Your premise is not without merit, though your conclusion is a bit farfetched.:^)
I think that there will probably be a peak in the number of supernovaes per year (if it already hasn't happened). Over time, though, what will happen is that galaxies will age, resulting in fewer, more longer-lived stars (and possibly black holes). In other words, give it several hundred billion years, and most of what's left of the universe will be populated by very small red dwarves and super-dense objects. A few trillion years further out, and these will start to die out too.
What happens after that? I don't know. One possibility is that the electromagnetic force will bifurcate into two distinct forces, and the nature of the universe will change at very fundamental levels, causing any predictions about what will happen in the distant future to be completely off-mark.
But then again, I could be rambling incoherently and am just killing time after work waiting for Adult Swim to start on Comedy Central tonight.:)
My comment was made in jest, though I can understand the seriousness of even doing this as a hobby.
Me, personally, I would love to be a hobbyist astronaut. Now THAT would be fun to brag about (and can you imagine the lookup tables for THAT!?)./tee-hee-hee:)
Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".
I may not be a lawyer (be prepared for an uninformed opinion here), but I think the "lack of enforcement" point can in fact be a pretty convincing argument in the court. Countless companies and individuals have lost rights to copyrights and trademarks due to various circumstances. The obvious example that comes to my mind is the Beyer/Aspirin example (though admittedly that's a trademark example and not a copyright example). Also, a license does not equate law. It's really up to the courts to decide whether or not the "non-enforcement" clauses from NDAs really apply in the land of lawyers. Another chink in the armor of this argument is, how long has this "non-enforcement" been willingly committed? These unknown questions and answers will play themselves out, I suppose, over the next several months, at least.
Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
If I release some written piece of work, but neglect to even bother to pursue copyright infringement for 10 years even though I posessed full knowledge of said infringement, does that count as "letting someone use it?" I don't know the answer to that one, but I do wonder.
I can hear the SCO execs and lawyers now: "See? They DID steal our code, now they're trying to find a loophole!"
Um, it would be irresponsible for copyright holders to not protect their property. What all this seemingly unimportant arguing is all about is protecting a copyrighted work (though it is a nebulously "owned" work, it is copyrighted nonetheless). It would seem that in the end the Linux code would be in worse shape legally speaking if everybody just let the chips fall where they may. Protecting intellectual property rights is a sign of strength, not weakness.
You ought to work tech support some time. There are real costs associated with software bugs. These costs are measured. Many times these costs are measured more meticulously than software vendors would like to admit. There are more organizations than you might realize that purposely delay software deployments to make sure that they do not ruin their technology infrastructure. Often times, when I work with a senior admin within the organization, I find they are the "NO" people. "No", we will not apply that patch unless you prove to us it will fix the problem. "No", we will not apply that patch unless you prove it won't introduce new problems. And, in the case that there are unforeseen complications in a software upgrade, guess who gets the heat? Directly, it's the senior admins. Both directly and indirectly, it's the software vendor. Bad publicity == lost sales. Ask any sales person (technical or non-technical).
Of course, I'm at the end of the equation where these costs are realized after the fact. Also, I think that since I come from the Unix world, I've seen more preference towards quality over quantity. Unix-oriented orgs are much more cautious than Windows-oriented orgs. I attribute this to lack of experience in that market, but the way things are going, experience is not in short supply. Bugs and security breaches are costing companies in real dollors nowadays, and commercial and gov't organizations are not ignorant of this fact, even at the high echelon levels.
For proof, look at Microsoft. I certainly remember reading that they decided to go for a company-wide code freeze to resolve bugs and security issues. This code freeze lasted for SIX MONTHS. That's a HUGE risk for a software company. Also, there's that whole trillion dollor fine against the company thing, too, that's been circulating a bit lately. It also undermines any arguments based on "customers are lemmings that will buy anything we dangle in front of them". Maybe the fact that features outweighed stability was true during the dot-com boom. I think it's definitely less true now, by a significant degree.
Consumers, in the COTS context, don't mind "planned obsolescence" in their software. The current state of things proves this. People would rather have pretty features on a flaky system, than a solid system.
This is not necessarily true... it's a bad generalization besides. Most people I work with in the IT industry would give their arm, leg, spleen, right lung, part of their left lung, lower intestine, and maybe even their occipital lobes for a reliable system that WORKS. Features are secondary.
The "features over stability" myth is just that: a myth. Show me an admin that prefers only the latest and greatest in "features" and I'll show you an admin that will lose all her/his hair within six months (a little after all their hair turns white).
Well, ok, I work primarily with IT people admittedly. Perhaps the folks in management are a little different. But I've noticed that IT people have ways of making management's lives miserable (in ways that are downright creative) when a bad decision is made with software purchases. I've done it, myself.;^)
The scientific method simply denies the existence of "laws", as you've put it. Theories do tend to get disproven, or modified over time. Cases in point:
Newton created a model of how gravity works. Einstein proved Newton "wrong" with the general theory of relativity (I actually know little about the general theory of relativity, but am pretty familiar with the special theory of relativity; the latter being a subset of the former). But, when shuttle astronauts go up into space and use their computers to plot their trajectory, which do they use, Newton's equations or Einstein's? Newton's theory was slightly innaccurate (increasingly so as local space-time curvature and/or relative velocity increases), but even at the high velocities that space crafts obtain compared to the earth's position Einstein's "adjustments" to Newton's equations don't amount to any practically measurable effect. Since the overhead of computing Einstein's equations is much higher than computing Newton's equations, the astronomers stick to Newton's equations.
What was the point to the above gobble-dee-gook? Newton was assumed to be "right" for a few centuries before a smart German guy figured out that he was a bit off in the final picture.
Since Einstein, many of his theories have been modified, prodded, poked, measured, etc. Like Newton before him, Einstein has been shown to be "mostly" right.
Now, if you're a Creationist (and I suspect you are judging from the nature of your argument), this looks like an Achille's heel for Science. "Well," you huff, "you can't PROVE that men evolved from primitive apes because where's the EVIDENCE?" Well, there's lots of evidence. I'll even dare to bring up the evil swear word of creationists: FOSSILS. Of course, it's easy for the non-scientific to ignore the evidence in front of them. Those of us who actually learn the tenets of the scientific method and the methodology of sensible logic (they teach these things in schools and colleges, incidentally) know that when the evidence is staring you in the face and points to a conclusion that is feasible and sensible, then it would be preposterous to simply ignore that evidence and sweep the conclusion under the rug as if nothing happened. Rather, the conclusion needs to be disproven. Otherwise, it will forevermore remain a possibility. This can be misconstrued from the outside as though scientists are trying to impose some sort of arbitrary laws on humankind. But the only way to eventually prove a theory wrong is to use it as an "assumption" and try to show that using that assumption produces contradictions. This doesn't always result in the theory being thrown away, though... usually, it's tweaked until a consistent result is produced. With evolution, the theory get tweaked constantly because, one, it's a complex field with lots of unknowns, and two, we still don't have that time machine (dangit).;)
Newton's theories were "tweaked" (though they were tweaked in a big way;) by Einstein. Even shuttle engineers largely depend on Newton's version of events because, quite frankly, it's close enough for government work. Since trying to find solutions to Einstein's equations can be a pain even for a computer to solve expediently and it doesn't amount to much difference in the real world anyways, it's just easier for the computer (or shuttle pilots) to make corrections on the fly as the result of any error.
Things like multiverse theory tend to strike people as strange and "unprovable" since we can't see them, just like we can't go back in time to see proto-humans wandering the African plains a million years back. But, when we look at things as simple as radioactive atom decay, the eveidence stares one in the face: It's impossible to determine when an atom *will* decay, so therefore it must be possible that it could decay at any time. And stemming from that, it's possible that there are different versions of reality in which an atom will decay at different
Hm, after reading my post, I noticed that I tend to rant after a few beers. Come to think of it, I tend to rant *before* a few beers, too. Ah, such is my lot in life.;^)
Yes, these arguments against OSS will make their rounds... too many well-funded players with vested interests, yada yada yada. But, I think this issue has been beaten to death already... besides I think this article scrolled off the main Slashdot page anyways.
The problem I have with this kind of argument is this: You want to labnel me as "liberal" or "conservative". Guess what? I'm one of those "middle of the road" people that extremists hate. I make decisions on my own.
Yup I disagree with conservatives. I disagree with liberals. I agree with conservatives. I agreee with liberals. What this ammounts to is: I think Ann Coultier and Bill O'Reilly are idiots who make good arguments at times. Same with Bill Clinton and Barbara Streisand. Sometimes, though, they say stuff that actually amounts to an intelligence behind their ideologies. It's rare, but it happens.
Now, to go back on-topic...
What do I think of this action by these folks who are claiming that Open Source is a threat to National Security(tm)? Nothing. I clicked on the comments here to see what people are thinking about this matter on an intellectual level. NOT an ideological level.
So, some people are raising a raucus in Washington. This happens all the time. Heck, it wasn't a few years ago when Microsoft faced a fate worse than this. In all honesty, I think Open Source got off lucky politically speaking over the past dozen years or so. And I'm glad to see it. Proprietary software needed its kick in the pants. That's not to say the Free Software movement (and its corporate-friendly equivalent, Open Source) needs the occasional kick too. But for these folks to be taken seriously, more than well-paid lobbyists will be able to make a difference.
Ideology goes three inches and a neutrino's width with me. Case closed.
(P.S. back from 3 years away from Slashdot, BTW... hoo-yeah:)
I took a class on Awk and Sed, and came out of it proclaiming Perl as the ultimate solution. It seemed that awk and sed came with a few shortcomings that perl easily overcame (take square brackets for example... awk seemed a little inadequate in handling those).
One tool to replace two. Hey, seemed straightforward to me!
I'm frankly somewhat worried about the titles of the parts: I could sort of see the Messiah one (and it might be interesting to be trying to save someone other than yourself), but the Children of Dune one is just too much. I don't want to know how that guy ends up with children...
Well let's put it this way:
Paul turned out to be a megalomaniac who ended up (ultimately) getting himself into deeper water than he could swim in. He couldn't handle the pressure of being "The Messiah", and eventually was banished into the desert of Dune because of his inability of dealing with the very Jihad he himself created.
His son, named Leto II (not to be confused with the child that was killed off in the original book [and movie]), ended up getting covered in sand trout and he eventually took over... for about 1500 years. *That* guy turned out to be a major son of a bitch as far as controlling the universe goes.
At any rate, read the books... they are *very* interesting, but you run into the danger of getting an inferiority complex since Frank Herbert's writing tens to be condescending to begin with. Add that to the fact that all he wrote about were super-human beings who denegrated the "Regular" human race at every turn, and what you get is a rather depressing outlook on life.
I am curious. How does one learn more from text config files than by using a GUI. Is it because it takes longer, so you get more exposure to the product? That doesn't seem right.
Well, my experience with IIS is a bit limited, not because I haven't had exposure to it, but it such a "easy-to-use" product once you start doing some of the more complicated tasks it gets too frustrating to use properly.
Think of it this way. I used to program religously in BASIC. Nowadays I stick to Perl, even though by most definitions Perl is "harder" to learn (which I agree with; I've used both extensively throughout my life). However, once you start doing tasks that are more complicated than the examples you find in the "Learning BASIC 101" tutorial books you realize that BASIC isn't as easy to use as you thought initially, since you start concentrating more on the "workarounds" rather that your code. Perl, as Larry Wall put it, "makes the easy job easy and the hard jobs possible". BASIC just does a good job of making the hard jobs a programming (and sometimes managerial) nightmare.
When you have something like IIS, it appears to be easier because the first ten "easy" tasks you can think of to do with it are so simple. But the bugger is when you try to bend it in ways Microsoft never really intended. Thus, your stuck.
<tongue_in_cheek>
Ah, yes; IIS, the web server for illiterates.
</tongue_in_cheek>
Seriously, IIS is not nearly as flexible or useful a general tool like Apache is. Look at the book. Feel the power. Get away from those pretty useless buttons and dialog boxes. You don't learn anything from them.
I've jumped between a bunch of programming languages when doing OO programming. Perl's way of doing things is more flexible than any other language I've seen. But if you want hard-core rules, well you can do one of two things:
Program in C++ or Java or Python. No one's holding a gun to your head.
Enforce the rules set out by the excellent documentation out there. It ain't that hard.
Python, while kind of neat, is too hard-set in its rules. Perl is more like the Jazz of programming languages. Python is sort of like, well, classical music. I like Jazz better BTW:^)
I want to see more of these types of arguments. In all the time I've heard of HURD, I've never actually heard its technical merits.
C'mon guys. Convince the unwashed masses. Give Linus Torvalds a run for his money. Prove him wrong and Tannenbaum right for once. Hey, it just might work.
They are required by law to do so. If they call you again, I believe you can do nasty damage to them in the form of a lawsuit.
Anybody got more info on this?
Do you also blame people for putting locks on their doors?
No, but when people start installing locks on my doors for me without my permission and lobbies for laws that let them arbitrarily change the lock whenever they so choose, *then* I start raising hell.
I think we have a case of weakness on your part, not 'addiction.'
My, aren't we self-righteous.:^P
Seriously, if you don't think smoking is an "addiction", I challenge you to start smoking, *then* quit. And I don't want to hear some cop-out excuse like "Oh I'd never start smoking; I'm too smart." I can assure you, you are never too smart to fall into a nasty bad habit. No one is that smart. Not even you or I.;^)
So, to make sure the lawyers get their pound of tasty flesh, all companies that choose to sell tobbacco (even a brand new company which has never done anything wrong) must pay into the settlement escrow. That way, all companies that sell tobbacco have the same costs, allowing companies to fix prices on cigarettes to guarantee a steady profit to pay the settlement. All this money comes out of the pockets of the smokers... mostly working-class chumps who got addicted when they were 12 or 13.
What kind of criterion do you use when you say "a brand new [tobacco] company which has never done anything wrong"?
Disclaimer: I am a smoker. I don't like the fact that I smoke, but all my quitting attempts have so far been unsuccessful. This is the reason why I don't think tobacco products should be sold. A government-enforced ban on smoking would probably be the best thing to happen to me in my life.
My (less than thourough) experience suggests that the tools under Wondows you just mentioned aren't as feature-rich or as stable under Redmond's OS than they are in Linux. Yes it's nice they exist, but they aren't the panacea we Linux and Unix developers have been looking for under Win32.
Slashdot Mirror
But then again, I could be rambling incoherently and am just killing time after work waiting for Adult Swim to start on Comedy Central tonight. :)
Er, I meant "Cartoon Network". Silly brain farts.
Your premise is not without merit, though your conclusion is a bit farfetched. :^)
:)
I think that there will probably be a peak in the number of supernovaes per year (if it already hasn't happened). Over time, though, what will happen is that galaxies will age, resulting in fewer, more longer-lived stars (and possibly black holes). In other words, give it several hundred billion years, and most of what's left of the universe will be populated by very small red dwarves and super-dense objects. A few trillion years further out, and these will start to die out too.
What happens after that? I don't know. One possibility is that the electromagnetic force will bifurcate into two distinct forces, and the nature of the universe will change at very fundamental levels, causing any predictions about what will happen in the distant future to be completely off-mark.
But then again, I could be rambling incoherently and am just killing time after work waiting for Adult Swim to start on Comedy Central tonight.
My comment was made in jest, though I can understand the seriousness of even doing this as a hobby.
/tee-hee-hee :)
Me, personally, I would love to be a hobbyist astronaut. Now THAT would be fun to brag about (and can you imagine the lookup tables for THAT!?).
DANG! If this is what you do as a hobbyist, I hate to see what the pros do. :^)
I may not be a lawyer (be prepared for an uninformed opinion here), but I think the "lack of enforcement" point can in fact be a pretty convincing argument in the court. Countless companies and individuals have lost rights to copyrights and trademarks due to various circumstances. The obvious example that comes to my mind is the Beyer/Aspirin example (though admittedly that's a trademark example and not a copyright example). Also, a license does not equate law. It's really up to the courts to decide whether or not the "non-enforcement" clauses from NDAs really apply in the land of lawyers. Another chink in the armor of this argument is, how long has this "non-enforcement" been willingly committed? These unknown questions and answers will play themselves out, I suppose, over the next several months, at least.
Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
If I release some written piece of work, but neglect to even bother to pursue copyright infringement for 10 years even though I posessed full knowledge of said infringement, does that count as "letting someone use it?" I don't know the answer to that one, but I do wonder.
I can hear the SCO execs and lawyers now: "See? They DID steal our code, now they're trying to find a loophole!"
Um, it would be irresponsible for copyright holders to not protect their property. What all this seemingly unimportant arguing is all about is protecting a copyrighted work (though it is a nebulously "owned" work, it is copyrighted nonetheless). It would seem that in the end the Linux code would be in worse shape legally speaking if everybody just let the chips fall where they may. Protecting intellectual property rights is a sign of strength, not weakness.
WRONG. Junior people don't *buy* those shirts. They'd prefer to get them for free as some sort of promotional thing or something :^)
You ought to work tech support some time. There are real costs associated with software bugs. These costs are measured. Many times these costs are measured more meticulously than software vendors would like to admit. There are more organizations than you might realize that purposely delay software deployments to make sure that they do not ruin their technology infrastructure. Often times, when I work with a senior admin within the organization, I find they are the "NO" people. "No", we will not apply that patch unless you prove to us it will fix the problem. "No", we will not apply that patch unless you prove it won't introduce new problems. And, in the case that there are unforeseen complications in a software upgrade, guess who gets the heat? Directly, it's the senior admins. Both directly and indirectly, it's the software vendor. Bad publicity == lost sales. Ask any sales person (technical or non-technical).
Of course, I'm at the end of the equation where these costs are realized after the fact. Also, I think that since I come from the Unix world, I've seen more preference towards quality over quantity. Unix-oriented orgs are much more cautious than Windows-oriented orgs. I attribute this to lack of experience in that market, but the way things are going, experience is not in short supply. Bugs and security breaches are costing companies in real dollors nowadays, and commercial and gov't organizations are not ignorant of this fact, even at the high echelon levels.
For proof, look at Microsoft. I certainly remember reading that they decided to go for a company-wide code freeze to resolve bugs and security issues. This code freeze lasted for SIX MONTHS. That's a HUGE risk for a software company. Also, there's that whole trillion dollor fine against the company thing, too, that's been circulating a bit lately. It also undermines any arguments based on "customers are lemmings that will buy anything we dangle in front of them". Maybe the fact that features outweighed stability was true during the dot-com boom. I think it's definitely less true now, by a significant degree.
Consumers, in the COTS context, don't mind "planned obsolescence" in their software. The current state of things proves this. People would rather have pretty features on a flaky system, than a solid system.
;^)
This is not necessarily true... it's a bad generalization besides. Most people I work with in the IT industry would give their arm, leg, spleen, right lung, part of their left lung, lower intestine, and maybe even their occipital lobes for a reliable system that WORKS. Features are secondary.
The "features over stability" myth is just that: a myth. Show me an admin that prefers only the latest and greatest in "features" and I'll show you an admin that will lose all her/his hair within six months (a little after all their hair turns white).
Well, ok, I work primarily with IT people admittedly. Perhaps the folks in management are a little different. But I've noticed that IT people have ways of making management's lives miserable (in ways that are downright creative) when a bad decision is made with software purchases. I've done it, myself.
The scientific method simply denies the existence of "laws", as you've put it. Theories do tend to get disproven, or modified over time. Cases in point:
;)
;) by Einstein. Even shuttle engineers largely depend on Newton's version of events because, quite frankly, it's close enough for government work. Since trying to find solutions to Einstein's equations can be a pain even for a computer to solve expediently and it doesn't amount to much difference in the real world anyways, it's just easier for the computer (or shuttle pilots) to make corrections on the fly as the result of any error.
Newton created a model of how gravity works. Einstein proved Newton "wrong" with the general theory of relativity (I actually know little about the general theory of relativity, but am pretty familiar with the special theory of relativity; the latter being a subset of the former). But, when shuttle astronauts go up into space and use their computers to plot their trajectory, which do they use, Newton's equations or Einstein's? Newton's theory was slightly innaccurate (increasingly so as local space-time curvature and/or relative velocity increases), but even at the high velocities that space crafts obtain compared to the earth's position Einstein's "adjustments" to Newton's equations don't amount to any practically measurable effect. Since the overhead of computing Einstein's equations is much higher than computing Newton's equations, the astronomers stick to Newton's equations.
What was the point to the above gobble-dee-gook? Newton was assumed to be "right" for a few centuries before a smart German guy figured out that he was a bit off in the final picture.
Since Einstein, many of his theories have been modified, prodded, poked, measured, etc. Like Newton before him, Einstein has been shown to be "mostly" right.
Now, if you're a Creationist (and I suspect you are judging from the nature of your argument), this looks like an Achille's heel for Science. "Well," you huff, "you can't PROVE that men evolved from primitive apes because where's the EVIDENCE?" Well, there's lots of evidence. I'll even dare to bring up the evil swear word of creationists: FOSSILS. Of course, it's easy for the non-scientific to ignore the evidence in front of them. Those of us who actually learn the tenets of the scientific method and the methodology of sensible logic (they teach these things in schools and colleges, incidentally) know that when the evidence is staring you in the face and points to a conclusion that is feasible and sensible, then it would be preposterous to simply ignore that evidence and sweep the conclusion under the rug as if nothing happened. Rather, the conclusion needs to be disproven. Otherwise, it will forevermore remain a possibility. This can be misconstrued from the outside as though scientists are trying to impose some sort of arbitrary laws on humankind. But the only way to eventually prove a theory wrong is to use it as an "assumption" and try to show that using that assumption produces contradictions. This doesn't always result in the theory being thrown away, though... usually, it's tweaked until a consistent result is produced. With evolution, the theory get tweaked constantly because, one, it's a complex field with lots of unknowns, and two, we still don't have that time machine (dangit).
Newton's theories were "tweaked" (though they were tweaked in a big way
Things like multiverse theory tend to strike people as strange and "unprovable" since we can't see them, just like we can't go back in time to see proto-humans wandering the African plains a million years back. But, when we look at things as simple as radioactive atom decay, the eveidence stares one in the face: It's impossible to determine when an atom *will* decay, so therefore it must be possible that it could decay at any time. And stemming from that, it's possible that there are different versions of reality in which an atom will decay at different
Hm, after reading my post, I noticed that I tend to rant after a few beers. Come to think of it, I tend to rant *before* a few beers, too. Ah, such is my lot in life. ;^)
Yes, these arguments against OSS will make their rounds... too many well-funded players with vested interests, yada yada yada. But, I think this issue has been beaten to death already... besides I think this article scrolled off the main Slashdot page anyways.
The problem I have with this kind of argument is this: You want to labnel me as "liberal" or "conservative". Guess what? I'm one of those "middle of the road" people that extremists hate. I make decisions on my own.
:)
Yup I disagree with conservatives. I disagree with liberals. I agree with conservatives. I agreee with liberals. What this ammounts to is: I think Ann Coultier and Bill O'Reilly are idiots who make good arguments at times. Same with Bill Clinton and Barbara Streisand. Sometimes, though, they say stuff that actually amounts to an intelligence behind their ideologies. It's rare, but it happens.
Now, to go back on-topic...
What do I think of this action by these folks who are claiming that Open Source is a threat to National Security(tm)? Nothing. I clicked on the comments here to see what people are thinking about this matter on an intellectual level. NOT an ideological level.
So, some people are raising a raucus in Washington. This happens all the time. Heck, it wasn't a few years ago when Microsoft faced a fate worse than this. In all honesty, I think Open Source got off lucky politically speaking over the past dozen years or so. And I'm glad to see it. Proprietary software needed its kick in the pants. That's not to say the Free Software movement (and its corporate-friendly equivalent, Open Source) needs the occasional kick too. But for these folks to be taken seriously, more than well-paid lobbyists will be able to make a difference.
Ideology goes three inches and a neutrino's width with me. Case closed.
(P.S. back from 3 years away from Slashdot, BTW... hoo-yeah
Um, it took me to the NOVA web page.
Mod this reply down please.
I took a class on Awk and Sed, and came out of it proclaiming Perl as the ultimate solution. It seemed that awk and sed came with a few shortcomings that perl easily overcame (take square brackets for example... awk seemed a little inadequate in handling those).
One tool to replace two. Hey, seemed straightforward to me!
I'm frankly somewhat worried about the titles of the parts: I could sort of see the Messiah one (and it might be interesting to be trying to save someone other than yourself), but the Children of Dune one is just too much. I don't want to know how that guy ends up with children...
Well let's put it this way:
Paul turned out to be a megalomaniac who ended up (ultimately) getting himself into deeper water than he could swim in. He couldn't handle the pressure of being "The Messiah", and eventually was banished into the desert of Dune because of his inability of dealing with the very Jihad he himself created.
His son, named Leto II (not to be confused with the child that was killed off in the original book [and movie]), ended up getting covered in sand trout and he eventually took over... for about 1500 years. *That* guy turned out to be a major son of a bitch as far as controlling the universe goes.
At any rate, read the books... they are *very* interesting, but you run into the danger of getting an inferiority complex since Frank Herbert's writing tens to be condescending to begin with. Add that to the fact that all he wrote about were super-human beings who denegrated the "Regular" human race at every turn, and what you get is a rather depressing outlook on life.
There's my 2 cent version of a book review. :)
I am curious. How does one learn more from text config files than by using a GUI. Is it because it takes longer, so you get more exposure to the product? That doesn't seem right.
Well, my experience with IIS is a bit limited, not because I haven't had exposure to it, but it such a "easy-to-use" product once you start doing some of the more complicated tasks it gets too frustrating to use properly.
Think of it this way. I used to program religously in BASIC. Nowadays I stick to Perl, even though by most definitions Perl is "harder" to learn (which I agree with; I've used both extensively throughout my life). However, once you start doing tasks that are more complicated than the examples you find in the "Learning BASIC 101" tutorial books you realize that BASIC isn't as easy to use as you thought initially, since you start concentrating more on the "workarounds" rather that your code. Perl, as Larry Wall put it, "makes the easy job easy and the hard jobs possible". BASIC just does a good job of making the hard jobs a programming (and sometimes managerial) nightmare.
When you have something like IIS, it appears to be easier because the first ten "easy" tasks you can think of to do with it are so simple. But the bugger is when you try to bend it in ways Microsoft never really intended. Thus, your stuck.
Anyways those are my two cents.
<tongue_in_cheek>
Ah, yes; IIS, the web server for illiterates.
</tongue_in_cheek>
Seriously, IIS is not nearly as flexible or useful a general tool like Apache is. Look at the book. Feel the power. Get away from those pretty useless buttons and dialog boxes. You don't learn anything from them.
I've jumped between a bunch of programming languages when doing OO programming. Perl's way of doing things is more flexible than any other language I've seen. But if you want hard-core rules, well you can do one of two things:
Python, while kind of neat, is too hard-set in its rules. Perl is more like the Jazz of programming languages. Python is sort of like, well, classical music. I like Jazz better BTW :^)
I want to see more of these types of arguments. In all the time I've heard of HURD, I've never actually heard its technical merits.
C'mon guys. Convince the unwashed masses. Give Linus Torvalds a run for his money. Prove him wrong and Tannenbaum right for once. Hey, it just might work.
They are required by law to do so. If they call you again, I believe you can do nasty damage to them in the form of a lawsuit. Anybody got more info on this?
um... YY males????
Missing a bit of genetic information there, aren't we? (A Y chromosome is an X chromosome with a leg missing).
Do you also blame people for putting locks on their doors?
No, but when people start installing locks on my doors for me without my permission and lobbies for laws that let them arbitrarily change the lock whenever they so choose, *then* I start raising hell.
I think we have a case of weakness on your part, not 'addiction.'
My, aren't we self-righteous. :^P
Seriously, if you don't think smoking is an "addiction", I challenge you to start smoking, *then* quit. And I don't want to hear some cop-out excuse like "Oh I'd never start smoking; I'm too smart." I can assure you, you are never too smart to fall into a nasty bad habit. No one is that smart. Not even you or I. ;^)
So, to make sure the lawyers get their pound of tasty flesh, all companies that choose to sell tobbacco (even a brand new company which has never done anything wrong) must pay into the settlement escrow. That way, all companies that sell tobbacco have the same costs, allowing companies to fix prices on cigarettes to guarantee a steady profit to pay the settlement. All this money comes out of the pockets of the smokers... mostly working-class chumps who got addicted when they were 12 or 13.
What kind of criterion do you use when you say "a brand new [tobacco] company which has never done anything wrong"?
Disclaimer: I am a smoker. I don't like the fact that I smoke, but all my quitting attempts have so far been unsuccessful. This is the reason why I don't think tobacco products should be sold. A government-enforced ban on smoking would probably be the best thing to happen to me in my life.
Have you tried Mortice kern Systems Toolkit under Windows. Open up a command prompt, type "sh" and your in the Korne shell, will be almost like home.
The key here being "almost". Windows with a pretty ksh face on it is still Windows. :^P
In my opinion every operating system sucks in proportion to the amount of time you spend using it
In my opinion every operating system sucks in proportion to the amount of time it spends using you
My (less than thourough) experience suggests that the tools under Wondows you just mentioned aren't as feature-rich or as stable under Redmond's OS than they are in Linux. Yes it's nice they exist, but they aren't the panacea we Linux and Unix developers have been looking for under Win32.