While I disagree, and kind of enjoy Joel's works, as "vicious" personal attacks go, this is rather tame. It limits itself to a critique of his published work, and doesn't once imply that Joel has committed any goat-related improprieties. Therefore, compared to Usenet, Slashdot is a bastion of civility.
Cynical rant: In my high school, "interacting with people of all sorts" meant the following: Find the group of people most like yourself. Hang around each other, telling yourselves how great it is to be you and yours instead of being one of the other tribes. If you have the physical prowess (or the numbers) to avoid retaliation, find people to abuse.
Throw in the fact that you're only really learning to deal with people who are very nearly your age, and the wastefulness of the process seems even more pronounced.
My best hypothesis for the educational system is that our economy depends on both parents working, and public schools act as warehouses for children while mum and dad are off growing the economy. If we'd just cut back on the number of DVDs and toys we own, we could give children much more rewarding childhoods.
Also, I've noticed some "socially developmental retardation" in geeks who did their time in public schools, so how are these studies separating correlation from causation? At best, going to school with age-peers results in the opportunity for social interaction. But if the child isn't comfortable taking advantage of those opportunities, he or she will end up playing alone in a corner come recess. At least, until the bullies get bored and decide to join in the fun. And there are few things more isolating than being "the smart kid".
If public school feels like a forbidding, unwelcoming place (as it probably would to this kid), I fail to see how sending him there is the best way to socialize him. If I were the kid's parent, I'd be looking for some sort of play group, maybe even getting "social tutors" from his age group. Most important, I'd try to explain to him why he needs to be able to deal with everyone around him, not just the other smart people he prefers to be around.
It's not "rushing through academics" if he just gets things faster than everyone else his age. Further, I'd like to know exactly when in his public school education these "outside the box" thinking skills would be installed in this kid. When he's being chased home from school by bullies? When he's spending an hour listening to an uninspired teacher drone on for an hour about concepts he's long since mastered? Or when his teacher gets mad at him for coming up with the correct answer, rather than the wrong answer in the book?
Yes, he needs time to be a kid, to socialize with other kids, and to do kid things. Are his parents giving him such opportunities? The article doesn't indicate one way or the other. But are you seriously asserting that the best way to provide those opportunities is to cage him up in a classroom with thirty other kids (most of whom probably despise him) and let them absorb material geared toward the dumbest kids in the class?
Child prodigies are a mystery to everyone. Nobody really knows how indications of genius at his age are going to translate into adult life, nor do we know how to get the most out of such children, or how to raise them in an emotionally happy way. But he's an extreme case, and as such doesn't fit well into any system designed for the bulk of people, whether that system is elementary school or universities. So I say, let him do what makes him happy.
Let's look at this cynically. I mean, I shouldn't have to be the only one, should I?
If I were Microsoft, I would be thinking, "If we let the states each pass their own regulations, and we do business in all fifty states, we're pretty much stuck abiding by the most stringent provisions of each. That will suck."
"But if we encourage a national law that pre-empts the state laws, it will be much less restrictive."
As someone else pointed out, the CAN-SPAM Act undermined several far superior anti-spamming ordinances. Microsoft's goals here could be to protect people from privacy abuses, to make the regulations more streamlined, or to allow them to perpetrate privacy abuses that they can't do right now under state laws. I'd say "we'll have to see," but by the time we do see it, it will likely be too late.
I think individuals are less culpable in such situations. Consider that we're all very busy, living relatively complicated lives, and for one individual, keeping track of the ethical successes and failings of dozens of different brands is just one more very complicated task to pile on top of an already strained life.
But when a big company decides it needs 300,000 shirts to stock in their stores this holiday season, it adds little to the transaction cost to have somebody study their suppliers' working conditions. It's just one more checkbox to take care of before signing the papers.
"Reasonable price? Check!"
"Good stitching? Check!"
"Colors don't run? Check!"
"Workers not chained to their benches? Check!"
The point is, companies can afford to have the sort of expertise that is simply beyond the reach of individuals making decisions. They hire accountants to plan out complex ways to save money. They hire productivity specialists to find novel ways to get the most out of their employees. But I don't think many companies rely on ethicists to help them find ways to not hurt people in their quest for profit. It's a sort of expertise few of them seem to want.
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<sarcasm>That's a great idea.</sarcasm> Maybe we can spread it a bit more widely. Let's see, given the venue, what other kinds of tags can we use? How about "uninformed speculation"? "Gratuitous insult"? "Right-wing nonsense"? "Reflexive Microsoft-bashing"?
<restatement_of_obvious>This is Slashdot.</restatement_of_obvious> I won't pretend to add meaningfully to the conversation <you_saw_my_posting_history>if you don't pretend you're coming here for meaningful conversation</you_saw_my_posting_history>, OK? <gratuitous_but_deserved_insult>And maybe start with the decaf tomorrow morning.</gratuitous_but_deserved_insult>
<joke class="stupid">Maybe this is what they mean by the "semantic web".</joke>
Bah. <a_slashdot_first>You're right.</a_slashdot_first> <excessive_honesty>I don't come here for learned discourse. I come here to find people saying stuff I rabidly disagree with, then try to nail them.</excessive_honesty>
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That's a prescriptive definition, not a descriptive one. Descriptive definitions can best be defined as "what people are actually trying to say when they use a word." In everyday usage, "tabloid" has nothing to do with the physical dimensions or layout, and everything to do with sleazy, gossipy, unsubstantiated pseudo-news.
You knew this already. So either you're trying to defend the newspaper in a dishonest way, or you're muddying the conversation by showing off your knowledge of irrelevant trivia. Trivia, by the way, actually comes from the Latin meaning "three roads". Wherever forks in the Roman road system occurred, bulletin boards sprung up, where people could post interesting bits of news that might be helpful to travelers.
There you have it, your daily meta-trivia. Now, tell me, how does this knowledge help us distinguish the relative merits of the Washington Post and the Washington Times? It doesn't. Neither does your helpful information on tabloids. So next time, prepend your commentary with "irrelevant nitpick", and provide the wikipedia link. Don't pretend you're adding meaningfully to the conversation.
Yeah, you're probably dreaming. If the porn industry did make a massive push towards Firefox, suddenly you'd get Focus on the Family sending out warnings about having "this ungodly porn browser" installed on your machines. Kids and spouses who installed it would be shipped off to Christian "rehabilitation camps". And so on.
All right, let's cut to the chase: What is the point of this website? What is it supposed to do? It doesn't seem like there is much sophisticated processing going on in the background (it seems that most of the time when I click on the prettier woman, she ends up getting replaced by an uglier woman) and of the 50,000 pictures supposedly on the site, I seem to get the same twenty or thirty over and over again.
I guess what I'm asking is: am I missing something?
Want me to prove that Windows isn't ready for the desktop? Let me tell you about my experiences with MusicMatch Jukebox. I mean, what a crash-happy, bloated, crippled piece of software that was...
Admittedly, it's different when a bit of software comes in the default installation. But I've successfully used several different CD rippers on Linux, and I've never had a problem. You simply can't claim that one failed application proves that the whole system is unsuitable.
People more familiar with the project might wail in anger when I say this, but my impression is that GORM isn't really the point. It seems like GORM is just an excuse to show off the GNUStep toolkit (which bears the same relationship to GORM that GTK does to to Gnome, and QT does to KDE). Since GNUStep is pretty similar to Apple's GUI toolkit (Cocoa), there may be something promising here.
Most likely, as GNUStep gets more popular, Gnome and KDE will be able to run that toolkit's apps (much as they run each others' apps today). That will be cool, because it means that you can write a Linux app whose GUI ports easily to Mac.
Note: I probably don't know what I'm talking about. Anyone with more of a clue, please correct me.
For the most part, I agree with you. I mostly ignore the desktop and use a couple of applications. Mostly I manipulate files and launch apps from the command line.
Yet I'm stuck on Gnome, and for possibly the silliest of reasons. A while back--and only in Gnome--I figured out how to make Firefox use Emacs-like keystrokes. When typing on a form, I can use Ctrl-(P,N,F,B) to move the cursor, Ctrl-E to yank everything from the cursor to the end of the line to the clipboard, etc.
It's a little thing, but it makes filling out web forms much more convenient for me. Since I don't know how to make this work on other desktops, I use Gnome. Most people have a favorite desktop, and the reasons for their preferences seem arbitrary to people who aren't them.
0-3 seconds: Click super-duper "Submit to Slashdot Front Page" button 3-18 seconds: type in http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox 19-22: click on "Try Firefox 1.5RC1" 22-26: right-click and save to desktop 26-24: Downloaded in -2.00 seconds at (inf+1)KB/s.
CmdrTaco would never settle for a connection that obeyed the laws of physics. You know it, I know it.
Nah. Long term, I think that SSNs should be considered public information. Somebody finding out your SSN should be about as harmful as somebody finding out your hair color.
What should be illegal is using a person's SSN as an authentication mechanism. If it's considered public knowledge, then companies wouldn't be running around going, "Well, if you're really Bob Smith of Trenton, NJ then what... is.... yoursocialsecuritynumber????"
The "Open Source community" is hardly monolithic, so if you're feeling like a pariah because of a few whiners, I'm sympathetic. Despite the current, happy state of anarchistic fragmentation, there are a lot of trends within the OSS community. Most of us do use Linux, and when we come across an open source package, our first thought is to try and use it within the frameworks that we already understand.
This project you're working on sounds cool, but in order to adopt it, many people would have to use non-free software. For the people whose goal is to use a freely redistributable, freely modifiable system on top of Windows and IIS, your project is a good candidate. For those who want to take maximum advantage of OSS (whether for financial, religious, or technical reasons), you've cut yourself out of the running. That's your own decision to make, and you shouldn't get heat for it.
You complain that those who judge you harshly are wrong because each OSS app should be judged on its own merits, without regard to the software it interacts with. While I think that point is arguable from both practical and political angles, you don't give the same consideration to the "Open Source companies" with hybrid business models.
Please stop using "Open Source" and "zealot" so close together. Google is starting to get suspicious of the entire movement.
Finally, don't let it get to you. People gripe and whine, and there isn't much to be done about that. It's human nature, like underage drinking and hogging the remote.
Copyright law usually only protects the embodiment of an idea, rather than the idea itself. This is usually all that is necessary because, when it comes right down to it, two people independently writing the exact same novel or the exact same code is so statistically improbable that I doubt it has ever happened.
Because it's too improbable to happen in practice, I don't believe that the law has ever had to deal with such a case.
Now, when two works are substantially similar in their ideas, then I'm guessing (this is Slashdot, you know) that it's up to the plaintiff to demonstrate that it's not just a coincidence, and that the defendant stole ideas from their work in an illegal way. Successful defenses usually involve something like, "We both derived the ideas from a third work," or "It's not all that similar."
With something as big and complex as the Linux kernel, you might expect similarities like:
- Both have an O(1) scheduler (the algorithm is public knowledge). - Both have the same binary interface (the specs are published). - Both have substantial POSIX compliance (again, public specs). - If both took their TCP/IP stacks from BSD, you would expect that code to be very similar.
But if large sections of Linux-only code were obviously present in your application, I don't see any way a judge would be convinced that you derived your code independently.
These days, the party line for software engineers everywhere is, "Build it as quickly as possible. Choose the best algorithms for the job, but otherwise don't worry about efficiency until it becomes clear that more efficiency is needed." This means we use quick and computationally wasteful programming languages like Python and Java rather than the more computationally efficient C. This means our programs burn more cycles trying to get to a given result.
I'm as obsessed with efficiency as anyone, and I think this is absolutely the proper approach.
The energy being used by computers is still only a tiny fraction of humanity's overall energy consumption, and computers are usually given tasks that help increase our overall efficiency and productivity. For example, if a prototype-friendly language like Python allows a programmer to quickly try out several designs for a program that (for instance) helps a trucking company plan routes to minimize fuel costs, and one of those designs ends up being a much better solution, then the inefficiency of the problem solver is more than outweighed by the efficiency gains that come from solving the problem. Since problems need solving wherever we turn, then using a quick-but-inefficient language means more of them can be solved.
You claim that faster systems are "less safe" because their speed means that people don't notice when the computer is doing things. I would counter that a faster system is safer, just because the users won't turn off the antivirus scanner because it grinds the system to a halt. System safety should be about safe practices and informative system tools, not about users trying to figure out why their Internet connection isn't as crisp as it was yesterday. That way lies madness.
I think you are being a troll, because nobody remotely competent selects software based strictly on "bug counts". Questions like, "How often do bugs cause crashes, corrupt data, or otherwise noticeably impact the user's experience?" are far more important. There are probably about a hundred bugs among the 5721 which, if fixed, would do more to improve the product than fixing all the other 5621 of them.
Let me put it another way: If OO.o eliminated every bug currently in its database, but in doing so had to replace them with the single bug, "Crashes on startup, taking the OS with it," then it would be far less fit for your organization than it is right now. But wouldn't a bugcount of 1 be sweet?
If your boss is waiting for the bug count in OO.o to drop below X before migrating, what is the number of bugs at which he's willing to dump MS Office? Does Microsoft even publish its bug list? I'm sure that if they did, the number of bugs they were tracking would have more to say about their QA program than the quality of the software itself. Face it, neither you nor your boss have any idea how the bug count actually translates into product quality, and your requirement of "1000 bugs or less" is entirely aribitrary.
Just today I was reading a copy of a New York Times Magazine article that had a pretty similar theme. There is a company out there (I'll call it "Bzz", because I don't remember the name but Bzz is pretty close) that works with unpaid volunteer "agents" to promote its customers' brands. People sign up, get product samples, then they're given talking points and told to go out and generate buzz for the product. The agents talk to their friends, fill out suggestion cards, call supermarkets/bookstores/etc. to ask whether they carry the product.
The reporters were surprised at how enthusiastic people were about doing unpaid work on behalf of these companies. Though Bzz offered a reward program, not many people cash in on it. The reporters came up with quite a few (mostly complementary) explanations. First, Bzz claimed that it only marketed 20% of the products that came to them, leaving the impression that their agents were only being asked to pimp the really good stuff. Then you have that eternal desire to be "in the know", to suggest a product or a restaurant to your friends and having the suggestion stick (see Linux advocacy). Finally, it seems that if you ask people to choose among basically equivalent items, when one of those items is somehow "theirs", they tend to value that item more highly. So just by giving agents a sample of the product, the marketing company can create a positive impression.
Officially, Bzz doesn't require its unpaid agents to spin the product in a positive light. All they ask is that people talk about the product. This helps sell people on the idea of being advertisers, since they're just being asked to talk about their opinions, rather than slavishly following the party line.
I think this is a small step up from some forms of astroturfing (for example, hiring beautiful women to go to bars and order Drink X), but not a big one. The worst part about these techniques is that they constitute an abuse of trust. Such activities allow a big corporation to sneak their "message" into what people assume to be a candid exchange of information. Whether the messengers are being paid in dollars, "points", sexual favors, or pats on the back isn't terribly relevant to me. The issue is that one party to the conversation has a hidden agenda that the other party isn't going to be on the lookout for.
Look at it this way: the marketers advertised so incessantly at us that we mostly tuned them out. We turned instead to the people around us for information. Now the evil bastards want to exploit the one remaining source of "unbiased" information. I mean, sure we're all biased, but the point is, we're plugging for our own biases, not those of the product manufacturer. They've finally found ways to exploit our trust in each other for personal profit, and they give fuck all if they're damaging that trust as they do so. Fight this.
The activities in the article are shameless in their own ways, but at least the targets have a better chance of discerning that the people plugging the product are paid product pluggers.
No, he's wrong. Whether or not the most important OSS projects are "copies" of commercial offerings, he's egregiously wrong about the motivations behind creating the software. The goal isn't to destroy the value of commercial offerings: the goal is to make good software that anyone can use, study, modify, and redistribute, and thereby create a massive pool of software that can be used without restriction.
Now, the effect may be the same, since it is indeed hard for commercial vendors to compete with a free alternative. But he makes it sound like the motivations of OSS developers can be boiled down to anti-capitalistic pique.
One of the great points made in the BoingBoing commentary is that, if a corporation follows certain bits of the article's advice, they could open themselves up to liability. For example, if you do as the author suggests, find "copyrighted text" on their site and then use it for the basis of a DMCA takedown notice, they might be able to justify their usage via fair use. If so, it's possible for them to countersue you for sending a misleading or inaccurate takedown notice. Again according to the commentary, Diebold got hit with $125,000 in fines for precisely this reason.
Not terribly responsible journalism by Daniel Lyons. Of course, you may remember the earlier Lyons article in which he defended Maureen O'Gara's attack on groklaw's PJ. He doesn't appear to be an open source enthusiast. For example, in an article on Marc Fleury of JBoss fame, he writes:
"Poor guy. Did he not get the memo? This is what open source software is all about: creating knockoffs and giving them away, destroying the value of whatever the other guy is selling."
"What's new is that now open-source companies are turning on each other."
Given Jack Thompson's overall reasoning skills, the connection wouldn't be nearly so indirect. It would be more along the lines of, "See! Not only are these games turning your precious children into violent, amoral thugs, they're turning them into SUPERGENIUSES! If the gaming industry isn't stopped, soon we'll be beset on all sides by evil masterminds who are building their own nuclear warheads and holding New York City hostage because they were programmed to do so by these terrorism simulators!"
If the sole purpose of punishment were to set an example for those who would be inclined to follow a convicted criminal's path, then the best way to fulfill that purpose is to give every crime a mandatory life sentence. But there are other factors we're supposed to be considering when determining what constitutes a proper punishment. For example, fairness and proportionality. There is nothing proportional about putting someone in jail for four years for "copying movies". That's more than most rapists and child molesters get.
Slashdot Mirror
While I disagree, and kind of enjoy Joel's works, as "vicious" personal attacks go, this is rather tame. It limits itself to a critique of his published work, and doesn't once imply that Joel has committed any goat-related improprieties. Therefore, compared to Usenet, Slashdot is a bastion of civility.
Cynical rant: In my high school, "interacting with people of all sorts" meant the following: Find the group of people most like yourself. Hang around each other, telling yourselves how great it is to be you and yours instead of being one of the other tribes. If you have the physical prowess (or the numbers) to avoid retaliation, find people to abuse.
Throw in the fact that you're only really learning to deal with people who are very nearly your age, and the wastefulness of the process seems even more pronounced.
My best hypothesis for the educational system is that our economy depends on both parents working, and public schools act as warehouses for children while mum and dad are off growing the economy. If we'd just cut back on the number of DVDs and toys we own, we could give children much more rewarding childhoods.
Did I mention that I tend towards cynical rants?
Can you cite specific studies?
Also, I've noticed some "socially developmental retardation" in geeks who did their time in public schools, so how are these studies separating correlation from causation? At best, going to school with age-peers results in the opportunity for social interaction. But if the child isn't comfortable taking advantage of those opportunities, he or she will end up playing alone in a corner come recess. At least, until the bullies get bored and decide to join in the fun. And there are few things more isolating than being "the smart kid".
If public school feels like a forbidding, unwelcoming place (as it probably would to this kid), I fail to see how sending him there is the best way to socialize him. If I were the kid's parent, I'd be looking for some sort of play group, maybe even getting "social tutors" from his age group. Most important, I'd try to explain to him why he needs to be able to deal with everyone around him, not just the other smart people he prefers to be around.
It's not "rushing through academics" if he just gets things faster than everyone else his age. Further, I'd like to know exactly when in his public school education these "outside the box" thinking skills would be installed in this kid. When he's being chased home from school by bullies? When he's spending an hour listening to an uninspired teacher drone on for an hour about concepts he's long since mastered? Or when his teacher gets mad at him for coming up with the correct answer, rather than the wrong answer in the book?
Yes, he needs time to be a kid, to socialize with other kids, and to do kid things. Are his parents giving him such opportunities? The article doesn't indicate one way or the other. But are you seriously asserting that the best way to provide those opportunities is to cage him up in a classroom with thirty other kids (most of whom probably despise him) and let them absorb material geared toward the dumbest kids in the class?
Child prodigies are a mystery to everyone. Nobody really knows how indications of genius at his age are going to translate into adult life, nor do we know how to get the most out of such children, or how to raise them in an emotionally happy way. But he's an extreme case, and as such doesn't fit well into any system designed for the bulk of people, whether that system is elementary school or universities. So I say, let him do what makes him happy.
Let's look at this cynically. I mean, I shouldn't have to be the only one, should I?
If I were Microsoft, I would be thinking, "If we let the states each pass their own regulations, and we do business in all fifty states, we're pretty much stuck abiding by the most stringent provisions of each. That will suck."
"But if we encourage a national law that pre-empts the state laws, it will be much less restrictive."
As someone else pointed out, the CAN-SPAM Act undermined several far superior anti-spamming ordinances. Microsoft's goals here could be to protect people from privacy abuses, to make the regulations more streamlined, or to allow them to perpetrate privacy abuses that they can't do right now under state laws. I'd say "we'll have to see," but by the time we do see it, it will likely be too late.
I think individuals are less culpable in such situations. Consider that we're all very busy, living relatively complicated lives, and for one individual, keeping track of the ethical successes and failings of dozens of different brands is just one more very complicated task to pile on top of an already strained life.
But when a big company decides it needs 300,000 shirts to stock in their stores this holiday season, it adds little to the transaction cost to have somebody study their suppliers' working conditions. It's just one more checkbox to take care of before signing the papers.
"Reasonable price? Check!"
"Good stitching? Check!"
"Colors don't run? Check!"
"Workers not chained to their benches? Check!"
The point is, companies can afford to have the sort of expertise that is simply beyond the reach of individuals making decisions. They hire accountants to plan out complex ways to save money. They hire productivity specialists to find novel ways to get the most out of their employees. But I don't think many companies rely on ethicists to help them find ways to not hurt people in their quest for profit. It's a sort of expertise few of them seem to want.
<joke class="stupid">Maybe this is what they mean by the "semantic web".</joke>
Bah. <a_slashdot_first>You're right.</a_slashdot_first> <excessive_honesty>I don't come here for learned discourse. I come here to find people saying stuff I rabidly disagree with, then try to nail them.</excessive_honesty>
That's a prescriptive definition, not a descriptive one. Descriptive definitions can best be defined as "what people are actually trying to say when they use a word." In everyday usage, "tabloid" has nothing to do with the physical dimensions or layout, and everything to do with sleazy, gossipy, unsubstantiated pseudo-news.
You knew this already. So either you're trying to defend the newspaper in a dishonest way, or you're muddying the conversation by showing off your knowledge of irrelevant trivia. Trivia, by the way, actually comes from the Latin meaning "three roads". Wherever forks in the Roman road system occurred, bulletin boards sprung up, where people could post interesting bits of news that might be helpful to travelers.
There you have it, your daily meta-trivia. Now, tell me, how does this knowledge help us distinguish the relative merits of the Washington Post and the Washington Times? It doesn't. Neither does your helpful information on tabloids. So next time, prepend your commentary with "irrelevant nitpick", and provide the wikipedia link. Don't pretend you're adding meaningfully to the conversation.
Yeah, you're probably dreaming. If the porn industry did make a massive push towards Firefox, suddenly you'd get Focus on the Family sending out warnings about having "this ungodly porn browser" installed on your machines. Kids and spouses who installed it would be shipped off to Christian "rehabilitation camps". And so on.
All right, let's cut to the chase: What is the point of this website? What is it supposed to do? It doesn't seem like there is much sophisticated processing going on in the background (it seems that most of the time when I click on the prettier woman, she ends up getting replaced by an uglier woman) and of the 50,000 pictures supposedly on the site, I seem to get the same twenty or thirty over and over again.
I guess what I'm asking is: am I missing something?
Want me to prove that Windows isn't ready for the desktop? Let me tell you about my experiences with MusicMatch Jukebox. I mean, what a crash-happy, bloated, crippled piece of software that was...
Admittedly, it's different when a bit of software comes in the default installation. But I've successfully used several different CD rippers on Linux, and I've never had a problem. You simply can't claim that one failed application proves that the whole system is unsuitable.
People more familiar with the project might wail in anger when I say this, but my impression is that GORM isn't really the point. It seems like GORM is just an excuse to show off the GNUStep toolkit (which bears the same relationship to GORM that GTK does to to Gnome, and QT does to KDE). Since GNUStep is pretty similar to Apple's GUI toolkit (Cocoa), there may be something promising here.
Most likely, as GNUStep gets more popular, Gnome and KDE will be able to run that toolkit's apps (much as they run each others' apps today). That will be cool, because it means that you can write a Linux app whose GUI ports easily to Mac.
Note: I probably don't know what I'm talking about. Anyone with more of a clue, please correct me.
For the most part, I agree with you. I mostly ignore the desktop and use a couple of applications. Mostly I manipulate files and launch apps from the command line.
Yet I'm stuck on Gnome, and for possibly the silliest of reasons. A while back--and only in Gnome--I figured out how to make Firefox use Emacs-like keystrokes. When typing on a form, I can use Ctrl-(P,N,F,B) to move the cursor, Ctrl-E to yank everything from the cursor to the end of the line to the clipboard, etc.
It's a little thing, but it makes filling out web forms much more convenient for me. Since I don't know how to make this work on other desktops, I use Gnome. Most people have a favorite desktop, and the reasons for their preferences seem arbitrary to people who aren't them.
Not really. Here's how it all went down:
0-3 seconds: Click super-duper "Submit to Slashdot Front Page" button
3-18 seconds: type in http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox
19-22: click on "Try Firefox 1.5RC1"
22-26: right-click and save to desktop
26-24: Downloaded in -2.00 seconds at (inf+1)KB/s.
CmdrTaco would never settle for a connection that obeyed the laws of physics. You know it, I know it.
Nah. Long term, I think that SSNs should be considered public information. Somebody finding out your SSN should be about as harmful as somebody finding out your hair color.
What should be illegal is using a person's SSN as an authentication mechanism. If it's considered public knowledge, then companies wouldn't be running around going, "Well, if you're really Bob Smith of Trenton, NJ then what... is.... yoursocialsecuritynumber????"
The "Open Source community" is hardly monolithic, so if you're feeling like a pariah because of a few whiners, I'm sympathetic. Despite the current, happy state of anarchistic fragmentation, there are a lot of trends within the OSS community. Most of us do use Linux, and when we come across an open source package, our first thought is to try and use it within the frameworks that we already understand.
This project you're working on sounds cool, but in order to adopt it, many people would have to use non-free software. For the people whose goal is to use a freely redistributable, freely modifiable system on top of Windows and IIS, your project is a good candidate. For those who want to take maximum advantage of OSS (whether for financial, religious, or technical reasons), you've cut yourself out of the running. That's your own decision to make, and you shouldn't get heat for it.
You complain that those who judge you harshly are wrong because each OSS app should be judged on its own merits, without regard to the software it interacts with. While I think that point is arguable from both practical and political angles, you don't give the same consideration to the "Open Source companies" with hybrid business models.
Please stop using "Open Source" and "zealot" so close together. Google is starting to get suspicious of the entire movement.
Finally, don't let it get to you. People gripe and whine, and there isn't much to be done about that. It's human nature, like underage drinking and hogging the remote.
How do you know this?
Copyright law usually only protects the embodiment of an idea, rather than the idea itself. This is usually all that is necessary because, when it comes right down to it, two people independently writing the exact same novel or the exact same code is so statistically improbable that I doubt it has ever happened.
Because it's too improbable to happen in practice, I don't believe that the law has ever had to deal with such a case.
Now, when two works are substantially similar in their ideas, then I'm guessing (this is Slashdot, you know) that it's up to the plaintiff to demonstrate that it's not just a coincidence, and that the defendant stole ideas from their work in an illegal way. Successful defenses usually involve something like, "We both derived the ideas from a third work," or "It's not all that similar."
With something as big and complex as the Linux kernel, you might expect similarities like:
- Both have an O(1) scheduler (the algorithm is public knowledge).
- Both have the same binary interface (the specs are published).
- Both have substantial POSIX compliance (again, public specs).
- If both took their TCP/IP stacks from BSD, you would expect that code to be very similar.
But if large sections of Linux-only code were obviously present in your application, I don't see any way a judge would be convinced that you derived your code independently.
These days, the party line for software engineers everywhere is, "Build it as quickly as possible. Choose the best algorithms for the job, but otherwise don't worry about efficiency until it becomes clear that more efficiency is needed." This means we use quick and computationally wasteful programming languages like Python and Java rather than the more computationally efficient C. This means our programs burn more cycles trying to get to a given result.
I'm as obsessed with efficiency as anyone, and I think this is absolutely the proper approach.
The energy being used by computers is still only a tiny fraction of humanity's overall energy consumption, and computers are usually given tasks that help increase our overall efficiency and productivity. For example, if a prototype-friendly language like Python allows a programmer to quickly try out several designs for a program that (for instance) helps a trucking company plan routes to minimize fuel costs, and one of those designs ends up being a much better solution, then the inefficiency of the problem solver is more than outweighed by the efficiency gains that come from solving the problem. Since problems need solving wherever we turn, then using a quick-but-inefficient language means more of them can be solved.
You claim that faster systems are "less safe" because their speed means that people don't notice when the computer is doing things. I would counter that a faster system is safer, just because the users won't turn off the antivirus scanner because it grinds the system to a halt. System safety should be about safe practices and informative system tools, not about users trying to figure out why their Internet connection isn't as crisp as it was yesterday. That way lies madness.
Please explain what you mean by "polish". Specifically, please please please tell me you don't mean "pretty, brushed metal buttons".
I think you are being a troll, because nobody remotely competent selects software based strictly on "bug counts". Questions like, "How often do bugs cause crashes, corrupt data, or otherwise noticeably impact the user's experience?" are far more important. There are probably about a hundred bugs among the 5721 which, if fixed, would do more to improve the product than fixing all the other 5621 of them.
Let me put it another way: If OO.o eliminated every bug currently in its database, but in doing so had to replace them with the single bug, "Crashes on startup, taking the OS with it," then it would be far less fit for your organization than it is right now. But wouldn't a bugcount of 1 be sweet?
If your boss is waiting for the bug count in OO.o to drop below X before migrating, what is the number of bugs at which he's willing to dump MS Office? Does Microsoft even publish its bug list? I'm sure that if they did, the number of bugs they were tracking would have more to say about their QA program than the quality of the software itself. Face it, neither you nor your boss have any idea how the bug count actually translates into product quality, and your requirement of "1000 bugs or less" is entirely aribitrary.
Just today I was reading a copy of a New York Times Magazine article that had a pretty similar theme. There is a company out there (I'll call it "Bzz", because I don't remember the name but Bzz is pretty close) that works with unpaid volunteer "agents" to promote its customers' brands. People sign up, get product samples, then they're given talking points and told to go out and generate buzz for the product. The agents talk to their friends, fill out suggestion cards, call supermarkets/bookstores/etc. to ask whether they carry the product.
The reporters were surprised at how enthusiastic people were about doing unpaid work on behalf of these companies. Though Bzz offered a reward program, not many people cash in on it. The reporters came up with quite a few (mostly complementary) explanations. First, Bzz claimed that it only marketed 20% of the products that came to them, leaving the impression that their agents were only being asked to pimp the really good stuff. Then you have that eternal desire to be "in the know", to suggest a product or a restaurant to your friends and having the suggestion stick (see Linux advocacy). Finally, it seems that if you ask people to choose among basically equivalent items, when one of those items is somehow "theirs", they tend to value that item more highly. So just by giving agents a sample of the product, the marketing company can create a positive impression.
Officially, Bzz doesn't require its unpaid agents to spin the product in a positive light. All they ask is that people talk about the product. This helps sell people on the idea of being advertisers, since they're just being asked to talk about their opinions, rather than slavishly following the party line.
I think this is a small step up from some forms of astroturfing (for example, hiring beautiful women to go to bars and order Drink X), but not a big one. The worst part about these techniques is that they constitute an abuse of trust. Such activities allow a big corporation to sneak their "message" into what people assume to be a candid exchange of information. Whether the messengers are being paid in dollars, "points", sexual favors, or pats on the back isn't terribly relevant to me. The issue is that one party to the conversation has a hidden agenda that the other party isn't going to be on the lookout for.
Look at it this way: the marketers advertised so incessantly at us that we mostly tuned them out. We turned instead to the people around us for information. Now the evil bastards want to exploit the one remaining source of "unbiased" information. I mean, sure we're all biased, but the point is, we're plugging for our own biases, not those of the product manufacturer. They've finally found ways to exploit our trust in each other for personal profit, and they give fuck all if they're damaging that trust as they do so. Fight this.
The activities in the article are shameless in their own ways, but at least the targets have a better chance of discerning that the people plugging the product are paid product pluggers.
No, he's wrong. Whether or not the most important OSS projects are "copies" of commercial offerings, he's egregiously wrong about the motivations behind creating the software. The goal isn't to destroy the value of commercial offerings: the goal is to make good software that anyone can use, study, modify, and redistribute, and thereby create a massive pool of software that can be used without restriction.
Now, the effect may be the same, since it is indeed hard for commercial vendors to compete with a free alternative. But he makes it sound like the motivations of OSS developers can be boiled down to anti-capitalistic pique.
Not terribly responsible journalism by Daniel Lyons. Of course, you may remember the earlier Lyons article in which he defended Maureen O'Gara's attack on groklaw's PJ. He doesn't appear to be an open source enthusiast. For example, in an article on Marc Fleury of JBoss fame, he writes:Memo to Slashdot, and to myself: YHBT.
Given Jack Thompson's overall reasoning skills, the connection wouldn't be nearly so indirect. It would be more along the lines of, "See! Not only are these games turning your precious children into violent, amoral thugs, they're turning them into SUPERGENIUSES! If the gaming industry isn't stopped, soon we'll be beset on all sides by evil masterminds who are building their own nuclear warheads and holding New York City hostage because they were programmed to do so by these terrorism simulators!"
I really want to build a shrine to that guy.
If the sole purpose of punishment were to set an example for those who would be inclined to follow a convicted criminal's path, then the best way to fulfill that purpose is to give every crime a mandatory life sentence. But there are other factors we're supposed to be considering when determining what constitutes a proper punishment. For example, fairness and proportionality. There is nothing proportional about putting someone in jail for four years for "copying movies". That's more than most rapists and child molesters get.
But it's not a disease.