I would say that geeks are so focused on the tactical level of code
this hints at the whole reason why opensource has the potential to totally change the computer/it business model. and why so many companies are failing at it.
it's all about product vs. service. since computers have been around the vast majority of companies have been product based. they sell wordprocessors or mainframes or videogames. this makes sense, of course, because the traditional economies have been product-based too. build a widget and sell it. simple.
opensource has the potential to move this to a service based economy. if the product itself is opensource then it is... free. you can't sell it successfully if people can just pluck it off a tree! the response should be to move the money-making into the service area.
okay, maybe "service" is a bad word (since it conjures up the image of low-pay, low-challenge tech support jobs). a better word is "solution". sure there are a lot of companies that claim to be "solution providers" but few really are. the successful companies are the ones that take free software, tailor it, combine it with other free wares, integrate it, document it, deliver it and support it as a unified "solution".
of course a lot of us can roll our own solutions - but a purchased solution can offer a lot of advantages that home-builts can't:
time savings: you can buy and install it in a day or build it in a month
accountability: if the solution fails it's on the providers head, not yours
transferability: if the guy who built your solution quits you may be in trouble. it may be better to buy.
pre-purchase audit: you can see the capabilities, merits and limitations of a purchased solution before you buy. you may not fully discover these aspects of yr home-rolled job until it's built. and then it's too late!
there are some companies that operate on this model. the old red hat did it with rhn and stronghold as just one example.
so. to the opensource companies out there: i have a dozen problems a day and a credit card. sell me a solution! please!
Women perceive that Slashdot is male-oriented, or that they are being viewed differently here
"perceive"? have you read the first thirty or so posts? the level downright sexist jokes that rely on stereotypes about women is insane!
he solution is not to create a simplified, pink-themed version of slashot
bingo. the solution is for the population here to smarten up. yes, women comprise only a small percentage of the it/programming world. but then again, so do mexicans. and yet no one seems to make jokes about mexicans and computers. why? because as a society we've finally clued in that racism is unjust and couterproductive.
In order to pay out a collected 'tax' they'll need to know how to divide it up, and to do that, they'll need to know who has what...
well, let's look at the blank cd levy in canada shall we? the tax is distributed to artists and labels by socan (society of canadian artists, musicians and producers... how they got "socan" out of that i don't know). it's distributed based on sales. ie big selling artists get a bigger chunk of the taxes.
now, i'm in a band. we're producing a record that will be released by a local label. it's almost certain that we're going to lose money on this whole venture but, hey, it's a labour of love. the cd's that we're using are subject to the levy.
what does this mean? it means my band will lose money making our cd but avril levigne will make a profit from it through the levy.
I can think of cases where C is the right tool for the job
but, really, there aren't that many of those. here's a statement you can argue about:
"usage of c and it's derivatives (c++, objective-c) is more likely create buggy and insecure software. the performance gains from these languages does not make up for this loss of stability"
seriously. direct memory management is a dangerous thing and isn't necessary for 90% of the software written in c-like languages. if you're writing device drivers or an os or whatever, it's important... but does sendmail really need to be written in c?
They're trying to give people a simple way to distinguish legitimate sites from phishing sites
like that works! my dad called me about a year or so ago. he'd only been on the 'net a couple of weeks and ran into a site that asked him to accept a certificate. he was concerned because his bank's site never asked him for acceptance... he assumed that if the site didn't ask for acceptance it wasn't a legit ssl connection. yep, exactly the opposite of how it's supposed to work.
now, you can say he didn't read the full message (and it's true, he didn't) but, really, who here actually reads all that stuff your computer throws at you? i mean, we all skip down the man page to the examples section (if there is one) don't we? and my dad's a chemical engineer - six years of math education and he's stumped by our ssl user interface.
yes... but microsoft has branding in the words. all their products are preceded by "ms" to tie the company to the product in the minds of end users. kinda like "mc" for all the mcdonalds "food" products or the much more recent "i" prefix for apple stuff.
linux doesn't really have that. sure there's "gnu" as in "gnutar" - but everyone just says "tar" anyway. and "k" and "g" for the desktop manager... but there's not over-arching naming mechanism that says "this is linux".
and quite frankly, i don't want there to be. if we're going to start messing with the names of linux stuff, i vote we put an 'n' in umount and an 'e' in resolv.conf first.
So if the movie companies did sell low-resolution copies of their movies (fully
DRM'd, of course) for handhelds, for say $4 a movie, then it would somehow no
longer be fair use to copy our DVDs to our handhelds?
so... because i can buy that cd on casette i can't make a tape of it for home use?
what's surprising is that even faced with this new competition, britannica still refuses to publish poorly-spelt and grossly ill-informed posts from my blog!
the web has my blog. britannica doesn't. the web is winning. isn't it obvious what people want?
probably from the corollary effect of actually going to bed on time
which proves my point that coffee extends your life... not by adding more years to the end of it, when you're old and frail, but by giving you more of it now. time that would normally be wasted in sleep is yours to live with coffee!
witness: if you drink enough coffee to get by on 6.5 hours of sleep rather than 8 then, after 35 years of continuous use you will have extended your life by a full two years ((35*365*1.5)/24/365 = 798)
Open Source is all about: "sharing" other people's ideas
yes, but open source is also about contributing new stuff to the existing body of work. that's what we call "innovation" - which is another strong point of oss.
seriously. this brings up the biggest hole in email as a communications medium: it's inherently broadcast.
for email to really become the predominant communications medium, privacy and authentication must be dealt with. whether that's through some open encryption/signing standard like gpg/openpgp or through some proprietary technique doesn't really matter (although obviously, i'm rooting for gpg). what matters is that people a) realize the shortcomings of email in this area and b) do something about it.
lots of big oss projects suffer from poor developer doco, wildly-divergent coding standards and a lack of anything vaguely looking like project management. have you ever tried to bust into the mozilla code? it's easier to become a mason!
in the proprietary world of software, new hires get weeks of training to explain the ins and outs of the source tree, the preferred tools, the internal standards &c. this is done not just to get said hires up to speed and productive as quickly as possible but also to ensure that their contributions don't damage the conceptual integrity of the project.
3. xerox will let this wither away in the lab just like all those other great parc ideas and we won't see it for another decade when someone with the actual common sense to build and sell the damn thing happens to get a peek at it through the window.
this is the most likely result. i blame it on the fact that the xerox corporate culture has been so built on the "copier" mentality that they can't recognize the value of an original.
Terrorism: "And he came in wielding this huge wad of 20's and a microwave transmitter!!..."
the fbi defines "terrorism" as "use of force... to intimidate or coerce... in the furtherance of political or social objectives" (full definition without snips here)
using money to intimidate in the furtherance of a political objectives is what the government does... not terrorists, silly!
hey, it's a valid question! the concept of end user isn't objective, it depends on who you are:
if you write commercial software, the end user is joe punter with a computer
if you write programming languages, the end user is the person who writes the software for joe punter
if you writing operating systems, the end user is everyone from the language writer to the programmer to joe punter. these people are often indistinguishable to os designers.
if you design hardware, the end user is the person who writes the operating system.
of course if you just piss away your valuable dev time posting on slashdot, the end user is whoever has mod points...
when the ftaa was being signed there was a lot of talk about subsidies to industries and regulations on producers as being "barriers to trade". i can only presume they were talking about things like:
public healthcare. a public system means corporations don't have to provide health insurance for employees. that's a "subsidy" to the industries in the country with public health.
safety regulations. if my country has higher worker safety standards than another country my domestic industry can claim that local safety standards are a barrier to export and take the government to the wto.
environmental standards. there are a lot of exceptions on this in the wto and ftaa agreements, but the bottom line is that any new environmental legislation can be construed as trade barrier. just look at the kerfuffle over mmt. is mmt bad? probably not. but sovereign nations should have the power to decide to ban it if they want, without having to get the approval of exporting nations' corporations.
exactly... it's important to realize that while software can be a commodity brokered for cash, it is far from being the only revenue stream and is, in most cases, not even the most valuable one. in the "information services" world you can make a tonne of money:
providing support
customization
install and maintainance
using the software to sell tangible goods
using the software to attract eyeballs for ads
you can run those revenue streams on open or closed wares... and if anything, the above revenue models will be more successful on opensource wares because they are more reliable (as in they won't disappear if the partent company goes out of business) and the talent pool for using them is greater.
if it wasn't for oss wares, my company wouldn't even exist and i wouldn't have this job. period.
suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how?
voicemail is a tech that makes my life easier. now i never have to talk to management or clients... when they call, they're greated with a nice "mailbox full" message and i get some peace and quiet.
I haven't seen Sun do anything that leads me to believe they are really for open systems.
then perhaps you should take a look at experimentalstuff.com - sun's site for experimental code. lots of it is opensource including an entire operating system (chorus os).
Things are different there, government and law struture wise.
note also that the uk has the highest number of cctv (surveillance cameras) per capita of any country in in europe by a healthy margin.
add to that the fact that the british legal system seems to be based on the concept of writing broad, generalize laws and letting justice be sorted out by selective enforcement. there's a crime in the uk called "going equipped to commit arson" - carrying matches, basically. the theory is it will only be enforced against those who "deserve" p[ro\|er]securtion.
put 'em together and it looks like britain is dedicated less privacy, and broader criminilazation. not very happy.
Re:i hate debugging
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 5, Funny
cause when i do it, it is often re-bugging
we have a special process we call "debuggery".
debuggery - maxims and arrows
be hostile: your application was your friend - your baby. you gave it life. well, no longer. now your application is your enemy. do you admire the intricate house of cards you have built like hiram abif? don't. you have a glue gun now and you are going to do a little explaining about who is boss here! your app is taunting you - it's thinking "what does a chemical/analogue hack like that have that i don't?" well, i'll tell you: an index finger. suitable for hitting the "del" key. make this crystal goddamn clear!
kludge everything! the debug stage of the development life cycle is all about kludges. we call it klop - kludge-oriented programming:
kludge foo = new kludge(specialCase bar);
you've written that. the debugging phase comes at the end of a project. ie the part closest to the deadline when clueless suits and moneyment confuse line count with product. the pressure is on. the company is on the line. are you going to walk into the glass tower and pitch to the vc's about how yr going to have to go back to the uml's and rebuild x? good luck! can i have your job when you're done? get the tape, get the staples, get the glue.
blame others: teamwork is just a code word for being the shepherd to a flock of scapegoats. if you were smart, you'd have been working on cultivating a culture of accepting blame early on in the cycle. this is espescially effective if yr building a client/server thingy. establish early on that most of the failures are on the client(server) side. whichever one you're not writing.
make yourself documentation czar if possible - then abuse the position to retroactively assign blame to other team members ("the docs explicitly state that we use roman numerals" - "gee, i don't remember that" - "well tough. get coding").if you set it up right you can build an army of debugging minions to do your kluding for you while you, uh, read slashdot...
redefine feature sets. the client is a clueless little doughboy who can't tell his ass from his operating system anyway. he's been flaking you on the spec-n-req all year. turn those tables! if a feature is buggy, yank it. if there's a complaint, reference the client to some vaguely-related advisory somewhere (trust me, he won't read all the way down). if he complains say "in light of advisory x we strongly adivse against implementing _______ (feature). a work around may be possible at a future point and we are more than willing to calculate the billing for that additional work now."
all that and echo will solve all yr debuggery problems.
Slashdot Mirror
this hints at the whole reason why opensource has the potential to totally change the computer/it business model. and why so many companies are failing at it.
it's all about product vs. service. since computers have been around the vast majority of companies have been product based. they sell wordprocessors or mainframes or videogames. this makes sense, of course, because the traditional economies have been product-based too. build a widget and sell it. simple.
opensource has the potential to move this to a service based economy. if the product itself is opensource then it is... free. you can't sell it successfully if people can just pluck it off a tree! the response should be to move the money-making into the service area.
okay, maybe "service" is a bad word (since it conjures up the image of low-pay, low-challenge tech support jobs). a better word is "solution". sure there are a lot of companies that claim to be "solution providers" but few really are. the successful companies are the ones that take free software, tailor it, combine it with other free wares, integrate it, document it, deliver it and support it as a unified "solution".
of course a lot of us can roll our own solutions - but a purchased solution can offer a lot of advantages that home-builts can't:
there are some companies that operate on this model. the old red hat did it with rhn and stronghold as just one example.
so. to the opensource companies out there: i have a dozen problems a day and a credit card. sell me a solution! please!
"perceive"? have you read the first thirty or so posts? the level downright sexist jokes that rely on stereotypes about women is insane!
he solution is not to create a simplified, pink-themed version of slashot
bingo. the solution is for the population here to smarten up. yes, women comprise only a small percentage of the it/programming world. but then again, so do mexicans. and yet no one seems to make jokes about mexicans and computers. why? because as a society we've finally clued in that racism is unjust and couterproductive.
can we start working on dealing with sexism now?
and with such a stunning deluge of churlish "humour" about women it has suddenly become apparent to me why computer programmers can never get dates!
well, let's look at the blank cd levy in canada shall we? the tax is distributed to artists and labels by socan (society of canadian artists, musicians and producers... how they got "socan" out of that i don't know). it's distributed based on sales. ie big selling artists get a bigger chunk of the taxes.
now, i'm in a band. we're producing a record that will be released by a local label. it's almost certain that we're going to lose money on this whole venture but, hey, it's a labour of love. the cd's that we're using are subject to the levy.
what does this mean? it means my band will lose money making our cd but avril levigne will make a profit from it through the levy.
whew.
but, really, there aren't that many of those. here's a statement you can argue about:
"usage of c and it's derivatives (c++, objective-c) is more likely create buggy and insecure software. the performance gains from these languages does not make up for this loss of stability"
seriously. direct memory management is a dangerous thing and isn't necessary for 90% of the software written in c-like languages. if you're writing device drivers or an os or whatever, it's important... but does sendmail really need to be written in c?
would it be more secure if it wasn't?
like that works! my dad called me about a year or so ago. he'd only been on the 'net a couple of weeks and ran into a site that asked him to accept a certificate. he was concerned because his bank's site never asked him for acceptance... he assumed that if the site didn't ask for acceptance it wasn't a legit ssl connection. yep, exactly the opposite of how it's supposed to work.
now, you can say he didn't read the full message (and it's true, he didn't) but, really, who here actually reads all that stuff your computer throws at you? i mean, we all skip down the man page to the examples section (if there is one) don't we? and my dad's a chemical engineer - six years of math education and he's stumped by our ssl user interface.
oh dear.
linux doesn't really have that. sure there's "gnu" as in "gnutar" - but everyone just says "tar" anyway. and "k" and "g" for the desktop manager... but there's not over-arching naming mechanism that says "this is linux".
and quite frankly, i don't want there to be. if we're going to start messing with the names of linux stuff, i vote we put an 'n' in umount and an 'e' in resolv.conf first.
so... because i can buy that cd on casette i can't make a tape of it for home use?
the web has my blog. britannica doesn't. the web is winning. isn't it obvious what people want?
which proves my point that coffee extends your life... not by adding more years to the end of it, when you're old and frail, but by giving you more of it now. time that would normally be wasted in sleep is yours to live with coffee!
witness: if you drink enough coffee to get by on 6.5 hours of sleep rather than 8 then, after 35 years of continuous use you will have extended your life by a full two years ((35*365*1.5)/24/365 = 798)
it's true.
Open Source is all about: "sharing" other people's ideas yes, but open source is also about contributing new stuff to the existing body of work. that's what we call "innovation" - which is another strong point of oss.
seriously. this brings up the biggest hole in email as a communications medium: it's inherently broadcast.
for email to really become the predominant communications medium, privacy and authentication must be dealt with. whether that's through some open encryption/signing standard like gpg/openpgp or through some proprietary technique doesn't really matter (although obviously, i'm rooting for gpg). what matters is that people a) realize the shortcomings of email in this area and b) do something about it.
more importantly is the new developer relations.
lots of big oss projects suffer from poor developer doco, wildly-divergent coding standards and a lack of anything vaguely looking like project management. have you ever tried to bust into the mozilla code? it's easier to become a mason!
in the proprietary world of software, new hires get weeks of training to explain the ins and outs of the source tree, the preferred tools, the internal standards &c. this is done not just to get said hires up to speed and productive as quickly as possible but also to ensure that their contributions don't damage the conceptual integrity of the project.
smart move kde.
you forgot the third option:
3. xerox will let this wither away in the lab just like all those other great parc ideas and we won't see it for another decade when someone with the actual common sense to build and sell the damn thing happens to get a peek at it through the window.
this is the most likely result. i blame it on the fact that the xerox corporate culture has been so built on the "copier" mentality that they can't recognize the value of an original.
the fbi defines "terrorism" as "use of force... to intimidate or coerce... in the furtherance of political or social objectives" (full definition without snips here)
using money to intimidate in the furtherance of a political objectives is what the government does... not terrorists, silly!
>Since when has anything SCO said made sense?
hey, it's a valid question! the concept of end user isn't objective, it depends on who you are:
of course if you just piss away your valuable dev time posting on slashdot, the end user is whoever has mod points...
hooray! more "barriers to trade" please!
when the ftaa was being signed there was a lot of talk about subsidies to industries and regulations on producers as being "barriers to trade". i can only presume they were talking about things like:
so, more barriers to trade please!
you can run those revenue streams on open or closed wares... and if anything, the above revenue models will be more successful on opensource wares because they are more reliable (as in they won't disappear if the partent company goes out of business) and the talent pool for using them is greater.
if it wasn't for oss wares, my company wouldn't even exist and i wouldn't have this job. period.
voicemail is a tech that makes my life easier. now i never have to talk to management or clients... when they call, they're greated with a nice "mailbox full" message and i get some peace and quiet.
then perhaps you should take a look at experimentalstuff.com - sun's site for experimental code. lots of it is opensource including an entire operating system (chorus os).
looks like a committment to opensource to me.
note also that the uk has the highest number of cctv (surveillance cameras) per capita of any country in in europe by a healthy margin.
add to that the fact that the british legal system seems to be based on the concept of writing broad, generalize laws and letting justice be sorted out by selective enforcement. there's a crime in the uk called "going equipped to commit arson" - carrying matches, basically. the theory is it will only be enforced against those who "deserve" p[ro\|er]securtion.
put 'em together and it looks like britain is dedicated less privacy, and broader criminilazation. not very happy.
why? because of monopolism or market dominance? not likely. as of november 2003 the ipod was the leader in portable digital music player with... 31%.
less than a third.
oh yeah, i have a source for that number.
we have a special process we call "debuggery". debuggery - maxims and arrows
- be hostile: your application was your friend - your baby. you gave it life. well, no longer. now your application is your enemy. do you admire the intricate house of cards you have built like hiram abif? don't. you have a glue gun now and you are going to do a little explaining about who is boss here! your app is taunting you - it's thinking "what does a chemical/analogue hack like that have that i don't?" well, i'll tell you: an index finger. suitable for hitting the "del" key. make this crystal goddamn clear!
- kludge everything! the debug stage of the development life cycle is all about kludges. we call it klop - kludge-oriented programming:
- blame others: teamwork is just a code word for being the shepherd to a flock of scapegoats. if you were smart, you'd have been working on cultivating a culture of accepting blame early on in the cycle. this is espescially effective if yr building a client/server thingy. establish early on that most of the failures are on the client(server) side. whichever one you're not writing.
- redefine feature sets. the client is a clueless little doughboy who can't tell his ass from his operating system anyway. he's been flaking you on the spec-n-req all year. turn those tables! if a feature is buggy, yank it. if there's a complaint, reference the client to some vaguely-related advisory somewhere (trust me, he won't read all the way down). if he complains say "in light of advisory x we strongly adivse against implementing _______ (feature). a work around may be possible at a future point and we are more than willing to calculate the billing for that additional work now."
all that and echo will solve all yr debuggery problems.kludge foo = new kludge(specialCase bar);
you've written that. the debugging phase comes at the end of a project. ie the part closest to the deadline when clueless suits and moneyment confuse line count with product. the pressure is on. the company is on the line. are you going to walk into the glass tower and pitch to the vc's about how yr going to have to go back to the uml's and rebuild x? good luck! can i have your job when you're done? get the tape, get the staples, get the glue.
make yourself documentation czar if possible - then abuse the position to retroactively assign blame to other team members ("the docs explicitly state that we use roman numerals" - "gee, i don't remember that" - "well tough. get coding").if you set it up right you can build an army of debugging minions to do your kluding for you while you, uh, read slashdot...
and neither can terminal.app! lord, it's the worst terminal program i've ever used. there are, however, some good replacements.