A leap of reason? Principles of capitalism say what I build or develop is mine, and belongs to noone else. Principles of communism say what I build or develop belongs to the greater community. Open Source says what I develop belongs to the greater community. I have no problems with open source, but it is communism.
What you develop doesn't belong to everybody, but if one makes a free will decision to collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the world then your code and theirs combined is better than what you can write by yourself. That's like calling barn raisings communism, or neighborhood backyard cookouts communism, or Google communism, or Wal-Mart communism. Joining forces is better than going it alone. It's your choice. You don't have to use it, and you don't have to participate. It's competition, and I'm going to choose which side I'm on. That's free enterprise, not communism.
AMD and the PowerPC give Intel enough competition to keep things healthy as far as hardware goes. Between the two monopolies, Intel and Microsoft I have a lot more respect for Intel, even though I wish competition were hotter sooner.
This is a really good post, well said, but the market couldn't support another CPU maker. AMD, IBM, and Intel are having one hell of a donnybrook that we're all benefitting from, and AMD is just barely able to stay in it as it is. I buy AMD chips to support the cause, and because they're better. But great comments.
I always find this a very disingenuous argument for OSS as it implies MS software cannot be customized when it obviously can. Yes you dont have the source code but the occasions where the OS source is required are few and far between for application developers.
"How much more customizeable can you get than having the source code? What I mean is, if you have the source, you can do *anything* concievable with it. Not just the things that Microsoft predicted you might want to change (even if that does happen to be 99% of it).
Say, what's the fastest way to rename 1,000 files according to some regular expression on your Windows box?"
You completely missed the point. The point is that there is very little desire out there to modify M$ Office software. The customization that is desired is done with VB script, and is actually what drives the usefulness in corporate shops. Until OSS advocates understand what really drives business software development, their constant advocacy of tweaking the infrastructure will be appreciated only by a few others who think that's cool.
I really can't see why many people in the IT field should get $80k+.
The people that make this money generally have the equivalent of two jobs due to the long hours and working from home. And not babysitting working, but tremendous pressure to make things work and keep them working. I've been doing it for 25 years now, and it doesn't get any easier. In fact, the pace is accelerating.
Operating systems should be free and open. Software should not. This is honest dissent, not a troll so moderators need to find someone else to mod down.
Having Windows controlled by Microsoft instead of the public allows them to wrestle companies to their knees. On the other side, the open source movement has as many innovative ideas as Microsoft which is damn near zero. By creating free software, the open source movement kicks third party companies in the kidneys while Microsoft is efficiently pushing them down already.
If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.
In fact, that might be the ultimate weapon in any potential trade war with Europe.;)
This is the sharpest insight on the subject I've ever seen. That's why my solution for the M$ monopoly is to have Win 98 SE declared public domain so it can be included in Linux for legal Windows compatability.
"What makes you think open source developers only copy ideas? Part of the article (you read it right?) had to do with cabilities of open source software that are unmatched by anything else.
Good point. However (and this is not a criticism), if anything you have only reinforced the parent posts's major point that:
The commercial, and particularly the retail, software industry is in big trouble from open source software.
As the old going says, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"
What kind of retail software are we talking about? Baby Windows retail software? Retail software encompasses a wide range of very complex activities to program, and companies like JDA and Island Pacific aren't worried about any "free" retail software doing anything complex anytime soon, I'm sure.
In any event, my theory on "free" software is that most of it not paid to be developed by the government indirectly through university grants or not paid for by companies with a larger agenda is that it was a crack at commercial success that didn't work out so if you have it and can't sell it, give it away and maybe grab the market. Worked for M$.
I know there are ecnomical studies in 1970s in America with similar awful predictions for oil and coal reserve worldwide from place to place and yet no one has run out of oil gas coal yet.
Canadian natural gas just went up by 33% because their source is dwindling. They can't supply as much as last year, and they haven't found anything to bring online.
You're leaving a hell of a world for your children, who will not be amused that their parents said we want gasoline cheaper than bottled water, don't worry, it won't run out anytime soon. And in the US, while paying out the yazoo for what's left of oil and natural gas fields, they'll be paying for the $3 trillion national deficit of the '80s and the $3 trillion national deficit of the first few years of the 2000's, while also paying Social Security for their parents who left them in this position. They will most definitely not be amused.
As for the question of IT jobs. The software developing jobs will gradually fade into memory, but there is still a need for having IT skills, and there will continue to be jobs for network admins, data entry and report writers, etc.
I see several of you repeating this, and referring to gluing together things, etc. What in the world do you think is going to replace software development? Everything needed just sitting there and all you need to do is set properties and point at services? Man, what a pipe dream.
The commercial, and particularly the retail, software industry is in big trouble from open source software. As software becomes a commodity, producing it will become less and less valuable to employers. Oddly, it still costs lots of money to create professional, polished consumer software, but the usually weak open source imitations are "good enough" for most people, or will be fairly soon. The real question is what happens when companies stop doing the basic research and innovation that open source developers rely on for ideas to copy?
Research? You mean the kind of research that was done by Xerox PARC and universities that was copied by M$? What "research" did M$ do that you think OSS devlopers are copying?
NT was developed by a DEC VAX developer,
Access was finally made into something that semi works after buying and gutting Foxpro,
Excel was copied from Visicalc,
Word was copied from Xerox Parc (by a former PARCer, Simonyi),
DriveSpace stolen from Stacker,
Visio bought and gutted,
Windows terminals ripped off from Citrix,
Partitioning from buying and gutting Connextix,
Windows from copying Xerox PARC research,
DOS from buying and gutting QDOS and copying CP/M and Unix,
Paint by buying and gutting it from Z-Soft (M$ had absolutely nothing to run on Windows 1.0 and had to get a developer to rewrite a baby version of DOS PC Paintbrush for something to run in Windows),
OS/2 to Windows porting technology ripped off from Micrografx and put them out of business,
Copied BASIC from Dartmouth,
Copied C# from Delphi and Java (by essentially stealing the entire Delphi team from Borland and trying to gut Borland and Delphi),
Powerpoint by buying and gutting a company copying Harvard Graphics, giving it away and putting Software Publishing out of business,
copied the browser, gave it away, and gutted Netscape's revenue,
Media Player copied from Quicktime,
Microsoft Mouse copied from Xeroc PARC,
Attempted to buy and gut Intuit to replace Money with Quicken but stopped by Justice Department,
bought and gutted Funk & Wagnall's and called it Encarta,
and ripped off every third party utility and gave them away, gutting countless small software developers.
Is this the "research" you're worried about OSS developers copying?
yep, it's true, I can't read minds, so glad to hear it was from someone who knows what they're talking about when they were joking about RPG. Enterprise may have been bigger, but I don't think it was far bigger than the $20 - $25 billion per year in sales transactions that have been handled by our clusters of AS/400's for the last several years. One data warehouse we did required IBM to tweak OS/400 to handle the size of it back in 1998. Almost all this work is done with RPG/400 programs, not ILE RPG, although I wrote a job site web server backend three years ago in ILE RPG in 12,000 lines of code over three months. Ran like a champ, but I think that particular database I/O intensive code would have been just as good in RPG/400.
Passion is another word that has become meaningless due to overuse and abuse by the marketroids and Madison Avenue. When I hear the word passion invoked these days I tune out because I know a sales pitch is coming. "At Staples we're passionate about paper clips!" Please.
It was appropriate as used here concerning one's own software development. Great software is written with passion.
7. Follow Change Control Procedure! Stick to it! Everybody wants you to "just add this bit/indicator/field, it's no big deal". A thousand little changes can kill you. Don't let it happen. There will by crying and gnashing of teeth. Be ready for it. Endure it. It will pass.
Indicator!?!?!? Shriek! Are you still developing in RPG?
Ok, I found what you referring to, but was not parent post for some reason.
Indicator!?!?!? Shriek! Are you still developing in RPG?
I looked at the parent post and didn't see the word indicator, but yes, as a matter of fact, I still program in RPG. Right now on a 16-way 3 TB AS/400, just one of several we have. I process data in files with more than 1 billion records with hundreds of concurrent users and batch jobs banging on the data. Billions of dollars of sales, thousands of stores, hundreds of thousands of items, all being processed by RPG programs. And before this gig, I was cross town at a distributor who's a really big company. Same deal, our RPG programs do the heavy lifting.
By the way, if any of you had accomplished creating an OS like OS/400, you'd be bragging about it day and night. But since you didn't, you'd rather not know about it.
What is "office space"? I've seen it mentioned a fair bit recently here on slashdot... I'm guessing its an American thing? (I'm English)... anyone care to fill me in?
It's the space where your offices are. No, I'm not being sarcastic.:) It might be used as "we need more office space", where office has a type of plural or collective meaning, not just one office or a particular office.
If one office is being referred to, "I need more office space" means "I want a bigger office". At least that is what I imagine PHB's who have offices say to each other...:) btw, I have no idea what the parent post meant when they said mentioning office space here gets you modded up.
I'm in a team re-engineering our company's website. We had done bleeding edge technology (CSS-2, XHTML, etc) to make maintenance easier. The code was valid all across the board. However, in doing so, we left Netscape 4-era browsers in the dust. A lot of our customer base (we're a small town ISP, not exactly in a high-tech area) still uses NS4, and they were unhappy.
This sounds like new technology = Correct and Proper and old technology = Quick and Dirty. I disagree with that, but at least you're one of the few people that gave an explicit example of what you consider Quick and Dirty.
Hopefully you won't see a UNIVAC 1050-II with barrel drum storage and a read head that looks like those earthquake recording pens. That's what the USAF was running Supply on in 1971. If it wasn't down on it's own then we were taking it down for exercises.
You don't really want people that aren't voting to be voting. If they don't care, they'll just vote for some name they recognize, and we wouldn't want that to happen, would we? I don't think the system is broke due to apathy, I seldom run across people who don't have quite a few opinions to share. I'm not even sure the system is broke. Deliberately sabotaged by those who want it to work a different way at times perhaps, but that won't be fixed by people voting for familiar names.
Based on the article, it does not appear to me that there was *any* integration done with university systems. This appears to me to be a web data entry and inquiry system.
You give the contract to the person who is going to give you the most value for money.
This doesn't make any sense in the RFQ world. Given the specs, however generated, the lowest bid to meet the specs is the most value. If the resulting product doesn't work, it doesn't meet the specs. Someone who wins a bid and can't meet the specs within the time frame and money bidded should be penalized on future bids until they've shown what changes they've made to ensure they can perform quality work. I'm sure this is how it works theoretically, and I've read that such determinations are in fact made. The bottom line: the bidding process determines the most value with lowest bid against a set of specs.
If the government is going to depend on this, I would think it would be important to stop the printer problems and problems where one univeristy accidently gains access to another.. Couldn't this cause more problems for national security, and maybe cause a greater terrorist threat?
Concerning "bleeding", I think that one university is gaining access to other students because of screwed up keys on the records. The equivalent here is if we were to look at our/. posts and see other people's posts along with ours. This would be caused by our id overwriting the original id key of the posts or the posts being stored with our id to start with.
Funny that phpBB boards don't have a problem with posts "bleeding" over to appear under another poster's name.
I had always thought that ordering the source code of Win 98 SE and its addins IE 4 and Media Player to be open sourced was the right remedy for M$ using its Windows monopoly to destroy Netscape. That's the time period of when it happened, that's the product they gave away to put a commercial competitor out of business, and that's the fork that the world could choose to go one way or the other. The source code could be used to run all legacy Windows/DOS software in other OS's or on it's own or those who choose to continue on with M$'s new products can choose to do so with M$ unhindered by further restrictions. They would no longer have a monopoly, Win 98 SE would always be a choice, and it's an abandoned product to boot.
This would be an immediate, all source code and make instructions ordered into public domain decree as restitution for their anti-competitive actions. I wrote to the Justice Dept. suggesting this at the time but they did not recommend this to the judge. I think the breakup scenario was exceeded in dubiousness only by the monitoring of a committee decree that ensued, in other words, the worst possible outcome of this trial was obtained, in my opinion. Perhaps second thoughts can be given to my suggestion thanks to the tenaciousness of the Commonwealth and West Virginia, my home state.
The program that our business users most rely on to supplement AS/400 business processing is the spreadsheet. We can bring the desktop into the AS/400 interface even more powerfully by creating a new kind of subfile: the spreadsheet.
So you are saying that you need to "create" a new thing called a spreadsheet because thats what everybody already uses? Perhaps it is YOU that doesn't understand what it means to innovate...
end quote
I am saying we need to create a spreadsheet that works directly against corporate data, not against downloaded data subsets. It's the same functionality that has existed since Visicalc. If M$ can clone a spreadsheet, I think I can talk about using the functionality against online data without getting you in a dither.
The programming efforts I'm talking about have little or nothing to do with M$. In addition, your "selling for 5 years now" shows that you're relatively new to this world. M$ has not introduced a new PC software product since the 80's. They have purchased and relabelled other's work, but it was a product before they relabelled it.
The Gnumeric thread explains well why any effort must have compatability with existing standards for users to migrate their work and know-how, while also extending into new processing capabilities to break new ground. It's an extremely hard line to walk. On the other hand, by definition maintaining compatability means creating something which already exists, and has existed for much more than five years in M$'s case. Office products Word and Excel were written in the 80's.
Although I wasn't referring to Office, concerning your comments of that imply efforts are merely cloning Office, I wrote a few years back in Midrange Computing about how I envision office productivity tools being integrated with online data. That is how I think OSS can take these tools beyond where they are now. Here's an excerpt:
Java programs are as much an island as browsers or emulators are, however. Part of the bold move we must make is to provide a seamless connection to desktop programs while working with the AS/400. The smart Java canvas program needs to have a plug-in that works through the Java Native Interface to enable the exchange of data with office suites such as Microsoft Office and Star Office under Linux. This plug-in should implement Microsoft technologies that provide for real-time data updates between programs and update data directly on the AS/400 as a green-screen entry would. Direct access to AS/400 data through a Java Swing interface using our legacy green-screen processing logic must be made available to the desktop environments of our business users for the AS/400 to provide a competitive advantage.
There is another bold move we must make. The program that our business users most rely on to supplement AS/400 business processing is the spreadsheet. We can bring the desktop into the AS/400 interface even more powerfully by creating a new kind of subfile: the spreadsheet. Existing subfiles could display in Java JTables but the new type of subfile would display in an AS/400 spreadsheet component. Data would display from the AS/400 and process against the AS/400 much like current subfile processing works. Macros and other spreadsheet operations would process against the entire AS/400 file or files. Data integrity would constantly improve, as all changes take place online instead of in offline files on desktops. There is no limit, actually, to how much we can integrate AS/400 data with desktop productivity programs and office suite components through the smart Java visual interface. This is the kind of bold move we must make to maintain relevancy for the future. Thick will beat thin. The users say so.
Slashdot Mirror
A leap of reason? Principles of capitalism say what I build or develop is mine, and belongs to noone else. Principles of communism say what I build or develop belongs to the greater community. Open Source says what I develop belongs to the greater community. I have no problems with open source, but it is communism.
What you develop doesn't belong to everybody, but if one makes a free will decision to collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the world then your code and theirs combined is better than what you can write by yourself. That's like calling barn raisings communism, or neighborhood backyard cookouts communism, or Google communism, or Wal-Mart communism. Joining forces is better than going it alone. It's your choice. You don't have to use it, and you don't have to participate. It's competition, and I'm going to choose which side I'm on. That's free enterprise, not communism.
rd
AMD and the PowerPC give Intel enough competition to keep things healthy as far as hardware goes. Between the two monopolies, Intel and Microsoft I have a lot more respect for Intel, even though I wish competition were hotter sooner.
This is a really good post, well said, but the market couldn't support another CPU maker. AMD, IBM, and Intel are having one hell of a donnybrook that we're all benefitting from, and AMD is just barely able to stay in it as it is. I buy AMD chips to support the cause, and because they're better. But great comments.
rd
I always find this a very disingenuous argument for OSS as it implies MS software cannot be customized when it obviously can. Yes you dont have the source code but the occasions where the OS source is required are few and far between for application developers.
"How much more customizeable can you get than having the source code? What I mean is, if you have the source, you can do *anything* concievable with it. Not just the things that Microsoft predicted you might want to change (even if that does happen to be 99% of it).
Say, what's the fastest way to rename 1,000 files according to some regular expression on your Windows box?"
You completely missed the point. The point is that there is very little desire out there to modify M$ Office software. The customization that is desired is done with VB script, and is actually what drives the usefulness in corporate shops. Until OSS advocates understand what really drives business software development, their constant advocacy of tweaking the infrastructure will be appreciated only by a few others who think that's cool.
rd
(i) $1 trillion debt.
It was nearly that just last year. It is now approaching $7 trillion, as shown by:
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
And yes, the children and grandchildren and great-grandgildren who will have to pay this will not be amused.
rd
I really can't see why many people in the IT field should get $80k+.
The people that make this money generally have the equivalent of two jobs due to the long hours and working from home. And not babysitting working, but tremendous pressure to make things work and keep them working. I've been doing it for 25 years now, and it doesn't get any easier. In fact, the pace is accelerating.
rd
What's H1-B? Thanks...
Honestly don't know...
KoalaBear33
Isn't it easier to type H1-B in Google than it is to post a question and look for answers? Seriously, just wondering...
rd
Operating systems should be free and open. Software should not. This is honest dissent, not a troll so moderators need to find someone else to mod down.
;)
Having Windows controlled by Microsoft instead of the public allows them to wrestle companies to their knees. On the other side, the open source movement has as many innovative ideas as Microsoft which is damn near zero. By creating free software, the open source movement kicks third party companies in the kidneys while Microsoft is efficiently pushing them down already.
If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.
In fact, that might be the ultimate weapon in any potential trade war with Europe.
This is the sharpest insight on the subject I've ever seen. That's why my solution for the M$ monopoly is to have Win 98 SE declared public domain so it can be included in Linux for legal Windows compatability.
rd
"What makes you think open source developers only copy ideas? Part of the article (you read it right?) had to do with cabilities of open source software that are unmatched by anything else.
Good point. However (and this is not a criticism), if anything you have only reinforced the parent posts's major point that:
The commercial, and particularly the retail, software industry is in big trouble from open source software.
As the old going says, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"
What kind of retail software are we talking about? Baby Windows retail software? Retail software encompasses a wide range of very complex activities to program, and companies like JDA and Island Pacific aren't worried about any "free" retail software doing anything complex anytime soon, I'm sure.
In any event, my theory on "free" software is that most of it not paid to be developed by the government indirectly through university grants or not paid for by companies with a larger agenda is that it was a crack at commercial success that didn't work out so if you have it and can't sell it, give it away and maybe grab the market. Worked for M$.
rd
I know there are ecnomical studies in 1970s in America with similar awful predictions for oil and coal reserve worldwide from place to place and yet no one has run out of oil gas coal yet.
Canadian natural gas just went up by 33% because their source is dwindling. They can't supply as much as last year, and they haven't found anything to bring online.
You're leaving a hell of a world for your children, who will not be amused that their parents said we want gasoline cheaper than bottled water, don't worry, it won't run out anytime soon. And in the US, while paying out the yazoo for what's left of oil and natural gas fields, they'll be paying for the $3 trillion national deficit of the '80s and the $3 trillion national deficit of the first few years of the 2000's, while also paying Social Security for their parents who left them in this position. They will most definitely not be amused.
rd
As for the question of IT jobs. The software developing jobs will gradually fade into memory, but there is still a need for having IT skills, and there will continue to be jobs for network admins, data entry and report writers, etc.
I see several of you repeating this, and referring to gluing together things, etc. What in the world do you think is going to replace software development? Everything needed just sitting there and all you need to do is set properties and point at services? Man, what a pipe dream.
rd
The commercial, and particularly the retail, software industry is in big trouble from open source software. As software becomes a commodity, producing it will become less and less valuable to employers. Oddly, it still costs lots of money to create professional, polished consumer software, but the usually weak open source imitations are "good enough" for most people, or will be fairly soon. The real question is what happens when companies stop doing the basic research and innovation that open source developers rely on for ideas to copy?
Research? You mean the kind of research that was done by Xerox PARC and universities that was copied by M$? What "research" did M$ do that you think OSS devlopers are copying?
NT was developed by a DEC VAX developer,
Access was finally made into something that semi works after buying and gutting Foxpro,
Excel was copied from Visicalc,
Word was copied from Xerox Parc (by a former PARCer, Simonyi),
DriveSpace stolen from Stacker,
Visio bought and gutted,
Windows terminals ripped off from Citrix,
Partitioning from buying and gutting Connextix,
Windows from copying Xerox PARC research,
DOS from buying and gutting QDOS and copying CP/M and Unix,
Paint by buying and gutting it from Z-Soft (M$ had absolutely nothing to run on Windows 1.0 and had to get a developer to rewrite a baby version of DOS PC Paintbrush for something to run in Windows),
OS/2 to Windows porting technology ripped off from Micrografx and put them out of business,
Copied BASIC from Dartmouth,
Copied C# from Delphi and Java (by essentially stealing the entire Delphi team from Borland and trying to gut Borland and Delphi),
Powerpoint by buying and gutting a company copying Harvard Graphics, giving it away and putting Software Publishing out of business,
copied the browser, gave it away, and gutted Netscape's revenue,
Media Player copied from Quicktime,
Microsoft Mouse copied from Xeroc PARC,
Attempted to buy and gut Intuit to replace Money with Quicken but stopped by Justice Department,
bought and gutted Funk & Wagnall's and called it Encarta,
and ripped off every third party utility and gave them away, gutting countless small software developers.
Is this the "research" you're worried about OSS developers copying?
rd
yep, it's true, I can't read minds, so glad to hear it was from someone who knows what they're talking about when they were joking about RPG. Enterprise may have been bigger, but I don't think it was far bigger than the $20 - $25 billion per year in sales transactions that have been handled by our clusters of AS/400's for the last several years. One data warehouse we did required IBM to tweak OS/400 to handle the size of it back in 1998. Almost all this work is done with RPG/400 programs, not ILE RPG, although I wrote a job site web server backend three years ago in ILE RPG in 12,000 lines of code over three months. Ran like a champ, but I think that particular database I/O intensive code would have been just as good in RPG/400.
rd
Passion is another word that has become meaningless due to overuse and abuse by the marketroids and Madison Avenue. When I hear the word passion invoked these days I tune out because I know a sales pitch is coming. "At Staples we're passionate about paper clips!" Please.
It was appropriate as used here concerning one's own software development. Great software is written with passion.
rd
7. Follow Change Control Procedure! Stick to it! Everybody wants you to "just add this bit/indicator/field, it's no big deal". A thousand little changes can kill you. Don't let it happen. There will by crying and gnashing of teeth. Be ready for it. Endure it. It will pass.
Indicator!?!?!? Shriek! Are you still developing in RPG?
Ok, I found what you referring to, but was not parent post for some reason.
rd
Indicator!?!?!? Shriek! Are you still developing in RPG?
I looked at the parent post and didn't see the word indicator, but yes, as a matter of fact, I still program in RPG. Right now on a 16-way 3 TB AS/400, just one of several we have. I process data in files with more than 1 billion records with hundreds of concurrent users and batch jobs banging on the data. Billions of dollars of sales, thousands of stores, hundreds of thousands of items, all being processed by RPG programs. And before this gig, I was cross town at a distributor who's a really big company. Same deal, our RPG programs do the heavy lifting.
By the way, if any of you had accomplished creating an OS like OS/400, you'd be bragging about it day and night. But since you didn't, you'd rather not know about it.
rd
Office Space is a movie made by Mike Judge. Think live-action Dilbert, only darker and funnier. I highly recommend it.
thanks, now I know why the references here. I'll look for the movie.
rd
What is "office space"? I've seen it mentioned a fair bit recently here on slashdot... I'm guessing its an American thing? (I'm English)... anyone care to fill me in?
:) It might be used as "we need more office space", where office has a type of plural or collective meaning, not just one office or a particular office.
:) btw, I have no idea what the parent post meant when they said mentioning office space here gets you modded up.
It's the space where your offices are. No, I'm not being sarcastic.
If one office is being referred to, "I need more office space" means "I want a bigger office". At least that is what I imagine PHB's who have offices say to each other...
rd
I'm in a team re-engineering our company's website. We had done bleeding edge technology (CSS-2, XHTML, etc) to make maintenance easier. The code was valid all across the board. However, in doing so, we left Netscape 4-era browsers in the dust. A lot of our customer base (we're a small town ISP, not exactly in a high-tech area) still uses NS4, and they were unhappy.
This sounds like new technology = Correct and Proper and old technology = Quick and Dirty. I disagree with that, but at least you're one of the few people that gave an explicit example of what you consider Quick and Dirty.
rd
Hopefully you won't see a UNIVAC 1050-II with barrel drum storage and a read head that looks like those earthquake recording pens. That's what the USAF was running Supply on in 1971. If it wasn't down on it's own then we were taking it down for exercises.
You don't really want people that aren't voting to be voting. If they don't care, they'll just vote for some name they recognize, and we wouldn't want that to happen, would we? I don't think the system is broke due to apathy, I seldom run across people who don't have quite a few opinions to share. I'm not even sure the system is broke. Deliberately sabotaged by those who want it to work a different way at times perhaps, but that won't be fixed by people voting for familiar names.
rd
Based on the article, it does not appear to me that there was *any* integration done with university systems. This appears to me to be a web data entry and inquiry system.
rd
You give the contract to the person who is going to give you the most value for money.
This doesn't make any sense in the RFQ world. Given the specs, however generated, the lowest bid to meet the specs is the most value. If the resulting product doesn't work, it doesn't meet the specs. Someone who wins a bid and can't meet the specs within the time frame and money bidded should be penalized on future bids until they've shown what changes they've made to ensure they can perform quality work. I'm sure this is how it works theoretically, and I've read that such determinations are in fact made. The bottom line: the bidding process determines the most value with lowest bid against a set of specs.
rd
If the government is going to depend on this, I would think it would be important to stop the printer problems and problems where one univeristy accidently gains access to another.. Couldn't this cause more problems for national security, and maybe cause a greater terrorist threat?
/. posts and see other people's posts along with ours. This would be caused by our id overwriting the original id key of the posts or the posts being stored with our id to start with.
Concerning "bleeding", I think that one university is gaining access to other students because of screwed up keys on the records. The equivalent here is if we were to look at our
Funny that phpBB boards don't have a problem with posts "bleeding" over to appear under another poster's name.
rd
I had always thought that ordering the source code of Win 98 SE and its addins IE 4 and Media Player to be open sourced was the right remedy for M$ using its Windows monopoly to destroy Netscape. That's the time period of when it happened, that's the product they gave away to put a commercial competitor out of business, and that's the fork that the world could choose to go one way or the other. The source code could be used to run all legacy Windows/DOS software in other OS's or on it's own or those who choose to continue on with M$'s new products can choose to do so with M$ unhindered by further restrictions. They would no longer have a monopoly, Win 98 SE would always be a choice, and it's an abandoned product to boot.
This would be an immediate, all source code and make instructions ordered into public domain decree as restitution for their anti-competitive actions. I wrote to the Justice Dept. suggesting this at the time but they did not recommend this to the judge. I think the breakup scenario was exceeded in dubiousness only by the monitoring of a committee decree that ensued, in other words, the worst possible outcome of this trial was obtained, in my opinion. Perhaps second thoughts can be given to my suggestion thanks to the tenaciousness of the Commonwealth and West Virginia, my home state.
rd
nd BTW- what the hell is this supposed to mean:
The program that our business users most rely on to supplement AS/400 business processing is the spreadsheet. We can bring the desktop into the AS/400 interface even more powerfully by creating a new kind of subfile: the spreadsheet.
So you are saying that you need to "create" a new thing called a spreadsheet because thats what everybody already uses? Perhaps it is YOU that doesn't understand what it means to innovate...
end quote
I am saying we need to create a spreadsheet that works directly against corporate data, not against downloaded data subsets. It's the same functionality that has existed since Visicalc. If M$ can clone a spreadsheet, I think I can talk about using the functionality against online data without getting you in a dither.
rd
The programming efforts I'm talking about have little or nothing to do with M$. In addition, your "selling for 5 years now" shows that you're relatively new to this world. M$ has not introduced a new PC software product since the 80's. They have purchased and relabelled other's work, but it was a product before they relabelled it.
The Gnumeric thread explains well why any effort must have compatability with existing standards for users to migrate their work and know-how, while also extending into new processing capabilities to break new ground. It's an extremely hard line to walk. On the other hand, by definition maintaining compatability means creating something which already exists, and has existed for much more than five years in M$'s case. Office products Word and Excel were written in the 80's.
Although I wasn't referring to Office, concerning your comments of that imply efforts are merely cloning Office, I wrote a few years back in Midrange Computing about how I envision office productivity tools being integrated with online data. That is how I think OSS can take these tools beyond where they are now. Here's an excerpt:
Java programs are as much an island as browsers or emulators are, however. Part of the bold move we must make is to provide a seamless connection to desktop programs while working with the AS/400. The smart Java canvas program needs to have a plug-in that works through the Java Native Interface to enable the exchange of data with office suites such as Microsoft Office and Star Office under Linux. This plug-in should implement Microsoft technologies that provide for real-time data updates between programs and update data directly on the AS/400 as a green-screen entry would. Direct access to AS/400 data through a Java Swing interface using our legacy green-screen processing logic must be made available to the desktop environments of our business users for the AS/400 to provide a competitive advantage.
There is another bold move we must make. The program that our business users most rely on to supplement AS/400 business processing is the spreadsheet. We can bring the desktop into the AS/400 interface even more powerfully by creating a new kind of subfile: the spreadsheet. Existing subfiles could display in Java JTables but the new type of subfile would display in an AS/400 spreadsheet component. Data would display from the AS/400 and process against the AS/400 much like current subfile processing works. Macros and other spreadsheet operations would process against the entire AS/400 file or files. Data integrity would constantly improve, as all changes take place online instead of in offline files on desktops. There is no limit, actually, to how much we can integrate AS/400 data with desktop productivity programs and office suite components through the smart Java visual interface. This is the kind of bold move we must make to maintain relevancy for the future. Thick will beat thin. The users say so.
rd