I believe the GPL requires you to make the source code "available". Many folks choose to implement this by putting the code on their website; but you can send a CD-ROM to folks who ask, or even (I think) a paper listing...
And if they aren't making any modifications to said source code, they may be able to get away with referring you to somewhere else that the code is available...
Oh, and you're only required to give source code to people to whom you give binaries; not anyone else.
There are three aspects of good software that I find are not mentioned nearly often enough:
Using what you write -- systems like the original Unix(tm) operating system (as opposed to what
got released later, commercially, by AT&T) were actually used and maintained by the people that
wrote them, every day. This is partly why things like version 6 unix are so readable and maintainable.
This is also largely true of Linux and much other Open Source. For all of
the Cathedral vs Bazaar type discussions out there, I think this "eating your own dog food" approach
is critical. If instead you use a big IDE to develop software that other people use, but not you,
you have a different attitude about it. On the other hand, Microsoft claims to do this -- that is,
use their own produtcs -- however I'm not sure how often the developers themselves use the packages
that they write in their daily work....
Having to explain your code. There are pushes for this -- code reviews, literate programming, etc. but these
often actually diverge from explaining how the code works, and thus falter. In my formative years I used to be a site consultant at the Purdue University computing center, and I found that most people who came up to ask why their program didn't work would figure it out on their own if you asked them to explain how the program worked. There is also the IBM research on "clean room" software development, which pushed this to the extereme, where people never got to run their software, they only got to discuss it with their coworkers and hand it over to a build and test team. This got really good quality, delivered on time software, the only problem was that none of the developers would ever agree to do it again.
What is now called testing by design -- you work in a mode where you define test sets first, then the test harness, and then write the code; module by module.
So combining these, I think you get a system where you design tests, discuss the tests with your team and justify them, then design code & discuss it with the team, and ensure it passes the test suite, and then you spend a noticable portion of your time using the software for its intended task. That is, if you're writing hotel management software, you should be spending a chunk of your time at a checkout desk at a hotel, filling in in the kitchen off hours, etc. using the system the way a real user does. Failing that, you should spend a chunk of your time on the support hotline with real customers finding out how they use the software, and what they like and don't like about it.
I don't see much of this in many of the software methodologies I hear discussed.
Okay, so your company is paying you to twiddle your thumbs... Pick a good open source project, install it on a desktop machine, fix some bugs, or add a needed feature, etc. Submit some patches, etc.
Or, if you're feeling charitable to the employer, start writing documentation...
I tried groups of 2, 4, and then 3 hex digits converted to decimal as badge numbers... At first I thought I was on a roll with the 3-digit set, becuase I got actual, current (visitor) badge numbers for the first two triples F0B, and E58, but it turns out the rest are not active badge numbers.
One can have, for example, online websites where if I want information about new cars, etc. I can go looking, when I want it. For example, I pay money for Consumer Reports, which goes out and finds products and tests them for me and sends me useful reviews which I read when I'm interested in something. This is a far better way to get me information about a product.
Blaring annoying, clearly biased, and content-free advertisements at me just annoys me, and makes me want to avoid the vendor who is thusly advertising.
Now if the advertisers simply had an announcer type quietly and politely saying "We make beer, and some people really like it" or "We make cars like this and this" I wouldn't mind so much; but when they torque up the volume, make my TV flash like a strobe light, and then make statments like "Better tasting" (than what?!?) I just hit the skip-forward button on my MythTV remote. It makes me wish for the Good Old Days on WXRT here in Chicago when most of their ads were just a few lines read by the DJ's between songs...
Well, considering that we recycle 54 billion aluminum cans a year, (pretty much just to drink soda pop that is mostly bad for our health anyway), we could instead use that aluminum to make mirrors for solar power collection. Lets see, two cans is about a square foot, unrolled, so 1 sqare mile is 5280 * 5280 * 2 = 55 million cans, so thats about 1000 square miles of aluminum, which we already make, every year.
So if we devoted half of that production to mirrors, it would take 17 years of our current recycled sheet aluminum processing to make the mirrors to cover a 92 x 92 mile grid (= 8464 square miles), more or less. And it would take probably that long to actually set it all up... But each year during that time, we could have a major increase in our solar power production.
Now as to transmission loss, long distance transmission is considered "cost effective" up to 4000 miles, and it's only 2462 miles from New York to LA, so anywhere between those two places would have cost effective power transmission to all the major cities in the US.
Now there is the potential for serious environmental impact of putting all of those mirrors in one place, but I expect we could setup some preserves to maintain the
desert ecosystems in that area.
There you've added a clause -- "while trying to defend himself...". The problem is that you are more likely to be shot with your own gun -- by a family member, or by yourself, etc. than you are to ever defend your home with a gun.
See for example this summary
which refers to numerous studies on the matter, including data from the CDC:
"In the U.S. for 2001, there were 29,573 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 16,869; Homicide 11,348; Accident 802; Legal Intervention 323; Undetermined 231.(CDC, 2004) This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S."
I think we can assume suicides are generally a person being killed by their own gun, yes? And accidental shooting deaths are either yourself or someone you didn't want to shoot? Whereas homicides total (not just ones where there is a breakin, etc.) are clearly overwhelmed by suicides and accidental shooting fatalities.
Yes. To be accurate, our "thief" would have to walk up to the house with a small copy machine, and copy the book page by page while you were inside and unaware, and walk away leaving the book on the front step.
It could happen...
I suspect the *IAA would argue it's more like leaving the book and a copy machine on the front stoop while you go inside, however that still doesn't constitute an offer to let other people use the copy machine to copy the book.
But what do you want to franchise upon? If you make every little thing different and proprietary, your developmenet costs are huge. If you write your own compiler in your own programming language to do software for your own custom hardware that needs power from your own special generators... There is a reason most companies that did this have gone by the wayside (except, somehow, for Sun -- and even they have started using PCI bus hardware peripherals, and started offering Intel based systems as well as their own Sparc stuff...)
So for the software that you don't need to franchise upon, and that isn't a distinct competitive advantage, contributing back patches or customizations really doesn't hurt you, and you may find that other folks (who may not, in fact, be competing with you) may need a similar solution, and they may improve it further in a manner that benefits you. For example, the vast majority of companies using databases are not your competitors; so collaborating with them indirectly via Red Hat or whoever to improve the database you all use is to your advantage.
In any town in the world, competing businesses both pay into the city/county/whoever to maintain the roads that their customers use to get to their stores. They could all work to have a separate set of roads just for their stores, which would give them a business advantage if their roads were better, but they don't; and if all stores did that for roads, it would be completely insane. Software (particularly O.S. Software, webserver software, etc.) is a lot like the roads -- it's infrastructure that we can all share more effectively than we can build on our own.
The point is, until you have evidence that distingushes between two models (or ten for that matter) , you don't know which one is wrong. It may very well be the established one that's wrong.
That is to say, when Einstein proposed relativity, as when folks proposed a heliocentric universe, it was every bit as proven as the current model. Certainly, more data came along later that disproved the older theory. But even at the time, the new theory that was presented was every bit as "proven" as the one it later displaced.
This is the great problem with string theories right now; nobody has come up with
any sort of performable experiment that distinguishes the string theory models from the standard model.
So the scientific establishment sticks witht the standard model for now, but that doesn't mean that
we really know which one of them is right, or that any of them is more proven than the others.
So are you claiming there is some sort of proof other than fitting all of the available evidence?
What would that be? Or is it that evidence has to age for a while before it's proof?
I don't understand what it is you claim has to happen before a theory is proven.
In my mind, if two theories both fit all the available evidence, they are both true, until
such time as a way to differentiate them is discovered. Certainly conventional wistom is to pick
the simpler one as the "official" model, but that's just a heuristic.
And yes, E=MC^2 is as true and as proven as any other statement of how the world works as I am aware of.
Right now over 1,000 proton/anti-proton collisions a second are happening, between particles going 99.98% the speed of light, and being measured, half a mile from where I'm sitting that wouldn't be colliding if that didn't work.
Anything we think is true can be later proven false.
But the intersection set between security and computer science is very large, and the complexity of doing security when you include computer based hardware and software is actually much much larger --
for example, the failure modes/work factor of a mechanical lock are much easier to understand than
the ones for a computer card-reader.
So studying the security as it relates to computer science is certainly worthwhile, and computers complicate security signifigantly; largely due to the lack of rigor and quality endemic in the software and hardware industries today.
Actually, the OP mentioned why most people think popularity of platform is important -- being able to hire people who already know how to work on it -- it's the "wanted: programmer with 3 years experience coding java beans" mentality; you pick the platform so that when you put that want ad out there are lots of respondants.
Although, in my opinion, you are better off hiring someone who's worked on numerous systems/languages and is willing to learn yours,
than switching platforms to get someone with experience in that single platform.
To the original question; if you were planning a major rewrite anyway, that's possibly the best time to switch platforms -- treat the old one as a prototype, and build another. But you're still better off with a team of programmers who have diverse experience, and letting them agree on the platform (after suitable battles with Nerf-weaponry), rather than picking it based on popularity.
(Boy is it hard to get Slashcode to do a decent fortran listing -- I had to do double-nested blockquotes with ecode blocks inside except for the line numbered part... And I had to add this at the end to make it not complain about how many characters per line the post is)
Obama, at least, has a website with more
details than most candidates.
So the folks who are swayed by slogans (alas, apparently most) can be swayed by the slogans, and those
that wish details can get them.
McCain, in fairness, has some policy details at his website, as well...
But I'll leave it up to someone who likes those policies to put up a link to them.
Slashdot Mirror
And if they aren't making any modifications to said source code, they may be able to get away with referring you to somewhere else that the code is available...
Oh, and you're only required to give source code to people to whom you give binaries; not anyone else.
- Using what you write -- systems like the original Unix(tm) operating system (as opposed to what
got released later, commercially, by AT&T) were actually used and maintained by the people that
wrote them, every day. This is partly why things like version 6 unix are so readable and maintainable.
This is also largely true of Linux and much other Open Source. For all of
the Cathedral vs Bazaar type discussions out there, I think this "eating your own dog food" approach
is critical. If instead you use a big IDE to develop software that other people use, but not you,
you have a different attitude about it. On the other hand, Microsoft claims to do this -- that is,
use their own produtcs -- however I'm not sure how often the developers themselves use the packages
that they write in their daily work....
- Having to explain your code. There are pushes for this -- code reviews, literate programming, etc. but these
often actually diverge from explaining how the code works, and thus falter. In my formative years I used to be a site consultant at the Purdue University computing center, and I found that most people who came up to ask why their program didn't work would figure it out on their own if you asked them to explain how the program worked. There is also the IBM research on "clean room" software development, which pushed this to the extereme, where people never got to run their software, they only got to discuss it with their coworkers and hand it over to a build and test team. This got really good quality, delivered on time software, the only problem was that none of the developers would ever agree to do it again.
- What is now called testing by design -- you work in a mode where you define test sets first, then the test harness, and then write the code; module by module.
So combining these, I think you get a system where you design tests, discuss the tests with your team and justify them, then design code & discuss it with the team, and ensure it passes the test suite, and then you spend a noticable portion of your time using the software for its intended task. That is, if you're writing hotel management software, you should be spending a chunk of your time at a checkout desk at a hotel, filling in in the kitchen off hours, etc. using the system the way a real user does. Failing that, you should spend a chunk of your time on the support hotline with real customers finding out how they use the software, and what they like and don't like about it.I don't see much of this in many of the software methodologies I hear discussed.
no, no, no... t e a p o t s
So even if they get to use leaded solder, they can get whiskers on their components...
You just see the colors from a distance because of how the light is bent.
Okay, so your company is paying you to twiddle your thumbs... Pick a good open source project, install it on a desktop machine, fix some bugs, or add a needed feature, etc. Submit some patches, etc. Or, if you're feeling charitable to the employer, start writing documentation...
Just to save anyone else the trouble...
- wait for a key press
- for decreasing n
- turn on the tape cassete relay
- wait n cycles
- turn off the tape cassete relay
this would cause an increasing pitch whine, followed by a little whiff of smoke from the cassette relay.Something about the people there always saying "there's nothing you can type on the computer that will hurt it..."
Blaring annoying, clearly biased, and content-free advertisements at me just annoys me, and makes me want to avoid the vendor who is thusly advertising.
Now if the advertisers simply had an announcer type quietly and politely saying "We make beer, and some people really like it" or "We make cars like this and this" I wouldn't mind so much; but when they torque up the volume, make my TV flash like a strobe light, and then make statments like "Better tasting" (than what?!?) I just hit the skip-forward button on my MythTV remote. It makes me wish for the Good Old Days on WXRT here in Chicago when most of their ads were just a few lines read by the DJ's between songs...
With titles like Origins of Software by I. Copy Everything, and Lawsuits for Fun and Profit by Dewey, Cheatem and Howe...
The solar proposal on the table would provide 100% of our energy needs, indefinitely, with no C02 footprint to speak of.
The two are not remotely comparable propositions.
So if we devoted half of that production to mirrors, it would take 17 years of our current recycled sheet aluminum processing to make the mirrors to cover a 92 x 92 mile grid (= 8464 square miles), more or less. And it would take probably that long to actually set it all up... But each year during that time, we could have a major increase in our solar power production.
Now as to transmission loss, long distance transmission is considered "cost effective" up to 4000 miles, and it's only 2462 miles from New York to LA, so anywhere between those two places would have cost effective power transmission to all the major cities in the US.
Now there is the potential for serious environmental impact of putting all of those mirrors in one place, but I expect we could setup some preserves to maintain the desert ecosystems in that area.
It could happen...
I suspect the *IAA would argue it's more like leaving the book and a copy machine on the front stoop while you go inside, however that still doesn't constitute an offer to let other people use the copy machine to copy the book.
So for the software that you don't need to franchise upon, and that isn't a distinct competitive advantage, contributing back patches or customizations really doesn't hurt you, and you may find that other folks (who may not, in fact, be competing with you) may need a similar solution, and they may improve it further in a manner that benefits you. For example, the vast majority of companies using databases are not your competitors; so collaborating with them indirectly via Red Hat or whoever to improve the database you all use is to your advantage.
In any town in the world, competing businesses both pay into the city/county/whoever to maintain the roads that their customers use to get to their stores. They could all work to have a separate set of roads just for their stores, which would give them a business advantage if their roads were better, but they don't; and if all stores did that for roads, it would be completely insane. Software (particularly O.S. Software, webserver software, etc.) is a lot like the roads -- it's infrastructure that we can all share more effectively than we can build on our own.
That is to say, when Einstein proposed relativity, as when folks proposed a heliocentric universe, it was every bit as proven as the current model. Certainly, more data came along later that disproved the older theory. But even at the time, the new theory that was presented was every bit as "proven" as the one it later displaced.
This is the great problem with string theories right now; nobody has come up with any sort of performable experiment that distinguishes the string theory models from the standard model. So the scientific establishment sticks witht the standard model for now, but that doesn't mean that we really know which one of them is right, or that any of them is more proven than the others.
What would that be? Or is it that evidence has to age for a while before it's proof? I don't understand what it is you claim has to happen before a theory is proven.
In my mind, if two theories both fit all the available evidence, they are both true, until such time as a way to differentiate them is discovered. Certainly conventional wistom is to pick the simpler one as the "official" model, but that's just a heuristic.
And yes, E=MC^2 is as true and as proven as any other statement of how the world works as I am aware of. Right now over 1,000 proton/anti-proton collisions a second are happening, between particles going 99.98% the speed of light, and being measured, half a mile from where I'm sitting that wouldn't be colliding if that didn't work.
Anything we think is true can be later proven false.
So studying the security as it relates to computer science is certainly worthwhile, and computers complicate security signifigantly; largely due to the lack of rigor and quality endemic in the software and hardware industries today.
So what does constitute proof?!?
However, it has existed for several years, and we still get lots of spam...
And you can only put in the encouraging restrictions once enough places use it, otherwise you just delay or block most of the email you need to see.
He did do work on parts of the recycler ring at Fermilab, which is exactly a place to store antimatter...
Although, in my opinion, you are better off hiring someone who's worked on numerous systems/languages and is willing to learn yours, than switching platforms to get someone with experience in that single platform.
To the original question; if you were planning a major rewrite anyway, that's possibly the best time to switch platforms -- treat the old one as a prototype, and build another. But you're still better off with a team of programmers who have diverse experience, and letting them agree on the platform (after suitable battles with Nerf-weaponry), rather than picking it based on popularity.
No, I'm Spartacus -- er -- Troll Tracker!
Obama, at least, has a website with more details than most candidates.
So the folks who are swayed by slogans (alas, apparently most) can be swayed by the slogans, and those that wish details can get them.
McCain, in fairness, has some policy details at his website, as well... But I'll leave it up to someone who likes those policies to put up a link to them.