I'm so tired of the slashdot "well I can do it by going through X steps and compiling source
While I'm capable of doing that, I'm tired of doing it.
A distro package manager that can "diff" and sense how it has been modified, save the differences and intelligently lay them back on top of the new version would be quite nice.
On one hand, it's pretty easy to see if someone has mucked around and created a new /etc/fstab, but it's another thing entirely to see if someone has installed application-cvs-nightly in /usr/local/random and changed their LD_LIBRARY_PATH to get the right stuff. Then, the new version of the distribution provides the fully released version of that application and "I don't need it anymore".
certain naive child-like trust of certain government officials
which confounds me to no end.
No matter what people tell you about their piety, any Christian knows that humans are all corrupt, corruptible, fallible.
This should include, yes, even religious figures that are, yes, people. It's only "In God We Trust". Nobody else, even if they claim to speaking for Him, doing His will, etc. deserves anywhere near the same loyalty and respect.
From my read, if the user happened to be using some kind of networked KVM software the judge would have ruled the other way. He really seemed to be throwing this back over the wall for the law to be better written.
The increased use of the Internet in everyday activities will probably continue to bring up interesting cases where "Interstate Commerce" and US federal regulation apply, and to things people didn't worry much about previously.
On the other hand, some of the downsides of a society without government are visible, as the country is divided by warring factions and the roads have gone completely unmaintained.
I wonder how much mindshare it will really get at the level decisions are made it in business and government.
Less than they deserve.
It would be more impressive if each of the persons was introduced by some figures of merit that matter in the minds of the attendees.
[Making this up... YMMV] "My name is Linus Torvalds and I am the original author of the Linux operating system on which over 50,000 computers in the EU run, night and day, saving businesses 100 million euroes in licensing costs per year, over 500 programmers from the EU have contributed to the Linux codebase, which was recently valued at over US$ 1 billion (yes, I know that's less and less in terms of euros every day)....blah blah...etc."
This would be better than "I'm a smart young computer geek that wrote something you yourself don't use everyday."
So I have a few directories like ~/bin, ~/msc, ~/tmp and ~/project_abbrev.
What I'd like though is multiple views of my data, like VFolders in Evolution, where an entirely different organizational structure could be applied to an entire directory tree.
That way, if one view has names associated with the underlying file formats
~/pdf, ~/jpeg, ~/ppt, etc. then, another view might have ~/today, ~/yesterday, ~/mold_covered.
Frequently, I'll have one application that I use for multiple projects. Sometimes, it's really convenient to have multiple project files for the single application all in the same place (because it's easier not to rebuild Rome from scratch).
Some of these files could be huge. And while I know about symbolic links, those have to be created by hand.
And, yes, even in the Google sense, having some organizational structure with Score by match and Score by Most Recent grep 'Video Card Perf' would also be nice.
Firefox would really take off nicely if it offered
Updated W3C standard SVG rendering.
A corresponding WYSIWYG SVG composer.
Last I heard, Mozilla's SVG engine was embroiled in licensing confusion. But this development would open up high-quality web-based document production to the world and put it on a non-owned standard.
And please, Santa, through in a MathML renderer with the years of built-in math quality of TeX.
After everything I've heard, I'm inclined to belive that just about any and every SQL solution will give anyone and everyone grief, the only difference being the flavor of grief.
But I'm curious where the best transition strategy lies: starting out with MySQL, can one grow to a certain point and then transition to one of the more expensive, supported, high-performance db engines in a reasonable way?
Somewhere out there sits a device which receives packets, converts packets into voice, dials a phone, and "speaks into the phone".
To me, this sounds like an Inverse ISP.
Local independent ISPs with banks of modems and a high speed net connection have all the equipment in place to provide service in the direction opposite to what they started doing.
Firefox is getting much better and has many extensions, but it hasn't quite replaced the windows desktop.
Replacing the Windows desktop is a harder thing to do than to provide adequate and reasonable applications that offer the same functionality as Windows.
While FOSS, particularly something like Firefox+Thunderbird+OpenOffice, offers virtually all of what people need, the slight differences in user interface and the comfort level with existing Windows applications in most corporate settings will slow growth of Windows competitors to only the most cost-conscious segments of the market.
That would include universities, the developing world, full of talent and lean on money, and small business owners with more time and expertise than money. People with ideas instead of money.
Of course, if I wanted mindshare, that's exactly where I'd want it to start. Risk-averse corporate IT departments will eventually climb on board once they see the bandwagon go by without losing a wheel.
...but its torque output is actually at its maximum at 0 RPM.
If you consider angular velocities in [0,infty). Extending the range further, what about the torque at negative angular velocities?
While it might be regarded as the ultimate entropy-producing sinful behavior, application of electric current could serve to brake these cars in a real hurry [realizing the virtuous energy efficient technique is let the car generate and store electric power from a braking maneuver].
Paraphrasing from Mark Twain, "the threat of legal action is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Steve Ballmer has an uphill battle to regain credibility among IT decision-makers if he has to abandon a tactic of directly comparing Microsoft's products to Linux and FOSS on the strict basis of features, price, bugs, security, standards adherence, kindly upgrade path lacking forced obsolescence, licensing terms, etc.
At least in the developed world where Microsoft has dominated the marketplace for years he can always bring up the Windows to Linux migration cost (neglecting to mention anything about the Windows to Windows migration costs) and backward compatibility to bolster his argument.
With this level of desperation, and with SCO's case foundering, MS may decide to fight more openly against Linux in the legal arena. But making such a move is risky from a PR perspective because it will cast MS in a bad light, opposing freely-available, zero-cost technology that helps anyone who cares to use it. While MS might be losing millions of dollars as companies choose FOSS in place of Microsoft products, it's not as if intellectual property violations (if they even exist) cause an equal - or even comparable - slide of millions of dollars into the pockets of greedy IP violators. Rather, most FOSS developers have minuscule wealth compared to Microsoft and stand to gain much less by contributing their work to the world at large. Pressing IP claims against software available to anyone and independently contributed by someone working from scratch in their garage at night is likely to smack of a David vs Goliath dispute, with Goliath wanting his tax from everyone else and David wanting to let the people keep their money.
Additionally, in the developing world they must regard claims of ownership of intellectual property as a curious and amusing Western contrivance for making money and preserving wealth, especially in light of the more preposterous patents that the USPTO has given over the last number of years.
its not like you are looking at anything useful while you are fastforwarding
Not so.
I'm looking very carefully to see when to stop the fast forwarding to resume the show without overrunning the commercial break.
Consequently, during the fast forward operation I already am paying a lot of attention to the albeit choppy 20x ad-stream. That's enough mental penetration for me to tolerate from the advertisement.
If this is implemented it will significantly decrease the value of my TiVo to me. My enthusiastic recommendations of TiVo to friends, family and coworkers will cease, and I won't purchase an HD TiVo.
Lots of companies outsource their IT strategy research to outfits like Gartner. Sure, companies still reserve the right to make their own decisions, but they do listen carefully to what "Gartner sez" (yes, sometimes instead of thinking) and, frequently, researchers at Gartner have more time to do in-depth research because they spread the costs over all their clients.
They have to maintain some semblance of being unbiased, accurate, and useful to their clients, so if they parroted MS sales droid talk too much they would lose their credibility and their clients. But, you're right, there is inertia with the herd.
Predicting more Linux deployment is not going out on a limb by any means.
The harder prediction is to tell your Inquiring Clients exactly when and where Linux should be deployed to best satisfy their business needs, reduce costs, etc. By sticking to the Playing It Safe playbook, I expect Gartner to say "Go!" sometime after Linux is actually ready.
If Gartner told their customers to "Go!" before Linux was "ready" it would be a mistake for their customers to follow the advice, those customers would suffer, blame Gartner, not renew their Gartner contracts, and, most importantly, Linux would get a black eye by dissatisifed customers not wanting a Science Project IT infrastructure.
How is this NOT an anti-trust violation? They're attempting to 'destroy' the competition in unethical manners.
Microsoft's actions may be unsavory, but I don't think they're illegal.
Why not an anti-trust action? Probably the question would be whether MS is unfairly using its dominant market position to quash a competitor. It's trying to quash a competitor through sleazy tactics, but those tactics in this instance do not include abuse of its dominant market position.
Arguably, all of its actions, investment in SCO etc were equally open to anyone, such as Apple, for example.
Even the stinky 800lb gorilla deserves fair consideration and treatment.
That suggests the original law is in need of repair.
But I suspect entrenched interests with currently-valuable patent portfolios will oppose reforms that would be a better global optimum.
The sooner this artificial market for "IP" is reformed the better for us all. This is a worse drag on the economy than taxes going to a monarcy, to pick an example. Restraints on innovation impede everyone in the long run.
Somehow I'm reminded of the imperious Ken Olsen of DEC dismissing UNIX in the late 1970's despite the popularity of his company's computers being used in all kinds of UNIX niches. A very different alternate reality might have developed if (a) Ken Olsen had jumped onto UNIX and (b) successfully put it onto desktop PCs early on.
I owe a debt to Sun; my Linux experience isn't where it would be if Sun hadn't contributed so much to UNIX standards.
They could do it again, or sit back while Novell does it instead of them.
For kids just a little older, give them a large cardboard boxes and let them take out the top and bottom flaps (with scissors, if they're responsible, or just rip `em out).
With crayons, you can color the outside of the box with headlights, tail lights, etc.
Then you can run around for hours with the "car" held up around your torso playing as if you're driving a real automobile.
Works best with largely blank outsides of boxes: it wouldn't do if Junior was running around the neighborhood with either the old Smirnoff Vodka box or the old Kotex Tampons box....
Since this would leave a population mostly geeky, mostly male, there should be an override for cute females, regardless of whether they can pass the sufficient computer geek test.
</evil_vision_addendum>
Suddenly, the Democratic support for abolishing the electoral college, which, in the 2000 election permitted Bush to win despite Gore carrying a majority of the popular vote, would vanish in a puff of smoke.
And it would be the Republicans complaining because a mere 60,000 vote switch in Ohio gave Kerry the presidency through the electoral college system despite Bush having won the popular vote by over 3 million.
It would be hilarious to watch as strident principled Democrats fell silent while the vocal Republicans would begin attacking positions that they themselves previously held onto with great fervor.
As if the whole thing weren't farcical enough already.
By rolling out the competitor as part of the desktop last time, MS was able to obliterate Netscape, which went from a dominant market position to a niche position in a few years.
That was accomplished through a combination of aggressive improvement of their product and unfair tactics against the competition, for which the punishment is bearable.
If they were able to this once, then they could rationally expect there's no reason they couldn't do it again.
The biggest hurdle MS faces is the touchy rollout of TCPA, which on one hand could start eliminating open source competitors like Mozilla, Open Office and Evolution that "won't have the keys". At the same time, if TCPA is too good, then it might stifle MS market penetration in the developing world which has historically relied heavily upon pirated copies of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm so tired of the slashdot "well I can do it by going through X steps and compiling source
While I'm capable of doing that, I'm tired of doing it.
A distro package manager that can "diff" and sense how it has been modified, save the differences and intelligently lay them back on top of the new version would be quite nice.
On one hand, it's pretty easy to see if someone has mucked around and created a new /etc/fstab , but it's another thing entirely to see if someone has installed application-cvs-nightly in /usr/local/random and changed their LD_LIBRARY_PATH to get the right stuff. Then, the new version of the distribution provides the fully released version of that application and "I don't need it anymore".
It's hard.
certain naive child-like trust of certain government officials
which confounds me to no end.
No matter what people tell you about their piety, any Christian knows that humans are all corrupt, corruptible, fallible.
This should include, yes, even religious figures that are, yes, people. It's only "In God We Trust". Nobody else, even if they claim to speaking for Him, doing His will, etc. deserves anywhere near the same loyalty and respect.
NFS isn't the network filesystem that we should be holding up as a good system to emulate.
Historically, yes.
But NFSv4 has a respectable security model.
Now if only it were easy to setup and use....
From my read, if the user happened to be using some kind of networked KVM software the judge would have ruled the other way. He really seemed to be throwing this back over the wall for the law to be better written.
The increased use of the Internet in everyday activities will probably continue to bring up interesting cases where "Interstate Commerce" and US federal regulation apply, and to things people didn't worry much about previously.
On the other hand, some of the downsides of a society without government are visible, as the country is divided by warring factions and the roads have gone completely unmaintained.
what the libertarian perspective is on Somalia?
rid of their 800-pund-microsoft-certified-gorilla IT services
They'd love nothing more than to be so free.
Unfortunately, when you eat the blue pill you get a Whole Reality with Rustproofing included in the deal whether you wanted it or not.
I wonder how much mindshare it will really get at the level decisions are made it in business and government.
Less than they deserve.
It would be more impressive if each of the persons was introduced by some figures of merit that matter in the minds of the attendees.
[Making this up ... YMMV] "My name is Linus Torvalds and I am the original author of the Linux operating system on which over 50,000 computers in the EU run, night and day, saving businesses 100 million euroes in licensing costs per year, over 500 programmers from the EU have contributed to the Linux codebase, which was recently valued at over US$ 1 billion (yes, I know that's less and less in terms of euros every day)....blah blah...etc."
This would be better than "I'm a smart young computer geek that wrote something you yourself don't use everyday."
So I have a few directories like ~/bin , ~/msc , ~/tmp and ~/project_abbrev .
What I'd like though is multiple views of my data, like VFolders in Evolution, where an entirely different organizational structure could be applied to an entire directory tree.
That way, if one view has names associated with the underlying file formats ~/pdf , ~/jpeg , ~/ppt , etc. then, another view might have ~/today , ~/yesterday , ~/mold_covered .
Frequently, I'll have one application that I use for multiple projects. Sometimes, it's really convenient to have multiple project files for the single application all in the same place (because it's easier not to rebuild Rome from scratch).
Some of these files could be huge. And while I know about symbolic links, those have to be created by hand.
And, yes, even in the Google sense, having some organizational structure with Score by match and Score by Most Recent grep 'Video Card Perf' would also be nice.
Firefox would really take off nicely if it offered
Last I heard, Mozilla's SVG engine was embroiled in licensing confusion. But this development would open up high-quality web-based document production to the world and put it on a non-owned standard.
And please, Santa, through in a MathML renderer with the years of built-in math quality of TeX.
but MySQL has no place in the enterprise
After everything I've heard, I'm inclined to belive that just about any and every SQL solution will give anyone and everyone grief, the only difference being the flavor of grief.
But I'm curious where the best transition strategy lies: starting out with MySQL, can one grow to a certain point and then transition to one of the more expensive, supported, high-performance db engines in a reasonable way?
Somewhere out there sits a device which receives packets, converts packets into voice, dials a phone, and "speaks into the phone".
To me, this sounds like an Inverse ISP.
Local independent ISPs with banks of modems and a high speed net connection have all the equipment in place to provide service in the direction opposite to what they started doing.
Firefox is getting much better and has many extensions, but it hasn't quite replaced the windows desktop.
Replacing the Windows desktop is a harder thing to do than to provide adequate and reasonable applications that offer the same functionality as Windows.
While FOSS, particularly something like Firefox+Thunderbird+OpenOffice, offers virtually all of what people need, the slight differences in user interface and the comfort level with existing Windows applications in most corporate settings will slow growth of Windows competitors to only the most cost-conscious segments of the market.
That would include universities, the developing world, full of talent and lean on money, and small business owners with more time and expertise than money. People with ideas instead of money.
Of course, if I wanted mindshare, that's exactly where I'd want it to start. Risk-averse corporate IT departments will eventually climb on board once they see the bandwagon go by without losing a wheel.
If you consider angular velocities in [0,infty). Extending the range further, what about the torque at negative angular velocities?
While it might be regarded as the ultimate entropy-producing sinful behavior, application of electric current could serve to brake these cars in a real hurry [realizing the virtuous energy efficient technique is let the car generate and store electric power from a braking maneuver].
Paraphrasing from Mark Twain, "the threat of legal action is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Steve Ballmer has an uphill battle to regain credibility among IT decision-makers if he has to abandon a tactic of directly comparing Microsoft's products to Linux and FOSS on the strict basis of features, price, bugs, security, standards adherence, kindly upgrade path lacking forced obsolescence, licensing terms, etc.
At least in the developed world where Microsoft has dominated the marketplace for years he can always bring up the Windows to Linux migration cost (neglecting to mention anything about the Windows to Windows migration costs) and backward compatibility to bolster his argument.
With this level of desperation, and with SCO's case foundering, MS may decide to fight more openly against Linux in the legal arena. But making such a move is risky from a PR perspective because it will cast MS in a bad light, opposing freely-available, zero-cost technology that helps anyone who cares to use it. While MS might be losing millions of dollars as companies choose FOSS in place of Microsoft products, it's not as if intellectual property violations (if they even exist) cause an equal - or even comparable - slide of millions of dollars into the pockets of greedy IP violators. Rather, most FOSS developers have minuscule wealth compared to Microsoft and stand to gain much less by contributing their work to the world at large. Pressing IP claims against software available to anyone and independently contributed by someone working from scratch in their garage at night is likely to smack of a David vs Goliath dispute, with Goliath wanting his tax from everyone else and David wanting to let the people keep their money.
Additionally, in the developing world they must regard claims of ownership of intellectual property as a curious and amusing Western contrivance for making money and preserving wealth, especially in light of the more preposterous patents that the USPTO has given over the last number of years.
its not like you are looking at anything useful while you are fastforwarding
Not so.
I'm looking very carefully to see when to stop the fast forwarding to resume the show without overrunning the commercial break.
Consequently, during the fast forward operation I already am paying a lot of attention to the albeit choppy 20x ad-stream. That's enough mental penetration for me to tolerate from the advertisement.
If this is implemented it will significantly decrease the value of my TiVo to me. My enthusiastic recommendations of TiVo to friends, family and coworkers will cease, and I won't purchase an HD TiVo.
Does anyone still pay attention to Gartner?
Lots of companies outsource their IT strategy research to outfits like Gartner. Sure, companies still reserve the right to make their own decisions, but they do listen carefully to what "Gartner sez" (yes, sometimes instead of thinking) and, frequently, researchers at Gartner have more time to do in-depth research because they spread the costs over all their clients.
They have to maintain some semblance of being unbiased, accurate, and useful to their clients, so if they parroted MS sales droid talk too much they would lose their credibility and their clients. But, you're right, there is inertia with the herd.
Predicting more Linux deployment is not going out on a limb by any means.
The harder prediction is to tell your Inquiring Clients exactly when and where Linux should be deployed to best satisfy their business needs, reduce costs, etc. By sticking to the Playing It Safe playbook, I expect Gartner to say "Go!" sometime after Linux is actually ready.
If Gartner told their customers to "Go!" before Linux was "ready" it would be a mistake for their customers to follow the advice, those customers would suffer, blame Gartner, not renew their Gartner contracts, and, most importantly, Linux would get a black eye by dissatisifed customers not wanting a Science Project IT infrastructure.
How is this NOT an anti-trust violation? They're attempting to 'destroy' the competition in unethical manners.
Microsoft's actions may be unsavory, but I don't think they're illegal.
Why not an anti-trust action? Probably the question would be whether MS is unfairly using its dominant market position to quash a competitor. It's trying to quash a competitor through sleazy tactics, but those tactics in this instance do not include abuse of its dominant market position.
Arguably, all of its actions, investment in SCO etc were equally open to anyone, such as Apple, for example.
Even the stinky 800lb gorilla deserves fair consideration and treatment.
That suggests the original law is in need of repair.
But I suspect entrenched interests with currently-valuable patent portfolios will oppose reforms that would be a better global optimum.
The sooner this artificial market for "IP" is reformed the better for us all. This is a worse drag on the economy than taxes going to a monarcy, to pick an example. Restraints on innovation impede everyone in the long run.
Sun seems to view Linux somewhat grudgingly,
Somehow I'm reminded of the imperious Ken Olsen of DEC dismissing UNIX in the late 1970's despite the popularity of his company's computers being used in all kinds of UNIX niches. A very different alternate reality might have developed if (a) Ken Olsen had jumped onto UNIX and (b) successfully put it onto desktop PCs early on.
I owe a debt to Sun; my Linux experience isn't where it would be if Sun hadn't contributed so much to UNIX standards.
They could do it again, or sit back while Novell does it instead of them.
I thought the correct term for a one minute episode was commercial.
Your mistake is understandable. What you're referring to are known as "breaks" by the industry.
However, all of the material between the "breaks" can be classified as a "commercial" or "advertisement".
For kids just a little older, give them a large cardboard boxes and let them take out the top and bottom flaps (with scissors, if they're responsible, or just rip `em out).
With crayons, you can color the outside of the box with headlights, tail lights, etc.
Then you can run around for hours with the "car" held up around your torso playing as if you're driving a real automobile.
Works best with largely blank outsides of boxes: it wouldn't do if Junior was running around the neighborhood with either the old Smirnoff Vodka box or the old Kotex Tampons box....
Since this would leave a population mostly geeky, mostly male, there should be an override for cute females, regardless of whether they can pass the sufficient computer geek test.
</evil_vision_addendum>
What would happen if it turned out Kerry won?
Suddenly, the Democratic support for abolishing the electoral college, which, in the 2000 election permitted Bush to win despite Gore carrying a majority of the popular vote, would vanish in a puff of smoke.
And it would be the Republicans complaining because a mere 60,000 vote switch in Ohio gave Kerry the presidency through the electoral college system despite Bush having won the popular vote by over 3 million.
It would be hilarious to watch as strident principled Democrats fell silent while the vocal Republicans would begin attacking positions that they themselves previously held onto with great fervor.
As if the whole thing weren't farcical enough already.
By rolling out the competitor as part of the desktop last time, MS was able to obliterate Netscape, which went from a dominant market position to a niche position in a few years.
That was accomplished through a combination of aggressive improvement of their product and unfair tactics against the competition, for which the punishment is bearable.
If they were able to this once, then they could rationally expect there's no reason they couldn't do it again.
The biggest hurdle MS faces is the touchy rollout of TCPA, which on one hand could start eliminating open source competitors like Mozilla, Open Office and Evolution that "won't have the keys". At the same time, if TCPA is too good, then it might stifle MS market penetration in the developing world which has historically relied heavily upon pirated copies of Windows.