Ok, well I meant that as it applies to free (in the GNU/BSD/Artistic License/etc. sense) software. I'm almost completely with you on the commercial software end.
Why the distinction? The ethics behind it all mostly. Almost every actively developed piece of open source software out there is maintained by a handful of people who literally "do it for fun". These are people who are addicted to writing code that does something they find cool--most are exploring technology, some are redefining it. They are motivated by the hey-wouldn't-it-be-nifty-if-we -could-do-X factor.
Compare this with the other extreme. Say, with a company that has massive teams of mostly mediocre programmers who are churning out big, bloated, meaty turds, packaging them up, marketing the hell out of them, forcing them down people's throats, influencing global politics, and being generally evil. Most commercial software companies aren't this bad, but that certainly seems to be their long-term goal. These are people motivated by the we-really-don't-care-as-long-as-we-make-a-buck factor.
I don't know about you, but I think that if a couple of nerds sit around and hack together some mindblowing piece of software, and they say "This isn't guaranteed to work. We hope it does, but if not...hey, sorry" and then the stuff *doesn't* work, I don't want to see any legal action taken against them.
That said, I think most of these open source maintainers are more than responsive to bug tracking and fixing. Spend any time on a high volume dev mailing list, and you see some *insane* dedication. Like, you know these guys sleep 8 hours a week whether they need to or not. I don't want to see these people warding off class action lawsuits. Save those for the nebulous corporate entities who bring you Value-Added Enterprise Solutions for the Multi-Tiered Enterprise.
If a bug exits and a sizeable amount of time passes with no fix, as new users are downloading and using the product *without being warned* then the maintainers of the source should be held liable.
Not when you see this little blurb:
"Foobar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE".
Part of the user's responsibility in relying on software (free or otherwise) is to read (and understand) the terms of the license.
Anyone who says this explicitly in their license should not be *required* to do anything. That includes notifying users, fixing, or even acknowledging the existence of bugs. And they definitely shouldn't be held liable for damages.
What!? I bought them for $900 each. They were mint condition original issues (not the reissued underoo variety but the ones that were made by Cincinnati Cotton (bought and liquidated in 1983 by the fine folks at Fruit of the Loom). These puppies were in the authentic manufacturers packaging...And that was in 1989!
On Ebay I'll occasionally sell near mint (maybe worn once, but not washed (never washed! (the value goes waaaaay down if you wash them))) ones for $2700+, fine (worn the same amount of time but with a stray fart mark or other small blemish) for $2100+, good (full blown skidmark and/or other deposits), and fair (corn) for $1000+.
You guys can laugh all you want, but I've been living *very* comfortably for 6 years writing open source code and selling used underwear. You have no idea the number of crazies out there who buy this stuff. Me, I'm in it for the money.
In fact, I also run a business in Japan with my ex room-mate, Masahiro, from college. It's this "private club" that sells underwear to these weird fetishists with deep pockets. All these secretaries, clerks, and a smaller number of upper-middle-class housewives sell us their dirty panties for about $200 each. Sometimes it's more, sometimes less, depending on "what they leave behind". We then turn around and sell them for about 700 bucks a pop. I kid you not.
It's sick, but good natured and pretty funny I think. Nobody is getting hurt, and everyone walks away happy. Though last year I was out there visiting him and we got drunk and for a laugh were laying hockers in the crotches of cheap cotton panties, bagging them up (for maximum freshness) and shipping them off to guys Kyoto, Nara, farming towns outside Ibaragi, you name it.
Everyone knows that to iterative over an array of n elements, you do this: for(i = 0; i arraySize) { error(); } else {... }
Reeeeeeeeeeally? In what language?
How can someone like you have the nerve to criticize the OpenSSH guys?! Missing '<' and '>' in such a critical spot! Jeez! It might be a common error to make, but I would think people trying to illustrate the incompetance of a talented security software coder making a minor mistake would constantly be thinking to themselves about the consequences of these kinds of trivial syntactic errors. It's also a real bonehead mistake. Everyone knows that you use & lt ; and & gt ; in HTML to get the '<' and '>' symbols. I'm sorry if this sounds conceited (that isn't my intention) but when I look at this I have an almost subconscious SCREAMING reaction. For whatever reason, the days when I made mistakes like this have come and gone -- whenever I use '<' or '>' to illustrate how stupid someone else is (when they're trying to illustrate how stupid someone else is) I always think about it, and I cannot imagine someone not thinking about what they are doing. Especially in a piece like this. How completely, and totally embarrassing for you, Briosa.
I tried using that argument once. The lady still hit me with her purse, and the cop didn't buy it either. I'm glad they're teaching it in universities now though. It's definitely tied to presentation and communication theory (and thus beneficial to society).
I doubt that! Kids still want warez. I think it's just that a lot of these punks were weened on MSN, AOL, webtv, and all the other crap out there. Many of them don't even know about things like irc and usenet. Most have never used a bbs, or ftpsearch (remember archie?). If it isn't on yahoo or google or the p2p du jour they don't know about it.
Then again, maybe they have jobs and realize it's cheaper to go buy commercial software than spend a day or more locating it and several hours downloading it.
So yeah, anyways...
Anyone know where I can leech a registered version of Allegro Common Lisp Enterprise Edition for linux?;)
Perhaps a starving mass of people mobbing a food delivery...
In that case it'd be better to use high pressure, large diameter hoses and spray the hungry rioters with a delicious mixture of mashed potatoes, sausage gravy, syrup, and Jell-O. Of course you'd want to heat it to around 150-180 degrees first, so it might not be practical.
The Cost: Its expensive, I don't know how much it costs but its money. This means that money is being spent
Yes, but if your history department doesn't do it, the terrorists have won. Don't you see?
Re:there must not be any vandals in whales...
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 1
Well it depends on what you mean by "vandals". There are many small organisms (and some that aren't so small) that are detrimental to a whale's health. Now, the question is whether or not they can be classified as vandals.
They just hear "Java" and whine without seeing if there is indeed a disadvantage/advantage in performance.
And performance can definitely be an issue. There's also the issue of development time. Any way you look at it, seasoned perl programmers can produce more usable code in a shorter time than seasoned java programmers. At least when it comes to server side apps.
Good point, but it's not easy to install, tweak, and generally tinker with things on a cluster of windows boxes that like to hang all the time (despite the stability improvements that showed up in win2k). I suppose it'd be the same with linux if you were tied to some heavyweight windowing system for the vast majority of your system tweaking.
Kinda makes me wonder though. Is it even possible to run a windows machine with no keyboard, graphics card, or mouse plugged in?
Ugh. I am putting together a win2k cluster at my job, and I have their computational clustering technological preview. For the most part it's a MS marketing scam (Here build a cluster on these trial versions of win2k, and check out our awesome Visual C++. Oh and here're some old versions of the stuff you really need to build a cluster.) It's not really that great IMHO. All you really need is MPI and a bunch of windows boxes. MS likes to push the proprietary MPI Pro from MPI Software Technology.
The AC3 folks at cornell have done quite a bit with these windows clusters. I guess the parallel Matlab is pretty nifty, but there's no reason any of this stuff couldn't be done on a more mature platform.
Personally, my biggest turnoff is the fact that you need KVM switches wired up to each node...well that and the overhead of running the bloatware that is win2k. Compared to a 256 node headless linux cluster we built this just sucks. Hard.
Look, Evan. I'm some anonymous person that you don't know. There is absolutely no need to lie to me.
It's obvious you have a crush on the guy, and hey that's fine. You've also got a Rocky Horror fetish, and that's fine too. More power to you. The key is to accept your feelings. Just don't keep lying to yourself, pretending you're doing some wonderful deed standing up for an actor in the hopes of making them notice you. It's just not going to happen, Mmmkay?
If I was to say, "Metallica Sucks." Would you grind my aggressive, anti-social asshole self into the ground for personally attacking them? No, probably not. Because it isn't a personal attack. Same applies here.
Oh wait - you're a coward, too afraid to even give your name. Ass.
Actually I just wasn't logged in, Evan.
Allow me to proclaim loudly for all to hear: "Wil Wheaton sucks."
He's not the worst actor, but he's definitely in the lowest tier. Down there with Adam Sandler, Martin Lawrence, the Baldwin brothers (collectively), and the guys from CHiPs. Just because he frequents slashdot doesn't make me think any higher of him. Clearly you, a card carrying member of the washed-up-Hollywood-actors-who-post-to-slashdot guild, feel he's a good buddy of yours because he spouts off his mindless drivel here. What does that say about you, Evan?
I invite you, and your easy-going "friend" to flame me with all you've got. You other Slashdroids who aren't afraid to lose karma are welcome to join in too.
Let me rephrase that: "If you add a bunch of small numbers, do you get a bigger number eventually? If so, is it possible that you might get hit in the head with a hammer?"
To answer your questions: Yes, and possibly.
You're probably going to be moderated to +5, but I know you're still an idiot...A verbose one, but an idiot nonetheless.
I proposed to my ex-girlfriend in the form of an obfuscated c program that drew the mandelbrot set rotated so that it looked like a heart. In the center it said "Would you marry me?". The bands of "color" in the fractal were taken from the characters in that string.
She thought it was junk email and deleted it, never even compiling the damn thing.
I broke up with her after that, and I've been single and bitter ever since.
Are there no clever, cynical geek-women out there?
It's far more important for the kids to learn to count, add fractions, write letters, and colour by hand in the lines than it is for them to learn about right-click menus and mail-to links
Close. It's far more important for kids to learn to color outside the lines.
We have too many drones already. Kids should spend time questioning authority, breaking conventions, thinking outside the box, drawing outside the lines, and enjoying themselves. Most of them will be assimilated by The System by the time they're 10 anyway, but the few that can be reached make up for it.
Computers definitely trivialize the importance of arithmetic skills, but they don't ruin the ability to do basic (or not so basic) math. I have a masters in in math and am horrible at simple arithmetic. In fact, I'm so bad at it that as an undergrad I'd have professors pen comments like "What!!!??" in regularly on tests. Give me some symbols to manipulate and abstract concepts to ponder, and I do fine. Give me numbers and I can't handle them. They're too trivial to bother with I guess.
You are speaking of Lisp, and it has existed for many solstices--more than my young and curious mind has witnessed. The ancient scriptures speak of it as having these very properties that we discuss. "All this and more!", quoth they. Kindly observe that this was before the days of modern operating systems, multitasking or not. Of this I am certain.
Currently, we use C, but there really isn't a functional difference between English and C except for the granularity of the specification of the problem and the desired implentation of its solution.
Really? Please tell me how to break down:
"Why are we here?", or "I think I love her", or "He died last week"
into a sufficient granularity to be implemented in C, of course with the full semantic connotations involved. There's a huge difference between a formally defined language and a natural language. That's why NLP is so damn hard.
As far as computers programming themselves, well... a c/c++ compiler translating c/c++ code into machine code isn't the same thing. Translation *is* a necessary step, but you also have to add the ability to change the running program. For that you need a language that blurs the distinction between data and instructions.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, well I meant that as it applies to free (in the GNU/BSD/Artistic License/etc. sense) software. I'm almost completely with you on the commercial software end.
;-)
Why the distinction? The ethics behind it all mostly. Almost every actively developed piece of open source software out there is maintained by a handful of people who literally "do it for fun". These are people who are addicted to writing code that does something they find cool--most are exploring technology, some are redefining it. They are motivated by the hey-wouldn't-it-be-nifty-if-we -could-do-X factor.
Compare this with the other extreme. Say, with a company that has massive teams of mostly mediocre programmers who are churning out big, bloated, meaty turds, packaging them up, marketing the hell out of them, forcing them down people's throats, influencing global politics, and being generally evil. Most commercial software companies aren't this bad, but that certainly seems to be their long-term goal. These are people motivated by the we-really-don't-care-as-long-as-we-make-a-buck factor.
I don't know about you, but I think that if a couple of nerds sit around and hack together some mindblowing piece of software, and they say "This isn't guaranteed to work. We hope it does, but if not...hey, sorry" and then the stuff *doesn't* work, I don't want to see any legal action taken against them.
That said, I think most of these open source maintainers are more than responsive to bug tracking and fixing. Spend any time on a high volume dev mailing list, and you see some *insane* dedication. Like, you know these guys sleep 8 hours a week whether they need to or not. I don't want to see these people warding off class action lawsuits. Save those for the nebulous corporate entities who bring you Value-Added Enterprise Solutions for the Multi-Tiered Enterprise.
Yeah. *cough*
If a bug exits and a sizeable amount of time passes with no fix, as new users are downloading and using the product *without being warned* then the maintainers of the source should be held liable.
Not when you see this little blurb:
"Foobar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE".
Part of the user's responsibility in relying on software (free or otherwise) is to read (and understand) the terms of the license.
Anyone who says this explicitly in their license should not be *required* to do anything. That includes notifying users, fixing, or even acknowledging the existence of bugs. And they definitely shouldn't be held liable for damages.
What!? I bought them for $900 each. They were mint condition original issues (not the reissued underoo variety but the ones that were made by Cincinnati Cotton (bought and liquidated in 1983 by the fine folks at Fruit of the Loom). These puppies were in the authentic manufacturers packaging...And that was in 1989!
On Ebay I'll occasionally sell near mint (maybe worn once, but not washed (never washed! (the value goes waaaaay down if you wash them))) ones for $2700+, fine (worn the same amount of time but with a stray fart mark or other small blemish) for $2100+, good (full blown skidmark and/or other deposits), and fair (corn) for $1000+.
You guys can laugh all you want, but I've been living *very* comfortably for 6 years writing open source code and selling used underwear. You have no idea the number of crazies out there who buy this stuff. Me, I'm in it for the money.
In fact, I also run a business in Japan with my ex room-mate, Masahiro, from college. It's this "private club" that sells underwear to these weird fetishists with deep pockets. All these secretaries, clerks, and a smaller number of upper-middle-class housewives sell us their dirty panties for about $200 each. Sometimes it's more, sometimes less, depending on "what they leave behind". We then turn around and sell them for about 700 bucks a pop. I kid you not.
It's sick, but good natured and pretty funny I think. Nobody is getting hurt, and everyone walks away happy. Though last year I was out there visiting him and we got drunk and for a laugh were laying hockers in the crotches of cheap cotton panties, bagging them up (for maximum freshness) and shipping them off to guys Kyoto, Nara, farming towns outside Ibaragi, you name it.
:)
On ebay you can. I'm wearing some right now.
Everyone knows that to iterative over an array of n elements, you do this: for(i = 0; i arraySize) { error(); } else { ... }
Reeeeeeeeeeally? In what language?
How can someone like you have the nerve to criticize the OpenSSH guys?! Missing '<' and '>' in such a critical spot! Jeez! It might be a common error to make, but I would think people trying to illustrate the incompetance of a talented security software coder making a minor mistake would constantly be thinking to themselves about the consequences of these kinds of trivial syntactic errors. It's also a real bonehead mistake. Everyone knows that you use & lt ; and & gt ; in HTML to get the '<' and '>' symbols. I'm sorry if this sounds conceited (that isn't my intention) but when I look at this I have an almost subconscious SCREAMING reaction. For whatever reason, the days when I made mistakes like this have come and gone -- whenever I use '<' or '>' to illustrate how stupid someone else is (when they're trying to illustrate how stupid someone else is) I always think about it, and I cannot imagine someone not thinking about what they are doing. Especially in a piece like this. How completely, and totally embarrassing for you, Briosa.
Ummmm, RTFP!
They aren't ruling out the possibility of a remote exploit.
And flash is certainly a viable medium for art.
I tried using that argument once. The lady still hit me with her purse, and the cop didn't buy it either. I'm glad they're teaching it in universities now though. It's definitely tied to presentation and communication theory (and thus beneficial to society).
I doubt that! Kids still want warez. I think it's just that a lot of these punks were weened on MSN, AOL, webtv, and all the other crap out there. Many of them don't even know about things like irc and usenet. Most have never used a bbs, or ftpsearch (remember archie?). If it isn't on yahoo or google or the p2p du jour they don't know about it.
;)
Then again, maybe they have jobs and realize it's cheaper to go buy commercial software than spend a day or more locating it and several hours downloading it.
So yeah, anyways...
Anyone know where I can leech a registered version of Allegro Common Lisp Enterprise Edition for linux?
Perhaps a starving mass of people mobbing a food delivery...
In that case it'd be better to use high pressure, large diameter hoses and spray the hungry rioters with a delicious mixture of mashed potatoes, sausage gravy, syrup, and Jell-O. Of course you'd want to heat it to around 150-180 degrees first, so it might not be practical.
BeOS is dying.
The Cost: Its expensive, I don't know how much it costs but its money. This means that money is being spent
Yes, but if your history department doesn't do it, the terrorists have won. Don't you see?
Well it depends on what you mean by "vandals". There are many small organisms (and some that aren't so small) that are detrimental to a whale's health. Now, the question is whether or not they can be classified as vandals.
They just hear "Java" and whine without seeing if there is indeed a disadvantage/advantage in performance.
And performance can definitely be an issue. There's also the issue of development time. Any way you look at it, seasoned perl programmers can produce more usable code in a shorter time than seasoned java programmers. At least when it comes to server side apps.
Good point, but it's not easy to install, tweak, and generally tinker with things on a cluster of windows boxes that like to hang all the time (despite the stability improvements that showed up in win2k). I suppose it'd be the same with linux if you were tied to some heavyweight windowing system for the vast majority of your system tweaking.
Kinda makes me wonder though. Is it even possible to run a windows machine with no keyboard, graphics card, or mouse plugged in?
Ugh. I am putting together a win2k cluster at my job, and I have their computational clustering technological preview. For the most part it's a MS marketing scam (Here build a cluster on these trial versions of win2k, and check out our awesome Visual C++. Oh and here're some old versions of the stuff you really need to build a cluster.) It's not really that great IMHO. All you really need is MPI and a bunch of windows boxes. MS likes to push the proprietary MPI Pro from MPI Software Technology.
The AC3 folks at cornell have done quite a bit with these windows clusters. I guess the parallel Matlab is pretty nifty, but there's no reason any of this stuff couldn't be done on a more mature platform.
Personally, my biggest turnoff is the fact that you need KVM switches wired up to each node...well that and the overhead of running the bloatware that is win2k. Compared to a 256 node headless linux cluster we built this just sucks. Hard.
Look, Evan. I'm some anonymous person that you don't know. There is absolutely no need to lie to me.
It's obvious you have a crush on the guy, and hey that's fine. You've also got a Rocky Horror fetish, and that's fine too. More power to you. The key is to accept your feelings. Just don't keep lying to yourself, pretending you're doing some wonderful deed standing up for an actor in the hopes of making them notice you. It's just not going to happen, Mmmkay?
If I was to say, "Metallica Sucks." Would you grind my aggressive, anti-social asshole self into the ground for personally attacking them? No, probably not. Because it isn't a personal attack. Same applies here.
Oh wait - you're a coward, too afraid to even give your name. Ass.
Actually I just wasn't logged in, Evan.
Allow me to proclaim loudly for all to hear: "Wil Wheaton sucks."
He's not the worst actor, but he's definitely in the lowest tier. Down there with Adam Sandler, Martin Lawrence, the Baldwin brothers (collectively), and the guys from CHiPs. Just because he frequents slashdot doesn't make me think any higher of him. Clearly you, a card carrying member of the washed-up-Hollywood-actors-who-post-to-slashdot guild, feel he's a good buddy of yours because he spouts off his mindless drivel here. What does that say about you, Evan?
I invite you, and your easy-going "friend" to flame me with all you've got. You other Slashdroids who aren't afraid to lose karma are welcome to join in too.
Yeah. Tell that to google.
Let me rephrase that: "If you add a bunch of small numbers, do you get a bigger number eventually? If so, is it possible that you might get hit in the head with a hammer?"
To answer your questions: Yes, and possibly.
You're probably going to be moderated to +5, but I know you're still an idiot...A verbose one, but an idiot nonetheless.
"CC:" for "carbon canine" brought to you by Dogmatic, Inc., El Paso, TX.
I proposed to my ex-girlfriend in the form of an obfuscated c program that drew the mandelbrot set rotated so that it looked like a heart. In the center it said "Would you marry me?". The bands of "color" in the fractal were taken from the characters in that string.
She thought it was junk email and deleted it, never even compiling the damn thing.
I broke up with her after that, and I've been single and bitter ever since.
Are there no clever, cynical geek-women out there?
It's far more important for the kids to learn to count, add fractions, write letters, and colour by hand in the lines than it is for them to learn about right-click menus and mail-to links
Close. It's far more important for kids to learn to color outside the lines.
We have too many drones already. Kids should spend time questioning authority, breaking conventions, thinking outside the box, drawing outside the lines, and enjoying themselves. Most of them will be assimilated by The System by the time they're 10 anyway, but the few that can be reached make up for it.
Computers definitely trivialize the importance of arithmetic skills, but they don't ruin the ability to do basic (or not so basic) math. I have a masters in in math and am horrible at simple arithmetic. In fact, I'm so bad at it that as an undergrad I'd have professors pen comments like "What!!!??" in regularly on tests. Give me some symbols to manipulate and abstract concepts to ponder, and I do fine. Give me numbers and I can't handle them. They're too trivial to bother with I guess.
Old and Wise One,
You are speaking of Lisp, and it has existed for many solstices--more than my young and curious mind has witnessed. The ancient scriptures speak of it as having these very properties that we discuss. "All this and more!", quoth they. Kindly observe that this was before the days of modern operating systems, multitasking or not. Of this I am certain.
Currently, we use C, but there really isn't a functional difference between English and C except for the granularity of the specification of the problem and the desired implentation of its solution.
Really? Please tell me how to break down:
"Why are we here?", or "I think I love her", or "He died last week"
into a sufficient granularity to be implemented in C, of course with the full semantic connotations involved. There's a huge difference between a formally defined language and a natural language. That's why NLP is so damn hard.
As far as computers programming themselves, well... a c/c++ compiler translating c/c++ code into machine code isn't the same thing. Translation *is* a necessary step, but you also have to add the ability to change the running program. For that you need a language that blurs the distinction between data and instructions.