You know how big the ocean is and how small a nuke is?
I mean it takes a special effort to find something like the Titanic (it was 'lost' for a long time before it was finally 'discovered') The ocean is huge... More importantly, it's way too deep to dive to in most places.
A few things come to my mind. At some point that special effort may become more tractable than building devices to purify plutonium and uranium and we need to have a plan for that. Maybe something could be scuttled over them to make it even more difficult to recover. It seems like the locations of various sunk nukes should be very highly classified. I'd like to know that some research was done and it was established that the fisile material is the only thing that could be salvaged from such a device.
This is funny but it's also accurate. We've got some kind of issue where we're too visual with our document production, a nice looking document is often thought more highly of than a document with good content (think resumes and the work people put in to making them "stand out")
HTML is a prime example of how this has cause problems. Initially, you separate the presentation from the data, leave that problem to the browser writers on what ever platform that maybe. Then marketing stepped in and look at all the crazy and fucked up things tables have become just to make it look the way that they want it to look rather than letting the browser lay it out. HTML wasn't designed that way.
I'm not bashing nice looking documents but there are formal disciplines for typesetting and proper ways to do things. Should you mess around with making it look nice or should you focus on the content and let some computer program figure the rest out?
LC5 I think is the latest version. It's staggeringly good. DVDs full of pre-calced hashes. (it's just a table look up at that point) It can crack off the wire; like you intercept credential hashes off the wire (it has the code built in) and then cracks them, so a smartly placed hub defeats your network... it has all the tools to hide it on the machine that's running it. Even bruteforcing with it can be shocking at times. Anything remotely dictionary like is weak, really weak. Some friends and I were experimenting with it and it just ate through passwords, some of which looked kind of good.
I think that passwords are coming to an end. Something will have to change.
I'll also ask the same question as everybody else. Why? Let me qualify that, you're clearly a sharp guy being at MIT and all. We're definitely beyond the "economic argument" becuase you were wholesale stealing far more software than you could possibly use. It's kind of a bs argument anyways. Is there some philosophy under it? Do you try to convince yourself that there is? Do you even think you did something wrong?
MIT has just about everything a student needs, you didn't need all of that stuff. Are you a kleptomaniac? I'm not trying to beat up on you, I'm just curious how you slept at night or what you told yourself to sleep at night. And if you didn't have any problems sleeping at night do you stay awake at night now wondering why your sense of right and wrong didn't or doesn't conincide with the laws of your country?
They are testing your ability to communicate. The best programmer in the world is useless if he can't communicate with the rest of his team. The idea behind those tests often is to see how well you can code/pseudo code up something. Often the problem is big enough that you can't just code up the answer right there and have to use some pseudocode and they get to see how you model a solution and start to build it. Now if they are going to get all syntaxy on you and doc you for swapping the args on memcpy or something then they aren't terribly good tests or really fair.
It's also worth noting that this kind of thing starts to be the cross over from hacking in to software engineering. You know there is a whole school of thought and practice (usually only for very important things) where the developers don't get to compile their code. You get a document that tells you to produce something, you code it up, you hand it over to an SCM person who compiles it and tells you if it compiles or not (they don't tell you why if it fails) if it fails you and your team start combing through everything looking for problems. Once it compiles it goes on to test and they react in a similar way. The idea is that you find and fix other problems when you don't know what the problem is. It works, there are aerospace applications and defense applications that have been produced that way and the correctness of the output is staggering, so is the cost of production but it costs a lot to make really really robust software.
As someone who has also done a fair share of BIOS and boot coding, there is something to be said for writing some code, reading it, seeing that it should be correct and then trying it. When it takes 15minutes to compile something, burn it in to an EEPROM or flash and then try it out you put a little more importance on proof reading the code regardless of what a compiler tells you. It's far more efficient to write something, debug it in your mind, rewrite it, then try it in those kinds of environments.
While I'm writing this, I'm reminded of Linus' dislike of kernel gdb code. You know what his thinking is? If you need to walk through it in the debugger to make it work, then you probably didn't understand everything that was going on in the first place. I really can't disagree with that, the problem with his product is that there are a lot of rules and conventions that aren't well documented so you can read them, step in and write a driver and understand all that is happening..
Personally, I start getting a little suspicious when someone can't code C++ or C without VC++ and intellisense or they need some wizbang Smalltalk IDE with drag and drop. Tools are great but they don't make the programmer. In the right hands they can make things more efficient and we all have our preferences but being unable to use other tools to do the same work isn't a limitation of the tool, the language, the platform or anything but the programmer. In the end, tools are just tools and all the tools in the world won't produce great products without great programmers using them.
If you can't produce programs away from a computer then I'd start working on it. It really says more about the kind of a programmer you are than the test. There will always be anxieties and things like that, those are often related to test taking skills, but if you simply cannot think through a program and start to produce something that looks like code without a computer then I think you should start practicing it a lot more. You may be a hell of a perl or C coder but you might not be much of a software engineer yet. (not to be personal, no ill feelings intended)
It never stops amazing me how many people in this industry can only do one or two things that they've memorized or who are generally one dimensional. Especially doing things that can be done by software already or can be done by software that was better.
I understand getting Java certified or MSCE to get through the door but at the end of the day you have to deliver, you have to stay current and from the software side of things, this industry is about solving problems.
I can't blame anyone for taking advantage of the last few years, more power to them but there are a lot of people who are going to make a lot less money in their new, non-IT, jobs and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
Moore's law is a bitch. You think you can get a certificate, get a high paying job doing nothing and keep it? I'm a developer with a real degree and I feel like I need to put a huge effort into staying on top of everything and do my job. I enjoy it and that's why I do it but don't think it's just a cake walk or something. It's definitely more than 40hours a week.
Back in the day, there wasn't an internet connected to every desktop. You simply weren't allowed to bring recording devices or media to and from work. I remember when it was a dismisable offense at IBM to bring a disk into the building or take one out, with out the proper parperwork and permission. So when your employer decides that you really don't need access to any sites that get blocked by their surfguard it's terrible, YRO are being compromised. What's the response going to be when they decide that you can't take any media in or out and that includes your music and digital camera?
If you're really worried about corporate security, that kind of stuff is a real risk. It's not even the employees who are doing it, it's just the fact that there is a channel that data is flowing on in and out of the company that isn't protected and not subject to it. Once that exists, it's just a matter of someone hijacking it to use it for their own plans.
Cost is huge. All joe consumer sees is higher price tag and wants to know what he get's for it. Technical details aside, the answer is "not much."
Games have always been huge, Nintendo is in business still because they get games made that people end up buying the box for. The Zeldas and the Marios and what have you. PS2 has some killer games, GTA3, VF4, SOE, MGS2, Ico, GT3, Jak and Daxter, FFX, and more. MS is operating with a deficit in this department. One or two good games just doesn't do it at this point for them.
Focus is also key. Nintendo and Sony are focused on games. MS sees the Xbox as their gateway to your living room. They see IE on you TV, PVR on Xbox. They've been meeting with satellite and cable vendors to get integrated with them. They want windows and office on your tv. The games are secondary.
We've known from the start that they'd take a hit on it, it's just a matter of how big of one they are willing to tolerate before they can it. What's it worth to them? $1billion? $1.5billion? We might find out. Even they can't take a loss forever and they won't. I've long thought that they would have to hit a home run to really matter because unless they clearly hit it out of the park they've got everything working against them, Sony and Nintendo beat them on cost, catalog, they've got history and reputation, they're Japanese and can expect to sell a few copies in Japan based on that alone. MS has made a good product but it's clearly not an unstopable killer. Sony still has the FUD card to play, just now when they can seriously cost reduce the Ps2 (they have a single chip solution..) they can also start talking about the PS3 that will be out in 18 months..
My sister works at a radio station. They did some promotion giving away PS2 games. When the people don't come in 30 days she can keep stuff if she wants. So one afternoon she strolls over to my place and gives me this game. Up to that point I had been completely high on PS2. I had Ico, GT3, NBA Street and I didn't think they could make a bad game for such a fine machine. Then I slipped Artic Thunder in.. I don't remember that crappy a title on any platform. They wouldn't let me trade it in at the store!
Ignoring the slow downs, I haven't really even played it enough to see them, there is just this amazingly cheap quality about it all. I mean the premise is insultingly stupid. I'm reminded of the mid 1990's when there was this glut of first person shooters release, I mean just dozens of them on the PC and they were largely Doom with different levels and graphics, or about that sophisticated and a lot of them you could tell were just rush jobs, someone somewhere hired a few artists and an engineer and tried to crank out a game in a week and make some bucks off the trend. they had this feeling like there was no soul put in to it, the authors didn't even care if they were good or not, that's how Arctic Thunder feels. Honestly, I doubt the authors really cared if it was any good, if not, then they have to be slave programmers in some radically different culture where they've never seen snow or something. There is just something amazingly shallow about it and I've only put about 10 minutes on it.
A 707 has a max takeoff weight of 328,000lbs. A 767 has a max takeoff weight of 450,000lbs. They have similar max velocities. Now I don't remember the physics off the top of my head but isn't force proportional to the square of mass and velocity? There is nearly a 50% difference and I think that's substantial, substantial enough that it should fall outside what the building was speced to do, essentially it's twice the impact.
Personally, I think the engineers and architects who built those buildings should be awarded and applauded. The buildings were made on budget and schedule. Only 3000-4000 people died, when they could easily hold close to 100,000 between the two of them. Neither building fell over and crashed other buildings, they pretty much imploded, which is remarkable. And despite the huge trauma, they stood for nearly an hour. It's amazing if you ask me.
This security second guessing crap is what's going to cause the next recession and put a minor stop to modern engineering. Money and time are really the difference between academia and engineering. Do you have any idea what it will cost to start engineering all of our buildings to withstand the worst? The WTC was over engineered as it was and we're talking about making it able to withstand twice what it was speced to. If it's possible and there are steel makers that don't think it is, I'm guessing we're talking about a 10x hit to the costs. That's crazy. The same thing can be said about all the security checks everywhere else. It'll work for a year or two and then the bills will start adding up and people will be astounded.
This may be a touch on the conspiracy side but Microsoft is a soft monopoly and intel is a hard one. It's entirely possible that MS could get displaced in the next 10 years. It's really only been about 10 years that they've really been on top and it took them about 10 years to displace IBM and Apple. That's the nature of software, it changes fast and that's how they got on top. Maybe call it 15 years, same idea though.
Intel on the other hand could stop everything they are doing today. They could disappear off of the face of the earth and in 10 years we'd have people building Intel chips, compiling code for them and supporting them. There might be something bigger and better but they're legacy would still be and extremely formiddable force.
regardless of what happens to MS, they are in a much more fragile position. Intel could be a real monopoly.
Now you have to know that the next step for MS to sure up their position is to grow in to other markets (a la xbox) and then to start clamping down a little more strictly on the hardware. As Mr Hunter from Transmeta put it once, they would need to start making hardware smaller and software bigger, doing things like softmodems, and that kind of ilk. Intel on the other hand has a vested interest in making hardware bigger and supporting more software. What leverage does MS have against Intel? AMD.
Never mind the fact that they'll get a better or equal solution cheaper from them.
This makes me sick and I hope it's being spun in non-flattering light. I don't see how an employee being owed $350k can be made to sound right though.
I was one of the geeks in LokiHack and I'll be honest and completely upfront. It left me with an awesome feeling about Linux and opensource. The 3 days created and captured an espirit de corp, we were doing it. I considered trying to go work for Loki at one point, Scott and I talked about it. I didn't. I did put my money where my mouth was and start working in a business that used opensource and I'm still making my living from Linux today, at a different company though. I've contributed code to projects and I'd be lying if I said that Loki didn't push me some to get started.
It really changed the perspective a lot, it's easy to be an opensource spectator and it takes initiative to get involved and see that you can just start doing it, if you want to.
I think there are a lot of geeks, especially at the Lokihack that had medium self esteem in the regard and it took an event like that to get some people jump started and hold their hand in to it. I don't know how many LUG meetings I've gone to that have tons of people with the technical prowess that are just spectators in it all, and not because they don't want to be. It was kind of a special thing.
I also could see how people who went there could believe in something. A number of them were at the Lokihack. I have no idea how they could live for a year without pay, in California, even if they were all living together. That's not to say it couldn't happen, I just don't think I could do it. I have money in the bank and my buffer is like 6 months, if I'm cutting back some, with unemployment maybe I could make it a year.. I also have no idea how you rack up a $350,000 debt to an employee. That just blows my mind as someone who is supposedly well paid and has bought a house and tried to raise a sum substantially smaller than $350,000 for the house and is on the hook for 30 years. We're talking about someone possibly being financially ruined for the rest of their life, or hopefully they have family money or something.
I hope Scott makes a statement about this and that it's not as bad as it sounds, there is stuff that I can't think of a way to justify though. Him taking a wage doesn't offend me nearly as much as the debt to employees; he did front the company and took the initial risk.
I'm still thankful for some of the stuff they did for me and the community and I really hope this doesn't jade all the other people that might be on the brink of getting involved with it. That would be the true crime and the true loss, more than any video games and even more than a few people owed a lot of money.
I've been wondering about this and kicking the idea of running sourcer on some non-Intel hardware I have.
I have some alphas, of the 3, 2 run debian and one runs Mandrake. they are all fairly modern alphas, 21164s and a 21264. Running stock Debian, the 600Mhz 21164s run like crap. It feels like it's running like crap. I take a recent GCC, and start recompling some stuff and the system starts to perform better. I'm not joking. I don't know if it's Debian's compile or if the chip specific optimizations are that good or what, replace the kernel and the C library and the system get's snappier. It's noticable, now I admit I've never benchmarked it but webserver responses appear to be quicker, gzip seems quicker after it's recompiled everything seems to go faster once I compile it with optimizations for the specific chip..
Remembering back to architecture and compiler courses at uni, I remember a few stunning things. I've hand optimized code on alpha and powerpc chips and I've seen the difference, it can be stunning. Big enough that it can easily make one chip outperform a similarly speced chip. So where am I going with this? Well x86 is hopefully starting to have a real competitor that will kill it. IA64 and other 64bit chips. I want it to die, it's time for it to die, or at least start to process of death. As I see it, one of the biggest hurdles is the code optimization thing, not not but wait until there are 4 IA64 chips to choose from. From everything I've seen, we can expect a pretty reasonable performance hit from not properly optimizing code for the chip it runs on. Is a distribution like sourcer or gentoo the solution to this?
The mistake is that it's not a desktop, there isn't a compelling reason to put one on the desktop.. It's a gateway/firewall. The hardware was designed for it.
Then you have to ask some hard questions. Can you get what you want working for someone else? For real? Are there decisions that are typically or likely going to be made that will ruin your dream?
Lastly, what's it worth? Do you have the tools to do it?
I worked at IBM. It's a great company. You can very easily get in to a nice routine there, never need to work a lot of overtime. Put your 40 in, get a decent raise every year, pick up your spec and churn out the code, show up to some meetings, go home raise some kids and a dog, buy that house with the picket fence.. It's safe and tame. You won't get fired but you probably won't work on really sexy stuff either. At age 23, after 5 years as a regular employee there (yes, I was a salaried software engineer for them) I wanted something more exciting.
I went to a medium sized company with hands off managment. It's awesome in ways. We have a goal and some deadlines and complete freedom to build the product. And it's linux based. It's a dream come true, or is it? It takes radically different skills to work in that environment, you can't have team member who simply want a spec and a dark office with no interaction, team dynamics are critical. You need people who take initiative. You need bold people who are good communicators. With just a few "roll players" who want that 40 hours, pick-up-spec-drop-off-code-never-talk-to-anyone job, it becomes nearly impossible to make it work. Likewise, you can't work 40 hours a week, it's not enough time to "do it the right way" you find yourself working 50-60 hours a week and still not having enough time becuase you've got complete engineering freedom and you want to make it perfect as you see it. It's hard, it has it's rewards, but it takes a lot way from life also. After 2 years of that I walked away from that and started my own business.
Running your own gig is different. There is a lot of work that has to get done before you can do the work. It's a lot of work. It has its moments and rewards, there are also times when I'd love to be back at IBM working my safe little 40 every week watching the stock options earn value. Is it worth it? I can't say yet. I can say that if I go back in to the corporate world it will be a safe and tame 40 so that I can easily put 10-15 in to something else outside of that.
You'll never be completely fullfilled building someone else's dream or vision. Remember that. There will always be decisions and tough choices to make and ultimately they are going to want some return on their investment in you and the dream they have. As cool as the product may be, if you're not calling the shots then there are probably going to be times when things are going to upset you. It's also supposed to be work and you're supposed to have a life outside of that.
I think it remains to be seen if Walmart is a monopoly or not. I'd be willing to bet that in a large number of areas where Walmart has a presence in the western US and the midwestern US they are the only source for a large number of products.
They aren't a pure monopoly, but neither is MS, nor was US Steel, or most other monopolies. They are a defacto monopoly in many cases though, just like MS is. The typical Joe 6pack goes and buys a computer, he buys an MS product or a set of them, whether he knows it or not. If you live in rural Kansas or Nebraska or Texas and you need to go buy something, a large percentage of the time it's going to be from walmart, not becuase of cost but because it's the nearest store you know will have the item you wish to buy.
I think the original message hit it on the head with Walmart. If you look at their managment, it's mostly white men, to a startling degree. There have been inqueries and lawsuits around racism and sexism at Walmart. They have a history of union busting, not that I think unions benefit the consumer a whole lot but it's disheartening the know that a corporation has chosen to close a store (a huge part of a local economy) because its employees' political views and associations they may have. And if you take the defacto monopoly business to heart and then realize that they are the only source for music, books, and even medications in some places and then look at what they have chosen to sell and not sell (I'm speaking directly about medication and contraception here, morning after pills, etc.) we're talking about a company that not only has a huge impact on the economy but on the lives of people and how they live them in a lot of places. This is not a company you wish to partner with, I think they make MS look like saints.
Personally, I think the matter of opensource allies is kind of missing the point. We need to keep doing what we're doing. It's not a matter of IBM, Sun, Walmart or E-Trade agreeing to use free software that makes it better or takes it to the next level, those are signs that what's happening is the right thing. This is a community lead effort and if we want things to be better then become part of the community, help out, write code, use it. Looking for allies is passive. If walmart starts using linux, it won't affect or impact any of us any time soon (unless they employ Linus and bully him or something) It might give it more legitimacy but it already has legitimacy and you further legitimize it by using it and working on it. If we work on it and make it better then they will use it becuase it's the best thing to use, that's what's happening elsewhere and that's what undoes the MS monopoly.
wow. Now that I reread the this message I can see that Larry was quoting a bare minimum type price.
Either way, SF has to be forking out some very serious money for the bandwidth, the machines, the admin staff and then any development they are trying to do on it all.
I've been critical of VA from the start. I've just never liked the idea of them being a big and powerful player in "Linux" and owning many of the more valuble resources. Call me a pessimist but I know what IBM, HP, Apple and Microsoft are all about, I know how they are going to react to some thigns and I can predict what they are usually going to do. VA is/was a bunch of upstarts who were too bold or foolish be told they couldn't do it and brash enough to think they could, it's a wild card, at best. Who knows what VA will do when things get tough? They've surprised me so far but I keep expecting something big and bad to happen. It's been a theme on Advogato for a while now, it would seem from there that a number of people aren't satisfied with SF.
Let's look at this a little more objectively. Hosting kernel.org costs about $80,000 a year (Larry McVoy posted this number to lkml about a month ago) at the least. It's an ftp site. That's bandwidth, not any warm bodies doing admin, not any fancy database stuff, nothing fancy just an ftp server and a minimal web site. Sourceforge has to cost 20 times more, probably more, to run. I have no idea what the numbers are but it has a staff and a huge amount of resources to manage and keep running. Personally, I'd assume that it's in the neighborhood of $5million+ a year, that's just my half-assed guess though. That's some substantial output for most companies, at IBM you can't spend that kind of money without producing something, people notice chunks that big. At most places, that kind of funding simply isn't available for something like that. At some point the free ride has to end, or something has to come out of it, or something has to change. Even a company like MS would see $5mill on the books in red ink and not black and there would have to be some reason to justify it and goodwill towards the community might not be enough.
Then with subjects like these, things rise up. Well they should trim dead stuff out of the tree, trimming the "dead" stuff is silly becuase it might be useful to people, that's the whole premise, if it's in use anywhere then it's not really dead. It might be dead to you and me, but that guy who is using it might want it. They should do x, y, or z to better support projects like q. They could do this or that. I think the most alarming propect is that there will be code in SF and it could be lost because of a policy change. I can get over most things, the changes to the mailing lists, and various other things they've done, it's free and you get what you pay for but a big part of the justification has been to promote interaction with developers to give VA a community they have close ties with and to promote open source software development. The idea of losing code is appauling, SF no longer serves a big part of its purpose at that point. That's what brings credibility in to question, what are they doing to prevent that from happening? Can I buy a set of DVDs that have SF backed-up on to them? Or is this it, the policy change is that there won't be any warning of future policy changes and those might cost you your code. I understand that they might have to sell stuff, or charge for services or do lot's of different things. I also understand that services like SF are prime for pirates and porn hustlers and others to use to propagate data and they need to protect themselves. It's time to look to tigris, Savannah, and Berlio more seriously.
I wonder if there is something we could add to licenses that would prevent a place like SF from shutting down and taking your code with them.
Allow me to let you inside to have a peak at my insanity. #include using namespace std;
Chapter 1
It all started when I worked at IBM PSD (Printing Systems Div,) formerly Pennet, and I think it had another name at one time. It's the printing group. We pretty much did the heavy lifting and the stable cleaning of the print business: bills, checks, forms, stuff you don't like to get in the mail usuall, that type stuff was our bread and butter. Being the young and spunky turk that I was, I wanted more. Since the idea was pretty much killed by the then VP I will share it here.
I was working on a large distributed print managment system that is essentially a database of printing devices and "jobs." It's all the standard stuff, bullet proof, fast (it really wasn't but it was good enough) robust, scales to inifinity (not really, but close enough) etc.. And huge pains were put in to making this thing distributed. The real deal, DCE and a hand-rolled object broker (more or less, it was around the time corba was getting hip) and so you could have machines that were dedicated to jobs or machines that were dedicated to devices or any possible combination. That's the technology, the use is printing boring shit out. It has one of the best print managment engines in the world under it and it's generally used for stuff that doesn't matter so much (grand scheme of things) and ultimately, if we're successful as a species, won't get printed out in too long.
My idea was to start signing deals with content providers, the book publishers, the people who own books but don't publish them, text books, magazines, journals, University thesis' even, etc.. Something an IBM could do. Then we ink a deal with Kinkos and whatever other "print houses" are out there and then we build a huge distributed Infoprint manager system that includes a database full of all the books and a device server in each Kinkos. My vision is to get the content in to some liquid form and then allow the end user to control, if possible and then let demand control printing. If an article is popular it will get bought more. You want an article, you can search the online database, order it made and go pick up a copy at the nearest kinkos, in the format you desire. Since IBM would control the whole thing (or some company they could create) the IP would be secure, people would get paid on a per copy basis and the end user would be better served. It has been my experiences that certain types of information is published but it doesn't become easy to get to. As the technology progresses the data would be in a form that would allow us to move with it, develop online books, etc.. The authors and publishers could still have a degree of control over things, they'd get paid and the guys who want access to stuff could get it without traveling to 10 libraries all over the land to find one that has it. Alas, I was ahead of my time or underestimated the difficulty in producing such an app. I felt that it was a good way to really use IBM technology for something that might be one of the most important things we could possibly do. I still kind of wish I had all my college text books bound in 3 ring binders with extra wide margines for notes... And there are still at least a dozen articles I want to read but the local university doesn't have them around any more..
Chapter 2
Fast forward a couple years. I got out of the printing business, been doing other stuff. I read more books now. I wish I had a copy of Stevens, online, a copy of Stroustrup, online, and there are a few dozen online "books" I want printed out.
My vision is the same, I think every book that ever was should be online and available for purchase but I also want a different kind of book now.
Books in print aren't going away real quick. It's just too easy, portable and nice. There is something deep inside that just feels right about a book and actually "having it." Online books kick much ass as well, there is nothing like searching through a book to find that passage you knew you read. Physical books let you draw in them, hilite things, write notes. Online books can be hypertexted and who knows all the cool stuff you can find by following links. I've got this vision of something that crosses that divide.
Kind of what I imagine is something like an online book with a docbook backend and a moderated weblog or wiki. So you'd write a book and it's digital (oh, what I didn't say in my long IBM story that I should have is that in the past 20 years or so pretty much all publishing is digital, some people don't know that but you can't make a book anymore unless it's in digital form at some point) You've got this book then you put it online, for fee or for free, it doesn't matter. You also print it for purchase, printed version should come with a CD copy of the online version. Then readers can go to the online version and with something like wiki they can write notes, criticisms, links to things, etc.. Some publisher or editor type will moderate them to some degree. Then for a minimal fee or for free I can get a "book version" of the book and notes, maybe a big PDF or something, whatever docbook makes. Periodically the publisher can republish with the new notes and such. I guess the way I see it is that the book can sort of become a little more dynamic and living while you still can have a bound printed copy of it made up periodically and you have an online copy for searching through. It's kind of like faq-o-matic meets wiki meets weblog meets docbook.
I can think that for technical books it would be marvelous. Examples and samples could be added by readers. You could write a book and only include small code samples (good books only have small ones) but in the online version you could have bigger ones. New ideas could be presented. Ideas could be discussed as needed for clearity. At the same time, the original work of the author would be the core and could (and should) stay that way. It would almost be like an opensource project for books, there would still be a central core that was original though. You would be able to filter the additions in various ways. It would take a pretty radical shift in thought for some, but I think something like that could be critical as we a mass more and more knowledge and information that we need to preserve and pass on to future generations.
Essentially the book would come in 2 forms, bound and online. The online part would allow annotations, extra content, etc.. Then as I see fit, I could reprint the online version with various annotations, filtered to my liking.
I read this the other day and I was wondering why it wasn't an issue. It doesn't feel right for some reason, especially with the MS.NET license issues and the bitterness that was between the GNU people and KDE/QT people.
I think the only thing that I really take exception to is the choice of wording. I'm assuming that GNOME will incorporate.NET but not be a direct clone of it and completely based off of it. I might be wrong about Miguel's intent, I do question the wisdom of building on an unproven (relatively speaking) architecture while the idea of embracing common APIs to the Windows world is exciting though. My doubts will fall away more when I see a Linux hosted.net compiler and as mono and.gnu get further along.
I also think there are some mistakes about Java in there. There are GTK+ and GNOME bindings for java and gcj. Java doesn't force you into a platform, it's very powerful to go there but you don't have to. We could very well design a new class framework and use java for this, there isn't any real reason why it couldn't be done, I just think that he thinks.NET and C# are where everything is really heading and he wants to be there.
If it really takes off and flies then maybe we should "base GNOME" on.NET but it just seems too early for that right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean it takes a special effort to find something like the Titanic (it was 'lost' for a long time before it was finally 'discovered') The ocean is huge... More importantly, it's way too deep to dive to in most places.
A few things come to my mind. At some point that special effort may become more tractable than building devices to purify plutonium and uranium and we need to have a plan for that. Maybe something could be scuttled over them to make it even more difficult to recover. It seems like the locations of various sunk nukes should be very highly classified. I'd like to know that some research was done and it was established that the fisile material is the only thing that could be salvaged from such a device.
HTML is a prime example of how this has cause problems. Initially, you separate the presentation from the data, leave that problem to the browser writers on what ever platform that maybe. Then marketing stepped in and look at all the crazy and fucked up things tables have become just to make it look the way that they want it to look rather than letting the browser lay it out. HTML wasn't designed that way.
I'm not bashing nice looking documents but there are formal disciplines for typesetting and proper ways to do things. Should you mess around with making it look nice or should you focus on the content and let some computer program figure the rest out?
I think that passwords are coming to an end. Something will have to change.
Get it here and PGP/GPG all your messages, at the very least start signing them.
MIT has just about everything a student needs, you didn't need all of that stuff. Are you a kleptomaniac? I'm not trying to beat up on you, I'm just curious how you slept at night or what you told yourself to sleep at night. And if you didn't have any problems sleeping at night do you stay awake at night now wondering why your sense of right and wrong didn't or doesn't conincide with the laws of your country?
It's also worth noting that this kind of thing starts to be the cross over from hacking in to software engineering. You know there is a whole school of thought and practice (usually only for very important things) where the developers don't get to compile their code. You get a document that tells you to produce something, you code it up, you hand it over to an SCM person who compiles it and tells you if it compiles or not (they don't tell you why if it fails) if it fails you and your team start combing through everything looking for problems. Once it compiles it goes on to test and they react in a similar way. The idea is that you find and fix other problems when you don't know what the problem is. It works, there are aerospace applications and defense applications that have been produced that way and the correctness of the output is staggering, so is the cost of production but it costs a lot to make really really robust software.
As someone who has also done a fair share of BIOS and boot coding, there is something to be said for writing some code, reading it, seeing that it should be correct and then trying it. When it takes 15minutes to compile something, burn it in to an EEPROM or flash and then try it out you put a little more importance on proof reading the code regardless of what a compiler tells you. It's far more efficient to write something, debug it in your mind, rewrite it, then try it in those kinds of environments.
While I'm writing this, I'm reminded of Linus' dislike of kernel gdb code. You know what his thinking is? If you need to walk through it in the debugger to make it work, then you probably didn't understand everything that was going on in the first place. I really can't disagree with that, the problem with his product is that there are a lot of rules and conventions that aren't well documented so you can read them, step in and write a driver and understand all that is happening..
Personally, I start getting a little suspicious when someone can't code C++ or C without VC++ and intellisense or they need some wizbang Smalltalk IDE with drag and drop. Tools are great but they don't make the programmer. In the right hands they can make things more efficient and we all have our preferences but being unable to use other tools to do the same work isn't a limitation of the tool, the language, the platform or anything but the programmer. In the end, tools are just tools and all the tools in the world won't produce great products without great programmers using them.
If you can't produce programs away from a computer then I'd start working on it. It really says more about the kind of a programmer you are than the test. There will always be anxieties and things like that, those are often related to test taking skills, but if you simply cannot think through a program and start to produce something that looks like code without a computer then I think you should start practicing it a lot more. You may be a hell of a perl or C coder but you might not be much of a software engineer yet. (not to be personal, no ill feelings intended)
I understand getting Java certified or MSCE to get through the door but at the end of the day you have to deliver, you have to stay current and from the software side of things, this industry is about solving problems.
I can't blame anyone for taking advantage of the last few years, more power to them but there are a lot of people who are going to make a lot less money in their new, non-IT, jobs and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
Moore's law is a bitch. You think you can get a certificate, get a high paying job doing nothing and keep it? I'm a developer with a real degree and I feel like I need to put a huge effort into staying on top of everything and do my job. I enjoy it and that's why I do it but don't think it's just a cake walk or something. It's definitely more than 40hours a week.
If you're really worried about corporate security, that kind of stuff is a real risk. It's not even the employees who are doing it, it's just the fact that there is a channel that data is flowing on in and out of the company that isn't protected and not subject to it. Once that exists, it's just a matter of someone hijacking it to use it for their own plans.
Haven't seen any on the cheap yet but they'll start showing up.
Games have always been huge, Nintendo is in business still because they get games made that people end up buying the box for. The Zeldas and the Marios and what have you. PS2 has some killer games, GTA3, VF4, SOE, MGS2, Ico, GT3, Jak and Daxter, FFX, and more. MS is operating with a deficit in this department. One or two good games just doesn't do it at this point for them.
Focus is also key. Nintendo and Sony are focused on games. MS sees the Xbox as their gateway to your living room. They see IE on you TV, PVR on Xbox. They've been meeting with satellite and cable vendors to get integrated with them. They want windows and office on your tv. The games are secondary.
We've known from the start that they'd take a hit on it, it's just a matter of how big of one they are willing to tolerate before they can it. What's it worth to them? $1billion? $1.5billion? We might find out. Even they can't take a loss forever and they won't. I've long thought that they would have to hit a home run to really matter because unless they clearly hit it out of the park they've got everything working against them, Sony and Nintendo beat them on cost, catalog, they've got history and reputation, they're Japanese and can expect to sell a few copies in Japan based on that alone. MS has made a good product but it's clearly not an unstopable killer. Sony still has the FUD card to play, just now when they can seriously cost reduce the Ps2 (they have a single chip solution..) they can also start talking about the PS3 that will be out in 18 months..
Ignoring the slow downs, I haven't really even played it enough to see them, there is just this amazingly cheap quality about it all. I mean the premise is insultingly stupid. I'm reminded of the mid 1990's when there was this glut of first person shooters release, I mean just dozens of them on the PC and they were largely Doom with different levels and graphics, or about that sophisticated and a lot of them you could tell were just rush jobs, someone somewhere hired a few artists and an engineer and tried to crank out a game in a week and make some bucks off the trend. they had this feeling like there was no soul put in to it, the authors didn't even care if they were good or not, that's how Arctic Thunder feels. Honestly, I doubt the authors really cared if it was any good, if not, then they have to be slave programmers in some radically different culture where they've never seen snow or something. There is just something amazingly shallow about it and I've only put about 10 minutes on it.
Personally, I think the engineers and architects who built those buildings should be awarded and applauded. The buildings were made on budget and schedule. Only 3000-4000 people died, when they could easily hold close to 100,000 between the two of them. Neither building fell over and crashed other buildings, they pretty much imploded, which is remarkable. And despite the huge trauma, they stood for nearly an hour. It's amazing if you ask me.
This security second guessing crap is what's going to cause the next recession and put a minor stop to modern engineering. Money and time are really the difference between academia and engineering. Do you have any idea what it will cost to start engineering all of our buildings to withstand the worst? The WTC was over engineered as it was and we're talking about making it able to withstand twice what it was speced to. If it's possible and there are steel makers that don't think it is, I'm guessing we're talking about a 10x hit to the costs. That's crazy. The same thing can be said about all the security checks everywhere else. It'll work for a year or two and then the bills will start adding up and people will be astounded.
Intel on the other hand could stop everything they are doing today. They could disappear off of the face of the earth and in 10 years we'd have people building Intel chips, compiling code for them and supporting them. There might be something bigger and better but they're legacy would still be and extremely formiddable force.
regardless of what happens to MS, they are in a much more fragile position. Intel could be a real monopoly.
Now you have to know that the next step for MS to sure up their position is to grow in to other markets (a la xbox) and then to start clamping down a little more strictly on the hardware. As Mr Hunter from Transmeta put it once, they would need to start making hardware smaller and software bigger, doing things like softmodems, and that kind of ilk. Intel on the other hand has a vested interest in making hardware bigger and supporting more software. What leverage does MS have against Intel? AMD.
Never mind the fact that they'll get a better or equal solution cheaper from them.
Would would want guys going to Sony's booth and beating up people in a game that's based on you? I don't think so.
I was one of the geeks in LokiHack and I'll be honest and completely upfront. It left me with an awesome feeling about Linux and opensource. The 3 days created and captured an espirit de corp, we were doing it. I considered trying to go work for Loki at one point, Scott and I talked about it. I didn't. I did put my money where my mouth was and start working in a business that used opensource and I'm still making my living from Linux today, at a different company though. I've contributed code to projects and I'd be lying if I said that Loki didn't push me some to get started.
It really changed the perspective a lot, it's easy to be an opensource spectator and it takes initiative to get involved and see that you can just start doing it, if you want to.
I think there are a lot of geeks, especially at the Lokihack that had medium self esteem in the regard and it took an event like that to get some people jump started and hold their hand in to it. I don't know how many LUG meetings I've gone to that have tons of people with the technical prowess that are just spectators in it all, and not because they don't want to be. It was kind of a special thing.
I also could see how people who went there could believe in something. A number of them were at the Lokihack. I have no idea how they could live for a year without pay, in California, even if they were all living together. That's not to say it couldn't happen, I just don't think I could do it. I have money in the bank and my buffer is like 6 months, if I'm cutting back some, with unemployment maybe I could make it a year.. I also have no idea how you rack up a $350,000 debt to an employee. That just blows my mind as someone who is supposedly well paid and has bought a house and tried to raise a sum substantially smaller than $350,000 for the house and is on the hook for 30 years. We're talking about someone possibly being financially ruined for the rest of their life, or hopefully they have family money or something.
I hope Scott makes a statement about this and that it's not as bad as it sounds, there is stuff that I can't think of a way to justify though. Him taking a wage doesn't offend me nearly as much as the debt to employees; he did front the company and took the initial risk.
I'm still thankful for some of the stuff they did for me and the community and I really hope this doesn't jade all the other people that might be on the brink of getting involved with it. That would be the true crime and the true loss, more than any video games and even more than a few people owed a lot of money.
I have some alphas, of the 3, 2 run debian and one runs Mandrake. they are all fairly modern alphas, 21164s and a 21264. Running stock Debian, the 600Mhz 21164s run like crap. It feels like it's running like crap. I take a recent GCC, and start recompling some stuff and the system starts to perform better. I'm not joking. I don't know if it's Debian's compile or if the chip specific optimizations are that good or what, replace the kernel and the C library and the system get's snappier. It's noticable, now I admit I've never benchmarked it but webserver responses appear to be quicker, gzip seems quicker after it's recompiled everything seems to go faster once I compile it with optimizations for the specific chip..
Remembering back to architecture and compiler courses at uni, I remember a few stunning things. I've hand optimized code on alpha and powerpc chips and I've seen the difference, it can be stunning. Big enough that it can easily make one chip outperform a similarly speced chip. So where am I going with this? Well x86 is hopefully starting to have a real competitor that will kill it. IA64 and other 64bit chips. I want it to die, it's time for it to die, or at least start to process of death. As I see it, one of the biggest hurdles is the code optimization thing, not not but wait until there are 4 IA64 chips to choose from. From everything I've seen, we can expect a pretty reasonable performance hit from not properly optimizing code for the chip it runs on. Is a distribution like sourcer or gentoo the solution to this?
The mistake is that it's not a desktop, there isn't a compelling reason to put one on the desktop.. It's a gateway/firewall. The hardware was designed for it.
Then you have to ask some hard questions. Can you get what you want working for someone else? For real? Are there decisions that are typically or likely going to be made that will ruin your dream?
Lastly, what's it worth? Do you have the tools to do it?
I worked at IBM. It's a great company. You can very easily get in to a nice routine there, never need to work a lot of overtime. Put your 40 in, get a decent raise every year, pick up your spec and churn out the code, show up to some meetings, go home raise some kids and a dog, buy that house with the picket fence.. It's safe and tame. You won't get fired but you probably won't work on really sexy stuff either. At age 23, after 5 years as a regular employee there (yes, I was a salaried software engineer for them) I wanted something more exciting.
I went to a medium sized company with hands off managment. It's awesome in ways. We have a goal and some deadlines and complete freedom to build the product. And it's linux based. It's a dream come true, or is it? It takes radically different skills to work in that environment, you can't have team member who simply want a spec and a dark office with no interaction, team dynamics are critical. You need people who take initiative. You need bold people who are good communicators. With just a few "roll players" who want that 40 hours, pick-up-spec-drop-off-code-never-talk-to-anyone job, it becomes nearly impossible to make it work. Likewise, you can't work 40 hours a week, it's not enough time to "do it the right way" you find yourself working 50-60 hours a week and still not having enough time becuase you've got complete engineering freedom and you want to make it perfect as you see it. It's hard, it has it's rewards, but it takes a lot way from life also.
After 2 years of that I walked away from that and started my own business.
Running your own gig is different. There is a lot of work that has to get done before you can do the work. It's a lot of work. It has its moments and rewards, there are also times when I'd love to be back at IBM working my safe little 40 every week watching the stock options earn value. Is it worth it? I can't say yet. I can say that if I go back in to the corporate world it will be a safe and tame 40 so that I can easily put 10-15 in to something else outside of that.
You'll never be completely fullfilled building someone else's dream or vision. Remember that. There will always be decisions and tough choices to make and ultimately they are going to want some return on their investment in you and the dream they have. As cool as the product may be, if you're not calling the shots then there are probably going to be times when things are going to upset you. It's also supposed to be work and you're supposed to have a life outside of that.
They aren't a pure monopoly, but neither is MS, nor was US Steel, or most other monopolies. They are a defacto monopoly in many cases though, just like MS is. The typical Joe 6pack goes and buys a computer, he buys an MS product or a set of them, whether he knows it or not. If you live in rural Kansas or Nebraska or Texas and you need to go buy something, a large percentage of the time it's going to be from walmart, not becuase of cost but because it's the nearest store you know will have the item you wish to buy.
I think the original message hit it on the head with Walmart. If you look at their managment, it's mostly white men, to a startling degree. There have been inqueries and lawsuits around racism and sexism at Walmart. They have a history of union busting, not that I think unions benefit the consumer a whole lot but it's disheartening the know that a corporation has chosen to close a store (a huge part of a local economy) because its employees' political views and associations they may have. And if you take the defacto monopoly business to heart and then realize that they are the only source for music, books, and even medications in some places and then look at what they have chosen to sell and not sell (I'm speaking directly about medication and contraception here, morning after pills, etc.) we're talking about a company that not only has a huge impact on the economy but on the lives of people and how they live them in a lot of places. This is not a company you wish to partner with, I think they make MS look like saints.
Personally, I think the matter of opensource allies is kind of missing the point. We need to keep doing what we're doing. It's not a matter of IBM, Sun, Walmart or E-Trade agreeing to use free software that makes it better or takes it to the next level, those are signs that what's happening is the right thing. This is a community lead effort and if we want things to be better then become part of the community, help out, write code, use it. Looking for allies is passive. If walmart starts using linux, it won't affect or impact any of us any time soon (unless they employ Linus and bully him or something) It might give it more legitimacy but it already has legitimacy and you further legitimize it by using it and working on it. If we work on it and make it better then they will use it becuase it's the best thing to use, that's what's happening elsewhere and that's what undoes the MS monopoly.
I mean, do they really consider Mach and Lites to be BSD? Or is it just good to hear BSD in the press?
Next time around, to really get the right awkward effect you should do it on 4/1. Then it's much more enjoyable for us spectators.
Either way, SF has to be forking out some very serious money for the bandwidth, the machines, the admin staff and then any development they are trying to do on it all.
Let's look at this a little more objectively. Hosting kernel.org costs about $80,000 a year (Larry McVoy posted this number to lkml about a month ago) at the least. It's an ftp site. That's bandwidth, not any warm bodies doing admin, not any fancy database stuff, nothing fancy just an ftp server and a minimal web site. Sourceforge has to cost 20 times more, probably more, to run. I have no idea what the numbers are but it has a staff and a huge amount of resources to manage and keep running. Personally, I'd assume that it's in the neighborhood of $5million+ a year, that's just my half-assed guess though. That's some substantial output for most companies, at IBM you can't spend that kind of money without producing something, people notice chunks that big. At most places, that kind of funding simply isn't available for something like that. At some point the free ride has to end, or something has to come out of it, or something has to change. Even a company like MS would see $5mill on the books in red ink and not black and there would have to be some reason to justify it and goodwill towards the community might not be enough.
Then with subjects like these, things rise up. Well they should trim dead stuff out of the tree, trimming the "dead" stuff is silly becuase it might be useful to people, that's the whole premise, if it's in use anywhere then it's not really dead. It might be dead to you and me, but that guy who is using it might want it. They should do x, y, or z to better support projects like q. They could do this or that. I think the most alarming propect is that there will be code in SF and it could be lost because of a policy change. I can get over most things, the changes to the mailing lists, and various other things they've done, it's free and you get what you pay for but a big part of the justification has been to promote interaction with developers to give VA a community they have close ties with and to promote open source software development. The idea of losing code is appauling, SF no longer serves a big part of its purpose at that point. That's what brings credibility in to question, what are they doing to prevent that from happening? Can I buy a set of DVDs that have SF backed-up on to them? Or is this it, the policy change is that there won't be any warning of future policy changes and those might cost you your code. I understand that they might have to sell stuff, or charge for services or do lot's of different things. I also understand that services like SF are prime for pirates and porn hustlers and others to use to propagate data and they need to protect themselves. It's time to look to tigris, Savannah, and Berlio more seriously.
I wonder if there is something we could add to licenses that would prevent a place like SF from shutting down and taking your code with them.
Allow me to let you inside to have a peak at my insanity. #include using namespace std;
Chapter 1
It all started when I worked at IBM PSD (Printing Systems Div,) formerly Pennet, and I think it had another name at one time. It's the printing group. We pretty much did the heavy lifting and the stable cleaning of the print business: bills, checks, forms, stuff you don't like to get in the mail usuall, that type stuff was our bread and butter. Being the young and spunky turk that I was, I wanted more. Since the idea was pretty much killed by the then VP I will share it here.
I was working on a large distributed print managment system that is essentially a database of printing devices and "jobs." It's all the standard stuff, bullet proof, fast (it really wasn't but it was good enough) robust, scales to inifinity (not really, but close enough) etc.. And huge pains were put in to making this thing distributed. The real deal, DCE and a hand-rolled object broker (more or less, it was around the time corba was getting hip) and so you could have machines that were dedicated to jobs or machines that were dedicated to devices or any possible combination. That's the technology, the use is printing boring shit out. It has one of the best print managment engines in the world under it and it's generally used for stuff that doesn't matter so much (grand scheme of things) and ultimately, if we're successful as a species, won't get printed out in too long.
My idea was to start signing deals with content providers, the book publishers, the people who own books but don't publish them, text books, magazines, journals, University thesis' even, etc.. Something an IBM could do. Then we ink a deal with Kinkos and whatever other "print houses" are out there and then we build a huge distributed Infoprint manager system that includes a database full of all the books and a device server in each Kinkos. My vision is to get the content in to some liquid form and then allow the end user to control, if possible and then let demand control printing. If an article is popular it will get bought more. You want an article, you can search the online database, order it made and go pick up a copy at the nearest kinkos, in the format you desire. Since IBM would control the whole thing (or some company they could create) the IP would be secure, people would get paid on a per copy basis and the end user would be better served. It has been my experiences that certain types of information is published but it doesn't become easy to get to. As the technology progresses the data would be in a form that would allow us to move with it, develop online books, etc.. The authors and publishers could still have a degree of control over things, they'd get paid and the guys who want access to stuff could get it without traveling to 10 libraries all over the land to find one that has it. Alas, I was ahead of my time or underestimated the difficulty in producing such an app. I felt that it was a good way to really use IBM technology for something that might be one of the most important things we could possibly do. I still kind of wish I had all my college text books bound in 3 ring binders with extra wide margines for notes... And there are still at least a dozen articles I want to read but the local university doesn't have them around any more..
Chapter 2
Fast forward a couple years. I got out of the printing business, been doing other stuff. I read more books now. I wish I had a copy of Stevens, online, a copy of Stroustrup, online, and there are a few dozen online "books" I want printed out.
My vision is the same, I think every book that ever was should be online and available for purchase but I also want a different kind of book now.
Books in print aren't going away real quick. It's just too easy, portable and nice. There is something deep inside that just feels right about a book and actually "having it." Online books kick much ass as well, there is nothing like searching through a book to find that passage you knew you read. Physical books let you draw in them, hilite things, write notes. Online books can be hypertexted and who knows all the cool stuff you can find by following links. I've got this vision of something that crosses that divide.
Kind of what I imagine is something like an online book with a docbook backend and a moderated weblog or wiki. So you'd write a book and it's digital (oh, what I didn't say in my long IBM story that I should have is that in the past 20 years or so pretty much all publishing is digital, some people don't know that but you can't make a book anymore unless it's in digital form at some point) You've got this book then you put it online, for fee or for free, it doesn't matter. You also print it for purchase, printed version should come with a CD copy of the online version. Then readers can go to the online version and with something like wiki they can write notes, criticisms, links to things, etc.. Some publisher or editor type will moderate them to some degree. Then for a minimal fee or for free I can get a "book version" of the book and notes, maybe a big PDF or something, whatever docbook makes. Periodically the publisher can republish with the new notes and such. I guess the way I see it is that the book can sort of become a little more dynamic and living while you still can have a bound printed copy of it made up periodically and you have an online copy for searching through. It's kind of like faq-o-matic meets wiki meets weblog meets docbook.
I can think that for technical books it would be marvelous. Examples and samples could be added by readers. You could write a book and only include small code samples (good books only have small ones) but in the online version you could have bigger ones. New ideas could be presented. Ideas could be discussed as needed for clearity. At the same time, the original work of the author would be the core and could (and should) stay that way. It would almost be like an opensource project for books, there would still be a central core that was original though. You would be able to filter the additions in various ways. It would take a pretty radical shift in thought for some, but I think something like that could be critical as we a mass more and more knowledge and information that we need to preserve and pass on to future generations.
Essentially the book would come in 2 forms, bound and online. The online part would allow annotations, extra content, etc.. Then as I see fit, I could reprint the online version with various annotations, filtered to my liking.
I think the only thing that I really take exception to is the choice of wording. I'm assuming that GNOME will incorporate
I also think there are some mistakes about Java in there. There are GTK+ and GNOME bindings for java and gcj. Java doesn't force you into a platform, it's very powerful to go there but you don't have to. We could very well design a new class framework and use java for this, there isn't any real reason why it couldn't be done, I just think that he thinks
If it really takes off and flies then maybe we should "base GNOME" on .NET but it just seems too early for that right now.