XML DTD: absolutely. very strong agreement.
on
Linuxberg opens
·
· Score: 1
database . . . normalization . . . We need something like an XML DTD for the interchange of this data
this is a very cool idea.
of course, after the flamewars about defining the DTD died down, there would be a question of getting somebody to maintain it, and then there would be endless flamewars about KDE coming after GNOME in the alphabet, whose entry didn't get updated, the insidious and unnatural influence of [insert Villain of the Day here] over the maintainers, blah blah blah. this doesn't mean it's a bad idea . . . just that there are some linux people who value their freedom of expression to a sometimes pathological degree:
1st clo: I'm going to the bathroom now. 2nd clo: YOU SOCIALIST! THAT'S JUST WHAT BILL GATES WOULD DO!
The world doesn't very badly need Yet Another Manual Archive of what amounts to the same data.
here, i disagree. it may be the same data, but it's presented in a newbie-friendly fashion. freshmeat is not friendly to most windows users, who need to be welcomed in a very gentle/warm-and-fuzzy way. here, the medium is the message. the credibility linux gains as a mainstream end-user platform is worth a little redundancy, and maybe even a little mild nausea over the barneyfication of free software distribution.
The LinuxBerg effort is nonetheless duplicative of information being maintained elsewhere.
so it's redundant. so's life. people will do this anyway. you can't stop it, but i do think that you've suggested a very good place to start towards coping with it.
the bottom line is that free software has suddenly woken up and found itself on the back of a tiger. it's running like hell, and instead of grabbing an ear and hanging on, we're all bickering about what kind of tiger it is, whether it's endangered or not, whether it's a boy or a girl tiger, what to name it, how "cute" it is, whether or not the lion architecture is technically superior to that of tigers, how tigers suck and we used to ride this really cool ocelot back in the good old usenet days, etc. ad infinitum.
Internet Explorer is such stiff competition . . . Enabled controls should look like enabled controls. Period.
you might have to pick just one or the other. IE and most new microsoft programs have widgets that change on mouse-over etc. -- very, very much like these new mozilla widgets. (those widgets aren't actual HTML pages rendered in IE; just most of the rest of the GUI. it's very inconsistent)
also, i don't mean to be rude, but i guess i'm not the only one who has noticed that when somebody follows an unsubstantiated assertion with this sentence: "Period.", that can generally be taken as a tacit admission that the preceding statement is blatantly contrary to fact. just a thought.
Listen socialist, the software would then not be free, would it? . . . shut up yourself about the socialist bullshit,
leaving aside the fact the "free beer/free speech" thing, which another poster was kind enough to explain, why is it that libertarians are (almost) invariably abusive and insulting? of course, their maturity level isn't a valid reason to dismiss their ideas (that's one of niven's laws: "no cause is so just that there isn't an idiot supporting it, so don't judge a cause by its followers" words to that effect). it's just depressing, that's all.
besides, what makes them think that being able to spell "libertarian" exempts them from the responsibility of learning any basic facts about economics and policy before they shoot their mouths off?
that guy sounded like a centrist mixed-economy advocate, which is not a socialist. these are two very, very different things. you can say, "yeah, but i define 'socialist' differently!", and that's your right, but if so, you can't expect anybody to read your mind and know what you mean.
I don't think I should be forced to pay for services not rendered unto me.
thank god these characters never had any power and never will. we'd still be in the bronze age.
the vast majority of basic research that happens in this world is funded by governments. businesses rarely have the cash flow to invest in anything with no short-term return, and almost never have the vision. there are exceptions, but they are brief and rare. i have no doubt that somebody can name some significant basic research done in the private sector, but much, much more has been done in academia with government funding, and in government agencies themselves.
the problem (IMHO) with these junior high school "libertarians" is that they have a nice, simple, appealing, reductionist Grand Theory of Everything. they never waste time on the facts when they can appeal to their Theory instead. look, if the greater good is served by a mixed economy, then let's stick with it. i'd very much like to see any convincing evidence to the contrary; it's a very interesting question, and worth discussing. unsupported theories don't count as evidence, nor does vebal abuse. . . . and shouting "socialist" as if it were a dirty word is just plain silly.
there must be some sensible, grown-up libertarians out there somewhere. come to think of it, i mentioned larry niven above, didn't i? he seems pretty sensible . . .
i've been involved in enough commercial software projects to take brooks very, very seriously, but i've started wondering lately about the "diminishing returns from increasing staff . .." thing . . .
. . . major advances in management theory.
the linux devlepment model seems to actually gain from mongolian-horde-ing, up to a point, anyway. look at where brooks sees the overhead form adding new programmers: communication. training and coordination. well, the solution is just not to train them and not to talk to them! seriously! i'm not kidding. i know somebody at a large corporation who got a hardware project in on schedule by using a similar technique. he may have been very lucky, of course, but brooks' thinking in that area presupposes that it's not acceptable to pay engineers to sit around staring at the documentation, beating their heads against their desks and getting nothing done -- and that may not be a valid assumption. if they're being trained, you still paying them to learn, but you're also paying somebody else to teach. so let 'em teach themselves. the downside is that this can be brutally painful for a new employee cast adrift without any support.
certainly it's no skin off linus' ass if 20,000 programmers out there in the darkness are staring at the kernel source trying to figure it out. when those poor bastards become useful, they'll make themselves known. so be it.
"If you're politically correct you'd better skip this -- it might put you in danger of learning something."
as long as he doesn't complain about microsoft being arrogant and propagandistic, i don't mind. heh.
the problem here IMHO is that we have an Open Source Spokesmodel who is not actually speaking for the whole OSS community. he undoubtedly speaks for a large portion of it; there are a lot of very favorable comments here. but, uh, i don't necessarily want this guy to speak for me, thank you.
but how do you appoint spokesmodels for a completely decentralized movement? how, indeed! you let them float to the top, just like ESR did (and for good reason at the time), and stallman, and the rest. when they slide back down, though, it becomes divisive. the Open Source Trademark Battle thing is really depressing. this internal bickering makes OSS look like a bunch of squabbling kids. it doesn't help either that a lot of talk out of the OSS camp makes it look like a bunch of random people united by their dislike for bill gates, rather than a stable and remarkably productive technical culture dating back to the 1950's, which is what it is (and ESR if anybody must know that, because i learned it from the jargon file!). microsoft is our retarded younger brother. be firm with him, but don't be mean.
slashdot wouldn't be slashdot without microsoft-bashing, but our spokesmodels should know better. how long has the linux advocacy FAQ been around?
if he were just speaking for himself it would be an entirely different matter. i, for example, am just a random nut. nothing i say will ever be public enough to affect public perceptions of OSS.
Are you saying there's only The One True Way to humour?
eek! i'm not denying that there may be many roads to humor; i'm simply saying that ESR isn't on any of them. he's writing schlock.
And you have a patent on it? Geeezz, if you don't like it, write your own!
oh, lord, i can't write humor worth a damn. it's hard to write humor, and i'm not much of a writer to begin with. i guess my excuse (for what it's worth) is that i can't write operating systems either, but i can still judge for myself whether or not win95 is a crock.
i think, anyhow, that there's plenty of room to respect ESR and value his many contributions, while still thinking that the robin hood play is terrible. and if i "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" hadn't impressed me so much, i wouldn't give a damn about ESR one way or the other. i am not saying "ESR sucks!", because he doesn't suck. though i haven't met him, i think he's cool. what sucks is lame cash-in sequels, and unfortunately an apparently cool guy just went and did one.
he's not as cloyingly cutesy as larry wall, but that's not saying much. humor requires a lighter touch and a greater sense of the absurd than ESR has (or for that matter larry wall, who makes piers anthony look subtle). ESR is not a fool, and he has contributed infinitely more to OSS than i have, but he's making an ass of himself trying to play a role that doesn't fit.
he also seems to be trying to bootstrap a halloween memo industry here. he's milking it for all it's worth. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is great stuff, and important to boot, but all he's doing now is advertising himself. i read his annotated version of halloween II, and the comments were mostly obvious, pointless, and cocky. i was embarrassed for him.
Slashdot Mirror
database . . . normalization . . . We need something like an XML DTD for the interchange of this data
this is a very cool idea.
of course, after the flamewars about defining the DTD died down, there would be a question of getting somebody to maintain it, and then there would be endless flamewars about KDE coming after GNOME in the alphabet, whose entry didn't get updated, the insidious and unnatural influence of [insert Villain of the Day here] over the maintainers, blah blah blah. this doesn't mean it's a bad idea . . . just that there are some linux people who value their freedom of expression to a sometimes pathological degree:
1st clo: I'm going to the bathroom now.
2nd clo: YOU SOCIALIST! THAT'S JUST WHAT BILL GATES WOULD DO!
The world doesn't very badly need Yet Another Manual Archive of what amounts to the same data.
here, i disagree. it may be the same data, but it's presented in a newbie-friendly fashion. freshmeat is not friendly to most windows users, who need to be welcomed in a very gentle/warm-and-fuzzy way. here, the medium is the message. the credibility linux gains as a mainstream end-user platform is worth a little redundancy, and maybe even a little mild nausea over the barneyfication of free software distribution.
The LinuxBerg effort is nonetheless duplicative of information being maintained elsewhere.
so it's redundant. so's life. people will do this anyway. you can't stop it, but i do think that you've suggested a very good place to start towards coping with it.
the bottom line is that free software has suddenly woken up and found itself on the back of a tiger. it's running like hell, and instead of grabbing an ear and hanging on, we're all bickering about what kind of tiger it is, whether it's endangered or not, whether it's a boy or a girl tiger, what to name it, how "cute" it is, whether or not the lion architecture is technically superior to that of tigers, how tigers suck and we used to ride this really cool ocelot back in the good old usenet days, etc. ad infinitum.
Internet Explorer is such stiff competition . . . Enabled controls should look like enabled controls. Period.
you might have to pick just one or the other. IE and most new microsoft programs have widgets that change on mouse-over etc. -- very, very much like these new mozilla widgets. (those widgets aren't actual HTML pages rendered in IE; just most of the rest of the GUI. it's very inconsistent)
also, i don't mean to be rude, but i guess i'm not the only one who has noticed that when somebody follows an unsubstantiated assertion with this sentence: "Period.", that can generally be taken as a tacit admission that the preceding statement is blatantly contrary to fact. just a thought.
Listen socialist, the software would then not be free, would it? . . . shut up yourself about the socialist bullshit,
leaving aside the fact the "free beer/free speech" thing, which another poster was kind enough to explain, why is it that libertarians are (almost) invariably abusive and insulting? of course, their maturity level isn't a valid reason to dismiss their ideas (that's one of niven's laws: "no cause is so just that there isn't an idiot supporting it, so don't judge a cause by its followers" words to that effect). it's just depressing, that's all.
besides, what makes them think that being able to spell "libertarian" exempts them from the responsibility of learning any basic facts about economics and policy before they shoot their mouths off?
that guy sounded like a centrist mixed-economy advocate, which is not a socialist. these are two very, very different things. you can say, "yeah, but i define 'socialist' differently!", and that's your right, but if so, you can't expect anybody to read your mind and know what you mean.
I don't think I should be forced to pay for services not rendered unto me.
thank god these characters never had any power and never will. we'd still be in the bronze age.
the vast majority of basic research that happens in this world is funded by governments. businesses rarely have the cash flow to invest in anything with no short-term return, and almost never have the vision. there are exceptions, but they are brief and rare. i have no doubt that somebody can name some significant basic research done in the private sector, but much, much more has been done in academia with government funding, and in government agencies themselves.
the problem (IMHO) with these junior high school "libertarians" is that they have a nice, simple, appealing, reductionist Grand Theory of Everything. they never waste time on the facts when they can appeal to their Theory instead. look, if the greater good is served by a mixed economy, then let's stick with it. i'd very much like to see any convincing evidence to the contrary; it's a very interesting question, and worth discussing. unsupported theories don't count as evidence, nor does vebal abuse. . . . and shouting "socialist" as if it were a dirty word is just plain silly.
there must be some sensible, grown-up libertarians out there somewhere. come to think of it, i mentioned larry niven above, didn't i? he seems pretty sensible . . .
The Mythical Man-Month
." thing . . .
i've been involved in enough commercial software projects to take brooks very, very seriously, but i've started wondering lately about the "diminishing returns from increasing staff . .
. . . major advances in management theory.
the linux devlepment model seems to actually gain from mongolian-horde-ing, up to a point, anyway. look at where brooks sees the overhead form adding new programmers: communication. training and coordination. well, the solution is just not to train them and not to talk to them! seriously! i'm not kidding. i know somebody at a large corporation who got a hardware project in on schedule by using a similar technique. he may have been very lucky, of course, but brooks' thinking in that area presupposes that it's not acceptable to pay engineers to sit around staring at the documentation, beating their heads against their desks and getting nothing done -- and that may not be a valid assumption. if they're being trained, you still paying them to learn, but you're also paying somebody else to teach. so let 'em teach themselves. the downside is that this can be brutally painful for a new employee cast adrift without any support.
certainly it's no skin off linus' ass if 20,000 programmers out there in the darkness are staring at the kernel source trying to figure it out. when those poor bastards become useful, they'll make themselves known. so be it.
am i fulla shit? probably!
"If you're politically correct you'd better skip this -- it might put you in danger of learning something."
as long as he doesn't complain about microsoft being arrogant and propagandistic, i don't mind. heh.
the problem here IMHO is that we have an Open Source Spokesmodel who is not actually speaking for the whole OSS community. he undoubtedly speaks for a large portion of it; there are a lot of very favorable comments here. but, uh, i don't necessarily want this guy to speak for me, thank you.
but how do you appoint spokesmodels for a completely decentralized movement? how, indeed! you let them float to the top, just like ESR did (and for good reason at the time), and stallman, and the rest. when they slide back down, though, it becomes divisive. the Open Source Trademark Battle thing is really depressing. this internal bickering makes OSS look like a bunch of squabbling kids. it doesn't help either that a lot of talk out of the OSS camp makes it look like a bunch of random people united by their dislike for bill gates, rather than a stable and remarkably productive technical culture dating back to the 1950's, which is what it is (and ESR if anybody must know that, because i learned it from the jargon file!). microsoft is our retarded younger brother. be firm with him, but don't be mean.
slashdot wouldn't be slashdot without microsoft-bashing, but our spokesmodels should know better. how long has the linux advocacy FAQ been around?
if he were just speaking for himself it would be an entirely different matter. i, for example, am just a random nut. nothing i say will ever be public enough to affect public perceptions of OSS.
Lighten up
point taken.
Are you saying there's only The One True Way to humour?
eek! i'm not denying that there may be many roads to humor; i'm simply saying that ESR isn't on any of them. he's writing schlock.
And you have a patent on it? Geeezz, if you don't like it, write your own!
oh, lord, i can't write humor worth a damn. it's hard to write humor, and i'm not much of a writer to begin with. i guess my excuse (for what it's worth) is that i can't write operating systems either, but i can still judge for myself whether or not win95 is a crock.
i think, anyhow, that there's plenty of room to respect ESR and value his many contributions, while still thinking that the robin hood play is terrible. and if i "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" hadn't impressed me so much, i wouldn't give a damn about ESR one way or the other. i am not saying "ESR sucks!", because he doesn't suck. though i haven't met him, i think he's cool. what sucks is lame cash-in sequels, and unfortunately an apparently cool guy just went and did one.
"oh, it's so precious i could just die."
he's not as cloyingly cutesy as larry wall, but that's not saying much. humor requires a lighter touch and a greater sense of the absurd than ESR has (or for that matter larry wall, who makes piers anthony look subtle). ESR is not a fool, and he has contributed infinitely more to OSS than i have, but he's making an ass of himself trying to play a role that doesn't fit.
he also seems to be trying to bootstrap a halloween memo industry here. he's milking it for all it's worth. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is great stuff, and important to boot, but all he's doing now is advertising himself. i read his annotated version of halloween II, and the comments were mostly obvious, pointless, and cocky. i was embarrassed for him.