OK, just since I see so many posts about how people only like OSS because they hate miscrosoft, I felt like posting.
People who back and write open source software dont neccessarily do it because they hate microsoft, in fact a good deal of people who write OSS don't really care either way for microsoft. People who write open sourced software do it because they like to see what could be. They don't care to make a million dollars for writing some application (though it would be nice), they really jsut want to write an application (I'll use a small text editor for example), then with the ideas and help from other developers, have that turn into a new and inovative application (something revolutionizing Word for example). The problem with limiting the people who have access to the code is that you limit the chances of including any revolutionary ideas into your program.
There's also another issue which is you really do a disservice to mankind. Lets put the licensing scheme in another field, we'll use the medical field. Let's say company XYZ (equivilant to microsoft) patented the idea of heart pumps, although they never made a heart pump that was actually used. Now company ABC comes along and invents artificial hearts, but in order to artificial hearts to work, they needed to use a heart pump which they invented on their own since company XYZ wouldn't release the specs on how to create one but, now that they've created it on their own, it was still patented by company XYZ. Now company ABC goes to XYZ and asks for use of their heart pumps, but company XYZ denies the use of them, but offers to buy company ABC at some rediculously low price compared to what it could make if it happened to have the rights to use said patent.
This is more or less the forsight most open source programmers have and why they frown upon closed source business practices.
So the building standards that require that your office won't collapse in a minor earthquake piss you off, eh?
Why should there be a law requiring this standard? We live in a capitalist society, so business's should use this as a marketing advantage (If I live in california and am getting a house built, I'm definitly going to go with the company that offers the earthquake resilient houses, but if I live somewhere like chicago where earthquakes are pretty uncommon, I'd like the choice of not having this option.
The drink-drive laws that help reduce the number of drunken fuckheads driving three ton killing machines piss you off, eh?
There's no statistics that prove that the harsher laws that were put in place in the late 80's for DUI's has helped at all. Even according to MADD stats, between 1982 and 1988, drunk driving fatilities dropped 9%, and since the harsher laws were put into place (I believe it was 988), the stats have only dropped 12% for this 15year period. Plus a car doesn't weight 3 tons.
The waste laws that stop your local pharmaceutical firm dumping chlorine and ammonia in your local lake piss you off, eh?
Yes this law pisses me off too. I would much rather have this law and the law that restricts me from vandalizing/destroying the property which is polluting me environment removed. As I recall, most companies find loopholes in these laws to allow them to keep their pollution levels high
The non-proliferation treaties that make it difficult for insane dictators to build nuclear weapons piss you off, eh?
We've already proven that these treaties don't work (iraq, north korea... [ok, so there were no WMD's found in iraq, that just shows that saddam swallowed them before he got caught]). On the other hand its great that we've reduced the amount of nucleur power these countries have been able to produce causing increased pollution and a lower standard of living for their citizens due to increased cost of power.
I am a tax payer and I am tired of my hard earned pay going to taxes which support the lives of society's trash.
Who's to say that prison inmates are societies trash? Personally I think people with your ignorant, sheltered attitude fit the image of "societies trash" better than a prison inmate does. After all, prison inmates (and future prison inmates) generally only effect the lives of other potential prison inmates, while people with your attitude tend to always try to reach out to people of different walks of life and change the way they live.
I haven't heard anything so retarded since the last time I heard steve balmer give a speech. How excactly is ".net much more free than java"? Last time I checked, microsoft was not giving away any open sourced versions of any.net compilers without at least purchasing the operating system, so it's not really giving it away, plus its not open sourced. On the other hand, you can freely download jre and jdk from the sun website
and though I'm not sure whether that is open sourced or not, there is always the open sourced blackdown java implementation.
So the closest thing I see to irony here is that in order to defend microsoft, you have to be totally ignorant to the everything, much like all of microsofts products.
The linux machines I set up in the call center at my work run Slackware w/ the gnome window manager. Personally though, I run enlightenment as my window manager with slackware. I'm curious though who you know though that runs windowmaker, I thought development stopped on that like 4 years ago? (you could obviously say the same thing about enlightenment which I'm running.)
i would rather have to maintain some code with variables like StupidSuckingGlobalCallbackFunction rather than when the variables a primarily named as whoopwhoop, beepbeep, barkbark, fluffyfishy, etc.
thats a common misconception of linux which you made. Linux isn't any "harder" than windows, its just different, so of course doing something different than what you already know is harder than doing something you already know. So mexico being as underdeveloped as it is should have as hard of a time setting up linux machines as say here in the states where everyone is already very accustomed to windows would have a much harder to trying to switch to linux. Now taking into account the record of linux machines being more stable than microsoft machines (obviously this isn't taking into effect what software is actually running ontop of the OS), the students would probably benifit more from a linux machine than a windows machine as far as amount of progress made via each sessions at the computer. So, so far I'd say linux has a small advantage over windows, but there's still a couple more things you gotta take into account. First, is without the cost of microsoft products (which I'm sure microsoft would discount or even give away if threatened with linux), you could afford more computers to reach out to more students, and at this point assuming you'd have to purchase microsoft products at retail price, I'd say linux now has a sizable lead in the decision. Finally though, you need to take into account the usefullness of learning with each of these products. With learning microsoft, you'd learn office skills (such as word processing), maybe twice as fast as you'd learn with linux, while with linux, you'd learn research and development skills faster than with windows (based on a limited budget due to r&d software for windows being so expensive, whereas with linux there's a lot more open source projects available). This being the underdeveloped mexico, I'd assume that having a large populus of r&d trained citizens would be more usefull than a large populus of office skilled citizens. So in my opinion linux would be the ideal choice for implementing in secondary schools in mexico.
Note: I have no idea how this comment turned out so long, I just meant to reply with the first line or two that I said, then got a little carried away.
I have a friend who is "mentally handicapped" to the point where he can't read or write at the age of 24. I've been testing the method of ridicule and public embarrassment in order to stimulate the motivation needed to learn which, have been fairly unsuccessful. So far in the past 3 years of testing, he has attempted the exercises of trying to get people to read books to him, attempting to learn french by listening to audio tapes, and self loathing. None of these attempts which he's tried have been successful, so I would say my experiment is failing... but on the other hand its REALLY funny so I think I'll continue with the experiment and see what happens.
After reading the comments to this post, I have finally lost my faith in the industry... C was around before your 'secure' languages, and C will be around long after your 'secure' languages become outdated/obsolete.
Yah, I'm in the same boat as you. I dropped out of school at 16, at 18 I went and got a job in the computer industry, and now that I'm 23, and making a good amount of money, I want out. Although I still love working with computers, and I still enjoy my work, I just came to the realization of how pointless 99% of computer jobs are. All your doing is trying to make it so one company can sell their product to another company... and I personally dont care if the companies make any money, sell their product, or become corrupt (even more corrupt?) and start stealing money from everyone.
So after coming to this realization, I decided to go back to community college to start studying physics with the hopes of tranfsering to a good UC. And like you said, now that I'm going back I am way more motivated and disciplined, only problem is that I've gotta work between 30 and 60 hours a week so last semester (my first), it can be kinda hard to study as much as I needed to.
For the past couple years, I've been building servers for my company, and it's really turned into more of a pain than that money is worth (not to mention we've probably lost more money than we saved due to some downtime). My company is really stingy with money (less so now than they were before), and wouldnt give me the money I needed to buy any prebuilt systems, so I would piece together machines. In the end this turned out not to be the best idea due to a few factors.
1) Shipping problems would always come up where they wouldn't send out items until like a week after I bought them.
2) I recieved quite a few parts that were DOA
3) Putting some of the 1U's together was a huge pain, especially trying to find 1U cpu fans for the faster processors
4) hardware would fail, and due to it being about a year and a half since I built the machine, and hardware changing so rapidly recently, It would be hard to find a local store with replacement parts.
I think out of the 9 rackmount servers I built, I've had 5 motherboards fail, 6 sticks of ram, and a power supply (not counting the stuff that was DOA). Most of the failed hardware I would say happened within the first week of the server being online, so I dont know if that should be considered DOA too, but i'm not including it. Anyways I've recently been buying Supermicro servers and couldn't be happier. All the machines I've got from them, and that my friend who recommended them has got from them have been running great, and they're much cheaper than IBM or any other big manufacturer (though if I had the funds I'd rather buy IBM). Anyways, before I quit building my own machines I found a great place to buy rackmount cases which is rackmountmaster. All the cases I've got from them are laid out great, have good air ventelation, and aren't rediculously priced like so many other rackmount manufacturers.
so your saying before you worked at microsoft you were brain-dead, but now that you work there, you some how arent brain dead and everyone around you is smart? hmm...
There's a big difference between majordomo/mailman/ezmlm and software such as MailList King Pro, these open source projects are interactive mailing lists where everyone on the list can participate, where as MailList King Pro and similar software is a one way mailing list (people on the mailing list cant interact with the mailing list).
I agree, everything should be dumped into a single directory, in fact we wont even need to call it a directory any more, you can just call it MyFiles (sticking with windows naming scheme). That way you wont need to worry about having to find out where your file is located because they'll all be in MyFiles. Now we just need to allow file names to be patentable (yes copywrite would make more sense, but copywrite just doesn't hold up well enough in court), that way if anyone ever designs their own program that has the same file naem as your program, we can all sue each other (this should also keep all those virus writers at bay because once they know they'll be able to be sued over writing a virus which overwrites your file, they'll have no choice but to stop).
I'm sure after seeing the responses that everyones given here, that the people at google were sorry they ever asked the question. I haven't seen a single post yet (not really surprised) that has said what is wrong with unix. About 75% of these responses are whats wrong with linux distributions, 15% have been whats wrong with the a specific kernel (usually linux), and 10% are trying to explain the question (I guess my response falls into that category).
So in response to your responses, 1) Linux and BSD are not unix, Linux (and everything written for linux) were originally written to emulate a unix system but now do even more, and BSD was a unix like system written alongside unix.
2) Saying whats wrong with a certain driver in any unix kernel doesn't answer whats wrong with unix as you don't need to use any specific drivers in order to be a unix system. All unix was originally was a portable multi-user, multi-processing system which was written at bell labs (in 1969 i believe). Now to brand your operating system unix, you must follow the 1170 Specs from The Open Group which states the system interface devices, the basic tool environment, networking services, and the X/Open Curses standard (non of these are any specific binary you need to install, just general rules to follow when creating each of these base systems).
Slashdot Mirror
OK, just since I see so many posts about how people only like OSS because they hate miscrosoft, I felt like posting.
People who back and write open source software dont neccessarily do it because they hate microsoft, in fact a good deal of people who write OSS don't really care either way for microsoft. People who write open sourced software do it because they like to see what could be. They don't care to make a million dollars for writing some application (though it would be nice), they really jsut want to write an application (I'll use a small text editor for example), then with the ideas and help from other developers, have that turn into a new and inovative application (something revolutionizing Word for example). The problem with limiting the people who have access to the code is that you limit the chances of including any revolutionary ideas into your program.
There's also another issue which is you really do a disservice to mankind. Lets put the licensing scheme in another field, we'll use the medical field. Let's say company XYZ (equivilant to microsoft) patented the idea of heart pumps, although they never made a heart pump that was actually used. Now company ABC comes along and invents artificial hearts, but in order to artificial hearts to work, they needed to use a heart pump which they invented on their own since company XYZ wouldn't release the specs on how to create one but, now that they've created it on their own, it was still patented by company XYZ. Now company ABC goes to XYZ and asks for use of their heart pumps, but company XYZ denies the use of them, but offers to buy company ABC at some rediculously low price compared to what it could make if it happened to have the rights to use said patent.
This is more or less the forsight most open source programmers have and why they frown upon closed source business practices.
they all definitly piss me off
So the building standards that require that your office won't collapse in a minor earthquake piss you off, eh?
Why should there be a law requiring this standard? We live in a capitalist society, so business's should use this as a marketing advantage (If I live in california and am getting a house built, I'm definitly going to go with the company that offers the earthquake resilient houses, but if I live somewhere like chicago where earthquakes are pretty uncommon, I'd like the choice of not having this option.
The drink-drive laws that help reduce the number of drunken fuckheads driving three ton killing machines piss you off, eh?
There's no statistics that prove that the harsher laws that were put in place in the late 80's for DUI's has helped at all. Even according to MADD stats, between 1982 and 1988, drunk driving fatilities dropped 9%, and since the harsher laws were put into place (I believe it was 988), the stats have only dropped 12% for this 15year period. Plus a car doesn't weight 3 tons.
The waste laws that stop your local pharmaceutical firm dumping chlorine and ammonia in your local lake piss you off, eh?
Yes this law pisses me off too. I would much rather have this law and the law that restricts me from vandalizing/destroying the property which is polluting me environment removed. As I recall, most companies find loopholes in these laws to allow them to keep their pollution levels high
The non-proliferation treaties that make it difficult for insane dictators to build nuclear weapons piss you off, eh?
We've already proven that these treaties don't work (iraq, north korea... [ok, so there were no WMD's found in iraq, that just shows that saddam swallowed them before he got caught]). On the other hand its great that we've reduced the amount of nucleur power these countries have been able to produce causing increased pollution and a lower standard of living for their citizens due to increased cost of power.
I am a tax payer and I am tired of my hard earned pay going to taxes which support the lives of society's trash.
Who's to say that prison inmates are societies trash? Personally I think people with your ignorant, sheltered attitude fit the image of "societies trash" better than a prison inmate does. After all, prison inmates (and future prison inmates) generally only effect the lives of other potential prison inmates, while people with your attitude tend to always try to reach out to people of different walks of life and change the way they live.
i wish that would happen here in the US, I've been looking for some more reasons to beat up little kids.
thank you for trying to teach me
Hmm, sorry I think I misinterpreted your statement, but am too lazy to research the context of what you were saying...
I haven't heard anything so retarded since the last time I heard steve balmer give a speech. How excactly is ".net much more free than java"? Last time I checked, microsoft was not giving away any open sourced versions of any .net compilers without at least purchasing the operating system, so it's not really giving it away, plus its not open sourced. On the other hand, you can freely download jre and jdk from the sun website
and though I'm not sure whether that is open sourced or not, there is always the open sourced blackdown java implementation.
So the closest thing I see to irony here is that in order to defend microsoft, you have to be totally ignorant to the everything, much like all of microsofts products.
The linux machines I set up in the call center at my work run Slackware w/ the gnome window manager. Personally though, I run enlightenment as my window manager with slackware. I'm curious though who you know though that runs windowmaker, I thought development stopped on that like 4 years ago? (you could obviously say the same thing about enlightenment which I'm running.)
its also a great sig. to discredit whatever you say
you wouldnt happen to know who came up with the x ? y : z syntax would you? I have a baseball bat who would like to meet him. or should i say
$baseball_bat ? $his_face : $the_rest_of_his_family
i would rather have to maintain some code with variables like StupidSuckingGlobalCallbackFunction rather than when the variables a primarily named as whoopwhoop, beepbeep, barkbark, fluffyfishy, etc.
thats a common misconception of linux which you made. Linux isn't any "harder" than windows, its just different, so of course doing something different than what you already know is harder than doing something you already know. So mexico being as underdeveloped as it is should have as hard of a time setting up linux machines as say here in the states where everyone is already very accustomed to windows would have a much harder to trying to switch to linux. Now taking into account the record of linux machines being more stable than microsoft machines (obviously this isn't taking into effect what software is actually running ontop of the OS), the students would probably benifit more from a linux machine than a windows machine as far as amount of progress made via each sessions at the computer. So, so far I'd say linux has a small advantage over windows, but there's still a couple more things you gotta take into account. First, is without the cost of microsoft products (which I'm sure microsoft would discount or even give away if threatened with linux), you could afford more computers to reach out to more students, and at this point assuming you'd have to purchase microsoft products at retail price, I'd say linux now has a sizable lead in the decision. Finally though, you need to take into account the usefullness of learning with each of these products. With learning microsoft, you'd learn office skills (such as word processing), maybe twice as fast as you'd learn with linux, while with linux, you'd learn research and development skills faster than with windows (based on a limited budget due to r&d software for windows being so expensive, whereas with linux there's a lot more open source projects available). This being the underdeveloped mexico, I'd assume that having a large populus of r&d trained citizens would be more usefull than a large populus of office skilled citizens. So in my opinion linux would be the ideal choice for implementing in secondary schools in mexico.
Note: I have no idea how this comment turned out so long, I just meant to reply with the first line or two that I said, then got a little carried away.
I have a friend who is "mentally handicapped" to the point where he can't read or write at the age of 24. I've been testing the method of ridicule and public embarrassment in order to stimulate the motivation needed to learn which, have been fairly unsuccessful. So far in the past 3 years of testing, he has attempted the exercises of trying to get people to read books to him, attempting to learn french by listening to audio tapes, and self loathing. None of these attempts which he's tried have been successful, so I would say my experiment is failing... but on the other hand its REALLY funny so I think I'll continue with the experiment and see what happens.
wouldn't it be a better idea to spend all that money you have available on the "highly skilled admins" rather than dumbed down software?
After reading the comments to this post, I have finally lost my faith in the industry... C was around before your 'secure' languages, and C will be around long after your 'secure' languages become outdated/obsolete.
hahahahhahahahaha
Yah, I'm in the same boat as you. I dropped out of school at 16, at 18 I went and got a job in the computer industry, and now that I'm 23, and making a good amount of money, I want out. Although I still love working with computers, and I still enjoy my work, I just came to the realization of how pointless 99% of computer jobs are. All your doing is trying to make it so one company can sell their product to another company... and I personally dont care if the companies make any money, sell their product, or become corrupt (even more corrupt?) and start stealing money from everyone.
So after coming to this realization, I decided to go back to community college to start studying physics with the hopes of tranfsering to a good UC. And like you said, now that I'm going back I am way more motivated and disciplined, only problem is that I've gotta work between 30 and 60 hours a week so last semester (my first), it can be kinda hard to study as much as I needed to.
For the past couple years, I've been building servers for my company, and it's really turned into more of a pain than that money is worth (not to mention we've probably lost more money than we saved due to some downtime). My company is really stingy with money (less so now than they were before), and wouldnt give me the money I needed to buy any prebuilt systems, so I would piece together machines. In the end this turned out not to be the best idea due to a few factors.
1) Shipping problems would always come up where they wouldn't send out items until like a week after I bought them.
2) I recieved quite a few parts that were DOA
3) Putting some of the 1U's together was a huge pain, especially trying to find 1U cpu fans for the faster processors
4) hardware would fail, and due to it being about a year and a half since I built the machine, and hardware changing so rapidly recently, It would be hard to find a local store with replacement parts.
I think out of the 9 rackmount servers I built, I've had 5 motherboards fail, 6 sticks of ram, and a power supply (not counting the stuff that was DOA). Most of the failed hardware I would say happened within the first week of the server being online, so I dont know if that should be considered DOA too, but i'm not including it. Anyways I've recently been buying Supermicro servers and couldn't be happier. All the machines I've got from them, and that my friend who recommended them has got from them have been running great, and they're much cheaper than IBM or any other big manufacturer (though if I had the funds I'd rather buy IBM). Anyways, before I quit building my own machines I found a great place to buy rackmount cases which is rackmountmaster. All the cases I've got from them are laid out great, have good air ventelation, and aren't rediculously priced like so many other rackmount manufacturers.
so your saying before you worked at microsoft you were brain-dead, but now that you work there, you some how arent brain dead and everyone around you is smart? hmm...
Guess I should have read the details of the product before I made assumptions.
There's a big difference between majordomo/mailman/ezmlm and software such as MailList King Pro, these open source projects are interactive mailing lists where everyone on the list can participate, where as MailList King Pro and similar software is a one way mailing list (people on the mailing list cant interact with the mailing list).
No, its unix like, but its not actually unix.
http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/call-it-a-duck.html
I agree, everything should be dumped into a single directory, in fact we wont even need to call it a directory any more, you can just call it MyFiles (sticking with windows naming scheme). That way you wont need to worry about having to find out where your file is located because they'll all be in MyFiles. Now we just need to allow file names to be patentable (yes copywrite would make more sense, but copywrite just doesn't hold up well enough in court), that way if anyone ever designs their own program that has the same file naem as your program, we can all sue each other (this should also keep all those virus writers at bay because once they know they'll be able to be sued over writing a virus which overwrites your file, they'll have no choice but to stop).
http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/security/ ssp/
http://www.immunix.org/
Theres others, just cant think of the names...
I'm sure after seeing the responses that everyones given here, that the people at google were sorry they ever asked the question. I haven't seen a single post yet (not really surprised) that has said what is wrong with unix. About 75% of these responses are whats wrong with linux distributions, 15% have been whats wrong with the a specific kernel (usually linux), and 10% are trying to explain the question (I guess my response falls into that category).
So in response to your responses,
1) Linux and BSD are not unix, Linux (and everything written for linux) were originally written to emulate a unix system but now do even more, and BSD was a unix like system written alongside unix.
2) Saying whats wrong with a certain driver in any unix kernel doesn't answer whats wrong with unix as you don't need to use any specific drivers in order to be a unix system. All unix was originally was a portable multi-user, multi-processing system which was written at bell labs (in 1969 i believe). Now to brand your operating system unix, you must follow the 1170 Specs from The Open Group which states the system interface devices, the basic tool environment, networking services, and the X/Open Curses standard (non of these are any specific binary you need to install, just general rules to follow when creating each of these base systems).