrictive safe mode, which would freaking MAKE people watch what code they're writing and give up incredibly stupid and at the same time tricky stuff like using variables with globals enabled without any kind of previous cleaning or filtering. And the second half of the solution would be to throw out on their ass all the self-proclaimed PHP programmers who pull stupid stuff like this.
The first part won't happen because hosting services can't afford to break all the sites using globals and so on. The second half may happen, I dunno.
Meanwhile, hardened PHP won't mean much, I'm afraid. If a guy doesn't know enough to use an automated filtering class on his $_GET[] he won't know he needs Hardened PHP either, because he lacks severely where PHP security is concerned. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, right?
Actually, with the success of the RIAA and MPAA getting the DMCA passed, I would not be surprised if they started lobbying to require P2P networks to identify users in order to make tracking down pirates feasible.
Who's a "P2P network"? With a decentralized, anonymous network, who do you hold responsible? The makers of the client software? Probably, like they did in Japan. How about every person caught with a copy of that piece of software on their computer gets the shaft?
I'd say it's crazy. Dude, come on, C++ OO programming at 7? That's a little hard to believe unless you're a genius. At 7 you don't have the concepts needed to do advanced programming. Heck, most kids only learn to read at 6 or 7, and this is the bright kids. You can't say he's been alive for 7 years now, and C++ can be mastered in 2 years, so he should be a guru by now. It just doesn't work that way, you need to accumulate knowledge and develop the mind in a certain way.
Logo at 6 or 7 I can believe. Basic between 8 and 10, likewise. C++ and OO from 12 up, fine. But C++ and OO at 7, I don't believe.
I'm not saying that kids aren't bright enough. Yeah, a kid of 5 can be pretty damn bright, and they have logic. But they don't have the analitical thinking and the power of abstraction. You have to train for that and you will achieve along with other various concepts about computing and math and logic and a lot more. You can't just pound abstract thinking into a 7yr old, that's why Logo teaching uses the little leaping frog stories. Also, they can't teach themselves, like another commenter said, they have to be taught, they don't have the critical mass of knowledge that will allow a person to evolve by itself in a certain field.
I'm a fairly bright person. I learned Basic at 10, it was taught to me, and let me tell you, in the beginning half the time it was like floating through a haze, doing things intuitively rather than knowingly, with only glimpses of the abstractions behind it all. Took me another 3 or 4 years to finally get the hang of this whole programming thing and to gradually develope appropriate patterns of thought that eventually allowed me to move to C and other languages.
I'm not exactly Einstein, granted. Perhaps a gifted kid, with high IQ and talent for programming (some don't have it, no matter how smart they are), properly instructed in a proper learning curve (Logo, Basic, C) can make faster progress from a younger age. But let's not get crazy.
However they can't force it on you. You are gaurenteed your day in court. So, if you are innocent, you should NOT take the plea. Espically if there is exculpatory evidence. You can have your own experts look at the evidence, and, as noted, get the results from their expert. They aren't allwoed to say "nope, can't see what we are doing". You and your lawyer can, and should, look over their findings if you innocent to tear them apart.
Kind of a naive and idealistic view there, mate. Haven't you seen NYPD Blue?:) Being innocent may well have nothing to do with it. The cops and the prosecutor may decide to threaten with a sentence even if you're innocent, and if you have an iffy case they may well succeed. But that's not the point, the reason here is their attempt to make you give up something of interest. Probably not the case in this story, but the idea is that things are not necessarily black and white.
China may be a superpower, but their foreign policy doesn't exactly match what you describe. Their policy is to surround themselves with "sattelite" states and they will only move when one of those is occupied or in trouble. As for direct confrontations resulting in occupation of China (yes, it happened), they deal with it by absorbing the conquering nation's culture within their own, given enough time.
Besides, piss off Asian states and some of them could remember that they are nuclear powers. I don't think that many people want the cold war era to make a comeback. Which is what would happen if you threaten with the billions of Chinese a country which has only nukes to show for it.
For Eurasia and Oceania, maybe, but I very much doubt we'll live to see a unified Asia. Just because some of the Asian countries aren't at war right now doesn't mean they don't hate each other's guts all the time. Double so for the Middle East.
That was me being cynical. If you want a rational explanation, here it is: the Asian and Middle Eastern nations are too deeply entrenched in their long lasting spiritual traditions to even consider the thing that constitutes the best point of the EU: cross-culturalization.
I'd say the key issue here comes down to percentages. OK, some people use P2P for sharing class materials and some use them for illegal copyrighted material. But when you look and see that the illegal copyright bit makes up for 99% of P2P, then you can imagine what the fuss is about. In light of their previous decision regarding guns (99% used for killing people, so we ban them) this reaction of the Japanese law enforcement regarding P2P is not in the least surprising.
(No, I don't have hard facts and studies to prove the 99% figure. But you can use your common sense just the same.)
You silly rabbit. "Photo editing tool?" Adobe already patented cookies and tabbed windows. No need to imagine the worst, it's already here, breathing heavily around the corner. And just about everything IS patented.
When I tried to install mouse gestures, it gave an error about permissions. I had to chmod a+rw the chrome folder in/usr/lib/mozilla, then change it back after installation.
Talk to the author, or use the mozdev comments to point it out. It's just bad design from his part, most XPI packs offer a choice between installing to the user profile or the global dir. LiveHTTPHeaders does this too.
Read the past materials and news provided by FFII. Some of the politicians (ie. EU Parliament) were clueless this time last year, but the public reactions have forced them to get up to date. As for those EU politicians that have an interest in this whole software patents (ie. the Council of Ministers), trust me, they already know very well what they're doing.
Think it's just a concidence that this vote happens at a time Ireland holds the EU Presidency? As the article on FFII says, Ireland is one of the biggest software exporters in Europe, it's a software haven to US software companies due to a pantent revenue tax of 0%, and its Presidency is sponsored by Microsoft.
At this point no European can invoke cluelessness on this matter unless they've been in a coma for the last year or so. It's come down to a show of force from the part of those with lots of money and influence. This is not about the sheer stupidity of the fact anymore. The big dogs have found a juicy way to rake in the dough and they're gonna make it happen. Short of having much larger numbers than what we've seen in the previous calls for action get out into the street now, they're gonna get their way.
When will they learn: the good games have simple basis/interface and intricate play, not vice-versa.
And yet... look at all the hand-to-hand fight arcade games out there, such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter and God knows what else. All have complicated controls and combos and succesion of moves. And yet they are quite popular. Perhaps it has to do with the player's mindset as well: you don't expect overly complicated controls in a driving game, but you do in a fighting game or a flight sim.
Acrobat Reader : so far, the few PDF I had to read displayed quite nicely in the Gnome PDF viewer (I was using Xpdf before that). The day Adobe make a build of Acrobat Reader with a decent widget set (QT or GTK, I suppose), I may give it a shot. In the meantime, I have very little interest in their butt-ugly reader. Hello ? The 90s called, they want their shitty Motif look back.
OK, now try printing a PDF using gpdf, then sit back and admire the nice Athena widgets on xpdf. And when you're done do a little comparison between what Acrobat Reader offers, both via the interface and the functionality.
Ugly Motif? Perhaps. But Adobe still makes the meanest PDF reader around. No offense, xpdf and gpdf are very nice efforts, but let's not get crazy and say we can drop Acrobat now.
I think Apple could make some serious cash if they created an x86 based OS. Their computer sales would take a hit.
Apple would be squashed the moment they showed their face on the x86 market. OK, maybe not squashed and maybe not right out, but they wouldn't get anywhere big either. Their success is based on their particular approach of providing tightly integrated hardware and software down to the operating system. They can afford to charge extra for that. But the moment they step in the x86 arena their trump card is worth nothing. Apple is a niche feeder, it feels good there and it won't get out in the open because they don't need to. What they do is find and exploit more niches like they did with iPod.
But how much does Outlook cost? How much do the Microsoft versions cost? Aren't those people paying for Outlook already? Doesn't Outlook cost about 90-100 bucks per copy? Isn't a $60 alternative cheaper?
You could have said they are interested in costs associated with migration or conversion, but you didn't, you just insisted on the price per copy.
If people are asking for open-source alternatives to Microsoft products, I hope they do so because of the benefits of open-source, not because they are cheap bastards who try to replace a $100 priced product with a $15 one (or a free one) and get the same functionality, if possible. Jeez, wouldn't that be nice. Of course such a product would fly off the shelves. I wonder why the heck Sun isn't making one and selling it for $15. Perhaps because they can't afford to?
I really wanted to smack you with a Troll flag, but I noticed some people actually find you insightful, which is down right ridiculous. "You have to pay for this, you have to pay for that"-- OF COURSE you have to pay, that's how programmers get to eat.
My brother's company did pretty much the same thing. Actually, I'd like to elaborate, since the person who asked (and others) may want some reasons to go with the move, and I got all the details.
So first here's the WHO: they are a small web development company. They have several development servers and a couple of deployment servers. They were running Red Hat, all the same version (the kernel configuration and the actual packages installed differred from the production to the work machines). They were using pretty much everything from RPM's, except for some central webdev things (Apache, PHP, Postgres) which they compiled from source because they needed special settings for them. They host they own servers and bandwidth is not a problem.
Now the HOW: They started with one of the development machines, by making a new root partition in the unused space. They chrooted in it and unpacked the base stable Debian tarball, then set up the apt sources to some nearby mirrors and fired up an upgrade to testing (it was a chroot, so networking was already up) as well as apt-get'ting whatever packages were needed to replicate the original environment.
Next they recompiled the kernel and those special apps I mentioned before, and copied over the work resources (projects and stuff). After a Grub setup and a reboot, it worked fine (just a few details to iron out). The whole thing took about an hour and a half (skilled guy doing it, I guess).
Next came about a week of testing. When everything turned out fine, they made a backup of the entire testing machine and then moved the Debian partition to the start of the disk and reorganized it with whatever other partitions were needed (/var,/tmp, swap).
Made an image of the disk, ghosted it to the other machines, restored work environments from backup, and they were done. Actually, the production machines were a bit tricky, but only because they had to make each of them serve everything while the other one was being changed. Plus they had to cross-compile the kernel and the webdev packages for them on the work machines, but they did that all the time already.
And now here's the WHY: why Debian? Because they were looking for: the lowest cost (cheap bastards); no support needed (they relied on their own syadmin -- yeah, one guy); painless package updates, from a variety of nearby mirrors; a distro similar enough to Red Hat so as not to need too much adjusting for the people; another end of life as far away into the future as possible (didn't fancy doing this again in 12 months). They felt that Debian and Slackware would fit the bill, because they were the oldest and most reliable Linux distro's around. (Eventually Slack got booted--you can guess why.)
Finally, a brief overview of why they rejected other choices: Red Hat = too pricey, life-time too short, plus it would imply a reinstall anyway; Gentoo = they felt that compilation and servers don't go very well together, plus Gentoo is too young; SuSE = it came very close, but the beancounters pushed for as little spending as possible; Mandrake = they felt none too sure that it won't dissapear suddenly someday, given it's history of financial problems; any BSD = too much a step from Red Hat. (Fedora wasn't yet a serious option at the time.)
Some of you are probably gonna say they're cheap bastards who wouldn't give back to open-source by at least investing in some support. What can I say, except "small company, gotta cut the expenses to stay ahead these days". The whole switch took a little over one week and cost them just a bonus for the sysadmin.
I assume that you also got mad at any super-feats in an actually comic book, too. Because film is only one more way to present the same data.
Fantasy and superheroes is not the best place to use if you want to teach physics, IMHO. And I was mad at SciFi and realistic action movies -- if those fail to present accurate physics what are we to do, go watch documentaries?
Considering how much of the web runs on PHP, I am surprized at the lack of interest in this new release. PHP 5 when combined with MySQL 4 is going to do some amazing things. Wake up you people!
Not quite. Most of the PHP Web out there is not using the bleeding edge features, or even the recent ones. Hosting services will wait for a while before installing 5, and so on.
I would refuse to attend a physics class that used freaking X-Men to teach me physics.
Here here. I mean, come on, physics in the movies? Please. When's the last time you saw a movie where an explosion in space does not make any noise? Any intelligent person with even basic physics knowledge has to make a conscious effort to ignore the blunders when watching a movie. And I mean ANY movie that involves a bit of action. Otherwise he gets caught in questions like "why the hell are they walking on Mars just like they do on Earth" and the whole movie watching experience goes down the drain. By assuming you will take this kind of crap, the movie makers are basically insulting your intelligence. Then again, perhaps I'm deluding myself into thinking that more than half a percent of the spectators are noticing.
I used to think the those people making those silly 60's movies about "the giant woman from outer space" were just naive. But now that I've given it some thought, I think those bastards were doing it on purpose too. Better it looks good than respect those silly laws of physics.
The sounds of slapping, spinning pottery wheels, and kiln fires roaring will never hit the Top 40 list.
Ah, but there may have been more to that. Apparently sometimes they sang and danced and told jokes while making those pots. Hearing ancient Greek spoken live by the ancient Greeks may be worth it.
Paper can last for thousands of years... this could be a good solution for long-term storage... right?
No no. Hasn't archeology thaught you anything? The things that survive best are pottery and slabs of rock. So let's get some paint or a hammer and pick and let's start recording!
I'm kidding, but I actually heard once about some crazy scientists trying to retrieve ancient sounds from pottery. Apparently the theory stated that during the molding, the tools may have impregnated the clay with the sounds in the immediate vicinity. And after seeing the recent/. story about trying to revive old records, it doesn't seem THAT crazy anymore.
Grip pretty much sucks in terms of speed. I dunno why since it's just a GUI wrapper over standard CLI tools, but it does.
Try something better. The combination of cdparanoia and lame is the classic. From cdparanoia you get good speed, error correction, digital ripping, and from lame you get quality encoding.
If you want a graphical ripper, I've discovered a little gem called oggre (not to be mistaken for the other OGGre which is an OGG reader written in Java.
The oggre I'm talking about is an XMMS output plugin which writes OGG to files:
Set your CD Audio input plugin to digital mode (analog won't work with oggre).
Load the playlist with tracks from the CD.
Select all tracks and use "get advanced info" (or whatever it's called) to load info from CDDB.
Set oggre as the output plugin, with quality 4.99 (recommended best quality/size ratio, read the oggre README to see why).
Make sure the play mode is not random or loop.
Press play, sit back and watch ripping work at a very nice speed.
About the only thing wrong with oggre is the fact that it uses a fixed output dir, so if you want dirs named after the CD you have to make them by hand. The files, however, do use song attributes in their names.
Oh, and the guy who wrote oggre also wrote out_lame, but that one has fewer features. I don't mind choosing OGG over MP3 so I don't care.
There's already ccache which does a great job of speeding up second time compilations. Yeah I know there are all kinds of differences between this and precompiled headers, I was just pointing out another build speedup method.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but OEone is nothing more than another window manager combined with a standard set of tools. What does it do to ease third party software installation?
Nothing, it was an example for a well done interface. Just so people won't say there isn't any.
At the very least, I want to be able to double click on an installer and have all dependencies automagically taken care of. I don't want any RPM conflicts, and I don't want to have to track down packages myself. Even better would be like OS X. Download a DMG, it automounts, then you drag the application to whatever "Applications" folder you want to use. THAT is what I want.
Zero Install is a step in that direction. At the very least it's distribution agnostic. But for some reason there's a huge number of about 20 apps which provide ZI packages.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the "Java is slow" assumption made by many people is quite exaggerated, mainly because most people don't understand how Java works. People like the original poster think "bytecode = interpreted = slow". I guess the concept of translating bytecode to native code just never occured to them. As I am currently developing a language which will, among other things, use bytecode, I'd like for this myth to die sometime soon. :)
Perhaps the bytecode issue isn't the cause of the "Java is slow" myth. Perhaps instead it has something to do with "I click on a Java application and oh my God it takes ages to start". Sure, I exagerate, but by the basics of it it's still true today, even if only in the form of a small delay. It's probably not even Java's fault, but of the virtual machine. When you run Java as a server application it will be fast, but the desktop user still notices the delay. Hence the myth lives.
Besides the dangers of bad code in general, PHP is particularly dangerous, with it's very flexible and network enabled features. It only gets worse because it is (apparently) so easy to learn and use and it makes everybody feel like a God of website making in no time flat. [Insert boss saying "hey, secretaries could write PHP without a problem" here].
The solution would be a very restrictive safe mode, which would freaking MAKE people watch what code they're writing and give up incredibly stupid and at the same time tricky stuff like using variables with globals enabled without any kind of previous cleaning or filtering. And the second half of the solution would be to throw out on their ass all the self-proclaimed PHP programmers who pull stupid stuff like this.
The first part won't happen because hosting services can't afford to break all the sites using globals and so on. The second half may happen, I dunno.
Meanwhile, hardened PHP won't mean much, I'm afraid. If a guy doesn't know enough to use an automated filtering class on his $_GET[] he won't know he needs Hardened PHP either, because he lacks severely where PHP security is concerned. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, right?
Actually, with the success of the RIAA and MPAA getting the DMCA passed, I would not be surprised if they started lobbying to require P2P networks to identify users in order to make tracking down pirates feasible.
Who's a "P2P network"? With a decentralized, anonymous network, who do you hold responsible? The makers of the client software? Probably, like they did in Japan. How about every person caught with a copy of that piece of software on their computer gets the shaft?
I'd say it's crazy. Dude, come on, C++ OO programming at 7? That's a little hard to believe unless you're a genius. At 7 you don't have the concepts needed to do advanced programming. Heck, most kids only learn to read at 6 or 7, and this is the bright kids. You can't say he's been alive for 7 years now, and C++ can be mastered in 2 years, so he should be a guru by now. It just doesn't work that way, you need to accumulate knowledge and develop the mind in a certain way.
Logo at 6 or 7 I can believe. Basic between 8 and 10, likewise. C++ and OO from 12 up, fine. But C++ and OO at 7, I don't believe.
I'm not saying that kids aren't bright enough. Yeah, a kid of 5 can be pretty damn bright, and they have logic. But they don't have the analitical thinking and the power of abstraction. You have to train for that and you will achieve along with other various concepts about computing and math and logic and a lot more. You can't just pound abstract thinking into a 7yr old, that's why Logo teaching uses the little leaping frog stories. Also, they can't teach themselves, like another commenter said, they have to be taught, they don't have the critical mass of knowledge that will allow a person to evolve by itself in a certain field.
I'm a fairly bright person. I learned Basic at 10, it was taught to me, and let me tell you, in the beginning half the time it was like floating through a haze, doing things intuitively rather than knowingly, with only glimpses of the abstractions behind it all. Took me another 3 or 4 years to finally get the hang of this whole programming thing and to gradually develope appropriate patterns of thought that eventually allowed me to move to C and other languages.
I'm not exactly Einstein, granted. Perhaps a gifted kid, with high IQ and talent for programming (some don't have it, no matter how smart they are), properly instructed in a proper learning curve (Logo, Basic, C) can make faster progress from a younger age. But let's not get crazy.
However they can't force it on you. You are gaurenteed your day in court. So, if you are innocent, you should NOT take the plea. Espically if there is exculpatory evidence. You can have your own experts look at the evidence, and, as noted, get the results from their expert. They aren't allwoed to say "nope, can't see what we are doing". You and your lawyer can, and should, look over their findings if you innocent to tear them apart.
Kind of a naive and idealistic view there, mate. Haven't you seen NYPD Blue? :) Being innocent may well have nothing to do with it. The cops and the prosecutor may decide to threaten with a sentence even if you're innocent, and if you have an iffy case they may well succeed. But that's not the point, the reason here is their attempt to make you give up something of interest. Probably not the case in this story, but the idea is that things are not necessarily black and white.
China may be a superpower, but their foreign policy doesn't exactly match what you describe. Their policy is to surround themselves with "sattelite" states and they will only move when one of those is occupied or in trouble. As for direct confrontations resulting in occupation of China (yes, it happened), they deal with it by absorbing the conquering nation's culture within their own, given enough time.
Besides, piss off Asian states and some of them could remember that they are nuclear powers. I don't think that many people want the cold war era to make a comeback. Which is what would happen if you threaten with the billions of Chinese a country which has only nukes to show for it.
For Eurasia and Oceania, maybe, but I very much doubt we'll live to see a unified Asia. Just because some of the Asian countries aren't at war right now doesn't mean they don't hate each other's guts all the time. Double so for the Middle East.
That was me being cynical. If you want a rational explanation, here it is: the Asian and Middle Eastern nations are too deeply entrenched in their long lasting spiritual traditions to even consider the thing that constitutes the best point of the EU: cross-culturalization.
I'd say the key issue here comes down to percentages. OK, some people use P2P for sharing class materials and some use them for illegal copyrighted material. But when you look and see that the illegal copyright bit makes up for 99% of P2P, then you can imagine what the fuss is about. In light of their previous decision regarding guns (99% used for killing people, so we ban them) this reaction of the Japanese law enforcement regarding P2P is not in the least surprising.
(No, I don't have hard facts and studies to prove the 99% figure. But you can use your common sense just the same.)
I would guess the easiest way is to just let Google staff or whatever methods it employs to take care of this.
Or if Adobe patents the photo editing tool.
You silly rabbit. "Photo editing tool?" Adobe already patented cookies and tabbed windows. No need to imagine the worst, it's already here, breathing heavily around the corner. And just about everything IS patented.
When I tried to install mouse gestures, it gave an error about permissions. I had to chmod a+rw the chrome folder in /usr/lib/mozilla, then change it back after installation.
Talk to the author, or use the mozdev comments to point it out. It's just bad design from his part, most XPI packs offer a choice between installing to the user profile or the global dir. LiveHTTPHeaders does this too.
Read the past materials and news provided by FFII. Some of the politicians (ie. EU Parliament) were clueless this time last year, but the public reactions have forced them to get up to date. As for those EU politicians that have an interest in this whole software patents (ie. the Council of Ministers), trust me, they already know very well what they're doing.
Think it's just a concidence that this vote happens at a time Ireland holds the EU Presidency? As the article on FFII says, Ireland is one of the biggest software exporters in Europe, it's a software haven to US software companies due to a pantent revenue tax of 0%, and its Presidency is sponsored by Microsoft.
At this point no European can invoke cluelessness on this matter unless they've been in a coma for the last year or so. It's come down to a show of force from the part of those with lots of money and influence. This is not about the sheer stupidity of the fact anymore. The big dogs have found a juicy way to rake in the dough and they're gonna make it happen. Short of having much larger numbers than what we've seen in the previous calls for action get out into the street now, they're gonna get their way.
When will they learn: the good games have simple basis/interface and intricate play, not vice-versa.
And yet... look at all the hand-to-hand fight arcade games out there, such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter and God knows what else. All have complicated controls and combos and succesion of moves. And yet they are quite popular. Perhaps it has to do with the player's mindset as well: you don't expect overly complicated controls in a driving game, but you do in a fighting game or a flight sim.
Acrobat Reader : so far, the few PDF I had to read displayed quite nicely in the Gnome PDF viewer (I was using Xpdf before that). The day Adobe make a build of Acrobat Reader with a decent widget set (QT or GTK, I suppose), I may give it a shot. In the meantime, I have very little interest in their butt-ugly reader. Hello ? The 90s called, they want their shitty Motif look back.
OK, now try printing a PDF using gpdf, then sit back and admire the nice Athena widgets on xpdf. And when you're done do a little comparison between what Acrobat Reader offers, both via the interface and the functionality.
Ugly Motif? Perhaps. But Adobe still makes the meanest PDF reader around. No offense, xpdf and gpdf are very nice efforts, but let's not get crazy and say we can drop Acrobat now.
I think Apple could make some serious cash if they created an x86 based OS. Their computer sales would take a hit.
Apple would be squashed the moment they showed their face on the x86 market. OK, maybe not squashed and maybe not right out, but they wouldn't get anywhere big either. Their success is based on their particular approach of providing tightly integrated hardware and software down to the operating system. They can afford to charge extra for that. But the moment they step in the x86 arena their trump card is worth nothing. Apple is a niche feeder, it feels good there and it won't get out in the open because they don't need to. What they do is find and exploit more niches like they did with iPod.
But how much does Outlook cost? How much do the Microsoft versions cost? Aren't those people paying for Outlook already? Doesn't Outlook cost about 90-100 bucks per copy? Isn't a $60 alternative cheaper?
You could have said they are interested in costs associated with migration or conversion, but you didn't, you just insisted on the price per copy.
If people are asking for open-source alternatives to Microsoft products, I hope they do so because of the benefits of open-source, not because they are cheap bastards who try to replace a $100 priced product with a $15 one (or a free one) and get the same functionality, if possible. Jeez, wouldn't that be nice. Of course such a product would fly off the shelves. I wonder why the heck Sun isn't making one and selling it for $15. Perhaps because they can't afford to?
I really wanted to smack you with a Troll flag, but I noticed some people actually find you insightful, which is down right ridiculous. "You have to pay for this, you have to pay for that"-- OF COURSE you have to pay, that's how programmers get to eat.
My brother's company did pretty much the same thing. Actually, I'd like to elaborate, since the person who asked (and others) may want some reasons to go with the move, and I got all the details.
So first here's the WHO: they are a small web development company. They have several development servers and a couple of deployment servers. They were running Red Hat, all the same version (the kernel configuration and the actual packages installed differred from the production to the work machines). They were using pretty much everything from RPM's, except for some central webdev things (Apache, PHP, Postgres) which they compiled from source because they needed special settings for them. They host they own servers and bandwidth is not a problem.
Now the HOW: They started with one of the development machines, by making a new root partition in the unused space. They chrooted in it and unpacked the base stable Debian tarball, then set up the apt sources to some nearby mirrors and fired up an upgrade to testing (it was a chroot, so networking was already up) as well as apt-get'ting whatever packages were needed to replicate the original environment.
Next they recompiled the kernel and those special apps I mentioned before, and copied over the work resources (projects and stuff). After a Grub setup and a reboot, it worked fine (just a few details to iron out). The whole thing took about an hour and a half (skilled guy doing it, I guess).
Next came about a week of testing. When everything turned out fine, they made a backup of the entire testing machine and then moved the Debian partition to the start of the disk and reorganized it with whatever other partitions were needed (/var, /tmp, swap).
Made an image of the disk, ghosted it to the other machines, restored work environments from backup, and they were done. Actually, the production machines were a bit tricky, but only because they had to make each of them serve everything while the other one was being changed. Plus they had to cross-compile the kernel and the webdev packages for them on the work machines, but they did that all the time already.
And now here's the WHY: why Debian? Because they were looking for: the lowest cost (cheap bastards); no support needed (they relied on their own syadmin -- yeah, one guy); painless package updates, from a variety of nearby mirrors; a distro similar enough to Red Hat so as not to need too much adjusting for the people; another end of life as far away into the future as possible (didn't fancy doing this again in 12 months). They felt that Debian and Slackware would fit the bill, because they were the oldest and most reliable Linux distro's around. (Eventually Slack got booted--you can guess why.)
Finally, a brief overview of why they rejected other choices: Red Hat = too pricey, life-time too short, plus it would imply a reinstall anyway; Gentoo = they felt that compilation and servers don't go very well together, plus Gentoo is too young; SuSE = it came very close, but the beancounters pushed for as little spending as possible; Mandrake = they felt none too sure that it won't dissapear suddenly someday, given it's history of financial problems; any BSD = too much a step from Red Hat. (Fedora wasn't yet a serious option at the time.)
Some of you are probably gonna say they're cheap bastards who wouldn't give back to open-source by at least investing in some support. What can I say, except "small company, gotta cut the expenses to stay ahead these days". The whole switch took a little over one week and cost them just a bonus for the sysadmin.
I assume that you also got mad at any super-feats in an actually comic book, too. Because film is only one more way to present the same data.
Fantasy and superheroes is not the best place to use if you want to teach physics, IMHO. And I was mad at SciFi and realistic action movies -- if those fail to present accurate physics what are we to do, go watch documentaries?
Considering how much of the web runs on PHP, I am surprized at the lack of interest in this new release. PHP 5 when combined with MySQL 4 is going to do some amazing things. Wake up you people!
Not quite. Most of the PHP Web out there is not using the bleeding edge features, or even the recent ones. Hosting services will wait for a while before installing 5, and so on.
I would refuse to attend a physics class that used freaking X-Men to teach me physics.
Here here. I mean, come on, physics in the movies? Please. When's the last time you saw a movie where an explosion in space does not make any noise? Any intelligent person with even basic physics knowledge has to make a conscious effort to ignore the blunders when watching a movie. And I mean ANY movie that involves a bit of action. Otherwise he gets caught in questions like "why the hell are they walking on Mars just like they do on Earth" and the whole movie watching experience goes down the drain. By assuming you will take this kind of crap, the movie makers are basically insulting your intelligence. Then again, perhaps I'm deluding myself into thinking that more than half a percent of the spectators are noticing.
I used to think the those people making those silly 60's movies about "the giant woman from outer space" were just naive. But now that I've given it some thought, I think those bastards were doing it on purpose too. Better it looks good than respect those silly laws of physics.
The sounds of slapping, spinning pottery wheels, and kiln fires roaring will never hit the Top 40 list.
Ah, but there may have been more to that. Apparently sometimes they sang and danced and told jokes while making those pots. Hearing ancient Greek spoken live by the ancient Greeks may be worth it.
Paper can last for thousands of years... this could be a good solution for long-term storage... right?
No no. Hasn't archeology thaught you anything? The things that survive best are pottery and slabs of rock. So let's get some paint or a hammer and pick and let's start recording!
I'm kidding, but I actually heard once about some crazy scientists trying to retrieve ancient sounds from pottery. Apparently the theory stated that during the molding, the tools may have impregnated the clay with the sounds in the immediate vicinity. And after seeing the recent /. story about trying to revive old records, it doesn't seem THAT crazy anymore.
Grip pretty much sucks in terms of speed. I dunno why since it's just a GUI wrapper over standard CLI tools, but it does.
Try something better. The combination of cdparanoia and lame is the classic. From cdparanoia you get good speed, error correction, digital ripping, and from lame you get quality encoding.
If you want a graphical ripper, I've discovered a little gem called oggre (not to be mistaken for the other OGGre which is an OGG reader written in Java.
The oggre I'm talking about is an XMMS output plugin which writes OGG to files:
About the only thing wrong with oggre is the fact that it uses a fixed output dir, so if you want dirs named after the CD you have to make them by hand. The files, however, do use song attributes in their names.
Oh, and the guy who wrote oggre also wrote out_lame, but that one has fewer features. I don't mind choosing OGG over MP3 so I don't care.
There's already ccache which does a great job of speeding up second time compilations. Yeah I know there are all kinds of differences between this and precompiled headers, I was just pointing out another build speedup method.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but OEone is nothing more than another window manager combined with a standard set of tools. What does it do to ease third party software installation?
Nothing, it was an example for a well done interface. Just so people won't say there isn't any.
At the very least, I want to be able to double click on an installer and have all dependencies automagically taken care of. I don't want any RPM conflicts, and I don't want to have to track down packages myself. Even better would be like OS X. Download a DMG, it automounts, then you drag the application to whatever "Applications" folder you want to use. THAT is what I want.
Zero Install is a step in that direction. At the very least it's distribution agnostic. But for some reason there's a huge number of about 20 apps which provide ZI packages.