The google file system is redundant. Loss of one node does not lose data.
Some of the reasons these techniques aren't used in enterprise computing:
They're hard, and business programmers are not that bright. And nobody has encapsulated these technologies in an IT product.
The system can only respond quickly to a finite set of transactions that was known at design time. It lacks the flexibility of a standard file system or relational database.
By the time a business has a lot of data, it usually has enough money to store the data conventionally. Search engines are a bit different.
Since I've seen it up close a few times, I can say that the standard "enterprise way" (Oracle/Sun/EMC) delivers very poor bang for the buck. If Google wanted to, they could deliver a modified GFS with any desired level of reliability by increasing the redundancy. And even after that bloating, it would still deliver greater bang for the buck than the conventional solutions.
Umm, why? Why would IBM care if Photoshop runs on Linux? The proportion of desktop or home users who need photoshop is vanishingly small. They happen to be loud and picky, but there is no point in catering to them.
Money would be better spent improving OpenOffice and getting functional Outlook, PowerPoint and Project replacements. That is, if you care about Linux on the average worker's desktop.
And the CANSPAM act implicitly confirms the right you speak of:
NO EFFECT ON POLICIES OF PROVIDERS OF INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to have any effect on the lawfulness or unlawfulness, under any other provision of law, of the adoption, implementation, or enforcement by a provider of Internet access service of a policy of declining to transmit, route, relay, handle, or store certain types of electronic mail messages.
I completely disagree. I remember being a kid and learning BASIC. I thought Logo was a steaming pile of patronizing bullshit. It is too far from a real language.
BASIC may be a joke to most folks here, but I wrote and played fun games in it.
Maybe the difference is that I'm not talking about "teaching". BASIC is more of a learning language. The idea of anyone teaching how to program struck me as ridiculous when I was 10, and still seems unlikely. You have to walk this path alone.
The earlier a kid starts programming, the better. It's not hard to learn new languages, styles and paradigms later. Basic makes it easy to get started.
Re:That's the problem with blogs...
on
The War Of The Word
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you want some good examples... consider how the mainstream media, including "reputable" sources like New York Times, were printing story after story about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This wasn't just an opinion; it was supposedly fact.
Give me an example where the New York Times stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I don't think you understand how journalism works, or can work. Journalists frequently report statements by experts or interested parties. They try to accurately capture the words and affiliation of the person speaking or writing. It is up to the reader to assess the credibility of the source.
You seem to want journalists to decide who is right and who is wrong. The best they can do is dig up facts or statements supporting both sides and present them all to the reader.
If the President says that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, that is news. Reporting that statement does not mean the journalists think it's true, merely that it's newsworthy.
The entertainment products are not a good analogy, because interoperability is not an issue there. Miguel fears a future in which critical services may become.NET based, so we have no way of accessing them from a Linux desktop. Think banking, voting, major online shopping. This could slow Linux desktop adoption both at home and in the office.
Miguel's central point is that the.NET train is coming whether we like it or not. Calling yourself a leader and marching off in a different direction won't even be noticed by the majority.
Turn it around and look at Samba. That's a case of following Microsoft's weird, often broken protocols. Painful, right? Should the energy have been put into better network file systems and print protocols? No. We need that interop greatly. Without Samba, many Linux deployments would not be possible.
Remember, Microsoft loved Samba when they were trying to catch up with Unix servers in credibility. They started hating it when they gained dominance. They correctly reasoned that when you're weak, you want to interoperate, but when you're strong you want to blaze your own trail and shut out competitors.
This is a typical demagogic attempt to get slashdotters riled up against an otherwise unnown blocklist operator. Simply put, most slashdotters do not run ISP's and therefore see only the downside of blocklists. Most slashdotters are benefiting from some kind of mail filtering and don't even realize it. They are like peaceniks bitching about the very defense establishment that keeps them free to bitch.
I never heard of the AHBL before this article. There are tons of lists. A list that would block a major ISP is probably a niche list aimed at small domains who are not going to have 10,000 angry customers. If SPEWS blocked this ISP, it might be news. If some unknown list does it, so what?
If you find it shocking that a list would shoot from the hip, don't ever query xbl.selwerd.cx. Fast, broad and unforgiving!
Before the inevitable whining chorus of broad-listing-is-bad-what-about-the-innocent-victi ms, let me remind you that SPEWS has gotten the attention of some extremely inattentive spam havens. Companies that unrepentantly spammed like mad in the face of every kind of complaint, peer pressure, and narrowly targetted listing have suddenly come to the table when facing a broad SPEWS block. Broad listing works where diplomacy has failed.
And remember, also, that you are almost certainly benefiting from a lot of filtering implemented by your postmasters or even network admins (at border routers). They spend a huge amount of time compiling lists of bad domains and netblocks - why shouldn't they share that knowledge with other admins? Such sharing is most efficiently done by publishing a DNS-based list like SPEWS. The high profile lists are more professionally maintained than most ISP's in-house lists. Would you rather they share in secret, so small operators can't benefit from their knowledge?
I agree. What is the connection between being a "geek" and rooting for the Segway? There are things about geekhood I don't understand. Why assume that New York is "luddite" for wanting to ban this nuisance? Of course they should ban it. It's a motor vehicle that wants to run on the crowded sidewalks. The last thing Americans need is a way to avoid walking.
However in more suburban areas it could fill a legitimate niche.
"Linux doesn't have automatic updates." Ignorant, caught in a time warp, or trolling? I pick the latter. We've had commercial trolls for a while. They post some inflammatory story to wind up the slashdot crowd, get tons of page views, then post something more conciliatory to ward off the raving loonies. Rob Enderle comes to mind, although I don't remember his specific exploits.
I think more of the mainstream media is catching on to the commercial potential of trolling the linux crowd. Just make an unfounded negative assertion about linux. Then next week, "As many readers pointed out to me, Linux does in fact have automatic updates. You learn something new every day."
You must never call Java an interpreted language. Java is compiled into bytecodes! These bytecodes are not interpreted by an interpreter, but rather executed by a virtual machine. Altogether different!
So how should a library author avoid this? We need to allocate lots of little chunks that the application author shouldn't have to see. That's why we have appropriate free() functions the app author can use to clean up afterwards.
Some libraries allow the caller to pass in a function pointer to his own malloc, which can add diagnostics or alloc from an application memory pool.
I'm not sure what you regard as best practice here. We can't have the caller allocate everything in advance, like you would allocate a sockaddr, because the library may be building data structures with lots of dynamically allocated nodes.
"Oppression" == "Systematic coercion that I don't like." It's a subjective word. Every criminal jailed by the state can claim "oppression." The degree of sympathy he gets will depend on how well he plucks the hearstrings of his listeners. Usually the cruelest governments are the ones enforcing the will of the majority. Saudi Arabia is a cruel regime, but if it ever becomes democratic it will be vastly crueler.
Every sane person, regardless of their culture, wants the right to express their own opinions...
I'd say that for a lot of people, the ability to raise your kids in peace and prosperity, free from bad influences, and the ability to feel pride in your country and know that it isn't just a puppet of the US, are more important than having and expressing unusual political opinions. I think your comment screams "young westerner." Let's try a few more riffs on that myopic scheme:
Every sane person, regardless of their culture, wants to obey the word of God and live as God commanded.
Every sane person, regardless of their culture, wants to have as many sons as possible and help them get as much wealth and power as possible. And have no daughters.
Lets see you explain that to the family of one of the Chinese students who died in Tiananmen Square in 1989
Let's see you explain to the family of an incarcerated felon why Daddy isn't coming home for a while. Not much of an argument, is it?
People from Iran, for example, don't necessarily feel that first world countries are better. In many cases they long to go home. People usually go to first world countries for education, money, or to flee political turmoil. They frequently feel that their home countries are more virtuous, stable and sensible and have better food.
Our western recipe for success doesn't really work. It requires turning all the housewives into realtors or project managers or something, and leaving TV and the streets to raise the kids. It requires importing women from traditional cultures to play Mom for kids of the affluent. It requires poor and repressive countries to make our stuff. We're phenomenally good at inventing, colonizing, owning, conquering; but not at much else.
Second, these third world countries are not as hellish as you're portraying. People generally aren't shot in the back of the head. The middle east isn't a hellhole for the people that live there, although it might be for a transplanted American. Many Palestinians have houses, cars, refrigerators and olive groves, a fact I only discovered when reading how the Israelis destroy these things.
Most people are free to say what they think, anything from bizarre politics to advocating child-adult sex.
I think that most people in the world do not want or approve this kind of freedom. People are generally very happy to see dissidents with bizarre politics punished. Ask any Chinese person about Falun Gong. If the US rounded up all the Scientologists and shot them, I think it would gain more popularity than any tax cut.
Personally, I'm a product of the West and wouldn't be happy in a traditional regime. But I realize that people raised in them may feel differently.
Rapists go to state prisons. Spammers will, one hopes, go to federal prisons. They're different systems, so complaining about inconsistency between their sentencing is like complaining that "slashdotters are for copyright one minute and against it the next." It's not the feds' fault if the states are too lenient.
The spammer sentences have to be strong enough to get the attention of investigators and prosecutors. They don't want to spend months chasing down someone who gets a trivial sentence. They also need to be strong enough for plea bargaining, so people involved in a spam ring have a strong incentive to testify against others in exchange for reduced sentences.
Whie I agree with you about what you term "Yuppie Laws" in general, I think you're completely wrong about CANSPAM. It is narrowly drafted to avoid the controversial edge cases. And yet it criminalizes the vast majority of spam in my inbox. If it is vigorously enforced it will substantially reduce spam.
And no, the typical slashdot arguments for why spammers will be able to evade the jurisdiction or effect of the law do not make sense. Anyone charging credit cards is very accessible to US jurisdiction.
It seems to me that tacking on SPAM sentancing to the sentace will only expediate the parole process.
I'm not sure what you mean, but there is no parole in the federal system.
It's really too bad that, technically, it's so difficult to catch a spammer. Especially if they route through international hosts.
It's not difficult if the spammer is trying to sell something. You know, the feds have already caught a bunch of ebay/aol password phishers. They didn't go through some high-tech process that slashdotters imagine - they merely followed the money.
It goes something like this:
Agent Bob gets a spam for pe|ns enl*rger.
Agent Bob whips out his credit card and orders one.
Agent Bob views his online statement and sees who the charge went to.
A few subpoenas later, Agent Bob knows the people involved.
Yes, there are details remaining, like establishing the link from merchant to spammer. It's very much the bread and butter of fraud investigation; being on the internet doesn't change it much.
So Agent Bob may be a drooling AOL user who can't tell a port from a subnet. Doesn't matter. Anyone who's charging people's credit cards is not invisible and is not immune from US jurisdiction.
Actually, it is insightful. We could have a roaring, hugely successful economy while the majority of people is unemployed. Imagine ACME, a US corporation. ACME has 50 US employees, all executives or lawyers and 1000 employees in India, including engineering and middle management. The products are made in China by non-employees. ACME (we'll say) sells a billion a year, making a profit of $200 million.
Now you might think, "Who buys their products if the majority in the US is unemployed?" Probably ACME sells to corporations or governments. Or maybe they sell to the minority of affluent consumers in the US. Or maybe they target the economically desperate with high-interest loans, goods on time payments, etc.
Prosperity for the US does not equal prosperity or employment for US residents.
Corporations like affluent people because they spend money freely. Corporations also like desperately poor people because they sell labor cheaply and buy things on very bad terms out of desperation.
If they did a Linux port, I'd be trying to find out if there's any similarity between the old dev team and the new one, and if there was, I'd run the other way.
Actually, programmers who have worked on a bad product have valuable experience that can help make a good product. Experience teaches, but uniformly successful experience probably doesn't teach as much.
I ran WP (5.1 I think) on DOS, and liked it. I could work in console mode, similar to an xterm today, and flick into GUI mode easily to see what something looked like. Of course I could hide and reveal codes - one feature that Word and its clones seem to lack.
Now I mostly use Abiword if I need a word processor. It's a very nice program, but it's strongly based on MS word. I don't like composing documents in a GUI. I don't want to see my document rendered in a font that's designed for laser printing - just use 'misc-fixed' or neep on the screen.
Besides, I'd like to access documents over dialup. X over dialup is too painful.
I guess most people like me use a text editor and a typesetter like troff or Tex. But I find that a bit annoying for letters and stuff.
Does anyone else want a ncurses-based word processor? Could I still enjoy WP 5.1 as much as I did, or has vi spoiled me with its fast navigation and terse commands? Is it possible to make a word processor with most of the vi functionality?
Owing to a legacy architecture, most (if not all) application logic is still embedded in PL/SQL stored packages.
Actually, that is probably the right way to do it today. You could build an oh-so-trendy layer cake of objects and application servers, but it will be a maintenance nightmare eight years later.
A database + PL/SQL app can survive many trends in programming languages. Connect with Perl, Java, whatever's trendy this week. Report with Crystal Reports for ad-hoc stuff. Nobody can bypass the business logic and mess up the database as long as they work through stored procedures.
PL/SQL is dull and weak, but quite maintainable. And it reduces the "impedance mismatch" between procedural langauge and SQL.
I didn't manage to communicate. No, we're not doing fine. And no, I don't report bugs like that. Experience has shown me that my report will be ignored or belittled. I really don't have time to qa my distro. I was happy to pay Red Hat for a relatively polished distro, until they decided they don't want me as a customer anymore. I would have paid twice as much for a more polished distro, but they didn't offer that - they offered overpriced "enterprise support."
You say that nothing that large is polished. Maybe so. In the Mac world, things work better because Apple lays down better guidelines. In the Linux world, you could build a polished commercial distro by hiring about ten seasoned guys who are thoroughly familiar with Mac, Windows and Linux to go through the distro with a fine toothed comb. It costs money. Nobody is willing to invest it.
I love Linux and use it at home and at work. But I am no longer thrilled by spending an hour solving a problem that should be 5 seconds. It's monstrously inefficient. I only feel happy if I can wrap up my solution in a script or program for others to use; but even then nobody will know of my solution so hundreds of man-hours will be wasted discussing and re-solving the issue, when the vendor could have just taken some responsibility and solved it for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the reasons these techniques aren't used in enterprise computing:
Since I've seen it up close a few times, I can say that the standard "enterprise way" (Oracle/Sun/EMC) delivers very poor bang for the buck. If Google wanted to, they could deliver a modified GFS with any desired level of reliability by increasing the redundancy. And even after that bloating, it would still deliver greater bang for the buck than the conventional solutions.
Umm, why? Why would IBM care if Photoshop runs on Linux? The proportion of desktop or home users who need photoshop is vanishingly small. They happen to be loud and picky, but there is no point in catering to them.
Money would be better spent improving OpenOffice and getting functional Outlook, PowerPoint and Project replacements. That is, if you care about Linux on the average worker's desktop.
I completely disagree. I remember being a kid and learning BASIC. I thought Logo was a steaming pile of patronizing bullshit. It is too far from a real language.
BASIC may be a joke to most folks here, but I wrote and played fun games in it.
Maybe the difference is that I'm not talking about "teaching". BASIC is more of a learning language. The idea of anyone teaching how to program struck me as ridiculous when I was 10, and still seems unlikely. You have to walk this path alone.
The earlier a kid starts programming, the better. It's not hard to learn new languages, styles and paradigms later. Basic makes it easy to get started.
Give me an example where the New York Times stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I don't think you understand how journalism works, or can work. Journalists frequently report statements by experts or interested parties. They try to accurately capture the words and affiliation of the person speaking or writing. It is up to the reader to assess the credibility of the source.
You seem to want journalists to decide who is right and who is wrong. The best they can do is dig up facts or statements supporting both sides and present them all to the reader.
If the President says that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, that is news. Reporting that statement does not mean the journalists think it's true, merely that it's newsworthy.
Nice to see that you're at:(Score:0, Interesting)
Insult not the sacred fruit lest you suffer the wrath of the devout moderators.
Well put, but there are counterpoints.
.NET based, so we have no way of accessing them from a Linux desktop. Think banking, voting, major online shopping. This could slow Linux desktop adoption both at home and in the office.
.NET train is coming whether we like it or not. Calling yourself a leader and marching off in a different direction won't even be noticed by the majority.
The entertainment products are not a good analogy, because interoperability is not an issue there. Miguel fears a future in which critical services may become
Miguel's central point is that the
Turn it around and look at Samba. That's a case of following Microsoft's weird, often broken protocols. Painful, right? Should the energy have been put into better network file systems and print protocols? No. We need that interop greatly. Without Samba, many Linux deployments would not be possible.
Remember, Microsoft loved Samba when they were trying to catch up with Unix servers in credibility. They started hating it when they gained dominance. They correctly reasoned that when you're weak, you want to interoperate, but when you're strong you want to blaze your own trail and shut out competitors.
This is a typical demagogic attempt to get slashdotters riled up against an otherwise unnown blocklist operator. Simply put, most slashdotters do not run ISP's and therefore see only the downside of blocklists.
i ms, let me remind you that SPEWS has gotten the attention of some extremely inattentive spam havens. Companies that unrepentantly spammed like mad in the face of every kind of complaint, peer pressure, and narrowly targetted listing have suddenly come to the table when facing a broad SPEWS block. Broad listing works where diplomacy has failed.
Most slashdotters are benefiting from some kind of mail filtering and don't even realize it. They are like peaceniks bitching about the very defense establishment that keeps them free to bitch.
I never heard of the AHBL before this article. There are tons of lists. A list that would block a major ISP is probably a niche list aimed at small domains who are not going to have 10,000 angry customers. If SPEWS blocked this ISP, it might be news. If some unknown list does it, so what?
If you find it shocking that a list would shoot from the hip, don't ever query xbl.selwerd.cx. Fast, broad and unforgiving!
Before the inevitable whining chorus of broad-listing-is-bad-what-about-the-innocent-vict
And remember, also, that you are almost certainly benefiting from a lot of filtering implemented by your postmasters or even network admins (at border routers). They spend a huge amount of time compiling lists of bad domains and netblocks - why shouldn't they share that knowledge with other admins? Such sharing is most efficiently done by publishing a DNS-based list like SPEWS. The high profile lists are more professionally maintained than most ISP's in-house lists. Would you rather they share in secret, so small operators can't benefit from their knowledge?
I agree. What is the connection between being a "geek" and rooting for the Segway? There are things about geekhood I don't understand. Why assume that New York is "luddite" for wanting to ban this nuisance? Of course they should ban it. It's a motor vehicle that wants to run on the crowded sidewalks. The last thing Americans need is a way to avoid walking.
However in more suburban areas it could fill a legitimate niche.
"Linux doesn't have automatic updates." Ignorant, caught in a time warp, or trolling? I pick the latter. We've had commercial trolls for a while. They post some inflammatory story to wind up the slashdot crowd, get tons of page views, then post something more conciliatory to ward off the raving loonies. Rob Enderle comes to mind, although I don't remember his specific exploits.
I think more of the mainstream media is catching on to the commercial potential of trolling the linux crowd. Just make an unfounded negative assertion about linux. Then next week, "As many readers pointed out to me, Linux does in fact have automatic updates. You learn something new every day."
I wish you'd log in. Your informed opinion deserves better than to languish at 0.
The mystery of truly horrible software that continues to sell is a fascinating one.
Blasphemer!
You must never call Java an interpreted language. Java is compiled into bytecodes! These bytecodes are not interpreted by an interpreter, but rather executed by a virtual machine. Altogether different!
So how should a library author avoid this? We need to allocate lots of little chunks that the application author shouldn't have to see. That's why we have appropriate free() functions the app author can use to clean up afterwards.
Some libraries allow the caller to pass in a function pointer to his own malloc, which can add diagnostics or alloc from an application memory pool.
I'm not sure what you regard as best practice here. We can't have the caller allocate everything in advance, like you would allocate a sockaddr, because the library may be building data structures with lots of dynamically allocated nodes.
I'd say that for a lot of people, the ability to raise your kids in peace and prosperity, free from bad influences, and the ability to feel pride in your country and know that it isn't just a puppet of the US, are more important than having and expressing unusual political opinions. I think your comment screams "young westerner." Let's try a few more riffs on that myopic scheme:
Let's see you explain to the family of an incarcerated felon why Daddy isn't coming home for a while. Not much of an argument, is it?
People from Iran, for example, don't necessarily feel that first world countries are better. In many cases they long to go home. People usually go to first world countries for education, money, or to flee political turmoil. They frequently feel that their home countries are more virtuous, stable and sensible and have better food.
Our western recipe for success doesn't really work. It requires turning all the housewives into realtors or project managers or something, and leaving TV and the streets to raise the kids. It requires importing women from traditional cultures to play Mom for kids of the affluent. It requires poor and repressive countries to make our stuff. We're phenomenally good at inventing, colonizing, owning, conquering; but not at much else.
Second, these third world countries are not as hellish as you're portraying. People generally aren't shot in the back of the head. The middle east isn't a hellhole for the people that live there, although it might be for a transplanted American. Many Palestinians have houses, cars, refrigerators and olive groves, a fact I only discovered when reading how the Israelis destroy these things.
I think that most people in the world do not want or approve this kind of freedom. People are generally very happy to see dissidents with bizarre politics punished. Ask any Chinese person about Falun Gong. If the US rounded up all the Scientologists and shot them, I think it would gain more popularity than any tax cut.
Personally, I'm a product of the West and wouldn't be happy in a traditional regime. But I realize that people raised in them may feel differently.
Rapists go to state prisons. Spammers will, one hopes, go to federal prisons. They're different systems, so complaining about inconsistency between their sentencing is like complaining that "slashdotters are for copyright one minute and against it the next." It's not the feds' fault if the states are too lenient.
The spammer sentences have to be strong enough to get the attention of investigators and prosecutors. They don't want to spend months chasing down someone who gets a trivial sentence. They also need to be strong enough for plea bargaining, so people involved in a spam ring have a strong incentive to testify against others in exchange for reduced sentences.
Why does this comment get made over and over? Why does it get modded up? It's wrong.
You cannot evade responsibility for a crime by hiring someone else to commit it.
Also, the law passed around the beginning of the year.
Whie I agree with you about what you term "Yuppie Laws" in general, I think you're completely wrong about CANSPAM. It is narrowly drafted to avoid the controversial edge cases. And yet it criminalizes the vast majority of spam in my inbox. If it is vigorously enforced it will substantially reduce spam.
And no, the typical slashdot arguments for why spammers will be able to evade the jurisdiction or effect of the law do not make sense. Anyone charging credit cards is very accessible to US jurisdiction.
I'm not sure what you mean, but there is no parole in the federal system.
It's not difficult if the spammer is trying to sell something. You know, the feds have already caught a bunch of ebay/aol password phishers. They didn't go through some high-tech process that slashdotters imagine - they merely followed the money.
It goes something like this:
Yes, there are details remaining, like establishing the link from merchant to spammer. It's very much the bread and butter of fraud investigation; being on the internet doesn't change it much.
So Agent Bob may be a drooling AOL user who can't tell a port from a subnet. Doesn't matter. Anyone who's charging people's credit cards is not invisible and is not immune from US jurisdiction.
Actually, it is insightful. We could have a roaring, hugely successful economy while the majority of people is unemployed. Imagine ACME, a US corporation. ACME has 50 US employees, all executives or lawyers and 1000 employees in India, including engineering and middle management. The products are made in China by non-employees. ACME (we'll say) sells a billion a year, making a profit of $200 million.
Now you might think, "Who buys their products if the majority in the US is unemployed?" Probably ACME sells to corporations or governments. Or maybe they sell to the minority of affluent consumers in the US. Or maybe they target the economically desperate with high-interest loans, goods on time payments, etc.
Prosperity for the US does not equal prosperity or employment for US residents.
Corporations like affluent people because they spend money freely. Corporations also like desperately poor people because they sell labor cheaply and buy things on very bad terms out of desperation.
Actually, programmers who have worked on a bad product have valuable experience that can help make a good product. Experience teaches, but uniformly successful experience probably doesn't teach as much.
I ran WP (5.1 I think) on DOS, and liked it. I could work in console mode, similar to an xterm today, and flick into GUI mode easily to see what something looked like. Of course I could hide and reveal codes - one feature that Word and its clones seem to lack.
Now I mostly use Abiword if I need a word processor. It's a very nice program, but it's strongly based on MS word. I don't like composing documents in a GUI. I don't want to see my document rendered in a font that's designed for laser printing - just use 'misc-fixed' or neep on the screen.
Besides, I'd like to access documents over dialup. X over dialup is too painful.
I guess most people like me use a text editor and a typesetter like troff or Tex. But I find that a bit annoying for letters and stuff.
Does anyone else want a ncurses-based word processor? Could I still enjoy WP 5.1 as much as I did, or has vi spoiled me with its fast navigation and terse commands? Is it possible to make a word processor with most of the vi functionality?
Actually, that is probably the right way to do it today. You could build an oh-so-trendy layer cake of objects and application servers, but it will be a maintenance nightmare eight years later.
A database + PL/SQL app can survive many trends in programming languages. Connect with Perl, Java, whatever's trendy this week. Report with Crystal Reports for ad-hoc stuff. Nobody can bypass the business logic and mess up the database as long as they work through stored procedures.
PL/SQL is dull and weak, but quite maintainable. And it reduces the "impedance mismatch" between procedural langauge and SQL.
I didn't manage to communicate. No, we're not doing fine. And no, I don't report bugs like that. Experience has shown me that my report will be ignored or belittled. I really don't have time to qa my distro. I was happy to pay Red Hat for a relatively polished distro, until they decided they don't want me as a customer anymore. I would have paid twice as much for a more polished distro, but they didn't offer that - they offered overpriced "enterprise support."
You say that nothing that large is polished. Maybe so. In the Mac world, things work better because Apple lays down better guidelines. In the Linux world, you could build a polished commercial distro by hiring about ten seasoned guys who are thoroughly familiar with Mac, Windows and Linux to go through the distro with a fine toothed comb. It costs money. Nobody is willing to invest it.
I love Linux and use it at home and at work. But I am no longer thrilled by spending an hour solving a problem that should be 5 seconds. It's monstrously inefficient. I only feel happy if I can wrap up my solution in a script or program for others to use; but even then nobody will know of my solution so hundreds of man-hours will be wasted discussing and re-solving the issue, when the vendor could have just taken some responsibility and solved it for everyone.