Here's the question you have to ask yourself, though... will your friends and relatives who don't use OSS and who have crashes & viruses actually do better with OSS and a fresh install of Linux?
In every organization I have ever been, a support person has been able to support about ten times as many UNIX/Linux machines as Windows machines. So, yes, I'd say there is a clear advantage to UNIX/Linux: keeping a Windows machine that sees any significant amount of usage running properly is a lot of work compared to a Linux machine (it also costs a lot of money).
If people put the time into Windows that Linux-users put into Linux/OSS (by way of customization, and finding apps and drivers), they'd have a much more reliable machine
People can't even install the Windows OS (let alone any Windows applications) in the time that it takes to install a full Linux desktop system with a full complement of applications (something that would cost you days of work and a lot of money for Windows).
Most people, in fact, install Windows with their credit card--by buying a new machine.
I'm being invaded by belly button lint! Get it off of me! Aieeeee...
Seriously. Lesions containing cellulose fibers in designer colors? Where are they supposed to come from? Invasive sesame seeds with a 70's designer heritage? This looks like an Internet hoax.
In any case, as far as doctors are concerned, it doesn't matter what they tell patients since even if there were such an organism, nobody would have a clue how to begin treating it.
Google should remove "ServersCheck" from their index; that will remove all illegal content related to that business. Of course, it will also remove 90% of the bussiness's traffic, but, hey, they want to be safe, and now they are safe.
Besides our brains, there is one other body part that is unusually large (for our body size) in humans: the primary sexual organs. That means that sex with a monkey probably wouldn't work that well for most anatomically modern humans (M/F).
In fact, it's quite possible that the change in our sexual anatomy was what finally caused us to split from other primates.
Demanding encryption keys is a pointless exercise; there are several techniques and systems supporting deniable encryption. You can achieve deniable encryption via steganography or random erasure of your hard disk. Some systems even support an arbitrary number of layers, so you can keep revealing things and still hold more back.
Even just using steganography alone, any noisy signal can be used for deniable encryption. So, if the UK government wants to be able to decrypt everything, they better also pass and enforce a law outlawing noise. I think everybody, from audiophiles to engineers, would surely be really happy if they succeeded at that.
Unfortunately, it sometimes becomes necessary to do so if there is disagreement in the way a project is handled.
You make it sound as if it's a personality issue. It may be, but usually, it's real technical or licensing issues that cause projects to split.
In this case and as a one-time Java software developer, I would definitely NOT want fragmentation in Java's implementation.
It's telling that you talk about "fragmentation in Java's implementation" because that's what Java really is: a single implementation.
In any case, Sun's obsession with control has lost them the desktop market, the applet market, and the numerical market. All they have left is education and a sliver of the enterprise server market. The reason why the Java community doesn't want fragmentation anymore is because all the people who have needs different from Sun's and yours have left in frustration.
I would agree to that kind of a license if and only if Sun relinquishes control of the JCP to the public.
I doubt it matters much anymore. Java has a specific market segment, the platform is what it is, and I don't see people coming back anymore or investing the energy to fix it; it's just not worth it--we have better choices.
Ubuntu is what Debian Stable should be: it's on a regular release schedule and well tested. If Debian gets their act together and gets Stable out the door every six months, then I'll switch back. Or maybe Debian should just start using Ubuntu as their Stable release.
Technically, the best solution for this kind of migration could be moving the code to managed C++: you keep your working code, the managed environment may find bugs you didn't know about, and you can do new development and rearchitecting in a more productive language. A big practical problem with that is that the only mainstream managed C++ solution comes from Microsoft and you may not want to be tied to Microsoft platforms (I don't).
But that's probably the only generic advice one can give you. Beyond that, deciding whether Java or anything else is the right choice depends on too many factors.
I hope their "prior java issues" will remain: Sun Java has no place on Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships with at least two open source Java implementations, and if you don't like either of them, go take a hike.
In fact, Ubuntu's Mono integration is so good that I'm really worried about Sun being allowed to get anywhere near it.
I guess there is nothing Ubuntu can do about being picked by Sun, but this is not a positive development as far as I'm concerned. I hope Sun won't be allowed to meddle or participate in the Ubuntu development process.
I realize that it is free, and it won't be as well featured as most purchased software
Actually, I think OpenOffice is more "well-featured" than Microsoft Office or any other office suite I have ever used. For example, OOo styles work in many more places and are more general and flexible and OOo's mathematical formula support is better than what comes with MS Office. When I am forced to use MS Office, the limitations of MS Office drive me crazy.
OOo is not stripped down bargain software, it's a heavy-duty office suite that happens to be open source.
The equivalent of PPS in OOo is PDF--it generates stand-alone presentations that pretty much anybody can view--much better than PPS. I don't know of a "shrink to fit", but I find selecting the text and making the font smaller to be quick and easy.
There is no way to prevent fragmentation. Open source projects fragment when a single code base can't serve every community anymore, or when the people running the project are screwing up. That's a good thing. Giving users the freedom to fork an open source project when they choose is what open source is all about. The concept of open source without the ability to fork and fragment doesn't make sense.
Sun is right to fear fragmentation; the minute they open source Java, they will lose control. Personally, I think that's a good thing for Java. but Java zealots disagree. In any case, I stopped worrying about it. It's taken Java only 10 years for its spectacular growth, but it can disappear even more quickly than it has grown. if Java continues along its current path, it will collapse under its own weight and become irrelevant in 5-10 years.
-- Whether your commute is long or short is largely unrelated to whether you choose to drive a gas guzzler or fuel miser. -- European settlement is anything but uniform; I suggest you have a look at a map, or at least a night-time satellite photo. -- Except for maybe Iceland, individual European nations can't change to alternative fuels by themselves--Europe is far more integrated than you seem to think. -- You're confusing cause and effect; it's not that US settlement patterns require cheap gasoline, it's that cheap gasoline and bad public policy caused current US settlement patterns some time in the 1950's and 1960's. This process can be reversed.
The US simply chooses to waste gasoline for a variety of political and ideological reasons. If the US wanted to, it could move back to an energy-efficient transportation infrastructure comparable to, or better than, Europe within a few decades.
If you read Tanenbaum's IEEE paper, you'll see that it's ideas that are decades old. Of the bunch, address-space based fault isolation and software verification have been tried many times and proven too cumbersome in practice. Language based fault isolation is sensible, although it's amazing that someone like Tanenbaum seems to seriously belief that it was only developed in the last few years. In fact, decades of experience with language-based fault isolation have shown that it greatly reduces some classes of errors and permits recovery from others, but that it is not sufficient for achieving reliability.
In fact, in my opinion, we need fundamentally new ideas to improve software reliability, and it's pretty clear from his paper that people like Tanenbaum don't have them.
Unfortunately, a lot of engineers write just like you describe. It's not a problem that they are writing clear, readable prose. What is a problem is that nobody has taught them that scientific and engineering writing has a specific structure that they need to obey, a structure that goes beyond your average college essay.
For example, you say "Hit the important conclusions in the first few sentences so your reader will read them.". Well, no, that's wrong. If you put your conclusions in the first few sentences of the paper, many people will likely not read them at all because a reader of a scientific or engineering article expects the conclusions to be at the end (and, in a certain limited sense, in the abstract, not the paper). The first few sentences of an engineering and scientific paper should be the motivation; readers familiar with the motivation for the work will simply never read those sentences.
If you move things around according to what you think will be most "interesting" for the reader, you have readers waste their time hunting all over your paper trying to find the information they need, or more likely, just skip/reject it. So, write clear, readable prose, but in addition obey the structural rules for scientific and engineering writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the question you have to ask yourself, though... will your friends and relatives who don't use OSS and who have crashes & viruses actually do better with OSS and a fresh install of Linux?
In every organization I have ever been, a support person has been able to support about ten times as many UNIX/Linux machines as Windows machines. So, yes, I'd say there is a clear advantage to UNIX/Linux: keeping a Windows machine that sees any significant amount of usage running properly is a lot of work compared to a Linux machine (it also costs a lot of money).
If people put the time into Windows that Linux-users put into Linux/OSS (by way of customization, and finding apps and drivers), they'd have a much more reliable machine
People can't even install the Windows OS (let alone any Windows applications) in the time that it takes to install a full Linux desktop system with a full complement of applications (something that would cost you days of work and a lot of money for Windows).
Most people, in fact, install Windows with their credit card--by buying a new machine.
I'm being invaded by belly button lint! Get it off of me! Aieeeee...
Seriously. Lesions containing cellulose fibers in designer colors? Where are they supposed to come from? Invasive sesame seeds with a 70's designer heritage? This looks like an Internet hoax.
In any case, as far as doctors are concerned, it doesn't matter what they tell patients since even if there were such an organism, nobody would have a clue how to begin treating it.
Google should remove "ServersCheck" from their index; that will remove all illegal content related to that business. Of course, it will also remove 90% of the bussiness's traffic, but, hey, they want to be safe, and now they are safe.
(Admittedly, I can't think of any legitimate reason most people would do so)
You just used them with a legitimate reason, didn't you?
Besides our brains, there is one other body part that is unusually large (for our body size) in humans: the primary sexual organs. That means that sex with a monkey probably wouldn't work that well for most anatomically modern humans (M/F).
In fact, it's quite possible that the change in our sexual anatomy was what finally caused us to split from other primates.
Something is very unique about humans and the evolution model does not seem to explain us very well.
Our unusually big brain is no more unique than the unusually big canines of a saber tooth tiger or the unusually long neck of a giraffe.
Take a look at ants. Ants have lived exponentially longer on this planet than us.
I think someone who doesn't know what "exponential" means really has no business talking about evolution.
Demanding encryption keys is a pointless exercise; there are several techniques and systems supporting deniable encryption. You can achieve deniable encryption via steganography or random erasure of your hard disk. Some systems even support an arbitrary number of layers, so you can keep revealing things and still hold more back.
Even just using steganography alone, any noisy signal can be used for deniable encryption. So, if the UK government wants to be able to decrypt everything, they better also pass and enforce a law outlawing noise. I think everybody, from audiophiles to engineers, would surely be really happy if they succeeded at that.
PDF permits animation, timing, and interaction. I don't know whether you can embed audio or animation.
If you like, OOo also has built-in support to let you export your presentation in Flash format, which supports all those features.
Unfortunately, it sometimes becomes necessary to do so if there is disagreement in the way a project is handled.
You make it sound as if it's a personality issue. It may be, but usually, it's real technical or licensing issues that cause projects to split.
In this case and as a one-time Java software developer, I would definitely NOT want fragmentation in Java's implementation.
It's telling that you talk about "fragmentation in Java's implementation" because that's what Java really is: a single implementation.
In any case, Sun's obsession with control has lost them the desktop market, the applet market, and the numerical market. All they have left is education and a sliver of the enterprise server market. The reason why the Java community doesn't want fragmentation anymore is because all the people who have needs different from Sun's and yours have left in frustration.
I would agree to that kind of a license if and only if Sun relinquishes control of the JCP to the public.
I doubt it matters much anymore. Java has a specific market segment, the platform is what it is, and I don't see people coming back anymore or investing the energy to fix it; it's just not worth it--we have better choices.
The equivalent of PPS in OpenOffice.org is PDF. There's even a toolbar button to generate them quickly.
Ubuntu is what Debian Stable should be: it's on a regular release schedule and well tested. If Debian gets their act together and gets Stable out the door every six months, then I'll switch back. Or maybe Debian should just start using Ubuntu as their Stable release.
Technically, the best solution for this kind of migration could be moving the code to managed C++: you keep your working code, the managed environment may find bugs you didn't know about, and you can do new development and rearchitecting in a more productive language. A big practical problem with that is that the only mainstream managed C++ solution comes from Microsoft and you may not want to be tied to Microsoft platforms (I don't).
But that's probably the only generic advice one can give you. Beyond that, deciding whether Java or anything else is the right choice depends on too many factors.
I hope their "prior java issues" will remain: Sun Java has no place on Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships with at least two open source Java implementations, and if you don't like either of them, go take a hike.
In fact, Ubuntu's Mono integration is so good that I'm really worried about Sun being allowed to get anywhere near it.
I guess there is nothing Ubuntu can do about being picked by Sun, but this is not a positive development as far as I'm concerned. I hope Sun won't be allowed to meddle or participate in the Ubuntu development process.
I realize that it is free, and it won't be as well featured as most purchased software Actually, I think OpenOffice is more "well-featured" than Microsoft Office or any other office suite I have ever used. For example, OOo styles work in many more places and are more general and flexible and OOo's mathematical formula support is better than what comes with MS Office. When I am forced to use MS Office, the limitations of MS Office drive me crazy. OOo is not stripped down bargain software, it's a heavy-duty office suite that happens to be open source. The equivalent of PPS in OOo is PDF--it generates stand-alone presentations that pretty much anybody can view--much better than PPS. I don't know of a "shrink to fit", but I find selecting the text and making the font smaller to be quick and easy.
There is no way to prevent fragmentation. Open source projects fragment when a single code base can't serve every community anymore, or when the people running the project are screwing up. That's a good thing. Giving users the freedom to fork an open source project when they choose is what open source is all about. The concept of open source without the ability to fork and fragment doesn't make sense.
Sun is right to fear fragmentation; the minute they open source Java, they will lose control. Personally, I think that's a good thing for Java. but Java zealots disagree. In any case, I stopped worrying about it. It's taken Java only 10 years for its spectacular growth, but it can disappear even more quickly than it has grown. if Java continues along its current path, it will collapse under its own weight and become irrelevant in 5-10 years.
-- Whether your commute is long or short is largely unrelated to whether you choose to drive a gas guzzler or fuel miser.
-- European settlement is anything but uniform; I suggest you have a look at a map, or at least a night-time satellite photo.
-- Except for maybe Iceland, individual European nations can't change to alternative fuels by themselves--Europe is far more integrated than you seem to think.
-- You're confusing cause and effect; it's not that US settlement patterns require cheap gasoline, it's that cheap gasoline and bad public policy caused current US settlement patterns some time in the 1950's and 1960's. This process can be reversed.
The US simply chooses to waste gasoline for a variety of political and ideological reasons. If the US wanted to, it could move back to an energy-efficient transportation infrastructure comparable to, or better than, Europe within a few decades.
In fact, in my opinion, we need fundamentally new ideas to improve software reliability, and it's pretty clear from his paper that people like Tanenbaum don't have them.
Unfortunately, a lot of engineers write just like you describe. It's not a problem that they are writing clear, readable prose. What is a problem is that nobody has taught them that scientific and engineering writing has a specific structure that they need to obey, a structure that goes beyond your average college essay.
For example, you say "Hit the important conclusions in the first few sentences so your reader will read them.". Well, no, that's wrong. If you put your conclusions in the first few sentences of the paper, many people will likely not read them at all because a reader of a scientific or engineering article expects the conclusions to be at the end (and, in a certain limited sense, in the abstract, not the paper). The first few sentences of an engineering and scientific paper should be the motivation; readers familiar with the motivation for the work will simply never read those sentences.
If you move things around according to what you think will be most "interesting" for the reader, you have readers waste their time hunting all over your paper trying to find the information they need, or more likely, just skip/reject it. So, write clear, readable prose, but in addition obey the structural rules for scientific and engineering writing.