It's an amalgam of both. You can still screw up a mainframe environment just fine, which is why I suggested to the OP that the people at his company might be idiots.
I understand what you're saying, but think about it a bit more and it makes no sense whatsoever. Remember where desktop Linux was back when ACPI was first released. Do you think Microsoft felt threatened by that?
Microsoft may be guilty of caring only about their platform, but that in and of itself does not make them guilty of trying to "sabotage" others. At least not in this particular context.
twitter does not reply when you hand him his ass on a plate, unless he has a name troll for he can use to insult you. And if you're not careful, he'll just create one. And then claim you threatened him with most foul death.
We've done this before, with the same expected results.
Heh. Think about this: At a former client of mine (your typical $LARGE_CORP) they had three physical boxes, I forget how many sysplexes and a number of LPAR instances. Two LPARs (one each ona separate physical box) where responsible for production (one hot, one spare). Between them they had something like seven years of actual service uptime.
I'll never cease to be amazed at that culture and how different it is from ours. Changing a network card (or whatever) on those things required a gaggle of IBM consultants ($230/hr baby), three months of planning and a budget that would put most of my projects to shame.
Still, you have to sit there in awe when one of those old farts tells you about how they can swap out processors without shutting down the machine.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's ASL compiler allows many of these errors and warnings to sneak by.
It's a well-known fact that you never use Microsoft's compiler if you need ACPI to work under Linux. That's what the Intel compiler exists for. I will grant you that laptop vendors might simply use Microsoft's compiler because "it works" (barely), but until very recently they had no reason or incentive to cater to Linux. However, had they wished to do so, they had a readily available option. I'm pretty sure Dell is not using it for their Ubuntu laptops.
as was the case with FoxConn mainboard
That's a completely different problem, a vendor specifically excluding power management support for Linux. Once enabled with a simple BIOS hack, everything worked correctly.
I recall them trying to pay a premium to sysadmins who convince their bosses to buy MS-products
Well, I can answer the reason why ACPI works "so well" on Windows.
Actually, in my experience it's as big a crapshoot as it is on Linux. It depends entirely who you purchased your laptop from. IBM Thinkpads seem to work most of the time, Toshiba not so much. Sony Vaios are completely broken under any OS.
maybe it's just a crappy standard
It *is* a crappy standard. But that has nothing to do with sabotage or any other conspiracy theories.
If this is an issue, then you are in the wrong profession or using the wrong development environment.
I know you're one of the XEmacs developers, and as such you have my respect. But I wonder how well you'd fare if I dropped you in a completely unfamiliar language with a completely unfamiliar runtime. You can be the best damn developer in the world, it's still going to take time for you to adapt to the new environment. There's no way you're not going to be fully productive inside of three weeks. You might grok the language quickly, you might get a hang of where everything is in the library in a few weeks, but domain knowledge, the point where you can actually do something productive with the platform, that takes time. No matter how awesome you are.
After reading your journal entry, I'm a little confused on how you believe Microsoft "intentionally sabotaged" power management under Linux? Of all the evidence presented in the Iowa case, surely you have something more specific than an email that proves nothing at all other than Bill Gates' reluctance to release something for free?
Also, if your claim that Microsoft somehow crippled ACPI (and/or APM) to hurt Linux... how come ACPI works as well (or as badly, depending on your hardware) as it does on Windows? Specifically, if Microsoft, *BSD and Linux all implement the same open standard, how is that intentional sabotage by "M$"?
And, going back to your journal entry, I see you never did reply to any of the posts that challenge your interpretation of this problem. Why is that?
there's very little that's genuinely "new" in any language, it's just a question of the subset of things you're already familiar with that happen to be included in X language.
Yes, this is a key point. All modern all well-established runtimes provide effectively the same set of services. Zip up some files, create an HTTP request to download a file, parse a command line. The trick is to become accustomed to "the way it's done" for your platform (and here by platform I mean language+runtime library+VM as applicable). Being able to find where everything is and how things interoperate in the context of whatever it is you're writing for fun or profit.
After many years of COM-based VB and C++ code, I started to learn Python during my transition to.NET back in 2001-2002. I consider myself a relatively good software developer, and I estimate that it took me about a year of constant C#/.NET usage and slightly more for Python to get to the point where I felt comfortable creating professional (i.e., pay the bills), full-fledged solutions with them.
Learning a language's syntax takes three days. Domain knowledge of the platform and runtime you're coding against with said language is typically a slow process, no matter how good a coder you happen to be.
At first I thought wow, a book to write CMSs in PHP, that's a fresh idea. Admittedly PHP has been used to write a great majority of content management systems in use today. More so if you include things like forums in the category. It seems like every developer's first non-trivial PHP project is a CMS of some sort.
But if this book is good enough to formalize the various basic elements of a content management system and present ways to implement them effectively (read: best practices) then I suppose it could be considered valuable. I hope it includes a really big chapter on how to properly use your RDBMS to avoid SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Still, I think a lot of detail is missing from the review. For example, the mention of chapter 5 on how to organize data is not very detailed. Does the author discuss entity models, for example? And when to use them or avoid them? On security, are non-permissive grant matrices discussed? Or alternatives to them? And how they can tie into an entity model, if you're using one? What about more esoteric identity management, like single sign-on systems? Authentication and authorization techniques? What about environment configuration? Deployment?
I think that for a write up that's supposed to be consumed by developers, the reviewer omitted some crucial information that would help me decide whether or not the book is worth buying. The fact that the book is authored by "the guy that wrote the XYZ CMS" doesn't necessarily carry much weight, in my opinion.
Agreed, but even assuming you can become proficient in a given language quickly, there's usually a huge learning curve associated with the library(ies)/runtime. Not to mention the amount of time needed to arrive at the "this is how you actually do it" point for any language.
I can write a 20-line utility script in Perl or Scheme just fine. Applications are another matter.
Oh, I know it's there. It's not like I downloaded a tarball and built from source or anything like that. I installed it with apt-get.
It's just time-consuming to then switch/usr/bin/python to point to the new version, verify nothing else broke, etc. Especially considering 2.5 is almost two years old now.
But I understand this is a Debian thing, so I try not to complain about it too much =)
For me personally it's a pain in the butt to get Debian up to date with the things I need on there, which is trivial in CentOS. We're talking about latest versions of things like Python (Etch still ships with 2.4.x) and so on. Not impossible, just time consuming.
Slicehost offers Ubuntu as a server image option. Call me crazy but for some reason I just don't trust a desktop-oriented distro to run a dedicated server. Not to mention all the stuff included in the default install that I have no need for whatsoever. So short of Slackware, I went with Debian.
To the previous poster's point, which was clearly insightful, I'd know it's the Apple updater because of the big ass Apple logo on the dialog.
Somehow I thought this was understood to be clear, but usually complaints about things like UAC are made by people who've never even used Vista to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
MSFT closed at 23 for the week, with a high of 27 or so. Any comments? When is this collapse going to start?
It's an amalgam of both. You can still screw up a mainframe environment just fine, which is why I suggested to the OP that the people at his company might be idiots.
I have (enough of them, anyway), since the mid-90s. Never heard such a thing from any Microsoft employee.
I understand what you're saying, but think about it a bit more and it makes no sense whatsoever. Remember where desktop Linux was back when ACPI was first released. Do you think Microsoft felt threatened by that?
Microsoft may be guilty of caring only about their platform, but that in and of itself does not make them guilty of trying to "sabotage" others. At least not in this particular context.
But like you say, that's just my opinion :)
twitter does not reply when you hand him his ass on a plate, unless he has a name troll for he can use to insult you. And if you're not careful, he'll just create one. And then claim you threatened him with most foul death.
We've done this before, with the same expected results.
Heh. Think about this: At a former client of mine (your typical $LARGE_CORP) they had three physical boxes, I forget how many sysplexes and a number of LPAR instances. Two LPARs (one each ona separate physical box) where responsible for production (one hot, one spare). Between them they had something like seven years of actual service uptime.
I'll never cease to be amazed at that culture and how different it is from ours. Changing a network card (or whatever) on those things required a gaggle of IBM consultants ($230/hr baby), three months of planning and a budget that would put most of my projects to shame.
Still, you have to sit there in awe when one of those old farts tells you about how they can swap out processors without shutting down the machine.
With all due respect, your mainframe people must be idiots. Nothing comes close to big iron in terms of processing capabilities and uptime.
I bought three cases of that, you insensitive clod!
What we need is a pervasive set of net goggles. Your ISP should provide this service, methinks.
It's a well-known fact that you never use Microsoft's compiler if you need ACPI to work under Linux. That's what the Intel compiler exists for. I will grant you that laptop vendors might simply use Microsoft's compiler because "it works" (barely), but until very recently they had no reason or incentive to cater to Linux. However, had they wished to do so, they had a readily available option. I'm pretty sure Dell is not using it for their Ubuntu laptops.
That's a completely different problem, a vendor specifically excluding power management support for Linux. Once enabled with a simple BIOS hack, everything worked correctly.
I fail to see how that is relevant here at all.
Actually, in my experience it's as big a crapshoot as it is on Linux. It depends entirely who you purchased your laptop from. IBM Thinkpads seem to work most of the time, Toshiba not so much. Sony Vaios are completely broken under any OS.
It *is* a crappy standard. But that has nothing to do with sabotage or any other conspiracy theories.
I know you're one of the XEmacs developers, and as such you have my respect. But I wonder how well you'd fare if I dropped you in a completely unfamiliar language with a completely unfamiliar runtime. You can be the best damn developer in the world, it's still going to take time for you to adapt to the new environment. There's no way you're not going to be fully productive inside of three weeks. You might grok the language quickly, you might get a hang of where everything is in the library in a few weeks, but domain knowledge, the point where you can actually do something productive with the platform, that takes time. No matter how awesome you are.
After reading your journal entry, I'm a little confused on how you believe Microsoft "intentionally sabotaged" power management under Linux? Of all the evidence presented in the Iowa case, surely you have something more specific than an email that proves nothing at all other than Bill Gates' reluctance to release something for free?
Also, if your claim that Microsoft somehow crippled ACPI (and/or APM) to hurt Linux... how come ACPI works as well (or as badly, depending on your hardware) as it does on Windows? Specifically, if Microsoft, *BSD and Linux all implement the same open standard, how is that intentional sabotage by "M$"?
And, going back to your journal entry, I see you never did reply to any of the posts that challenge your interpretation of this problem. Why is that?
Yes, this is a key point. All modern all well-established runtimes provide effectively the same set of services. Zip up some files, create an HTTP request to download a file, parse a command line. The trick is to become accustomed to "the way it's done" for your platform (and here by platform I mean language+runtime library+VM as applicable). Being able to find where everything is and how things interoperate in the context of whatever it is you're writing for fun or profit.
After many years of COM-based VB and C++ code, I started to learn Python during my transition to .NET back in 2001-2002. I consider myself a relatively good software developer, and I estimate that it took me about a year of constant C#/.NET usage and slightly more for Python to get to the point where I felt comfortable creating professional (i.e., pay the bills), full-fledged solutions with them.
Learning a language's syntax takes three days. Domain knowledge of the platform and runtime you're coding against with said language is typically a slow process, no matter how good a coder you happen to be.
At first I thought wow, a book to write CMSs in PHP, that's a fresh idea. Admittedly PHP has been used to write a great majority of content management systems in use today. More so if you include things like forums in the category. It seems like every developer's first non-trivial PHP project is a CMS of some sort.
But if this book is good enough to formalize the various basic elements of a content management system and present ways to implement them effectively (read: best practices) then I suppose it could be considered valuable. I hope it includes a really big chapter on how to properly use your RDBMS to avoid SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Still, I think a lot of detail is missing from the review. For example, the mention of chapter 5 on how to organize data is not very detailed. Does the author discuss entity models, for example? And when to use them or avoid them? On security, are non-permissive grant matrices discussed? Or alternatives to them? And how they can tie into an entity model, if you're using one? What about more esoteric identity management, like single sign-on systems? Authentication and authorization techniques? What about environment configuration? Deployment?
I think that for a write up that's supposed to be consumed by developers, the reviewer omitted some crucial information that would help me decide whether or not the book is worth buying. The fact that the book is authored by "the guy that wrote the XYZ CMS" doesn't necessarily carry much weight, in my opinion.
Agreed, but even assuming you can become proficient in a given language quickly, there's usually a huge learning curve associated with the library(ies)/runtime. Not to mention the amount of time needed to arrive at the "this is how you actually do it" point for any language.
I can write a 20-line utility script in Perl or Scheme just fine. Applications are another matter.
I'm sure that will become reality, just like all your other "M$" predictions.
But we'll revisit this later, for the lulz.
Oh, I know it's there. It's not like I downloaded a tarball and built from source or anything like that. I installed it with apt-get.
It's just time-consuming to then switch /usr/bin/python to point to the new version, verify nothing else broke, etc. Especially considering 2.5 is almost two years old now.
But I understand this is a Debian thing, so I try not to complain about it too much =)
I recently switched from CentOS to Etch.
For me personally it's a pain in the butt to get Debian up to date with the things I need on there, which is trivial in CentOS. We're talking about latest versions of things like Python (Etch still ships with 2.4.x) and so on. Not impossible, just time consuming.
Slicehost offers Ubuntu as a server image option. Call me crazy but for some reason I just don't trust a desktop-oriented distro to run a dedicated server. Not to mention all the stuff included in the default install that I have no need for whatsoever. So short of Slackware, I went with Debian.
So far so good.
Some of those bugs are trivial (some are even documentation-related), so I doubt they are *all* blocking at this point.
It seems "the soft" are doing quite well today. But I'm sure you'll blame that on the markets recovering, of course.
Yes, but surely it's incapable of putting up a string that reads ~/usr/bin/synaptic.
To the previous poster's point, which was clearly insightful, I'd know it's the Apple updater because of the big ass Apple logo on the dialog.
Somehow I thought this was understood to be clear, but usually complaints about things like UAC are made by people who've never even used Vista to begin with.
How do you know that it's kdesudo prompting you when you run Synaptic or pulling up the network interface dialog?
If you allowed "malware" into your system to begin with, it's game over anyway.
Isn't that mostly obvious from the context of the action that caused the dialog to appear?