The explanation for the desk and stuff was a bit more vauge, but had something to do with red tape and ensuring that they were providing an acceptable work place environment (never made any sence to me, but hey, whatever).
I'm going to guess that they have an insurance contract which covers injuries to employees while using company-owned equipment. Given that RSI is a major issue for office workers, they'd have wanted to be absolutely certain that you were covered, even if it meant paying for an extra desk and chair.
I want to hear from Slashdot readers who have quit jobs or turned down offered jobs because it was not what they wanted to do.
I haven't quit any jobs, but I've turned down lots of them in the few months -- some open source work I've done (FreeBSD Update and bsdiff, mostly) has attracted interest from a large number of companies.
My standard reply to job offers (or more commonly, invitations to interview) from the US is as follows:
Thanks for the (invitation | offer), but I've decided not to accept employment in the US until at least January 20th, 2009.
I'm sure some people would say that I'm being crazy, putting politics ahead of getting a job; but I value freedom more than money, and right now (especially for non-US citizens) I don't consider the USA to be a free country.
If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?
Re:To be fair, 5.x has been botched
on
The Case for FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
the development is getting very political
It is?
Ok, I can't say that I'm the most politically savvy of people, so maybe there's a lot of politics which has whooshed over my head, but... jeez, I had no idea.
It's a sad day when a FreeBSD committer learns something about the internals of the FreeBSD project from slashdot.
Re:Who cares about this battle?
on
The Case for FreeBSD
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
[If other people don't know about FreeBSD], who loses? Personally I have a use for only a couple of operating systems now, and they are Linux and netbsd.
To answer your question: You lose.
Linus Torvalds has said that the idea behind Linux is "do it yourself". The idea behind BSD -- coming, as it does, from an academic background -- is "there's lots of trash out there. Let's give people something better".
As far as providing people with a better alternative is concerned, writing FreeBSD doesn't accomplish much if everyone keeps on running the Linux distribution of the day.
In a separate study, also presented to the conference, a team led by Ruth Curry of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Connecticut has established that 20,000 square kilometres of freshwater ice melted in the Arctic between 1965 and 1995.
Strange, I've always measured volumes in cubic metres, not square metres...
More seriously, does anyone have a clue what this "20,000 square kilometres of freshwater ice" is supposed to mean?
Well, there are a number of native (or at least very fluent) English speakers on the FreeBSD core team. If they are going to put out a major announcement in English regarding the project, and presumably from the core team, do you suppose maybe one of them could have taken a minute to proofread it?
Funny that you should mention that. Kuriyama did, in fact, ask for people to proofread, and this announcement wasn't going to be sent out until after that happened.
Unfortunately, someone leaked the story to slashdot before the announcement was ready (and proofread).
Nobody is suggesting that Beastie should cease to be the FreeBSD mascot; this is about selecting a new logo.
The reasons for this include not just that some people consider the daemon to be offensive, but also legal issues: The daemon image is owned by Kirk McKusick and right now if companies want to use the image, they need to get permission from him. A "powered by FreeBSD" logo which is actually free for everybody to use would make things much easier.
I'm not sure I see that as accepting mediocrity. I see it as more a "relaxed" approach.
I'm not sure I understand. What's the difference between accepting mediocrity, and being "relaxed" about issues of quality?
Linux, OTOH, isn't under external pressure from a marketing department that keeps promoting superwhamodyne products by such-and-such a date. Linux is ready when it is ready, and not before.
Strangely enough, Microsoft is becoming famous for delaying products until they're ready (e.g., XP SP2, LongHorn), while Linus is happy to charge ahead and release "stable" kernels whether they're ready or not.
... There's a standard of established mediocrity within [Microsoft's] internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
What makes you think that Linus would solve this problem? In all seriousness, look at the "stable" 2.6 kernel branch, and the attitude demonstrated by comments like "some kernels will be good, others will be bad... we'll find out which kernels are broken soon enough".
I'm not saying that Linus himself believes in such mediocrity; but it's a bit unreasonable to expect that he would improve things at Microsoft when Linux, under his "benevolent dictatoriship" is plagued by exactly the same problems.
There's a mantra which covers this perfectly: If you can solve 99% of the problem with 1% of the work, it's probably a good idea.
The large, expensive, and failed projects cited were run in what is a very typical manner outside of computing: A group of people sat down, decided exactly what they'd like to have, and then they hired another group of people to produce it.
The better approach is the 99% solution: Decide approximately what you'd like to have, then look around and see if there are any existing solutions, or parts of solutions, available which give you approximately what you want.
This is one way that computer software is very much different from "real world" products: If you're building a house, customizations aren't going to change the cost very much, since most of the cost goes into materials and fixed labor costs. With computer software, on the other hand, the materials and fixed costs are zero, and it is entirely possible for a 99% solution to exist at 1% of the cost.
They can copyright their exact words and can (and probably should*) control the distribution of those words, but copyright does not give them any protection of the facts contained within.
In my capacity as part of the FreeBSD Security team, I often receive emails -- including security advisories -- and forward them to other security people. I don't want to spend an hour rewriting the advisory; I just want to forward it.
*: Reputation is important. One of the reasons copyright should not be straight-out abolished is its usefulness in making sure that words are correctly attributed and can be quality controlled, a virtue you are so used to you may never even think about until it is gone.
The right to be identified as the author of a work (and equally, to not be identified as the author of a work that you did not produce) is quite separate from the right to restrict redistribution.
COPYING, DISTRIBUTION, AND MODIFICATION OF INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS ALLOWED ONLY WITH EXPRESS PERMISSION OF ONE OF THE AUTHORS.
Is it just me, or is this mind-bogglingly stupid? A security advisory which can't be redistributed freely? Imagine if the same approach was taken to important warnings in the real world -- "There's a tsunami heading towards you... but you're not allowed to redistribute this warning to all the people around you without my permission."
Security advisories should be in the public domain.
I'm not directly involved here, so I don't know all the details, but I talk to people from the FreeBSD Foundation on a regular basis. Hopefully they'll forgive me if I get some of the details wrong here.
Basically, the story can be summarized as follows:
1. Sun dropped the ball by mistake. 2. FreeBSD Foundation didn't know what was going on, and mentioned the problem in their newsletter. 3. People at Sun realized that they had dropped the ball. 4. Sun picked up the ball and put it through the goal posts (or whatever the right sports analogy is).
This whole story is really just a misunderstanding. Sun wasn't trying to be evil, they just made a mistake, and as soon as they realized that there was a problem they started doing all that they could to fix it.
The new license should be announced Real Soon Now.
Joel seems to have discarded graduate degrees on the basis of a very small sample of courses -- one. I don't like dynamic logic any more than Joel does. I don't like lambda calculus either. And I wouldn't even consider writing anything in Haskell. I have, however, almost finished (my thesis defence is in three weeks) my D.Phil. at Oxford University in Computer Science.
Guess what -- there's more to computer science than dynamic logic, lambda calculus, and Haskell. I spent my time working on algorithms: First parallel computing, then I got distracted and ended up writing my thesis about a new algorithm for matching with mismatches, delta compression of executable code, ``universal'' delta compression (You have file X, someone else has file Y. You can't talk to them. Given the constraint that Y is "similar" to X, first build a patch P; then given P and Y, compute X.), and a rapid string similarity metric. Four new and interesting algorithms; no lambda calculus needed.
You should never discard a field because it contains some material you don't like. As you move to more advanced study, you become increasingly specialized, and you can easily avoid the topics which don't interest you.
Apparently most of the governments secret high-optical resolution sattelites were curiously locked in geo-synchronous orbits
It's a nice idea, but rather pointless -- geosynchronous orbits are sufficiently expensive to reach, and would require sufficiently higher resolution optics, that it would probably be cheaper to launch an entire fleet of LEO satellites in such a manner that your target was always visible at the desired resolution.
Now, we should all be using encryption on our wireless networks, so I wouldn't suggest this as a mechanism for wireless security -- furthermore, I'm sure this isn't 100% effective, so any determined attacker would simply turn up his amplifier by a few dB.
That said, this could be a useful way of protecting against unintentional transmissions. Our computers are doing an awful lot of radiating, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was enough leakage to provide an effective cryptographic side-channel. Paint your walls with copper, and even if you only block out 90% of the leakage, you may well have reduced an already marginal signal enough to stop an attacker.
Can you please explain how a switch in the world's reserver currency leads to huge inflation in the US?
As soon as the dollar ceases to be a reserve currency, banks around the world will sell off their US dollar reserves. That puts a large number of USD onto the international markets, pushing the price down.
Anything imported into the US -- or locally manufactured using imported parts or raw materials -- suddenly becomes more expensive.
VCs never "knock down your door to give you money."
You may be correct in this, but only in the literal sense. At the height of the dotcom bubble I was contacted by a VC who was interested in offering me "initial funding... of $5M to $15M". (I turned down the offer, since I was more interested in going to Oxford to do my D.Phil.)
Of course, I doubt that would happen now, but this example at least demonstrates that it's not impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Getting it done right.
The explanation for the desk and stuff was a bit more vauge, but had something to do with red tape and ensuring that they were providing an acceptable work place environment (never made any sence to me, but hey, whatever).
I'm going to guess that they have an insurance contract which covers injuries to employees while using company-owned equipment. Given that RSI is a major issue for office workers, they'd have wanted to be absolutely certain that you were covered, even if it meant paying for an extra desk and chair.
I haven't quit any jobs, but I've turned down lots of them in the few months -- some open source work I've done (FreeBSD Update and bsdiff, mostly) has attracted interest from a large number of companies.
My standard reply to job offers (or more commonly, invitations to interview) from the US is as follows:
I'm sure some people would say that I'm being crazy, putting politics ahead of getting a job; but I value freedom more than money, and right now (especially for non-US citizens) I don't consider the USA to be a free country.
A decent number of them are marked BROKEN.
If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?
the development is getting very political
It is?
Ok, I can't say that I'm the most politically savvy of people, so maybe there's a lot of politics which has whooshed over my head, but... jeez, I had no idea.
It's a sad day when a FreeBSD committer learns something about the internals of the FreeBSD project from slashdot.
[If other people don't know about FreeBSD], who loses? Personally I have a use for only a couple of operating systems now, and they are Linux and netbsd.
To answer your question: You lose.
Linus Torvalds has said that the idea behind Linux is "do it yourself". The idea behind BSD -- coming, as it does, from an academic background -- is "there's lots of trash out there. Let's give people something better".
As far as providing people with a better alternative is concerned, writing FreeBSD doesn't accomplish much if everyone keeps on running the Linux distribution of the day.
Maybe if /. had a broadcast flag, it would be able to recognize stories which had been broadcast and avoid copying them?
Ok, a bit lame, but I'm having a hard time trying to come up with anything which wasn't posted the first two times...
A closed-source module could contain stolen proprietary code
For that matter, an open-source module could also contain stolen proprietary code.
I hope this will be treated with caution until it can be ascertained to be fully legitimate...
I hope you never use any code which you didn't write yourself.
In a separate study, also presented to the conference, a team led by Ruth Curry of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Connecticut has established that 20,000 square kilometres of freshwater ice melted in the Arctic between 1965 and 1995.
Strange, I've always measured volumes in cubic metres, not square metres...
More seriously, does anyone have a clue what this "20,000 square kilometres of freshwater ice" is supposed to mean?
Well, there are a number of native (or at least very fluent) English speakers on the FreeBSD core team. If they are going to put out a major announcement in English regarding the project, and presumably from the core team, do you suppose maybe one of them could have taken a minute to proofread it?
Funny that you should mention that. Kuriyama did, in fact, ask for people to proofread, and this announcement wasn't going to be sent out until after that happened.
Unfortunately, someone leaked the story to slashdot before the announcement was ready (and proofread).
Nobody is suggesting that Beastie should cease to be the FreeBSD mascot; this is about selecting a new logo.
The reasons for this include not just that some people consider the daemon to be offensive, but also legal issues: The daemon image is owned by Kirk McKusick and right now if companies want to use the image, they need to get permission from him. A "powered by FreeBSD" logo which is actually free for everybody to use would make things much easier.
I'm not sure I see that as accepting mediocrity. I see it as more a "relaxed" approach.
I'm not sure I understand. What's the difference between accepting mediocrity, and being "relaxed" about issues of quality?
Linux, OTOH, isn't under external pressure from a marketing department that keeps promoting superwhamodyne products by such-and-such a date. Linux is ready when it is ready, and not before.
Strangely enough, Microsoft is becoming famous for delaying products until they're ready (e.g., XP SP2, LongHorn), while Linus is happy to charge ahead and release "stable" kernels whether they're ready or not.
... There's a standard of established mediocrity within [Microsoft's] internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
What makes you think that Linus would solve this problem? In all seriousness, look at the "stable" 2.6 kernel branch, and the attitude demonstrated by comments like "some kernels will be good, others will be bad... we'll find out which kernels are broken soon enough".
I'm not saying that Linus himself believes in such mediocrity; but it's a bit unreasonable to expect that he would improve things at Microsoft when Linux, under his "benevolent dictatoriship" is plagued by exactly the same problems.
There's a mantra which covers this perfectly: If you can solve 99% of the problem with 1% of the work, it's probably a good idea.
The large, expensive, and failed projects cited were run in what is a very typical manner outside of computing: A group of people sat down, decided exactly what they'd like to have, and then they hired another group of people to produce it.
The better approach is the 99% solution: Decide approximately what you'd like to have, then look around and see if there are any existing solutions, or parts of solutions, available which give you approximately what you want.
This is one way that computer software is very much different from "real world" products: If you're building a house, customizations aren't going to change the cost very much, since most of the cost goes into materials and fixed labor costs. With computer software, on the other hand, the materials and fixed costs are zero, and it is entirely possible for a 99% solution to exist at 1% of the cost.
The first time I read your post, I thought it was a self-referential joke that was lame to begin with.
Oh wait...
They can copyright their exact words and can (and probably should*) control the distribution of those words, but copyright does not give them any protection of the facts contained within.
In my capacity as part of the FreeBSD Security team, I often receive emails -- including security advisories -- and forward them to other security people. I don't want to spend an hour rewriting the advisory; I just want to forward it.
*: Reputation is important. One of the reasons copyright should not be straight-out abolished is its usefulness in making sure that words are correctly attributed and can be quality controlled, a virtue you are so used to you may never even think about until it is gone.
The right to be identified as the author of a work (and equally, to not be identified as the author of a work that you did not produce) is quite separate from the right to restrict redistribution.
COPYING, DISTRIBUTION, AND MODIFICATION OF
INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS ALLOWED ONLY WITH EXPRESS PERMISSION OF
ONE OF THE AUTHORS.
Is it just me, or is this mind-bogglingly stupid? A security advisory which can't be redistributed freely? Imagine if the same approach was taken to important warnings in the real world -- "There's a tsunami heading towards you... but you're not allowed to redistribute this warning to all the people around you without my permission."
Security advisories should be in the public domain.
I'm not directly involved here, so I don't know all the details, but I talk to people from the FreeBSD Foundation on a regular basis. Hopefully they'll forgive me if I get some of the details wrong here.
Basically, the story can be summarized as follows:
1. Sun dropped the ball by mistake.
2. FreeBSD Foundation didn't know what was going on, and mentioned the problem in their newsletter.
3. People at Sun realized that they had dropped the ball.
4. Sun picked up the ball and put it through the goal posts (or whatever the right sports analogy is).
This whole story is really just a misunderstanding. Sun wasn't trying to be evil, they just made a mistake, and as soon as they realized that there was a problem they started doing all that they could to fix it.
The new license should be announced Real Soon Now.
Joel seems to have discarded graduate degrees on the basis of a very small sample of courses -- one. I don't like dynamic logic any more than Joel does. I don't like lambda calculus either. And I wouldn't even consider writing anything in Haskell. I have, however, almost finished (my thesis defence is in three weeks) my D.Phil. at Oxford University in Computer Science.
Guess what -- there's more to computer science than dynamic logic, lambda calculus, and Haskell. I spent my time working on algorithms: First parallel computing, then I got distracted and ended up writing my thesis about a new algorithm for matching with mismatches, delta compression of executable code, ``universal'' delta compression (You have file X, someone else has file Y. You can't talk to them. Given the constraint that Y is "similar" to X, first build a patch P; then given P and Y, compute X.), and a rapid string similarity metric. Four new and interesting algorithms; no lambda calculus needed.
You should never discard a field because it contains some material you don't like. As you move to more advanced study, you become increasingly specialized, and you can easily avoid the topics which don't interest you.
Apparently most of the governments secret high-optical resolution sattelites were curiously locked in geo-synchronous orbits
It's a nice idea, but rather pointless -- geosynchronous orbits are sufficiently expensive to reach, and would require sufficiently higher resolution optics, that it would probably be cheaper to launch an entire fleet of LEO satellites in such a manner that your target was always visible at the desired resolution.
Now, we should all be using encryption on our wireless networks, so I wouldn't suggest this as a mechanism for wireless security -- furthermore, I'm sure this isn't 100% effective, so any determined attacker would simply turn up his amplifier by a few dB.
That said, this could be a useful way of protecting against unintentional transmissions. Our computers are doing an awful lot of radiating, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was enough leakage to provide an effective cryptographic side-channel. Paint your walls with copper, and even if you only block out 90% of the leakage, you may well have reduced an already marginal signal enough to stop an attacker.
Can you please explain how a switch in the world's reserver currency leads to huge inflation in the US?
As soon as the dollar ceases to be a reserve currency, banks around the world will sell off their US dollar reserves. That puts a large number of USD onto the international markets, pushing the price down.
Anything imported into the US -- or locally manufactured using imported parts or raw materials -- suddenly becomes more expensive.
Will this quota of 1/3 of public donations need to be held every year from now on?
IANA tax lawyer, but I believe the "public support" test needs to be met each year on the basis of the totals for the preceeding 48 months.
I hope it's after noon - I have an important 10 o'clock meeting that morning.
In that case, you're safe (unless you live in some part of the world operating on UTC - 1200). The possible impact time is approximately 9:30 PM UTC.
VCs never "knock down your door to give you money."
You may be correct in this, but only in the literal sense. At the height of the dotcom bubble I was contacted by a VC who was interested in offering me "initial funding... of $5M to $15M". (I turned down the offer, since I was more interested in going to Oxford to do my D.Phil.)
Of course, I doubt that would happen now, but this example at least demonstrates that it's not impossible.