The guy writing bingo software is out there to make money. You can't blame him for that. If you are selling any kind of software, it would probably be crazy to target customers that can't afford to pay $25.
Teachers don't exactly have expense accounts, and don't get paid well-enough to be expected to pay out of pocket...
Teachers don't make bad money where I live. In fact, I'd say their wages are in the same ballpark as general IT staff at my university and the IT staff works year round. $25 is not killer by any stretch, and I've known public hs teachers with much larger budgets than $50/year.
but teachers are a time-poor lot who don't usually have time for such endeavors.
I know a few teachers, and I've heard that they can be very very busy, especially their first few years teaching. However, I always find these arguments border line offensive because there's an unspoken philosophy here that says, "My time is too valuable to be spent on this, but you other people could do it." Besides, cough, cough, don't a lot of teachers have the summer off?
it will become completely impossible for any fully independent developer to compete against the collosal pyramid of software resources being constructed by the FOSS movement.
Most of the open source libraries I use are bsd licensed or lgpl or something comparable. On the other hand, I use plenty of gpl applications. I suspect this is the natural order of things. If you gpl an application, you don't cripple/restrict people who want to use the application. If you gpl a library, you do, and it can be every bit as annoying as downloading a shareware program and finding half the features have been disabled.
Look at it this way. If you write a gpl application, everyone can use it as much as they want and with a few exceptions, no one has a reason to write a non-gpl version. However, with a library, if it is something useful, there are hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people out there who would benefit from a version with a less restrictive license like lgpl therefore people will be motivated to make one.
Anyways, I don't think the gpl library resources will grow faster than other open source licenses that are compatible with closed source development.
The article discusses this and his conclusion is that there are times to cripple it by features and times to cripple it by a time limit. I think if you have a product that people need for a specific task in the short term but not necessarily in the long run, then it makes more sense to feature cripple it. For example, consider data recovery programs. Almost all of them feature cripple the software so you can see which documents you may be able to recover but you can't actually recover the document until you buy the full version. If they offered fully functional trial versions, I doubt they'd get nearly as many sales.
That's funny, I thought Homeland Insecurity cut all the funding for Port Security.
They did. That's why, as the great grandparent indicates, we now have to very carefully pick and choose which ports to block. In the old days, we blocked all ports by default and only allowed unmonitored traffic on a select few. Now, without Homeland Security subsidies, no one has the resources to police thousands of ports on even one pc. Now imagine you're a small organization with 50-60 pcs and you could be dealing with well over a hundred thousand ports! It's a rediculously untennable situation and a testament to our nation's blatant disregard for security.
These ports have to do with things like name resolution, network file sharing, remote execution, and stuff. I don't really know all the details. While linux can talk samba with windows, it is more a windows to windows kind of thing. Read this for some more info. What port 445 does
One should probably never have 139 and 445 exposed directly to the internet, one should probably only have them exposed beyond an individual workstation if that workstation is part of a realish network (eg, three pcs that never talk to each other plugged into the same linksys router wouldn't count). When in doubt, block it and see what happens.
I'm a system administrator at a large university. Apparently Microsoft actually contacted a few people around the university urging them to patch up. This shocked a few people because apparently we don't normally get that kind of communication from them here. It went around our listserv yesterday. So anyways, it seems like Microsoft might think it's an unusually big deal too.
he he, I thought that conclusion was out there to be drawn. I'm sure some law makers would think a few thousand mile electric fence would be too cheap and enviro-friendly so I'd recommend we tap the alaskan oil reserves, ship the oil to the mexican border (perhaps this can be done economically by pouring it into rivers that flow south), and then use it to fuel a 24x7 wall of fire along the mexican border.
Of course this won't stop the determined, and noone knows when the studios will figure that that is noway to stop the determined.
I think they figured this out a long time ago which is why they go for things like this now. I think they know that the common people (and everyone else) don't understand copyright. And that, if a person sees how easy it is to do something like copy a cd, they think it's not that bad a thing to do. So in response, they add drm and copy protection technology... and they make me watch all these infuriating piracy is theft commercials on my legal dvd rentals.
Think of it this way. If you've got a 10 mile border to guard, putting up one or two no tresspassing signs is kind of like relying on copyright law to protect the border. Some people probably don't even know their not supposed to tresspass, others might know but won't care because it's so easy. Meanwhile, DRM is kind of the equivalent of putting up a big eye sore electric fence guarded by loud obnoxious barking guard dogs. The electric fence and dogs will not stop the determined, but it will prevent average joe from hopping over to your land to pick apples or go hiking. Also, tresspassing somewhere with an electric fence and guard dogs brings to mind stiffer penalties than tresspassing somewhere with one or two no tresspassing signs.
Point taken, but stools are not really comfortable. There may be a few comfortable, expensive stools out there, but in general, it's hard to find something anywhere near as nice as a nice office chair for a reasonable price.
I experimented with this at home. Most of the time, it worked well, especially for things like programming. But there would invariably be times when I'd want to sit down. For example, I'd usually rather sit when idly surfing the net, playing a game, or watching a movie on the computer. Sometimes I'd just be a little tired and would prefer to sit. So the problem ended up being that I could only easily have one configuration and standing was too uncomfortable for my general usage pattern. It might have worked better at work, but even doing all work, there would be times when I'd rather sit... after a lunch of mexican food, after having run around the office all day, when trying to clear my head.
An easily convertible station would be very cool.
I think before you can make a coherent argument, you need a rough idea of what a change entails. For example, it's possible the university has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development into some kind of large system of which travel is a part and that this system is inherently incompatible with non IE browsers (cough - peoplesoft - cough). If this is the case, you can probably spend the rest of your life writing letters and never get anything to show for it.
Dual monitor support is much harder to configure in linux than in windows. It generally involves editing a flat file by hand, and introducing an error in that file generally leaves you stuck at a command line without a GUI. Dual monitor configuration in linux is the kind of thing sys admins can't figure out without spending way too much time. Meanwhile, dual monitor configuration in windows is easy enough for an average user to figure it out. Windows may have fewer options, but it's far more usable.
Want to run multiple cards for multiple monitors, all different manufacturers?
I've done three monitors in windows and I believe they were all running on different video cards. It worked fine. That said, I found three monitors was excessive and the fact that I had to swivel my head and would occassionally forget which monitor I left something on made me go back to two monitors.
It's nice that linux can have a zillion task bars or arrange monitors in any configuration if you really know what you are doing, but most people who want multiple displays just want dual displays and there is something to be said for making the 98% common case easy and idiot proof.
Me too with respect to those books. I read them in graduate studies and found them both helpful. They are both very easy reads. In addition, anyone technical doing web design would benefit from a basic study of print design topics... how to align things, set up good contrast, using proper fonts and all that.
Software development is hard because at its core it's as much about design and invention as it is about implementation. Implementation, in the general sense of the word, is often fairly easy. You have a plan, possibly a well known and understood plan, you can track progress, things are more predictable. With design and invention, you are often in unexplored territory so it's hard to tell where your next steps should take you and it's hard to track the progress you've made to date. What makes software development even harder, is often that the customers don't actually know what they want nor can they really be expected to know what they want. Problems are often not well understood.
One analogy that I've always liked is to look at software development as a mapping problem. When you start, you're pretty much dropped in the middle of nowhere without much understanding of the surrounding terrain. You then have to go exploring the area around, get an understanding of the feature space. Maybe the best approach is to climb a mountain or a hill, implement or design a major well understood component, and see what you can see about the area around you from that peak. You make little scribbles and notes on your makeshift map outlining what you've seen from the top of your mountain. Later, you climb a different mountain and all of a suddent everything looks completely different from the new perspective and you realize large parts of your old scribbled map are wrong. Maybe walking in between mountains one day you discover a large impassable ravine that was masked from above by foliage. Your in unexplored territory and there can be lots of surprises and setbacks.
Only, I think this kind of mapping analogy really falls short because it only takes into account a single perspective, that of the developer, and it assumes there is some well defined terrain that just needs to be discovered. In reality, the terrain being explored is much more mercurial. Much of it is visible only through the inconsistant and confused descriptions of customers or other developers. It's quite possible that the mountain you climbed yesterday, and the things you saw from the top, will not exist tomorrow.
Anyways, that's the best I've got at the moment. It probably doesn't make much sense, but then, what does?
Actually, I heard the dogs were only able to detect movies such as Hulk and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as these had particularly strong odors. Indeed, I would not be surprised to discover if many of the movies released today have been specifically engineered for this attribute just to make it easier for dogs to detect them.
because you release code in an untested state, what you are doing is not "engineering." Imagine if a civil engineer built a bridge and tested it by having the public drive over it.
Whether or not it makes sense to release code in an untested state depends on the results and risks of doing so. It also probably depends on the relative costs of doing tests as well. If the worst that happens is someone has to redo an hour's work, but it would take 3 months to set up proper testing, then someone who insists on proper testing is more bureaucrat than engineer. These are perhaps extreme examples, but the point is if someone releases code in an untested state, that does not imo disqualify them from engineer status if for no other reason than because sometimes production is the most sensible test environment given the nature of the work and whatever restrictions exist in a work environment.
They're betting on consumers feeling some sort of empathy for the smaller company standing up to the industry giant.
It actually had the opposite effect on me. I've been thinking about cancelling my netflix subscription for a while as I horribly underuse it... and I hate patent suits. But then, I imagine most of the general populace would see it as david vs goliath.
since the students pay the professor's salary, the professor should be forced to give them A's?
One thing that mitigates this, is that students don't pay the professor to teach them, rather they pay the university for things like education, opportunity, and certification of achievement. If everyone got A's, a university degree might actually be less valuable to students... or perhaps more likely... people would start using better metrics.
whoa... I like the acceleration/deccerlation features of the menu. God forbid clickable menu options be stationary. It reminds me of that scene from Airplane where one guy says, "shouldn't we turn on the landing lights?" And Rex Cramer gets this conspiratorial look and says, "No! That's just what they'd be expecting us to do!"
Sometimes too good when it auto-pages me all hours
Ah, and one thing to mention too is that with nagios it is fairly easy to set or unset monitoring windows. Since most of our stuff is not super critical, we turn off nagios warnings between 1am and 6am. If a system goes down then and is still down when 6:00am rolls around, then we start get emails or pages and we still have an hour before our more crazy users start rolling in.
We also segregate machines and alerts by importance. Domain controller and mail server generate pages, pretty much everything else is email based (which is fast enough for our purposes and habits).
We're a similarly small IT department and have fiddled with a variety of software for things like patch installation, system audits, helpdesk, documentation, and availability monitoring. The only piece of software which I'd say has been a sure fire winner is Nagios, which we use for monitoring server availability. It was "fun" to set up, but it's worked nearly flawlessly for many moons without any hand holding on our part... and to me... in a small IT shop, this is probably the number one requirement. I'm not even sure if the nagios system still has a keyboard/mouse/display attached to it.
1.8 man IT department here. We tried a wiki a few times for internal it documentation and pretty much gave up because it was more of a hassle than just maintaining a few word documents. I think a wiki would have been a better idea if we had more people generating documentation... but with a very few reader/writers, it was overkill and less friendly than alternatives.
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The guy writing bingo software is out there to make money. You can't blame him for that. If you are selling any kind of software, it would probably be crazy to target customers that can't afford to pay $25.
Teachers don't exactly have expense accounts, and don't get paid well-enough to be expected to pay out of pocket...
Teachers don't make bad money where I live. In fact, I'd say their wages are in the same ballpark as general IT staff at my university and the IT staff works year round. $25 is not killer by any stretch, and I've known public hs teachers with much larger budgets than $50/year.
but teachers are a time-poor lot who don't usually have time for such endeavors.
I know a few teachers, and I've heard that they can be very very busy, especially their first few years teaching. However, I always find these arguments border line offensive because there's an unspoken philosophy here that says, "My time is too valuable to be spent on this, but you other people could do it." Besides, cough, cough, don't a lot of teachers have the summer off?
it will become completely impossible for any fully independent developer to compete against the collosal pyramid of software resources being constructed by the FOSS movement.
Most of the open source libraries I use are bsd licensed or lgpl or something comparable. On the other hand, I use plenty of gpl applications. I suspect this is the natural order of things. If you gpl an application, you don't cripple/restrict people who want to use the application. If you gpl a library, you do, and it can be every bit as annoying as downloading a shareware program and finding half the features have been disabled.
Look at it this way. If you write a gpl application, everyone can use it as much as they want and with a few exceptions, no one has a reason to write a non-gpl version. However, with a library, if it is something useful, there are hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people out there who would benefit from a version with a less restrictive license like lgpl therefore people will be motivated to make one.
Anyways, I don't think the gpl library resources will grow faster than other open source licenses that are compatible with closed source development.
The article discusses this and his conclusion is that there are times to cripple it by features and times to cripple it by a time limit. I think if you have a product that people need for a specific task in the short term but not necessarily in the long run, then it makes more sense to feature cripple it. For example, consider data recovery programs. Almost all of them feature cripple the software so you can see which documents you may be able to recover but you can't actually recover the document until you buy the full version. If they offered fully functional trial versions, I doubt they'd get nearly as many sales.
That's funny, I thought Homeland Insecurity cut all the funding for Port Security.
They did. That's why, as the great grandparent indicates, we now have to very carefully pick and choose which ports to block. In the old days, we blocked all ports by default and only allowed unmonitored traffic on a select few. Now, without Homeland Security subsidies, no one has the resources to police thousands of ports on even one pc. Now imagine you're a small organization with 50-60 pcs and you could be dealing with well over a hundred thousand ports! It's a rediculously untennable situation and a testament to our nation's blatant disregard for security.
These ports have to do with things like name resolution, network file sharing, remote execution, and stuff. I don't really know all the details. While linux can talk samba with windows, it is more a windows to windows kind of thing. Read this for some more info. What port 445 does
One should probably never have 139 and 445 exposed directly to the internet, one should probably only have them exposed beyond an individual workstation if that workstation is part of a realish network (eg, three pcs that never talk to each other plugged into the same linksys router wouldn't count). When in doubt, block it and see what happens.
I'm a system administrator at a large university. Apparently Microsoft actually contacted a few people around the university urging them to patch up. This shocked a few people because apparently we don't normally get that kind of communication from them here. It went around our listserv yesterday. So anyways, it seems like Microsoft might think it's an unusually big deal too.
That was always my hunch too. Put another way...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
he he, I thought that conclusion was out there to be drawn. I'm sure some law makers would think a few thousand mile electric fence would be too cheap and enviro-friendly so I'd recommend we tap the alaskan oil reserves, ship the oil to the mexican border (perhaps this can be done economically by pouring it into rivers that flow south), and then use it to fuel a 24x7 wall of fire along the mexican border.
Of course this won't stop the determined, and noone knows when the studios will figure that that is noway to stop the determined.
I think they figured this out a long time ago which is why they go for things like this now. I think they know that the common people (and everyone else) don't understand copyright. And that, if a person sees how easy it is to do something like copy a cd, they think it's not that bad a thing to do. So in response, they add drm and copy protection technology... and they make me watch all these infuriating piracy is theft commercials on my legal dvd rentals.
Think of it this way. If you've got a 10 mile border to guard, putting up one or two no tresspassing signs is kind of like relying on copyright law to protect the border. Some people probably don't even know their not supposed to tresspass, others might know but won't care because it's so easy. Meanwhile, DRM is kind of the equivalent of putting up a big eye sore electric fence guarded by loud obnoxious barking guard dogs. The electric fence and dogs will not stop the determined, but it will prevent average joe from hopping over to your land to pick apples or go hiking. Also, tresspassing somewhere with an electric fence and guard dogs brings to mind stiffer penalties than tresspassing somewhere with one or two no tresspassing signs.
Point taken, but stools are not really comfortable. There may be a few comfortable, expensive stools out there, but in general, it's hard to find something anywhere near as nice as a nice office chair for a reasonable price.
I experimented with this at home. Most of the time, it worked well, especially for things like programming. But there would invariably be times when I'd want to sit down. For example, I'd usually rather sit when idly surfing the net, playing a game, or watching a movie on the computer. Sometimes I'd just be a little tired and would prefer to sit. So the problem ended up being that I could only easily have one configuration and standing was too uncomfortable for my general usage pattern. It might have worked better at work, but even doing all work, there would be times when I'd rather sit... after a lunch of mexican food, after having run around the office all day, when trying to clear my head. An easily convertible station would be very cool.
I think before you can make a coherent argument, you need a rough idea of what a change entails. For example, it's possible the university has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development into some kind of large system of which travel is a part and that this system is inherently incompatible with non IE browsers (cough - peoplesoft - cough). If this is the case, you can probably spend the rest of your life writing letters and never get anything to show for it.
Oh whatever. Just be glad your parents didn't name you Darth Burrito.
Dual monitor support is much harder to configure in linux than in windows. It generally involves editing a flat file by hand, and introducing an error in that file generally leaves you stuck at a command line without a GUI. Dual monitor configuration in linux is the kind of thing sys admins can't figure out without spending way too much time. Meanwhile, dual monitor configuration in windows is easy enough for an average user to figure it out. Windows may have fewer options, but it's far more usable.
Want to run multiple cards for multiple monitors, all different manufacturers?
I've done three monitors in windows and I believe they were all running on different video cards. It worked fine. That said, I found three monitors was excessive and the fact that I had to swivel my head and would occassionally forget which monitor I left something on made me go back to two monitors.
It's nice that linux can have a zillion task bars or arrange monitors in any configuration if you really know what you are doing, but most people who want multiple displays just want dual displays and there is something to be said for making the 98% common case easy and idiot proof.
Me too with respect to those books. I read them in graduate studies and found them both helpful. They are both very easy reads. In addition, anyone technical doing web design would benefit from a basic study of print design topics... how to align things, set up good contrast, using proper fonts and all that.
Software development is hard because at its core it's as much about design and invention as it is about implementation. Implementation, in the general sense of the word, is often fairly easy. You have a plan, possibly a well known and understood plan, you can track progress, things are more predictable. With design and invention, you are often in unexplored territory so it's hard to tell where your next steps should take you and it's hard to track the progress you've made to date. What makes software development even harder, is often that the customers don't actually know what they want nor can they really be expected to know what they want. Problems are often not well understood.
One analogy that I've always liked is to look at software development as a mapping problem. When you start, you're pretty much dropped in the middle of nowhere without much understanding of the surrounding terrain. You then have to go exploring the area around, get an understanding of the feature space. Maybe the best approach is to climb a mountain or a hill, implement or design a major well understood component, and see what you can see about the area around you from that peak. You make little scribbles and notes on your makeshift map outlining what you've seen from the top of your mountain. Later, you climb a different mountain and all of a suddent everything looks completely different from the new perspective and you realize large parts of your old scribbled map are wrong. Maybe walking in between mountains one day you discover a large impassable ravine that was masked from above by foliage. Your in unexplored territory and there can be lots of surprises and setbacks.
Only, I think this kind of mapping analogy really falls short because it only takes into account a single perspective, that of the developer, and it assumes there is some well defined terrain that just needs to be discovered. In reality, the terrain being explored is much more mercurial. Much of it is visible only through the inconsistant and confused descriptions of customers or other developers. It's quite possible that the mountain you climbed yesterday, and the things you saw from the top, will not exist tomorrow.
Anyways, that's the best I've got at the moment. It probably doesn't make much sense, but then, what does?
Actually, I heard the dogs were only able to detect movies such as Hulk and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as these had particularly strong odors. Indeed, I would not be surprised to discover if many of the movies released today have been specifically engineered for this attribute just to make it easier for dogs to detect them.
not murder all of us or make us into batteries
This just struck me as funny. A typical machine would interpret this condition as satisfied if either of the following two conditions were met:
1) Not all humans were murdered.
2) Humans were made into batteries (negation has higher precendence than -or- operations).
because you release code in an untested state, what you are doing is not "engineering." Imagine if a civil engineer built a bridge and tested it by having the public drive over it.
Whether or not it makes sense to release code in an untested state depends on the results and risks of doing so. It also probably depends on the relative costs of doing tests as well. If the worst that happens is someone has to redo an hour's work, but it would take 3 months to set up proper testing, then someone who insists on proper testing is more bureaucrat than engineer. These are perhaps extreme examples, but the point is if someone releases code in an untested state, that does not imo disqualify them from engineer status if for no other reason than because sometimes production is the most sensible test environment given the nature of the work and whatever restrictions exist in a work environment.
They're betting on consumers feeling some sort of empathy for the smaller company standing up to the industry giant.
It actually had the opposite effect on me. I've been thinking about cancelling my netflix subscription for a while as I horribly underuse it... and I hate patent suits. But then, I imagine most of the general populace would see it as david vs goliath.
since the students pay the professor's salary, the professor should be forced to give them A's?
One thing that mitigates this, is that students don't pay the professor to teach them, rather they pay the university for things like education, opportunity, and certification of achievement. If everyone got A's, a university degree might actually be less valuable to students... or perhaps more likely... people would start using better metrics.
whoa... I like the acceleration/deccerlation features of the menu. God forbid clickable menu options be stationary. It reminds me of that scene from Airplane where one guy says, "shouldn't we turn on the landing lights?" And Rex Cramer gets this conspiratorial look and says, "No! That's just what they'd be expecting us to do!"
Sometimes too good when it auto-pages me all hours
Ah, and one thing to mention too is that with nagios it is fairly easy to set or unset monitoring windows. Since most of our stuff is not super critical, we turn off nagios warnings between 1am and 6am. If a system goes down then and is still down when 6:00am rolls around, then we start get emails or pages and we still have an hour before our more crazy users start rolling in.
We also segregate machines and alerts by importance. Domain controller and mail server generate pages, pretty much everything else is email based (which is fast enough for our purposes and habits).
We're a similarly small IT department and have fiddled with a variety of software for things like patch installation, system audits, helpdesk, documentation, and availability monitoring. The only piece of software which I'd say has been a sure fire winner is Nagios, which we use for monitoring server availability. It was "fun" to set up, but it's worked nearly flawlessly for many moons without any hand holding on our part... and to me... in a small IT shop, this is probably the number one requirement. I'm not even sure if the nagios system still has a keyboard/mouse/display attached to it.
1.8 man IT department here. We tried a wiki a few times for internal it documentation and pretty much gave up because it was more of a hassle than just maintaining a few word documents. I think a wiki would have been a better idea if we had more people generating documentation... but with a very few reader/writers, it was overkill and less friendly than alternatives.