You're right, I didn't need to insult him (her?). However,/. is a discussion site. I consider it good manners to read a post to which I reply and to make a responses to it which are at least intended to answer it. Anything else just wastes everybody's time. Perhaps I should just have ignored him, but sometimes I think it's good to get a well-meaning verbal slap (even if it takes a while for the slapee to appreciate it).
I think it's probably a bit of a stretch to say he's "into the IP business". I think he's just deluded and builds arguments to protect his delusions. The truth hurts!
Essentially, the longer the term, the more incentive (here, meaning financial potential) there is for artist to keep selling her work, and again, some argue that can encourage such work and help artists to make a living.
I would think the longer the term, the less incentive for an artist to produce new work, and the more scope to keep pedalling old work still in copyright. Therefore to benefit society (and keep the artist innovating) the term should be long enough to allow just enough reward, and short enough to ensure they can't rest on their laurels.
But at the end of the day, for fuck's sake, ars gratia artis. All this talk of "incentives" makes musicians sound like salesmen. I don't wanna buy no warez, I want art.
If you would actually read the content of the posts in this thread perhaps your argument would improve.
You imply that only full-time developers understand development; you're wrong. I am a full time admin supporting development environments. I can also code when I get the chance; I built and maintain a system to replace broken GUI tools, used by my developer community to deploy code to our servers. A decade ago I developed document production systems for two local businesses. My training is in electronics so at one time I could write 6502 assembly. I'm not ignorant.
You accuse me of saying things I haven't (money sucks, all software should be downloadable).
You say you support proprietary software for other reasons than keeping yourself employed, and back your statement up by saying "full time software developers need to be paid to write software". But I'm not the only one to point out your circular argument.
You are right that many companies writing code for in-house use are at the moment uncomfortable releasing it. But that's just a statement of the status quo, which doesn't earn you any points. Its a status quo that can change and is changing.
The only weakness in my argument is I can't at the moment find a source for my claim that most developers are not employed by proprietary software houses. By the way, look up the term "software house" if you are still confused; you might need a real dictionary though, so I'll type out the definition for you:
software house a company that specialises in producing or testing software.
I applaude that you have "dedicated countless hours" to the OSS movement. I have too, perhaps not by writing software (I am still fairly young though, so there is time) but I have, in both my day job and my sideline, spent countless hours advocating and deploying Free Software. After all, writing the code in itself doesn't mean that anyone's going to use it.
Look pal, I didn't say "proprietary software institutions", I said "proprietary software houses" and that is different. Don't change my words to suit your argument.
I am neither a developer nor a student, and I don't see the relevance anyway.
It seems the only argument you have for supporting proprietary development is to keep yourself in a job. Well, tough. The rest of society isn't here to support you just because you feel entitled to it. That's what I meant when I talked about a license to print money.
Of course I don't mean anihilation of the developer market and I am at a loss to see how such an outcome would be achieved.
Most software developers don't work for proprietary software houses. Free Software threatens only proprietary software houses. (I like the phrase "software house", it reminds me of the 80s).
Thanks, and thanks too for enlightening me to the outcome of the W3 patent policy debates. I expressed my feelings at the time but lost touch with the issue due to heavy work commitments. It's nice to see the right outcome.
I will also look into donating to the EFF when my credit card arrives.
we're discussing the value with respect to the individual, not the company.
Thank you. In this case, the value with respect to the individual is the value of being rewarded for his work. I think that's quite relevant.
You are right that management often overlook hoarding. In the long term, though, people who are clearly supporting their team by visibly sharing knowledge will be valued higher than those that don't. My personal course of action is to openly share my knowledge - making sure my manager sees what I do - and I know that this makes me look better than those who don't.
Well said. The problem with relating worthiness of action to personal reward is that the reward part becomes all anyone cares about, and people will bypass the worthiness part if they see a loophole in the system.
IOW a reward-based society does not work when the rules are poorly conceived and poorly implemented. Which is where we are now.
How we get away from here god alone knows, but if enough right-thinking people keep doing the right things (like writing and advocating Free Software) then at least it keeps the question fresh in people's minds. That is the minimum we can expect.
In this case, Asshole has a significantly positive value on his knowledge and his abillity to hord it.
And the company has a significantly negative value on his hording of the knowledge and if wise will get rid of his fucked up ass as soon as they get the chance.
Hey, you need to take flames with a pinch of salt. This place is open, but that means it's open to trolls as well as hobbits. The hobbits just need to learn how to deal with the trolls.
Well, what can I say but congratulations. I'm afraid I can't comment further because I don't know what our issues have been and frankly don't care that much because as long as I have Cygwin and Lotus Notes I am happy (well, I'm not happy with Notes but I need my email).
So do you have 20 devs and 25 ops support working on the desktop rollout full time? In which case I reckon you're upgrade is probably resourced by a factor of 5 more than ours.
About O'Reilly books, you call them "forbidding" and express surprise when you found one readable.
That's the whole reason why those books are liked! They are all readable, and the best ones are actually fun to read, and yet manage to be both correct and complete. I hate the books that "try" to be readable by dumbing everything down and filling themselves with pictures. This is fine for Management books but for christ's sake you can't document a technical subject without getting technical!
I think SuSE is pronounced "soossuh", going by general German pronunciation rules. Personally I think that sounds too weird around English speakers and I pronounce it Susie, like the girl.
Anyway, the thing is that you have found SuSE tricky to set up, and that it doesn't comes with stuff you need. That's because SuSE is not suited for your kind of needs. I don't like it either. YAST is a disaster area.
what's a runlevel
Aside from the fact that you should not be running *nix if you don't know about runlevels (likewise you shouldn't be running NT if you don't know about Services - no they're not the same thing), that is again down to SuSE being rubbish. I don't know any other distro which expects you to set up the runlevel configuration after installing daemons. A competent admin should know how to do it, but a competent distro should do it for you.
Personally I switched to Debian from RedHat and other commercial distros because they don't get the basics right.
RedHat is just great if you are happy with an out-the-box install but I always got into dependency hell whenever I wanted to change anything. Trying to build the most recent Gnome for RedHat 5.1 was the straw that broke the camels back. It put me off Linux for about a year.
SuSE was one of the first distros I tried and it was OK but the structure of the installation CDs was horrid and I couldn't find the stuff I wanted. Lately my work deployed SuSE (because RedHat doesn't come with the "heartbeat" package, and a non-commercial distro would be incomprehensible to mgmt) and I had to help the guy doing the deployment because I was the only one who really knew Linux. I hit the runlevel problem with everything we installed that wasn't in the base install. I was sort of embarrassed for SuSE. Anyway, I gave the guy a runlevel tutorial and now he copes. No-one I've met likes YaST.
So, I run Debian. I have no dependency issues thanks to apt. Its well supported online via mailing lists and IRC; the documentation (/usr/share/doc) is usually pretty damn good too. If I install a daemon, it configures it there and then to startup with the system, and the configuration will work without any tweaking. I just can't wait for Perens to sort out UserLinux so it's possible to get commercial support.
can you imagine setting up that many copies of any OS?
Quite. We only have about 10,000 desktop PCs but, even with Microsoft reps onsite full time, lots of money and some clever technical staff, our migration from NT4 to XP has been running for two years and is still not complete.
Thank god I'm one of the stragglers. XP... eeuuuggghhh!
Your post has persuaded me to try out plan9 sometime. I heard about plan9 years back but it seemed very fringe and I never really paid it any attention.
I was shocked to see there was a release last year and that it's still in active use. Thanks for kindling a flame of curiousity.
It's just a shame there is no release for Sparc, I have a load of IPX's that would benefit from an interesting operating system.
Anyone who worries about extra user-driven forks on personal systems nowadays is obviously the kind of person who would obsess over a long-dead academic operating system.
Thanks, I knew there was a good reason why I avoided them but I couldn't remember it!
Actually I don't use spaces in my ogg filenames but I am quite happy to have spaces in the directory names. I never experience problems. And where I do, I 'quote' the filename.
Someone complained about for mp3 in *mp3... find . -name '*mp3' -exec.... should do it.
Slashdot Mirror
While the insults aren't necessary,
/. is a discussion site. I consider it good manners to read a post to which I reply and to make a responses to it which are at least intended to answer it. Anything else just wastes everybody's time. Perhaps I should just have ignored him, but sometimes I think it's good to get a well-meaning verbal slap (even if it takes a while for the slapee to appreciate it).
You're right, I didn't need to insult him (her?). However,
I think it's probably a bit of a stretch to say he's "into the IP business". I think he's just deluded and builds arguments to protect his delusions. The truth hurts!
And trying to pass off musicians as salesmen just for being concerned abount making a living, that simply tells me that you're not one of them.
And this tells me you're more interested in pumping your own argument than actually reading and replying to my post.
Moron.
Essentially, the longer the term, the more incentive (here, meaning financial potential) there is for artist to keep selling her work, and again, some argue that can encourage such work and help artists to make a living.
I would think the longer the term, the less incentive for an artist to produce new work, and the more scope to keep pedalling old work still in copyright. Therefore to benefit society (and keep the artist innovating) the term should be long enough to allow just enough reward, and short enough to ensure they can't rest on their laurels.
But at the end of the day, for fuck's sake, ars gratia artis. All this talk of "incentives" makes musicians sound like salesmen. I don't wanna buy no warez, I want art.
The post was not criticising her English. It was just a weak play on the "In Soviet Russia..." meme.
Nothing to get upset about, although I agree it didn't warrant getting modded up to +5.
If you would actually read the content of the posts in this thread perhaps your argument would improve.
You imply that only full-time developers understand development; you're wrong. I am a full time admin supporting development environments. I can also code when I get the chance; I built and maintain a system to replace broken GUI tools, used by my developer community to deploy code to our servers. A decade ago I developed document production systems for two local businesses. My training is in electronics so at one time I could write 6502 assembly. I'm not ignorant.
You accuse me of saying things I haven't (money sucks, all software should be downloadable).
You say you support proprietary software for other reasons than keeping yourself employed, and back your statement up by saying "full time software developers need to be paid to write software". But I'm not the only one to point out your circular argument.
You are right that many companies writing code for in-house use are at the moment uncomfortable releasing it. But that's just a statement of the status quo, which doesn't earn you any points. Its a status quo that can change and is changing.
The only weakness in my argument is I can't at the moment find a source for my claim that most developers are not employed by proprietary software houses. By the way, look up the term "software house" if you are still confused; you might need a real dictionary though, so I'll type out the definition for you:
software house a company that specialises in producing or testing software.
I applaude that you have "dedicated countless hours" to the OSS movement. I have too, perhaps not by writing software (I am still fairly young though, so there is time) but I have, in both my day job and my sideline, spent countless hours advocating and deploying Free Software. After all, writing the code in itself doesn't mean that anyone's going to use it.
Look pal, I didn't say "proprietary software institutions", I said "proprietary software houses" and that is different. Don't change my words to suit your argument.
I am neither a developer nor a student, and I don't see the relevance anyway.
It seems the only argument you have for supporting proprietary development is to keep yourself in a job. Well, tough. The rest of society isn't here to support you just because you feel entitled to it. That's what I meant when I talked about a license to print money.
Of course I don't mean anihilation of the developer market and I am at a loss to see how such an outcome would be achieved.
Most software developers don't work for proprietary software houses. Free Software threatens only proprietary software houses. (I like the phrase "software house", it reminds me of the 80s).
Next you'll be wanting a license to print money, like lawyers, accountants and politicians.
the market decides you are worth
But the market is very flawed and will be rectified, by Free Software.
Thanks, and thanks too for enlightening me to the outcome of the W3 patent policy debates. I expressed my feelings at the time but lost touch with the issue due to heavy work commitments. It's nice to see the right outcome.
I will also look into donating to the EFF when my credit card arrives.
Cheers!
we're discussing the value with respect to the individual, not the company.
Thank you. In this case, the value with respect to the individual is the value of being rewarded for his work. I think that's quite relevant.
You are right that management often overlook hoarding. In the long term, though, people who are clearly supporting their team by visibly sharing knowledge will be valued higher than those that don't. My personal course of action is to openly share my knowledge - making sure my manager sees what I do - and I know that this makes me look better than those who don't.
Open Source isn't a religion to anyone, but Free Software is a moral position to many.
Copyright started in 1710. Michaelangelo lived from 1475 to 1564. The careers of J S Bach, Handel and Mozart all started before Copyright came along.
Of course if you equate Free Software with Zero Cost then you can be forgiven for jumping to all the wrong conclusions....
Well said. The problem with relating worthiness of action to personal reward is that the reward part becomes all anyone cares about, and people will bypass the worthiness part if they see a loophole in the system.
IOW a reward-based society does not work when the rules are poorly conceived and poorly implemented. Which is where we are now.
How we get away from here god alone knows, but if enough right-thinking people keep doing the right things (like writing and advocating Free Software) then at least it keeps the question fresh in people's minds. That is the minimum we can expect.
In this case, Asshole has a significantly positive value on his knowledge and his abillity to hord it.
And the company has a significantly negative value on his hording of the knowledge and if wise will get rid of his fucked up ass as soon as they get the chance.
Hey, you need to take flames with a pinch of salt. This place is open, but that means it's open to trolls as well as hobbits. The hobbits just need to learn how to deal with the trolls.
Cadburys? Pah, sassenach chocolate. Where's your patriotism? Its either Duncans or Tunnocks.
You'd make a great tabloid journalist!?!??!?!?!?!
Well, what can I say but congratulations. I'm afraid I can't comment further because I don't know what our issues have been and frankly don't care that much because as long as I have Cygwin and Lotus Notes I am happy (well, I'm not happy with Notes but I need my email).
So do you have 20 devs and 25 ops support working on the desktop rollout full time? In which case I reckon you're upgrade is probably resourced by a factor of 5 more than ours.
About O'Reilly books, you call them "forbidding" and express surprise when you found one readable.
That's the whole reason why those books are liked! They are all readable, and the best ones are actually fun to read, and yet manage to be both correct and complete. I hate the books that "try" to be readable by dumbing everything down and filling themselves with pictures. This is fine for Management books but for christ's sake you can't document a technical subject without getting technical!
I think SuSE is pronounced "soossuh", going by general German pronunciation rules. Personally I think that sounds too weird around English speakers and I pronounce it Susie, like the girl.
Anyway, the thing is that you have found SuSE tricky to set up, and that it doesn't comes with stuff you need. That's because SuSE is not suited for your kind of needs. I don't like it either. YAST is a disaster area.
what's a runlevel
Aside from the fact that you should not be running *nix if you don't know about runlevels (likewise you shouldn't be running NT if you don't know about Services - no they're not the same thing), that is again down to SuSE being rubbish. I don't know any other distro which expects you to set up the runlevel configuration after installing daemons. A competent admin should know how to do it, but a competent distro should do it for you.
Personally I switched to Debian from RedHat and other commercial distros because they don't get the basics right.
RedHat is just great if you are happy with an out-the-box install but I always got into dependency hell whenever I wanted to change anything. Trying to build the most recent Gnome for RedHat 5.1 was the straw that broke the camels back. It put me off Linux for about a year.
SuSE was one of the first distros I tried and it was OK but the structure of the installation CDs was horrid and I couldn't find the stuff I wanted. Lately my work deployed SuSE (because RedHat doesn't come with the "heartbeat" package, and a non-commercial distro would be incomprehensible to mgmt) and I had to help the guy doing the deployment because I was the only one who really knew Linux. I hit the runlevel problem with everything we installed that wasn't in the base install. I was sort of embarrassed for SuSE. Anyway, I gave the guy a runlevel tutorial and now he copes. No-one I've met likes YaST.
So, I run Debian. I have no dependency issues thanks to apt. Its well supported online via mailing lists and IRC; the documentation (/usr/share/doc) is usually pretty damn good too. If I install a daemon, it configures it there and then to startup with the system, and the configuration will work without any tweaking. I just can't wait for Perens to sort out UserLinux so it's possible to get commercial support.
can you imagine setting up that many copies of any OS?
Quite. We only have about 10,000 desktop PCs but, even with Microsoft reps onsite full time, lots of money and some clever technical staff, our migration from NT4 to XP has been running for two years and is still not complete.
Thank god I'm one of the stragglers. XP... eeuuuggghhh!
Your post has persuaded me to try out plan9 sometime. I heard about plan9 years back but it seemed very fringe and I never really paid it any attention.
I was shocked to see there was a release last year and that it's still in active use. Thanks for kindling a flame of curiousity.
It's just a shame there is no release for Sparc, I have a load of IPX's that would benefit from an interesting operating system.
Anyone who worries about extra user-driven forks on personal systems nowadays is obviously the kind of person who would obsess over a long-dead academic operating system.
And what's wrong with top posting???
"We think it is due to our patented time-traveling module," quips Steve Balmer.
Well, that explains top-posting.
Thanks, I knew there was a good reason why I avoided them but I couldn't remember it!
Actually I don't use spaces in my ogg filenames but I am quite happy to have spaces in the directory names. I never experience problems. And where I do, I 'quote' the filename.
Someone complained about for mp3 in *mp3... find . -name '*mp3' -exec.... should do it.
So why is this a problem for you?