This is a tax on not having an open format and wanting to sell to government.
Doing that is very similar to a sin tax on cigarettes, say, which many governments do as well. It is a method of encouraging behavior that a government decides is desirable.
One can certainly argue whether or not doing such things is a desirable function of government, but it is not just about tilting playing fields towards open source. It is about applying a tax to closed formats if they want to be involved with government.
Also somewhat similar, say, to some fees charged by the US government when someone like Lockheed fails to produce documents by a certain date on a government contract.
And for you hard-core naysayers out there, you have to ask yourself this: If this is such a bad idea, then why did Oracle provide this as a feature too?
Because Oracle is as monopolistic in intent as MS, just not quite as good at it?
IFS was a horrible failure. Oracle has a history of this sort of thing - throwing something out there and hoping it sticks, without really treating it like a true product. Remember WebDB, I think it was called?
IFS has a lot of problems (interaction with backup tools, orthogonality of intent, decent tools to take advantage of what gains actually are there, etc.).
Even the link you posted reads really defensively, as if a project manager is attempting to justify their job.
I believe that NTFS supports multiple streams of data per filename much like HFS.
Sort of.
OS9 suppored two streams, the resource and the data fork (this went way back before OS9, BTW.) The resource fork was usually used via a defined structure that allowed storage of elements like code segments, icons, text strings, etc. in a common format. (ResEdit rocked.) The data fork was freeform.
NTFS streams are arbitrary in definition and number. MS played with using streams for Office documents, as best I can tell simply to tie the format to the file system, but was forced to write in more sensical ways to legacy file systems and for some forms of legacy network access.
NTFS streams also enabled some fun hacks, like letting attackers store cracker tools as alternate streams attached to other files. These streams wouldn't show up in most normal methods of viewing files.
Read about Netatalk's.AppleDouble directories for an approach to foreign datastreams...they can get ugly pretty quick.
Very true. You see similar things with some databases' implementation of BLOBs - shoved on the file system with an ugly name.
I think we are moving to a day where more and more, file systems are used for application access instead of user access. Another layer of indirection. Content management packages already point in this direction. Part of me is not looking forward to it - we'll need tools to rebuild sensical filesystem structure from crashed applications on top of the tools we already have for rebuilding filesystems. But some things can be useful, too. Progress?
.NET's whole purpose is to make access to the services available to everyone, regardless of the platform.
Microsoft is a vertically integrated monopoly. They diversify, but only in order to build a bigger core business, which is keeping everyone using all of the other offered products. They are particularly interesting/pernicious, becuase thier stock is still treated as a growth stock, and the business will have to change significantly when is isn't, so they fight like hell to be a growth stock.
By pioneering the code and servers that Internet commerce relies on, they will remain at the top, regardless of the outcome of the Windows/Office future.
No, see, they _depend_ on the outcome of Windows/Office to "pioneer" a push into commerce (that they're clearly not the first ones there is something I'll let someone else rant about).
If they can't use Win/Office to muscle people around, they're not going anywhere.
Would you argue that the X-box is an attempt to lock people into using Windows and Office?
Um, What OS does the Xbox run? Yes, a customized windows. Good guess. True, it doesn't run office, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see more and more functionality of Outlook and IE on it over time.
Back to the real issue of PNG, if someone can't handle PNG and whines about it, I'd just tell them to upgrade their shit. I don't see any point in coding / working to the lowest ancient common denominator. Doing that restricts you way to much.
If you are prepared to limit your audience, then that's a choice you can make.
Many sites don't have that luxury, because they want as wide an audience as possible.
I'm sure Slashdot, for instance, would find it difficult indeed to choose something that didn't work or looked like crap in IE.
I think a better answer is that political opinion is not tied to hacking.
Sort of. Hacking is an apolitical action as it happens. The activity tends to influence people who persue it in certain ways. Of course, people screw up signals, so they're interpreted differently. But a certain consensus eventually emerges.
ESR is a strange boy. But something like pure capitalism is a result of free software. Make no mistake about that - RMS is actually wrong. European socialism will absolutely not be the normal model. The "race for the bottom" is both why OS software works, and why some nation states are getting nervous about tax structures.
If you close your textile plant is MA and move to Saipan, you are investing in Saipan. Your (perhaps) lower wages are giving you a return on investment by moving, possibly offset by the cost of transport (which happens to employ people), which perhaps you should have considered before moving.
Good lord, you obviously have never tried to run a business, or run your life like one, which you should. You ain't buzshwa until you've fought your way up and learned the key points.
What I'm getting at is this: perhaps this intercepting of private signals is no worse than speeding on the freeway, but perhaps both should be significantly more risky, in terms of punishment incurred if you're caught.
This is very wrong. It is the sort of wrong-headed sillyness that creates laws all over the place.
The right interpretation is to notice that speeding tickets pay for otherwise useful services, and attempt to finance them a different way. Contract law is more than capable of handling a speeder, even if they don't have a contract with a given company.
As for "intercepting of private signals", I'm not sure what you mean. If I can intercept them, they aren't very private, are they?
If I broadcast my diary to the world, and then demand payment from anyone who reads it, you're on my side, right?
The post office (USPS). The post office is now an independent business, but coupled to the government. I'm sorry, but I don't feel like having to deal with private companies for that (company A won't deliver to Iowa, it's not profitable, company b only supports packages of this minimum size... yadda yadda).
Your assertion seems to be that lowest-common-denominator mail delivery paid for by others is something you want. Is that true? Personally, I send things via private carriers, either local bike messangers or Fedex. I've had a lot of problems with USPS mail, including a case of theft by a USPS employee. This is the sort of thing government monopolies encourage. Theft by an employee of Fedex results in a termination of that employee, and some compensation to me. Theft by an employee of a government run monopoly results in nothing for me, an expensive "investigation", and promoting the thief to a point where he can't steal anymore.
Plus, the USPS has done a great job on combating fraud.
Sorry, did you want a postal service or a law enforcement agency? There is a difference.
Environmental Protection. The phrase "The fox guarding the Henhouse" applies to any private company. And I doubt that people who want less government would want the Sierra Club providing this function.
Hm. You're halfway there. Have you looked at the behavior of, say, the EPA? You'll find the board is loaded with former executives of companies that pollute a lot. Much like how the FAA is loaded with people from airlines. The very existence of an agency that writes rules for a given function ensures that the agency in question is dominated by people who represent the regulated activity. "The fox guarding the Henhouse", indeed.
Fire and Emergency Services. I can see "Sorry, your insurance doesn't cover this type of emergency - what is your credit card number". Yes, I know some ambulances are run by private companies.
This still happens. For a long time, I lived in a very rural town in the SW US. When someone's house was on fire, the local fire department first looked up whether or not they'd made "donations" recently. If they hadn't, it took longer to find them. Same with the local hospital. If you think a monopoly run by government fixes this, you're dreaming. You don't even have to go to small towns for this - look at how government officials get preferential treatment for home monitoring, etc. in any city.
I'm not being flip here. They are the collection agency of the government. They have a monopoly on force for collecting whatever is determined appropriate by an arcane process from you. They are judged by how well they do that.
Military Defense. Sorry, I don't like the idea of private armies. Sounds too feudal to me.
Perhaps. Current uses of military power would appear to be entirely feudal, but ignore that. The US used to imagine armies to be raised by grave threats, and dispanded thereafter. After WWII, this changed. What exactly was the reason for this? Think about it some.
It could be furthered argued that since the GPL has never been tested in court that it required more time to determine the best course of action.
That's silly.
I have a signed contract between myself and my partners. It has never been tested in court. Delay tactics for "determining the best course of action" based on that are extremely likely to be frowned upon by a judge if it ever goes to court.
You can think the GPL is different than other contracts if you want to, but it isn't.
Your analogy is all wrong. A better analogy would be, suppose that hierloom is stuck in a box, perhaps by a kid or a maid, You then sell the box at a yardsale. The new owner of the box opens it, says, "cool!", and walks off with the hierloom. Do you feel that the purchaser as committed an actionable offense against you by purchasing the box?
which releases a program that the RIAA and MPAA will undoubtedly call a tool whose sole purpose is to illicitly distribute copyrighted works....
There is no reason to call it that. It is a communication tool that tries not to leak information. I would encourage RIAA members to use it themselves, to better secure internal conversations against unintentional leakage. I'm sure "they" send files to each other via email from time to time. Isn't this better? What's not to like?
As a long time cypherpunk, I'm glad this is here. Way back in '94, I wrote out a model of this sort of thing, but with decent routing and key exchange, and then got busy working for money. I'm glad someone is doing this, even if it doesn't work on a larger scale.
That's what consultants are for. I'm biased; I'll say that up front, because that's what I do for a living.
A current largish client of mine is in the businesss of selling things on the web. They looked at commercial offerings combining CMS and storefront functionality (there are a lot of them), and ran screaming to my company, which is providing them a custom built package based on OS tools that will cost them less than 25% of what the commercial tools would have.
The problem with most of the commercial packages is that you still have to customize them, and it isn't much easier, and certainly not cheaper.
OS does have "best of breed" components for building things. Companies that fear OS consultants and run to an integrator or a vendor professional services group have an irrational view of software development that costs them a lot of money. I _know_ this for a fact - I've been on the other side of the divide, on both sides of large integration/customization projects.
One big problem that profesional service teams of many (certainly not all) commercial vendors have is the same thing they claim as a value add - being part of the same company as the product development team. Find a bug? Wait for the next release, I threw it in the issue tracker. Need a feature? I'll bring it up with the product manager, we'll get back to you. If I find a bug in Postgres, I fix it, submit a patch and move on with the project. If the PG team doesn't integrate my patch or has more pressing things to do, my client still gets what they need.
To be fair, there are a lot of "consultants" out there that give Open Source a bad name. A consultant should be just that - a neutral third party that helps you with your business. We consider ourselves 1/3 business consultants, 1/3 development house, and 1/3 fixers. Essentially, what a good lawyer does (they actually are out there, but rare) - a good consultant is the client's advocate, and that's much more than a technical role.
That said, back to the topic, the general state of commercial software is not so different from the state of OS. They differ widely in places, and commercial software has an edge in vertical and specialty markets. Generally speaking, if COTS software doesn't do it for your company, OS has the building blocks for you to build it, and usually more cheaply and more quickly than a commercial offering, because you're only paying for the subset of the development you need for your business, and not a (usually massive) fee for the building blocks as well.
Anyway, this is all very off-topic.
-j, stepping off the soap box (should that be milk crate these days?)
At least you're trying to be rational.
on
UK Pushing ID Cards
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with national ids is not that they might be convenient. The problem is that they are enabling technologies for what could be very, very evil.
If you think about common interactions with government or private businesses, identity is almost never actually needed. When it is, various specific ways of determining who you are are perfectly valid, and have been used for hundreds of years. That a national ID would be easier is not a justification. Think about the root problem for a second.
When considering this sort of thing, it is important to keep in mind the worst sorts of abuses that _could_ happen. When talking about national identity cards, it clearly is important to ask, "what if Nazi Germany could have done a SELECT WHERE against a central citizen-unit database?"
This should have been a train wreck I could walk past.
I learned to program in this order QBasic, TCL\TK, Visual Basic, Python, C, C++ then PHP. Ive never ever looked at Perl code so I was not traumatized by it.
To try to meet you in the middle, I learned AppleBasic, some assembly, [nothing for a long time], sh*, awk*, csh, sql*, C*, Perl*, Tcl, Vb, PHP, Java*, Lisp*. (asterisks indicate that I'm still using them, and still learning. When do you stop learning?)
Sorry, but Perl rocks. I'm building tools for people. Lately, that's sometimes is Java, sometimes in C, usually in Perl. Fast, bug-free development is the goal, and we do suprisingly well.
I'll never argue that Perl looks pretty by nature[1]. If people want a pretty language, please, that bin is other there.
For an example of my problems with PHP, look no farther than PHPGroupWare. It tries really hard to solve a really big problem, and honestly, comes somewhat close. But it blows, and is so impossible to read that nobody can fix it. We stared at it for months, and then gave up and built what we needed from it in perl, in 4 days. (We're filling things out, fixing dumb mistakes, and thinking about future moves before the code is released.) I won't even get in to these horrible messes of interlocked HTML, PHP, SQL (usually MySQL specific,) and poached Javascript that are the rule for this sort of crap...
When you need another ounce of performance, use C. When you need a large engineering team working together, use C++ or Java. When you need a team of monkeys pounding out "dynamic" html (or doing a personal website where it doesn't matter), use PHP. If you're playing with compsci, use Lisp. Otherwise, use Perl.
Flame off.
There, have I done enough for the pageview count for the/. cabel yet? Will you call the goons off? I like my last son really a bunch...
[1] It _can_ look pretty, if you actually have a plan. Many people use perl to build messes, and that is something they should have the right to do. Not my business. My code rarely gets messy, and when it does, I either comment it for fixing, or explain why I'm doing something weird. Contrast with the last 10K lines of C you've seen.
There's no great technical expertise needed to buy things, or make a website, or sell/ship things.
Heh. That's funny.
True, one could buy the talent and over the course of time recreate the Amazon site featureset.
Takes you a while to get there, and a lot of capital and management expertise, and all the while you're competing with someone already there.
And, of course, you have to raise capital. Any Joe can do so taking a summer stroll down Sand Hill Road, right?
Don't forget There's no great technical expertise needed to [...] sell/ship things.
Tell that to Walmart, who sued Amazon over hiring away thier operations talent. (Walmart didn't win, which of course is right and proper.) Tell that to the company (I forget the name) who sold Amazon a ~$10M mostrosity that takes things off a conveyer belt, scans a barcode, routes it down another conveyerbelt to land in the right bucket with the rest of the order, and hands it to packaging, and some absurd rate-of-items per minute.
Now make it work all together with the workers, delivery, forcasting, ordering and transport. And make sure the feedback loop to the website works well, and handle the accounting. Watch your costs. Now, go make some decisions about how to make it better.
You very clearly have no clue what the word "operations" means.
Interesting point. Aside from the scott/tiger obvious stuff, how common are Oracle or DB2 vulnerabilities? I'm sure they are more common than we know about, but how many have been really exploited?
Dunno about DB2, but Oracle seems to run at about 1 priviledge escalation bug every 4 months or so. They're fixed extremely quickly, in general, although Oracle has been known to hide its head and pretend problems don't exist on occasion, just like any other firm.
They have better engineers than MS, because they've been doing it longer. Also, they know thier codebase; MS tricked Sybase into giving them SQL Server, although that was almost 10 years ago now.
In general, worms tend not to happen in th eOracle world, not because they can't, but because the goals of attackers are different. I'd expect this to change over time, if MS keeps thier current marketshare.
The OS should be simple and replacable. Knoppix is perfect for that.
twm is simplistic, minimalist, and doesn't require much in the way of learning.
Don't teach kids how to use a window manager, teach them whatever you want to teach them.
When they get annoyed with twm, they can move on to something else, and hopefully know enough to choose for themselves. (I know a few OS developers who swear by windows98 as a window manager, and that's cool. Myself, I like wmaker. Being able to choose is the point.)
A wire frame with hooks hanging internally from the trame to hook over the intakes... It works. Cats and smokers make for bad server rooms, but with this (and it doesn't look so bad - an opportunity to be creative), until I need to change it, which is sort of the point) works out reasonably well without outfitting my servers with HEPPA approved air intakes. Get some decent, stiff thin wire (I had some laying around, so I can't specify, but I'm guessing it is about 24 guage, soft) and play with it. Breathing filters are easy to modify to place over it and do not seem to harm airflow.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing that is very similar to a sin tax on cigarettes, say, which many governments do as well. It is a method of encouraging behavior that a government decides is desirable.
One can certainly argue whether or not doing such things is a desirable function of government, but it is not just about tilting playing fields towards open source. It is about applying a tax to closed formats if they want to be involved with government.
Also somewhat similar, say, to some fees charged by the US government when someone like Lockheed fails to produce documents by a certain date on a government contract.
CFengine rocks. It isn't a distributed shell, but for configuration management and remote automated changes, you can't beat it.
One quiblle:
And for you hard-core naysayers out there, you have to ask yourself this: If this is such a bad idea, then why did Oracle provide this as a feature too?
Because Oracle is as monopolistic in intent as MS, just not quite as good at it?
IFS was a horrible failure. Oracle has a history of this sort of thing - throwing something out there and hoping it sticks, without really treating it like a true product. Remember WebDB, I think it was called?
IFS has a lot of problems (interaction with backup tools, orthogonality of intent, decent tools to take advantage of what gains actually are there, etc.).
Even the link you posted reads really defensively, as if a project manager is attempting to justify their job.
Sort of.
OS9 suppored two streams, the resource and the data fork (this went way back before OS9, BTW.) The resource fork was usually used via a defined structure that allowed storage of elements like code segments, icons, text strings, etc. in a common format. (ResEdit rocked.) The data fork was freeform.
NTFS streams are arbitrary in definition and number. MS played with using streams for Office documents, as best I can tell simply to tie the format to the file system, but was forced to write in more sensical ways to legacy file systems and for some forms of legacy network access.
NTFS streams also enabled some fun hacks, like letting attackers store cracker tools as alternate streams attached to other files. These streams wouldn't show up in most normal methods of viewing files.
Read about Netatalk's .AppleDouble directories for an approach to foreign datastreams...they can get ugly pretty quick.
Very true. You see similar things with some databases' implementation of BLOBs - shoved on the file system with an ugly name.
I think we are moving to a day where more and more, file systems are used for application access instead of user access. Another layer of indirection. Content management packages already point in this direction. Part of me is not looking forward to it - we'll need tools to rebuild sensical filesystem structure from crashed applications on top of the tools we already have for rebuilding filesystems. But some things can be useful, too. Progress?
Microsoft is a vertically integrated monopoly. They diversify, but only in order to build a bigger core business, which is keeping everyone using all of the other offered products. They are particularly interesting/pernicious, becuase thier stock is still treated as a growth stock, and the business will have to change significantly when is isn't, so they fight like hell to be a growth stock.
By pioneering the code and servers that Internet commerce relies on, they will remain at the top, regardless of the outcome of the Windows/Office future.
No, see, they _depend_ on the outcome of Windows/Office to "pioneer" a push into commerce (that they're clearly not the first ones there is something I'll let someone else rant about).
If they can't use Win/Office to muscle people around, they're not going anywhere.
Would you argue that the X-box is an attempt to lock people into using Windows and Office?
Um, What OS does the Xbox run? Yes, a customized windows. Good guess. True, it doesn't run office, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see more and more functionality of Outlook and IE on it over time.
If you are prepared to limit your audience, then that's a choice you can make.
Many sites don't have that luxury, because they want as wide an audience as possible.
I'm sure Slashdot, for instance, would find it difficult indeed to choose something that didn't work or looked like crap in IE.
Sort of. Hacking is an apolitical action as it happens. The activity tends to influence people who persue it in certain ways. Of course, people screw up signals, so they're interpreted differently. But a certain consensus eventually emerges.
ESR is a strange boy. But something like pure capitalism is a result of free software. Make no mistake about that - RMS is actually wrong. European socialism will absolutely not be the normal model. The "race for the bottom" is both why OS software works, and why some nation states are getting nervous about tax structures.
If you close your textile plant is MA and move to Saipan, you are investing in Saipan. Your (perhaps) lower wages are giving you a return on investment by moving, possibly offset by the cost of transport (which happens to employ people), which perhaps you should have considered before moving.
Good lord, you obviously have never tried to run a business, or run your life like one, which you should. You ain't buzshwa until you've fought your way up and learned the key points.
But what if you leave your wallet there?
This is very wrong. It is the sort of wrong-headed sillyness that creates laws all over the place.
The right interpretation is to notice that speeding tickets pay for otherwise useful services, and attempt to finance them a different way. Contract law is more than capable of handling a speeder, even if they don't have a contract with a given company.
As for "intercepting of private signals", I'm not sure what you mean. If I can intercept them, they aren't very private, are they?
If I broadcast my diary to the world, and then demand payment from anyone who reads it, you're on my side, right?
Your assertion seems to be that lowest-common-denominator mail delivery paid for by others is something you want. Is that true? Personally, I send things via private carriers, either local bike messangers or Fedex. I've had a lot of problems with USPS mail, including a case of theft by a USPS employee. This is the sort of thing government monopolies encourage. Theft by an employee of Fedex results in a termination of that employee, and some compensation to me. Theft by an employee of a government run monopoly results in nothing for me, an expensive "investigation", and promoting the thief to a point where he can't steal anymore.
Plus, the USPS has done a great job on combating fraud.
Sorry, did you want a postal service or a law enforcement agency? There is a difference.
Environmental Protection. The phrase "The fox guarding the Henhouse" applies to any private company. And I doubt that people who want less government would want the Sierra Club providing this function.
Hm. You're halfway there. Have you looked at the behavior of, say, the EPA? You'll find the board is loaded with former executives of companies that pollute a lot. Much like how the FAA is loaded with people from airlines. The very existence of an agency that writes rules for a given function ensures that the agency in question is dominated by people who represent the regulated activity. "The fox guarding the Henhouse", indeed.
Fire and Emergency Services. I can see "Sorry, your insurance doesn't cover this type of emergency - what is your credit card number". Yes, I know some ambulances are run by private companies.
This still happens. For a long time, I lived in a very rural town in the SW US. When someone's house was on fire, the local fire department first looked up whether or not they'd made "donations" recently. If they hadn't, it took longer to find them. Same with the local hospital. If you think a monopoly run by government fixes this, you're dreaming. You don't even have to go to small towns for this - look at how government officials get preferential treatment for home monitoring, etc. in any city.
Tax Collection. Sorry, can't trust non-government entities.
And you trust the IRS?
I'm not being flip here. They are the collection agency of the government. They have a monopoly on force for collecting whatever is determined appropriate by an arcane process from you. They are judged by how well they do that.
Military Defense. Sorry, I don't like the idea of private armies. Sounds too feudal to me.
Perhaps. Current uses of military power would appear to be entirely feudal, but ignore that. The US used to imagine armies to be raised by grave threats, and dispanded thereafter. After WWII, this changed. What exactly was the reason for this? Think about it some.
That's silly.
I have a signed contract between myself and my partners. It has never been tested in court. Delay tactics for "determining the best course of action" based on that are extremely likely to be frowned upon by a judge if it ever goes to court.
You can think the GPL is different than other contracts if you want to, but it isn't.
That much is clear.
Your analogy is all wrong. A better analogy would be, suppose that hierloom is stuck in a box, perhaps by a kid or a maid, You then sell the box at a yardsale. The new owner of the box opens it, says, "cool!", and walks off with the hierloom. Do you feel that the purchaser as committed an actionable offense against you by purchasing the box?
There is no reason to call it that. It is a communication tool that tries not to leak information. I would encourage RIAA members to use it themselves, to better secure internal conversations against unintentional leakage. I'm sure "they" send files to each other via email from time to time. Isn't this better? What's not to like?
As a long time cypherpunk, I'm glad this is here. Way back in '94, I wrote out a model of this sort of thing, but with decent routing and key exchange, and then got busy working for money. I'm glad someone is doing this, even if it doesn't work on a larger scale.
Please flame the evil cypherpunk vision below.
That's what consultants are for. I'm biased; I'll say that up front, because that's what I do for a living.
A current largish client of mine is in the businesss of selling things on the web. They looked at commercial offerings combining CMS and storefront functionality (there are a lot of them), and ran screaming to my company, which is providing them a custom built package based on OS tools that will cost them less than 25% of what the commercial tools would have.
The problem with most of the commercial packages is that you still have to customize them, and it isn't much easier, and certainly not cheaper.
OS does have "best of breed" components for building things. Companies that fear OS consultants and run to an integrator or a vendor professional services group have an irrational view of software development that costs them a lot of money. I _know_ this for a fact - I've been on the other side of the divide, on both sides of large integration/customization projects.
One big problem that profesional service teams of many (certainly not all) commercial vendors have is the same thing they claim as a value add - being part of the same company as the product development team. Find a bug? Wait for the next release, I threw it in the issue tracker. Need a feature? I'll bring it up with the product manager, we'll get back to you. If I find a bug in Postgres, I fix it, submit a patch and move on with the project. If the PG team doesn't integrate my patch or has more pressing things to do, my client still gets what they need.
To be fair, there are a lot of "consultants" out there that give Open Source a bad name. A consultant should be just that - a neutral third party that helps you with your business. We consider ourselves 1/3 business consultants, 1/3 development house, and 1/3 fixers. Essentially, what a good lawyer does (they actually are out there, but rare) - a good consultant is the client's advocate, and that's much more than a technical role.
That said, back to the topic, the general state of commercial software is not so different from the state of OS. They differ widely in places, and commercial software has an edge in vertical and specialty markets. Generally speaking, if COTS software doesn't do it for your company, OS has the building blocks for you to build it, and usually more cheaply and more quickly than a commercial offering, because you're only paying for the subset of the development you need for your business, and not a (usually massive) fee for the building blocks as well.
Anyway, this is all very off-topic.
-j, stepping off the soap box (should that be milk crate these days?)
Managers tend to try to sell high.
A great predictor of future stock price is manager's behavior.
You should sell when they do.
Nothing to see here.
The problem with national ids is not that they might be convenient. The problem is that they are enabling technologies for what could be very, very evil.
If you think about common interactions with government or private businesses, identity is almost never actually needed. When it is, various specific ways of determining who you are are perfectly valid, and have been used for hundreds of years. That a national ID would be easier is not a justification. Think about the root problem for a second.
When considering this sort of thing, it is important to keep in mind the worst sorts of abuses that _could_ happen. When talking about national identity cards, it clearly is important to ask, "what if Nazi Germany could have done a SELECT WHERE against a central citizen-unit database?"
If that is a problem for you, I would suggest you get your nose out of your armpit.
I have posted anonymously here in the past for various reasons. I take anonymous posts with ample amounts of salt. What's your problem?
To try to meet you in the middle, I learned AppleBasic, some assembly, [nothing for a long time], sh*, awk*, csh, sql*, C*, Perl*, Tcl, Vb, PHP, Java*, Lisp*. (asterisks indicate that I'm still using them, and still learning. When do you stop learning?)
Sorry, but Perl rocks. I'm building tools for people. Lately, that's sometimes is Java, sometimes in C, usually in Perl. Fast, bug-free development is the goal, and we do suprisingly well.
I'll never argue that Perl looks pretty by nature[1]. If people want a pretty language, please, that bin is other there.
For an example of my problems with PHP, look no farther than PHPGroupWare. It tries really hard to solve a really big problem, and honestly, comes somewhat close. But it blows, and is so impossible to read that nobody can fix it. We stared at it for months, and then gave up and built what we needed from it in perl, in 4 days. (We're filling things out, fixing dumb mistakes, and thinking about future moves before the code is released.) I won't even get in to these horrible messes of interlocked HTML, PHP, SQL (usually MySQL specific,) and poached Javascript that are the rule for this sort of crap...
When you need another ounce of performance, use C. When you need a large engineering team working together, use C++ or Java. When you need a team of monkeys pounding out "dynamic" html (or doing a personal website where it doesn't matter), use PHP. If you're playing with compsci, use Lisp. Otherwise, use Perl.
Flame off.
There, have I done enough for the pageview count for the /. cabel yet? Will you call the goons off? I like my last son really a bunch...
[1] It _can_ look pretty, if you actually have a plan. Many people use perl to build messes, and that is something they should have the right to do. Not my business. My code rarely gets messy, and when it does, I either comment it for fixing, or explain why I'm doing something weird. Contrast with the last 10K lines of C you've seen.
There's no great technical expertise needed to buy things, or make a website, or sell/ship things.
Heh. That's funny.
True, one could buy the talent and over the course of time recreate the Amazon site featureset.
Takes you a while to get there, and a lot of capital and management expertise, and all the while you're competing with someone already there.
And, of course, you have to raise capital. Any Joe can do so taking a summer stroll down Sand Hill Road, right?
Don't forget There's no great technical expertise needed to [...] sell/ship things.
Tell that to Walmart, who sued Amazon over hiring away thier operations talent. (Walmart didn't win, which of course is right and proper.) Tell that to the company (I forget the name) who sold Amazon a ~$10M mostrosity that takes things off a conveyer belt, scans a barcode, routes it down another conveyerbelt to land in the right bucket with the rest of the order, and hands it to packaging, and some absurd rate-of-items per minute.
Now make it work all together with the workers, delivery, forcasting, ordering and transport. And make sure the feedback loop to the website works well, and handle the accounting. Watch your costs. Now, go make some decisions about how to make it better.
You very clearly have no clue what the word "operations" means.
NOTE: I'm not defending the patent.
Dunno about DB2, but Oracle seems to run at about 1 priviledge escalation bug every 4 months or so. They're fixed extremely quickly, in general, although Oracle has been known to hide its head and pretend problems don't exist on occasion, just like any other firm.
They have better engineers than MS, because they've been doing it longer. Also, they know thier codebase; MS tricked Sybase into giving them SQL Server, although that was almost 10 years ago now.
In general, worms tend not to happen in th eOracle world, not because they can't, but because the goals of attackers are different. I'd expect this to change over time, if MS keeps thier current marketshare.
Seriously.
The OS should be simple and replacable. Knoppix is perfect for that.
twm is simplistic, minimalist, and doesn't require much in the way of learning.
Don't teach kids how to use a window manager, teach them whatever you want to teach them.
When they get annoyed with twm, they can move on to something else, and hopefully know enough to choose for themselves. (I know a few OS developers who swear by windows98 as a window manager, and that's cool. Myself, I like wmaker. Being able to choose is the point.)
I have run into bad marketers a few times, I quit visioning with the cheap stuff and only deal with Zoink, Inc. - have had excellent luck with them.
A wire frame with hooks hanging internally from the trame to hook over the intakes... It works. Cats and smokers make for bad server rooms, but with this (and it doesn't look so bad - an opportunity to be creative), until I need to change it, which is sort of the point) works out reasonably well without outfitting my servers with HEPPA approved air intakes. Get some decent, stiff thin wire (I had some laying around, so I can't specify, but I'm guessing it is about 24 guage, soft) and play with it. Breathing filters are easy to modify to place over it and do not seem to harm airflow.