"One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box"
Since when does the use of open source software equate to "thinking outside the box"? I would think that government agencies have more important criteria for a system than "can we play with the source code?".
If they need some new software, they're not going to hop on over to freshmeat. They're going to decide the function of the software. Then they're going to hire somebody to design a system that accomplishes that exact task. I'm sure there's instances on needing to maintain or upgrade software in the government, but all that means is that they need to be in possession of the source code, the code doesn't need to be sitting on source forge though.
If you did work at the DoD (which I have not), I would think that you'd realize that their use for software is to accomplish a specific task, and it's not for having fun, or sticking it to MS.
BTW, Taco, do you guys have a clapper installed on the db server or what?
This doesn't mean that you can have both in a given situation. Let corporations patent all the stuff they want. Everybody has a right to create their own solution.
Let me give you this example though, and tell me what your answer is. If corporation A comes up and says they have this great piece of technology that can give 10x lossless compression in data transfers. That would definitely help internet traffic, and in turn help hundreds of millions of people. Should that not be a standard, so that as many people as possible can use it? Should that corporation give their formulas away for free, or should they be rewarded?
I'm a human being, living on planet earth, in America specifically. My only affiliation is myself. I can think on my own without having to blindly join a group of fanatics, be it Windows, Linux or Mac.
You example doesn't involve somebody slipping patents into standards, it involves MS coding thier site to work with one particular browser.
It's not as though some weasel is going to "sneak" anything into W3C standards. And I suppose the standard will be formally released and used, and then this guy will jump out and say "gotcha!".
Arghh, capitalism! I must religiously defend the ideals of Slashdot in that we should not have to pay for anything, that Bill Gates is Satan himself, and therefore any actions taken to promote the exchange of money is controlled by Microsoft and therefore is evil!
Does that about sum up your attitude. Think for yourself. Corporations pay employees. Employees have families to support and their own bills to pay. The corporations need to survive in order to pay the employees. Maybe the hundred thousand jobs lost in the last couple months haven't opened your eyes up to that yet. Yes, the rich become richer, but it continues to pay for many other people that aren't rich, and that outweighs the petty ideals of a ragtag group of open source programmers.
This really shouldn't even be an issue. If open source is so powerful and has such a large community, then develop your own standards? Somehow I don't think that will happen;)
I thought secretaries were suppose to be able to read their PHBs speeches to them over a regular sized cell phone, complete will FMV? And what happened to the Dick Tracy cell phone watch? What about the head mounted displays for the average day trader that likes to sit in a park full of pidgeons and yell at his computer? Don't tell me I've been fooled by somebodies marketing team!
You're acting as if the web is going away tomorrow, or that fees are going to be charged to webmasters for using HTML on their web pages.
Honestly, what new standard would you propose that is going to be the next killer app of the internet that relies on open standards?
There will be a natural response is the W3C implements licensing fees. Big corporations will latch on and implement the standards, while small groups will create their own open standards to compete. Ahem, notice the similarities between other centerpieces of/. discussions. So maybe there will be two competing standards for awhile. Is this going to kill the internet? Nope. Is it going to cause political uprising and the complete collapse of society? Nope. Is it going to prevent some college kid from slapping a "**ML 1.0 Compliant" sticker on some software he wrote in his dorm room? Maybe.
Let them implement licensing fees and then just argue about inidividal standards when authors push for fees. It's really ironic: everybody complains that there's no competition because corporations have everybody locked into standards, in the same breath they complain that there is too much competion and there's no standard.
"Microsoft has always done its best work when faced with real competition"
Does the author mean their best software? If he did, then that would be MS-DOS 5.0, circa 1990. I would truly take this statement to mean their best marketing work. Gates has admitted it before, that when the going gets tough, they throw some more money into marketing.
Despite the common cry of "free as in beer", as heard throughout Slashdot, people do need to make money. I know that's a strange thing to hear when you're engulfed in open source, but it's true. Believe it or not, some people like to eat meals on a regular basis. Some wackos even like to have a roof over their heard. And the extremists tend to enjoy outlandish living, such as owning a home and a car.
Seriously though, if any person is going to devote a good chunk of his time/life to developing a solid architecture that millions of people are going to use to make thier lives easier, shouldn't they be compensated? Standards are great, they're needed to get everybody on the same page. Have a million instant messaging programs is great, but not if they can't talk to one another. You can't get caught up in thinking that if its a standard, you should have every right to slap your own interface on top of it. A standard is something that has been well thought and discussed and determined to be the best solution for a specific task at the present time. People put work into these things. MP3 is a standard, yet you still have to pay Fraunhoffer (probably spelled incorrectly).
I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that would give away their time just for the recognition, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't become jealous of people that choose money instead of an eternal reference in that "Thanks to" section of somebody's code comments.
I'll continue to make dumb jokes primarily because you should not need to tune the performance of your everyday-joe-blow app to make it run at an acceptable speed. My Perl scripts run fast enough for me. That's interpretted, just like Java is. Unlike other languages, Java started out bloated.
I had a Maxtor crap out once too. Apparently they have a problem with my fist slamming down on the top of the case while the HD is running. They never asked me if I hit it, they just confirmed it failed, and sent me a drive that was 3gig bigger. Not wanting to push my luck, I quickly learned self control after that.
My question has been answered!
on
IBM Launches p690
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"achieves leadership in business, scientific and Java performance benchmarks"
I had always been wondering what kind of system was needed to run Java apps at a decent speed.
My name is Scott. Does that mean I can sue the owner of scott.com? Nope.
Did Yahoo Serios pull his current name out of thin air, i.e. was is completely originaly and never been said before? Nope, that word has been around a lot longer than he's been using it.
He's been in more recent movies than Young Einstein but when was the last time you heard his name mentioned? During promos for Young Einstein.
I tried using the lockdown tool after I manually did a little house cleaning. Specifically, deleting the iissamples folder. The tool wouldn't run without that folder. Now that makes me feel secure. I restored it from the recycling bin and the tools proceeded.
Of course, what was I thinking by deleting the samples folder, they've never had any security issues with those files.
I'm too lazy to go looking for it, but didn't MS claim they were going to focus on security about 1.5 or 2 years ago, back when IIS 4 was having problems?
I agree completely. Teams are used in the real world to complete projects faster. Bringing people that are specialized in one type of development is a natural aspect of this. However, at the college level, Johnny Network should not already have been type-cast as a network programmer.
Colleges exist to provide education, not restrict it, because when Johnny Network gets out into the real world, he's going to find that his job options are going to be more limited if he's already accepted that he is just a networking guru and is apprehensive about other computer jobs. Colleges aren't about tunnel vision.
They even suggested working on core competencies, just like a real world situation - if someone better at the input parsing, let him/her do that while another teamate may focus on the mathematics involved.
Doesn't this lock people down to one aspect of development? At the college level, they are most likely better at one specific task because that's all they've learned so far. Isn't the point of college to become well versed in many things, not just one small part of the industry you want to join?
My experience comes from working in a small company, but my tasks include website design, graphics, CGI, admin, application design and coding both new and maintaining others code, all using mathematical, logic and creativity skills. I'm not the best in the world, but all these skill were aquired over a couple years and I'd like to think that while I'm not quite to "guru" status, I'm at least in the "advanced" category. I wouldn't have learned so much from being type-cast as a webmaster or a application programmer. That's not what a programmer is. A programmer knows how and what commands to send to a computer to make it perform a specified task. The actual task is irrelevent. HTML, Perl, C++, they're all just interfaces to commands.
my CS Theory professor says we can only meet in groups but "cannot walk away with anything written on paper." That's like telling a 2 year old "Be sure not to play with that fun-looking toy!" - it'll never fly.
So maybe it won't fly with everybody. Some students will copy others work. Maybe the prof. won't find out and they'll get a good grade. They'll graduate and go on to their first job.
Then the interesting things start to happen. Such as they'll have to start explaining why they can't learn basic skills associated with the companies software. They'll have to explain why they can't get any projects completed on time. This is actually a good thing, because it makes the job market that much better for me:)
"Teams in college are used to teach people what teams in the real world will be like, and that is a very valuable lesson."
Good point. It does have merit, although I still tend to disagree. Working in a team is the same whether its in software, marketing, medicine or sports. It's just communication with the rest of the team, which is better left to other general courses to teach.
Hopefully the colleges are telling the CS students that TALKING to people will be a requirement of their future jobs. Programmers don't just get locked up in the basement anymore.
There is nothing you will learn by working in a CS team in college. The whole point of college is to learn as much as possible and hopefully learn information relevant to your major. Working in teams means not everybody has to work as hard or learn as much.
In the real world, teams are used to decrease the amount of time it will take to complete a project. That is all. Any one person in the team should be able to complete the project on their own, given enough time to do so. The goal of teamwork in real life is to get a product to market as fast as possible. The goal in college is to learn as much as possible. The relationship between time and number of people do not work the same for both scenarios.
While we're on the topic, I'd just like to send a big F.U. out to all the college students that post messages in newgroups, asking the intelligent people to do their homework for them.
The whole premise of these intrusive ads is wrong.
Intrusive ads in TV is acceptable because we are just sitting there like bumps on a log and it give us a break to go do something. We know the commercials are going to last a couple minutes and we expect it. Digging deeper we all understand that those commericals paid for the content.
Web surfing is entirely different. We are interacting with the computer to find information. Basically we are in control and are most likely actively searching, or discussing and not just trying to be passively entertained. We want to find our information, or post our comment and be done with it.
Advertisers are having a tough time on coming up with a creative way to advertise on the net since their previous method (banners) had limited success, they are falling back on what they know. But what they know is a method designed for a passive medium and not an interactive one.
The one thing they have going for them, is that like TV, web advertising for the most part is targetted at groups and not so much individuals. Slashdot is going to run tech related ads. TechTV (the TV channel) is going to run tech related commericals. Generally, the specific group you are looking for will see your ad. They need to expand on that without taking it to the extreme.
One option: large ads that are not intrusive. I wouldn't mind if an ad takes the top portion of my screen. I do mind if though some fancy javascript, it follows me as I scroll, or randomly appears or is in a fixed frame. Just give me the ability to decide whether or not your products are right for me and let me continue on with the content. If you're watching TV and you don't want to see the commercial, you see what else is on or you go to the fridge or bathroom. Basically you can decide what's relevant. Advertisers are trying to take the position that they know what's relevant and you just need to spend as much time as possible looking at their ad and eventually you will buy.
With the economy the way it is, consumers are being smarter, and web-users are getting smarter about the products they purchase. I guess I'd say that the advertising isn't failing, it's the products being offered.
Just reading an article about people getting patriotic tatoos lately. Just wandering, do any of the linux zealots out there get the kernel source or anything else geeky tatooed to them?
Slashdot Mirror
"One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box"
Since when does the use of open source software equate to "thinking outside the box"? I would think that government agencies have more important criteria for a system than "can we play with the source code?".
If they need some new software, they're not going to hop on over to freshmeat. They're going to decide the function of the software. Then they're going to hire somebody to design a system that accomplishes that exact task. I'm sure there's instances on needing to maintain or upgrade software in the government, but all that means is that they need to be in possession of the source code, the code doesn't need to be sitting on source forge though.
If you did work at the DoD (which I have not), I would think that you'd realize that their use for software is to accomplish a specific task, and it's not for having fun, or sticking it to MS.
BTW, Taco, do you guys have a clapper installed on the db server or what?
Competition = GOOD
Standards = GOOD
This doesn't mean that you can have both in a given situation. Let corporations patent all the stuff they want. Everybody has a right to create their own solution.
Let me give you this example though, and tell me what your answer is. If corporation A comes up and says they have this great piece of technology that can give 10x lossless compression in data transfers. That would definitely help internet traffic, and in turn help hundreds of millions of people. Should that not be a standard, so that as many people as possible can use it? Should that corporation give their formulas away for free, or should they be rewarded?
Are you fifteen? Seriously.
Ok though, I'll declare my "affiliation":
I'm a human being, living on planet earth, in America specifically. My only affiliation is myself. I can think on my own without having to blindly join a group of fanatics, be it Windows, Linux or Mac.
where someone slips a patent into a standard
You example doesn't involve somebody slipping patents into standards, it involves MS coding thier site to work with one particular browser.
It's not as though some weasel is going to "sneak" anything into W3C standards. And I suppose the standard will be formally released and used, and then this guy will jump out and say "gotcha!".
To paraphrase your comment:
;)
Arghh, capitalism! I must religiously defend the ideals of Slashdot in that we should not have to pay for anything, that Bill Gates is Satan himself, and therefore any actions taken to promote the exchange of money is controlled by Microsoft and therefore is evil!
Does that about sum up your attitude. Think for yourself. Corporations pay employees. Employees have families to support and their own bills to pay. The corporations need to survive in order to pay the employees. Maybe the hundred thousand jobs lost in the last couple months haven't opened your eyes up to that yet. Yes, the rich become richer, but it continues to pay for many other people that aren't rich, and that outweighs the petty ideals of a ragtag group of open source programmers.
This really shouldn't even be an issue. If open source is so powerful and has such a large community, then develop your own standards? Somehow I don't think that will happen
I thought secretaries were suppose to be able to read their PHBs speeches to them over a regular sized cell phone, complete will FMV? And what happened to the Dick Tracy cell phone watch? What about the head mounted displays for the average day trader that likes to sit in a park full of pidgeons and yell at his computer? Don't tell me I've been fooled by somebodies marketing team!
You're acting as if the web is going away tomorrow, or that fees are going to be charged to webmasters for using HTML on their web pages.
/. discussions. So maybe there will be two competing standards for awhile. Is this going to kill the internet? Nope. Is it going to cause political uprising and the complete collapse of society? Nope. Is it going to prevent some college kid from slapping a "**ML 1.0 Compliant" sticker on some software he wrote in his dorm room? Maybe.
Honestly, what new standard would you propose that is going to be the next killer app of the internet that relies on open standards?
There will be a natural response is the W3C implements licensing fees. Big corporations will latch on and implement the standards, while small groups will create their own open standards to compete. Ahem, notice the similarities between other centerpieces of
Let them implement licensing fees and then just argue about inidividal standards when authors push for fees. It's really ironic: everybody complains that there's no competition because corporations have everybody locked into standards, in the same breath they complain that there is too much competion and there's no standard.
"Microsoft has always done its best work when faced with real competition"
Does the author mean their best software? If he did, then that would be MS-DOS 5.0, circa 1990. I would truly take this statement to mean their best marketing work. Gates has admitted it before, that when the going gets tough, they throw some more money into marketing.
Despite the common cry of "free as in beer", as heard throughout Slashdot, people do need to make money. I know that's a strange thing to hear when you're engulfed in open source, but it's true. Believe it or not, some people like to eat meals on a regular basis. Some wackos even like to have a roof over their heard. And the extremists tend to enjoy outlandish living, such as owning a home and a car.
Seriously though, if any person is going to devote a good chunk of his time/life to developing a solid architecture that millions of people are going to use to make thier lives easier, shouldn't they be compensated? Standards are great, they're needed to get everybody on the same page. Have a million instant messaging programs is great, but not if they can't talk to one another. You can't get caught up in thinking that if its a standard, you should have every right to slap your own interface on top of it. A standard is something that has been well thought and discussed and determined to be the best solution for a specific task at the present time. People put work into these things. MP3 is a standard, yet you still have to pay Fraunhoffer (probably spelled incorrectly).
I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that would give away their time just for the recognition, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't become jealous of people that choose money instead of an eternal reference in that "Thanks to" section of somebody's code comments.
I'll continue to make dumb jokes primarily because you should not need to tune the performance of your everyday-joe-blow app to make it run at an acceptable speed. My Perl scripts run fast enough for me. That's interpretted, just like Java is. Unlike other languages, Java started out bloated.
I had a Maxtor crap out once too. Apparently they have a problem with my fist slamming down on the top of the case while the HD is running. They never asked me if I hit it, they just confirmed it failed, and sent me a drive that was 3gig bigger. Not wanting to push my luck, I quickly learned self control after that.
"achieves leadership in business, scientific and Java performance benchmarks"
I had always been wondering what kind of system was needed to run Java apps at a decent speed.
My name is Scott. Does that mean I can sue the owner of scott.com? Nope.
Did Yahoo Serios pull his current name out of thin air, i.e. was is completely originaly and never been said before? Nope, that word has been around a lot longer than he's been using it.
He's been in more recent movies than Young Einstein but when was the last time you heard his name mentioned? During promos for Young Einstein.
Does he have a chance in hell of winning? Nope.
because each hotfix wanted its own reboot to complete and you couldn't just apply them all and then reboot once.
Just move the messagebox telling you to reboot, out of the way and install the next patch.
I tried using the lockdown tool after I manually did a little house cleaning. Specifically, deleting the iissamples folder. The tool wouldn't run without that folder. Now that makes me feel secure. I restored it from the recycling bin and the tools proceeded.
Of course, what was I thinking by deleting the samples folder, they've never had any security issues with those files.
I'm too lazy to go looking for it, but didn't MS claim they were going to focus on security about 1.5 or 2 years ago, back when IIS 4 was having problems?
I agree completely. Teams are used in the real world to complete projects faster. Bringing people that are specialized in one type of development is a natural aspect of this. However, at the college level, Johnny Network should not already have been type-cast as a network programmer.
Colleges exist to provide education, not restrict it, because when Johnny Network gets out into the real world, he's going to find that his job options are going to be more limited if he's already accepted that he is just a networking guru and is apprehensive about other computer jobs. Colleges aren't about tunnel vision.
They even suggested working on core competencies, just like a real world situation - if someone better at the input parsing, let him/her do that while another teamate may focus on the mathematics involved.
Doesn't this lock people down to one aspect of development? At the college level, they are most likely better at one specific task because that's all they've learned so far. Isn't the point of college to become well versed in many things, not just one small part of the industry you want to join?
My experience comes from working in a small company, but my tasks include website design, graphics, CGI, admin, application design and coding both new and maintaining others code, all using mathematical, logic and creativity skills. I'm not the best in the world, but all these skill were aquired over a couple years and I'd like to think that while I'm not quite to "guru" status, I'm at least in the "advanced" category. I wouldn't have learned so much from being type-cast as a webmaster or a application programmer. That's not what a programmer is. A programmer knows how and what commands to send to a computer to make it perform a specified task. The actual task is irrelevent. HTML, Perl, C++, they're all just interfaces to commands.
my CS Theory professor says we can only meet in groups but "cannot walk away with anything written on paper." That's like telling a 2 year old "Be sure not to play with that fun-looking toy!" - it'll never fly.
:)
So maybe it won't fly with everybody. Some students will copy others work. Maybe the prof. won't find out and they'll get a good grade. They'll graduate and go on to their first job.
Then the interesting things start to happen. Such as they'll have to start explaining why they can't learn basic skills associated with the companies software. They'll have to explain why they can't get any projects completed on time. This is actually a good thing, because it makes the job market that much better for me
"Teams in college are used to teach people what teams in the real world will be like, and that is a very valuable lesson."
Good point. It does have merit, although I still tend to disagree. Working in a team is the same whether its in software, marketing, medicine or sports. It's just communication with the rest of the team, which is better left to other general courses to teach.
Hopefully the colleges are telling the CS students that TALKING to people will be a requirement of their future jobs. Programmers don't just get locked up in the basement anymore.
There is nothing you will learn by working in a CS team in college. The whole point of college is to learn as much as possible and hopefully learn information relevant to your major. Working in teams means not everybody has to work as hard or learn as much.
In the real world, teams are used to decrease the amount of time it will take to complete a project. That is all. Any one person in the team should be able to complete the project on their own, given enough time to do so. The goal of teamwork in real life is to get a product to market as fast as possible. The goal in college is to learn as much as possible. The relationship between time and number of people do not work the same for both scenarios.
While we're on the topic, I'd just like to send a big F.U. out to all the college students that post messages in newgroups, asking the intelligent people to do their homework for them.
I could really use an unobfuscater to translate all the code I write at 3:00am while on a Jolt/Vivarin high.
It would also come in handy when I have to look at the code the interns wrote.
You totally missed the point and I'm to groggy to dumb it down for ya.
The whole premise of these intrusive ads is wrong.
Intrusive ads in TV is acceptable because we are just sitting there like bumps on a log and it give us a break to go do something. We know the commercials are going to last a couple minutes and we expect it. Digging deeper we all understand that those commericals paid for the content.
Web surfing is entirely different. We are interacting with the computer to find information. Basically we are in control and are most likely actively searching, or discussing and not just trying to be passively entertained. We want to find our information, or post our comment and be done with it.
Advertisers are having a tough time on coming up with a creative way to advertise on the net since their previous method (banners) had limited success, they are falling back on what they know. But what they know is a method designed for a passive medium and not an interactive one.
The one thing they have going for them, is that like TV, web advertising for the most part is targetted at groups and not so much individuals. Slashdot is going to run tech related ads. TechTV (the TV channel) is going to run tech related commericals. Generally, the specific group you are looking for will see your ad. They need to expand on that without taking it to the extreme.
One option: large ads that are not intrusive. I wouldn't mind if an ad takes the top portion of my screen. I do mind if though some fancy javascript, it follows me as I scroll, or randomly appears or is in a fixed frame. Just give me the ability to decide whether or not your products are right for me and let me continue on with the content. If you're watching TV and you don't want to see the commercial, you see what else is on or you go to the fridge or bathroom. Basically you can decide what's relevant. Advertisers are trying to take the position that they know what's relevant and you just need to spend as much time as possible looking at their ad and eventually you will buy.
With the economy the way it is, consumers are being smarter, and web-users are getting smarter about the products they purchase. I guess I'd say that the advertising isn't failing, it's the products being offered.
Just reading an article about people getting patriotic tatoos lately. Just wandering, do any of the linux zealots out there get the kernel source or anything else geeky tatooed to them?