It also would have been courteous, if not necessarily a journalistic obligation, to give credit to ocelotbob for bringing this story to his attention. Unless Katz reads the Daily Breeze himself, which I'm guessing he doesn't.
Open Source is about the willing participation of creators in the distribution, modification, and enhancement of their work. We do not take; we accept what is freely given.
You must be new here. Around here, Open Source means feeling entitled to do anything you please with other people's work. (Unless Microsoft registers a domain name that's similar to someone else's trademark or someone thinks a company may have committed a trivial, inadvertent violation of the GPL.)
It also apparently has something to do with surly, self-pitying, overdramatic teenage angst, although I'm not exactly sure what or why.
What is with all the people posting their comments inside CODE tags in the last couple of months? Is it a Slash bug, an annoying new feature of some browser or an annoying new meme?
Check out Gartner's previous pronouncements on this subject. In particular, read Gartner Slams Linux from just over a year ago. I wish they'd explain what new development has caused them to upgrade Linux's prospects from hopeless to unstoppable. XFree86 4? TuxRacer? Gnome Foundation press releases?
Of course, the 2.4 kernel is due soon. But that was true last October, too.;-)
Re:When is this a good thing?
on
Death March
·
· Score: 2
You mean the Dilbert reality isn't our reality?
No, I'm saying it is! That's why I'm leery about the idea of a book about optimizing overwork. I recognize the reality is that people have to deal with this stuff for no good reason (my girlfriend's boss recently announced, "If you're not miserable, you're not working hard enough.") and that's why the idea of "Managing Your Death March" bothers me.
I also have to say that while I know people use "Death March" facetiously in conversation, raising it to the level of Industry Terminology strikes me as insensitive and dismissive of the real human suffering for which the term originated. No, I'm not some PC zombie -- I was bashing them just yesterday/a& gt;.
When is this a good thing?
on
Death March
·
· Score: 1
My first reaction was to wonder why anyone would bother to read (or write) a manual about being a professional developer of poorly managed projects.
I guess the justification is that there are times when you sincerely believe what you're doing is so important that it's worth sacrificing yourself for. There certainly are cases like that (people can argue about what they are), but the problem is that in practice you get the Dilbert reality where everything is viewed as important enough to sacrifice workers' sanity for.
.. and we could certainly use a few laughs to liven up an otherwise bitter, almost entirely humorless election season.
Bitter? On the contrary -- for the first time since 1976 (maybe even 1956) we have two candidates who are both acceptable, if not necessarily ideal, to the vast majority of Americans. If the campaign hasn't seemed impassioned, it's because most of the electorate will be comfortable with either outcome. (And would have been with McCain or Bradley, for that matter.)
The yelling about how there is no democracy and corporations control the whole process is coming from a few leftists who can't accept the possibility that the majority of voters don't share their views and amplified by media that push cynicism and conspiracy at the expense of journalism and edification.
Look -- I voted for John McCain in the primary. I wish he had won but more people voted for Bush. People. Not one corporation cast a vote. I'm not thrilled about that outcome but I accept it as the outcome of democrarcy. I don't go off bitching about how there's some conspiracy holding down all the Real Voters who just happen to think exactly like me.
If I haven't antagonized the leftists enough yet, check out the New Republic on Nader. And you know, of course, that when a disgruntled ex-employee followed Michael Moore around with a camera, your hero had him arrested, right?
I don't make a living from computers, I enjoy writing code that other people will use and want to give a little back in exchange for the software and documentation people have made freely available to me. But, you know, if I were a professional developer I'd be leery about creating a perceived value of zero for software. Today, an new OS simply is not thought to be worth paying money for.
Of course, I'm a biomedical researcher so everybody already thinks I should be working for free, with an occasional pat on the head for compensation....
Well, yes and no. If your definition of a successful IPO is one where the stock price skyrockets on the first day, making fortunes for the original investors as well as for users who submitted bug reports, random people from Freshmeat and everyone else but Bowie J. Poag -- that's not going to happen.
But if the goal of the IPO is to raise a few million dollars to keep the company going, that's still manageable if they have good fundamentals. And until the Netscape IPO, that's what stock issues were for.
With 521 comments already, probably no one will ever read this but -- I have to say that in the 3+ years I've been reading Slashdot, this is the single most idiotic, clueless, divorced-from-reality discussion I have ever seen. I haven't been this embarassed to be part of the free software world since Eric Raymond marched on Microsoft dressed as Obi-Wan.
Sun thinks: As part of its formation, the GNOME Foundation has announced that it is adopting OpenOffice.org -- the StarOffice productivity suite that Sun is making available to the open source community -- as the core of the office productivity software for GNOME Office.
Dom Lachowicz thinks:
Michael Meeks clarified to me that the big coroporations were paying large
sums of $$ to get figurehead positions and that we could get the same result
by joining the gnome-foundation mailing list and voting/running for office,
which at least I have done.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about DB's more complex than an Excel worksheet. But...
In a speech at OpenWorld, Ellison offered $10 million to anyone who could get any application to run on Microsoft's TPC-C clustered-database configuration that the Transaction Processing Council awarded its top TPC-C price/performance ranking.
To me that suggests that this benchmark is even less real-world meaningful than the Photoshop filters Apple keeps trotting out to demonstrate that a G4 is twice as fast as a Pentium of the same speed. Anyone knowledgeable want to comment?
Did anyone read the article? Anyone? It's talking about plain old "information systems" used in a health care setting. The article is extremely short on specifics, but it's certainly not arguing for the use of open-source products in specialized medical devices. Mostly it's the usual Introduction To Open Source boilerplate.
Almost completely off-topic, but I had to laugh when I saw this on EvangeList today. You think Slashdot readers and the Mac community might have significantly different priorities?
Subject: [CTA]:CueCat Reader for Mac
From: "Dan Fisher"
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 08:13:39 +1100
Hey Guys,
There's a really neat little product being pushed (FOR FREE) by RadioShack called the:CueCat Reader. There is a Mac version of the software in development, and they're gauging the response on their website with a form for Mac users to sign up if they're interested. Let's show them we want this! Go read up on it at the site, it's basically a barcode scanner that launches websites of the products or books, CDs, DVDs, whatever you scan into it.
Regarding speed -- try rebuilding Qt without exception handling. I got a huge performance improvement with no apparent drawbacks. In any case, KDE speed has improved significantly since the early betas, which may be be what you're judging it by.
If by allowing near unlimited flexability to the users of a network, the entire network infrastructure becomes too unreliable, you often end up with a whole lot more lost productivity.
Absolutely. I'm not saying users should be allowed to do anything they want. I'm saying that IT people routinely lose sight of the fact that they and the equipment they preside over are there to serve the users, not the other way around.
Newcomers to GNU/ Linux are often also newcomers to the world of (freely available) source code. They can't interpret the term "F.S." correctly, because of a complete lack of context.
On the contrary, I would say that newcomers to the Linux world read Slashdot and the other media and get the impression that "free software" culture has always existed exactly as it is today, with preoccupation with ideological figureheads, manifestos, VC funded startups, IPO's, jihads and endless yammering about the correct terminology for everything.
In fact (I'm hardly a grizzled veteran but even 3 or 4 years of experience is enough to know this) while the FSF/Emacs/gcc world may well have been like that for years, for the most part free software was written and shared by a pragmatic, easy-going community that was happy to receive what they did instead of complaining that they were entitled to everything from video drivers to movies on their own terms. That's the world that produced Perl, Apache, Sendmail, BSD, Linux, Qt, KDE and all the rest of the stuff that the RMS's and ESR's retroactively claim for their own movements.
The "lack of context" comes when people judge long-standing projects as if they were part of the 1998-1999 companies whose primary activities pandering to "the community" and keeping their stock valuation wildly overinflated.
Speaking as a user: The main gripe I have against IT people is that they think the point of computers and networks is to serve their interests. No! The point of IT is to enable employees to best get their work done, not to provide the most elegant and tractable system for the admins to preside over.
If you're barring employees from using tools that would make them more productive because they don't serve your interests, you're falling short, not them.
You can take my Mac when you pry it from my cold dead fingers;-)
I was a little surprised that a +5 question I posted for the Carnivore reviewer interview didn't make the cut, while 5 (maybe 6) of the 10 questions that were asked were all variants on, "You tell us you'll tell us the truth but aren't you lying when you tell us you'll tell us the truth?"
Our digital rights management system will ensure that any copy protected content will be protected. For example, any MP3s which are loaded onto the box without copy protection will be considered public domain content, but any SDMI or other copy protected music downloaded to the IES will be properly protected. We use very strong encryption and digital signatures to protect that data. Hacking that would be extremely non-trivial.
That struck me as an odd bit of reasoning. Is he talking about licensing or simply about what the system will and won't make an effort to protect? The fact that a game stores music as an MP3 doesn't affect the terms under which it's licensed and it's not in the console maker's power to change that licensing.
They develop technology, not products. The task of turning technology into product has been the work of other groups...PARC could make money, by creating patentable (oooh, there's that word) technology then licensing it to other companies to develop into products.
I'd thought this myth would have been thoroughly debunked by now. Xerox made a ton of money from PARC inventions -- most notably laser printers and Ethernet. The knock on PARC comes mostly from the "Apple stole the Mac interface from Xerox" story. That is in itself a myth to flatter Steve Jobs at the expense of the original Macintosh team. The Mac project was influenced by a visit to PARC but was largely designed long before that. And Apple paid to license GUI elements from Xerox, so the company even made money on that.
If this article reminds you of The Great Gatsby, you probably paid more attention in English class than did the average Slashdotter....
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Bouncing robots exploring other planets -- and Rob's complaining that he doesn't have talking fruit!?!
As always, you need to match the tool to the job. Gimp is fine for making images for on-screen display. If you're doing print work, Photoshop is far superior, especially when combined with ColorSync on a Mac.
Personally I find the Gimp interface painful to use but i suppose that's a matter of taste and familiarity.
Slashdot Mirror
It also would have been courteous, if not necessarily a journalistic obligation, to give credit to ocelotbob for bringing this story to his attention. Unless Katz reads the Daily Breeze himself, which I'm guessing he doesn't.
You must be new here. Around here, Open Source means feeling entitled to do anything you please with other people's work. (Unless Microsoft registers a domain name that's similar to someone else's trademark or someone thinks a company may have committed a trivial, inadvertent violation of the GPL.)
It also apparently has something to do with surly, self-pitying, overdramatic teenage angst, although I'm not exactly sure what or why.
What is with all the people posting their comments inside CODE tags in the last couple of months? Is it a Slash bug, an annoying new feature of some browser or an annoying new meme?
Of course, the 2.4 kernel is due soon. But that was true last October, too. ;-)
No, I'm saying it is! That's why I'm leery about the idea of a book about optimizing overwork. I recognize the reality is that people have to deal with this stuff for no good reason (my girlfriend's boss recently announced, "If you're not miserable, you're not working hard enough.") and that's why the idea of "Managing Your Death March" bothers me.
I also have to say that while I know people use "Death March" facetiously in conversation, raising it to the level of Industry Terminology strikes me as insensitive and dismissive of the real human suffering for which the term originated. No, I'm not some PC zombie -- I was bashing them just yesterday/a& gt;.
I guess the justification is that there are times when you sincerely believe what you're doing is so important that it's worth sacrificing yourself for. There certainly are cases like that (people can argue about what they are), but the problem is that in practice you get the Dilbert reality where everything is viewed as important enough to sacrifice workers' sanity for.
Bitter? On the contrary -- for the first time since 1976 (maybe even 1956) we have two candidates who are both acceptable, if not necessarily ideal, to the vast majority of Americans. If the campaign hasn't seemed impassioned, it's because most of the electorate will be comfortable with either outcome. (And would have been with McCain or Bradley, for that matter.)
The yelling about how there is no democracy and corporations control the whole process is coming from a few leftists who can't accept the possibility that the majority of voters don't share their views and amplified by media that push cynicism and conspiracy at the expense of journalism and edification.
Look -- I voted for John McCain in the primary. I wish he had won but more people voted for Bush. People. Not one corporation cast a vote. I'm not thrilled about that outcome but I accept it as the outcome of democrarcy. I don't go off bitching about how there's some conspiracy holding down all the Real Voters who just happen to think exactly like me.
If I haven't antagonized the leftists enough yet, check out the New Republic on Nader. And you know, of course, that when a disgruntled ex-employee followed Michael Moore around with a camera, your hero had him arrested, right?
A day later, goatse.cx isn't even on the list. Looks like Google did some more "tweaking".
Of course, I'm a biomedical researcher so everybody already thinks I should be working for free, with an occasional pat on the head for compensation....
But if the goal of the IPO is to raise a few million dollars to keep the company going, that's still manageable if they have good fundamentals. And until the Netscape IPO, that's what stock issues were for.
Here's an EE Times article on the same subject that has the credibility edge of not being from the Register.
With 521 comments already, probably no one will ever read this but -- I have to say that in the 3+ years I've been reading Slashdot, this is the single most idiotic, clueless, divorced-from-reality discussion I have ever seen. I haven't been this embarassed to be part of the free software world since Eric Raymond marched on Microsoft dressed as Obi-Wan.
Sun thinks: As part of its formation, the GNOME Foundation has announced that it is adopting OpenOffice.org -- the StarOffice productivity suite that Sun is making available to the open source community -- as the core of the office productivity software for GNOME Office.
Dom Lachowicz thinks: Michael Meeks clarified to me that the big coroporations were paying large sums of $$ to get figurehead positions and that we could get the same result by joining the gnome-foundation mailing list and voting/running for office, which at least I have done.
In a speech at OpenWorld, Ellison offered $10 million to anyone who could get any application to run on Microsoft's TPC-C clustered-database configuration that the Transaction Processing Council awarded its top TPC-C price/performance ranking.
To me that suggests that this benchmark is even less real-world meaningful than the Photoshop filters Apple keeps trotting out to demonstrate that a G4 is twice as fast as a Pentium of the same speed. Anyone knowledgeable want to comment?
Did anyone read the article? Anyone? It's talking about plain old "information systems" used in a health care setting. The article is extremely short on specifics, but it's certainly not arguing for the use of open-source products in specialized medical devices. Mostly it's the usual Introduction To Open Source boilerplate.
Subject: [CTA] :CueCat Reader for Mac
:CueCat Reader. There is a Mac version of the software in development, and they're gauging the response on their website with a form for Mac users to sign up if they're interested. Let's show them we want this! Go read up on it at the site, it's basically a barcode scanner that launches websites of the products or books, CDs, DVDs, whatever you scan into it.
From: "Dan Fisher"
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 08:13:39 +1100
Hey Guys,
There's a really neat little product being pushed (FOR FREE) by RadioShack called the
http://www.crq.com/mac.html
Dan
Personally, I agree with Joel On Software -- I can't imagine why I would want one of these, regardless of whose software it runs.
Regarding speed -- try rebuilding Qt without exception handling. I got a huge performance improvement with no apparent drawbacks. In any case, KDE speed has improved significantly since the early betas, which may be be what you're judging it by.
Absolutely. I'm not saying users should be allowed to do anything they want. I'm saying that IT people routinely lose sight of the fact that they and the equipment they preside over are there to serve the users, not the other way around.
On the contrary, I would say that newcomers to the Linux world read Slashdot and the other media and get the impression that "free software" culture has always existed exactly as it is today, with preoccupation with ideological figureheads, manifestos, VC funded startups, IPO's, jihads and endless yammering about the correct terminology for everything.
In fact (I'm hardly a grizzled veteran but even 3 or 4 years of experience is enough to know this) while the FSF/Emacs/gcc world may well have been like that for years, for the most part free software was written and shared by a pragmatic, easy-going community that was happy to receive what they did instead of complaining that they were entitled to everything from video drivers to movies on their own terms. That's the world that produced Perl, Apache, Sendmail, BSD, Linux, Qt, KDE and all the rest of the stuff that the RMS's and ESR's retroactively claim for their own movements.
The "lack of context" comes when people judge long-standing projects as if they were part of the 1998-1999 companies whose primary activities pandering to "the community" and keeping their stock valuation wildly overinflated.
The main gripe I have against IT people is that they think the point of computers and networks is to serve their interests. No! The point of IT is to enable employees to best get their work done, not to provide the most elegant and tractable system for the admins to preside over.
If you're barring employees from using tools that would make them more productive because they don't serve your interests, you're falling short, not them.
You can take my Mac when you pry it from my cold dead fingers ;-)
---------
That struck me as an odd bit of reasoning. Is he talking about licensing or simply about what the system will and won't make an effort to protect? The fact that a game stores music as an MP3 doesn't affect the terms under which it's licensed and it's not in the console maker's power to change that licensing.
---------
I'd thought this myth would have been thoroughly debunked by now. Xerox made a ton of money from PARC inventions -- most notably laser printers and Ethernet. The knock on PARC comes mostly from the "Apple stole the Mac interface from Xerox" story. That is in itself a myth to flatter Steve Jobs at the expense of the original Macintosh team. The Mac project was influenced by a visit to PARC but was largely designed long before that. And Apple paid to license GUI elements from Xerox, so the company even made money on that.
---------
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Bouncing robots exploring other planets -- and Rob's complaining that he doesn't have talking fruit!?!
---------
Personally I find the Gimp interface painful to use but i suppose that's a matter of taste and familiarity.
---------