swa14

>>open hardware MIPS netbook made in China

More specificly, the Lemote Yeelong, which is not only made in China (like most hardware I guess), but also designed there.

It's neat enough if you can find one, with actually a pretty decent keyboard (for a netbook; rms uses a seperate keyboard with his).

For a moment there one might have been thinking he meant atrocious actions with high death tolls against a civilian population, in which case the OP is definitely failing to understand it with his "for something no other country has ever faced", and the "spare yourself embarrassment by not making such witless pronouncements" is spot on.

>>There is no shame in asking for someone to pay for what they have purchased.

True, but what have they purchased ?

>>Safeway is not greedy, begging or anything of the sort when they ask me to pay for a loaf of bread.

No, but that's a loaf of bread, a physical thing with uniform properties and an established price. When you send out an invoice for your freelance work, there is the amount of hours and there's significant markup for it being freelance hours. It adds up, and before you know it you're sending out a bill for what is, at that moment in time, for you a huge amount of money.

It's not a bad thing to reflect on that. "Am I really worth this ?", "Did I actually earn this?", "Am I offending my customer by being out of the ballpark ?", and most importantly, "Can I justify this, not just to the customer, but to myself ?"

Over time you will appreciate how you fretted over that "huge bill", and maybe even adjusted it a little to feel comfortable about the value you feel you have provided.

It's not comparable to retail, where everything more or less has an agreed upfront price.

Not silly. It's supposed to be this way. And don't skip out on the angst.

A starting businessman should be apprehensive of sending out invoices and questioning himself. Yes, it does feel like "begging", but it makes sure you don't lose out because of hubris. Over time (if you're doing everything well) you will have more money and business acumen, and it will become easier, since you won't be needing the money on the short term. It will also allow you to better negotiate higher prices.

And when you've mastered it, you can hire a (part-time) secretary, who sends out the invoices. That's your reward. You faced your fear, learned how to handle it, and now you can let it go, because with someone else doing the billing, you can always fall back to it being a secretarial error.

There are whole industries based on making it seem you have enough cash and confidence so you feel you have a stronger position to negotiate, skipping out on what I feel is a basic business skill.

Or you can do it the hard way, without leased luxury and practicing the voodoo feelgood technique of the day. Building a business on hard work and gathering confidence in your own skills through your customers, without blaming your parents or the world or your mirror.

Dont' be an actor playing an entrepeneur; be an entrepeneur.

>>Oracle is just a business.

It's just that it's the kind of business that makes me glad kitten stomping doesn't have an appreciable ROI .

Well, price dumping, I would say.

Normally centos users would "grow into" payed support from RH. Now Oracle claims to give them that support without cost.

Unbreakable Linux was never an attempt to have their own distribution, it was to undercut RH, and now they're found a new way to do that through Centos. It may cost Oracle money, but it costs RH more money, because, after all, they actually build a distribution.

Ideally, kill/buy RH, phase out Unbreakable, and cram in proprietary Solaris. But for now just destabilizing the RH ecosystem has to do.

Thanks for the brtfs, but no thanks. I'll only touch your stuff with a GPL pole and with a non-oracle maintainer.

If you want support for Centos, please consider redhat *

I'm sure there are some good people at Oracle, and maybe this is a genuine project by some of them, but the hierarchy Oracle is under is just too fickle (as what happened with OpenSolaris).

*Not redhat affiliated. Not even running redhat or fedora anywhere. But on enough mailinglists to see that RH isn't a respected open-source company for nothing.

And once again, by your proposed model to fund science. How are we even going to know there's a comet hurling towards earth ? Gazing out there for neat stuff in the cosmos isn't even a problem in the first place, so it's completely useless by your metric.

>>move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive"

Those are screenwriting scenarios

>>answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.

The answers to those questions have allowed governments to, in as far as is realistically possible, have scenarios and structures in place, for actual world-wide calamity events.

>>Try reading.

You make some highly unorthodox points. There's nothing wrong with that in itself; in fact, it's welcomed. But when people respond to those points and indicate they have no merit (like how research scientists are in it for their own enrichment), being rude and dismissive is not going to convince anyone you're right; quite the contrary.

>>if the problem cannot be addressed than why even bring it up?

Because an engineer (not a research scientist) somewhere, given the right model, and access to the right information, has a basis on which to start working on a solution.

>>Downvote me, I don't care.

You have a very serious misunderstanding about the scientific process and its interaction with other disciplines it seems. Or to put it more bluntly. Cancer is a punishment from God, not a "problem", no investigation warranted, case closed. So let's all get back to devising scientific methods for determining who's a witch, a real problem that can at least be addressed directly and is beneficial to society.

>>Take special note of my words above, particularly "DEEP DOWN"

Especially DEEP DOWN, that's where the problem lies.

It's called "Appeal to nature", and it consists of explaining one concept in term of another (love in reproductive drive), even though their fields of use are on completely different levels. It's a form of reductio ad absurdum, which, even if ultimately and factually correct, adds nothing to the argument other than to discard important facets of a problem that are important for understanding the problem on one level, but not on the other, like, e.g.

"I am capable of feeling love without sexual connotations, but deep down I understand that the reason my brain loves is because it has found a worthy mate"

I'm sure a brother/father would be fascinated by that sort of reasoning :)

This is just to show that in your reduction of the term "love" to purely reproductional terms, you cast out a lot of complex interaction, because "love" exists on the level of rational human interaction, and is complex behaviour, whereas reproduction is not; in fact, the complexity of love is what makes it worth having a seperate term for "love" and "reproductional drive", and worth arguing about what it entails and its place in society.

To redefine it in simpler but unequivalent (even if related) terms, is to change the subject entirely, and that's why it's a logical fallacy.

>If a male were to sexually harass a female, it would not be sexism because he is not giving males special preference over females

Well, seeing how he's not sexually harassing the males I'd say there's a noted difference in "special preference".

Anyway, I'd argue that sexism is almost inherent to any sexual harassment, as the male put himself in a position of power/dominance based on little more than gender difference and the perceived inequality/role expectations that go along with that.

>>you know what I mean

I'm afraid not. Your implication does not really define anything.

>>If you want to argue

I don't. But I'd like to impart the following.

>>If you <snip> maybe you are the type of person that believes in which case our views are inherently different.

That exceedlingly bad form in any sort of argument, and a very weak position to take.

To paraphrase: "If you don't believe in God, then maybe you are just the sort of person who believes not in God, in which case I'm just going to ignore any argument you make anyway because I'm inherently not that sort of person."

Basically it reduces whatever case you're arguing to your personal opinion/ pet theory.

It basically fails falsifiability, because every objection that can be made against your point can be countered with "Yes, but in my mind .... " reducing everything you say to "true", and becomes thus useless for further discourse.

@@gavanwoolery @swa14 - Have you ever tried to argue with a believer of god (from an atheist perspective)?

"God" was just a drop-in example to illustrate the point in arguing with someone who believes in his opinion so strongly that arguing against it would automatically classify that person as "that (opposite) kind of person".

So to answer your question, ironically, yes; in fact, I'm doing so right at this moment.

>It is pretty fruitless, which is why I would advise to avoid it, just as I would advise arguing against me if you believe in mysticism like soul-mates.

"mysticism like soul-mates" are your words and have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

The "type of person" you argue with is not "they who believe in 'mysticism like soul-mates'", but, "They who do not take your inner ideas and values as granted truths".

The point of my post was that the way you put your argument puts it firmly in the "pretty fruitless" category, since it can neither be denied or confirmed. If you want your argument to be given serious though, you would need to rephrase it.

>>Anything which cannot be scientifically proven or disproven (like the existence of a god) generally leads to fruitless arguments.

Which is why token_female's "[citation needed]" was right on the spot.

I'm sorry. I meant "the business" as in "the business you're representing", not the "business" as in suits. So in this case dressing in wacky t-shirts and mohawks.

Actually, as you put it, wearing a nice business suit might be a good solution for women at defcon. It would buck the trend of dressing whacky forced-casual, making you stand out and garner attention, and, noone is going to grab the ass of a suspected federal agent.

It's not that I disagree with the general sentiment, but there's an undertone of self-righteousness there.

" I was already thinking about what clothes I would avoid taking to Las Vegas for Defcon. Short skirts, low cut tops, tight dresses, and anything that might be overtly attention-grabbing have been bumped to second priority on that packing list.

Why?"

Maybe because it's a good idea to dress as part of the business, not part of "the entertainment", if you want to be taken seriously.

And no, women should be able to dress in whatever fashion they please without being worried about being assaulted verbally or otherwise, but that doesn't imply the right to be taken seriously.

I'm just not sure whether behaviour of that kind is a net-positive in solving the gender-issues during conferences.

the git dcvs has a git-blame feature. I guess it depends on the right environment for such a feature to be productive, which would basically mean an environment where "Blame Jim" means, "Go directly to Jim, he's either the goto person for this issue, or likely knows where to get it fixed quickly", instead of "everyone point the finger at Jim". Judging by the massive amount of negative reactions here, I guess there aren't a lot of productive environments available.

Because when programming in any language, you can't rise above your own proficiency in C.

That is my observation anyway. I think it has something to do with the deeper understanding of references and dereferencing, and the inner workings of languages in general.

Raymond, as is his wont, sets up a strawman and proceeds to set it on fire pitching himself as a champion of "the just side".

It's a strawman, because in truth the only important part about Turing's life in view of his accomplishments is that it was cut short. i.e. his genius could no longer produce progress. Whether this would have been due to suicide, an accident, or murder is not relevant. It is not relevant because for the people under which his work was meant to be dissipated (people in the same field), the circumstances in which the results are produced are of no importance.

Because of the progress he produced he became a people's hero to his country. People think about and tell tales about their heroes and their lives and circumstances. Irrespective of the direction these tales take, the accomplishments stand on their own among his peers, to wit, those who can actually understand the accomplishments.

Whether people appropriate a part of a life of a hero to underline certain aspects of it, or deny parts of it to underline other aspects of it, matters not one iota.

The facts of the matter are. "The work of Alan Turing was seminal to the entire field of computer science." The rest is history, and, as sometimes happens with history, can be rewritten by whomever needs the pageviews.

"this sort of politically motivated myth-making diminishes the object of the myth"

And any sort of tug of war between two sides who purport to propagate "the true story" is part of this myth. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous.

Ah. I guess I didn't express myself very clearly. I'm not advocating starting with 'ed' and transitioning to 'vi'. I'm an emacs user myself. But as you know, emacs is not always installed by default (especially on remote server installations). 'vi' is always there, but I already know and prefer emacs. 'ed' is also always there, and catches some corner cases 'vi' doesn't. As a bonus to knowing 'ed' (in addition to a fullblown editor), should the occasion arise when it's convenient to have a visual editor and emacs is not installed, your knowledge of 'ed' will allow you to do useful things with 'vi', even if you never normally use it.

As to what sysadmin jobs call for, having knowledge of 'ed' is not something I would put in the requirements, but it is something I would ask during an interview as it would hint at knowledge of the myriad of obscure tools that unix has, and/or having tackled delicate problems that would have required a fallback to 'ed' in the past.

As such we're mostly in agreement I think. I agree there are no compelling reasons for learning 'ed' as your primary text-editor. But there are compelling reasons against not having a working knowledge of 'ed', although it depends to a large extent on your field of endeavour.

not a joke at all. A regex you use in 'ed' command mode, you can use directly in vi after typing ':' I never made any heavy use of 'vi', but I can use it because I know a little 'ed'. Conversely, if one knows 'vi', it's easy to use 'ed' when one needs a tiny edit and doesn't want the whole screen to be filled. Even though it's just a moment, I find it distracting, especially in the ssh case I mentioned where I expect to login over ssh and suddenly I would need to change the whole screen just to make a trivial edit; 'ed' is a real timesaver there because it hardly disrupts the workflow.

I guess the benefits of 'ed' depend on your line of work though. For a systems administrator, I would make it a job-interview question.

well, if he was referring to 'unix' as specified in the Single Unix Specification (which incorporates IEEE Std 1003.1)

then all unix systems have 'ed'

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ed....

If arch linux doesn't include it, it's not a 'unix'; it's not even a good "not unix". So the author wouldn't have needed to correct his article but Arch would need to include 'ed' :)

It's not whether 'vi' is available (it usually is), but whether it is behaving properly. Situations do occur where any fullscreen editor will fail and where 'ed' will work as expected. And at such moments, even though you don't know the full extent of the power of 'ed' you will be happy to know how to change a line and save the config file (and actually quit 'ed'; that's harder than it sounds)

An editor in need is an editor indeed!

Even today 'ed' has practical uses apart from being the default emergency backup of the backup editor.

One situation where I always use 'ed' is when I reinstall a machine (with the same ip) and ssh tells me the keys don't match together with the line number in the file known_hosts. It's easy as: #ed ~/.ssh/known_hosts 15d wq

(assuming the mismatching line was 15). Only sed would be faster if it wasn't for the time spent always looking up the "-i" (edit in place) flag, so I just use ed.

Also knowing a little 'ed' will make working with 'vi' easier, assuming 'vi' is not your usual editor.

I think I see your point, and it has merit ... but ... :)

in a way, the 'find' program is like what you envision, except it's just for files. That means that someone somewhere along the road, had the same idea/problem (but limited to files) as you and whipped up a parser to produce that meta-data. That particular parser proved to be so useful to so many people, it became it's own program.

There's more than 40 years of sofware-"evolution" contained in unix, and apparently retrieving structured on the command-line has only proven universally useful for files. Unix has outlived many at the time more modern operating systems, and I think it's partly because it lacked a "grand unifying vision". Instead it has a "small, quick&dirty unifying vision" of which "flat text processing" on the commandline is a central part. It has turned out to be the greatest common denominator for being able to write programs, that might be quick and dirty oneliners, but ultimately they got the job done. And only those tiny little utilities that proved to be universally useful were developed into bigger more stuctured programs.

I'm not saying you idea is without merit, but it does apply the principle of "this concept A is useful for this particular problem-set. Let's apply it natively to all problem-sets so it can be useful there too!" ( in a way like Java did with the OO concept).

When simpler visions and concepts are actually implemented in the end it usually turns out one has been replacing witchcraft with voodoo.

>>Let me ask you this; how would you do the equivalent of this hypothetical command? >> $ ls | structured-grep 'file.size > 1M'

# find . -maxdepth 1 -size +1M

really, flat text is fine. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough that most want to not add any complexity to it that would make it incompatible.

And if you really need that complexity, it's usually worth whipping up a parser for.

GNU's a little more than some userland tools thrown in for good measure. It is actually an operating system.

If you look at the posix spec, which defines what a real "unix" should have and how it should behave, there's a tremendous amount of libraries and little tools (like how, for example, 'sed' is mandatory). If you look at a barebones installed unix-like system, most of these utilities and libraries actually come from GNU. In these days of X and GUI-goodness, they don't seem very important anymore, but nevertheless, they are needed to be able to claim one has a full unix-like operating system.

As for credit hogging, a lot of work went into writing GNU, and most of it was not rockstar-programming like kernel work. Most of the people who wrote GNU wrote it with a specific reason. That those people make a plea to call it by a name that would acknowledge those reasons, is neither unreasonable nor overly burdensome, and most importantly, not mandatory. As such, I don't feel it's "misplaced", or a "bunch of misguided rhetoric".

>Can't we simply be happy for an engineer who fully deserves the recognition he's getting?

Of course, any money in Linus' pocket is well spent. His approach to online collaborative development advanced the entire industry! ( the kernel is, of course, a great achievement as well, just not quite as remarkable )

on >>RMS' approach to a business which produces proprietary software is, essentially, "Your business is evil, you are evil, and I will crusade to end your evil."

He's been around for some years now. He's had the time to formulate his thought on matters. It's okay to not know what exactly he said/wrote, but it's not okay to just make up stuff you thought he might say based on your own biases.

What he actually wrote, is: "Over the years, many companies have contributed to free software development. Some of these companies primarily developed non-free software, but the two activities were separate; thus, we could ignore their non-free products, and work with them on free software projects. Then we could honestly thank them afterward for their free software contributions, without talking about the rest of what they did." Which is a far cry from what you assumed he might have had to say about it.

esr has long become open source's Colonel Kurz. Being stuck somewhere in his own little piece of the cyber jungle, together with those who adhere to his peculiar view of life.

Some might know him from his work "the Cathedral and the Bazaar", or know him as contributor to "Battle for Wesnoth". And some might even know him for his contributions to GNU (yes, really! open up the documentation to various utilities some time, and his name will be there). The problem with esr is however, his fanaticism. Where rms speaks of software, he speaks of software and its impact on society only. Whether this is done in the most effective way is open to debate. To expound on the rest of his personal political ideas, he uses his homepage. In general he makes a clear distinction between his general political stance (which everyone has one), and his ideas on software (where he can speak authoritatively).

esr's views are "all in". You are either part of "the tribe" and accept him as your "silverback gorilla" alpha-male, or you're wrong. He's been using his notoriety as a hacker to create visibility for his ideas on other aspects of life, creating, imo, a position of false authority for himself.

You can agree or disagree with rms. But irrespective of the way he presents his ideas on software, they stand on their own, they stand up to scrutiny, and can be defended by and discussed in terms of logical arguments; meaning you are free to agree or disagree with the body of ideas behind free sofware and radically differ (from rms) in any other aspect of life.

Pitting esr's and rms's ideas on free sofware as "two sides of the same coin", needs a coin in a very non-euclidian universe.

In short. esr's influence on opensource dwindled over the years, alienating readers because of tying in his views on software with his strong political beliefs. rms's influence on free software has remained strong, not because of his persona (some might say, "in spite" of), but because they are sound and selfcontaining, and don't require people to "buy into" ideas on other aspects of life that are not strictly software related.

>>he's probably got some disorder but when he's punching himself in the head publicly you can't help but wonder if maybe we should reevaluate our faith in his ideas

That's a bit of a leap of faith from a second hand account from a comment on a blog that related the event. I think it's safer to assume for now that the person who made the comment is not a native speaker (due to his name, and, obviously, being present at the talk) and is describing someone acting out the "stupid, stupid! stupid. How could I be so careless!" routine combined with hitting your own head, which I believe is a fairly common way to express exasperation, as "punching himself in the head".

rms received the MacArthur Genius grant at some point, which comes with a decent sum of money.

Now before some might get the wrong idea (that it would be easy to be an rms if financial worries were taken care of), rms had a job teaching before he got the award and was already doing these speeches.

As an aside, in my opinion it makes his dedication even more admirable. It would be easy for him to decide that he's done enough for Free Software, gets himself a nice seaside property to retire on and tend to his RSI, instead of speaking around the world, getting mocked and willfully misrepresented in the press, and apparently get his stuff stolen. But he doesn't, because his work is important. He's quite the character, warts and all, but he does have character.

CS to a programmer is no more "theoretical" than anatomy is to a surgeon.