Wow! Nice link! That's one disturbing piece of work. I took enough psych to see that the man is clearly egomaniacal, I'm curious if he's borderline delusional. Anyone with more training have an insight?
Nor is this well formed apologetics as he fundamentally contradicts himself more than once. For example, he attacks the working man since he asserts that the majority of Linux users are not entrepeneurs. Not that the majority of any OS users are entrepeneurs but ok. So he calls people who work for a living "zombies". Later he proposes to be championing the case of the working man. Dude, you just called him a zombie! (And you wonder why people threaten you?)
Also enjoyed the inference that many Linux users are clueless morons who don't code or play video games!? First, the fact that Linux finally has some non-coders using it is an indication that it is getting more user-friendly. Secondly, do you really want to compare the coding skills of the average Linux user with, say, the average XP user? (Not bashing any of the bright coders who do use XP but you also realize that you do not represent the average user.) And video games? Ooo, how sinister is that? What does that have to do with anything? (However you can make the case that Osama Binladen doesn't play video games. Is it such a stretch to think that non-gamers might be terrorists?)
But let's not throw out the good with the bad. His point that no one has the right to threaten him (or anyone else) with violence is just. Point taken. This is an area where the OSS advocates need to take note and clean up their image a little.
You still get the feeling he's using the image to try to paint Linux advocates as the bully and SCO/Microsoft as the victim.
GM and Ford have the cash to hire competent engineers. They do hire competent engineers. Unfortunately for the consumer those engineers intentionally design their vehicles to give a limited number of years of reliable service.
The problem is economic. The North American auto manufacturing process is grosly innefficient from a number of angles (not the least of which is union related) and profits commensurately slim. In this environment a reliable vehicle could be a problem.
Manufacturers like Toyota have better profit margins and can afford to make more reliable vehicles. (This is not raw conjecture - the profit information is documented.)
Make no mistake, your car was carefully designed to break down.
Scepticle? Let me give you another example:
I used to work as a diesel mechanic for a large construction company. As you probably know, Caterpillar is an American company with production facilities in North America. I did maintenance on Cats almost 30 years old which were still being run full tilt doing heavy duty, high-impact workloads for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, at least 6 months a year. There isn't a passenger vehicle on the planet that works as hard as those old bulldozers (American designed at that) and yet they gave us decades of service.
Why did a domestic construction vehicle give us such good service compaired to domestic passenger vehicles? The problem for a company that produces $500,000 equipment is that their customers are large businesses who have economic sense and are fully prepared to take their business elsewhere if they know they're getting screwed on quality. The auto industry, on the other hand, has it much softer dealing with the general public which is largely descriminate in their purchasing. There are smart consumers, but they are few enough that they do not significantly affect the market.
If we could get the person(s) who invented text based computing to patent it and charge $1 million per user/license we could hold the world economy hostage.
The choice would be clear - either shut down every computer on the planet and go back to the stone age or revamp patent law to be useful and relevant to society.
It may sound harsh - "reform or die" - but it's really not any different from the slow death we're suffering now as we passively let the rich, greedy fingers clamp around our necks.
Perhaps the example I mentioned is too old to be patentable but we have to be able to come up with something.
I'm a neighbour (Canadian) and I'm all for good U.S. border security.
New Year's 2000 a U.S. border officer recognized a terrorist trying to enter the U.S. from Canada and apprehended him. She subsequently found a huge bomb in the trunk of his car.
Believe you me Canadians were relieved she caught the guy and not at all impressed that someone would want to use our nation as a platform to attack a friend! (And we're not just kiss-ups , we can be quite vocal when there are areas where we disagree with American politics. But we also want to look out for our friends and allies.)
I do not find the idea of finger-printing particularly invasive. If they wanted to insert tracking chips or force me to wear a large hat with the words "Danger: Foreigner!" on it, that would be different.
Actually having the words "Applications" and "Actions" available for your clicking pleasure is already a useability improvement from just presenting a foot. There's nothing instinctive about clicking a foot! (or a K)
We also have to make the nomenclature friendly. Names like "daemon" and even "ghostscript" are inappropriate. Great wars are fought over spiritual beliefs. Terms like "Services" are much more appropriate and better explain their purpose.
I'll also throw my hat in the ring with those looking for a more standardized install method. I do like the simplicity of the OSX/ROX idea but it may be that someone comes up with a better solution.
It is exciting to watch this all evolve isn't it?:)
Thanks for pointing out D3 does use C++ and is the first Id engine to do so.
I know Carmack isn't anti-OOp, but he is very concious of performance and I'll openly speculate that he waited to leverage C++ until now for that reason.
I also wish that more of the licensees using Id engines were onboard with multi-platform support. There's really little excuse not to compile a couple extra binaries when the core engine supports it.
One thing I really admire about Carmack's work is just how much graphics he can deliver per unit of hardware.
This is not a fluke. The pattern for all his previous engines is that the most intensive parts are coded in optimized assembly. The rest is coded in C. He admits to using some object oriented practices in his code but he still uses C. Even custom scripting support is reasonably efficient.
Id also designs the games themselves to be reasonably efficient. (When was the last time you saw a true outdoor scene in an Id game? Outdoor scenes have so far been modeled as a special kind of interior.)
In contrast the heavier games some people have mentioned use liberal amounts of C++, (which makes sense from a project management perspective) their custom scripting languages slow things down yet more, and they render scenes which are inherently hardware intensive. They can also deliver high quality graphics, they simply need more hardware.
Now I just have to add my voice to those who wish that more thought was put into the content of the games themselves - so many people spending so much fantasy time focused on raw evil is not healthy.
Consoles are great but one of the biggest problems with the current batch is that they eliminate independant game development. What does this mean to the consumer? Less variety for one thing. Higher prices for another. Just compare the prices of two year old releases - console version vs. PC version.
In this regard computers are a much more open market. If standards emerge which enable us to develop independant titles for affordable gaming consoles I'm all for it. In the end the hardware may need to cost a little more (as the console developer may not always make as much on titles) but the overall cost to the end user will be a good value.
Actually reducing vehicle mass is something we need to take a look at.
We can try shifting the the energy source as many times as we want but eventually we also need to look at reducing energy consumption if we want a maintainable lifestyle.
Also a question for any bio engineers (or arm-chair bio engineers) out there: what are the implications of a large number of fuel cell vehicles releasing steam into the local atmosphere? Will it affect weather? Bacteria? Mold?
The busiest website in the world. As was already mentioned, Yahoo! runs on PHP. I would also hazard a guess that their code does not look quite like the kind of quick and dirty scripts most of us are guilty of firing off for cheap low-to-moderate load applications.
Regardless of platform, application design is just about the most critical factor in ensuring high load performance. If you want your PHP driven site to scale well to heavy loads you will wind up using a few concepts more familiar to the J2EE crowd.
On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this.
At this point free software appears to be the only software which can thrive along side the Microsoft monopoly. I think by now Sun realizes they cannot build a monopoly of their own but I would be surprised if they do not try to leverage open source components in an attempt to make their own offerings more attractive - taking a page from IBM.
The largest handlers like Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL simply have more resources to combat spam. Because they handle millions of accounts they can identify mailing patterns in real time. It also gives them better means to hunt down spam sources.
...or you could use your education to get a job in education to take other people's money for nothing.
Welding is a natural choice for a programmer; after spending countless hours frying the eyes staring at low-grade monitors it only makes sense to spend the rest of your life staring at a retina-frying arc.
Seriously, if you ever go that route make sure you work in a well ventilated shop. Welding can release some nasty gases.
It's good to protect the publishers. I mean what programmer or artist here wants to get their work ripped off? But the punishment has to fit the crime. The fines need to be enforced but they also have to be reasonable. We've come up with creative arguements to justify it but file "sharing" is stealing. If someone found a way to download money off your paycheck you'd freak, right? But you can't go to court and nail them for 1,000 times what they took from you.
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Wow! Nice link! That's one disturbing piece of work. I took enough psych to see that the man is clearly egomaniacal, I'm curious if he's borderline delusional. Anyone with more training have an insight?
Nor is this well formed apologetics as he fundamentally contradicts himself more than once. For example, he attacks the working man since he asserts that the majority of Linux users are not entrepeneurs. Not that the majority of any OS users are entrepeneurs but ok. So he calls people who work for a living "zombies". Later he proposes to be championing the case of the working man. Dude, you just called him a zombie! (And you wonder why people threaten you?)
Also enjoyed the inference that many Linux users are clueless morons who don't code or play video games!? First, the fact that Linux finally has some non-coders using it is an indication that it is getting more user-friendly. Secondly, do you really want to compare the coding skills of the average Linux user with, say, the average XP user? (Not bashing any of the bright coders who do use XP but you also realize that you do not represent the average user.) And video games? Ooo, how sinister is that? What does that have to do with anything? (However you can make the case that Osama Binladen doesn't play video games. Is it such a stretch to think that non-gamers might be terrorists?)
But let's not throw out the good with the bad. His point that no one has the right to threaten him (or anyone else) with violence is just. Point taken. This is an area where the OSS advocates need to take note and clean up their image a little.
You still get the feeling he's using the image to try to paint Linux advocates as the bully and SCO/Microsoft as the victim.
Too weird.
GM and Ford have the cash to hire competent engineers. They do hire competent engineers. Unfortunately for the consumer those engineers intentionally design their vehicles to give a limited number of years of reliable service.
The problem is economic. The North American auto manufacturing process is grosly innefficient from a number of angles (not the least of which is union related) and profits commensurately slim. In this environment a reliable vehicle could be a problem.
Manufacturers like Toyota have better profit margins and can afford to make more reliable vehicles. (This is not raw conjecture - the profit information is documented.)
Make no mistake, your car was carefully designed to break down.
Scepticle? Let me give you another example:
I used to work as a diesel mechanic for a large construction company. As you probably know, Caterpillar is an American company with production facilities in North America. I did maintenance on Cats almost 30 years old which were still being run full tilt doing heavy duty, high-impact workloads for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, at least 6 months a year. There isn't a passenger vehicle on the planet that works as hard as those old bulldozers (American designed at that) and yet they gave us decades of service.
Why did a domestic construction vehicle give us such good service compaired to domestic passenger vehicles? The problem for a company that produces $500,000 equipment is that their customers are large businesses who have economic sense and are fully prepared to take their business elsewhere if they know they're getting screwed on quality. The auto industry, on the other hand, has it much softer dealing with the general public which is largely descriminate in their purchasing. There are smart consumers, but they are few enough that they do not significantly affect the market.
I could give more examples but I'm done.
If you're going to Bob and Doug something like this you should really throw in a "Take off, eh?"
If we could get the person(s) who invented text based computing to patent it and charge $1 million per user/license we could hold the world economy hostage.
The choice would be clear - either shut down every computer on the planet and go back to the stone age or revamp patent law to be useful and relevant to society.
It may sound harsh - "reform or die" - but it's really not any different from the slow death we're suffering now as we passively let the rich, greedy fingers clamp around our necks.
Perhaps the example I mentioned is too old to be patentable but we have to be able to come up with something.
I'm a neighbour (Canadian) and I'm all for good U.S. border security.
New Year's 2000 a U.S. border officer recognized a terrorist trying to enter the U.S. from Canada and apprehended him. She subsequently found a huge bomb in the trunk of his car.
Believe you me Canadians were relieved she caught the guy and not at all impressed that someone would want to use our nation as a platform to attack a friend! (And we're not just kiss-ups , we can be quite vocal when there are areas where we disagree with American politics. But we also want to look out for our friends and allies.)
I do not find the idea of finger-printing particularly invasive. If they wanted to insert tracking chips or force me to wear a large hat with the words "Danger: Foreigner!" on it, that would be different.
Actually having the words "Applications" and "Actions" available for your clicking pleasure is already a useability improvement from just presenting a foot. There's nothing instinctive about clicking a foot! (or a K)
We also have to make the nomenclature friendly. Names like "daemon" and even "ghostscript" are inappropriate. Great wars are fought over spiritual beliefs. Terms like "Services" are much more appropriate and better explain their purpose.
I'll also throw my hat in the ring with those looking for a more standardized install method. I do like the simplicity of the OSX/ROX idea but it may be that someone comes up with a better solution.
It is exciting to watch this all evolve isn't it? :)
Thanks for pointing out D3 does use C++ and is the first Id engine to do so.
I know Carmack isn't anti-OOp, but he is very concious of performance and I'll openly speculate that he waited to leverage C++ until now for that reason.
I also wish that more of the licensees using Id engines were onboard with multi-platform support. There's really little excuse not to compile a couple extra binaries when the core engine supports it.
One thing I really admire about Carmack's work is just how much graphics he can deliver per unit of hardware.
This is not a fluke. The pattern for all his previous engines is that the most intensive parts are coded in optimized assembly. The rest is coded in C. He admits to using some object oriented practices in his code but he still uses C. Even custom scripting support is reasonably efficient.
Id also designs the games themselves to be reasonably efficient. (When was the last time you saw a true outdoor scene in an Id game? Outdoor scenes have so far been modeled as a special kind of interior.)
In contrast the heavier games some people have mentioned use liberal amounts of C++, (which makes sense from a project management perspective) their custom scripting languages slow things down yet more, and they render scenes which are inherently hardware intensive. They can also deliver high quality graphics, they simply need more hardware.
Now I just have to add my voice to those who wish that more thought was put into the content of the games themselves - so many people spending so much fantasy time focused on raw evil is not healthy.
Consoles are great but one of the biggest problems with the current batch is that they eliminate independant game development. What does this mean to the consumer? Less variety for one thing. Higher prices for another. Just compare the prices of two year old releases - console version vs. PC version.
In this regard computers are a much more open market. If standards emerge which enable us to develop independant titles for affordable gaming consoles I'm all for it. In the end the hardware may need to cost a little more (as the console developer may not always make as much on titles) but the overall cost to the end user will be a good value.
And all these years we've been using silicon implants :(
Actually reducing vehicle mass is something we need to take a look at.
We can try shifting the the energy source as many times as we want but eventually we also need to look at reducing energy consumption if we want a maintainable lifestyle.
Also a question for any bio engineers (or arm-chair bio engineers) out there: what are the implications of a large number of fuel cell vehicles releasing steam into the local atmosphere? Will it affect weather? Bacteria? Mold?
The busiest website in the world. As was already mentioned, Yahoo! runs on PHP. I would also hazard a guess that their code does not look quite like the kind of quick and dirty scripts most of us are guilty of firing off for cheap low-to-moderate load applications.
Regardless of platform, application design is just about the most critical factor in ensuring high load performance. If you want your PHP driven site to scale well to heavy loads you will wind up using a few concepts more familiar to the J2EE crowd.
On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this.
At this point free software appears to be the only software which can thrive along side the Microsoft monopoly. I think by now Sun realizes they cannot build a monopoly of their own but I would be surprised if they do not try to leverage open source components in an attempt to make their own offerings more attractive - taking a page from IBM.
The largest handlers like Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL simply have more resources to combat spam. Because they handle millions of accounts they can identify mailing patterns in real time. It also gives them better means to hunt down spam sources.
...or you could use your education to get a job in education to take other people's money for nothing.
Welding is a natural choice for a programmer; after spending countless hours frying the eyes staring at low-grade monitors it only makes sense to spend the rest of your life staring at a retina-frying arc.
Seriously, if you ever go that route make sure you work in a well ventilated shop. Welding can release some nasty gases.
All the best in the new career hunt.
Passwords are a poor security mechanism anyway. We really need to press the industry to move on in this field.
It's good to protect the publishers. I mean what programmer or artist here wants to get their work ripped off? But the punishment has to fit the crime. The fines need to be enforced but they also have to be reasonable. We've come up with creative arguements to justify it but file "sharing" is stealing. If someone found a way to download money off your paycheck you'd freak, right? But you can't go to court and nail them for 1,000 times what they took from you.