Your point of view is that the end users are commissioning these projects... The goals for open source projects lie with the developers who create them.
You misunderstand me. As a matter of fact, others did as well. My point, in a nutshell, is only that a feedback loop between end users and developers is essential. They may or may not be one and the same, but the information needs to flow. The article merely points out specific ways in which information does not flow freely.
First, I define a project (a bit differently than sourceforge) as alive if it is being used by anyone. A project may not be actively developed (perhaps it is "done") and still be very much alive, like bzip2. It has a user community.
Second, to maximize the number of people which use a project, it should appeal to a wide audience within its intended market, so-to-speak. This means involving more than only the developers in the development. A widely-used and successful project is the result of a balance between the creative forces which drive project development: sales & marketing (if applicable), end users, developers, etc.
I have been programming for twenty years, so I certainly understand the developer viewpoint. I also know the importance of understanding the users' viewpoints as well.
I can't say I'd disagree with anything in the article.
The whole article is right on the money. It seems like the author does not hold any bias but approached open source with an open mind.
Considering the author is speaking about general trends, I'd say these concepts have one common basis: separation between the end user and the developer. Each of these problems can occur (in any project, "open" or "closed") when this separation exists. This feedback loop must exist for a project to be successful, and the article presents five clear reasons why.
1) User Interface Design Feedback regarding the ease-of-use and intuitiveness of the interface must be communicated to the developer responsible for the UI. Otherwise, users are presented with an interface for which they had no input and therefore could not alter to better fit their needs.
2) Documentation The developer responsible for documentation must make sure tasks performed by the end-user are fully explained and the information organized in a simple manner. In order to do this, the developer must interact with the end-user to ascertain how the software is actually used as well as the level of knowledge of the typical end user.
3) Feature-centric development Users focus on how the software enables them to do what they need. When developers know exactly what users need, they can in turn focus their development on what is important to the end user. If they don't know what is important to the end user, then features which are important only to the developer have the opportunity to "creep" in.
4) Programming for the self An open source project survives (by definition) because people use it. If developers program for themselves, then the usefulness of the application to end users can suffer (where developers are not the end user).
5) Religious blindness End users are essential in this because they don't necessarily have the same viewpoints as the developer. They just want something that works. By telling the developers what works and what doesn't, the developers can balance their beliefs with the needs of the end user.
I sincerely hope you are kidding. Forcibly implanting ID tags in people is the stuff of science fiction, and that's exactly what it should be: fiction.
Anything else is a direct violation of basic human rights. There is no good reason for it, and if in place it will be abused.
* People start using Gmail. Love it. Use it all the time. * Google goes public. * Microsoft buys 4.99% of Google then AOL. * AOL (now MS) exercises right to buy 2 mil. shares of Google. MS all but owns Google. * Microsoft has at its fingertips billions of email messages now easily and quickly searchable.
I know they have msn and hotmail already, but this would add to it in a big way. Not only that, what if the government pressured MS to grant it access to search everything with this new search engine? The DOJ let them off the monopoly hook -- they owe the government a favor. Scary thought.
It's a machine, not a person reading what you wrote, except possibly in a recount. Oklahoma has a similar system, and it has always worked well. If it isn't broke, why fix it?
You aren't doing the topic justice. What you should do is list the pros and cons of each choice. Wireless isn't perfect for everyone. It has cons: security and interference, for example. Yes, both can be addressed, but they are a non-issue with wire.
I installed CAT 5e for next to nothing when my house was built and I am very happy with it.
Actually, this could be a useful suggestion. A collage frame has spaces for several small pictures. What you do is place that mask over an LCD monitor and program the picture frame with the coordinates of each space.
Now, instead of just one picture on your frame, you can have many!
According to this March 10 story at the Above Top Secret News Network, it is not actually news:
Posted by: Throwaway On: Wed March, 10 2004 @ 20:33 GMT This is old news, folks. Just signed up to tell you that BBC is recycling news stories to fill column-inches. I'm sitting on site a few hundred yards from the beamline. LEP shut down a couple of years ago, and there's been no real news since then.
My group works exclusively on Higgs searches and more or less leads the effort here on experimental analysis in that direction. Sorry.
9% is nowhere near close enough. And the BBC story is wrong - Higgs doesn't really explain where the mass of all particles comes from. And "the God particle" is a stupid marketing ploy for funding agencies. There's a lot more to go. Higgs has been the fundamental theory hole, not pivot. If we get one, it'll round things off nicely.
... it is instructive that Stallman foresaw the problem the closed source IP created and started the OpenSource movement.
You make RMS sounds like Hari Seldon.;-)
Heh. I loved those days. Most Apple 5.25" drives could physically access more than 34 tracks even though that was the standard DOS 3.3 limit. A simple poke statement followed by a format gave you access to an extra one or two tracks for free!
My favorite trick was to increase the number of tracks by one and place the (volume table of contents) VTOC on the extra track (35) with one other poke statement. A standard disk copy program would not copy the VTOC on the extra track. If someone were to boot from a normal DOS 3.3 disk and try to access the modified disk, it would look for the VTOC on track 17 instead of 35.
That's all we need: someone to spontaneously flip the 'conspiracy theorist' bit on hundreds of thousands of records, causing a huge leap in the number of heart attacks nationwide.
That is why the "good" reason of "tracking terrorists" had to be used. Like you need a 100+ TB database to track terrorists! The real reason would cause too much of a fuss. The sheer number of naive and/or apathetic citizens that can not or will not ponder the ramifications of the construction of such a large people-tracking infrastructure -- regardless of its purpose -- is depressing.
"Secretly, deep down, we all hope there's life beyond our own home planet."
After reading the article, I'm left wondering if there's intelligent life on our own planet.
Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.
Note that this also means that FUD can be spread in the same way. Suppose you want to do a pump-and-dump scheme. If you can deceive an influential blogger or two, then you've gained yourself a lot of ground for a relatively small amount of effort.
Knowing who the most influential individuals are for a particular topic is extremely valuable for both good and bad information!
This is an excellent concept. I never understood why people designed clusters to "stack" like this one. Especially if you use higher-power processors, heat dissipation is an important issue.
I've been trying to think of a simple way to arrange them in "slices", but I never thought of a dish rack. Thanks for the idea!:)
It doesn't mean MS found and fixed it. That particular piece of code may not be present in IE6 for a completely different reason.
If they knew it was a security risk, they'd have fixed it in both IE5 and IE6.
Since they didn't, you may safely conclude that MS doesn't "do their job."
Your statement is true, but networks firmly believe they _must_ control content to reliably control revenue. The AOL-Time Warner merger proved it was a bad idea, but some people just don't get it.
AOL-Time Warner was an experiment. In a sense, all businesses are. It failed, but like most experiments useful information regarding what works and what doesn't was distilled from the experience. It appears Comcast is the next such "experiment", with Disney as the (perhaps unwilling) subject.
It also seems that the business plan of the next decade is "force customers to buy your product". Any thoughts on that? To successfully sell content to customers you must have content, communications, and customers. It's like someone mentioned in another article: If you have any one of Power, Wealth, or Information, you leverage it to obtain the other two. Here, Power = communcations, Wealth = customers, and Knowledge = content.
Does that sound likely, or is it just pure speculation on my part?
AOL's choice of the modem for communications and their choice of content (their own private "Internet", if you will) didn't work. A community with similarly orgainzed content is easily available from other, lower-cost providers, and thus their customer base was lost.
Now, Comcast has a fast pipe. With Disney, they have content. Do they have the customers? Not yet. The big question is: Can they leverage a fast pipe and/or Disney content to gain customers? If people could download any Disney production on demand, would Comcast have them then?
I am making a wild guess these "experiments" will conclude before the end of the decade with MCI Worldcom as an unexpectedly major player.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point of view is that the end users are commissioning these projects ... The goals for open source projects lie with the developers who create them.
You misunderstand me. As a matter of fact, others did as well. My point, in a nutshell, is only that a feedback loop between end users and developers is essential. They may or may not be one and the same, but the information needs to flow. The article merely points out specific ways in which information does not flow freely.
First, I define a project (a bit differently than sourceforge) as alive if it is being used by anyone. A project may not be actively developed (perhaps it is "done") and still be very much alive, like bzip2. It has a user community.
Second, to maximize the number of people which use a project, it should appeal to a wide audience within its intended market, so-to-speak. This means involving more than only the developers in the development. A widely-used and successful project is the result of a balance between the creative forces which drive project development: sales & marketing (if applicable), end users, developers, etc.
I have been programming for twenty years, so I certainly understand the developer viewpoint. I also know the importance of understanding the users' viewpoints as well.
I can't say I'd disagree with anything in the article.
The whole article is right on the money. It seems like the author does not hold any bias but approached open source with an open mind.
Considering the author is speaking about general trends, I'd say these concepts have one common basis: separation between the end user and the developer. Each of these problems can occur (in any project, "open" or "closed") when this separation exists. This feedback loop must exist for a project to be successful, and the article presents five clear reasons why.
1) User Interface Design
Feedback regarding the ease-of-use and intuitiveness of the interface must be communicated to the developer responsible for the UI. Otherwise, users are presented with an interface for which they had no input and therefore could not alter to better fit their needs.
2) Documentation
The developer responsible for documentation must make sure tasks performed by the end-user are fully explained and the information organized in a simple manner. In order to do this, the developer must interact with the end-user to ascertain how the software is actually used as well as the level of knowledge of the typical end user.
3) Feature-centric development
Users focus on how the software enables them to do what they need. When developers know exactly what users need, they can in turn focus their development on what is important to the end user. If they don't know what is important to the end user, then features which are important only to the developer have the opportunity to "creep" in.
4) Programming for the self
An open source project survives (by definition) because people use it. If developers program for themselves, then the usefulness of the application to end users can suffer (where developers are not the end user).
5) Religious blindness
End users are essential in this because they don't necessarily have the same viewpoints as the developer. They just want something that works. By telling the developers what works and what doesn't, the developers can balance their beliefs with the needs of the end user.
I sincerely hope you are kidding. Forcibly implanting ID tags in people is the stuff of science fiction, and that's exactly what it should be: fiction.
Anything else is a direct violation of basic human rights. There is no good reason for it, and if in place it will be abused.
Imagine this scenario:
* People start using Gmail. Love it. Use it all the time.
* Google goes public.
* Microsoft buys 4.99% of Google then AOL.
* AOL (now MS) exercises right to buy 2 mil. shares of Google. MS all but owns Google.
* Microsoft has at its fingertips billions of email messages now easily and quickly searchable.
I know they have msn and hotmail already, but this would add to it in a big way. Not only that, what if the government pressured MS to grant it access to search everything with this new search engine? The DOJ let them off the monopoly hook -- they owe the government a favor. Scary thought.
Got Gmail? No thanks.
Domain Name: MOBILEMAG.COM
Name Server: NS2.IHOST.CA
Name Server: NS1.IHOST.CA
Even the company web site is only intermittently available.
If you can't get to it, part of it says:
All Accounts Include:
- ...
- 99.8% Uptime
- ...
So much for 99.8% uptime! I think they will be having some words with their customer soon. Maybe 'mobilemag' will post the graphical stats for us.Axiontech has a 1GHz VIA EPIA-V10000A for $123, and an 800MHz is $90. I got the 1GHz, and it is real nice. Here is the case ($72) I use with it.
Shaped like a dog bone, it was simple to use, easy to understand, and a pleasure to hold.
If you didn't read the article, you may not know what the author means when another poster quotes the article! :)
performance decline due to digital piracy? What's next? Newspaper readership declining due to ignorant reporting?
It's a machine, not a person reading what you wrote, except possibly in a recount. Oklahoma has a similar system, and it has always worked well. If it isn't broke, why fix it?
You aren't doing the topic justice. What you should do is list the pros and cons of each choice. Wireless isn't perfect for everyone. It has cons: security and interference, for example. Yes, both can be addressed, but they are a non-issue with wire.
I installed CAT 5e for next to nothing when my house was built and I am very happy with it.
Actually, this could be a useful suggestion. A collage frame has spaces for several small pictures. What you do is place that mask over an LCD monitor and program the picture frame with the coordinates of each space.
Now, instead of just one picture on your frame, you can have many!
There was a Dilbert comic not too long ago about that:
Dilbert enters PHB's (Pointy-Haired Boss) office shuffling papers:
Dilbert: "I have some disturbing news."
Dilbert: "We outsourced our customer-service function to India a few years
ago."
PHB: "So?"
Dilbert: "Apparently, they sub-contracted the job to Mexico."
Dilbert: "Then Mexico sub-contracted the job to Vietnam who sub-contracted
to the Philippines."
Dilbert: "Who subcontracted it to us."
Dilbert: "It turns out we're the lowest-cost provider because we lie about
our hold times."
Dilbert: "In summary, we pay ourselves to hose ourselves."
Dilbert: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
PHB: "We should raise our prices?"
According to this March 10 story at the Above Top Secret News Network, it is not actually news:
Posted by: Throwaway
On: Wed March, 10 2004 @ 20:33 GMT
This is old news, folks. Just signed up to tell you that BBC is recycling news stories to fill column-inches. I'm sitting on site a few hundred yards from the beamline. LEP shut down a couple of years ago, and there's been no real news since then.
My group works exclusively on Higgs searches and more or less leads the effort here on experimental analysis in that direction. Sorry.
9% is nowhere near close enough. And the BBC story is wrong - Higgs doesn't really explain where the mass of all particles comes from. And "the God particle" is a stupid marketing ploy for funding agencies. There's a lot more to go. Higgs has been the fundamental theory hole, not pivot. If we get one, it'll round things off nicely.
Stay tuned for 2007-2008 (9?)
... it is instructive that Stallman foresaw the problem the closed source IP created and started the OpenSource movement. ;-)
You make RMS sounds like Hari Seldon.
Heh. I loved those days. Most Apple 5.25" drives could physically access more than 34 tracks even though that was the standard DOS 3.3 limit. A simple poke statement followed by a format gave you access to an extra one or two tracks for free!
My favorite trick was to increase the number of tracks by one and place the (volume table of contents) VTOC on the extra track (35) with one other poke statement. A standard disk copy program would not copy the VTOC on the extra track. If someone were to boot from a normal DOS 3.3 disk and try to access the modified disk, it would look for the VTOC on track 17 instead of 35.
You don't. The article indicates the databases themselves comprise 100 TB. The 2.5TB RAM drive is for temporary storage to speed up database queries.
RocketDrive retails for $1000 with 1GB to $3000 with 4GB. Not exactly "on the cheap" though. They used to sell it without memory, but apparently they don't anymore. Here's a review.
That's all we need: someone to spontaneously flip the 'conspiracy theorist' bit on hundreds of thousands of records, causing a huge leap in the number of heart attacks nationwide.
That is why the "good" reason of "tracking terrorists" had to be used. Like you need a 100+ TB database to track terrorists! The real reason would cause too much of a fuss.
The sheer number of naive and/or apathetic citizens that can not or will not ponder the ramifications of the construction of such a large people-tracking infrastructure -- regardless of its purpose -- is depressing.
"Secretly, deep down, we all hope there's life beyond our own home planet."
After reading the article, I'm left wondering if there's intelligent life on our own planet.
Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.
Note that this also means that FUD can be spread in the same way. Suppose you want to do a pump-and-dump scheme. If you can deceive an influential blogger or two, then you've gained yourself a lot of ground for a relatively small amount of effort.
Knowing who the most influential individuals are for a particular topic is extremely valuable for both good and bad information!
This is an excellent concept. I never understood why people designed clusters to "stack" like this one. Especially if you use higher-power processors, heat dissipation is an important issue.
:)
I've been trying to think of a simple way to arrange them in "slices", but I never thought of a dish rack. Thanks for the idea!
It doesn't mean MS found and fixed it. That particular piece of code may not be present in IE6 for a completely different reason.
If they knew it was a security risk, they'd have fixed it in both IE5 and IE6.
Since they didn't, you may safely conclude that MS doesn't "do their job."
Your statement is true, but networks firmly believe they _must_ control content to reliably control revenue. The AOL-Time Warner merger proved it was a bad idea, but some people just don't get it.
AOL-Time Warner was an experiment. In a sense, all businesses are. It failed, but like most experiments useful information regarding what works and what doesn't was distilled from the experience. It appears Comcast is the next such "experiment", with Disney as the (perhaps unwilling) subject.
It also seems that the business plan of the next decade is "force customers to buy your product". Any thoughts on that? To successfully sell content to customers you must have content, communications, and customers. It's like someone mentioned in another article: If you have any one of Power, Wealth, or Information, you leverage it to obtain the other two. Here, Power = communcations, Wealth = customers, and Knowledge = content.
Does that sound likely, or is it just pure speculation on my part?
AOL's choice of the modem for communications and their choice of content (their own private "Internet", if you will) didn't work. A community with similarly orgainzed content is easily available from other, lower-cost providers, and thus their customer base was lost.
Now, Comcast has a fast pipe. With Disney, they have content. Do they have the customers? Not yet. The big question is: Can they leverage a fast pipe and/or Disney content to gain customers? If people could download any Disney production on demand, would Comcast have them then?
I am making a wild guess these "experiments" will conclude before the end of the decade with MCI Worldcom as an unexpectedly major player.