Most of us are sorry for your tragic loss of lives, UK.
I think the best response to this is not a greater tightening of civil liberties, but to simply continue bringing McDonald's to the Middle East, and to continue college-educating their women.
I think that being fully prepared to offer violence in certain situations is a Good Thing. Because the fact is that we live in a violent world. And no amount of programming is going to change that; we animate monkey meat shells which are wired to fight or flight, and it ain't gonna change any time soon.
I met a woman a couple years ago who was preparing to set up a birthing zone for poor people in central America, where women could come and give birth to their babies in a warm water tank. Her rationalization was that babies born into a soft, warm environment, as opposed to a clinical brightly lit hospital, makes for more docile humans. Wow. That is a hippy-dippy pipe dream.
I live in Denver, very close to Columbine. The two young men (they weren't boys when they decided to murder their school mates) had plenty of positive environmental feedback; they simply chose to be evil motherfuckers. It is a horrible shame that some concealed carry person on hand wasn't able to cap them before they killed all those people.
This whole violent video game thing is a red herring. Let's focus on a real problem, like the bloated growth of government, or the lack of checks and balances on the power of the Supreme Court.
And if the US is not careful, it will be about our marginalization as a country of any importance in the information sector. We'll have made it illegal for Americans to create or have culture. That's very sad, particularly as I am an American.
I find it hard to believe that we could ever create such conditions as to stop us from being creative. And culture is a by-product of shared experience, no matter how it is regulated, so what I think you mean is an 'unfettered cutlural expression' perhaps.
I like Lessig, but the article missed the clue train at the end there. Larry relates that a group of masked goons hijack the rally to push their own agenda. That isn't freedom, it is imposition. Just because Gil was able to talk them down, doesn't mean they weren't jerks of the first order.
What really annoyed me though was Gil's statement that America had the 'important people', whereas Brazilians were just citizens. My bullshit meter went off the scale there. Advocates of socialism keep making the same blunder, which is to assume that as power accrues within a society, that its 'citizens' won't be corrupted by it. Let's suppose for a moment that Brazil quickly achieved an economic condition similar to the US, where the vast majority of people are middle-class wage-earners, with a strong economic base. Would Brazil adopt policies to impose control in as many areas of life as America has? You bet it would. Maybe even more so.
"Companies are using the potential of communities as subcontractors -- the open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals," added Villasante, who called on the open source community to develop more independence from these large companies.
It is a shame that Europeans can't take advantage of all this sub-contracted American open source labor... wait.
Innovation is not just happening in throwing more processors at a problem, but in HOW we solve problems.
I've been in the computing business for over twenty years, and I am amazed at the rate of acceleration of technical innovation.
For instance: I work for a client with multiple web projects going, using a variety of operating systems and development environments. A couple weeks ago, one of the other teams gave a presentation to the rest of us about how they have switched from using a relational database for data management to Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/). I was skeptical that a Java-based XML indexer back-end could retrieve information faster than MySQL, but these guys showed that it was much more efficient to do so. Lucene is not a perfect solution to every problem, but for primarily static word searches, it utterly trumps an RDBMS in performance.
The moral of the story is that there are more than one one to skin a cat, and some ways are faster than others!
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
The job of Ford Motor Company is not to make money. It is to make cars.
Stephan-
I think you are mistaken. Every for-profit corporation contains a declaration in its founding document (Articles of Corporation) which somewhere explicitly states that the purpose of the coporation is to make money. If there are corps which don't have that statement, they are not being run in a business-like fashion.
In the case of Ford, they achieve profit (or not) through the manufacture and servicing of automobiles. This is pretty easy to understand. What is not so easy to understand is when you look at a company like Apple, who is a hardware company, but has chosen to create some incredible software to leverage sales of their products.
About money being an instrument, well, yes. It is also a legitimate corporate goal to make more of it, in and of itself. What the participants of that corporation decide to do with any extra money is another discussion.
McVoy is talking out of both sides of his mouth. First, he says open source software is crap because IBM is willing and able to sell support for it, yet later on in the article he says he doesn't want to build a hospital, he just wants to pay someone to provide healthcare, which is essentially exactly what IBM is doing, successfully.
Corporations become sugar daddies to the open source community because they perceive that they get value for their money. For instance, Apple, during its development of the OS X gui, hired open source programmers and used open source software for components of its operating system package. Was Apple stupid, delusional, greedy, or suckers for doing so? I would argue that they were effective in channeling their development efforts that way. Would it have cost more and resulted in less innovation if Apple had developed OS X the traditional way? Yes.
Movies projects are by nature collaborative efforts. What interests me about this effort is that the final content will be open source, and the workflow utilized to produce the movie are in the open source mode.
I'm a line producer/director in a project in which 8 teams around North America each make a 10 minute segment, which is woven into a final feature-length movie, which will be shown in theaters and also made available on DVD. It started out as a lark among fans of the Panasonic DVX100 camera, but has taken on a life of its own.
While we are using a few open source tools (such as Open Office) to support the production, most of the software is commercial stuff. However, most of the filmmakers have never met each other, and will not do so until premiere day. We use the internet for collaboration just like an open source project.
Will the movie be dreck? Maybe, but from what I have seen so far from the other teams, it might just turn out to be quite entertaining. A lot of hollywood people are following the project closely, because a successful product would have implications for higher-budgeted films.
I believe I understand the difference between open source and Linux, but for the purposes of this thread they might as well be lumped into the same Silly Putty pile. Microsoft is spending oodles of money to obtain 'findings' that their OS and software deliver better business value than open source alternatives.
Notice that Bill Gates hasn't ever said that OpenBSD was a threat to Microsoft... but he did and does mention Linux. What has got to be keeping the people in Redmond up at night is that Linux, as the embodiment of a new software philosophy, offers none of the weaknesses which Microsoft has been able to attack in the past. When it comes to competition, MS is very much of a Crush/Acquire/Make Go Away company, not Adopt/Emulate.
For MS, I think it IS all about winning or losing. And their definition of winning is the continuation of their domainance of the operating system and Office application markets.
This kind of article always brings out the same argument, which we've beaten to death in this forum.
The question seems to be, is Microsoft winning 'the war'?
Oh, come now. All they are doing is fighting a rear-guard action. How could they possibly win in the long-term? The only way would be if we collectively stopped developing Linux and the applications which run on it, and go back to always buying Windows products. Does anyone really think that's going to happen?
I am currently consulting for a company which has a variety of systems and applications going. About half of their software development effort goes to in-house, never-to-be-published applications. The other half is specifically for the purpose of public consumption. You know what? The public consumption side is all running or being converted to Linux/Apache/Tomcat. The internal stuff is still up for grabs, but this is a cultural issue, not a question of the technical merits of MS vs the world.
I had a short timeframe to develop my current project, and I ended up going C# and.NET, because the other developer was a VB guy, and the learning curve for him would have made it impossible to meet our deadline. I am comfortable with the Linux/Apache world, and generally prefer it, but I must admit that we whipped out a smokin' application, thanks to the data support from Visual Studio. (Interesting side note: this app has VB for the data layer, but C# for the business logic and the presentation layer. We had absolutely no trouble integrating the two languages.)
The Linux/Apache/Java side of the house is also grudgingly admitting we did a great job getting a fully-functional app out the door in a short timeframe. But they are also doing interesting things with Lucene and some other child projects of Apache.
The state of things now at the comapny are that getting the job done is Job #1, and the folks who write the checks don't care whether MS is in the loop or not. But, as more of our IT staff begin using open source tools, the more our tech staff will start saying to the bean counters, 'hey, we don't need to buy a Microsoft license for this or that project.' And the beanies are going to be happy to go along with that!
What's interesting to me, as a long-time Linux and FreeBSD guy, is that the quality of development tools that MS has had to create is a direct result of having to compete with the open source alternatives. And the quality and utility of those tools is accelerating.
The first thing anyone wants to do who has built a cluster is performance testing.
I noticed last week that Microsoft's.NET framework EULA requires that you get written permission from MS before publishing any benchmarking infomation about the.NET platform.
I doubt Mono's implementation of.NET carries the same anti-free speech restriction. So we can probably publicize C# and CLR performance in a cluster, but not comparable Windows cluster performance.
Re:Developer Laments: What Killed FreeBSD
on
The Case for FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I feel your pain Mike, but you haven't gone into specifics. It just looks right now like you've not gotten your way about certain directions the core is going, and you've taken your marbles home.
Good luck to ya, I hope you can take your expertise with BSD and make Apple's offering that much better. I just am saying that your post is lacking specifics.
MPEG-4 compression uses previous frames to make a frame. This allows the file to be smaller, but doesn't allow frames to pulled out of context for effects to be added.
Err, not quite. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 streams can be edited, but the framing scheme makes it more difficult to do than the straightforward 'each frame is a complete one' scheme.
That's what it seems like the/.'ers who don't like Mono and C# are saying, that anything from Microsoft is automatically bad, and must not be adopted.
I got news for you, C# is a great language to develop with. Don't adopt it if you don't want to, which is fine with me, because that means there will be more jobs for me.
Brilliant move, Microsoft. Now some dweeb living in his mom's basement will write an ActiveX virus that creates the Wine key in the registry, then exits.
The next time you go to Windows Update, whether you run Wine or not...
The media in 2004 hasn't failed its public; we keep tuning in to them, and they keep selling advertising. That is not failure.
Calling the Bush administration 'failed' is a laugh. Isn't it pretty much EVERY administration's objective to get re-elected? Bush: 2, whiny clueless Democrats: 0.
A 'rogue' administration? What, because they use the powers of the executive branch as they are entitled to do so by being elected into the position? Because they invaded Iraq (per U.N. Security Council resolutions), even if they had to go it alone? Because they are pursuing diplomatic solutions to the problem of Iranian nukes, against the tide of whiny Democrat criticism that we should have invaded Iran first? Perhaps you do not understand the meaning of the word 'rogue.'
'Arrogant?' Whew, that's a crime against humanity! I guess we should lock up Rumsfeld and Bush because they are arrogant. Oh wait, then we'd have to lock up Saddam, Milosevic, Putin, JFK, and Teddy Roosevelt.
I feel for this disgruntled spouse, because I was young and stupid once. I worked the same kind of environment when I was an Aeorspace guy, and LOVED the work. 80-hour work weeks, regardless of deadlines, was the norm. And in a tie. You know, we were *creating something great.*
I got smart. I started up my own company whch sells stuff to MegaAeroCorp. I worked my own hours, kept all my money, and had the satisfaction to be able to say to my former management, 'you ain't the boss of me.'
Everyone has choices. The worker bee made his biggest mistake when he found out that 85 hours per week were the expected norm, and he didn't do anything about it.
If EA is operating illegally, rape them in a class action lawsuit. Otherwise, put up with it, or quit and support your family like a man. It may mean that you have to do something you don't 'love', like flipping burgers, or moving to Iowa.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of us are sorry for your tragic loss of lives, UK.
I think the best response to this is not a greater tightening of civil liberties, but to simply continue bringing McDonald's to the Middle East, and to continue college-educating their women.
I think that being fully prepared to offer violence in certain situations is a Good Thing. Because the fact is that we live in a violent world. And no amount of programming is going to change that; we animate monkey meat shells which are wired to fight or flight, and it ain't gonna change any time soon.
I met a woman a couple years ago who was preparing to set up a birthing zone for poor people in central America, where women could come and give birth to their babies in a warm water tank. Her rationalization was that babies born into a soft, warm environment, as opposed to a clinical brightly lit hospital, makes for more docile humans. Wow. That is a hippy-dippy pipe dream.
I live in Denver, very close to Columbine. The two young men (they weren't boys when they decided to murder their school mates) had plenty of positive environmental feedback; they simply chose to be evil motherfuckers. It is a horrible shame that some concealed carry person on hand wasn't able to cap them before they killed all those people.
This whole violent video game thing is a red herring. Let's focus on a real problem, like the bloated growth of government, or the lack of checks and balances on the power of the Supreme Court.
I find it hard to believe that we could ever create such conditions as to stop us from being creative. And culture is a by-product of shared experience, no matter how it is regulated, so what I think you mean is an 'unfettered cutlural expression' perhaps.
I like Lessig, but the article missed the clue train at the end there. Larry relates that a group of masked goons hijack the rally to push their own agenda. That isn't freedom, it is imposition. Just because Gil was able to talk them down, doesn't mean they weren't jerks of the first order.
What really annoyed me though was Gil's statement that America had the 'important people', whereas Brazilians were just citizens. My bullshit meter went off the scale there. Advocates of socialism keep making the same blunder, which is to assume that as power accrues within a society, that its 'citizens' won't be corrupted by it. Let's suppose for a moment that Brazil quickly achieved an economic condition similar to the US, where the vast majority of people are middle-class wage-earners, with a strong economic base. Would Brazil adopt policies to impose control in as many areas of life as America has? You bet it would. Maybe even more so.
It is a shame that Europeans can't take advantage of all this sub-contracted American open source labor... wait.
Innovation is not just happening in throwing more processors at a problem, but in HOW we solve problems.
I've been in the computing business for over twenty years, and I am amazed at the rate of acceleration of technical innovation.
For instance: I work for a client with multiple web projects going, using a variety of operating systems and development environments. A couple weeks ago, one of the other teams gave a presentation to the rest of us about how they have switched from using a relational database for data management to Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/). I was skeptical that a Java-based XML indexer back-end could retrieve information faster than MySQL, but these guys showed that it was much more efficient to do so. Lucene is not a perfect solution to every problem, but for primarily static word searches, it utterly trumps an RDBMS in performance.
The moral of the story is that there are more than one one to skin a cat, and some ways are faster than others!
Stephan-
I think you are mistaken. Every for-profit corporation contains a declaration in its founding document (Articles of Corporation) which somewhere explicitly states that the purpose of the coporation is to make money. If there are corps which don't have that statement, they are not being run in a business-like fashion.
In the case of Ford, they achieve profit (or not) through the manufacture and servicing of automobiles. This is pretty easy to understand. What is not so easy to understand is when you look at a company like Apple, who is a hardware company, but has chosen to create some incredible software to leverage sales of their products.
About money being an instrument, well, yes. It is also a legitimate corporate goal to make more of it, in and of itself. What the participants of that corporation decide to do with any extra money is another discussion.
McVoy is talking out of both sides of his mouth. First, he says open source software is crap because IBM is willing and able to sell support for it, yet later on in the article he says he doesn't want to build a hospital, he just wants to pay someone to provide healthcare, which is essentially exactly what IBM is doing, successfully.
Corporations become sugar daddies to the open source community because they perceive that they get value for their money. For instance, Apple, during its development of the OS X gui, hired open source programmers and used open source software for components of its operating system package. Was Apple stupid, delusional, greedy, or suckers for doing so? I would argue that they were effective in channeling their development efforts that way. Would it have cost more and resulted in less innovation if Apple had developed OS X the traditional way? Yes.
Movies projects are by nature collaborative efforts. What interests me about this effort is that the final content will be open source, and the workflow utilized to produce the movie are in the open source mode.
I'm a line producer/director in a project in which 8 teams around North America each make a 10 minute segment, which is woven into a final feature-length movie, which will be shown in theaters and also made available on DVD. It started out as a lark among fans of the Panasonic DVX100 camera, but has taken on a life of its own.
While we are using a few open source tools (such as Open Office) to support the production, most of the software is commercial stuff. However, most of the filmmakers have never met each other, and will not do so until premiere day. We use the internet for collaboration just like an open source project.
Will the movie be dreck? Maybe, but from what I have seen so far from the other teams, it might just turn out to be quite entertaining. A lot of hollywood people are following the project closely, because a successful product would have implications for higher-budgeted films.
Keep your eyes open for http://twomoretomorrows.org/
I believe I understand the difference between open source and Linux, but for the purposes of this thread they might as well be lumped into the same Silly Putty pile. Microsoft is spending oodles of money to obtain 'findings' that their OS and software deliver better business value than open source alternatives.
Notice that Bill Gates hasn't ever said that OpenBSD was a threat to Microsoft... but he did and does mention Linux. What has got to be keeping the people in Redmond up at night is that Linux, as the embodiment of a new software philosophy, offers none of the weaknesses which Microsoft has been able to attack in the past. When it comes to competition, MS is very much of a Crush/Acquire/Make Go Away company, not Adopt/Emulate.
For MS, I think it IS all about winning or losing. And their definition of winning is the continuation of their domainance of the operating system and Office application markets.
This kind of article always brings out the same argument, which we've beaten to death in this forum.
.NET, because the other developer was a VB guy, and the learning curve for him would have made it impossible to meet our deadline. I am comfortable with the Linux/Apache world, and generally prefer it, but I must admit that we whipped out a smokin' application, thanks to the data support from Visual Studio. (Interesting side note: this app has VB for the data layer, but C# for the business logic and the presentation layer. We had absolutely no trouble integrating the two languages.)
The question seems to be, is Microsoft winning 'the war'?
Oh, come now. All they are doing is fighting a rear-guard action. How could they possibly win in the long-term? The only way would be if we collectively stopped developing Linux and the applications which run on it, and go back to always buying Windows products. Does anyone really think that's going to happen?
I am currently consulting for a company which has a variety of systems and applications going. About half of their software development effort goes to in-house, never-to-be-published applications. The other half is specifically for the purpose of public consumption. You know what? The public consumption side is all running or being converted to Linux/Apache/Tomcat. The internal stuff is still up for grabs, but this is a cultural issue, not a question of the technical merits of MS vs the world.
I had a short timeframe to develop my current project, and I ended up going C# and
The Linux/Apache/Java side of the house is also grudgingly admitting we did a great job getting a fully-functional app out the door in a short timeframe. But they are also doing interesting things with Lucene and some other child projects of Apache.
The state of things now at the comapny are that getting the job done is Job #1, and the folks who write the checks don't care whether MS is in the loop or not. But, as more of our IT staff begin using open source tools, the more our tech staff will start saying to the bean counters, 'hey, we don't need to buy a Microsoft license for this or that project.' And the beanies are going to be happy to go along with that!
What's interesting to me, as a long-time Linux and FreeBSD guy, is that the quality of development tools that MS has had to create is a direct result of having to compete with the open source alternatives. And the quality and utility of those tools is accelerating.
The real story is that WE win.
Growing human brains in sheep would be...
:)
baaaaaaaad.
Better Dead Than Red... Beotch
Really, this article is a troll.
Aaaaahhhhh! Please put a warning label before you post something like that!
Must...wash...eyeballs...
The first thing anyone wants to do who has built a cluster is performance testing.
.NET framework EULA requires that you get written permission from MS before publishing any benchmarking infomation about the .NET platform.
.NET carries the same anti-free speech restriction. So we can probably publicize C# and CLR performance in a cluster, but not comparable Windows cluster performance.
I noticed last week that Microsoft's
I doubt Mono's implementation of
I feel your pain Mike, but you haven't gone into specifics. It just looks right now like you've not gotten your way about certain directions the core is going, and you've taken your marbles home.
Good luck to ya, I hope you can take your expertise with BSD and make Apple's offering that much better. I just am saying that your post is lacking specifics.
Err, not quite. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 streams can be edited, but the framing scheme makes it more difficult to do than the straightforward 'each frame is a complete one' scheme.
That's what it seems like the /.'ers who don't like Mono and C# are saying, that anything from Microsoft is automatically bad, and must not be adopted.
I got news for you, C# is a great language to develop with. Don't adopt it if you don't want to, which is fine with me, because that means there will be more jobs for me.
Brilliant move, Microsoft. Now some dweeb living in his mom's basement will write an ActiveX virus that creates the Wine key in the registry, then exits.
The next time you go to Windows Update, whether you run Wine or not...
Wow, I got modded down as a flamebait post. Jeesh, get a thicker skin.
My point is that good video games are damned hard to create, and I was getting a sense of entitlement from the post I replied to.
By the way, my hobby is indy movie making. I don't like most of the schlock that comes out of Hollywood, so I make my own.
This is a troll article; we've been over this subject material before.
You are free at any time to write an uber-exciting and profitable video game which blows the doors off anything the Big Guys are doing.
I didn't ever like Nixon, as he certainly WAS a crook.
But the guy did do things like found the EPA, and open the doors to China.
Hey, I don't the guy is perfect, in fact he screws up quite a bit.
But, he isn't my 'beloved Bush.' I voted Libertarian, again.
Your post is a pathetic whine.
The media in 2004 hasn't failed its public; we keep tuning in to them, and they keep selling advertising. That is not failure.
Calling the Bush administration 'failed' is a laugh. Isn't it pretty much EVERY administration's objective to get re-elected? Bush: 2, whiny clueless Democrats: 0.
A 'rogue' administration? What, because they use the powers of the executive branch as they are entitled to do so by being elected into the position? Because they invaded Iraq (per U.N. Security Council resolutions), even if they had to go it alone? Because they are pursuing diplomatic solutions to the problem of Iranian nukes, against the tide of whiny Democrat criticism that we should have invaded Iran first? Perhaps you do not understand the meaning of the word 'rogue.'
'Arrogant?' Whew, that's a crime against humanity! I guess we should lock up Rumsfeld and Bush because they are arrogant. Oh wait, then we'd have to lock up Saddam, Milosevic, Putin, JFK, and Teddy Roosevelt.
What a maroon.
Nothing is wrong with Iowa. My point is that this family may have to go where the jobs are.
I feel for this disgruntled spouse, because I was young and stupid once. I worked the same kind of environment when I was an Aeorspace guy, and LOVED the work. 80-hour work weeks, regardless of deadlines, was the norm. And in a tie. You know, we were *creating something great.*
I got smart. I started up my own company whch sells stuff to MegaAeroCorp. I worked my own hours, kept all my money, and had the satisfaction to be able to say to my former management, 'you ain't the boss of me.'
Everyone has choices. The worker bee made his biggest mistake when he found out that 85 hours per week were the expected norm, and he didn't do anything about it.
If EA is operating illegally, rape them in a class action lawsuit. Otherwise, put up with it, or quit and support your family like a man. It may mean that you have to do something you don't 'love', like flipping burgers, or moving to Iowa.