...around poorly designed operating systems where threads are slow. The cool thing about 2.6 is that there now is one less motivation for using such kludges.
The Internet is a network of networks. In that way it is reasonable to consider each ISP a single node of the Internet. Which makes the claim correct, there may be censorship and filtering and blocking within each node (ISP), but not between the nodes.
Of course it makes the ISP name incorrect. They don't give you direct access to the Internet, they give you access to a local network, which itself is part of the Internet.
Research as fundamental as this should be funded, with no regard to practical applications. These scientists shoudn't be forced to think about practical applications, that is the job of other scientists, later in the process.
There are lots of such studies, financed by the customers. That is, corporations or government agencies who want to know which solution is most cost-efficient. These customers have no interest in anything but the most accurate result.
The problem is that such customers often have no interest in publishing the results, in particular when in may benefit their competition as well. Sometimes government funded studies are published, or studies done by large trade unions. And the companies who perform the studies have an interest in publishing part of them, enough to attract customers to other studies.
Maersk and SAS (the air carrier, not the statistics package or the military unit) was given huge fines by EU for having non-competition agreements. EU is very active on that, in Denmark many age-old trusts have been stopped by the EU.
Airbus is not a monopoly, it is an European attempt to break Boeings monopoly on air planes.
Microsoft is a European company too, having subsidaries in many EU countries. Obviously, it should not be excempt from EU law, just because its headquarter is located elsewhere. Everyone who does business in EU must perform that business according to EU law. I can't see why that could be a surprise to anyone.
And yes, EU based companies has to obey US laws as well, when doing business in the the US. I don't know if anyone of them are dominating enough in the US market to come in conflict with US anti-trust law, but if so, no the EU would not be silly enough to claim that the US does not have the power to enforce US law on US ground. (The US have the power to enforce US law everywhere on the planet and close space, but on US ground, they also have the legal and moral right to do so).
Most GCC development is funded by companies who redistribute their own derived versions. I think it is rather unjust to both these people, and the volunteers who also work on GCC, to say that all this work contributed by the companies would have been done anyway by volunteers, and therefore doesn't matter. GCC is today the de-facto reference implementation of C and C++, and perhaps Ada (the Hava, Objective-C and Fortran front-ends haven't reached that status yet). It only got that status because of contributions from private companies. The C++ and Ada front-ends were written by private companies in the first place.
The GPL provides a powerful reason to work with original authors for the common benefit, namely that derived versions will have to be made public anyway. This resaon only holds if we actually care about violations, and does not treat it just like a lengthy version of the BSDL.
I hope MPlayer will be in the same position as GCC is, known as the reference media player. But this requires that companies like KISS work with the original authors, rather than keeping their derived versions private.
As far as I understand, Red Hat Advanced Server is protected by tradmark law, not copyright law. This means that if someone redistributes RHAS without removing Red Hat trademarks, they may be sued for tradmark violation. I don't believe an end user will be in any risk, trademark law is supposed to protect trade, not use.
You can have a personal list of "known good domains" with competent managers and SPF from which mail go directly to your inbox, without other spam filters. Safe knowing that mail from these domains really are from these domains.
You may even want to use a whitelist server ran by someone you trust.
Most of the scientists I know tend to stick with what works (or even what doesn't work) when it comes to computer software. It is not so noticable for the MS Windows guys, as they are more or less forced to update due to buuild-in obsolence in MS products. However, many of the Unix people have ancient desktops.
As a Unix quy myself, I have found nothing in Gnome or KDE that adds uitility over twm + Athena.
pr0n was considered the most dangerous aspect of the computer networks. In particular, people under the age 21 migth be exposed to nude people, or even worse, nude people having sex, and thus have their entire life ruined.
It does seem to me that this attitude has been relexed a lot the last few years, probably because the net has given most people easy access to pr0n, taking some of the mystique away.
... but experimenting with technology is. Palladium and similar technologies which are largely motivated by the desire to prevent us from unautorized playing movies, may as a side effect prevent us from experimenting with technology. If we can only run authorized programs, plug in authorized hardware, and browse authorized content, how can we experiment with new programs, new hardware or new content?
For the 97.3% of us, it would be business as usual. We make a living creating specialised software for a single customer, who is usually also our employer. Our work is going to be a bit easier if we can get source for everything, but that is all.
Another 2.5% of the programmers make a living creating software primarily intended for sale to corporate users. These people will have short term problems, while the industry completes the transformation from product based to service based. However, this transformation is already well underway, both Microsoft and Red Hat products are becomming services.
The remaining 0.2% of the programmers are creating software for the home segment, such as games. I don't see how these people can get paid for writing single-user games. Free software is probably not a solution there. However, some of them should be able to gain jobs for massively multiuser games, which can be (and is) sold like a service.
If you look at the moderations, the extremist spam apologist comments about how spam is protected speach, not really a problem, or at most a minor crime which should be proscuted with a small fine, and in particular, comments flamming people with a more sensible attitude to spam are almost always moderated up.
While articles stating a more moderate and sensible opinion, namely that spam destroys communities and should be prosecuted with death, preferable painful and including the spammers family, are consistently moderated down as flamebait.
You own comment is a perfect example, moderated up like other spam apologisk articles. While this comment will almost certainly be moderated down, if the moderators even sees it.
> Do you have any opinions that you would be > reluctant to express in front of a group of your > peers?
No, because I do like to raise and discuss controversial and thought provoking issues, and those I consider my peers love to hear and participate in them too.
This is not quite the same as being a troll (it is the resulting thoughts and insights I like, not the controverse or provokation by itself), nor quite the same as being a kook (since I don't repeat the issues ad nauserum and actually step back or change side).
Your three rules are the problem, they result in presentations that are visually stimulating, but does not carry any information that sticks.
Such presentations are very simular to TV news. If you ask people after watching a TV news broadcast, they in general answer that they feel informed. But if you ask them about what was in the newscast, they remember very little.
PowerPoint presentations have the same effect, they give the subjective impression of being informative, but the audience learn very little from them.
Your advice are fine if you want to be popular. If you'd rather want to be informative, here are some better advice:
Blackboards rule, if have the skills. But they require a lot of the teacher in organization talent, multitasking, and handwriting. For most people, transparents are better. Handwritten is best, if you can write so everybody can read it.
The basis should be the oral presentation, the slides should support it by providing structure. This mean they should be mostly text, but not much. A good slide has 5 plus/minus 2 bullets (yes, it is cliche, but it works), each containing 1-3 words highliting a point in your presentation. Never complete sentenses, they are an aid to your oral presentation, not a replacement for it. Using handwritting helps avoid overloading the slides.
A bit of carfully chosen color is fine. Avoid animations at all cost. Some topics will need diagrams, but remember, you can not actually present raw data in this form, only the conclusions and highlights. Keep the diagrams few, and if you have any drwaing skills, prefer handdrawn diagrams.
You will obviously need to know what information you want to get across, and you should attempt the presentation at least once. But do not learn it by rote, unless you are an actor or other professional. For most people, a bit of improvision on the spot makes the presentation feel more alive to the audience.
Of course, if your job depends on a positive evaluation from the audience, or you are doing this as part of an entertainment gig, follow the other guys advice. The audience will feel entertained, and give you high marks (or suggest friend to hire you). My advice only pertain to the, perhaps rare, case when you have some information it is important to you to deliver to your audience.
Statistically, 25% will be able to invisible at will, 25% will be transformed into big stone monsters, 25% will be able to turn into flames without getting hurt, and 26% will be able to stretch their body many times its normal length.
> Of course, this assumes those hours that were spent > on GNOME would have been spent on KDE. This is > simply not the case.
Some of them would. Some would be spend on other free software applications. And some would be spend on something else entirely.
Because of the two first groups, the free software society as a whole would have been better of woth nly a single desktop. I won't say "without Gnome, because without Gnome, Qt might never have been QPL'ed or GPL'ed. Of course, the Harmony project might have achieved the same effect with much less effort and disruption.
> How many open-source developers you know that > conduct large-scale usability tests?
Sun does for Gnome and Open Office.
> How many open-source developers go around > interviewing end users?
RMS does for Emacs. I know that because I tried to submit some code directed at novice users to Emacs. RMS actually asked some compute-ignorant people to try the code, and came with suggestions to changes based on their reactions.
Yes, that is one pattern. Of the applications I mentioned, OpenOffice and Mozilla started from a proprietary base, so they were never amateur projects. The Linux kernel is a clear example of an originally amateur project that hit it big time. GCC and GDB were both started by RMS working as a volunteer for the FSF, they are kind of a special case. I believe Apache was started by sysadmins who often have a certain liberty in deciding what activities are part of their job. I don't know if Samba had a similar status.
My own project was paid from the start, as part of a larger research grant.
Given the ratio between the number of sourceforge projects and the number of free software projects that can feed their own programmers, I don't recommend starting a free software project because it might one day it the big way. If you are not paid from the start, you should do it because it is fun or educational, or you need the code yourself.
You are, of course, completely right. When we are not getting paid and don't hurt anybody, we should be able to spend our time as we wish.
Nonetheless, I believe it would be in the interest of most of us to develop a culture where it seems more fun/cooler/whatever to 1) help an existing project rather than start one of your own, 2) show respect for and collaborate with each other, and 3) attempt to think of the needs of ignorant end users, not just those of our peers.
I believe such a culture will result in better free software, and increase the chance that we get a job where we get paid for using or even developing free software.
> I can't figure out what your point is here at all
I believe the point is that the original article wasn't "why the open source community is worse than closed source communitis" but "places where the open source community could do better than it does now".
Slashdot Mirror
The mirror was a piece of shiny metal from the space ship that brought him to Earth.
...around poorly designed operating systems where threads are slow. The cool thing about 2.6 is that there now is one less motivation for using such kludges.
I haven't but I'd expect the crossover and transgaming versions to feel less geeky.
The Internet is a network of networks. In that way it is reasonable to consider each ISP a single node of the Internet. Which makes the claim correct, there may be censorship and filtering and blocking within each node (ISP), but not between the nodes.
Of course it makes the ISP name incorrect. They don't give you direct access to the Internet, they give you access to a local network, which itself is part of the Internet.
Research as fundamental as this should be funded, with no regard to practical applications. These scientists shoudn't be forced to think about practical applications, that is the job of other scientists, later in the process.
There are lots of such studies, financed by the customers. That is, corporations or government agencies who want to know which solution is most cost-efficient. These customers have no interest in anything but the most accurate result.
The problem is that such customers often have no interest in publishing the results, in particular when in may benefit their competition as well. Sometimes government funded studies are published, or studies done by large trade unions. And the companies who perform the studies have an interest in publishing part of them, enough to attract customers to other studies.
Maersk and SAS (the air carrier, not the statistics package or the military unit) was given huge fines by EU for having non-competition agreements. EU is very active on that, in Denmark many age-old trusts have been stopped by the EU.
Airbus is not a monopoly, it is an European attempt to break Boeings monopoly on air planes.
Microsoft is a European company too, having subsidaries in many EU countries. Obviously, it should not be excempt from EU law, just because its headquarter is located elsewhere. Everyone who does business in EU must perform that business according to EU law. I can't see why that could be a surprise to anyone.
And yes, EU based companies has to obey US laws as well, when doing business in the the US. I don't know if anyone of them are dominating enough in the US market to come in conflict with US anti-trust law, but if so, no the EU would not be silly enough to claim that the US does not have the power to enforce US law on US ground. (The US have the power to enforce US law everywhere on the planet and close space, but on US ground, they also have the legal and moral right to do so).
Most GCC development is funded by companies who redistribute their own derived versions. I think it is rather unjust to both these people, and the volunteers who also work on GCC, to say that all this work contributed by the companies would have been done anyway by volunteers, and therefore doesn't matter. GCC is today the de-facto reference implementation of C and C++, and perhaps Ada (the Hava, Objective-C and Fortran front-ends haven't reached that status yet). It only got that status because of contributions from private companies. The C++ and Ada front-ends were written by private companies in the first place.
The GPL provides a powerful reason to work with original authors for the common benefit, namely that derived versions will have to be made public anyway. This resaon only holds if we actually care about violations, and does not treat it just like a lengthy version of the BSDL.
I hope MPlayer will be in the same position as GCC is, known as the reference media player. But this requires that companies like KISS work with the original authors, rather than keeping their derived versions private.
As far as I understand, Red Hat Advanced Server is protected by tradmark law, not copyright law. This means that if someone redistributes RHAS without removing Red Hat trademarks, they may be sued for tradmark violation. I don't believe an end user will be in any risk, trademark law is supposed to protect trade, not use.
You can have a personal list of "known good domains" with competent managers and SPF from which mail go directly to your inbox, without other spam filters. Safe knowing that mail from these domains really are from these domains.
You may even want to use a whitelist server ran by someone you trust.
Most of the scientists I know tend to stick with what works (or even what doesn't work) when it comes to computer software. It is not so noticable for the MS Windows guys, as they are more or less forced to update due to buuild-in obsolence in MS products. However, many of the Unix people have ancient desktops.
As a Unix quy myself, I have found nothing in Gnome or KDE that adds uitility over twm + Athena.
pr0n was considered the most dangerous aspect of the computer networks. In particular, people under the age 21 migth be exposed to nude people, or even worse, nude people having sex, and thus have their entire life ruined.
It does seem to me that this attitude has been relexed a lot the last few years, probably because the net has given most people easy access to pr0n, taking some of the mystique away.
... but experimenting with technology is. Palladium and similar technologies which are largely motivated by the desire to prevent us from unautorized playing movies, may as a side effect prevent us from experimenting with technology. If we can only run authorized programs, plug in authorized hardware, and browse authorized content, how can we experiment with new programs, new hardware or new content?
Security was lax, the site got compromised. So they upped security and worked hard to undo the damage.
If you have a public site with low security, it *will* get hacked. FSF has now learned that lesson the hard way, what's more to figure out?
First, nobody should be forced to work for free.
For the 97.3% of us, it would be business as usual. We make a living creating specialised software for a single customer, who is usually also our employer. Our work is going to be a bit easier if we can get source for everything, but that is all.
Another 2.5% of the programmers make a living creating software primarily intended for sale to corporate users. These people will have short term problems, while the industry completes the transformation from product based to service based. However, this transformation is already well underway, both Microsoft and Red Hat products are becomming services.
The remaining 0.2% of the programmers are creating software for the home segment, such as games. I don't see how these people can get paid for writing single-user games. Free software is probably not a solution there. However, some of them should be able to gain jobs for massively multiuser games, which can be (and is) sold like a service.
If you look at the moderations, the extremist spam apologist comments about how spam is protected speach, not really a problem, or at most a minor crime which should be proscuted with a small fine, and in particular, comments flamming people with a more sensible attitude to spam are almost always moderated up.
While articles stating a more moderate and sensible opinion, namely that spam destroys communities and should be prosecuted with death, preferable painful and including the spammers family, are consistently moderated down as flamebait.
You own comment is a perfect example, moderated up like other spam apologisk articles. While this comment will almost certainly be moderated down, if the moderators even sees it.
> Do you have any opinions that you would be
> reluctant to express in front of a group of your
> peers?
No, because I do like to raise and discuss controversial and thought provoking issues, and those I consider my peers love to hear and participate in them too.
This is not quite the same as being a troll (it is the resulting thoughts and insights I like, not the controverse or provokation by itself), nor quite the same as being a kook (since I don't repeat the issues ad nauserum and actually step back or change side).
Such presentations are very simular to TV news. If you ask people after watching a TV news broadcast, they in general answer that they feel informed. But if you ask them about what was in the newscast, they remember very little.
PowerPoint presentations have the same effect, they give the subjective impression of being informative, but the audience learn very little from them.
Your advice are fine if you want to be popular. If you'd rather want to be informative, here are some better advice:
- Blackboards rule, if have the skills. But they require a lot of the teacher in organization talent, multitasking, and handwriting. For most people, transparents are better. Handwritten is best, if you can write so everybody can read it.
- The basis should be the oral presentation, the slides should support it by providing structure. This mean they should be mostly text, but not much. A good slide has 5 plus/minus 2 bullets (yes, it is cliche, but it works), each containing 1-3 words highliting a point in your presentation. Never complete sentenses, they are an aid to your oral presentation, not a replacement for it. Using handwritting helps avoid overloading the slides.
- A bit of carfully chosen color is fine. Avoid animations at all cost. Some topics will need diagrams, but remember, you can not actually present raw data in this form, only the conclusions and highlights. Keep the diagrams few, and if you have any drwaing skills, prefer handdrawn diagrams.
- You will obviously need to know what information you want to get across, and you should attempt the presentation at least once. But do not learn it by rote, unless you are an actor or other professional. For most people, a bit of improvision on the spot makes the presentation feel more alive to the audience.
Of course, if your job depends on a positive evaluation from the audience, or you are doing this as part of an entertainment gig, follow the other guys advice. The audience will feel entertained, and give you high marks (or suggest friend to hire you). My advice only pertain to the, perhaps rare, case when you have some information it is important to you to deliver to your audience.Statistically, 25% will be able to invisible at will, 25% will be transformed into big stone monsters, 25% will be able to turn into flames without getting hurt, and 26% will be able to stretch their body many times its normal length.
There are 1% uncertainty on these numbers.
> Of course, this assumes those hours that were spent
> on GNOME would have been spent on KDE. This is
> simply not the case.
Some of them would. Some would be spend on other free software applications. And some would be spend on something else entirely.
Because of the two first groups, the free software society as a whole would have been better of woth nly a single desktop. I won't say "without Gnome, because without Gnome, Qt might never have been QPL'ed or GPL'ed. Of course, the Harmony project might have achieved the same effect with much less effort and disruption.
> How many open-source developers you know that
> conduct large-scale usability tests?
Sun does for Gnome and Open Office.
> How many open-source developers go around
> interviewing end users?
RMS does for Emacs. I know that because I tried to submit some code directed at novice users to Emacs. RMS actually asked some compute-ignorant people to try the code, and came with suggestions to changes based on their reactions.
Yes, that is one pattern. Of the applications I mentioned, OpenOffice and Mozilla started from a proprietary base, so they were never amateur projects. The Linux kernel is a clear example of an originally amateur project that hit it big time. GCC and GDB were both started by RMS working as a volunteer for the FSF, they are kind of a special case. I believe Apache was started by sysadmins who often have a certain liberty in deciding what activities are part of their job. I don't know if Samba had a similar status.
My own project was paid from the start, as part of a larger research grant.
Given the ratio between the number of sourceforge projects and the number of free software projects that can feed their own programmers, I don't recommend starting a free software project because it might one day it the big way. If you are not paid from the start, you should do it because it is fun or educational, or you need the code yourself.
You are, of course, completely right. When we are not getting paid and don't hurt anybody, we should be able to spend our time as we wish.
Nonetheless, I believe it would be in the interest of most of us to develop a culture where it seems more fun/cooler/whatever to 1) help an existing project rather than start one of your own, 2) show respect for and collaborate with each other, and 3) attempt to think of the needs of ignorant end users, not just those of our peers.
I believe such a culture will result in better free software, and increase the chance that we get a job where we get paid for using or even developing free software.
It is quite possible for the open source community to be quite immature, yet still more mature than Ballmer, Jobs or Darl.
> I can't figure out what your point is here at all
I believe the point is that the original article wasn't "why the open source community is worse than closed source communitis" but "places where the open source community could do better than it does now".