I hate to say it but you should mod this post up and mod the parent down. The parent post is NOT informative, but downright inaccurate as was pointed out by another poster as well (Laser Speckle Interferometry). I am not an expert on this subject, but I find it logically obvious that optical resolution is an angular measurement and depends entirely on the angle subtended by the object in question.
No, it's pretty much established fact that they Carnivore and Echelon exist for exactly this purpose. How effective they are is questionable. I don't think that's lunatic fringe in any way.
I think it may be more thoughtful than that. I don't think it's just a cheap shot at cat-lovers, but perhaps a more significant commentary on the human love of shaping nature to our own aesthetic standards. For a lot of people, the beauty that nature provides just isn't aligned enough with their own aesthetic, they have to tame it, shape it to their own desires.
Or perhaps the site is just a cheap shot at cat lovers for being so silly. Sort of like reading James Joyce - you can interpret it on so many levels. Whether you agree or not, though, doesn't give you the right to censor it.
You misread my comment. I realize that the W3C DOM spec is a standard API. However the only browser as you point out that comes very close to supporting this API is Netscape6/Mozilla/other Gecko based browsers which represent in total no more than a few percent of the browser market right now. I was commenting on the Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x/5.x document.layers and document.all Javascript objects which allow, in very nonstandard ways, access to most of the DOM functionality. Those are the pseudo-DOM/DOM-alike APIs I was referring to.
The point is that a standard that you can't assume support for is a fairly ineffective standard - within a year of so, I think the standard will be pretty much accepted, or at least I hope so. Better to make people download an up-to-date, standards-compliant browser than to have to code 4 different versions of your site.
Of course, the problem is that e-commerce sites can't afford to take that kind of approach. But non-profit sites, general interest sites, etc. can. If they stick to standards compliance, they will drive most people to use standards compliant browsers. And once the market-share of DOM compliant browsers approaches 80% or so, people will stop coding shit for those old nasty browsers.
And why we continue to use this mistaken nomenclature is beyond me. The associations are common but the technologies are only superficially related. Javascript has a heinous, disorganized API, is weakly typed, etc. ECMAScript is a standardization of the base Javascript API and syntax. Javascript embedded in the browser lets you access the in-browser document via some level of DOM-alike API (although these are totally nonstandardized, as we all know - this is generally known by the also-misused nomenclature DHTML, which just means using CSS and layer-type things with Javascript as the active event control structure.
Java may be used in the applet framework, and that may have been part of the early vision of Java but that's now just a sideline to server-side Java, where the ability to build large scale apps without the syntactic complexity of C++ lets you push out business logic with fewer worries about internals.
In general though, the languages are often perceived as a combination of syntax, general usage characteristics, and standardized/available APIs. Java is incredibly different from JavaScript in all of these ways, and the association with "the web" is an artifact of one particular use of Java.
A major point as well... if you consider command line completion I can move that file *TONS* faster than someone clicking through folders. That's why enabling Command-Line Completion is a necessity for Win2k (1 minute registry hack, very cool). Bash still does a better job, but command line completion in the W2k command shell makes it that much closer to the Real Thing and I can Get Stuff Done so much faster.
I will definitely tell you that as a workstation, Win2k still doesn't match up to Linux in stability. I use both for very similar things, email/groupware junk, lots of emacs, lots of web browsing, listening to MP3s, lots of compiling and building Java apps, running and testing Java apps. I do as you said have to reboot my Dell Win2k development box at least once every week or two due to sudden bizarre failures of IE and/or Outlook that seem to have systemic effect (i.e. even killing the processes does nothing to make them run again).
My Linux box on the other hand has the occasional XFree86 4.0.2 crash which seems to be a weird interaction with my USB optical Intellimouse Explorer, but I can always kill the X process and restart X. I use ReiserFS so even the two or three times I have had to reboot it comes back up real fast (like when I kicked the power cord out of the wall by accident).
I haven't seen Win2k run as an active server really other than the low-usage PDC we have in the office here. It has gone down only once as far as I know in several months of usage, but then again, it doesn't do very much work.:)
Uh, not all of them are. First of all CGI implies one process per request, which isn't (I believe) true of PHP, nor do I believe the Zope engine or mod_php to be "built on top of" CGI in any way. They use an interface similar to CGI but only in the sense that CGI is basically trivially obvious. Also, Java does NOT use CGI at all. I've never seen nor heard of a Java CGI program, although again it would be possible. The Servlet API is the usual alternative in Java, which uses an interface quite distinct from CGI to glue together HTTP and Java code that produces HTML or other documents.
That's pure rubbish. There are lots of other interfaces between code and the HTTP protocol and HTML return results. For example, the Java Servlet API provides an interface that is not the same as CGI but exposes pretty much the same set of functionality to Java apps. I don't know whether FastCGI and other "interfaces" expose the same API and are simply different at the implementation level, but I would imagine they provide a different interface at least to some extent because CGI implies separate processes spawned for each HTTP request/response, whereas most alternatives to CGI don't use one process per request.
If you want to see what CGI really means and what is CGI and what is not CGI, please refer to the CGI spec. CGI refers to an interface that requires a set of environment variables to be set, passes in POST and PUT information via stdin, and returns HTTP response results on stdout.
This allows almost any language to be used to write CGI programs (C, perl, tcl, bash, whatever you want). But it doesn't imply that every interface to the HTTP protocol is CGI.
Nice in theory, but if you're doing what you can do and others refuse to, then _they_ aren't looking to respond and it is a natural human reaction to throw your arms up in despair and say "I can't do anything because I can't get cooperation from the necessary parties, who themselves need to take responsibility and take action". See "blame" is just a negative facet of responsibility. I don't _blame_ Africans for their own condition because I don't feel any guilt over what people do to themselves, at least by your definition of the word blame (which is to deflect responsibility onto others). I rationally can state that the people need to take responsibility and the governments need to take responsibility. I can also rationally state that I should help to whatever extent possible to support those efforts by giving money, by lobbying our own government to help make sure necessary supplies (including drugs) will be available at low cost to those people, etc.
That is moronic communist tripe. I hear it all the time here in Cambridge, MA. Look, I agree 100% with you about the War on [Some] Drugs being a terribly waste of our taxpayer dollars and being morally unjustified. I think careful, controlled drug use and experimentation is just fine.
But it's a fact that ANYBODY wandering the streets so high that they are a risk to others should be jailed. In the same way a drunk person wandering the streets causing injury to others or damage to property should be jailed.
But as long as they aren't infringing on other's rights, you are basically correct.
Where you become drastically wrong is that shit about race. Nobody has claimed that Caucasians don't use drugs, and I don't know of any studies showing that Latinos or Blacks use statistically more drugs than Whites. Most minorities who are in jail for drug convictions got caught for something. For socioeconomic reasons, proportionally more minorities are involved in dealing drugs (this is based on my personal observations, and uh... "purchases"). Trafficking and dealing are the primary targets of most enforcement, far more than users.
Also, in general, minority community standards seem to make it more acceptable, or at least a more regular practice to use drugs in places that are out in the open, in communities that are more heavily policed due to generally higher crime rates (i.e. the barrios and ghettos you referred to). This is purely logical, although it may have unfortunate statistical results in your mind. I would counter that if the people in those ghettos weren't shooting each other all the time, the cops wouldn't be riding around looking for people to arrest in those neighborhoods and wouldn't have to use any means necessary to supress gang-related activity, etc. You would counter that my brutal white suppression of your economic chances has resulted in that situation. I would counter that many minorities have faced worse situations when they first came to this country, but they prioritized their children, their families, and educations, and within a generation or two they were out of their ghettos.
My point? Work to eliminate the backdrop of violent crime in your community by reaching out to children and lobbying for educational opportunities for all people. Then take some damned responsibility within these communities to care for your children and instill them with values that emphasize education and success, not the "coolness" of being gang members, or stealing, etc. Don't blabber to me about oppression. The vast majority of Americans don't care about your skin color, but rather about your behavior. If you want success and you go for it, you will get it. As for the War on [Some] Drugs, we should all be united against this silly waste of our money. Let's put those dollars into education and work training programs as well as drug rehabilitation for hard-core addicts who are a threat to themselves and society. Leave the casual users alone, legalize the distribution channels, tax it, and I'll open up a cannibis shop.:)
Sometimes I think things were better during the Industrial Revolution. If people were disrespectful like this little snot they'd get fired and end up with no government spoon to feed them. Be dead in a week, or they'd learn some respect for their jobs and for other people's property.
For very specialized purposes that are not what the general purpose Linux kernel aims to be. They are based on the Linux kernel codebase, but they aren't forks in the same sense of the word that I was using. Somebody doesn't decide to make the uclinux kernel because they think Linus and the gang of kernel hackers suck, but rather because they _like_ the Linux kernel but want to use it for a different purpose.
Right, it's his trademark by right. His kernel is his kernel, he makes nobody use it and a lot of kernel hackers contribute back to the codebase and other patches get rolled in as he sees fit (they must be GPLed of course).
IBM is free to take the Linux kernel base and roll in whatever they want, do whatever they feel they want to do with it under an industry consortium. They can release it and call it "Foonix" as long as it follows the GPL. Linus, Alan Cox and others will still continue to work on the kernel *they* want to work on. And we, the users, can use whichever kernel we want.
And IBM can release their Foonix distro, and nobody will be unhappy about it. If they sufficiently break compatibility with Linux, well, nobody might want to use it, but that's IBM's fault. If Foonix is significantly better than Linux, we'll all probably start using something based on Foonix soon enough, or Foonix will get rolled into Linux.
This all seems fairly self-regulating to me. I don't get the issues people make over it. I feel no pain or anguish about the current Linux kernel. If I did, and I was IBM, I'd go get my 10 billion dollar industry consortium together and fork it and write some code instead of whining.
You do bring up two excellent points. However, the posting was about an article that refers to big business interests. If the big business interests want to steer it another way, they are free to. They in no way would be subject to the cult of personality surrounding Linus. However, you are right that they would probably suffer a lot at the hands of the majority of Linux users.
The BSD point you make is excellent. But again, from the perspective of big business, why are they buying into Linux rather than *BSD, when it's the *BSDs that have the supposedly business-friendly licenses? I believe it's because these business interests are only being propelled by the massive geek-centric focus on Linux.
I have often thought that those of us who were the early adopters of Linux, who used it before it was cool, because it was _good_, would probably be the first to migrate in disgust to the *BSDs. It's interesting that a lot of us have stuck around in Linux land though. We don't seem to mind the fact that for a while at least, our interests are in line with some big money, big business interests.
In reality, there's a very clear piece of evidence that Linus isn't killing the kernel. NOBODY HAS FORKED IT.
Past experience and observation would indicate that Open Source projects of high general interest, in the condition of massive disagreement between factions will result in project forking. In other words, if enough smart people think Linus is screwing things up, or not directing kernel development in the right way, or refusing to merge in important patches, then dammit, they can and will fork and make their own kernel fork. This hasn't happened to any significant extent. Therefore things are probably doing okay. Hell, if they look like they have _MY_ interests better in hand, then I'll support a forked effort too. I just doubt that a megacorp consortium will in any way have my interests at heart.
Actually, I disagree strongly. I agree that the trademarks seem like they're in different domains to me. However, I strongly encourage organizations that have been the victim of IP bullying to fight back. A couple of well-placed wins and some punitive measures will do a lot to get rid of the original frivolous lawsuits from the big eToys.com-types that smack people around with their lawyers. If they learn that there are consequences, they will lay off the fucking frivolous intimidation.
Of course it is. There are tons of closed source user land apps. Every moron looking at some internet appliance running Linux claims it's a GPL violation. It's obviously not as long as they contribute back and distribute and modifications they made to GPLed code. They have NO obligation to make their proprietary client/interface/whatever app that runs and makes a pretty X interface for their appliance/ TV recording device/whatever accessible and fun to use and it probably wouldn't benefit many people if they did anyway.
You my friend can go fuck yourself as well. There are more opportunistic morons working as contractors than as full time people. There was an economic boom and a lot of unqualified opportunists ran to where the money was, which was proportionally more in contract work than in full time. There are tons of bozos working as full time developers too, but if you were interviewing contractors 6-10 months ago in the Boston area, you would realize the ratio of moron to competent was far higher among them than among full timers.
In any case to assume that I am a manager or want to be one is your fucking moronic assumption. I am the CTO of a company, I was forced into doing something I had little experience in. I was forced to deal with a Project Manager who was hired against my recommendations and thus I was doing something I couldn't possibly know how to do.
Again I was right out of school, and I guarantee you I am far better at YOUR job (coding) than you will ever be. I was forced to hire contractors by our VCs. Finding competent people of any sort on the market here in Boston 10 months ago was impossible for somebody with no industry connections. It's trivially easy now thanks to the economic downturn.
Anyway, my point is that nobody is worth 3 times what a full time person is worth. We only want the best full time people here, they work for fair compensation. Any shithead can hire bozos who work at market rates but accomplish nothing (and therefore are 1/5th as valuable as a good engineer).
In any case, the underlying premise is still true: that there are a greater proportion of moron contractors than moron full time workers was extremely true 10 months ago here in Boston. It may or may not be true now. Furthermore, it is obvious that people who invest themselves in their work and their projects will have better quality results than those who don't. And many contractors don't. And that's why contract code often == shit code even when the person is quite good.
Besides which your argument makes no fucking sense. Why would I be achieving such good results now with a full time team and before I had to do all the work myself with a contract team?
To each their own. But don't insult ME when I'm simply reporting the reality that I've observed and measured out there. Like I said, a lot of other people who've had to hire contractors before have had similar experiences. When I hire somebody at 100 dollars an hour, goddamnit, they ought not to need any fucking micromanagement or any of that shit and they better produce at 3 times the rate of an average developer. If they don't then they are a waste of fucking money, JUST like you and all your little friends really are, sir.
In short, your little contract worker-cronies have burned me and you can all go fucking rot in hell for all I care about your problems. I won't work with contract shitheads any more, period. And I can't wait to see all these fucking H1B contract agencies en masse deporting their workers back to India when there aren't enough contract gigs for them to pawn people off on anymore. God bless the economic downturn.
You my friend are a fucking moron. I should get fired? Hardly. It's MY COMPANY, I own a significant percentage of it, I founded it. I WAS NOT the project manager, shithead. I had a project manager who I did fire because he couldn't do his job. I'm the CTO of the company, dickbrain. And I am extremely good at it. I was right out of college and forced to hire people in an impossible job market by our VCs who gave me no support, no guidance no nothing. I wrote about 75% of the code for our first product release and it fucking worked and was great.
So in response again, I hired a PM who couldn't do his job and misrepresented his experience level because I had no experience. Within 2 months I learned what I needed to know, fired the guy and hired a full time person to the job extremely well.
And obviously, not all contract people are bad. In times of economic boom however there are a lot of opportunists and those opportunists go straight to where the most money is. There was a ton of it in doing contract work, and a lot less in doing full time work. Not to say full time people are all great. We get tons of resumes for bozos as full timers everyday. But I don't get annoying FUCKING AGENCIES pushing full time people down my throat day and night, while I still get that occasionally now (actually, I just refer them to other people in the company and don't deal with it myself).
The point of all this. Go fuck yourself if your going to insult me, I challenge you to accomplish a quarter of what I have in my life.
That is extremely reductionist of you. I think the whole point of this is that for certain applications that are not CPU limited but I/O limited, let's say, you want more machines per unit space at a similar cost rather than more CPU speed. So 8 Crusoe boxes may take the same space and power as one Athlon but can push a lot more bits through their buses combined.
Also, you are completely ignoring that fact the relationship between power consumption and processing capability is not at all linear. 8 Crusoes may draw the same current as one Athlon or one PIII, but for an inherently parallelizable or distributed application may be able to do 2-3 times as much work (all together) as that one Athlon. For other applications that are less amenable to distribution/parallelization, they may do significantly LESS work than 1 Athlon or 1 PIII. It isn't a one-size-fits-all problem and there is no absolute metric of "Processing Power" for all applications, nor is "Processing Power" the only relevant factor for all applications.
Performance at doing what though. If the power consumption is very low and you want a farm of web servers, you can embed 8 of them in one 2U rack box, which will have much more performance. The whole point here is that not everything is CPU limited AND you may get better bang per unit volume with lots of small Crusoes. I don't know about better bang for your buck as that depends on what kind of performance you need. If you want a box to run a CPU intensive process that needs scalibility in the CPU realm (i.e. SMP) and isn't inherently distributed, then obviously 5 or 6 or 8 of these Transmeta boxes are clearly at a disadvantage to one powerful SMP PIII box. The right tool for the right task.
You got it. If Berlin does nothing more than force X to innovate and figure out ways to get this functionality into the existing infrastructure, then more power to it. That along makes Berlin Not A Failure.
I think Berlin would have a serious chance if it was able to run X apps. Given that it currently can't, adoption is just not going to be widespread.
The amazing part is that this time, the trotskyites are winning. The interesting thing here is that the so-called-Linux-communism actually works. Marxism and all the derived Soviet creeds just don't seem to work, because the meat world economy in game-theoretic terms offers a low payoff for the cooperative state.
This is the key difference between meat-world communism and bit-world communism. The payoff for the cooperative behavior is much higher. This fits in quite nicely to a modified PD-norms explanation (Prisoner's Dillemma).
So that, my friends, is why Linux is winning out over OpenBSD. The good ole communist GPL cooperative contract. Anyway, just some thoughts on this. Regardless, I am a meritocrat. Let the best tools win, there's no need to force bad tools on a person, when what we care about is the product. If the winner doesn't use the GIMP, the GIMP should use the winner's feedback to see what's missing and improve their product. There's nothing worse than shitty software.
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I hate to say it but you should mod this post up and mod the parent down. The parent post is NOT informative, but downright inaccurate as was pointed out by another poster as well (Laser Speckle Interferometry). I am not an expert on this subject, but I find it logically obvious that optical resolution is an angular measurement and depends entirely on the angle subtended by the object in question.
No, it's pretty much established fact that they Carnivore and Echelon exist for exactly this purpose. How effective they are is questionable. I don't think that's lunatic fringe in any way.
Or perhaps the site is just a cheap shot at cat lovers for being so silly. Sort of like reading James Joyce - you can interpret it on so many levels. Whether you agree or not, though, doesn't give you the right to censor it.
The point is that a standard that you can't assume support for is a fairly ineffective standard - within a year of so, I think the standard will be pretty much accepted, or at least I hope so. Better to make people download an up-to-date, standards-compliant browser than to have to code 4 different versions of your site.
Of course, the problem is that e-commerce sites can't afford to take that kind of approach. But non-profit sites, general interest sites, etc. can. If they stick to standards compliance, they will drive most people to use standards compliant browsers. And once the market-share of DOM compliant browsers approaches 80% or so, people will stop coding shit for those old nasty browsers.
Java may be used in the applet framework, and that may have been part of the early vision of Java but that's now just a sideline to server-side Java, where the ability to build large scale apps without the syntactic complexity of C++ lets you push out business logic with fewer worries about internals.
In general though, the languages are often perceived as a combination of syntax, general usage characteristics, and standardized/available APIs. Java is incredibly different from JavaScript in all of these ways, and the association with "the web" is an artifact of one particular use of Java.
A major point as well... if you consider command line completion I can move that file *TONS* faster than someone clicking through folders. That's why enabling Command-Line Completion is a necessity for Win2k (1 minute registry hack, very cool). Bash still does a better job, but command line completion in the W2k command shell makes it that much closer to the Real Thing and I can Get Stuff Done so much faster.
My Linux box on the other hand has the occasional XFree86 4.0.2 crash which seems to be a weird interaction with my USB optical Intellimouse Explorer, but I can always kill the X process and restart X. I use ReiserFS so even the two or three times I have had to reboot it comes back up real fast (like when I kicked the power cord out of the wall by accident).
I haven't seen Win2k run as an active server really other than the low-usage PDC we have in the office here. It has gone down only once as far as I know in several months of usage, but then again, it doesn't do very much work. :)
Uh, not all of them are. First of all CGI implies one process per request, which isn't (I believe) true of PHP, nor do I believe the Zope engine or mod_php to be "built on top of" CGI in any way. They use an interface similar to CGI but only in the sense that CGI is basically trivially obvious. Also, Java does NOT use CGI at all. I've never seen nor heard of a Java CGI program, although again it would be possible. The Servlet API is the usual alternative in Java, which uses an interface quite distinct from CGI to glue together HTTP and Java code that produces HTML or other documents.
If you want to see what CGI really means and what is CGI and what is not CGI, please refer to the CGI spec. CGI refers to an interface that requires a set of environment variables to be set, passes in POST and PUT information via stdin, and returns HTTP response results on stdout.
This allows almost any language to be used to write CGI programs (C, perl, tcl, bash, whatever you want). But it doesn't imply that every interface to the HTTP protocol is CGI.
Nice in theory, but if you're doing what you can do and others refuse to, then _they_ aren't looking to respond and it is a natural human reaction to throw your arms up in despair and say "I can't do anything because I can't get cooperation from the necessary parties, who themselves need to take responsibility and take action". See "blame" is just a negative facet of responsibility. I don't _blame_ Africans for their own condition because I don't feel any guilt over what people do to themselves, at least by your definition of the word blame (which is to deflect responsibility onto others). I rationally can state that the people need to take responsibility and the governments need to take responsibility. I can also rationally state that I should help to whatever extent possible to support those efforts by giving money, by lobbying our own government to help make sure necessary supplies (including drugs) will be available at low cost to those people, etc.
But it's a fact that ANYBODY wandering the streets so high that they are a risk to others should be jailed. In the same way a drunk person wandering the streets causing injury to others or damage to property should be jailed.
But as long as they aren't infringing on other's rights, you are basically correct.
Where you become drastically wrong is that shit about race. Nobody has claimed that Caucasians don't use drugs, and I don't know of any studies showing that Latinos or Blacks use statistically more drugs than Whites. Most minorities who are in jail for drug convictions got caught for something. For socioeconomic reasons, proportionally more minorities are involved in dealing drugs (this is based on my personal observations, and uh... "purchases"). Trafficking and dealing are the primary targets of most enforcement, far more than users.
Also, in general, minority community standards seem to make it more acceptable, or at least a more regular practice to use drugs in places that are out in the open, in communities that are more heavily policed due to generally higher crime rates (i.e. the barrios and ghettos you referred to). This is purely logical, although it may have unfortunate statistical results in your mind. I would counter that if the people in those ghettos weren't shooting each other all the time, the cops wouldn't be riding around looking for people to arrest in those neighborhoods and wouldn't have to use any means necessary to supress gang-related activity, etc. You would counter that my brutal white suppression of your economic chances has resulted in that situation. I would counter that many minorities have faced worse situations when they first came to this country, but they prioritized their children, their families, and educations, and within a generation or two they were out of their ghettos.
My point? Work to eliminate the backdrop of violent crime in your community by reaching out to children and lobbying for educational opportunities for all people. Then take some damned responsibility within these communities to care for your children and instill them with values that emphasize education and success, not the "coolness" of being gang members, or stealing, etc. Don't blabber to me about oppression. The vast majority of Americans don't care about your skin color, but rather about your behavior. If you want success and you go for it, you will get it. As for the War on [Some] Drugs, we should all be united against this silly waste of our money. Let's put those dollars into education and work training programs as well as drug rehabilitation for hard-core addicts who are a threat to themselves and society. Leave the casual users alone, legalize the distribution channels, tax it, and I'll open up a cannibis shop. :)
Sometimes I think things were better during the Industrial Revolution. If people were disrespectful like this little snot they'd get fired and end up with no government spoon to feed them. Be dead in a week, or they'd learn some respect for their jobs and for other people's property.
For very specialized purposes that are not what the general purpose Linux kernel aims to be. They are based on the Linux kernel codebase, but they aren't forks in the same sense of the word that I was using. Somebody doesn't decide to make the uclinux kernel because they think Linus and the gang of kernel hackers suck, but rather because they _like_ the Linux kernel but want to use it for a different purpose.
IBM is free to take the Linux kernel base and roll in whatever they want, do whatever they feel they want to do with it under an industry consortium. They can release it and call it "Foonix" as long as it follows the GPL. Linus, Alan Cox and others will still continue to work on the kernel *they* want to work on. And we, the users, can use whichever kernel we want.
And IBM can release their Foonix distro, and nobody will be unhappy about it. If they sufficiently break compatibility with Linux, well, nobody might want to use it, but that's IBM's fault. If Foonix is significantly better than Linux, we'll all probably start using something based on Foonix soon enough, or Foonix will get rolled into Linux.
This all seems fairly self-regulating to me. I don't get the issues people make over it. I feel no pain or anguish about the current Linux kernel. If I did, and I was IBM, I'd go get my 10 billion dollar industry consortium together and fork it and write some code instead of whining.
The BSD point you make is excellent. But again, from the perspective of big business, why are they buying into Linux rather than *BSD, when it's the *BSDs that have the supposedly business-friendly licenses? I believe it's because these business interests are only being propelled by the massive geek-centric focus on Linux.
I have often thought that those of us who were the early adopters of Linux, who used it before it was cool, because it was _good_, would probably be the first to migrate in disgust to the *BSDs. It's interesting that a lot of us have stuck around in Linux land though. We don't seem to mind the fact that for a while at least, our interests are in line with some big money, big business interests.
Past experience and observation would indicate that Open Source projects of high general interest, in the condition of massive disagreement between factions will result in project forking. In other words, if enough smart people think Linus is screwing things up, or not directing kernel development in the right way, or refusing to merge in important patches, then dammit, they can and will fork and make their own kernel fork. This hasn't happened to any significant extent. Therefore things are probably doing okay. Hell, if they look like they have _MY_ interests better in hand, then I'll support a forked effort too. I just doubt that a megacorp consortium will in any way have my interests at heart.
Actually, I disagree strongly. I agree that the trademarks seem like they're in different domains to me. However, I strongly encourage organizations that have been the victim of IP bullying to fight back. A couple of well-placed wins and some punitive measures will do a lot to get rid of the original frivolous lawsuits from the big eToys.com-types that smack people around with their lawyers. If they learn that there are consequences, they will lay off the fucking frivolous intimidation.
Yes. And in this case, it also happens to be potential trademark infrigement on etoy.
Of course it is. There are tons of closed source user land apps. Every moron looking at some internet appliance running Linux claims it's a GPL violation. It's obviously not as long as they contribute back and distribute and modifications they made to GPLed code. They have NO obligation to make their proprietary client/interface/whatever app that runs and makes a pretty X interface for their appliance/ TV recording device/whatever accessible and fun to use and it probably wouldn't benefit many people if they did anyway.
In any case to assume that I am a manager or want to be one is your fucking moronic assumption. I am the CTO of a company, I was forced into doing something I had little experience in. I was forced to deal with a Project Manager who was hired against my recommendations and thus I was doing something I couldn't possibly know how to do.
Again I was right out of school, and I guarantee you I am far better at YOUR job (coding) than you will ever be. I was forced to hire contractors by our VCs. Finding competent people of any sort on the market here in Boston 10 months ago was impossible for somebody with no industry connections. It's trivially easy now thanks to the economic downturn.
Anyway, my point is that nobody is worth 3 times what a full time person is worth. We only want the best full time people here, they work for fair compensation. Any shithead can hire bozos who work at market rates but accomplish nothing (and therefore are 1/5th as valuable as a good engineer).
In any case, the underlying premise is still true: that there are a greater proportion of moron contractors than moron full time workers was extremely true 10 months ago here in Boston. It may or may not be true now. Furthermore, it is obvious that people who invest themselves in their work and their projects will have better quality results than those who don't. And many contractors don't. And that's why contract code often == shit code even when the person is quite good.
Besides which your argument makes no fucking sense. Why would I be achieving such good results now with a full time team and before I had to do all the work myself with a contract team?
To each their own. But don't insult ME when I'm simply reporting the reality that I've observed and measured out there. Like I said, a lot of other people who've had to hire contractors before have had similar experiences. When I hire somebody at 100 dollars an hour, goddamnit, they ought not to need any fucking micromanagement or any of that shit and they better produce at 3 times the rate of an average developer. If they don't then they are a waste of fucking money, JUST like you and all your little friends really are, sir.
In short, your little contract worker-cronies have burned me and you can all go fucking rot in hell for all I care about your problems. I won't work with contract shitheads any more, period. And I can't wait to see all these fucking H1B contract agencies en masse deporting their workers back to India when there aren't enough contract gigs for them to pawn people off on anymore. God bless the economic downturn.
So in response again, I hired a PM who couldn't do his job and misrepresented his experience level because I had no experience. Within 2 months I learned what I needed to know, fired the guy and hired a full time person to the job extremely well.
And obviously, not all contract people are bad. In times of economic boom however there are a lot of opportunists and those opportunists go straight to where the most money is. There was a ton of it in doing contract work, and a lot less in doing full time work. Not to say full time people are all great. We get tons of resumes for bozos as full timers everyday. But I don't get annoying FUCKING AGENCIES pushing full time people down my throat day and night, while I still get that occasionally now (actually, I just refer them to other people in the company and don't deal with it myself).
The point of all this. Go fuck yourself if your going to insult me, I challenge you to accomplish a quarter of what I have in my life.
Also, you are completely ignoring that fact the relationship between power consumption and processing capability is not at all linear. 8 Crusoes may draw the same current as one Athlon or one PIII, but for an inherently parallelizable or distributed application may be able to do 2-3 times as much work (all together) as that one Athlon. For other applications that are less amenable to distribution/parallelization, they may do significantly LESS work than 1 Athlon or 1 PIII. It isn't a one-size-fits-all problem and there is no absolute metric of "Processing Power" for all applications, nor is "Processing Power" the only relevant factor for all applications.
Performance at doing what though. If the power consumption is very low and you want a farm of web servers, you can embed 8 of them in one 2U rack box, which will have much more performance. The whole point here is that not everything is CPU limited AND you may get better bang per unit volume with lots of small Crusoes. I don't know about better bang for your buck as that depends on what kind of performance you need. If you want a box to run a CPU intensive process that needs scalibility in the CPU realm (i.e. SMP) and isn't inherently distributed, then obviously 5 or 6 or 8 of these Transmeta boxes are clearly at a disadvantage to one powerful SMP PIII box. The right tool for the right task.
I think Berlin would have a serious chance if it was able to run X apps. Given that it currently can't, adoption is just not going to be widespread.
This is the key difference between meat-world communism and bit-world communism. The payoff for the cooperative behavior is much higher. This fits in quite nicely to a modified PD-norms explanation (Prisoner's Dillemma).
So that, my friends, is why Linux is winning out over OpenBSD. The good ole communist GPL cooperative contract. Anyway, just some thoughts on this. Regardless, I am a meritocrat. Let the best tools win, there's no need to force bad tools on a person, when what we care about is the product. If the winner doesn't use the GIMP, the GIMP should use the winner's feedback to see what's missing and improve their product. There's nothing worse than shitty software.