I just felt the need to point out that not all of us yanks are morons, and I for one found your post to be quite funny. And simultaneously insightful, as it skillfully points out that one group's traitor is often another group's hero.
Someday these CEOs may be lauded as heroic global citizens who were able to look past the myopia of the little clumps of dirt on which they were born and provide opportunities to the underpriviledged in India, China, and other parts of the underdeveloped world.
But for now, and especially during a presidential election year, they're just traitorous, greedy scumbags who are giving "our" jobs away to damn furriners.
You're right, I must plead mea culpa, it turns out that, in the January 2002 case that I was thinking of when I wrote the above message ( here and here), the guy who killed four people while driving drunk the wrong way on I-40 had only 9 drunk driving arrests, not 10. I guess that makes me full of shit.
This guy should have been locked up for years long before he killed four people, not after. It's a clear sign that, despite all the talk, the criminal justice system still doesn't take drunk driving seriously in New Mexico. Their solution is to punish the innocent because they don't have the balls to punish the guilty.
This is a bunch of baloney. In New Mexico, there are plenty of people who kill innocent bystanders while drunk driving who have TEN PREVIOUS DUI CONVICTIONS!!!. What the heck is a person with 10 DUI convictions doing out on the streets, let alone driving?
The problem is that the courts and the legislature are too wimpy to punish the guilty by throwing them in jail, so instead the legislature is trying to punish the innocent by making them all pay an extra couple of hundred dollars for their car, wait an extra 30 seconds every time they drive, and make them all guilty-until-proven-innocent.
This is an excellent example of how easy it is to dupe the public into believing something that is not entirely factual. It also drives home the importance of our taking what we hear on radio/TV and what we read in the newspapers with a very big grain of salt.
Exactly. Sort of like making the audience that believe that they're about to read an article about Clear Channel making up facts for local news broadcasts, only to find a link to an article about some guy who likes to vacation in Florida for a few weeks a year.
This just in: Bruce Perens has decided that UserLinux will be built on top of Microsoft Windows instead of using the traditional Linux kernel. Perens, famed founder and leader of the Debian project, said yesterday: "Just like Qt, the Linux kernel is released under a GPL license, which requires developers modifying it to release their source code under the GPL. This prevents commercial solution developers from creating closed-source, proprietery kernel modifications, which would inhibit the adoption of UserLinux."
Perens reportedly approached Linux founder Linus Torvalds to request that he change the Linux kernel license from GPL to LGPL, in order to be more consistent with the GNOME license. Mr. Torvalds apparently refused, at which time Perens managed to negotiate favorable kernel licensing terms from Microsoft.
Mr. Perens had no comment in response to the claim by a spokesperson for TrollTech, the Norway-based company that develops Qt, that their code was actually "freer than Linux", since unlike the Linux kernel, developers can choose to license thier applications under either the GPL or TrollTech's proprietary license that allows close-source development.
What the author claims as a weakness is actually a strength. Qt/UNIX is distributed under the GPL, which means that it can be used for free software development with the same freedom and same restrictions as any other GPL'd software library. However, if you can't comply with the terms of the GPL (because you are doing proprietary, closed software development) then with a normal GPL'd library you'd be SOL, but TrollTech gives you the option to pay them some money and obtain Qt under a commercial license.
This gives Qt a huge *advantage* over over the other libaries. By having its "business-oriented web site", it suckers thousands of large corporations into paying $2000 each for a Qt license. TrollTech uses this money to support the further development and improvement of Qt, which benefits both the commercial licensees and the free software, GPL users. Sure, they probably line their own pockets with some of the money, but no more than owners of RedHat, Debian, etc. Other libraries depend on volunteers performing intermittent maintenance and development, while Qt has an ever-increasing staff of paid developers. + My small company uses Qt for both free software development and proprietary software development, and we consider the $20K or so that we've sent to TrollTech to be money well spent!
neither does Japan, and possibly other Asian countries, although I do not know which ones in particular. Japan has traditionally used CCYY-MM-DD. Actually Japan has "traditionally" used, and still often uses, "[Emperor name] [year of emperor's reign]" as their common date format. You can't describe future dates without guessing how long the emperor will live, and you have to know how many years each emperor lived in order to count back very far. To further complicate things, the year that an emperor dies has two descriptions, e.g. Showa 64 is the same as Heisei 1.
They've probably started adopting the YYYY-MM-DD because that's the ISO 8601 international standard date format. I'd encourage everyone to get into the habit of using it. It sorts nicely, it's language independent, and there is less opportunity for ambiguity. When you see "03/04/02" you have to wonder whether it's American or European, but "2003-04-02" can only mean 2 April 2003. Ok, I suppose some total idiot could think it was 4 February 2003, but that would be as wholly illogical as the common American date format of MM/DD/YY.
Heh. Back in high school we all had TI-83's. You can do a lot with 28k and BASIC given...
You think you had it bad with a TI-83? We would 'ave dreamed of having a TI-83! Our school had just one computer with only one bit of memory, and the only operation it could perform was XOR. We had to pass it around the class and hope that no one set the bit before it got to us!
We had to carve the stone input decks with our bare hands, then to reboot we'd have to stick the computer into a 240Volt socket and close the connection with our bare tongues!
But you tell that to kids these days, and they won't believe you.
No, an important point of the 2-page memo was that DoD is required to respect the copyright laws. They cannot use a security clearance to "override" the GPL.
If they use GPL'ed code, they must obey the license restrictions of the GPL, which means that they must provide source code to anyone to whom they provide executables. Of course, if the code is classified, then presumably they will only provide the binaries to folks with the appropriate security clearance. The GPL, and this memo, says that they must provide the source code to those peoeple as well.
Calm down, people. There is no plan for long-term occupation of the moon, and we have no aim to take the moon's water. After we liberate the water, we will put in place a system that allows the water to flow where it wants to flow instead of where some dictatorial rock wants it to flow. Then we will withdraw.
a little problem there, on moon the acceleration due to gravity is about six times less. so on the whole the dust will settle slower. atmospheric impedence is very small compared to the acceleration due to gravity unless there are heavy winds.
This is wrong. Do the math. It's simple high school physics.
In the absense of atmosphere on earth, everything would fall according to the equation d = 1/2 g t^2, where g is 9.8 meter/sec^2. So dust reaching a height of 5 meters would settle to the earth in almost exactly 1 second. (Simple arithmetic, verify it yourself.) Go outside and play in the dirt, I'd say that in the presense of atmosphere dust takes much, much longer that 1 second to settle.
On the moon the same equation applies but g = 1.6 meter/sec^2 (about 1/6 the force of gravity on earth.) So dust reaching a height of 5 meters would settle in about 2.5 seconds.
In fact dust reaching heights of 500 meters would settle in about 25 seconds, whereas on earth due to the atmosphere dust reaching such heights would probably linger in the air for hours.
why do we have to keep coming up with new operating systems for these things?
Here's one possible reason, quoting from the article:
Mobile e-mail ($7.50/mo.), AOL Instant Messaging ($5/mo.), two-way messaging ($7.50/mo.), and Address Book ($5/mo.)
If they used a normal operating system like Palm OS or WinCE, you'd be able to download software for simple stuff like email and address books. By locking you into their new operating system, you have to buy their overpriced "services."
This is a fiction from Hollywood. For example, the commanders of a nuclear submarine can launch their nuclear weapons whenever they want to. It has to be this way. Otherwise disabling the American nuclear arsenal would be as easy as killing the handful of people who have the codes, or even just blocking their communications.
Er, no, there really are launch codes, generally requiring two-person control at the launch site plus Presidential authorization, with redundant communications methods and backups of the codes and designated alternates in case the President was killed. According to this: Only the president can authorize a nuclear weapons launch. His encrypted authorization will arrive at the submarine by secure radio. Sealed authenticators which are kept under continuous two-man control ensure the message's authenticity.
The U.S. sometimes postured as if it had a launch-on-launch policy, i.e. the U.S. would launch as soon as it detected that the Russians had launched their missiles, in order to maximize deterrence. But in reality that would be exceedingly dangerous, so instead we built up a huge arsenel so that we could be sure of having plenty of weapons left to retaliate even after a Russian strike. While the actual SIOP (Single Intergrated Operation Plan) is classified so we may never know, most people think we really had a "launch on impact" policy - we wouldn't launch until we started seeing mushroom clouds over U.S. cities.
I use FastMail and have been very happy with them, they're still small enough that you can contact the developers directly and they respond promptly. I use SSL IMAP but they support SSL for POP as well.
Ah, but does the book talk about my favorite SSH client, Top Gun ssh for PalmOS? It lets me configure a UNIX server from a palm-enabled cell phone while lying on the beach!
Admittedly using vi with Graffiti is a bit of a challenge...
It's irrelevant to rant about who should own the software, you or the business owner. It's been said that in business you get what you negotiate, and if it's important to you that the code be open source, and if your client is a small business owner with no interest in selling the software in the future, then I'm sure you will be able to negotiate with him very successfully.
The tactic to use is to tell him that it will be easier for you to write this software, and therefore less costly to him, if you can use GPL'ed component libraries in the software, and that the GPL requires that the resulting software must also be licensed under the GPL. Point out to him that this means that he will get all of the project source code, even the source code to component libraries, and that he will be free to hire anyone at all in the future to maintain, modify, or update the software - he won't be "locked in" to you or anyone else, as sometimes happens with vendor-proprietary software.
If he balks at the idea of releasing to others for free the source code that he will have paid to develop, point out that he is benefitting from thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have already done the same thing - paid money or contributed their own valuable time to develop tools and components that they have given away for free.
And you can point out the possibility (although it's admittedly remote) that if the software turns out to be generally useful to others, the open source software community might take the software, modify it to suit their needs, and release the modifications for free, so he might benefit by getting free improvements to the software in the future.
Again, in terms of answering the poster's questions, the issue is not whether the above points are valid, but whether the above points are likely to convince the business owner that GPL'ing the software is in his best interest.
Spammers aren't smart, but they're probably smart enough to strip the ".gov" addresses before they fire up the spam blasters.
Maybe some are, but plenty of them are not. I've received a fair amount of spam at my "af.mil" account. A short note to the owner of the spamming domain or advertised service, including some mumbling about misuse of federal government computer systems constituting a federal crime, usually shuts them up, without even needing to point out the fact that they're sending spam to an organization with precision GPS-guided munitions!
I've been doing something like this for about 2 years now. In fact, since I own my own domain, I make up a new email address for every company that I sign up with, so I can know exactly who sold my email address or gave it to one of their "partners" without my permission. For example, if my domain is example.com and I'm signing up for some account at potentialspammer.com, I sign up with the email address cppotentialspammer@example.com (my initials are "cp".) I do this whenever I buy something online, register at a site, etc.
When I first started this, I thought I'd "catch" a huge number of companies selling or using my email address without their permission. But what I've noticed over time is that I almost never receive any spam at these addresses. That is, probably 95-99% of the companies that I've signed up with have respected my preferences and have not sold or spammed my email address. Nearly all the spam that I receive (and I get a lot, though switching to the fastmail IMAP mail service has cut my spam significantly) is sent to:
an old address that I used 10 years ago to post on usenet
the address that I used when registering my domain
I think it's somewhat heartening that most companies that I have any real business or interaction with have properly protected my email address, the spam seems to come almost entirely from various types of harvesters.
All this discussion about whether UFOs or ESP might actually exist despite the lack of scientific evidence, about whether the poll is biased and anti-religious, about whether the answers to the poll are indeed "right", misses the main point about science.
Observations in science must follow the scientific method. Hypotheses must be testable, and verifiable or falsifiable. Hypotheses like "there is an invisible, ethereal, undetectable dragon in my garage," or "ESP exists but is fundamentally undetectable in scientific experiments" are not even scientific hypotheses because they're not testable. So believe whatever you want about these things, but they don't belong in the realm of science. Science is not a set of beliefs, but is a method for resolving questions about observable, repeatable phenomena.
Debates about whether there are things that are "true" that can't be proven by science, or whether all things verified by science are "true", are more philosophical debates about the nature of "truth" than they are scientific debates. Science presumes that nature follows rules (even non-intuitive and probablistic rules in cases like quantum physics) and is therefore repeatable, and that these rules can be divined through experimentation and observation. If you don't believe this, it doesn't mean you are wrong (in the sense of philosophical truth) but it does mean that your beliefs are "unscientific."
It is not evident (to me, anyway) that theories about evolution and creation are really even scientific theories, because they're not directly testable, though they are based on scientific understanding of underlying physical processes which are separately testable.
Please explain to me how having to thumb through a manual is bad.
Oh, come on, you took half a sentence out of context and criticized it without even addressing my main point. With Open Source software, you are not at the mercy of some big company to fix the bugs in their software, you can fix them yourself or get a fix from a third party. Yes, "traditional" companies make lots of money by charging for the next update, charging for support to "customize" their software for your needs, etc. They are causing lots of unnecessary work by all parties by hiding their source code and making users guess as to where the problem lies. Is that a "healthy ecosystem" just because some people are getting rich at the expense of others?
Bill Gates isn't really saying anything wrong here. Selling closed-source software has worked, for Microsoft as well as many other companies. Consumers have for the most part benefited, PCs are cheaper and better than they've ever been.
Sure, business has worked for years based on close-source software. And for years users and programmers have had to thumb through thick user's manuals or call the company's support-line paying hundreds of dollars to figure out why the software isn't working the way it should be, and then beg for a patch or a new feature when it turns out that their project fundamentally depends on a library or tool that isn't working properly.
Open Source software suggests that there just might be a better way, and the way to measure the idea's success is not just to look at the number of companies getting rich off the idea - that's only a relevant measure to the people running those companies. Look at the satisfaction of users running Linux or web sites running Apache to see whether the idea of Open Source works.
I tell ya what I would pay a for, the ability to remove the stupid yahoo advertisements from the bottom of my emails (you can pay another 20$ a year to do this via pop3 but it dosen't effect your webmail).
You can do that at FastMail.fm. Sign up for any level of "pay" service and they ditch all the tag lines.
The best thing about it is that you can also use IMAP in addition to POP3! Our ISPs act as if POP3 is the only way to do email, I've only been using the IMAP protocol at FastMail for a couple of months now but I'd never go back to POP3 now! You can set up spam filtering rules and you can "bounce" messages back to any spammers who haven't totally forged all their headers.
I think they do also have a free service that is comparable to Yahoo's old free service - you can use POP3 or the web interface, but you get tag lines added to your messages - but I'm happy paying a few bucks a year for quality email service.
If that $1B allows you to break one key every 5 minutes, over a 4 year period, you can break ~420,000 keys - which works out to a cost of less than $2500 per key. If you can intelligently target who's keys you wish to compromise, the benefits could be significant.
Now here's the scary part. Once they've made the $1B investment to break terrorist encryption, do you really think they'll have 420,000 encrypted messages from terrorists sitting around waiting to be cracked? No, but they're going to have to find something to crack with all those spare CPU cycles to justify their expenditure...
But it does appear that the claims have been exaggerated and that the ability to break 1024-bit encryption is still a long way off.
"checked-in files are seen immediately by all developers"
No...
Well, it sounds like ClearCase has improved since we gave up on it several years ago, but at that time the only way to prevent this seemed to be establishing a private branch. The way we were using it, branches couldn't be set up by developers, only by administrators, and merging branches was an endeavor that was only performed by the designated "merge and build manager" after much coordination. (Though clearmerge was a very handy tool for 3-way merging!) Evidently despite numerous training classes, the ClearCase administrators still didn't get how to use the thing effictively.
I can't understand why you think CVS is better at distributed SCM than Clearcase. How can you justify this? CVS doesn't even have any replication features at all. Period. At my company, we use Clearcase in three countries around the world and replication works just fine.
With ClearCase your working directory is a virtual directory hosted by the ClearCase server. If that server goes down or you lose connectivity to it, you're dead and can do nothing. Period. So in that framework distributed SCM requires replicating the repository and syncing up repositories periodically. (We used to do it automatically every night.) If you wanted to see someone's changes from a remote location immediately, too bad - unless you wanted to log in, generate a repository sync package, ftp it over, and apply their changes to your local repository manually, that is. (Or rather, ask the ClearCase administrator to do it...) I believe you had to temporarily shut down the server to apply synchronization packets to the repository, so synch'ing during the work day was out of the question.
With CVS you can write your code on a laptop on the beach, then connect your cell-phone modem to connect only when you want to checkin or update. So you don't need to replicate the repository to achieve distributed SCM.
My company is one of Rational's biggest competitors, so I wouldn't normally be so supportive of them, but they really did write a kick-ass SCM system in clearcase.
Then I'm sure you know they didn't write it - they bought it!
As someone who has used both CVS and ClearCase extensively, I'd say that this points out one of the major problems with ClearCase: checked-in files are seen immediately by all developers. (This is sometimes touted as an advantage, or even a "feature".)
CVS lets developers update to see other people's changes at their own convenience. But that also means developers need to exercise some discipline to update frequently enough that their code does not remain too far out of sync with the baseline. This, combined with a "checkin early and checkin often" approach, should really minimize the number of conflicts, even for fairly large projects.
I can't imagine the problems that the original poster described ever happening with proper use of CVS, but perhaps there's something in that "developing patch sets" phrase that he hasn't fully explained to us.
Just a couple of other thoughts:
Distributed ClearCase works reasonably (though I wouldn't say well) for projects that have a few interconnected sites, but is not well-suited at all for a project involving many different developers each in a different location. CVS is ideally suited for that type of environment.
CVS really needs a way to move or rename files, and a way to do atomic checkins of multiple files. When will this happen? I know, "sooner, if I help."
No version control system should prevent people from fixing code just because the code "belongs" to someone else, or is "being modified" by someone else. This sort of "coordination" and "planning" obstructs progress more than hinders it.
Although it's possible in theory for an automatic merge to succeed while being semantically incorrect (with either CVS or ClearCase), I've never once seen it happen. If your code is well-written, the dependencies on certain assumptions should be fairly collocated, not spread all over the code where they could get out of sync.
In a large, well-segmented project where the "frequent checkin" policy is used, it is rare indeed that two people even modify the same file at the same time, let alone modify the same lines.
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I just felt the need to point out that not all of us yanks are morons, and I for one found your post to be quite funny. And simultaneously insightful, as it skillfully points out that one group's traitor is often another group's hero.
Someday these CEOs may be lauded as heroic global citizens who were able to look past the myopia of the little clumps of dirt on which they were born and provide opportunities to the underpriviledged in India, China, and other parts of the underdeveloped world.
But for now, and especially during a presidential election year, they're just traitorous, greedy scumbags who are giving "our" jobs away to damn furriners.
You're right, I must plead mea culpa, it turns out that, in the January 2002 case that I was thinking of when I wrote the above message ( here and here), the guy who killed four people while driving drunk the wrong way on I-40 had only 9 drunk driving arrests, not 10. I guess that makes me full of shit.
This guy should have been locked up for years long before he killed four people, not after. It's a clear sign that, despite all the talk, the criminal justice system still doesn't take drunk driving seriously in New Mexico. Their solution is to punish the innocent because they don't have the balls to punish the guilty.
I think my point still stands.
This is a bunch of baloney. In New Mexico, there are plenty of people who kill innocent bystanders while drunk driving who have TEN PREVIOUS DUI CONVICTIONS!!!. What the heck is a person with 10 DUI convictions doing out on the streets, let alone driving?
The problem is that the courts and the legislature are too wimpy to punish the guilty by throwing them in jail, so instead the legislature is trying to punish the innocent by making them all pay an extra couple of hundred dollars for their car, wait an extra 30 seconds every time they drive, and make them all guilty-until-proven-innocent.
-- Conrad
Exactly. Sort of like making the audience that believe that they're about to read an article about Clear Channel making up facts for local news broadcasts, only to find a link to an article about some guy who likes to vacation in Florida for a few weeks a year.
This just in: Bruce Perens has decided that UserLinux will be built on top of Microsoft Windows instead of using the traditional Linux kernel. Perens, famed founder and leader of the Debian project, said yesterday: "Just like Qt, the Linux kernel is released under a GPL license, which requires developers modifying it to release their source code under the GPL. This prevents commercial solution developers from creating closed-source, proprietery kernel modifications, which would inhibit the adoption of UserLinux."
Perens reportedly approached Linux founder Linus Torvalds to request that he change the Linux kernel license from GPL to LGPL, in order to be more consistent with the GNOME license. Mr. Torvalds apparently refused, at which time Perens managed to negotiate favorable kernel licensing terms from Microsoft.
Mr. Perens had no comment in response to the claim by a spokesperson for TrollTech, the Norway-based company that develops Qt, that their code was actually "freer than Linux", since unlike the Linux kernel, developers can choose to license thier applications under either the GPL or TrollTech's proprietary license that allows close-source development.
What the author claims as a weakness is actually a strength. Qt/UNIX is distributed under the GPL, which means that it can be used for free software development with the same freedom and same restrictions as any other GPL'd software library. However, if you can't comply with the terms of the GPL (because you are doing proprietary, closed software development) then with a normal GPL'd library you'd be SOL, but TrollTech gives you the option to pay them some money and obtain Qt under a commercial license.
This gives Qt a huge *advantage* over over the other libaries. By having its "business-oriented web site", it suckers thousands of large corporations into paying $2000 each for a Qt license. TrollTech uses this money to support the further development and improvement of Qt, which benefits both the commercial licensees and the free software, GPL users. Sure, they probably line their own pockets with some of the money, but no more than owners of RedHat, Debian, etc. Other libraries depend on volunteers performing intermittent maintenance and development, while Qt has an ever-increasing staff of paid developers.
+
My small company uses Qt for both free software development and proprietary software development, and we consider the $20K or so that we've sent to TrollTech to be money well spent!
neither does Japan, and possibly other Asian countries, although I do not know which ones in particular. Japan has traditionally used CCYY-MM-DD.
Actually Japan has "traditionally" used, and still often uses, "[Emperor name] [year of emperor's reign]" as their common date format. You can't describe future dates without guessing how long the emperor will live, and you have to know how many years each emperor lived in order to count back very far. To further complicate things, the year that an emperor dies has two descriptions, e.g. Showa 64 is the same as Heisei 1.
They've probably started adopting the YYYY-MM-DD because that's the ISO 8601 international standard date format. I'd encourage everyone to get into the habit of using it. It sorts nicely, it's language independent, and there is less opportunity for ambiguity. When you see "03/04/02" you have to wonder whether it's American or European, but "2003-04-02" can only mean 2 April 2003. Ok, I suppose some total idiot could think it was 4 February 2003, but that would be as wholly illogical as the common American date format of MM/DD/YY.
Heh. Back in high school we all had TI-83's. You can do a lot with 28k and BASIC given ...
You think you had it bad with a TI-83? We would 'ave dreamed of having a TI-83! Our school had just one computer with only one bit of memory, and the only operation it could perform was XOR. We had to pass it around the class and hope that no one set the bit before it got to us!
We had to carve the stone input decks with our bare hands, then to reboot we'd have to stick the computer into a 240Volt socket and close the connection with our bare tongues!
But you tell that to kids these days, and they won't believe you.
If they use GPL'ed code, they must obey the license restrictions of the GPL, which means that they must provide source code to anyone to whom they provide executables. Of course, if the code is classified, then presumably they will only provide the binaries to folks with the appropriate security clearance. The GPL, and this memo, says that they must provide the source code to those peoeple as well.
Calm down, people. There is no plan for long-term occupation of the moon, and we have no aim to take the moon's water. After we liberate the water, we will put in place a system that allows the water to flow where it wants to flow instead of where some dictatorial rock wants it to flow. Then we will withdraw.
a little problem there, on moon the acceleration due to gravity is about six times less. so on the whole the dust will settle slower. atmospheric impedence is very small compared to the acceleration due to gravity unless there are heavy winds.
This is wrong. Do the math. It's simple high school physics.
In the absense of atmosphere on earth, everything would fall according to the equation d = 1/2 g t^2, where g is 9.8 meter/sec^2. So dust reaching a height of 5 meters would settle to the earth in almost exactly 1 second. (Simple arithmetic, verify it yourself.) Go outside and play in the dirt, I'd say that in the presense of atmosphere dust takes much, much longer that 1 second to settle.
On the moon the same equation applies but g = 1.6 meter/sec^2 (about 1/6 the force of gravity on earth.) So dust reaching a height of 5 meters would settle in about 2.5 seconds.
In fact dust reaching heights of 500 meters would settle in about 25 seconds, whereas on earth due to the atmosphere dust reaching such heights would probably linger in the air for hours.
Er, no, there really are launch codes, generally requiring two-person control at the launch site plus Presidential authorization, with redundant communications methods and backups of the codes and designated alternates in case the President was killed. According to this:
Only the president can authorize a nuclear weapons launch. His encrypted authorization will arrive at the submarine by secure radio. Sealed authenticators which are kept under continuous two-man control ensure the message's authenticity.
The U.S. sometimes postured as if it had a launch-on-launch policy, i.e. the U.S. would launch as soon as it detected that the Russians had launched their missiles, in order to maximize deterrence. But in reality that would be exceedingly dangerous, so instead we built up a huge arsenel so that we could be sure of having plenty of weapons left to retaliate even after a Russian strike. While the actual SIOP (Single Intergrated Operation Plan) is classified so we may never know, most people think we really had a "launch on impact" policy - we wouldn't launch until we started seeing mushroom clouds over U.S. cities.
I use FastMail and have been very happy with them, they're still small enough that you can contact the developers directly and they respond promptly. I use SSL IMAP but they support SSL for POP as well.
Ah, but does the book talk about my favorite SSH client, Top Gun ssh for PalmOS? It lets me configure a UNIX server from a palm-enabled cell phone while lying on the beach!
Admittedly using vi with Graffiti is a bit of a challenge...
It's irrelevant to rant about who should own the software, you or the business owner. It's been said that in business you get what you negotiate, and if it's important to you that the code be open source, and if your client is a small business owner with no interest in selling the software in the future, then I'm sure you will be able to negotiate with him very successfully.
The tactic to use is to tell him that it will be easier for you to write this software, and therefore less costly to him, if you can use GPL'ed component libraries in the software, and that the GPL requires that the resulting software must also be licensed under the GPL. Point out to him that this means that he will get all of the project source code, even the source code to component libraries, and that he will be free to hire anyone at all in the future to maintain, modify, or update the software - he won't be "locked in" to you or anyone else, as sometimes happens with vendor-proprietary software.
If he balks at the idea of releasing to others for free the source code that he will have paid to develop, point out that he is benefitting from thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have already done the same thing - paid money or contributed their own valuable time to develop tools and components that they have given away for free.
And you can point out the possibility (although it's admittedly remote) that if the software turns out to be generally useful to others, the open source software community might take the software, modify it to suit their needs, and release the modifications for free, so he might benefit by getting free improvements to the software in the future.
Again, in terms of answering the poster's questions, the issue is not whether the above points are valid, but whether the above points are likely to convince the business owner that GPL'ing the software is in his best interest.
Maybe some are, but plenty of them are not. I've received a fair amount of spam at my "af.mil" account. A short note to the owner of the spamming domain or advertised service, including some mumbling about misuse of federal government computer systems constituting a federal crime, usually shuts them up, without even needing to point out the fact that they're sending spam to an organization with precision GPS-guided munitions!
When I first started this, I thought I'd "catch" a huge number of companies selling or using my email address without their permission. But what I've noticed over time is that I almost never receive any spam at these addresses. That is, probably 95-99% of the companies that I've signed up with have respected my preferences and have not sold or spammed my email address. Nearly all the spam that I receive (and I get a lot, though switching to the fastmail IMAP mail service has cut my spam significantly) is sent to:
an old address that I used 10 years ago to post on usenet
the address that I used when registering my domain
I think it's somewhat heartening that most companies that I have any real business or interaction with have properly protected my email address, the spam seems to come almost entirely from various types of harvesters.
All this discussion about whether UFOs or ESP might actually exist despite the lack of scientific evidence, about whether the poll is biased and anti-religious, about whether the answers to the poll are indeed "right", misses the main point about science.
Observations in science must follow the scientific method. Hypotheses must be testable, and verifiable or falsifiable. Hypotheses like "there is an invisible, ethereal, undetectable dragon in my garage," or "ESP exists but is fundamentally undetectable in scientific experiments" are not even scientific hypotheses because they're not testable. So believe whatever you want about these things, but they don't belong in the realm of science. Science is not a set of beliefs, but is a method for resolving questions about observable, repeatable phenomena.
Debates about whether there are things that are "true" that can't be proven by science, or whether all things verified by science are "true", are more philosophical debates about the nature of "truth" than they are scientific debates. Science presumes that nature follows rules (even non-intuitive and probablistic rules in cases like quantum physics) and is therefore repeatable, and that these rules can be divined through experimentation and observation. If you don't believe this, it doesn't mean you are wrong (in the sense of philosophical truth) but it does mean that your beliefs are "unscientific."
It is not evident (to me, anyway) that theories about evolution and creation are really even scientific theories, because they're not directly testable, though they are based on scientific understanding of underlying physical processes which are separately testable.
Oh, come on, you took half a sentence out of context and criticized it without even addressing my main point. With Open Source software, you are not at the mercy of some big company to fix the bugs in their software, you can fix them yourself or get a fix from a third party. Yes, "traditional" companies make lots of money by charging for the next update, charging for support to "customize" their software for your needs, etc. They are causing lots of unnecessary work by all parties by hiding their source code and making users guess as to where the problem lies. Is that a "healthy ecosystem" just because some people are getting rich at the expense of others?
Sure, business has worked for years based on close-source software. And for years users and programmers have had to thumb through thick user's manuals or call the company's support-line paying hundreds of dollars to figure out why the software isn't working the way it should be, and then beg for a patch or a new feature when it turns out that their project fundamentally depends on a library or tool that isn't working properly.
Open Source software suggests that there just might be a better way, and the way to measure the idea's success is not just to look at the number of companies getting rich off the idea - that's only a relevant measure to the people running those companies. Look at the satisfaction of users running Linux or web sites running Apache to see whether the idea of Open Source works.
You can do that at FastMail.fm. Sign up for any level of "pay" service and they ditch all the tag lines.
The best thing about it is that you can also use IMAP in addition to POP3! Our ISPs act as if POP3 is the only way to do email, I've only been using the IMAP protocol at FastMail for a couple of months now but I'd never go back to POP3 now! You can set up spam filtering rules and you can "bounce" messages back to any spammers who haven't totally forged all their headers.
I think they do also have a free service that is comparable to Yahoo's old free service - you can use POP3 or the web interface, but you get tag lines added to your messages - but I'm happy paying a few bucks a year for quality email service.
-- Conrad
Now here's the scary part. Once they've made the $1B investment to break terrorist encryption, do you really think they'll have 420,000 encrypted messages from terrorists sitting around waiting to be cracked? No, but they're going to have to find something to crack with all those spare CPU cycles to justify their expenditure...
But it does appear that the claims have been exaggerated and that the ability to break 1024-bit encryption is still a long way off.
Well, it sounds like ClearCase has improved since we gave up on it several years ago, but at that time the only way to prevent this seemed to be establishing a private branch. The way we were using it, branches couldn't be set up by developers, only by administrators, and merging branches was an endeavor that was only performed by the designated "merge and build manager" after much coordination. (Though clearmerge was a very handy tool for 3-way merging!) Evidently despite numerous training classes, the ClearCase administrators still didn't get how to use the thing effictively.
With ClearCase your working directory is a virtual directory hosted by the ClearCase server. If that server goes down or you lose connectivity to it, you're dead and can do nothing. Period. So in that framework distributed SCM requires replicating the repository and syncing up repositories periodically. (We used to do it automatically every night.) If you wanted to see someone's changes from a remote location immediately, too bad - unless you wanted to log in, generate a repository sync package, ftp it over, and apply their changes to your local repository manually, that is. (Or rather, ask the ClearCase administrator to do it...) I believe you had to temporarily shut down the server to apply synchronization packets to the repository, so synch'ing during the work day was out of the question.
With CVS you can write your code on a laptop on the beach, then connect your cell-phone modem to connect only when you want to checkin or update. So you don't need to replicate the repository to achieve distributed SCM.
Then I'm sure you know they didn't write it - they bought it!
CVS lets developers update to see other people's changes at their own convenience. But that also means developers need to exercise some discipline to update frequently enough that their code does not remain too far out of sync with the baseline. This, combined with a "checkin early and checkin often" approach, should really minimize the number of conflicts, even for fairly large projects.
I can't imagine the problems that the original poster described ever happening with proper use of CVS, but perhaps there's something in that "developing patch sets" phrase that he hasn't fully explained to us.
Just a couple of other thoughts:
Distributed ClearCase works reasonably (though I wouldn't say well) for projects that have a few interconnected sites, but is not well-suited at all for a project involving many different developers each in a different location. CVS is ideally suited for that type of environment.
CVS really needs a way to move or rename files, and a way to do atomic checkins of multiple files. When will this happen? I know, "sooner, if I help."
No version control system should prevent people from fixing code just because the code "belongs" to someone else, or is "being modified" by someone else. This sort of "coordination" and "planning" obstructs progress more than hinders it.
Although it's possible in theory for an automatic merge to succeed while being semantically incorrect (with either CVS or ClearCase), I've never once seen it happen. If your code is well-written, the dependencies on certain assumptions should be fairly collocated, not spread all over the code where they could get out of sync.
In a large, well-segmented project where the "frequent checkin" policy is used, it is rare indeed that two people even modify the same file at the same time, let alone modify the same lines.