Yea, there is no way someone can enter a casino in vegas, hell go anywhere near the strip, without being caught on hundreds of cameras. so they have a blind spot in one corner of the floor, but there is likly hundreds of hours of video tape covering every step of the delivery.
People Bitch about all the cameras in London. They got nothing on the number of cameras in Vegas.
If the security cameras in Vegas where not the best in World, the cons would have cleaned out the casinos years ago and the customers would not feel safe walking in to and out of the casinos with large amounts of cash.
Something like ISO certifications. Perhaps not exactly that, but the general idea. It would likly give FOSS a boost of professionalism, build confidence, and overall improve the reputation and adoption of FOSS in both public and private sector.
How often in using FOSS in biz and just average desktop use do we have software that really is the best thing since sliced bread, but we have to hesitate to adopt it because the project behind it is of questionable status? How often does that rub off on on other FOSS projects, either directly or indirectly related to them?
The dream would be to have an entire chain of core FOSS software that is for example has ISO or similar certification for all the projects under it. The vision would be to be able to for example pick a distro, and select stable repositories FOSS ISO certified tree, and know that all the projects under it and everything they are built on are stable open source projects that have certain standards. You can still add on project that do not meet those standards, but they can then be better managed and problematic ones evaluated for mission critical use.
The downside of this is that it has super committee written all over it, but at this point in the FOSS landscape what is one more standardization body among friends if it made a big leap forward in to adoption and kill the FUD?
This is after all one of the major arguments used by closed source companies to discourage the adoption of FOSS in companies. Essentially, 'FOSS is the unknown so don't risk your buisness on it'. Remove a bit of the unknown, and we pull the teeth out of those arguments. Done right, it could be the new standard of what is expected in software development.
Yes, corporations have these problems also. When they don't deal with them, they go under. There is a reason why corporations sink so much time and money in to insuring they don't happen.
These problems however are not so much similar to the problems you find in companies, but problems you find in none-profit organizations of any stripe. Places where ego is basis for much of the personal incentive for getting involved. Spend some time on your average neighborhood NGO board of directors, and you will see the very similar things happen to their projects.
Everyone will jump on this as proof that open source projects can not be trusted or relied on. Now, that may or may not be true. This instance really is not a poster child for problems with FOSS projects. We are talking about a project based on repackaging and rebranding a commercial distro. The heavy lifting is done by RH and other projects.
This should be food for thought however about other projects, which there are many many instances of FOSS project management issues leaving users high and dry because of political issues.
We really need some better organizational standards for FOSS project management, not just high quality code. Remember the segment of society we are talking about. They might be great at programing or whatever, but they rarely have the leadership and organization skills to handle a project once it reaches a critical mass of popularity or use.
One of the first things I have to do, after years of using FOSS, is look at the project and see how healthy it is before deciding to implement it in my biz. I have to do things like look at how many projects have derived work from it, who is contributing to it, how alive is the forum community both for developers and users, development cycles, and so on.
What we really need is some sort of organizational certification. Something that an end user of FOSS or other FOSS project can with one glance determine what is the status of the organization and the project. Especially the large important ones. Are there for example policies in place to handle the death of the head of the project? Is there a formal system for order of succession? Is there policy for archiving legacy code and related information?
The worse thing that can happen to a FOSS project is a cult of personality forming around just one person ( that is more than just PR).
Thus, Amazon owed the copyright holder. They should have just payed them for the screwup, and moved on. The public would have been none the wiser. They are paying a much bigger tab for the PR disaster.
The reason no one has paid attention to this theory or area is because it is total bullshit, and he used a thin grasp of his Philosophy 101 to try and paint over the shit. It still smells like shit.
It is called "Intentionality" (and NOT 'I intend to go to the store' type Intentionality). I would say he is several hundred years too late to the party on it. For a quick appreciation of just what a hack he is try this: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
For those that do not want to dive in to all the ugly details to understand a big of the above, I can point out the problem in simpler form.
Did you notice how this guy is still defining the intelligence of his system using human intelligence? Well, there is a very good reason why we have to use human intelligence as the benchmark for AI.
First, I run several CentOS servers. The nature of the core structure to mirroring RH distro, does not make me very concerned that somehow this is the end of CentOS. It is a fairly trivial task for someone to fork this projects (just buy a frigen new domain name), and carry on as before.
It does however bring up a increasingly greater problem of amateurs in the FOSS projects because of the increased popularity. I have recently found this out the hard way when the PClinuxos distro project blew apart. I encountered people telling me (with my own very limited experience related to distros and rpms) that I should for example take over running a 64 bit version, and not to worry about it because they had no experience either and where running a distro project. Which right there made me drop any wish to use it in the future for anything important. I have been using linux for over 8 years, but would never assume I am qualified to run a public distro project. In the case of PCLos it is showing obviously in ever increasing instabilities, infighting, delays, and so on in the project. This is just one case off the top of my head among FOSS recently.
This is not the first project to have the amateurs take over, but across the board you see more and more new users getting involved in FOSS projects. That is both a blessing and curse. The problem is those with experience and talent that keep those people in check, are getting spread thinner and thinner. Just look at the explosion of distros in the last few years. Everyone and their brother now can run their own distro.
So how do we insure quality and stability in FOSS without killing the open spirit and innovation?
Most of that dead dog you just posted has been beat and beat again. If "the new standard" OS where an issue, we would have real and WIDE SPREAD viruses in the wild long long ago for the millions of unix servers that have been under attack for years. This is a far more a fundamental issue of systems design and responsibility of MS for their product.
Why does it seem everyone ignores the real source of the majority of spam: Microsoft windows computers infected by viruses running botnets that send spam. Yes, is generated by other systems, but not nearly the amount that is being generated by MS based botnets.
How about everyone just send their frigen spam bill to MS. How about a class action for everyone to collect for the damage that MS does to networks around the World. Better yet lets just forward all the spam we get to MS. Let them sort it out.
They are studying the net more than the bot. It is just simpler to create a super cheap net of bots on wine, then I am sure they have just for fun tossed in a couple virgin copies of windows to keep them fed and find out if they differ much from the wine versions. Bots are extreamly simple animals in isolation. It is the colective that gives them balls.
I am sorry. Going to the coffee shop down the street does not make you a nomad. It is just going for a coffee. Moving from country to country is being a nomad.
I specialize in providing support services to "digital nomads" in Chile, and run a community made mostly of these sorts of people that live in Chile . Many of my clients are IT professionals that have moved their families to Chile, and work exclusively on the internet. Many have lived and worked all over the World. They just choose Chile because it stable, safe, and has some of the best internet in Latin America. A few live completely off the grid in rather remote locations besides their internet connections through wireless, sat, cell phone.
Has anyone tested this exploit? Some frigin security company claiming macs and Linux are vulnerable is no help. Can anyone document a case or two of this exploit actually doing anything in Linux or the Mac?
I would highly suspect by now the entire eco-system involved in an average patch in FOSS software is very much outstripping the resources of MS. At least on the eyeball side. What does MS put at any given problem a few hundred or a few thousand programmers? Yea, there might be a whole lot more people in the marketing spin department, but they don't really count as helpful.
It is not just the guys around one project, a particular writer in FOSS that vets the patch. It is the entire community of hundreds of different distros, sub-projects, individual users, and so on that vet a patch or change and decide to include it, ignore it, put it on the shelf, and push changes back up the food chain as problems are found.
I consider myself to be fairly much an end user of FOSS, but perhaps leaning more on the power users side of things. I remember a bug in a early development release of Firefox I found. From the time it was released, to the time I found it, verified it, and went to report it, was less than 30 mins. Guess what? 100 other people found it, 10 proposed patches had been submitted, and the best was already accepted and in to the next version a full 15 mins earlier than me. That is just normal in FOSS.
No one can tell me a company with massive bureaucracy of rules and procedures would be able to mobilize anything at that speed. It likly takes them a week just to get authorization to look at the source code they wrote from the legal department.
Likely not so much the subs beneath, as where the subs can do surprise penetrations or at least that would be the cold war theory.
My pet conspiracy theory is that Bush and company where keeping them secret until their buddies in the oil biz could fully explore the new turf. Like Bush ever gave a dam about national security.
The advantages of this are questionable over what we already have.
What we need is the ability to stand in the doorway of library or a warehouse and know where something is relative to your current position. Kind of like how google maps works. We need to be able to not just index but locate, and do it in such a way that dead batteries are not an issue. Perhaps some sort of radioactive isotope or something. Something that later as things get automated more, a machine can easily locate. We don't want to just identify it after we have found it, we want to always be able to locate it. We basically want small GPS systems for boxes, that also broadcast other information.
How about we start using IPV6 addresses for barcodes now?
Hell, I am 34 and can not write in cursive. Yes, I was taught in school at around second grade, and that was about the last place I used it. By university and at least by grad school, I quit really even taking written notes beyond perhaps the date of the next test or what book I should be reading. They would just go in to a notebook, and never be looked at a again. In my day to day work, everything is recorded in some digital format or it is sure to be lost.
Yea, it is pipe dream, because computer scientist have been sucking on the wrong pipe.
It is not the hardware emulation we have to worry about (emulating human brains bla, bla, bla), it is the software (emulating human culture and language). We need to be concerned about Strong AI means human culture and language, and human culture well...we know how that has turned out.
I am sorry. How the hell did this even come up? If someone decides to explode and EMP over a smart grid, how is this any worse than they did it over a regular grid? Everything is fried anyway. We are chip based society, and very little of it is not vulnerable to EMP or solar flares.
By the way, I would be far more concerned with what a solar flare would do than a man made EMP. We have actually had these in our life time, and will have more.
I think that is wonderful. The first time the grid fails, everyone will run out and start buying their own solar panels, wind generators, and other independent power sources.
I have to agree with both.The thing with PHP, although arguably at best a limited programing language (if at all), is the accessibility. You do something, there is instance feedback. I just would not let someone get too hung on just PHP. It will however get at the basic concepts behind programing rapidly.
I remember the most complex thing in learning my first programing language was learning the language of programing. Exactly of what is loop, var, and so on. You are reading these books, documentation, and most would fail to define the terms (or define the terms using the terms) they where using so that someone new to programing could understand the lingo or shoptalk. It was not particularly hard once you figured it out (c, c++, Java), but it was like being frigen anthropologist in the jungle encountering a new tribe. You have to translate the crap in to something common to English culture. Thus, why instance feedback is important to knowing are you doing it something right.
I would have to say PHP documentation is excellent. Lots of easy access definitions, with examples, small snippets of working code, and discussion of pros and cons and recommendations. In fact if other programming languages followed that lead, they would be many more programmers in the World and perhaps a few less bad programmers.
My vote for a second language would be C++. All the more advanced concepts, including going down to the metal (although perhaps not the best way to get there) can be captured in C++. Basically, you can go up and down the food chain fairly rapidly with C++, and the key concepts translate well to just about every other language.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, there is no way someone can enter a casino in vegas, hell go anywhere near the strip, without being caught on hundreds of cameras. so they have a blind spot in one corner of the floor, but there is likly hundreds of hours of video tape covering every step of the delivery.
People Bitch about all the cameras in London. They got nothing on the number of cameras in Vegas.
If the security cameras in Vegas where not the best in World, the cons would have cleaned out the casinos years ago and the customers would not feel safe walking in to and out of the casinos with large amounts of cash.
Sorry, Las Vegas casino Hotel. There are cameras in the toilets. They likly already know who they are.
Something like ISO certifications. Perhaps not exactly that, but the general idea. It would likly give FOSS a boost of professionalism, build confidence, and overall improve the reputation and adoption of FOSS in both public and private sector.
How often in using FOSS in biz and just average desktop use do we have software that really is the best thing since sliced bread, but we have to hesitate to adopt it because the project behind it is of questionable status? How often does that rub off on on other FOSS projects, either directly or indirectly related to them?
The dream would be to have an entire chain of core FOSS software that is for example has ISO or similar certification for all the projects under it. The vision would be to be able to for example pick a distro, and select stable repositories FOSS ISO certified tree, and know that all the projects under it and everything they are built on are stable open source projects that have certain standards. You can still add on project that do not meet those standards, but they can then be better managed and problematic ones evaluated for mission critical use.
The downside of this is that it has super committee written all over it, but at this point in the FOSS landscape what is one more standardization body among friends if it made a big leap forward in to adoption and kill the FUD?
This is after all one of the major arguments used by closed source companies to discourage the adoption of FOSS in companies. Essentially, 'FOSS is the unknown so don't risk your buisness on it'. Remove a bit of the unknown, and we pull the teeth out of those arguments. Done right, it could be the new standard of what is expected in software development.
Dude, you are obviously missing the point.This is not about CentOS.
Really?
Yes, corporations have these problems also. When they don't deal with them, they go under. There is a reason why corporations sink so much time and money in to insuring they don't happen.
These problems however are not so much similar to the problems you find in companies, but problems you find in none-profit organizations of any stripe. Places where ego is basis for much of the personal incentive for getting involved. Spend some time on your average neighborhood NGO board of directors, and you will see the very similar things happen to their projects.
Everyone will jump on this as proof that open source projects can not be trusted or relied on. Now, that may or may not be true. This instance really is not a poster child for problems with FOSS projects. We are talking about a project based on repackaging and rebranding a commercial distro. The heavy lifting is done by RH and other projects.
This should be food for thought however about other projects, which there are many many instances of FOSS project management issues leaving users high and dry because of political issues.
We really need some better organizational standards for FOSS project management, not just high quality code. Remember the segment of society we are talking about. They might be great at programing or whatever, but they rarely have the leadership and organization skills to handle a project once it reaches a critical mass of popularity or use.
One of the first things I have to do, after years of using FOSS, is look at the project and see how healthy it is before deciding to implement it in my biz. I have to do things like look at how many projects have derived work from it, who is contributing to it, how alive is the forum community both for developers and users, development cycles, and so on.
What we really need is some sort of organizational certification. Something that an end user of FOSS or other FOSS project can with one glance determine what is the status of the organization and the project. Especially the large important ones. Are there for example policies in place to handle the death of the head of the project? Is there a formal system for order of succession? Is there policy for archiving legacy code and related information?
The worse thing that can happen to a FOSS project is a cult of personality forming around just one person ( that is more than just PR).
Thus, Amazon owed the copyright holder. They should have just payed them for the screwup, and moved on. The public would have been none the wiser. They are paying a much bigger tab for the PR disaster.
The reason no one has paid attention to this theory or area is because it is total bullshit, and he used a thin grasp of his Philosophy 101 to try and paint over the shit. It still smells like shit.
It is called "Intentionality" (and NOT 'I intend to go to the store' type Intentionality). I would say he is several hundred years too late to the party on it. For a quick appreciation of just what a hack he is try this:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
For those that do not want to dive in to all the ugly details to understand a big of the above, I can point out the problem in simpler form.
Did you notice how this guy is still defining the intelligence of his system using human intelligence? Well, there is a very good reason why we have to use human intelligence as the benchmark for AI.
First, I run several CentOS servers. The nature of the core structure to mirroring RH distro, does not make me very concerned that somehow this is the end of CentOS. It is a fairly trivial task for someone to fork this projects (just buy a frigen new domain name), and carry on as before.
It does however bring up a increasingly greater problem of amateurs in the FOSS projects because of the increased popularity. I have recently found this out the hard way when the PClinuxos distro project blew apart. I encountered people telling me (with my own very limited experience related to distros and rpms) that I should for example take over running a 64 bit version, and not to worry about it because they had no experience either and where running a distro project. Which right there made me drop any wish to use it in the future for anything important. I have been using linux for over 8 years, but would never assume I am qualified to run a public distro project. In the case of PCLos it is showing obviously in ever increasing instabilities, infighting, delays, and so on in the project. This is just one case off the top of my head among FOSS recently.
This is not the first project to have the amateurs take over, but across the board you see more and more new users getting involved in FOSS projects. That is both a blessing and curse. The problem is those with experience and talent that keep those people in check, are getting spread thinner and thinner. Just look at the explosion of distros in the last few years. Everyone and their brother now can run their own distro.
So how do we insure quality and stability in FOSS without killing the open spirit and innovation?
Most of that dead dog you just posted has been beat and beat again. If "the new standard" OS where an issue, we would have real and WIDE SPREAD viruses in the wild long long ago for the millions of unix servers that have been under attack for years. This is a far more a fundamental issue of systems design and responsibility of MS for their product.
Why does it seem everyone ignores the real source of the majority of spam: Microsoft windows computers infected by viruses running botnets that send spam. Yes, is generated by other systems, but not nearly the amount that is being generated by MS based botnets.
How about everyone just send their frigen spam bill to MS. How about a class action for everyone to collect for the damage that MS does to networks around the World. Better yet lets just forward all the spam we get to MS. Let them sort it out.
They are studying the net more than the bot. It is just simpler to create a super cheap net of bots on wine, then I am sure they have just for fun tossed in a couple virgin copies of windows to keep them fed and find out if they differ much from the wine versions. Bots are extreamly simple animals in isolation. It is the colective that gives them balls.
I am sorry. Going to the coffee shop down the street does not make you a nomad. It is just going for a coffee. Moving from country to country is being a nomad.
I specialize in providing support services to "digital nomads" in Chile, and run a community made mostly of these sorts of people that live in Chile
. Many of my clients are IT professionals that have moved their families to Chile, and work exclusively on the internet. Many have lived and worked all over the World. They just choose Chile because it stable, safe, and has some of the best internet in Latin America. A few live completely off the grid in rather remote locations besides their internet connections through wireless, sat, cell phone.
It is called a honey pot. Not very new.
Has anyone tested this exploit? Some frigin security company claiming macs and Linux are vulnerable is no help. Can anyone document a case or two of this exploit actually doing anything in Linux or the Mac?
I would highly suspect by now the entire eco-system involved in an average patch in FOSS software is very much outstripping the resources of MS. At least on the eyeball side. What does MS put at any given problem a few hundred or a few thousand programmers? Yea, there might be a whole lot more people in the marketing spin department, but they don't really count as helpful.
It is not just the guys around one project, a particular writer in FOSS that vets the patch. It is the entire community of hundreds of different distros, sub-projects, individual users, and so on that vet a patch or change and decide to include it, ignore it, put it on the shelf, and push changes back up the food chain as problems are found.
I consider myself to be fairly much an end user of FOSS, but perhaps leaning more on the power users side of things. I remember a bug in a early development release of Firefox I found. From the time it was released, to the time I found it, verified it, and went to report it, was less than 30 mins. Guess what? 100 other people found it, 10 proposed patches had been submitted, and the best was already accepted and in to the next version a full 15 mins earlier than me. That is just normal in FOSS.
No one can tell me a company with massive bureaucracy of rules and procedures would be able to mobilize anything at that speed. It likly takes them a week just to get authorization to look at the source code they wrote from the legal department.
If you don't do evolution, you are not doing biology.
Try relating one strain of DNA, or the existences of DNA, or any science related to DNA, based on creationist stories.
It gets to be a progressively harder to make it all hang together, unless you toss in some aliens (wait that does not fit either).
Likely not so much the subs beneath, as where the subs can do surprise penetrations or at least that would be the cold war theory.
My pet conspiracy theory is that Bush and company where keeping them secret until their buddies in the oil biz could fully explore the new turf. Like Bush ever gave a dam about national security.
6. Much of the population does not believe in Evolution.
What a great place to do evolution dependent research.
Wait a second. If they don't believe in Evolution, then it none of it is really dangerous.
The advantages of this are questionable over what we already have.
What we need is the ability to stand in the doorway of library or a warehouse and know where something is relative to your current position. Kind of like how google maps works. We need to be able to not just index but locate, and do it in such a way that dead batteries are not an issue. Perhaps some sort of radioactive isotope or something. Something that later as things get automated more, a machine can easily locate. We don't want to just identify it after we have found it, we want to always be able to locate it. We basically want small GPS systems for boxes, that also broadcast other information.
How about we start using IPV6 addresses for barcodes now?
Hell, I am 34 and can not write in cursive. Yes, I was taught in school at around second grade, and that was about the last place I used it. By university and at least by grad school, I quit really even taking written notes beyond perhaps the date of the next test or what book I should be reading. They would just go in to a notebook, and never be looked at a again. In my day to day work, everything is recorded in some digital format or it is sure to be lost.
Yea, it is pipe dream, because computer scientist have been sucking on the wrong pipe.
It is not the hardware emulation we have to worry about (emulating human brains bla, bla, bla), it is the software (emulating human culture and language). We need to be concerned about Strong AI means human culture and language, and human culture well...we know how that has turned out.
I am sorry. How the hell did this even come up? If someone decides to explode and EMP over a smart grid, how is this any worse than they did it over a regular grid? Everything is fried anyway. We are chip based society, and very little of it is not vulnerable to EMP or solar flares.
By the way, I would be far more concerned with what a solar flare would do than a man made EMP. We have actually had these in our life time, and will have more.
What is the likly hood of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm
vs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse
I think that is wonderful. The first time the grid fails, everyone will run out and start buying their own solar panels, wind generators, and other independent power sources.
I have to agree with both.The thing with PHP, although arguably at best a limited programing language (if at all), is the accessibility. You do something, there is instance feedback. I just would not let someone get too hung on just PHP. It will however get at the basic concepts behind programing rapidly.
I remember the most complex thing in learning my first programing language was learning the language of programing. Exactly of what is loop, var, and so on. You are reading these books, documentation, and most would fail to define the terms (or define the terms using the terms) they where using so that someone new to programing could understand the lingo or shoptalk. It was not particularly hard once you figured it out (c, c++, Java), but it was like being frigen anthropologist in the jungle encountering a new tribe. You have to translate the crap in to something common to English culture. Thus, why instance feedback is important to knowing are you doing it something right.
I would have to say PHP documentation is excellent. Lots of easy access definitions, with examples, small snippets of working code, and discussion of pros and cons and recommendations. In fact if other programming languages followed that lead, they would be many more programmers in the World and perhaps a few less bad programmers.
My vote for a second language would be C++. All the more advanced concepts, including going down to the metal (although perhaps not the best way to get there) can be captured in C++. Basically, you can go up and down the food chain fairly rapidly with C++, and the key concepts translate well to just about every other language.