R.I.P. Debian, you have been a faithful friend for many many years. And there's dark forebodings for the whole of Linux, too. As an environment where I could always agree with the important choices that were taken, I mean. Debian and RedHat were born roughly at the same time. I remember how sad I was to see a split in the Linux world, but a good option was available to me: I could let the jacket-and-tie folks go the way of RedHat, and keep navigating on the interesting seas that Debian was heading towards. Now, no more. The Debian spirit is all but extinguished,and we are bound to have two RedHats for the price of one. Pity. Occasion lost. Now, what will I do with my beloved Debian tee shirt?!?
One of the many eye-openers that reading Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" book has provided me, all those years ago, is that, no matter how much we humans may try, we may *never* be sure to have removed all errors or imperfections from anything that's even marginally worth of our interest. In a nutshell, if you can prove that something has reached perfection, at the same you prove that it is not interesting anymore.
We cannot write complex bug-free software. PERIOD. OpenSSL is not windows. Headlines about OpenSSL bugs are not such a common occurrence. One bug happened at the wrong time, wrong place. This could have happened even if the world had opted for a proprietary library for this critical role. The only difference is that there would have been somebody to sue. Big consolation.
New theories come out of IT faculties around the world at regular intervals, that promise, if strictly followed, the holy grail of bug-free software. All of them eventually prove non-effective.
The only concrete effect of all these tactics is that the job of the programmer becomes more tedious, less interesting. One thing I can tell you from direct experience is that, the lowest the level of interest of the programmer, the higher the possibility will be that bugs may slip into his or her code.
So, the question is wrong. We cannot prevent the next Heartbleed. What the world needs to (re)learn instead is how to cope with unexpected events without reaching for your phone and calling your lawyer.
Many thanks go to all free software contributors, including OpenSSL ones, for what they do!
It depends on what life's ultimate goal is. If it is as I trust it to be - personal growth - enforced "good" behaviour brings nothing at all to me, and thus it is not good at all. Not only do I not grow by blindly obeying orders, but my discriminating capabilities are progressively dulled.
Our uniqueness as human beings is that we are provided with free will. The "bad" option must be available to me if I am to develop my ability to choose what's good for my personal growth.
(what's more: the decision about what's good and what's bad is bounced up (or down?) the power ladder. If you don't trust yourself for that decision, would you trust some remote politician? They are human, too. And often, they are found to be wanting on the ethical plane...)
Most important is who will manage the system. You talk about a NGO. It may base its existence on some set of ethical values. Find a person who developed sufficient net skills, and who shares the values behind the NGO.
I manage my own home site. Domain, mail server, web server. For presence online, one fixed IP address, plus some friend with a second fixed address somewhere else, is enough. No opaque clouds to block my view. A small PC which is always powered is enough.
If requests are kept reasonable - i.e., not pretending to be able to handle thousands of contacts per second, not pretending to maintain multi-million contact mailing lists, and especially not pretending to aspire to the useless utopia of assured 24/7 fault-free presence - half a day per week of paid maintenance plus the emergency intervention here and there should keep your ONG afloat.
You should be able to provide whatever PC-dependent functions you want the 20 people to make use of with Linux apps. Your in-house Linux expert, if adeguately motivated, will be eager to write small scripts (or even huge applications) to cater for your specific needs. Of course, workplace PC's should only be used for work-related activities...
This only works for ethically motivated entities. If you manage a purely for-profit concern, no matter how small, you can only motivate experts to manage your network and machines with money, and there will always be someone who can offer more money than you. For good experts who base their choices on money, it will be a no-brainer to abandon you. What you will be left with are unskilled people with some vague point-and-click experience. You can opt for the cloud, but remember that, whenever an even vaguely important concern is raised, the survival or even the well-being of the entity providing the cloud services will always come before yours. ALWAYS! They are big and you are less than small.
The solution: either become a huge money-printing concern and get the best people available on the market, or much better, BE ETHICAL.
If Perl, Python, and Ruby are unable to match Java's performance, I'll take their portability, ease of development, lack of overhead and succinctness over Java any day.
Java's currently used for a lot of different things -- the scripting languages are a good fit to replace some, but not all and I wouldn't even really say most, of it.
For Perl or Python I cannot speak. But it is now more than 5 years that I switched, for my development work, to Ruby as my main language. I talk about more than 150.000 lines of Ruby, mostly for big interactive art installations (have a look at the web page of my best client to have an idea of what I am talking about).
How have I solved the evident performance problem? First of all, Ruby version 1.9 made the language much snappier. But if you need as much performance as you can get, Ruby makes it easy and comfortable to merge sections written in C within programs. If the partition between the two languages is made with intelligence (i.e. limiting C to machine-intensive small "engines"), you can really obtain the best of two worlds. C outperforms Java, and Ruby is much nicer to work with than Java.
The holy grail is to know at any moment where every subject is, with as much precision as possible.
Obviously it is impossible for any kind of authority or goods provider to guarantee for you an accident-free future. Statistics may show an improvement (although statistics may be easily shaped to say what you want them to say). But they will never represent an assurance that you will be spared the specific pain or annoyance tomorrow.
On the other hand, to know at any moment where every subject is (and in this case, to eventually be able to remotely control their means of transportation) gives, to a more and more remote, less and less humane form of government, the possibility to steer the herd of primates with less effort.
Not evil - just plain lazy. If, at the expense of personal liberty, humans are restrained from committing what the government decides to forbid, law enforcers have less work to do. But I don't like it. To behave correctly because you are forced to does not bring about personal growth, and I am here on this earth to grow, not to own the latest volvo...
a majority of the scientific community, most sensible thinkers. Against - A small minority of sceptical scientists who on the whole tend not to be climatologists.
Wouldn't your average "sensible thinker" maybe end up risking his cozy well-fed professorship by adopting a controversial position? As well as his friends, maybe, and that network of relations that he invested so much time and energy into building up? Conformism pays a lot. Especially where much much much money is involved. Think of this: who gives out official "climatologist" labels?
...that nutbag down the road who lives in his mother's basement and believes that JFK was assassinated by time travelling Nazi robots...
The "nutbag" is currently busier trying to make out how the WTC towers could collapse at free-fall speed while having to destroy floor after floor of massive steel pillars on their way...
I completely share your disappointment at Python's usage of indentation as syntax. I gave python a deep review when it appeared, around '97 or '98. I was fascinated by the concepts, I could see there was some important element of progress in it. But I concluded that I could never use the language because of the indentation problem. It was (and is) unacceptable that I would end up changing the logic of a program by inadvertently deleting an invisible tab. It is the duty of the editor to fix the right indentation of my code, and it is an invaluable debugging tool to press tab in my Emacs screen and find out what the right indentation should be. This is obviously impossible if it is the change of indentation itself that marks the end of a loop or of an if clause. Really really really impossible to adopt.
I had hopes that the Python developers would eventually give in and allow the (maybe facultative) usage of a reserved word for closing loops and clauses. This has not happened. Worse: it has become a matter of pride, a distinctive aspect of the language.
I went on with my mostly C with limited Java usage. Until in 2005 I decided to give Ruby a try. From that moment, all my projects have been written in Ruby, with substantial C inserts. After writing almost 100.000 lines of Ruby code, I am more awed than ever about the qualities of the language. It goes without saying that you use keywords to close loops and clauses in Ruby (either the end keyword, or C-like curly brackets, at your choice.)
A few reasons for giving Ruby a try:
Ruby is from the same generation of Python, only newer. Same zeitgeist, better implementation.
Ruby comes from Japan, where it is developed with typical pragmatic attitude. The language contains what is useful, often with more than one possible alternative (you can create your own distinctive style).
Ruby implements the object-oriented paradigm in a full, no-compromise way, which is at last capable to deliver the results (in terms of ease of coding and adherence to thought processes) that were promised by the theoreticians.
Ruby has a lean, very efficient way of including C code. it is really possible to have the best of both worlds. If you need to use a C library, it is easy to write your own bindings, provided they have not already been written by someone else.
Ruby is very net-aware. Generic tasks can be implemented in a few lines of code.
You should take great care to distinguish between Ruby and Ruby on Rails. The first one is the language. The second one is an application based on the language. While it is obviously good that RoR gained such a notable momentum, it must be remembered that Ruby is a language as of itself, with great qualities that can be harvested even if one does not use RoR. I, for one, do not use RoR.
The reason why I did not switch to GIT when Linus created it is that it was not possible to add auto-modifying keywords. With keywords, the SCM can physically modify your files, in precisely marked spots, to indicate the version level of a file in the actual code. I really like this aspect.
At the first publication of GIT, I remember Linus holding a strong stance against keywords. This is why I did not convert to GIT (I am a one-man-company and I do not need to collaborate on code: I need SCM to keep all old versions and changes).
In the current GIT faq they mention that keyword substitution is "not recommended", but they then point to the
man page of gitattributes, which, disappointingly, does not mention keywords.
This is why I keep using SVN. I need my sources to hold within themselves an easily trackable age indication.
One of the most important requirements, in my opinion, of an eventual solution to the energy problem would have to be the possibility to easily produce and store it at a local/individual level. Any solution that requires the existence of a distribution grid does not satisfy this requirement, and is bound to suffer from cut-throat monopoly practices.
For this reason I found the possibility to produce one's own hydrogen very appealing. This solution, I understand, is currently very limited in range, and the whole hydrogen technology has many concrete obstacles to overcome. But you cannot compare it to propane gas, for example. Propane gas is a fossil fuel (must be extracted), while hydrogen comes from water.
Yes, you need energy to extract hydrogen from water. The required electricity could come from a local windmill or solar panel array. What I did not find (maybe I did not search long enough) is, how does the electricity consumption to produce hydrogen to travel those 25 miles compare to a) the amount of gasoline and b) the amount of electricity that an electric car would use to travel along the same distance. Does anybody have these figures?
I have been using xfce for years now, for my personal desktops (with 30 virtual screens!). For me, it is the right balance between complexity (nifty accessories) and lightness of use. With the Gnome aesthetics - I do really prefer the graphical look of Gnome over KDE. This is not only due to the fact that I try to avoid anything C++.
For work, most of the times I use plain X. Without a windows manager. I develop applications for interactive arts installations. I generally use one or more SDL-managed windows with or without OpenGL inside. If I really need windows decorations, I use Oroborus, a very simple, very lean windows manager, and I use GTK+ if interactive widgets are needed. All of this, in Ruby. With C-coded snippets when speed is crucial.
There is life outside of the Gnome/KDE dichotomy. Sometimes, I still use text mode!
I really love the living utopian minds who spend big slices of their time posting on Slashdot. No matter what your current sets of convictions (if we are evolving, our convictions evolve with us), I get the impression that you do really care.
What I have realized, after many years, is that the effort to work with the noble goal to improve objective world, even by little, has no way to guarantee objective changes. While it is true that large-scale changes are always sparked by individuals' acts, it is also true that, in almost all cases, those individuals are not at all conscious of the future effects of their acts. This would require the ability to have a perfectly objective outlook on reality, and our outlook is always, unescapably biased. This bias can change, it can be reduced, it can be better understood, but it cannot be completely erased.
So, what do I do? I accept all challenges that life offers me; I act; I operate on reality with enthusiasm. But I try with as much serenity as possible to not decide beforehand what the best outcome of my actions has to be. I focus on defying laziness, my strongest enemy.
Then, if I am confident that I have done all that life has asked of me for the present time, I can, I must leave no space to frustration at the state of the world. As long as I have completed what I know is my present duty, as long as I have done my best to limit suffering upon living beings to whatever minimum I can reach, I am entitled to whatever happiness welcomes me. It is unjust towards myself to lose myself in cosmic anguish (unless this is what I consider a healthy pastime. I do not.)
Sincere, spontaneous compassion towards whatever suffering I come to witness is a feeling I carefully consider and welcome. If the feeling comes together with clear indications of something concrete to do to relief the suffering, I must overcome laziness and provide help: I must help an old lady change the tyre of her car if I encounter her on my way. But remote, large-scale problems, problems for which no direct act of mine that I can think of can have a confirmed constructive effect, must not distract me from my present circumstances.
The present US government smells fishy (to say the least). But what government doesn't? I can foresee that whoever wins between Condi and Hillary will provide the world with an equivalent aroma. Security-justified freedom curtailing is running wild everywhere, regardless of the fact that freedom limitation cannot protect any subject from sufficiently determined "terrorists". But there are way too many interests involved in this trend. I cannot envisage any practical plan that could result in its reversal.
What can I do then?
Make sure that I constantly challenge my laziness so that I do not postpone forever what I know I must do.
Make sure that I do my best to avoid hurting other sentient beings.
At this point,I will actively search for personal conditions of life that will allow me to constructively evolve. I know that drinkable water is bound to become a precious asset, so I have the duty to search for myself a corner of this beautiful world where water is good and abundant, and things promise to remain like this for a decent time span. Then I know that there are vast amounts of people in Africa who are starving. But I also know (source: U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Base) that the population of Africa was 228 millions in 1950, 471 millions in 1980 and 891 millions in 2005. How did this happen? And now we are force-feeding them with transgenic, sterile crops and anti-retroviral poisons.
I do also have to do what is possible so that my conscience is not tainted by my day-to-day activities. I write software. The most interesting software that is there to develop dabbles with genetics or arms (or both) (not with security -- security jobs are extremely well-paid but a royal PITA). I know that, should I be offered a thrillingly int
Yes, it absolutely is in a company's best economic interest if I just grab a handy soda and go back to work without losing my train of thought, rather than walk or drive to get one.
Did you happen to read Edward De Bono's books about lateral thinking?
Creativity is very much stimulated by periodic changes in perspective. I remember one of De Bono's examples, about being stuck with some hard-to-solve problem, and finding the solution during a refreshing visit to a local flea market.
Flea markets are unexpectedly varied: this is how they help you get fresh insights. Opting for a short trip to the outside world, maybe together with an effort to visit some unknown feeding coordinates, surely helps in improving the quality of the output of any creative professional.
And programmers are creative professionals, even the people at Microsoft...!
Yes, but, thanks to huuuuge gains made by oil companies, research in the direction of finding a clean, cheap substitute for oil is (I believe) actively hampered.
You must have a lot of courage (and your research must be damn cheap) to aim your research to a direction that risks damaging the gains of the oil dons.
Yet, I believe the availability of cheap, clean energy is the only possible safe way out from the messy situation we are in.
Not loving the epic of the soldier, I am not at all seeing with joy the perspective that resources (water, rather than oil...) be captured by force.
The largest majority of you may not care, but the point is: do I
really want to offer the results of my hard work to the military?
If they snarf some of the code you wrote for the Free Software
community, well, you cannot really do anything about it (apart from
hoping that the whole military concept will fall into oblivion as soon
as we humans learn to live in peace). They have done so and will do so
again: there are multiple signs of Linux and friends being used in
many.mil situations.
But do you really want to burden your
karma by pouring the precious juice of your neurons directly into
their bottomless pits?
They indeed have money. Military and
security are where big money can be made currently. But while with
security you are just making impossible promises (there is no security
that cannot be broken given enough time, patience and effort), with
the military you are just plainly contributing to make the world
worse.
I am stunned by another thing. Why on earth do the
military rely on external contractors for weapons code? Since we all
know that writing bug-free code is impossible, this is probably the
situation where it would be most important to have the author
of the code promptly available (with his/her green-gray dress loaded with
the appropriate amount of stars and medals) for day-to-day
maintenance. Is military code written with the same love for Quality
that characterizes the Redmond masterpieces?
'Till then I bet you're just like everyone else -- you have at least one skeleton in the
closet.
It is slightly different. You can be completely OK with your
conscience. And you still have reasons to protect yourself from these
threats. That's because laws are written to be pliable. And because
any government, yours, mine, both the old and the new Afghan
one, passes laws to defend itself. And to make its life
easier. Sometimes your conscience allows, sometimes your conscience
forces you to violate laws of whatever country you happen to
live in.
But all this can backfire. Evil hackers will find their way
sometime or other through whatever backdoor exists. There are simply
too many around. And all the info that would be for the government's
eyes only will be accessible to surely less trustworthy elements.
What if they tell them: you let us spy on windows users, and we
will be as helpful as we can be in the field of antitrust and similar
stuff.
While I believe that it is concretely possible to receive an infested.deb or even an infested kernel, I believe we linux users have two
advantages: 1) we are more attentive and careful and 2) we know how to
handle our systems.
Our system could become compromised, but there would most probably be
little time before we found out. And really fixed our boxes.
Which is what attentive and careful windows user could also do if they
had hold of the source.
So, the solution is, yes, to use an open OS, but also to be and remain
attentive and careful. And to learn what we are doing and why. This is
what information age boils to:
a) you don't use computers (and you probably live in some monastery in
the mountains).
b) you use computers but you prefer to remain ignorant about what
happens behind the hood. I would prefer to say: you are used by
computers.
c) you understand computers, you use them for what they're worth, you
don't let any corporation or government pull dirty tricks to you. You
help family and friends and common people in doing so (provided they
accept to shed off their laziness).
Windows is the lazy choice. Due to their laziness, people willingly
"bend over." Microsoft does not need to "bend over:" they are slowly
fusing with the US government, who will find it (already finds it?)
extremely useful to keep an eye on lazy corporations and people.
An ideal anarchic is as distant as possible from right & left. An anarchic idealist would probably stay away from any kind of ballot box.
But an anarchic individualist who kept ears and eyes open and happened to be of American nationality should have the courage of evaluating her/his options.
This election (still?) has 0% possibility that a non-rep/dem candidate will be elected. So this all is really about choosing the least bad one.
To climb to the top of the political pyramid you have to eat and digest loads of unhealthy stuff. This leaves all top-level politicians tainted. The only thing that can at least partially protect a politician from the ebullient sea of excrement that she/has to wade through is a strong character.
GWB or Gore? My point of view is that GWB is even less able to take his own decisions than Clinton. At least, with Clinton, it was a family affair. I have this image of GWB with a big steering wheel planted into his skull, ready to be very proficiently used by the dark gnomes of real, material power.
OTOH I see Gore not as an unforgettable personality, but at least as someone who might be evaluating his choices according to a personal, and possibly partially condivisible scale of values.
Of course, my biggest fright is that any and all existing attempts to curb microsoft's omnipotence would be quickly and quietly silenced by whoever would be holding GWB's steering wheel. But that's only the beginning. I see GWB as the lowering of all and any remaining defenses against multinationals of all kinds.
* * *
This message has been brought to you by a non-socialist, anarchic idealist who sadly knows that mass protests, while giving space to animal instincts in some protesters, have the only practical result of moving more and more midwestern suburbanites to wish for the flat-brain-wave tranquillity of sitcoms & macdonalds (& windows) that the GWB pilots will make sure to expand even more.
This message has been brought to you by an anarchic individualist who will not vote. Because he is not American...
I think Corel should have hired two persons, not one. Maybe, with half the experience. But, one who would be paid for finding bugs/unpleasant features in KDE's UI, and another (this time, a Linux developer) to actually perform the changes.
This way, instead of just submitting truckloads of bug reports, Corel would have been submitting truckloads of patches. And whoever is responsible for top-level steering of KDE would have found it much easier to apply those patches that were judged kosher.
And all this by using a LOT less time and energy from the unpaid main KDE developers.
This way, Corel would also have been able to benefit much more quickly from their UI expert's work. With the risk of spinning off a different version of KDE, but that's not so bad.
Slashdot Mirror
R.I.P. Debian, you have been a faithful friend for many many years. And there's dark forebodings for the whole of Linux, too. As an environment where I could always agree with the important choices that were taken, I mean.
Debian and RedHat were born roughly at the same time. I remember how sad I was to see a split in the Linux world, but a good option was available to me: I could let the jacket-and-tie folks go the way of RedHat, and keep navigating on the interesting seas that Debian was heading towards.
Now, no more. The Debian spirit is all but extinguished,and we are bound to have two RedHats for the price of one.
Pity. Occasion lost.
Now, what will I do with my beloved Debian tee shirt?!?
No. Software for which you can guarantee that no error exist is not only boring: it is useless.
You do not get my point. You may succeed in rendering it less probable. But you cannot prevent it.
One of the many eye-openers that reading Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" book has provided me, all those years ago, is that, no matter how much we humans may try, we may *never* be sure to have removed all errors or imperfections from anything that's even marginally worth of our interest. In a nutshell, if you can prove that something has reached perfection, at the same you prove that it is not interesting anymore.
We cannot write complex bug-free software. PERIOD. OpenSSL is not windows. Headlines about OpenSSL bugs are not such a common occurrence. One bug happened at the wrong time, wrong place. This could have happened even if the world had opted for a proprietary library for this critical role. The only difference is that there would have been somebody to sue. Big consolation.
New theories come out of IT faculties around the world at regular intervals, that promise, if strictly followed, the holy grail of bug-free software. All of them eventually prove non-effective.
The only concrete effect of all these tactics is that the job of the programmer becomes more tedious, less interesting. One thing I can tell you from direct experience is that, the lowest the level of interest of the programmer, the higher the possibility will be that bugs may slip into his or her code.
So, the question is wrong. We cannot prevent the next Heartbleed. What the world needs to (re)learn instead is how to cope with unexpected events without reaching for your phone and calling your lawyer.
Many thanks go to all free software contributors, including OpenSSL ones, for what they do!
It depends on what life's ultimate goal is. If it is as I trust it to be - personal growth - enforced "good" behaviour brings nothing at all to me, and thus it is not good at all. Not only do I not grow by blindly obeying orders, but my discriminating capabilities are progressively dulled.
Our uniqueness as human beings is that we are provided with free will. The "bad" option must be available to me if I am to develop my ability to choose what's good for my personal growth.
(what's more: the decision about what's good and what's bad is bounced up (or down?) the power ladder. If you don't trust yourself for that decision, would you trust some remote politician? They are human, too. And often, they are found to be wanting on the ethical plane...)
Most important is who will manage the system. You talk about a NGO. It may base its existence on some set of ethical values. Find a person who developed sufficient net skills, and who shares the values behind the NGO.
I manage my own home site. Domain, mail server, web server. For presence online, one fixed IP address, plus some friend with a second fixed address somewhere else, is enough. No opaque clouds to block my view. A small PC which is always powered is enough.
If requests are kept reasonable - i.e., not pretending to be able to handle thousands of contacts per second, not pretending to maintain multi-million contact mailing lists, and especially not pretending to aspire to the useless utopia of assured 24/7 fault-free presence - half a day per week of paid maintenance plus the emergency intervention here and there should keep your ONG afloat.
You should be able to provide whatever PC-dependent functions you want the 20 people to make use of with Linux apps. Your in-house Linux expert, if adeguately motivated, will be eager to write small scripts (or even huge applications) to cater for your specific needs. Of course, workplace PC's should only be used for work-related activities...
This only works for ethically motivated entities. If you manage a purely for-profit concern, no matter how small, you can only motivate experts to manage your network and machines with money, and there will always be someone who can offer more money than you. For good experts who base their choices on money, it will be a no-brainer to abandon you. What you will be left with are unskilled people with some vague point-and-click experience. You can opt for the cloud, but remember that, whenever an even vaguely important concern is raised, the survival or even the well-being of the entity providing the cloud services will always come before yours. ALWAYS! They are big and you are less than small.
The solution: either become a huge money-printing concern and get the best people available on the market, or much better, BE ETHICAL.
For Perl or Python I cannot speak. But it is now more than 5 years that I switched, for my development work, to Ruby as my main language. I talk about more than 150.000 lines of Ruby, mostly for big interactive art installations (have a look at the web page of my best client to have an idea of what I am talking about).
How have I solved the evident performance problem? First of all, Ruby version 1.9 made the language much snappier. But if you need as much performance as you can get, Ruby makes it easy and comfortable to merge sections written in C within programs. If the partition between the two languages is made with intelligence (i.e. limiting C to machine-intensive small "engines"), you can really obtain the best of two worlds. C outperforms Java, and Ruby is much nicer to work with than Java.
The holy grail is to know at any moment where every subject is, with as much precision as possible.
Obviously it is impossible for any kind of authority or goods provider to guarantee for you an accident-free future. Statistics may show an improvement (although statistics may be easily shaped to say what you want them to say). But they will never represent an assurance that you will be spared the specific pain or annoyance tomorrow.
On the other hand, to know at any moment where every subject is (and in this case, to eventually be able to remotely control their means of transportation) gives, to a more and more remote, less and less humane form of government, the possibility to steer the herd of primates with less effort.
Not evil - just plain lazy. If, at the expense of personal liberty, humans are restrained from committing what the government decides to forbid, law enforcers have less work to do. But I don't like it. To behave correctly because you are forced to does not bring about personal growth, and I am here on this earth to grow, not to own the latest volvo...
a majority of the scientific community, most sensible thinkers. Against - A small minority of sceptical scientists who on the whole tend not to be climatologists.
Wouldn't your average "sensible thinker" maybe end up risking his cozy well-fed professorship by adopting a controversial position? As well as his friends, maybe, and that network of relations that he invested so much time and energy into building up? Conformism pays a lot. Especially where much much much money is involved. Think of this: who gives out official "climatologist" labels?
...that nutbag down the road who lives in his mother's basement and believes that JFK was assassinated by time travelling Nazi robots...
The "nutbag" is currently busier trying to make out how the WTC towers could collapse at free-fall speed while having to destroy floor after floor of massive steel pillars on their way...
I completely share your disappointment at Python's usage of indentation as syntax. I gave python a deep review when it appeared, around '97 or '98. I was fascinated by the concepts, I could see there was some important element of progress in it. But I concluded that I could never use the language because of the indentation problem. It was (and is) unacceptable that I would end up changing the logic of a program by inadvertently deleting an invisible tab. It is the duty of the editor to fix the right indentation of my code, and it is an invaluable debugging tool to press tab in my Emacs screen and find out what the right indentation should be. This is obviously impossible if it is the change of indentation itself that marks the end of a loop or of an if clause. Really really really impossible to adopt.
I had hopes that the Python developers would eventually give in and allow the (maybe facultative) usage of a reserved word for closing loops and clauses. This has not happened. Worse: it has become a matter of pride, a distinctive aspect of the language.
I went on with my mostly C with limited Java usage. Until in 2005 I decided to give Ruby a try. From that moment, all my projects have been written in Ruby, with substantial C inserts. After writing almost 100.000 lines of Ruby code, I am more awed than ever about the qualities of the language. It goes without saying that you use keywords to close loops and clauses in Ruby (either the end keyword, or C-like curly brackets, at your choice.)
A few reasons for giving Ruby a try:
You should take great care to distinguish between Ruby and Ruby on Rails. The first one is the language. The second one is an application based on the language. While it is obviously good that RoR gained such a notable momentum, it must be remembered that Ruby is a language as of itself, with great qualities that can be harvested even if one does not use RoR. I, for one, do not use RoR.
I find it curious that nobody mentions keywords.
The reason why I did not switch to GIT when Linus created it is that it was not possible to add auto-modifying keywords. With keywords, the SCM can physically modify your files, in precisely marked spots, to indicate the version level of a file in the actual code. I really like this aspect.
At the first publication of GIT, I remember Linus holding a strong stance against keywords. This is why I did not convert to GIT (I am a one-man-company and I do not need to collaborate on code: I need SCM to keep all old versions and changes).
(You can read Linus' stand on this, for example, in this e-mail from 2006)
In the current GIT faq they mention that keyword substitution is "not recommended", but they then point to the man page of gitattributes, which, disappointingly, does not mention keywords.
This is why I keep using SVN. I need my sources to hold within themselves an easily trackable age indication.
One of the most important requirements, in my opinion, of an eventual solution to the energy problem would have to be the possibility to easily produce and store it at a local/individual level. Any solution that requires the existence of a distribution grid does not satisfy this requirement, and is bound to suffer from cut-throat monopoly practices.
For this reason I found the possibility to produce one's own hydrogen very appealing. This solution, I understand, is currently very limited in range, and the whole hydrogen technology has many concrete obstacles to overcome. But you cannot compare it to propane gas, for example. Propane gas is a fossil fuel (must be extracted), while hydrogen comes from water.
Yes, you need energy to extract hydrogen from water. The required electricity could come from a local windmill or solar panel array. What I did not find (maybe I did not search long enough) is, how does the electricity consumption to produce hydrogen to travel those 25 miles compare to a) the amount of gasoline and b) the amount of electricity that an electric car would use to travel along the same distance. Does anybody have these figures?
I have been using xfce for years now, for my personal desktops (with 30 virtual screens!). For me, it is the right balance between complexity (nifty accessories) and lightness of use. With the Gnome aesthetics - I do really prefer the graphical look of Gnome over KDE. This is not only due to the fact that I try to avoid anything C++.
For work, most of the times I use plain X. Without a windows manager. I develop applications for interactive arts installations. I generally use one or more SDL-managed windows with or without OpenGL inside. If I really need windows decorations, I use Oroborus, a very simple, very lean windows manager, and I use GTK+ if interactive widgets are needed. All of this, in Ruby. With C-coded snippets when speed is crucial.
There is life outside of the Gnome/KDE dichotomy. Sometimes, I still use text mode!
I really love the living utopian minds who spend big slices of their time posting on Slashdot. No matter what your current sets of convictions (if we are evolving, our convictions evolve with us), I get the impression that you do really care.
What I have realized, after many years, is that the effort to work with the noble goal to improve objective world, even by little, has no way to guarantee objective changes. While it is true that large-scale changes are always sparked by individuals' acts, it is also true that, in almost all cases, those individuals are not at all conscious of the future effects of their acts. This would require the ability to have a perfectly objective outlook on reality, and our outlook is always, unescapably biased. This bias can change, it can be reduced, it can be better understood, but it cannot be completely erased.
So, what do I do? I accept all challenges that life offers me; I act; I operate on reality with enthusiasm. But I try with as much serenity as possible to not decide beforehand what the best outcome of my actions has to be. I focus on defying laziness, my strongest enemy.
Then, if I am confident that I have done all that life has asked of me for the present time, I can, I must leave no space to frustration at the state of the world. As long as I have completed what I know is my present duty, as long as I have done my best to limit suffering upon living beings to whatever minimum I can reach, I am entitled to whatever happiness welcomes me. It is unjust towards myself to lose myself in cosmic anguish (unless this is what I consider a healthy pastime. I do not.)
Sincere, spontaneous compassion towards whatever suffering I come to witness is a feeling I carefully consider and welcome. If the feeling comes together with clear indications of something concrete to do to relief the suffering, I must overcome laziness and provide help: I must help an old lady change the tyre of her car if I encounter her on my way. But remote, large-scale problems, problems for which no direct act of mine that I can think of can have a confirmed constructive effect, must not distract me from my present circumstances.
The present US government smells fishy (to say the least). But what government doesn't? I can foresee that whoever wins between Condi and Hillary will provide the world with an equivalent aroma. Security-justified freedom curtailing is running wild everywhere, regardless of the fact that freedom limitation cannot protect any subject from sufficiently determined "terrorists". But there are way too many interests involved in this trend. I cannot envisage any practical plan that could result in its reversal.
What can I do then?
Yes, it absolutely is in a company's best economic interest if I just grab a handy soda and go back to work without losing my train of thought, rather than walk or drive to get one.
Did you happen to read Edward De Bono's books about lateral thinking?
Creativity is very much stimulated by periodic changes in perspective. I remember one of De Bono's examples, about being stuck with some hard-to-solve problem, and finding the solution during a refreshing visit to a local flea market.
Flea markets are unexpectedly varied: this is how they help you get fresh insights. Opting for a short trip to the outside world, maybe together with an effort to visit some unknown feeding coordinates, surely helps in improving the quality of the output of any creative professional.
And programmers are creative professionals, even the people at Microsoft...!
Yes, but, thanks to huuuuge gains made by oil companies, research in the direction of finding a clean, cheap substitute for oil is (I believe) actively hampered.
You must have a lot of courage (and your research must be damn cheap) to aim your research to a direction that risks damaging the gains of the oil dons.
Yet, I believe the availability of cheap, clean energy is the only possible safe way out from the messy situation we are in.
Not loving the epic of the soldier, I am not at all seeing with joy the perspective that resources (water, rather than oil...) be captured by force.
The largest majority of you may not care, but the point is: do I really want to offer the results of my hard work to the military?
If they snarf some of the code you wrote for the Free Software community, well, you cannot really do anything about it (apart from hoping that the whole military concept will fall into oblivion as soon as we humans learn to live in peace). They have done so and will do so again: there are multiple signs of Linux and friends being used in many .mil situations.
But do you really want to burden your karma by pouring the precious juice of your neurons directly into their bottomless pits?
They indeed have money. Military and security are where big money can be made currently. But while with security you are just making impossible promises (there is no security that cannot be broken given enough time, patience and effort), with the military you are just plainly contributing to make the world worse.
I am stunned by another thing. Why on earth do the military rely on external contractors for weapons code? Since we all know that writing bug-free code is impossible, this is probably the situation where it would be most important to have the author of the code promptly available (with his/her green-gray dress loaded with the appropriate amount of stars and medals) for day-to-day maintenance. Is military code written with the same love for Quality that characterizes the Redmond masterpieces?
'Till then I bet you're just like everyone else -- you have at least one skeleton in the closet.
It is slightly different. You can be completely OK with your conscience. And you still have reasons to protect yourself from these threats. That's because laws are written to be pliable. And because any government, yours, mine, both the old and the new Afghan one, passes laws to defend itself. And to make its life easier. Sometimes your conscience allows, sometimes your conscience forces you to violate laws of whatever country you happen to live in.
But all this can backfire. Evil hackers will find their way sometime or other through whatever backdoor exists. There are simply too many around. And all the info that would be for the government's eyes only will be accessible to surely less trustworthy elements.
Any backdoor can backfire! Enjoy...
What if they tell them: you let us spy on windows users, and we will be as helpful as we can be in the field of antitrust and similar stuff.
While I believe that it is concretely possible to receive an infested .deb or even an infested kernel, I believe we linux users have two
advantages: 1) we are more attentive and careful and 2) we know how to
handle our systems.
Our system could become compromised, but there would most probably be little time before we found out. And really fixed our boxes.
Which is what attentive and careful windows user could also do if they had hold of the source.
So, the solution is, yes, to use an open OS, but also to be and remain attentive and careful. And to learn what we are doing and why. This is what information age boils to:
a) you don't use computers (and you probably live in some monastery in the mountains).
b) you use computers but you prefer to remain ignorant about what happens behind the hood. I would prefer to say: you are used by computers.
c) you understand computers, you use them for what they're worth, you don't let any corporation or government pull dirty tricks to you. You help family and friends and common people in doing so (provided they accept to shed off their laziness).
Windows is the lazy choice. Due to their laziness, people willingly "bend over." Microsoft does not need to "bend over:" they are slowly fusing with the US government, who will find it (already finds it?) extremely useful to keep an eye on lazy corporations and people.
The process will be very quiet.
I actually set the user agent string of my w3m to Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Linux) and it worked!
I like this. It shows what Micro$oft should have done with IE long time ago if they wanted to prove their intellectual honesty: a version for Linux!
Well, they now have it in their statistics.
But an anarchic individualist who kept ears and eyes open and happened to be of American nationality should have the courage of evaluating her/his options.
This election (still?) has 0% possibility that a non-rep/dem candidate will be elected. So this all is really about choosing the least bad one.
To climb to the top of the political pyramid you have to eat and digest loads of unhealthy stuff. This leaves all top-level politicians tainted. The only thing that can at least partially protect a politician from the ebullient sea of excrement that she/has to wade through is a strong character.
GWB or Gore? My point of view is that GWB is even less able to take his own decisions than Clinton. At least, with Clinton, it was a family affair. I have this image of GWB with a big steering wheel planted into his skull, ready to be very proficiently used by the dark gnomes of real, material power.
OTOH I see Gore not as an unforgettable personality, but at least as someone who might be evaluating his choices according to a personal, and possibly partially condivisible scale of values.
Of course, my biggest fright is that any and all existing attempts to curb microsoft's omnipotence would be quickly and quietly silenced by whoever would be holding GWB's steering wheel. But that's only the beginning. I see GWB as the lowering of all and any remaining defenses against multinationals of all kinds.
* * *
This message has been brought to you by a non-socialist, anarchic idealist who sadly knows that mass protests, while giving space to animal instincts in some protesters, have the only practical result of moving more and more midwestern suburbanites to wish for the flat-brain-wave tranquillity of sitcoms & macdonalds (& windows) that the GWB pilots will make sure to expand even more.
This message has been brought to you by an anarchic individualist who will not vote. Because he is not American...
I think Corel should have hired two persons, not one. Maybe, with half the experience. But, one who would be paid for finding bugs/unpleasant features in KDE's UI, and another (this time, a Linux developer) to actually perform the changes.
This way, instead of just submitting truckloads of bug reports, Corel would have been submitting truckloads of patches. And whoever is responsible for top-level steering of KDE would have found it much easier to apply those patches that were judged kosher.
And all this by using a LOT less time and energy from the unpaid main KDE developers.
This way, Corel would also have been able to benefit much more quickly from their UI expert's work. With the risk of spinning off a different version of KDE, but that's not so bad.
disclaimer: I don't use KDE.