Legislation goes a bit too far
on
Mega-Geek March?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Legislation demanding the use of one type of software, with licensing the primary concern, goes a bit too far. Legislation should instead simply dictate that all types of software are considered - bringing open source packages to the attention of decision makers is sometimes all that's needed, as many only know about MS, Lotus, etc. and don't know about some quality open source packages which perform the same task for a lower cost or with other benefits.
LEGISLATING that everyone has to use open source regardless of other factors has a bad impact. It smacks of 'affirmative action' programs and admission standards - you can't always be sure the people around you are there in that job or student seat because they can actually hack it, or there was a government program that placed them there regardless of merit or ability.
Legislating a written review process for software would help open the process to open source. Consider if we had written records of purchasing decisions. For example, person X considered Open Office, but went ahead and purchased 500 copies of Word for a bank of users who only ever read memos emailed from another branch. Having that on record, open for review, will surely help departments consider open source more, if only initially from a financial standpoint. It won't be an overnight thing, but it'll help.
It's just as wrong to legislate everyone use Open Office as it is to legislate that everyone use MS Office.
Yes, both have made progress, but it's STILL a bit much to say that you're basing an entire airline's support on those projects. I loved the line about 'phpgroupware is rumored to potentially support VoIP in the future'. Great reason to use things now - something in the future *might* support something that other packages already *do* support today.
My company supports PHP wholeheartedly - phphelpdesk.com and PHP training courses are two services we offer. But trying to run a whole airline (even if it's small) off postnuke and phpgroupware - they're going to spend quite a lot on inhouse staff writing custom modules. They *might* be better off financially using *some* third party stuff.
The focus here is as much on open source stuff as Linux (phpgroupware could be run on Windows, for example) so instead of 'right tool for the job' you've got 'open source at any cost', which is, imo, just as bad as 'closed source at any cost'.
For the record, they lived in the UK, and are moving the Australia, and had a few weeks stopover at our place in Michigan. If it was an easy thing to get in Australia, they'd get it. It doesn't seem like it's easy or even possible to do there.
Re:tridge is australian
on
PVRs Down Under?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
That's great but not what I asked. Excellent that tridge is hacking a tivo - where did he buy it? The local appliance store in Sydney? Or was it imported. Yes, I did the obligatory 0.05 second search - doesn't mean it answered my question. Nothing mentions whether or not you can actually GET a tivo in australia - tivo.com certainly don't mention it, and yahoo.com.au has nothing on tivo. My inlaws (in their 70's) aren't going to be hacking an imported tivo - they don't like it that much.
in fact we know of no instance where a Passport user's information has ever been compromised
I seem to recall more than a few hacks that would allow someone to read Hotmail accounts they shouldn't have. These hacks were generally cross-site scripting attacks, but these were after Passport was installed. Doesn't that qualify? Oh, maybe this particular MS marketing team didn't know about them, so it's alright to make the claim. That's not 'misleading'.
One could add another caching layer on top of mod_perl to speed things up too....
But that 'caching' layer would be in addition to what it's already doing. mod_perl is already caching compiled scripts in memory. PHP by default is not. To accurately compare the max speed available, run the accelerator from php-accelerator.co.uk on the PHP machine.
Of course speed isn't everything, but you seemed to want to make it a big factor in comparison with PHP, and I was simply pointing out the flaw with the comparison.
And if you put a cache product on the PHP machine, it'd be as fast or faster than mod_perl. mod_perl is caching the script in memory, something the default PHP doesn't do. Compare apples to apples please.
Because it's using native drivers wherever it can and you get the best performance that way. If you WANT abstraction (and the accompanying slowdown) you can use ADODB, Metabase, PEARDB, or other projects.
his service seems to be redundant and will probably not stay up to date with CVS or else CVS will not stay current with it either way it doesnt seem to make sense IMO
Having adopted CVS for most projects in the past couple years, I beat my head against the wall with many, imo, stupid issues with CVS. I assume that you don't use CVS, or you would be familiar with the fact that CVS pretty much isn't maintained/extended anymore. What's there is there, and has been *mostly* unchanged for years. There may have been a few patches here and there, but if it was being upgraded/extended, the issues that are 'stupid' now (diretories, permissions, etc) would have been fixed years ago.
but try running apt-get again in a day or two and it is usually resolved.
If that's the kind of 'rock solid' stability people advocate for servers (or my goodness, even desktops where the user is supposed to be productive) you can kiss away the idea of Debian ever being a major play er.
Every debian 'advocate' I've met pushes Debian for the desktop precisely because it's 'so easy' to keep things up to date. Sounds fine for a server too, but for a server I generally only run a handful of packages that I'm comfortable compiling anyway. It's getting new stuff for the desktop that's so much of a hassle. And that's why Debian fans I know use it on the desktop.
Point 1 - only if you have a questioning community is it harder to lie to them. The majority of people I know in most communities pretty much just accept what is being offered.
Point 2 - reread the initial stuff. 'suits'. Lumping people together as 'suits' and 'hackers' is pretty stupid, which was the poster's point.
Point 3 - I have tried using Debian. There was not one decent IM package. The AOL deb package didn't work. GAIM crashed every 3 minutes. And on and on. I would apt-get install or upgrade a package and it would crash. The answer? "Try it again in an hour or so - you're using unstable.". Of course I'm using 'unstable' cause that's where the fairly recents stuff is.
Another set of fantastic experiences with Debian involved apt-get upgrading some packages. I had to repeatedly repeat the process because the first few times it would just sporadically die in the middle of the process. Answers from debian people? 'go back to windows' or 'just keep doing it - sometimes you have to run the command a few times before it works'. Excellent attitude for something supposedly stable and 'lie' proof. Is that 'truism' plastered anywhere on the debian site? "might need to run apt-get upgrade 4 times for some packages" as a warning label might be nice.
The fact is that it's not really any better or worse - on the whole - from other distributions. Debian people need to get other this perception of superiority.
With Konqueror, if you click a link the KDE rpm package manager installs it for you.
Funny, mine ALWAYS prompts me for a stupid 'root password'. I can't do anything productive with the system without constantly rekeying the root password, yet Lunix dogmatics would either laugh at you or verbally abuse you if you simply ran a desktop session as root the entire time.
eh? the desktop is resized to match the new resolution.
Are you saying that the desktop manager (KDE/Gnome/etc) adjust their taskbars and other niceties to the new viewable dimensions when ctrl/alt/+/- are hit? They certainly don't do that on the Redhat, Caldera, Mandrake and Debian installations I've used over the past 3 years.
Multiple desktops mean less to me than consistent cut/copy/paste between apps. Having highlighted text auto-copied to the clipboard (overwriting what I had put there myself intentionally) SUCKS.
*I* do, but I think many people don't - BECAUSE it's MS. I agree, it's not competitive with MS or Apple yet. Nice? Yes. Closer than a year ago? Sure. But no cigar yet.
This seems to be another case of copying Microsoft again. They've bundled a remote desktop viewer tool, and now KDE has it. Why can't people integrate some of the cooler stuff before MS? Yes, you could do some of this before, with much setup, but it's going to be point-and-click, and MS beats people to 'point-and-click' implementations usually.
Here's something I've seen people BEGGING for in Konqueror and Mozilla - file upload progress bars in the browser. How much do we want to bet that MS will put that in IE7, THEN konqueror or mozilla will implement it poorly 6 months later?
Is it so hard to think that a person can *like* the features of one product but see that development-wise, they think something else will become better and surpass in the coming months/years? Why does everything need to think so 'binary'? There's nothing mutually exclusive about these statements. One was saying what I use now - the other way stating that I think another product is getting better and will probably overtake in terms of developmental direction and features that matter to developers and end users.
So I repeat: give me the money _in front_ and I create the user experience.
If you want up front money, and think you have a saleable product, go get investors. That's how pretty much every other company does it. The fact that KDE developers don't do that says either they don't care or they don't believe they have a saleable product (actually, many probably believe NOTHING should be 'saleable' in the first place, but that's a different story).
To most OS developers, their projects ARE "successful" because "success" is defined as having the project work the way they wanted to. Having numeroud end users is normally NOT the definition of success, nor is making something 'easy to use' in most cases either.
"If you want something that 'just works', go use Windows".
Actual quote from IRC conversations with different project developers over the past 8 months. I guess the attitude can't get much clearer. They don't WANT end users using their stuff, only themslves. WHY it's published on the internet instead of simply their ~/kewlProjects/ dir is beyond me, though.
If you're a KDE developer, either set up a company or, in the short term, actually ACT like you WANT money. They don't - they act like money is some sort of disease and they are so much more holy because money doesn't enter in to their development mindset. If you WANT money, COMPORT yourself like you DESERVE money. "CODE IT YOURSELF", "THIS IS MY HOBBY", etc. don't get you many people who want to give you money. Contrast this with the Snort story - it WAS a hobby, but the guy treated it like a business. That's a niche market. If KDE developers rallied together, many could make a decent living just making a good DE and making it easy to develop good apps for it. KBASIC would be something we could pay $ for if
1. It helped create good, stable apps which ran on multiple versions of KDE (within reason) 2. It had a good installation routine.
One shell file, RPM or a few binaries that could install the KDE app in multiple platforms (Alpha, Intel, etc) with a good VE under the KBASIC banner would be worthy of $49 -> $99 easily. Instead, projects like this linger on in 'hobby' mode for YEARS.
This article really exposes some issues about why many open source projects 'fail', or look like failures, in the eyes of many 'average joe' users.
No one is getting paid, therefore, things are only as good as what a developer wants, not what an end user may need.
Most of the comments I read focused on money. The problem is, I may *want* to donate money or actually pay for code. The way KDE in particular is coded, though, it makes it hard for others (the Kompany) to write software worth paying for on it (relative to other platforms). So there's a big disconnect there. If more care was taken with the underlying framework, it'd be much easier to have people writing apps that work with less concern for portability - the framework would help take care of that.
Tranisitioning from Win 95->98, or 98->2000 worked pretty well for most apps (excluding games - I dunno about those). People didn't need to go back and recompile apps and redistribute them, most just worked. Why can't it be that easy under KDE?
Back to the payment issue - many of these developers seem *averse* to ever making money from their efforts. Of course the developers don't *need* KDE users, but eventually the users won't need the developers becaus they'll migrate to something else. Without a critical mass of users, any project falls into obscurity. It's not impossible to imagine RH10, for example, not bundling KDE4 because early tests show *nothing* from KDE3 will work on it. "So what?" would be the answer from most KDE devs.
Instead of trying to capitalize on their efforts by creating something which is useful beyond their own immediate needs and longer lasting, many of these developers seem to wear it as a badge of honor that they are *only* in this for themselves, to hell with everyone else.
It'd be great to see something *like* Ximian for KDE - I prefer KDE to Gnome, but at this rate, Ximian seems to be going after user's needs more, and I may just have to switch at some point. DE aside, it's sad to see *SO MUCH POTENTIAL* being thrown away on projects that don't organize themselves effectively.
When you're 5, you have the attitudes and behaviours and respect for others that a 5 year old has (regardless of getting paid!). When you're 10, your attitude, behaviour and respect for others changes and is usually more mature. Same for 15, 20, etc. I don't see that same type of growth pattern happening in the KDE project - it's growing technically, but stagnating attitudinally(?).
Damn, I wish I had my points back - excellent issue you raise! This might not seem such a big deal in the socialist UK, but it's blatantly obvious to us yanks.:)
My guess is that there really *is* a big difference at the barest levels. Chances are good the original 'silence' was an analog recording, which wouldn't sound the same as digital silence. The media to playback the original would have been tape/vinyl/whatever. This current silence was either recorded or just reproduced digitally, probably intended for CDs primarily. Look at a sonic meter thingy analyzing Cage's silence and the Batt silence. I'm sure there's a *big* difference.
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Legislation demanding the use of one type of software, with licensing the primary concern, goes a bit too far. Legislation should instead simply dictate that all types of software are considered - bringing open source packages to the attention of decision makers is sometimes all that's needed, as many only know about MS, Lotus, etc. and don't know about some quality open source packages which perform the same task for a lower cost or with other benefits.
LEGISLATING that everyone has to use open source regardless of other factors has a bad impact. It smacks of 'affirmative action' programs and admission standards - you can't always be sure the people around you are there in that job or student seat because they can actually hack it, or there was a government program that placed them there regardless of merit or ability.
Legislating a written review process for software would help open the process to open source. Consider if we had written records of purchasing decisions. For example, person X considered Open Office, but went ahead and purchased 500 copies of Word for a bank of users who only ever read memos emailed from another branch. Having that on record, open for review, will surely help departments consider open source more, if only initially from a financial standpoint. It won't be an overnight thing, but it'll help.
It's just as wrong to legislate everyone use Open Office as it is to legislate that everyone use MS Office.
phpgroupware and postnuke?
Yes, both have made progress, but it's STILL a bit much to say that you're basing an entire airline's support on those projects. I loved the line about 'phpgroupware is rumored to potentially support VoIP in the future'. Great reason to use things now - something in the future *might* support something that other packages already *do* support today.
My company supports PHP wholeheartedly - phphelpdesk.com and PHP training courses are two services we offer. But trying to run a whole airline (even if it's small) off postnuke and phpgroupware - they're going to spend quite a lot on inhouse staff writing custom modules. They *might* be better off financially using *some* third party stuff.
The focus here is as much on open source stuff as Linux (phpgroupware could be run on Windows, for example) so instead of 'right tool for the job' you've got 'open source at any cost', which is, imo, just as bad as 'closed source at any cost'.
For the record, they lived in the UK, and are moving the Australia, and had a few weeks stopover at our place in Michigan. If it was an easy thing to get in Australia, they'd get it. It doesn't seem like it's easy or even possible to do there.
That's great but not what I asked. Excellent that tridge is hacking a tivo - where did he buy it? The local appliance store in Sydney? Or was it imported. Yes, I did the obligatory 0.05 second search - doesn't mean it answered my question. Nothing mentions whether or not you can actually GET a tivo in australia - tivo.com certainly don't mention it, and yahoo.com.au has nothing on tivo. My inlaws (in their 70's) aren't going to be hacking an imported tivo - they don't like it that much.
in fact we know of no instance where a Passport user's information has ever been compromised
I seem to recall more than a few hacks that would allow someone to read Hotmail accounts they shouldn't have. These hacks were generally cross-site scripting attacks, but these were after Passport was installed. Doesn't that qualify? Oh, maybe this particular MS marketing team didn't know about them, so it's alright to make the claim. That's not 'misleading'.
One could add another caching layer on top of mod_perl to speed things up too....
But that 'caching' layer would be in addition to what it's already doing. mod_perl is already caching compiled scripts in memory. PHP by default is not. To accurately compare the max speed available, run the accelerator from php-accelerator.co.uk on the PHP machine.
Of course speed isn't everything, but you seemed to want to make it a big factor in comparison with PHP, and I was simply pointing out the flaw with the comparison.
And if you put a cache product on the PHP machine, it'd be as fast or faster than mod_perl. mod_perl is caching the script in memory, something the default PHP doesn't do. Compare apples to apples please.
why is there zero abstraction in PHP?
Because it's using native drivers wherever it can and you get the best performance that way. If you WANT abstraction (and the accompanying slowdown) you can use ADODB, Metabase, PEARDB, or other projects.
his service seems to be redundant and will probably not stay up to date with CVS or else CVS will not stay current with it either way it doesnt seem to make sense IMO
Having adopted CVS for most projects in the past couple years, I beat my head against the wall with many, imo, stupid issues with CVS. I assume that you don't use CVS, or you would be familiar with the fact that CVS pretty much isn't maintained/extended anymore. What's there is there, and has been *mostly* unchanged for years. There may have been a few patches here and there, but if it was being upgraded/extended, the issues that are 'stupid' now (diretories, permissions, etc) would have been fixed years ago.
If they would offer songs in ogg vorbis they would be greatly increasing the quality of their product
How so? MP3 isn't all that bad. I suspect for many casual listeners, the difference between MP3 and Ogg isn't hugely noticeable for most files.
but try running apt-get again in a day or two and it is usually resolved.
If that's the kind of 'rock solid' stability people advocate for servers (or my goodness, even desktops where the user is supposed to be productive) you can kiss away the idea of Debian ever being a major play er.
Every debian 'advocate' I've met pushes Debian for the desktop precisely because it's 'so easy' to keep things up to date. Sounds fine for a server too, but for a server I generally only run a handful of packages that I'm comfortable compiling anyway. It's getting new stuff for the desktop that's so much of a hassle. And that's why Debian fans I know use it on the desktop.
Point 1 - only if you have a questioning community is it harder to lie to them. The majority of people I know in most communities pretty much just accept what is being offered.
Point 2 - reread the initial stuff. 'suits'. Lumping people together as 'suits' and 'hackers' is pretty stupid, which was the poster's point.
Point 3 - I have tried using Debian. There was not one decent IM package. The AOL deb package didn't work. GAIM crashed every 3 minutes. And on and on. I would apt-get install or upgrade a package and it would crash. The answer? "Try it again in an hour or so - you're using unstable.". Of course I'm using 'unstable' cause that's where the fairly recents stuff is.
Another set of fantastic experiences with Debian involved apt-get upgrading some packages. I had to repeatedly repeat the process because the first few times it would just sporadically die in the middle of the process. Answers from debian people? 'go back to windows' or 'just keep doing it - sometimes you have to run the command a few times before it works'. Excellent attitude for something supposedly stable and 'lie' proof. Is that 'truism' plastered anywhere on the debian site? "might need to run apt-get upgrade 4 times for some packages" as a warning label might be nice.
The fact is that it's not really any better or worse - on the whole - from other distributions. Debian people need to get other this perception of superiority.
With Konqueror, if you click a link the KDE rpm package manager installs it for you.
Funny, mine ALWAYS prompts me for a stupid 'root password'. I can't do anything productive with the system without constantly rekeying the root password, yet Lunix dogmatics would either laugh at you or verbally abuse you if you simply ran a desktop session as root the entire time.
Sorry, it's still not that easy.
eh? the desktop is resized to match the new
resolution.
Are you saying that the desktop manager (KDE/Gnome/etc) adjust their taskbars and other niceties to the new viewable dimensions when ctrl/alt/+/- are hit? They certainly don't do that on the Redhat, Caldera, Mandrake and Debian installations I've used over the past 3 years.
Dunno what the scrollbar thing is.
Themes suck - they impact consistency.
Tabbed browsing is good.
Multiple desktops mean less to me than consistent cut/copy/paste between apps. Having highlighted text auto-copied to the clipboard (overwriting what I had put there myself intentionally) SUCKS.
*I* do, but I think many people don't - BECAUSE it's MS. I agree, it's not competitive with MS or Apple yet. Nice? Yes. Closer than a year ago? Sure. But no cigar yet.
This seems to be another case of copying Microsoft again. They've bundled a remote desktop viewer tool, and now KDE has it. Why can't people integrate some of the cooler stuff before MS? Yes, you could do some of this before, with much setup, but it's going to be point-and-click, and MS beats people to 'point-and-click' implementations usually.
Here's something I've seen people BEGGING for in Konqueror and Mozilla - file upload progress bars in the browser. How much do we want to bet that MS will put that in IE7, THEN konqueror or mozilla will implement it poorly 6 months later?
Is it so hard to think that a person can *like* the features of one product but see that development-wise, they think something else will become better and surpass in the coming months/years? Why does everything need to think so 'binary'? There's nothing mutually exclusive about these statements. One was saying what I use now - the other way stating that I think another product is getting better and will probably overtake in terms of developmental direction and features that matter to developers and end users.
So I repeat: give me the money _in front_ and I create the user experience.
If you want up front money, and think you have a saleable product, go get investors. That's how pretty much every other company does it. The fact that KDE developers don't do that says either they don't care or they don't believe they have a saleable product (actually, many probably believe NOTHING should be 'saleable' in the first place, but that's a different story).
To most OS developers, their projects ARE "successful" because "success" is defined as having the project work the way they wanted to. Having numeroud end users is normally NOT the definition of success, nor is making something 'easy to use' in most cases either.
"If you want something that 'just works', go use Windows".
Actual quote from IRC conversations with different project developers over the past 8 months. I guess the attitude can't get much clearer. They don't WANT end users using their stuff, only themslves. WHY it's published on the internet instead of simply their ~/kewlProjects/ dir is beyond me, though.
If you're a KDE developer, either set up a company or, in the short term, actually ACT like you WANT money. They don't - they act like money is some sort of disease and they are so much more holy because money doesn't enter in to their development mindset. If you WANT money, COMPORT yourself like you DESERVE money. "CODE IT YOURSELF", "THIS IS MY HOBBY", etc. don't get you many people who want to give you money. Contrast this with the Snort story - it WAS a hobby, but the guy treated it like a business. That's a niche market. If KDE developers rallied together, many could make a decent living just making a good DE and making it easy to develop good apps for it. KBASIC would be something we could pay $ for if
1. It helped create good, stable apps which ran on multiple versions of KDE (within reason)
2. It had a good installation routine.
One shell file, RPM or a few binaries that could install the KDE app in multiple platforms (Alpha, Intel, etc) with a good VE under the KBASIC banner would be worthy of $49 -> $99 easily. Instead, projects like this linger on in 'hobby' mode for YEARS.
This article really exposes some issues about why many open source projects 'fail', or look like failures, in the eyes of many 'average joe' users.
No one is getting paid, therefore, things are only as good as what a developer wants, not what an end user may need.
Most of the comments I read focused on money. The problem is, I may *want* to donate money or actually pay for code. The way KDE in particular is coded, though, it makes it hard for others (the Kompany) to write software worth paying for on it (relative to other platforms). So there's a big disconnect there. If more care was taken with the underlying framework, it'd be much easier to have people writing apps that work with less concern for portability - the framework would help take care of that.
Tranisitioning from Win 95->98, or 98->2000 worked pretty well for most apps (excluding games - I dunno about those). People didn't need to go back and recompile apps and redistribute them, most just worked. Why can't it be that easy under KDE?
Back to the payment issue - many of these developers seem *averse* to ever making money from their efforts. Of course the developers don't *need* KDE users, but eventually the users won't need the developers becaus they'll migrate to something else. Without a critical mass of users, any project falls into obscurity. It's not impossible to imagine RH10, for example, not bundling KDE4 because early tests show *nothing* from KDE3 will work on it. "So what?" would be the answer from most KDE devs.
Instead of trying to capitalize on their efforts by creating something which is useful beyond their own immediate needs and longer lasting, many of these developers seem to wear it as a badge of honor that they are *only* in this for themselves, to hell with everyone else.
It'd be great to see something *like* Ximian for KDE - I prefer KDE to Gnome, but at this rate, Ximian seems to be going after user's needs more, and I may just have to switch at some point. DE aside, it's sad to see *SO MUCH POTENTIAL* being thrown away on projects that don't organize themselves effectively.
When you're 5, you have the attitudes and behaviours and respect for others that a 5 year old has (regardless of getting paid!). When you're 10, your attitude, behaviour and respect for others changes and is usually more mature. Same for 15, 20, etc. I don't see that same type of growth pattern happening in the KDE project - it's growing technically, but stagnating attitudinally(?).
Damn, I wish I had my points back - excellent issue you raise! This might not seem such a big deal in the socialist UK, but it's blatantly obvious to us yanks. :)
My guess is that there really *is* a big difference at the barest levels. Chances are good the original 'silence' was an analog recording, which wouldn't sound the same as digital silence. The media to playback the original would have been tape/vinyl/whatever. This current silence was either recorded or just reproduced digitally, probably intended for CDs primarily. Look at a sonic meter thingy analyzing Cage's silence and the Batt silence. I'm sure there's a *big* difference.