Yeah, it's the New Jersey method ("Worse is Better")... make something with a decent base design, nice and simple, get it working 90% and release it, hoping that the remaining bugs will get fixed sometime later. Remarkably, this method, however flawed, has proven to be quite adequate for a majority of the world's computing needs so far, as attested to by the enormous popularity of Unix and Microsoft systems. "Working tools now are better than perfect tools later." Unix pulls it off with an unexpected grace, due in a large part to the fact that its programs are usually small and relatively easy to debug and have had many years to mature, and some big design wins in the flexibility of the system ("everything is a file", "plain text is a universal interface").
Actually, the Redmond method is a bit different ("Good enough is Best"), copy something, anything that looks good and can check off a buzzword list of features, get it done good enough to compile and run a little then ship it off to your world class marketing department to grab market share as soon as possible. Fix bugs later if the customers actually need a better program as a reason to switch from your competitor's (they rarely need a good reason though).
It's quick and highly contagious. Some bacterial infections can be very dangerous because of those characteristics... bacteria are much more robust and eager destroyers of body tissue than viruses, if less insidious. Victims of bacterial meningitis sometimes go to sleep with what they think is just a headache and wake up dead. Victims of flesh-eating bacteria sometimes have limbs amputated to save them from an uncurable spreading necrosis.
I think it is equally evil to deprive people of having their cake or eating their cake as a result of their willingness to choose eating their cake over having their cake. All people, their potential foolishness notwithstanding, have the right to have their cake and eat it too.
Why burn bridges when you can nuke the whole river?
Yeah, people have been saying that for a long time s/Forth/Lisp , etc. But no one has gone ahead and done it. Yet Unix has been implemented several times in C, and the first thing new systems do is implement a POSIX layer (i.e. eros). Why is this? Is C so much easier to implement large systems with? Is Unix actually a really useful design despite what some academics who have never built a practical system maintain?
Why burn bridges when you can nuke the whole river?
Linus has the copyright on the Linux kernel code... he can relicense at will. The next version could be completely closed and proprietary. The only thing he can't do is relicense and take away all the old versions that he's already GPL'ed.
People coding under bsd licenses generally just want their code to be used, even if the people who use it want to keep their changes secret. They will still have their original code, after all.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Because it's more interesting this way... you don't think the cosmic mind would set up a whole planet for its avatars to just sit around and eat grapes do you?
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Oh but learning to install service packs, how to use regedit to keep it stable, how to rescue self-corrupted office files and reinstall the whole mess when it finally dies... that's easy enough? But./configure && make && su -c 'make install' is too hard?
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Only if you let them (enroll in their school, sign a contract to work for them, etc.). Of course for kids it's more like "only if your parents let them."
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
I'm just bitter because I recently witnessed a perfectly good and reliable system of Unix terminals replaced by a bunch of PCs running terminal emulators(!) on Windows. The amount of support we have to do now is at least 8 times what it was before, yet they have hired no extra people and our tech support calls are piling up. This is no Windows is by no means "easy to use" or "enterprise ready", yet we have every schmuck and his sister here on Slashdot crowing about the superiority of Microsoft systems.
I'm no kid, you think I'm being childish? Maybe. But I'm sick of the bullshit and I'm venting here. You don't like it, too bad.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
as long as you avoid software conflicts and understand the registry
Oh I see, so that is what is touted as "so easy my gramma can use it"?
Or do you mean "easy for people to use enough to really screw themselves over and lose lots of work because they don't know how to use regedit and sacrifice the appropriate goats."
Windows gives users the illusion of ease. And the pathetic "power users" who've invested so much time in learning all the little tricks of tweaking Windows are very resistant to something like Linux which puts them back in the role of "clueless newbie" because all of the Windows tricks they learned are useless outside of their little Wintel world. They don't want to face up to the fact that they don't really know much about computers at all... just Windows.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
The only "alternative" fuel powered cars that produce zero total emissions are solar powered cars, which are pretty useless in most parts of the world...
Any electric car that gets its power from a solar cell is a "solar-powered car," even if those solar cells are in a large array on top of a mountain hundreds of miles away.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
I have a machine with the same specs and I agree, Windows and Office run better on it than Gnome and StarOffice.
But not better than vi and fvwm2:) And, for me, that's where the fun stuff is. Real men publish in gorgeous, perfectly typeset pdf generated by LaTeX from documents marked up with vi or emacs:)
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
Really? Linux runs great for me with only 32MB RAM... but then I don't use bloatware like desktop environments, office suites, or (forgive me for saying so, but I don't think it will get much smaller) Mozilla.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out /etc/login.defs ... in Slackware at least.
Really? There's less than 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 atoms in the universe?
Who counted them and when did we find the end of the universe? Man, out of touch for a few days and everything changes...
Hmmm... X looks fine to me when I install a True-Type font server like xfstt. I would post a screenshot but I'm at work :P
Yeah, it's the New Jersey method ("Worse is Better")... make something with a decent base design, nice and simple, get it working 90% and release it, hoping that the remaining bugs will get fixed sometime later. Remarkably, this method, however flawed, has proven to be quite adequate for a majority of the world's computing needs so far, as attested to by the enormous popularity of Unix and Microsoft systems. "Working tools now are better than perfect tools later." Unix pulls it off with an unexpected grace, due in a large part to the fact that its programs are usually small and relatively easy to debug and have had many years to mature, and some big design wins in the flexibility of the system ("everything is a file", "plain text is a universal interface").
Actually, the Redmond method is a bit different ("Good enough is Best"), copy something, anything that looks good and can check off a buzzword list of features, get it done good enough to compile and run a little then ship it off to your world class marketing department to grab market share as soon as possible. Fix bugs later if the customers actually need a better program as a reason to switch from your competitor's (they rarely need a good reason though).
Oh, and that damn pdf reader for unix keeps crashing on my solaris box. pppffft.
Which one? Try gv... it antialiases the fonts and has never crashed for me.
OK, I was wrong, Anthrax is not especially contagious... but it is quick!
Thanks for the insightful mod though :)
"Wake up dead."
It's a joke people, I didn't think anyone would interpret that literally.
The cake thing was a joke, pointing out the fallacy of the parent poster's argument. Like "You can't have your cake and eat it too," get it?
OK, never mind.
Why burn bridges when you can nuke the whole river?
It's quick and highly contagious. Some bacterial infections can be very dangerous because of those characteristics... bacteria are much more robust and eager destroyers of body tissue than viruses, if less insidious. Victims of bacterial meningitis sometimes go to sleep with what they think is just a headache and wake up dead. Victims of flesh-eating bacteria sometimes have limbs amputated to save them from an uncurable spreading necrosis.
Underestimate the mighty bacteria at your peril.
I think it is equally evil to deprive people of having their cake or eating their cake as a result of their willingness to choose eating their cake over having their cake. All people, their potential foolishness notwithstanding, have the right to have their cake and eat it too.
Why burn bridges when you can nuke the whole river?
Yeah, people have been saying that for a long time s/Forth/Lisp , etc. But no one has gone ahead and done it. Yet Unix has been implemented several times in C, and the first thing new systems do is implement a POSIX layer (i.e. eros). Why is this? Is C so much easier to implement large systems with? Is Unix actually a really useful design despite what some academics who have never built a practical system maintain?
Why burn bridges when you can nuke the whole river?
Linus has the copyright on the Linux kernel code... he can relicense at will. The next version could be completely closed and proprietary. The only thing he can't do is relicense and take away all the old versions that he's already GPL'ed.
People coding under bsd licenses generally just want their code to be used, even if the people who use it want to keep their changes secret. They will still have their original code, after all.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Because it's more interesting this way... you don't think the cosmic mind would set up a whole planet for its avatars to just sit around and eat grapes do you?
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Still sounds easier than Windows to me... (shrug)
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Oh but learning to install service packs, how to use regedit to keep it stable, how to rescue self-corrupted office files and reinstall the whole mess when it finally dies... that's easy enough? But ./configure && make && su -c 'make install' is too hard?
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Only if you let them (enroll in their school, sign a contract to work for them, etc.). Of course for kids it's more like "only if your parents let them."
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
I'm just bitter because I recently witnessed a perfectly good and reliable system of Unix terminals replaced by a bunch of PCs running terminal emulators(!) on Windows. The amount of support we have to do now is at least 8 times what it was before, yet they have hired no extra people and our tech support calls are piling up. This is no Windows is by no means "easy to use" or "enterprise ready", yet we have every schmuck and his sister here on Slashdot crowing about the superiority of Microsoft systems.
I'm no kid, you think I'm being childish? Maybe. But I'm sick of the bullshit and I'm venting here. You don't like it, too bad.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
So, are you under impression that only a "kernel hacker" can figure out a Unix shell? Where did you get that idea?
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
as long as you avoid software conflicts and understand the registry
Oh I see, so that is what is touted as "so easy my gramma can use it"?
Or do you mean "easy for people to use enough to really screw themselves over and lose lots of work because they don't know how to use regedit and sacrifice the appropriate goats."
Windows gives users the illusion of ease. And the pathetic "power users" who've invested so much time in learning all the little tricks of tweaking Windows are very resistant to something like Linux which puts them back in the role of "clueless newbie" because all of the Windows tricks they learned are useless outside of their little Wintel world. They don't want to face up to the fact that they don't really know much about computers at all... just Windows.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
My mother used a Unix shell to get her work done for years. Is your mother really more stupid than mine or do you just underestimate her?
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
(applause)
Very good analogy. That could be a starting point for an entire thesis on the subject of software patents.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Any electric car that gets its power from a solar cell is a "solar-powered car," even if those solar cells are in a large array on top of a mountain hundreds of miles away.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
If only Plan9 had a web browser... and you didn't have to use the damn mouse so much.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
I have a machine with the same specs and I agree, Windows and Office run better on it than Gnome and StarOffice.
But not better than vi and fvwm2 :) And, for me, that's where the fun stuff is. Real men publish in gorgeous, perfectly typeset pdf generated by LaTeX from documents marked up with vi or emacs :)
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
Really? Linux runs great for me with only 32MB RAM... but then I don't use bloatware like desktop environments, office suites, or (forgive me for saying so, but I don't think it will get much smaller) Mozilla.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.