Wouldn't it be handy if there was a HOWTO describing the most common investment appraisal techniques (ROI, CBA, boundary values, etc) and providing skeletal material from which to write a full justification report?
Microsoft, Sun, et. al. provide white papers and sales material intended for exactly this purpose, and while there's a fair amount of source material available these days, so far I haven't seen anyone pull it together into a trivially-usable form.
Not that Delphi for Linux was ever more than a pipe dream anyway. VCL was always too Windows-specific.
I wonder what this means to Interbase for Linux? Will Microsoft kill that too?
If you have to hate IDEs at least hate a good one.
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Linux is Not Red Hat
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· Score: 1
I've worled with MS Visual C++ and while I might make the sacreligious statement that it actually has some neat features, its user interface sucks rocks.
The term IDE was coined by Borland and the best currently available IDE is Delphi. It's hard to explain why something is cool to people who don't believe in it, and Unix people generally scoff at the very notion of an IDE or a visual development environment.
All I can say is, trust me, the reason I like Delphi is not that I am incompetent or unable to handle "real" programming. Designing GUI dialogs by drawing what they should look like just feels like the right way to do things. So far, I haven't seen a Unix-based GUI builder that doesn't suck, but I'm really hoping something will appear soon.
I look forward to reading Red Hat's SEC filings on Edgar Online and finding out everything they have been so quiet about to date, like exactly how many copies they're selling, who owns what percentage of the company, how profitable they actually are, etc, etc. I also look forward with great anticipation to the imminent conflict between Red Hat's embattled but still strong Free Software ideology, and Wall Street analysts' ideas about how to judge the value of software companies.
However, I am somewhat disquieted by this proof that Red Hat, like practically all other for-profit firms, are in fact lying bastards. You don't register an IPO without months of planning; yet, mere weeks ago, Red Hat announced *that they had no plans* (not merely that they couldn't comment). I seem to recall Bob Young quoted as saying "maybe in 20 years or so," or words to that effect. Yet he must at that very moment have been deeply embroiled in planning for this.
Unless...you don't suppose this is being forced on Red Hat by one of the new investors, do you? Maybe somebody like, say, Intel, isn't happy with the performance or liquidity of their investment, and is using some tactic (perhaps directors' liability or "fiduciary duty" threats) to force a hastily-planned IPO so they can cash out?
Nahh, that's crazy. Occam's razor says Bob Young is simply a liar, just like Bill Gates and everyone else who matters. But I'll be watching the buys and sells on Nasdaq Level II, just to see if anyone sells right away...
Red Hat is in the middle of a conversion from a small, tightly-integrated company with a strong shared vision of its beliefs and values, to a larger firm, a notable industry player, with dissenting versions of what its vision should be.
No doubt there are people at Red Hat who think that producing a Windows-clone user interface is the best way to going beyond the early adopters and penetrating the majority market. No doubt there are also people at Red Hat who think that the whole point of the exercise has been to build something different from Microsoft's offerings and that if you're just going to turn the product into a Windows-clone, why bother? No doubt there are even people at Red Hat who don't care a great deal about these issues, and just want to do their job and pick up a paycheck.
This is normal.
I'm not saying that I agree with everything Red Hat is doing; in fact, I have had serious issues with Red Hat for a couple years now. But this item is not one of them. We can only expect to hear more and more dissent from inside Red Hat, and this is good--it means they are maintaining transparency. We as users and customers want to know what's going on inside the company, and that means sometimes we will see some dirty laundry aired. Let's try to be mature about it.
As for obsolete certification, why not use a language everybody should know or pick up easily like Pascal? It's obsolete, and it's a good learning language.
Is this a troll? I could point to about a million and a half Delphi programmers who might not agree that Pascal is obsolete quite yet...although they might make a pretty good case that C *should* be.
Your post echoes a sentiment I've heard expressed frequently in these discussions: Why should Microsoft, the paragon of American hi-tech success, be punished for nothing more than being wildly successful?
The answer is - it shouldn't and it isn't. The control of monopolies is fundamentally necessary to achieve economic efficiency in a capitalist system. It's not a question of the monopolist being "bad" - it's a limitation of how much a free market can do for you.
The basic idea behind a free market system is to create a playing field with a carefully crafted set of rules such that if everyone does nothing but pursue their own greedy self-interest, the market operates efficiently. Recent political rhetoric has become confused between the cause and the effect. The goal is economic efficiency and prosperity. The means of achieving that goal is the free market. But in cases where the free market fails to achieve that goal, intervention is not only acceptable but necessary.
The reason a monopoly is inefficient is that monopolists' self-interest leads them to produce too few goods; market demand will then cause these goods to be sold at too high prices. I won't go into the details; look at any microeconomics textbook. But the goal of government regulation has to be to get the monopolist to produce more of the good, so that prices drop to the economically efficient level. This can be accomplished in various ways: Allowing the monopoly to continue but regulating their price, like in local telephone service; Allowing competitors to enter the market and preventing the monopolist from destroying them, like in long distance telephone service; Breaking up the monopoly itself into smaller competing firms, like with Standard Oil. Presumably there are other ways as well.
The problem is, it's hard to see Microsoft as a traditional monopolist. Are they producing too few goods and charging too high prices? Depends on how you look at it, I guess, but there isn't any clear price gouging going on. If you can't see Microsoft as a traditional monopolist, but you still want to take action against them, you have to invent some new definition of the term 'monopoly' that's different from "a supplier who produces all goods in a market." Once you start redefining terms, it's anyone's business.
But classic economics is not quite done in yet. Remember, you can calculate what the economically efficient price is supposed to be in a market. On the supply side, the condition necessary for economic efficiency is that price equals marginal cost. "Marginal cost" means the additional cost involved in producing the final unit of output. In the case of shrink-wrapped software, and ignoring technical support for the moment (since at most software firms it is now charged for separately anyway), marginal cost equals the reproduction and materials costs of the CDs, manuals, and box--about $10 to $20 for most software. Therefore, practically all software should cost $10 to $20. The free market would establish a price in this range for all software, and any software that costs more than this must be benefiting from some kind of monopoly power--otherwise consumers would not pay the higher prices.
It's easy to see where this monopoly power comes from: Copyright and, to a lesser extent, patent law. Without copyright and patent protections, software *would* sell for the cost of materials--because even if the company that produced it wanted to charge more, someone else would make copies and sell them for less. Traditionally, copyright and patent protections have been defended on the grounds that in their absence, there would be no incentive for people to invent things or develop new products. This is probably true. The free software movement has proved that under some limited circumstances, it doesn't *have* to be true--but, as has been pointed out, most free software authors also have day jobs, many of which are paid for by revenues generated by copyright and patent monopolies.
The issues become confusing at this point, but at least we can focus on what they actually are. The Microsoft trial should be seen not as reward or punishment for one particular company, but as a fine-tuning of the ways in which copyright and patent law should be applied to the software world. In this sense, the Microsoft trial is likely to set precedents that will shape the software industry for decades, free and commercial alike. The free software community needs to get past the immediate anti-Microsoft knee jerk and recognize that there is a real debate needed on the role of intellectual property in the world we want to create--bearing in mind both that copyright law forms the underpinnings of the free software world (via the GPL, etc), and that whatever Microsoft is going through right now, *we* may have to go through something similar if *our* operating system ever gains an 80% unit share.
Yes, this is incorrect. As I recall the default settings, regular users only get write access to HKEY_CURRENT_USER and read access to pretty much anything else. However, the "administrator" account on any other NT box on the network has remote write access to the entire registry.
I think the C2 certification is if the computer is not connected to a network and is physically placed in a secure location where unauthorized users are not allowed to enter. So most of what real-world sysadmins have to deal with is eliminated from consideration right off the bat.
All right, first of all - get over it. I've been hearing the same anti-mouse sentiments for ten years now. How long do mice have to be around before you give it up?
Second - Windows is not that hard to navigate without a mouse. In fact, handicaped accessibility rules mean that every major Windows app has to be navigable from the keyboard. I use the mouse as and where appropriate, but I do a lot from the keyboard and could happily use a Windows machine with no mouse--as long as I wasn't trying to use Visio or suchlike where the mouse is an obvious requirement.
The real offender in this regard is X. You can't even start an XFree86 server if your mouse is wonky. And both KDE and Gnome are horrifically mouse-dependent. Hell, if you don't have at least one xterm already running, you can't even launch another one without going to the mouse.
One of my biggest current annoyances in KDE (which is what I'm using at the moment, not through any strong preference, but just because it crashes less than Gnome at the moment) is that you can't get to the "K" ("Start" equivalent) without using the mouse. In Win95/NT, I constantly hit Ctrl-Esc, P,N,N to start Netscape, or Ctrl-Esc,P,A,N to start Notepad, or what have you. Having to constantly go to the mouse for this stuff in KDE is a total P.I.T.A.
I may be in a uniquely qualified position to comment on this issue, as I moved from Canada to the U.S. halfway through high school. This was in the mid-80s, and I don't think American high schools were as bad then as they are now, but the difference was obvious.
In elementary school (in Canada), I was picked on by the other kids pretty badly. But when I got to high school, I didn't have any real problems, even though I was high-IQ, low-brawn, into computers, etc. The high school I went to in Canada had less restrictive policies than some American universities. You were expected to go to class, and if you failed to show up for a scheduled class more than once or twice, the school would call your parents and get you in trouble. But at lunch time, or before and after school, or during a period when you hadn't scheduled a class (what American students call a "study hall" - we called it a "spare"), you pretty much did whatever you wanted: Go sit in the cafeteria or the library, walk across the street to the nearby shopping center (which had a video arcade and a food court), what have you.
After a couple years of this, I moved to the U.S. and was thrown into an American high school. I showed up the first day with a walkman, like I'd worn to school every day for the last two years; it was immediately confiscated. We were not allowed to be in the halls during class without a signed note from a teacher; we were absolutely not permitted to leave school grounds during the day (except for seniors who, only if they had their own car, were conditionally permitted to go out to lunch, no more than two days a week). If we didn't schedule a class during a period, we had to go sit at a desk in a classroom, with a teacher sitting up front but not teaching anything--and we weren't allowed to _go to the bathroom_ without asking permission first.
After about a week in this environment, I realized, not without some horror, that these people were children and that I would have to spend the next two years being treated like one of them. The coursework was almost without exception pure memorization and repetition--in my case, it involved a heavy diet of American propaganda indoctrination ("civics") because this was the only graduation requirement that I hadn't already satisfied. Happily, the school I went to had a "gifted & talented" program and I managed to find a couple courses that were actually interesting--AP physics and calculus.
I also met my first geek when I went to the computer club. Now, there are undoubtedly geeks in Canada; I'm not trying to say there aren't. But these people bought into every negative stereotype about themselves. They didn't just like playing with computers; they defined themselves by _hating_ the good-looking kids. I didn't get this at first, and almost wound up ostracized by every group at the school including the geeks. But as it turned out I was a lot better at the computer stuff than all but a couple of them, which earned me some respect.
Then there was the racial tension. In gym class, the black kids and the white kids actually played on opposite sides of the gym. This was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn't even notice, and went and played on the wrong side. They whipped me into line pretty quick--and it wasn't just the students; the gym teacher took me aside and told me what the deal was--as if it had official approval!
In short--I've never been in a more hateful, useless, divisive, nasty place than an American high school, and I can state from experience that there's no inherent reason why it has to be that way. It may sound like I'm painting Canada as some land of milk and honey--but believe me, that's not what I think at all (otherwise why would I still live in the U.S.)--and I have no way of knowing what's happened to Canadian high schools in the last 15 years. But if Canadians rarely kill each other in their schools, maybe there are good reasons why.
I think that the heart of this problem is the notion of discipline in schools. As much as Americans talk about freedom and liberty, they sure aren't comfortable with it in practice. America can be (and is) one of the most oppressive nations in the developed world. Hell, any politician who doesn't have quite as many votes as he would like can run a "get tough on crime" campaign and win an election. And what's the effective difference between "get tough on crime" laws in America, and oppressive social policy in places like China and Saudi Arabia?
The typical American on the street is strongly in favor of, to name a few, state-sponsored execution; state-sponsored political assassination (of foreigners, never of Americans--but no qualms about foreign heads of state, Geneva conventions be damned); immediate death penalties for anyone even suspected of, say, selling drugs to children; economic "starvation warfare" against civilian populations; the sale of heavy arms to essentially crazy people (ie state militias); and God knows what else--I can't even go on.
And they want to blame violence in the schools on Quake and Doom? Please.
The penchant for extreme violence and extreme social oppression is built into the American psyche. You can't get away from it. The use of language, the mass entertainment, the political scene, the reality of many neighborhoods--you can't turn around twice without being confronted by violence. Hell, America was founded on violence; up to maybe four generations ago, a fairly typical way to get land to live on was to go drive off or kill the native people who lived there. There's the old joke about an American and a Canadian talking about guns: "Guns are necessary," says the American, "because without guns we couldn't have won the West from the Indians." Replies the Canadian: "Did you ever think of making friends with them?"
But even with all the violent tendencies in the world, it's very difficult to act on them if you don't have a gun. Guns are the basic problem. Gun advocates will quote the Constitution as if it were holy writ: I say, the Constitution be damned; the provision for well-armed militias was written when the worst thing you could carry was a wheel lock musket. Stop hiding behind the Constitution and tell us exactly how free access to guns helps build communities in our cities. A note to the clue-challenged: You can't. They don't. Wake up.
Well, I dunno. My wife and I took Doom and Quake off my kids' computer because we didn't like the way they behaved and talked when they'd been playing it. And believe me, I've played plenty of Doom, although I never really got into Quake. And I'm not a heavy disciplinarian; in fact, I think a lot of society's problems are caused by too much "discipline" and not enough playtime. But Quake and Doom really are excessively, unnecessarily violent (and revel in it, for that matter).
Did violent video games drive these kids to what they did? No. But given a couple twisted kids who lacked the moral sense to know that you just don't do things like that, was the inspiration rooted in Quake and Doom somehow? We'll probably never know, but the possibility clearly exists. Should we outlaw Quake and Doom? No, definitely not--but the community should still develop a sense that shooting and blowing up people is wrong, and I don't see a good way to reconcile that with blowing up and shooting people on a computer screen being okay.
The above posting clearly illustrates the exact though process that led to the Colorado murders. You can't pretend it doesn't feel bad when people loathe you--the issue is clearly that geeks/nerds do have negative feelings because the "cool people" don't like them.
As much as you want to deny it, we are all programmed (by advertising, peer opinion, even parental opinion) that cool is good. But being cool and being smart both require a major investment of time and attention; so much so, in fact, that it is difficult or impossible to do both at once.
So every student makes a choice; perhaps by temperament and capability; perhaps by chance; rarely, if ever, by conscious desire. This choice perpetuates itself: Having spent a lot of time becoming either smart or cool, it is much easier to remain what you are than to switch to the other side.
From the point of view of cool people, it must be true that uncool==bad. If investment in coolness is to pay dividends in social currency, then it is at least as important to make sure that uncool people don't get social reward as to make sure that cool people do. So the cool people (again, not necessarily consciously) loathe the smart people, and the smart people feel bad because nobody likes to be loathed.
The smart people have no such inherent need to loathe the cool people. The expected reward of an investment in coolness is social promotion; in order to receive it, it is necessary to force everyone into the "correct" social attitudes. But the reward that smart people expect to gain from their investment is intellectual accomplishment, eventual future money-making, and perhaps a sense of superiority. But this is all internal and does not really require anyone else to be forced to fit any particular pigeonhole.
The problem is, we all want social recognition. Even smart people. The environment is set up so that smart people don't get it because they can no longer afford to make the investment in being cool (ie, spending their time knowing what fashions are current, who's dating who this week, going to parties, never being seen near a computer, etc). So smart people are made to feel bad; in some cases, very bad indeed.
The most obvious way to deal with these bad feelings is to demonize those who cause them. How do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance between the belief that you are a good, worthwhile, useful person, and that they all think you are valueless? Well, they must be wrong. See the previous poster's choice of words: stupid, scared, mindless. People you don't even want to be involved with. People who don't like you and aren't liked by you. People who are so worthless that you don't even care if they think you're worthless. People so useless that 'subjecting yourself' to their company is a trial to be endured rather than an enjoyable experience.
And if they take such strong, destructive actions as loathing you based on what you see as a wrong-headed belief (ie, cool is better than smart), they must be bad people. And if they're bad people, why not kill them? You're doing the world a favor: Improving the collective IQ, as it were.
Needless to say, this is the wrong answer. For healing to occur, you must accept that these people loathe you, that it matters to you, try to understand their reasons, try to find ways to cope. This is very difficult and it would be a better world if it didn't have to happen. However, given the unpleasant choice as it has come to exist, better to grow up understanding that shallow people exist and posessing a few tools to deal with them succesfully, than to grow up with a kernel of hatred buried in your psyche and a twisted view that includes the [do I dare say it: evil] concept that permits you to value human beings as worthless.
The real tragedy is that these issues could easily, almost trivially, be addressed by the teachers, but the functional structure of the schools prevents it. By high school, courses are taught by subject, and the subjects are academic: history, science, math. There isn't a class in how to get along with people. Unlike elementary school, there isn't anyone specifically tasked to get to know the kids and oversee their cognitive and social development. It's easy to say that it's the parent's responsibility, but the parents rarely have any clear knowledge of what goes on in the school.
Home schooling is not the answer, because most parents can't stay home all day, aren't qualified as teachers anyway, and can't provide opportunities for social interaction; so all that happens is that their kids' social development pains are delayed until college instead of high school.
The real answer is to have a mandatory and participatory ethics/morals curriculum in the high schools, but of course it's very difficult to teach morals in a way that doesn't offend one or another fundamentalist religion. We've actually gotten to the point where you can't say "It is wrong to kill" in a classroom because it might be interpreted as religious in nature (not to mention then having to explain away the barbarity of state-sponsored execution). Now I'm not particularly religious myself, and I'd be generally against teaching specific dogmas in the schools, but I think high school is where moral grounding needs to be learned--and I think if the recent tragedy shows us anything, it's that we have to address this problem NOW.
The VCL is its own class library and is based on nothing but the Win32 API. Actually, the class design of the VCL is one of the reasons why Delphi and C++Builder are so nice. The problem is, it's heavily Win32-API dependent. It wasn't particularly designed with portability in mind. I think it would be quite difficult to implement the existing VCL library on top of Qt or Gtk without at least some degree of application breakage. Certainly, any app that makes direct Win32 API calls would break.
The other problem, of course, is that Delphi and C++Builder (and, to stay on topic, JBuilder) are shrink-wrapped commercial software products. And if there's one thing that _has_ to be open source, it's the development tools. As much as I would love for Borland (sorry, Inprise) to release Delphi for Linux, I bet I'd change my mind the first time a library upgrade broke the package and I had to wait months for Borland to fix things.
All that aside, I have to say I'd happily [have my employer] pay the $2500 for a copy of Delphi Client/Server for Linux. I might even buy JBuilder if I can find it within myself to care about Java.
For example, one of the major recent changes to the kernel architecture was the migration from v2.0/early 2.1 with a single kernel lock to late 2.1/2.2 with multiple locks, to handle SMP better. I'm not a kernel internals expert by any stretch, but it seems like one of the major changes required for this was to make all the SCSI and Ethernet drivers aware of the various differnt types of kernel lock.
How many times have kernel architecture changes occurred that required thorough driver updates? How difficult would this become with accumulated binary cruft that nobody would be willing to change just because one OS wants to rearchitect its kernel?
It's not a question of abstract notions of Stallmanesque software liberty. It's a question of compromising the plain flexibility and usefulness that made Linux great in the first place.
-Graham
Son of Fear the Flame
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CDE vs Gnome
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· Score: 1
I've been playing with Gnome 1.0 and KDE 1.1, as packaged in Red Hat Starbuck (v5.9, aka beta-6.0). Gnome is sexier but parts of it crash. It really feels like a development release--I'm not even sure I'd call it a respectable beta. KDE is solid and stable, but still has major missing features and "things that make you go hmmm." Neither is remotely close to the usability of Windows, let alone MacOS.
The Halloween document was correct on at least one point: Usability isn't something that can be easily 'grafted on' to an otherwise finished system, any more than security or stability. It's one of those things that requires fundamental support from the whole package.
To co-opt an old saying: Security, stability, usability; pick any two.
On the whole, I like Rob's scheme, not as much for the details as for the amount of effort that is being put into it. Rob's attitude is quite reminiscent of really good BBS sysops of a bygone era--and it's a hard thing to find on the new world of the Web.
That having been said, even though the current proposal is mostly neutral on the topic, some of the comments that have been posted seem to be fairly strongly anti-lurker. The assumption is that unless you are an active contributor of posts to forums, you aren't moderator material. I submit that in many cases lurkers would make better moderators than active posters. While it's true that a lot of lurkers are such simply because they aren't that interested in the site, those aren't the droids we're looking for.
Given the other criteria (long-time users who read articles frequently), lurkers within this group are simply those whose "is this worthwhile" filters are set to "high." Most lurkers within this group, I suspect, would be quite willing to post, if they thought they had something interesting or different to contribute--but most of the time, the obvious responses have already been done to death, and there really isn't that much more to say. The person who can recognize this condition and choose not to post as a result is displaying a quality that can only be seen as desirable in a moderator.
Consider the extreme version of the moderator/contributor choice: You can choose to be a moderator, but only if you give up posting ability on all of slashdot! As a thought experiment, let's assume the problem of posting-as-AC has been solved somehow. Someone willing to make this choice would have demonstrated their objectivity in a way that's hard to ignore. It would be hard to find reasons not to trust this sort of moderator. Yes, they might well have chosen to become a moderator because they feel it's a better (or more powerful) way to express their own opinions, but what of it? Why would anyone contribute to Slashdot, either as moderator, poster, or even Supreme Taco, if not as a vehicle for expressing their opinions? There's no possible way to get totally non-opinionated moderators, because totally non-opinionated people would have little or no reason to participate. But of the available population, lurkers are probably as close as you're going to get.
On those occasions when their servers haven't crashed, Microsoft's Web site says that all of the listed products are fully compliant if you install all necessary patches. Maybe "fully compliant" means "they won't crash measurably more often just because it's y2k," but you can't predict a mass Y2K exodus away from MS Office on the strength of that.
After each monkey had typed one letter, there would be an infinite number of pages with exactly one letter typed on them. Given that in no case can one letter be considered equivalent to the works of Shakespeare, exactly zero of the monkeys would have reproduced Shakespeare at that point.
Yeah, I have networking running on a virtual NT4 on RH5.2 + kernel 2.2.1 on a dual P-II 400. It got an address from my DHCP server and just ran. I even installed the Novell client software, and now I can get to all my company's production servers. I installed Delphi 4 on the NT4 virtual box, and I can't really notice a performance difference between this and Delphi running on my PII-300 notebook. The only thing is that window updates are a bit slow sometimes. It seems quite stable, too--I have yet to see it fail in any way.
Also, as to the idea that $300 is too much--it depends on who they're targeting. In my case, anything under $500 my boss can and will sign for if it seems cool. I wouldn't pay $300 for it personally, but it's chump change to any reasonable IT department. At least until you start trying to deploy it to hundreds of desktops.
Even then, I could justify $30,000 on support costs for 100 machines if I could claim noticeable stability improvements. Of course, I can't in this case, because a desktop user running Windows on real hardware is not going to improve stability by running Windows on virtual hardware. Sure, Linux keeps running underneath, but so what?
I've been trying to convince my employer to consider buying some kind of PC other than Compaq, because you can get better cheaper. I'd despaired of finding any ammo to use in my against them...but this is perfect! Thanks, Compaq.
Like several other people here, I am now at the point where I can barely tolerate reading Katz articles. However, I have an inherent distrust of the reasons for my own discomfort. If reading something is uncomfortable, do you immediately stop and retreat into your comfortable, established worldview, or do you attempt to find a reason for your discomfort and decide if there is something about your worldview that might need to be changed as a result? I prefer the latter. So I have continued to read Katz articles, not because I find them particularly interesting, but in an attempt to discover what it is about them that I object to. With today's article, I have achieved a 'moment of clarity' on the subject.
The reason I don't enjoy reading Katz' articles is that he writes about the definition of a term that I had accepted as self-referential. As a result, I read his articles as if they were about me - and I object to them strongly because they fail to describe me in any way I find acceptable. So the insight to be drawn from them is: I am not a geek. I have been calling myself one for years; I started programming when I was 7 years old (see footnote); I work in the industry; I read slashdot. But I only called myself a geek because it was a convenient term at the time, and provided some sense of shared experience with others of similar mind. If the definition of the word changes to the point where it no longer reflects my experience, then I must abandon the word, not the experience itself. This leaves me without a good word to describe this aspect of myself, which I find uncomfortable, but as I said before, uncomfortable is often the step that comes before understanding.
I am not a geek because: I care about my relationship with society and want to operate as a valued and contributing member rather than an alienated outsider. I have two kids and don't necessarily want them to grow up to be programmers--I would rather that they be well-adjusted socially. I am working on an MBA. In a couple years I plan to stop coding (for money, anyway) and become a manager or a marketer. None of these motivations are compatible with the term 'geek' as it is now defined, not only by Katz but by the whole bandwagon that has sprung up around the term.
This whole business reminds me of the way 'hacker' got corrupted in the 80s. Once I was a hacker; now I am not. I have not changed. Actually, a better comparison would be the way 'Generation X' was misunderstood for so many years. Hollywood and Madison Avenue both thought that the post-Boomer generation was nihilistic, lazy, and heavily influenced by drug and alcohol culture. Even though I'm in the right age group (I am now 30), I vehemently rejected 'GenX' as having anything to do with myself. However, in the last few years, the term 'GenX' seems to have become more like: "People who dig Howard Jones and remember the old hamburgler." This I can identify with. Perhaps, over time, 'geek' will go through this sort of convergence to reality. If it does, perhaps I will adopt it again.
-Graham
Footnote: Per a previous thread, I feel compelled to provide some details. I turned 7 years old in 1975. We did not have a home computer at the time, but my father sometimes brought home a printing terminal for the IBM 360 at work. He arranged for me to have an account in a training area where I couldn't hurt anything, and let me loose. I wrote simple programs in BASIC for a while and got good at it. Through the era of my dad's homebrew machines of the late 70s, I stuck to BASIC as if it were a religion--although I did code some inner loops in 6800 and then 6809 assembly language because it was the only way to get performance. On my 14th birthday, in 1982, my dad bought me a copy of Turbo Pascal for CP/M. My teenage rebellion was against structured programming; I liked GOTOs as a child. But after a year or so of fighting against it, I saw the light and converted to Pascal. In point of fact, I still program in Pascal (Delphi) to this day, although somewhere along the way I also picked up C/C++ and Perl. So when did I start programming? If BASIC doesn't count, then I started when I was 14. If you don't start until you're paid for it, then I started when I was 15--but that was in BASIC. If you aren't a programmer until you have programmed for money in a language other than BASIC, then I started when I was 19. If you aren't a programmer until you've written your own operating system kernel, then I'm not one yet and probably never will be (although I have written a simple compiler). And yes, my only reason for telling you all this is simple ego gratification. Live with it.
The mantra of the pundits for the last few months has been: If Linux is to go mainstream, it must be made easy to use. Everyone's repeating this as if it were ultimate truth, even longtime Linux people. Well, I'm sorry, but I think this misses the whole point.
The reason Linux (and other free software) is appealing is that it provides an opportunity to achieve Computing Freedom(tm). This means being the master of your tools rather than allowing them to control you. This means having full, autonomous control of your computing world.
But it's fundamentally impossible to have it both ways. If you're going to be the master of your tools, you must achieve a difficult, deep and informed understanding of how those tools operate. If you want "easy to use" you are essentially saying you refuse to understand your tools in any detail, you just want to get some other, non-computer-related work done.
But by this refusal to accept responsibility for your own understanding of your own computer, you have essentially subordinated your ability to compute--your Computing Freedom(tm)--to the quality of user interface design provided by some nameless programmer you'll never meet. Your objective at this point is to find the programmers who produce the simplest user interfaces. That ain't Linux.
Perhaps the ultimate illustration of this point goes as follows. What is the fundamental difference between Linux and Windows? With Linux, you get source code. What is the point of having source code if you can't even read it, let alone modify it to suit your preference? None whatever. So what is the fundamental advantage of Linux over Windows or MacOS, for a non-programmer? There isn't any.
So let's focus on our core competency and stop wasting valuable effort trying to make Linux appealing to market segments who don't care about Linux's sustainable strengths. It's like offering jackhammers in designer colors. It makes no sense and it detracts from the focus on things that really matter, like getting the kernel to scale well to higher-end (16- to 64-way) SMP.
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Don't you mean "its?"
Wouldn't it be handy if there was a HOWTO describing the most common investment appraisal techniques (ROI, CBA, boundary values, etc) and providing skeletal material from which to write a full justification report?
Microsoft, Sun, et. al. provide white papers and sales material intended for exactly this purpose, and while there's a fair amount of source material available these days, so far I haven't seen anyone pull it together into a trivially-usable form.
-Graham
ps. First post!
This sucks.
Not that Delphi for Linux was ever more than a pipe dream anyway. VCL was always too Windows-specific.
I wonder what this means to Interbase for Linux? Will Microsoft kill that too?
I've worled with MS Visual C++ and while I might make the sacreligious statement that it actually has some neat features, its user interface sucks rocks.
The term IDE was coined by Borland and the best currently available IDE is Delphi. It's hard to explain why something is cool to people who don't believe in it, and Unix people generally scoff at the very notion of an IDE or a visual development environment.
All I can say is, trust me, the reason I like Delphi is not that I am incompetent or unable to handle "real" programming. Designing GUI dialogs by drawing what they should look like just feels like the right way to do things. So far, I haven't seen a Unix-based GUI builder that doesn't suck, but I'm really hoping something will appear soon.
-Graham
I look forward to reading Red Hat's SEC filings on Edgar Online and finding out everything they have been so quiet about to date, like exactly how many copies they're selling, who owns what percentage of the company, how profitable they actually are, etc, etc. I also look forward with great anticipation to the imminent conflict between Red Hat's embattled but still strong Free Software ideology, and Wall Street analysts' ideas about how to judge the value of software companies.
However, I am somewhat disquieted by this proof that Red Hat, like practically all other for-profit firms, are in fact lying bastards. You don't register an IPO without months of planning; yet, mere weeks ago, Red Hat announced *that they had no plans* (not merely that they couldn't comment). I seem to recall Bob Young quoted as saying "maybe in 20 years or so," or words to that effect. Yet he must at that very moment have been deeply embroiled in planning for this.
Unless...you don't suppose this is being forced on Red Hat by one of the new investors, do you? Maybe somebody like, say, Intel, isn't happy with the performance or liquidity of their investment, and is using some tactic (perhaps directors' liability or "fiduciary duty" threats) to force a hastily-planned IPO so they can cash out?
Nahh, that's crazy. Occam's razor says Bob Young is simply a liar, just like Bill Gates and everyone else who matters. But I'll be watching the buys and sells on Nasdaq Level II, just to see if anyone sells right away...
-Graham
Red Hat is in the middle of a conversion from a small, tightly-integrated company with a strong shared vision of its beliefs and values, to a larger firm, a notable industry player, with dissenting versions of what its vision should be.
No doubt there are people at Red Hat who think that producing a Windows-clone user interface is the best way to going beyond the early adopters and penetrating the majority market. No doubt there are also people at Red Hat who think that the whole point of the exercise has been to build something different from Microsoft's offerings and that if you're just going to turn the product into a Windows-clone, why bother? No doubt there are even people at Red Hat who don't care a great deal about these issues, and just want to do their job and pick up a paycheck.
This is normal.
I'm not saying that I agree with everything Red Hat is doing; in fact, I have had serious issues with Red Hat for a couple years now. But this item is not one of them. We can only expect to hear more and more dissent from inside Red Hat, and this is good--it means they are maintaining transparency. We as users and customers want to know what's going on inside the company, and that means sometimes we will see some dirty laundry aired. Let's try to be mature about it.
-Graham
As for obsolete certification, why not use a language everybody should know or pick up easily like Pascal? It's obsolete, and it's a good learning language.
Is this a troll? I could point to about a million and a half Delphi programmers who might not agree that Pascal is obsolete quite yet...although they might make a pretty good case that C *should* be.
-Graham
Your post echoes a sentiment I've heard expressed frequently in these discussions: Why should Microsoft, the paragon of American hi-tech success, be punished for nothing more than being wildly successful?
The answer is - it shouldn't and it isn't. The control of monopolies is fundamentally necessary to achieve economic efficiency in a capitalist system. It's not a question of the monopolist being "bad" - it's a limitation of how much a free market can do for you.
The basic idea behind a free market system is to create a playing field with a carefully crafted set of rules such that if everyone does nothing but pursue their own greedy self-interest, the market operates efficiently. Recent political rhetoric has become confused between the cause and the effect. The goal is economic efficiency and prosperity. The means of achieving that goal is the free market. But in cases where the free market fails to achieve that goal, intervention is not only acceptable but necessary.
The reason a monopoly is inefficient is that monopolists' self-interest leads them to produce too few goods; market demand will then cause these goods to be sold at too high prices. I won't go into the details; look at any microeconomics textbook. But the goal of government regulation has to be to get the monopolist to produce more of the good, so that prices drop to the economically efficient level. This can be accomplished in various ways: Allowing the monopoly to continue but regulating their price, like in local telephone service; Allowing competitors to enter the market and preventing the monopolist from destroying them, like in long distance telephone service; Breaking up the monopoly itself into smaller competing firms, like with Standard Oil. Presumably there are other ways as well.
The problem is, it's hard to see Microsoft as a traditional monopolist. Are they producing too few goods and charging too high prices? Depends on how you look at it, I guess, but there isn't any clear price gouging going on. If you can't see Microsoft as a traditional monopolist, but you still want to take action against them, you have to invent some new definition of the term 'monopoly' that's different from "a supplier who produces all goods in a market." Once you start redefining terms, it's anyone's business.
But classic economics is not quite done in yet. Remember, you can calculate what the economically efficient price is supposed to be in a market. On the supply side, the condition necessary for economic efficiency is that price equals marginal cost. "Marginal cost" means the additional cost involved in producing the final unit of output. In the case of shrink-wrapped software, and ignoring technical support for the moment (since at most software firms it is now charged for separately anyway), marginal cost equals the reproduction and materials costs of the CDs, manuals, and box--about $10 to $20 for most software. Therefore, practically all software should cost $10 to $20. The free market would establish a price in this range for all software, and any software that costs more than this must be benefiting from some kind of monopoly power--otherwise consumers would not pay the higher prices.
It's easy to see where this monopoly power comes from: Copyright and, to a lesser extent, patent law. Without copyright and patent protections, software *would* sell for the cost of materials--because even if the company that produced it wanted to charge more, someone else would make copies and sell them for less. Traditionally, copyright and patent protections have been defended on the grounds that in their absence, there would be no incentive for people to invent things or develop new products. This is probably true. The free software movement has proved that under some limited circumstances, it doesn't *have* to be true--but, as has been pointed out, most free software authors also have day jobs, many of which are paid for by revenues generated by copyright and patent monopolies.
The issues become confusing at this point, but at least we can focus on what they actually are. The Microsoft trial should be seen not as reward or punishment for one particular company, but as a fine-tuning of the ways in which copyright and patent law should be applied to the software world. In this sense, the Microsoft trial is likely to set precedents that will shape the software industry for decades, free and commercial alike. The free software community needs to get past the immediate anti-Microsoft knee jerk and recognize that there is a real debate needed on the role of intellectual property in the world we want to create--bearing in mind both that copyright law forms the underpinnings of the free software world (via the GPL, etc), and that whatever Microsoft is going through right now, *we* may have to go through something similar if *our* operating system ever gains an 80% unit share.
-Graham
Yes, this is incorrect. As I recall the default settings, regular users only get write access to HKEY_CURRENT_USER and read access to pretty much anything else. However, the "administrator" account on any other NT box on the network has remote write access to the entire registry.
I think the C2 certification is if the computer is not connected to a network and is physically placed in a secure location where unauthorized users are not allowed to enter. So most of what real-world sysadmins have to deal with is eliminated from consideration right off the bat.
-Graham
All right, first of all - get over it. I've been hearing the same anti-mouse sentiments for ten years now. How long do mice have to be around before you give it up?
Second - Windows is not that hard to navigate without a mouse. In fact, handicaped accessibility rules mean that every major Windows app has to be navigable from the keyboard. I use the mouse as and where appropriate, but I do a lot from the keyboard and could happily use a Windows machine with no mouse--as long as I wasn't trying to use Visio or suchlike where the mouse is an obvious requirement.
The real offender in this regard is X. You can't even start an XFree86 server if your mouse is wonky. And both KDE and Gnome are horrifically mouse-dependent. Hell, if you don't have at least one xterm already running, you can't even launch another one without going to the mouse.
One of my biggest current annoyances in KDE (which is what I'm using at the moment, not through any strong preference, but just because it crashes less than Gnome at the moment) is that you can't get to the "K" ("Start" equivalent) without using the mouse. In Win95/NT, I constantly hit Ctrl-Esc, P,N,N to start Netscape, or Ctrl-Esc,P,A,N to start Notepad, or what have you. Having to constantly go to the mouse for this stuff in KDE is a total P.I.T.A.
-Graham
I may be in a uniquely qualified position to comment on this issue, as I moved from Canada to the U.S. halfway through high school. This was in the mid-80s, and I don't think American high schools were as bad then as they are now, but the difference was obvious.
In elementary school (in Canada), I was picked on by the other kids pretty badly. But when I got to high school, I didn't have any real problems, even though I was high-IQ, low-brawn, into computers, etc. The high school I went to in Canada had less restrictive policies than some American universities. You were expected to go to class, and if you failed to show up for a scheduled class more than once or twice, the school would call your parents and get you in trouble. But at lunch time, or before and after school, or during a period when you hadn't scheduled a class (what American students call a "study hall" - we called it a "spare"), you pretty much did whatever you wanted: Go sit in the cafeteria or the library, walk across the street to the nearby shopping center (which had a video arcade and a food court), what have you.
After a couple years of this, I moved to the U.S. and was thrown into an American high school. I showed up the first day with a walkman, like I'd worn to school every day for the last two years; it was immediately confiscated. We were not allowed to be in the halls during class without a signed note from a teacher; we were absolutely not permitted to leave school grounds during the day (except for seniors who, only if they had their own car, were conditionally permitted to go out to lunch, no more than two days a week). If we didn't schedule a class during a period, we had to go sit at a desk in a classroom, with a teacher sitting up front but not teaching anything--and we weren't allowed to _go to the bathroom_ without asking permission first.
After about a week in this environment, I realized, not without some horror, that these people were children and that I would have to spend the next two years being treated like one of them. The coursework was almost without exception pure memorization and repetition--in my case, it involved a heavy diet of American propaganda indoctrination ("civics") because this was the only graduation requirement that I hadn't already satisfied. Happily, the school I went to had a "gifted & talented" program and I managed to find a couple courses that were actually interesting--AP physics and calculus.
I also met my first geek when I went to the computer club. Now, there are undoubtedly geeks in Canada; I'm not trying to say there aren't. But these people bought into every negative stereotype about themselves. They didn't just like playing with computers; they defined themselves by _hating_ the good-looking kids. I didn't get this at first, and almost wound up ostracized by every group at the school including the geeks. But as it turned out I was a lot better at the computer stuff than all but a couple of them, which earned me some respect.
Then there was the racial tension. In gym class, the black kids and the white kids actually played on opposite sides of the gym. This was so far beyond my comprehension that I didn't even notice, and went and played on the wrong side. They whipped me into line pretty quick--and it wasn't just the students; the gym teacher took me aside and told me what the deal was--as if it had official approval!
In short--I've never been in a more hateful, useless, divisive, nasty place than an American high school, and I can state from experience that there's no inherent reason why it has to be that way. It may sound like I'm painting Canada as some land of milk and honey--but believe me, that's not what I think at all (otherwise why would I still live in the U.S.)--and I have no way of knowing what's happened to Canadian high schools in the last 15 years. But if Canadians rarely kill each other in their schools, maybe there are good reasons why.
I think that the heart of this problem is the notion of discipline in schools. As much as Americans talk about freedom and liberty, they sure aren't comfortable with it in practice. America can be (and is) one of the most oppressive nations in the developed world. Hell, any politician who doesn't have quite as many votes as he would like can run a "get tough on crime" campaign and win an election. And what's the effective difference between "get tough on crime" laws in America, and oppressive social policy in places like China and Saudi Arabia?
The typical American on the street is strongly in favor of, to name a few, state-sponsored execution; state-sponsored political assassination (of foreigners, never of Americans--but no qualms about foreign heads of state, Geneva conventions be damned); immediate death penalties for anyone even suspected of, say, selling drugs to children; economic "starvation warfare" against civilian populations; the sale of heavy arms to essentially crazy people (ie state militias); and God knows what else--I can't even go on.
And they want to blame violence in the schools on Quake and Doom? Please.
The penchant for extreme violence and extreme social oppression is built into the American psyche. You can't get away from it. The use of language, the mass entertainment, the political scene, the reality of many neighborhoods--you can't turn around twice without being confronted by violence. Hell, America was founded on violence; up to maybe four generations ago, a fairly typical way to get land to live on was to go drive off or kill the native people who lived there. There's the old joke about an American and a Canadian talking about guns: "Guns are necessary," says the American, "because without guns we couldn't have won the West from the Indians." Replies the Canadian: "Did you ever think of making friends with them?"
But even with all the violent tendencies in the world, it's very difficult to act on them if you don't have a gun. Guns are the basic problem. Gun advocates will quote the Constitution as if it were holy writ: I say, the Constitution be damned; the provision for well-armed militias was written when the worst thing you could carry was a wheel lock musket. Stop hiding behind the Constitution and tell us exactly how free access to guns helps build communities in our cities. A note to the clue-challenged: You can't. They don't. Wake up.
-Graham
Well, I dunno. My wife and I took Doom and Quake off my kids' computer because we didn't like the way they behaved and talked when they'd been playing it. And believe me, I've played plenty of Doom, although I never really got into Quake. And I'm not a heavy disciplinarian; in fact, I think a lot of society's problems are caused by too much "discipline" and not enough playtime. But Quake and Doom really are excessively, unnecessarily violent (and revel in it, for that matter).
Did violent video games drive these kids to what they did? No. But given a couple twisted kids who lacked the moral sense to know that you just don't do things like that, was the inspiration rooted in Quake and Doom somehow? We'll probably never know, but the possibility clearly exists. Should we outlaw Quake and Doom? No, definitely not--but the community should still develop a sense that shooting and blowing up people is wrong, and I don't see a good way to reconcile that with blowing up and shooting people on a computer screen being okay.
-Graham
The above posting clearly illustrates the exact though process that led to the Colorado murders. You can't pretend it doesn't feel bad when people loathe you--the issue is clearly that geeks/nerds do have negative feelings because the "cool people" don't like them.
As much as you want to deny it, we are all programmed (by advertising, peer opinion, even parental opinion) that cool is good. But being cool and being smart both require a major investment of time and attention; so much so, in fact, that it is difficult or impossible to do both at once.
So every student makes a choice; perhaps by temperament and capability; perhaps by chance; rarely, if ever, by conscious desire. This choice perpetuates itself: Having spent a lot of time becoming either smart or cool, it is much easier to remain what you are than to switch to the other side.
From the point of view of cool people, it must be true that uncool==bad. If investment in coolness is to pay dividends in social currency, then it is at least as important to make sure that uncool people don't get social reward as to make sure that cool people do. So the cool people (again, not necessarily consciously) loathe the smart people, and the smart people feel bad because nobody likes to be loathed.
The smart people have no such inherent need to loathe the cool people. The expected reward of an investment in coolness is social promotion; in order to receive it, it is necessary to force everyone into the "correct" social attitudes. But the reward that smart people expect to gain from their investment is intellectual accomplishment, eventual future money-making, and perhaps a sense of superiority. But this is all internal and does not really require anyone else to be forced to fit any particular pigeonhole.
The problem is, we all want social recognition. Even smart people. The environment is set up so that smart people don't get it because they can no longer afford to make the investment in being cool (ie, spending their time knowing what fashions are current, who's dating who this week, going to parties, never being seen near a computer, etc). So smart people are made to feel bad; in some cases, very bad indeed.
The most obvious way to deal with these bad feelings is to demonize those who cause them. How do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance between the belief that you are a good, worthwhile, useful person, and that they all think you are valueless? Well, they must be wrong. See the previous poster's choice of words: stupid, scared, mindless. People you don't even want to be involved with. People who don't like you and aren't liked by you. People who are so worthless that you don't even care if they think you're worthless. People so useless that 'subjecting yourself' to their company is a trial to be endured rather than an enjoyable experience.
And if they take such strong, destructive actions as loathing you based on what you see as a wrong-headed belief (ie, cool is better than smart), they must be bad people. And if they're bad people, why not kill them? You're doing the world a favor: Improving the collective IQ, as it were.
Needless to say, this is the wrong answer. For healing to occur, you must accept that these people loathe you, that it matters to you, try to understand their reasons, try to find ways to cope. This is very difficult and it would be a better world if it didn't have to happen. However, given the unpleasant choice as it has come to exist, better to grow up understanding that shallow people exist and posessing a few tools to deal with them succesfully, than to grow up with a kernel of hatred buried in your psyche and a twisted view that includes the [do I dare say it: evil] concept that permits you to value human beings as worthless.
The real tragedy is that these issues could easily, almost trivially, be addressed by the teachers, but the functional structure of the schools prevents it. By high school, courses are taught by subject, and the subjects are academic: history, science, math. There isn't a class in how to get along with people. Unlike elementary school, there isn't anyone specifically tasked to get to know the kids and oversee their cognitive and social development. It's easy to say that it's the parent's responsibility, but the parents rarely have any clear knowledge of what goes on in the school.
Home schooling is not the answer, because most parents can't stay home all day, aren't qualified as teachers anyway, and can't provide opportunities for social interaction; so all that happens is that their kids' social development pains are delayed until college instead of high school.
The real answer is to have a mandatory and participatory ethics/morals curriculum in the high schools, but of course it's very difficult to teach morals in a way that doesn't offend one or another fundamentalist religion. We've actually gotten to the point where you can't say "It is wrong to kill" in a classroom because it might be interpreted as religious in nature (not to mention then having to explain away the barbarity of state-sponsored execution). Now I'm not particularly religious myself, and I'd be generally against teaching specific dogmas in the schools, but I think high school is where moral grounding needs to be learned--and I think if the recent tragedy shows us anything, it's that we have to address this problem NOW.
The VCL is its own class library and is based on nothing but the Win32 API. Actually, the class design of the VCL is one of the reasons why Delphi and C++Builder are so nice. The problem is, it's heavily Win32-API dependent. It wasn't particularly designed with portability in mind. I think it would be quite difficult to implement the existing VCL library on top of Qt or Gtk without at least some degree of application breakage. Certainly, any app that makes direct Win32 API calls would break.
The other problem, of course, is that Delphi and C++Builder (and, to stay on topic, JBuilder) are shrink-wrapped commercial software products. And if there's one thing that _has_ to be open source, it's the development tools. As much as I would love for Borland (sorry, Inprise) to release Delphi for Linux, I bet I'd change my mind the first time a library upgrade broke the package and I had to wait months for Borland to fix things.
All that aside, I have to say I'd happily [have my employer] pay the $2500 for a copy of Delphi Client/Server for Linux. I might even buy JBuilder if I can find it within myself to care about Java.
-Graham
For example, one of the major recent changes to the kernel architecture was the migration from v2.0/early 2.1 with a single kernel lock to late 2.1/2.2 with multiple locks, to handle SMP better. I'm not a kernel internals expert by any stretch, but it seems like one of the major changes required for this was to make all the SCSI and Ethernet drivers aware of the various differnt types of kernel lock.
How many times have kernel architecture changes occurred that required thorough driver updates? How difficult would this become with accumulated binary cruft that nobody would be willing to change just because one OS wants to rearchitect its kernel?
It's not a question of abstract notions of Stallmanesque software liberty. It's a question of compromising the plain flexibility and usefulness that made Linux great in the first place.
-Graham
I've been playing with Gnome 1.0 and KDE 1.1, as packaged in Red Hat Starbuck (v5.9, aka beta-6.0). Gnome is sexier but parts of it crash. It really feels like a development release--I'm not even sure I'd call it a respectable beta. KDE is solid and stable, but still has major missing features and "things that make you go hmmm." Neither is remotely close to the usability of Windows, let alone MacOS.
The Halloween document was correct on at least one point: Usability isn't something that can be easily 'grafted on' to an otherwise finished system, any more than security or stability. It's one of those things that requires fundamental support from the whole package.
To co-opt an old saying: Security, stability, usability; pick any two.
-Graham
On the whole, I like Rob's scheme, not as much for the details as for the amount of effort that is being put into it. Rob's attitude is quite reminiscent of really good BBS sysops of a bygone era--and it's a hard thing to find on the new world of the Web.
That having been said, even though the current proposal is mostly neutral on the topic, some of the comments that have been posted seem to be fairly strongly anti-lurker. The assumption is that unless you are an active contributor of posts to forums, you aren't moderator material. I submit that in many cases lurkers would make better moderators than active posters. While it's true that a lot of lurkers are such simply because they aren't that interested in the site, those aren't the droids we're looking for.
Given the other criteria (long-time users who read articles frequently), lurkers within this group are simply those whose "is this worthwhile" filters are set to "high." Most lurkers within this group, I suspect, would be quite willing to post, if they thought they had something interesting or different to contribute--but most of the time, the obvious responses have already been done to death, and there really isn't that much more to say. The person who can recognize this condition and choose not to post as a result is displaying a quality that can only be seen as desirable in a moderator.
Consider the extreme version of the moderator/contributor choice: You can choose to be a moderator, but only if you give up posting ability on all of slashdot! As a thought experiment, let's assume the problem of posting-as-AC has been solved somehow. Someone willing to make this choice would have demonstrated their objectivity in a way that's hard to ignore. It would be hard to find reasons not to trust this sort of moderator. Yes, they might well have chosen to become a moderator because they feel it's a better (or more powerful) way to express their own opinions, but what of it? Why would anyone contribute to Slashdot, either as moderator, poster, or even Supreme Taco, if not as a vehicle for expressing their opinions? There's no possible way to get totally non-opinionated moderators, because totally non-opinionated people would have little or no reason to participate. But of the available population, lurkers are probably as close as you're going to get.
-Graham
On those occasions when their servers haven't crashed, Microsoft's Web site says that all of the listed products are fully compliant if you install all necessary patches. Maybe "fully compliant" means "they won't crash measurably more often just because it's y2k," but you can't predict a mass Y2K exodus away from MS Office on the strength of that.
After each monkey had typed one letter, there would be an infinite number of pages with exactly one letter typed on them. Given that in no case can one letter be considered equivalent to the works of Shakespeare, exactly zero of the monkeys would have reproduced Shakespeare at that point.
Yeah, I have networking running on a virtual NT4 on RH5.2 + kernel 2.2.1 on a dual P-II 400. It got an address from my DHCP server and just ran. I even installed the Novell client software, and now I can get to all my company's production servers. I installed Delphi 4 on the NT4 virtual box, and I can't really notice a performance difference between this and Delphi running on my PII-300 notebook. The only thing is that window updates are a bit slow sometimes. It seems quite stable, too--I have yet to see it fail in any way.
Also, as to the idea that $300 is too much--it depends on who they're targeting. In my case, anything under $500 my boss can and will sign for if it seems cool. I wouldn't pay $300 for it personally, but it's chump change to any reasonable IT department. At least until you start trying to deploy it to hundreds of desktops.
Even then, I could justify $30,000 on support costs for 100 machines if I could claim noticeable stability improvements. Of course, I can't in this case, because a desktop user running Windows on real hardware is not going to improve stability by running Windows on virtual hardware. Sure, Linux keeps running underneath, but so what?
I'll certainly get a copy for myself, though...
-Graham
I've been trying to convince my employer to consider buying some kind of PC other than Compaq, because you can get better cheaper. I'd despaired of finding any ammo to use in my against them...but this is perfect! Thanks, Compaq.
Like several other people here, I am now at the point where I can barely tolerate reading Katz articles. However, I have an inherent distrust of the reasons for my own discomfort. If reading something is uncomfortable, do you immediately stop and retreat into your comfortable, established worldview, or do you attempt to find a reason for your discomfort and decide if there is something about your worldview that might need to be changed as a result? I prefer the latter. So I have continued to read Katz articles, not because I find them particularly interesting, but in an attempt to discover what it is about them that I object to. With today's article, I have achieved a 'moment of clarity' on the subject.
The reason I don't enjoy reading Katz' articles is that he writes about the definition of a term that I had accepted as self-referential. As a result, I read his articles as if they were about me - and I object to them strongly because they fail to describe me in any way I find acceptable. So the insight to be drawn from them is: I am not a geek. I have been calling myself one for years; I started programming when I was 7 years old (see footnote); I work in the industry; I read slashdot. But I only called myself a geek because it was a convenient term at the time, and provided some sense of shared experience with others of similar mind. If the definition of the word changes to the point where it no longer reflects my experience, then I must abandon the word, not the experience itself. This leaves me without a good word to describe this aspect of myself, which I find uncomfortable, but as I said before, uncomfortable is often the step that comes before understanding.
I am not a geek because: I care about my relationship with society and want to operate as a valued and contributing member rather than an alienated outsider. I have two kids and don't necessarily want them to grow up to be programmers--I would rather that they be well-adjusted socially. I am working on an MBA. In a couple years I plan to stop coding (for money, anyway) and become a manager or a marketer. None of these motivations are compatible with the term 'geek' as it is now defined, not only by Katz but by the whole bandwagon that has sprung up around the term.
This whole business reminds me of the way 'hacker' got corrupted in the 80s. Once I was a hacker; now I am not. I have not changed. Actually, a better comparison would be the way 'Generation X' was misunderstood for so many years. Hollywood and Madison Avenue both thought that the post-Boomer generation was nihilistic, lazy, and heavily influenced by drug and alcohol culture. Even though I'm in the right age group (I am now 30), I vehemently rejected 'GenX' as having anything to do with myself. However, in the last few years, the term 'GenX' seems to have become more like: "People who dig Howard Jones and remember the old hamburgler." This I can identify with. Perhaps, over time, 'geek' will go through this sort of convergence to reality. If it does, perhaps I will adopt it again.
-Graham
Footnote: Per a previous thread, I feel compelled to provide some details. I turned 7 years old in 1975. We did not have a home computer at the time, but my father sometimes brought home a printing terminal for the IBM 360 at work. He arranged for me to have an account in a training area where I couldn't hurt anything, and let me loose. I wrote simple programs in BASIC for a while and got good at it. Through the era of my dad's homebrew machines of the late 70s, I stuck to BASIC as if it were a religion--although I did code some inner loops in 6800 and then 6809 assembly language because it was the only way to get performance. On my 14th birthday, in 1982, my dad bought me a copy of Turbo Pascal for CP/M. My teenage rebellion was against structured programming; I liked GOTOs as a child. But after a year or so of fighting against it, I saw the light and converted to Pascal. In point of fact, I still program in Pascal (Delphi) to this day, although somewhere along the way I also picked up C/C++ and Perl. So when did I start programming? If BASIC doesn't count, then I started when I was 14. If you don't start until you're paid for it, then I started when I was 15--but that was in BASIC. If you aren't a programmer until you have programmed for money in a language other than BASIC, then I started when I was 19. If you aren't a programmer until you've written your own operating system kernel, then I'm not one yet and probably never will be (although I have written a simple compiler). And yes, my only reason for telling you all this is simple ego gratification. Live with it.
The mantra of the pundits for the last few months has been: If Linux is to go mainstream, it must be made easy to use. Everyone's repeating this as if it were ultimate truth, even longtime Linux people. Well, I'm sorry, but I think this misses the whole point.
The reason Linux (and other free software) is appealing is that it provides an opportunity to achieve Computing Freedom(tm). This means being the master of your tools rather than allowing them to control you. This means having full, autonomous control of your computing world.
But it's fundamentally impossible to have it both ways. If you're going to be the master of your tools, you must achieve a difficult, deep and informed understanding of how those tools operate. If you want "easy to use" you are essentially saying you refuse to understand your tools in any detail, you just want to get some other, non-computer-related work done.
But by this refusal to accept responsibility for your own understanding of your own computer, you have essentially subordinated your ability to compute--your Computing Freedom(tm)--to the quality of user interface design provided by some nameless programmer you'll never meet. Your objective at this point is to find the programmers who produce the simplest user interfaces. That ain't Linux.
Perhaps the ultimate illustration of this point goes as follows. What is the fundamental difference between Linux and Windows? With Linux, you get source code. What is the point of having source code if you can't even read it, let alone modify it to suit your preference? None whatever. So what is the fundamental advantage of Linux over Windows or MacOS, for a non-programmer? There isn't any.
So let's focus on our core competency and stop wasting valuable effort trying to make Linux appealing to market segments who don't care about Linux's sustainable strengths. It's like offering jackhammers in designer colors. It makes no sense and it detracts from the focus on things that really matter, like getting the kernel to scale well to higher-end (16- to 64-way) SMP.
-Graham
Wait...you've never had a problem with a Mac, but most of your problems come from out-of-date software versions? Most of nothing?