Snicker. The hardware's more important? The hardware's nothing at all: it's a commodity. We call Dell and order more when we need it.
We must be talking about two different things. Enrolement and billing are trivial, the hard bit is making sure that your hardware won't take your records with it if it goes bad; the more people and data you have the more important this becomes; commodity Dell hardly covers that.
I've still got some. (Standard and E6B)
I have a strange one marked out for pre-decimal British currency.
$2.4M sounds like a lot of money, but to a relatively large university, it's not.
The point I was making in my flame was that forking out piles of cash for closed systems which then have to have "extensive customisations" to solve your problem (at a whacking great outsourced price, I imagine) is not a reasonable alternative.
Take the $2.4M, hire a bunch of programmers to re-write the critical software that you currently use but don't control and at the end of that you will probably have cash left over, plus have applications written for your problem that solve them your way, and you will have control over the upgrade/bugfixing cycle, and you can make any modifications in the light of experience as and when you want to.
In the long run, keeping the closed system his college has now is just plain stupid.
Our student registration and billing systems are Windows.
Oh, yeah, that would be difficult stuff to write, wouldn't it?
(Price Banner recently? Our IT director did: it's buy Banner or renovate the library.)
He can't be much of an IT Director if he needs to run to the shop for that sort of thing. An entire university, which presumably knows what it needs the software to do and has the hardware (MUCH more important for this sort of thing) to run it on and it can't produce its own? That's a pathetic attitude. "Oh, no! Mummy's gone out and we have to make a sandwich for lunch. I better phone a restaurant and have them courier something over for 80 bucks."
Oh, and finding secretaries and office workers that know StarOffice is damn hard.
Jesus, where do you live? Retardville? ITS A FUCKING OFFICE SUITE, NOT QUANTUM PHYSICS When we hire temps we don't bother telling them that we use OpenOffice, and most of them don't notice.
We've got some good network admins, server gurus and programmers here, but they're Windows folks... Do you fire those staff or switch them to Unix, where their 10+ years of experience is suddenly null?
Why? Because you have to type in Urdu to use Emacs? Has 10 years of MS so rotted their brains that they can't read a man page or an O'Reilly book?
How did your collage ever get rid of its slide rules?
"let[s] networks set the parameters, dictating which shows users can reschedule, and it also creates ways for networks to insert commercials."
That's just what's always annoyed me about our VCR: it lets me skip ads and watch things when I want to. At last, a recorder that really recreates that "just watching normal TV" feel.
I can't believe it. You mean the fact that there are two competing desktop environments for Linux is not the absolute best thing that can happen??
No, it's not. The best thing is that there are more than two and so I don't have to install or use either GNOME or KDE, which are both utter crap. There are lots of options and anyone that writes software specifically for any of them is a fool. Write for the toolkits (QT, GTK, etc) if you want but never make the MS mistake of assuming that the desktop is anything more than another, optional, user program.
Obviously, there are exceptions to this, since I have various wm widgets running on my desktop here, but the idea of a word processor that is written for a particular desktop is just so 20th century.
I have put backdoors in software that I thought the client was going to try to wriggle out of paying for; I closed them once the money was in. I like to be able to pull the plug if someone scarpers.
I can't believe this. Slashdot editors post these articles purporting to expose problems in the patent system, and they don't even know what a design patent is, or how it differs from a utility patent.
Or perhaps they are aware that patent law is supposed to prevent design patents being given out for pictures of everyday objects?
In addition, 35 U.S.C. 171 requires that a design to be patentable must be "original". Clearly a design which simulates a well known, or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute.
who wrote a story where it was illegal to have a keyboard without a licence since keyboards were only used by hard-core programmers (everyone else used voice) and anyone that wanted to program without the government knowing about it must be some kind of cyber-terrorist.
I thought it was a bit silly at the time (~10 years ago) but I'm starting to wonder.
Virtually every app written for Linux now has some ridiculous set of dependencies on this huge complete graph of Gnome libraries, and if you go two weeks without upgrading your entire Gnome distribution, trying to compile the latest release of any app is futile.
I don't have GNOME installed on any of the machines I use or administer so my advice is to delete it (and Python, which is even worse for dependencies and updates)
And I also get annoyed when I can't figure out what the current proper administration tools are for a given Linux distribution,
Vi and Emacs are the proper administration tools for all Linux systems. Top, ps and the contents of/etc are useful too.
Any guesses how our current administration would resolve the tension between military and civilian purposes?
Get the military to shot the civilians? We are, after all dealing with a man that actually laughed at a press conference at the idea of listening to the people...
Don't support patents on obvious ideas, don't support patents on software, don't support patents on implementing other people's ideas, don't support laws about what you can think, don't support Amazon.com.
I would love to sell it as a pure open-source application, but even if I charge a small price compared to what these kind off applications do cost in the Windows world ($100 vs $1000-$5000) I fear my source-code would get pirated and spread over the internet.
I do my work as a consultant so I don't have the same issues as you do. But, why is the source being pirated any worse than the binary being pirated? I'm not necessarily saying that you should use the GPL but I do believe that a user has a right to have the source code for a program s/he has paid for. Users need and deserve protection from you getting run over by a bus or, as has happened with one of my favorite systems, being bought out by a competitor that simply drops the product in order to force the users to "upgrade" to the competitor's system.
Meanwhile, I don't know of a Windows program which can't be downloaded off the 'Net in binary form; so what protection have you as a programmer obtained while denying the users' the right to their software? Honest people will pay you and dishonest ones won't and source code won't change that.
Well I see myself as a GPL fanatic and I'm currently developing a closed-source
Well, I can't help what you see yourself as but you don't sound like a GPL fanatic to me. I'M not a GPL fanatic but I would never go back to writing closed-source code again.
GNOME is a good environment for writing closed-source application as there is no license fees like in the KDE world.
I must admit that I'm surprised by this. How is GNOME a GNU project if this is allowed/easy? I don't have either GNOME or KDE installed anymore (I couldn't decide which was worse so I deleted both) so I've never looked at the details of their license but I assumed that GNOME is all GPL.
Create a robots.txt file in your site's root directory with:
User-agent: googlebot Disallow:/
and then go to the "Urgent URL removal" page on google (click here and follow the instructions. Your site should be removed within 24hrs. I've taken mine off and I suggest that any programmer that is concerned about being able to work freely should too.
A patent on an algorithm is just a patent on a list of instructions, and pretty vague (no source code) instructions at that . There is NO difference between Google's patent and you or I getting a patent on a good shortcut from our house to the shops. I have no problem with people printing the instructions, copyrighting them and selling them, or just keeping them to themselves and offering a service based on their knowledge but saying that no one else is allowed to follow this list of instructions or to even think of them for themselves is crap, pure and simple.
I am deciding which alternative to Google to use, just as, despite being a book collector, I never buy from Amazon.
ALL software patents are wrong: this one, the one that stung Microshaft the other day, Amazon's, LZW, ALL of them. You can't pick and choose when to apply your morals (*cough* *Tony Blair* *cough*), if you do then they aren't morals, they're just slogans.
They have patches for Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP.
If telling them which OS you have installed (and perhaps the date of your last patching) still results in a list too big for you to manage then you probably won't want to wait for the patches to download over your piece of damp string anyway. Whatever; they still don't need to know what non-MS programs you have installed.
Apple and giant pandas are very alike: they look nice, people tend to like them even if they don't want to own one, just because people keep saying that they're on the edge of oblivion doen't mean they're not, and both have a lot of dedicated people that will do almost anything to stop them actually becoming extinct.
Sorry if I'm being harsh here but this is definately the dev's problem
I disagree. I'm all for frequent builds but to say that a project this size has to be in a buildable state every single day is just a not reasonable point of view and puts the individual programmers, regardless of their quality, under too much pressure to "perform".
Of course, this ignores the question of is there any good way to handle this size of project?
Slashdot Mirror
We must be talking about two different things. Enrolement and billing are trivial, the hard bit is making sure that your hardware won't take your records with it if it goes bad; the more people and data you have the more important this becomes; commodity Dell hardly covers that.
I've still got some. (Standard and E6B)
I have a strange one marked out for pre-decimal British currency.
TWW
The point I was making in my flame was that forking out piles of cash for closed systems which then have to have "extensive customisations" to solve your problem (at a whacking great outsourced price, I imagine) is not a reasonable alternative.
Take the $2.4M, hire a bunch of programmers to re-write the critical software that you currently use but don't control and at the end of that you will probably have cash left over, plus have applications written for your problem that solve them your way, and you will have control over the upgrade/bugfixing cycle, and you can make any modifications in the light of experience as and when you want to.
In the long run, keeping the closed system his college has now is just plain stupid.
TWW
Oh, yeah, that would be difficult stuff to write, wouldn't it?
(Price Banner recently? Our IT director did: it's buy Banner or renovate the library.)
He can't be much of an IT Director if he needs to run to the shop for that sort of thing. An entire university, which presumably knows what it needs the software to do and has the hardware (MUCH more important for this sort of thing) to run it on and it can't produce its own? That's a pathetic attitude. "Oh, no! Mummy's gone out and we have to make a sandwich for lunch. I better phone a restaurant and have them courier something over for 80 bucks."
Oh, and finding secretaries and office workers that know StarOffice is damn hard.
Jesus, where do you live? Retardville? ITS A FUCKING OFFICE SUITE, NOT QUANTUM PHYSICS When we hire temps we don't bother telling them that we use OpenOffice, and most of them don't notice.
We've got some good network admins, server gurus and programmers here, but they're Windows folks... Do you fire those staff or switch them to Unix, where their 10+ years of experience is suddenly null?
Why? Because you have to type in Urdu to use Emacs? Has 10 years of MS so rotted their brains that they can't read a man page or an O'Reilly book?
How did your collage ever get rid of its slide rules?
TWW
Because it's annoying and tedious (oh, yes, I'm sure your flash animation was interesting the first time, by the 23rd it's lost something).
Plus, it adds zero utility to most sites while reducing it for many people.
You don't still drive 30 mph in a '55 Chevy, why would you be so resistent to modern browser plugins?
No, it's CRAP plugins I'm resistant to.
TWW
TWW
That's just what's always annoyed me about our VCR: it lets me skip ads and watch things when I want to. At last, a recorder that really recreates that "just watching normal TV" feel.
What a pack of dickheads.
TWW
No, it's not. The best thing is that there are more than two and so I don't have to install or use either GNOME or KDE, which are both utter crap. There are lots of options and anyone that writes software specifically for any of them is a fool. Write for the toolkits (QT, GTK, etc) if you want but never make the MS mistake of assuming that the desktop is anything more than another, optional, user program.
Obviously, there are exceptions to this, since I have various wm widgets running on my desktop here, but the idea of a word processor that is written for a particular desktop is just so 20th century.
TWW
TWW
Or perhaps they are aware that patent law is supposed to prevent design patents being given out for pictures of everyday objects?
Hems, Taco, crisd et al - GET A CLUE.
Quite.
TWW
You should write that up; it would make a good story.
TWW
I thought it was a bit silly at the time (~10 years ago) but I'm starting to wonder.
TWW
"Fix this!"
"We are fixing it."
"I don't wanna hear that!"
"Some people are never happy."
"That's funny, sir; that's just what Jesus said."
TWW
I don't have GNOME installed on any of the machines I use or administer so my advice is to delete it (and Python, which is even worse for dependencies and updates)
And I also get annoyed when I can't figure out what the current proper administration tools are for a given Linux distribution,
Vi and Emacs are the proper administration tools for all Linux systems. Top, ps and the contents of /etc are useful too.
TWW
I had no idea the Normans were so advanced just 18 years after the Conquest.
TWW
Get the military to shot the civilians? We are, after all dealing with a man that actually laughed at a press conference at the idea of listening to the people...
TWW
TWW
I do my work as a consultant so I don't have the same issues as you do. But, why is the source being pirated any worse than the binary being pirated? I'm not necessarily saying that you should use the GPL but I do believe that a user has a right to have the source code for a program s/he has paid for. Users need and deserve protection from you getting run over by a bus or, as has happened with one of my favorite systems, being bought out by a competitor that simply drops the product in order to force the users to "upgrade" to the competitor's system.
Meanwhile, I don't know of a Windows program which can't be downloaded off the 'Net in binary form; so what protection have you as a programmer obtained while denying the users' the right to their software? Honest people will pay you and dishonest ones won't and source code won't change that.
TWW
Well, I can't help what you see yourself as but you don't sound like a GPL fanatic to me. I'M not a GPL fanatic but I would never go back to writing closed-source code again.
GNOME is a good environment for writing closed-source application as there is no license fees like in the KDE world.
I must admit that I'm surprised by this. How is GNOME a GNU project if this is allowed/easy? I don't have either GNOME or KDE installed anymore (I couldn't decide which was worse so I deleted both) so I've never looked at the details of their license but I assumed that GNOME is all GPL.
TWW
They had enough prior art documentation to sink a battleship, and money to back it up.
TWW
TWW
I am deciding which alternative to Google to use, just as, despite being a book collector, I never buy from Amazon.
ALL software patents are wrong: this one, the one that stung Microshaft the other day, Amazon's, LZW, ALL of them. You can't pick and choose when to apply your morals (*cough* *Tony Blair* *cough*), if you do then they aren't morals, they're just slogans.
TWW
If telling them which OS you have installed (and perhaps the date of your last patching) still results in a list too big for you to manage then you probably won't want to wait for the patches to download over your piece of damp string anyway. Whatever; they still don't need to know what non-MS programs you have installed.
TWW
TWW
Dunno, I don't use either. The wonders of choice...
TWW
I disagree. I'm all for frequent builds but to say that a project this size has to be in a buildable state every single day is just a not reasonable point of view and puts the individual programmers, regardless of their quality, under too much pressure to "perform".
Of course, this ignores the question of is there any good way to handle this size of project?
TWW