If you are the sort of person who is won't put up with a simple test, which seems to me to be quite a reasonable request (where you seem to think it is all "how dare you question my magnificence), you certainly aren't the sort of person I want to employ. I don't want someone who is not willing to pitch in with whatever is needed.
In this case, I think the test has provided a useful function.
I remember talking to a Solaris lover about Linux support once, and how he thought it sucked. This was in the City of London.
The difference between an old-skool Solaris, or even Windows, is that if you have a bug, if you've got enough money you can persuade the company to get the guy who wrote the code to stop what (s)he was doing, and fix it, right now. Or in other words, most of the code is written by someone who works for Sun/HP/Microsoft/whatever.
A Linux distribution, as we all know, is software pieced together from all over the place. Fair enough, RedHat do employ a lot of programmers, but most of what comes on that RHEL DVD is written elsewhere. So if you go to RedHat and say "there is a bug in X", they can't often help- they have to go to a third party project and try and persuade them to deal with it. Or they can get a generic programmer, try and get them to look at the code and work out what is wrong. That really doesn't help you above and beyond what you could do yourself.
What I am trying to say is the "Linux" support (where Linux is a distribution) is not really a thing that is possible in the traditional sense.
DHL doesn't necessarily think it can save some money. Y might be larger than X at the offset, but Y might be lower risk. That is to say, DHL might be able to negociate a fixed deal with HP, but if DHL employ staff themselves it might seem cheaper, but costs could be highly variable.
E.g. suppose a load of your staff leave. Your faced with costs of hiring, and costs of getting expensive contractors in to fill in. X has rocketed here. HP will have to pick up the tab if that happens. Or suppose a project goes titsup. HP will end up paying to get it straight under the new scheme, not DHL.
Here he is in this vault of cool stuff, and all he can talk about his his "feelings" and how life is all so hard.
Remember journalists! The first rule of journalism is "Nobody cares about you and your life. If you are really lucky, they might just be interested in your subject, but they certainly aren't interested in you!"
Trouble is, it costs more and more to make a game that looks good enough for an XBox 360 or a PS3. If you are going to bet $10M+, are you going to put your chips on "New Super Idea" or "Latest Franchise with Guaranteed Sales 27"?
This is what's so great about XBox Arcade, in my view.
Funny, but it depends on what you mean by the UK car industry.
We are actually manufacturing more cars than ever before. Difference is, they are all Toyotas and Nissans, which people probably don't count as "British".
This seems to be true. I remember a few days back on Slashdot reading a story comparing Apple employees salaries to Google salaries in Silicon Valley. Well, believe me, all the salaries in that article are very high for UK programmers. Especially when you consider the high level of tax we have to pay over here.
starts to rant....
But I think it's all part of a general pattern of undervaluing technical, academic skills in Britain generally. In my first job working for a university, is was very noticeable how all the top academics had gone to the US. You'd often go on conferences to America and find that the top man in a particular field whose name you recognised turned out to be British when you met him, and he'd emigrated.
There is a lot of nonsense in the press at the moment about declining numbers of maths and science students, all the way through kids to university. There suggesting that it is because it's too geeky, and has a social stigma. Well, the real reason is people have got more sense. If the best jobs just require "a degree", no matter what in, you aren't going to pick something really difficult like Physics, are you?
Sorry to feed the troll, but the point of the GPL is not to increase adoption. Your absolutely right to say that other licenses will lead to greater adoption- but this is adoption by people who may take, take, take and not give back.
Besides, it sounds like LGPL is what's needed in this case, anyhow.
Just what the world needs! Another remote procedure protocol!
Maybe Unix RPC, Corba, XML-RPC, SOAP, DCOM, DCOP and XPCOM were not enough already?
Seriously, the problem in this space is that:
Rather than working together on one RPC protocol that might not be 100% suitable for all uses, people just get the hump and start their own. Hello? These things are supposed to be interoperable! How does starting thousands of incompatible protocols achieve this?
Some of the above protocols only work well under certain circumstances. The ones that have been designed to work under many circumstances (e.g. many programming languages, object oriented) are dismissed as being "too complicated".
A lot of the protocols are designed to advance someone's agenda, rather than be actually useful
As far as getting mp3 support, and other things like that, I agree with you, but I understand their POV. They want to put out a distro that's free of patent, license or other legal encumbrances, and let the user add those difficult programs on their own. I'd rather they were less stiff about it, but they have strict principles and I'm not going to complain about their sticking to them. The point is that RedHat is a US company, and therefore are not legally allowed to include (say) MP3 support. Ubuntu is not based in the US and does not have this problem.
The real problem is not that Apple charge 30%. You can debate whether that is good value or not. The real problem is that you have no choice if you want to develop iPhone apps. It's Apple's way or the highway.
The thing to bear in mind here is that the ads that were about before the internet- TV spots, posters on the street, pages in magazines and newspapers, jingles on the radio and so on have a click-through of zero. Yet people still bother with them.
The real problem here is that the pay-per-click method doesn't charge advertisers fairly. A combination pay-per-view, and pay-per-click model might be better.
The problem is that there is only one legitimate customer- Real. Why would anyone else want this information? Only to break into your computer. There is no use selling to end users since they aren't going to be able to fix it even if they know about it (almost certainly). An end user only needs to know one piece of information- Real 11 isn't secure- and they've given that information free to the world.
By selling to whoever pays, they are in effect blackmailing Real- "we are going to sell this info to lots of bad guys unless you pay up".
There's a lot of fluff in reply to this comment, but basically everybody knows that nuclear power is very clean and nice, unless a big disaster happens, whereupon it becomes extremely unpleasant. Coal on the other hand is slightly unpleasant all of the time. Which you think is best largely depends on how much you trust the people running them to avoid the big disaster.
I can tell you now that mine, while only a month old doesn't get tooooo hot and hasn't broken,... THE NOISE PROBLEM IS ANNOYING.
Yes, I said problem, it's simply un-acceptably noisy, sure if you're playing Sporty Mc Loud cheer 09 or Explosion masher 12 that's fine but for an RPG or or any adventure style game, ugh!.
Man, I can't wait for Sporty McLoud Cheer 09. That sounds awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean McLaren and Ferrari, or do I not understand this post?
what do you think?
If you are the sort of person who is won't put up with a simple test, which seems to me to be quite a reasonable request (where you seem to think it is all "how dare you question my magnificence), you certainly aren't the sort of person I want to employ. I don't want someone who is not willing to pitch in with whatever is needed.
In this case, I think the test has provided a useful function.
Difference is that Blu-Ray players can play DVDs too, so you don't have to replace your collection unless you really want to.
The difference between an old-skool Solaris, or even Windows, is that if you have a bug, if you've got enough money you can persuade the company to get the guy who wrote the code to stop what (s)he was doing, and fix it, right now. Or in other words, most of the code is written by someone who works for Sun/HP/Microsoft/whatever.
A Linux distribution, as we all know, is software pieced together from all over the place. Fair enough, RedHat do employ a lot of programmers, but most of what comes on that RHEL DVD is written elsewhere. So if you go to RedHat and say "there is a bug in X", they can't often help- they have to go to a third party project and try and persuade them to deal with it. Or they can get a generic programmer, try and get them to look at the code and work out what is wrong. That really doesn't help you above and beyond what you could do yourself.
What I am trying to say is the "Linux" support (where Linux is a distribution) is not really a thing that is possible in the traditional sense.
-1 Flamebait??? Come on- this is funny!
DHL doesn't necessarily think it can save some money. Y might be larger than X at the offset, but Y might be lower risk. That is to say, DHL might be able to negociate a fixed deal with HP, but if DHL employ staff themselves it might seem cheaper, but costs could be highly variable.
E.g. suppose a load of your staff leave. Your faced with costs of hiring, and costs of getting expensive contractors in to fill in. X has rocketed here. HP will have to pick up the tab if that happens. Or suppose a project goes titsup. HP will end up paying to get it straight under the new scheme, not DHL.
If you think the end is nigh, it often pays more to be pushed than jump. I'd cling on and see if I could land a redundancy payment.
Remember journalists! The first rule of journalism is "Nobody cares about you and your life. If you are really lucky, they might just be interested in your subject, but they certainly aren't interested in you!"
This is what's so great about XBox Arcade, in my view.
We are actually manufacturing more cars than ever before. Difference is, they are all Toyotas and Nissans, which people probably don't count as "British".
This seems to be true. I remember a few days back on Slashdot reading a story comparing Apple employees salaries to Google salaries in Silicon Valley. Well, believe me, all the salaries in that article are very high for UK programmers. Especially when you consider the high level of tax we have to pay over here.
starts to rant....
But I think it's all part of a general pattern of undervaluing technical, academic skills in Britain generally. In my first job working for a university, is was very noticeable how all the top academics had gone to the US. You'd often go on conferences to America and find that the top man in a particular field whose name you recognised turned out to be British when you met him, and he'd emigrated.
There is a lot of nonsense in the press at the moment about declining numbers of maths and science students, all the way through kids to university. There suggesting that it is because it's too geeky, and has a social stigma. Well, the real reason is people have got more sense. If the best jobs just require "a degree", no matter what in, you aren't going to pick something really difficult like Physics, are you?
Sorry to feed the troll, but the point of the GPL is not to increase adoption. Your absolutely right to say that other licenses will lead to greater adoption- but this is adoption by people who may take, take, take and not give back.
Besides, it sounds like LGPL is what's needed in this case, anyhow.
Maybe Unix RPC, Corba, XML-RPC, SOAP, DCOM, DCOP and XPCOM were not enough already?
Seriously, the problem in this space is that:
We use powerdns_recursor which seems very similar, and is very good.
The RedHat clustering is freely available and GPL on Fedora.
Two hours later. 18 posts. Not the most popular slashdot story of all time is it? Editors, you've done it again!
The real problem is not that Apple charge 30%. You can debate whether that is good value or not. The real problem is that you have no choice if you want to develop iPhone apps. It's Apple's way or the highway.
IANAA? I am not an apple?
Why do VMs have to run as root?
The thing to bear in mind here is that the ads that were about before the internet- TV spots, posters on the street, pages in magazines and newspapers, jingles on the radio and so on have a click-through of zero. Yet people still bother with them.
The real problem here is that the pay-per-click method doesn't charge advertisers fairly. A combination pay-per-view, and pay-per-click model might be better.
The problem is that there is only one legitimate customer- Real. Why would anyone else want this information? Only to break into your computer. There is no use selling to end users since they aren't going to be able to fix it even if they know about it (almost certainly). An end user only needs to know one piece of information- Real 11 isn't secure- and they've given that information free to the world.
By selling to whoever pays, they are in effect blackmailing Real- "we are going to sell this info to lots of bad guys unless you pay up".
There's a lot of fluff in reply to this comment, but basically everybody knows that nuclear power is very clean and nice, unless a big disaster happens, whereupon it becomes extremely unpleasant. Coal on the other hand is slightly unpleasant all of the time. Which you think is best largely depends on how much you trust the people running them to avoid the big disaster.