Its absolutely true that companies often can only justify going with OSS because there's a service company to support the product (and anyone who thinks that OSS just works and doesn't need fixes obviously hasn't realised that these service companies make money).
The JBoss group wll be OK, hire a few more developers, pay them less, get them trained, no difference from yesterday. Sure, the developers who left think that because they know the code they're indispensible, and it'll 'hit them hard', but the reality is often just the opposite.
I think that the breakaway group will find it difficult to get going, especially as the JBoss group has an established track record, for business people that's number 1 on the checklist. techies come way down that list.
we were a middling sized company - about 400 people. The CTO was supposed to do CTO type stuff, but he preferred to tinker with the code - we had to make the new product perform better, and for him, that meant the opportunity to fiddle with very low level OS features.
The company is called AIT - listed on LSE, it all collapsed when the directors were caught effectively fiddling the accounts.
Dear Mr Bush.
thank you for disseminating the binaries to the missle guidance software to me via the onboard computer in the handily packaged LBU100 bomb which was delivered by US Military couriers today.
I find, however, that you neglected to include the software to this device, especially the arming and control routines.
Please deliver to me, within a reasonable time, said software as you are obliged to under the terms of the GPL, and I shall ensure that the delivery package is returned as soon as possible.
I don't know about 1) but my last company, we had a bug, and a nice support contract with MS, this bug turned into something pretty major for us, and MS stepped in and had developers working 9-5 to find and fix it.
Apparently if the bug hadn't been fixed in a week, it'd have been escalted into a 'class A' bug and Ballmer or Gates would have been informed, and the developers would have started working round the clock.
(it turns out our CTOs code was at fault, the duffer).
I was surprised at the response from MS though. I think we had paid a fair bit to MS for the support, though knowing the guys in charge they persuaded MS that it was a strategic relationship and subject to a special discount.
Oh, we also had a MS employee assigned to us as a support contact - not just a secretary-type either, someone who knew his stuff and could actually do things for us, including helping us with the MS performance lab we got to use.
it has little to do with MS though. if another department's beauracracy decided that the custom windows apps had to be rewritten for OSS-only software, this story could be retold. (though not on/., obviously). The pain the poster went through is the kind of thing everyone gets to go through with big, inflexible, strategic-decisions made-from-afar organisations.
It is up to the project managers to make a product that delivers; forget about NSTISS or the GPL.
What are you on about. Did you stop for just a second to think about what you just wrote? Forget the GPL indeed!
I can see it now... "hi. yes, I'd like the source code for those precision guided bombs thanks. oh, but I understand a programmer used a GPL numeric class in the code. So that makes the entire codebase GPL, which if you read the licence...... post it on sourceforge will do fine thanks."
I could say that java is percieved as an all-pervasive language that will fulfill everyone's needs forever, but I don't really know.
What did happen is that many unis needed to move away from procedural Pascal programming to OOP, when they cast around looking, Java seemed to fit the bill, or was hyped up at the time.
I'd prefer them to teach Oberon, use C++ nowadays. ho hum, instead we'll just have to keep giving the 'hotshot' kids the oldest, legacy programs to maintain:-)
Not only should universities be teaching students *about* programming, including techniques and best practices, they should never, ever give the students anything they can take to the workplace thinking better than the employees.
Too many students come out of CS courses thinking Java is the only progamming language, and have difficulty moving to whatever the company uses (because they know how to do something in Java, they dont understand the technique - they only know the practise), but also come with a less than flexible mind-set.
Sometimes its no wonder companies prefer grads who don't have a CS degree.
"Hey, why waste time on those sanity checks, let's use gets(), the security monkeys will clean it up anyway!"... and then publish your name as producing the worst, security-poor code in the company and everyone can laugh at you, and the bosses can cancel your bonus.
not necessarily - 'cleaning the code' IMHO means going though looking for bits written by less-competant programmers, or written in a hurry to meet the deadline, or just hacked as no-one thought it'd be shipped as product.
I'm sure using a contactless credit card will be exactly liek you use the swipe card at the moment - only the reader will be a different shape.
I used to have credit-card shaped contactless door pass at a previous company. Only they were binned in the end as having too great a failure rate - people would put them in their wallets in their back pockets and they'd (the internal aerial) get slightly bent and stop working. In the end we changed to teardrop-shaped versions which worked very well and made an excellent keyring. (which raises an interesting idea - concept credit cards - strange shapes made into jewelry, watches, pens...)
I think the same problems with the form will happen here, unless technology has improved.
Oh, and the worry about criminals 'swiping' your card - forget it, these door passes had to be slapped against the reader even though they were technically contactless, the range was truly pathetic.
bear in mind his argument isn't about standards really - more an apology for Sun not releasing Java to a standards body. That way Sun can keep on deprecating chunks of it as it pleases, and at the same time, criticise anyone who thinks Java should be standardised as stifling innovation (where have I heard that line before?) and generally being a bit dim.
He can argue against design by committee - but I doubt that Java is going to evolve by 1 engineer adding something cool to it. There's going to be discussion from managers, top bosses at Sun will be involved, the JCP will be consulted etc.. and if all those interested parties don't look like a committee, I don't know what is.
C++ is doing OK. As is C. As are all the Web technologies I can think of. All those people involved in them can't be wrong, so just perhaps its Jim who's wrong here.
No, I remember this (from the UK press). I thought it was completely wacko for the people to vote one way, only for the government to effectively say 'thats not how you were supposed to vote, lets try again until you get it right'.
I suppose electronic voting could make this process easier.
Please check option a or b, and every time you press b a dialog pops up 'invalid entry, please choose another option'.
Its never that easy just to fix things - quite often one man's fix is another man's bug. Consider the security feature in Outlook - yes you can receive.exes securely but only by being unable to run them...
MS Research is doing its bit to make things better for you though - check some of the projects on the go, lke Penny Black (costed email processing to beat spammers), as well as more mainstream research:
Perhaps he's exaggerating, but who cares! ah yes, those nice folks at the IRS. Perhaps one of you good US citizens would like to mention to a tax official that you suspect this chap of evading some taxes - after all, 1% of 180m/day is 1.8million responses. Even if 1% of those are sales and he earns 1% commission (of $20?), he should be earning $3600 per day. Surely he'll be paying tax on all of that.
To a computer base 12 or base 20 is just as stupid a numbering system as base 10. If ease of programming is a consideration, we should have all our currency moved to 1024 cents in the dollar.
As for shillings and farthings - ask your granddad - he'll be able to do quite complex maths in his head. Ask him how much a bag of chips cost, and how much change he'd get from a thruppeny bit. He'll answer you far quicker than you would if I asked for change for £2.85 from a £5:-)
my comments... err.. lock them up and throw away the key?
However, if you read the article, you'll note a couple of things.. 1. The girl was accidently shot dead as she held the gun on the offender, which is why the judge called it an accident. 2. The article never said what the youth was originally convicted of - tagging orders are not usually given for even slightly serious crimes. 3. The shooting happened an hour before the curfew came into effect.
No doubt people reading the headlines will assume that tagging is a poor means of sentencing, but in these cases, a lot of criminals convicted of lesser offences will simply get suspended or community sentences - ie. back on the street with little supervision, or a lot of time on their own anyway.
The simplest use would be for people ordered not to go near some places (paedophiles near schools, stalkers near victims etc). In the case of the paedophiles, such orders are for life - an implant would be perfect in such a case.
I don't have a problem with convicted criminals being implanted, and their movements tracked for a certain amount of time, it'll reduce the prison populations and, hopefully, ensure convicts don't commit more crimes because theyd be found out easier. Deterring crime is far better than punishing the wrongdoer after the event.
I just read the article, that's what the guy said. I doubt if they're doing it on a whim - I do not know why June 13th is such a magic date, but it suggested there was something in the licence terms/lifetime that allowed for this to happen.
Oh I think SCO has a bright future ahead of them - consider this quote:
We have the ability to withdraw or pull the AIX license on June 13, which should cause IBM to expedite this issue as well.
What does that mean? It means they brought the case so IBM would settle out of court beofre that date. Much wonga for SCO for doing nothing. They don't have to show the source code, they don't have t prove anything, IBM will cave in rather than lose the ability to sell AIX. The only problem is that doing this may leave the doors open for SCO to say 'see, we were right', and then sue whichever other Linux distributor they like.
yeah, opensource is the logical choice if all you're doing is attempting to get software for free.. except that the city will hire IBM (or simlar) to consult them as to which software to use, and implement it, and maintain it.....
free software? nothing's ever free. This will prevent them from just buying more of whatever they've currently got, which is always cheaper than buying new stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Its absolutely true that companies often can only justify going with OSS because there's a service company to support the product (and anyone who thinks that OSS just works and doesn't need fixes obviously hasn't realised that these service companies make money).
The JBoss group wll be OK, hire a few more developers, pay them less, get them trained, no difference from yesterday. Sure, the developers who left think that because they know the code they're indispensible, and it'll 'hit them hard', but the reality is often just the opposite.
I think that the breakaway group will find it difficult to get going, especially as the JBoss group has an established track record, for business people that's number 1 on the checklist. techies come way down that list.
we were a middling sized company - about 400 people. The CTO was supposed to do CTO type stuff, but he preferred to tinker with the code - we had to make the new product perform better, and for him, that meant the opportunity to fiddle with very low level OS features.
The company is called AIT - listed on LSE, it all collapsed when the directors were caught effectively fiddling the accounts.
Dear Mr Bush.
:-)
thank you for disseminating the binaries to the missle guidance software to me via the onboard computer in the handily packaged LBU100 bomb which was delivered by US Military couriers today.
I find, however, that you neglected to include the software to this device, especially the arming and control routines.
Please deliver to me, within a reasonable time, said software as you are obliged to under the terms of the GPL, and I shall ensure that the delivery package is returned as soon as possible.
yours Sincerely.
O bin Laden (Mr.)
I don't know about 1) but my last company, we had a bug, and a nice support contract with MS, this bug turned into something pretty major for us, and MS stepped in and had developers working 9-5 to find and fix it.
Apparently if the bug hadn't been fixed in a week, it'd have been escalted into a 'class A' bug and Ballmer or Gates would have been informed, and the developers would have started working round the clock.
(it turns out our CTOs code was at fault, the duffer).
I was surprised at the response from MS though. I think we had paid a fair bit to MS for the support, though knowing the guys in charge they persuaded MS that it was a strategic relationship and subject to a special discount.
Oh, we also had a MS employee assigned to us as a support contact - not just a secretary-type either, someone who knew his stuff and could actually do things for us, including helping us with the MS performance lab we got to use.
it has little to do with MS though. if another department's beauracracy decided that the custom windows apps had to be rewritten for OSS-only software, this story could be retold. (though not on /., obviously).
The pain the poster went through is the kind of thing everyone gets to go through with big, inflexible, strategic-decisions made-from-afar organisations.
What are you on about. Did you stop for just a second to think about what you just wrote? Forget the GPL indeed!
I can see it now... "hi. yes, I'd like the source code for those precision guided bombs thanks. oh, but I understand a programmer used a GPL numeric class in the code. So that makes the entire codebase GPL, which if you read the licence...... post it on sourceforge will do fine thanks."
I could say that java is percieved as an all-pervasive language that will fulfill everyone's needs forever, but I don't really know.
:-)
What did happen is that many unis needed to move away from procedural Pascal programming to OOP, when they cast around looking, Java seemed to fit the bill, or was hyped up at the time.
I'd prefer them to teach Oberon, use C++ nowadays. ho hum, instead we'll just have to keep giving the 'hotshot' kids the oldest, legacy programs to maintain
yay. I second that totally.
Not only should universities be teaching students *about* programming, including techniques and best practices, they should never, ever give the students anything they can take to the workplace thinking better than the employees.
Too many students come out of CS courses thinking Java is the only progamming language, and have difficulty moving to whatever the company uses (because they know how to do something in Java, they dont understand the technique - they only know the practise), but also come with a less than flexible mind-set.
Sometimes its no wonder companies prefer grads who don't have a CS degree.
"Hey, why waste time on those sanity checks, let's use gets(), the security monkeys will clean it up anyway!" ... and then publish your name as producing the worst, security-poor code in the company and everyone can laugh at you, and the bosses can cancel your bonus.
not necessarily - 'cleaning the code' IMHO means going though looking for bits written by less-competant programmers, or written in a hurry to meet the deadline, or just hacked as no-one thought it'd be shipped as product.
I can - the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.
t m) :-o
err. except that I make it 70,892,159,775,195,513 IP addresses per grain. bummer.
(from http://www.mscd.edu/~physics/astro/grainsofsand.h
I'm sure using a contactless credit card will be exactly liek you use the swipe card at the moment - only the reader will be a different shape.
I used to have credit-card shaped contactless door pass at a previous company. Only they were binned in the end as having too great a failure rate - people would put them in their wallets in their back pockets and they'd (the internal aerial) get slightly bent and stop working. In the end we changed to teardrop-shaped versions which worked very well and made an excellent keyring. (which raises an interesting idea - concept credit cards - strange shapes made into jewelry, watches, pens...)
I think the same problems with the form will happen here, unless technology has improved.
Oh, and the worry about criminals 'swiping' your card - forget it, these door passes had to be slapped against the reader even though they were technically contactless, the range was truly pathetic.
bear in mind his argument isn't about standards really - more an apology for Sun not releasing Java to a standards body. That way Sun can keep on deprecating chunks of it as it pleases, and at the same time, criticise anyone who thinks Java should be standardised as stifling innovation (where have I heard that line before?) and generally being a bit dim.
He can argue against design by committee - but I doubt that Java is going to evolve by 1 engineer adding something cool to it. There's going to be discussion from managers, top bosses at Sun will be involved, the JCP will be consulted etc.. and if all those interested parties don't look like a committee, I don't know what is.
C++ is doing OK. As is C. As are all the Web technologies I can think of. All those people involved in them can't be wrong, so just perhaps its Jim who's wrong here.
yes you do - its translation of German to English is way, way, way better than my ability to read German.
No, I remember this (from the UK press). I thought it was completely wacko for the people to vote one way, only for the government to effectively say 'thats not how you were supposed to vote, lets try again until you get it right'.
I suppose electronic voting could make this process easier.
Please check option a or b, and every time you press b a dialog pops up 'invalid entry, please choose another option'.
Its never that easy just to fix things - quite often one man's fix is another man's bug. Consider the security feature in Outlook - yes you can receive .exes securely but only by being unable to run them...
p ://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/kohinoor /
MS Research is doing its bit to make things better for you though - check some of the projects on the go, lke Penny Black (costed email processing to beat spammers), as well as more mainstream research:
http://research.microsoft.com/reliability/
htt
http://research.microsoft.com/behave/
and many more.
Perhaps he's exaggerating, but who cares! ah yes, those nice folks at the IRS. Perhaps one of you good US citizens would like to mention to a tax official that you suspect this chap of evading some taxes - after all, 1% of 180m/day is 1.8million responses. Even if 1% of those are sales and he earns 1% commission (of $20?), he should be earning $3600 per day. Surely he'll be paying tax on all of that.
This Life just stopped, and Ultraviolet should have a UN reslution demanding a second series :-)
Strange won't see the light of day again either. Its a disgrace!!
To a computer base 12 or base 20 is just as stupid a numbering system as base 10. If ease of programming is a consideration, we should have all our currency moved to 1024 cents in the dollar.
:-)
As for shillings and farthings - ask your granddad - he'll be able to do quite complex maths in his head. Ask him how much a bag of chips cost, and how much change he'd get from a thruppeny bit. He'll answer you far quicker than you would if I asked for change for £2.85 from a £5
my comments... err.. lock them up and throw away the key?
However, if you read the article, you'll note a couple of things..
1. The girl was accidently shot dead as she held the gun on the offender, which is why the judge called it an accident.
2. The article never said what the youth was originally convicted of - tagging orders are not usually given for even slightly serious crimes.
3. The shooting happened an hour before the curfew came into effect.
No doubt people reading the headlines will assume that tagging is a poor means of sentencing, but in these cases, a lot of criminals convicted of lesser offences will simply get suspended or community sentences - ie. back on the street with little supervision, or a lot of time on their own anyway.
The simplest use would be for people ordered not to go near some places (paedophiles near schools, stalkers near victims etc). In the case of the paedophiles, such orders are for life - an implant would be perfect in such a case.
I don't have a problem with convicted criminals being implanted, and their movements tracked for a certain amount of time, it'll reduce the prison populations and, hopefully, ensure convicts don't commit more crimes because theyd be found out easier. Deterring crime is far better than punishing the wrongdoer after the event.
I just read the article, that's what the guy said. I doubt if they're doing it on a whim - I do not know why June 13th is such a magic date, but it suggested there was something in the licence terms/lifetime that allowed for this to happen.
We have the ability to withdraw or pull the AIX license on June 13, which should cause IBM to expedite this issue as well.
What does that mean? It means they brought the case so IBM would settle out of court beofre that date. Much wonga for SCO for doing nothing. They don't have to show the source code, they don't have t prove anything, IBM will cave in rather than lose the ability to sell AIX. The only problem is that doing this may leave the doors open for SCO to say 'see, we were right', and then sue whichever other Linux distributor they like.
yeah, opensource is the logical choice if all you're doing is attempting to get software for free.. except that the city will hire IBM (or simlar) to consult them as to which software to use, and implement it, and maintain it.....
free software? nothing's ever free. This will prevent them from just buying more of whatever they've currently got, which is always cheaper than buying new stuff.
I would have pronounced it 'Doi-tt', prnounced similarly to "dwight". ("doitte"?) :-)