Older blog entries for haruspex (starting at number 60)

AlanHorkan, CharlesGoodwin: There is a thread on the Adobe forums at the moment - offering more heat than light, unfortunately - on why there is no Linux version of Photoshop. One thing no-one's mentioned, hardly surprising given the low level of commentary, is that Photoshop on Linux would likely outperform the Windows and Mac versions by a comfy margin.

Intra-Adobe pundits (of the non-executive sort) have from time to time given unconvincing excuses as to why it's too hard for them, but we are all still waiting for any substantive reason why Adobe should not test the Linux market.

Having used Photoshop since version 0.x, I well know that the GIMP ain't the same thing. That's not to say there's anything wrong with the GIMP. Sometimes I wonder why there is no Photoshop clone; the underlying algorithms are more basic than many OSS projects.

Re: the interface, while I would not enter the debate about which is superior, it seems that (viz. OpenOffice etc) adoption of an OSS package is greatly aided if the interfaces are closely compatible (but presumably not patent-infringing, eh, Macromedia?)

Archit: Interesting read? Not really. I've read that kind of crap before.

Romantic is what you can get out of that money and that's a decent life with a house, a car and a family. 

LOL! I can't think of anything less romantic.

The whole thing about ``free software'' is a lie. It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software. At the bottom of the food chain are people like you, who are easily fooled by the ``let's make the world a better place'' rhetoric and who are so enthusiastic about technology that writing open-source - or any source for that matter - is the absolutely best imaginable way to spend their time. It doesn't matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It's exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That's why they trick you into doing it. 

This nonsense hardly merits a response. The writer is seriously delusional and projecting his own fears and inadequacies on to an ecosystem and value-system he doesn't understand. Perhaps he is jealous of the Tim O'Reillys of the world.

What's spooky is the writer's random sprinkling of the word "family" throughout the text... he is making a subliminal emotional appeal instead of making his points with evidence.

The way it's written, it could have been planted as part of a coordinated FUD-Astroturf campaign to attack free/open source software on a "populist" level. A groklaw user has summarised the lies which comprise this "strategy":

• Open source destroys the value of programmers' labor
• Programmers who code OSS are putting other programmers out of work
• Programmers should stop coding OSS and start thinking from a traditional career value perspective (they will present this as an either-or choice)
• The OSS ideologues (Stallman et al.) want all software to be free (as in beer) and you to be out of work

The gimmick here is that they're trying to radicalize the debate and to portray both sides as slippery slopes. This is a way of herding people and excluding the middle.

The middle of course is that OSS represents a way for the free market to escape from the lock-in entrapments of commercial operating systems by commoditizing the basic OS and working environment of computing. In turn, this provides an open platform on which any kind of solution (commercial, free, hybrid, etc.) can be developed without the encumberance of proprietary lock-in to a single platform.

This is the reality and the excluded middle that they don't want you to see: FOSS as a free-market response to lock-in and a mechanism for constructing an open platform on which to build new levels of business and technology.

I have added emphasis to the points which specifically refute the bullshit quoted at top.

Welcome back, Lobster!

deekayen: I think you should send the résumé - not like I have my shit together or anything...

mrd: The Australian-US "F"TA: what a disaster. If I'd wanted to be an American, I'd freaking move there. Let's hope John Howard retires to the US, the sooner the better. Clearly he'd rather be living there.

cactus: I so wish I could agree with you about Enemy at the Gates - but it was crud. :-) The only bright spots were:

• Bob Hoskins IS Khrushchev - the role he was born to play!
• and Rachel Weisz. 'nuff said.

My biggest problem is I didn't know which side to root for. And neither did the screenwriter. Let's see... do I cheer THESE fascists, or THESE fascists? In Hollywood tradition, the suspense depended upon manipulative, circumstantial, episodic peaks and troughs, such as the hanging of the child-traitor. My favourite scene from the whole film, the only one I felt had a ring of reality about it - the grandfather and child shooting the wolf in the snow - was completely fictional, according to Russian friends familiar with Vassili's life story. Ed Harris' character was a two-dimensional caricature of a Nazi, who belonged to the Indiana Jones genre instead of a pretentious war film. I suggest anyone in the mood for a bleak WWII period piece should see The Pianist and avoid Enemy like the plague. Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

This [Helma Object Publisher] seems interesting:

Helma is a highly integrated open source web application platform that combines the strength of the Java platform with the power and simplicity of scripting languages. Server side scripting languages such as Perl and PHP have been a mainstay of the Web since the early days. But scripted Web apps have often proved to be less than well-designed and maintainable. Helma, which is scripted with standard JavaScript, was built to encourage clean and simple application design.

Why another scripting framework/application server?

Because, quite honestly, the one we need hasn't been built yet. What we need is a platform that offers a high level of abstraction on the prevalent web application concepts, but is not dumbed down and stripped of power and flexibility in order to be "idiot proof". The problem of so many J2EE solutions is that they are targeted to Java developers. But how many web developers you know sleep with the EJB spec under their pillow? That's what we thought. On the other hand, high level platforms often sacrifice the smart concepts in the underlying layers because their architects don't trust their users to be able to grasp those concepts. That's why JSP was patterened after Microsoft ASP when everybody doing serious web work already knew how broken that approach was.

Our credo is: Building websites should not be a task of system level programming. But when you bring web site building to the "ordinary people", they should be able to use the serious tools to get the job done. That's what we're trying to provide with Helma.

"Great moments at work brought to you by the Microsoft Office System."

Are you kidding? I could name some Not-So-Great moments it's brought me.

"The new Microsoft Office System helps you focus on what's important" -- presumably, they mean, "such as sending us more money."

As a great friend reminded me yesterday, vector products are alien technology. Then he mentioned Clifford algebras.

I know I'm never going to know what he's talking about in this lifetime. I can't even get an lburg code generator working...

mjg59:

"This code is in the public domain. You may not use it for commerical purposes"

IANAL but I think that's a contradiction. Either it's in the public domain - fair game for all - or it's a license with strings (see GPL). If that combination of conditions is indeed ambiguous, the original author needs to make it sensible.

Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla today told The Associated Press that some incomplete portions of the Windows 2000 and Windows NT4.0 source code had been "illegally made available on the Internet".

... access could also provide a competitive edge to Microsoft rivals, who would gain a much better understanding of the inner workings of Microsoft's technology.

It is but to laugh. News flash, M$: your rivals already have the competitive edge. Looking at M$' code can only make things worse...

Sounds more like this "leak" is a straw-man invention to allow M$ to deflect the blame for the accelerating virus plague.

Jody:

Use this one

Ack... nothing against johnnyb or his new book - and not to start another flamewar like the great man vs info cataclysm of 2003 - but I get the shudders thinking of x86 assembly being used as a first contact to machine language. I have never come across anything so baroque as the Intel instruction set... it's a shame that its pointlessly painful perversities are now by default a rite of passage for student programmers... There are many more fun machines to learn about :-)

But I'm not the first to say it... I'll let the always erudite /. crowd speak:

Calling X86 assembly "baroque" is like calling the Grand Canyon a "ditch".

(From a thread reviewing a different book on x86 assembly.)