I've submitted a lot of bug reports and patches to various software projects -- but typically only the 1 or 2 fixes that I need to get it working for me. So I have a not-too-deep but very broad interaction with a lot of different GPL & BSD projects. In fact, I've even submitted patches to projects with closed-source (like faqts -- gave them patches to better rank members and score answers... but they never made any improvement using my code or anyone else's). In fact, the faqts site is par-for-the-course. Most projects don't seem to respond.
So I would nominate the gentleman behind HT Track. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. They're responsive and accept code, even cleaning up my poorly done offerings. I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and I'd feel even happier if they were sung heroes.
...becomes dumbly obvious as a message when it loops over and over and over again. We can pick out patterns. Even a signal that was so long and varied that it only repeated annually would still be possible to capture within normal human timespans.
With the rising number of silly astroturfish advertising getting by the editors, slash needs an ability to let users filter submissions based on the submitter. hrm, it could be a simple extension to the 'foe' feature for comments.
Doesn't attaching a score to your "foes" do what you want? Pick someone as a foe, then go to Preferences -> Comments and set foes to have a -6 score. They're filtered out. Done.
Using incoherent terms such as unstructured data is just wrong.
Boy, you really want to flaunt that you are completely unfamiliar with common terms in use by the data mining industry. You need to read this post and then give thanks that you posted anonymously. The moderators should be modding down your comments as uninformed, not modding them up.
I'm on the verge of moving to the US from the UK, to work in silicon valley. The salary is very attractive too, so there's obviously *some* improvement happening.
A townhome in Silicon Valley is $500,000. A "real" home is $700,000. To buy, you need to put 20% down (I put down less, but I had to accept some terrible terms because of it). So, if you have $100,000+ saved up, or you can save it over a reasonable period of time, then living in Silicon Valley is OK. You'll be able to build a fair life for yourself. But if you don't have that kind of money, Silicon Valley is baaaadd. You will pay huge amounts of money to rent a place you'll never be able to own. You will pay more for food and other necessities. You will have to deal with bad traffic during your daily commute. It's the kind of thing that people in their 20s can handle for a while, but everyone else either buys a home or moves to another state.
Oh well. Silicon Valley does have other nice things about it. It truly is a melting pot. You will interact with people from India, Japan, China, the UK, Russia, and elsewhere -- daily. When you want to eat, you will be able to choose from bratwurst at a local German pub to Thai food, and everything in between. Personally, I usually just go for a burger or sandwich nowadays, but every now and then I hook up with someone new to the area -- they're almost always like a kid in a candy store, with a list of things to eat and places to go. I like that. And if you hate your job, there are 10,000 other big tech companies that will want to employ you. Or at least, they did want to employ you... until the economy went bad.
It's your choice, but know what you're getting into.
Yeah, you're right. I guess having a decade of real-world experience working in Marketing for 3 different companies makes me much less qualified to speak than someone who took a class.
Marketing is not the same as advertising. In fact, the most important functions of marketing are not from the company to the customer, but the other way around. A good marketing department listens to the market or the customer, determines what the market or customer needs, and helps orient production within the company to produce products that meet some identified need.
No. Marketing is advertising. What you describe is Product Marketing, typically a very technical department populated by PMMs (Product Marketing Managers). PMMs do not work for the Marketing department.
I think advertising might not end up under marketing. To me it seems that advertising, as communication from the company to the market/customer, belongs more with sales than with marketing.
Then you are not representative of the norm for most companies.
how many google employees have become instant millionaires?
I live in the area. One of the more disturbing articles in the local paper made reference to about 1,000 paper millionaires at Google, and how those 1,000 people would push up housing costs as they all leveraged their worth to buy houses. The reason it bothers me is twofold: first, Silicon Valley seems too big to have its housing market pushed around by a mere one thousand people; second, our housing costs are already bad enough. 3-bedroom homes sell for $600,000. That's usually with no yard, and a cookie-cutter floorplan.
Oh well. I guess I should be happy. I own my house, and it'll only go up in value. Thanks Google! But I feel bad for those still trying to buy. I thought the poor economy would give them a buying opportunity.
AB is gambling that no one will fork MySQL and make them irrelavent?
That's the gamble every GPL project makes. My own phpBB Blog software is GPL, and I run the risk of a fork just like everyone else. In fact, possibly more so -- I specifically ask users to post patches and even entirely recoded pages. I guess my project lumbers from one fork to the next, integrating code as I'm allowed. The MySQL team doesn't really have much to worry about, though. They are doing right by their users for the most part, and they are better at building and extending the product than most of the users would be. The X Windows fiasco took years of unhappiness to boil over. The MySQL team doesn't have unhappiness bubbling under the surface. This entire story is just a misunderstanding, attributing malice where there is none.
Of course, if I'm wrong about that, then I want a fork (just like I did for X Windows). But right now MySQL is doing fine by me.
In other words, in order for AB to require you to have a commerical license they would need their commerical version to 100% free of any GPLed contributions.
I'm coming to this discussion a day late, and I can't believe no one has answered your questions, greggman. In any case, here it is: their commerical version is 100% free of any GPL'd contributions. You clearly wonder how a product that huge, with that many contributions, can manage such a thing. It's simple. They do the same thing that the FSF does: they require everyone who contributes code to give it to them under no license. In other words, if I contribute a patch to MySQL, they only include it in their product if I certify that I am the copyright holder of that code, and that I give them ownership. Once MySQL has full ownership, they are free to take what is now theirs and license it under any license they wish. Even dual licenses.
Again, when I give them a patch, I don't say, "here is a patch you can use under GPL." If I do that, they reject it. Instead, I have to say, "here is a patch, I give you full ownership, and I can no longer dictate how my own code will be used. Feel free to license it however you wish." And then they do.
Of course, I don't have to offer my patch to them. The GPL only requires that I get my patch "out there" somehow. So if I only want my code to be available under GPL, I don't have to offer it to MySQL. I can just put my patch up on my own web server, offer it only under GPL, and allow people to download it. But if I want MySQL to incorporate it into the official product, I have to give it to them on their terms. The GPL cannot prevent that. It doesn't force the owner of a product to incorporate patches. If it did, then even the FSF would be in trouble, because they do the same thing (ask that full copyright be assigned to them).
That climate has changed the last ten years, but that exactly was the climate you can see with Schwarzenegger, once in the office he started to talk with both parties.
Ummm. Being a Californian, I'd just say that it doesn't look like that on the ground. Reading the Mercury or Chronicle every day, I'm mostly seeing Arnold bullying them into doing it -- threatening to take any issue to the voters if it doesn't go his way, mocking politicians who do not fall in line, etc.
However, this is not a slam against him. You need to understand: our state politicians are so inept, so entrenched, and have done such a terrible job on both sides of the aisle, that I fully back Arnold's arm-twisting. I'm not even a Republican, and I voted for him, and pretty much any time he says he's taking something to the voters, I'm going to vote his side on it. Why? Well I'm obviously not following the Democrat's party line (I'm a Demo), but I am sick of the electricity scandals, the Oracle scandal, the delayed budgets, the whiney politicians, and everything else. I want the Terminator to kick some ass. If the politicians walk out of their meetings with bloody teeth, good. They deserve it.
Don't trust anybody with a Slashdot ID Number > 800000.
You can actually do this, or get close. Login, and click the "Preferences" link on the left side of the page. Then click the "Comments" tab. One of the options on that page is a "New User Modifier" with 2 menus. Set the first to about 10% and the second to -1. That should penalize the newest 10% of users with a -1 to their mod scores. In my case, I actually have it set to 80% -- with a number that large (and because I browse at a threshold of 4), what I end up with is that anyone with a low UID sort of "rises" out of the din. My own posts are penalized, as I don't consider even my own UID to be low enough.:)
I don't know. I can half-support that based on my own experience. I was a severely underpaid web monkey at Borland back in the 90s. As the market boomed, I had a ton of job offers, some for $30K more than my existing salary. Eventually I went to management and explained it. They said they would need a few months to arrange a matching offer. I actually gave them the time, and they actually came through. I spent many months pulling down that fat paycheck and being happy. Thus far, it seems that taking a counter-offer is good.
After about 6 or 7 months at that pay scale, things started to get ugly at work. I had a new boss who seemed to hate me. It turns out that I made more money than the boss, and when this came to light, all hell broke loose. Soon enough, I had to give up the job. Of course, the next job I got paid $20K more again. So maybe it's best to take the counter offer and then also take the next job with the higher pay? Hmm. I'm not sure what life lesson I can take from my experience other than the market was really good back then.
It is interesting to watch the replies to jbash's post. You can almost tell how old people are by their responses (almost -- I suspect that some people who appear to be very immature are not young, but just, well... immature).
It seems to be something like this: people in their 20s & still at their first or second job are giving all kinds of job tips like "dude, just be l33t and you'll never lose a job!" While people in their 30s do the math and wonder how the sob story could actually be true. And people in their 40s are saying "where is your SAVINGS?"
Whatever. All I know is that when you get old, you get near-unhirable. Every hiring manager is younger than you are and some worry that you'll have their job. Some companies don't want to hire someone who will just retire in a few years. Some think you'll cost too much or be completely bored with the tasks. When this time comes, and it'll catch nearly every self-righteous Slashdotter here, one of your best options and only options left is to start your own business. Maybe consulting, maybe a franchise.
Seriously, when you're five years from a normal retirement, I dare any Slashdotter to quit the job and find a new one. It won't be easy for 99% of the population. So stop beating up on the guy for trying to start a business. It may have been a logical way to overcome some obstacles. Of course, you can say that it sounds like he didn't plan it out well. But if my boss laid me off tomorrow, I wouldn't exactly be starting up a business on ideal terms.
The guys bitching about this new trend are inching up on 35 years old, and they grew up on old-school gameplay. They're a very vocal bunch, but they're just not the market anymore.
Really? Really? I've been reading that the gamer demographic keeps getting older. I've even read a little bit of that on Slashdot (although when I searched for it, all I got was a link to an article about women over 40 being a big, growing gamer market -- not quite the article I recall reading). We now have the gamer dad web site, and I'm sure a gamer mom web site either exists or will soon. I'm 33, and over the last 3 years, my income has finally been good enough to allow me to buy a Dreamcast, a PS2, and about $1,000 worth of games. I don't think I'm the only 30-something gamer in existence. I wonder if this guy just doesn't understand the market anymore. It's bigger than he imagines.
Re:What's wrong with you people?
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Leave this man alone. He hasn't done anything substantially criminal.
My vote: Sheena Easton as Annah. Yum. Hearing her call me a "piker" -- well, I knew it was a term of derision, but she sounded so good saying it. I just wanted to hear her say it again and again, and maybe swish that tail of hers around a little bit.
Wow. A single comment for this entire article/post? I guess the adventure gaming genre must really be uninteresting to many. Personally, I am looking forward to a (big) adventure game: Dreamfall. This is the sequel to The Longest Journey. In Dreamfall, you have visions of your world being destroyed, and have to track down April Ryan to help. April is the heroine from the first game.
Of course, it's not an independent game -- it's by Funcom. But it's getting funded by the Norwegian Film Fund, so that's an interesting/artistic influence. And they are changing the game from "adventure" to "action-adventure." Every hardcore role-player knows that "action-RPG" typically means "dumbed-down for the masses." It's the difference between Planescape: Torment, and Diablo 2. But, in the case of adventure games, a little action will help pull me in. Some of the Zorks remain unsolved, still installed on my Win 98se computer -- partly because the puzzles are so puzzling. One of the advantages of Dreamfall's "action" influence appears to be multiple solutions to a puzzle, and the option to use force if you get stuck. If they do it right, this could be one of the first adventure games I finish without a cheatbook. I would really like that.
In relation to some of the links in the original article, I would mention that A Case of the Crabs is great, I'm playing it now. Thanks for the pointer!
Re:Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
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· Score: 1, Funny
What unique attributes of perl do you believe contribute to your claim that perl "can become unmaintainable on a small project"?
Dan Glickman is an avid Linux user, a well-known consumer advocate, vehemently critical of the DMCA and a member of the EFF. Ha ha. Just kidding, Dave Barry style.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a good nomination. He's done a lot, but I've heard about him only a little.
I've submitted a lot of bug reports and patches to various software projects -- but typically only the 1 or 2 fixes that I need to get it working for me. So I have a not-too-deep but very broad interaction with a lot of different GPL & BSD projects. In fact, I've even submitted patches to projects with closed-source (like faqts -- gave them patches to better rank members and score answers... but they never made any improvement using my code or anyone else's). In fact, the faqts site is par-for-the-course. Most projects don't seem to respond.
So I would nominate the gentleman behind HT Track. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. They're responsive and accept code, even cleaning up my poorly done offerings. I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and I'd feel even happier if they were sung heroes.
Does it repeat? Then it's interesting. Even this:
...becomes dumbly obvious as a message when it loops over and over and over again. We can pick out patterns. Even a signal that was so long and varied that it only repeated annually would still be possible to capture within normal human timespans.
Doesn't attaching a score to your "foes" do what you want? Pick someone as a foe, then go to Preferences -> Comments and set foes to have a -6 score. They're filtered out. Done.
Boy, you really want to flaunt that you are completely unfamiliar with common terms in use by the data mining industry. You need to read this post and then give thanks that you posted anonymously. The moderators should be modding down your comments as uninformed, not modding them up.
A townhome in Silicon Valley is $500,000. A "real" home is $700,000. To buy, you need to put 20% down (I put down less, but I had to accept some terrible terms because of it). So, if you have $100,000+ saved up, or you can save it over a reasonable period of time, then living in Silicon Valley is OK. You'll be able to build a fair life for yourself. But if you don't have that kind of money, Silicon Valley is baaaadd. You will pay huge amounts of money to rent a place you'll never be able to own. You will pay more for food and other necessities. You will have to deal with bad traffic during your daily commute. It's the kind of thing that people in their 20s can handle for a while, but everyone else either buys a home or moves to another state.
Oh well. Silicon Valley does have other nice things about it. It truly is a melting pot. You will interact with people from India, Japan, China, the UK, Russia, and elsewhere -- daily. When you want to eat, you will be able to choose from bratwurst at a local German pub to Thai food, and everything in between. Personally, I usually just go for a burger or sandwich nowadays, but every now and then I hook up with someone new to the area -- they're almost always like a kid in a candy store, with a list of things to eat and places to go. I like that. And if you hate your job, there are 10,000 other big tech companies that will want to employ you. Or at least, they did want to employ you... until the economy went bad.
It's your choice, but know what you're getting into.
Yeah, you're right. I guess having a decade of real-world experience working in Marketing for 3 different companies makes me much less qualified to speak than someone who took a class.
No. Marketing is advertising. What you describe is Product Marketing, typically a very technical department populated by PMMs (Product Marketing Managers). PMMs do not work for the Marketing department.
Then you are not representative of the norm for most companies.
I live in the area. One of the more disturbing articles in the local paper made reference to about 1,000 paper millionaires at Google, and how those 1,000 people would push up housing costs as they all leveraged their worth to buy houses. The reason it bothers me is twofold: first, Silicon Valley seems too big to have its housing market pushed around by a mere one thousand people; second, our housing costs are already bad enough. 3-bedroom homes sell for $600,000. That's usually with no yard, and a cookie-cutter floorplan.
Oh well. I guess I should be happy. I own my house, and it'll only go up in value. Thanks Google! But I feel bad for those still trying to buy. I thought the poor economy would give them a buying opportunity.
Huh? No they wouldn't. They would film the stop-motion Hut with greenscreen, then superimpose that on top of the furry guy.
That's the gamble every GPL project makes. My own phpBB Blog software is GPL, and I run the risk of a fork just like everyone else. In fact, possibly more so -- I specifically ask users to post patches and even entirely recoded pages. I guess my project lumbers from one fork to the next, integrating code as I'm allowed. The MySQL team doesn't really have much to worry about, though. They are doing right by their users for the most part, and they are better at building and extending the product than most of the users would be. The X Windows fiasco took years of unhappiness to boil over. The MySQL team doesn't have unhappiness bubbling under the surface. This entire story is just a misunderstanding, attributing malice where there is none.
Of course, if I'm wrong about that, then I want a fork (just like I did for X Windows). But right now MySQL is doing fine by me.
I'm coming to this discussion a day late, and I can't believe no one has answered your questions, greggman. In any case, here it is: their commerical version is 100% free of any GPL'd contributions. You clearly wonder how a product that huge, with that many contributions, can manage such a thing. It's simple. They do the same thing that the FSF does: they require everyone who contributes code to give it to them under no license. In other words, if I contribute a patch to MySQL, they only include it in their product if I certify that I am the copyright holder of that code, and that I give them ownership. Once MySQL has full ownership, they are free to take what is now theirs and license it under any license they wish. Even dual licenses.
Again, when I give them a patch, I don't say, "here is a patch you can use under GPL." If I do that, they reject it. Instead, I have to say, "here is a patch, I give you full ownership, and I can no longer dictate how my own code will be used. Feel free to license it however you wish." And then they do.
Of course, I don't have to offer my patch to them. The GPL only requires that I get my patch "out there" somehow. So if I only want my code to be available under GPL, I don't have to offer it to MySQL. I can just put my patch up on my own web server, offer it only under GPL, and allow people to download it. But if I want MySQL to incorporate it into the official product, I have to give it to them on their terms. The GPL cannot prevent that. It doesn't force the owner of a product to incorporate patches. If it did, then even the FSF would be in trouble, because they do the same thing (ask that full copyright be assigned to them).
Ummm. Being a Californian, I'd just say that it doesn't look like that on the ground. Reading the Mercury or Chronicle every day, I'm mostly seeing Arnold bullying them into doing it -- threatening to take any issue to the voters if it doesn't go his way, mocking politicians who do not fall in line, etc.
However, this is not a slam against him. You need to understand: our state politicians are so inept, so entrenched, and have done such a terrible job on both sides of the aisle, that I fully back Arnold's arm-twisting. I'm not even a Republican, and I voted for him, and pretty much any time he says he's taking something to the voters, I'm going to vote his side on it. Why? Well I'm obviously not following the Democrat's party line (I'm a Demo), but I am sick of the electricity scandals, the Oracle scandal, the delayed budgets, the whiney politicians, and everything else. I want the Terminator to kick some ass. If the politicians walk out of their meetings with bloody teeth, good. They deserve it.
You can actually do this, or get close. Login, and click the "Preferences" link on the left side of the page. Then click the "Comments" tab. One of the options on that page is a "New User Modifier" with 2 menus. Set the first to about 10% and the second to -1. That should penalize the newest 10% of users with a -1 to their mod scores. In my case, I actually have it set to 80% -- with a number that large (and because I browse at a threshold of 4), what I end up with is that anyone with a low UID sort of "rises" out of the din. My own posts are penalized, as I don't consider even my own UID to be low enough. :)
That says more about your skills than it does about MySQL.
You are on crack. Saying MySQL can't handle load is like saying PostgreSQL doesn't have better compliance with the standards.
I don't know. I can half-support that based on my own experience. I was a severely underpaid web monkey at Borland back in the 90s. As the market boomed, I had a ton of job offers, some for $30K more than my existing salary. Eventually I went to management and explained it. They said they would need a few months to arrange a matching offer. I actually gave them the time, and they actually came through. I spent many months pulling down that fat paycheck and being happy. Thus far, it seems that taking a counter-offer is good.
After about 6 or 7 months at that pay scale, things started to get ugly at work. I had a new boss who seemed to hate me. It turns out that I made more money than the boss, and when this came to light, all hell broke loose. Soon enough, I had to give up the job. Of course, the next job I got paid $20K more again. So maybe it's best to take the counter offer and then also take the next job with the higher pay? Hmm. I'm not sure what life lesson I can take from my experience other than the market was really good back then.
I haven't seen a pay increase in four years.
It is interesting to watch the replies to jbash's post. You can almost tell how old people are by their responses (almost -- I suspect that some people who appear to be very immature are not young, but just, well... immature).
It seems to be something like this: people in their 20s & still at their first or second job are giving all kinds of job tips like "dude, just be l33t and you'll never lose a job!" While people in their 30s do the math and wonder how the sob story could actually be true. And people in their 40s are saying "where is your SAVINGS?"
Whatever. All I know is that when you get old, you get near-unhirable. Every hiring manager is younger than you are and some worry that you'll have their job. Some companies don't want to hire someone who will just retire in a few years. Some think you'll cost too much or be completely bored with the tasks. When this time comes, and it'll catch nearly every self-righteous Slashdotter here, one of your best options and only options left is to start your own business. Maybe consulting, maybe a franchise.
Seriously, when you're five years from a normal retirement, I dare any Slashdotter to quit the job and find a new one. It won't be easy for 99% of the population. So stop beating up on the guy for trying to start a business. It may have been a logical way to overcome some obstacles. Of course, you can say that it sounds like he didn't plan it out well. But if my boss laid me off tomorrow, I wouldn't exactly be starting up a business on ideal terms.
I don't trust Microsoft to make that decision for me.
Really? Really? I've been reading that the gamer demographic keeps getting older. I've even read a little bit of that on Slashdot (although when I searched for it, all I got was a link to an article about women over 40 being a big, growing gamer market -- not quite the article I recall reading). We now have the gamer dad web site, and I'm sure a gamer mom web site either exists or will soon. I'm 33, and over the last 3 years, my income has finally been good enough to allow me to buy a Dreamcast, a PS2, and about $1,000 worth of games. I don't think I'm the only 30-something gamer in existence. I wonder if this guy just doesn't understand the market anymore. It's bigger than he imagines.
Substantially? Who gets to define that?
My vote: Sheena Easton as Annah. Yum. Hearing her call me a "piker" -- well, I knew it was a term of derision, but she sounded so good saying it. I just wanted to hear her say it again and again, and maybe swish that tail of hers around a little bit.
Of course, it's not an independent game -- it's by Funcom. But it's getting funded by the Norwegian Film Fund, so that's an interesting/artistic influence. And they are changing the game from "adventure" to "action-adventure." Every hardcore role-player knows that "action-RPG" typically means "dumbed-down for the masses." It's the difference between Planescape: Torment, and Diablo 2. But, in the case of adventure games, a little action will help pull me in. Some of the Zorks remain unsolved, still installed on my Win 98se computer -- partly because the puzzles are so puzzling. One of the advantages of Dreamfall's "action" influence appears to be multiple solutions to a puzzle, and the option to use force if you get stuck. If they do it right, this could be one of the first adventure games I finish without a cheatbook. I would really like that.
In relation to some of the links in the original article, I would mention that A Case of the Crabs is great, I'm playing it now. Thanks for the pointer!
I bet he heard that from good old Tim Towtdi!
;)
Well now that's just fucking mean.