The problem is that most organization have no way of actually tracking productivity, so they pay people basically for being on site for X hours a day.
And what makes you think being on site has anything to do with tracking productivity? I observed exactly the opposite working in an office the past two years. If anything, remote working is better for tracking productivity because it leaves a better audit trail. Honestly, it is hard to match the productivity of a typical office environment, as close to zero as it tends to be.
If you want to define "open source" strictly according to the Open Source Definition then you are correct, and I need to be careful about using that term because in that sense it is very narrow. Up till now, by "open source" I have meant not the letter of the OSD definition, but the development model. While Google does use open source licenses, it very much does not like or use the open source development model. And in that Google causes a great deal of harm to both itself and the community.
In my opinion, the license is just one part of what the world commonly understands to be "open source". However I will be careful in future to be specific about whether I mean a kind of license, a community, or a development approach.
They are doing closed development. That's actually the mode the FSF has traditionally worked in (note that this was one of the reasons for the egcs fork of gcc), therefore it quite obviously doesn't make the code less open source (or even less free software), although it makes for a less open development model.
Absolutely wrong. Your EGCS example directly refutes your argument: the open fork won in features, efficiency, stability and pace of development. Likewise xorg won over xfree. Degree of openness does matter, and Google is heading in the wrong direction, both for them and us.
Google has totally been publicly whipped for Buzz and for collecting WiFi data....
As is richly deserved for flagrant and willful abuse of privacy. Now please explain to me why these same watchful agencies continue to look the other way and let Microsoft get away with murder in terms of continued market control of PC vendors and such destructive tactics as undermining the ISO standards process. How about fabricating evidence in court, what punishment was there for that?
At least Google is likely to learn and improve its behavior as a result of the punishment. Microsoft never would.
They have the time and the money to get it right and the money to get out there.
Time works against Microsoft as their engineering culture sinks further and further into dysfunctionality. Who cares about trying to achieve great things, much less hard slogging debugging work, when midyear review has no correlation between engineering success and career advancement? When rank and file employees are forced into a zero sum mutual backstabbing game trying to avoid that dreaded A/10? When the top management does the opposite of inspire by example?
Microsoft is not known for strong initial offerings. The original IE was awful. The original Windows was unusable. They tend to stay in and fight, and sometimes win.
With P/E chronically below 12, the market is clearly betting against Microsoft winning anything significant in the foreseeable future.
Well that sounds like nonsense then, I thought the argument was deeper. In fact the opposite is true: holding state in multiple independent objects tends to make an algorithm more parallelizable, not less, provided synchronization does not require serializing access between objects.
I use them for a number of applications including 3D rendering and 2D filtering. In C++ such code gets ugly fast if you have to compute multidimensional indices by hand. Even buried in helper methods its still ugly and less maintainable than the C incarnation. I typically write code like that in C and call it from C++. This introduces its own awkwardness.
I did indeed mean flexible arrays. I did not know about std::array, maybe it really is always better than classic C arrays. But I am skeptical, I will try it and see. In any case, there is no plausible excuse for not supporting variable arrays, especially in their role as function arguments. They are required for C99 anyway, which typically uses the same back end as C++.
I think there's definitely room for C++ within Linux, though. I think it might be easier to restrict it to loadable modules and I recall that somebody once implemented a C++ framework for modules.
No framework is necessary, just declare the external linkage extern "C".
Almost any computer language is simpler than C++. If you don't know that, you haven't explored it much. As for better... well I have switched pretty much exclusively to C++ now. Love, hate.
Some monster warts not addressed, like no designated intializers, no flexible arrays. Some backwards progress like the idiotic narrowing errors in cases like { 1, 2 } for an array of floats. But in general, a better language, I switched to -std=gnu++0x a few months back.
So a company having a successful business model and dominating the market is evil? Got it. If all markets were dominated by companies like Google, the world would be a much better place. Are they perfect? No. But they're trying dammit.
Oh please, stop white-knighting for the multi-billion dollar international corporation. They aren't trying to be a force for good in the world. They're trying to make money.
Google does try to advertise itself as a force for good and that is part of the sales pitch to prospective recruits. There is some truth to it: in general, more open is more good. In general, don't be evil is a mighty good rule to live by. Now if veteran Googlers would just take that seriously, not just the starry eyed recruits, then Google might avoid going down the morality drain as Microsoft did.
You are an excellent example of the kind of arrogant revisionist who has knocked Google off the top of the "want to work there" lists. Better you should admit there are serious problems in paradise and try to address be part of the solution than mindlessly waving your Googly.
Shall I post something about the rampant alcoholism that repeatedly landed Googlers in hospital and wore out our welcome at a number of offsite venues? Would that conflict with your rose colored views?
I think that CMU's point is that in a world where serial speed is stagnant, but where computers will become increasingly parallel (thousands of cores), a methodology that tightly links state and function, and which main mode of operation is to mutate state (i.e., OO) is not a likely candidate to stay dominant.
Interesting argument, can you supply concrete examples of such state mutation?
Which is why a certain CS professor, you may have heard of him, he's called Knuth, uses Assembler in his somewhat reasonably well-known(some would call them the bible of CS) books.
I have a great deal of respect for Knuth and have implemented a number of algorithms from his texts. Particularly in the case of high precision arithmetic, it was necessary from time to time to actually read his horrible assembly language. The end result was good and tight, however I can say with confidence that his exclusive use of assembler for detailing algorithms is a blemish that weakens his monumental work. There are some cases where only a description of the algorithm in machine instructions will do, for example where a carry flag is an integral part of an algorithm, however the vast majority of his algorithms would have been better expressed in an algorithmic language.
That said, I will still continue to collect everything he publishes, and aspire to understanding more of his deep mathematical presentation.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that most organization have no way of actually tracking productivity, so they pay people basically for being on site for X hours a day.
And what makes you think being on site has anything to do with tracking productivity? I observed exactly the opposite working in an office the past two years. If anything, remote working is better for tracking productivity because it leaves a better audit trail. Honestly, it is hard to match the productivity of a typical office environment, as close to zero as it tends to be.
If you want to define "open source" strictly according to the Open Source Definition then you are correct, and I need to be careful about using that term because in that sense it is very narrow. Up till now, by "open source" I have meant not the letter of the OSD definition, but the development model. While Google does use open source licenses, it very much does not like or use the open source development model. And in that Google causes a great deal of harm to both itself and the community.
In my opinion, the license is just one part of what the world commonly understands to be "open source". However I will be careful in future to be specific about whether I mean a kind of license, a community, or a development approach.
They are doing closed development. That's actually the mode the FSF has traditionally worked in (note that this was one of the reasons for the egcs fork of gcc), therefore it quite obviously doesn't make the code less open source (or even less free software), although it makes for a less open development model.
Absolutely wrong. Your EGCS example directly refutes your argument: the open fork won in features, efficiency, stability and pace of development. Likewise xorg won over xfree. Degree of openness does matter, and Google is heading in the wrong direction, both for them and us.
There are three things I've never done on the internet.
...and nobody knows you're a dog.
It is not Google's right to tell the world who you have emailed and who has emailed you.
Google has totally been publicly whipped for Buzz and for collecting WiFi data....
As is richly deserved for flagrant and willful abuse of privacy. Now please explain to me why these same watchful agencies continue to look the other way and let Microsoft get away with murder in terms of continued market control of PC vendors and such destructive tactics as undermining the ISO standards process. How about fabricating evidence in court, what punishment was there for that?
At least Google is likely to learn and improve its behavior as a result of the punishment. Microsoft never would.
if you actually look at the fundamentals, MS is a much better buy than Apple or Google
If you really think that then mortgage your house and load up with Microsoft shares, it's your funeral.
Lower P/E actually means the company isn't over priced.
Not really. Low P/E normally means a company is not expected to grow quickly.
They have the time and the money to get it right and the money to get out there.
Time works against Microsoft as their engineering culture sinks further and further into dysfunctionality. Who cares about trying to achieve great things, much less hard slogging debugging work, when midyear review has no correlation between engineering success and career advancement? When rank and file employees are forced into a zero sum mutual backstabbing game trying to avoid that dreaded A/10? When the top management does the opposite of inspire by example?
Nekrosoft?
Microsoft is not known for strong initial offerings. The original IE was awful. The original Windows was unusable. They tend to stay in and fight, and sometimes win.
With P/E chronically below 12, the market is clearly betting against Microsoft winning anything significant in the foreseeable future.
For the period 2010-2012, correct "dead" to "walking wounded".
Well that sounds like nonsense then, I thought the argument was deeper. In fact the opposite is true: holding state in multiple independent objects tends to make an algorithm more parallelizable, not less, provided synchronization does not require serializing access between objects.
I use them for a number of applications including 3D rendering and 2D filtering. In C++ such code gets ugly fast if you have to compute multidimensional indices by hand. Even buried in helper methods its still ugly and less maintainable than the C incarnation. I typically write code like that in C and call it from C++. This introduces its own awkwardness.
I did indeed mean flexible arrays. I did not know about std::array, maybe it really is always better than classic C arrays. But I am skeptical, I will try it and see. In any case, there is no plausible excuse for not supporting variable arrays, especially in their role as function arguments. They are required for C99 anyway, which typically uses the same back end as C++.
I think there's definitely room for C++ within Linux, though. I think it might be easier to restrict it to loadable modules and I recall that somebody once implemented a C++ framework for modules.
No framework is necessary, just declare the external linkage extern "C".
Almost any computer language is simpler than C++. If you don't know that, you haven't explored it much. As for better... well I have switched pretty much exclusively to C++ now. Love, hate.
Some monster warts not addressed, like no designated intializers, no flexible arrays. Some backwards progress like the idiotic narrowing errors in cases like { 1, 2 } for an array of floats. But in general, a better language, I switched to -std=gnu++0x a few months back.
Wow, sounds bad. Maybe I should sell my Google stock. Or not.
It's really david vs. goliath...
Err, sorry, no, it's Goliath vs Goliath.
So a company having a successful business model and dominating the market is evil? Got it. If all markets were dominated by companies like Google, the world would be a much better place. Are they perfect? No. But they're trying dammit.
Oh please, stop white-knighting for the multi-billion dollar international corporation. They aren't trying to be a force for good in the world. They're trying to make money.
Google does try to advertise itself as a force for good and that is part of the sales pitch to prospective recruits. There is some truth to it: in general, more open is more good. In general, don't be evil is a mighty good rule to live by. Now if veteran Googlers would just take that seriously, not just the starry eyed recruits, then Google might avoid going down the morality drain as Microsoft did.
You are an excellent example of the kind of arrogant revisionist who has knocked Google off the top of the "want to work there" lists. Better you should admit there are serious problems in paradise and try to address be part of the solution than mindlessly waving your Googly.
Shall I post something about the rampant alcoholism that repeatedly landed Googlers in hospital and wore out our welcome at a number of offsite venues? Would that conflict with your rose colored views?
I think that CMU's point is that in a world where serial speed is stagnant, but where computers will become increasingly parallel (thousands of cores), a methodology that tightly links state and function, and which main mode of operation is to mutate state (i.e., OO) is not a likely candidate to stay dominant.
Interesting argument, can you supply concrete examples of such state mutation?
my experience is that knowing how the processor works or a stack works, isn't helpful in 99% of cases..
However, it is helpful in 100% of cases where efficiency matters.
Which is why a certain CS professor, you may have heard of him, he's called Knuth, uses Assembler in his somewhat reasonably well-known(some would call them the bible of CS) books.
I have a great deal of respect for Knuth and have implemented a number of algorithms from his texts. Particularly in the case of high precision arithmetic, it was necessary from time to time to actually read his horrible assembly language. The end result was good and tight, however I can say with confidence that his exclusive use of assembler for detailing algorithms is a blemish that weakens his monumental work. There are some cases where only a description of the algorithm in machine instructions will do, for example where a carry flag is an integral part of an algorithm, however the vast majority of his algorithms would have been better expressed in an algorithmic language.
That said, I will still continue to collect everything he publishes, and aspire to understanding more of his deep mathematical presentation.