I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.
Star Trek: Western in space. Kinda campy but did have its moments. Very memorable characters. Fanbase: Big enough to get a few movies going after its cancelation. Noteworthy: The fans loved the show and movies enough to get an entire freakin' space shuttle renamed. Nae bad.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Pretty deep plots. Much deeper than much of what is shown on TV, which really doesn't say much. Very memorable characters. Very powerful episodes. (Remember the one where the crew find a probe and Picard spends a lifetime on a dieing planet?) Had many people who aren't fans of scifi watching. Noteworthy: Roddenbery died during this series.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Very deep storyline spanning many seasons. Characters not as memorable as those on TNG, but memorable none the less.
Star Trek: Voyager: Unmemorable characters, superficial plots, enough gaps in the plot to make Spock have a stroke. The previously immortal and near unbeatable borg were made to look like a bunch of pussies in this. Time travel became more cliche than it previously was. It's crap, Jim.
Star Trek: Enterprise New 'hip' series that shits on the pre-federation history laid out by the previous series and movies. Superficial. Unmemorable characters. Plots so shallow not even an infant could drown in them. Superficial. Tries to grab your attention with random semi-nudity. Predictable. Superficial. Theme song sucks. Superficial.
As somebody who used to be a HUGE Trek fan 10 years ago - good. The horse is laying in the middle of the field, four broken legs, broken ribs, and is oozing blood out of its ears. Just shoot it and get it over with. I hate seeing my childhood fave raped for ratings.
I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.
I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver. Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.
A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth. I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow. What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to make, it's beyond
1) The big Telco's start revamping their systems so that they are giant VOIP systems. 2) Tax revenues plummet. 3) Congress says "I don't think so." 4) Tax laws are amended. 5) Tax revenues go back up (Govt. version of Profit!)
I would like to share my 2 cent concerning my experience in Linux mandrake recently.
The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one man, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. Since these humble beginnings, a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but until recently Linux has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the recent economic downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing policy, Linux is now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft Windows.
While there are many other alternatives to Windows, including BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network) server-grade Solaris operating system, none have commanded the same level of media attention as Linux. Linux Mandrake is just the latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux. Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint at its zany nature.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from the Mandrake-Linux web site. But don't worry,
this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me in the "required configuration" section of the hocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the "bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are blatantly incorrect.
Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system?
Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for Linux. To add insult to i
1. Middle click to open link in new window/tab
2. Find as you type
3. Themes/Skins/Chromes
4. Customizable toolbars
5. Plugins that allow me to put just about anything on the toolbars
6. Great development tools - javascript console, venkman debugger, live-headers plugin
All that boils down to:
1. Easier to use
2. Easier to customize
3. Broader advanced feature set
You know, I wish they would stop changing their name. I use Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my sole browser and absolutely enjoy it. The problem is, I am trying to get my family to use it as well, but trying to keep them straight on what it is called is getting a little ridiculous.
Conversation with family: "You know that browser I gave you a link on...No, not Mozilla. Yeah, it was Firebird. No now its called Firefox. I don't know why, just use it"
We are the Slashbots. Lower your threshold and surrender your karma. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your dissenting opinions will adapt to agree with ours. Resistance is futile.
" Let me just start out by saying that the Ewoks are the single most underrated cinematic creations of all time. I love those little dudes! I love these little movies, too. Though I haven't seen them for a good six years or more, I remember absolutely loving them when I was little. They always made me want to go climb a tree and pretend I was an Ewok! Honestly, WHO would not want to live in hundred-foot trees, leaping on vines and speaking in those funky voices?! Um, anyway, just to give you the idea how much I love Ewoks . . . . . ..
Plus, to all you Ewok-bashers out there, they were successful enough to star in not one, but TWO solo adventure movies. HA HA HA!!
There had been rumors of an eventual DVD release of these two films for years. (That fawlty announcement of a three-disc ultimate collector's edition was a doozy.) Now, it's official: Come November, Ewoks fans across the nation can rejoice!! Though not in any special edition format (which coud be expected from two 80s TV movies), just having these priceless gems on DVD will be enough."
Believe it or not, but the scientists and engineers working on this are not complete morons. Unlike you (and I don't mean this as an insult), they have experience and a budget they can put towards researching this. If its used, you can be sure that much thought has gone into it. No-one wants a repeat of the last shuttle disaster.
Single Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
Multiple Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
IPv4 Category
Single Stream Class: 69,073 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the SUNET, the organization for the national higher research and education network (NREN) of Sweden, and Sprint across 16,343 kilometers of network.
Multiple Stream Class: 104,528 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN by sending 859 gigabytes of data across 15,766 kilometers of network in 1037 seconds (just over 17 minutes), for an average rate of 6.63 gigabits per second.
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Everyone--from good hearted people to downright argumentative trolls--misses the point on spying.
I don't care about online privacy. I'm not worried about government spooks sifting through my e-mail or web surfing habits and finding out that I like brunettes with long legs, long hair, and almond shaped eyes. It really doesn't concern me. If it were some supercomputer sitting in a back room chewing through e-mail looking for "homicide, suicide, terror, assassinate, secret, password, 9/11" or some other stupid set of keywords or tracing kiddie porn that'd be fine by me. At least until the anti-pr0n people decide that moral righteousness has no bounds and start coming after willing adults with no real sex life and a speedy net connection.
Face it. We live in the real world. People in power let it go to their heads and they often use it for purposes other than those in which it was given to them for.
What I'm worried about is that the guy down the block is an FBI agent. Or CIA. Or NSA. Or some local politician who knows one. One day I'm walking down the street and a candy wrapper drops out of my pocket onto his lawn. Now this guy is such a straight laced Bible thumping tight a__ POS that he uses his political muscle to find out who I am and begin harassing me. "He dropped a candy wrapper on my lawn! He's a litterer! He's no good for society! Besides, I saw him carrying home a six-pack of beer! He must be an alcoholic as well!"
Where's the check and balance? There is none. Who could prove it? No one. Who can stop it? No one.
Echelon, Big Brother surveillance, the Anti-Terror bill. They all suck for the same reason that the Windows registry sucks: there's no way to secure them from people misusing them to hijack the system.
Two years or so ago I visited Tami Nadu, a poor state in the south of India... Even in the smallest towns (say, 20 inhabitants which is nothing in India), you would find a place offering dirst-cheap internet acces (typically 2 or 3 computers sharing a 33.6k line). People there had taken to using that instead of phone because it was much, much cheaper! It allowed for exemple parents who had a son or daughter studying or working in an other city to contact him at a fraction of the cost of a phone call. It also allowed farmers to have up-to-date information on market price for their product or to ask for the delivery of fertiliser or spare parts for those who had a truck, or to know when one of their relative living in a city had an opening for a temporary job (at a building site, for exemple). It was amazingly useful - and it was not designed for tourists. Though we were happy to use the places, we were often the only foreigners the guy in charge of the place had had for clients this year. And while it was slow, for text emails a 33.6 line is more than enough. You really wanted to kill spammers there though - downloading 50 spam emails using broadband is annoying, but on a shared 33.6k line it's a real pain;-)
People who reacts to article like that by saying that internet is a luxury are missing the fact that basic internet services like emails or simple websites are in practice often the cheapest way to communicate - you get far more information out of your phone line. And even poor farmers in third-world countries need to communicate, if only to the nearest city. Internet is more than just a greater provider of pr0n and pirated music...
'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
Not to further fuel the flames, but it's not quite that straightforward.
I think part of the problem is that folks are looking at AAC as 'Apple's format.' It's not. AAC -- Advanced Audio Coding -- is an open standard; there's an ISO number for it, and it was come up with by the MPEG standards group. AAC is to MPEG4 what MP3 (MPEG1 Audio Layer 3) was to the original MPEG. AAC itself is quite widely played by software players -- more than just iTunes -- and is more or less the intended successor to MP3. (NOTE: Intended. I make no predictions about whether or not it will actually happen.)
Where you can point the finger at Apple is on their DRM implementation on top of AAC; that's not part of the AAC specification, and so means that while an un-protected AAC file can play on iTunes, WinAmp, etc., a protected iTunes Music Store one cannot. THIS is a little unfortunate; I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.
WMA makes me more nervous as a format, because as far as I know it's controlled by a single entity (Microsoft) instead of an open group (MPEG standards group). However, it can't be discounted that WMA's integration of DRM has made it the more attractive commercial option for folks, since it's possible to make differing players handle the same DRM-protected files.
Whether or not AAC with some form of DRM will catch on remains to be seen, I guess.
What, exactly, does Microsoft have to offer in this area?
WMA? Sure, it's the "standard" for all the other services--whose combined sales pale in comparison to Apple's. It's also the "standard" for the other players, whose--again, combine--sales pale in comparison to the iPod.
You can bet their music service won't hold a candle to the ease of use and quality of service of the iTMS. It will also use WMA--see above. By the time MS is ready to launch it, though, it's likely that most non-iTMS music download services will be failing, and the remaining ones will be consolidating.
Sorry, but in this case Apple has out-Microsofted Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology. I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving. I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes. Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL. As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
I think Timothy should have posted this story here
Star Trek:
Western in space. Kinda campy but did have its moments. Very memorable characters. Fanbase: Big enough to get a few movies going after its cancelation. Noteworthy: The fans loved the show and movies enough to get an entire freakin' space shuttle renamed. Nae bad.
Star Trek: The Next Generation:
Pretty deep plots. Much deeper than much of what is shown on TV, which really doesn't say much. Very memorable characters. Very powerful episodes. (Remember the one where the crew find a probe and Picard spends a lifetime on a dieing planet?) Had many people who aren't fans of scifi watching. Noteworthy: Roddenbery died during this series.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Very deep storyline spanning many seasons. Characters not as memorable as those on TNG, but memorable none the less.
Star Trek: Voyager:
Unmemorable characters, superficial plots, enough gaps in the plot to make Spock have a stroke. The previously immortal and near unbeatable borg were made to look like a bunch of pussies in this. Time travel became more cliche than it previously was. It's crap, Jim.
Star Trek: Enterprise
New 'hip' series that shits on the pre-federation history laid out by the previous series and movies. Superficial. Unmemorable characters. Plots so shallow not even an infant could drown in them. Superficial. Tries to grab your attention with random semi-nudity. Predictable. Superficial. Theme song sucks. Superficial.
As somebody who used to be a HUGE Trek fan 10 years ago - good. The horse is laying in the middle of the field, four broken legs, broken ribs, and is oozing blood out of its ears. Just shoot it and get it over with. I hate seeing my childhood fave raped for ratings.
I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.
I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver. Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.
A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth. I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow. What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to make, it's beyond
1) The big Telco's start revamping their systems so that they are giant VOIP systems.
2) Tax revenues plummet.
3) Congress says "I don't think so."
4) Tax laws are amended.
5) Tax revenues go back up (Govt. version of Profit!)
No, no ??? line in this one. It's too obvious.
I would like to share my 2 cent concerning my experience in Linux mandrake recently.
The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one
man, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. Since
these humble beginnings, a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up
to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but until recently Linux
has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the recent economic
downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing
policy, Linux is now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft
Windows.
While there are many other alternatives to Windows, including
BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network)
server-grade Solaris operating system, none have commanded the
same level of media attention as Linux. Linux Mandrake is just the
latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux.
Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm
and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT
preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint
at its zany nature.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image"
from the Mandrake-Linux web site. But don't worry,
this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware,
meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by
the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a
major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and
self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the
documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for
me in the "required configuration" section of the hocked to learn that
Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes
of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore,
a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although
the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their
chosen operating system and deride the
"bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are
blatantly incorrect.
Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that
Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer
hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system?
Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my
many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake
reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity
applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web
browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best
efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to
encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of
Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to
recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used
software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to
learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus
Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer
for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the
most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of
software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are
mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their
commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked
by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses
are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software
is available for Linux. To add insult to i
last I heard, MIT was working on something like this. Just a rumor - can anyone verify?
FireFox features I can't live without:
1. Middle click to open link in new window/tab
2. Find as you type
3. Themes/Skins/Chromes
4. Customizable toolbars
5. Plugins that allow me to put just about anything on the toolbars
6. Great development tools - javascript console, venkman debugger, live-headers plugin
All that boils down to:
1. Easier to use
2. Easier to customize
3. Broader advanced feature set
You know, I wish they would stop changing their name. I use Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my sole browser and absolutely enjoy it. The problem is, I am trying to get my family to use it as well, but trying to keep them straight on what it is called is getting a little ridiculous. Conversation with family: "You know that browser I gave you a link on...No, not Mozilla. Yeah, it was Firebird. No now its called Firefox. I don't know why, just use it"
this will be good for games
you are all fucking robots, you know that? you are not special. And the mods are idiots.
We are the Slashbots. Lower your threshold and surrender your karma. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your dissenting opinions will adapt to agree with ours. Resistance is futile.
lets just nuke it!
" .
Let me just start out by saying that the Ewoks are the single most underrated cinematic creations of all time. I love those little dudes! I love these little movies, too. Though I haven't seen them for a good six years or more, I remember absolutely loving them when I was little. They always made me want to go climb a tree and pretend I was an Ewok! Honestly, WHO would not want to live in hundred-foot trees, leaping on vines and speaking in those funky voices?! Um, anyway, just to give you the idea how much I love Ewoks . . . . . .
Plus, to all you Ewok-bashers out there, they were successful enough to star in not one, but TWO solo adventure movies. HA HA HA!!
There had been rumors of an eventual DVD release of these two films for years. (That fawlty announcement of a three-disc ultimate collector's edition was a doozy.) Now, it's official: Come November, Ewoks fans across the nation can rejoice!! Though not in any special edition format (which coud be expected from two 80s TV movies), just having these priceless gems on DVD will be enough."
Um, right. Long live the ewoks!
Believe it or not, but the scientists and engineers working on this are not complete morons. Unlike you (and I don't mean this as an insult), they have experience and a budget they can put towards researching this. If its used, you can be sure that much thought has gone into it. No-one wants a repeat of the last shuttle disaster.
here are some other records (taken from here:
Current Records
IPv6 Category
Single Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
Multiple Stream Class: 46,156 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 10,949 kilometers of network.
IPv4 Category
Single Stream Class: 69,073 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the SUNET, the organization for the national higher research and education network (NREN) of Sweden, and Sprint across 16,343 kilometers of network.
Multiple Stream Class: 104,528 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN by sending 859 gigabytes of data across 15,766 kilometers of network in 1037 seconds (just over 17 minutes), for an average rate of 6.63 gigabits per second.
Its called, a slipperly slope.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller
Everyone--from good hearted people to downright argumentative trolls--misses the point on spying.
I don't care about online privacy. I'm not worried about government spooks sifting through my e-mail or web surfing habits and finding out that I like brunettes with long legs, long hair, and almond shaped eyes. It really doesn't concern me. If it were some supercomputer sitting in a back room chewing through e-mail looking for "homicide, suicide, terror, assassinate, secret, password, 9/11" or some other stupid set of keywords or tracing kiddie porn that'd be fine by me. At least until the anti-pr0n people decide that moral righteousness has no bounds and start coming after willing adults with no real sex life and a speedy net connection.
Face it. We live in the real world. People in power let it go to their heads and they often use it for purposes other than those in which it was given to them for.
What I'm worried about is that the guy down the block is an FBI agent. Or CIA. Or NSA. Or some local politician who knows one. One day I'm walking down the street and a candy wrapper drops out of my pocket onto his lawn. Now this guy is such a straight laced Bible thumping tight a__ POS that he uses his political muscle to find out who I am and begin harassing me. "He dropped a candy wrapper on my lawn! He's a litterer! He's no good for society! Besides, I saw him carrying home a six-pack of beer! He must be an alcoholic as well!"
Where's the check and balance? There is none. Who could prove it? No one. Who can stop it? No one.
Echelon, Big Brother surveillance, the Anti-Terror bill. They all suck for the same reason that the Windows registry sucks: there's no way to secure them from people misusing them to hijack the system.
Two years or so ago I visited Tami Nadu, a poor state in the south of India... Even in the smallest towns (say, 20 inhabitants which is nothing in India), you would find a place offering dirst-cheap internet acces (typically 2 or 3 computers sharing a 33.6k line). People there had taken to using that instead of phone because it was much, much cheaper! It allowed for exemple parents who had a son or daughter studying or working in an other city to contact him at a fraction of the cost of a phone call. It also allowed farmers to have up-to-date information on market price for their product or to ask for the delivery of fertiliser or spare parts for those who had a truck, or to know when one of their relative living in a city had an opening for a temporary job (at a building site, for exemple). It was amazingly useful - and it was not designed for tourists. Though we were happy to use the places, we were often the only foreigners the guy in charge of the place had had for clients this year. And while it was slow, for text emails a 33.6 line is more than enough. You really wanted to kill spammers there though - downloading 50 spam emails using broadband is annoying, but on a shared 33.6k line it's a real pain ;-)
People who reacts to article like that by saying that internet is a luxury are missing the fact that basic internet services like emails or simple websites are in practice often the cheapest way to communicate - you get far more information out of your phone line. And even poor farmers in third-world countries need to communicate, if only to the nearest city. Internet is more than just a greater provider of pr0n and pirated music...
We are confused. What is this 'chick' you speak off?
The Slashbot Collective Hivemind
'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
Not to further fuel the flames, but it's not quite that straightforward.
I think part of the problem is that folks are looking at AAC as 'Apple's format.' It's not. AAC -- Advanced Audio Coding -- is an open standard; there's an ISO number for it, and it was come up with by the MPEG standards group. AAC is to MPEG4 what MP3 (MPEG1 Audio Layer 3) was to the original MPEG. AAC itself is quite widely played by software players -- more than just iTunes -- and is more or less the intended successor to MP3. (NOTE: Intended. I make no predictions about whether or not it will actually happen.)
Where you can point the finger at Apple is on their DRM implementation on top of AAC; that's not part of the AAC specification, and so means that while an un-protected AAC file can play on iTunes, WinAmp, etc., a protected iTunes Music Store one cannot. THIS is a little unfortunate; I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.
WMA makes me more nervous as a format, because as far as I know it's controlled by a single entity (Microsoft) instead of an open group (MPEG standards group). However, it can't be discounted that WMA's integration of DRM has made it the more attractive commercial option for folks, since it's possible to make differing players handle the same DRM-protected files.
Whether or not AAC with some form of DRM will catch on remains to be seen, I guess.
What, exactly, does Microsoft have to offer in this area? WMA? Sure, it's the "standard" for all the other services--whose combined sales pale in comparison to Apple's. It's also the "standard" for the other players, whose--again, combine--sales pale in comparison to the iPod. You can bet their music service won't hold a candle to the ease of use and quality of service of the iTMS. It will also use WMA--see above. By the time MS is ready to launch it, though, it's likely that most non-iTMS music download services will be failing, and the remaining ones will be consolidating. Sorry, but in this case Apple has out-Microsofted Microsoft.