Yes, that's my standard too; but these days people don't want software right. They want it now. More and more I find myself lowering my standards in order to meet deadlines. Since I can't get away from that, it would be nice to have some indication of what can be expected from the software. "Okay, you got it now, but you also got this and this bugs..." At least I'd feel more honest.
First, my point was that I saw Kylix running on a machine I happen to know as opposed to a machine "built to order" by Borland/Inprise. My point was not that Kylix on Linux is 10 times faster than Delphi on Windows.
That said, let me comment on your posting. Since you established some credentials, let me do the same. I'm not a Delphi expert, even less a Windows expert. However, I've been working as a system administrator for 10 years and I've worked with computers at one capacity or another for over 20 years. It's from the point of view of a sys admin that I write this.
Boy does that sound like a load of bullshit, and I'm saying that as a professional Delphi 3/4/5 developer. Are you comparing this with Delphi 5? On a P-II 450 Delphi 5 (or 4 or 3) compiles all but EXTREMELY large projects in a virtual instant, so how exactly are you timing this FUD 10 times faster claim? The reality is that the demo was likely extremely simple and compiled close to instantly on both machines.
Actually I don't know which version of Delphi they used on their machine. Very unscientifically, I didn't time it. The app was a simple text editor much like MS's Notepad. It took a few minutes to compile on Windows and a few seconds to compile on Kylix. The reality was just like I described it.
Linux doesn't make the processor run any faster, and in Windows 2000 or NT 4 the processor sits at 0% when I'm not doing anything, leaving 100% for Delphi to do its thing in, so any difference between the OS' will purely be the result of the coding abilities of Borland/Inprise.
This is interesting. Considering the monitor is itself a program that must consume some CPU cycles, I think it's odd that it shows 0%. If MS came up with a way to write programs that don't consume cycles at all, that's a real achievement. More probably, though, the monitor is accounting for its own load when showing the result. I wouldn't rely on such a monitor. If it accounts for its own load, why not accounting for the OS overhead too? Heck, 'top' shows itself consuming about 1% of the CPU while Linux is doing nothing else.
The file system is unmatched in 2000 (NTFS) and the memory infrastructure is good. Having said that what would be the difference?
The file system is unmatched by whose standards? I'm yet to see an independent benchmark proving the case one way or another. It's immaterial, though. They used Win98, not 2000, for that demo.
Does Windows insert special SLOW_DOWN_OP opcodes in the instruction stream? Does Linux have special RUN_SUPER_FAST_OP opcodes? No of course it doesn't. Barring multithreaded or multiprocess issues, where 2000 is considered superior anyones, there'll be no real difference.
Again, considered superior by whom? Again, immaterial. It was 98, not 2000.
What you seem to be saying, however, is that there never should be a difference in performance between different operating systems because no OS makes the processor run slower or faster. Now that, if you excuse me for paraphrasing your opening remark, is what sounds like a load of bullshit. I won't bother to explain why.
The operating system is a facilitator, it isn't an interpreter.
Exactly. Think about what that means and you may understand what I didn't bother to explain in the last paragraph.
Granted, you saw it running on a few machines that weren't on the net. It was blazingly fast. Wow. Did you see what was inside the machines? What kinds of processors? Don't we always point fingers at Microsoft for pulling the same trick, demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPU's and shovelfuls of memory?
I have seen it runnin on my machine. I own a small Linux consulting company in Brasil and was invited by Borland to talk about Linux on a conference they gave for Brazilian developers. They asked me for a linux box in which they could demo Kylix, so I brought my own box. It's a PII 400 with 64 Megs. I did no scientific bechmarks on it, but the demo apps we built on Kylix compiled at least 10 times faster than the same code on their own Windows box (which was also a PII, but that's all I know about it). As a demo, we had the app up and running under Gnome while Delphi was still compiling it on the Windows side.
Unfortunately they made me uninstall Kylix before I brought the box back. No amount of pleading, cajoling or even begging would work, which is why I can't send you a pirate copy;)
I think they probaly have a reason for not letting anybody have it, but the reason is not that they're demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPUs or anything like that. I wouldn't call my PII ridiculously overpowered.
I second the question. I know it probably pays the rent, but there sure are other ways of accomplishing the same. I don't like doubleclick and I'd like to see an answer to ashpool7's question.
Linux trade shows aren't (just) for the Linux community. They're for the general public and companies of all sizes. They're an opportunity, perhaps the only one, for people immersed (voluntarily or not) in MS culture to see Linux running, learn what it's all about and be exposed to the Linux culture. Yes, we need trade shows, badly.
It's not for nothing that Windows has such a strongly hooked developer base (check out your local newsstand for evidence).
Of course it's not for nothing. When you've spent big bucks for your certification, where you learned things by Microsoft made-up names that map one-by-one to the thing's real names, you discover you just don't know enough about computers to use any other platform - that's where the steep Unix/Linux learning curve comes from.
Not just for developers - After 10 years setting up, running and managing TCP/IP networks, I look at the names MS gives to TCP/IP elements under NT and feel like I don't know TCP/IP at all. Really, I had to do a little one-to-one index just to be able to read the fscked NT TCP/IP configuration!
One of my customers is always complaining about the large number of servers in their server room. They point to the 24 Intel, Alpha and RISC/6000 servers and yell about maintenance costs, training costs and even the cost of sheer space. They remember the good old days when they had only 2 servers. They're right, too. 24 servers do take a lot of space and cost a bunch to maintain and operate.
So, when I read about the S/390 version of Linux I started half serious (but half joking, too) to analyse replacing 24 low- to mid-range boxes with one S/390.
Aside from the cost of scrapping the 24 not-so-cheap machines and paying for a very expensive S/390, the maintenance costs are higher for a properly configured, working, redundant S/390 system. Much much higher. At least for now, it's just not a cost-effective proposition.
I'm not sure about MSCEs, but most people I see who advocate Windows are just not as computer savvy or technologically oriented enought to do that. Most people use Windows precisely BECAUSE they don't have to know very much about computers. I think what you propose just won't happen.
Maybe you're right, but I'd be surprised. At least with respect to this community, I'd say most of us would NOT exchange our ideas, beliefs or operating systems for money. I think we don't care that much about money anyway. I think the average person in this community will always be capable of making a comfortable living because our skills will always be in demand, regardless of technology, operating system or Age. And that is just about how much money we need: enough to live comfortably. It's a subjective definiton, of course, but somewhere between a nice car and an ocean-going yacht is the line that divides "comfortable" from "rich". For myself, I can say I've already, more than once, chose to keep my beliefs and throw a lot of cash away the way it'd come. I think most of us have similar stories to tell.
Re:Up until the same 19th cntr logic fries Linus..
on
A Post-Microsoft World
·
· Score: 1
There's one BIG difference between Linux and Microsoft, regarding Judge Jackson's text. I read the whole thing and he goes to the trouble of explaining evertyhing with a lot of detail. The difference is Microsoft is a "profit maximizing firm"; if it wasn't it couldn't legally be considered monopolistic. Of course RedHat is the same, but even if it was stopped in the same manner, that wouldn't mean much - it wouldn't hurt Linux at all.
Quite the contrary, I do understand the star wars universe. All I'm saying is its not hard-core sci-fi. I didn't say most of the societies, I said a lot of societies. Besides Princess Leia there's Queen Amigdala. That's two out of 4-5 societies we're shown. That's got to represent a lot of societies throughout the galaxy. No, I don't want to see the Millenium Falcon racing noiselessy through space, but that isn't sci-fi. Now, the Discovery *does* glide without a sound in 2001: A Space Odissey, but then 2001 is not space-western and certainly not fantasy. I'd also like to have a light saber, but let's be serious: even now war is less and less about contact-fighting and more and more about remote control button pushing. What I mean is the Star Wars universe is a lot of fun, but it's not based in the laws of physics of the real universe. That makes it fantasy, not sci-fi.
Don't get me wrong, I love Star Wars, but it's not really hard-core sci-fi by a a long shot! It's fantasy disguised as sci-fi. The Force is just magic in disguise, there are monsters disguised as alien species, ewoks look a lot like munchkins. Fighters, star destroyers and blasters make noise in the vacuum of space; we're supposed to believe a lot of advanced space-faring societies will revert to monarchy; with all the high tech stuff around the weapon of choice is the sword! The list is endless...
Instead of anti-virus software, why not software that helps people plug security holes? Software that could advise on proper use of the root account, sensible measures when installing rpms or kernel modules, and require an interactive password before writing to +x files?
Unix won't die because it's easy
on
The End of Unix?
·
· Score: 1
It's easy. The Unix Bible in a nutshell:
everyone is a user there are user groups everything is a file users and groups own files r means can-read, w means can-write, x means can-execute all config files are plain text start from/etc/inittab
That is all you need to know to learn, use and admin Unix, if you're trully computer literate and have average intelligence. Er, sorry, it's not easy for other kinds of people.
... that yes, I know you're not bad as a people. But to discover that fact I had to go to the US many times and make friends there. But when most people look at the US from the outside what they see is Hollywood, Disney World, wars, wars and more wars, and a lot of intervention in *their* own country. Some of this can be ascribed to pure and simple envy, because the Hollywood and Disney side of the equation leads them to believe all Americans are happy, rich and get laid every night. The other, ugly side is the real effect people feel in their lives from the interventionism. Myself, having a lot of American friends, I think they're all individually nice people, but they usually don't have a clue what their government is doing outside their borders, or they would never allow it.
Delphi for Linux is a good thing in that it makes development easier for more kinds of developers, because it will help companies with Delphi based systems switch to Linux and because it will bring more "respectability" to our favorite OS.
Delphi for Linux is a bad thing in that it will bring hosts of "developers" (as opposed to programmers) to the platform. I see a trend here, RedHat is trying to make Linux as easy to use as Windows and Delphi will try to make Linux as easy to develop to as Windows. "Developers" tend to rely more on the ability of their "development environments" than on their own ability, leading to excessive automation, leading to bloated applications and to an increase in your daily number of core dumps.
It's the same everywhere: more features and less buttons. More ease of use and more impossibility of understanding. I mean, my answering machine has lots of features I don't use because I don't like to memorize all of the "shift modes" of its 3 buttons.
One button for every feature! Every feature in its button!
First of all, I don't know if Brazil falls into the category of a "third world" country. Other terms have been proposed, such as "developing country", but personally I think we need a new way of rating countries. I know Brazil cannot be considered a "developed country" in the traditional sense. Anyway, Brazil is what I know so here goes my report on how the Internet is doing here:
You must understand that a country being poor does not automatically make all, or even most of its citizens poor. It's a lot more complicated than that, but Brazil has some tens of millions of Internet users and, of course, a bigger number of computer users. Call it perverse, unfair, whatever you like, but while there are homeless people hungry on the streets, almost everybody I know here has money to buy computers and Internet access.
On the financial side, millions of dollars are being invested in Internet businesses of all kinds, and it's been forecast that it will create 300 new jobs per working day for the remaining of the year in Brazil. So, it's a big economic boost.
On the cultural side, pioneer companies are discovering a scary trait in Brazilians: we don't trust the Internet enough to buy there! Maybe that comes from a few decades being screwed by big business like banks, health, credit card, etc. The fact is most Brazilians use the net to shop around, than go to the stores themselves to phisically buy the product. The biggest use of the net here is, by far, communicating. Chat rooms, e-mail lists, discussion sites are all blossoming.
On the social side, I see the greatest risks. Although the government has been very supporting, up to the point of legislating mandatory web publishing of public accounting records, the Brazilian people are not used to fight for their rights - it's a new democracy after all, just a little over a decade old. It does happen, but it feels like a new game where you don't yet know the rules. Also, we don't have American's enthusiasm for litigation. All that means that the same tools that can be used to promote freedom of speach and freedom in general can be used to lock people away from inconvenient content. This is not done by the Government, mind you, but by big business. For instance, when I try to access some American sites, they resolve my IP as coming from Brazil and dump me on a "Brazilian version" of the site which has different content from the original site. They clame this is localization, but it smells like censorship. The problem is the government does nothing to regulate this kind of actions and the people are not used to do that by themselves.
Finally, pornography. Sadly, this country exports pornography and sex in general. Again, this is the effect of an absent Government. The vast majority of the people is quite moral, maybe overly moral, but that doesn't stop tourists coming to Rio because it's not too hard to find cheap teen hookers. On the Internet, however, is where we can see most of the Government's actions against this. There's a special federal police bureau equipped and trained to deal with illegal Internet pornography, especially kid porn, and it's been quite effective. The bad news is that I believe this is driven by a lobby seeking to restrain some of the net's freedom. Nobody can afford to be publicly against efforts made to "shield" children from porn, and this is being used to create strong public support for some degree of censorship.
Overall I think the Internet has been and will be highly benefitial to the country, but we will need to mature into a wiser society to avoid falling into some of the traps.
Please, this is not flame, just a statement of facts.
I don't know if I'm representative of the Slashdot community, but my view of Windows is something like this: a) I will never put critical/production software on Windows; b) I profoundly dislike Windows both as a working and as a development platform - I went through great pains to tailor myself a job where I almost never need to do anything in Windows and c) I will never touch Windows unless absolutely necessary for customer to buy my products, and then never as a server - I'd rather not have a customer using Windows as a server because I know I'll spend a lot of time working around Windows to get it to work properly with my Linux-based products, plus I won't get paid to do that, plus I can't expect any help from the MSP who maintains the Windows box.
That put, I have to say any new aditions to the open source base is welcome, but you'll probably have to spend some time/money on convincing Windows users to use anything open source seriously because they're the guys who'll use it if anyone will and they don't trust open source.
You're right, of course. We should be have both tools and use each where it's the strongest. What I really fear is the tendency to take things to extremes. The Windows GUI is not bad, but Microsoft style insistence in trying to make it impossible for Joe User to make a mistake, besides being self-defeating, make things harder for us Joe Programmers. That's what I fear might happen to Linux if we try to make it too user friendly.
Granted, Gnome and KDE are crappy interfaces, but I'll have a crappy interface that still lets me do it the old fashioned way if I want to than a shiny new one that insulates me from the computer.
OK, now try to put that into a script that takes the username as an argument so you don't have to do all that mouse dragging every time you need to do this. While you're at it, make your script be careful not to delete open files. Throw in a switch that will e-mail the user to let him know his files have been deleted. If you manage to do all this in a graphical interface, then please find a way to schedule the thing and make it also act only on files older than 1 week. When a GUI is able to do that (and other arbitrary similar tasks) I'll retire my command line prompt.
...And we'll do it in a way that appeals to today's Linux users and to mere mortals...
I'll believe it when I see it. What "mere mortals" want is auto-everything. For auto-everything to work the system has to make assumptions, or rather the programmers behind the systems make assumptions. My experience is that they almost never make the same assumptions I would make, which always leads me to disable all the auto-everything stuff the system will let me disable.
Another thing "mere mortals" want is an all-graphics interface; everything point and click. Hmm, I can't see how something like:
rm `ls -l|awk '{print $3}'|grep "juser"`
could be graphical, not with the same flexibility and any kind of Unix without the pipe/redirect capabilities would be kinda stupid.
Another thing, admin tools (like linuxconf) require that you refrain from touching the config files by hand, or things will preety soon get out of sync.
So, it will take quite a piece of software to convince me it can be useful and enjoyable both for current Linux users and for "mere mortals"; if any software does convince me, though, it'll be amazing.
...hackers do what they do because of a profound understanding of computers, like really good writers can make up words and expressions because of a profound understanding of the language. Also, there's a one on one relantionship between a hacker and the computer. It doesn't depend on anything and anyone else.
For this idea to work we would have to understand law and BB as well as we understand the computer, and most of us would think that really boring. Sure, we can hire lawyers, but then we'd have a grasp on "their world" just as good as the one they have on ours when they hire us - and that would be laughable.
What we need is someone who understands profoundly both worlds. Actually, we'd need a lot of these someones.
Although it would be interesting to know the bug count for Linux (and anyone could find out if they wanted to), I don't see the relevance of that for this article. This is an article about the Microsoft's Windows 2000 product. It's very interesting indeed to realize that Linux causes so much worry among Windows fans. Or maybe Linux already is the standard OS against which other OSs should be compared?
Not quite. Linux is always under intense scrutiny through the "development" code branch (version numbers with an odd middle number such as 2.3.x). Moreover, we don't have to wait for someone to leak confidential information to find out about Linux bugs. It's all there for anyone to see; check the kernel lists. BTW, I couldn't help comparing the MS memo with a recent interview by Alan Cox, where he despairs with the number of lines of code in the Linux kernel. This demonstrates just how profound the difference is in how seriously MS and Linux developers take the quality of their code.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's my standard too; but these days people don't want software right. They want it now. More and more I find myself lowering my standards in order to meet deadlines. Since I can't get away from that, it would be nice to have some indication of what can be expected from the software. "Okay, you got it now, but you also got this and this bugs..." At least I'd feel more honest.
That said, let me comment on your posting. Since you established some credentials, let me do the same. I'm not a Delphi expert, even less a Windows expert. However, I've been working as a system administrator for 10 years and I've worked with computers at one capacity or another for over 20 years. It's from the point of view of a sys admin that I write this.
Boy does that sound like a load of bullshit, and I'm saying that as a professional Delphi 3/4/5 developer. Are you comparing this with Delphi 5? On a P-II 450 Delphi 5 (or 4 or 3) compiles all but EXTREMELY large projects in a virtual instant, so how exactly are you timing this FUD 10 times faster claim? The reality is that the demo was likely extremely simple and compiled close to instantly on both machines.
Actually I don't know which version of Delphi they used on their machine. Very unscientifically, I didn't time it. The app was a simple text editor much like MS's Notepad. It took a few minutes to compile on Windows and a few seconds to compile on Kylix. The reality was just like I described it.
Linux doesn't make the processor run any faster, and in Windows 2000 or NT 4 the processor sits at 0% when I'm not doing anything, leaving 100% for Delphi to do its thing in, so any difference between the OS' will purely be the result of the coding abilities of Borland/Inprise.
This is interesting. Considering the monitor is itself a program that must consume some CPU cycles, I think it's odd that it shows 0%. If MS came up with a way to write programs that don't consume cycles at all, that's a real achievement. More probably, though, the monitor is accounting for its own load when showing the result. I wouldn't rely on such a monitor. If it accounts for its own load, why not accounting for the OS overhead too? Heck, 'top' shows itself consuming about 1% of the CPU while Linux is doing nothing else.
The file system is unmatched in 2000 (NTFS) and the memory infrastructure is good. Having said that what would be the difference?
The file system is unmatched by whose standards? I'm yet to see an independent benchmark proving the case one way or another. It's immaterial, though. They used Win98, not 2000, for that demo.
Does Windows insert special SLOW_DOWN_OP opcodes in the instruction stream? Does Linux have special RUN_SUPER_FAST_OP opcodes? No of course it doesn't. Barring multithreaded or multiprocess issues, where 2000 is considered superior anyones, there'll be no real difference.
Again, considered superior by whom? Again, immaterial. It was 98, not 2000.
What you seem to be saying, however, is that there never should be a difference in performance between different operating systems because no OS makes the processor run slower or faster. Now that, if you excuse me for paraphrasing your opening remark, is what sounds like a load of bullshit. I won't bother to explain why.
The operating system is a facilitator, it isn't an interpreter.
Exactly. Think about what that means and you may understand what I didn't bother to explain in the last paragraph.
Cheers.
I like Becker better.
I have seen it runnin on my machine. I own a small Linux consulting company in Brasil and was invited by Borland to talk about Linux on a conference they gave for Brazilian developers. They asked me for a linux box in which they could demo Kylix, so I brought my own box. It's a PII 400 with 64 Megs. I did no scientific bechmarks on it, but the demo apps we built on Kylix compiled at least 10 times faster than the same code on their own Windows box (which was also a PII, but that's all I know about it). As a demo, we had the app up and running under Gnome while Delphi was still compiling it on the Windows side.
Unfortunately they made me uninstall Kylix before I brought the box back. No amount of pleading, cajoling or even begging would work, which is why I can't send you a pirate copy ;)
I think they probaly have a reason for not letting anybody have it, but the reason is not that they're demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPUs or anything like that. I wouldn't call my PII ridiculously overpowered.
I have posted a Portuguese translation of the entire article over here.
I second the question. I know it probably pays the rent, but there sure are other ways of accomplishing the same. I don't like doubleclick and I'd like to see an answer to ashpool7's question.
Linux trade shows aren't (just) for the Linux community. They're for the general public and companies of all sizes. They're an opportunity, perhaps the only one, for people immersed (voluntarily or not) in MS culture to see Linux running, learn what it's all about and be exposed to the Linux culture. Yes, we need trade shows, badly.
Of course it's not for nothing. When you've spent big bucks for your certification, where you learned things by Microsoft made-up names that map one-by-one to the thing's real names, you discover you just don't know enough about computers to use any other platform - that's where the steep Unix/Linux learning curve comes from.
Not just for developers - After 10 years setting up, running and managing TCP/IP networks, I look at the names MS gives to TCP/IP elements under NT and feel like I don't know TCP/IP at all. Really, I had to do a little one-to-one index just to be able to read the fscked NT TCP/IP configuration!
So, when I read about the S/390 version of Linux I started half serious (but half joking, too) to analyse replacing 24 low- to mid-range boxes with one S/390.
Aside from the cost of scrapping the 24 not-so-cheap machines and paying for a very expensive S/390, the maintenance costs are higher for a properly configured, working, redundant S/390 system. Much much higher. At least for now, it's just not a cost-effective proposition.
I'm not sure about MSCEs, but most people I see who advocate Windows are just not as computer savvy or technologically oriented enought to do that. Most people use Windows precisely BECAUSE they don't have to know very much about computers. I think what you propose just won't happen.
Maybe you're right, but I'd be surprised. At least with respect to this community, I'd say most of us would NOT exchange our ideas, beliefs or operating systems for money. I think we don't care that much about money anyway. I think the average person in this community will always be capable of making a comfortable living because our skills will always be in demand, regardless of technology, operating system or Age. And that is just about how much money we need: enough to live comfortably. It's a subjective definiton, of course, but somewhere between a nice car and an ocean-going yacht is the line that divides "comfortable" from "rich". For myself, I can say I've already, more than once, chose to keep my beliefs and throw a lot of cash away the way it'd come. I think most of us have similar stories to tell.
There's one BIG difference between Linux and Microsoft, regarding Judge Jackson's text. I read the whole thing and he goes to the trouble of explaining evertyhing with a lot of detail. The difference is Microsoft is a "profit maximizing firm"; if it wasn't it couldn't legally be considered monopolistic. Of course RedHat is the same, but even if it was stopped in the same manner, that wouldn't mean much - it wouldn't hurt Linux at all.
Quite the contrary, I do understand the star wars universe. All I'm saying is its not hard-core sci-fi. I didn't say most of the societies, I said a lot of societies. Besides Princess Leia there's Queen Amigdala. That's two out of 4-5 societies we're shown. That's got to represent a lot of societies throughout the galaxy. No, I don't want to see the Millenium Falcon racing noiselessy through space, but that isn't sci-fi. Now, the Discovery *does* glide without a sound in 2001: A Space Odissey, but then 2001 is not space-western and certainly not fantasy. I'd also like to have a light saber, but let's be serious: even now war is less and less about contact-fighting and more and more about remote control button pushing. What I mean is the Star Wars universe is a lot of fun, but it's not based in the laws of physics of the real universe. That makes it fantasy, not sci-fi.
Don't get me wrong, I love Star Wars, but it's not really hard-core sci-fi by a a long shot! It's fantasy disguised as sci-fi. The Force is just magic in disguise, there are monsters disguised as alien species, ewoks look a lot like munchkins. Fighters, star destroyers and blasters make noise in the vacuum of space; we're supposed to believe a lot of advanced space-faring societies will revert to monarchy; with all the high tech stuff around the weapon of choice is the sword! The list is endless...
Instead of anti-virus software, why not software that helps people plug security holes? Software that could advise on proper use of the root account, sensible measures when installing rpms or kernel modules, and require an interactive password before writing to +x files?
everyone is a user /etc/inittab
there are user groups
everything is a file
users and groups own files
r means can-read, w means can-write, x means can-execute
all config files are plain text
start from
That is all you need to know to learn, use and admin Unix, if you're trully computer literate and have average intelligence. Er, sorry, it's not easy for other kinds of people.
... that yes, I know you're not bad as a people. But to discover that fact I had to go to the US many times and make friends there. But when most people look at the US from the outside what they see is Hollywood, Disney World, wars, wars and more wars, and a lot of intervention in *their* own country. Some of this can be ascribed to pure and simple envy, because the Hollywood and Disney side of the equation leads them to believe all Americans are happy, rich and get laid every night. The other, ugly side is the real effect people feel in their lives from the interventionism. Myself, having a lot of American friends, I think they're all individually nice people, but they usually don't have a clue what their government is doing outside their borders, or they would never allow it.
Delphi for Linux is a bad thing in that it will bring hosts of "developers" (as opposed to programmers) to the platform. I see a trend here, RedHat is trying to make Linux as easy to use as Windows and Delphi will try to make Linux as easy to develop to as Windows. "Developers" tend to rely more on the ability of their "development environments" than on their own ability, leading to excessive automation, leading to bloated applications and to an increase in your daily number of core dumps.
It's the same everywhere: more features and less buttons. More ease of use and more impossibility of understanding. I mean, my answering machine has lots of features I don't use because I don't like to memorize all of the "shift modes" of its 3 buttons.
One button for every feature! Every feature in its button!
You must understand that a country being poor does not automatically make all, or even most of its citizens poor. It's a lot more complicated than that, but Brazil has some tens of millions of Internet users and, of course, a bigger number of computer users. Call it perverse, unfair, whatever you like, but while there are homeless people hungry on the streets, almost everybody I know here has money to buy computers and Internet access.
On the financial side, millions of dollars are being invested in Internet businesses of all kinds, and it's been forecast that it will create 300 new jobs per working day for the remaining of the year in Brazil. So, it's a big economic boost.
On the cultural side, pioneer companies are discovering a scary trait in Brazilians: we don't trust the Internet enough to buy there! Maybe that comes from a few decades being screwed by big business like banks, health, credit card, etc. The fact is most Brazilians use the net to shop around, than go to the stores themselves to phisically buy the product. The biggest use of the net here is, by far, communicating. Chat rooms, e-mail lists, discussion sites are all blossoming.
On the social side, I see the greatest risks. Although the government has been very supporting, up to the point of legislating mandatory web publishing of public accounting records, the Brazilian people are not used to fight for their rights - it's a new democracy after all, just a little over a decade old. It does happen, but it feels like a new game where you don't yet know the rules. Also, we don't have American's enthusiasm for litigation. All that means that the same tools that can be used to promote freedom of speach and freedom in general can be used to lock people away from inconvenient content. This is not done by the Government, mind you, but by big business. For instance, when I try to access some American sites, they resolve my IP as coming from Brazil and dump me on a "Brazilian version" of the site which has different content from the original site. They clame this is localization, but it smells like censorship. The problem is the government does nothing to regulate this kind of actions and the people are not used to do that by themselves.
Finally, pornography. Sadly, this country exports pornography and sex in general. Again, this is the effect of an absent Government. The vast majority of the people is quite moral, maybe overly moral, but that doesn't stop tourists coming to Rio because it's not too hard to find cheap teen hookers. On the Internet, however, is where we can see most of the Government's actions against this. There's a special federal police bureau equipped and trained to deal with illegal Internet pornography, especially kid porn, and it's been quite effective. The bad news is that I believe this is driven by a lobby seeking to restrain some of the net's freedom. Nobody can afford to be publicly against efforts made to "shield" children from porn, and this is being used to create strong public support for some degree of censorship.
Overall I think the Internet has been and will be highly benefitial to the country, but we will need to mature into a wiser society to avoid falling into some of the traps.
I don't know if I'm representative of the Slashdot community, but my view of Windows is something like this: a) I will never put critical/production software on Windows; b) I profoundly dislike Windows both as a working and as a development platform - I went through great pains to tailor myself a job where I almost never need to do anything in Windows and c) I will never touch Windows unless absolutely necessary for customer to buy my products, and then never as a server - I'd rather not have a customer using Windows as a server because I know I'll spend a lot of time working around Windows to get it to work properly with my Linux-based products, plus I won't get paid to do that, plus I can't expect any help from the MSP who maintains the Windows box.
That put, I have to say any new aditions to the open source base is welcome, but you'll probably have to spend some time/money on convincing Windows users to use anything open source seriously because they're the guys who'll use it if anyone will and they don't trust open source.
Granted, Gnome and KDE are crappy interfaces, but I'll have a crappy interface that still lets me do it the old fashioned way if I want to than a shiny new one that insulates me from the computer.
OK, now try to put that into a script that takes the username as an argument so you don't have to do all that mouse dragging every time you need to do this. While you're at it, make your script be careful not to delete open files. Throw in a switch that will e-mail the user to let him know his files have been deleted. If you manage to do all this in a graphical interface, then please find a way to schedule the thing and make it also act only on files older than 1 week. When a GUI is able to do that (and other arbitrary similar tasks) I'll retire my command line prompt.
I'll believe it when I see it. What "mere mortals" want is auto-everything. For auto-everything to work the system has to make assumptions, or rather the programmers behind the systems make assumptions. My experience is that they almost never make the same assumptions I would make, which always leads me to disable all the auto-everything stuff the system will let me disable.
Another thing "mere mortals" want is an all-graphics interface; everything point and click. Hmm, I can't see how something like:
rm `ls -l|awk '{print $3}'|grep "juser"`
could be graphical, not with the same flexibility and any kind of Unix without the pipe/redirect capabilities would be kinda stupid.
Another thing, admin tools (like linuxconf) require that you refrain from touching the config files by hand, or things will preety soon get out of sync.
So, it will take quite a piece of software to convince me it can be useful and enjoyable both for current Linux users and for "mere mortals"; if any software does convince me, though, it'll be amazing.
For this idea to work we would have to understand law and BB as well as we understand the computer, and most of us would think that really boring. Sure, we can hire lawyers, but then we'd have a grasp on "their world" just as good as the one they have on ours when they hire us - and that would be laughable.
What we need is someone who understands profoundly both worlds. Actually, we'd need a lot of these someones.
Although it would be interesting to know the bug count for Linux (and anyone could find out if they wanted to), I don't see the relevance of that for this article. This is an article about the Microsoft's Windows 2000 product. It's very interesting indeed to realize that Linux causes so much worry among Windows fans. Or maybe Linux already is the standard OS against which other OSs should be compared?
Not quite. Linux is always under intense scrutiny through the "development" code branch (version numbers with an odd middle number such as 2.3.x). Moreover, we don't have to wait for someone to leak confidential information to find out about Linux bugs. It's all there for anyone to see; check the kernel lists. BTW, I couldn't help comparing the MS memo with a recent interview by Alan Cox, where he despairs with the number of lines of code in the Linux kernel. This demonstrates just how profound the difference is in how seriously MS and Linux developers take the quality of their code.