I've had a little interaction with NASA, and let me say that the culture there is so steeped in governmental mentality that its a suprise they get anything done right.
For example: There's a big push from the top to do QRA (Quantitative Reliability Analysis). HELLO! Why weren't they doing that already?! The answer is that they were doing it before the days of the Challenger and then stopped because they didn't like the numbers they were getting. So they started playing voodoo statistics to estimate their reliabilities. (I remember Feynman saying that their supposed reliability would mean something like a launch a day for a millenium without serious failure.)
Another example: I heard of a project in which millions of $$ were spent to estimate the unreliability of a system. Then someone else did it for a hundredth the price and exposed errors in the original project's analysis. Instead of getting a pat on the back, and fixing the problem, then NASA culture would rather hush-hush the situation because it would show that the original project wasted millions of dollars. Sigh.
Don't get me wrong. There are groups within NASA that are top notch. (The shuttle control software development team comes to mind.) However, NASA is a huge organization with huge bureaucracy, huge politics, and huge inefficiencies. --------------------------------- ----------------------
I'm not draggin my butt outta bed just to be disappointed like I was with the Leonids. Oh wait... It's 7am and I've been up for an hour and a half.... Nevermind. -------------------------------------- -----------------
When I was in high school, I could count the number of really inspiring teachers on one hand after it had gone through a combine. I recently tried to explain the endearing nature of phys. ed. classes to Indian friends of mine. My guess is that things are only worse now.
Are things worse now? What do you think could make things better? What would "better" mean to you? -------------------------------------------- -----------
My first though is "or what?" What authority does the IOC have over my website? If I publish scores that I got from NBC, or journals written by eyewitnesses, what law have I broken? I didn't enter into any agreement with the IOC. -------------------------------------------- -----------
Yep. Perl is portable. With Microsoft working with the Perl team to add stuff like fork(), it will be even more portable on the non-POSIX Windows platform. The Perl compiler is finally becoming usable, and tools like perl2exe allow people to bundle Perl with their code into a single binary for a number of platforms.
Regarding Perl modules, if you don't know about the CPAN module, do "perldoc CPAN". Installing a module can be as easy as "perl -MCPAN -e 'install Date::Parse'" ----------------------------------- --------------------
Great article. For once, someone with half a brain actually respects Slashdot enough to answer thoughtfully... But this:
People appear out of nowhere and volunteer to work on things that you'd never dream of asking. Whereas, putting something on the wish list seems to kill off all enthusiasm for it.
Wow. This was a shocker to me. I have a few projects of my own, and I've suspected that people might have a "well, he'll implement it, so why bother?" attitude. This seems to confirm it. I wonder if development would go better if the TODO list was renamed a WISHLIST with a note saying that there is no one working on those aspects, even though they would be worthwhile. ------------------------------------- ------------------
The single biggest problem at Microsoft as a corporation is this: nobody has yelled at Bill Gates in 20 years.
Do you have any facts/anecdotes to back this up? I've read (in Microsoft Secrets) and heard from people at MS that he expects people to literally yell back at him. He calls it "high bandwidth communication".
I seriously doubt that people like Steve Ballmer would have a hard time telling Gates that he is wrong. Similarly, I doubt this spam feature was even known to the top MS brass.
Coppit
P.S. Anyone else think that Ballmer would make a good olympic wrestler?;) ---------------------------------------------- ---------
Virginia has tried to educate students about the copyright issues surrounding Napster rather than block the program, a tactic that many campus administrators say clashes with the freedom-of-inquiry ethos of a university environment. They also say they doubt blocking it will work anyway in the long run. "My biggest personal concern is whether [blocks] will be effective for the goal that they are trying to accomplish," Mr. German said.
The funny thing is, I'm at UVa and Napster seems to be blocked. Maybe it's just this department... Using Napigator, the the non-Napster servers seem perpetually swamped. I actually get better results connecting to Napster servers over dialup at home. ------------------------------------------- ------------
Astronaut: Houston, I've dropped the new Hubble gyroscope. Houston: Unlatch and retrieve. Astronaut: Unlatching... Engaging thrusters... Five feet... Four feet... Three feet... Two feet... One foot... BBBBBZZZZZZPPPPTTTTT Astronaut: Er... Houston, the broom zapped it. Houston: Damn it. Okay, scrap the mission. Return to earth for another gyro
------------------------------------------------ -------
1. immediate release of the source code at product launch,
This is likely to get the most OS programmers interested, especially if your product has a high "cool factor". Let programmers know during all the release hoopla that they can start hacking on the code now.
2. waiting until the technology has acquired a large enough user base to insure a competitor won't just 'take the code and run',
If this is your concern, you'd better think again about your company plans. Heck, Microsoft didn't need Netscape's code to hijack their market dominance. Don't rely on your software to bring in the bucks. Use the software as a loss leader, building up other aspects of your business like consulting, documentation, easy installers, etc.
More pragmatically, think of the GPL instead of a BSD-like license, which actually protects you against this sort of thing. No one can "steal" your code because they are forced by the GPL to make their modifications public.
3. commit to full source code release and release piecemeal (ala ZeroKnowledge),
Not sure what this means... But see below
4. a short-term (~1yr) closed-release to mutually trusted third parties (e.g. EFF),
5. placing the code in a provable timed-release escrow."
Programmers are finicky, and it helps if they can start hacking with as little frustration as possible. If they know that they won't get access to all the code, or that their patches might not see the light of day for over a year, they may not want to contribute. Of course, if your stuff is so cool that people are willing to put up with frustration, you might get away with it.
However, Ghostscript shows how finicky programmers can be. Because (at least in part) of the time-delay release of the Alladin Ghostscript code for public use, GNU Ghostscript was started.
David ------------------------------------------- ------------
I fear that the War on Copying could go on for decades as well. To end it, we will need to rethink the copyright system, based on the Constitution's view that it is meant to benefit the public, not the copyright owners.
I always thought the whole idea of copyright was to protect the creator! Or is this part of RMS' to-hell-with-production-costs-I-have-a-right-to-co py-as-I-see-fit philosophy? (His tollway example always struck me as being insensitive to the cost of construction -- sure, it should be free once it's built and the gov't has recouped construction costs.) ----------------------------------------- --------------
What we REALLY need right now is some REAL intelligence. I mean, sure, it's nice to have "intelligent" machines, but what good does that do when a good size of the population are utter and complete morons? Let's concentrates on making the PEOPLE smarter, then worry about the machines.
Easy. It's easier to make machines smarter than it is to make humans smarter. Try it some time -- be a guest speaker at a local tutoring company or school. ----------------------------------------- --------------
...publish an API and a set of cross-language libraries, so that people can write applications which take advantage of the service remotely...
No need to link in a GIMP library that will be outdated in a couple months... No need to add yet another maintenance task (well, easy as it might be)... Get instant upgrades when they update the server code.
How long before Perl has an Image::GIMP::Transform library?;) ---------------------------------------------- ---------
The next day a plebiscite was held across Germany, designed to underscore the legitimacy of Hitler's government. Ninety-six percent of the voting public cast their ballots. Ninety-two percent voted their approval of the single list of National Socialists and a handful of Nationalists to fill parliament. Some intimidation may have been involved in the voting, but it is estimated that overall the vote was a genuine expression of support for Hitler's government.
The argument is valid. The real point here is that if you asked people, a majority would say they would copy an MP3 illegally. Yet if you asked the same people if it should be legal for everyone to copy MP3s, a majority would likely say no.
That's because, deep down, we all know that the artist gets $0 when we copy an MP3 instead of buying the CD. It's stealing, according to the law, and we shouldn't talk about changing that law until we're ready to deal with the full ramifications. (e.g. Music and books only written for a bounty.)
If you don't believe me, try selling GPL'd code some day.:) ---------------------------------------------- ---------
Microsoft has spent a lot of money on usability engineering. One of the key philosphies appears to be the prevalent use of the mouse as the input device.
First, is this a good goal? Right now, Linux users always have a console open, and GUI interfaces to standard idioms are slowly emerging. (Any good filesystem browsers out there? Any GUI print queue tool? Any process monitor with sortable columns and "right-click" kill?)
Second, the console interface is often associated with the "power" interface to the OS. Any insights on providing that power along with usability? Or should we just layer the more usable/less powerful interface on top of the less usable/more powerful interface? -------------------------------------- -----------------
The point isn't that men and women are different -- they are. The question is why... If it's "natural" differences like strength, I totally agree. If it's "unnatural" differences imposed by society, I disagree.
For example: female firefighters should have the exact same fitness requirements as men -- raging fires are not gender sensitive. However, in an intellectual setting, teachers have to fight the gender bias that results in women with "less CS interest". It's a chicken and egg problem -- if we don't discourage critical thinking in females when they're young, they may end up choosing CS when they're older.
Gender bias research says that: teachers call on boys more often, let boys interrupt girls, encourage boys to solve problems, etc. More is here. An article about women and computers is here, and a dissenting view is here ------------------------------------------------ -------
There's a hard-to-verbalize distaste that people have about Katz. Here's a part of it: he raises the geek to Geek, and makes a living writing about it. Imagine if I decided that Bullies were an unsung minority, and started acting like the Prometheus of bullyhood, telling the world about the secret and unknown social structure of bullies.
Don't get me wrong -- Hellmouth was a stroke of genius. But I think that many Slashdot folks find Katz offensive because he seems to be promoting himself by making "geekdom" newsworthy.
How many reporters got recognition for identifying and writing about the "Generation X"? How many of those same reporters are getting recognition for pieces about how "Generation X is leading the tech boom", when in fact they've just trained their sights on the hard-working subsegment of the <i>same generation</i>.
Katz is styling himself as the outsider who has an "in" to geek circles. By positioning himself as the outsider, he can avoid tackling serious technical issues, while simultaneously looking good for getting into the social structure of geeks.
My advice to Katz: write about geeks, but please expand beyond the social aspects. Write about the technical issues of CSS, as opposed to how some teenager felt oppressed by the big corporation. Stop capitalizing geek as though it were the latest journalistic buzzword, and learn enough about the tech to be respected by the community you write about.
Coppit
P.S. Geeks react the same way to ads for people who know "CORBA, DCOM, Java, Javascript and Pearl";)
Hanging requires no active control, but standing does. While I'm sure there are similarities between swinging and walking, the fact that walking puts the robot in an unstable situation complicates things. (The inverted pendulum requires active control to keep it up, but a pendulum requires no control at all.:) ---------------------------------------------- ---------
If your open source project is Sendmail or Fetchmail, you can expect your users to be reasonably technical. Therefore, the UI that comes out of the community is likely to match the needs of users.
But what if your product is a word processor, where the main users will never write a line of code...
For example, a person I know once asked me what the funny character on their Word document was. After peering at it, I realized that the reverse video of the cursor on top of their letter confused them. I moved the mouse... The point here is that what I took for granted they found very confusing.
David ----------------------------------------- --------------
One thing you can do is follow the model of RedHat & O'reilly - sell non-source services and products such as priority support and documentation. This is what I've tried to do with News Clipper.
A word of warning, however: your community may take the view that "the company will fix it", resulting in less code contributions. Likewise, your community may not want to contribute if it may result in money going into your pocket. Purists may also stop contributing because the documentation isn't free.
Nurturing a developer community for an open source project is a delicate matter.:) ---------------------------------------------- ---------
What exactly constitutes spying equipment? For example, I just bought a wireless A/V system from X10. They also market a package that includes a small camera. I suppose you could use it as a security camera, but their ads (with women) imply you'd use it for other purposes.
People have been saying that copying DVDs is less economical that simply buying the movie. Is this really a compelling argument? How long will it be before it does become economical, and this argument deflates?
I believe the reviewer wasn't trying to be precise, but rather to give the gist of NP-Complete. For example, many non-cs people would think that the problem of "bin packing" is easy. Learning that there are distinct classes of problems, and being able to have a gut feeling that one problem is intrinsically harder than another is an important skill.
Slashdot Mirror
For example: There's a big push from the top to do QRA (Quantitative Reliability Analysis). HELLO! Why weren't they doing that already?! The answer is that they were doing it before the days of the Challenger and then stopped because they didn't like the numbers they were getting. So they started playing voodoo statistics to estimate their reliabilities. (I remember Feynman saying that their supposed reliability would mean something like a launch a day for a millenium without serious failure.)
Another example: I heard of a project in which millions of $$ were spent to estimate the unreliability of a system. Then someone else did it for a hundredth the price and exposed errors in the original project's analysis. Instead of getting a pat on the back, and fixing the problem, then NASA culture would rather hush-hush the situation because it would show that the original project wasted millions of dollars. Sigh.
Don't get me wrong. There are groups within NASA that are top notch. (The shuttle control software development team comes to mind.) However, NASA is a huge organization with huge bureaucracy, huge politics, and huge inefficiencies.- ----------------------
--------------------------------
I'm not draggin my butt outta bed just to be disappointed like I was with the Leonids. Oh wait... It's 7am and I've been up for an hour and a half.... Nevermind.- -----------------
-------------------------------------
Are things worse now? What do you think could make things better? What would "better" mean to you?- -----------
-------------------------------------------
My first though is "or what?" What authority does the IOC have over my website? If I publish scores that I got from NBC, or journals written by eyewitnesses, what law have I broken? I didn't enter into any agreement with the IOC.- -----------
-------------------------------------------
Regarding Perl modules, if you don't know about the CPAN module, do "perldoc CPAN". Installing a module can be as easy as "perl -MCPAN -e 'install Date::Parse'"- --------------------
----------------------------------
Wow. This was a shocker to me. I have a few projects of my own, and I've suspected that people might have a "well, he'll implement it, so why bother?" attitude. This seems to confirm it. I wonder if development would go better if the TODO list was renamed a WISHLIST with a note saying that there is no one working on those aspects, even though they would be worthwhile.- ------------------
------------------------------------
Quick! Somebody patent the "rotating illusionary clock"!- --------------
----------------------------------------
Do you have any facts/anecdotes to back this up? I've read (in Microsoft Secrets) and heard from people at MS that he expects people to literally yell back at him. He calls it "high bandwidth communication".
I seriously doubt that people like Steve Ballmer would have a hard time telling Gates that he is wrong. Similarly, I doubt this spam feature was even known to the top MS brass.
Coppit
P.S. Anyone else think that Ballmer would make a good olympic wrestler? ;)- ---------
---------------------------------------------
The funny thing is, I'm at UVa and Napster seems to be blocked. Maybe it's just this department... Using Napigator, the the non-Napster servers seem perpetually swamped. I actually get better results connecting to Napster servers over dialup at home.- ------------
------------------------------------------
It's already been made into a song.- ------------
------------------------------------------
Astronaut: Houston, I've dropped the new Hubble gyroscope.- -------
Houston: Unlatch and retrieve.
Astronaut: Unlatching... Engaging thrusters... Five feet... Four feet... Three feet... Two feet... One foot...
BBBBBZZZZZZPPPPTTTTT
Astronaut: Er... Houston, the broom zapped it.
Houston: Damn it. Okay, scrap the mission. Return to earth for another gyro
-----------------------------------------------
This is likely to get the most OS programmers interested, especially if your product has a high "cool factor". Let programmers know during all the release hoopla that they can start hacking on the code now.
2. waiting until the technology has acquired a large enough user base to insure a competitor won't just 'take the code and run',
If this is your concern, you'd better think again about your company plans. Heck, Microsoft didn't need Netscape's code to hijack their market dominance. Don't rely on your software to bring in the bucks. Use the software as a loss leader, building up other aspects of your business like consulting, documentation, easy installers, etc.
More pragmatically, think of the GPL instead of a BSD-like license, which actually protects you against this sort of thing. No one can "steal" your code because they are forced by the GPL to make their modifications public.
3. commit to full source code release and release piecemeal (ala ZeroKnowledge),
Not sure what this means... But see below
4. a short-term (~1yr) closed-release to mutually trusted third parties (e.g. EFF),
5. placing the code in a provable timed-release escrow."
Programmers are finicky, and it helps if they can start hacking with as little frustration as possible. If they know that they won't get access to all the code, or that their patches might not see the light of day for over a year, they may not want to contribute. Of course, if your stuff is so cool that people are willing to put up with frustration, you might get away with it.
However, Ghostscript shows how finicky programmers can be. Because (at least in part) of the time-delay release of the Alladin Ghostscript code for public use, GNU Ghostscript was started.
David- ------------
------------------------------------------
I always thought the whole idea of copyright was to protect the creator! Or is this part of RMS' to-hell-with-production-costs-I-have-a-right-to-co py-as-I-see-fit philosophy? (His tollway example always struck me as being insensitive to the cost of construction -- sure, it should be free once it's built and the gov't has recouped construction costs.)- --------------
----------------------------------------
Easy. It's easier to make machines smarter than it is to make humans smarter. Try it some time -- be a guest speaker at a local tutoring company or school.- --------------
----------------------------------------
...publish an API and a set of cross-language libraries, so that people can write applications which take advantage of the service remotely...
;)- ---------
No need to link in a GIMP library that will be outdated in a couple months... No need to add yet another maintenance task (well, easy as it might be)... Get instant upgrades when they update the server code.
How long before Perl has an Image::GIMP::Transform library?
---------------------------------------------
You lose, now come up with some real arguments.
No, you lose:
The argument is valid. The real point here is that if you asked people, a majority would say they would copy an MP3 illegally. Yet if you asked the same people if it should be legal for everyone to copy MP3s, a majority would likely say no.That's because, deep down, we all know that the artist gets $0 when we copy an MP3 instead of buying the CD. It's stealing, according to the law, and we shouldn't talk about changing that law until we're ready to deal with the full ramifications. (e.g. Music and books only written for a bounty.)
If you don't believe me, try selling GPL'd code some day. :)- ---------
---------------------------------------------
Microsoft has spent a lot of money on usability engineering. One of the key philosphies appears to be the prevalent use of the mouse as the input device.
- -----------------
First, is this a good goal? Right now, Linux users always have a console open, and GUI interfaces to standard idioms are slowly emerging. (Any good filesystem browsers out there? Any GUI print queue tool? Any process monitor with sortable columns and "right-click" kill?)
Second, the console interface is often associated with the "power" interface to the OS. Any insights on providing that power along with usability? Or should we just layer the more usable/less powerful interface on top of the less usable/more powerful interface?
-------------------------------------
For example: female firefighters should have the exact same fitness requirements as men -- raging fires are not gender sensitive. However, in an intellectual setting, teachers have to fight the gender bias that results in women with "less CS interest". It's a chicken and egg problem -- if we don't discourage critical thinking in females when they're young, they may end up choosing CS when they're older.
Gender bias research says that: teachers call on boys more often, let boys interrupt girls, encourage boys to solve problems, etc. More is here. An article about women and computers is here, and a dissenting view is here- -------
-----------------------------------------------
There's a hard-to-verbalize distaste that people have about Katz. Here's a part of it: he raises the geek to Geek, and makes a living writing about it. Imagine if I decided that Bullies were an unsung minority, and started acting like the Prometheus of bullyhood, telling the world about the secret and unknown social structure of bullies.
;)
- -------
Don't get me wrong -- Hellmouth was a stroke of genius. But I think that many Slashdot folks find Katz offensive because he seems to be promoting himself by making "geekdom" newsworthy.
How many reporters got recognition for identifying and writing about the "Generation X"? How many of those same reporters are getting recognition for pieces about how "Generation X is leading the tech boom", when in fact they've just trained their sights on the hard-working subsegment of the <i>same generation</i>.
Katz is styling himself as the outsider who has an "in" to geek circles. By positioning himself as the outsider, he can avoid tackling serious technical issues, while simultaneously looking good for getting into the social structure of geeks.
My advice to Katz: write about geeks, but please expand beyond the social aspects. Write about the technical issues of CSS, as opposed to how some teenager felt oppressed by the big corporation. Stop capitalizing geek as though it were the latest journalistic buzzword, and learn enough about the tech to be respected by the community you write about.
Coppit
P.S. Geeks react the same way to ads for people who know "CORBA, DCOM, Java, Javascript and Pearl"
-----------------------------------------------
Hanging requires no active control, but standing does. While I'm sure there are similarities between swinging and walking, the fact that walking puts the robot in an unstable situation complicates things. (The inverted pendulum requires active control to keep it up, but a pendulum requires no control at all. :)- ---------
---------------------------------------------
If your open source project is Sendmail or Fetchmail, you can expect your users to be reasonably technical. Therefore, the UI that comes out of the community is likely to match the needs of users.
- --------------
But what if your product is a word processor, where the main users will never write a line of code...
For example, a person I know once asked me what the funny character on their Word document was. After peering at it, I realized that the reverse video of the cursor on top of their letter confused them. I moved the mouse... The point here is that what I took for granted they found very confusing.
David
----------------------------------------
One thing you can do is follow the model of RedHat & O'reilly - sell non-source services and products such as priority support and documentation. This is what I've tried to do with News Clipper.
:)- ---------
A word of warning, however: your community may take the view that "the company will fix it", resulting in less code contributions. Likewise, your community may not want to contribute if it may result in money going into your pocket. Purists may also stop contributing because the documentation isn't free.
Nurturing a developer community for an open source project is a delicate matter.
---------------------------------------------
What exactly constitutes spying equipment? For example, I just bought a wireless A/V system from X10. They also market a package that includes a small camera. I suppose you could use it as a security camera, but their ads (with women) imply you'd use it for other purposes.
- -------
-----------------------------------------------
People have been saying that copying DVDs is less economical that simply buying the movie. Is this really a compelling argument? How long will it be before it does become economical, and this argument deflates?
I believe the reviewer wasn't trying to be precise, but rather to give the gist of NP-Complete. For example, many non-cs people would think that the problem of "bin packing" is easy.
Learning that there are distinct classes of problems, and being able to have a gut feeling that one problem is intrinsically harder than another is an important skill.