Did you bother to read the linked article? No? Well, in fact, the question was, "Is there any truth to this ZD report of the formation of a KDE League?" A more forthright answer would have been, "Yes, we are forming an organization to coordinate the project's public relations effort. We have stated in the past that KDE will *never* have an elected
governing board like GNOME Foundation. Absolutely nothing has
happened or will happen to change that."
By the way, I have to thank the author of the underrated "Will there be a KDE draft?" post. It overwrote the mental image of David Faure in tights and a cape that I'd been struggling to rid myself of all morning.
Now, it is true that this is not an elected governing board, but that response seems fairly disingenuous now. Plus "KDE League" is an extremely stupid name.
If I may Smartenize you a bit -- you don't seem to understand what statistical significance means. From your site:
The study found a Relative Risk (RR) for spousal exposure of 1.16, with a Confidence Interval (CI) of.93 - 1.44
This means that no conclusion of increased risk can be drawn from the study. It may be that the 16% increase in risk is noise, or it may be that it is real but a larger sample size is necessary to demonstrate it in a significant way. It does not mean that "they found that it caused no harm at all."
It may be possible to demonstrate that the study had sufficient power to detect a certain level of relative risk and to set an upper bound that way, but that has nothing to do with the numbers you present.
My gut reaction to that is 'you do that, I quit,' but I'd like to put together a viable argument for maintaining/expanding flex here.
To the degree that you and others genuinely feel that way, that's the single most powerful argument you could make.
I don't mean to sound like a "I would never take a job that required me to read Word documents!" kiddie but if you and your coworkers really feel leaving would be a more attractive option than staying, you should definitely make that clear to management.
The article states that they will be releasing the code to the GNOME Foundation. They will also be joining the GNOME Foundation. This is a completely different than releasing the code to the general public, under a Free license like the GPL.
Hell, the Slashdot posting says that! I know people refuse to read the linked article before posting but can't they at least read the blurb here?
Monday morning and I'm already flaming. This isn't a promising sign...
While I'm at it, have the people who post wondering if Gnome apps work in the KDE environment and vice versa ever considered just trying it and finding out? Fer cryin' out loud, each project puts the other project's apps in its start menu!
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
on
Embracing Insanity
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· Score: 1
Absolutely. I've used Excel heavily for years but it wasn't until I started through the KSpread sources that I got a clear idea of how to write a spreadsheet program. But I was disagreeing with the argument that you learn nothing from a binary-only release. Clearly, both open and closed-source developers learn a great deal from other products.
Going back to the analogy to art, artists don't need to fully document all their brushstroke techniques, and authors don't explicitly catalog every device to be eligible for a copyright. That level of documentation is required for patents, though. Maybe software patents are the answer?
I'm just being a devil's advocate here. The initial post is one of the more interesting ideas I've seen on Slashdot (certainly when compared to more jabber about "geeks" and pronouncements that truth is uniquely important in free software development). I'm just trying to poke at some soft spots to encourage debate and fine-tuning.
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
on
Embracing Insanity
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· Score: 1
No amount of study of Windows 98 will teach you how to write an operating system. That's because Windows 98 doesn't come with source code
I don't know if I fully agree with that. Didn't the KDE and Gnome projects learn how to design a desktop environment from Windows (among other sources)? Just like the GIMP developers learned how to write an image editor from Photoshop, Eazel and the Konqueror team learned about file browsers from IE...
I read the review twice, trying to decide if I want to buy the book. (I'm guessing the book itself is proprietary, right?) Can anyone point to a single concrete, worthwhile point that Jon Katz gained by reading the book?
The only thing that comes close, it seems to me, is "One of the key values of OS and its community, he argues, is truth." Uh, yeah. Truth is irrelevant in closed development. Or investment banking or lifeguarding. Who cares if the engineers building that bridge are honest and forthright with each other?
As for the rest of it, proving that "geeks" aren't all homicidal sociopaths and borrowing "disruptive technology" from another author don't wildly impress me.
BTW, while doing a Google search to find where "disruptive technology" was cribbed from, I found this definition:
A disruptive technology is a technology or innovation "that results in worse product performance, at least in the near-term...[It] brings to the market a very different value proposition than had been available previously...Products that are based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. [But, they generally] underperform established products in mainstream markets." (Christensen, 1997, p.xv)
No, no, no, at least as far as the workplace is concerned. In most states, there is an implied transfer of rights to your employer, even if you haven't explicitly transferred them.
Regarding the larger issue, as with many such discussions here, people don't seem to distinguish between what they think the law ought to be and what the law actually is. My advice to the questioner is to try to win whatever victories you can -- latitude to release software freely, a share in licensing revenue -- rather than trying to overturn the whole system next week.
And, to head off the inevitable response, I have no interest in anyone using "GPL" and "Rosa Parks" in the same sentence...
a -- If you're talking about buzzword compliance, OK. KDE dropped CORBA for technical reasons and went with a lighter-weight alternative, which is fully documented and obviously an "open standard".
b -- True, but the downside is that Gnome now has, what, 30-something dependencies versus KDE's 2? Of course, you need that rat's nest of libraries to provide Helix Code's business plan.
c -- A matter of taste. To me, if you're going to rely on objects, why not use a language designed to support them?
I was interested to see how Eazel is planning to make money on this project. I can't say I'm wildly optimistic. The online storage is available for free at many different sites, which aren't making any money. It seems to me that disk space is so cheap relative to bandwidth that users almost always have more space locally than they could comfortably use remotely. Sure, maybe you might want to save a file while you're at someone else's computer but does that happen often enough that you'd pay for your account?
The software catalog seems more promising, although I don't see users paying for it. They'll need sponsors. It sounds like this line is going directly against Helix Code's business plan, isn't it?
I'm very interested to see how the whole Gnome / Eazel / Helix Code / Sun / Red Hat thing is going to play out. Unfortunately, I suspect it's going to be like Mozilla where we get exciting free projects to use and to draw from without any great benefit to the people who bet their money on it. It's an exciting experiment, though!
Well, I think the objection was to the fact that Slashdot treats alleged violations of the GPL as shooting offenses, including interminable slams against the KDE developers for linking their own GPL code against an non-GPL library, but didn't view the statement that "Comments are owned by the poster" as binding, legally or ethically. I give Hemos a lot of credit for doing the right thing.
Of course, you're right that there's obvious contradiction in the treatment of the RIAA and of the GPL. The explanation is always something like, "Well, the GPL gives you freedom so it's GOOD. When Metallica wants to make money from their music, that's BAD."
Yes, I understand what a standard is. But the existence of a "standard' doesn't make it relevant. The fact that a browser is going to support some "standard" declared by somebody is less important to me than whether the browser a) exists and b) supports the de-facto standards and correctly renders the sites I read.
Like several people pointed out on Mozillazine, Mr. Flanagan is complaining that the the most standard-compliant browser is not compliant enough.
Is there a moderately objective site that explains what browsers are and aren't compliant with what? I've read all the assertions here that Mozilla is "the most standards compliant". I've read that IE 5 on the Mac is the most compliant. iCab and Konqueror are touted as compliant. I'd be interested in seeing a thorough review.
That said, who cares? I'm more familiar with what goes on under the hood of my broswer than the vast majority of users. I've filed Mozilla bug reports and I have a small patch in Konqueror. And I couldn't care less about a laundry list of standards compliance. My test for "compliance" is whether I can read the sites I want to read -- it makes no difference to me whether my browser supports an alphabet soup of acronyms I know nothing about.
I was going to propose that you get a passport and see some of the world to give some perspective to your notion of the US as the world's leading disaster. But apparently you've already done that.
It's funny -- there are the stereotypical "We're the best at everything!" Americans, and then there's their mirror image, "We have the worst country in the world! Everybody laughs at us!" folks. The two types hate each other but what's funny is that both mindsets come from the same parochialism and ethnocentrism and the idea that the US must necessarily be unique in every quality.
Incidentally, I keep seeing posts from people from other countries expressing dismay and horror about what the US must be like. To them I'd say that believing what you read about America on Slashdot is about as smart as believing all the stuff here about how Windows crashes every ten seconds and is completely impossible to use. Get yourself a plane ticket and see for yourself instead of taking the word of all the nitwits here.
About 90% of the national elections use use a device called the 'Shouptronic' to count the votes.
Really? I've lived in 4 states in the last 11 years and each used a radically different vote casting mechanism (punched-out holes, SAT-type filled-in circles, 2 different lever machines). I find it hard to believe that there's one counting apparatus behind all of them.
The Shouptronic is a closed system that isn't open for inspection. Several groups argue that it has been used to fix the vote in elections. This is a good argument to use an open system for election counting.
And it hasn't been tested, either? And no one but a single family of nuts has noticed? And no one involved in any of those conspiracies has spilled the secret? I'm not getting too excited about this.
Not that anyone who remembers last year's Beanie Awards is likely to take Slashdot too seriously as a voice for openness in voting...
from the you-know-you've-been-reading-too-much-Slashdot dept:
I just took the new issue of Trends In Genetics out of my mailbox and looked at the cover -- a photo of two goats and the caption "Mammalian intersexes". My head instantly whipped around 90 degrees, presumably a learned aversion response to seeing "sex" and a goat in any kind of proximity.
Notice how no news agency that has reported the recent cracks has equated the security flaws in Microsoft's network and servers to Microsft's Windows operating system.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I know only what I need to about security and nothing about Windows) but this has nothing to do with security flaws in Windows.
This discussion reminds me of those posts you always see saying, "Look at all the cracked sites on attrition.org running Windows IIS. See how poor Winblows security is?" Web defacements like these reflect holes in the server (IIS + Front Page extensions), not in the OS.
I always get 1 in 500 and 500-to-1 confused. Just to clarify: 500-to-1 is the one where we're screwed, right?
As people have pointed out, 1 in 500 and 500-1 are effectively the same, with one being a statement of probability and the other the bet to be placed based on that probabiliy. I think you're thinking of 500-1 versus 1-to-500. You won't see that bet often but a heavily favored horse often has 1-3 odds. That's good if you own that horse, bad if that's the odds on an asteroid hitting us.
What I can never keep straight is whether a positive point spread means the team is favored or underdog by that amount...
It's worth mentioning, though, that overzealous "advocacy" is part of the reason Apple hasn't released a Linux QuickTime player. There was a post on a QuickTime list from one of the project leads describing his frustration with hate mail from Linux users and his impression that the large majority believe they are entitled to everything on their terms and that a binary-only Linux release would have generated more hostility and bad press than benefit to Apple. (Sorry, no URL. Apple is changing their listservers and the archive isn't up yet.)
And, although Katz faux pas may (and let me again stress, may ) be qualified as plagiarism, it is certainly not the level of dishonesty that would cause a student to fail his course (unless the professor is a real ass), and it is no where near the level of deceit that would justify an expulsion or suspension.
Sorry, that's just wrong. Students routinely get disciplined for precisely this sort of act.
Are your seriously trying to put forth that the "visiousness", "cruelty", and "lying" that Katz is referring to is in any way similar to what professors and administration subject students to, even when they are disciplined for plagiarizing?
Huh? I suppose this is a matter of opinion but to me being expelled from school is a lot rougher than some flamage on Slashdot.
The people who perpetrate these attacks strike me as the wannabee jocks of the Tech world... They display a vulgar pack mentality in which, not only do they not feel regret for their dehumanizing behavior, they somehow feel pleasurably justified in perpetuating it.
I agree! And I'm sympathetic towards CmdrTaco, Hemos, Natalie Portman and the other targets of their antics. I don't have much sympathy for Jon Katz because a) he trolled up a lot of the flames himself with his early columns ("I'm a pompous windbag and I won't leave no matter how much you hate me") and b) his recasting Slashdot as a self-esteem group for unhappy teenage computer enthusiasts is what brought most of those idiots here in the first place.
Finally, what is surprising to me...would stand by and allow these "jocks" so much power in influencing the slashdot community.
Look at this response to one of my (admittedly ill-tempered but IMHO accurate) posts. Why don't I get excited about it? Because I know the person behind it is a 14 year-old pimple farm who spends his days getting stuffed in his locker and couldn't possibly hurt me even if he weren't on the other end of the Net. He has no power to influence anything.
If you just said, "I provided a link but I still should have made it clearer which text is mine and which is quoted. I'm sorry." that would be the end of it. (Hemos had the right idea.) But to say that if you link or footnote, that frees you from any obligation to use quotes -- sorry, but that's just not the way it works. You can accuse people of "viciousness", "cruelty" and "lying" but the fact is that college students routinely get failed, suspended or even expelled over the failure to mark even a sentence or two as quoted text.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I have to thank the author of the underrated "Will there be a KDE draft?" post. It overwrote the mental image of David Faure in tights and a cape that I'd been struggling to rid myself of all morning.
> any truth to this?
> > http://www.zdnet.c om/ zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2626017,00.html
We have stated in the past that KDE will *never* have an elected governing board like GNOME Foundation. Absolutely nothing has happened or will happen to change that. --
Kurt Granroth | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org | granroth@suse.com
Now, it is true that this is not an elected governing board, but that response seems fairly disingenuous now. Plus "KDE League" is an extremely stupid name.
The study found a Relative Risk (RR) for spousal exposure of 1.16, with a Confidence Interval (CI) of .93 - 1.44
This means that no conclusion of increased risk can be drawn from the study. It may be that the 16% increase in risk is noise, or it may be that it is real but a larger sample size is necessary to demonstrate it in a significant way. It does not mean that "they found that it caused no harm at all."
It may be possible to demonstrate that the study had sufficient power to detect a certain level of relative risk and to set an upper bound that way, but that has nothing to do with the numbers you present.
To the degree that you and others genuinely feel that way, that's the single most powerful argument you could make.
I don't mean to sound like a "I would never take a job that required me to read Word documents!" kiddie but if you and your coworkers really feel leaving would be a more attractive option than staying, you should definitely make that clear to management.
Hell, the Slashdot posting says that! I know people refuse to read the linked article before posting but can't they at least read the blurb here?
Monday morning and I'm already flaming. This isn't a promising sign...
While I'm at it, have the people who post wondering if Gnome apps work in the KDE environment and vice versa ever considered just trying it and finding out? Fer cryin' out loud, each project puts the other project's apps in its start menu!
Going back to the analogy to art, artists don't need to fully document all their brushstroke techniques, and authors don't explicitly catalog every device to be eligible for a copyright. That level of documentation is required for patents, though. Maybe software patents are the answer?
I'm just being a devil's advocate here. The initial post is one of the more interesting ideas I've seen on Slashdot (certainly when compared to more jabber about "geeks" and pronouncements that truth is uniquely important in free software development). I'm just trying to poke at some soft spots to encourage debate and fine-tuning.
I don't know if I fully agree with that. Didn't the KDE and Gnome projects learn how to design a desktop environment from Windows (among other sources)? Just like the GIMP developers learned how to write an image editor from Photoshop, Eazel and the Konqueror team learned about file browsers from IE...
The only thing that comes close, it seems to me, is "One of the key values of OS and its community, he argues, is truth." Uh, yeah. Truth is irrelevant in closed development. Or investment banking or lifeguarding. Who cares if the engineers building that bridge are honest and forthright with each other?
As for the rest of it, proving that "geeks" aren't all homicidal sociopaths and borrowing "disruptive technology" from another author don't wildly impress me.
BTW, while doing a Google search to find where "disruptive technology" was cribbed from, I found this definition:
A disruptive technology is a technology or innovation "that results in worse product performance, at least in the near-term...[It] brings to the market a very different value proposition than had been available previously...Products that are based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. [But, they generally] underperform established products in mainstream markets." (Christensen, 1997, p.xv)
Regarding the larger issue, as with many such discussions here, people don't seem to distinguish between what they think the law ought to be and what the law actually is. My advice to the questioner is to try to win whatever victories you can -- latitude to release software freely, a share in licensing revenue -- rather than trying to overturn the whole system next week.
And, to head off the inevitable response, I have no interest in anyone using "GPL" and "Rosa Parks" in the same sentence...
a -- If you're talking about buzzword compliance, OK. KDE dropped CORBA for technical reasons and went with a lighter-weight alternative, which is fully documented and obviously an "open standard".
b -- True, but the downside is that Gnome now has, what, 30-something dependencies versus KDE's 2? Of course, you need that rat's nest of libraries to provide Helix Code's business plan.
c -- A matter of taste. To me, if you're going to rely on objects, why not use a language designed to support them?
d -- KDE has something exactly like this.
e -- No idea what you're talking about.
The software catalog seems more promising, although I don't see users paying for it. They'll need sponsors. It sounds like this line is going directly against Helix Code's business plan, isn't it?
I'm very interested to see how the whole Gnome / Eazel / Helix Code / Sun / Red Hat thing is going to play out. Unfortunately, I suspect it's going to be like Mozilla where we get exciting free projects to use and to draw from without any great benefit to the people who bet their money on it. It's an exciting experiment, though!
Posted in Konqueror...
Of course, you're right that there's obvious contradiction in the treatment of the RIAA and of the GPL. The explanation is always something like, "Well, the GPL gives you freedom so it's GOOD. When Metallica wants to make money from their music, that's BAD."
Yes, I understand what a standard is. But the existence of a "standard' doesn't make it relevant. The fact that a browser is going to support some "standard" declared by somebody is less important to me than whether the browser a) exists and b) supports the de-facto standards and correctly renders the sites I read.
Is there a moderately objective site that explains what browsers are and aren't compliant with what? I've read all the assertions here that Mozilla is "the most standards compliant". I've read that IE 5 on the Mac is the most compliant. iCab and Konqueror are touted as compliant. I'd be interested in seeing a thorough review.
That said, who cares? I'm more familiar with what goes on under the hood of my broswer than the vast majority of users. I've filed Mozilla bug reports and I have a small patch in Konqueror. And I couldn't care less about a laundry list of standards compliance. My test for "compliance" is whether I can read the sites I want to read -- it makes no difference to me whether my browser supports an alphabet soup of acronyms I know nothing about.
What is with all the posts in CODE tags lately? Is that a bug in Slash or are you and this guy and the rest of you all using the same buggy browser?
Remember, they've got their $273 million -- it's not going anywhere. The question now is how the IPO investors are going to make out.
It's funny -- there are the stereotypical "We're the best at everything!" Americans, and then there's their mirror image, "We have the worst country in the world! Everybody laughs at us!" folks. The two types hate each other but what's funny is that both mindsets come from the same parochialism and ethnocentrism and the idea that the US must necessarily be unique in every quality.
Incidentally, I keep seeing posts from people from other countries expressing dismay and horror about what the US must be like. To them I'd say that believing what you read about America on Slashdot is about as smart as believing all the stuff here about how Windows crashes every ten seconds and is completely impossible to use. Get yourself a plane ticket and see for yourself instead of taking the word of all the nitwits here.
Really? I've lived in 4 states in the last 11 years and each used a radically different vote casting mechanism (punched-out holes, SAT-type filled-in circles, 2 different lever machines). I find it hard to believe that there's one counting apparatus behind all of them.
The Shouptronic is a closed system that isn't open for inspection. Several groups argue that it has been used to fix the vote in elections. This is a good argument to use an open system for election counting.
And it hasn't been tested, either? And no one but a single family of nuts has noticed? And no one involved in any of those conspiracies has spilled the secret? I'm not getting too excited about this.
Not that anyone who remembers last year's Beanie Awards is likely to take Slashdot too seriously as a voice for openness in voting...
from the you-know-you've-been-reading-too-much-Slashdot dept:
I just took the new issue of Trends In Genetics out of my mailbox and looked at the cover -- a photo of two goats and the caption "Mammalian intersexes". My head instantly whipped around 90 degrees, presumably a learned aversion response to seeing "sex" and a goat in any kind of proximity.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I know only what I need to about security and nothing about Windows) but this has nothing to do with security flaws in Windows.
This discussion reminds me of those posts you always see saying, "Look at all the cracked sites on attrition.org running Windows IIS. See how poor Winblows security is?" Web defacements like these reflect holes in the server (IIS + Front Page extensions), not in the OS.
As people have pointed out, 1 in 500 and 500-1 are effectively the same, with one being a statement of probability and the other the bet to be placed based on that probabiliy. I think you're thinking of 500-1 versus 1-to-500. You won't see that bet often but a heavily favored horse often has 1-3 odds. That's good if you own that horse, bad if that's the odds on an asteroid hitting us.
What I can never keep straight is whether a positive point spread means the team is favored or underdog by that amount...
As psergiu said, "polite".
Sorry, that's just wrong. Students routinely get disciplined for precisely this sort of act.
Are your seriously trying to put forth that the "visiousness", "cruelty", and "lying" that Katz is referring to is in any way similar to what professors and administration subject students to, even when they are disciplined for plagiarizing?
Huh? I suppose this is a matter of opinion but to me being expelled from school is a lot rougher than some flamage on Slashdot.
The people who perpetrate these attacks strike me as the wannabee jocks of the Tech world... They display a vulgar pack mentality in which, not only do they not feel regret for their dehumanizing behavior, they somehow feel pleasurably justified in perpetuating it.
I agree! And I'm sympathetic towards CmdrTaco, Hemos, Natalie Portman and the other targets of their antics. I don't have much sympathy for Jon Katz because a) he trolled up a lot of the flames himself with his early columns ("I'm a pompous windbag and I won't leave no matter how much you hate me") and b) his recasting Slashdot as a self-esteem group for unhappy teenage computer enthusiasts is what brought most of those idiots here in the first place.
Finally, what is surprising to me.. .would stand by and allow these "jocks" so much power in influencing the slashdot community.
Look at this response to one of my (admittedly ill-tempered but IMHO accurate) posts. Why don't I get excited about it? Because I know the person behind it is a 14 year-old pimple farm who spends his days getting stuffed in his locker and couldn't possibly hurt me even if he weren't on the other end of the Net. He has no power to influence anything.
If you just said, "I provided a link but I still should have made it clearer which text is mine and which is quoted. I'm sorry." that would be the end of it. (Hemos had the right idea.) But to say that if you link or footnote, that frees you from any obligation to use quotes -- sorry, but that's just not the way it works. You can accuse people of "viciousness", "cruelty" and "lying" but the fact is that college students routinely get failed, suspended or even expelled over the failure to mark even a sentence or two as quoted text.