Q: For example when Borland introduced Kylix for GNU/Linux, we'll see a software, that is itself free, but can't be built with free tools. Do you consider this really a free software?
A (Stallman): It is free software, but not usable in a free operating system, not available to people who want to keep their freedom
I can understand Stallman being annoyed that Kylix is a free-as-in-beer closed source compiler. Still, this is a tool for generating free-as-in-speech software (or non-free commercial software, developer's choice). Does Stallman not understand the difference between Delphi (for programs running under MS Windows) and Kylix (for programs running under GNU/Linux, as Mr. Bednar so tactfully called it during the Stallman interview)?
The previous question is a more general one about non-free compilers. Stallman described software compilable only with a non-free compiler as something that "can't run on a non-free platform... useless in the Free World." (He then pats himself on the back for having written the GNU C compiler.)
Stallman considers "GNU/Linux" to be a free operating system, right? Does he consider an installation non-free if every byte can't be generated from free source code?
Except to trash whitehouse.gov, using servers and networks all over the world to do so.
In the vast world of potential Internet viruses and worms, Code Red is a grade Z microbe.
If people hadn't woken up and smelled the patch, it would have been a grade B (if not A) pain in the butt. Like Y2K, there was too much hype, but the hype helped; a self-defeating prophecy.
It would have to go through a significant amount of mutation before it became any sort of serious threat to the Internet's health.
Significant, but not huge. There's been lots of discussion about how bad the next generation may be.
At its broadest definition, all hacking is white-hat hacking.
This statement is nonsense. There is certainly such a thing as white-hat hacking, and certainly too much hacking is portrayed as far darker than it really is, but there's a huge difference between the white hats and the jerks behind Code Red.
At most, Code Red proved you should always be wary about what Microsoft software does to your machine, like turning it into a server without your implicit knowledge.
Um, these machines were supposed to be servers.-)
We should be wary about what any software does to our machines. Point well taken, though.
My mom uses MSN for dial-up because her Dell computer came with 12 months of MSN. (Now Dells come with 6 months of MSN.) As another poster said, click "Connect to the Internet," and you get the MSN home page.
Funny thing is, you can still use MSN (the Web site) with any dial-up ISP. We'll see how Mom feels about transitioning (say, to a $15/month account, instead of paying $22/month for MSN) when the year's up.
P.S.: Yes, I know, it's not free, it's included in the price of the computer.
There are many reasons why you should transition your service:
With more than 230 million visitors per month, MSN is available in 33 markets and in 17 languages. (Mom, can I jump off the cliff, too? All the cool kids are doing it.) (More importantly, *any* ISP lets you visit MSN.)
Quality, reliability and speed. (Unlike all the other ISPs?)
Technical support, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at no charge!
(Ditto?)
Continue to enjoy POP3 e-mail service, with an option to switch to the world's largest Web-based e-mail service, MSN Hotmail®, via MSN Internet Explorer and get up to nine e-mail screen names for you and the rest of your family. (You can get Hotmail, and hundreds of screen names, from any ISP. But once you transition your MSN e-mail to Web-based, it's difficult or impossible to go back to POP3/SMTP.)
Instant messaging from MSN Messenger Service, the fast growing instant messaging service. (Accessible from any ISP.)
You get more space for your personal Web site from 5MB to 30MB. (Okay, one real one.)
Easy access to great resources from MSN that help make your life better.
Catch up on the latest news from MSNBC (Accessible from any ISP.)
Listen to your favorite music (Accessible from any ISP.)
Play games (Accessible from any ISP.)
Send instant messages (Accessible from any ISP.)
Create an online photo album for your family (Accessible from any ISP, whether or not you use MSN to do it..)
Personalize your home page with weather, sports, news or local events (Ditto.)
Shop from the convenience of your home (Other ISPs block Amazon.com or something?)
Invest your money wisely (Accessible from any ISP.)
Search for information (Accessible from any ISP.)
Send online greeting cards (Accessible from any ISP, unfortunately.)-:
Plan your vacation (Accessible from any ISP.)
Take care of your family's health (Information to help do this is accessible from any ISP, though you're gonna have to get off the darned Internet to do something with it.)
My mom uses dialup MSN. They've intercepted the "launch a connection to the Internet" action, so the only way you can get online is to run the MSN home page thingie (the AOL-ish screen that's a seriously DHTML'ed IE). Want a PPP connection to run just your favorite TCP/IP apps over, not your ISP's favorite app? Tough luck.
And beyond that, its only going to apply to some customers, not all.
"If you use a PC with the Windows operating system (rather than a Macintosh), between August 7, 2001 and August 24, 2001 an e-mail message will be sent to eligible customers [anyone who runs Windows and uses dial-up or DSL from Qwest.net]. The e-mail will provide a link to the transition Web site. Once you transition to MSN, your Qwest.net account services will be inaccessible 10 days after you successfully transition your service to MSN Internet Access.
Beginning November 4, 2001, eligible Qwest.net Internet Access customers who have not transitioned their account will automatically be transitioned to MSN."
"Some customers" means "any customers who don't immediately lie and say they own Macs"?-)
Beyond all this, if you have another ISP that youve chosen to do business with, such as a local ISP in your home town, Qwest does not have the legal authority to render the contract between you and your ISP null and void. Its only "Qwest.net" subscribers that have to "worry" about anything.
So all you have to do is change ISPs, change your e-mail address, and hope (dial-up) you can still get a local POP or (DSL) go through the whole DSL Installation Hell routine ("No, it's not our fault, it's their fault") again? How reassuring.
They came first for the Qwest.net customers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Qwest.net customer. Then they came for the DakotaCom customers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a DakotaCom customer.... Then they came for me, and by that time, was no one left to speak up. (Sorry, trivialization of a Holocaust-related quote... but no intentional triggering of Godwin's Law.-)
"Cringely" and Dvorak keep saying, "No, seriously, shutdown the Internet and replace it with something secure."
They're missing the first law of complex systems. I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes something like:
All complex systems that work began as simple systems that worked.
You can't replace today's Internet, the result of decades of evolution, with something purpose-built from scratch to do as much. The attempt will suffer from the second-system effect, and just plain won't work.
It's easy for a columnist to ask for something drastic. Too easy. But it sells papers (or click-thrus, or whatever we're selling today).
It's obviously a kick-ass portable MP3 (and WAV) player, with the ability to store about 150 CD's worth of music! Or will be if it's got decent audio hardware. (Headphones provided.) Likely.
Mostly what it appears to be is a 10 GB "removable drive" designed for consumers. Big emphasis on storing photos (and the ability to show them on a TV as well as transfer to and from PCs). Think about it: The capacity of 16 CD-R's, totally re-writable, that can be used between two PCs without CD-R or CD-RW drives.
(Prediction: This will be used to transfer pr0n downloaded at work via the office T1, to a PC at home where it can be, ahem, "enjoyed." Lovely.)
What don't I see:
It says, "Fully versitile. Totally secure." I don't see where the security comes in... or could, with a consumer grade device. ("Sorry, sir, if you forgot your password, there's no way you can retrieve those, um, important documents from your office PC. Sir?")
No PDA functionality. (20 character x 4 line display; cheap, but don't try to bring up your calendar, or a big phone directory.)
No ability to rip CD's. Not a problem; it begs to be hooked up to a PC, so count on the computer to rip.
No support for Windows 95 (98 or 2000 need a device drive; Windows ME appears to have native support for USB disk drives), Mac, or, ironically, Linux.
Robustness. You need to "eject" the virtual drive (how the Mine looks to a PC) before disconnecting. Yeah, like that'll happen every time.
EFF Rejoins Protests After Meeting with US Attorney's Office
Representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) met with representatives of the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco today. There was a productive dialog, however the U.S. Attorney's office gave no indication of dropping the prosecution against Dmitry Sklyarov.
Having explored good faith negotiations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation rejoins the call for nonviolent protests worldwide to secure the immediate release of Dmitry Sklarov and dropping of all criminal charges against him.
A protest is already scheduled in San Francisco for 11:30am this Monday, July 30, at the Federal Courthouse at 450 Golden Gate Ave. Additional protests will occur in 25 or more cities worldwide in coming weeks.
A recent AT&T CEO (not the current one) once lamented, "Every year, billions of dollars of sales are made over our 800 numbers. Why can't we somehow get some cut of that business?" I think the idea was to arrange lower rates in exchange for a percentage.
When several projects I've been on asked Oracle for a price quote, we were asked for our business plan. Oracle wanted to charge one (large) ISP for every dialup customer account! (Another project chose Sybase for a similar reason.)
Bill Gates, MSFT's chief strategist, must have recently asked himself, "Billions of dollars are spent online every year, from computers running our operating system. Why can't...?"
The scary thing is, MSFT is providing some value to the online vendors. They've got lots of allies for shoving this down our throats.
"The Windows XP operating system leaves the user with little choice but to employ Passport. As soon as the user starts a computer and uses a modem, a dialog box appears on the screen stating: 'You've just connected to the Internet. You need a Passport to use Windows XP Internet communications features (such as instant messaging, voice chat and video), and to access Net-enabled features. Click here to set up your Passport.' "
"... users cannot receive support services for products without registering for Microsoft Passport. The user's product identification number [not provided with XP activation but provided with XP registration] is then linked to his or her personally identifiable Passport information."
" 'If in the future Passport sends email on behalf of participating web sites, you will be able to follow instructions contained in the email to choose whether or not you'd like to receive additional email.' There appears to be no means by which users currently can limit the exchange of their email addresses with the Microsoft Network and no limitations on the unsolicited commercial email that may result from the collection of email addresses in this fashion." Yikes; built-in opt-out spam!
(I de-moronized the quotes by hand. Slightly scary thing: The original document was written with Microsoft Word, then converted with Acrobat PDFWriter.)
Code reviews are the practice most univerally praised and most rarely carried out.
My first exposure to something like code reviews was writers' workshops; everyone submits a poem, story, whatever, and then everyone critiques everyone's works. From this, I learned the first rule of both writers' workshops and of code reviews:
REVIEW THE WRITING, NOT THE WRITER
Being reviewed is tough on the author's ego; spare him or her as much as you can. If everyone gets a turn in the hot seat, they'll learn the difference between flamage and constructive criticism.
Here's the second rule: People hate performing less than they hate preparing for code reviews. It's heresy, but I've had a lot of luck with zero-prep code reviews: Everyone shows up, gets a printout, and away we all go. It can take a lot of time in the review, but the total time spent is smaller (and, IMHO, more effective). In reality, people skip the preparation; why not plan for it?
Third rule: Reviews identify problems, not solutions. You don't have to know a better way to know something's wrong.
Fourth rule: The author is there to learn, and to answer questions, not to be defensive.
I brought code reviews into the small startup I joined a few years ago. Final rule: everything deployed to production gets reviewed. It worked; not only did my co-workers accept it, but at least one of them, when he left for another job, got people there to do code reviews the same way.
Code reviews aren't just for finding bugs; they're for improving the quality of the code, for whatever your local definition of "quality" is. I've always considered maintainability to be fair game.
My current project has a fairly rigid process, put into place long before I arrived. Here, they do desk checks and call them "reviews." It's not as good, but it's better than nothing.
... based on over three years with the (commercial, non-open, non-free, cross platform) product I've been working on (and ported from NT to Solaris), and twenty years in the industry. The following advice applies to both Unix and other, less worthy, operating systems.
Every configuration option must have a sane (and documented) default. Period.
A configuration file has the following advantages:
If the user has a problem, he or she can send you the configuration file. This is easier than sending you an environment dump.
Users can more easily back up a configuraion file than all the combinations of things that set environment variables. (Eudora keeps everything it needs in one directory structure. Trivial to back up. Trivial to support multiple users on the same machine. Very nice.)
If your product can read the configuration file, perhaps your product can write the configuration file, too. Look at Sun's OpenLook mail tool, or at Z-Mail: both use (effectively) the.mailrc format, but provide (purely optional) GUI interfaces to set most or all of the options. Speaking as a one-time mailx guru, I found this much more convenient than surfing mailrc(1) options list (which I was, thank you very much, quite capable of doing).
Environment variables have the advantage of really simple ad hoc experimentation:
$ MAGICFOO=bar yap # or
% env MAGICFOO=bar yap
We use one environment variable, which points to the directory where our configuration file lives.
Don't talk to me about "the registry". Our product doesn't use the registry. Eudora doesn't use the registry. Both greatly benefit as a result of this non-use. The registry is a black hole: everything falls into it, because it really sucks.
As previously proposed, the freeze will proceed in four phases: first policy will be frozen, followed by the base system, followed by standard installs, and concluding with the remainder of Debian. The aim of this first part of the freeze is to finalise our expectations of the release (what we want packages to look like, what architectures we're going to release) and to prepare ourselves for the freezing the base system by ensuring that the base system is releasable.
Note that this does not involve a freeze on package development yet: bugfixes, and new features are still welcome, and will continue being added to woody in the usual way. What it does mean is that your packages will be frozen in the near future, so now is probably a good time to limit yourself to only introducing new features that have already been heavily tested upstream, and fixing bugs.
In detail, the goals for this phase are:
Finalise debian-policy: accept any further proposals that woody packages should concern themselves with; and ensure -policy is a useful document for people working on quality assurance.
Deadline: final version of debian-policy for woody needs to be uploaded to the archive by July 21st.
Finalise our target architectures. As well as alpha, arm, i386, m68k, powerpc and sparc, we have the opportunity to include ia64 (Intel's new 64bit Itanium architecture), hppa (HP's PA-RISC architecture), mips and mipsel (SGI and Decstation machines), too. Requirements for inclusion in woody are fairly simple and have been met, or are close to being met, by all those architectures. For reference, they are: a working, relatively stable toolchain, a usable system (including all of base and standard; and a fair chunk of optional and extra), and a functional install. (Hurd people, see below)
Deadline: someone from each architecture that wants to release needs to mail -release with their current status, and a successful install report by July 24th.
Determine whether cryptographic software can be moved from non-US/main to main. Ben Collins (project leader) is hustling this through the appropriate avenues.
Deadline: legal advice needs to be obtained by July 21st.
Ensure the base system is releasable on all architectures: this means making sure we know what packages, exactly, the base system consists of on all architectures; and fixing any and all release critical bugs (ie, with severities critical, grave or serious) in those packages.
Deadline: base packages need to be free of RC bugs by July 21st.
If all goes well, the next phase will begin on the 1st of August. If all goes incredibly well, we'll release in November. Ha ha ha.
The main risk that may affect moving on to the next phase is the possiblity of finding release critical bugs in the base system that take significant amounts of time to fix.
As you've noticed by a careful analysis of the subject line, the woody release will be numbered Debian 3.0, in recognition of the large number of changes made since potato. This is, to put it mildly, a somewhat controversial decision, but it's one I get to make. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the way woody's progressing, and I think by the time it's released it'll easily live up to that number -- and by that I mean the "3", not the ".0".
On the subject of controversial decisions, one I'm not going to make today is what to call the release after woody. That one will be made when woody is released and a new testing distribution is forked from woody. Besides which, I still haven't gotten around to rewatching Toy Story.
While I may not be too concerned one way or another about the name of the next release, I do have some ideas about how it might be good to handle the next release. My overriding goal for this release was to manage to get a short, controllable freeze; one that we can get over and done with in a few months, rather than letting it drag on for seven months with no end in sight, but this came at a cost of letting the development cycle go on for quite a while: ten and a half months, as it turned out. For the next cycle (assuming this freeze actually turns out to be relatively short and controlled), I think it would be interesting to see if we can do the same thing again, with a short (2 or 3 month) development cycle, for a 5 to 7 month release cycle.
Which would mean you mightn't need to worry too much about not getting the neat new feature you were planning on working on into woody, if that's any consolation.
And on that note, I'm inclined to think Hurd is probably better off targetting the next freeze, (in, say, six to eight months from today) rather than woody. In particular, Hurd is at present both a difficult target to port to (and thus has a quite limited range of software when compared to the Linux ports of Debian) and isn't able to self install.
Easy CD Creator probably installed an association with.ISO files; your friend should be able to just double click the image files.
Alternative approach: Start Easy CD Creator; from the File menu, select Build CD From CD Image; change the image type from.CIF to.ISO (the least intuitive step); navigate until you find the image file.
I've burned Red Hat 7.0 and 7.1 CD sets, and a SuSE 7.0 CD, this way. I think they were bootable.
I've also burned CDs this way based on my own ISO images (created with mkisofs; Joliet, autorun on NT, plus Solaris package format), for versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the product I work on.
... solid rockets are capable of vicious acceleration. I'm talking "supersonic by the time it's left the launch rail" vicious....
Think "Darwin Award for the guy who strapped JATO units to an Impala and flew it into a cliff"... or the longer, funnier, and even vaguely plausible Legend of the Rocket Car.
The policy around here is: 40 hours of classroom learning per year, paid by the company, on company time.
But... no conferences (boondoggles for some, but the best way for me to learn); they'll buy books, but I don't get credit for reading them, or for anything I do at home. If there's no babysitter watching over me, maybe I'm goofing off?-(
In my previous company (small startup), the official policy was: We'll buy books, but you read them on your own time. (I had a two hour commute each way on the train every day. I read the Blue Camel cover to cover three times.) My policy (I supervised a group of Perl programmers) was: We do code reviews for every line of code that goes in production, and any possible improvement is fair game. We went from (collectively) only knowing Perl 4, to being a really sharp Perl 5 shop with very maintainable code, right after Perl 5.0 (and the Blue Camel) came out and became generally accepted.
Wheeler estimates 6.2 corresponds to a project that would take 4500 person-years to develop, and 7.1, 8000 person-years. This for two versions released within 13 months of each other.
Do the math. This represents the effort of over three thousand people working full time on free software in that period. More likely, it means the free and open source software in this study was written a heck of a lot faster than COCOMO suggests!
(OTOH, 7.1 included Mozilla and LINPACK; 6.2 didn't. These projects were started before 6.2 was released.)
What struck me about the CNET article was not Gate's analogy, but what percentage of the article was spent explaining free (and Open Source) licenses, and rebutting (by way of VA Linux's CEO, Larry Augustin) what Gates said.
Either we've got some friends out there, or Gates is really coming off as pointy haired. Or both.
P.S.: Yes, Richard, they blew the distinction between free software and Open Source software.
In The budding e-book controversy, the retired founder of Random House Electronic Publishing bemoans how "Random House's lawyers are trying to stretch the definition of the word "book" in order to justify a grab of author's rights." (Beware the phrase "mechanical reproduction rights.")
Slashdot Mirror
Q: For example when Borland introduced Kylix for GNU/Linux, we'll see a software, that is itself free, but can't be built with free tools. Do you consider this really a free software?
... useless in the Free World." (He then pats himself on the back for having written the GNU C compiler.)
A (Stallman): It is free software, but not usable in a free operating system, not available to people who want to keep their freedom
I can understand Stallman being annoyed that Kylix is a free-as-in-beer closed source compiler. Still, this is a tool for generating free-as-in-speech software (or non-free commercial software, developer's choice). Does Stallman not understand the difference between Delphi (for programs running under MS Windows) and Kylix (for programs running under GNU/Linux, as Mr. Bednar so tactfully called it during the Stallman interview)?
The previous question is a more general one about non-free compilers. Stallman described software compilable only with a non-free compiler as something that "can't run on a non-free platform
Stallman considers "GNU/Linux" to be a free operating system, right? Does he consider an installation non-free if every byte can't be generated from free source code?
Here is a photo of an IBM prototype.
Interesting example display (tiny, very clear, may be a complete mock up): I can't tell whether or not it's MS Windows, but it's surely Netscape.
From the article:
There was no malicious intent.
Except to trash whitehouse.gov, using servers and networks all over the world to do so.
In the vast world of potential Internet viruses and worms, Code Red is a grade Z microbe.
If people hadn't woken up and smelled the patch, it would have been a grade B (if not A) pain in the butt. Like Y2K, there was too much hype, but the hype helped; a self-defeating prophecy.
It would have to go through a significant amount of mutation before it became any sort of serious threat to the Internet's health.
Significant, but not huge. There's been lots of discussion about how bad the next generation may be.
At its broadest definition, all hacking is white-hat hacking.
This statement is nonsense. There is certainly such a thing as white-hat hacking, and certainly too much hacking is portrayed as far darker than it really is, but there's a huge difference between the white hats and the jerks behind Code Red.
At most, Code Red proved you should always be wary about what Microsoft software does to your machine, like turning it into a server without your implicit knowledge.
Um, these machines were supposed to be servers.-)
We should be wary about what any software does to our machines. Point well taken, though.
Why do you use it?
My mom uses MSN for dial-up because her Dell computer came with 12 months of MSN. (Now Dells come with 6 months of MSN.) As another poster said, click "Connect to the Internet," and you get the MSN home page.
Funny thing is, you can still use MSN (the Web site) with any dial-up ISP. We'll see how Mom feels about transitioning (say, to a $15/month account, instead of paying $22/month for MSN) when the year's up.
P.S.: Yes, I know, it's not free, it's included in the price of the computer.
There are many reasons why you should transition your service:
- With more than 230 million visitors per month, MSN is available in 33 markets and in 17 languages. (Mom, can I jump off the cliff, too? All the cool kids are doing it.) (More importantly, *any* ISP lets you visit MSN.)
- Quality, reliability and speed. (Unlike all the other ISPs?)
- Technical support, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at no charge!
- (Ditto?)
-
- Continue to enjoy POP3 e-mail service, with an option to switch to the world's largest Web-based e-mail service, MSN Hotmail®, via MSN Internet Explorer and get up to nine e-mail screen names for you and the rest of your family. (You can get Hotmail, and hundreds of screen names, from any ISP. But once you transition your MSN e-mail to Web-based, it's difficult or impossible to go back to POP3/SMTP.)
- Instant messaging from MSN Messenger Service, the fast growing instant messaging service. (Accessible from any ISP.)
- You get more space for your personal Web site from 5MB to 30MB. (Okay, one real one.)
- Easy access to great resources from MSN that help make your life better.
- Catch up on the latest news from MSNBC (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Listen to your favorite music (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Play games (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Send instant messages (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Create an online photo album for your family (Accessible from any ISP, whether or not you use MSN to do it..)
- Personalize your home page with weather, sports, news or local events (Ditto.)
- Shop from the convenience of your home (Other ISPs block Amazon.com or something?)
- Invest your money wisely (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Search for information (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Send online greeting cards (Accessible from any ISP, unfortunately.)-:
- Plan your vacation (Accessible from any ISP.)
- Take care of your family's health (Information to help do this is accessible from any ISP, though you're gonna have to get off the darned Internet to do something with it.)
- And, so much more
And, I'm so much less impressed.So what if MSN becomes the "preferred ISP"?
... but no intentional triggering of Godwin's Law.-)
My mom uses dialup MSN. They've intercepted the "launch a connection to the Internet" action, so the only way you can get online is to run the MSN home page thingie (the AOL-ish screen that's a seriously DHTML'ed IE). Want a PPP connection to run just your favorite TCP/IP apps over, not your ISP's favorite app? Tough luck.
And beyond that, its only going to apply to some customers, not all.
"If you use a PC with the Windows operating system (rather than a Macintosh), between August 7, 2001 and August 24, 2001 an e-mail message will be sent to eligible customers [anyone who runs Windows and uses dial-up or DSL from Qwest.net]. The e-mail will provide a link to the transition Web site. Once you transition to MSN, your Qwest.net account services will be inaccessible 10 days after you successfully transition your service to MSN Internet Access.
Beginning November 4, 2001, eligible Qwest.net Internet Access customers who have not transitioned their account will automatically be transitioned to MSN."
"Some customers" means "any customers who don't immediately lie and say they own Macs"?-)
Beyond all this, if you have another ISP that youve chosen to do business with, such as a local ISP in your home town, Qwest does not have the legal authority to render the contract between you and your ISP null and void. Its only "Qwest.net" subscribers that have to "worry" about anything.
So all you have to do is change ISPs, change your e-mail address, and hope (dial-up) you can still get a local POP or (DSL) go through the whole DSL Installation Hell routine ("No, it's not our fault, it's their fault") again? How reassuring.
They came first for the Qwest.net customers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Qwest.net customer. Then they came for the DakotaCom customers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a DakotaCom customer.... Then they came for me, and by that time, was no one left to speak up. (Sorry, trivialization of a Holocaust-related quote
"Cringely" and Dvorak keep saying, "No, seriously, shutdown the Internet and replace it with something secure."
They're missing the first law of complex systems. I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes something like:
All complex systems that work began as simple systems that worked.
You can't replace today's Internet, the result of decades of evolution, with something purpose-built from scratch to do as much. The attempt will suffer from the second-system effect, and just plain won't work.
It's easy for a columnist to ask for something drastic. Too easy. But it sells papers (or click-thrus, or whatever we're selling today).
It's obviously a kick-ass portable MP3 (and WAV) player, with the ability to store about 150 CD's worth of music! Or will be if it's got decent audio hardware. (Headphones provided.) Likely.
... or could, with a consumer grade device. ("Sorry, sir, if you forgot your password, there's no way you can retrieve those, um, important documents from your office PC. Sir?")
Mostly what it appears to be is a 10 GB "removable drive" designed for consumers. Big emphasis on storing photos (and the ability to show them on a TV as well as transfer to and from PCs). Think about it: The capacity of 16 CD-R's, totally re-writable, that can be used between two PCs without CD-R or CD-RW drives.
(Prediction: This will be used to transfer pr0n downloaded at work via the office T1, to a PC at home where it can be, ahem, "enjoyed." Lovely.)
What don't I see:
It says, "Fully versitile. Totally secure." I don't see where the security comes in
No PDA functionality. (20 character x 4 line display; cheap, but don't try to bring up your calendar, or a big phone directory.)
No ability to rip CD's. Not a problem; it begs to be hooked up to a PC, so count on the computer to rip.
No support for Windows 95 (98 or 2000 need a device drive; Windows ME appears to have native support for USB disk drives), Mac, or, ironically, Linux.
Robustness. You need to "eject" the virtual drive (how the Mine looks to a PC) before disconnecting. Yeah, like that'll happen every time.
EFF Rejoins Protests After Meeting with US Attorney's Office
Representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) met with representatives of the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco today. There was a productive dialog, however the U.S. Attorney's office gave no indication of dropping the prosecution against Dmitry Sklyarov.
Having explored good faith negotiations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation rejoins the call for nonviolent protests worldwide to secure the immediate release of Dmitry Sklarov and dropping of all criminal charges against him.
A protest is already scheduled in San Francisco for 11:30am this Monday, July 30, at the Federal Courthouse at 450 Golden Gate Ave. Additional protests will occur in 25 or more cities worldwide in coming weeks.
A recent AT&T CEO (not the current one) once lamented, "Every year, billions of dollars of sales are made over our 800 numbers. Why can't we somehow get some cut of that business?" I think the idea was to arrange lower rates in exchange for a percentage.
...?"
When several projects I've been on asked Oracle for a price quote, we were asked for our business plan. Oracle wanted to charge one (large) ISP for every dialup customer account! (Another project chose Sybase for a similar reason.)
Bill Gates, MSFT's chief strategist, must have recently asked himself, "Billions of dollars are spent online every year, from computers running our operating system. Why can't
The scary thing is, MSFT is providing some value to the online vendors. They've got lots of allies for shoving this down our throats.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"The Windows XP operating system leaves the user with little choice but to employ Passport. As soon as the user starts a computer and uses a modem, a dialog box appears on the screen stating: 'You've just connected to the Internet. You need a Passport to use Windows XP Internet communications features (such as instant messaging, voice chat and video), and to access Net-enabled features. Click here to set up your Passport.' "
"... users cannot receive support services for products without registering for Microsoft Passport. The user's product identification number [not provided with XP activation but provided with XP registration] is then linked to his or her personally identifiable Passport information."
" 'If in the future Passport sends email on behalf of participating web sites, you will be able to follow instructions contained in the email to choose whether or not you'd like to receive additional email.' There appears to be no means by which users currently can limit the exchange of their email addresses with the Microsoft Network and no limitations on the unsolicited commercial email that may result from the collection of email addresses in this fashion." Yikes; built-in opt-out spam!
(I de-moronized the quotes by hand. Slightly scary thing: The original document was written with Microsoft Word, then converted with Acrobat PDFWriter.)
Bothered by filling out that Apple registration form? Lie.
Conversation at my wife's company:
"Heh. I hate filling out those forms that ask you all sorts of personal information, so I told 'em I have eight kids."
"But you do have eight kids!"
"That's the beauty of it. They'll never believe me."
Code reviews are the practice most univerally praised and most rarely carried out.
My first exposure to something like code reviews was writers' workshops; everyone submits a poem, story, whatever, and then everyone critiques everyone's works. From this, I learned the first rule of both writers' workshops and of code reviews:
REVIEW THE WRITING, NOT THE WRITER
Being reviewed is tough on the author's ego; spare him or her as much as you can. If everyone gets a turn in the hot seat, they'll learn the difference between flamage and constructive criticism.
Here's the second rule: People hate performing less than they hate preparing for code reviews. It's heresy, but I've had a lot of luck with zero-prep code reviews: Everyone shows up, gets a printout, and away we all go. It can take a lot of time in the review, but the total time spent is smaller (and, IMHO, more effective). In reality, people skip the preparation; why not plan for it?
Third rule: Reviews identify problems, not solutions. You don't have to know a better way to know something's wrong.
Fourth rule: The author is there to learn, and to answer questions, not to be defensive.
I brought code reviews into the small startup I joined a few years ago. Final rule: everything deployed to production gets reviewed. It worked; not only did my co-workers accept it, but at least one of them, when he left for another job, got people there to do code reviews the same way.
Code reviews aren't just for finding bugs; they're for improving the quality of the code, for whatever your local definition of "quality" is. I've always considered maintainability to be fair game.
My current project has a fairly rigid process, put into place long before I arrived. Here, they do desk checks and call them "reviews." It's not as good, but it's better than nothing.
Every configuration option must have a sane (and documented) default. Period.
A configuration file has the following advantages:
Environment variables have the advantage of really simple ad hoc experimentation:
$ MAGICFOO=bar yap # or
% env MAGICFOO=bar yap
We use one environment variable, which points to the directory where our configuration file lives.
Don't talk to me about "the registry". Our product doesn't use the registry. Eudora doesn't use the registry. Both greatly benefit as a result of this non-use. The registry is a black hole: everything falls into it, because it really sucks.
Welcome to the woody freeze.
As previously proposed, the freeze will proceed in four phases: first policy will be frozen, followed by the base system, followed by standard installs, and concluding with the remainder of Debian. The aim of this first part of the freeze is to finalise our expectations of the release (what we want packages to look like, what architectures we're going to release) and to prepare ourselves for the freezing the base system by ensuring that the base system is releasable.
Note that this does not involve a freeze on package development yet: bugfixes, and new features are still welcome, and will continue being added to woody in the usual way. What it does mean is that your packages will be frozen in the near future, so now is probably a good time to limit yourself to only introducing new features that have already been heavily tested upstream, and fixing bugs.
In detail, the goals for this phase are:
Finalise debian-policy: accept any further proposals that woody packages should concern themselves with; and ensure -policy is a useful document for people working on quality assurance.
Deadline: final version of debian-policy for woody needs to be uploaded to the archive by July 21st.
Finalise our target architectures. As well as alpha, arm, i386, m68k, powerpc and sparc, we have the opportunity to include ia64 (Intel's new 64bit Itanium architecture), hppa (HP's PA-RISC architecture), mips and mipsel (SGI and Decstation machines), too. Requirements for inclusion in woody are fairly simple and have been met, or are close to being met, by all those architectures. For reference, they are: a working, relatively stable toolchain, a usable system (including all of base and standard; and a fair chunk of optional and extra), and a functional install. (Hurd people, see below)
Deadline: someone from each architecture that wants to release needs to mail -release with their current status, and a successful install report by July 24th.
Determine whether cryptographic software can be moved from non-US/main to main. Ben Collins (project leader) is hustling this through the appropriate avenues.
Deadline: legal advice needs to be obtained by July 21st.
Ensure the base system is releasable on all architectures: this means making sure we know what packages, exactly, the base system consists of on all architectures; and fixing any and all release critical bugs (ie, with severities critical, grave or serious) in those packages.
Deadline: base packages need to be free of RC bugs by July 21st.
If all goes well, the next phase will begin on the 1st of August. If all goes incredibly well, we'll release in November. Ha ha ha.
The main risk that may affect moving on to the next phase is the possiblity of finding release critical bugs in the base system that take significant amounts of time to fix.
As you've noticed by a careful analysis of the subject line, the woody release will be numbered Debian 3.0, in recognition of the large number of changes made since potato. This is, to put it mildly, a somewhat controversial decision, but it's one I get to make. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the way woody's progressing, and I think by the time it's released it'll easily live up to that number -- and by that I mean the "3", not the ".0".
On the subject of controversial decisions, one I'm not going to make today is what to call the release after woody. That one will be made when woody is released and a new testing distribution is forked from woody. Besides which, I still haven't gotten around to rewatching Toy Story.
While I may not be too concerned one way or another about the name of the next release, I do have some ideas about how it might be good to handle the next release. My overriding goal for this release was to manage to get a short, controllable freeze; one that we can get over and done with in a few months, rather than letting it drag on for seven months with no end in sight, but this came at a cost of letting the development cycle go on for quite a while: ten and a half months, as it turned out. For the next cycle (assuming this freeze actually turns out to be relatively short and controlled), I think it would be interesting to see if we can do the same thing again, with a short (2 or 3 month) development cycle, for a 5 to 7 month release cycle.
Which would mean you mightn't need to worry too much about not getting the neat new feature you were planning on working on into woody, if that's any consolation.
And on that note, I'm inclined to think Hurd is probably better off targetting the next freeze, (in, say, six to eight months from today) rather than woody. In particular, Hurd is at present both a difficult target to port to (and thus has a quite limited range of software when compared to the Linux ports of Debian) and isn't able to self install.
In short, the freeze, she is begun. Have at it.
Cheers,
aj
Easy CD Creator probably installed an association with .ISO files; your friend should be able to just double click the image files.
.CIF to .ISO (the least intuitive step); navigate until you find the image file.
Alternative approach: Start Easy CD Creator; from the File menu, select Build CD From CD Image; change the image type from
I've burned Red Hat 7.0 and 7.1 CD sets, and a SuSE 7.0 CD, this way. I think they were bootable.
I've also burned CDs this way based on my own ISO images (created with mkisofs; Joliet, autorun on NT, plus Solaris package format), for versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the product I work on.
This list of functions for Nero (Burning Rom) leads me to believe it can do the same thing.
... solid rockets are capable of vicious acceleration. I'm talking "supersonic by the time it's left the launch rail" vicious....
... or the longer, funnier, and even vaguely plausible Legend of the Rocket Car.
Think "Darwin Award for the guy who strapped JATO units to an Impala and flew it into a cliff"
The policy around here is: 40 hours of classroom learning per year, paid by the company, on company time.
... no conferences (boondoggles for some, but the best way for me to learn); they'll buy books, but I don't get credit for reading them, or for anything I do at home. If there's no babysitter watching over me, maybe I'm goofing off?-(
But
In my previous company (small startup), the official policy was: We'll buy books, but you read them on your own time. (I had a two hour commute each way on the train every day. I read the Blue Camel cover to cover three times.) My policy (I supervised a group of Perl programmers) was: We do code reviews for every line of code that goes in production, and any possible improvement is fair game. We went from (collectively) only knowing Perl 4, to being a really sharp Perl 5 shop with very maintainable code, right after Perl 5.0 (and the Blue Camel) came out and became generally accepted.
"Giving in to legal pressure" is not "exercising editorial control."
Does that mean I can't use it with Outlook?-)
Wheeler estimates 6.2 corresponds to a project that would take 4500 person-years to develop, and 7.1, 8000 person-years. This for two versions released within 13 months of each other.
Do the math. This represents the effort of over three thousand people working full time on free software in that period. More likely, it means the free and open source software in this study was written a heck of a lot faster than COCOMO suggests!
(OTOH, 7.1 included Mozilla and LINPACK; 6.2 didn't. These projects were started before 6.2 was released.)
What struck me about the CNET article was not Gate's analogy, but what percentage of the article was spent explaining free (and Open Source) licenses, and rebutting (by way of VA Linux's CEO, Larry Augustin) what Gates said.
Either we've got some friends out there, or Gates is really coming off as pointy haired. Or both.
P.S.: Yes, Richard, they blew the distinction between free software and Open Source software.
I feel that being able to multithread code effectively in Java would make a programmer advanced in that topic.
Here's the best book on the subject:
Doug Lea, Concurrent Programming in Java. Second Edition: Design Principles and Patterns
book home page
author home page (pointer to online supplement for the book)
at Fatbrain
at Amazon
Doug Lea (well known C++ programmer and writer; teaches at SUNY/Oswego)
Kevin Sullivan (U. of Virginia)
A couple of less positive articles from Australia.
An article at O'Reilly.
In The budding e-book controversy, the retired founder of Random House Electronic Publishing bemoans how "Random House's lawyers are trying to stretch the definition of the word "book" in order to justify a grab of author's rights." (Beware the phrase "mechanical reproduction rights.")
Worth reading.