Yes, spin the data out of cvs logs in a program like GNOME that has a bunch of people with cvs access.
Metrics are a fascintating part of software engineering, though not to be taken too seriously. The problem with them is that if you start taking them seriously, they become the goal of the team. So if you measure lines of code produced, you end up after a while with locquacious coders stuffing code into source control. If you measure defects corrected, you end up with lots of shoddy code being checked in and subsequently fixed...
And if you measure subscribers to devel & support mailing lists, you get lots of new subscribers. Eric, please post an update to your graph tommorrow so we can see the slashdot effect!:)
Fetchmail was created by Virginia Tech undergrad Carl Harris to itch a scratch he had while a sysadmin there. Eric Raymond took over maintainance of the project when Carl moved on to other things. The elegant prose of C&B was inferred by ESR after the fact, rather than the cart leading to the horse as you imply.
This just encourages the embrace and extend tactics of the Talking Moon. Why conform to standards when you have a magic gizmo that will sort everything out at the last minute? While this might be originally sold as a way to give extranet wireless surfers pared down pages, it will end up with the big Internet sites using this technology to tailor output to diverging browser technologies. Unless you can afford to spring the money to big blue for this proxy server to sit in front of your regular web server you can forget about being a big time player on the Internet 5 years from now. Big Blue will now be actively pressing the browser makers to diverge from standards so that their technology becomes more and more necessary. Definitely a dark day.
Blind mom & gimpy physicist should have the stuff tested on them, if they so choose, not on helpless animals, IMO.
KW is interested in this field and is implanting things in himself, which I applaud.
I hate sounding all preachy, and apologize for misconstruing your original post, but your glib comment about the monkeys brings a terrible image to mind of rows of semi-sentient beings strapped down for weeks with their skulls cracked open so that people can poke at their brains with electric probes while they scream and their eyes bug out in terror.
To me, that ain't science, regardless of the lofty goals.
I, for one, think that torturing cats and monkeys so that dorks can have lights turn on when they walk into the room is pretty repugnant. It certainly speaks to the out-of-touch nature of CS people that is so evident in your post, if not to the inherent evil alluded to in the original interview.
No way. Without some sort of accountability, whether it be pair programming or code reviews or whatever, dirty little secrets will become pervasive in the code base and eventually pull the works down. In addition, the best way for new members to get up to speed as quick as possible is to have design and code reviews. It takes time from senior developers, but pretty soon the people getting reviewed are doing reviews on others. Development done in isolation is doomed to fail.
Incidentally, AOL has just recently released their AOLserver that they run all their sites with under a NPL clone. It took them a while to release it because they wanted to clean it up before they released it for general consumption. Its pretty nifty, check it out at http://www.aolserver.com
AOL is getting ready to open source their webserver that they've up til now only been giving away binaries for. Interestingly, they have gutted a large amount of "bloat" from the 2.x codebase and are throwing it out as a lean and mean but feature poor 3.0. I guess the assumption is that if people really liked the 2.x features that were removed they will re-implement them properly. It would seem they have learned a lesson from the 6 months of aimless wandering of the Mozilla project and have preemptively extricated all the cruft that made entry into the mozilla project so daunting.
Stand by, AOLServer 3.0 is coming down the pipe now and its open source! The documentation has already leaked out on the AOLServer mailing list and the license will likely be a GPL clone.
I thought ESR retired a month or so back. Or did I dream it? I am really tired of this guy and the "my open-source movement would wither without commercial involvement" rhetoric that he spouts. They implanted something in him while he was out at Talking Moon.
There was a comment somewhere about Naboo being the only planet with cloning technology. Given that Dolly the sheep is dying of old age at 1 y/o, perhaps the Queen has some sort of "accumulated" wisdom of her ancestral genetic donor(s)?
Yeah, but it has right at the top of the site in big red letters that the database is 1.01 terabytes. My point was that they chose the relatively large grain data set (my math shows 300k/image) which minimizes the stress of the 1Tb test.
My hometown isn't covered and the spots that I looked at that were close seem to all get me to "cloudy_day.gif". ')
Yes, what a joke that site is. A terabyte of data - but its like 1000 really big pictures. Ooo it really takes a powerful RDBMS to keep track of 1000 pieces of information. Access might even be able to do it.
> If Microsoft were really tracking this > information in some sort of piracy database, > they would have to spend a LOT more time > investigating the discrepancy than you'd think, > and in most cases, it simply wouldn't be worth > it.
They don't have to follow up on it (or even track it for that matter). Just knowing that the capability is there cows corporate customers into diligently keeping their licenses current. Fear is a great motivator. And the fact that this information is embedded in all the company's documents (the lifeblood of many companies) makes this an additional imperative. Its quite brilliant really.
So what? The OLE DLLs use the GUID of the embedded or linked object to look up the implementing executable or DLL, start it up and hand it the archive handle.
There is no technically valid reason why anyone that is not developing COM components should be generating GUIDs.
The only reason for this is so that Microsoft has hard evidence of piracy of their software. If people are really stupid they will send this information to M$ using the Winders update. If they don't fall for this very obvious trap the incriminating evidence will infect every piece of persistent information created by the company.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the OLE2 object registration process, though the MS fud and misdirection and half-truths would have you believe that.
Executables and DLLs that implement COM objects are registered with GUIDs, not users or documents.
This is a well thought-out feature from M$ that has their software create hard evidence of piracy by corporations. With this in place, corporate users that are using multiple installations of software from the same CD not only broadcast this fact to M$ as part of the update process, they also create a papertrail in the form of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets that can be used in court to demonstrate that:
a) User A and user B have different workstations (i.e. different ethernet adaptor IDs)
b) User A and user B have the same software license numbers.
therefore:
c) Illegal copies of the software have been made.
As with most things from Redmond, its not about marketing or privacy or anything except money.
If mircosoft smells money in Linux they will get their fingers in the pie regardless of what it takes. Its only a matter of time before the "embrace and extend" begins. I think whoever made the call of the end of the summer for some announcement was spot on.
It will be all spun up in a manner that supports their defense in the anti-trust suit to boot. Kind of a "look, not only are we not monopolistic, we are actively supporting the competition." Much as they have done with their straw-man competition, Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Metrics are a fascintating part of software engineering, though not to be taken too seriously. The problem with them is that if you start taking them seriously, they become the goal of the team. So if you measure lines of code produced, you end up after a while with locquacious coders stuffing code into source control. If you measure defects corrected, you end up with lots of shoddy code being checked in and subsequently fixed...
And if you measure subscribers to devel & support mailing lists, you get lots of new subscribers. Eric, please post an update to your graph tommorrow so we can see the slashdot effect! :)
you go boy!
KW is interested in this field and is implanting things in himself, which I applaud.
I hate sounding all preachy, and apologize for misconstruing your original post, but your glib comment about the monkeys brings a terrible image to mind of rows of semi-sentient beings strapped down for weeks with their skulls cracked open so that people can poke at their brains with electric probes while they scream and their eyes bug out in terror.
To me, that ain't science, regardless of the lofty goals.
I, for one, think that torturing cats and monkeys so that dorks can have lights turn on when they walk into the room is pretty repugnant. It certainly speaks to the out-of-touch nature of CS people that is so evident in your post, if not to the inherent evil alluded to in the original interview.
No way. Without some sort of accountability, whether it be pair programming or code reviews or whatever, dirty little secrets will become pervasive in the code base and eventually pull the works down. In addition, the best way for new members to get up to speed as quick as possible is to have design and code reviews. It takes time from senior developers, but pretty soon the people getting reviewed are doing reviews on others. Development done in isolation is doomed to fail.
I hope the Webster's people are paying attention.
I thought they said the place was evacuated - they must be looters on there now.
Which would account for Word being 5 years over its initial schedule.
Incidentally, AOL has just recently released their AOLserver that they run all their sites with under a NPL clone. It took them a while to release it because they wanted to clean it up before they released it for general consumption. Its pretty nifty, check it out at http://www.aolserver.com
I agree. We are the new straw man to replace the worn-out "competitors" that OS/2 and Apple once were.
AOL is getting ready to open source their webserver that they've up til now only been giving away binaries for. Interestingly, they have gutted a large amount of "bloat" from the 2.x codebase and are throwing it out as a lean and mean but feature poor 3.0. I guess the assumption is that if people really liked the 2.x features that were removed they will re-implement them properly. It would seem they have learned a lesson from the 6 months of aimless wandering of the Mozilla project and have preemptively extricated all the cruft that made entry into the mozilla project so daunting.
Stand by, AOLServer 3.0 is coming down the pipe now and its open source! The documentation has already leaked out on the AOLServer mailing list and the license will likely be a GPL clone.
I thought ESR retired a month or so back. Or did I dream it? I am really tired of this guy and the "my open-source movement would wither without commercial involvement" rhetoric that he spouts. They implanted something in him while he was out at Talking Moon.
Good stuff Rob!
There was a comment somewhere about Naboo being the only planet with cloning technology. Given that Dolly the sheep is dying of old age at 1 y/o, perhaps the Queen has some sort of "accumulated" wisdom of her ancestral genetic donor(s)?
An interesting tack. Take the "purest" distro and add proprietary components to it.
Its got the water buffalo behind it if you look very closely. An editorial by the author perhaps?
Yeah, but it has right at the top of the site in big red letters that the database is 1.01 terabytes. My point was that they chose the relatively large grain data set (my math shows 300k/image) which minimizes the stress of the 1Tb test.
My hometown isn't covered and the spots that I looked at that were close seem to all get me to "cloudy_day.gif". ')
Yes, what a joke that site is. A terabyte of data - but its like 1000 really big pictures. Ooo it
really takes a powerful RDBMS to keep track of
1000 pieces of information. Access might even be
able to do it.
> If Microsoft were really tracking this > information in some sort of piracy database, > they would have to spend a LOT more time > investigating the discrepancy than you'd think, > and in most cases, it simply wouldn't be worth > it.
They don't have to follow up on it (or even track it for that matter). Just knowing that the capability is there cows corporate customers into diligently keeping their licenses current. Fear is a great motivator. And the fact that this information is embedded in all the company's documents (the lifeblood of many companies) makes this an additional imperative. Its quite brilliant really.
So what? The OLE DLLs use the GUID of the embedded or linked object to look up the implementing executable or DLL, start it up and hand it the archive handle.
There is no technically valid reason why anyone that is not developing COM components should be generating GUIDs.
The only reason for this is so that Microsoft has hard evidence of piracy of their software. If people are really stupid they will send this information to M$ using the Winders update. If they don't fall for this very obvious trap the incriminating evidence will infect every piece of persistent information created by the company.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the OLE2 object registration process, though the MS fud and misdirection and half-truths would have you believe that.
Executables and DLLs that implement COM objects are registered with GUIDs, not users or documents.
This is a well thought-out feature from M$ that has their software create hard evidence of piracy by corporations. With this in place, corporate users that are using multiple installations of software from the same CD not only broadcast this fact to M$ as part of the update process, they also create a papertrail in the form of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets that can be used in court to demonstrate that:
a) User A and user B have different workstations (i.e. different ethernet adaptor IDs)
b) User A and user B have the same software license numbers.
therefore:
c) Illegal copies of the software have been made.
As with most things from Redmond, its not about marketing or privacy or anything except money.
If mircosoft smells money in Linux they will get their fingers in the pie regardless of what it takes. Its only a matter of time before the "embrace and extend" begins. I think whoever made the call of the end of the summer for some announcement was spot on.
It will be all spun up in a manner that supports their defense in the anti-trust suit to boot. Kind of a "look, not only are we not monopolistic, we are actively supporting the competition." Much as they have done with their straw-man competition, Apple.