Good news indeed. 10 years from now we might even have a cool micro kernel based OS with Java as (most of) it's system language rather than a cobbled together hack that requires 16GB of memory to run solitaire.
This old timer (who turned down a chance to help develop a 32 Bit UCSD p-system back in the old days) is looking forward to banging on the VM code. Haven't done any serious hacking on byte code interps since the 80's (grins).
Seriously, open sourcing Java means that anyone with a serious itch to scratch (need a really compact VM?) can think about playing with it. Just like Unix, just when we thought it was dead...
Sigh. Swapped out the 2000 machine and forgot i'd done it - so forget the comments re win2000 (it was an xp machine in old style garb) (grins). On win 2000 you get a page from yahoo explaining which systems can be upgraded (sic) to IE7.
Andy
Even if you block IE7 auto download using MS's toolkit, most of your dumb losers will click on the helpful button on yahoo's home page (grrh).
Went there with FireFox, got the button. Looks like he hands you a cookie 'cos the next time you visit you just get the normal page.
WARNING: if you are using IE with the yahoo toolbar there is an (even more helpful?) button in the toolbar for upgrading which persists between sessions. Sigh. Disabled all yahoo stuff in IE (manage add ins...).
P.S: apparently a genuine win2000 from a c.a. 2001 original MSDN universal is (cough) a pir (cough) te copy (grrh) so I couldn't even sacrifice the one machine i'm prepared to risk to IE7 newnessss (grins).
Don't even think of putting in a temp IP block to microsoft because the download is (very helpfully again) from Yahoo themselves:-(
Bang on the nail. But it also has the interesting side effect of making it easier to try out other operating systems at practically zero risk:-)...
Right now, I'm installing dropline gnome in the slackware linux 11.0 I'm running under virtual PC 2004. Usual Amessdos + loadlin + monolithic kernel for minimum fuss...
Andy.
The article doesn't make it clear, but I think he means the Intel graphics support for notebooks e.g. GMA950 and friends (which are kind of acceptable with Core Duo and the *ORIGINAL* UT) but horrid for modern games (quake 4, F.E.A.R and friends).
I guess someone over at ISC had to blow the dust off the colo(u)r sensor (grins), but seriously, not much on the radar to panic anyone right now. Still, if you aren't awake you really ought to add ISC to your morning newspaper (wakeup + gallon of coffee) along with some others, so for the sake of people who don't grok the need to be aware (but: go read doug adams and don't panic as well!):
Here goes: (sometimes costs me an hour in the morning, but it's worth the effort...).
http://www.dshield.org/ http://secunia.com/ http://vitalsecurity.org/ http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/ - gossip and just plain fun (cough) dilbert (cough). (many others, but i'm tooo lazy on a sunday morning to write em...).
Oh, and be sure to replace the windows task manager with the wonderful (process explorer) over at the always splendid Mark Russinovich's sysinternals.com (it'll save you when your friends machine gets pwn3d). (hint: it shows tcp/ip connections so you can see if ET is phoning home).
Finally, no list would be complete without a pointer to "comp.risks" (google groups ok?). Laugh. It helps...
I've always used radio more (olden days HF, but now internet). Given how awful most commercial tv outfits are they deserve to die, but the BBC is different and always has been. Part of that is down to Sir David Attenborough who set the tone for BBC 2 (science, fringe programs) in the 60's when he was the first director general of the 2nd channel there...
Even now the bbc's web site is so loaded with science and other programs that you could spend half a lifetime just trying to keep up.
I don't miss the tv at all. I have twice as many radio options even just from the uk as i used to do (I'm in Athens Greece and hear more music than most un computer folk in the uk).
Radio always lets you do something else as well , its kind of a background thing.
Yes, I have experienced this a little, and no, I backed away from your dilemma. You see, I have some ideas I personally think are good, and an old friend in the hardware side of things thinks is good. The problem is that he is an old fashioned guy who doesn't grok the modern OSS sort of world. So I guess I'll file it in the (wish i did that) cabinet. He thinks I should keep my idea a secret, and I laugh at him...
Sounds familiar? Well, having a good idea is a start. But, it isn't so much. For good insight about where good ideas end up try Pete Petersens "Almost perfect" or anything else...
This isn't the garage days of the Apple. But We all wish you good luck anyway...
Money stuff always freaks me, so perhaps I've lost out. I still haven't forgotten my recent good idea, but it's sort of back burner (until I find a fairy godmother for it). I'd love to see it in some schools though because it would be a start for where we will all be familiar with in a few years... (sorry, no peeking slashdot ppl).
Go jump - thats my advice. The worst that happens is that you fail. In the US that's sort of respectable. Try doing that here in europe and you will be considered dirt for all eternity....
I'd agree with you absolutely. But , I figured (living in greece) that I had to make the transition from naive dumb UK english attitudes to more european and nay verily global ones. It isn't easy to do this. Greece makes europe as a whole easy because like some of the other balkan countries they don't use the latin alphabet. That helps a bit.
It's only 10 million people here so I always understand if we are overlooked, but I try. If you design for at least europe + US then you are doing pretty well. Languages that read right to left (arabic etc) and asia are much harder, and I haven't tried to tackle them yet. I guess I will some day...
But never feel ashamed that you can't hit everyone. It takes time. I haven't got there yet and I wish I could (love to hit my friends in bulgaria etc in cyrillic, but still working on it).
It takes time. It helps if you think more internationally at the design stage though. I managed mostly by accident (next time it won't be...).
There. Nobody said we weren't honest on this here forum. And (never start a sentence with and...) it is your responsibility if you are designing the program. Slap wrists time. Hey, so you are coding it too? Big deal... (no offence i hope)
Believe me, its not about level of water. I had the misery of living in (pretty normal for student days) a very crappy apartment , basement of a victorian house in Bristol UK (6th largest city in UK).
When it is really bad you know because you are scrapping the mold off the carpet...
(This isn't news to anyone who was a university student in england).
Basements in many old buildings were where the servants used to live in victorian times. I'd guess that in those days because the houses were newer they weren't as bad as we saw them.
But nobody anticipated how long these buildings would be in use. (One friend of mine had a near death experience falling from an old balcony of such a building. Thankfully she missed the spikes that you see (I never have understood those)
Sadly, two years later she was the only survivor of another nightmare - this time on the motorway. Lots of decaying stuff in the uk, which is very scary).
I hope (20 yrs on) that she is making people enjoy the pleasures of good art... Gotta hope for something you know...
Not the temperature. That's cool in more senses than one. Not the environment (if it's dry). The wildlife. Including the crazy two legged kind. I've already seen wacky stuff with pidgeons in servers so I figure you could have a bad time there.
If you think I'm joking. I'm not. I had a simple network with my old machine as a server and a compact fluorescent in my work room...... and Genghis the Gecko paid me a visit...
Just one problem. Genghis was obviously a follower of that quiet gentleman at MS aka Steve the Ballmer. Genghis crapped all over my file server keyboard. Normally, just as most of us with linux boxen i don't use the keyboard (telnet is easier), but this day i needed to. So, I picked up the (what the heck is this on the keyboard ugh) keyboard. Took me a couple of hours to calm down and stop using my favourite undeleted expletives to describe greece....
Darned gecko. Very tidy though. Just on the letter H.
AARRGH!
When i finally returned to something like sanity, I tried to stop laughing.
Moral is: good file servers are great places for gecko poop. (This is greece and they are awesome creatures). I forgive it. Just wish it understood OSS...
If you are truly lucky (and in northern europe) you might get a blackbird to decide its a great place to nest...
Sorry, but this sort of trolls me a bit. Im english from the UK, and have written an app which has 10's of thousands of copies here in greece (a greek/english dictionary). I wish you US folks would recognise (when u design stuff) that there is another world out there.
My app was *asked for* by MS's localization people. Six months later the MSDN official stuff for greek was (well we scored 100% to my extreme surprise)...
Nuff said.
Please don't be so limited when you write apps. Think global...
Even if only one copy lives in another part of the planet nothing compares with the buzz of knowing you made something really global.... (I may be poor, but I love the idea that someone half a planet away is using my app to teach his kids his own language)
Now, let me repeat that . Let me get this straight. You really want to ID university students in a university environment. Hmm. Some chance that'll work. Point 1): they will break it in 5 minutes. This is the nature of universities - we ask the students to be imaginative and creative and they do this on steroids...
Point 2): Universities are inherently slightly subversive and anarchistic. We value them precisely for this (it's how good new ideas get spawned). You want to check badges? Get a life.
No. If you really want to waste your money in a rational way you should listen to how a lot of students play red vs. blue in their spare time.
We did it even in Bristol UK c.a. 1980 (and I predicted something like the japanese nerve gas thing on the basis of the limited info we had 15 years early). (To be honest I was scared that the IRA would do it, and thankfully they didn't).
So, all of you spooks out there wake up and listen. Universities are your best friends, not your worst enemies... So, teacher (always wanted to say this) leave those kids alone...
I've always liked debian, but it seems a little uh historical at times vs other distros. Sometimes, I like that conservatism, but I think it loses lots of street cred because it is so behind...
Question is: how can we all help you guys keep up to o speed?
I remember advent melting a pdp11 running rsts c.a. 1978 in my first job at a research institute (John Innes) outside Norwich UK. Even the guys who drove tractors in the field were sitting in front of the terminals. Even though my friend could barely put together an articulate sentence without the word "fuck" he was entranced...
Good days. "You are in a maze of twisty passages" "this is not the maze where the pirate leaves his treasure"
Sigh (On the few occasions I teach others programming they get really confused that an old timer like me *plays games*. Huh?)
Why oh why do we hear this time and time again. Whether it be auto-miners, bots or speed hacks?
It wouldn't really be the case that the games designers are short sighted would it?
It wouldn't really be the case that some people have almost zero real imagination?
Just like the OSS movement, I would really love to see at least one game where we could contribute things which made the game better for all. In other words, better AI (please please) better anything. All it takes is to allocate a few worlds as a sandbox/playpen where anybody can break every rule (and accepts that their code becomes public domain)...
What do other slashdotters think? (perhaps i should post to askslashdot?)
Yes, you can make houses out of almost anything. Thomas Edison was playing with this idea almost 100 years ago (with concrete prefabricated house shells). The bad news is that a shed is still a shed. Unless you have damp course (to stop water from the soil) you will have serious problems with our friends the fungi. After WWII, in the UK, there was an attempt to rebuild infrastructure using "prefab" houses (mostly asbestos etc). Took a long time to get everyone out of what was supposed to be temporary housing even there in UK. Nice in theory, ugly in practice. Might be fun here in the med where its drier though...
Now, which island do i want my cardboard house on. (2000+ to choose from)?
about sun. Sometimes (like OOo) it feels that they are our best friends. Other times, (like the MS+SCO thing) it feels like they are like the bad old days of IBM. I think we should wait and see though. They, like any big organization have lots of internal politics. (Look at what anders has engineered over at MS for an example). Still, I'm willing (despite a rather nasty paranoid post i made about solaris 10 here previously) to give them some time. Let's see if they really understand OSS. I sure hope so. I'm spending a lot of time trying to see if OOo works in a greek env, and getting interestingly mixed feelings so one day soon i may go live rather than hide in the OSS closet.
Hope the weather is improving in your part of the world alan, and thanx for the penguin at my old alma mater (aka Bristol). BTW: how long do those guys live? Bet they hate the rain though...Always rains in Bristol. (This year in athens very little rain)
Probably nowhere if RMS hadn't tilted at windmills. (To be honest, that leap of courage still scares me even today, although I like him believe in the right of a programmer to have source (responsibly)). Don't ask how much UCSD p-system source I once had lying around (probably more than Softech or Pecan... (grins)).
We all thought RMS was stark staring mad. But what a beautiful madness. I hope I get struck by the same disease one day when I'm mildly less uncomfortable...
Sadly, back to the.NET grind.
But, seriously Linus the Executive. Now penguins might look like they wear suits, but I imagine Linus hates the idea of justifying something to a banker... (cue oblig John Cleese).
In any case the BSD movement was there and would have happened (see DDJ onwards). But possibly not quite the same way.
I hope Linus writes a thoroughly beautiful "no I don't want an OBE" speech and posts it to them.
Given Linus's literary skills that will be a fun read...
Sadly, that doesn't even seem to work out in the wilds of science/technology like ITER. That project, (to build a next generation fusion reactor prototype) has been mired in the mud for a very very long time simply because of all the countries/political agendas involved.
I'd love what you suggest too, but do you really see everybody holding hands (under a UN mandate) and doing this. Hmm. Didn't think so.
Mavericks (and I sort of think he wouldn't mind me calling him that) like Burt Rutan, and the others doing the X-prize things *will* make this happen. I know it looks as if it's just Burt, but we hope and pray for competition. I hope to see the pre-cambrian explosion in full flow real soon now...
India, despite all of its problems, *is* the worlds largest democracy, and even if its viewpoint is not to the liking of the worlds most greedy and self-centred one, that is something that as an Englishman I admire.
I wish them good luck, and look forward to seeing them able to bargain at the table with the big guys for what exactly we should all do in manned space flights. It will happen. Perhaps soon.
Already in 2004 we have seen the dream of manned space flight change back to one we thought was totally lost. Perhaps tomorrow, we will be debating how to deal with treaties for mining the moon. I sure hope so...
As an aside, I don't think that spending in this area is totally devoid of military implications, and everybody should be aware of the potential that the first use of nukes in space may come about because of clashes with Indias neighbour Pakistan.
Bad things, good things. Just interesting things really. Business as usual.
Slashdot Mirror
even if you just grab ENU. Perhaps they've fixed it now.
(The solution is to slipstream the SP2 onto the CD and make a new iso which would fit, sans SP2)
see e.g. http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp for slipstreaming SP2 on an original or SP1 CD.
Highly recommended.
short thread at http://www.caligari.com/.
Does this mean we'll see a 3d desktop on Blue Crystals(R) 7.5 I wonder?
or even worse a 3d virtual MS-Bob
Andy
Yes, it's all fun and games until someone grows an arm...
This is precisely why the rights of citizens (and visitors) to any country need to be
enshrined in some written constitution and enforced by a (hopefully) impartial judiciary
Sigh. I'm English, but from Norfolk so Tom Paine is one of my heroes :-)
I've no problem with a camera monitoring me in a supermarket or at an ATM, but no way do
i think that such things should be in public places in general. Here in Athens, Greece if you
tried to do that there would be a civil war
Andy Allen.
This old timer (who turned down a chance to help develop a 32 Bit UCSD p-system back in the old days) is looking forward to banging on the VM code. Haven't done any serious hacking on byte code interps since the 80's (grins).
Seriously, open sourcing Java means that anyone with a serious itch to scratch (need a really compact VM?) can think about playing with it. Just like Unix, just when we thought it was dead...
check out: https://openjdk.dev.java.net/
Andy Allen.
Sigh. Swapped out the 2000 machine and forgot i'd done it - so forget the comments re win2000 (it was an xp machine in old style garb) (grins). On win 2000 you get a page from yahoo explaining which systems can be upgraded (sic) to IE7. Andy
Went there with FireFox, got the button. Looks like he hands you a cookie 'cos the next time you visit you just get the normal page.
WARNING: if you are using IE with the yahoo toolbar there is an (even more helpful?) button in the toolbar for upgrading which persists between sessions. Sigh. Disabled all yahoo stuff in IE (manage add ins...).
P.S: apparently a genuine win2000 from a c.a. 2001 original MSDN universal is (cough) a pir (cough) te copy (grrh) so I couldn't even sacrifice the one machine i'm prepared to risk to IE7 newnessss (grins).
Don't even think of putting in a temp IP block to microsoft because the download is (very helpfully again) from Yahoo themselves :-(
Andy
Right now, I'm installing dropline gnome in the slackware linux 11.0 I'm running under virtual PC 2004. Usual Amessdos + loadlin + monolithic kernel for minimum fuss... Andy.
The article doesn't make it clear, but I think he means the Intel graphics support for notebooks e.g. GMA950 and friends (which are kind of acceptable with Core Duo and the *ORIGINAL* UT) but horrid for modern games (quake 4, F.E.A.R and friends).
I guess someone over at ISC had to blow the dust off the colo(u)r sensor (grins), but seriously, not much on the radar to panic anyone right now. Still, if you aren't awake you really ought to add ISC to your
morning newspaper (wakeup + gallon of coffee) along with some others, so for the sake of people who don't grok the need to be aware (but: go read doug adams and don't panic as well!):
Here goes: (sometimes costs me an hour in the morning, but it's worth the effort...).
http://www.dshield.org/ http://secunia.com/ http://vitalsecurity.org/ http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/ - gossip and just
plain fun (cough) dilbert (cough).
(many others, but i'm tooo lazy on a sunday morning to write em...).
Oh, and be sure to replace the windows task manager with the wonderful (process explorer)
over at the always splendid Mark Russinovich's sysinternals.com (it'll save you when your friends machine gets pwn3d). (hint: it shows tcp/ip connections so you can see if ET is phoning home).
Finally, no list would be complete without a pointer to "comp.risks" (google groups ok?). Laugh. It helps...
cheers all,
Andy.
I've always used radio more (olden days HF, but now
internet). Given how awful most commercial tv outfits are they deserve to die, but the BBC is different and always has been. Part of that is down to Sir David Attenborough who set the tone for BBC 2 (science, fringe programs) in the 60's when he was the first director general of the 2nd channel there...
Even now the bbc's web site is so loaded with science and other programs that you could spend half a lifetime just trying to keep up.
I don't miss the tv at all. I have twice as many radio options even just from the uk as i used to do (I'm in Athens Greece and hear more music than most un computer folk in the uk).
Radio always lets you do something else as well , its kind of a background thing.
Yes, I have experienced this a little, and no, I backed away from your dilemma. You see, I have some ideas I personally think are good, and an old friend in the hardware side of things thinks is good. The problem is that he is an old fashioned guy who doesn't grok the modern OSS sort of world. So I guess I'll file it in the (wish i did that) cabinet. He thinks I should keep my idea a secret, and I laugh at him...
Sounds familiar? Well, having a good idea is a start. But, it isn't so much. For good insight about where good ideas end up try Pete Petersens "Almost perfect" or anything else...
This isn't the garage days of the Apple. But We all wish you good luck anyway...
Money stuff always freaks me, so perhaps I've lost out. I still haven't forgotten my recent good idea, but it's sort of back burner (until I find a fairy godmother for it). I'd love to see it in some schools though because it would be a start for where we will all be familiar with in a few years... (sorry, no peeking slashdot ppl).
Go jump - thats my advice. The worst that happens is that you fail. In the US that's sort of respectable. Try doing that here in europe and you will be considered dirt for all eternity....
Capillary action my friend. The water *will* get you even if it't in the soil
I'd agree with you absolutely. But , I figured (living in greece) that I had to make the transition from naive dumb UK english attitudes to more european and nay verily global ones. It isn't easy to do this. Greece makes europe as a whole easy because like some of the other balkan countries they don't use the latin alphabet. That helps a bit.
It's only 10 million people here so I always understand if we are overlooked, but I try. If you design for at least europe + US then you are doing pretty well. Languages that read right to left (arabic etc) and asia are much harder, and I haven't tried to tackle them yet. I guess I will some day...
But never feel ashamed that you can't hit everyone. It takes time. I haven't got there yet and I wish I could (love to hit my friends in bulgaria etc in cyrillic, but still working on it).
It takes time. It helps if you think more internationally at the design stage though. I managed mostly by accident (next time it won't be...).
There. Nobody said we weren't honest on this here forum. And (never start a sentence with and...) it is your responsibility if you are designing the program. Slap wrists time. Hey, so you are coding it too? Big deal... (no offence i hope)
Rgds,
Andy
Believe me, its not about level of water. I had the misery of living in (pretty normal for student days) a very crappy apartment , basement of a victorian house in Bristol UK (6th largest city in UK).
When it is really bad you know because you are scrapping the mold off the carpet...
(This isn't news to anyone who was a university student in england).
Basements in many old buildings were where the servants used to live in victorian times. I'd guess that in those days because the houses were newer they weren't as bad as we saw them.
But nobody anticipated how long these buildings would be in use. (One friend of mine had a near death experience falling from an old balcony of such a building. Thankfully she missed the spikes that you see (I never have understood those)
Sadly, two years later she was the only survivor of another nightmare - this time on the motorway. Lots of decaying stuff in the uk, which is very scary).
I hope (20 yrs on) that she is making people enjoy the pleasures of good art... Gotta hope for something you know...
Not the temperature. That's cool in more senses than one. Not the environment (if it's dry). The wildlife. Including the crazy two legged kind. I've already seen wacky stuff with pidgeons in servers so I figure you could have a bad time there.
... and Genghis the Gecko paid me a visit...
If you think I'm joking. I'm not. I had a simple network with my old machine as a server and a compact fluorescent in my work room...
Just one problem. Genghis was obviously a follower of that quiet gentleman at MS aka Steve the Ballmer. Genghis crapped all over my file server keyboard. Normally, just as most of us with linux boxen i don't use the keyboard (telnet is easier), but this day i needed to. So, I picked up the (what the heck is this on the keyboard ugh) keyboard. Took me a couple of hours to calm down and stop using my favourite undeleted expletives to describe greece....
Darned gecko. Very tidy though. Just on the letter
H.
AARRGH!
When i finally returned to something like sanity, I tried to stop laughing.
Moral is: good file servers are great places for gecko poop. (This is greece and they are awesome
creatures). I forgive it. Just wish it understood OSS...
If you are truly lucky (and in northern europe) you might get a blackbird to decide its a great place to nest...
Sorry, but this sort of trolls me a bit. Im english from the UK, and have written an app which has 10's of thousands of copies here in greece (a greek/english dictionary). I wish you US folks would recognise (when u design stuff) that there is another world out there.
My app was *asked for* by MS's localization people. Six months later the MSDN official stuff
for greek was (well we scored 100% to my extreme surprise)...
Nuff said.
Please don't be so limited when you write apps. Think global...
Even if only one copy lives in another part of the planet nothing compares with the buzz of knowing you made something really global....
(I may be poor, but I love the idea that someone
half a planet away is using my app to teach his kids his own language)
Now, let me repeat that . Let me get this straight. You really want to ID university students in a university environment. Hmm. Some chance that'll work. Point 1): they will break it in 5 minutes. This is the nature of universities - we ask the students to be imaginative and creative and they do this on steroids...
Point 2): Universities are inherently slightly subversive and anarchistic. We value them precisely for this (it's how good new ideas get spawned). You want to check badges? Get a life.
No. If you really want to waste your money in a rational way you should listen to how a lot of students play red vs. blue in their spare time.
We did it even in Bristol UK c.a. 1980 (and I predicted something like the japanese nerve gas thing on the basis of the limited info we had 15 years early). (To be honest I was scared that the IRA would do it, and thankfully they didn't).
So, all of you spooks out there wake up and listen. Universities are your best friends, not your worst enemies... So, teacher (always wanted to say this) leave those kids alone...
I've always liked debian, but it seems a little uh historical at times vs other distros. Sometimes, I like that conservatism, but I think it loses lots of street cred because it is so behind...
Question is: how can we all help you guys keep up to o speed?
Please flame me. Passionate discussion is good.
I remember advent melting a pdp11 running rsts c.a. 1978 in my first job at a research institute (John Innes) outside Norwich UK. Even the guys who drove tractors in the field were sitting in front of the terminals. Even though my friend could barely put together an articulate sentence without the word "fuck" he was entranced...
Good days.
"You are in a maze of twisty passages"
"this is not the maze where the pirate leaves his treasure"
Sigh (On the few occasions I teach others programming they get really confused that an old timer like me *plays games*. Huh?)
Why oh why do we hear this time and time again. Whether it be auto-miners, bots or speed hacks?
It wouldn't really be the case that the games designers are short sighted would it?
It wouldn't really be the case that some people have almost zero real imagination?
Just like the OSS movement, I would really love to see at least one game where we could contribute things which made the game better for all. In other words, better AI (please please) better anything. All it takes is to allocate a few worlds as a sandbox/playpen where anybody can break every
rule (and accepts that their code becomes public domain)...
What do other slashdotters think?
(perhaps i should post to askslashdot?)
Andy.
Yes, you can make houses out of almost anything.
Thomas Edison was playing with this idea almost 100 years ago (with concrete prefabricated house shells). The bad news is that a shed is still a shed. Unless you have damp course (to stop water from the soil) you will have serious problems with our friends the fungi. After WWII, in the UK, there was an attempt to rebuild infrastructure using "prefab" houses (mostly asbestos etc). Took a long time to get everyone out of what was supposed to be temporary housing even there in UK. Nice in theory, ugly in practice. Might be fun here in the med where its drier though...
Now, which island do i want my cardboard house on.
(2000+ to choose from)?
Cheers,
Andy Allen
Athens Greece
about sun. Sometimes (like OOo) it feels that they are our best friends. Other times, (like the MS+SCO thing) it feels like they are like the bad old days of IBM. I think we should wait and see though. They, like any big organization have lots of internal politics. (Look at what anders has engineered over at MS for an example). Still, I'm willing (despite a rather nasty paranoid post i made about solaris 10 here previously) to give them some time. Let's see if they really understand OSS. I sure hope so. I'm spending a lot of time trying to see if OOo works in a greek env, and getting interestingly mixed feelings so one day soon i may go live rather than hide in the OSS closet.
Hope the weather is improving in your part of the world alan, and thanx for the penguin at my old alma mater (aka Bristol). BTW: how long do those
guys live? Bet they hate the rain though...Always rains in Bristol. (This year in athens very little rain)
Cheers from
Athens Greece
Andy Allen
Probably nowhere if RMS hadn't tilted at windmills.
.NET grind.
(To be honest, that leap of courage still scares me
even today, although I like him believe in the right of a programmer to have source (responsibly)). Don't ask how much UCSD p-system
source I once had lying around (probably more than
Softech or Pecan... (grins)).
We all thought RMS was stark staring mad. But what a beautiful madness. I hope I get struck by the same disease one day when I'm mildly less uncomfortable...
Sadly, back to the
But, seriously Linus the Executive. Now penguins might look like they wear suits, but I imagine Linus hates the idea of justifying something to a banker... (cue oblig John Cleese).
In any case the BSD movement was there and would have happened (see DDJ onwards). But possibly not
quite the same way.
I hope Linus writes a thoroughly beautiful "no I don't want an OBE" speech and posts it to them.
Given Linus's literary skills that will be a fun read...
Sadly, that doesn't even seem to work out in the wilds of science/technology like ITER. That project, (to build a next generation fusion reactor prototype) has been mired in the mud for a very very long time simply because of all the countries/political agendas involved.
I'd love what you suggest too, but do you really see
everybody holding hands (under a UN mandate) and doing this. Hmm. Didn't think so.
Mavericks (and I sort of think he wouldn't mind me calling him that) like Burt Rutan, and the others doing the X-prize things *will* make this happen. I know it looks as if it's just Burt, but we hope and pray for competition. I hope to see the pre-cambrian explosion in full flow real soon now...
India, despite all of its problems, *is* the worlds largest democracy, and even if its viewpoint is not to the liking of the worlds most greedy and self-centred one, that is something that as an Englishman I admire.
I wish them good luck, and look forward to seeing them able to bargain at the table with the big guys for what exactly we should all do in manned space flights. It will happen. Perhaps soon.
Already in 2004 we have seen the dream of manned space flight change back to one we thought was totally lost. Perhaps tomorrow, we will be debating how to deal with treaties for mining the moon. I sure hope so...
As an aside, I don't think that spending in this area is totally devoid of military implications, and everybody should be aware of the potential that the first use of nukes in space may come about because of clashes with Indias neighbour Pakistan.
Bad things, good things. Just interesting things really. Business as usual.