In my office I don't plan a single meeting without it. Its nice to be able to plan a meeting while know everyones availablity. Its always a pain scheduling a meeting only to find out everyone is in another.
Unfortunately that forces the rest of us to follow suit.
I hate outlook. I hate the calendar.
I hate the fact that everytime I want to have lunch I need to put it in the calendar so people don't book me for a meeting!
I understand the usefulness of the calendar, but I hate having to make all my plans public in some central location.
Heck! I have enough trouble justifying to people that I skiped a meeting because I was fixing a production outage. They always say "You were free in outlook". Yeah well outlook didn't know that someone was going to eat up all the disk-space on our server did it!
</rant>
whatever it is people shout about at Ozian athletic events
That would be
"Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Oi! Oi! Oi!
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Oi! Oi! Oi!
Aussie! Oi!
Aussie! Oi!
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Oi! Oi! Oi!"
I hope this doesn't mean that Python is going to go the same way.
I'm not sure why it would mean that.
Zope and Zend are not related. (Apart from being in similar product spaces)
Zend is the company behind the latest PHP offerings.
Zope is a product from Digital Creations, that provides similar features to PHP (similar in the sense that it's about dynamic web-page generation).
Zope is OpenSource, with quite a reasonable license.
I certainly hope the Python doesn't go down the path of semi-open-source the way some products have, but I have faith that Guido wouldn't agree to that, and the new non-profit that will be taking on the Python copyright will probably have some safe guards in place to stop it.
In a very real sense, arent we all in the same war? promotion of our platforms as a viable alternative to Windows.
If that's anyone's war, then I find it a bit pathetic.
Linux is probably chasing that goal more than any of the BSDs, but I don't think any of the core teams are or should be focusing on it.
The aim of FreeBSD is (more or less) to build a free, solid, stable, high performance server OS for commodity hardware.
The aim of NetBSD is to provide a free, stable, portable OS for all possible hardware.
The aim of OpenBSD is to provide a free, stable, secure OS for as much hardware as can be reasonably supported
The war is to keep providing features people need and support for the hardware they run, while still meeting and iimproving in the particular OS's stated aim. To that end, Windows is irrelvant.
When you decided that windows was the enemy, you sold out on the idea of producing quality software, and opted for a pissing competition with Microsoft.
That wasn't meant to be a dig at you.
It was a dig at shire-folks.
Having grown up in Wollongong, my initial reaction was the same as yours. But I lived for almost 18 months in Sutherland, so I know that they really do think they are the centre of Australia...
True, but you can do the same with Java.
There is little difference (in terms of open-ness) between Jikes (or JPython) for the JVM, and Mercury for.NET
Jikes is free software (GPL I think...?) translates it's language (Java) into the platform's implementation language (java byte code). JPython is the same, but for a different language.
As far as I could tell, that is all that the open-ness of mercury will give you (unless you're actually interested in the mercury language).
Actually, just south of Sydney is Sutherland and "the shire" residents certainly do think it is the capital of Australia....
Rant: Why is it that when there's an article mentioning (eg) Denver, we don't get a geography lesson. Do people just assume that the whole #@$^@# world knows US geography? Or is it just that you think that US people can't look at an atlas, but the rest of us can.
If you just keep coding untill you can't get any further, you'll come in the next day, tired out and wondering
where to begin. You'll spend hours just getting rolling again.
I'm not sure that's always the case.
At a previous job (where I got to single-task [*]) I found that the best way to work was come in at 9.30 (my preferred start time), and work until 6.30 - except if at anytime from 5 to 6.30, I ran into a problem that took more than 5 minutes to solve, I'd go home.
Almost every significant coding problem is really a design problem. When you realise that, you also realise that the only way to solve them is to step away from the code, and start thinking about it in the abstract again. Most people have trouble re-designing once they've hit the coding stage. You usually need to be somewhere else to force yourself to do it.
Of course, if you hit a barrier in the middle of the day, you need to be disciplined to get around it, since for most situations you can't just up and leave.
[*] In my current job, I have to massively multi-task. I'm involved in development , design , developer support , three levels of systems support , and research. I no longer have the type of position where the above methods bear fruit.
The QPL is an Open Source licence.
Modifications are explicitly allowed
3. You may make modifications to the Software and distribute your modifications, in a form that is separate from the Software, such as patches. The following restrictions apply to modifications:
a. Modifications must not alter or remove any copyright notices in the Software.
b. When modifications to the Software are released under this license, a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the initial developer of the Software to distribute your modification in future versions of the Software provided such versions remain available under these terms in addition to any other license(s) of the initial developer.
There is no restriction that those modifications must be for X11. I'm a member of a team porting QT to BeOS right now.
Troll didn't release any version of QT other than the X11 one, but they can't stop you porting QT/X11 to another display mechanism.
I would recommend researching before posting, but if people did that, then this wouldn't be slashdot anymore would it?
Perhaps something like Sybase's SQL Anywhere Ahh, SQL anywhere. How many times has that thing been renamed? From Watcom SQL to SQL anywhere, to Sybase SQL anywhere, to Adaptive Server Anywhere, and now back to SQL Anywhere Studio.
The problem with this, I think, is that it would tend to constrain people to genres.
Depends how you do the linking.
It could be I like "Bob's Ska Band", I like "Joe's Trance Tracks" therefore BSB and JTT are linked. That wouldn't give a high ranking to the link, but the link would be there, so you could follow it. One way you could do both together is to rate each band based on the number of links to it. So if I'm looking at Ska, and I go to BSB's page, then the JTT link will be there. If JTT is a popular outfit, then that link could be higher, even though only 1 person actually made the link. The popularity of JTT pushes it up. It wouldn't be up there with "Mike's Ska Band", but it would be enough to get some people to follow it.
The interface to all this could just be a "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" on each band page. That creates a mesh of links between every band you like, and degrades the link between bands you like to bands you don't like.
know any OSS collaborative filtering solutions Yeah...Slashcode.
Actually, I think everything is closer.
Everything links one node to another. IMHO the best way to rate mp3s is to link them one to another. People who like "Cherry Poppin Daddies" also like "The Louisville Sluggers" So you have a link between those nodes. You shouldn't create links in the same was that Everything does (by navigation), but the idea should be the same.
If you just use the moderation method, you end up loosing the whole indie thing, which MP3s should be good at. Popular !~ Good. I don't want to see that a large percentage of the population likes Britney Spears. I know that. I see it on TV. I hear it on commerical radio. I'm constantly trying to avoid it. I want to know which bands on MP3.com suit my tastes. That means saying "Hey I really like BlueBottleKiss, what else do BBK fans listen to?"
As it stands, my best way of finding new music is from seeing live bands. I can ge some clue of what a band is like based on:
Who sponsors the show
Where they're playing
Which mags/radio stations advertise it
Who they're playing with
Who else is going
Then I turn up, listen. And maybe buy their CD if they have one. I make it a habit to buy the CD of any band I enjoyed seeing live. I saw The Louisville Sluggers last night. I went based on a friend's suggestion. They were good. I had fun. I bought the CD. It's not normally my style of music, but I enjoyed it, and I'll find a use for the CD.
Open source means: ``I trust you and I share my code/work because I don't care about (beer) benefits but all I want is just the credits of authoring the damm thing'' -- and this is fair.
Really? I've certainly not seen that definition at www.opensource.org. It might be true for some developers, but not all, and I would argue, not even most.
Some counter-examples:
RMS - "I don't like proprietry software. I don't want to use them so I won't subject you to them either. Get rid of proprietry systems because I don't like them.", It really is a selfish viewpoint (actually selfish for the masses). RMS didn't release GNU tools because he didn't want money for them, he did it because his ideal world is full of free software, and he wanted to live in that world. That's cool, but it's not charity, it's idealism. There's a difference.
Tivo - I will release my linux kernel changes as open-source because the licence forces me to.
BeUnited - We release open-source because then we get free support from Be engineers.
Slashdot - We release open source software because the community has produced the tools that we run the site on, and we think that it is appropriate to give back to that community. You scratch our back, we scratch yours.
In all those cases, the developers have an agenda (generally quite a valid one) they are seeking to acheive, and going opensource works to that end. I really can't see how Trolltech is any worse than the above.
Your suggestion that TT only provides free versions of QT for their own benefit, it IMO bogus. TT has (eg) a Linux FTP server free for download. Why? Because they wrote one, and have no need to keep it to themselves. True sharing. In fact, it meets your open-source definition perfectly. Why is it so hard to believe that a company does not care about the community/users? The people who run TT are PEOPLE. Just because they are running a company doesn't make them evil. Two guys writing GIMP as individuals and releasing it as OpenSource is sharing, but a few guys writing a GUI tookit as a company, and releasing it as OpenSource isn't?? I don't think the cluetrain is visting your town.
Suppose everyone in the next tournament employed a hedge of this type. Wouldn't that dramatically randomize the tournament results?
The problem is, that once you move to a random strategy, you cannot improve your position. So all you do is make sure you don't loose by a larger margin than you currently hold.
So the following points hold
If every opponent hedges, then you only the first X rounds become significiant. This has major consequences.
You should not throw any rounds in the first few. You might otherwise chose to do this, to break your oppontents prediction, but in this case early rounds are highly important for scoring, not just for confusing. That is, in a game where 1000 rounds count, you can safely throw 5 rounds in the first 50, if you think it will allow you to gain one extra round in 50 for the remaining 950. If the game has been dragged down to (say) 250 rounds, then you drop 5 to gain 4. A bad bet. In a non-hedged game all 1000 rounds are equally weighted wrt points, but not for strategy. In a hedged game that ceases to hold.
If your agent mixes strategies, then all the above holds again. You need to make sure you use your BEST strategy in the first set of rounds.
If you have a strategy that works for 250 rounds, but then becomes easily predictable, you can play it safely if you know your oppontent is going to start hedging at 250.
You'd better make sure you start hedging at the right time. Your agent now needs a really good algorithm to predict WHEN to hedge.
You should be able to break out of hedging if your opponent starts changing its behaviour. See above points.
If you know your opponent is hedging, it may be worthwhile to start being predictable (heck it can't hurt anyway) to lure him out of hedging, in the hope that your 5 losses when he comes out and hammers you, can be made up for by you then hammering him 10 times before he hedges again.
All this is only relevant in the version where winning margins count. If it's just win/lose/draw scoring, then aiming for a small loss is pointless.
That's all off the top of my head at 12.30am. If I get around to writing an entry, I'll aim to think of some more ways to use/beat hedging.
Iocaine does cover some of these points, most notably 2 and 3.
What I don't see is how flipping databases and mixing databases in your joins "kills much of the usefulness of having transactions".
I'm not the original author, but... If you have data in two database on the same server (and a lot of us do, for a lot of good reasons) then you want (read need) to be able to access both dbs in the same transaction. If you have to have two conntections and feed the data between them, then you are running TWO transactions, and loose your integrity guarantees.
INSERT db_one.table_one SELECT max(id) from db_two.table_two becomes [Tran1] $max_id = SELECT max(id) from table_two [Tran2] INSERT table_one VALUES($max_id) and you loose your consistency.
Cross database selects are critical to handling consistency across databases.
Yes, in my opinion he does. He paints OSS software as untrustworthy, while giving no examples of CSS doing it better
I don't think it was his intention to say that CSS is better than OSS (hence the lack of evidence to support such an argument). He is, I gather, suggesting that on the point he considers, OSS is no better than CSS (which is false, because, all things being equal, having the source has to be better than not having it).
His crowning glory is a project he had serious setbacks on due to (unspecified) bugs in the compiler. I don't know about you, but *I* have had serious setbacks time and again using Visual Basic and Visual C++
Not me. I don't use VB:) This supports his point that on a reliability level, OSS and CSS come out the same. I didn't hear him arguing that CSS had less bugs, merely that the "OSS is more reliable" argument didn't hold in his experience.
and he is right - it is.
So, then from a users point of view, CSS is ethial. And if users are willing to chose a closed product over an open one, then I consider it ethical to produce CSS, and so the FSF argument that it is immoral to write closed software is shown to be false for me (since morality is to some extent subjective).
It's the same one that ESR gives - if you contribute a single patch to the shared pool, and receive just ONE patch in return, you have broken even; if you get TWO, you have made a profit
Which interacts with ethics, only in the realm of business ethics. Which means, that it is up to the owner of the resource to decide whether releasing the source to their product is the right thing. For an individual that's fine. For a corporate entity, the case can be made, and the representative of the corportation will make the decision. I'm not sure how it works with tax-payer funded software (ie Universities). If the software was developed for an educational purpose, which is has served, then it should be release open-source, since that should deliver the most value back to the tax-payers. However when professors start writing software on work time because they want to, should the tax-payer be funding it?
ESR was attacked for being Pro-Guns
, yes but that's not why his arguments were straw-men. ERS's arguments are so easy to push over because they are ridiculous. eg:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
WTF? Just because his personal project was a personal itch doesn't mean every piece of software is. A lot of good software scratches someone else's itch. ESR takes the features of his project and applies them as universal axioms of software development. It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that OS advocates keep quoting it. It attempts to argue for open, collaborative development processes, but spends half of the essay talking about some useful software engineering methods. eg Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Sure it's true, but it's as applicable to Cathedrals and Bazaars. But enough ESR bashing.
Because it isn't finished - OSS is a work in progress, released to the public.
This is all very well, but it's not what advocates argue. The argument is, "OSS is more reliable". "You can trust our code because it's open". If it's buggy, then it's buggy. Most people don't care why, or how easy it is to fix, they just want to know when it will work. If OSS really can deliver better software, then great, but if it can't (and I don't believe that, on the whole, OSS is by definition better), then ESR (et al) should be honest about it.
their point is to make the best possible BSD for the x86
You could more say their point was to make the best BSD for the x86, but even that's no quite true.
386BSD came out, and the FreeBSD guys (who obviously weren't FreeBSD guys then) thought "Cool, UNIX for the masses. And it's free. We like this." But 386BSD never went anywhere. It jumped out of the blocks, but then stopped, and so FreeBSD started where 386BSD left off.
Their goal was to provide UNIX for the people out there. That meant providing BSD for the common hardware, the x86. It wasn't that they thought other platforms weren't good, or didn't deserve FreeBSD, it was (as I understand it) more a case of saying "We want to provide the best unix to the most people" and to devote their limited reources to small platforms was counter-productive.
FreeBSD was never supposed to be x86 for the sake of x86, any more than Linux was (which started off in 386 assembly). It was (and is) x86 because that's where people most needed it. Despite running on many architectures, Linux is still most popular on x86. It's where the market is. FreeBSD is highly pragmatic - don't do it cause it's cool, do it cause it acheives a purpose.
So, the conclusion then is, if the FreeBSD team feels that pouring some of the effort into a new architecture is going to provide greater overall benefit to the users, then it is within their original goals to do so.
Which is his point. OpenSource proponents argue that OSS is much more reliable, but Meyer's point is that it's not always the case. He's run into show stopping bugs in Free software, than shouldn't have been there.
The point is that in terms of reliabilty, neither free nor non-free programs have the advantage. The/. reponse (as expected) is "yeah we've got bugs, but so do they!" which is hardly the kind of professional, reliable response he's looking for.
Because there's no point in arguing the "Free and Good" vs "Non-Free and bad" situation. Unless there is a conflict between two competing values, then you have no sacrifice to make. If you can get everything you want, then there is nothing to complain about?
you (And Bertrand.) give the choice of freedom OR quality
Because it's a real choice. Oracle is better than PostgreSQL. Solaris (currently) scales better than Linux. Intel's compiler produces better code than gcc. Photoshop has more features than the GIMP. Which of these do you chose? I'll happily run my production system with Oracle on Solaris if I think it is better setup (and in general, I think it is), despite not having the source. (Well I can get the source to Solaris, but...)
Why is it then that OSS has a given track record of being of higher quality?
Does it? Not for Meyer. He had cancel two projects due to unreliable OSS. The magical "OSS is better quality" argument is bogus. ESR's papers carry no more proof or logic than Meyer's does. The C & the B is full of nice sounding arguments that OSS is better, but it lacks any real proof. Free software is developed in a number of different methods, and some of the best ones are where one or two people work on the tool, and are dedicated to it. The GNU tools are very good, but that is not indicative of all OSS.
If OSS really were as great as its proponent claim, it would be used everywhere. It isn't. GZip is everywhere because it works well. BIND/Sendmail/qmail are everywhere because they work. Solaris, Oracle, DB2, Windows, Office, Photoshop are everywhere because they meet the needs of the users. Don't blindly believe that the OS product is always better than the closed one. It's not that simple.
Sometimes the free product is the best. Sometimes it's not. Anyone who tells you otherwise has their head up their arse. When there is a non-free product that is better than the free one, why is it unethical to use the non-free one?
Is available from at least one source without payment Now, that's not officially part of any definition of Free Software, but it is a direct result of the Open-Source definition from point 1:
The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software
So, as someone else pointed out, once you release it to someone under an OpenSource licence, they can potentially give it away free. So, the software IS available from one source without payment, should that source choose to exercise their rights.
He should have expanded that point and made his reasoning clear, but since his definition of Free software includes "Available free", that makes all Free Software, FreeWare by nature, so all his arguments against freeware (which is what he mostly argues against), apply.
It just allows him to ignore the benefits of having source.
If the developers choose to release their software free, that's their choice. But if they release their software and don't fix bugs, then it's not useful, reliable software - regardless of the price. When all you want is software that does the job, then software that doesn't do it, isn't any good. Pointing to the source is saying "Yeah our software is buggy, fix it yourself", when he wants to hear "We support our customers".
Releasing the source is often an excuse for not having to act professionally. I do it. I have plenty of code that I don't want to support, so I make it free and let people deal with it themselves. That attitude doesn't appeal to people who want software with support.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate outlook. I hate the calendar.
I hate the fact that everytime I want to have lunch I need to put it in the calendar so people don't book me for a meeting!
I understand the usefulness of the calendar, but I hate having to make all my plans public in some central location.
Heck! I have enough trouble justifying to people that I skiped a meeting because I was fixing a production outage. They always say "You were free in outlook". Yeah well outlook didn't know that someone was going to eat up all the disk-space on our server did it!
</rant>
--
Quite often, yes. Of course creative people do vary it a little to "Sydney Sydney Sydney..."
Of course, attendance at local games is pretty poor so you'll hear a lot more chanting at international matches anyway.
--
That would be
"Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Oi! Oi! Oi!
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Oi! Oi! Oi!
Aussie! Oi!
Aussie! Oi!
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Oi! Oi! Oi!"
Yes... seriously.
--
I'm not sure why it would mean that.
Zope and Zend are not related. (Apart from being in similar product spaces)
Zend is the company behind the latest PHP offerings.
Zope is a product from Digital Creations, that provides similar features to PHP (similar in the sense that it's about dynamic web-page generation).
Zope is OpenSource, with quite a reasonable license.
I certainly hope the Python doesn't go down the path of semi-open-source the way some products have, but I have faith that Guido wouldn't agree to that, and the new non-profit that will be taking on the Python copyright will probably have some safe guards in place to stop it.
--
If that's anyone's war, then I find it a bit pathetic.
Linux is probably chasing that goal more than any of the BSDs, but I don't think any of the core teams are or should be focusing on it.
The aim of FreeBSD is (more or less) to build a free, solid, stable, high performance server OS for commodity hardware.
The aim of NetBSD is to provide a free, stable, portable OS for all possible hardware.
The aim of OpenBSD is to provide a free, stable, secure OS for as much hardware as can be reasonably supported
The war is to keep providing features people need and support for the hardware they run, while still meeting and iimproving in the particular OS's stated aim. To that end, Windows is irrelvant.
When you decided that windows was the enemy, you sold out on the idea of producing quality software, and opted for a pissing competition with Microsoft.
--
It was a dig at shire-folks.
Having grown up in Wollongong, my initial reaction was the same as yours. But I lived for almost 18 months in Sutherland, so I know that they really do think they are the centre of Australia...
Hey I'm all for nitpicks.
--
There is little difference (in terms of open-ness) between Jikes (or JPython) for the JVM, and Mercury for
Jikes is free software (GPL I think...?) translates it's language (Java) into the platform's implementation language (java byte code). JPython is the same, but for a different language.
As far as I could tell, that is all that the open-ness of mercury will give you (unless you're actually interested in the mercury language).
--
Rant: Why is it that when there's an article mentioning (eg) Denver, we don't get a geography lesson. Do people just assume that the whole #@$^@# world knows US geography? Or is it just that you think that US people can't look at an atlas, but the rest of us can.
--
--
I'm not sure that's always the case.
At a previous job (where I got to single-task [*]) I found that the best way to work was come in at 9.30 (my preferred start time), and work until 6.30 - except if at anytime from 5 to 6.30, I ran into a problem that took more than 5 minutes to solve, I'd go home.
Almost every significant coding problem is really a design problem. When you realise that, you also realise that the only way to solve them is to step away from the code, and start thinking about it in the abstract again. Most people have trouble re-designing once they've hit the coding stage. You usually need to be somewhere else to force yourself to do it.
Of course, if you hit a barrier in the middle of the day, you need to be disciplined to get around it, since for most situations you can't just up and leave.
[*] In my current job, I have to massively multi-task. I'm involved in development , design , developer support , three levels of systems support , and research. I no longer have the type of position where the above methods bear fruit.
--
The QPL is an Open Source licence.
Modifications are explicitly allowed
There is no restriction that those modifications must be for X11. I'm a member of a team porting QT to BeOS right now.
Troll didn't release any version of QT other than the X11 one, but they can't stop you porting QT/X11 to another display mechanism.
I would recommend researching before posting, but if people did that, then this wouldn't be slashdot anymore would it?
--
Ahh, SQL anywhere. How many times has that thing been renamed?
From Watcom SQL to SQL anywhere, to Sybase SQL anywhere, to Adaptive Server Anywhere, and now back to SQL Anywhere Studio.
Very good product though.
--
Depends how you do the linking.
It could be I like "Bob's Ska Band", I like "Joe's Trance Tracks" therefore BSB and JTT are linked. That wouldn't give a high ranking to the link, but the link would be there, so you could follow it.
One way you could do both together is to rate each band based on the number of links to it. So if I'm looking at Ska, and I go to BSB's page, then the JTT link will be there. If JTT is a popular outfit, then that link could be higher, even though only 1 person actually made the link. The popularity of JTT pushes it up. It wouldn't be up there with "Mike's Ska Band", but it would be enough to get some people to follow it.
The interface to all this could just be a "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" on each band page. That creates a mesh of links between every band you like, and degrades the link between bands you like to bands you don't like.
So, who's going implement it?
--
Everything links one node to another. IMHO the best way to rate mp3s is to link them one to another. People who like "Cherry Poppin Daddies" also like "The Louisville Sluggers" So you have a link between those nodes.
You shouldn't create links in the same was that Everything does (by navigation), but the idea should be the same.
If you just use the moderation method, you end up loosing the whole indie thing, which MP3s should be good at. Popular !~ Good.
I don't want to see that a large percentage of the population likes Britney Spears. I know that. I see it on TV. I hear it on commerical radio. I'm constantly trying to avoid it. I want to know which bands on MP3.com suit my tastes. That means saying "Hey I really like BlueBottleKiss, what else do BBK fans listen to?"
As it stands, my best way of finding new music is from seeing live bands. I can ge some clue of what a band is like based on:
- Who sponsors the show
- Where they're playing
- Which mags/radio stations advertise it
- Who they're playing with
- Who else is going
Then I turn up, listen. And maybe buy their CD if they have one.I make it a habit to buy the CD of any band I enjoyed seeing live. I saw The Louisville Sluggers last night. I went based on a friend's suggestion. They were good. I had fun. I bought the CD. It's not normally my style of music, but I enjoyed it, and I'll find a use for the CD.
--
Really? I've certainly not seen that definition at www.opensource.org. It might be true for some developers, but not all, and I would argue, not even most.
Some counter-examples:
- RMS - "I don't like proprietry software. I don't want to use them so I won't subject you to them either. Get rid of proprietry systems because I don't like them.", It really is a selfish viewpoint (actually selfish for the masses). RMS didn't release GNU tools because he didn't want money for them, he did it because his ideal world is full of free software, and he wanted to live in that world. That's cool, but it's not charity, it's idealism. There's a difference.
- Tivo - I will release my linux kernel changes as open-source because the licence forces me to.
- BeUnited - We release open-source because then we get free support from Be engineers.
- Slashdot - We release open source software because the community has produced the tools that we run the site on, and we think that it is appropriate to give back to that community. You scratch our back, we scratch yours.
In all those cases, the developers have an agenda (generally quite a valid one) they are seeking to acheive, and going opensource works to that end.I really can't see how Trolltech is any worse than the above.
Your suggestion that TT only provides free versions of QT for their own benefit, it IMO bogus. TT has (eg) a Linux FTP server free for download. Why? Because they wrote one, and have no need to keep it to themselves. True sharing. In fact, it meets your open-source definition perfectly.
Why is it so hard to believe that a company does not care about the community/users? The people who run TT are PEOPLE. Just because they are running a company doesn't make them evil. Two guys writing GIMP as individuals and releasing it as OpenSource is sharing, but a few guys writing a GUI tookit as a company, and releasing it as OpenSource isn't??
I don't think the cluetrain is visting your town.
--
So the following points hold
- If every opponent hedges, then you only the first X rounds become significiant. This has major consequences.
- You should not throw any rounds in the first few. You might otherwise chose to do this, to break your oppontents prediction, but in this case early rounds are highly important for scoring, not just for confusing.
- If your agent mixes strategies, then all the above holds again. You need to make sure you use your BEST strategy in the first set of rounds.
- If you have a strategy that works for 250 rounds, but then becomes easily predictable, you can play it safely if you know your oppontent is going to start hedging at 250.
- You'd better make sure you start hedging at the right time. Your agent now needs a really good algorithm to predict WHEN to hedge.
- You should be able to break out of hedging if your opponent starts changing its behaviour. See above points.
- If you know your opponent is hedging, it may be worthwhile to start being predictable (heck it can't hurt anyway) to lure him out of hedging, in the hope that your 5 losses when he comes out and hammers you, can be made up for by you then hammering him 10 times before he hedges again.
- All this is only relevant in the version where winning margins count. If it's just win/lose/draw scoring, then aiming for a small loss is pointless.
That's all off the top of my head at 12.30am.That is, in a game where 1000 rounds count, you can safely throw 5 rounds in the first 50, if you think it will allow you to gain one extra round in 50 for the remaining 950. If the game has been dragged down to (say) 250 rounds, then you drop 5 to gain 4. A bad bet. In a non-hedged game all 1000 rounds are equally weighted wrt points, but not for strategy. In a hedged game that ceases to hold.
If I get around to writing an entry, I'll aim to think of some more ways to use/beat hedging.
Iocaine does cover some of these points, most notably 2 and 3.
--
--
On Solaris 2.6, I use the following:
cd /opt/perl5.004/man/man3
nroff -mansun CGI.3 > ~/mancgi
I'm afraid I don't have a linux box to try on.
HTH.
--
If you have data in two database on the same server (and a lot of us do, for a lot of good reasons) then you want (read need) to be able to access both dbs in the same transaction.
If you have to have two conntections and feed the data between them, then you are running TWO transactions, and loose your integrity guarantees.
INSERT db_one.table_one
SELECT max(id) from db_two.table_two
becomes
[Tran1] $max_id = SELECT max(id) from table_two
[Tran2] INSERT table_one VALUES($max_id)
and you loose your consistency.
Cross database selects are critical to handling consistency across databases.
--
This supports his point that on a reliability level, OSS and CSS come out the same. I didn't hear him arguing that CSS had less bugs, merely that the "OSS is more reliable" argument didn't hold in his experience. So, then from a users point of view, CSS is ethial. And if users are willing to chose a closed product over an open one, then I consider it ethical to produce CSS, and so the FSF argument that it is immoral to write closed software is shown to be false for me (since morality is to some extent subjective). Which interacts with ethics, only in the realm of business ethics. Which means, that it is up to the owner of the resource to decide whether releasing the source to their product is the right thing. For an individual that's fine. For a corporate entity, the case can be made, and the representative of the corportation will make the decision. I'm not sure how it works with tax-payer funded software (ie Universities). If the software was developed for an educational purpose, which is has served, then it should be release open-source, since that should deliver the most value back to the tax-payers. However when professors start writing software on work time because they want to, should the tax-payer be funding it? , yes but that's not why his arguments were straw-men. ERS's arguments are so easy to push over because they are ridiculous. eg: WTF? Just because his personal project was a personal itch doesn't mean every piece of software is. A lot of good software scratches someone else's itch. ESR takes the features of his project and applies them as universal axioms of software development. It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that OS advocates keep quoting it.
It attempts to argue for open, collaborative development processes, but spends half of the essay talking about some useful software engineering methods. eg Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Sure it's true, but it's as applicable to Cathedrals and Bazaars.
But enough ESR bashing. This is all very well, but it's not what advocates argue. The argument is, "OSS is more reliable". "You can trust our code because it's open". If it's buggy, then it's buggy. Most people don't care why, or how easy it is to fix, they just want to know when it will work. If OSS really can deliver better software, then great, but if it can't (and I don't believe that, on the whole, OSS is by definition better), then ESR (et al) should be honest about it.
--
386BSD came out, and the FreeBSD guys (who obviously weren't FreeBSD guys then) thought "Cool, UNIX for the masses. And it's free. We like this." But 386BSD never went anywhere. It jumped out of the blocks, but then stopped, and so FreeBSD started where 386BSD left off.
Their goal was to provide UNIX for the people out there. That meant providing BSD for the common hardware, the x86. It wasn't that they thought other platforms weren't good, or didn't deserve FreeBSD, it was (as I understand it) more a case of saying "We want to provide the best unix to the most people" and to devote their limited reources to small platforms was counter-productive.
FreeBSD was never supposed to be x86 for the sake of x86, any more than Linux was (which started off in 386 assembly). It was (and is) x86 because that's where people most needed it. Despite running on many architectures, Linux is still most popular on x86. It's where the market is. FreeBSD is highly pragmatic - don't do it cause it's cool, do it cause it acheives a purpose.
So, the conclusion then is, if the FreeBSD team feels that pouring some of the effort into a new architecture is going to provide greater overall benefit to the users, then it is within their original goals to do so.
x86 was a starting point, not an end.
--
OpenSource proponents argue that OSS is much more reliable, but Meyer's point is that it's not always the case. He's run into show stopping bugs in Free software, than shouldn't have been there.
The point is that in terms of reliabilty, neither free nor non-free programs have the advantage. /. reponse (as expected) is "yeah we've got bugs, but so do they!" which is hardly the kind of professional, reliable response he's looking for.
The
--
Which of these do you chose? I'll happily run my production system with Oracle on Solaris if I think it is better setup (and in general, I think it is), despite not having the source. (Well I can get the source to Solaris, but...)
Does it? Not for Meyer. He had cancel two projects due to unreliable OSS. The magical "OSS is better quality" argument is bogus. ESR's papers carry no more proof or logic than Meyer's does. The C & the B is full of nice sounding arguments that OSS is better, but it lacks any real proof. Free software is developed in a number of different methods, and some of the best ones are where one or two people work on the tool, and are dedicated to it. The GNU tools are very good, but that is not indicative of all OSS.
If OSS really were as great as its proponent claim, it would be used everywhere. It isn't. GZip is everywhere because it works well. BIND/Sendmail/qmail are everywhere because they work. Solaris, Oracle, DB2, Windows, Office, Photoshop are everywhere because they meet the needs of the users. Don't blindly believe that the OS product is always better than the closed one. It's not that simple.
Sometimes the free product is the best. Sometimes it's not. Anyone who tells you otherwise has their head up their arse. When there is a non-free product that is better than the free one, why is it unethical to use the non-free one?
--
--
If the developers choose to release their software free, that's their choice. But if they release their software and don't fix bugs, then it's not useful, reliable software - regardless of the price.
When all you want is software that does the job, then software that doesn't do it, isn't any good.
Pointing to the source is saying "Yeah our software is buggy, fix it yourself", when he wants to hear "We support our customers".
Releasing the source is often an excuse for not having to act professionally. I do it. I have plenty of code that I don't want to support, so I make it free and let people deal with it themselves. That attitude doesn't appeal to people who want software with support.
--