I think it is fairly clear what their problem is. Linux is being developed openly, at no cost to resellers, apart from what they decide to contribute themselves. SCO, on the other hand, needs a large -- and expensive -- staff to produce their OS. This means that Red Hat, Caldera et. al. can resell the system at a price point that would be suicidal for SCO. It seems fairly clear that they have no problem with Linux as a hackers toy, but deeply resent the fact that Linux is eating away the same market segment they are in.
I would'nt be too suprised if SCO tried attacking the Linux distributors legally, claiming that they have unfair advantage in the marketplace. Don't think they could win such a suit, but it would probably slow the adoption of Linux during the legal proceedings.
OK, you like Debian -- and with good reason from what I hear about the distribution. But there is always the risk that preference for one item will cloud the judgement for other.
I have RH5.2 installed on two machines, and we have a couple more in the lab where I work. I have never had any RPM related problems with anything from Red Hat; contributed RPMs are of course different, and they do not claim that they in fact are installable on anything. caveat installator as they probably did not say in ancient Rome.
As for why none of us run Debian, it is simply because Debian is positioning itself as a hackers' distribution; in the docs it seems to be a source of pride that there is little in the way of system configuration tools and the like. We use our machines for work, and need to spend as little time as possible coddling with our computers. When I get a new machine at home, I do plan on trying Debian, though.
Re: You don't need to be a lawyer...
on
APSL 1.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Whoa, slow down there. Apple is a company, and as such it has one and only one obligation: make its owners happy with it. If the owners want maximal profits, that's what it will strive for. If the owner's goal is to have all employees dressed for the ballet, Apple will order tutus. It would actually be immoral, and possibly illegal, not to have its owners best interests at heart. And this goes not only for Apple, but for every company, from IBM to the corner deli. Who are the owners? Why, the stockholders of course. What's the reason to buy stock? To get a return on your investments. Thus Apple (and every other company) will do all it can to make that happen.
If you do not trust Apple, or do not like the APSL, the answer is simple: don't develop for it.
But Gnome is not necessarily tied to Linux... You can (if my memory servers) surn it on xBSD and Solaris as well.
Better to leave the entire GNU/Linux thing out. Just the foot; that ought to be enough.
As for Slashdot shirts, I would like a design on a black shirt of a 'slashdot green' circle with a white, somewhat blurry/. in the center.
Difference between types of filtering
on
ShutUp Software
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· Score: 1
I think we have to distinguish between two major types of filtering, one of which is good (and will become incresingly necessary as net use grows), and one that is a Bad Thing.
Good filters are those you as a user have chosen yourself -- you know what you are filtering and you know what you are filtering. Most filters, like killfiles, scoring threshold on/., banner removal proxies a'la JunkBuster (I love that program!), etc. are fine for me, as I know what content I am removing. There are plenty other techniques that would also qualify as filters; when a mail gets sorted into my 'maybe take a look at it someday' bin, I perform a powerful form of filtering to separate what mail I think is important from my perceived junk. Just as with killfiles and banners, I might (and sometimes do) miss stuff that could have been useful for me, but it is a chance I am prepared to take.
In contrast, NetNanny and the like function on the premise that "they" (PTA or whoever) know better than you do yourself what you should see. For all practical purposes you have relegated the responsibilities of a part of your own life to another party -- and one who does not have the same goals for your well-being as you do yourself. This could become especially distressing if such filters become mandatory for all public access points to the net; if you have the means, you can choose what ideas to be exposed to, if you do not (and have to rely on libraries or schools for net access), you will only get a selection deemed appropriate by somebody else. This is when it gets scary.
Can't really see the qualitative difference between that vision of the future and todays' millions of couchpotatoes that spend their entire workday in front of a machine (be it industrial equipment or a computer) and their entire free time in fron of a television. So lying still in bed surfing the net is little different from lying in the couch watching endless sitcoms.
People have at least the option to be active on the net. With television, the only activity is choosing the channel and getting fat on junk food.
Perl - for one-liners, filters and sundry one-shot stuff C - My language of choice. For most 'real' stuff. C++ - When I have to (like when my stuff is to be used with existing C++ code). SmallC - Use it to program the HC11 (together with assembler).
Generally, I find that languages that are themselves low on features (read: bells and whistles), but are easily extended through libraries are the easiest, most efficient to work with. With C++, you tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time second-guessing the compiler instead of working on your problem -- this of course depends on how much of the C++ features you actually use.
After graduation, I worked for a small software company for a period of four months, after which I quit and enrolled in graduate school. I thought at first it was just me not being able to handle a 'real' work environment. It turns out this company eats programmers and projectmanagers like popcorn - my four months were not much under the average for this place. By now people reading CompSci or systems design know about it, so they've resorted to advertising for people under other company names and to hire unschooled people (littel or no programming experience) to get employees...
This is one reason to get a degree (to connect this with an earlier post). While it certainly is true that you can land a great job in the industry without it, the base knowledge gained at a CompSci department or similar will last a lot longer than proficiency in whatever the latest buzzword technology, and it also makes it easier to live through a technology transition. While this is no panacea for obsolecence, it will make you employable longer than without it.
Then, of course, there's those of us skipping that race altogether by entering academia instead:)
I'm basically waiting for a player that can read CD-ROMs - having 650mb worth of MP3:s is a lot of music, and besides, I store all my MP3 files on CD-ROMs anyway.
As a Perl-lover, I don't find Perl to be ugly at all...
Well, I love Perl as well; I write in C or C++ only when I can't do it in Perl. It is one of the best things to appear on the net. I would marry the language if I could.
But, let's face it: as languages go, it is definitely homey. I would go so far as claiming it really is ugly. But then, who said good tools need to be beautiful...
Well, they didn't use the penguin for their Linux books, so they will probably not use a daemon for the BSD line... Interesting that they chose a wild west theme for Linux though -- wish they could squeeze a penguin into the covers somehow; I see Tux in a hat and poncho with a cigar in the beak sauntering up to the bar:)
Well, being a geek does not have to mean being obsessive about computers, and vice versa. Had a fellow student in CompSci that is married, plays golf on the weekends, likes to dress nice (wears a suit on the job) and has a number of interests not even remotely connected with technology. He is also one of the better programmers I've ever met.
On the other hand, someone being obsessively into physics or SciFi or medieval reenactments or whatever can be a prime specimen of geekdom withut ever using a computer.
[...]im assuming few people look at -1 posts (i for one dont)
Actually, I think it's pretty funny to lower my threshold now and then to see what I miss... It could be fun to have the option to collect the lowest scoring posts on a separate page -- sort of like a sideshow:-)
Bloody furby clones...
on
Robotic Dogs
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· Score: 1
It's NOT a furby clone, but a serious study of how to do the mechanics and electronics for four-legged robots. As I understand it, the fact that they made them look like dogs is just an added feature -- they have to look like something. With the pricetag they have, you won't see these in private homes anytime soon. For researchers, they offer a free loan of a unit provided you sign a non-disclosure agreement (we considered it, but it felt like too much of a hassle just to get another toy to play with in the lab).
You get memory leaks if you are lucky or segfaults if you are not.
Actually the other way around... I've worked as a C++ programmer under Windows (ugh!). A segfault is an obvious indication that something is wrong and will tell you where it occured, while a memory leak can go unnoticed for days or weeks of development and is a pain to track down. Give me segfaults over memory leaks everytime.
This just goes to show that the use and content of the information is an important factor when comparing information capacity. If I want to get a few hundred full-length movies delivered to my lonely marsian base, bandwidth is very important and latency is neglible. Playing Quake, the situation is reversed. What's needed is a measure that's abstract enough to discount these factors.
Interesting question. There is a real problem measuring bandwidth in preindustrial times. Let's say a cart fully loaded with codices; this would be the medieval analogue to the truckload of tapes. However, information was very rarely transported in this fashion, and never at the maximum speed. One example would be when Queen Kristina of Sweden abdicated and brought her library from Stockholm to Rome. She stopped at various places on the continent for over a year.
Probably a better measure would be a 'typical' message carried by a courier on horse and ship. Let's assume a typical royal decree to be 40 characters per line, 30 lines per page and 5 pages. This would give a message length of 6000 bytes. A messenger would rarely carry only one message, however - let's say our intrepid traveller carries an equivalent of forty decrees (he'd bring along letters, maybe a codex for a monastery and such as well). That gives a 'packet size' of around 250k.
Next, the travelling speed: If my memory serves, it would take three weeks between Copenhagen and Stockholm (a distance of 630km). This would give a bandwidth of 0.13 bytes/sec.
Of course, many manuscripts were illustrated, so in practice the bandwidth would be somewhat higher. Nevertheless, I would hate surfing the web in the fifteenth century:)
Maybe I'm just a sicko, but I would actually like to choose a maximum score now and then, and wallow in the dumbest posts of any subject (Gnome/KDE comes to mind).
Only in the US would a lawsuit such as this actually be admissible in court. If we take this trend to its logical extreme, having paid for a class will entitle you to a passed exam. When everybody can get a degree without actually knowing the subject matter, the value of education will disappear. Employers will no longer want to hire american graduates, and will instead hire people from Europe and Asia... So for us in Europe, this may not be such a bad thing.
Actually, RSI is a well known occupational hazard for professional musicians. Add hearing impairments and lousy pay and you wonder why you ever would choose to play music professionally...
What is it, I mean, really?
on
Saving MST3K
·
· Score: 1
Could somebody explain what the show is for those of us living on the other side of the Atlantic?
Had he written the piece in the style of a philosophy text, he would have started with five pages of definitions nobody else in the field agrees with, followed by a ten-page rant about why his views of qualia are superior to everyone elses:-)
Disclaimer: CompSci major doing doctoral work at a philosophy department - any bias is my own fault.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is fairly clear what their problem is. Linux is being developed openly, at no cost to resellers, apart from what they decide to contribute themselves. SCO, on the other hand, needs a large -- and expensive -- staff to produce their OS. This means that Red Hat, Caldera et. al. can resell the system at a price point that would be suicidal for SCO. It seems fairly clear that they have no problem with Linux as a hackers toy, but deeply resent the fact that Linux is eating away the same market segment they are in.
I would'nt be too suprised if SCO tried attacking the Linux distributors legally, claiming that they have unfair advantage in the marketplace. Don't think they could win such a suit, but it would probably slow the adoption of Linux during the legal proceedings.
OK, you like Debian -- and with good reason from what I hear about the distribution. But there is always the risk that preference for one item will cloud the judgement for other.
I have RH5.2 installed on two machines, and we have a couple more in the lab where I work. I have never had any RPM related problems with anything from Red Hat; contributed RPMs are of course different, and they do not claim that they in fact are installable on anything. caveat installator as they probably did not say in ancient Rome.
As for why none of us run Debian, it is simply because Debian is positioning itself as a hackers' distribution; in the docs it seems to be a source of pride that there is little in the way of system configuration tools and the like. We use our machines for work, and need to spend as little time as possible coddling with our computers. When I get a new machine at home, I do plan on trying Debian, though.
Whoa, slow down there. Apple is a company, and as such it has one and only one obligation: make its owners happy with it. If the owners want maximal profits, that's what it will strive for. If the owner's goal is to have all employees dressed for the ballet, Apple will order tutus. It would actually be immoral, and possibly illegal, not to have its owners best interests at heart. And this goes not only for Apple, but for every company, from IBM to the corner deli. Who are the owners? Why, the stockholders of course. What's the reason to buy stock? To get a return on your investments. Thus Apple (and every other company) will do all it can to make that happen.
If you do not trust Apple, or do not like the APSL, the answer is simple: don't develop for it.
It's probably the other way around: disabled people do not become programmers because of the accessibility difficulties.
But Gnome is not necessarily tied to Linux... You can (if my memory servers) surn it on xBSD and Solaris as well.
/. in the center.
Better to leave the entire GNU/Linux thing out. Just the foot; that ought to be enough.
As for Slashdot shirts, I would like a design on a black shirt of a 'slashdot green' circle with a white, somewhat blurry
I think we have to distinguish between two major types of filtering, one of which is good (and will become incresingly necessary as net use grows), and one that is a Bad Thing.
/., banner removal proxies a'la JunkBuster (I love that program!), etc. are fine for me, as I know what content I am removing. There are plenty other techniques that would also qualify as filters; when a mail gets sorted into my 'maybe take a look at it someday' bin, I perform a powerful form of filtering to separate what mail I think is important from my perceived junk. Just as with killfiles and banners, I might (and sometimes do) miss stuff that could have been useful for me, but it is a chance I am prepared to take.
Good filters are those you as a user have chosen yourself -- you know what you are filtering and you know what you are filtering. Most filters, like killfiles, scoring threshold on
In contrast, NetNanny and the like function on the premise that "they" (PTA or whoever) know better than you do yourself what you should see. For all practical purposes you have relegated the responsibilities of a part of your own life to another party -- and one who does not have the same goals for your well-being as you do yourself. This could become especially distressing if such filters become mandatory for all public access points to the net; if you have the means, you can choose what ideas to be exposed to, if you do not (and have to rely on libraries or schools for net access), you will only get a selection deemed appropriate by somebody else. This is when it gets scary.
Can't really see the qualitative difference between that vision of the future and todays' millions of couchpotatoes that spend their entire workday in front of a machine (be it industrial equipment or a computer) and their entire free time in fron of a television. So lying still in bed surfing the net is little different from lying in the couch watching endless sitcoms.
People have at least the option to be active on the net. With television, the only activity is choosing the channel and getting fat on junk food.
Perl - for one-liners, filters and sundry one-shot stuff
C - My language of choice. For most 'real' stuff.
C++ - When I have to (like when my stuff is to be used with existing C++ code).
SmallC - Use it to program the HC11 (together with assembler).
Generally, I find that languages that are themselves low on features (read: bells and whistles), but are easily extended through libraries are the easiest, most efficient to work with. With C++, you tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time second-guessing the compiler instead of working on your problem -- this of course depends on how much of the C++ features you actually use.
After graduation, I worked for a small software company for a period of four months, after which I quit and enrolled in graduate school. I thought at first it was just me not being able to handle a 'real' work environment. It turns out this company eats programmers and projectmanagers like popcorn - my four months were not much under the average for this place. By now people reading CompSci or systems design know about it, so they've resorted to advertising for people under other company names and to hire unschooled people (littel or no programming experience) to get employees...
This is one reason to get a degree (to connect this with an earlier post). While it certainly is true that you can land a great job in the industry without it, the base knowledge gained at a CompSci department or similar will last a lot longer than proficiency in whatever the latest buzzword technology, and it also makes it easier to live through a technology transition. While this is no panacea for obsolecence, it will make you employable longer than without it.
:)
Then, of course, there's those of us skipping that race altogether by entering academia instead
I'm basically waiting for a player that can read CD-ROMs - having 650mb worth of MP3:s is a lot of music, and besides, I store all my MP3 files on CD-ROMs anyway.
As a Perl-lover, I don't find Perl to be ugly at all...
Well, I love Perl as well; I write in C or C++ only when I can't do it in Perl. It is one of the best things to appear on the net. I would marry the language if I could.
But, let's face it: as languages go, it is definitely homey. I would go so far as claiming it really is ugly. But then, who said good tools need to be beautiful...
Well, they didn't use the penguin for their Linux books, so they will probably not use a daemon for the BSD line... Interesting that they chose a wild west theme for Linux though -- wish they could squeeze a penguin into the covers somehow; I see Tux in a hat and poncho with a cigar in the beak sauntering up to the bar :)
Well, being a geek does not have to mean being obsessive about computers, and vice versa. Had a fellow student in CompSci that is married, plays golf on the weekends, likes to dress nice (wears a suit on the job) and has a number of interests not even remotely connected with technology. He is also one of the better programmers I've ever met.
On the other hand, someone being obsessively into physics or SciFi or medieval reenactments or whatever can be a prime specimen of geekdom withut ever using a computer.
[...]im assuming few people look at -1 posts (i for one dont)
:-)
Actually, I think it's pretty funny to lower my threshold now and then to see what I miss... It could be fun to have the option to collect the lowest scoring posts on a separate page -- sort of like a sideshow
It's NOT a furby clone, but a serious study of how to do the mechanics and electronics for four-legged robots. As I understand it, the fact that they made them look like dogs is just an added feature -- they have to look like something. With the pricetag they have, you won't see these in private homes anytime soon. For researchers, they offer a free loan of a unit provided you sign a non-disclosure agreement (we considered it, but it felt like too much of a hassle just to get another toy to play with in the lab).
You get memory leaks if you are lucky or segfaults if you are not.
Actually the other way around... I've worked as a C++ programmer under Windows (ugh!). A segfault is an obvious indication that something is wrong and will tell you where it occured, while a memory leak can go unnoticed for days or weeks of development and is a pain to track down. Give me segfaults over memory leaks everytime.
This just goes to show that the use and content of the information is an important factor when comparing information capacity. If I want to get a few hundred full-length movies delivered to my lonely marsian base, bandwidth is very important and latency is neglible. Playing Quake, the situation is reversed. What's needed is a measure that's abstract enough to discount these factors.
Interesting question. There is a real problem measuring bandwidth in preindustrial times. Let's say a cart fully loaded with codices; this would be the medieval analogue to the truckload of tapes. However, information was very rarely transported in this fashion, and never at the maximum speed. One example would be when Queen Kristina of Sweden abdicated and brought her library from Stockholm to Rome. She stopped at various places on the continent for over a year.
:)
Probably a better measure would be a 'typical' message carried by a courier on horse and ship. Let's assume a typical royal decree to be 40 characters per line, 30 lines per page and 5 pages. This would give a message length of 6000 bytes. A messenger would rarely carry only one message, however - let's say our intrepid traveller carries an equivalent of forty decrees (he'd bring along letters, maybe a codex for a monastery and such as well). That gives a 'packet size' of around 250k.
Next, the travelling speed: If my memory serves, it would take three weeks between Copenhagen and Stockholm (a distance of 630km). This would give a bandwidth of 0.13 bytes/sec.
Of course, many manuscripts were illustrated, so in practice the bandwidth would be somewhat higher. Nevertheless, I would hate surfing the web in the fifteenth century
Maybe I'm just a sicko, but I would actually like to choose a maximum score now and then, and wallow in the dumbest posts of any subject (Gnome/KDE comes to mind).
Only in the US would a lawsuit such as this actually be admissible in court. If we take this trend to its logical extreme, having paid for a class will entitle you to a passed exam. When everybody can get a degree without actually knowing the subject matter, the value of education will disappear. Employers will no longer want to hire american graduates, and will instead hire people from Europe and Asia... So for us in Europe, this may not be such a bad thing.
Actually, RSI is a well known occupational hazard for professional musicians. Add hearing impairments and lousy pay and you wonder why you ever would choose to play music professionally...
Could somebody explain what the show is for those of us living on the other side of the Atlantic?
So - it's just like those mindmap thingies they tried to have us use in school. Neat, but not new.
Had he written the piece in the style of a philosophy text, he would have started with five pages of definitions nobody else in the field agrees with, followed by a ten-page rant about why his views of qualia are superior to everyone elses :-)
Disclaimer: CompSci major doing doctoral work at a philosophy department - any bias is my own fault.