The story is interesting, and but the description of it here seems so far off that I briefly wondered if I'd hit the wrong link.
Look, since day one of the commercial web, sites have obsessively tracked how many hits they get, where they're coming from, how a user moves through the pages, where they spend time and how often they return. (As if Andover/OSDN isn't doing all of those things -- or is this like with web bugs where we're just supposed to care about them on other sites?) That's one of the great edges the net was going to have over other media. To the degree that people are bothered by that and to the degree that they're technically sophisticated, they turned off cookies and otherwise interfered. And what does Junkbuster have to do with anything?
What this seems to be is an incremental advance in tracking how pages are read -- there's a little added feedback about mouse movements and maybe scrolling. As always, if this takes off it will be trivial to block for those who know and care about such things. And everyone else has far more important privacy invasion being done to them.
Mind you, it has been years since I've looked at RAD tools -- it may be that some of them now do support dynamic layouts better, and maybe even use logical positioning (eg, sizers and other layout tools) rather than rely on absolute positioning and sizing.
Have you looked at Qt Designer? It does exactly what I think you're talking about.
In a way it was a company without a soul....Companies like RedHat, KDE and VA will continue because of these people.
I don't know -- VA's soul is a vendor of Linux systems, and maybe some kernel hacking to optimize those systems. What's left is Sourceforge, a bunch of unprofitable web sites, a company that sells soda and mints and their new proprietary software business.
Slashdot, Freshmeat, K5 and the like do have a soul and a core of believers, which is why they'll continue to exist in one form or another. Themes.org has a soul, but apparently lacks a brain.
KDE, by the way, isn't a company and isn't supposed to make any money. Of course, that also makes it particularly recession-proof...
I started because there was an app I used all the time in MacOS and didn't have in Linux. So I ported it to KDE (source was available!) and figured if I found it useful, others might also.
I'd say the reason I continue is that I enjoy coding and software development, and since I don't work as a developer, or in IT at all, joining a project is kind of like the coding version of those sports fantasy camps -- I get to work, hang with and learn from some really skilled people and at the end, my work is on CD's and hard drives all over the world.
I don't do it because I hate Microsoft, and I've never met anyone who does. If they're motivated by hate, it's of a competing free software project!;-) I don't do it because I want to destroy paid development and put people out of work, and I've never met anyone who does. (I do wonder if I coded for a living, whether I'd be so willing to work for free.)
Eric Raymond says people work on free projects to get girls. Eric Raymond should generally be ignored.
Now, if I can ask a question:
Answering this question may be the key to resolving public FUD about open source.
I dunno. Somehow *I* made it through school when all we had was PETs and Apple IIs.
Point taken (I saw my first computer in high school, an Apple ][ that was soon replaced by a bunch of PC's running DOS 1.0) but I still have reservations. For one thing, at least WordStar v. 1.0 and Visicalc were stable. The Linux office apps, in my experience crash constantly.
Like I said, it depends on the situation. KOffice is fine for an elementary school, inappropriate for a business with any international dealings and may or may not work in other contexts.
I'd feel much better about this whole thing if Linux actually were a decent alternative to a M$ Windows desktop. There are certainly places for Linux in a program like this, particularly in the infrastructure.
Well, like you said, Linux and *BSD are certainly worth considering for the back end. As far as the desktops go, it depends what you're trying to do. If the primary goal is to provide internet access, a Linux desktop wouldn't be a bad choice. Use a Gnome or KDE or whatever desktop to launch Konqueror, pan/trn, X-Chat, KMail/Evolution/pine, Mozilla when it's done . Arguably some of those may be inferior to Windows or Mac alternatives, but it's certainly a perfectly usable desktop.
On the other hand, if you're talking about providing office and productivity apps, I agree that you're giving up a lot of functionality. (At least today -- who knows what'll be when this actually happens.) It depends on what the goal is. Unfortunately, I bet that in a giant "Let's give everyone a computer!" government project, no one knows what the goal is.
/. old-timers will remember when the Mexican schools were all going to adopt Linux/Gnome desktops, back in 1998 or so. That never panned out and it would have been a disaster if it had -- a country's educational system relying on Gnome 0.6 or so and the acompanying office apps?!? Of course, the experience has left me with a bit of skepticism about pre-announcements of massive deployments of Gnome in Mexico. Has Mexico City replaced all its desktops with Linux, as promised a while back?
The people who make the economic decisions, such as el Presidente, are the people that we should be talking to. I'm curious, as I'm sure Miguel is, as how that can be done...
From the article:
Getting Mexico to do the same has been de Icaza's obsession for the past few months. And in that regard, he's met with President Fox, too. During the half-hour conference, which took place earlier this year, he ran though this math with Fox: At a retail price of $209 for Windows and $440 for Office, it could cost the country as much as $3.25 billion just for license fees. "Our country needs that money for many other things," de Icaza said he told Fox. He said Fox seemed to be surprised by the cost analysis, but he made no promises.
I don't know if Fox was surprised because he knows you don't pay CompUSA prices when you're buying software for an entire country, but Miguel certainly doesn't lack political connections in Mexico...
"Nobel laureates and the like.."?
on
Microsoft vs. Ximian
·
· Score: 3, Informative
De Icaza is in the United States on a special "genius" immigration visa typically reserved for Nobel laureates and the like.
Say what?!? Anyone have a more detailed explanation of this status and who the "geniuses" are who get it?
My ongoing complaint about the YRO articles is that whatever is currently being proposed is always ridiculed in favor of something else. Government regulation? Schools and libraries should set policies. Schools and libraries restricting access? It should be up to parents. Parents take responsibility? How dare they!
In this case, I would be extremely reluctant to join a workplace that monitored my computer usage. But unlike the hypocritical, dishonest bigots who edit Slashdot, I recognize the real issues here and I'm curious to hear what people think is an equitable way to deal with them.
Unfortunately, the reality is that workers in the judicial offices are not capable of policing themselves. ("A letter Lee sent on March 5 contains a list of all the movies accessed by a particular user between 12:12 p.m. and 1:35 p.m., including/bigtits/bix/mer021/3.mpg and/personal4/fuckmovie/asian/07.mpg. ")
It seems to me the issues are:
Workers ought to be working, not posting long-winded rants on Slashdot.;-)
The workplace faces liability for sexual and racial harassment suits and copyright violations. That's you and me who has to pick up the tab when the DOJ gets hit with a multimillion dollar suit.
The network has to remain functional, which in this case it frequently was not, as a result of downloads and file sharing.
Known issue. Being worked on (its not all KDE's fault).
Also, read the responses to question 7 of the interview. For example: We expect to see some more improvements from prelinking in a next generation Linux distributions. The current "object prelinking" manages to reduce the link-time of applications with 30% to 50%. The developers of the GNU linker are hard at work to get rid of the remaining 50% to 70% as well using a more advanced form of prelinking. This will effectively remove the linking overhead completely. Of course the 4-5 seconds that you mentioned are not all caused by the linker, so we will have to take a critical look at our own code as well to see where we can improve things.
Linux community needs to produce a quality set of serif and non-serif hinted fonts. Only then will Linux desktop look as good as MS Windows one.
This would be a great thing to lobby for, before the investment in the Linux desktop dries up completely: that someone with deep pockets (IBM, Gnome Foundation, the remnants of VA) would buy or underwrite development for some good, freely-licensed, anti-aliasable fonts.
It's not the kind of thing a talented CS sophomore is going to bang out.
Anyone else wondering if the real issue is that Clark neglected to cash out of his options in time...?
Seriously, though, this piece seems absurd to me. Whatever your views about stem cell research (personally, I think Bush came up with a fair compromise, and I'm no fan of Bush), clearly the ethical implications of biological research are crucial and are going to become even more so. Does Clark really think that _not_ having guidelines is the way to a bright future?
By the way I agree that characterizing the voters who don't think precisely as Clark does as "a conservative few" is a contemptible bit of class bias. Those people may not rub elbows with Clark, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Basically, stations are finding that web streaming isn't increasing their listener base, but is increasing their costs.
It's like streaming video, Internet movies, all that stuff -- it's simply not practical with the bandwidth and hardware normal people have. If you're a college student on a Napster-free network, network multimedia is barely worthwhile. For a typical user on a 56K dial-up, playing music on an eMachine speaker, it's just not happening.
It will happen, of course.
Another factor is 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires Webcasters to pay an additional fee for music over the Internet. Broadcasters sued the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over the fee, and lost. Now the argument is over the amount of the fee -- the RIAA wants Webcasters to pay up to 15 percent of their revenues, but Webcasters argue for a rate that's about 30 times lower than that.
This isn't the sort of attack on fair-use that makes the DMCA evil. It's something the market will sort out, when there's money to be made. Right now, there isn't.
Did you read what he wrote? Michael's typically dishonest summary notwithstanding, Microsoft is not mailing letters in people's names. (Yes, that would be illegal, if not criminal.) They are sending people letters to sign and send. The Sierra Club does that with me all the time -- except that that they don't engineer it to look spontaneous.
I agree with Satai that this is wildly sleazy, and think he's naive to think that "pro-Microsoft groups" aren't precisely the sort of shills Slashbots probably think I am for expressing insufficiently uncontrolled rage and wild accusations towards Microsoft.
Profits are not a *right* (something MPAA and RIAA are also having a hard time getting their heads around...they continually are going to Washington whining, "hey, it's not *fair*...we *expected* to make lots of money and now we're not, boohoo")
No, profits aren't a right. Equal protection under the law is a right. The issue here is that these companies invested billions in research and testing on the expectation that if they found something useful, they could sell it under the same laws that apply to everyone else.
Oh, and by the way, if you conclude through extrapolation that the failure of pharmaceutical X to make lots of money because society decides there is a greater cause, immediately disincentivizes the whole industry..
Here's a less dramatic scenario: the companies decide not to bother developing drugs that save the lives of lots of poor people, preferring the safety of products to help wealthy people live another two years.
I suggest you reexamine your assumptions about the motives for doing such work - for example, it's taken for granted that people *will* work without compensation on many things, e.g. Open Source software..
Oh yes -- having gone through grad school, I'm very familiar with the idea that it's taken for granted that researchers will work 80 hour weeks for $15,000 a year until they're 30. I'd raise these questions, though:
* Look at the range of quality on Freshmeat. Is that what you want to find in the drugstore?
* I paid $1200 or so for my computer, $40 for LinuxPPC and nothing for Qt, KDevelop and gcc. Do you you see a problem in your extrapolation that researchers will therefore be eager to drop $100 million out of their pockets for compound screening and clinical testing? (Hint: I code for free, but I damn well don't pay the $100,000 a year that my research costs...)
There's a time and a place for all this profit-minded patent shite. AIDS ain't it!
In my time in science, I've learned that whenever people tell you how important it is what you're doing, it invariably means your life is about to be made worse. No one ever seems to say, "This is important! You deserve more money (benefits, whatever..)."
There's an odd sort of market theory here where it's perfectly acceptable to earn hundreds of millions of dollars because you can hit a curveball or you IPO your worthless Internet startup just the right week, but if you can save lives -- well, that's just too darned important for you to be allowed to make money from it.
As it happens, I think the pharmaceutical companies involved here are being ethically callous and idiotically short-sighted from a PR point of view. But I can't help noticing that the people who are so eager to take from them because, gosh, it's just so imeportant! don't ever seem to consider dropping some of their own money to make sure that drugs are readily available.
Honestly, if you had told Act-Up! protestors in the early '90s that in 2001 the biggest villain in the AIDS world would be the companies that cure it, they wouldn't have believed it. Hey, make A-Rod play for free and use his money to fight AIDS.
Setting the compiler to fast executables is something that is only done when the software has reached its release state. Any distributed software will of course include a Makefile or similar which will set the fast executable settings on.
Sure, I realize that you would do that, just like you turn on optimization and turn off debugging when you release. Still, to me it seems much safer to default to faster code and expect the programmer to make the change to get faster compiles. Especially in the free software world, where so many apps are written by people as clueless as, well, me, it seems like you'd want to make sure slow code doesn't get unknowingly distributed.
Somehow I get the impression that the number of paid KDE developers is smaller than 100.
Depends on how you count. Strictly speaking, the number of full-time, paid KDE developers is more like 7 -- David Faure and Laurent Montel at Mandrake, Waldo Bastian at SuSE, and probably a few more I don't know about. Browse the developer profiles and see how few paid coders there are.
Even if you include all the guys at TrollTech working on Qt, I doubt if it's close to 100. Eazel probably spent more money and employed more workers than the cumulative history of KDE and Qt togther.
Out of curiosity, where are all these paid full-time Gnome workers? Ximian can't be that big -- are they at Sun? Red Hat?
It's funny how they stress how many paid devs they have. I'm wondering whether you should brag about how many or how few people work on your project...
The amount of needless string copying is mind boggling (extrapolating from the bugs in kdelibs-2.2/kdoctools)...
...and you think extrapolating to all of KDE from unnamed bugs in one module that was recently rushed into service is sound statistical practice?
1) The KDE code that's not compiling with the new gcc is correct, and it's a compiler bug that's the problem. (At least that's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong.) 2) The speed issue mentioned here has nothing to do with KDE.
As it happens, I do think that KDE is unacceptably slow on less than really fast boxes. But the reasons for that are understood and have nothing to do with "poor programming". (No, I haven't tried the prelinking hacks yet.)
Two more asides: * Timothy, it would help if you mentioned that the last bit pertains to gcc instead of leaving that a mystery. * I agree with the person who said it's nuts to have a compiler default to fast compiles and slow executables.
Anyone with half a brain should comprehend that if you release you music on one site, you can expect it to be posted to some other site.
I think this relates to the feature that got Mp3.com in trouble, where they ripped songs themselves and provided access to the files to users who possessed a CD. As far as I'm concerned, that's fair use, but if you were wondering why the labels cared when supposedly CD's still had to bought, this is why.
Out of curiosity, is there any way to distinguish the Mp3.com-made files from user-ripped ones? Or is the suit just proceeding on the assumption illegal trading must have happened?
Is it still open?
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm not one of those people who starts gloating every time a Windows vulnerability appears, claiming it proves how awful Microsoft development is and how clearly inferior their products are to free alternatives. (How many holes in wu-ftpd do you need before that rings empty?)
But to me, the most astounding betrayal of computer security ever was Microsoft's conduct during the last Hotmail breach. Not that it happened (could happen to anyone) or even that they didn't pull the plug days until days after the exploit was made public but that they kept going for hours after everyone had the URL for the backdoor.
There was a great Salon article by a woman who heard about the breach on CNN, found the URL here and read her ex's new girlfriend's mail. I love the conclusion:
Late Monday, Microsoft continued to downplay the Hotmail hack in a statement published by Reuters: "We're hoping that because we jumped on it so quickly no one was affected."
Reading all the way through, it seems Raymond's argument is equivalent to Linus Torvalds' much more concise version: He who writes the code gets to choose the license. This is throwing a lot of cleverness after demonstrating why that ought to be so, but for those of us to whom it seems obvious, I'm not sure what's being added.
Slashdot Mirror
Same in Boston. By all means give blood, but unless you're in the NYC area wait a couple of days until things calm down. They'll still be needing it.
Look, since day one of the commercial web, sites have obsessively tracked how many hits they get, where they're coming from, how a user moves through the pages, where they spend time and how often they return. (As if Andover/OSDN isn't doing all of those things -- or is this like with web bugs where we're just supposed to care about them on other sites?) That's one of the great edges the net was going to have over other media. To the degree that people are bothered by that and to the degree that they're technically sophisticated, they turned off cookies and otherwise interfered. And what does Junkbuster have to do with anything?
What this seems to be is an incremental advance in tracking how pages are read -- there's a little added feedback about mouse movements and maybe scrolling. As always, if this takes off it will be trivial to block for those who know and care about such things. And everyone else has far more important privacy invasion being done to them.
Have you looked at Qt Designer? It does exactly what I think you're talking about.
I don't know -- VA's soul is a vendor of Linux systems, and maybe some kernel hacking to optimize those systems. What's left is Sourceforge, a bunch of unprofitable web sites, a company that sells soda and mints and their new proprietary software business.
Slashdot, Freshmeat, K5 and the like do have a soul and a core of believers, which is why they'll continue to exist in one form or another. Themes.org has a soul, but apparently lacks a brain.
KDE, by the way, isn't a company and isn't supposed to make any money. Of course, that also makes it particularly recession-proof...
I'd say the reason I continue is that I enjoy coding and software development, and since I don't work as a developer, or in IT at all, joining a project is kind of like the coding version of those sports fantasy camps -- I get to work, hang with and learn from some really skilled people and at the end, my work is on CD's and hard drives all over the world.
I don't do it because I hate Microsoft, and I've never met anyone who does. If they're motivated by hate, it's of a competing free software project! ;-) I don't do it because I want to destroy paid development and put people out of work, and I've never met anyone who does. (I do wonder if I coded for a living, whether I'd be so willing to work for free.)
Eric Raymond says people work on free projects to get girls. Eric Raymond should generally be ignored.
Now, if I can ask a question:
Answering this question may be the key to resolving public FUD about open source.
Huh? How?
Point taken (I saw my first computer in high school, an Apple ][ that was soon replaced by a bunch of PC's running DOS 1.0) but I still have reservations. For one thing, at least WordStar v. 1.0 and Visicalc were stable. The Linux office apps, in my experience crash constantly.
Like I said, it depends on the situation. KOffice is fine for an elementary school, inappropriate for a business with any international dealings and may or may not work in other contexts.
Well, like you said, Linux and *BSD are certainly worth considering for the back end. As far as the desktops go, it depends what you're trying to do. If the primary goal is to provide internet access, a Linux desktop wouldn't be a bad choice. Use a Gnome or KDE or whatever desktop to launch Konqueror, pan/trn, X-Chat, KMail/Evolution/pine, Mozilla when it's done . Arguably some of those may be inferior to Windows or Mac alternatives, but it's certainly a perfectly usable desktop.
On the other hand, if you're talking about providing office and productivity apps, I agree that you're giving up a lot of functionality. (At least today -- who knows what'll be when this actually happens.) It depends on what the goal is. Unfortunately, I bet that in a giant "Let's give everyone a computer!" government project, no one knows what the goal is.
/. old-timers will remember when the Mexican schools were all going to adopt Linux/Gnome desktops, back in 1998 or so. That never panned out and it would have been a disaster if it had -- a country's educational system relying on Gnome 0.6 or so and the acompanying office apps?!? Of course, the experience has left me with a bit of skepticism about pre-announcements of massive deployments of Gnome in Mexico. Has Mexico City replaced all its desktops with Linux, as promised a while back?
From the article:
Getting Mexico to do the same has been de Icaza's obsession for the past few months. And in that regard, he's met with President Fox, too.
During the half-hour conference, which took place earlier this year, he ran though this math with Fox: At a retail price of $209 for Windows and $440 for Office, it could cost the country as much as $3.25 billion just for license fees. "Our country needs that money for many other things," de Icaza said he told Fox. He said Fox seemed to be surprised by the cost analysis, but he made no promises.
I don't know if Fox was surprised because he knows you don't pay CompUSA prices when you're buying software for an entire country, but Miguel certainly doesn't lack political connections in Mexico...
Say what?!? Anyone have a more detailed explanation of this status and who the "geniuses" are who get it?
Anyway, on a less combatative note than this article, here's KDE's Konqui visiting the Ximian booth at LWCE and trying out GNOME. From Rob Kaper's photo gallery.
My ongoing complaint about the YRO articles is that whatever is currently being proposed is always ridiculed in favor of something else. Government regulation? Schools and libraries should set policies. Schools and libraries restricting access? It should be up to parents. Parents take responsibility? How dare they!
In this case, I would be extremely reluctant to join a workplace that monitored my computer usage. But unlike the hypocritical, dishonest bigots who edit Slashdot, I recognize the real issues here and I'm curious to hear what people think is an equitable way to deal with them.
Unfortunately, the reality is that workers in the judicial offices are not capable of policing themselves. ("A letter Lee sent on March 5 contains a list of all the movies accessed by a particular user between 12:12 p.m. and 1:35 p.m., including /bigtits/bix/mer021/3.mpg and /personal4/fuckmovie/asian/07.mpg. ")
It seems to me the issues are:
Actually, Lars, given the rate at which khtml and Konqueror have gone from zero to my browser of choice, it's not so far-fetched that you could have.
And that's not even mentioning the 100+ employees and $13 million Eazel needed to come up with an unfinished file browser that piggybacks on Gecko!
Also, read the responses to question 7 of the interview. For example:
We expect to see some more improvements from prelinking in a next generation Linux distributions. The current "object prelinking" manages to reduce the link-time of applications with 30% to 50%. The developers of the GNU linker are hard at work to get rid of the remaining 50% to 70% as well using a more advanced form of prelinking. This will effectively remove the linking overhead completely. Of course the 4-5 seconds that you mentioned are not all caused by the linker, so we will have to take a critical look at our own code as well to see where we can improve things.
This would be a great thing to lobby for, before the investment in the Linux desktop dries up completely: that someone with deep pockets (IBM, Gnome Foundation, the remnants of VA) would buy or underwrite development for some good, freely-licensed, anti-aliasable fonts.
It's not the kind of thing a talented CS sophomore is going to bang out.
Seriously, though, this piece seems absurd to me. Whatever your views about stem cell research (personally, I think Bush came up with a fair compromise, and I'm no fan of Bush), clearly the ethical implications of biological research are crucial and are going to become even more so. Does Clark really think that _not_ having guidelines is the way to a bright future?
By the way I agree that characterizing the voters who don't think precisely as Clark does as "a conservative few" is a contemptible bit of class bias. Those people may not rub elbows with Clark, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
It's like streaming video, Internet movies, all that stuff -- it's simply not practical with the bandwidth and hardware normal people have. If you're a college student on a Napster-free network, network multimedia is barely worthwhile. For a typical user on a 56K dial-up, playing music on an eMachine speaker, it's just not happening.
It will happen, of course.
Another factor is 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires Webcasters to pay an additional fee for music over the Internet. Broadcasters sued the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over the fee, and lost. Now the argument is over the amount of the fee -- the RIAA wants Webcasters to pay up to 15 percent of their revenues, but Webcasters argue for a rate that's about 30 times lower than that.
This isn't the sort of attack on fair-use that makes the DMCA evil. It's something the market will sort out, when there's money to be made. Right now, there isn't.
I agree with Satai that this is wildly sleazy, and think he's naive to think that "pro-Microsoft groups" aren't precisely the sort of shills Slashbots probably think I am for expressing insufficiently uncontrolled rage and wild accusations towards Microsoft.
No, profits aren't a right. Equal protection under the law is a right. The issue here is that these companies invested billions in research and testing on the expectation that if they found something useful, they could sell it under the same laws that apply to everyone else.
Oh, and by the way, if you conclude through extrapolation that the failure of pharmaceutical X to make lots of money because society decides there is a greater cause, immediately disincentivizes the whole industry..
Here's a less dramatic scenario: the companies decide not to bother developing drugs that save the lives of lots of poor people, preferring the safety of products to help wealthy people live another two years.
I suggest you reexamine your assumptions about the motives for doing such work - for example, it's taken for granted that people *will* work without compensation on many things, e.g. Open Source software..
Oh yes -- having gone through grad school, I'm very familiar with the idea that it's taken for granted that researchers will work 80 hour weeks for $15,000 a year until they're 30. I'd raise these questions, though:
* Look at the range of quality on Freshmeat. Is that what you want to find in the drugstore?
* I paid $1200 or so for my computer, $40 for LinuxPPC and nothing for Qt, KDevelop and gcc. Do you you see a problem in your extrapolation that researchers will therefore be eager to drop $100 million out of their pockets for compound screening and clinical testing? (Hint: I code for free, but I damn well don't pay the $100,000 a year that my research costs...)
In my time in science, I've learned that whenever people tell you how important it is what you're doing, it invariably means your life is about to be made worse. No one ever seems to say, "This is important! You deserve more money (benefits, whatever..)."
There's an odd sort of market theory here where it's perfectly acceptable to earn hundreds of millions of dollars because you can hit a curveball or you IPO your worthless Internet startup just the right week, but if you can save lives -- well, that's just too darned important for you to be allowed to make money from it.
As it happens, I think the pharmaceutical companies involved here are being ethically callous and idiotically short-sighted from a PR point of view. But I can't help noticing that the people who are so eager to take from them because, gosh, it's just so imeportant! don't ever seem to consider dropping some of their own money to make sure that drugs are readily available.
Honestly, if you had told Act-Up! protestors in the early '90s that in 2001 the biggest villain in the AIDS world would be the companies that cure it, they wouldn't have believed it. Hey, make A-Rod play for free and use his money to fight AIDS.
Sure, I realize that you would do that, just like you turn on optimization and turn off debugging when you release. Still, to me it seems much safer to default to faster code and expect the programmer to make the change to get faster compiles. Especially in the free software world, where so many apps are written by people as clueless as, well, me, it seems like you'd want to make sure slow code doesn't get unknowingly distributed.
IMHO, of course.
Depends on how you count. Strictly speaking, the number of full-time, paid KDE developers is more like 7 -- David Faure and Laurent Montel at Mandrake, Waldo Bastian at SuSE, and probably a few more I don't know about. Browse the developer profiles and see how few paid coders there are.
Even if you include all the guys at TrollTech working on Qt, I doubt if it's close to 100. Eazel probably spent more money and employed more workers than the cumulative history of KDE and Qt togther.
Out of curiosity, where are all these paid full-time Gnome workers? Ximian can't be that big -- are they at Sun? Red Hat?
It's funny how they stress how many paid devs they have. I'm wondering whether you should brag about how many or how few people work on your project...
Err, my bad. (Although a little additional clarification wouldn't have been out of line...)
...and you think extrapolating to all of KDE from unnamed bugs in one module that was recently rushed into service is sound statistical practice?
1) The KDE code that's not compiling with the new gcc is correct, and it's a compiler bug that's the problem. (At least that's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong.) 2) The speed issue mentioned here has nothing to do with KDE.
As it happens, I do think that KDE is unacceptably slow on less than really fast boxes. But the reasons for that are understood and have nothing to do with "poor programming". (No, I haven't tried the prelinking hacks yet.)
Two more asides:
* Timothy, it would help if you mentioned that the last bit pertains to gcc instead of leaving that a mystery.
* I agree with the person who said it's nuts to have a compiler default to fast compiles and slow executables.
I think this relates to the feature that got Mp3.com in trouble, where they ripped songs themselves and provided access to the files to users who possessed a CD. As far as I'm concerned, that's fair use, but if you were wondering why the labels cared when supposedly CD's still had to bought, this is why.
Out of curiosity, is there any way to distinguish the Mp3.com-made files from user-ripped ones? Or is the suit just proceeding on the assumption illegal trading must have happened?
But to me, the most astounding betrayal of computer security ever was Microsoft's conduct during the last Hotmail breach. Not that it happened (could happen to anyone) or even that they didn't pull the plug days until days after the exploit was made public but that they kept going for hours after everyone had the URL for the backdoor.
There was a great Salon article by a woman who heard about the breach on CNN, found the URL here and read her ex's new girlfriend's mail. I love the conclusion:
Late Monday, Microsoft continued to downplay the Hotmail hack in a statement published by Reuters: "We're hoping that because we jumped on it so quickly no one was affected."
Fat chance.
I wonder if this time will be different...
Is there some deeper point I'm missing?