Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Many small-time programmers do pick GPL for irrational ideological reasons - "don't let evil corporations steal our code". That was the prevailing culture from the early days of open source software, back when everyone lived in mom's basement and thought money grew on trees. As FLOSS got bigger, a lot of software authors simply didn't give much thought to the GPL-vs-BSD debate, and went with the herd mentality (pun intended). Some bigger players like Qt (now Nokia) also used GPL's restrictiveness to make money, which is perfectly fine as long as you don't claim that restrictively licensed software is somehow more "free" than the permissively licensed / public domain kind. A lot of people also thought GPL would be more effective at "hurting Microsoft" than BSD, which has proven to be completely the opposite - as I predicted. (Google - smart, IBM - dumb.)
I'm not "trying to pin the non-success of SFU" on anyone but the regulators. The FLOSS community doesn't have any obligation to support a particular platform, but it's very telling that they snubbed Interix as much as they did...
So, anyway, I'm just making a long-term prediction of a libertarian-minded counter-movement in open-source software - people like me picking *BSD over Linux / Solaris for ideological reasons. We'll see how that prediction holds out.
Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market! Read Murray Rothbard, David Friendman, and other free market philosophers. The government is a violent and effectively unaccountable monopoly that has clipped the wings of human civilization, and may bring it to a screeching dystopian halt if not debunked and dismantled by the end of this century!
I get at least a 10% performance boot recompiling i386 binaries for pentium4 with all gcc optimisations. Even more importantly, you get your packages to include the libraries you need and avoid those you don't. Most precompiled distros are getting really bloated, and you can't uninstall many things you don't need because whoever compiled another package decided to link it with everything plus the kitchen sink.
The more settings are set at compile-time, the faster a package runs. Compiling also allows for greater hardware flexibility, including having your software take full advantage of all the hardware you have on your system: CPU's, graphics, sound, specialty network adapters, and so on. In the future, hardware platforms will continue to become ever-more diverse. An ideal compilation for a server with 256 128-bit CPU's is very different than the ideal compilation for a wristwatch!
Precompiled packages become a self-fulfilling prophecy that discourages market innovation. Imagine you're a small-time electronics manufacturer in Taiwan and you want to release a hardware product that would boost performance of certain applications 50%, but it will only work if the software is compiled to take advantage of that. If your target customers are running precompiled distros, your product launch is no-go until you convince the distro maintainers to compile all their packages your way, or you have to set up your own package repository for your clients. If your target customers are running Gentoo, on the other hand, after installing your hardware they'll just have to set a new USE flag and re-emerge!
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
Public domain software is ideal, but the most permissive (least restrictive) FLOSS software stack you can get today would be based on minimalist "cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD. Other great permissive software includes Apache, PostgreSQL, Python, LLVM, X, vim, libtorrent, the Xiph codecs, and so on. Major kudos to Google for releasing Chromium under the BSD license, which for the first time in history finally makes a decent 100% free software desktop possible!
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back. There has been some effort to get Gentoo's portage or NetBSD's pkgsrc working on it, but it never got off the ground. It seems like the open source community is ostracising Interix for purely irrational anti-capitalist reasons, and that's really a shame - it could have brought the power of UNIX to the >90% of users who run Windows! (Yes, there's also Cygwin, but it's embarrassingly slow, buggy, and incomplete.)
As Stallman's economic fallacies become ever more evident, I expect ever-more developer time to shift to 100% free (non-copyleft) software, which means there's a very bright long-term future ahead for platforms like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, NewForkBSD, and even MINIX 4!
Big Business loves government regulation, because they get to control it and raise the barrier-to-entry for smaller / future competition.
Megacorps and demagogue politicians aside, regulation hurts everyone else, especially the so-called "sweatshop victims" who must now resort to even worse means of survival (if any).
Fiscal conservatism / capitalism and not spreading your subjective religion through government violence is kids' stuff, eh? I guess real life experience is required to understand how successful socialism and religious bigotry have been throughout history...
This is the most retarded piece of drivel in the history of the Internet!
While I agree on Socrates and Aristotle, Plato should definitely be Algol, Fortran, or Cobol.
Kant should at best be associated with BrainF*ck, or some other useless nonsensical irrational joke of a programming language. Even that would be a greater honor than he deserves!
Python should in fact be associated with the very opposite philosophy, and the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century: Ayn Rand. Python is clearly something Howard Roark would design: clean, rational, and brilliant.
Government in of itself is bad for individual sovereignty and everything that goes with it, including freedom of speech online. The conventional wisdom has been: there is no such thing as an honest politician, at least not in the two mainstream parties. Most nerds are reasonable people, and reasonable people don't need the government to tuck them in at night, they only vote defensively, for the lesser of two evils, if at all.
In the 2008 election, however, for the first time in a generation, there's an exception to this rule - Ron Paul! In Dr. Paul we have a serious candidate who isn't owned by the military-industrial-complex or the unions, and who isn't running on charisma or mindless nationalism or promises of government handouts! He understands that the role of the Federal Government is to protect our borders and our airspace, ensure fundamental rights (life, liberty, and property), and that's pretty much it. If you want to hand out free blueberry muffins, this should be done at state or municipal level, or better yet through an NGO. Dr. Paul has a proven track record of standing on principle and not yielding an inch!
Going back to the "nerds" metaphor - he will keep the "jocks" from taking away our lunch money and giving a swirly to anyone who resists!
I don't have a problem with my 3-year-old Dell running Vista Home Basic via the "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200" driver dated 11/3/2003 - probably because only 3D apps I ever run are Second Life and Quake 3 Arena, which work as well as on Linux / XP.
Funny thing, though, if I let Windows update my driver, it installs some Microsoft version from 2006, which Second Life refuses to work with...
The Solaris Kernel has some advantages, and it has some nice high-end server tools. People will still prefer to use GNU packages for most things, though. This would put Debian's plans to create a "Universal Operating System" with interchangeable kernels at an advantage over other distributions. There will probably be many efforts to recreate some of Solaris advantages as part of Linux/BSD. Maybe, as the result of all this, the Linux JVM will no longer suck.
As much as I love programming language comparo's, this one just doesn't hit the spot. Do people actually think a scripting language should only be used for tiny write-only stand-alone scripts?
TOOLS: If this section was meant to cover the tools / features that enhance the versatility and convenience of a language, it isn't complete. What about machine code compiler availability / VM support, Web options (CGI, Apache plug-in, Server Pages, etc), editor / IDE support, profiling, RAD features like unit testing, and docstrings, multiplatform support for threading and other features that immature languages might leave POSIX-centered, etc? License openness and multiplatform range should also be considered. And why is shebang awareness, working without which would just require one extra word on the command line, three times more important than an interactive interpreter, debugger, or passing program in command line, which open up some serious time-saving habits.
SPEED: Unlike compiled / system programming languages, interpreted speed isn't the most important feature of a higher-level / scripting language. For most tasks on a modern computer, development time is infinitely more precious than execution time. Algorithms matter more than the overhead language speed. For example, since many scripts spend much of their time waiting for file I/O, network response, or user input, a Perl programmer who understands multithreading might end up writing faster apps than a C programmer who doesn't. Another important point is how a language fits into a large modular system. For example, Tcl is easier to embed / extend with C than many of the languages compared, so the real-world apps that are implemented in a combination of C/C++ and Tcl can be optimized as much as is needed. Python has superior profiling, JIT machine code compilation, and VM (IronPython, Jython) implementation than most / all of those scripting languages. Final speed note: the Python version 2.2 used in those benchmarks is ~30% slower than the latest version.
L.O.C. COUNT: Program briefness shouldn't be the only measurement of sample code: productivity and readability are each at least equally as important. Like, even though Perl is more compact, I'd bet those sample Python scripts would take less time programmers to write, and far less time to read for a non-Perl-centered programmer. The benchmark should also define a common policy for abbreviation-vs-readability in sample code: many of those examples could be made briefer or more readable regardless of the language.
The comparison was missing a number of essential sections:
LANGUAGE QUALITIES: how the fundamental language features impact its abilities as a scripting language. This would include language agility, dynamic typing system, garbage collection, high-level non-scalar objects (arrays, hashes, tables, relational features, etc), OO / multi-paradigm abilities, etc. How easy is the language to learn? (Will your non-programmer users be able to make trivial changes themselves?) Does it have any unavoidable annoyances (ex. as much as I love Python's use of whitespace, lack of an alternative block syntax would be a minus here).
SCALABILITY: Can it be used for very large applications? Does it break if running more than X instances / threads / CGI hits / etc at the same time? Does it break when asked to allocate 20 gigs of memory for some fancy chemistry simulation with lots of large numbers?
AVAILABILITY: How frequently is a language available on a typical shared Web host? How many add-on packages / libraries are available? Does it have any gaps in its library offerings: well-rounded RDBMS support, GUI, regex, multithreading, etc. How easy is it to find related published books, online tutorials / references, and community help? Is there a quality-assured version (like ActiveState), without which a language may not be usable in some commercial situations? Are there many popular / killer-app projects that use the language (ex. Zope).
Finally, the comparison was missing PHP, which has full
It mainly depends on how telecommuting-compatible you and your job are. If that works out for you, you're in luck. Nothing beats being paid for writing PHP code with one half of your brain, and watching TV with the family with another. (Effective multitasking takes some getting used to, but it's a great skill to learn.) Bring a laptop to your kids' soccer practice, put the kids to bed early, or have a babysitter for a part of the day, etc, and you can still put in those 12 hour days from home.
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Many small-time programmers do pick GPL for irrational ideological reasons - "don't let evil corporations steal our code". That was the prevailing culture from the early days of open source software, back when everyone lived in mom's basement and thought money grew on trees. As FLOSS got bigger, a lot of software authors simply didn't give much thought to the GPL-vs-BSD debate, and went with the herd mentality (pun intended). Some bigger players like Qt (now Nokia) also used GPL's restrictiveness to make money, which is perfectly fine as long as you don't claim that restrictively licensed software is somehow more "free" than the permissively licensed / public domain kind. A lot of people also thought GPL would be more effective at "hurting Microsoft" than BSD, which has proven to be completely the opposite - as I predicted. (Google - smart, IBM - dumb.)
I'm not "trying to pin the non-success of SFU" on anyone but the regulators. The FLOSS community doesn't have any obligation to support a particular platform, but it's very telling that they snubbed Interix as much as they did...
So, anyway, I'm just making a long-term prediction of a libertarian-minded counter-movement in open-source software - people like me picking *BSD over Linux / Solaris for ideological reasons. We'll see how that prediction holds out.
Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market! Read Murray Rothbard, David Friendman, and other free market philosophers. The government is a violent and effectively unaccountable monopoly that has clipped the wings of human civilization, and may bring it to a screeching dystopian halt if not debunked and dismantled by the end of this century!
I get at least a 10% performance boot recompiling i386 binaries for pentium4 with all gcc optimisations. Even more importantly, you get your packages to include the libraries you need and avoid those you don't. Most precompiled distros are getting really bloated, and you can't uninstall many things you don't need because whoever compiled another package decided to link it with everything plus the kitchen sink.
The more settings are set at compile-time, the faster a package runs. Compiling also allows for greater hardware flexibility, including having your software take full advantage of all the hardware you have on your system: CPU's, graphics, sound, specialty network adapters, and so on. In the future, hardware platforms will continue to become ever-more diverse. An ideal compilation for a server with 256 128-bit CPU's is very different than the ideal compilation for a wristwatch!
Precompiled packages become a self-fulfilling prophecy that discourages market innovation. Imagine you're a small-time electronics manufacturer in Taiwan and you want to release a hardware product that would boost performance of certain applications 50%, but it will only work if the software is compiled to take advantage of that. If your target customers are running precompiled distros, your product launch is no-go until you convince the distro maintainers to compile all their packages your way, or you have to set up your own package repository for your clients. If your target customers are running Gentoo, on the other hand, after installing your hardware they'll just have to set a new USE flag and re-emerge!
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
Public domain software is ideal, but the most permissive (least restrictive) FLOSS software stack you can get today would be based on minimalist "cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD. Other great permissive software includes Apache, PostgreSQL, Python, LLVM, X, vim, libtorrent, the Xiph codecs, and so on. Major kudos to Google for releasing Chromium under the BSD license, which for the first time in history finally makes a decent 100% free software desktop possible!
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back. There has been some effort to get Gentoo's portage or NetBSD's pkgsrc working on it, but it never got off the ground. It seems like the open source community is ostracising Interix for purely irrational anti-capitalist reasons, and that's really a shame - it could have brought the power of UNIX to the >90% of users who run Windows! (Yes, there's also Cygwin, but it's embarrassingly slow, buggy, and incomplete.)
As Stallman's economic fallacies become ever more evident, I expect ever-more developer time to shift to 100% free (non-copyleft) software, which means there's a very bright long-term future ahead for platforms like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, NewForkBSD, and even MINIX 4!
Big Business loves government regulation, because they get to control it and raise the barrier-to-entry for smaller / future competition.
Megacorps and demagogue politicians aside, regulation hurts everyone else, especially the so-called "sweatshop victims" who must now resort to even worse means of survival (if any).
Fiscal conservatism / capitalism and not spreading your subjective religion through government violence is kids' stuff, eh? I guess real life experience is required to understand how successful socialism and religious bigotry have been throughout history...
This is the most retarded piece of drivel in the history of the Internet!
While I agree on Socrates and Aristotle, Plato should definitely be Algol, Fortran, or Cobol.
Kant should at best be associated with BrainF*ck, or some other useless nonsensical irrational joke of a programming language. Even that would be a greater honor than he deserves!
Python should in fact be associated with the very opposite philosophy, and the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century: Ayn Rand. Python is clearly something Howard Roark would design: clean, rational, and brilliant.
Government in of itself is bad for individual sovereignty and everything that goes with it, including freedom of speech online. The conventional wisdom has been: there is no such thing as an honest politician, at least not in the two mainstream parties. Most nerds are reasonable people, and reasonable people don't need the government to tuck them in at night, they only vote defensively, for the lesser of two evils, if at all.
In the 2008 election, however, for the first time in a generation, there's an exception to this rule - Ron Paul! In Dr. Paul we have a serious candidate who isn't owned by the military-industrial-complex or the unions, and who isn't running on charisma or mindless nationalism or promises of government handouts! He understands that the role of the Federal Government is to protect our borders and our airspace, ensure fundamental rights (life, liberty, and property), and that's pretty much it. If you want to hand out free blueberry muffins, this should be done at state or municipal level, or better yet through an NGO. Dr. Paul has a proven track record of standing on principle and not yielding an inch!
Going back to the "nerds" metaphor - he will keep the "jocks" from taking away our lunch money and giving a swirly to anyone who resists!
I don't have a problem with my 3-year-old Dell running Vista Home Basic via the "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200" driver dated 11/3/2003 - probably because only 3D apps I ever run are Second Life and Quake 3 Arena, which work as well as on Linux / XP.
Funny thing, though, if I let Windows update my driver, it installs some Microsoft version from 2006, which Second Life refuses to work with...
The Solaris Kernel has some advantages, and it has some nice high-end server tools. People will still prefer to use GNU packages for most things, though. This would put Debian's plans to create a "Universal Operating System" with interchangeable kernels at an advantage over other distributions. There will probably be many efforts to recreate some of Solaris advantages as part of Linux/BSD. Maybe, as the result of all this, the Linux JVM will no longer suck.
As much as I love programming language comparo's, this one just doesn't hit the spot. Do people actually think a scripting language should only be used for tiny write-only stand-alone scripts? TOOLS: If this section was meant to cover the tools / features that enhance the versatility and convenience of a language, it isn't complete. What about machine code compiler availability / VM support, Web options (CGI, Apache plug-in, Server Pages, etc), editor / IDE support, profiling, RAD features like unit testing, and docstrings, multiplatform support for threading and other features that immature languages might leave POSIX-centered, etc? License openness and multiplatform range should also be considered. And why is shebang awareness, working without which would just require one extra word on the command line, three times more important than an interactive interpreter, debugger, or passing program in command line, which open up some serious time-saving habits. SPEED: Unlike compiled / system programming languages, interpreted speed isn't the most important feature of a higher-level / scripting language. For most tasks on a modern computer, development time is infinitely more precious than execution time. Algorithms matter more than the overhead language speed. For example, since many scripts spend much of their time waiting for file I/O, network response, or user input, a Perl programmer who understands multithreading might end up writing faster apps than a C programmer who doesn't. Another important point is how a language fits into a large modular system. For example, Tcl is easier to embed / extend with C than many of the languages compared, so the real-world apps that are implemented in a combination of C/C++ and Tcl can be optimized as much as is needed. Python has superior profiling, JIT machine code compilation, and VM (IronPython, Jython) implementation than most / all of those scripting languages. Final speed note: the Python version 2.2 used in those benchmarks is ~30% slower than the latest version. L.O.C. COUNT: Program briefness shouldn't be the only measurement of sample code: productivity and readability are each at least equally as important. Like, even though Perl is more compact, I'd bet those sample Python scripts would take less time programmers to write, and far less time to read for a non-Perl-centered programmer. The benchmark should also define a common policy for abbreviation-vs-readability in sample code: many of those examples could be made briefer or more readable regardless of the language. The comparison was missing a number of essential sections: LANGUAGE QUALITIES: how the fundamental language features impact its abilities as a scripting language. This would include language agility, dynamic typing system, garbage collection, high-level non-scalar objects (arrays, hashes, tables, relational features, etc), OO / multi-paradigm abilities, etc. How easy is the language to learn? (Will your non-programmer users be able to make trivial changes themselves?) Does it have any unavoidable annoyances (ex. as much as I love Python's use of whitespace, lack of an alternative block syntax would be a minus here). SCALABILITY: Can it be used for very large applications? Does it break if running more than X instances / threads / CGI hits / etc at the same time? Does it break when asked to allocate 20 gigs of memory for some fancy chemistry simulation with lots of large numbers? AVAILABILITY: How frequently is a language available on a typical shared Web host? How many add-on packages / libraries are available? Does it have any gaps in its library offerings: well-rounded RDBMS support, GUI, regex, multithreading, etc. How easy is it to find related published books, online tutorials / references, and community help? Is there a quality-assured version (like ActiveState), without which a language may not be usable in some commercial situations? Are there many popular / killer-app projects that use the language (ex. Zope). Finally, the comparison was missing PHP, which has full
It mainly depends on how telecommuting-compatible you and your job are. If that works out for you, you're in luck. Nothing beats being paid for writing PHP code with one half of your brain, and watching TV with the family with another. (Effective multitasking takes some getting used to, but it's a great skill to learn.) Bring a laptop to your kids' soccer practice, put the kids to bed early, or have a babysitter for a part of the day, etc, and you can still put in those 12 hour days from home.