FYI, commendations are often worthless, and in this case, it smells like the higher-ups are coviring their asses because THEY failed to act on blatant waste of taxpayer money.
Sure, that's one interpretation. It's the most cynical interpretation.
Another intepretation is that the "lazy boss" really was doing his job and the commendation was worthy. Maybe his job didn't require much use of a computer. Or maybe he did all his document writing on a laptop (that's what I do). Or maybe he's just a brilliant guy who can hold a phone conversation while playing solitaire. Who cares. His bosses are not concerned. They didn't sack him when the noise was made the first time. They didn't sack him the second time either. Obviously the higher-ups don't think there's a problem with the "lazy boss".
Now you could accuse the higher-ups of being incompetent and/or corrupt - as you have already done - or you could take the more rational view that they are more informed about the particulars and they made an appropriate decision.
I've seen people who work their socks off get hosed by management and people who do little work get praise. That's often happening in business today, ESPECIALLY public business. (Try reading Dilbert sometime.)
Oh great, you're getting your leet business knowledge from Dilbert. The PHBs at DTA should all resign right away now that you've uncovered their comical blunders (/rollseyes).
Lastly, what you, like most others continually ignore is that this boss is getting money FROM YOUR TAX SLIP for playing Solitaire. Do you really think that is appropriate ?
Actually I'm Australian (check my bio) so I really don't care what happens to your tax dollars.
Though if I were you I'd be less concerned about the $50k potentially wasted on a "lazy boss" (even though the DTA thinks the only waste of time was the psycho sysadmin). I'd be more concerned about the $1.2 *trillion* the USA government just wasted on an unjustified invasion of Iraq. I'd also be very concerned to realise that those tax dollars are now making a selected few companies (eg, Haliburton) extremely rich. I'd also be VERY concerned that the USA government administration has personal and business ties to aforementioned companies.
To an ignorant outsider like me (who also gets all his leet business knowledge from Dilbert) it seems that the "liberation" of Iraq was simply a convenient way to funnel tax money from the poor majority to the rich minority. Why aren't you pissing and moaning about that?
The boss, George Dobbs, received a letter of reprimand from the department in January because of the time he spent playing computer games on his office computer.
But his letter of reprimand also commended his work ethic and production. He is still on the job as assistant state right of way engineer and the supervisor for the division's engineering section manager.
The letter to Dobbs also states, "While your work ethic and your production are above reproach, management level personnel must be mindful not to compromise their ability to manage subordinates."
So the "lazy boss" received commendations for production. Seems that the "lazy boss" gets a lot done while still playing solitaire. Even when his supervisors had full knowledge of his alleged "slacking off" they chose to keep the "lazy boss" on the payroll. They even commented that his production is "above reproach".
Seems to me the sysadmin was grinding his axe in error.
He was also a doofus for taking the situation into his own hands. He installed a pirated version of WinSpy without authorisation from a superior officer. He also monitored other staff (two other people) for 7 months, without authorisation. He claims he was doing it to catch slackers at work. But that behaviour is too easily miscontrued. He was begging for trouble and he got it.
Open Source is great, but as the licenses make clear, *you* wind up holding all the liabilities.
Says who? Darl said this 1000 times and now we have people like yourself parroting it, but I've yet to see anybody with legal knowledge state the same thing.
1.) Typing "M$" doesn't make you clever or witty.
2.) NT isn't based on DOS at all. Nobody knows what you're talking about there.
3.) Select HTML format next time.
4.) This technology is not "unimpressive." Only to elitist Slashdot snobs who think XFCE is still a cool idea. The rest of the world wants to move to a modern, 3D-based compositing architecture. Where is that happening in Linux? 2006 is just a year and a half away. Well?
Can't disagree with you on items 1 through 3. The guy before you was a pratt.
But regarding item 4: that stuff is happening in Linux. Look at freedesktop.org for projects like DRI, CAIRO, XRender, XFixes, XDamage, XComposite, and so on. It might not happen before 2006 but it's not a neglected or unwanted feature in Linux land.
It would be nice to see some of the Linux GUI developers implement a fully vector-based scalable windowing system.
It's sort of happening already.
SVG in GNOME and KDE. That's scalable vector graphics at the application level. Some themes already use SVG for icons and window decorations.
CAIRO offers scalable vector graphics at the X11 level. Nice pics here.
Hardware acceleration through Xrender.
Windows are getting alpha channels thanks to XDamage, XFixes and XComposite. Means we'll finally start seeing similar effects to what you get with Aqua on MacOS X.
All the bits are coming together. If you're willing to play at the bleeding edge then you can see some of these effects today.
Try finding all mp3 by Brian Adams or Withney Houston on a 200Gb disk filled with 250'000 files with file and locate, you'll get the answer 10 minutes later.
I assume you're finding those particular MP3s so you can delete them. Badoom tish.
...for those of us who read Slashdot, the question becomes "why?" I've had a PVR at home for the past four or five months, ever since I built my MythTV [mythtv.org] system with KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv].
I'd pay for the service if it had accurate EPG data. I built a DVB-MythTV box of my own. It's usually great but recently I've had problems with "reality shows" that go overtime. I don't watch reality shows but because they play 15-30 minutes too long it ruins anything I'm recording on that channel after 8pm. Effectively Capital (the worst offender) has been inaccessible to me for weeks. Can't wait until that shite called Big Brother is off the air and programming returns to normal.
I see the majority of comments are cries of "FUD" and "closed source has the same issues" and "Linux is secure; many eyeballs". I don't disagree. I think O'Dowd's arguments are largely bollocks. Security sensitive software will always be auditted whether it's open source or closed source. His implications that some deviant from Eurasia can slip trojans into the ICBM control systems if they're running on Linux are totally bizarre. We all know that's not true.
But there is a kernel of truth in his claims. I've worked on Defence programming contracts. You have to get a security clearance (eg, Secret) before you're even allowed to look at the source code, let alone modify it. I was working on a non-critical messaging system (basically e-mail) and I still needed clearance. The Defence Department wouldn't have it any other way. If the company violated this rule - eg, allowed me to write code without getting clearance frst - then there would have been severe reprecussions for everybody involved. Gaol time is one of many possibilities.
So what O'Dowd is saying is partially true. There is some benefit from closed source because the developers can have security and background checks before they even see the source code. It's not a make or break requirement but it is one of the many factors that were considered when auditting our product. Most FLOSS projects don't have security clearance (and nor should they) so that is a negative mark against FLOSS. But as other people point out there are plenty of other ways to verify the security of a product. And many non-FLOSS software products used within Defence are written by developers without security clearance (I'm looking at you, Windows). So while O'Dowd does raise a valid point, I still don't think it's a very important one.
NB: our messaging system ran on top of Windows so I thought the strict security requirements for our product were rather pointless.
When Sun wants 100k for a quad processor system when you can easily buy an far faster Opteron based quad processor system for 1/5th the price, it makes you wonder what it is that Sun is smoking and why they haven't passed the bong.
I wonder what you're smoking that you think a $100k Sun system is comparable to a quad-Opteron from Joe's Crazy Discount Computers just because of CPU performance.
A $100k Sun system likely comes with LOM, hi-speed backplanes, redundant power, ECC RAM, ECC cache, hot swap CPUs, Ultra320 throughout, multiple hotswap PCI-100 busses, 24x7 onsite parts replacement, etc. A whitebox Opteron isn't even in the same ballpark; it's not even on the short list.
Last time I compared vendor-supported Opteron systems from HP against Ultrasparc servers from Sun (for a $200k purchase of 10 servers), yes I agree the CPU/$ was much better for the Opteron, but Sun won every other performance category. CPU isn't very important for most tasks. Backplanes and network and SCSI performance are often far more important.
To continue with the HP example, would Rowling have spent years writing and polishing the HP books if the first publisher she approached with the manuscript could rip it off and make all the profit?
What profit? In a world without copyright the publisher wouldn't have had a monopoly either. Any publisher could have "ripped it off", including all the Internet publishers willing to publish the book for gratis.
Don't forget. Copyright is a recent invention. Just under 300 years old.
It was not until the 1709 Statute of Anne which passed into law on 10th April 1710 that copyright in books and other writings gained protection of an Act of Parliament.
Musicians and authors seemed to get by just fine before copyright. You might argue that copyright has increased the quantity of work produced. I might also argue that it has decreased the average quality.
Always remember: copyright is an ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCT created by THE GOVERNMENT. If it went away then who knows what would happen. But it's a sure bet that innovation wouldn't stop. It would just occur in different ways. Maybe a combination of performing arts, sponsored works, payment in advance, payment as the work is written, etc. But don't delude yourself that copyright is the only way this can work.
Also remember that we the taxpayers are paying to enforce this artificial scarcity so that the author can become rich. In other words, your tax dollars are making these copyright owners wealthy. I don't know about you but I certainly don't think Rowling deserves to be the richest British woman simply because she wrote a children's book. That says to me that there's something wrong with the system, that she can live in comfort for the next 50 years while people like Tesla died in poverty.
Application to software, then: if a company spends thousands or millions of $CURRENCY developing a product, and then the first person they sell it to can make as many copies as they want and sell them on for half the price, that person will make more profit per copy, because they didn't have the overheads, and will sell more copies to boot. The only way to avoid this is to sell it to that person for the price of developing, which means that there will only be incentive for a company to write software if it's in-house or built-to-order. There goes company innovation.
If the software doesn't sell then the company goes kaput anyway. Maybe they should figure out a business model that isn't a perpetual gamble.
Some people will inevitably condemn me for putting down Open Source, disparaging the community process and otherwise encouraging the proprietary, close-source model.
Nah, I just condemn you for this...
But what I do object to is the concept that all code can somehow be developed for "free",
Not even RMS, the most fanatical of all free software developers, thinks that code should be developed for "free". RMS charges for his coding services and GNU has paid developers to write code for free software like EMACS. Red Hat pays all their developers to work on Linux. IBM is paying their own FLOSS developers. The Sun guys get paid to write code for OpenOffice. Look at all these people getting PAID to write free software.
Seeing as you even write "Open Source" a dozen times it's not like you can claim that you misunderstood that "Free Software" means libre, not gratis, because you weren't talking exclusively about Free Software. You knew what you wrote was a falsehood. So why the hell did you publish it?
But you know as well as I do that if I am successful then inevitably some kid in his parents' basement
The problem is IT people can interfere with my work, but what I do doesn't affect them. For example, I'm a scientist. I know Linux inside and out and have been using it at home and elsewhere for over ten years. Yet, I don't have root access to my *own* Linux PC at work, which is behind the firewall. So whenever I need something installed, I need to ask IT, wait weeks, explain what's needed ten times to different IT people, and my productivity is hindered. As far as I'm concerned, IT is more or less useless, as I could do their job in addition to mine. And of course they know that -- that's why they don't give root access to us scientists.
As a person who used to work in the hell that was IT support for a university, I can say without reservation that _you_ are the sort of person that led to PCs being locked down. We got sick of your type installing unapproved applications, breaking their e-mail or word processor, and then wasting several hours of _our_ time after you had already wasted several hours of _your_ time trying to fix it by yourself.
I know Linux inside and out and have been using it at home and elsewhere for over ten years.
Environments where "I know this, this is UNIX" scientists muck about with their PCs are the most broken, insecure, and unproductive environments imaginable. There's nothing worse than a scientist who thinks they're an expert at everything just because they have a PhD. Your job is to do your research and teach your students. Leave the IT to the professionals. Unless you'd like us to come down and muck about with your experiments when your back is turned.
As far as I'm concerned, IT is more or less useless, as I could do their job in addition to mine.
But I'm curious what restrictions the XFree people added and why it caused all this ruckus. It doesn't seem to have made any difference to my ability to get the source or play with it. What am I missing?
They added an advertising clause. Similar to the old BSD license.
There's a reasonable argument that the license change by itself didn't cause the exodus. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. There has been friction between the XFree developers and the rest of the FLOSS community for quite some time. There has even been considerable friction within the XFree team which led to the infamous "eviction" of Keith. But until recently there haven't been any realistic alternatives to XFree.
It remains to be seen whether Xorg can deliver better than XFree. Initial signs are promising; the codebase is being broken up and autotooled, cutting edge extensions like Xcomposite are being integrated, some of the best and brightest have committed themselves to Xorg instead of XFree, the distributions are backing Xorg over XFree, and (most important of all) the Xorg developers are COMMUNICATING with the rest of freedesktop.org (eg, the projects that build upon X11/XFree/Xorg). Those changes alone are a significant improvement over XFree.
Re:C# is not an open standard.
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The rest of your comment is ok, but C# is not an open standard. Part of the CLI spec has been submitted, but the remoting parts (essential for.NET, otherwise it is as dead as a paperweight) and the library are not Open Standard in the Open Standard sense.
Thanks for the correction.
Re:catchiness
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· Score: 4, Insightful
comparing *declarations* , the phrase "MINDFUL of the desire and commitment..." just doesnt quite have the same catchiness as "We hold these truths to be self evident", does it? c'mon now, if you are gonna extol open source, shouldnt you claim it as self evident?
They don't say "open source" anywhere in the declaration. They're talking about open standards. Arguably open standards are more important than open source. An open source product can splinter and produce two competing incompatible products, even though they are both open source. It takes a lot of effort to reconcile the splinter and sadly there is a lot of "heated" discussion involved in the reconciliation.
But open standards are the ultimate arbitrator; a product either is or is not compliant with the standard. There are no arguments over who is right and who is wrong. The arguments were all over and done with once the standard was written. Agreed, sometimes standards are imperfect so there can be different interpretations, but standards are the strongest mechanism we have for coordinating many vendors to produce compatible products.
Be aware that even in the open source world we have attempts at our own open standards (eg, LSB) and we have implementations of many open standards (eg, POSIX, X11, C#, LDAP). The marriage of open source and open standards is a formidable pairing. Far stronger than either element alone.
We can safely assume that there will always be vendors who follow open standards but do not release open source. We can still work with those vendors. We do so every day when we network a Linux server with Cisco routers. Those vendors are still our friends. We can also work with vendors who write open source software but don't follow any open standards. They are also our friends, though IMO they are painful vendors to work with. And there will be some vendors who write open source and follow open standards. Those vendors are a dream come true.
But be wary of vendors who don't release open source and don't follow open standards. There be dragons.
What I don't get, though, is if you're a huge fan of debit cards, why wouldn't you just use a credit card? Let the *bank* take the credit risk, you earn interest on your own cash and they eat the interest for 30 days, plus you can pick up frequent flier miles or some other trivial bennie at the same time.
For people who can't budget their finances, a debit card minimises the risk of running up a large debt to the bank.
There have been recent stories on the news about people with $10k+ credit card debts. They can only just afford to repay the interest so they're never able to pay off the debt. Now these people are stupid (they should find personal finance at a reduced interest rate, or sell an asset to repay the debt) but it highlights the risk if you can't budget your finances.
Me, I miss the old IBM ATMs with the glowing red thin slit readout and small card balance receipts, they fit so perfectly in the same space that a bank card fits. None of this bollocks on screen pretty graphics, just a bank of different coloured buttons (one for withdrawal actions, one for deposits) and a sensible layout.
Sing it, brother! I loved those old IBM ones because they were fast. All the buttons were labelled so you knew exactly which button to press next. I could tap out a transaction in 2 seconds flat.
But these new ATMs display the button labels on the video screen. So you have to wait for the damn screen to refresh, then you have to read all the entries, then you have to correlate the video display with the right button (because parallax error means they're never quite in alignment) all before you can hit the button.
It's tortuous to use the new ATMs. I wish they'd get a clue and go back to the old school ones.
Thanks to your message I managed to sort out the trackpad problem, which was indeed annoying. However, I'm not sure why you recommend pmud-utils. On attempting to install it, I saw that it wanted to to remove pbbuttonsd, which works (sort of) to control the Mac buttons. With gnome the battery indicator gives ample warning of low power and apparently pbbuttonsd has a default configuration to force an elegant shutdown if things get really critical, though I haven't dared to test it yet.
I just checked and you're right, I don't have pmud-utils installed. I think I used to have it but that was with an older Apple laptop with pmud support.
One problem which I haven't found a solution to, is no sound while using the Gnome CD player. If I rip the CD and play the ogg or mp3 files from disk, there's no problem. Have you encountered the same problem?
Never noticed the problem because I never try to play audio CDs directly. I always rip with sound-juicer and then play the rips with muine or rhythmbox.
Another question: how do you start/stop vm/laptop_mode? I found a script a script for it, but as I am no geek, I am wary of using it as I think it is not for powerpcs. Script at: http://www.ulihansen.kick-ass.net/aero/linux/lapto p-mode/
The laptop_mode feature works on all platforms. It just changes the way that buffers are written to disk. Normal behaviour is to flush all buffers every 30 seconds. With laptop_mode, buffers are kept in memory for several minutes (configurable option) BUT if there is a disk read then buffers are flushed straight away (because the disk has spun up so there's no loss in flushing).
All the script does is poke some values into sysfs and change the hdparm settings. So I just added these lines to/etc/sysctl.conf and didn't bother with the script.
# NH20040320 - less aggressive flushing of buffer cache to disk vm/dirty_background_ratio = 40 vm/dirty_ratio = 40 vm/dirty_expire_centisecs = 60000 vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs = 60000
Take note that 60000 centisecs is 10 minutes. So you can lose up to 10 minutes of unsaved disk buffers if you suffer a kernel crash or power outage! However I've never had a kernel crash on PPC and batteries last a long time on PowerBooks.
A recent article on NewsForge addresses this problem from the perspective that software usability is a technical issue that Open Source developers can and should face and conquer, just as we have conquered other technical problems that have stood in our way.
FLOSS is a really good development model when the software can be incrementally written in a distributed manner. Linux works because the majority of work in the kernel is in maintaining the drivers; small and independent chunks of code. Debian works because of packages; without packaging, Ian says Debian would never have succeeded.
Projects that require a big bang from a small group of people do sometimes occur with FLOSS but it's much rarer. And I think those projects are far less successful. The last example I can think of was the DRI; it took a small team of very dedicated people to invest a lot of effort before there was a result. The barrier to entry (the knowledge required to contribute) with the DRI is very high so progress is slow. It's not possible to just jump in and fix something small. You have to spend ages learning how it all fits together.
In my mind, the way to solve the "UI problem" with KDE and GNOME is to figure out how to break the problem into smaller independent chunks. Then just sit back and allow the distributed model of development take over. 1000s of programmers each contributing 10 lines of code has the same coding power as 10 programmers contributing 1000 lines each but it's only possible if the problem can be broken up into 1000 independent chunks.
Maybe UI design isn't one of the problems that can be broken up that way.
People working in the recording industry have as much of a right to lobby for rights as you have to lobby against them.
Sure, but I'd prefer it if they didn't lobby for retrospective rights. Elvis' songs were produced 50 years ago with the full knowledge that 50 years was all the copyright protection they got. Now that the 50 years is almost up the publishers are trying to extend the copyright.
It's as annoying as those people who build their houses next to airports and then complain about the noise. They knew what they were getting into when they built there!
If copyright extension acts only affected works produced after the date the act went into effect then I think there would be fewer complaints from the rest of us.
Now if your only point is that you disagree with that and you don't really think it's of interest -- well, it's just too damn bad you can't do anything about it, isn't it?
I don't disagree with that. I do think it is of interest. If the best you can do is to attribute me with beliefs I do not have and disprove arguments that I have not made then you really should reconsider what value you bring to this discussion.
You haven't asked a question.
I might not have put a question mark at the end but my request for you to clarify your position was pretty clear. Your continued refusal to do so is very telling.
I explained exactly what I meant two responses up. I was talking about the Red Hat case. Not Groklaw.
I saw your comment earlier where you claimed I "confused the pronouns". I did no such thing. I knew precisely that you meant "Red Hat case" when you wrote "this" and my comment is unchanged by your "clarification". You are trying to evade the question.
I was the previous poster, and I was doing nothing more than pointing out that/. was 2 days behind Groklaw on this story. Period.
The way you said it was denigrating. If I had said "Geez, you sure don't think much of yourself, other people made much better comments than yours less than 5 minutes ago" it would also have been a pointless insult.
You could have just said "Groklaw also had an article about this, here is the link".
Who said anything about influence?
My interpretation of your comment "This, I think, is probably where we'll want to be paying some attention next" is that you think Groklaw's attention makes a squat of difference. If you don't believe that, and you do think that Groklaw has little to no influence on the outcome, then I'll be happy to apologise.
Of course Groklaw's articles are post-event. All reporting and analysis of events happen after the fact. Don't be silly. No one can research a document that doesn't exist yet.
I didn't claim that anybody was researching documents that don't exist yet. I was pointing out there's no difference between Groklaw and Slashdot in terms of influence on these cases. The previous poster was denigrating Slashdot for no good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, that's one interpretation. It's the most cynical interpretation.
Another intepretation is that the "lazy boss" really was doing his job and the commendation was worthy. Maybe his job didn't require much use of a computer. Or maybe he did all his document writing on a laptop (that's what I do). Or maybe he's just a brilliant guy who can hold a phone conversation while playing solitaire. Who cares. His bosses are not concerned. They didn't sack him when the noise was made the first time. They didn't sack him the second time either. Obviously the higher-ups don't think there's a problem with the "lazy boss".
Now you could accuse the higher-ups of being incompetent and/or corrupt - as you have already done - or you could take the more rational view that they are more informed about the particulars and they made an appropriate decision.
Oh great, you're getting your leet business knowledge from Dilbert. The PHBs at DTA should all resign right away now that you've uncovered their comical blunders (/rollseyes).
Actually I'm Australian (check my bio) so I really don't care what happens to your tax dollars.
Though if I were you I'd be less concerned about the $50k potentially wasted on a "lazy boss" (even though the DTA thinks the only waste of time was the psycho sysadmin). I'd be more concerned about the $1.2 *trillion* the USA government just wasted on an unjustified invasion of Iraq. I'd also be very concerned to realise that those tax dollars are now making a selected few companies (eg, Haliburton) extremely rich. I'd also be VERY concerned that the USA government administration has personal and business ties to aforementioned companies.
To an ignorant outsider like me (who also gets all his leet business knowledge from Dilbert) it seems that the "liberation" of Iraq was simply a convenient way to funnel tax money from the poor majority to the rich minority. Why aren't you pissing and moaning about that?
RTFA.
So the "lazy boss" received commendations for production. Seems that the "lazy boss" gets a lot done while still playing solitaire. Even when his supervisors had full knowledge of his alleged "slacking off" they chose to keep the "lazy boss" on the payroll. They even commented that his production is "above reproach". Seems to me the sysadmin was grinding his axe in error.
He was also a doofus for taking the situation into his own hands. He installed a pirated version of WinSpy without authorisation from a superior officer. He also monitored other staff (two other people) for 7 months, without authorisation. He claims he was doing it to catch slackers at work. But that behaviour is too easily miscontrued. He was begging for trouble and he got it.
Says who? Darl said this 1000 times and now we have people like yourself parroting it, but I've yet to see anybody with legal knowledge state the same thing.
Can't disagree with you on items 1 through 3. The guy before you was a pratt.
But regarding item 4: that stuff is happening in Linux. Look at freedesktop.org for projects like DRI, CAIRO, XRender, XFixes, XDamage, XComposite, and so on. It might not happen before 2006 but it's not a neglected or unwanted feature in Linux land.
It's sort of happening already.
SVG in GNOME and KDE. That's scalable vector graphics at the application level. Some themes already use SVG for icons and window decorations.
CAIRO offers scalable vector graphics at the X11 level. Nice pics here. Hardware acceleration through Xrender.
Windows are getting alpha channels thanks to XDamage, XFixes and XComposite. Means we'll finally start seeing similar effects to what you get with Aqua on MacOS X.
All the bits are coming together. If you're willing to play at the bleeding edge then you can see some of these effects today.
I assume you're finding those particular MP3s so you can delete them. Badoom tish.
I'd pay for the service if it had accurate EPG data. I built a DVB-MythTV box of my own. It's usually great but recently I've had problems with "reality shows" that go overtime. I don't watch reality shows but because they play 15-30 minutes too long it ruins anything I'm recording on that channel after 8pm. Effectively Capital (the worst offender) has been inaccessible to me for weeks. Can't wait until that shite called Big Brother is off the air and programming returns to normal.
I see the majority of comments are cries of "FUD" and "closed source has the same issues" and "Linux is secure; many eyeballs". I don't disagree. I think O'Dowd's arguments are largely bollocks. Security sensitive software will always be auditted whether it's open source or closed source. His implications that some deviant from Eurasia can slip trojans into the ICBM control systems if they're running on Linux are totally bizarre. We all know that's not true.
But there is a kernel of truth in his claims. I've worked on Defence programming contracts. You have to get a security clearance (eg, Secret) before you're even allowed to look at the source code, let alone modify it. I was working on a non-critical messaging system (basically e-mail) and I still needed clearance. The Defence Department wouldn't have it any other way. If the company violated this rule - eg, allowed me to write code without getting clearance frst - then there would have been severe reprecussions for everybody involved. Gaol time is one of many possibilities.
So what O'Dowd is saying is partially true. There is some benefit from closed source because the developers can have security and background checks before they even see the source code. It's not a make or break requirement but it is one of the many factors that were considered when auditting our product. Most FLOSS projects don't have security clearance (and nor should they) so that is a negative mark against FLOSS. But as other people point out there are plenty of other ways to verify the security of a product. And many non-FLOSS software products used within Defence are written by developers without security clearance (I'm looking at you, Windows). So while O'Dowd does raise a valid point, I still don't think it's a very important one.
NB: our messaging system ran on top of Windows so I thought the strict security requirements for our product were rather pointless.
Microsoft "innovates" again.
I wonder what you're smoking that you think a $100k Sun system is comparable to a quad-Opteron from Joe's Crazy Discount Computers just because of CPU performance.
A $100k Sun system likely comes with LOM, hi-speed backplanes, redundant power, ECC RAM, ECC cache, hot swap CPUs, Ultra320 throughout, multiple hotswap PCI-100 busses, 24x7 onsite parts replacement, etc. A whitebox Opteron isn't even in the same ballpark; it's not even on the short list.
Last time I compared vendor-supported Opteron systems from HP against Ultrasparc servers from Sun (for a $200k purchase of 10 servers), yes I agree the CPU/$ was much better for the Opteron, but Sun won every other performance category. CPU isn't very important for most tasks. Backplanes and network and SCSI performance are often far more important.
What profit? In a world without copyright the publisher wouldn't have had a monopoly either. Any publisher could have "ripped it off", including all the Internet publishers willing to publish the book for gratis.
Don't forget. Copyright is a recent invention. Just under 300 years old.
Musicians and authors seemed to get by just fine before copyright. You might argue that copyright has increased the quantity of work produced. I might also argue that it has decreased the average quality.
Always remember: copyright is an ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCT created by THE GOVERNMENT. If it went away then who knows what would happen. But it's a sure bet that innovation wouldn't stop. It would just occur in different ways. Maybe a combination of performing arts, sponsored works, payment in advance, payment as the work is written, etc. But don't delude yourself that copyright is the only way this can work.
Also remember that we the taxpayers are paying to enforce this artificial scarcity so that the author can become rich. In other words, your tax dollars are making these copyright owners wealthy. I don't know about you but I certainly don't think Rowling deserves to be the richest British woman simply because she wrote a children's book. That says to me that there's something wrong with the system, that she can live in comfort for the next 50 years while people like Tesla died in poverty.
If the software doesn't sell then the company goes kaput anyway. Maybe they should figure out a business model that isn't a perpetual gamble.
Nah, I just condemn you for this...
Not even RMS, the most fanatical of all free software developers, thinks that code should be developed for "free". RMS charges for his coding services and GNU has paid developers to write code for free software like EMACS. Red Hat pays all their developers to work on Linux. IBM is paying their own FLOSS developers. The Sun guys get paid to write code for OpenOffice. Look at all these people getting PAID to write free software.
Seeing as you even write "Open Source" a dozen times it's not like you can claim that you misunderstood that "Free Software" means libre, not gratis, because you weren't talking exclusively about Free Software. You knew what you wrote was a falsehood. So why the hell did you publish it?
Now I just think you're a trolling dickhead.
To bring back a famous euphemism... *plonk*.
As a person who used to work in the hell that was IT support for a university, I can say without reservation that _you_ are the sort of person that led to PCs being locked down. We got sick of your type installing unapproved applications, breaking their e-mail or word processor, and then wasting several hours of _our_ time after you had already wasted several hours of _your_ time trying to fix it by yourself.
Environments where "I know this, this is UNIX" scientists muck about with their PCs are the most broken, insecure, and unproductive environments imaginable. There's nothing worse than a scientist who thinks they're an expert at everything just because they have a PhD. Your job is to do your research and teach your students. Leave the IT to the professionals. Unless you'd like us to come down and muck about with your experiments when your back is turned.
GAaaaahhhh. Must... restrain... fist of death.
They added an advertising clause. Similar to the old BSD license.
There's a reasonable argument that the license change by itself didn't cause the exodus. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. There has been friction between the XFree developers and the rest of the FLOSS community for quite some time. There has even been considerable friction within the XFree team which led to the infamous "eviction" of Keith. But until recently there haven't been any realistic alternatives to XFree.
It remains to be seen whether Xorg can deliver better than XFree. Initial signs are promising; the codebase is being broken up and autotooled, cutting edge extensions like Xcomposite are being integrated, some of the best and brightest have committed themselves to Xorg instead of XFree, the distributions are backing Xorg over XFree, and (most important of all) the Xorg developers are COMMUNICATING with the rest of freedesktop.org (eg, the projects that build upon X11/XFree/Xorg). Those changes alone are a significant improvement over XFree.
Thanks for the correction.
They don't say "open source" anywhere in the declaration. They're talking about open standards. Arguably open standards are more important than open source. An open source product can splinter and produce two competing incompatible products, even though they are both open source. It takes a lot of effort to reconcile the splinter and sadly there is a lot of "heated" discussion involved in the reconciliation.
But open standards are the ultimate arbitrator; a product either is or is not compliant with the standard. There are no arguments over who is right and who is wrong. The arguments were all over and done with once the standard was written. Agreed, sometimes standards are imperfect so there can be different interpretations, but standards are the strongest mechanism we have for coordinating many vendors to produce compatible products.
Be aware that even in the open source world we have attempts at our own open standards (eg, LSB) and we have implementations of many open standards (eg, POSIX, X11, C#, LDAP). The marriage of open source and open standards is a formidable pairing. Far stronger than either element alone.
We can safely assume that there will always be vendors who follow open standards but do not release open source. We can still work with those vendors. We do so every day when we network a Linux server with Cisco routers. Those vendors are still our friends. We can also work with vendors who write open source software but don't follow any open standards. They are also our friends, though IMO they are painful vendors to work with. And there will be some vendors who write open source and follow open standards. Those vendors are a dream come true.
But be wary of vendors who don't release open source and don't follow open standards. There be dragons.
For people who can't budget their finances, a debit card minimises the risk of running up a large debt to the bank.
There have been recent stories on the news about people with $10k+ credit card debts. They can only just afford to repay the interest so they're never able to pay off the debt. Now these people are stupid (they should find personal finance at a reduced interest rate, or sell an asset to repay the debt) but it highlights the risk if you can't budget your finances.
Sing it, brother! I loved those old IBM ones because they were fast. All the buttons were labelled so you knew exactly which button to press next. I could tap out a transaction in 2 seconds flat.
But these new ATMs display the button labels on the video screen. So you have to wait for the damn screen to refresh, then you have to read all the entries, then you have to correlate the video display with the right button (because parallax error means they're never quite in alignment) all before you can hit the button.
It's tortuous to use the new ATMs. I wish they'd get a clue and go back to the old school ones.
I just checked and you're right, I don't have pmud-utils installed. I think I used to have it but that was with an older Apple laptop with pmud support.
Never noticed the problem because I never try to play audio CDs directly. I always rip with sound-juicer and then play the rips with muine or rhythmbox.
The laptop_mode feature works on all platforms. It just changes the way that buffers are written to disk. Normal behaviour is to flush all buffers every 30 seconds. With laptop_mode, buffers are kept in memory for several minutes (configurable option) BUT if there is a disk read then buffers are flushed straight away (because the disk has spun up so there's no loss in flushing).
All the script does is poke some values into sysfs and change the hdparm settings. So I just added these lines to /etc/sysctl.conf and didn't bother with the script.
I also add the following to /etc/hdparm.conf
Take note that 60000 centisecs is 10 minutes. So you can lose up to 10 minutes of unsaved disk buffers if you suffer a kernel crash or power outage! However I've never had a kernel crash on PPC and batteries last a long time on PowerBooks.
FLOSS is a really good development model when the software can be incrementally written in a distributed manner. Linux works because the majority of work in the kernel is in maintaining the drivers; small and independent chunks of code. Debian works because of packages; without packaging, Ian says Debian would never have succeeded.
Projects that require a big bang from a small group of people do sometimes occur with FLOSS but it's much rarer. And I think those projects are far less successful. The last example I can think of was the DRI; it took a small team of very dedicated people to invest a lot of effort before there was a result. The barrier to entry (the knowledge required to contribute) with the DRI is very high so progress is slow. It's not possible to just jump in and fix something small. You have to spend ages learning how it all fits together.
In my mind, the way to solve the "UI problem" with KDE and GNOME is to figure out how to break the problem into smaller independent chunks. Then just sit back and allow the distributed model of development take over. 1000s of programmers each contributing 10 lines of code has the same coding power as 10 programmers contributing 1000 lines each but it's only possible if the problem can be broken up into 1000 independent chunks.
Maybe UI design isn't one of the problems that can be broken up that way.
Sure, but I'd prefer it if they didn't lobby for retrospective rights. Elvis' songs were produced 50 years ago with the full knowledge that 50 years was all the copyright protection they got. Now that the 50 years is almost up the publishers are trying to extend the copyright.
It's as annoying as those people who build their houses next to airports and then complain about the noise. They knew what they were getting into when they built there!
If copyright extension acts only affected works produced after the date the act went into effect then I think there would be fewer complaints from the rest of us.
I don't disagree with that. I do think it is of interest. If the best you can do is to attribute me with beliefs I do not have and disprove arguments that I have not made then you really should reconsider what value you bring to this discussion.
I might not have put a question mark at the end but my request for you to clarify your position was pretty clear. Your continued refusal to do so is very telling.
I saw your comment earlier where you claimed I "confused the pronouns". I did no such thing. I knew precisely that you meant "Red Hat case" when you wrote "this" and my comment is unchanged by your "clarification". You are trying to evade the question.
The way you said it was denigrating. If I had said "Geez, you sure don't think much of yourself, other people made much better comments than yours less than 5 minutes ago" it would also have been a pointless insult.
You could have just said "Groklaw also had an article about this, here is the link".
My interpretation of your comment "This, I think, is probably where we'll want to be paying some attention next" is that you think Groklaw's attention makes a squat of difference. If you don't believe that, and you do think that Groklaw has little to no influence on the outcome, then I'll be happy to apologise.
I didn't claim that anybody was researching documents that don't exist yet. I was pointing out there's no difference between Groklaw and Slashdot in terms of influence on these cases. The previous poster was denigrating Slashdot for no good reason.