It's a usenet concept. In September the noise-to-signal ratio goes up in Usenet because thats when lots of new college kids discover the existence of Usenet for the first time.
We aren't pissed because D&D and video games didn't help us get laid. We are pissed because they were viewed by outsiders as being 'dangerous' influences. Remember that crap about D&D being satanic in the '80s? I had a friend whose mother made him throw out all his D&D stuff because she bought into that kind of garbage. (Without any regard to the fact that it cost aroung $80 altogether, which is no chump change to someone at that age.) This feels like the D&D scare all over again.
It's not the fact that geeks get picked on (not that fact alone anyway) that is causing this outrage. It's the fact that the superstitious morons who run things are assuming that if two geeks kill 13 people, that this means all geeks are dangerous. Then the have the gall to go off and cite geek personality traits as indicators of a homicidal mind. That's pretty damn insulting, unfair, and more of the same kind of discriminating crap we had to deal with in high school. The only difference is that now its the established authorities doing it instead of harmless kid bullies.
Yes. I remember that song well. While it was already about 4 years old when I first heard it, it was the first Rush song I heard, and it's what got me started listening to them. The lyrics in that song are so very TRUE, and I remember listening to it thinking, "at last, someone who knows what its like and tells it like it is."
I was meek. I never 'worked out', never did anything physical (to the detriment of my health.) I did the D&D thing and the computer thing, but I was not a straight-A student. I hated classes because most of it seemed like irrelevant memorizing of facts that I could just look up if I needed to know it in the future, so I never really tried very hard. (Later on, I found out that my problem is that I'm bad at rote memorization, but good at remembering things that have 'reasons' and 'patterns'. My problem with American schools is that they place too much emphasis on memorizing lists of facts without rhyme or reason, and that was my weakest area. (For example, I was horrible at arithmetic, but good at calculus).). Anyway, I had the standard list of cruddy experiences, which I won't go into because they are pretty much the same as what everyone else here has already talked about.
Anyway, the point is that one day I snapped too. I got into a fight. Now, that by itself doesn't seem very strange, but in this case it was a fight with the principal. In the cafeteria. With everyone watching. I'd had a bad week, and someone had been 'scuffling' with me after having tripped me or something like that (I can't really remember anymore what started it). Anyway, the pricipal just happened to be nearby (walking down the hall past the cafeteria), and so he was the one to break it up. At first I was glad he broke it up, but then he immediately started blaming me for the fight, and not the other guy. Up until this point I had been relatively calm and rational, but then this was the last straw. This was not the first time this particular principal had done this. He was well known for going "light" on jocks when there was a fight and going "heavy" on whomever the other partcicipant was. He had recently installed a rule that anyone involved in a fight would be automatically charged with a misdemenor 'disturbing the peace' and charged the standard $67.50 fine for that offense in that county. Time and time again, I had seen friends get roped into this by some jerk coming along and starting a fight and leaving the person with the choice between standing there and letting himself get hit, or defending himself and getting a $67.50 fine for it. (The antagonist being some rich jock kid who thought the $67.50 fine was easily worth it for being able to pummel someone without them defending themselves.)
We had brought this up to the leaders of the school through the 'proper channels' and had been summarily ignored. So the problem got worse. The fights got worse. Instead of walking away, people figured "If I'm probably going to get fined $67.50 anyway, whether I do anything or not, I might as well make it worth it and fight back." This idiotic principal's policy had made things much worse, making fights much more violent. (Because in addition to the normal anger that goes with a fight, you were also mad at the person for costing you a $67.50 fine.)
So anyway, as I struggled in the grip of the principal, the cafeteria students had started chanting "sixty-seven-fifty, sixty-seven-fifty", which had become the standard taunting chant. This reminded me that this self-important twit was indirectly responsible for the crap I had just been receiving, as well as a lot of the crap I'd been receiving the last weeks, as well as my entire time in that school. Finally, little meek me, who usually sucked at fighting and let everyone walk all over me, finally snapped. I socked the principal right in the kisser, saying something about "This place sucks and its all your fault!", or something equally lame sounding, I can't remember. I had knocked his glasses askew and raised a bruise. This was in front of literally half the school. (We had two staggered lunch periods.)
I stood in shock. With the adreneline still running like crazy, making me shake, I realized what I had just done, with a big fat "oooops!" running through my head.
Well, obviously there was disciplinary action, which wasn't helped by the fact that I chose not to be the least bit apologetic when the principal talked to me later in his office. I told him off again (this time more coherently, with reasoned arguments) and described exactly what led up to the incident and where my anger was coming from. He asked me to apologise. I refused. I tried to explain that an apology under duress is empty and meaningless, and I wouldn't do it just to get out of trouble. Maybe later I would, but not right now. Not when my motivation would be purely to get out of hot water - my apology would be a pack of lies.
Anyway, where this is going is this: After I came back to school a few days later from my suspension. the students actually respected me (they didn't want to get all buddy-buddy, but they now thought I was 'cool' enough to talk to on occasion, with an occasional, "Wow, you hit the principal, that took balls, man- I guess maybe you're not so bad after all."
This made me sick. After taking the time to cool down, I was ashamed of what I had done. (The principal got that apology a few days later, BTW, but I think it baffled him more than anything.) But *this* was how to gain respect amongst these people? To let my anger take over and go off and punch the principal? (Side note: it was kinda fun to notice how the tale had grown in the telling while I was away. In the few days I was gone, It seems some people thought I had pulled a knife on the principal, and sent him screaming away while yelling obscenities at him.)
Anyway, this made me ill. After having done the second most shameful thing I had ever done in my life, these jerks thought that this was a great and wonderful 'cool' thing to do. I was so glad the day I graduated and got out of that mess.
So, yes, High School is hell. And the faculty are often a part of the problem (not all the faculty - some were familiar with the principal's favoritism in discipline and were sympathetic - but not many).
Somehow, 11 years later, that is one event that still sticks out in my mind about high school. The fact that my 'peers' were so deranged that what I percieved as one of my more shameful moments, they percieved as one of my better moments. It still makes me sick to think about it.
No, this was not some inner-city school from a violent neighborhood, either. It was a lilly-white suburban school of about 1000 where just about everyone goes to church on sunday and all that. (It turns out that the fact that I *didn't* go to church was part of the reason for my not fitting in, but I didn't realize it at the time. - everyone's cliques were started in their churches.)
So, if I have any advice to give to highschoolers out there it is just to echo this one fact: High School is not the real world. Others have already said it, and I'll say it again. And people change too. If you go on to college you will find that some of those bullies and self-important types actually do grow up and get to be less of a pain. They probably won't ever be friendly with you if you are of the geek persuation, but they will stop trying to make your life a living hell at least. (until they get their MBA's and become your pointy-haired boss, but at that point you have a little bit more weight you can throw around, given that they can't easily find someone else to do your job.)
Statistics about private schools being better than public ones are meaningless because public schools are required to take everybody, private ones are not.
See, it's not the system (school) that's different, its the input to the system (students and their families) that's different.
The fact that private schools are peopled only by those students whose families will pay more for education is an incredibly strong filtering factor. Either they are richer families, or they are families more willing to sacrifice for their childrens' educations. Either way, the private schools don't have to worry about trying to accomodate the lazy students whose parent's don't care, or the poor students with too many other life crises getting in the way.
Private schools aren't necessarily any better. They just get better input.
Okay, I like the idea of making all the HTML be HTML compliant, but what about the extensions that aren't really HTML at all - like Java applets?
I worry about that because where I work we want to develop a user interface that will need Java, and we are federally funded so this law could affect us.
(What we want to do is not even possible in a CGI form, so that's why we are looking at Java.)
Also, some things don't make any sense for handicapped access anyway - for example making a site that produces roadmaps be accessable to blind people on braille terminals makes zero sense. If they can't see the site, they can't see the maps it produces either.
I like this. - futher ideas for the contest:
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Good idea. To further stipulate, I think it would have to be a setup like this:
Both teams start the contest with a *BARE* machine with a totally wiped unformatted hard drive, no OS installed on it. Ask each team (ahead of time so you can be ready) which off-the-shelf incarnation of their OS they will want to install. Obtain it for them, and hand it to them at the start of the contest. This ensures the requirement that they use a 'consumer' version and not a 'cooked' version for the test, as per the advice of the previous poster. Give each team lots of time to get ready (4-5 hours, since they will have to install the OS and everything from scratch.) Also, to be fair, make sure both teams know ahead of time what hardware the two computers will have, so they can come prepared for any driver problems.
Also, tell them what kind of things you will be testing. It would be unfair if one team tuned for large numbers of small queries, and then the other team tuned for small numbers of large queries, and then only one or the other kind of case gets tested.
Flames and Facts are not mutually exclusive.
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Flames and facts are not mutually exclusive things. Something which is true, which you utter in an insulting manner, is in both categories. For example, "That piece of crap Windows OS has remote capabilities that suck compared to Unix." This is both true and a flame at the same time.
I think those of you who are arguing for "facts instead of flames" need to remember that. If something sucks as much as Windows does, the only way to avoid flaming is to lie about it and not point out its shortcomings.
...it makes the assumption that anyone who dislikes 'recreational' drugs must be a god-soaked twit. I don't fit that category: I think drugs and religion are the same thing - an attempt to avoid reality because it 'feels good' to do so.
Granted, I do roleplaying games, so I avoid reality too, but I *use* my brain to do it, instead of destroying my brain as I do it.
Hell, I don't even drink alchohol, except when I take cold medicine. The strongest thing I 'do' is Mt. Dew.
Gee, Let's trade a drug-induced delusional reality for a bible-induced one. Big fscking improvement. Addiction is the same whether it's drugs or middle-ages dogma.
So, what scenerio are you looking for here? "Here's a book I reviewed. I liked it. But I can't tell you where you might be able to buy it since that would be a conflict of interest. You'll have to guess where you can get it if you want it. Good Luck."
Whenever you see movie reviews, the tell you the theatres where the movie is playing. I don't see how this is different.
Okay, first - I have no problem with what Caldera is doing - it's a great idea. But I am really getting sick of the terminology of assuming "Consumer" means "newbie". I like CLIs. I am a programmer. I am also a Consumer. Just not the *kind* of consumer this product is targetted at.
Geeks are consumers too.
side topic: the Y2038 problem.
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People have been bringing up the Y2038 32-bit time_t problem in this thread. It's not a problem. Making an integer contain more bits in a program is much much easier than altering the number of characters in a string (the two-digit y2k problem). The ramifications are smaller. We won't be seeing the kinds of trillion-dollar (I say "trillion" because I am predicting for inflation and speaking in 2038 dollars) problems that y2k gives. For the software, a recompile with a bigger time_t fixes everything. For the data files, there's a bit more work, but not much.
The real party to get incensed at here is the Media and the way they protrayed this. Everybody has flamewars from time to time. Everybody says dumb things. Sometimes they do it in public. But that's not the issue. Regardless of if you agree with Bruce or ESR or neither, there is a much bigger problem here: The media portrayed this as if this was something that would affect the OpenSource community. It won't.
As long as they continue to view this phenomenon as if it were one big monolithic company, they are doing it a disservice. When the heads of a company has a dispute over policy, it affects the output of that company. Projects get cancelled, new alternate projects are created, etc. With OpenSource it isn't like that. ESR, Bruce, and RMS could all die tomorrow and it would have only a tiny effect. Wine people will still work on Wine, Gnome people will still work on Gnome, Samba people will still work on Samba, and so on.
So, yeah, I'm peeved by this public flamewar. Not at the flamewar itself, but at the ignorant media's response, spreading the FUD that this is somehow a drastic problem in the OpenSource community.
Argument is healthy! That's partly the whole point of OpenSource - the best designed software is software that airs its dirty laundry for public comment.
I believe that it was a republican (Forbes), who suggested that we repeal the income tax and switch to a flat tax system. It is the democratic candidates that wouldn't even suggest we switch.
That second sentence is false. Jerry Brown ran in the Democratic Primary in 1992 on a flat-tax platform. Granted, he didn't win the primary, but he was a candidate.
Can anyone tell me of a time a off the shelf product for Windows didn't work on Windows
Uhm, yeah - several:
Microsoft Flight Simulator expansions (there are several) have never worked for me. They always end up breaking the whole install when I put them in and it's time for re-install-all-of-windows.
DirectX. It's quite a maze to find out if your hardware is supported or not, and even when it is, you've got bugs all over the place. (shaded polygons that have no overlaid texture so they are all shades of grey - I got that in Tomb Raider and Thief under several different kinds of cards.)
"Robot City", a storyline kind of game, required the installation of some add-on to the video driver that ended up hosing Windows every time I tried it (this was Windows 3.1). I've never run the game.
Your point is based on the premise that NT is easier to develop on than Linux. This is a dubious assertion at best.
What NT does have going for it is that if you want to use its nonstandard standards like DCOM, this works best in Windows. But that's circular reasoning, saying that Windows is a better development environment because you insist on using tools that only work well in Windows.
MS just doesn't get it. They think Linux is being sucessful because it is stripped-down and featureless. They couldn't be any further from the truth. It is sucessful because it is exactly as featureful as you *want* it to be, and no more. Yes, it can be a stripped down file/print/network-bridge machine, but it can be easily expanded later when need be.
Please note: When you give the impression that you consider all dissention to be flaming, you do not make yourself look good.
People are too quick to use the word "flame" to describe all disagreement. That is a dangerous precident to set. Open dissention, such as RMS's public 'bomb', as ESR called it, are the necessary results of open software being truly open. Please don't ask the community to present a false facade of 100% agreement with each other. To do so would be a lie, and would stifle openness.
For the most part I do feel sorry for ESR and all the flak he has recieved, but in this one instance I have to disagree with him. The last thing in the world we want to do is hunker down into a clique and only allow open debate within that clique and not in public.
I find ESR's suggestion that RMS should have brought the issue up in private instead of public to be a scary, appalling suggestion. I also found it truly surprising because it goes against the very openness that ESR keeps pushing for. I was surprised to hear those words out of ESR's "mouth".
Right away I noticed they were using the word "cracker" and not "hacker". Its about fscking time someone got it right. (Granted, this is Wired, but even they keep using the hacker==malevolent meaning all the time.)
I got up to this part and then I just had to stop:
When pushed, the Free Software Foundation defines "free" as a matter of liberty, not of price. Many people pay for GNU/Linux, but the underlying mechanics are freely available to anyone who wants them. Companies that sell Linux offer the support and maintenance that people have come to expect--and charge for them.
Note how he seems to imply that the FSF only defines free as libre 'when pushed'. Pure Bull. They (by which I guess I mean RMS) are always going out of their way to constantly mention it again and again and again whenever someone makes the mistake of assuming the F in FSF is about Free Beer. You don't have to "push" the FSF at all to get them to say it.
It's as if he's subtly trying to give the impression that the FSF is using weaseling its way around the word "free". What a crock. It's been that way since the GNU manifesto was first written. No weaseling about it.
This is standard MS spin. One thing they are very talented at is making damning accusations by inference, without actually saying them outright (so you can't get them for slander). They are skilled at saying things that are semantically true, but deliberately loaded with connotations that are false. This is more of the same.
And this guy is not a "geek". Notice his title. "Chief Program Manager" is not the title of a techie.
For that kind of software testing to have any real value, you need to know *ahead* of time what the expected result is supposed to be. That means formal designs, reviews, and all the other beurocracy that goes with programming for big companies. That sort of environment is useful for high-level applications (where the people doing the design on paper don't have to know how to program to know that they want a button that does such-and-such.) On the other hand, for deep technical stuff, like kernels and compilers and whatnot, it is much less useful. Only the original programmer really knows the algorithms intimately enough to distinguish correct behaviour from incorrect behaviour. The idea of a separate testing person makes little sense when you are doing stuff that low-level. (And high-level tests really don't reveal much at that level. There's too many oppurtunities for two wrongs to make a right so that something goes unnoticed.)
I've been thinking about DVORAK layouts for a while now, but the problem is that I prefer vi over Emacs, and vi assumes the HJKL keys will be right next to each other. If they aren't anymore, then vi is no longer as fast for me. (I like not having to use the arrow-keys, and I think this helps relieve my hands - my hands don't have to stretch to hit Escape,Meta,Alt,Control,Shift all the time, and I don't ever 'lose' my home-row. This doubles typing speed, but starts to run into the upper limit of comfortable QWERTY speed.)
I don't really know what the right answer is. Emacs would be okay if the typewriter-cursor keys weren't ^N,^P,^F,^B, which are nowhere near each other on oth QWERTY and DVORAK.
The survey was a survey of one subsection of the market: Those users who run servers and currently use Windows NT. This is *not* the Linux market at large.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a usenet concept. In September the noise-to-signal ratio goes up in Usenet because thats when lots of new college kids discover the existence of Usenet for the first time.
It's not the fact that geeks get picked on (not that fact alone anyway) that is causing this outrage. It's the fact that the superstitious morons who run things are assuming that if two geeks kill 13 people, that this means all geeks are dangerous. Then the have the gall to go off and cite geek personality traits as indicators of a homicidal mind. That's pretty damn insulting, unfair, and more of the same kind of discriminating crap we had to deal with in high school. The only difference is that now its the established authorities doing it instead of harmless kid bullies.
Yes. I remember that song well. While it was already about 4 years old when I first heard it, it was the first Rush song I heard, and it's what got me started listening to them. The lyrics in that song are so very TRUE, and I remember listening to it thinking, "at last, someone who knows what its like and tells it like it is."
I was meek. I never 'worked out', never did anything physical (to the detriment of my health.) I did the D&D thing and the computer thing, but I was not a straight-A student. I hated classes because most of it seemed like irrelevant memorizing of facts that I could just look up if I needed to know it in the future, so I never really tried very hard. (Later on, I found out that my problem is that I'm bad at rote memorization, but good at remembering things that have 'reasons' and 'patterns'. My problem with American schools is that they place too much emphasis on memorizing lists of facts without rhyme or reason, and that was my weakest area. (For example, I was horrible at arithmetic, but good at calculus).). Anyway, I had the standard list of cruddy experiences, which I won't go into because they are pretty much the same as what everyone else here has already talked about.
Anyway, the point is that one day I snapped too. I got into a fight. Now, that by itself doesn't seem very strange, but in this case it was a fight with the principal. In the cafeteria. With everyone watching. I'd had a bad week, and someone had been 'scuffling' with me after having tripped me or something like that (I can't really remember anymore what started it). Anyway, the pricipal just happened to be nearby (walking down the hall past the cafeteria), and so he was the one to break it up. At first I was glad he broke it up, but then he immediately started blaming me for the fight, and not the other guy. Up until this point I had been relatively calm and rational, but then this was the last straw. This was not the first time this particular principal had done this. He was well known for going "light" on jocks when there was a fight and going "heavy" on whomever the other partcicipant was. He had recently installed a rule that anyone involved in a fight would be automatically charged with a misdemenor 'disturbing the peace' and charged the standard $67.50 fine for that offense in that county. Time and time again, I had seen friends get roped into this by some jerk coming along and starting a fight and leaving the person with the choice between standing there and letting himself get hit, or defending himself and getting a $67.50 fine for it. (The antagonist being some rich jock kid who thought the $67.50 fine was easily worth it for being able to pummel someone without them defending themselves.)
We had brought this up to the leaders of the school through the 'proper channels' and had been summarily ignored. So the problem got worse. The fights got worse. Instead of walking away, people figured "If I'm probably going to get fined $67.50 anyway, whether I do anything or not, I might as well make it worth it and fight back." This idiotic principal's policy had made things much worse, making fights much more violent. (Because in addition to the normal anger that goes with a fight, you were also mad at the person for costing you a $67.50 fine.)
So anyway, as I struggled in the grip of the principal, the cafeteria students had started chanting "sixty-seven-fifty, sixty-seven-fifty", which had become the standard taunting chant. This reminded me that this self-important twit was indirectly responsible for the crap I had just been receiving, as well as a lot of the crap I'd been receiving the last weeks, as well as my entire time in that school. Finally, little meek me, who usually sucked at fighting and let everyone walk all over me, finally snapped. I socked the principal right in the kisser, saying something about "This place sucks and its all your fault!", or something equally lame sounding, I can't remember. I had knocked his glasses askew and raised a bruise. This was in front of literally half the school. (We had two staggered lunch periods.)
I stood in shock. With the adreneline still running like crazy, making me shake, I realized what I had just done, with a big fat "oooops!" running through my head.
Well, obviously there was disciplinary action, which wasn't helped by the fact that I chose not to be the least bit apologetic when the principal talked to me later in his office. I told him off again (this time more coherently, with reasoned arguments) and described exactly what led up to the incident and where my anger was coming from. He asked me to apologise. I refused. I tried to explain that an apology under duress is empty and meaningless, and I wouldn't do it just to get out of trouble. Maybe later I would, but not right now. Not when my motivation would be purely to get out of hot water - my apology would be a pack of lies.
Anyway, where this is going is this: After I came back to school a few days later from my suspension. the students actually respected me (they didn't want to get all buddy-buddy, but they now thought I was 'cool' enough to talk to on occasion, with an occasional, "Wow, you hit the principal, that took balls, man- I guess maybe you're not so bad after all."
This made me sick. After taking the time to cool down, I was ashamed of what I had done. (The principal got that apology a few days later, BTW, but I think it baffled him more than anything.) But *this* was how to gain respect amongst these people? To let my anger take over and go off and punch the principal? (Side note: it was kinda fun to notice how the tale had grown in the telling while I was away. In the few days I was gone, It seems some people thought I had pulled a knife on the principal, and sent him screaming away while yelling obscenities at him.)
Anyway, this made me ill. After having done the second most shameful thing I had ever done in my life, these jerks thought that this was a great and wonderful 'cool' thing to do. I was so glad the day I graduated and got out of that mess.
So, yes, High School is hell. And the faculty are often a part of the problem (not all the faculty - some were familiar with the principal's favoritism in discipline and were sympathetic - but not many).
Somehow, 11 years later, that is one event that still sticks out in my mind about high school. The fact that my 'peers' were so deranged that what I percieved as one of my more shameful moments, they percieved as one of my better moments. It still makes me sick to think about it.
No, this was not some inner-city school from a violent neighborhood, either. It was a lilly-white suburban school of about 1000 where just about everyone goes to church on sunday and all that. (It turns out that the fact that I *didn't* go to church was part of the reason for my not fitting in, but I didn't realize it at the time. - everyone's cliques were started in their churches.)
So, if I have any advice to give to highschoolers out there it is just to echo this one fact: High School is not the real world. Others have already said it, and I'll say it again. And people change too. If you go on to college you will find that some of those bullies and self-important types actually do grow up and get to be less of a pain. They probably won't ever be friendly with you if you are of the geek persuation, but they will stop trying to make your life a living hell at least. (until they get their MBA's and become your pointy-haired boss, but at that point you have a little bit more weight you can throw around, given that they can't easily find someone else to do your job.)
See, it's not the system (school) that's different, its the input to the system (students and their families) that's different.
The fact that private schools are peopled only by those students whose families will pay more for education is an incredibly strong filtering factor. Either they are richer families, or they are families more willing to sacrifice for their childrens' educations. Either way, the private schools don't have to worry about trying to accomodate the lazy students whose parent's don't care, or the poor students with too many other life crises getting in the way.
Private schools aren't necessarily any better. They just get better input.
I worry about that because where I work we want to develop a user interface that will need Java, and we are federally funded so this law could affect us.
(What we want to do is not even possible in a CGI form, so that's why we are looking at Java.)
Also, some things don't make any sense for handicapped access anyway - for example making a site that produces roadmaps be accessable to blind people on braille terminals makes zero sense. If they can't see the site, they can't see the maps it produces either.
Both teams start the contest with a *BARE* machine with a totally wiped unformatted hard drive, no OS installed on it. Ask each team (ahead of time so you can be ready) which off-the-shelf incarnation of their OS they will want to install. Obtain it for them, and hand it to them at the start of the contest. This ensures the requirement that they use a 'consumer' version and not a 'cooked' version for the test, as per the advice of the previous poster. Give each team lots of time to get ready (4-5 hours, since they will have to install the OS and everything from scratch.) Also, to be fair, make sure both teams know ahead of time what hardware the two computers will have, so they can come prepared for any driver problems.
Also, tell them what kind of things you will be testing. It would be unfair if one team tuned for large numbers of small queries, and then the other team tuned for small numbers of large queries, and then only one or the other kind of case gets tested.
I think those of you who are arguing for "facts instead of flames" need to remember that. If something sucks as much as Windows does, the only way to avoid flaming is to lie about it and not point out its shortcomings.
Granted, I do roleplaying games, so I avoid reality too, but I *use* my brain to do it, instead of destroying my brain as I do it.
Hell, I don't even drink alchohol, except when I take cold medicine. The strongest thing I 'do' is Mt. Dew.
Gee, Let's trade a drug-induced delusional reality for a bible-induced one. Big fscking improvement. Addiction is the same whether it's drugs or middle-ages dogma.
Whenever you see movie reviews, the tell you the theatres where the movie is playing. I don't see how this is different.
Geeks are consumers too.
People have been bringing up the Y2038 32-bit time_t problem in this thread. It's not a problem. Making an integer contain more bits in a program is much much easier than altering the number of characters in a string (the two-digit y2k problem). The ramifications are smaller. We won't be seeing the kinds of trillion-dollar (I say "trillion" because I am predicting for inflation and speaking in 2038 dollars) problems that y2k gives. For the software, a recompile with a bigger time_t fixes everything. For the data files, there's a bit more work, but not much.
As long as they continue to view this phenomenon as if it were one big monolithic company, they are doing it a disservice. When the heads of a company has a dispute over policy, it affects the output of that company. Projects get cancelled, new alternate projects are created, etc. With OpenSource it isn't like that. ESR, Bruce, and RMS could all die tomorrow and it would have only a tiny effect. Wine people will still work on Wine, Gnome people will still work on Gnome, Samba people will still work on Samba, and so on.
So, yeah, I'm peeved by this public flamewar. Not at the flamewar itself, but at the ignorant media's response, spreading the FUD that this is somehow a drastic problem in the OpenSource community.
Argument is healthy! That's partly the whole point of OpenSource - the best designed software is software that airs its dirty laundry for public comment.
That second sentence is false. Jerry Brown ran in the Democratic Primary in 1992 on a flat-tax platform. Granted, he didn't win the primary, but he was a candidate.
Uhm, yeah - several:
Easy to use, my ass.
What NT does have going for it is that if you want to use its nonstandard standards like DCOM, this works best in Windows. But that's circular reasoning, saying that Windows is a better development environment because you insist on using tools that only work well in Windows.
MS just doesn't get it. They think Linux is being sucessful because it is stripped-down and featureless. They couldn't be any further from the truth. It is sucessful because it is exactly as featureful as you *want* it to be, and no more. Yes, it can be a stripped down file/print/network-bridge machine, but it can be easily expanded later when need be.
They just don't get it.
People are too quick to use the word "flame" to describe all disagreement. That is a dangerous precident to set. Open dissention, such as RMS's public 'bomb', as ESR called it, are the necessary results of open software being truly open. Please don't ask the community to present a false facade of 100% agreement with each other. To do so would be a lie, and would stifle openness.
For the most part I do feel sorry for ESR and all the flak he has recieved, but in this one instance I have to disagree with him. The last thing in the world we want to do is hunker down into a clique and only allow open debate within that clique and not in public.
I find ESR's suggestion that RMS should have brought the issue up in private instead of public to be a scary, appalling suggestion. I also found it truly surprising because it goes against the very openness that ESR keeps pushing for. I was surprised to hear those words out of ESR's "mouth".
Right away I noticed they were using the word "cracker" and not "hacker". Its about fscking time someone got it right. (Granted, this is Wired, but even they keep using the hacker==malevolent meaning all the time.)
I got up to this part and then I just had to stop:
Note how he seems to imply that the FSF only defines free as libre 'when pushed'. Pure Bull. They (by which I guess I mean RMS) are always going out of their way to constantly mention it again and again and again whenever someone makes the mistake of assuming the F in FSF is about Free Beer. You don't have to "push" the FSF at all to get them to say it.
It's as if he's subtly trying to give the impression that the FSF is using weaseling its way around the word "free". What a crock. It's been that way since the GNU manifesto was first written. No weaseling about it.
This is standard MS spin. One thing they are very talented at is making damning accusations by inference, without actually saying them outright (so you can't get them for slander). They are skilled at saying things that are semantically true, but deliberately loaded with connotations that are false. This is more of the same.
And this guy is not a "geek". Notice his title. "Chief Program Manager" is not the title of a techie.
For that kind of software testing to have any real value, you need to know *ahead* of time what the expected result is supposed to be. That means formal designs, reviews, and all the other beurocracy that goes with programming for big companies. That sort of environment is useful for high-level applications (where the people doing the design on paper don't have to know how to program to know that they want a button that does such-and-such.) On the other hand, for deep technical stuff, like kernels and compilers and whatnot, it is much less useful. Only the original programmer really knows the algorithms intimately enough to distinguish correct behaviour from incorrect behaviour. The idea of a separate testing person makes little sense when you are doing stuff that low-level. (And high-level tests really don't reveal much at that level. There's too many oppurtunities for two wrongs to make a right so that something goes unnoticed.)
right button == right eye blink
middle mouse button == pick your nose.
No, I won't shake your hand, you've been cutting and pasting in X all day! Ewww!
I don't really know what the right answer is. Emacs would be okay if the typewriter-cursor keys weren't ^N,^P,^F,^B, which are nowhere near each other on oth QWERTY and DVORAK.
Emacs wrecked RMS's hands.
The survey was a survey of one subsection of the market: Those users who run servers and currently use Windows NT. This is *not* the Linux market at large.