Re:Assembly language is the Java of 1999
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V2 OS
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· Score: 2
Small, fast code is not a marketing craze. It's refusing wasting your users' hardware investment. I paid a lot of money for my machine, and I don't dig having to buy bigger drives, more RAM, and a faster CPU just because some schmuck, be they in Redmond or in someone's garage, can't code worth a damn.
God, I hope small apps come back into fashion.
Inexperience: The root of all BS
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V2 OS
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· Score: 1
Amen to that. I thought it was nice to see someone still capable of tight, fast, bare-metal hackery, and more power to them. It's a shame it isn't full open source, but maybe that will change when they have more time to polish the tools.
First of all, assembler is not obsolete. People incapable of writing a non-trivial app in any given language are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject -- not that that ever stops them. If someone tries to tell you that assembly language is obsolete, the best way to shut them up is to ask them how many years of assembly experience they have. If that fails, ask them to name even one algorithm that is only possible in assembly language.
(Frankly, I'd be surprised if even one quarter of the AC's dissing this project can program in any language.)
Secondly, I can see plenty of uses for an OS like this one, not the least of which would be embedded systems, to say nothing of learning something about low-level hardware interfaces. Somebody has to write that kind of code, even if it isn't kewl enough for all these l33t HaX0r d00ds.
Thirdly, the growing me-too strains of Linux "world domination" are really starting to piss me off. Free software is, first and foremost, about choice and control. If Linux ever actually does dominate the world, it will have become the Enemy, and it will be necessary to destroy it in the same way Microsoft is being destroyed. Popularity is not a measure of quality; often, it is just an index of trendoid mediocrity.
Finally, not just with respect to V2 but with respect to all creative endeavors: If you think you can do better, go do it or shut up. Anyone can be a critic; relatively few, it seems, are contributors.
There is more than just a little Big Brother possibility to this. If this technology actually works as advertised, it eliminates the last technical barrier preventing governments from monitoring all voice communications all the time. Heretofore, this was not practically possible because of the manpower required to listen to millions of voice calls; this technology will make it possible to search for key phrases in real time as well as to archive millions of calls efficiently. The fact that it is apparently both cheap and simple only makes things worse.
Almost equally disturbing is the apparent ability of the Berger-Liaw system to distinguish individual voices from background noise, which raises the specter of governments being able to use almost unimaginably faint sounds to avoid more intrusive methods of bugging, and the monitoring of conversations in crowds. Combine that with existing off-the-shelf technology for face recognition...
Let's just say that I will be very surprised if the first customers for this technology aren't in Beijing and even more surprised if they aren't quickly followed by the dolts in Washington.
And hey, if I can reconstruct what you say inside your home from the weak sound waves that drift out into the street, that might not even require a warrant...
The idea that black kids will be inspired to excel if and only if they have black models is either bullshit, or else black kids are racists. My chief personal heroes from the time I was a boy were, in no particular order, George Washington Carver, Lao Tzu, and Imhotep, none of whom were white. Admittedly, that's an odd set of role models, but the point is that if I were the only white man in the world, there have been plenty of creative and admirable people distributed through all of the so-called races to choose from. If you have to pick your role models from within your own ethnic group, not only are you needlessly narrowing your own horizons, but you are actively perpetuating racism.
The problem is that no matter how well-designed your hierarchy is, most end users don't grasp the concept of hierarchies. Do you realize how many people think Yahoo is just a search engine and never, ever drill down through the categories? (Not that Yahoo is especially well-designed, but you get my point.)
OTOH, the real problem is that end users want to be able to type what they want in plain English (or the badly spelled, ungrammatical, punctuation- and capitalization-free crud that passes for end user English) and get exactly what they want, even if they aren't sure what they want and couldn't express it if they were. Just because you can reference a document as "1996 budget report" doesn't mean your pointy-haired boss isn't going to type "bugdet report 96".
The idea is not necessarily a bad one, though I think it might open the door to more onerous burdens down the road. However, if I may be permitted a typical knee-jerk American reaction, my primary objection is that UN representatives are appointed by national governments instead of by direct popular election.
When I get to vote for my UN representative the same as I get to vote for my President and my Congressmen, then I will at least consider the idea. Until then, forget it.
Big Hairy Waste of Bandwidth
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Browser news
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· Score: 2
I won't get into the pseudo-intellectual tripe that netomat was introduced with. Others, far more sarcastic than I, have already slashed it to ribbons.
I guess I instantly identify myself as part of the pre-1990 crowd with my reaction to netomat: if it becomes popular, how much bandwidth will it waste? I remember when doing something stupid like streaming video would have gotten your network privileges revoked. Granted, we've got (nearly) adequate bandwidth now, so it's not as much of an issue, but still --- we finally get to the point that we have oodles of bandwidth, and we end up with some useless screensaver specifically designed to waste it.
Yeah, the net is changing the world, but not the way we thought it would in the old days. We've just provided an almost unlimited forum for endless garbage. Silly me, I thought that was what TV was for.
My company's website is generated from a flat-text "database". (The pages are mostly served statically, and the site generator is only run when the content changes -- once or twice a day.) This was originally written in Perl, and took half an hour to do the job. (It's a very big site.)
After a brief attempt to replace my Perl scripts with NetObjects Fusion, which was a disaster, I rewrote the program in C. It now takes just under two minutes to run, yielding a roughly 15x speedup. I've had similar experiences replacing some Perl CGI scripts with C programs, and though the gains are usually not quite as dramatic, I can usually get a 2-4x speedup. (The exception is for very short Perl scripts, which are usually best left as they are.)
Perl is a great systems administration tool, and it is often useful for web purposes, but there are many instances where other tools work substantially better. (The same is true of other popular tools, like PHP.) Perl has some serious shortcomings, like its hideous syntax and the tendency of Perl programs to use regex searches for simple literal strings, which could be done much more efficiently with a Boyer-Moore search in C or another language.
I wouldn't exactly discourage the use of Perl with the web -- perish the thought! -- but I would advise a newbie to bear in mind that it is a swiss army knife: pretty good for a wide array of tasks, but hardly ever the best at any of them. Greenspun's criticisms provide a welcome balance to a sometimes overzealous Perl advocacy.
Re:Philanthropy != Communism
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
Not that anyone will probably read this now that the article is two or three days down the road, but it is worth noting that I am not a leftist or a liberal. I am an active member of the Republican party and have generally voted for substantially right-of-center Republicans.
This being said, I think Reagan was a fraud, and despite what he may have said, he was as big a proponent of Big Government as any president in this century. My slam was not against the right, but against the kind of vacuous, all-talk-and-no-substance, principled-when-it's-convenient kind of faux conservatism that goes under the banner of Reaganism.
I'm a big RMS fan because I'm a conservative. Philanthropy becomes a personal social obligation precisely because the government ought not to be involved in any form of welfare; it is the duty of citizens to do that work. I suppose I differ from many conservatives in that I'm not being cynical when I say that private civic responsibility must take the place of official welfare. Most "Reagan Republicans" just say that to convince the moderates to support cuts in individual welfare in order to fund the enormous corporate welfare system.
Philanthropy != Communism
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RMS Responds
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· Score: 5
It find it endlessly irritating to hear the free software movement and RMS identified with communism by the inadequately educated reactionaries who like to think of themselves as representatives of the "business community".
Free software is not communism, or even anything close to it. You will find nothing in Das Kapital that bears anything more than the most superficial resemblance to the free software movement. (For that matter, you will find very little in the software industry that resembles "capital" in the traditional sense of the word, but I digress.)
Richard Stallman is a philanthropist. Those of you old enough to remember life before Reagan may recall a time when giving things away to society at large was considered a virtue. Back then, altruism, generosity, charity, and community service did not draw cries of "Communism!" from the peanut gallery. Even in the age of the robber barons --- probably the closest parallel to the current day --- there were esteemed philanthropists whose donations would have dwarfed the incomes of a roomful of today's wealthy entrepreneurs. When Andrew Carnegie built libraries for the entire country, did anyone accuse him of Marxism?
Richard Stallman's contributions to free software, both direct and indirect, could potentially have a dollar value on a par with Carnegie's bequest to the nation, and certainly more than all the token charity work of today's commercial software magnates. The same is true of Eric Raymond, Paul Vixie, Eric Allman, Linus Torvalds and innumerable others.
What has happened to the developer community, and indeed, the world at large, when people who selflessly devote years of work to building great software and donating it to the world at large are reviled for it? I was first attracted to this business in the late 70's and early 80's when hackers dreamed of changing and improving the world with computers, and later with the Internet. What happened to that idealism?
There's nothing wrong with making a buck. There is something very wrong with only making a buck. Generosity isn't a sign of mental deficiency or sinister political views; it is a moral obligation. It's high time that the profit-above-all reactionaries were put on notice that they are social parasites, and that those who devote some or all of their time to the common good are the real contributing members of society.
As far as I'm concerned -- totally ignoring the three ring ego circus of ESR, RMS, and Bruce Perens -- the "Open Source" term didn't help to clarify matters very much as it was just as vague as "Free Software", if not more so. When Stallman said "Free Software", he meant the GPL and we all knew it. When Raymond said "Open Source", it could mean any number of things ranging from the GPL to genuine public domain to liberally-licensed proprietary software.
What we really need is to come up with a rating system, something like the "Geek Code" but not so deliberately overcomplicated, that classifies software according to a few key points of its licensing terms.
The good doctor was next to last. Once Vonnegut goes, all of my heroes will be humus. And the great thing about living in a declining civilization is that no one is stepping forward to fill their shoes.
The weird thing is that, as I was driving home today before I heard the news, I was thinking idly about the afterlife and imagined Bones saying, "My God, Jim... I'm dead!" Howzat for creepy?
The 120 meg minimum install bothers me, too, as it made it impossible to install on an old 486 with a (very) small HD that I was planning to use for IP masquerading for my home LAN. Yeah, I know I can install Linux manually and not have to screw with the automated install, but that's why I bought RH 6.0 -- I wanted a relatively painless install. Instead, I get an inflexible installer that slings tons of unnecessary junk on my hard drive. If I was a newbie freshly emerged from Windows, I might not be surprised, but there are too many bare bones single-floppy Linux distros for 120 megs to be a minimum install.
To add insult to injury, the RH installer doesn't check to insure that enough drive space is available before attempting the install. Hell, even Microsoft can do that much.
I won't turn my back on Redhat just yet, but the odds are very good that my next distribution will be Debian.
Do you really expect the SETI@Home folks to kiss *your* very personal butt, just because you contributed a few cpu cycles and were even thinking of throwing in your mighty RS6000?
Hardly. What I meant to communicate was that if one's project depends on the good will of volunteers, going out of your way to offend those volunteers is counterproductive. Moreover, it's not very nice, which is the worst part of it. I know that being nice is not considered important in some quarters, and that some people confuse it with butt kissing, but it matters to me. That's all.
What offends me, or more accurately, bothers me about Anderson's remarks is that:
They unfairly reflect badly on Linux. This is personally important to me because I'd like to see Linux win more hearts and minds.
Anderson helped perpetuate the misuse of the term 'hacker'.
The whole thing struck me as an underhanded way to direct attention away from the SETI@Home team's own mismanagement of their project. I have no proof that this was his motivation, so I didn't mention it in the letter.
SETI@Home is a volunteer project relying on essentially personal motivations to encourage participation. I personally didn't care for what Anderson said, I told him so, and it is possible that I will cease to participate because of it. I offer my opinion as a personal opinion, not a recommendation that others think or do likewise.
Did it ever occur to you that the statement might have been meant in a positive way, as in "while it's been mostly the Unix/Linux crowd, it's not because they're all criminals, but rather because of the hacking spirit"?
That strikes me as highly unlikely given the rest of the things he said. If a retraction or clarification appears, I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
If you don't like the project, get out. If you like it, stay in.
I am not concerned with the recent technical problems with SETI@Home. While the decision to continue accepting new clients before the system was ready for the load demonstrated dubious judgment, problems of this sort are to be expected with a large distributed project during the early stages.
What was not expected was the poor judgment to make the following statement, among others, to _Wired_:
>"I don't want to name names," he said, >"But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux >crowds are causing most of the >headaches. It seems to be the hacker >mentality."
I have the SETI@Home client running on eight or nine workstations at present, some of which are Linux boxes. I was about to take three backup servers that are currently idle -- an IBM RS6000, a Compaq Proliant, and an IBM PC Server, all of which are running one flavor of Unix or another -- and devote them wholly to SETI@Home until such time as they are needed for other purposes. I thought it would be a nice project for my "hacker mentality". That plan is no longer on the burner. I don't know if I will go as far as many Unix admins already have and take the trouble to pull SETI@Home off the machines it's already running on, but I'm giving it some thought. It certainly won't be going on any new servers. You guys clearly don't want any of us hackers burning CPU time for you.
The next time you have problems with a few individuals, you might want to address them directly, rather than the largely innocent and devoted demographic to which they belong. If you have problems with a businessman who happens to be Jewish, you would not launch a polemic against Jews as a class, would you? Yet, faced with a few problematic vandals who happen to use Unix and style themselves "hackers", you denounce law-abiding, honest Unix hackers as a class. That was stupid and indecent. Shame on you.
If we do someday manage to achieve contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, it is my devout hope that their first impression of humanity does not come from the likes of you.
--Eric O'Dell Director of Information Services, The Gadget Guru, LLC
That they are having problems is understandable for a new project struggling to scale to unanticipated load levels, and it doesn't bother me at all. I wasn't using those CPU cycles for anything else anyway, and I think SETI@Home is a great idea -- certainly more important in the broad scheme of things than the encryption projects run by distributed.net, which are merely political rather than cosmic in scope.
On the other hand, their wholesale slam against the Unix/Linux crowd on the basis of what are probably a tiny percentage of idiots was just plain stupid. I won't end my participation in the project because of it, but I'm insulted enough that the next time they screw up I'll give it some serious thought. It's precisely because of my hacker mentality that I'm participating in the first place.
This is true. When I was working in the theater as an assistant manager, I was 19 and in total charge of the theater at least two nights a week. Everyone else there, except for the general manager, was closer to 16. Theft of all kinds, including the re-selling of tickets and the nefarious practice of "cupping" (if you don't know what that is, you don't want to), were almost impossible to eradicate. I knew of a couple of other theater managers in the city who not only tolerated but actually organized some of these things to their immense personal profit. So it hardly follows that individual theater managers are scrupulously honest.
Private, illegal showings of films were pretty common. Whenever we spliced a new film together, we were obligated to run it through the projector at least once to make sure it worked, i.e., no weak splices, all of the film oriented properly, and so on. It was customary for the theater employees to invite all of their friends to post-midnight previews of new films on these occasions. In an 8-plex with a fair number of employees, this sometimes ran to over a hundred people. No outsider ever offered me money for a private showing, but I don't necessarily know that I would have refused it. It would have been pointless to do so, though, as most theaters will gladly rent a private showing -- in such a case, the distributor does get royalties.
The original poster on this thread does have a good point, though. When we were shipping films out, we left the cans right by the door, or just inside the box office. Under those circumstances, they'd be quite easy to steal for someone who knew what they were after.
It never did occur to me to steal a film, though. I can't imagine what I'd have done with it.
I used to be a projectionist during my college days, and this story doesn't make much sense to me.
Movie theatre projectors are not like the little 16mm projectors they use in schools. They are man-sized machines that hold the film on a set of three platters that are about four feet in diameter. The film arrives in hexagonal metal cans, each containing three or four reels. The film is removed from the reels and wound onto the platters, pausing to splice each reel to the next. The film is actually shown from the platters; the reels are just used for transport.
The process is fairly time-consuming, and removing the film from the platter to put it back on the reels is no less prolonged. Unless the thief grabbed the reels while they were still in the cans, he would have had to gain access to the building after hours and be familiar with the equipment. If this isn't a publicity stunt, and the reels were really stolen, it would almost have to be an inside job.
And my memory may be failing me, but a seven-reel film loaded into cans weighs closer to sixty or seventy pounds. I remember having to lug those damn things up and down the stairs...
Funny, it seems to me that we never go more than two weeks between announcements of some sort of Linux support from one multi-billion dollar company or another, Linux marketshare continues to climb at an astonishing rate, and even Ziff-Davis sometimes runs favorable articles about Linux. What more do you want?
It's lamentable that the source isn't included, though I can certainly understand their reluctance to provide it, considering that fairly sophisticated (and therefore easy to screw up) mathematics involved.
Personally, the prospect of discovering signs of alien intelligence is worth a lot more to me than an insignificant risk to my privacy. In fact, it's the sort of thing I'd risk injury or death for.
I'm much more worried about what MS Office does behind the scenes on my Win95 box than I am about what a Real Science(tm) app might be doing.
"[Linux is] a 'techie' technology right now," said Cam Cullen.
Oh, for crying out loud, networking is a 'techie' technology. How many end users administer networks? 3Com has some notoriously good engineers, but bigosh, their marketing people are just as thick as those at any other company.
IMHO, politeness is a requirement of genteel society; it is the obligation of a decent person to be polite, not of other people to "earn" it. Obviously, you disagree. This is your loss.
As it happens, Mr. Leonard did not show me a copy of the review prior to publication. Frankly, I don't have any problem with the review as such. Nothing in it that I can see falls outside the realm of opinions about which honest people can disagree, and it does accurately reflect concerns held by some members of the non-technical user community.
I am well aware of the serious stability problems Windows has; such was my main motivation to adopt Linux for my personal use. In managing a mixed network of Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and AIX boxes, and a userbase of varying technical skill, it has been my observation that Windows (and secondarily MacOS) pose fewer usability problems for inexperienced users than does Linux+KDE. This is particularly true of routine system configuration. The average non-technical business user doesn't mind rebooting and having to seek technical support for the occasional reinstall as much as they mind a system that makes routine operations difficult.
It was a terrible review, and I think you are a shill. Clearly you have some kind of axe to grind...
Baseless personal attacks are always the last resort of the intolerant. If I am a shill, I am a shill for Linux. If I have an axe to grind, it is a thorough hatred for Microsoft and what Microsoft has done to the personal computing industry. Unfortunately, personal integrity forbids me to lie and deny that Linux has some end-user usability problems, or to refuse to acknowledge that Microsoft occasionally does something acceptably well.
The thick-headed dogmatic insistence that Linux is better in all ways than the competition will get Linux just about as far as the same attitude did for the Amiga and the Macintosh. Nothing can be improved until it is recognized as needing improvement.
What Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 _does_ do, however, is give us newbies a "safe" starting point -- a place that looks familiar to us. We'll make tiny little forays into the horrible world of the blinking command prompt, and if it doesn't work we'll retreat to a good solid game of Freecell or Reversi. When we actually do something right in that horrible place, we'll feel more comfortable with it. Sooner or later, we'll be able to edit configuration files with the best of you.
That's exactly it. Personally, I detest GUIs (to the point of using Lout instead of a word processor), but they really help with the learning curve for inexperienced users. The problem with Windows and MacOS is that they actively prevent even experienced users from getting at the nuts and bolts of the system. After a certain point, the learning curve hits a brick wall. Linux has the opportunity to be the best of both worlds: raw power for the experienced, ease of use for the inexperienced, and a bridge between the two.
Of course, this is only possible if we can get past the (let's face it) frequently condescending and contemptuous attitude that a lot of techies take towards non-technical types.
I'm not sure it's necessarily such a good idea to work on a policy of "If Microsoft can't do it, why should Linux?" The developers at Microsoft couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Linux should be able to do better because the development model is superior, the code quality is superior, and the programmers are generally more conscientious. If we're going to let Microsoft set the hurdles, we're going to be crawling on our bellies.
The novice user has plenty of reasons to modify his/her system configuration, not the least of which are installing new hardware, setting up a dialup ISP account, and adjusting display parameters. The fact of the matter is that a newbie is far more likely to screw things up beyond his ability to repair them under Linux than under Windows when making routine adjustments. By foolproof I don't mean bulletproof; I just mean an interface that any clueless twit can use for reasonably simple tasks. And I don't mean that it should be like Windows or Macintosh. It should be better than either. Substantially.
Saying that a newbie can more easily get into trouble with Linux than with Windows is no more FUD than saying that a newbie can more easily injure himself with a motorcycle than with a tricycle. It's just the way it is. Linux desperately needs training wheels. As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with that unless, like Windows and Macintosh, it somehow becomes impossible to remove them.
Slashdot Mirror
God, I hope small apps come back into fashion.
First of all, assembler is not obsolete. People incapable of writing a non-trivial app in any given language are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject -- not that that ever stops them. If someone tries to tell you that assembly language is obsolete, the best way to shut them up is to ask them how many years of assembly experience they have. If that fails, ask them to name even one algorithm that is only possible in assembly language.
(Frankly, I'd be surprised if even one quarter of the AC's dissing this project can program in any language.)
Secondly, I can see plenty of uses for an OS like this one, not the least of which would be embedded systems, to say nothing of learning something about low-level hardware interfaces. Somebody has to write that kind of code, even if it isn't kewl enough for all these l33t HaX0r d00ds.
Thirdly, the growing me-too strains of Linux "world domination" are really starting to piss me off. Free software is, first and foremost, about choice and control. If Linux ever actually does dominate the world, it will have become the Enemy, and it will be necessary to destroy it in the same way Microsoft is being destroyed. Popularity is not a measure of quality; often, it is just an index of trendoid mediocrity.
Finally, not just with respect to V2 but with respect to all creative endeavors: If you think you can do better, go do it or shut up. Anyone can be a critic; relatively few, it seems, are contributors.
I hope not. I can't imagine that the net could be dumbed down any more than it already has without becoming TV.
There is more than just a little Big Brother possibility to this. If this technology actually works as advertised, it eliminates the last technical barrier preventing governments from monitoring all voice communications all the time. Heretofore, this was not practically possible because of the manpower required to listen to millions of voice calls; this technology will make it possible to search for key phrases in real time as well as to archive millions of calls efficiently. The fact that it is apparently both cheap and simple only makes things worse.
Almost equally disturbing is the apparent ability of the Berger-Liaw system to distinguish individual voices from background noise, which raises the specter of governments being able to use almost unimaginably faint sounds to avoid more intrusive methods of bugging, and the monitoring of conversations in crowds. Combine that with existing off-the-shelf technology for face recognition...
Let's just say that I will be very surprised if the first customers for this technology aren't in Beijing and even more surprised if they aren't quickly followed by the dolts in Washington.
And hey, if I can reconstruct what you say inside your home from the weak sound waves that drift out into the street, that might not even require a warrant...
The idea that black kids will be inspired to excel if and only if they have black models is either bullshit, or else black kids are racists. My chief personal heroes from the time I was a boy were, in no particular order, George Washington Carver, Lao Tzu, and Imhotep, none of whom were white. Admittedly, that's an odd set of role models, but the point is that if I were the only white man in the world, there have been plenty of creative and admirable people distributed through all of the so-called races to choose from. If you have to pick your role models from within your own ethnic group, not only are you needlessly narrowing your own horizons, but you are actively perpetuating racism.
The problem is that no matter how well-designed your hierarchy is, most end users don't grasp the concept of hierarchies. Do you realize how many people think Yahoo is just a search engine and never, ever drill down through the categories? (Not that Yahoo is especially well-designed, but you get my point.)
OTOH, the real problem is that end users want to be able to type what they want in plain English (or the badly spelled, ungrammatical, punctuation- and capitalization-free crud that passes for end user English) and get exactly what they want, even if they aren't sure what they want and couldn't express it if they were. Just because you can reference a document as "1996 budget report" doesn't mean your pointy-haired boss isn't going to type "bugdet report 96".
The idea is not necessarily a bad one, though I think it might open the door to more onerous burdens down the road. However, if I may be permitted a typical knee-jerk American reaction, my primary objection is that UN representatives are appointed by national governments instead of by direct popular election.
When I get to vote for my UN representative the same as I get to vote for my President and my Congressmen, then I will at least consider the idea. Until then, forget it.
I won't get into the pseudo-intellectual tripe that netomat was introduced with. Others, far more sarcastic than I, have already slashed it to ribbons.
I guess I instantly identify myself as part of the pre-1990 crowd with my reaction to netomat: if it becomes popular, how much bandwidth will it waste? I remember when doing something stupid like streaming video would have gotten your network privileges revoked. Granted, we've got (nearly) adequate bandwidth now, so it's not as much of an issue, but still --- we finally get to the point that we have oodles of bandwidth, and we end up with some useless screensaver specifically designed to waste it.
Yeah, the net is changing the world, but not the way we thought it would in the old days. We've just provided an almost unlimited forum for endless garbage. Silly me, I thought that was what TV was for.
My company's website is generated from a flat-text "database". (The pages are mostly served statically, and the site generator is only run when the content changes -- once or twice a day.) This was originally written in Perl, and took half an hour to do the job. (It's a very big site.)
After a brief attempt to replace my Perl scripts with NetObjects Fusion, which was a disaster, I rewrote the program in C. It now takes just under two minutes to run, yielding a roughly 15x speedup. I've had similar experiences replacing some Perl CGI scripts with C programs, and though the gains are usually not quite as dramatic, I can usually get a 2-4x speedup. (The exception is for very short Perl scripts, which are usually best left as they are.)
Perl is a great systems administration tool, and it is often useful for web purposes, but there are many instances where other tools work substantially better. (The same is true of other popular tools, like PHP.) Perl has some serious shortcomings, like its hideous syntax and the tendency of Perl programs to use regex searches for simple literal strings, which could be done much more efficiently with a Boyer-Moore search in C or another language.
I wouldn't exactly discourage the use of Perl with the web -- perish the thought! -- but I would advise a newbie to bear in mind that it is a swiss army knife: pretty good for a wide array of tasks, but hardly ever the best at any of them. Greenspun's criticisms provide a welcome balance to a sometimes overzealous Perl advocacy.
Not that anyone will probably read this now that the article is two or three days down the road, but it is worth noting that I am not a leftist or a liberal. I am an active member of the Republican party and have generally voted for substantially right-of-center Republicans.
This being said, I think Reagan was a fraud, and despite what he may have said, he was as big a proponent of Big Government as any president in this century. My slam was not against the right, but against the kind of vacuous, all-talk-and-no-substance, principled-when-it's-convenient kind of faux conservatism that goes under the banner of Reaganism.
I'm a big RMS fan because I'm a conservative. Philanthropy becomes a personal social obligation precisely because the government ought not to be involved in any form of welfare; it is the duty of citizens to do that work. I suppose I differ from many conservatives in that I'm not being cynical when I say that private civic responsibility must take the place of official welfare. Most "Reagan Republicans" just say that to convince the moderates to support cuts in individual welfare in order to fund the enormous corporate welfare system.
Free software is not communism, or even anything close to it. You will find nothing in Das Kapital that bears anything more than the most superficial resemblance to the free software movement. (For that matter, you will find very little in the software industry that resembles "capital" in the traditional sense of the word, but I digress.)
Richard Stallman is a philanthropist. Those of you old enough to remember life before Reagan may recall a time when giving things away to society at large was considered a virtue. Back then, altruism, generosity, charity, and community service did not draw cries of "Communism!" from the peanut gallery. Even in the age of the robber barons --- probably the closest parallel to the current day --- there were esteemed philanthropists whose donations would have dwarfed the incomes of a roomful of today's wealthy entrepreneurs. When Andrew Carnegie built libraries for the entire country, did anyone accuse him of Marxism?
Richard Stallman's contributions to free software, both direct and indirect, could potentially have a dollar value on a par with Carnegie's bequest to the nation, and certainly more than all the token charity work of today's commercial software magnates. The same is true of Eric Raymond, Paul Vixie, Eric Allman, Linus Torvalds and innumerable others.
What has happened to the developer community, and indeed, the world at large, when people who selflessly devote years of work to building great software and donating it to the world at large are reviled for it? I was first attracted to this business in the late 70's and early 80's when hackers dreamed of changing and improving the world with computers, and later with the Internet. What happened to that idealism?
There's nothing wrong with making a buck. There is something very wrong with only making a buck. Generosity isn't a sign of mental deficiency or sinister political views; it is a moral obligation. It's high time that the profit-above-all reactionaries were put on notice that they are social parasites, and that those who devote some or all of their time to the common good are the real contributing members of society.
As far as I'm concerned -- totally ignoring the three ring ego circus of ESR, RMS, and Bruce Perens -- the "Open Source" term didn't help to clarify matters very much as it was just as vague as "Free Software", if not more so. When Stallman said "Free Software", he meant the GPL and we all knew it. When Raymond said "Open Source", it could mean any number of things ranging from the GPL to genuine public domain to liberally-licensed proprietary software.
What we really need is to come up with a rating system, something like the "Geek Code" but not so deliberately overcomplicated, that classifies software according to a few key points of its licensing terms.
The good doctor was next to last. Once Vonnegut goes, all of my heroes will be humus. And the great thing about living in a declining civilization is that no one is stepping forward to fill their shoes.
The weird thing is that, as I was driving home today before I heard the news, I was thinking idly about the afterlife and imagined Bones saying, "My God, Jim... I'm dead!" Howzat for creepy?
The 120 meg minimum install bothers me, too, as it made it impossible to install on an old 486 with a (very) small HD that I was planning to use for IP masquerading for my home LAN. Yeah, I know I can install Linux manually and not have to screw with the automated install, but that's why I bought RH 6.0 -- I wanted a relatively painless install. Instead, I get an inflexible installer that slings tons of unnecessary junk on my hard drive. If I was a newbie freshly emerged from Windows, I might not be surprised, but there are too many bare bones single-floppy Linux distros for 120 megs to be a minimum install.
To add insult to injury, the RH installer doesn't check to insure that enough drive space is available before attempting the install. Hell, even Microsoft can do that much.
I won't turn my back on Redhat just yet, but the odds are very good that my next distribution will be Debian.
Do you really expect the SETI@Home folks to kiss *your* very personal butt, just because you contributed a few cpu cycles and were even thinking of throwing in your mighty RS6000?
Hardly. What I meant to communicate was that if one's project depends on the good will of volunteers, going out of your way to offend those volunteers is counterproductive. Moreover, it's not very nice, which is the worst part of it. I know that being nice is not considered important in some quarters, and that some people confuse it with butt kissing, but it matters to me. That's all.
What offends me, or more accurately, bothers me about Anderson's remarks is that:
SETI@Home is a volunteer project relying on essentially personal motivations to encourage participation. I personally didn't care for what Anderson said, I told him so, and it is possible that I will cease to participate because of it. I offer my opinion as a personal opinion, not a recommendation that others think or do likewise.
Did it ever occur to you that the statement might have been meant in a positive way, as in "while it's been mostly the Unix/Linux crowd, it's not because they're all criminals, but rather because of the hacking spirit"?
That strikes me as highly unlikely given the rest of the things he said. If a retraction or clarification appears, I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
If you don't like the project, get out. If you like it, stay in.
But shut up either way, right? No thanks.
To SETI@Home project manager David Anderson:
I am not concerned with the recent technical problems with SETI@Home. While the decision to continue accepting new clients before the system was ready for the load demonstrated dubious judgment, problems of this sort are to be expected with a large distributed project during the early stages.
What was not expected was the poor judgment to make the following statement, among others, to _Wired_:
>"I don't want to name names," he said,
>"But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux
>crowds are causing most of the
>headaches. It seems to be the hacker
>mentality."
I have the SETI@Home client running on eight or nine workstations at present, some of which are Linux boxes. I was about to take three backup servers that are currently idle -- an IBM RS6000, a Compaq Proliant, and an IBM PC Server, all of which are running one flavor of Unix or another -- and devote them wholly to SETI@Home until such time as they are needed for other purposes. I thought it would be a nice project for my "hacker mentality". That plan is no longer on the burner. I don't know if I will go as far as many Unix admins already have and take the trouble to pull SETI@Home off the machines it's already running on, but I'm giving it some thought. It certainly won't be going on any new servers. You guys clearly don't want any of us hackers burning CPU time for you.
The next time you have problems with a few individuals, you might want to address them directly, rather than the largely innocent and devoted demographic to which they belong. If you have problems with a businessman who happens to be Jewish, you would not launch a polemic against Jews as a class, would you? Yet, faced with a few problematic vandals who happen to use Unix and style themselves "hackers", you denounce law-abiding, honest Unix hackers as a class. That was stupid and indecent. Shame on you.
If we do someday manage to achieve contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, it is my devout hope that their first impression of humanity does not come from the likes of you.
--Eric O'Dell
Director of Information Services,
The Gadget Guru, LLC
That they are having problems is understandable for a new project struggling to scale to unanticipated load levels, and it doesn't bother me at all. I wasn't using those CPU cycles for anything else anyway, and I think SETI@Home is a great idea -- certainly more important in the broad scheme of things than the encryption projects run by distributed.net, which are merely political rather than cosmic in scope.
On the other hand, their wholesale slam against the Unix/Linux crowd on the basis of what are probably a tiny percentage of idiots was just plain stupid. I won't end my participation in the project because of it, but I'm insulted enough that the next time they screw up I'll give it some serious thought. It's precisely because of my hacker mentality that I'm participating in the first place.
This is true. When I was working in the theater as an assistant manager, I was 19 and in total charge of the theater at least two nights a week. Everyone else there, except for the general manager, was closer to 16. Theft of all kinds, including the re-selling of tickets and the nefarious practice of "cupping" (if you don't know what that is, you don't want to), were almost impossible to eradicate. I knew of a couple of other theater managers in the city who not only tolerated but actually organized some of these things to their immense personal profit. So it hardly follows that individual theater managers are scrupulously honest.
Private, illegal showings of films were pretty common. Whenever we spliced a new film together, we were obligated to run it through the projector at least once to make sure it worked, i.e., no weak splices, all of the film oriented properly, and so on. It was customary for the theater employees to invite all of their friends to post-midnight previews of new films on these occasions. In an 8-plex with a fair number of employees, this sometimes ran to over a hundred people. No outsider ever offered me money for a private showing, but I don't necessarily know that I would have refused it. It would have been pointless to do so, though, as most theaters will gladly rent a private showing -- in such a case, the distributor does get royalties.
The original poster on this thread does have a good point, though. When we were shipping films out, we left the cans right by the door, or just inside the box office. Under those circumstances, they'd be quite easy to steal for someone who knew what they were after.
It never did occur to me to steal a film, though. I can't imagine what I'd have done with it.
I used to be a projectionist during my college days, and this story doesn't make much sense to me.
Movie theatre projectors are not like the little 16mm projectors they use in schools. They are man-sized machines that hold the film on a set of three platters that are about four feet in diameter. The film arrives in hexagonal metal cans, each containing three or four reels. The film is removed from the reels and wound onto the platters, pausing to splice each reel to the next. The film is actually shown from the platters; the reels are just used for transport.
The process is fairly time-consuming, and removing the film from the platter to put it back on the reels is no less prolonged. Unless the thief grabbed the reels while they were still in the cans, he would have had to gain access to the building after hours and be familiar with the equipment. If this isn't a publicity stunt, and the reels were really stolen, it would almost have to be an inside job.
And my memory may be failing me, but a seven-reel film loaded into cans weighs closer to sixty or seventy pounds. I remember having to lug those damn things up and down the stairs...
Funny, it seems to me that we never go more than two weeks between announcements of some sort of Linux support from one multi-billion dollar company or another, Linux marketshare continues to climb at an astonishing rate, and even Ziff-Davis sometimes runs favorable articles about Linux. What more do you want?
It's lamentable that the source isn't included, though I can certainly understand their reluctance to provide it, considering that fairly sophisticated (and therefore easy to screw up) mathematics involved.
Personally, the prospect of discovering signs of alien intelligence is worth a lot more to me than an insignificant risk to my privacy. In fact, it's the sort of thing I'd risk injury or death for.
I'm much more worried about what MS Office does behind the scenes on my Win95 box than I am about what a Real Science(tm) app might be doing.
Oh, for crying out loud, networking is a 'techie' technology. How many end users administer networks? 3Com has some notoriously good engineers, but bigosh, their marketing people are just as thick as those at any other company.
As it happens, Mr. Leonard did not show me a copy of the review prior to publication. Frankly, I don't have any problem with the review as such. Nothing in it that I can see falls outside the realm of opinions about which honest people can disagree, and it does accurately reflect concerns held by some members of the non-technical user community.
I am well aware of the serious stability problems Windows has; such was my main motivation to adopt Linux for my personal use. In managing a mixed network of Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and AIX boxes, and a userbase of varying technical skill, it has been my observation that Windows (and secondarily MacOS) pose fewer usability problems for inexperienced users than does Linux+KDE. This is particularly true of routine system configuration. The average non-technical business user doesn't mind rebooting and having to seek technical support for the occasional reinstall as much as they mind a system that makes routine operations difficult.
It was a terrible review, and I think you are a shill. Clearly you have some kind of axe to grind...
Baseless personal attacks are always the last resort of the intolerant. If I am a shill, I am a shill for Linux. If I have an axe to grind, it is a thorough hatred for Microsoft and what Microsoft has done to the personal computing industry. Unfortunately, personal integrity forbids me to lie and deny that Linux has some end-user usability problems, or to refuse to acknowledge that Microsoft occasionally does something acceptably well.
The thick-headed dogmatic insistence that Linux is better in all ways than the competition will get Linux just about as far as the same attitude did for the Amiga and the Macintosh. Nothing can be improved until it is recognized as needing improvement.
That's exactly it. Personally, I detest GUIs (to the point of using Lout instead of a word processor), but they really help with the learning curve for inexperienced users. The problem with Windows and MacOS is that they actively prevent even experienced users from getting at the nuts and bolts of the system. After a certain point, the learning curve hits a brick wall. Linux has the opportunity to be the best of both worlds: raw power for the experienced, ease of use for the inexperienced, and a bridge between the two.
Of course, this is only possible if we can get past the (let's face it) frequently condescending and contemptuous attitude that a lot of techies take towards non-technical types.
The novice user has plenty of reasons to modify his/her system configuration, not the least of which are installing new hardware, setting up a dialup ISP account, and adjusting display parameters. The fact of the matter is that a newbie is far more likely to screw things up beyond his ability to repair them under Linux than under Windows when making routine adjustments. By foolproof I don't mean bulletproof; I just mean an interface that any clueless twit can use for reasonably simple tasks. And I don't mean that it should be like Windows or Macintosh. It should be better than either. Substantially.
Saying that a newbie can more easily get into trouble with Linux than with Windows is no more FUD than saying that a newbie can more easily injure himself with a motorcycle than with a tricycle. It's just the way it is. Linux desperately needs training wheels. As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with that unless, like Windows and Macintosh, it somehow becomes impossible to remove them.