Yeah, that was my immediate thought. I have a handful of Greasemonkey scripts, and when I saw this article I wondered what it would take to re-create the feature. To do it right, you'd need a central server of your own that Greasemonkey could use to store which items were flagged as yours. Then you'd need to provide some kind of labeling feature to the page ("10 of the movies on this list are for me, 30 are for my spouse, and 20 are for my kids"), and finally a "rebalance" option that would take the single queue and intersperse your items with your spouse/kids items. That would roughly simulate the feature.
There's a simpler way if you can assume that only 2 people are using one account -- you'd use Greasemonkey to store all the items you flag as your own, and then when you rebalance, it would just put your own items every-other-one in the list. It "assumes" that everything not flagged as your own would be from one other person, so it could split the list 50-50. No central server needed in such a case.
Having thought it through, I think I'll leave it to others. I'd want to do it the "right" way with the central server, which would take more time to put together than I have. It seems very useful, though. I hope other Greasemonkey developers are considering it. Heck, maybe there is a better way that is less investment for the developer. Better minds will find it.
I posted my review at here. It seems to be unapologetic in imitating many aspects of MMORPGs. So you can like that or not, but its there. The good news is that unlike previous editions, when 3.5 goes out of print, there will still be many ways to get the rules. 3.5 is open-sourced (kinda). See d20srd.org. Also Pathfinder will provide new 3.6-ish books for new players wanting to try the old edition. Overall it's going to be a better time for all RPGers, even if you don't like 4th edition.
I want to add to what cynicsreport said earlier in this topic. The word "cult" has commonly accepted definitions, and if Scientology fits that definition, then the sign was a statement of fact.
In particular, part of my liberal arts studies at Westmont college included multiple classes on cults (it is/was a religious school, so knowing about many flavors of cults was mandatory). We had a lengthy course on the difference between cults & religion. The main difference was secrecy, not legitimacy. A religion -- whether you believed it to be true or fake -- was an institution that had open processes. You could gain access to the teachings freely, and likely audit the finances, too. This means the institutions of Catholics, Christians, Jews, and a handful of others were "religions." Then there were other institutions like Scientology, Moonies, and lots of others that had closed processes. You couldn't audit the finances, you couldn't freely gain access to the teachings, etc. Those were cults.
It's entirely possible that you could feel a particular cult held the truth while all religions of the world were shams. The word "cult" was not intended to imply who was right. If calling something a cult was an insult, it wasn't because the cult was crappy or false; it was because of secrecy, potential for deception regarding finances, and so on. And not surprisingly, when you fall back on the dispassionate definition, it gets really hard to refute it even if you DO take it as an insult. If someone says you're holding documents in secrecy and you say "That's an insult" well... ARE you holding documents in secrecy? If so, you're feeling insulted by the truth. In such a case, I don't really feel that a state should compel people to lie.
That will means developers will start using unicode only to find scattered lines of code throughout the app doesn't work as the core function it uses doesn't support unicode. The overhead of keeping track of which functions do and don't support unicode will be a nightmare.
Dude, it's already a nightmare. For my employer, I had to move from MySQL 4.0 to 4.1 or higher, as well as move into UTF-8 land with PHP. Anyone who has done this knows that's a double-whammy, as MySQL had a huge shift regarding this stuff with the move to 4.1. Going to PHP's page on which functions need to be replaced is woefully incomplete. You cannot just substitute the functions they mention. There are dozens of others that have problems with multibyte text, and they're not flagged at all. I took it upon myself to create a Greasemonkey script that will flag the dangerous functions in PHP's online manual. But even still, a lot of it is educated guesswork because I can't program at the level they do, so reviewing their source code is grueling for me.
To be honest, this is one thing that the Perl team got right. I don't know how painful it was for them, but for me, UTF-8 just worked in Perl. I wish PHP could reproduce that, but it's already too late. The best we can hope for is that they keep working hard and work well.
This is a fairly serious problem for me now, because my software has recently been adopted by a university, and I'm just not in a position to manage the entire set of applications and update everything on my own. Just preparing a version for release to students has been especially hard.
I'm sorry to word this so aggressively, but what the hell are you doing? Open Source does not mean "I am free labor for everyone." Nor does it mean, "I am a doormat, please walk all over me."
Listen, I'm no Linux kernel developer. I'm a poetry guy who was looking for a cheap way to get my poems out in front of eyeballs back in 1994, and coincidentally the Web had just appeared. So I'm only a long-time Web geek at best. And maybe that's not the kind of experience that some would respect. But I've put out probably 100 Open Source products in that time -- 50 phpBB mods, 10 Greasemonkey scripts, 5 Movable Type plugins, and a handful of awful, awful old scripts that nobody should ever use. I'm a father of two with a full-time job, and I've have had 15 year-olds tell me they couldn't be bothered to read the readme, because their time is more valuable than my own. I've had people come to my forums, stomp their virtual feet, and demand that I support them for free in much better fashion. After all, they ask, why did I release a product if I don't intend to add their feature requests and do the installations for them?
Listen, their agendas are not your agendas. Their timetables are not your timetables. And most most MOST importantly, your job is not to be their serving wench. It's not a job at all! Get it straight in your head what you are doing this for. I can't tell you why you do it, but making yourself so stressed out that you have to post on Slashdot begging for help (but not giving out your project name, so you can be an even bigger martyr when it all goes south) IS NOT THE REASON.
You know what I do? I say yes if I can, maybe if maybe, and no if I cannot. And I mean it. Don't make it more than that. Stop feeling obligated. And if you made promises that do obligate you in ways that you cannot meet, it's not the end of the world, but get back to the table and renegotiate. If people blackmail you with statements like "I guess I need another product" or "YOU put it out there, YOU DO IT" then just put that burden right to the side. I don't get bothered that someone might uninstall the app. They're cutting their losses (their lost time) and in the process they cut my losses (of time invested in someone who cannot help himself or herself) too. If you say you cannot build a feature and someone complains, tell them to build it. Seriously. Don't be mean, don't be vindictive, don't be snide. Mean it. If you are stressed and this isn't even your paying job, then draw lines and see who comes to your side. If they don't, then it didn't really matter to them. In which case, you're free to work on what matters to you, in a way that is healthy and sane.
I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this is part of the downside of open source. We've had the same thing with pidgin - in the end perhaps we could all just get along?
Please no. Let's foster competition. Especially in the case of Pigdin. This is how developers route around damage. This is Open Source working as intended.
Oh screw you. I'll post whatever I want, and if it makes you uncomfortable, all the more reason to post it. Lars tried to protect his band by attacking his fans. Trent tried to protect his band by being innovative. If you can't see the difference in how these musicians reacted, that's your own issue.
I actually have more respect for someone who is willing to say "Yep, I fucked up. Lets do it a better way."
I would just point out that they haven't said that. Instead they've done a sleight of hand -- "What? We never had a problem with downloading. Just some criminals. We got nothing wrong, so nothing to apologize for. Here, buy our album!"
Of course, they're really rewriting history when they try such stunts. Lars personally delivered a list of 300,000 "criminals" (fans) he wanted fined/booted. He was truly hostile. His label followed up with another 300,000. Some of the people here on/. may have been the ones who had to defend themselves against their crazy attacks.
I don't know if people will believe that Metallica is turning over a new leaf, but judging from the comments here, it looks like some will be happy to buy the new album. That disappoints me, as I feel Metallica may be manipulating the geek crowd to sell a few more copies. ("Hey, we're poster boys for the anti-RIAA now! Right? That's what is trendy now? OK! So buy our CD!") If they turned on their fans once, they can do it again.
I'm glad the story about Brian Regan using his name for a dumb character got modded funny. However, on a "disappointed" note, I just went to brianregan.com to see the Flash monstrosity, and it crashed the browser. I was given this error message:
This problem was caused by Flash Player, which was created by Adobe Systems Inc.. Currently, there is no solution for the problem that you reported.
Soooo... I kinda find myself wishing that Brian had actually listened to Floyd's complaint. Maybe Brian should use his own name for the stupid characters in his skits.
We do get to keep what we made. If it's under the GPL, we can always fork it into a new Open Source product called OurSQL. It's just that we won't be able to integrate any of their proprietary new features that are NOT under the GPL. But, hey, who needs 'em for that? If Open Source could get it this far, odds are good Open Source can do even more.
Perhaps it is a rip off, but then either way the Slashdot article should provide evidence of this.
Ummm... what? Did you read the article? It specifically does exactly what you say it does not do. It includes screenshots to show that many of the graphics are stolen (pixel for pixel exactly the same, not an approximation). And it includes text from the creator of the original game, documenting how he reviewed their game code and discovered that it was completely stolen, not clean-roomed. From the article:
I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren't being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).
I'm pretty sure that if the game the Olympics is using contains sound files that are basically leftover stubs from his other games then that's pretty damning evidence.
At the time I'm writing this, there are only 11 posts rated 4 or 5. That seems like a weak response. So I'll chime in.
Perl and Cold Fusion are languages that once were really hot & useful for the Web, but nowadays are not as prevalent. The languages still exist, people still make money off that skill set. However, the Web-based jobs for those are shrinking, while other languages are growing. This is just pie-chart stuff -- what's shrinking, what's getting bigger?
In such a case, you know you're running out of developers when you're running out of developers. (Oops! This may have happened to you already!)
Of course it's possible that a platform/system/language is so hot that all the developers are picked up, and your trouble stems from its success, rather than its failure. If that's the case, you should know it. You should see clearly that there are tons of job openings in that area, and everyone you call is interested but simply making more money elsewhere. It's very different from having people flee because your development environment makes them queasy. If success really is the problem you're facing, then you simply have unrealistic expectations. You expect top-notch work for bottom dollar. You offer no perks and/or no incentives for employee retention. If that's the case, then you're simply suffering the consequences of your decisions. Pay better, offer more perks, or live with it.
Assuming success is not the problem, you really are finding yourself in a dead-end. So now the true question is, "I know I have to change, but will it hurt?" The answer is, "Yeah, it's gonna hurt, but not as much as remaining at a standstill."
So find out where the developers are, and learn to entice them better. Find the big communities, communicate not only your needs but WHY a developer should choose your company over all the others. Then hire well, and then set them on the project. Good developers really can build things competently, and to a deadline. They may drop a feature or three as they march to the deadline, but they'll deliver a working system. Specify what you want, give them the lame-but-working system as a template to improve upon, and let them go for it. If you hired well, things will get done and your pain will diminish.
Now, as to the question, "How do I hire well?" I can only say, search Slashdot. That question has been asked repeatedly. Good luck.
We have determined that our system simply does not allow us to obtain the information you are seeking about the identity of a person accessing a particular story at a certain time.
Barring a typo, wouldn't something like that give them the result they are seeking? Why is it so difficult? And if it's difficult because they don't have the logs, then why is it so difficult to explain that?
I have to admit, I'm kind of glad that PHP doesn't let you do that. This is kind of a Perl-ish mindset, that everything that can be consolidated should be. It makes for dense code. I'll take PHP's limitations here, as they seem to be a bonus for readability.
I don't disagree with the idea, I disagree with the implementation. For example, here is a simpler method: to turn undead, roll as usual to see how many HD of undead you can turn, but don't roll for the cap -- assume the cap is your level.
If you don't like that, there are many other ways to get the same effect without complicated rolling. Do one roll, keep it simple (no lookup tables).
The D&D 4.0 team is doing this same thing with saving throws. Right now, in 3.5, if a fireball hits the group, each person is rolling to save. They're trying to beat a number. In D&D 4.0, it's flipped. Everyone has a save number, and only the caster rolls. If he/she beats your save number, you take full damage. Otherwise, you make the save. The net effect is the same. The amount of rolls is reduced. You get the same level of detail without the details slowing the gameplay. This is what I'm talking about. This is what I will pay good money for.
Hmm. Okay, I'll explain some reasons why a new edition (or at least a version 3.6!) would be welcome.
Player says, "I want to grapple the enemy," and everyone sighs, gets out their books, turns to pages 120-150 and tries to figure out the sequence. Gameplay halts for a while.
The player wants to disarm or trip an opponent -- more page turning. Found the sequence of events? Okay, now do they have the improved disarm feat? Well that changes retaliatory disarmament. What about locked gauntlets? Got that? Okay, add 10 to your opposed roll. There many more things to consider, but I won't bore you with a lengthy list.
Cleric is turning undead? Good, roll to see what you can turn. Okay, now roll again to see... what you can turn. Yes, you roll twice. Once to see how many HD you can turn, but first a roll to cap what you can do (don't want low-level characters turning liches, natch). There is actually a little chart for interpreting the results because it isn't intuitive at all.
Your group's spellcaster is out of spells? You want to make camp and sleep? But you just got started your journey an hour ago!
You want to run? Okay, you can move quadruple your normal movement speed... unless your wearing a medium/heavy load, then triple... unless you intend to veer or turn, then double. Yeah, double if you intend to turn corners. What? You want to charge instead of run? Okay, you can go double speed... but only in a straight line, because this double-speed is different from running.
Anyway, I don't think that everything they're doing is good for the game. D&D 4.0 is going to have warts -- the main issue that I see is that the team is very strongly going toward 12-year-old boys, abandoning the outreach to girl gamers and adults that they accomplished over the last 10 years. As an adult, I'll play, but I'll have to hold my nose for some dumbed-down pandering that wasn't there before (for example, tieflings are getting revised to be "like rebellious teenagers" -- their words).
Having said that, I do think there are needed improvements, and it won't be money-grubbing in my opinion if they streamline gameplay. I'll consider that a worthy investment, and happily pay for such books.
I'm in California, and I typically just sign those things with a rider, "not legal in California, and if that changes, I expect to renegotiate the contract." They don't seem to care. I even point out my notes, in case they're just oblivious. But they care later, though. One particularly bad company I used to work for issued a ruling that no one could own or work on "any Web sites, including personal ones."
I told them that it wasn't legal. They said that there were moonlighting exemptions in California law, so that they could prohibit it. We argued for a while about what was considered "moonlighting" and how the hell a personal site could qualify, then finally I shrugged and said, "I exempted myself in our legal agreement." They checked, and boy were they pissed. I kept my sites running, while all the other employees shut theirs down or got really quiet about what they were doing.
If you're not in California, I would say that you should strike out the lines you don't agree with, sign it, and turn it in. If their lawyers freak out, they'll come back to negotiate more with you. You'll have to decide if you want to play hardball. They could fire you if they think you're not worth the trouble. I typically have enough job offers that I call bluffs like that, but I feel that it's a dangerous lead to follow if you really need the job. Good luck.
Someone is first to do everything, and that includes obvious things.
Hey Martin, I liked your succinct post, so I thought it would be a good place to hang my hat. I want to expand on your point.
It's pathetic that I remember this -- a better generation might remember where they were when JFK was shot or something -- but I recall the exact day that Amazon was awarded the 1-click patent. I was in my cubicle at Borland, in the marketing department, working on a Perl script for the Web site. At the time, I had no idea why it riled me up so much. I couldn't put words to it -- I had no counterargument for their patent, and I spent the day actively trying to find prior art (and failing) -- but I was certain that it couldn't stand.
Looking back, I know exactly what words to put with it now. Back then, I was trying to find the actual words "1 click" or something very close. It summarized the concept, and the concept was so obvious I was sure it would be everywhere. But it wasn't. However, what wasn't there was the phrase "1 click" -- the concept was everywhere. And that's what I couldn't put my finger on at the time. Borland wasn't even a consumer-oriented company. We made developer tools for a small niche of geeks. Our customers were the most technically adept people online. Our store could have been ridiculously difficult and they would have figured it out. But even in our little geeky world, we were pushing hard to simplify. "Intuitive" was a huge mantra. Just before the Amazon 1-click patent had come out, we had been in on a study of the C|Net redesign of their home page. I still have it lying around in a box somewhere. But the point is, the study outlined how when they cluttered up their home page with a ton of extra links -- something we felt was a step backwards -- they experienced a 40% uptick in stickiness, articles read, and I believe even customer satisfaction. Why? It turns out, the extra links brought sooo much more material to the surface, making it easy for the user to click directly into the article of interest. Is that directly tied to Amazon's 1-click patent? Well, not directly enough for me to put them together at the time. Amazon had a system -- all we has was an insight that drove us to simplify, to require fewer clicks, to improve our search engine, to even use hidden frames and such to try to anticipate what our patrons wanted, and provide it fast.
And Borland wasn't alone! In fact, working at Borland sometimes I felt marginalized as I watched all these hot startups rocket off, watched them take ideas that were gestating in my brain, and grow them faster than I could.
That's what I couldn't put my finger on back then -- all around me was a crazed idea factory, and everyone was pushing toward the same damn goal: make it intuitive, easy, and fast. It was all 1-click without calling it 1-click! Did Amazon patent it first? Sure. Did Amazon even possibly build it first? Uh, maybe. But did Amazon conceive of it first? Hell no! And it was so freaking obvious, that I was rushing toward it along with everyone else. And I'm no genius. If I had it on the tip of my tongue, then so did everyone else. 1-click was invented and revinvented a thousand times in 1997, 1998 and 1999. Seriously. If Amazon did it first, it was only because everyone else was busy putting the finishing touches on the 2-click process they just rolled out to replace their old 3-click process! 1-click was the obvious next step. And I wish I could have put that into words back then.
I have neither the time, inclination, nor inspiration to do anything more with it
Don't bother uploading it. Without its primary developer being involved, unless you've got some users with a real care that they can keep using it *and* that it improves, and who are also skilled PHP dev's (enough to read through and understand somebody else's code on the timescale they need modifications done) nobody is going to pick up your code.
Don't listen to him, goldcd. Nothing is inevitable. I have picked up a number of dead projects and resurrected them. In fact, in some cases I've then left the project to atrophy, and someone else picked it up from me. In fact, my work has been right in your domain, goldcd. I've done something like 35 or 36 phpBB modules. I resurrected the phpBB blog module, the phpBB custom fields module, and a lot of others. Many were dead, some just needed a senior developer to clean up code, some just needed features. One of my feature specialities was adding EasyMod compatibility, so that n00bs could install modules without needing coding skills.
Post the code. Yes, put it on Sourceforge... or whatever the GNU equivalent service is. There are a lot of places to put it. Don't worry about the quality of the code. That's what people like me are for. Many people do cleanups on the weekend, for fun. Post it. Stop worrying.
(But I will agree with a previous poster -- if you have any inclination to do documentation, that's really, really helpful. You need a high-level install guide for beginners, a low-level mod guide for developers, and liberal comments in the code. Well, you don't NEED it. But if you do that, adoption will go two or three or four times faster. And having some is better than none, so post something incomplete rather than nothing.)
I don't say this to be PC or placate anyone, but both sides appear to be right. Theo's side is correct that attribution was conspicuously absent. Eben's side is correct to admit it, and to fix it. Eben's side is also correct that threatening to litigate against a bunch of lawyers probably has repercussions. I think that's all Eben is saying here -- he is not saying "we won't change it, nyah!" But what he is saying is that since the response to his mistake was threats of lawsuit, his legal team has been forced to engage in S.O.P. for such cases, and withdraw. He feels that is a shame, because he's trying to work for Theo's group. But Theo's group is already casting aspersions on Eben's motives.
If it were me, I would simply do both what Theo's team is asking, and what the lawyers are asking: fix the mistakes until Theo's team is satisfied, and then withdraw. If you're withdrawing because you hate 'em now and want to scream & shout, fine to feel that way, but maybe don't say it. If you're withdrawing under protest because you feel that you should/could have done more good things together, fine to feel that way, but face facts: the relationship is poisoned at this point. Get out before the venom poisons the relationship more. Especially if the group is suspicious of your motives and is tarnishing your reputation by saying nasty stuff about you -- just get the hell away from it, spend your limited resources to help groups who are more gracious and less prone to paranoia.
If you do that, everyone wins. Theo's group gets rid of the suspicious betrayers they no longer want in their midst, and Eben's group gets away from a reputation-damaging public fight and money pit. There may also be karma -- perhaps Theo's group learns that they really needed Eben, and is forced to behave more politely with whoever next helps out. And perhaps Eben learns to be more careful up front, lest all his relationships end badly. Or perhaps, as Dane Cook says, they will "stick with the relationship for a few more years and end things violently."
Wow. I'm actually glad I wasn't raised in the la-la world you apparently experienced. Kids have all the power? My wife's parents had their son removed from their home. He was a troublemaker, and their response was to simply say, "Bye. Come back when you can behave."
I don't understand where all these weak parents come from, but the parents I know are not that way. They expect their rules to be respected, and those who do not respect their rules (adult or child, family or otherwise) are asked to leave. If they won't leave, the police will come escort them off the premises.
Personally, I'm fully willing to do the same to my kids. If they end up hating me, then that's their mistake. That only means they've failed to learn the life lesson. You can learn the lesson that "I must respect the rules of the people helping me to survive" or you can learn the lesson that "mommy and daddy are mean, so I'm going to hate them forever, nyah!" If you decide you wish to learn the latter, that's your choice, and a sad one at that.
Are you kidding? If he comes up with the metrics, HE can dictate the terms of the solution. Rather than management tracking downtime, he can set up the dashboard to track uptime. If he's good at closing tickets but bad at customer service, he can set up the dashboard to show closed tickets rather than the feedback rating he got on each one. Or vice versa.
If it were me, I'd certainly agree to craft such a system.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was my immediate thought. I have a handful of Greasemonkey scripts, and when I saw this article I wondered what it would take to re-create the feature. To do it right, you'd need a central server of your own that Greasemonkey could use to store which items were flagged as yours. Then you'd need to provide some kind of labeling feature to the page ("10 of the movies on this list are for me, 30 are for my spouse, and 20 are for my kids"), and finally a "rebalance" option that would take the single queue and intersperse your items with your spouse/kids items. That would roughly simulate the feature.
There's a simpler way if you can assume that only 2 people are using one account -- you'd use Greasemonkey to store all the items you flag as your own, and then when you rebalance, it would just put your own items every-other-one in the list. It "assumes" that everything not flagged as your own would be from one other person, so it could split the list 50-50. No central server needed in such a case.
Having thought it through, I think I'll leave it to others. I'd want to do it the "right" way with the central server, which would take more time to put together than I have. It seems very useful, though. I hope other Greasemonkey developers are considering it. Heck, maybe there is a better way that is less investment for the developer. Better minds will find it.
I posted my review at here. It seems to be unapologetic in imitating many aspects of MMORPGs. So you can like that or not, but its there. The good news is that unlike previous editions, when 3.5 goes out of print, there will still be many ways to get the rules. 3.5 is open-sourced (kinda). See d20srd.org. Also Pathfinder will provide new 3.6-ish books for new players wanting to try the old edition. Overall it's going to be a better time for all RPGers, even if you don't like 4th edition.
I want to add to what cynicsreport said earlier in this topic. The word "cult" has commonly accepted definitions, and if Scientology fits that definition, then the sign was a statement of fact.
In particular, part of my liberal arts studies at Westmont college included multiple classes on cults (it is/was a religious school, so knowing about many flavors of cults was mandatory). We had a lengthy course on the difference between cults & religion. The main difference was secrecy, not legitimacy. A religion -- whether you believed it to be true or fake -- was an institution that had open processes. You could gain access to the teachings freely, and likely audit the finances, too. This means the institutions of Catholics, Christians, Jews, and a handful of others were "religions." Then there were other institutions like Scientology, Moonies, and lots of others that had closed processes. You couldn't audit the finances, you couldn't freely gain access to the teachings, etc. Those were cults.
It's entirely possible that you could feel a particular cult held the truth while all religions of the world were shams. The word "cult" was not intended to imply who was right. If calling something a cult was an insult, it wasn't because the cult was crappy or false; it was because of secrecy, potential for deception regarding finances, and so on. And not surprisingly, when you fall back on the dispassionate definition, it gets really hard to refute it even if you DO take it as an insult. If someone says you're holding documents in secrecy and you say "That's an insult" well... ARE you holding documents in secrecy? If so, you're feeling insulted by the truth. In such a case, I don't really feel that a state should compel people to lie.
Dude, it's already a nightmare. For my employer, I had to move from MySQL 4.0 to 4.1 or higher, as well as move into UTF-8 land with PHP. Anyone who has done this knows that's a double-whammy, as MySQL had a huge shift regarding this stuff with the move to 4.1. Going to PHP's page on which functions need to be replaced is woefully incomplete. You cannot just substitute the functions they mention. There are dozens of others that have problems with multibyte text, and they're not flagged at all. I took it upon myself to create a Greasemonkey script that will flag the dangerous functions in PHP's online manual. But even still, a lot of it is educated guesswork because I can't program at the level they do, so reviewing their source code is grueling for me.
To be honest, this is one thing that the Perl team got right. I don't know how painful it was for them, but for me, UTF-8 just worked in Perl. I wish PHP could reproduce that, but it's already too late. The best we can hope for is that they keep working hard and work well.
I'm sorry to word this so aggressively, but what the hell are you doing? Open Source does not mean "I am free labor for everyone." Nor does it mean, "I am a doormat, please walk all over me."
Listen, I'm no Linux kernel developer. I'm a poetry guy who was looking for a cheap way to get my poems out in front of eyeballs back in 1994, and coincidentally the Web had just appeared. So I'm only a long-time Web geek at best. And maybe that's not the kind of experience that some would respect. But I've put out probably 100 Open Source products in that time -- 50 phpBB mods, 10 Greasemonkey scripts, 5 Movable Type plugins, and a handful of awful, awful old scripts that nobody should ever use. I'm a father of two with a full-time job, and I've have had 15 year-olds tell me they couldn't be bothered to read the readme, because their time is more valuable than my own. I've had people come to my forums, stomp their virtual feet, and demand that I support them for free in much better fashion. After all, they ask, why did I release a product if I don't intend to add their feature requests and do the installations for them?
Listen, their agendas are not your agendas. Their timetables are not your timetables. And most most MOST importantly, your job is not to be their serving wench. It's not a job at all! Get it straight in your head what you are doing this for. I can't tell you why you do it, but making yourself so stressed out that you have to post on Slashdot begging for help (but not giving out your project name, so you can be an even bigger martyr when it all goes south) IS NOT THE REASON.
You know what I do? I say yes if I can, maybe if maybe, and no if I cannot. And I mean it. Don't make it more than that. Stop feeling obligated. And if you made promises that do obligate you in ways that you cannot meet, it's not the end of the world, but get back to the table and renegotiate. If people blackmail you with statements like "I guess I need another product" or "YOU put it out there, YOU DO IT" then just put that burden right to the side. I don't get bothered that someone might uninstall the app. They're cutting their losses (their lost time) and in the process they cut my losses (of time invested in someone who cannot help himself or herself) too. If you say you cannot build a feature and someone complains, tell them to build it. Seriously. Don't be mean, don't be vindictive, don't be snide. Mean it. If you are stressed and this isn't even your paying job, then draw lines and see who comes to your side. If they don't, then it didn't really matter to them. In which case, you're free to work on what matters to you, in a way that is healthy and sane.
Please no. Let's foster competition. Especially in the case of Pigdin. This is how developers route around damage. This is Open Source working as intended.
Oh screw you. I'll post whatever I want, and if it makes you uncomfortable, all the more reason to post it. Lars tried to protect his band by attacking his fans. Trent tried to protect his band by being innovative. If you can't see the difference in how these musicians reacted, that's your own issue.
I would just point out that they haven't said that. Instead they've done a sleight of hand -- "What? We never had a problem with downloading. Just some criminals. We got nothing wrong, so nothing to apologize for. Here, buy our album!"
Of course, they're really rewriting history when they try such stunts. Lars personally delivered a list of 300,000 "criminals" (fans) he wanted fined/booted. He was truly hostile. His label followed up with another 300,000. Some of the people here on /. may have been the ones who had to defend themselves against their crazy attacks.
I don't know if people will believe that Metallica is turning over a new leaf, but judging from the comments here, it looks like some will be happy to buy the new album. That disappoints me, as I feel Metallica may be manipulating the geek crowd to sell a few more copies. ("Hey, we're poster boys for the anti-RIAA now! Right? That's what is trendy now? OK! So buy our CD!") If they turned on their fans once, they can do it again.
I'm glad the story about Brian Regan using his name for a dumb character got modded funny. However, on a "disappointed" note, I just went to brianregan.com to see the Flash monstrosity, and it crashed the browser. I was given this error message:
Soooo... I kinda find myself wishing that Brian had actually listened to Floyd's complaint. Maybe Brian should use his own name for the stupid characters in his skits.
We do get to keep what we made. If it's under the GPL, we can always fork it into a new Open Source product called OurSQL. It's just that we won't be able to integrate any of their proprietary new features that are NOT under the GPL. But, hey, who needs 'em for that? If Open Source could get it this far, odds are good Open Source can do even more.
Ummm... what? Did you read the article? It specifically does exactly what you say it does not do. It includes screenshots to show that many of the graphics are stolen (pixel for pixel exactly the same, not an approximation). And it includes text from the creator of the original game, documenting how he reviewed their game code and discovered that it was completely stolen, not clean-roomed. From the article:
I'm pretty sure that if the game the Olympics is using contains sound files that are basically leftover stubs from his other games then that's pretty damning evidence.
At the time I'm writing this, there are only 11 posts rated 4 or 5. That seems like a weak response. So I'll chime in.
Perl and Cold Fusion are languages that once were really hot & useful for the Web, but nowadays are not as prevalent. The languages still exist, people still make money off that skill set. However, the Web-based jobs for those are shrinking, while other languages are growing. This is just pie-chart stuff -- what's shrinking, what's getting bigger?
In such a case, you know you're running out of developers when you're running out of developers. (Oops! This may have happened to you already!)
Of course it's possible that a platform/system/language is so hot that all the developers are picked up, and your trouble stems from its success, rather than its failure. If that's the case, you should know it. You should see clearly that there are tons of job openings in that area, and everyone you call is interested but simply making more money elsewhere. It's very different from having people flee because your development environment makes them queasy. If success really is the problem you're facing, then you simply have unrealistic expectations. You expect top-notch work for bottom dollar. You offer no perks and/or no incentives for employee retention. If that's the case, then you're simply suffering the consequences of your decisions. Pay better, offer more perks, or live with it.
Assuming success is not the problem, you really are finding yourself in a dead-end. So now the true question is, "I know I have to change, but will it hurt?" The answer is, "Yeah, it's gonna hurt, but not as much as remaining at a standstill."
So find out where the developers are, and learn to entice them better. Find the big communities, communicate not only your needs but WHY a developer should choose your company over all the others. Then hire well, and then set them on the project. Good developers really can build things competently, and to a deadline. They may drop a feature or three as they march to the deadline, but they'll deliver a working system. Specify what you want, give them the lame-but-working system as a template to improve upon, and let them go for it. If you hired well, things will get done and your pain will diminish.
Now, as to the question, "How do I hire well?" I can only say, search Slashdot. That question has been asked repeatedly. Good luck.
grep "/doc/1P2-915261.html" access.2007march.txt >> results_for_subpoena.txt
Barring a typo, wouldn't something like that give them the result they are seeking? Why is it so difficult? And if it's difficult because they don't have the logs, then why is it so difficult to explain that?
I have to admit, I'm kind of glad that PHP doesn't let you do that. This is kind of a Perl-ish mindset, that everything that can be consolidated should be. It makes for dense code. I'll take PHP's limitations here, as they seem to be a bonus for readability.
I don't disagree with the idea, I disagree with the implementation. For example, here is a simpler method: to turn undead, roll as usual to see how many HD of undead you can turn, but don't roll for the cap -- assume the cap is your level.
If you don't like that, there are many other ways to get the same effect without complicated rolling. Do one roll, keep it simple (no lookup tables).
The D&D 4.0 team is doing this same thing with saving throws. Right now, in 3.5, if a fireball hits the group, each person is rolling to save. They're trying to beat a number. In D&D 4.0, it's flipped. Everyone has a save number, and only the caster rolls. If he/she beats your save number, you take full damage. Otherwise, you make the save. The net effect is the same. The amount of rolls is reduced. You get the same level of detail without the details slowing the gameplay. This is what I'm talking about. This is what I will pay good money for.
Hmm. Okay, I'll explain some reasons why a new edition (or at least a version 3.6!) would be welcome.
Anyway, I don't think that everything they're doing is good for the game. D&D 4.0 is going to have warts -- the main issue that I see is that the team is very strongly going toward 12-year-old boys, abandoning the outreach to girl gamers and adults that they accomplished over the last 10 years. As an adult, I'll play, but I'll have to hold my nose for some dumbed-down pandering that wasn't there before (for example, tieflings are getting revised to be "like rebellious teenagers" -- their words).
Having said that, I do think there are needed improvements, and it won't be money-grubbing in my opinion if they streamline gameplay. I'll consider that a worthy investment, and happily pay for such books.
I'm in California, and I typically just sign those things with a rider, "not legal in California, and if that changes, I expect to renegotiate the contract." They don't seem to care. I even point out my notes, in case they're just oblivious. But they care later, though. One particularly bad company I used to work for issued a ruling that no one could own or work on "any Web sites, including personal ones."
I told them that it wasn't legal. They said that there were moonlighting exemptions in California law, so that they could prohibit it. We argued for a while about what was considered "moonlighting" and how the hell a personal site could qualify, then finally I shrugged and said, "I exempted myself in our legal agreement." They checked, and boy were they pissed. I kept my sites running, while all the other employees shut theirs down or got really quiet about what they were doing.
If you're not in California, I would say that you should strike out the lines you don't agree with, sign it, and turn it in. If their lawyers freak out, they'll come back to negotiate more with you. You'll have to decide if you want to play hardball. They could fire you if they think you're not worth the trouble. I typically have enough job offers that I call bluffs like that, but I feel that it's a dangerous lead to follow if you really need the job. Good luck.
Hey Martin, I liked your succinct post, so I thought it would be a good place to hang my hat. I want to expand on your point.
It's pathetic that I remember this -- a better generation might remember where they were when JFK was shot or something -- but I recall the exact day that Amazon was awarded the 1-click patent. I was in my cubicle at Borland, in the marketing department, working on a Perl script for the Web site. At the time, I had no idea why it riled me up so much. I couldn't put words to it -- I had no counterargument for their patent, and I spent the day actively trying to find prior art (and failing) -- but I was certain that it couldn't stand.
Looking back, I know exactly what words to put with it now. Back then, I was trying to find the actual words "1 click" or something very close. It summarized the concept, and the concept was so obvious I was sure it would be everywhere. But it wasn't. However, what wasn't there was the phrase "1 click" -- the concept was everywhere. And that's what I couldn't put my finger on at the time. Borland wasn't even a consumer-oriented company. We made developer tools for a small niche of geeks. Our customers were the most technically adept people online. Our store could have been ridiculously difficult and they would have figured it out. But even in our little geeky world, we were pushing hard to simplify. "Intuitive" was a huge mantra. Just before the Amazon 1-click patent had come out, we had been in on a study of the C|Net redesign of their home page. I still have it lying around in a box somewhere. But the point is, the study outlined how when they cluttered up their home page with a ton of extra links -- something we felt was a step backwards -- they experienced a 40% uptick in stickiness, articles read, and I believe even customer satisfaction. Why? It turns out, the extra links brought sooo much more material to the surface, making it easy for the user to click directly into the article of interest. Is that directly tied to Amazon's 1-click patent? Well, not directly enough for me to put them together at the time. Amazon had a system -- all we has was an insight that drove us to simplify, to require fewer clicks, to improve our search engine, to even use hidden frames and such to try to anticipate what our patrons wanted, and provide it fast.
And Borland wasn't alone! In fact, working at Borland sometimes I felt marginalized as I watched all these hot startups rocket off, watched them take ideas that were gestating in my brain, and grow them faster than I could.
That's what I couldn't put my finger on back then -- all around me was a crazed idea factory, and everyone was pushing toward the same damn goal: make it intuitive, easy, and fast. It was all 1-click without calling it 1-click! Did Amazon patent it first? Sure. Did Amazon even possibly build it first? Uh, maybe. But did Amazon conceive of it first? Hell no! And it was so freaking obvious, that I was rushing toward it along with everyone else. And I'm no genius. If I had it on the tip of my tongue, then so did everyone else. 1-click was invented and revinvented a thousand times in 1997, 1998 and 1999. Seriously. If Amazon did it first, it was only because everyone else was busy putting the finishing touches on the 2-click process they just rolled out to replace their old 3-click process! 1-click was the obvious next step. And I wish I could have put that into words back then.
Don't listen to him, goldcd. Nothing is inevitable. I have picked up a number of dead projects and resurrected them. In fact, in some cases I've then left the project to atrophy, and someone else picked it up from me. In fact, my work has been right in your domain, goldcd. I've done something like 35 or 36 phpBB modules. I resurrected the phpBB blog module, the phpBB custom fields module, and a lot of others. Many were dead, some just needed a senior developer to clean up code, some just needed features. One of my feature specialities was adding EasyMod compatibility, so that n00bs could install modules without needing coding skills.
Post the code. Yes, put it on Sourceforge... or whatever the GNU equivalent service is. There are a lot of places to put it. Don't worry about the quality of the code. That's what people like me are for. Many people do cleanups on the weekend, for fun. Post it. Stop worrying.
(But I will agree with a previous poster -- if you have any inclination to do documentation, that's really, really helpful. You need a high-level install guide for beginners, a low-level mod guide for developers, and liberal comments in the code. Well, you don't NEED it. But if you do that, adoption will go two or three or four times faster. And having some is better than none, so post something incomplete rather than nothing.)
You advocate censorship just so that you can goof off at work? You are NOT against censorship, you're the frigging poster-boy for it.
Wow, what a weak reason to ask for censorship. You really need to rethink your priorities.
I don't say this to be PC or placate anyone, but both sides appear to be right. Theo's side is correct that attribution was conspicuously absent. Eben's side is correct to admit it, and to fix it. Eben's side is also correct that threatening to litigate against a bunch of lawyers probably has repercussions. I think that's all Eben is saying here -- he is not saying "we won't change it, nyah!" But what he is saying is that since the response to his mistake was threats of lawsuit, his legal team has been forced to engage in S.O.P. for such cases, and withdraw. He feels that is a shame, because he's trying to work for Theo's group. But Theo's group is already casting aspersions on Eben's motives.
If it were me, I would simply do both what Theo's team is asking, and what the lawyers are asking: fix the mistakes until Theo's team is satisfied, and then withdraw. If you're withdrawing because you hate 'em now and want to scream & shout, fine to feel that way, but maybe don't say it. If you're withdrawing under protest because you feel that you should/could have done more good things together, fine to feel that way, but face facts: the relationship is poisoned at this point. Get out before the venom poisons the relationship more. Especially if the group is suspicious of your motives and is tarnishing your reputation by saying nasty stuff about you -- just get the hell away from it, spend your limited resources to help groups who are more gracious and less prone to paranoia.
If you do that, everyone wins. Theo's group gets rid of the suspicious betrayers they no longer want in their midst, and Eben's group gets away from a reputation-damaging public fight and money pit. There may also be karma -- perhaps Theo's group learns that they really needed Eben, and is forced to behave more politely with whoever next helps out. And perhaps Eben learns to be more careful up front, lest all his relationships end badly. Or perhaps, as Dane Cook says, they will "stick with the relationship for a few more years and end things violently."
Wow. I'm actually glad I wasn't raised in the la-la world you apparently experienced. Kids have all the power? My wife's parents had their son removed from their home. He was a troublemaker, and their response was to simply say, "Bye. Come back when you can behave."
I don't understand where all these weak parents come from, but the parents I know are not that way. They expect their rules to be respected, and those who do not respect their rules (adult or child, family or otherwise) are asked to leave. If they won't leave, the police will come escort them off the premises.
Personally, I'm fully willing to do the same to my kids. If they end up hating me, then that's their mistake. That only means they've failed to learn the life lesson. You can learn the lesson that "I must respect the rules of the people helping me to survive" or you can learn the lesson that "mommy and daddy are mean, so I'm going to hate them forever, nyah!" If you decide you wish to learn the latter, that's your choice, and a sad one at that.
Yes. You've done an excellent job showing how well-adjusted you are.
Thus proving the AC's point.
Are you kidding? If he comes up with the metrics, HE can dictate the terms of the solution. Rather than management tracking downtime, he can set up the dashboard to track uptime. If he's good at closing tickets but bad at customer service, he can set up the dashboard to show closed tickets rather than the feedback rating he got on each one. Or vice versa.
If it were me, I'd certainly agree to craft such a system.