Why won't I use BSD? Because I believe in the GPL, not the Berkeley license, that's why.
If a software license was like the government:
1. BSD would be anarchy. You can do whatever you want with whatever you want, whenever you want to. Murder your own mother? Nobody cares, you're free to do so! It's anarchy baby!
2. Most of Microsoft's traditional licenses would be rampant fascism. We control everything, we are accountable for nothing, and we will not stop until there is nothing left. Hitler would be proud.
3. Just about any license agreement from any small company would be the equivalent to an Iraqi or Italian dictatorship (think Musolini, absolutely pathetic compared to Hitler, but still a complete control freak).
4. Shared source would be communism (you have the illusion of freedom, but really, we the collective control everything and you have no say even though we say you have say even though you don't but you do).
5 And finally, the GPL would be democracy. Democracies are hardly ideal, they are slow, they waste a lot of energy, they infight a lot, but in the end there is NOTHING better.
How can we name movies when nobody makes them? It's a chicken and egg scenario. Nobody makes them because they don't sell, and they don't sell because nobody makes them. It's no differnt than games on Linux.
Raw performance will ALWAYS be an issue. If you can handle 100,000 hits per day on the same hardware that I can handle 1,000,000 (and these are not made up numbers, we see this kind of discrepency in web applications all the time), then I clearly will be able to do MORE business than you and do it cheaper. That gives me a competitive advantage from now till the end of time. If you throw more hardware at the problem, well, so can I and I'll still be ahead of you.
Performance realities do not go away, no matter how much we may wish they would. Now, does that mean you're going to go write major portions of your web application in assembly to speed it up? No, probably not. But your database vendor may very well use some tricks like that to speed up the key parts of their database. You sink or swim by your database, so don't say it doesn't matter because it absolutely does.
Anyway, in my day-to-day operations, I can think of quite a few things that get compiled directly to executable code even though they don't have to be. Why would you do this if performance wasn't an issue and we could just throw more hardware at it?
1. Regular expressions in the.NET environment are compiled down to executable code, then executed.
2. XSL transformations in the.NET environment are compiled to a form of executable code (I don't think it's actual.NET byte code, but it may be) and then executed.
3. The XmlSerializer classes creates a special compiled executable specifically created to serialize objects into XML (byte code!!).
And the list just goes on and all of this eventually ends up getting JITed as well. My pages are 100% XML based, go through many transformation steps to get to where they need to be, and on average render in about 70-100ms (depending upon the amount of database calls I need to make and the size of the data). This all happens without spiking our CPU utilization to extreme levels. There is *NO WAY* I could've done this on our hardware if nobody cared about performance.
As always, a good design is the most important factor. But a good design that performs well will always be superior to one that doesn't.
I get about 40-50 hours of playtime from 2 AAs for my Sony CDRW (the primary reason why I bought it over all the other brands). Very pleased with it. Not so pleased with my MiniDisk player.
I have a Sony Mini-Disk player. I never use it. Instead, I use my Sony CDRW MP3 player.
Why?
1. The CDRW holds a LOT more music. 2. The CDRW media is cheaper. 3. The CDRW plays MP3 AS IS. 4. The CDRW media is a lot faster than the Mini-Disk medai. 5. The CDRW does not require any special software.
Play MP3s as is (no re-encoding them to your own crappy custom DRMed format) and get rid of that GOD-AWFULL software that comes with the Mini-Disk. Honestly, that software my Mini-Disk player came with was amongst the worst I have *EVER* used.
Do the above, and I might consider another one. Until then, stick with your ipods and CDRW players.
If I remember correctly, yes the Saturn V's can carry more weight, but the shuttle can carry bulkier (i.e. bigger) loads. The Hubble couldn't have been carried up in a Saturn V because it just wouldn't fit!
That is, of course from memory. I do not claim my memory is perfect.
Welcome to America buddy. Everybody's opinion matters. If somebody doesn't voice their disgust with how these major programs are run, then we might as well live in Communist Russia. No thanks.
I'm not against the ISS per-say. But if I don't at least argue against it on occasion and try to understand both sides of the issue, then I'm a fool and I'm doing myself and my money a disservice.
What about you? Are are you one those people who buys into the Democrat or Republican party hook line and sinker, never questioning your beliefs? Content to let the worst travesties of both parties slide by with hardly a raised eyebrow? Or are you somebody truly interested in bettering yourself AND bettering this country?
Demanding results for my investment isn't a bad thing. It's the American way and it's what keeps this country better than all the rest.
Yeah, and you ALSO have to know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much money you throw into something, if quacks like a duck it's still a duck.
I am seeing NO practical benefit whatsoever from my money that is being put into the ISS. I am hardly seeing any that is going into the Space Shuttle program either (only those missions that carry something too big to fly abourd a Saturn V or similar rocket).
Why do we have to spend BILLIONS of dollars for science which can be done with MILLIONS?? A few ummaned capsules, satellites and additional (larger) telescopes would give us a lot more science and cost billions less.
Tell me, why do we need to send men up there? What can we possibly learn that we hadn't already learned with SkyLab and MIR? We're not finding new sources of energy! We're not finding new materials! We're not mining materials from asteroids or the moon! We're not finding ways to get more people into space safer! Everything we learned on the ground, we could've learned building smaller more efficient ships.
So where is the benefit? Internation respect? That went out the window soon as Bush stepped into office, so we know how far that gets us.
Insurance companies don't fix every totalled car for a reason: Some times you have to cut your losses and move on. It's long since been time to move on.
And that's only if the problem doesn't get worse. It could be like that cartoon character next to the damn... one hole appears, he sticks his finger in it. Another hole appears, he sticks another finger in it.
I'm an astro-nut. If I could control where most of my taxed income went, I'd almost certainly have it tunnelled off to Air Force black projects, NASA and science education.
That being said, the ISS has long since become a turkey. It's time to cut that thing loose and build us something usefull. In particular, real telescopes that will let real science be done. This space station is nothing more than a big money black hole.
I'd much rather have a space based inferometer placed at one of the Earth's lagrange points. We could learn a lot from something like that! What are we learning from ISS? Russia has no money... nobody else will cooperate with us... people can't stay up in space for a long time (hello mir?) and our space program is woefully inadequate. Great. Billions of dollars for this? I could've told you this years ago...
1. My parents even want Windows XP. I can tell you right now they're so sick of the crap that they've had with Windows over the last few years that they're nearly ready to try anything that isn't Microsoft.
2. I would want to administer Windows XP remotely. I don't think so. I'd much rather work with a BSD/Linux based system any day of the week. I spend 40-60/hours a week dealing with MS BS at work. Enough is enough.
Yes, that's true. But it's not always practical. I'll tell you what, VirusScan does a REALLY good job catching bad ActiveX/JavaScript/Java controls. I'm very pleased with it so far. It's not fool proof, nothing is, but it's gotten the job done so far.
I use Mozilla. I've even contemplated setting it up on my parents machine many times, but I'm not ready for their culture shock. I'd rather they just get a Mac with OSX that I can administer remotely and deal with the changes all at once.
You know, I'm not afraid of somebody exploiting my parents Windows 98 machine. I WOULD be afraid of somebody exploiting my parents machine if it were running WinXP or Win2K. Why? Because those machines would then have the tools on them to do really nasty things.
For all it's defects and security problems, Win98 has one thing going for it: It has none of the fixins' that the later versions of windows come with. I'm talking transaction managers, networking tools, true background services, web servers, mail servers, and everything else Windows now comes with.
Why target a Windows 98 machine which has nothing on it when you can go for a Win2K machine which would be practically usefull?
Now I know a lot of that stuff can be removed, but a lot of it can't. A lot of it can also be installed on Windows 98. Here is what I know now: My parents machine works. It has on it ONLY what they need on it. It's patched. It's updated. It's got high quality virus software that is kept up to date. My father knows how to use it. My father knows how to keep it up to date.
If I were to switch over to W2K, the whole process would have to start all over again. I would have to retrain them on how to do things that changed and what not to do. I would have to lock down the machine and re-audit all the software to determine what's a high risk and what isn't. All while STILL making the machine a much more valuable target for nefarious individuals.
I'm not satisfied with any solution, to tell the truth. However, as it stands, there is nothing that makes the upgrade worthwhile for me. It's just more work. So, Microsoft dropped their support. Big deal. As I said before, Microsoft never really supported us in the first place so why will things be any different after the 14th than they are now?
The machine is nearing the end if it's life cycle too. It's just not worth it.
Because it's my job. Our servers at work are Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers. It's my job to make sure that our stuff works on Windows 2003 servers. You know what, it's works better than both Windows XP and Windows 2000 on this machine (which doesn't say much, but it does).
Microsoft had no choice. Millions of computer users use Microsoft's operating systems and Microsoft's bottom line rests on their satisfaction.
Red Hat doesn't have anywhere near as many users, their bottom line is not as threatened by a mass exodus, and most of their market is very tech savvy and capable of moving (unlike Windows users).
Microsoft was not being generous, Microsoft was merely being practical.
Well, my parents run Windows 98. My grandfather runs Windows 98. My other grandfather runs Windows 98SE. I have no intention of upgrading their computers now or ever.
I've long since put my trust in anti-viral software and AdAware. That's working far better for me than many of Microsoft's patches have. I still have IE trying to download stuff on my Windows Server 2003 laptop all the time, but thankfully VirusScan always catches it and AdAware makes a nice backup should VisusScan fail. If my fully up-to-date Windows Server 2003 machine fails, why should I even bother trying to lock-down or upgrade a windows 98 machine?
Microsoft isn't supporting me, so I'm not going to go out of my way to get any of my relatives to support them. In fact, I'm recommending they all get Apple laptops next time they want to do a major computer upgrade.
Bryan
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
I take your point. What is meta data if not just data? Is there meta meta data? Or meta meta meta meta meta data? Or is it all really just data?
The use of the word is the real problem. It's either bad or it isn't. People just need to make up their minds.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Why won't I use BSD? Because I believe in the GPL, not the Berkeley license, that's why.
If a software license was like the government:
1. BSD would be anarchy. You can do whatever you want with whatever you want, whenever you want to. Murder your own mother? Nobody cares, you're free to do so! It's anarchy baby!
2. Most of Microsoft's traditional licenses would be rampant fascism. We control everything, we are accountable for nothing, and we will not stop until there is nothing left. Hitler would be proud.
3. Just about any license agreement from any small company would be the equivalent to an Iraqi or Italian dictatorship (think Musolini, absolutely pathetic compared to Hitler, but still a complete control freak).
4. Shared source would be communism (you have the illusion of freedom, but really, we the collective control everything and you have no say even though we say you have say even though you don't but you do).
5 And finally, the GPL would be democracy. Democracies are hardly ideal, they are slow, they waste a lot of energy, they infight a lot, but in the end there is NOTHING better.
It's as simple as that.
Bryan
How can we name movies when nobody makes them? It's a chicken and egg scenario. Nobody makes them because they don't sell, and they don't sell because nobody makes them. It's no differnt than games on Linux.
Bryan
And then people will buy even less CDs and pirate more. When you're fighting everybody, you can't expect to get out of the fight without getting hurt.
Bryan
Schema, heh. Can anybody tell I'm a programmer? I meant scheme.
And only serves to proove why this whole schema was a boneheaded idea in the first place.
May I ask why you're moving to Apache 1.x and not 2.x?
Bryan
Raw performance will ALWAYS be an issue. If you can handle 100,000 hits per day on the same hardware that I can handle 1,000,000 (and these are not made up numbers, we see this kind of discrepency in web applications all the time), then I clearly will be able to do MORE business than you and do it cheaper. That gives me a competitive advantage from now till the end of time. If you throw more hardware at the problem, well, so can I and I'll still be ahead of you.
.NET environment are compiled down to executable code, then executed.
.NET environment are compiled to a form of executable code (I don't think it's actual .NET byte code, but it may be) and then executed.
Performance realities do not go away, no matter how much we may wish they would. Now, does that mean you're going to go write major portions of your web application in assembly to speed it up? No, probably not. But your database vendor may very well use some tricks like that to speed up the key parts of their database. You sink or swim by your database, so don't say it doesn't matter because it absolutely does.
Anyway, in my day-to-day operations, I can think of quite a few things that get compiled directly to executable code even though they don't have to be. Why would you do this if performance wasn't an issue and we could just throw more hardware at it?
1. Regular expressions in the
2. XSL transformations in the
3. The XmlSerializer classes creates a special compiled executable specifically created to serialize objects into XML (byte code!!).
And the list just goes on and all of this eventually ends up getting JITed as well. My pages are 100% XML based, go through many transformation steps to get to where they need to be, and on average render in about 70-100ms (depending upon the amount of database calls I need to make and the size of the data). This all happens without spiking our CPU utilization to extreme levels. There is *NO WAY* I could've done this on our hardware if nobody cared about performance.
As always, a good design is the most important factor. But a good design that performs well will always be superior to one that doesn't.
Bryan
Actually, given the immense # of spam mails that purport to have come from AOL, this is already an immediately great way to cut those out!
Do any mail servers/spam filters support using the TXT record on a domain by domain basis? (i.e. for just aol.com for now).
Bryan
I get about 40-50 hours of playtime from 2 AAs for my Sony CDRW (the primary reason why I bought it over all the other brands). Very pleased with it. Not so pleased with my MiniDisk player.
Bryan
WTF?! Have they never heard of Perl??
Bryan
I have a Sony Mini-Disk player. I never use it. Instead, I use my Sony CDRW MP3 player.
Why?
1. The CDRW holds a LOT more music.
2. The CDRW media is cheaper.
3. The CDRW plays MP3 AS IS.
4. The CDRW media is a lot faster than the Mini-Disk medai.
5. The CDRW does not require any special software.
Play MP3s as is (no re-encoding them to your own crappy custom DRMed format) and get rid of that GOD-AWFULL software that comes with the Mini-Disk. Honestly, that software my Mini-Disk player came with was amongst the worst I have *EVER* used.
Do the above, and I might consider another one. Until then, stick with your ipods and CDRW players.
Bryan
If I remember correctly, yes the Saturn V's can carry more weight, but the shuttle can carry bulkier (i.e. bigger) loads. The Hubble couldn't have been carried up in a Saturn V because it just wouldn't fit!
That is, of course from memory. I do not claim my memory is perfect.
Bryan
Welcome to America buddy. Everybody's opinion matters. If somebody doesn't voice their disgust with how these major programs are run, then we might as well live in Communist Russia. No thanks.
I'm not against the ISS per-say. But if I don't at least argue against it on occasion and try to understand both sides of the issue, then I'm a fool and I'm doing myself and my money a disservice.
What about you? Are are you one those people who buys into the Democrat or Republican party hook line and sinker, never questioning your beliefs? Content to let the worst travesties of both parties slide by with hardly a raised eyebrow? Or are you somebody truly interested in bettering yourself AND bettering this country?
Demanding results for my investment isn't a bad thing. It's the American way and it's what keeps this country better than all the rest.
Bryan
Yeah, and you ALSO have to know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much money you throw into something, if quacks like a duck it's still a duck.
I am seeing NO practical benefit whatsoever from my money that is being put into the ISS. I am hardly seeing any that is going into the Space Shuttle program either (only those missions that carry something too big to fly abourd a Saturn V or similar rocket).
Why do we have to spend BILLIONS of dollars for science which can be done with MILLIONS?? A few ummaned capsules, satellites and additional (larger) telescopes would give us a lot more science and cost billions less.
Tell me, why do we need to send men up there? What can we possibly learn that we hadn't already learned with SkyLab and MIR? We're not finding new sources of energy! We're not finding new materials! We're not mining materials from asteroids or the moon! We're not finding ways to get more people into space safer! Everything we learned on the ground, we could've learned building smaller more efficient ships.
So where is the benefit? Internation respect? That went out the window soon as Bush stepped into office, so we know how far that gets us.
Insurance companies don't fix every totalled car for a reason: Some times you have to cut your losses and move on. It's long since been time to move on.
Bryan
And that's only if the problem doesn't get worse. It could be like that cartoon character next to the damn... one hole appears, he sticks his finger in it. Another hole appears, he sticks another finger in it.
Unfortunately, he's only got 10 fingers...
Bryan
I'm an astro-nut. If I could control where most of my taxed income went, I'd almost certainly have it tunnelled off to Air Force black projects, NASA and science education.
That being said, the ISS has long since become a turkey. It's time to cut that thing loose and build us something usefull. In particular, real telescopes that will let real science be done. This space station is nothing more than a big money black hole.
I'd much rather have a space based inferometer placed at one of the Earth's lagrange points. We could learn a lot from something like that! What are we learning from ISS? Russia has no money... nobody else will cooperate with us... people can't stay up in space for a long time (hello mir?) and our space program is woefully inadequate. Great. Billions of dollars for this? I could've told you this years ago...
Bryan
You make two invalid assumptions:
1. My parents even want Windows XP. I can tell you right now they're so sick of the crap that they've had with Windows over the last few years that they're nearly ready to try anything that isn't Microsoft.
2. I would want to administer Windows XP remotely. I don't think so. I'd much rather work with a BSD/Linux based system any day of the week. I spend 40-60/hours a week dealing with MS BS at work. Enough is enough.
Bryan
Yes, that's true. But it's not always practical. I'll tell you what, VirusScan does a REALLY good job catching bad ActiveX/JavaScript/Java controls. I'm very pleased with it so far. It's not fool proof, nothing is, but it's gotten the job done so far.
Bryan
I use Mozilla. I've even contemplated setting it up on my parents machine many times, but I'm not ready for their culture shock. I'd rather they just get a Mac with OSX that I can administer remotely and deal with the changes all at once.
Bryan
You know, I'm not afraid of somebody exploiting my parents Windows 98 machine. I WOULD be afraid of somebody exploiting my parents machine if it were running WinXP or Win2K. Why? Because those machines would then have the tools on them to do really nasty things.
For all it's defects and security problems, Win98 has one thing going for it: It has none of the fixins' that the later versions of windows come with. I'm talking transaction managers, networking tools, true background services, web servers, mail servers, and everything else Windows now comes with.
Why target a Windows 98 machine which has nothing on it when you can go for a Win2K machine which would be practically usefull?
Now I know a lot of that stuff can be removed, but a lot of it can't. A lot of it can also be installed on Windows 98. Here is what I know now: My parents machine works. It has on it ONLY what they need on it. It's patched. It's updated. It's got high quality virus software that is kept up to date. My father knows how to use it. My father knows how to keep it up to date.
If I were to switch over to W2K, the whole process would have to start all over again. I would have to retrain them on how to do things that changed and what not to do. I would have to lock down the machine and re-audit all the software to determine what's a high risk and what isn't. All while STILL making the machine a much more valuable target for nefarious individuals.
I'm not satisfied with any solution, to tell the truth. However, as it stands, there is nothing that makes the upgrade worthwhile for me. It's just more work. So, Microsoft dropped their support. Big deal. As I said before, Microsoft never really supported us in the first place so why will things be any different after the 14th than they are now?
The machine is nearing the end if it's life cycle too. It's just not worth it.
Bryan
Because it's my job. Our servers at work are Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers. It's my job to make sure that our stuff works on Windows 2003 servers. You know what, it's works better than both Windows XP and Windows 2000 on this machine (which doesn't say much, but it does).
I never said I didn't lock it down. I do, religiously. It makes no difference, there's a new exploit for IE every other week.
Microsoft had no choice. Millions of computer users use Microsoft's operating systems and Microsoft's bottom line rests on their satisfaction.
Red Hat doesn't have anywhere near as many users, their bottom line is not as threatened by a mass exodus, and most of their market is very tech savvy and capable of moving (unlike Windows users).
Microsoft was not being generous, Microsoft was merely being practical.
Well, my parents run Windows 98. My grandfather runs Windows 98. My other grandfather runs Windows 98SE. I have no intention of upgrading their computers now or ever.
I've long since put my trust in anti-viral software and AdAware. That's working far better for me than many of Microsoft's patches have. I still have IE trying to download stuff on my Windows Server 2003 laptop all the time, but thankfully VirusScan always catches it and AdAware makes a nice backup should VisusScan fail. If my fully up-to-date Windows Server 2003 machine fails, why should I even bother trying to lock-down or upgrade a windows 98 machine?
Microsoft isn't supporting me, so I'm not going to go out of my way to get any of my relatives to support them. In fact, I'm recommending they all get Apple laptops next time they want to do a major computer upgrade.
Bryan
I take your point. What is meta data if not just data? Is there meta meta data? Or meta meta meta meta meta data? Or is it all really just data?
:)
The use of the word is the real problem. It's either bad or it isn't. People just need to make up their minds.
Bryan