Why are we talking to someone from 'James Cook University' about global warming? In my parallel computing class at Berkeley we have had scientists from LBNL come and talk to us about simulations, the math behind them, and results from various teams. There was only one major simulation that said there was no global warming, and it was from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, headed by this guy named John Christy. Too bad his tropospheric data was wrongly interpreted in the simulation code (which LBNL at one point demanded that it be turn over for inspection) due to a wayward negative sign, and the re-run with the new code showed global warming. I can't find the very detailed article on the simulation, but the Wikipedia entry on him mentions a little about the data fiasco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christy
The speaker ended his presentation to our class by saying that his generation would have to spend their whole lives convincing others that there is a problem and that it would be up to us to come up with solutions to it. But by then it might be too late. So let's stop listening to random scientists from random institutions (UAH, JCU, or Carleton, or what have you) that are of little scientific repute and think about reducing vehicle emissions. If anything we will have better air quality so there is no harm in trying except that a few higher-ups in major corporations make less money.
While I do agree that for the most speed-intensive programs you need C, it isn't as bad as you seem to make it seem either. In many common algorithm tests, a JIT compiled Java program runs just as fast as its C equivalent. Also, the fact that Java is 'over 10 years old' is irrelevant, because C is over 30 years old. The fact remains that while a low-level is required for very intensive programs, in many applications the fastest program is not a necessity. This is often the case when you need to write a program where the database is a much larger bottleneck. Many companies use Java for speed-to-solution, and in this parameter Java easily outdoes C.
Also, your mention of DirectX having.NET wrappers is irrelevant. You can use DirectX with unmanaged code as well, it is just that it has wrappers available so that if you wanted to use it with C# or VB.NET, you can. It was NOT re-written in C# internally or anything like that, because that WOULD deliver a fair performance hit.
Anyways, I feel every programming language has its place somewhere. To say that one language is worse than another one in every aspect is more likely to be false than true since its an absolute statement.
Starcraft: For a RTS with such diverse races, it is amazingly balanced and has some very interesting gameplay in UMS maps. Time and again I uninstall SC only to reinstall it soon after. It is the one game for which I can say that I enjoy it as much as I did the day I got it.
Super Smash Brothers Melee: My and my friends spend hours battling it out. One of the few games of this last (meaning pre-X360) generation that really had incredible gameplay. For the majority of people I know that own a GameCube, this game is the reason why they bought it.
Diablo 2: Patch 1.10 added a whole lot of material and pulled back a lot of people who left during the 1.09d era because of hackers, dupes, and overall lack of depth.
Pokemon: Fun to replay it with different creatures...what can I say. I didn't believe that my friends were actually going to spend several hours playing this all over but I have to say, I kinda wanna play it right now haha.
Baldur's Gate II: So much depth in this game. Tons of classes and races, tons of items, over 200 hours of play time because of a myriad of subquests - and this doesn't include the expansion.
Fallout 2: One of the best RPG's ever. And so unique in comparison to the stale overused 'fantasy' setting RPG's. Fun to go run around towns doing side quests and talking to all those people I never talked to before.
Unreal Tournament: Still a great Lan Party game, because it runs well on everyone's computers and just has outstanding FPS gameplay overall. A few years from now, I'll add 2004 to this list because it's gameplay modes are also amazingly addictive.
Note: I know there are a lot of CLASSIC games that aren't on this list (esp. on consoles), but I leave them out because I think the important factor here is replay value and so the grading is a little different. Games that tend to be strictly linear especially hurt from this.
Here we go - random idiot Linux whores (apologies to the smart non-whore ones) ready to spout out some of the usual nonsense and waiting to be modded up. Look at the number of employees MS has: Company Profile for MSFT And now look at another company, say...Oracle: Company Profile for ORCL
Something people here need to realize is that Microsoft makes a LOT of products. A whole freakin' lot, in basically every CS area you can think of. Per employee, they churn out quite a bit - the teams for each product are really small (often orders of magnitude smaller than corresponding teams or companies elsewhere).
Instead of blindly criticizing for all the flaws, why don't you also count all the things they did right.
And as for the article itself, it is not wrong or particularly amazing that a company spends a lot of money on marketing.
I think most of you are failing to recognize that Google is competing against only a tiny sliver of Microsoft. Note that a large majority of Google's employees are devoted to their search engine technology, whereas Microsoft operates in MANY different markets, and MSN Search is only one of them with less than a tenth of Google's corresponding group in employee count. Seeing as how all the rumors about Google planning for their own office suite etc. have been debunked, I don't think Google is as big a threat as people think it is.
IBM on the other hand, is the largest service sector company and the largest IT company. IBM's rock solid line of servers provide a much larger push for Unix-based systems (not just IBM's AIX, but really any of them) than does Google's use of FOSS in their products, or Summer of Code. Furthermore, IBM is by far the strongest presence in the HPC market, which as Bill indicated previously, is something MS wants to get into. We've also seen that IBM consistently produces great software (DB2, Business and Commerce software, OS, Application Server, and much more) as well as hardware (their hardware line includes complete server solutions, processors, storage systems, etc.) and is capable of using only its own products end-to-end.
Thus, it is appropriate to say that IBM is a bigger threat to MS than is Google.
PS: Google's market cap is not a reflection on its strength or presence so don't bring that up as a figure plz.
" Nothing new here that was not reported on slashdot four days ago.. Move along. or repost your incitefule or insightful comment. or someone elses if you karma whore."
What?? And abandon a perfect instance of flamebait!?!?
How about "Don't turn your XBox 360 sideways or vertical when it is running with a disc inside". According to the article linked to from the article, the guy experienced this issue only when changing the X360's position DURING OPERATION.
As you might recall, the Japanese beat Professor Kaz's team to it, although the application the Japanese one is aimed at is different: The Sexy Japanese Version
BTW isn't having a gas engine bad because of the noise it might make?
There are MANY trends in tech/internet which are not good. Videos are one of them. A lot of sites now are making videos almost a mandatory part of their experience. Gamespot for example, did not have a text version of its top games of the year. Instead, you could only see the nominees and to see the actual winner you have to go see a boring video instead of just seeing who the damn winner is! Furthermore, it is one of those videos where you can't click around towards the end, even if the video has been downloaded grr! People use the internet because it has such a massive amount of information. While entertainment is certainly part of the Internet (EBaumsWorld or Timekiller for example), quick access to salient information is likely more useful.
I think that everyone needs to get off their respective bandwagons and think from a perspective of actual utility to end-users. This goes for videos, people on MySpace with MP3's playing in the background, sites that seemingly all want to throw in AJAX even where it is 100% unnecessary, and so forth.
Something messed up with their JS? On Firefox their menu renders into the middle of the page, but it looks fine on IE...
A Layman's Troubleshooting Guide?
on
Linux Troubleshooting
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Is there a troubleshooting guide in general for linux? A lot of newbies are intimidated by the number of hoops they have to jump through for things like setting up sound etc. I know it can be quite frustrating because I recall back when I first installed Ubuntu in different installations of the same version of Ubuntu, different tricks got my sound to work on my laptop. For that matter, is something like this feasible because of the various distros and the difficulty of hardware support? So far, the best one I've found is the Ubuntu Starter Guide, but it is distro specific...
This is also against most trading rules but oddly MS get away with it.
No it's not. A company can enter any segment they want to (I tried looking for something about this but it's hard to find proof for lack of existence of a law). How do you think a lot of 'holdings' (meaning investment) companies enter newer and newer markets every single day, building up a massive collection of businesses? While MS does not make a profit on the CONSOLE, they do make profits elsewhere in the XBox business as well, so the loss isn't AS BAD as ppl make it out to be when they cite the 'per console' loss.
.NET is also a very good product. You fail to address the fact that a LOT of programmers do love.NET. It is a beautiful framework that seamlessly binds a number of languages together. Furthermore, Microsoft has been more standards compliant than ever before, also as addressed by.NET (scoping in C# for example). Telling developers they must use.NET is similar to any other company saying their product is the best. It's called marketing.
Only a platform which believes it has a stranglehold on developers would charge for the basic tools.
By no means is Visual Studio just a 'basic tool'. It is basically the definition of IDE. It is fairly fast, offers a multitude of features for the languages it supports, and really is a cinch to use. The statement you make is also a VERY broad generalization. It is a PRODUCT. Why is it so odd to charge something for it? If I were a company spending lots of money to produce something and wanted to make some money off of it, I wouldn't care if someone else is giving away a similar product (regardless of theirs being better or worse), I would charge for it. Or did you ignore that in your fervor?
I am so damn sick and tired of biased headlines and (often) even more biased comments. I know Slashdot is part of OSTG and all, but come on - it is beneficial to all concerned to be FAIR and unbiased. To compare MySQL to Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server is a joke. Anyone with half a hint of what they are talking about would know this. MySQL is only better for SMALL websites where speed is more of a deciding factor.
In any case, even ignoring the fact that these are crippled versions of the real deal, this isn't even a proper test! Let's see what a REAL DB comparison looks like: Complete TPC-H Results List
I know that MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't included in that result list but that is how a test SHOULD be performed, not with the ridiculously hand-wavy methods the authors use to 'score' each DB software.
That being said, no one has any business saying MySQL >> DB2 or Oracle. That's a joke. MySQL would SUFFER in the 10TB test. Also, where is Teradata? Furthermore, the way that the article treats SQL Server is even more ridiculous, because their 'free' version is likely the least functional of the lot since it is SPECIFICALLY aimed at learning on one's own desktop. Nothing to see here, just a random useless article trying to say something to push its writers' ideas without much basis.
Yes, Java is no longer the buzzword of the day, but that doesn't mean that it is obsolete, dying, or anything like that. This is (at least partially) highlighted by the fact that MS is aggressively developing C# and the.NET framework. Java has its own niche, and that's a different group than Ruby. As the article points out, some decisions in Java syntax (in J2SE) were made for efficiency's sake, at the slight expense of programmers' convenience - and different applications demand different tradeoffs. It is stupid to compare Java directly to Ruby or RoR, because only a portion of Java competes with it.
That being said, today's buzzwords seem to be RoR and AJAX, though I don't think either will be knocking any of the competition (completely) out of the picture.
When RMS came to speak here at Cal I was not too impressed. He was interesting, entertaining, but the guy seemed (this especially came out in the Q&A session at the end) like a ranting madman rather than a proper spokesman for GNU. ZD must have REALLY edited the interview's transcript to get it into the form that's been put up on the site.
I am not trying to just get points by being the odd one out here, but seriously - do you really expect the general public to accept free software let alone programmers? Given the shaky prospect of let's say...making a living, for example, I doubt it will be accepted broadly.
I agree that the FLOSS model has led to much innovation. But the story ends there - I for one, won't be spending my life without a job, contributing to free software (although I might do it as a side-hobby). The argument that one can 'modify' software or do custom jobs to make money is idiotic. Do you seriously think there is a market there? Often, people claim that (as pointed out in 'The Magic Cauldron' by ESR) over 95% of software is not for sale (so called 'custom' jobs), but it is ridiculous to expect programmers to bank on the availability of such jobs, especially because they don't get much attention. Also, how is that figure calculated? Total number of lines, discrete tasks, etc. Furthermore, most freelance work or custom applications don't pay well compared to salaried jobs.
There are strengths to OSS, as well as weaknesses. I find Linus's view of OSS much more acceptable than those of the Stallman (GNU).
preferably India Institute of Technology, where they train the next generation of yes men.
Agreed with everything except that last clause there. Do you really know what you are talking about or are you just randomly talkin' out your ass? Whether you are a 'yes man' or not, is completely based on your own personality and not where you go to college. I think what you meant to say is that 'preferably IIT, which has typically churned out excellent graduates' (note: I am at UCB not IIT, so this is by no means a biased statement).
A lot of you are pointing out that these are just random ex-Google people (or even that we have no proof they ever worked there) but there are some good points brought out in the articles. I think the majority of posters who are complaining about the blog or the accuracy of a blog are just randomly posting in hopes of points/Google-whoring rather than actually reading what was linked to. That being said,...
While those outside Google might disagree with the ultimate decisions the company has made, they should know that those decisions were not made without reflection on the consequences. One of my goals with Xooglers is to expose the nature of that debate. I agree with Matt that providing more transparency into how difficult decisions get made within the Googleplex can only enhance the brand. It's not enough to say you're not evil; you need to show the world how you define evil and how you choose to avoid it.
Well put don't you think? Indeed a large portion of slashdotters tend to believe Google is the messiah and that they are not an 'evil' company. But let's face it, 'evil' is different from person to person and to vaguely portray one company as evil and another as not is ridiculous. To many, MS won't seem evil - after all, a lot of people use their products and are damn satisfied with them. To still others, the fact that Google supports OSS means nothing and they want only excellence of product (BTW don't start a tangential reply about MS products not being excellent blah blah).
The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I'm concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been.
As an aside, there is a raging debate in the hacker community about the overall economic merit of the open source model. (Making money producing free software is quite a challenge.) I am not taking sides in that debate here. All I am saying is that from the end user's point of view free software is often much better than the producers of commercial software would like people to think.
Again, a good point - there are some OSS that are good, others that aren't. But what I want to point out is that Google did go for non-OSS software at one point - suddenly, it seems like Google was making a decision from the standpoint of "What would be best for us?" (the fact that the ACTUAL decision they made was wrong and they returned to OSS later is irrelevant BTW) correct? Indeed, they are a business. While no one here can likely say for certain, we certainly shouldn't assume that because of Summer of Code or other opened material that Google is supporting OSS (btw I am not an advocate of OSS nor am I an opponent, so please don't think I am being biased) or that it is "not evil".
My 2 cents
PS: When people bring up databases and talk about MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, they often ignore some other big players: MS's SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Don't start a thread about the different relational databases half-assedly plz.
Whoever it is, forcing links to be placed to "sites that allow one to download competiting versions of such software" is ridiculous. This is basically forcing a business to advertise for its competitors - it makes no logical sense!
Slashdot Mirror
I logged in for the first time in forever to post exactly that lol...
Why are we talking to someone from 'James Cook University' about global warming? In my parallel computing class at Berkeley we have had scientists from LBNL come and talk to us about simulations, the math behind them, and results from various teams. There was only one major simulation that said there was no global warming, and it was from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, headed by this guy named John Christy. Too bad his tropospheric data was wrongly interpreted in the simulation code (which LBNL at one point demanded that it be turn over for inspection) due to a wayward negative sign, and the re-run with the new code showed global warming. I can't find the very detailed article on the simulation, but the Wikipedia entry on him mentions a little about the data fiasco:
5 /08/the-tropical-lapse-rate-quandary/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christy
Real Climate also has more on it:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
The speaker ended his presentation to our class by saying that his generation would have to spend their whole lives convincing others that there is a problem and that it would be up to us to come up with solutions to it. But by then it might be too late. So let's stop listening to random scientists from random institutions (UAH, JCU, or Carleton, or what have you) that are of little scientific repute and think about reducing vehicle emissions. If anything we will have better air quality so there is no harm in trying except that a few higher-ups in major corporations make less money.
While I do agree that for the most speed-intensive programs you need C, it isn't as bad as you seem to make it seem either. In many common algorithm tests, a JIT compiled Java program runs just as fast as its C equivalent. Also, the fact that Java is 'over 10 years old' is irrelevant, because C is over 30 years old. The fact remains that while a low-level is required for very intensive programs, in many applications the fastest program is not a necessity. This is often the case when you need to write a program where the database is a much larger bottleneck. Many companies use Java for speed-to-solution, and in this parameter Java easily outdoes C.
.NET wrappers is irrelevant. You can use DirectX with unmanaged code as well, it is just that it has wrappers available so that if you wanted to use it with C# or VB.NET, you can. It was NOT re-written in C# internally or anything like that, because that WOULD deliver a fair performance hit.
Also, your mention of DirectX having
Anyways, I feel every programming language has its place somewhere. To say that one language is worse than another one in every aspect is more likely to be false than true since its an absolute statement.
Starcraft: For a RTS with such diverse races, it is amazingly balanced and has some very interesting gameplay in UMS maps. Time and again I uninstall SC only to reinstall it soon after. It is the one game for which I can say that I enjoy it as much as I did the day I got it.
Super Smash Brothers Melee: My and my friends spend hours battling it out. One of the few games of this last (meaning pre-X360) generation that really had incredible gameplay. For the majority of people I know that own a GameCube, this game is the reason why they bought it.
Diablo 2: Patch 1.10 added a whole lot of material and pulled back a lot of people who left during the 1.09d era because of hackers, dupes, and overall lack of depth.
Pokemon: Fun to replay it with different creatures...what can I say. I didn't believe that my friends were actually going to spend several hours playing this all over but I have to say, I kinda wanna play it right now haha.
Baldur's Gate II: So much depth in this game. Tons of classes and races, tons of items, over 200 hours of play time because of a myriad of subquests - and this doesn't include the expansion.
Fallout 2: One of the best RPG's ever. And so unique in comparison to the stale overused 'fantasy' setting RPG's. Fun to go run around towns doing side quests and talking to all those people I never talked to before.
Unreal Tournament: Still a great Lan Party game, because it runs well on everyone's computers and just has outstanding FPS gameplay overall. A few years from now, I'll add 2004 to this list because it's gameplay modes are also amazingly addictive.
Note: I know there are a lot of CLASSIC games that aren't on this list (esp. on consoles), but I leave them out because I think the important factor here is replay value and so the grading is a little different. Games that tend to be strictly linear especially hurt from this.
Here we go - random idiot Linux whores (apologies to the smart non-whore ones) ready to spout out some of the usual nonsense and waiting to be modded up. Look at the number of employees MS has:
Company Profile for MSFT
And now look at another company, say...Oracle:
Company Profile for ORCL
Something people here need to realize is that Microsoft makes a LOT of products. A whole freakin' lot, in basically every CS area you can think of. Per employee, they churn out quite a bit - the teams for each product are really small (often orders of magnitude smaller than corresponding teams or companies elsewhere).
Instead of blindly criticizing for all the flaws, why don't you also count all the things they did right.
And as for the article itself, it is not wrong or particularly amazing that a company spends a lot of money on marketing.
I think most of you are failing to recognize that Google is competing against only a tiny sliver of Microsoft. Note that a large majority of Google's employees are devoted to their search engine technology, whereas Microsoft operates in MANY different markets, and MSN Search is only one of them with less than a tenth of Google's corresponding group in employee count. Seeing as how all the rumors about Google planning for their own office suite etc. have been debunked, I don't think Google is as big a threat as people think it is.
IBM on the other hand, is the largest service sector company and the largest IT company. IBM's rock solid line of servers provide a much larger push for Unix-based systems (not just IBM's AIX, but really any of them) than does Google's use of FOSS in their products, or Summer of Code. Furthermore, IBM is by far the strongest presence in the HPC market, which as Bill indicated previously, is something MS wants to get into. We've also seen that IBM consistently produces great software (DB2, Business and Commerce software, OS, Application Server, and much more) as well as hardware (their hardware line includes complete server solutions, processors, storage systems, etc.) and is capable of using only its own products end-to-end.
Thus, it is appropriate to say that IBM is a bigger threat to MS than is Google.
PS: Google's market cap is not a reflection on its strength or presence so don't bring that up as a figure plz.
" Nothing new here that was not reported on slashdot four days ago.. Move along. or repost your incitefule or insightful comment. or someone elses if you karma whore."
What?? And abandon a perfect instance of flamebait!?!?
If I am sitting away from my computer I can't see my interface as well and that matters a lot in most games.
Religion
Is their webserver running Linux too?
How about "Don't turn your XBox 360 sideways or vertical when it is running with a disc inside". According to the article linked to from the article, the guy experienced this issue only when changing the X360's position DURING OPERATION.
As you might recall, the Japanese beat Professor Kaz's team to it, although the application the Japanese one is aimed at is different:
The Sexy Japanese Version
BTW isn't having a gas engine bad because of the noise it might make?
There are MANY trends in tech/internet which are not good. Videos are one of them. A lot of sites now are making videos almost a mandatory part of their experience. Gamespot for example, did not have a text version of its top games of the year. Instead, you could only see the nominees and to see the actual winner you have to go see a boring video instead of just seeing who the damn winner is! Furthermore, it is one of those videos where you can't click around towards the end, even if the video has been downloaded grr! People use the internet because it has such a massive amount of information. While entertainment is certainly part of the Internet (EBaumsWorld or Timekiller for example), quick access to salient information is likely more useful.
I think that everyone needs to get off their respective bandwagons and think from a perspective of actual utility to end-users. This goes for videos, people on MySpace with MP3's playing in the background, sites that seemingly all want to throw in AJAX even where it is 100% unnecessary, and so forth.
Lost and 24 are both missing, and they are both most-excellent shows
Maddox on Podcasting (scroll down)
Something messed up with their JS? On Firefox their menu renders into the middle of the page, but it looks fine on IE...
Is there a troubleshooting guide in general for linux? A lot of newbies are intimidated by the number of hoops they have to jump through for things like setting up sound etc. I know it can be quite frustrating because I recall back when I first installed Ubuntu in different installations of the same version of Ubuntu, different tricks got my sound to work on my laptop. For that matter, is something like this feasible because of the various distros and the difficulty of hardware support? So far, the best one I've found is the Ubuntu Starter Guide, but it is distro specific...
PS: I've already checked the Linux Documentation Project
This is also against most trading rules but oddly MS get away with it.
No it's not. A company can enter any segment they want to (I tried looking for something about this but it's hard to find proof for lack of existence of a law). How do you think a lot of 'holdings' (meaning investment) companies enter newer and newer markets every single day, building up a massive collection of businesses? While MS does not make a profit on the CONSOLE, they do make profits elsewhere in the XBox business as well, so the loss isn't AS BAD as ppl make it out to be when they cite the 'per console' loss.
.NET is also a very good product. You fail to address the fact that a LOT of programmers do love .NET. It is a beautiful framework that seamlessly binds a number of languages together. Furthermore, Microsoft has been more standards compliant than ever before, also as addressed by .NET (scoping in C# for example). Telling developers they must use .NET is similar to any other company saying their product is the best. It's called marketing.
Only a platform which believes it has a stranglehold on developers would charge for the basic tools.
By no means is Visual Studio just a 'basic tool'. It is basically the definition of IDE. It is fairly fast, offers a multitude of features for the languages it supports, and really is a cinch to use. The statement you make is also a VERY broad generalization. It is a PRODUCT. Why is it so odd to charge something for it? If I were a company spending lots of money to produce something and wanted to make some money off of it, I wouldn't care if someone else is giving away a similar product (regardless of theirs being better or worse), I would charge for it. Or did you ignore that in your fervor?
I am so damn sick and tired of biased headlines and (often) even more biased comments. I know Slashdot is part of OSTG and all, but come on - it is beneficial to all concerned to be FAIR and unbiased. To compare MySQL to Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server is a joke. Anyone with half a hint of what they are talking about would know this. MySQL is only better for SMALL websites where speed is more of a deciding factor.
In any case, even ignoring the fact that these are crippled versions of the real deal, this isn't even a proper test! Let's see what a REAL DB comparison looks like:
Complete TPC-H Results List
I know that MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't included in that result list but that is how a test SHOULD be performed, not with the ridiculously hand-wavy methods the authors use to 'score' each DB software.
That being said, no one has any business saying MySQL >> DB2 or Oracle. That's a joke. MySQL would SUFFER in the 10TB test. Also, where is Teradata? Furthermore, the way that the article treats SQL Server is even more ridiculous, because their 'free' version is likely the least functional of the lot since it is SPECIFICALLY aimed at learning on one's own desktop. Nothing to see here, just a random useless article trying to say something to push its writers' ideas without much basis.
Yes, Java is no longer the buzzword of the day, but that doesn't mean that it is obsolete, dying, or anything like that. This is (at least partially) highlighted by the fact that MS is aggressively developing C# and the .NET framework. Java has its own niche, and that's a different group than Ruby. As the article points out, some decisions in Java syntax (in J2SE) were made for efficiency's sake, at the slight expense of programmers' convenience - and different applications demand different tradeoffs. It is stupid to compare Java directly to Ruby or RoR, because only a portion of Java competes with it.
That being said, today's buzzwords seem to be RoR and AJAX, though I don't think either will be knocking any of the competition (completely) out of the picture.
When RMS came to speak here at Cal I was not too impressed. He was interesting, entertaining, but the guy seemed (this especially came out in the Q&A session at the end) like a ranting madman rather than a proper spokesman for GNU. ZD must have REALLY edited the interview's transcript to get it into the form that's been put up on the site.
I am not trying to just get points by being the odd one out here, but seriously - do you really expect the general public to accept free software let alone programmers? Given the shaky prospect of let's say...making a living, for example, I doubt it will be accepted broadly.
I agree that the FLOSS model has led to much innovation. But the story ends there - I for one, won't be spending my life without a job, contributing to free software (although I might do it as a side-hobby). The argument that one can 'modify' software or do custom jobs to make money is idiotic. Do you seriously think there is a market there? Often, people claim that (as pointed out in 'The Magic Cauldron' by ESR) over 95% of software is not for sale (so called 'custom' jobs), but it is ridiculous to expect programmers to bank on the availability of such jobs, especially because they don't get much attention. Also, how is that figure calculated? Total number of lines, discrete tasks, etc. Furthermore, most freelance work or custom applications don't pay well compared to salaried jobs.
There are strengths to OSS, as well as weaknesses. I find Linus's view of OSS much more acceptable than those of the Stallman (GNU).
preferably India Institute of Technology, where they train the next generation of yes men.
Agreed with everything except that last clause there. Do you really know what you are talking about or are you just randomly talkin' out your ass? Whether you are a 'yes man' or not, is completely based on your own personality and not where you go to college. I think what you meant to say is that 'preferably IIT, which has typically churned out excellent graduates' (note: I am at UCB not IIT, so this is by no means a biased statement).
A lot of you are pointing out that these are just random ex-Google people (or even that we have no proof they ever worked there) but there are some good points brought out in the articles. I think the majority of posters who are complaining about the blog or the accuracy of a blog are just randomly posting in hopes of points/Google-whoring rather than actually reading what was linked to. That being said,...
While those outside Google might disagree with the ultimate decisions the company has made, they should know that those decisions were not made without reflection on the consequences. One of my goals with Xooglers is to expose the nature of that debate. I agree with Matt that providing more transparency into how difficult decisions get made within the Googleplex can only enhance the brand. It's not enough to say you're not evil; you need to show the world how you define evil and how you choose to avoid it.
Well put don't you think? Indeed a large portion of slashdotters tend to believe Google is the messiah and that they are not an 'evil' company. But let's face it, 'evil' is different from person to person and to vaguely portray one company as evil and another as not is ridiculous. To many, MS won't seem evil - after all, a lot of people use their products and are damn satisfied with them. To still others, the fact that Google supports OSS means nothing and they want only excellence of product (BTW don't start a tangential reply about MS products not being excellent blah blah).
The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for. There are a lot of companies out there paying dearly for commercial databases (and operating systems for that matter). As far as I'm concerned they might as well be flushing that money down the toilet. Actually, they might be better off. We certainly would have been. As an aside, there is a raging debate in the hacker community about the overall economic merit of the open source model. (Making money producing free software is quite a challenge.) I am not taking sides in that debate here. All I am saying is that from the end user's point of view free software is often much better than the producers of commercial software would like people to think.
Again, a good point - there are some OSS that are good, others that aren't. But what I want to point out is that Google did go for non-OSS software at one point - suddenly, it seems like Google was making a decision from the standpoint of "What would be best for us?" (the fact that the ACTUAL decision they made was wrong and they returned to OSS later is irrelevant BTW) correct? Indeed, they are a business. While no one here can likely say for certain, we certainly shouldn't assume that because of Summer of Code or other opened material that Google is supporting OSS (btw I am not an advocate of OSS nor am I an opponent, so please don't think I am being biased) or that it is "not evil".
My 2 cents
PS: When people bring up databases and talk about MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, they often ignore some other big players: MS's SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Don't start a thread about the different relational databases half-assedly plz.
Whoever it is, forcing links to be placed to "sites that allow one to download competiting versions of such software" is ridiculous. This is basically forcing a business to advertise for its competitors - it makes no logical sense!