I've notices previously that Korelib boasts support for AtheOS, which amazed when I noticed it. Now as someone who has been using AtheOS since 0.1.4, I have a few questions:
o What exactly is Korelib?
o How and why did you include AtheOS as a supported platform?
o What are your future plans for The Kompany and AtheOS?
This means that some people using Linux or any other OS that they don't support, will not be able to use their service.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. It wont be long until Napsters new "partners" decide that WMA with SDMI protected content is better than those MP3's anyway, and then you'll have to use Windows with Windows Media Player and Windows Secure Audio Path to listen to any songs you might have been able to download anyway.
Expect an announcment sometime next year, after XP has been around for a month or two. Until then, why not use something other than Napster?
Re:Unions doing the bashing....
on
Dial U for Union
·
· Score: 1
So don't you see why membership must be voluntary? Would you to be forced to join the Tories as a condition of employment? In the US, most union members had no choice; they were forced.
In the UK, Union membership is purely voluntery. No one is ever forced or coerced or threatened into joining a Union (Since at least the 70's anyway)
You know I always used to wonder why so many Americans were so opposed to Unions, until I found out that the American idea of a "Union" seems to be completly screwy. How can a Union be for the benefit of a worker if the worker is forced to join to work? How is threatening violance in the workers interests?
None of this happens in the UK, and we're supposedly the Socialists here, the ones who support the idea of worker unity. It seems to me that the best thing for all these people who are afraid of the Unions to do is write to your congressmen to get the laws regarding Unions sorted, and then get some real workable Union policies in place.
I was recently in America, and I was surprised to hear the same songs being played over and over again on not only the same stations, but on almost every other station on the dial. It was almost as if they were all running a continuous loop of five songs.
So, thank fuck for the BBC. No commercial interests means no Payola. No Payola means no endless drivel of the same stuff all the time. BBC Radio 2 has recently become the most listened to station in the UK, the main reason being that it plays a massive mix of old and new music.
I'm sure most of you already know, but the BBC also webcast both Radio 1 and Radio 2 over RealMedia streams. If you live outside of the UK and want to know what a non-commercial, music playing radio stations sounds like, I recomend you try them. You might be surprised.
P.S: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1 & http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2 for those who don't like links in posts.
Creditcards may not be as widespread as they are in the US (Most people have no more than one, if they have one at all).
However, Debitcards are far more widespread, at least in the UK we have Switch and Solo, to name two. We also use Direct Debit to pay for regular bills, which doesn't even require the company to send you a bill each month or each quater.
But yeah, people still don't like to use Credit or Debit cards online. It's an odd world we live in.
Are you trying to gather the momentum among application developers now or is it too early?
It's a bit early. I have never ever anounced AtheOS anywhere myself since many important "desktop features" and other things that I whould like to have firmly defined from the beginning are still missing
Yeah, but you can't stop the mentally deranged from trying you know;D
It's keeps me busy and off the streets I suppose:)
Re:My take on AtheOS... I want my shell, dammit!
on
AtheOS Interview
·
· Score: 2
It is true that AtheOS' kernel & appserver are closely tied. There is no "Command Line Only" option when running AtheOS, but there is the ATerm. The ATErm is analogous to an xterm. AtheOS uses bash exclusivly.
As for all those features "In the kernel", how do you think Linux does it?
Under AtheOS, the appserver (The bit that does all the GUI elements) is in userspace. Drivers are dynamically loaded, as are filsystems. There is no need to recompile the kernel to add in a driver. In fact there is no option to compile a driver into the kernel. Linux has far more "stuffed into the kernel" than AtheOS.
AtheOS isn't going to appeal to the hardcore Linux and BSD users. However, i'm inclined to say, "So what?"
If you like Unix & X, use it. If you want something a little easier to manage as a desktop OS, keep your eye on AtheOS.
Only one person gave any insight to what I was missing - its not based on Unix
Well, AtheOS:
Has a POSIX.1 API
Uses bash as it's shell
Uses GNU CC & Glibc
It's as close to Unix as it really needs to be, for me to feel comfortable using it. If you're used to Linux, you feel close enough to home using AtheOS for basic tasks:)
Anybody who is a programmer and enjoys doing it has seen code which he thinks is beautiful, or at least elegant. Two different ways of doing the same exact thing, both functional, but one might be ugly, while the other will elicit noises of appreciation from good programmers.
Indeed. Any logical and mathmatical problem will have one, final, elegent answer, where the problem can not be completed in any less instructions than has already been expressed. Indeed, there is a long tradition stretching back to the TMRC of "bumming" code.
Only someone who has the mind of a coder can really understand how a block of code can be expressive, or how it can illicit an emotonal "Oh wow!" response. Because until you can visualise the solution in your mind, and trace the path your code will take, all you see is a set of English looking words and funny symbols.
That is how code is expresive. In same way looking at a Harley Wrapped in Cellophane can illicit thought and imagination in an Art lover, a well modeled solution to a code problem can illicit thought and imagination in a Coder.
In the same way that acidently stepping on someones big toe is diferent to wilfully stamping as hard as you can on their entire foot.
Even killing someone has diferent classes and penalties, depending on wether the action was willful (Murder) or accidental (Man slaughter), and so it is the case with patents (Or appears to be).
You (and most of the people I've seen describe the "standard" at their companies in the comments section) must be in the retail software business, otherwise you wouldn't be asking this question.
I don't see how you figure that. Certainly all the products i've tested have not been retail software, and my experience still sits well with the experiences of the other people posting comments here.
QA is still QA, and customers are still customers. Retail or not.
Thats because QA has a inherent mistrust of developers;D
Nothing personal, but if your developers can directly edit the Bug Report information after it's in the database, you can garuntee at least one will try it to avoid fixing a bug.
I would like to tell you a story. It may sounds like a fairy tale, but I assure you, it is true:)
Back in November/December 2000, I was lead QA Tester on a software project for BT. These particular peice of software was released on a monthly basis, as it was used for front end, phone monkeys. This month, there were some very important new products beeing added to BT's portfolio, which made some major additions to the software. Not only that, but due to advertising the release date was fixed. Absolutly no way we could have missed the delivery date, or it would have been a very public failure for a large UK compnay.
Do you know, that after only three weeks of testing, we had found all of the faults, and all of those faults were fixed? (Save one, which was a usability issue, not functionality. It was a Low Priority "bug" as we had no Feature Request mechanism)
That software went live on the date promised, and with no bugs in it. With the entire sales staff of BT in the UK, not one bug was found in live. It went through that months a huge success.
One of my proudest moments, and also just goes to show sometimes, you can get all the bugs out of the software:D
The only effective way i've found to get developers to look at Low priority bugs, is to have a good manager, and keep your manager informed.
Provided you have an adiquete process at your company, your manager will be the one who decides if the software is fit to go live. Tell your manager about the Low priority bugs. If they're good, they'll get the bugs fixed.
If that fails, try threatening physical violence.;)
Yup, thats pretty close to the sort of scale most software houses seem to use, although in my current place we use a scale of 1-10, with 1 being most severe, and 10 being "Tester having a bad day, being pedantic"
As a Software Tester myself, the four catagories you list make sense, as any good tester can imediatly class a bug into that scale. With the 1-10 scale I currently have to use, the diference between a 3 and a 4/5 bug is infitismal. So, don't let anyone try and tell you more catagories are better, they must certainly arn't:)
For a more detailed answer, get Andy Tanenbaums OS Design & Implentation, but for now, i'll try & explain.
An OS is just a peice of software, just like any other peice of software. To the CPU, it's the same opcodes (With a special exception, but we'll skip that for now) The only reason that an OS is thought of as "special" is because it is the lowest level of software that you run on your computer. But it doesn't perform magic.
Now, on the Intel x86, task switching (Which is what Linus's terminal emulator was doing) is fairly simple. You set up a few CPU tables (The Global Descriptor Table & Interupt Descriptor Table), and point a software interupt to your interupt handler. That is, and interupt occures every n nanoseconds, and your code is automatically jumped to by the CPU. Now, you can do anything in that peice of code, but an Operating System does something called scheduling, were it saves the status of the currently running "process", and loads the status of a previously saved process. (All this involves is pushing the CPU flags onto the stack, changing a few CPU registers, and then poping data off the stack) Then your interupt code exits and the CPU goes back to running the code. Except you've changed the CPU registers, so it actually goes back to running the code from the process you've just swaped in.
This is all there is too it, in theory. Your two (Or however many) processes can do anything a program normally would.
Just having the scheduler though, does not make your code into a kernel. You need things like memory allocators, device drivers, process loaders, a filesystem, and a callable API, before your code can be considered an Operating System.
I knew I'd read some of this before (Especially the "dialling the harddisk" thing). Rebel Code by Glyn Moody has a few of the anecdotes from Lars, as well as some more from diferent people who were involved with Linux & Linus in the early years. The book even has some of the original news articles to the Minix group, which can be very interesting when you put them in context.
I never said moving to the current Linux framebuffer, I asked why the framebuffer can't be expanded into a proper driver model/API that we can use. I only use the name Framebuffer to distingish it from X, but it's a misleading name as it would no longer be a framebuffer.
You don't loose your hardware exceleration, you've got it in the new drivers. You don't have to loose 3D, as OpenGL can sit on top (Or even parts of it in) the device drivers.
You don't even need to loose your toolkit libraries or even, dare I say it, XLib. The toolkits are fully portable, no problem there, and if you put your mind to it, you could layer an XLib implentation over the lower level Framebuffer. Another option would be to allow the user to switch off the Framebuffer and just run the old X.
For home users, they can still run GTK+, Qt, and the Gnome or KDE desktop(s) without even noticing anything other than the fact that Linux is easier to use. The Old Guard, and people who need X for whatever reason, can still run X.
Have done for years - provided you've got more than one resolution configured in your XF86Config. If you're talking about color depth, then, yes, XFree has problems (but not all X servers do)
Yup, but as you say: Provided they're preconfigured & you can't change colour depth with XFree86, and lets face it, how many Linux do you know who don't run XF86 as their X server?
Changing to a resolution you havn't thought to configure, or changing your graphics card under X, is a pain in the ass, even with tools such as XFConfigurator or xconfig. It also doesn't solve the problem that X is big, ugly, slow, and not really suitable for a desktop user. My point is, maybe we should look at dumping X completly.
If we want a better desktop version of Linux, we should be looking at dumping the huge layer that is X and the Window Manager, and expanding the Framebuffer into a real, accelerated video driver implmentation.
GTK+ and Qt already have framebuffer implmentations, so it's not an imposible to think that X could be droped in favour of a faster, neater, more direct video system. There are a lot of things that X does well (Like network transparency), but then there are a lot of things that X doesn't do well when you put it on a single user, desktop machine. Things like changing resolution on the fly is something that X just can't do, not to mention the various ugly hacks to do things like direct video rendering, video input, font handling etc.
Move X out of the picture for desktop users and Linux becomes a more attractive proposition for home users.
Is that there are so many conflicting reports. Who built the first computer? What is a computer? Who actually invented the GUI? Who invented packet switching, and who implemented it first?
It goes on like that. Every area seems to have difering accounts. It will be hard to combine all of it into a single, sensible course that doesn't contradict itself.
Of course, the best place to start are books that have already been written. Check out Steven Levy's stuff (Hackers & Insanly Great), also Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Fire In The Valley, and loads more on top. Slashdot has done loads of reviews on books like these, search a bit.
Oh, and please, don't teach the falacy of the Internet. It wasn't built to survive a Nuclear attack at all.
Hackers at MIT were using "Open Source" software long before the internet. They would post up source code, and leave their paper tapes in the drawers for anyone to copy or update as they saw fit.
Hardware Hackers at Homebrew meetings freely exchanged hardware designs and information, as well as neat hacks for the new machines among each other. GNU was started in the early 80's, before the Internet became commercialised.
What the Internet has done, however, is to increase the speed and audience that Open Source code can reach. Instead of paper tapes in drawers hackers post their source to an FTP or CVS site. The ideals and ethics of Open Source software have been spread much farther than a small room in MIT or Berkeley. The Internet didn't start this though.
If anything, hackers had their Utopia long before the corporations took control. There were hackers in the world before there were software companies. All the companies did was to see a market, and sell to people who in many cases, had little knowledge of computers. Open Source and hackers carried on just as they had before.
So are we on our way to a New Jeresulam? Nah, we were already there Jon, it's just that people have only just begun to realise it.
Re:Another warning against Linux certification
on
Linuxgruven Deorbits
·
· Score: 2
Apart from the fact that you should not be managing technical people let alone interviewing them, if you are Technically Illiterate, why do you assume a Certificate shows that a candidate knows what they are doing? All it shows is that the candidate could sit through a course and get the questions right at the end of it. That sort of learning is usually of the parrot type, I.E, listen, store but not understand, reiterate.
If you want proof of someones knowledge, ask them questions about their supposed area of knowledge. If you are technically illiterate, have someone who does know their stuff to ask the questions. Get them to evaluate the answers. The very best way is to set them theoritical situations and ask them what their course of action would be. Whatever you do though, don't look at a pretty peice of paper and think they know what's what.
For someone with some very good ideas, take a look at Joel on Software
Slashdot Mirror
Hi.
I've notices previously that Korelib boasts support for AtheOS, which amazed when I noticed it. Now as someone who has been using AtheOS since 0.1.4, I have a few questions:
o What exactly is Korelib?
o How and why did you include AtheOS as a supported platform?
o What are your future plans for The Kompany and AtheOS?
This means that some people using Linux or any other OS that they don't support, will not be able to use their service.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. It wont be long until Napsters new "partners" decide that WMA with SDMI protected content is better than those MP3's anyway, and then you'll have to use Windows with Windows Media Player and Windows Secure Audio Path to listen to any songs you might have been able to download anyway.
Expect an announcment sometime next year, after XP has been around for a month or two. Until then, why not use something other than Napster?
So don't you see why membership must be voluntary? Would you to be forced to join the Tories as a condition of employment? In the US, most union members had no choice; they were forced.
In the UK, Union membership is purely voluntery. No one is ever forced or coerced or threatened into joining a Union (Since at least the 70's anyway)
You know I always used to wonder why so many Americans were so opposed to Unions, until I found out that the American idea of a "Union" seems to be completly screwy. How can a Union be for the benefit of a worker if the worker is forced to join to work? How is threatening violance in the workers interests?
None of this happens in the UK, and we're supposedly the Socialists here, the ones who support the idea of worker unity. It seems to me that the best thing for all these people who are afraid of the Unions to do is write to your congressmen to get the laws regarding Unions sorted, and then get some real workable Union policies in place.
I was recently in America, and I was surprised to hear the same songs being played over and over again on not only the same stations, but on almost every other station on the dial. It was almost as if they were all running a continuous loop of five songs.
So, thank fuck for the BBC. No commercial interests means no Payola. No Payola means no endless drivel of the same stuff all the time. BBC Radio 2 has recently become the most listened to station in the UK, the main reason being that it plays a massive mix of old and new music.
I'm sure most of you already know, but the BBC also webcast both Radio 1 and Radio 2 over RealMedia streams. If you live outside of the UK and want to know what a non-commercial, music playing radio stations sounds like, I recomend you try them. You might be surprised.
P.S: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1 & http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2 for those who don't like links in posts.
Square,Square,R1,L,R,U,U,D,D,R1,R1,D,D,L2,L1,U,U,R ,R,R,R,Square,Triangle,Square,L1,L1. New paragraph. L1,L1,Square,Triangle....
Creditcards may not be as widespread as they are in the US (Most people have no more than one, if they have one at all).
However, Debitcards are far more widespread, at least in the UK we have Switch and Solo, to name two. We also use Direct Debit to pay for regular bills, which doesn't even require the company to send you a bill each month or each quater.
But yeah, people still don't like to use Credit or Debit cards online. It's an odd world we live in.
The article says: "Indeed, there are dozens of markets where Microsoft doesn't play, such as online stock trading and e-tailing"
Wait a minute here. Don't Microsoft own Expedia and others?
Only two examples as well? Wow, a non Microsoft opurtunity of one! Count me in for online stock trading! I'll make Billions!
So I guess Microsoft isn't a monopoly after all. I'm glad thats settled!
Are you trying to gather the momentum among application developers now or is it too early?
;D
:)
It's a bit early. I have never ever anounced AtheOS anywhere myself since many important "desktop features" and other things that I whould like to have firmly defined from the beginning are still missing
Yeah, but you can't stop the mentally deranged from trying you know
It's keeps me busy and off the streets I suppose
It is true that AtheOS' kernel & appserver are closely tied. There is no "Command Line Only" option when running AtheOS, but there is the ATerm. The ATErm is analogous to an xterm. AtheOS uses bash exclusivly.
As for all those features "In the kernel", how do you think Linux does it?
Under AtheOS, the appserver (The bit that does all the GUI elements) is in userspace. Drivers are dynamically loaded, as are filsystems. There is no need to recompile the kernel to add in a driver. In fact there is no option to compile a driver into the kernel. Linux has far more "stuffed into the kernel" than AtheOS.
AtheOS isn't going to appeal to the hardcore Linux and BSD users. However, i'm inclined to say, "So what?"
If you like Unix & X, use it. If you want something a little easier to manage as a desktop OS, keep your eye on AtheOS.
Well, AtheOS:
- Has a POSIX.1 API
- Uses bash as it's shell
- Uses GNU CC & Glibc
It's as close to Unix as it really needs to be, for me to feel comfortable using it. If you're used to Linux, you feel close enough to home using AtheOS for basic tasksAnybody who is a programmer and enjoys doing it has seen code which he thinks is beautiful, or at least elegant. Two different ways of doing the same exact thing, both functional, but one might be ugly, while the other will elicit noises of appreciation from good programmers.
Indeed. Any logical and mathmatical problem will have one, final, elegent answer, where the problem can not be completed in any less instructions than has already been expressed. Indeed, there is a long tradition stretching back to the TMRC of "bumming" code.
Only someone who has the mind of a coder can really understand how a block of code can be expressive, or how it can illicit an emotonal "Oh wow!" response. Because until you can visualise the solution in your mind, and trace the path your code will take, all you see is a set of English looking words and funny symbols.
That is how code is expresive. In same way looking at a Harley Wrapped in Cellophane can illicit thought and imagination in an Art lover, a well modeled solution to a code problem can illicit thought and imagination in a Coder.
In the same way that acidently stepping on someones big toe is diferent to wilfully stamping as hard as you can on their entire foot.
Even killing someone has diferent classes and penalties, depending on wether the action was willful (Murder) or accidental (Man slaughter), and so it is the case with patents (Or appears to be).
You (and most of the people I've seen describe the "standard" at their companies in the comments section) must be in the retail software business, otherwise you wouldn't be asking this question.
I don't see how you figure that. Certainly all the products i've tested have not been retail software, and my experience still sits well with the experiences of the other people posting comments here.
QA is still QA, and customers are still customers. Retail or not.
Thats because QA has a inherent mistrust of developers ;D
Nothing personal, but if your developers can directly edit the Bug Report information after it's in the database, you can garuntee at least one will try it to avoid fixing a bug.
I would like to tell you a story. It may sounds like a fairy tale, but I assure you, it is true :)
:D
Back in November/December 2000, I was lead QA Tester on a software project for BT. These particular peice of software was released on a monthly basis, as it was used for front end, phone monkeys. This month, there were some very important new products beeing added to BT's portfolio, which made some major additions to the software. Not only that, but due to advertising the release date was fixed. Absolutly no way we could have missed the delivery date, or it would have been a very public failure for a large UK compnay.
Do you know, that after only three weeks of testing, we had found all of the faults, and all of those faults were fixed? (Save one, which was a usability issue, not functionality. It was a Low Priority "bug" as we had no Feature Request mechanism)
That software went live on the date promised, and with no bugs in it. With the entire sales staff of BT in the UK, not one bug was found in live. It went through that months a huge success.
One of my proudest moments, and also just goes to show sometimes, you can get all the bugs out of the software
The only effective way i've found to get developers to look at Low priority bugs, is to have a good manager, and keep your manager informed.
;)
Provided you have an adiquete process at your company, your manager will be the one who decides if the software is fit to go live. Tell your manager about the Low priority bugs. If they're good, they'll get the bugs fixed.
If that fails, try threatening physical violence.
Yup, thats pretty close to the sort of scale most software houses seem to use, although in my current place we use a scale of 1-10, with 1 being most severe, and 10 being "Tester having a bad day, being pedantic"
:)
As a Software Tester myself, the four catagories you list make sense, as any good tester can imediatly class a bug into that scale. With the 1-10 scale I currently have to use, the diference between a 3 and a 4/5 bug is infitismal. So, don't let anyone try and tell you more catagories are better, they must certainly arn't
For a more detailed answer, get Andy Tanenbaums OS Design & Implentation, but for now, i'll try & explain.
An OS is just a peice of software, just like any other peice of software. To the CPU, it's the same opcodes (With a special exception, but we'll skip that for now) The only reason that an OS is thought of as "special" is because it is the lowest level of software that you run on your computer. But it doesn't perform magic.
Now, on the Intel x86, task switching (Which is what Linus's terminal emulator was doing) is fairly simple. You set up a few CPU tables (The Global Descriptor Table & Interupt Descriptor Table), and point a software interupt to your interupt handler. That is, and interupt occures every n nanoseconds, and your code is automatically jumped to by the CPU. Now, you can do anything in that peice of code, but an Operating System does something called scheduling, were it saves the status of the currently running "process", and loads the status of a previously saved process. (All this involves is pushing the CPU flags onto the stack, changing a few CPU registers, and then poping data off the stack) Then your interupt code exits and the CPU goes back to running the code. Except you've changed the CPU registers, so it actually goes back to running the code from the process you've just swaped in.
This is all there is too it, in theory. Your two (Or however many) processes can do anything a program normally would.
Just having the scheduler though, does not make your code into a kernel. You need things like memory allocators, device drivers, process loaders, a filesystem, and a callable API, before your code can be considered an Operating System.
I knew I'd read some of this before (Especially the "dialling the harddisk" thing). Rebel Code by Glyn Moody has a few of the anecdotes from Lars, as well as some more from diferent people who were involved with Linux & Linus in the early years. The book even has some of the original news articles to the Minix group, which can be very interesting when you put them in context.
I never said moving to the current Linux framebuffer, I asked why the framebuffer can't be expanded into a proper driver model/API that we can use. I only use the name Framebuffer to distingish it from X, but it's a misleading name as it would no longer be a framebuffer.
You don't loose your hardware exceleration, you've got it in the new drivers. You don't have to loose 3D, as OpenGL can sit on top (Or even parts of it in) the device drivers.
You don't even need to loose your toolkit libraries or even, dare I say it, XLib. The toolkits are fully portable, no problem there, and if you put your mind to it, you could layer an XLib implentation over the lower level Framebuffer. Another option would be to allow the user to switch off the Framebuffer and just run the old X.
For home users, they can still run GTK+, Qt, and the Gnome or KDE desktop(s) without even noticing anything other than the fact that Linux is easier to use. The Old Guard, and people who need X for whatever reason, can still run X.
Have done for years - provided you've got more than one resolution configured in your XF86Config. If you're talking about color depth, then, yes, XFree has problems (but not all X servers do)
Yup, but as you say: Provided they're preconfigured & you can't change colour depth with XFree86, and lets face it, how many Linux do you know who don't run XF86 as their X server?
Changing to a resolution you havn't thought to configure, or changing your graphics card under X, is a pain in the ass, even with tools such as XFConfigurator or xconfig. It also doesn't solve the problem that X is big, ugly, slow, and not really suitable for a desktop user. My point is, maybe we should look at dumping X completly.
If we want a better desktop version of Linux, we should be looking at dumping the huge layer that is X and the Window Manager, and expanding the Framebuffer into a real, accelerated video driver implmentation.
;)
GTK+ and Qt already have framebuffer implmentations, so it's not an imposible to think that X could be droped in favour of a faster, neater, more direct video system. There are a lot of things that X does well (Like network transparency), but then there are a lot of things that X doesn't do well when you put it on a single user, desktop machine. Things like changing resolution on the fly is something that X just can't do, not to mention the various ugly hacks to do things like direct video rendering, video input, font handling etc.
Move X out of the picture for desktop users and Linux becomes a more attractive proposition for home users.
You may all now flame me about X
Is that there are so many conflicting reports. Who built the first computer? What is a computer? Who actually invented the GUI? Who invented packet switching, and who implemented it first?
It goes on like that. Every area seems to have difering accounts. It will be hard to combine all of it into a single, sensible course that doesn't contradict itself.
Of course, the best place to start are books that have already been written. Check out Steven Levy's stuff (Hackers & Insanly Great), also Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Fire In The Valley, and loads more on top. Slashdot has done loads of reviews on books like these, search a bit.
Oh, and please, don't teach the falacy of the Internet. It wasn't built to survive a Nuclear attack at all.
Hackers at MIT were using "Open Source" software long before the internet. They would post up source code, and leave their paper tapes in the drawers for anyone to copy or update as they saw fit.
Hardware Hackers at Homebrew meetings freely exchanged hardware designs and information, as well as neat hacks for the new machines among each other. GNU was started in the early 80's, before the Internet became commercialised.
What the Internet has done, however, is to increase the speed and audience that Open Source code can reach. Instead of paper tapes in drawers hackers post their source to an FTP or CVS site. The ideals and ethics of Open Source software have been spread much farther than a small room in MIT or Berkeley. The Internet didn't start this though.
If anything, hackers had their Utopia long before the corporations took control. There were hackers in the world before there were software companies. All the companies did was to see a market, and sell to people who in many cases, had little knowledge of computers. Open Source and hackers carried on just as they had before.
So are we on our way to a New Jeresulam? Nah, we were already there Jon, it's just that people have only just begun to realise it.
Apart from the fact that you should not be managing technical people let alone interviewing them, if you are Technically Illiterate, why do you assume a Certificate shows that a candidate knows what they are doing? All it shows is that the candidate could sit through a course and get the questions right at the end of it. That sort of learning is usually of the parrot type, I.E, listen, store but not understand, reiterate.
If you want proof of someones knowledge, ask them questions about their supposed area of knowledge. If you are technically illiterate, have someone who does know their stuff to ask the questions. Get them to evaluate the answers. The very best way is to set them theoritical situations and ask them what their course of action would be. Whatever you do though, don't look at a pretty peice of paper and think they know what's what.
For someone with some very good ideas, take a look at Joel on Software