This desire to exlore mars is reliant on our mastering reaching and taming the moon.
This is not the case. "The Case For Mars" clearly puts forward a case for the opposite, that the Moon is a diversion, that Mars is much richer in natural resources than the moon, and much more habitable. Not only is the moon less habitable, but there is very little science of any import to do there compared to Mars. Mars could have a self sustaining base, which that is very improbable on the Moon.
I suppose you have to expect this kind of thing when Christian Fundimentalists are in charge of the science purse strings. Just take a look at the recent issue with NASA Public Relations censoring a scientist on Global Warming. The last thing the Christian Fundimentalist Bush administration want is more money spent on science that continues to prove their dearest beliefs wrong. After all if you know "The Truth" by divine relalation why bother with science?
The Bitkeeper business has to be understood in context of history. Yes, Stallman may have been saying that Bitkeeper should not be used, but was he presenting an alternative? Linus at the time was facing a huge problem; Linus didn't scale, and he was dropping contributions on the floor. The people closest to Linus pushed for Bitkeeper as a way for Linus to cope with the huge numbers of patches coming in. Basically it was a coup - either he fixed the problem or, with respect Alan Cox and Co would fork Linux.
Say you spend six months writing a book, as I have, and you have this book published. Would you want some other publisher coming along and copying your book and selling it for $10 less than your publisher and pocketing the profit, not giving you a dime?
There is a huge gulf of a difference between people willingly licensing their work so that it is free, and the abolishment of copyright which would remove the ability of a author to control the rights over their own works. This is an ideological difference - the difference between giving people the option of giving away their work for the public good and taking it.
The Shareware industry proved that expecting people to pay for things - software - they can obtain for free is a fools paradise. Open source works only because there is no expectation for payment and many people can colaborate. The "use" value of the software exceeds "sale" value, and the use value is sufficient that spending real time and money on it is worthwhile. The GPL makes it possible to license work such that your competitor won't take the work you do and resell it unfairly.
What I see as irrational is the belief that just because data can be moved at virtually no cost that the value of creating that data is thus zero. Stallman's persona came out of a feeling of loss; that the cooperative society he grew up in was corrupted by selfish closing of a public resource. However, most software is developed by companies in a closed fashion that is never part of a open community - they are not taking advantage of a open resource. Forcing them to be open is just as unjust as taking open resources closed.
The real ethic for me is freedom of the individual to control their own expression, if they wish to release to the public, or to profit from their work.
Get real. We all know his appearance is somewhat to be desired, but thats a rather shallow analysis of a person. it is his ideas which are important. Judge him on those. Hardly anyone will meet him in real life, but those his software touches is in the millions. Just to be clear, I'm not a Stallman fanboy; I think his non support of Open Source is childish, and actually hurts his objectives.
I think if I had to wrie a school report it would say "Good problem solver, but doesn't play well with others".
If it were anyone else they could be safely ignored, but RMS brought us the GPL, and it was through his uncomprimising commitment to his vision that we have the movement of Open Source today. Yes people - Open Source, he is one of the fathers of Open Source even if he has disowned his own child. The point is that the man is uncomprimising to the point of being irrational.
But is he - in this instance - being irrational? Well, the creative commons typically used by Flickr, is simply a means of easily defining the rights you are providing. It can mean a number of things, and I think he has a point - that its confusing; you have to read the rights for every bit of work, rather than being able to trust that a creative commons mark means you have certain rights.
I still wouldn't use the GPL for writing or music because the GPL has clauses specifically aimed at software. There is no "source code" for music, and no obligation to distribute the score of the music along with the audio recordings for example. However, the creative commons is a diluted concept if you don't gauranttee certain rights to people, and they have to dig to see what their rights actually are.
Stallmans problem isn't one of intellect as such, but rather poor communication. He communicates in a uncomprimising and arrogant way; his way or the highway; and is unwilling to be part of a bigger team that he has no direct control over. That is why Open Source came about - we escaped the limits of Stallmans retoric.
Stallman still doesn't get Open Source I think - The Hurd being an example more of Cathedral style than Bazzar style development. Open Source has overtaken him for a reason, and that reason is a positive feedback cycle generated by a community of willing participants.
The big difference between open source and free software is the uncomprimising ideological dogma of Stallman. Free Software was about the Stallmans dictatorship; his word was law in that universe. Open Source on the other hand starts with the principles of Free Software, but does not insist the developers have the same ideological passions as Stallman.
That said, Open Source has not diluted the principle (as the Creative Commoms may have) by retaining a clear statement about what is and is not Open Source.
He didn't seem to answer the actual Microsoftie in the trenches who was saying that the processes that are in place are not working. His comments about repeatable processes reminds me of the production line school of thought, that if you can work out how to do something right once, you need only document it and the factory worker can do it over and over again like a robot.
This has been applied to software development for a long time, and certainly not only by Microsoft. Sadly software developerment isn't a factory job; it is creative, and so you must treat it differently. Quality Assurance isn't something you test in at the end, it has to be a consequence of the entire process. When you are designing something new you have to think from the very start about the security model.
I don't believe code review will help security - as in my experience code review will only deal with issues of syntax and adherance to coding standards. One way to do it is not to use a language which permits so many potential issues such as buffer overruns that can result in a system being owned.
Dr Phil talks about setting yourself up for success, and I don't think Microsoft has learned this yet. They are still coding the same way as always, only added on some 'processes', rather than giving the developers the ability to deal with security as a priority higher than shipping.
Why do we suddenly expect Linus to be the politician? What has made him so popular is his honesty. He is allowed to prefer a window manager over another. Hes allowed to have his reasons. Nobody has to give it any weight just because it comes from Linus. Decisions should be made based on the facts, and if Linus makes a good case, then perhaps you should listen.
But Linus isn't the CEO of Linux Incorporated, he cannot order people to implement his personal preferences. The developers and users of Gnome will no doubt continue as they always have.
Besides, I feel for poor Linus who has every word he says discussed and analysed. Perhaps he just woke up after a bad day at the office:)
Okay, so its not real, but let us imagine that there were a machine as intelligent as a human. Do you think that there is some magic barrier after human intellect? Machines would just continue to be built smarter. Soon all decisions by corporates would be made by machines because humans would be too stupid. Corporates who didn't have these machines would soon be bankrupted by companies that did have them, and were able to outcompete. Machines will rull the world - but they will do it with the help of existing power structures, not by force of arms.
The problem is that all hardware will fail eventually, so we have no alternative but to create systems from such. My approach to high availability is to ensure that a failure of any two servers won't bring down the system. There are still some areas I have trouble with, distributed databases being one. For database servers I still prefer fault tolerant servers, and to have a backup server which can be quickly brought up. The application servers are all just standard builds. The other point of failure is the load balancer, although I suspect this could also be mitigated.
By the way, anyone had success with Apache and JK load balancing across multiple Tomcat web servers?
Well, if you are American you don't have to fear being killed - yet. If you are an Iraqi or an Afghan however you can expect to be tortured and killed, or perhaps locked up in some god forsaken hole in Cuba for years on end.
Of course, other countries won't speak out too harshly because of what we see the US did to countries it didn't get on with.
Talking of FUD, who on earth suggested that portability doesn't matter? Although our company uses Linux internally our customers are prodominantly Windows users. We develop using Java, PHP and Python, and all our applications are cross platform.
Portability is the difference between surviving and not surviving; at least for me. Linux is not the one true OS, but it is an excellent example of the new way of thinking, a way which doesn't have greed at its core.
Janet was a school teacher. Like many teachers she didn't decide on her profession based on the financial rewards. Money was tight at the best of times.
Janet buys a computer for herself, but doesn't buy a copy of Office. Later she finds out that Wordpad isn't really what she needs in a word processor. She visits one of the local appliance shops which also sell PC software.
Discussing the situation with the sales person she finds she will be paying $200 for a copy of Office. Now $200 is much better than the full price only because she can get the academic pricing, but it is still $200 she can ill afford.
Just then a young man comes up to her and asks her what she needs the word processor for. Does it need to run Macro's etc. She answers that it will be used for writing letters, looking at the childrens homework etc. The young man then suggests that she take a look at OpenOffice, which can be purchased at another store thats only a few minutes walk away.
Intrigued she walks down to the store and buys a copy of OpenOffice for $10. Getting home she pops the CD into the computer and with littlw effort has OpenOffice up and running. How, she wonders, can such excellent software ge so cheap. She begins tgo read the front cover describing that OpenOffice is open source, and what open source means.
Three months later the entire school has changed to OpenOffice, as the idea of freedom that Janet brought to the school caught like wildfire with the teachers that saw the quality of open source. Janet was now used Linux at home, but her journey into open source was just beginning.
Its easy to be critical of the Politicians, however the fact is they are not bowing down to US interests at all. The Patent legislation is currently under review, and there has been a prolonged consultation period. Thats not to say the current form of the draft legislation is exactly what we want, but to suggest that "generous contributors" are influencing Government in a major way is just not accurate in the New Zealand environment.
Thats not to say they don't have any influence - but nothing like the obvious failure of democracy that is the current US administration.
I really hope you are not American, as the US has already accepted the patent. Oh, you are being sarcastic. My bad:)
On another note I see most Slashdotters are missing the point. Microsoft are not patenting all word processing XML documents, just documents that use their magic filled XML schema. The real point here is that they are using Patent law not to protect something innovative, but to control who can interoperate with their formats.
The really evil thing is that if you write a document in Word, then save it as XML, your data is not mixed with Microsoft "intellectual property" - and therefore you can not do with it as you please.
Microsoft make a big deal about the patent being licenced reasonably, however that doesn't include being able to use GPL tools with *your data*.
The problem is that nothing any company does is ever good enough for praise. No matter how positive the move they will be picked apart and their motives questioned.
I have talked to IBM people before this move, and found out that they are against software patents, and have made statements to that effect, but until the law changes they still must file patents to ensure they protect their own interests.
Even if their motives are self interest they have also acted in the interests of open source. I also expect that the 500 patents will be patents that open source projects are already infringing, and therefore they will all be very useful.
The stand taken today by Novell is positive. They should be commended and congradulated for this move. Nobody is under the illusion that Novell have suddenly accepted the true religion of OSS, however do you honestly believe companies will continue to support us if we continue to be critical even when they have done what they can to support the movement.
We know that for companies its the bottom line that counts - however while companies such as IBM and Novell are aligned, why not cooperate and make the most of the opportunities. Yes, at some time in the future they may change their tune - but right now they are supporting us.
My congratulations to NASA. I really hope that NASA figure out that Mars can be achieved (aka Mars Direct), and avoid a waste of time and effort on the large ball of rock that orbits earth.
Regarding "Anti-American" feelings: The problem - at least from my point of view - is the policy that essentially states that the US can invade whoever they want. They bitch and moan when developing countries don't obey treaties developed by the US for US interests, but drop anything that is inconveneient - like Global Warming agreements. They talk of free trade agreements, yet refuse to open free trade agreements with countries such as New Zealand that would benefit.
This is really a disagreement with US policy - not some kind of personal dislike of Amercians as such.
The work NASA is doing is great. In fact if there was a way to donate money I would gladly do so. I certainly think that the hundreds of billions of dollars going to kill Iraqies would be better spent by NASA.
We can't afford to ignore terrorist, however the invasion of Iraq has only served to isolate the US from other countries, waste huge amounts of US Taxpayers money, and kill many thousands of innocent Iraqi. Oh, and to create a totally new hotbed of potential international terrorists where none before existed.
If I were the US I would have put the money into Space to prove that the US are able to make progress despite 9/11. Sure its not nice when terrorists attack, but you can't live your life with that fear, and allow it to drive your relationships with other countries. Well you can - only it will serve to alienate them.
The guys name was Bruce Simpson. You can find him on his news web site at www.aardvark.co.nz. Thee point of the project was to show exactly how easy it is to develop a cruise missile from commonly available parts. He has already made working pulse jet engines.
While it may seem insane to think of a OSS missile system - is it any less insane to have no air defence at all? New Zealand has no air defence, in fact our vintage airforce is better armed than the 'air farce'.
However, a missile system would be better than nothing.
Robert Zubrin wrote "The Case For Mars" which describes how we might fly to Mars. His idea was to fly directly to Mars like Apollo. He answers the following questions.
1. The moon is only 3 days away. Mars is months away. Logistically, it's easier.
The energy to go from the Earth to the Moon, and then from the Moon to Mars is about double that a direct flight would take to Mars. The Moon itself is not a great destination because everything you need to survive has to be imported. In comparision much of what you need to survive on mars can be obtained locally.
2. The moon gives us an opportunity to work out engineering issues of establishing a permanent base on foreign celestial bodies.
The problem with the Moon is that it has very little in the way of natural resources. To get water you would have to crush huge amounts of rock to extract it. Also there is much less gravity, no atmosphere, meaning no way to create rocket fuel. All rocket fuel would have to be imported. In general life on the moon would be much more expensive, and require much more imported material compared to a base on Mars.
Most importantly however a Moon base would not teach us very much about living on Mars at all. You would not learn how to "live off the land" on the Moon - and if you did the technologies for extracting resources are dramatically different.
3. There may be immediate tangible benefits to a moon base: mining, factories, observatories, astronaut training, research.
There is very little of mineral value on the Moon, and as I said previously, maintaining a Moon Base would mean importing virtually everything required for life. In terms of energy there isn't much more energy required to get to Mars, however there are huge advantages in terms of being able to produce fuel on the surface of Mars, when you can't do the same on the Moon.
Finally, waiting to create a Moon Base might distract us unnessasarily from Mars. There is no need to have a Moon base to launch a Mars mission, and there is little a Moon base would do to teach us any more than we already know from experience with space stations. Therefore Robert makes what I feel is a convincing case for doing a Mars Direct mission.
Robert's idea is that we send precursor return vechiles that use hydrogen to make methanol on the surface of Mars. Basically you only need to import 10% feed stock of hydrogen and the rest is generated from the Martian atmosphere. Once the return vechile is ready you send the first humans. They already have a working return vechile on the surface.
This means they have a place ready to stay on Mars before they get there. The Mars Direct system calls for missions every six months or so, alternating between manned and return vechicles.
You are free to license your software in any way you choose. However, I would suggest that it would be exceedingly difficult to enforce the license, as I doubt any country creating weapons with the code would blink an eye at violating the license terms.
For me there are two issues with mandating open source or free software in Government.
The first one is that you can't be for freedom on one hand and try to force people into something on the other. Mandating open source software in Government would be removing their freedom. Thats not to say we shouldn't be encouraging its use in Government, and that we shouldn't fight to have certain inequities in the procurement process addressed. I believe that open standards should be mandated, so a signgle vendor cannot lock the government into their solutions. Closed formats prevents freedom to move.
The other issue I have is from a strategic point of view. If Governments mandate open source software there will be a backlash from those who don't want to move away from closed source. Typically they will sabotage open source pilots and projects. They will make the move to open source much more expensive and painfull as they are dragged into using open source. We don't need this.
So in summary, its better to use encouragement than a stick, and we must be carefull we don't undermine our own values of freedom when we talk of regulating others - since in actuality we are winning by conversion anyway.
Oh no, not another Oracle DBA. It seems that Oracle DBA's are trained into believing that everything should be done in stored procs, and that a database must have all the latest features that Oracle have dreamed up in order for it to be a good product.
I run a software company, and have made the decision that I will not use stored procs or product specific SQL. Where possible everything we do is cross platform in terms of databases. To date I have personally done a MS-SQL to Interbase, MS-SQL to Postgres and Access MDB to Postgres transition.
In each case the move took less than a days work, mostly dealing with issues around how different databases handle autoincrementing fields for ID's.
Oracle has a interest in having as much of your projects investment within Oracle. This way it makes life very difficult to change databases - you will have to throw away all that code and reimplement it.
However, if you decide from the start that you won't do it that way, then you are free to move between databases. Does that mean you have to give up on some cool features - yes. The OO type features of Postgres are great, and I would love to use them - if only they were supported on other databases.
The problem is that my products may be sold into companies that insist on MS-SQL, or Oracle, or whatever else. How can you do that if you tie yourself to a specific DB?
The problem with this approach is that nody has ever completed a project in which the user managed to exactly specify what they needed in a system before it was built. Also the designers of the systems have never been able to translate a requirements document into a specification that addresses all the requirements perfectly. Finally the coders are never able to code exactly to the specification. When will people get that this is a fairy tale.
I don't subscribe to XP in everything it says, however a close relationship with the client, making small changes frequently, and applying stringent code review - these things are proven to work in the real world. It also means you won't have huge arguments with Marketing because now you will accept they are not perfect and have a system that deals with it.
Slashdot Mirror
This desire to exlore mars is reliant on our mastering reaching and taming the moon.
This is not the case. "The Case For Mars" clearly puts forward a case for the opposite, that the Moon is a diversion, that Mars is much richer in natural resources than the moon, and much more habitable. Not only is the moon less habitable, but there is very little science of any import to do there compared to Mars. Mars could have a self sustaining base, which that is very improbable on the Moon.
I suppose you have to expect this kind of thing when Christian Fundimentalists are in charge of the science purse strings. Just take a look at the recent issue with NASA Public Relations censoring a scientist on Global Warming. The last thing the Christian Fundimentalist Bush administration want is more money spent on science that continues to prove their dearest beliefs wrong. After all if you know "The Truth" by divine relalation why bother with science?
The Bitkeeper business has to be understood in context of history. Yes, Stallman may have been saying that Bitkeeper should not be used, but was he presenting an alternative? Linus at the time was facing a huge problem; Linus didn't scale, and he was dropping contributions on the floor. The people closest to Linus pushed for Bitkeeper as a way for Linus to cope with the huge numbers of patches coming in. Basically it was a coup - either he fixed the problem or, with respect Alan Cox and Co would fork Linux.
Say you spend six months writing a book, as I have, and you have this book published. Would you want some other publisher coming along and copying your book and selling it for $10 less than your publisher and pocketing the profit, not giving you a dime?
There is a huge gulf of a difference between people willingly licensing their work so that it is free, and the abolishment of copyright which would remove the ability of a author to control the rights over their own works. This is an ideological difference - the difference between giving people the option of giving away their work for the public good and taking it.
The Shareware industry proved that expecting people to pay for things - software - they can obtain for free is a fools paradise. Open source works only because there is no expectation for payment and many people can colaborate. The "use" value of the software exceeds "sale" value, and the use value is sufficient that spending real time and money on it is worthwhile. The GPL makes it possible to license work such that your competitor won't take the work you do and resell it unfairly.
What I see as irrational is the belief that just because data can be moved at virtually no cost that the value of creating that data is thus zero. Stallman's persona came out of a feeling of loss; that the cooperative society he grew up in was corrupted by selfish closing of a public resource. However, most software is developed by companies in a closed fashion that is never part of a open community - they are not taking advantage of a open resource. Forcing them to be open is just as unjust as taking open resources closed.
The real ethic for me is freedom of the individual to control their own expression, if they wish to release to the public, or to profit from their work.
Get real. We all know his appearance is somewhat to be desired, but thats a rather shallow analysis of a person. it is his ideas which are important. Judge him on those. Hardly anyone will meet him in real life, but those his software touches is in the millions. Just to be clear, I'm not a Stallman fanboy; I think his non support of Open Source is childish, and actually hurts his objectives.
I think if I had to wrie a school report it would say "Good problem solver, but doesn't play well with others".
If it were anyone else they could be safely ignored, but RMS brought us the GPL, and it was through his uncomprimising commitment to his vision that we have the movement of Open Source today. Yes people - Open Source, he is one of the fathers of Open Source even if he has disowned his own child. The point is that the man is uncomprimising to the point of being irrational.
But is he - in this instance - being irrational? Well, the creative commons typically used by Flickr, is simply a means of easily defining the rights you are providing. It can mean a number of things, and I think he has a point - that its confusing; you have to read the rights for every bit of work, rather than being able to trust that a creative commons mark means you have certain rights.
I still wouldn't use the GPL for writing or music because the GPL has clauses specifically aimed at software. There is no "source code" for music, and no obligation to distribute the score of the music along with the audio recordings for example. However, the creative commons is a diluted concept if you don't gauranttee certain rights to people, and they have to dig to see what their rights actually are.
Stallmans problem isn't one of intellect as such, but rather poor communication. He communicates in a uncomprimising and arrogant way; his way or the highway; and is unwilling to be part of a bigger team that he has no direct control over. That is why Open Source came about - we escaped the limits of Stallmans retoric.
Stallman still doesn't get Open Source I think - The Hurd being an example more of Cathedral style than Bazzar style development. Open Source has overtaken him for a reason, and that reason is a positive feedback cycle generated by a community of willing participants.
The big difference between open source and free software is the uncomprimising ideological dogma of Stallman. Free Software was about the Stallmans dictatorship; his word was law in that universe. Open Source on the other hand starts with the principles of Free Software, but does not insist the developers have the same ideological passions as Stallman.
That said, Open Source has not diluted the principle (as the Creative Commoms may have) by retaining a clear statement about what is and is not Open Source.
He didn't seem to answer the actual Microsoftie in the trenches who was saying that the processes that are in place are not working. His comments about repeatable processes reminds me of the production line school of thought, that if you can work out how to do something right once, you need only document it and the factory worker can do it over and over again like a robot.
This has been applied to software development for a long time, and certainly not only by Microsoft. Sadly software developerment isn't a factory job; it is creative, and so you must treat it differently. Quality Assurance isn't something you test in at the end, it has to be a consequence of the entire process. When you are designing something new you have to think from the very start about the security model.
I don't believe code review will help security - as in my experience code review will only deal with issues of syntax and adherance to coding standards. One way to do it is not to use a language which permits so many potential issues such as buffer overruns that can result in a system being owned.
Dr Phil talks about setting yourself up for success, and I don't think Microsoft has learned this yet. They are still coding the same way as always, only added on some 'processes', rather than giving the developers the ability to deal with security as a priority higher than shipping.
Why do we suddenly expect Linus to be the politician? What has made him so popular is his honesty. He is allowed to prefer a window manager over another. Hes allowed to have his reasons. Nobody has to give it any weight just because it comes from Linus. Decisions should be made based on the facts, and if Linus makes a good case, then perhaps you should listen.
:)
But Linus isn't the CEO of Linux Incorporated, he cannot order people to implement his personal preferences. The developers and users of Gnome will no doubt continue as they always have.
Besides, I feel for poor Linus who has every word he says discussed and analysed. Perhaps he just woke up after a bad day at the office
Okay, so its not real, but let us imagine that there were a machine as intelligent as a human. Do you think that there is some magic barrier after human intellect? Machines would just continue to be built smarter. Soon all decisions by corporates would be made by machines because humans would be too stupid. Corporates who didn't have these machines would soon be bankrupted by companies that did have them, and were able to outcompete. Machines will rull the world - but they will do it with the help of existing power structures, not by force of arms.
Funny, I thought it was New Zealand that had Australia.
The problem is that all hardware will fail eventually, so we have no alternative but to create systems from such. My approach to high availability is to ensure that a failure of any two servers won't bring down the system. There are still some areas I have trouble with, distributed databases being one. For database servers I still prefer fault tolerant servers, and to have a backup server which can be quickly brought up. The application servers are all just standard builds. The other point of failure is the load balancer, although I suspect this could also be mitigated.
By the way, anyone had success with Apache and JK load balancing across multiple Tomcat web servers?
Well, if you are American you don't have to fear being killed - yet. If you are an Iraqi or an Afghan however you can expect to be tortured and killed, or perhaps locked up in some god forsaken hole in Cuba for years on end.
Of course, other countries won't speak out too harshly because of what we see the US did to countries it didn't get on with.
All hail the American Empire.
Talking of FUD, who on earth suggested that portability doesn't matter? Although our company uses Linux internally our customers are prodominantly Windows users. We develop using Java, PHP and Python, and all our applications are cross platform.
Portability is the difference between surviving and not surviving; at least for me. Linux is not the one true OS, but it is an excellent example of the new way of thinking, a way which doesn't have greed at its core.
Janet was a school teacher. Like many teachers she didn't decide on her profession based on the financial rewards. Money was tight at the best of times.
Janet buys a computer for herself, but doesn't buy a copy of Office. Later she finds out that Wordpad isn't really what she needs in a word processor. She visits one of the local appliance shops which also sell PC software.
Discussing the situation with the sales person she finds she will be paying $200 for a copy of Office. Now $200 is much better than the full price only because she can get the academic pricing, but it is still $200 she can ill afford.
Just then a young man comes up to her and asks her what she needs the word processor for. Does it need to run Macro's etc. She answers that it will be used for writing letters, looking at the childrens homework etc. The young man then suggests that she take a look at OpenOffice, which can be purchased at another store thats only a few minutes walk away.
Intrigued she walks down to the store and buys a copy of OpenOffice for $10. Getting home she pops the CD into the computer and with littlw effort has OpenOffice up and running. How, she wonders, can such excellent software ge so cheap. She begins tgo read the front cover describing that OpenOffice is open source, and what open source means.
Three months later the entire school has changed to OpenOffice, as the idea of freedom that Janet brought to the school caught like wildfire with the teachers that saw the quality of open source. Janet was now used Linux at home, but her journey into open source was just beginning.
Its easy to be critical of the Politicians, however the fact is they are not bowing down to US interests at all. The Patent legislation is currently under review, and there has been a prolonged consultation period. Thats not to say the current form of the draft legislation is exactly what we want, but to suggest that "generous contributors" are influencing Government in a major way is just not accurate in the New Zealand environment.
Thats not to say they don't have any influence - but nothing like the obvious failure of democracy that is the current US administration.
I really hope you are not American, as the US has already accepted the patent. Oh, you are being sarcastic. My bad :)
On another note I see most Slashdotters are missing the point. Microsoft are not patenting all word processing XML documents, just documents that use their magic filled XML schema. The real point here is that they are using Patent law not to protect something innovative, but to control who can interoperate with their formats.
The really evil thing is that if you write a document in Word, then save it as XML, your data is not mixed with Microsoft "intellectual property" - and therefore you can not do with it as you please.
Microsoft make a big deal about the patent being licenced reasonably, however that doesn't include being able to use GPL tools with *your data*.
The problem is that nothing any company does is ever good enough for praise. No matter how positive the move they will be picked apart and their motives questioned.
I have talked to IBM people before this move, and found out that they are against software patents, and have made statements to that effect, but until the law changes they still must file patents to ensure they protect their own interests.
Even if their motives are self interest they have also acted in the interests of open source. I also expect that the 500 patents will be patents that open source projects are already infringing, and therefore they will all be very useful.
The stand taken today by Novell is positive. They should be commended and congradulated for this move. Nobody is under the illusion that Novell have suddenly accepted the true religion of OSS, however do you honestly believe companies will continue to support us if we continue to be critical even when they have done what they can to support the movement.
We know that for companies its the bottom line that counts - however while companies such as IBM and Novell are aligned, why not cooperate and make the most of the opportunities. Yes, at some time in the future they may change their tune - but right now they are supporting us.
My congratulations to NASA. I really hope that NASA figure out that Mars can be achieved (aka Mars Direct), and avoid a waste of time and effort on the large ball of rock that orbits earth.
Regarding "Anti-American" feelings: The problem - at least from my point of view - is the policy that essentially states that the US can invade whoever they want. They bitch and moan when developing countries don't obey treaties developed by the US for US interests, but drop anything that is inconveneient - like Global Warming agreements. They talk of free trade agreements, yet refuse to open free trade agreements with countries such as New Zealand that would benefit.
This is really a disagreement with US policy - not some kind of personal dislike of Amercians as such.
The work NASA is doing is great. In fact if there was a way to donate money I would gladly do so. I certainly think that the hundreds of billions of dollars going to kill Iraqies would be better spent by NASA.
We can't afford to ignore terrorist, however the invasion of Iraq has only served to isolate the US from other countries, waste huge amounts of US Taxpayers money, and kill many thousands of innocent Iraqi. Oh, and to create a totally new hotbed of potential international terrorists where none before existed.
If I were the US I would have put the money into Space to prove that the US are able to make progress despite 9/11. Sure its not nice when terrorists attack, but you can't live your life with that fear, and allow it to drive your relationships with other countries. Well you can - only it will serve to alienate them.
The guys name was Bruce Simpson. You can find him on his news web site at www.aardvark.co.nz. Thee point of the project was to show exactly how easy it is to develop a cruise missile from commonly available parts. He has already made working pulse jet engines.
While it may seem insane to think of a OSS missile system - is it any less insane to have no air defence at all? New Zealand has no air defence, in fact our vintage airforce is better armed than the 'air farce'.
However, a missile system would be better than nothing.
Robert Zubrin wrote "The Case For Mars" which describes how we might fly to Mars. His idea was to fly directly to Mars like Apollo. He answers the following questions.
1. The moon is only 3 days away. Mars is months away. Logistically, it's easier.
The energy to go from the Earth to the Moon, and then from the Moon to Mars is about double that a direct flight would take to Mars. The Moon itself is not a great destination because everything you need to survive has to be imported. In comparision much of what you need to survive on mars can be obtained locally.
2. The moon gives us an opportunity to work out engineering issues of establishing a permanent base on foreign celestial bodies.
The problem with the Moon is that it has very little in the way of natural resources. To get water you would have to crush huge amounts of rock to extract it. Also there is much less gravity, no atmosphere, meaning no way to create rocket fuel. All rocket fuel would have to be imported. In general life on the moon would be much more expensive, and require much more imported material compared to a base on Mars.
Most importantly however a Moon base would not teach us very much about living on Mars at all. You would not learn how to "live off the land" on the Moon - and if you did the technologies for extracting resources are dramatically different.
3. There may be immediate tangible benefits to a moon base: mining, factories, observatories, astronaut training, research.
There is very little of mineral value on the Moon, and as I said previously, maintaining a Moon Base would mean importing virtually everything required for life. In terms of energy there isn't much more energy required to get to Mars, however there are huge advantages in terms of being able to produce fuel on the surface of Mars, when you can't do the same on the Moon.
Finally, waiting to create a Moon Base might distract us unnessasarily from Mars. There is no need to have a Moon base to launch a Mars mission, and there is little a Moon base would do to teach us any more than we already know from experience with space stations. Therefore Robert makes what I feel is a convincing case for doing a Mars Direct mission.
Robert's idea is that we send precursor return vechiles that use hydrogen to make methanol on the surface of Mars. Basically you only need to import 10% feed stock of hydrogen and the rest is generated from the Martian atmosphere. Once the return vechile is ready you send the first humans. They already have a working return vechile on the surface.
This means they have a place ready to stay on Mars before they get there. The Mars Direct system calls for missions every six months or so, alternating between manned and return vechicles.
You are free to license your software in any way you choose. However, I would suggest that it would be exceedingly difficult to enforce the license, as I doubt any country creating weapons with the code would blink an eye at violating the license terms.
For me there are two issues with mandating open source or free software in Government.
The first one is that you can't be for freedom on one hand and try to force people into something on the other. Mandating open source software in Government would be removing their freedom. Thats not to say we shouldn't be encouraging its use in Government, and that we shouldn't fight to have certain inequities in the procurement process addressed. I believe that open standards should be mandated, so a signgle vendor cannot lock the government into their solutions. Closed formats prevents freedom to move.
The other issue I have is from a strategic point of view. If Governments mandate open source software there will be a backlash from those who don't want to move away from closed source. Typically they will sabotage open source pilots and projects. They will make the move to open source much more expensive and painfull as they are dragged into using open source. We don't need this.
So in summary, its better to use encouragement than a stick, and we must be carefull we don't undermine our own values of freedom when we talk of regulating others - since in actuality we are winning by conversion anyway.
Oh no, not another Oracle DBA. It seems that Oracle DBA's are trained into believing that everything should be done in stored procs, and that a database must have all the latest features that Oracle have dreamed up in order for it to be a good product.
I run a software company, and have made the decision that I will not use stored procs or product specific SQL. Where possible everything we do is cross platform in terms of databases. To date I have personally done a MS-SQL to Interbase, MS-SQL to Postgres and Access MDB to Postgres transition.
In each case the move took less than a days work, mostly dealing with issues around how different databases handle autoincrementing fields for ID's.
Oracle has a interest in having as much of your projects investment within Oracle. This way it makes life very difficult to change databases - you will have to throw away all that code and reimplement it.
However, if you decide from the start that you won't do it that way, then you are free to move between databases. Does that mean you have to give up on some cool features - yes. The OO type features of Postgres are great, and I would love to use them - if only they were supported on other databases.
The problem is that my products may be sold into companies that insist on MS-SQL, or Oracle, or whatever else. How can you do that if you tie yourself to a specific DB?
The problem with this approach is that nody has ever completed a project in which the user managed to exactly specify what they needed in a system before it was built. Also the designers of the systems have never been able to translate a requirements document into a specification that addresses all the requirements perfectly. Finally the coders are never able to code exactly to the specification. When will people get that this is a fairy tale.
I don't subscribe to XP in everything it says, however a close relationship with the client, making small changes frequently, and applying stringent code review - these things are proven to work in the real world. It also means you won't have huge arguments with Marketing because now you will accept they are not perfect and have a system that deals with it.