Far be it for me to confuse this debate with the introduction of facts, but this is utter nonsense.
There are plenty of people who can do work in VB/VC++ and perl and on both Windows and Unix-like platforms (to generalise the debate further). Where I work all of our code runs on XP, Linux and Solaris and for scripting we use a lot of perl as well as other languages. Visual C++ is the compiler toolchain for our c++ code on XP. From where I sit I could throw a brick and hit at least five people who use VC++ and perl on a daily basis.
Furthermore, VC++ is fundamentally different from visual basic. It is proper programming, not just a gui builder/form-filling exercise. And the Visual Studio compiler toolchain is a proper compiler, which does just fine on normal code without the environment (most people here only use the dev studio environment for debugging and use visual slickedit, xemacs or vim for development on windows).
That gui is nothing more or less than Computer Associates "CA UniCenter TNG", which is a systems management thingummybobber. I remember going to a demo for it in 1998 (or was it earlier?).
Where I work they have a variant they call the WSJ test. Never write anything you wouldn't be happy to see attributed to you on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Sadly you are completely wrong in almost every detail. This type of superencryption doesn't necessarily improve things at all and may make things worse. In effect you're saying "The chocolate lock I have on my front door isn't a problem because I have a deaf dumb and blind guard dog. Each on his own wouldn't do the job but together they reduce the chances of being burgaled to virtually zero".
Trivially, consider a "hash" algorithm (hash1) where you just add all of the ascii values of the letters together to get a hash value. This will obviously be insecure and easy to manufacture collisions.
Now consider another "hash" algorithm (hash2) where you just subtract all of the ascii values of the letters together to get a hash value. This will obviously also be insecure and easy to manufacture collisions.
Now, they're both bad so to make them more secure I add the results of hash1 and hash2 together. I then have a "super" hash function where any text will collide with any other text (because the result of adding the numbers together will always be zero). In other words, my well-intentioned change has made the resultant algorithm much worse.
The point of this straw man example is that changes to crypto algorithms which seem intuitively to help often don't. By adding algo a and algo b together I don't get a*b I get c, which could be better or worse than a or b on their own.
100% agree. If enlightenment only looks as beautiful as ever, then we really do have a problem.
I'll stick with ratpoison. It may not look like the interface to a videogame, but it is fast, elegant, small, and (most importantly for me) a productive work environment.
I work for a big wall-street firm. I was originally hired as a contractor and have become permanent. Since being made permanent my total compensation has increased massively and there is more-or-less no upper cap on how much I can earn if I continue to deliver the goods.
They are a fantastic company to work for, the environment is great, I get to work for and with some very very smart people and I do interesting work as well as being well-paid. The fringe benefits are great too.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I would not have taken my job had I used a single short-term criterion such as this to decide my path.
How did I get here? By thinking of the big picture. Think of your career in the long term, don't base your decision on something dumb like how long it takes for the company to approve a new headcount. Due to the desire to compensate people really well in the long term, my employer takes forever to approve new hires and to begin with I could only be taken on as a contractor. If I had allowed that to put me off I might feel like I'm real smart getting one over The Man and not letting The Man screw me over, but in actual fact I would be materially worse off.
Instead, think about your career in the long term and invest in the big picture. If there are good prospects, don't let short-term stuff get in your way. If you are good enough, you will be rewarded whether you are a permie or a contractor. I have been both and their are plusses and minusses to both sides. Just be sure to put your own priorities at the top of your personal employment agenda and you'll make the right choice.
Good luck whatever you do.
"LAMP" is marketing-speak and not a platform, and anyone posting to/. should know better. What are they really talking about?
Linux (well, you could just as easily use BSD)
Apache (well you could use another free webserver or an appserver like Zope)
Mysql (well you could use Postgres)
Php/Perl/Python (well PHP is just plain awful and there are other alternatives anyway).
Firstly, mysql may be fine for small applications, but is pretty rotten as databases go. When I have used it in the past it really begins to suffer from lock starvation as you scale to more and more read and write contention. As free databases go, postgres has been superior in my experience.
Really what people mean when they talk about "Lamp" is "open source n-tier architecture" or "open-source middleware with a database".
Sun have always been against Linux and its pretty easy to see why. For some time their business model has been to lock big companies (particularly Wall St & Fortune 500) into the datacentres full of slow Sun hardware on the premise that that's the only way to run a reliable bullet-proof O/S. Linux has provided a viable alternative and as such challenges their profitable hardware business.
I work for a big Wall St firm, and in my job I used to get heads of various trading desks asking if they could get their $250000 suns "upgraded" to be like one oof our $2500 commodity Linux boxes because of the difference in computing power. Sun completely misread how to play the reliability game too and decided to go for huge, expensive boxes, whereas the whole beowulf thing has lead a trend to large numbers of inexpensive boxes such that if multiple components fail you're still ok. You don't need a 64-CPU box if you can get 128 2xCPU machines with 8 times the processing power for less than half the price.
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of these babies... ...oh, it already is one. nevermind, I'll get my coat.
Yawn. My Logitech three-button wheel mouse works just fine in OS X and guess what the wheel does?
Yup. Last time I did business there, all communications (including voice and internet traffic) went through ICE, the state monopoly telco.
For this reason, (for example) you couldn't use a foreign mobile phone in Costa Rica. This is a purely commercial thing.
But imagine a beowulf cluster of these puppies!
Far be it for me to confuse this debate with the introduction of facts, but this is utter nonsense.
There are plenty of people who can do work in VB/VC++ and perl and on both Windows and Unix-like platforms (to generalise the debate further). Where I work all of our code runs on XP, Linux and Solaris and for scripting we use a lot of perl as well as other languages. Visual C++ is the compiler toolchain for our c++ code on XP. From where I sit I could throw a brick and hit at least five people who use VC++ and perl on a daily basis.
Furthermore, VC++ is fundamentally different from visual basic. It is proper programming, not just a gui builder/form-filling exercise. And the Visual Studio compiler toolchain is a proper compiler, which does just fine on normal code without the environment (most people here only use the dev studio environment for debugging and use visual slickedit, xemacs or vim for development on windows).
How on earth did the parent get "+2 Insightful"?
That gui is nothing more or less than Computer Associates "CA UniCenter TNG", which is a systems management thingummybobber. I remember going to a demo for it in 1998 (or was it earlier?).
Where I work they have a variant they call the WSJ test. Never write anything you wouldn't be happy to see attributed to you on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Sadly you are completely wrong in almost every detail. This type of superencryption doesn't necessarily improve things at all and may make things worse. In effect you're saying "The chocolate lock I have on my front door isn't a problem because I have a deaf dumb and blind guard dog. Each on his own wouldn't do the job but together they reduce the chances of being burgaled to virtually zero".
Trivially, consider a "hash" algorithm (hash1) where you just add all of the ascii values of the letters together to get a hash value. This will obviously be insecure and easy to manufacture collisions.
Now consider another "hash" algorithm (hash2) where you just subtract all of the ascii values of the letters together to get a hash value. This will obviously also be insecure and easy to manufacture collisions.
Now, they're both bad so to make them more secure I add the results of hash1 and hash2 together. I then have a "super" hash function where any text will collide with any other text (because the result of adding the numbers together will always be zero). In other words, my well-intentioned change has made the resultant algorithm much worse.
The point of this straw man example is that changes to crypto algorithms which seem intuitively to help often don't. By adding algo a and algo b together I don't get a*b I get c, which could be better or worse than a or b on their own.
100% agree. If enlightenment only looks as beautiful as ever, then we really do have a problem.
I'll stick with ratpoison. It may not look like the interface to a videogame, but it is fast, elegant, small, and (most importantly for me) a productive work environment.
I work for a big wall-street firm. I was originally hired as a contractor and have become permanent. Since being made permanent my total compensation has increased massively and there is more-or-less no upper cap on how much I can earn if I continue to deliver the goods. They are a fantastic company to work for, the environment is great, I get to work for and with some very very smart people and I do interesting work as well as being well-paid. The fringe benefits are great too. Why am I telling you all this? Because I would not have taken my job had I used a single short-term criterion such as this to decide my path. How did I get here? By thinking of the big picture. Think of your career in the long term, don't base your decision on something dumb like how long it takes for the company to approve a new headcount. Due to the desire to compensate people really well in the long term, my employer takes forever to approve new hires and to begin with I could only be taken on as a contractor. If I had allowed that to put me off I might feel like I'm real smart getting one over The Man and not letting The Man screw me over, but in actual fact I would be materially worse off. Instead, think about your career in the long term and invest in the big picture. If there are good prospects, don't let short-term stuff get in your way. If you are good enough, you will be rewarded whether you are a permie or a contractor. I have been both and their are plusses and minusses to both sides. Just be sure to put your own priorities at the top of your personal employment agenda and you'll make the right choice. Good luck whatever you do.
"LAMP" is marketing-speak and not a platform, and anyone posting to /. should know better. What are they really talking about?
Linux (well, you could just as easily use BSD)
Apache (well you could use another free webserver or an appserver like Zope)
Mysql (well you could use Postgres)
Php/Perl/Python (well PHP is just plain awful and there are other alternatives anyway).
Firstly, mysql may be fine for small applications, but is pretty rotten as databases go. When I have used it in the past it really begins to suffer from lock starvation as you scale to more and more read and write contention. As free databases go, postgres has been superior in my experience.
Really what people mean when they talk about "Lamp" is "open source n-tier architecture" or "open-source middleware with a database".
...but apparently it supports betamax
Sun have always been against Linux and its pretty easy to see why. For some time their business model has been to lock big companies (particularly Wall St & Fortune 500) into the datacentres full of slow Sun hardware on the premise that that's the only way to run a reliable bullet-proof O/S. Linux has provided a viable alternative and as such challenges their profitable hardware business.
I work for a big Wall St firm, and in my job I used to get heads of various trading desks asking if they could get their $250000 suns "upgraded" to be like one oof our $2500 commodity Linux boxes because of the difference in computing power. Sun completely misread how to play the reliability game too and decided to go for huge, expensive boxes, whereas the whole beowulf thing has lead a trend to large numbers of inexpensive boxes such that if multiple components fail you're still ok. You don't need a 64-CPU box if you can get 128 2xCPU machines with 8 times the processing power for less than half the price.
My mac "mouse" is a logitech trackball with three buttons and a scroll wheel all of which work just fine in OsX.