but this country does have a history of curtailing civil rights during a wartime footing.
This is the key, I think, to the growing schism between conservative Republicans and the current administration. Conservative Republicans traditionally believe in small government except in time of war. In the current administration, it seems that in order to achieve their big government goals, they must keep the country on a permanent wartime footing. These pseudo conservatives or neo-conservatives have tried this in the past with "the war on <insert populist bad thing here>," but the war on terrorism is the first one with a sufficiently stark case-in-point to turn even traditional conservatives into supporters of long-term big government agendas.
This leads me to the question I posed to my brother last weekend, "Who should I, as a moderate conservative, vote for?" He did not have an answer as he is in the same quandary. The Republican party has abandoned me.
As an aside, I wonder where Charlton Heston stands. I'm assuming that any politician who supports tracking citizens' reading history must also support tracking citizens' gun ownership history.
airport (which the taxicab and limo groups fight tooth and nail)
You know, this would be a lot more palatable if the taxi and limo services provided remotely acceptable service. When I'm landing in Vegas I don't give a crap about the $10 - $20 for the cab fare - what I hate is standing in a line of 3,000 people for 45 minutes waiting for a cab. In fact, if there were a line for the cheap monorail and little or no line for the cabs, I would still gladly take the cabs - I'm on my way to meet friends from other cities and I already know I'm going to lose money.
Everyone arrives in Vegas on Friday at 7 PM. The Vegas taxi queue is an impressive one, with 20 or 30 stands, but it's still entirely inadequate. When moving large volumes of people from one fixed point to another fixed point (airport/strip), it's worthwhile looking into systems designed to transit people in mass numbers.
I happen to drive a car with an EPA sticker of 21 city 25 highway (all figures in miles per gallon). I've driven the car for 47000 miles and the lowest I've ever seen is 23 and some change; the highest, 36.3
1995 Ford Escort absolute base model (actually, I got floormats). My figures are surprisingly similar to yours. When I did a lap of the country (US) I was hitting high 30's the entire way. I drive very aggressively (well, as aggressively as one can with less than 100 ponies, haha), and consistently get high 20s to low 30s. EPA estimates are 23/28. I use high octane and synthetic oil (90,000 miles and I expect another 90,000), which may be part of it.
Yeah, people laugh at my car, but the only time it had a signifcant problem was when I hit a deer on the freeway. Even then I managed to limp to the repair shop ($3,000 worth of damage). Consumer Reports gave it their best rating for maintenance costs.
in contrast to the GPL, which obligates developers to make their modifications available to the public.
Once again for the slow learners among us: The GPL does not obligate you to make your modifications available to the public. The GPL only requires you to make the source code available to anyone to whom you provide a copy of the derivative work. If, for example, you modify GNU Emacs for your personal use, you do not have to publish your work.
The Republican Party has figured out that they can buy votes from the uneducated. After the last election, Bush handed out $300 Treasury checks left and right after telling people throughout the campaign that it was their money due (to the budget surplus). He never discussed the national debt or the fact that over 25% of all federal taxes collected pay interest on that debt. He never suggested paying down that debt first and then cutting taxes after it was paid down.
I was brought up to believe that the Republican party was the party of fiscal conservancy (maintaining a balanced budget). I believe fiscal conservancy is a good thing - one of the most important elements in the long run health of the economy. As such, for a long time I was a staunch Republican.
I am still a strong fiscal conservative, and the deficit records over the past 25 years were disturbing to me - it felt like the Republican party had abandoned its fiscal conservancy. But I wasn't sure, so I did an analysis. The troubling fact is that the Republican party no longer appears to support fiscal conservancy as a party policy.
I believe Reagan's first term liberal fiscal policy was the correct response to runaway inflation and unemployment, and the economy did stabilize. But it seems like they forgot that after taking such strong corrective action, you have to reign it in. In 1983 or 1984, when the economy started surging ahead, he should have nailed down a few years of surplus to pay for the party. They are no longer the party of fiscal conservancy.
I feel abandoned, because neither party now clearly supports fiscal conservancy, and yet it is one of the most important issues to me. John McCain is a fiscal conservative, and a Republican. Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, and a Democrat. Neither seems to be representative of the heart of his party. Kerry doesn't seem much of a fiscal conservative, and Bush is way off the deep end of fiscal liberalism.
The worst part is that I fear most Americans don't even know what fiscal conservative means. I fear most think, "Higher taxes and lower spending? That's bad!" I'd vote for anyone who said he or she plans to raise taxes and lower spending.
But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work
If I understand correctly, (s)he only took their Free work. The core of the NoMachine product is GPL.
and made it available for free... Why is this a good thing?
Speaking strictly from a capitalist standpoint, it is good because it reduces the cost to businesses that wish to use this technology. Similarly, the freeness of HTTP software (client and server) has been a great boon to corporations that wish to provide easy access to information about their product lines. This has in turn lead to consumers making more informed decisions, which is one of the keystones of free market capitalism. (that's just the good part, in response to your question, see below for a look at the bad part)
even giving it a similar name.
The similarity in the name is the "NX" part. I believe NX is a Free protocol. This is much like referring to both Sendmail and Postfix as SMTP engines.
If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free
Very well said. This statemtnt (which clearly supports FLOSS) seems to be in contrast to the rest of your post.
which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.
All competition has this effect, whether from proprietary or Free sources. Are Chevrolet and Ford evil because they caused Yugo to go out of business?
How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed?
They can't. But this makes a leap from "FreeNX removed or reduced the ability to charge twice for solving a problem once" to "developers will be unemployed." That is a spurious leap. The ideal situation, from an economic standpoint, would be for each solution to each problem to be developed once, and the development effort compensated once, freeing the development resource to move on to the next problem. The increased pool of available software labour resources would reduce the time delay businesses incur in solving their information problems, but does not necessarily reduce the time value of solving any given problem the first time. If we begin to approach software development as a temporally-oriented problem solving service, one cannot accurately predict the effect on the wages paid - the economic shift is too great to predict the result on the supply side - but the demand side will be very happy indeed.
We have not yet developed the economic models to make this a practical reality yet, but with FLOSS operating in tension with proprietary software, the economic stage has been set. This is the typical first stage in every major economic advancement - new technology, in this case zero cost reproduction of information, makes new economic models possible. The shift to the implementation of those new economic models must necessarily occur after the technological advancement, and so a period of market inefficiency occurs. It's not a bad thing, any more than Ford's assembly line was bad for Daimler Benz.
I can't help wonder if they used a wide-angle lens in those shots to accentuate the curvature of the horizon.
Definitely a fisheye lens - it's only, what, 40 miles up in that shot, not enough for that much curvature - Earth is ~8000 miles in diameter. I think the reasoning was non-conspiratorial though - they probably just wanted to fit more in the shot.
You should be looking for someone whose view of management is not only compatible with your own desires of being managed, but who also will be a successful manager in the eyes of upper management. They must be sufficiently aware of the dual role they perform, and have rational views of how to perform that role. Most importantly, they should be honest with you about what they intend to do - if they spin you in the interview, they will spin you down the road.
One good question for assessing this:
- What do you see as the role for an IT manager? Wrong Answer 1: To tell the IT employees what upper management has told me needs to be done, when to do it, how to do it, and the amount of time in which it needs to be done. (the wrongness of this should be self evident) Wrong Answer 2: To tell upper management what my employees have told me can be done, when it will get done, how it will be done, and how long it will take. (this may sound right at first, but they are either lying to you to kiss your ass, or they do not understand management) Correct Answer: An IT manager acts as an intermediary between upper management and the IT labour force. He or she should, when talking with upper management, promote the technical solutions presented by the technical experts on the team. He or she should also, when working with the team, promote the value of satisfying the customer by striving to acheive the goals set by upper management. (honest, rational, and compatible with any dedicated employee)
On the compatibility front, one note in response to some of the other postings: You shouldn't see it as a requirement for your manager to have an outside life and understand that you have one also. In this you should seek compatibility with your view of the world. If you like working 80 hour weeks, you should seek a manager who will work 80 hour weeks. There's nothing wrong with being a workaholic, if that's your thing. If that is your thing, you'll want to look for a manager who appreciates workaholism. I say this because I am presently a bachelor workaholic who is working at a company where workaholism is significantly undervalued. In the future I will settle down and start a family, but for now I would be happier working somewhere where 80 hour weeks beget large raises. It is good to be a dedicated family man. It is also good to be a career focused soldier. Each is good in the right context.
A man went to see his new house under construction. As the contractor was showing him around, every few minutes the contractor would walk to a window and shout, "Green side up, Brown side down!" After a few repetitions of this ritual the new homeowner asked what the contractor was doing. "Simple," replied the contractor, "we've got <insert ethnic class here> laying the sod for your new lawn, and I need to keep reminding them to put the green side up."
I imagine Cory and Larry and others like them walking to the window of the burgeoning digital media market and shouting, "Create what your customers want, don't crap on them," then turning with a wink and saying, "We've got corporatists building the digital media infrastructure, I have to keep reminding them how to increase sales in a capitalist society."
Besides, If I've legally bought a CD, I don't see any moral reson that I shouldn't copy it to a computer/MP3 player/other more convenient form, for my own use,
Moreover, and I think more importantly, the artist wants you to do that (though he or she may not realize it). Why? Because if you can derive more enjoyment from the product, you will be willing to pay more for it and buy more of it. In economic terms, by increasing the utility, the demand curve is raised.
Whatever happened to my decentralized net with no single point of failure?
Its still there, and you're using it. The only organizations affected by this are those who chose to use a service that acts as a single point of failure.
You said it brother (and beat me to the punch). This is a clear talking talking point for anyone who is attempting to justify avoiding a monoculture. When you brings up Microsoft, around which revolve a number of good examples of the dangers of monoculture, you risk the debate turning political and will almost certainly be discounted as a Linux/Apple/Unix zealot by at least some in the listening audience. It is very worthwhile to have other examples besides Microsoft and cotton when explaining the risks.
I use Gnome, largely exclusively because of the keyboard bindings offered by Sawfish. I'd like to switch to something lighter - hoping someone here has an opinion (does anyone here have any opinions on anything?):
Features I would need to switch: - Real windows (including overlapping) - maximize/restore toggle from the keyboard - at least 8 workspaces (2x4) - move directionally between workspaces from the keyboard - move windows directionally between workspaces from the keyboard - launch arbitrarily defined commands from the keyboard (can do this with xbindkeys if necessary, but would prefer native support) - cycle windows from the keyboard - close window from the keyboard - a cpu/mem/swap/network load monitor for the taskbar - a graphical workspace display for the taskbar - taskbar clock - taskbar application launcher - taskbar display of apps in this workspace
Anyone know the thinnest desktop environment that supports those features?
OK, mine is a completely meaningless and vacuous post, but:
it used to be a RadioShack Compaq running WinME,
Sweet Galloping Jeesus! That's like, three of the four horsemen of the apocolypse. The horror. The horror. I'm surprised your Mac didn't flat out refuse to type that string of characters.
what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?
OK, I'm sure this is redundant, but since this is survey like in nature:
All the above, plus price. Mostly the quality of the platform itself, with price second and business practices third.
The big thing is all the little things; forward slash path delimiters, customizability/tunability, the GNU toolkit, services, apt, bash, emacs, keyboard-centricity, etc. You can get some of that by customizing Windows, but it's not the same. Once you get over the initial learning curve, Linux is a vastly more powerful and natural platform.
Price is a big one; TCO doesn't matter to me - when I ran windows I spent a ton of time tuning, tweaking, and stabilizing it too. Amount of time is similar, and it's a hobby. So with TCO out of the way, the only deciding factor is retail price, and since I choose not to infringe copyrights, it would be a big hit to buy Windows, MS Office, Photoshop, something like POVRay, something that could hold a candle to Emacs, etc.
Business practices-wise, I'm a software engineer. Microsoft is continously taking a big steaming dump on the industry in which I earn a living. I can't in good conscience give them money for their software (though I do buy their keyboards - a good product in a competitive market).
"institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth.
As others have pointed out, the OSDL already deals with the truth thing. What we need is some hardcore rhetoric, spin, and bullshit artists. We're facing an enemy armed with real guns and real bullets. Choosing to fight them with swords because swords are more gentlemanly is dangerous.
I see lots of answers regarding caps use in non-programming fields, but didn't notice any mentioning the use in programming. I do my constants in most languages using all caps underscore delimited, and SQL fields (and sometimes tables) the same way. Case is a nice visual cue in code for representing metadata about the symbol.
So who is going to step forward and write a book, of researched FACTS to counteract this work of FICTION?
Facts? Facts? Have you gone daft?!? What this situation calls for is not facts. What we need is truckloads of corporate grade bullshit. While I believe the last thing we should do is attempt to directly refute anything Ken Brown has said (that's a land war in Asia), we should be creating vacuous Powerpoint presentations (OpenOffice exports quite nicely to that format) backed by acres of specious logical fallacies showing exactly why Open Source will bring about the second coming of the 1950's.
Emotionally, I agree with you - I'm a computer scientist, perhaps like yourself, and like most of the people here. Granted, we are concerned with the rational processing and presentation of information, and the facts certainly are vastly in support of the economic benefits of FLOSS. But consider our target audience - rational people have small place in the US government. If this were India and we had an economist as a Prime Minister, maybe, but here? Facts are the last thing we need.
I've just finished reading the piece and can only conclude one thing:
Arguing with this guy is completely pointless. He is constantly mixing the legal protections afforded by copyright, trademark, trade dress, and patent. He bounces off every logical fallacy in the book. It's like the open letter wars with SCO, but with a guy who is clearly far more versed in rhetoric.
There is only one clear response to this in my opinion; force him to address the real issue. Point blank: What code are you alleging has been infringed, and by what code in the Linux kernel? The entire history of the Linux kernel is available for public review - if he is going to make slanderous accusations about Linus, he had better be ready to back them up in court.
Samizdat concludes that the root of attribution, IP misappropriation, and acknowledgement problems in Linux is ---in fact--- the trust model. Basically, Torvalds and other Linux advocates are admitting to using a 'three monkeys' policy for software development: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Specifically, Torvalds and the Linux kernel management team accept blind source code contributions. Then, they ask for a certification. But the certification does not hold the contributor, the Linux community, or Torvalds legally accountable. Nor does it guarantee that the source is produced in a 'clean room'.
How does this differ from proprietary software development? Is he suggesting that proprietary software development organizations audit their code against the entire body of code created throughout history? There is nothing in the FLOSS model that increases the likelihood that proprietary code will be incorporated when compared to proprietary development.
Are Linux Today's readers too stupid to think for themselves?
Are you too stupid to understand the value of collective action?
People long ago realized that the best way to run a battle group was a hierarchical structure with each level seeing the levels above it acting as a collective unit. Later, businesses adopted the same strategy with manegment acting as a collective unit. Most recently, labour has adopted the same strategy of acting as a collective unit.
Collective action is as old as the concept of the tribe, and it is one of the best ways (in many cases the only way) for like-minded individuals to get things done.
I code Java for a living and couldn't agree more. I've only been doing software development for about eight years now, and I'm really beginning to feel that I made a mistake by concentrating too much on Java, for exactly the reasons this guy lists.
While we're getting the credentials out of the way, I started coding in 1979. I've written commercial code in a lot of languages, from C to LISP to Python (just to name a few that cover a good chunk of the spectrum of language types).
The problem with Java on the client is that you depend on the end-user to have things set up 'correctly' on their end. In our case, these are lawyers and accountants and other assorted people who could care less about computers. So if you discover that Java 1.3.1_06 and below has a fatal bug in the networking code, you have to write a workaround for that, since it is untenable to ask your customers to install a new JVM
I'm presently employed on a cross-platform Java application. We have synchronized deployments to 3500 client machines that have to occur over a single weekend, and travel via our WAN to roughly 40 states plus Europe and Asia. The clients know not and care not how the application works. We ship a new JRE with roughly 20% of our deployments. Our application is currently deployed to Linux (client and server), Windows (client side only), and Solaris (server side only).
How is this practical? Our application is over a million lines - the JRE isn't the largest part of the deployment. In enterprise deployments to a heterogenous environment, the key factor is not the size of the JRE, it is the things that really affect the bottom line - maintainability, platform neutrality, performance (yes, performance - Swing is within 10% of C when written properly), etc. I'm not saying Java is head and shoulders above all competitors in these areas, but it is certainly a decent match against the best of them. Every language has it's ideal areas - for my money (and having solved the problem with a number of technology sets), enterprise scale GUI client/server apps is one area where Java is well suited, as are some other languages.
It's a toolkit. If you're having troubles with Java, try some other languages - you may find that others are more suited to your development style or your deployment environment. Java is not a bad language because the JRE is over 10 megs any more than an airplane is a bad form of transportation because it requires an airstrip. The right tool for the job is the key.
(and somewhat tongue-in-cheek)... Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies,
I think you may have missed some of the article, or you are injecting your own moralism into the discussion. The author makes it very clear that he's talking about the actual dollar value that people place on their own risk of death. He arrives at this number based on research related to the amount of money people will forego to reduce their risk of death. He also makes it clear that moral humanists (who place an additional, incalculable value on life) will wildly disagree. Economists are a peculiar bunch - I know, because I am one (armchair variety) - we genuinely do believe that all government activity can and should be reduced to simple economic equations.
He does make one mistake though - he implicitly asserts that a willingness to spend one dollar to avoid a one in ten million risk of death equates to a human valuing their own life at $10,000,000. I think this misses some psychology; humans are generally optimistic about risk. I think it might be the case that the same person would forego more than $5,000,000 to avoid a one in two chance of death. This must be considered since the death penalty, once executed, has a one in one chance of causing death (though arguably he takes this into account by valuing the vermiscripter at one hundred million).
that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares,
An ethnic minority person walks into an ethnic majority bar and orders a beer. The ethnic majority guy next to him says, "we don't like your kind around here." Words are exchanged, and the ethnic minority guy pulls out a knife. The ethnic majority guy pulls out a gun and shoots him. Ethnic majority guy turns to the bartender and says, "just like an ethnic slur to bring a knife to a gun fight."
So what should you do when the enemy is both more powerful and unethical? Most business people don't grasp (or care about) the long run benefits of open source software. If they don't see the open source equivalent as being better - and let me stress, they have to see it as being better, regardless of whether it is better - if they don't see it as a better product, they're not going to use it. If they're reading the trades, the open source people should be promoting their products there by all means necessary. Anonymous? Do you think Microsoft's shills on this site are adding disclaimers? This isn't pattycake, this is business. This is war. If you can't handle it, at least stay out of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Under the provision, Japanese makers would be unable to sue Microsoft even if the software giant's technologies are deemed to violate their patents
Is this the same Microsoft that claims that Open Source software destroys intellectual property?
but this country does have a history of curtailing civil rights during a wartime footing.
This is the key, I think, to the growing schism between conservative Republicans and the current administration. Conservative Republicans traditionally believe in small government except in time of war. In the current administration, it seems that in order to achieve their big government goals, they must keep the country on a permanent wartime footing. These pseudo conservatives or neo-conservatives have tried this in the past with "the war on <insert populist bad thing here>," but the war on terrorism is the first one with a sufficiently stark case-in-point to turn even traditional conservatives into supporters of long-term big government agendas.
This leads me to the question I posed to my brother last weekend, "Who should I, as a moderate conservative, vote for?" He did not have an answer as he is in the same quandary. The Republican party has abandoned me.
As an aside, I wonder where Charlton Heston stands. I'm assuming that any politician who supports tracking citizens' reading history must also support tracking citizens' gun ownership history.
airport (which the taxicab and limo groups fight tooth and nail)
You know, this would be a lot more palatable if the taxi and limo services provided remotely acceptable service. When I'm landing in Vegas I don't give a crap about the $10 - $20 for the cab fare - what I hate is standing in a line of 3,000 people for 45 minutes waiting for a cab. In fact, if there were a line for the cheap monorail and little or no line for the cabs, I would still gladly take the cabs - I'm on my way to meet friends from other cities and I already know I'm going to lose money.
Everyone arrives in Vegas on Friday at 7 PM. The Vegas taxi queue is an impressive one, with 20 or 30 stands, but it's still entirely inadequate. When moving large volumes of people from one fixed point to another fixed point (airport/strip), it's worthwhile looking into systems designed to transit people in mass numbers.
I happen to drive a car with an EPA sticker of 21 city 25 highway (all figures in miles per gallon). I've driven the car for 47000 miles and the lowest I've ever seen is 23 and some change; the highest, 36.3
1995 Ford Escort absolute base model (actually, I got floormats). My figures are surprisingly similar to yours. When I did a lap of the country (US) I was hitting high 30's the entire way. I drive very aggressively (well, as aggressively as one can with less than 100 ponies, haha), and consistently get high 20s to low 30s. EPA estimates are 23/28. I use high octane and synthetic oil (90,000 miles and I expect another 90,000), which may be part of it.
Yeah, people laugh at my car, but the only time it had a signifcant problem was when I hit a deer on the freeway. Even then I managed to limp to the repair shop ($3,000 worth of damage). Consumer Reports gave it their best rating for maintenance costs.
in contrast to the GPL, which obligates developers to make their modifications available to the public.
Once again for the slow learners among us: The GPL does not obligate you to make your modifications available to the public. The GPL only requires you to make the source code available to anyone to whom you provide a copy of the derivative work. If, for example, you modify GNU Emacs for your personal use, you do not have to publish your work.
The Republican Party has figured out that they can buy votes from the uneducated. After the last election, Bush handed out $300 Treasury checks left and right after telling people throughout the campaign that it was their money due (to the budget surplus). He never discussed the national debt or the fact that over 25% of all federal taxes collected pay interest on that debt. He never suggested paying down that debt first and then cutting taxes after it was paid down.
I was brought up to believe that the Republican party was the party of fiscal conservancy (maintaining a balanced budget). I believe fiscal conservancy is a good thing - one of the most important elements in the long run health of the economy. As such, for a long time I was a staunch Republican.
I am still a strong fiscal conservative, and the deficit records over the past 25 years were disturbing to me - it felt like the Republican party had abandoned its fiscal conservancy. But I wasn't sure, so I did an analysis. The troubling fact is that the Republican party no longer appears to support fiscal conservancy as a party policy.
I believe Reagan's first term liberal fiscal policy was the correct response to runaway inflation and unemployment, and the economy did stabilize. But it seems like they forgot that after taking such strong corrective action, you have to reign it in. In 1983 or 1984, when the economy started surging ahead, he should have nailed down a few years of surplus to pay for the party. They are no longer the party of fiscal conservancy.
I feel abandoned, because neither party now clearly supports fiscal conservancy, and yet it is one of the most important issues to me. John McCain is a fiscal conservative, and a Republican. Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, and a Democrat. Neither seems to be representative of the heart of his party. Kerry doesn't seem much of a fiscal conservative, and Bush is way off the deep end of fiscal liberalism.
The worst part is that I fear most Americans don't even know what fiscal conservative means. I fear most think, "Higher taxes and lower spending? That's bad!" I'd vote for anyone who said he or she plans to raise taxes and lower spending.
For instance, Michael Moore has consistently insisted that at least a significant portion of his film is satire and not meant to be taken seriously,
Could you provide a link to an interview that supports this statement?
But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work
... Why is this a good thing?
If I understand correctly, (s)he only took their Free work. The core of the NoMachine product is GPL.
and made it available for free
Speaking strictly from a capitalist standpoint, it is good because it reduces the cost to businesses that wish to use this technology. Similarly, the freeness of HTTP software (client and server) has been a great boon to corporations that wish to provide easy access to information about their product lines. This has in turn lead to consumers making more informed decisions, which is one of the keystones of free market capitalism. (that's just the good part, in response to your question, see below for a look at the bad part)
even giving it a similar name.
The similarity in the name is the "NX" part. I believe NX is a Free protocol. This is much like referring to both Sendmail and Postfix as SMTP engines.
If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free
Very well said. This statemtnt (which clearly supports FLOSS) seems to be in contrast to the rest of your post.
which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.
All competition has this effect, whether from proprietary or Free sources. Are Chevrolet and Ford evil because they caused Yugo to go out of business?
How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed?
They can't. But this makes a leap from "FreeNX removed or reduced the ability to charge twice for solving a problem once" to "developers will be unemployed." That is a spurious leap. The ideal situation, from an economic standpoint, would be for each solution to each problem to be developed once, and the development effort compensated once, freeing the development resource to move on to the next problem. The increased pool of available software labour resources would reduce the time delay businesses incur in solving their information problems, but does not necessarily reduce the time value of solving any given problem the first time. If we begin to approach software development as a temporally-oriented problem solving service, one cannot accurately predict the effect on the wages paid - the economic shift is too great to predict the result on the supply side - but the demand side will be very happy indeed.
We have not yet developed the economic models to make this a practical reality yet, but with FLOSS operating in tension with proprietary software, the economic stage has been set. This is the typical first stage in every major economic advancement - new technology, in this case zero cost reproduction of information, makes new economic models possible. The shift to the implementation of those new economic models must necessarily occur after the technological advancement, and so a period of market inefficiency occurs. It's not a bad thing, any more than Ford's assembly line was bad for Daimler Benz.
I can't help wonder if they used a wide-angle lens in those shots to accentuate the curvature of the horizon.
Definitely a fisheye lens - it's only, what, 40 miles up in that shot, not enough for that much curvature - Earth is ~8000 miles in diameter. I think the reasoning was non-conspiratorial though - they probably just wanted to fit more in the shot.
You should be looking for someone whose view of management is not only compatible with your own desires of being managed, but who also will be a successful manager in the eyes of upper management. They must be sufficiently aware of the dual role they perform, and have rational views of how to perform that role. Most importantly, they should be honest with you about what they intend to do - if they spin you in the interview, they will spin you down the road.
One good question for assessing this:
- What do you see as the role for an IT manager?
Wrong Answer 1: To tell the IT employees what upper management has told me needs to be done, when to do it, how to do it, and the amount of time in which it needs to be done. (the wrongness of this should be self evident)
Wrong Answer 2: To tell upper management what my employees have told me can be done, when it will get done, how it will be done, and how long it will take. (this may sound right at first, but they are either lying to you to kiss your ass, or they do not understand management)
Correct Answer: An IT manager acts as an intermediary between upper management and the IT labour force. He or she should, when talking with upper management, promote the technical solutions presented by the technical experts on the team. He or she should also, when working with the team, promote the value of satisfying the customer by striving to acheive the goals set by upper management. (honest, rational, and compatible with any dedicated employee)
On the compatibility front, one note in response to some of the other postings: You shouldn't see it as a requirement for your manager to have an outside life and understand that you have one also. In this you should seek compatibility with your view of the world. If you like working 80 hour weeks, you should seek a manager who will work 80 hour weeks. There's nothing wrong with being a workaholic, if that's your thing. If that is your thing, you'll want to look for a manager who appreciates workaholism. I say this because I am presently a bachelor workaholic who is working at a company where workaholism is significantly undervalued. In the future I will settle down and start a family, but for now I would be happier working somewhere where 80 hour weeks beget large raises. It is good to be a dedicated family man. It is also good to be a career focused soldier. Each is good in the right context.
This whole situation reminds me of a joke:
A man went to see his new house under construction. As the contractor was showing him around, every few minutes the contractor would walk to a window and shout, "Green side up, Brown side down!" After a few repetitions of this ritual the new homeowner asked what the contractor was doing. "Simple," replied the contractor, "we've got <insert ethnic class here> laying the sod for your new lawn, and I need to keep reminding them to put the green side up."
I imagine Cory and Larry and others like them walking to the window of the burgeoning digital media market and shouting, "Create what your customers want, don't crap on them," then turning with a wink and saying, "We've got corporatists building the digital media infrastructure, I have to keep reminding them how to increase sales in a capitalist society."
Besides, If I've legally bought a CD, I don't see any moral reson that I shouldn't copy it to a computer/MP3 player/other more convenient form, for my own use,
Moreover, and I think more importantly, the artist wants you to do that (though he or she may not realize it). Why? Because if you can derive more enjoyment from the product, you will be willing to pay more for it and buy more of it. In economic terms, by increasing the utility, the demand curve is raised.
Whatever happened to my decentralized net with no single point of failure?
Its still there, and you're using it. The only organizations affected by this are those who chose to use a service that acts as a single point of failure.
You said it brother (and beat me to the punch). This is a clear talking talking point for anyone who is attempting to justify avoiding a monoculture. When you brings up Microsoft, around which revolve a number of good examples of the dangers of monoculture, you risk the debate turning political and will almost certainly be discounted as a Linux/Apple/Unix zealot by at least some in the listening audience. It is very worthwhile to have other examples besides Microsoft and cotton when explaining the risks.
I use Gnome, largely exclusively because of the keyboard bindings offered by Sawfish. I'd like to switch to something lighter - hoping someone here has an opinion (does anyone here have any opinions on anything?):
Features I would need to switch:
- Real windows (including overlapping)
- maximize/restore toggle from the keyboard
- at least 8 workspaces (2x4)
- move directionally between workspaces from the keyboard
- move windows directionally between workspaces from the keyboard
- launch arbitrarily defined commands from the keyboard (can do this with xbindkeys if necessary, but would prefer native support)
- cycle windows from the keyboard
- close window from the keyboard
- a cpu/mem/swap/network load monitor for the taskbar
- a graphical workspace display for the taskbar
- taskbar clock
- taskbar application launcher
- taskbar display of apps in this workspace
Anyone know the thinnest desktop environment that supports those features?
OK, mine is a completely meaningless and vacuous post, but:
it used to be a RadioShack Compaq running WinME,
Sweet Galloping Jeesus! That's like, three of the four horsemen of the apocolypse. The horror. The horror. I'm surprised your Mac didn't flat out refuse to type that string of characters.
what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?
OK, I'm sure this is redundant, but since this is survey like in nature:
All the above, plus price. Mostly the quality of the platform itself, with price second and business practices third.
The big thing is all the little things; forward slash path delimiters, customizability/tunability, the GNU toolkit, services, apt, bash, emacs, keyboard-centricity, etc. You can get some of that by customizing Windows, but it's not the same. Once you get over the initial learning curve, Linux is a vastly more powerful and natural platform.
Price is a big one; TCO doesn't matter to me - when I ran windows I spent a ton of time tuning, tweaking, and stabilizing it too. Amount of time is similar, and it's a hobby. So with TCO out of the way, the only deciding factor is retail price, and since I choose not to infringe copyrights, it would be a big hit to buy Windows, MS Office, Photoshop, something like POVRay, something that could hold a candle to Emacs, etc.
Business practices-wise, I'm a software engineer. Microsoft is continously taking a big steaming dump on the industry in which I earn a living. I can't in good conscience give them money for their software (though I do buy their keyboards - a good product in a competitive market).
"institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth.
As others have pointed out, the OSDL already deals with the truth thing. What we need is some hardcore rhetoric, spin, and bullshit artists. We're facing an enemy armed with real guns and real bullets. Choosing to fight them with swords because swords are more gentlemanly is dangerous.
I see lots of answers regarding caps use in non-programming fields, but didn't notice any mentioning the use in programming. I do my constants in most languages using all caps underscore delimited, and SQL fields (and sometimes tables) the same way. Case is a nice visual cue in code for representing metadata about the symbol.
So who is going to step forward and write a book, of researched FACTS to counteract this work of FICTION?
Facts? Facts? Have you gone daft?!? What this situation calls for is not facts. What we need is truckloads of corporate grade bullshit. While I believe the last thing we should do is attempt to directly refute anything Ken Brown has said (that's a land war in Asia), we should be creating vacuous Powerpoint presentations (OpenOffice exports quite nicely to that format) backed by acres of specious logical fallacies showing exactly why Open Source will bring about the second coming of the 1950's.
Emotionally, I agree with you - I'm a computer scientist, perhaps like yourself, and like most of the people here. Granted, we are concerned with the rational processing and presentation of information, and the facts certainly are vastly in support of the economic benefits of FLOSS. But consider our target audience - rational people have small place in the US government. If this were India and we had an economist as a Prime Minister, maybe, but here? Facts are the last thing we need.
I've just finished reading the piece and can only conclude one thing:
Arguing with this guy is completely pointless. He is constantly mixing the legal protections afforded by copyright, trademark, trade dress, and patent. He bounces off every logical fallacy in the book. It's like the open letter wars with SCO, but with a guy who is clearly far more versed in rhetoric.
There is only one clear response to this in my opinion; force him to address the real issue. Point blank: What code are you alleging has been infringed, and by what code in the Linux kernel? The entire history of the Linux kernel is available for public review - if he is going to make slanderous accusations about Linus, he had better be ready to back them up in court.
Samizdat concludes that the root of attribution, IP misappropriation, and acknowledgement problems in Linux is ---in fact--- the trust model. Basically, Torvalds and other Linux advocates are admitting to using a 'three monkeys' policy for software development: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Specifically, Torvalds and the Linux kernel management team accept blind source code contributions. Then, they ask for a certification. But the certification does not hold the contributor, the Linux community, or Torvalds legally accountable. Nor does it guarantee that the source is produced in a 'clean room'.
How does this differ from proprietary software development? Is he suggesting that proprietary software development organizations audit their code against the entire body of code created throughout history? There is nothing in the FLOSS model that increases the likelihood that proprietary code will be incorporated when compared to proprietary development.
Are Linux Today's readers too stupid to think for themselves?
Are you too stupid to understand the value of collective action?
People long ago realized that the best way to run a battle group was a hierarchical structure with each level seeing the levels above it acting as a collective unit. Later, businesses adopted the same strategy with manegment acting as a collective unit. Most recently, labour has adopted the same strategy of acting as a collective unit.
Collective action is as old as the concept of the tribe, and it is one of the best ways (in many cases the only way) for like-minded individuals to get things done.
I code Java for a living and couldn't agree more. I've only been doing software development for about eight years now, and I'm really beginning to feel that I made a mistake by concentrating too much on Java, for exactly the reasons this guy lists.
While we're getting the credentials out of the way, I started coding in 1979. I've written commercial code in a lot of languages, from C to LISP to Python (just to name a few that cover a good chunk of the spectrum of language types).
The problem with Java on the client is that you depend on the end-user to have things set up 'correctly' on their end. In our case, these are lawyers and accountants and other assorted people who could care less about computers. So if you discover that Java 1.3.1_06 and below has a fatal bug in the networking code, you have to write a workaround for that, since it is untenable to ask your customers to install a new JVM
I'm presently employed on a cross-platform Java application. We have synchronized deployments to 3500 client machines that have to occur over a single weekend, and travel via our WAN to roughly 40 states plus Europe and Asia. The clients know not and care not how the application works. We ship a new JRE with roughly 20% of our deployments. Our application is currently deployed to Linux (client and server), Windows (client side only), and Solaris (server side only).
How is this practical? Our application is over a million lines - the JRE isn't the largest part of the deployment. In enterprise deployments to a heterogenous environment, the key factor is not the size of the JRE, it is the things that really affect the bottom line - maintainability, platform neutrality, performance (yes, performance - Swing is within 10% of C when written properly), etc. I'm not saying Java is head and shoulders above all competitors in these areas, but it is certainly a decent match against the best of them. Every language has it's ideal areas - for my money (and having solved the problem with a number of technology sets), enterprise scale GUI client/server apps is one area where Java is well suited, as are some other languages.
It's a toolkit. If you're having troubles with Java, try some other languages - you may find that others are more suited to your development style or your deployment environment. Java is not a bad language because the JRE is over 10 megs any more than an airplane is a bad form of transportation because it requires an airstrip. The right tool for the job is the key.
(and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) ... Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies,
I think you may have missed some of the article, or you are injecting your own moralism into the discussion. The author makes it very clear that he's talking about the actual dollar value that people place on their own risk of death. He arrives at this number based on research related to the amount of money people will forego to reduce their risk of death. He also makes it clear that moral humanists (who place an additional, incalculable value on life) will wildly disagree. Economists are a peculiar bunch - I know, because I am one (armchair variety) - we genuinely do believe that all government activity can and should be reduced to simple economic equations.
He does make one mistake though - he implicitly asserts that a willingness to spend one dollar to avoid a one in ten million risk of death equates to a human valuing their own life at $10,000,000. I think this misses some psychology; humans are generally optimistic about risk. I think it might be the case that the same person would forego more than $5,000,000 to avoid a one in two chance of death. This must be considered since the death penalty, once executed, has a one in one chance of causing death (though arguably he takes this into account by valuing the vermiscripter at one hundred million).
that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares,
An ethnic minority person walks into an ethnic majority bar and orders a beer. The ethnic majority guy next to him says, "we don't like your kind around here." Words are exchanged, and the ethnic minority guy pulls out a knife. The ethnic majority guy pulls out a gun and shoots him. Ethnic majority guy turns to the bartender and says, "just like an ethnic slur to bring a knife to a gun fight."
So what should you do when the enemy is both more powerful and unethical? Most business people don't grasp (or care about) the long run benefits of open source software. If they don't see the open source equivalent as being better - and let me stress, they have to see it as being better, regardless of whether it is better - if they don't see it as a better product, they're not going to use it. If they're reading the trades, the open source people should be promoting their products there by all means necessary. Anonymous? Do you think Microsoft's shills on this site are adding disclaimers? This isn't pattycake, this is business. This is war. If you can't handle it, at least stay out of the way.