The presence of an existing community around a software provides a visible trace of the viability of the technology (developer adoption) and of the presence of a market for it (user adoption). If numbers for both groups of adopters are significant and constantly on the rise, the VC considers this as a sure sign that the product is a winner. In other words, the presence of a significant community shows that you've done your homeworks; investment guaranteed.
Then FLOSS protects the source code assets against the consequences of the startup that initiated the project going belly up; anyone can pick up where the on-staff developers left by forking. This fosters the Long Tail approach as well as protects adopters. This is the kind of sustainability we all dream of; it protects the investments and data of businesses and governments as well. Everybody wins.
Having had the priviledge of working with Måde a few years ago, I must say that he's an extremely rare kind of suit: the type who truely gets Free Software and understands both sides of the story, the FSF agenda and the business possibilities. He's also unusually good at inspiring his troops by bringing a clear vision and highly motivational speeches.
However, let's not fool ourselves: business is business and what matters is the bottom line. I for one truely beleive him when he says that he was aware of the potential outrage in the Free Software community, but that making the product available to yet another vendor's customers was the decisive factor.
Whether dealing with career Congress critters or with petty ass kissers at the job, the result is the same: it's a popularity contest, not a meritocracy. As such, I really don't care whether the company hierarchy is based upon old boys' network motivated management decisions or by a popularity contest among the proles in the department; workplace hierarchy is completely flawed and totally biased regardless.
My first two IT jobs were both in Technical Writing:
The first one because I hadn't yet decided on a career focus and I wanted to leverage my native English language skills to quickly get a foot inside a foreign country's IT sector, as a freshly landed immigrant;
The second came as one of those offers one cannot refuse, based on my excellent performance at the first job.
Once I got pigeonholed into Technical Writing, applying for any other job became a dauntingly difficult task. I just kept on getting comments like:
This opening is for a Project Manager. That doesn't match your profile: you're a Technical Writer.
Hi! This is Ms.Clueless BitchAufHR from soonbankrupt.com, how ya doing? Thanks for your application for this Product Manager position. We were all sitting here reading your CV and we have a nice Technical Writer job for you.
Oh, so you're fluent in 7 languages. That's good, cause we're badly in need of a Technical Writer who can do both English and German.
At some point, it almost felt like my college degree was being systematically ignored, which made me ponder whether I would be better off switching field rather than fighting the HR drones.
I stopped sending out CVs and instead focused on contacting old friends, which paid off in spades: within a few weeks, I landed myself a CTO position at a really forward-looking startup where a mere acquaintance was working, based solely on his pitching my CV to his boss.
Since then, I haven't bothered with the CV mailing game; I utilize the power of social networking. It works.
My true wish would be for a GTK2-based version of Opera. Who needs half a dozen of crappy Mozilla variants, when there is one excellent Opera that did things right the first time?
Open Sourcedness is not the decisive factor, usability is. That's where Opera wins over any Mozilla variant, any day: it does what I want, right out of the box.
Now, if only they could just make it GTK2-based, instead of QT-based...
dump Esound in favor of Network Audio Sound
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
Esound requires too much manual fiddling to get working accross networked applications, while NAS was designed with exactly that in mind. NAS also happens to be supported out-of-the-box by several X terminal devices made by HP, NCD, etc.
Ditch aspell and ispell, standardize on MySpell
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
From a written works author's perspective, nothing more frustrating than finding out that the GNOME people insisted on adopting a spellchecker framework for which hardly any dictionary is available outside the realms of the English language. Please dump that aspell crap and apply the MySpell/OpenOffice spellchecking infrastructure across the board ASAP!
Don't list crap as improvements, dammit!
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Sheesh! The following items are NOT improvements and should therefore not be listed as one:
New file selector - Either click your way thru the whole folder hierarchy or call up a path dialog and be expected to remember the exact full path. The lovely tab completion from GNOME 2.4 is gone. Idiots!
Yet another browser change - First Galeon, then Epiphany, now Firefox? Can you make your fucking mind up and stick to it for good?
Rhythmbox is more mature - Hard to tell, given that the 0.6 series could play streams and files that the new 0.8 series fail to playback. Try telling that to the Gstreamer guys who are so ego-inflated that they insist on calling their new back-ends "better" even though they broke Rhythmbox.
Every foreigner here has been treated as a potential mafioso or terrorist since ages. That position has recently been rubber-stamped approved when the new Aliens' Act came into law on May 1st 2004. Things like arbitrary seizure of passports for undertermined amount of time (often for several months or over 1 year) and druging people unconscious for deportation, to deprive them of their right to appeal, are common here.
Officially, Finland has an immigration policy of some sort. In practice, everybody is discouraged from putting down an application for a residence permit in the first place and then whenever someone dares apply anyhow, they get a refusal on shady basis that contradict several of this country's laws. The point is that they build a wall of hopelessness, betting on the idea that someone facing a refusal after waiting for a decision over a year willl not bother with appealing and will instead try their luck in another country. That assumption usually proves correct; few bother appealing, instead leaving full of bitterness and hatered against a country that advertises itself as being civilised and based on equal rights. Liars!
Handling someone's death (even in the absence of a last will) used to be fairly simple:
real estate (house, summer place),
monetary assets (bank, liquidity, stock),
vehicles (car, motorcycle, boat),
other valuables (antiques, silverware),
personal goods (books, music),
memory lane (letters, family pictures)
The point in common with all the above is that everything is a material asset whose location can easily and quickly be determined.
The new thing since the proliferation of computers and the Internet is that people suddenly have immaterial assets to be considered too, but their existence might well be unknown or their location unclear.
Then, proving credentials to get access to the data can be difficult:
For instance, just think how Internic handles domain transfers when your ISP disappeared or locked you out - they want confirmation from the same e-mail address used to register the domain, yet you cannot access that account right now.
what if the deceased's data is hosted in a foreign country, in an attempt to escape local laws forbidding that type of online content? Picture a case where you know for fact that the deceased scanned and stored important data, uploaded it to a foreign server, but left no trace of the password anywhere. how do you recover the data?
Add to this the fact that people might create e-mail or shell accounts on different hosts for different purposes: free software development, meeting sex partners, job, other hobbies... How do you keep track of them all, yourself? Can you positively say whether you still have an account on the Dead Hackers Society BBS and what the password might be? What about that free e-mail account that you use to correspond with your mistress to whom you had promised to give that old but cozzy summer place nobody else but you and her knows about?
This being said, I just got married and these are all things I have to worry about, as I update my last will... *yikes*
I have made my own source package, which generates the following Debian meta-packages:
foobarsoft-base
Whatever I find absolutely essential on any Debian system.
foobarsoft-configs
Fills/etc with my favorite settings and environment variables.
foobarsoft-desktop
X with IceWM and favorite commandline tools.
foobarsoft-gnome-environment
GNOME plus every GUI application I need for maximum comfort on a desktop.
foobarsoft-openoffice
My favorite selection of dictionaries, spellcheckers and localisation files for OpenOffice.
This allows me to get new computers setup in a matter of minutes, and to keep them all updated if I change my mind about which applications I like to standardize upon.
The correct answer is not, did that guy stick with his last job for at least 6 months. The correct answer is, did his last employer mean to keep him for more than what it took to complete project X?
I really want an employer that, once I invest time into learning their methodology and fitting it with the senior staff, will not ditch me at the first sight of the CEO not being able to pocket his multi-million quarterly bonus.
So, what really ought to be considered is employee loyalty: care for your employees and stop firing them for no reason. Otherwise, if you treat everyone as temps, YOU are the one forcing them to look for another job 6 months after starting.
Someone once rightfully described me by the words "Do anything twice": I've been a teacher (foreign languages, music, CS, network security, etc.), I've held a variety of jobs in ICT, from webmaster all the way up to CTO, I've been a studio musician playing on several gold records... Unless it involves heavy manual labour, you name it, I've been there.
Nowadays, I'm living as someone who has been forced out of a well-paying job, following a work permit extension refusal, but who cannot leave the country either. Whatever I could be doing to keep myself busy and paying taxes, I'm not allowed to do (horrible story, but that's not the point).
Looking back, maybe this situation is not as bad as it looks: nowadays, I have plenty of time to actually enjoy whatever I'm doing with computers (music, Debian packages, creative writing, etc.) and absolutely none of the presure usually related to holding jobs and of the sense of burn-out we all too easily experience when whatever was our hobby becomes our dayjob; we no longer enjoy it.
Here, using Linux and touching a computer is not a burden or a liability, because it's not related to any job. In a sense, it's like I'm back in my dad's basement when I was a teenager typing short programs in BASIC on my CoCo 3, taking my time and really digging it. Isn't life precious enough that it should always be enjoyed this way?
...and then using this as an excuse to conquer any Muslim country out there, on the basis of "preventing and fighting terrorism".
Provoke CIA-trained former ally.
Former ally retaliates by crashing plane in WTC towers.
Launch a war "against terrorism" to get even with former ally; kill his sons, rape his daughters and take over his (petroleum-filled) land.
??
Proffit?
*sigh*
Is there any friggin' free country left out there, which is not under the influence of the drug known as the World Trade Organisation? Hint: USA is not such a free country.
..who are just about to pass yet another reform of the Immigrations's act that will essentially make it impossible for anyone to immigrate to Finland; no more refugees, no more political asylum, no more immigration... nothing except other EU citizens. Add to this increased police surveillance of foreigners (under a presumption similar to the American "all Muslims are suspects" one-liner) and you've got a nice police state that stands proud of its Soviet heritage. Finlandization at its best. *sigh*
Jeff visited us last year at Alternative Party in Helsinki. He shared his stories on game development, animal fetishes and other Minter oddities. Then he accompanied a large group of visitors for a pint of Guinness at the nearest Irish pub, then partied like a Finn in the sauna after eating reindeer meat (thanks Nosfe!). Too bad he couldn't make it this year...
Many people complained that kernels since 2.4.22 broke ACPI support on their hardware.
The cause is a brand new ACPI implementation which has a cutoff date of January 1st 2001. If your computer's BIOS is older than that, any ACPI support that might be present will be completely ignored by the kernel. ACPI hacker Len Brown explains that while the cutoff date is indeed arbitrary, it was already being used by certain distributions who noticed a pattern in when BIOSes with broken ACPI support where manufactured, so the ACPI hackers stuck by that concensus.
If you know for fact that ACPI worked fine on your computer until 2.4.21, you can enable it again: the cure is to put acpi=force in your bootloader configuration options.
Len also noted that there might eventually be a whitelist of older BIOS versions whose ACPI support is spotless. If you feel that your motherboard is one of those that should be whitelisted, file a bug at
Kernel.org. Len makes absolutely no promise whatsoever that such a whitelist will ever be implemented, but still leaves the door open for people to manifest their interest via the above bug report form.
Guitars, computers, electronic parts... you name it, Canadians and Yankees have it cheaper than Europe. Why? Because just about everything in Europe is sold at full list price, also adding all sorts of levies and taxes on import of non-EU goods. By comparision, North America is used to have everything at discounts often approaching 50% of list price.
Your part about man being patronized on any child-rearing issue, while women are presumed to have mastered it all upfront, it really hits home. Nice to see that I'm not the only one noticing how fathers have basically no rights and are presumed to be complete idiots when it comes to taking care of kids.
The day Carly Fiorina will agree to working at $5/hour with NO extra compensation, NO bonus and NO company-paid anything, I'll consider doing so myself.
/Me safely goes back to sleep, knowing that no "leader" will ever agree to the above clause for themselves.
During the dot-com boom, I worked at the company of a famous Finnish rocker, who had the dubvious pretention of trying to develop the "Apache of the WAP business". By the time the company collapsed with extensive media coverage, having that company's name on my CV became a liability for any job in the ICT business: the recruiters' attitude was that I probably was involved into what made the company fail, so there was no way any potential employer would risk having me ruin their company too. *sigh*
Looking back, the WAP place was typical of cash-burning zero-result startups from the dot-com era. All flash and no content. No wonder it failed! There is also something to be said about people who become so engrossed with themselves, just because they work at "company X" and get an indecently generous paycheck for no result. Kinda rhymes with cocktail lounges, dope and cheap girls. *shivers*
Luckily, I have more than one area of expertise up my sleeves, so I found myself a dreamjob in Network Security awhile after. The irony of it all is, that company also burned cash faster than it could find and retain customers (never mind that the products are also crappier than what any script kiddy could come up with) and, as such, according to former collegues, they are fairly close to filing for bankrupcy. *sigh*
ARGH!!! Don't the friggin suits ever learn anything?
The original Norwegian article is happy enough to state that a 2nd trial has occured. They stick to the facts.
Meanwhile, the BBC blackpaints Jon and anyone trying to access DVDs they rightfully own, with RIAA statements along the lines that yet another criminal got away.
The BBC also presents a statement that CSS is used be to prevent copying of DVDs (byte-copying the media does NOT require prior decoding, sorry). They should have said that CSS is an access-control technology, not a copy-protection technology; a technology that failed and that flies in the face of fair use jurisprudence, at that.
Slashdot Mirror
Then FLOSS protects the source code assets against the consequences of the startup that initiated the project going belly up; anyone can pick up where the on-staff developers left by forking. This fosters the Long Tail approach as well as protects adopters. This is the kind of sustainability we all dream of; it protects the investments and data of businesses and governments as well. Everybody wins.
However, let's not fool ourselves: business is business and what matters is the bottom line. I for one truely beleive him when he says that he was aware of the potential outrage in the Free Software community, but that making the product available to yet another vendor's customers was the decisive factor.
Whether dealing with career Congress critters or with petty ass kissers at the job, the result is the same: it's a popularity contest, not a meritocracy. As such, I really don't care whether the company hierarchy is based upon old boys' network motivated management decisions or by a popularity contest among the proles in the department; workplace hierarchy is completely flawed and totally biased regardless.
- The first one because I hadn't yet decided on a career focus and I wanted to leverage my native English language skills to quickly get a foot inside a foreign country's IT sector, as a freshly landed immigrant;
- The second came as one of those offers one cannot refuse, based on my excellent performance at the first job.
Once I got pigeonholed into Technical Writing, applying for any other job became a dauntingly difficult task. I just kept on getting comments like:- This opening is for a Project Manager. That doesn't match your profile: you're a Technical Writer.
- Hi! This is Ms.Clueless BitchAufHR from soonbankrupt.com, how ya doing? Thanks for your application for this Product Manager position. We were all sitting here reading your CV and we have a nice Technical Writer job for you.
- Oh, so you're fluent in 7 languages. That's good, cause we're badly in need of a Technical Writer who can do both English and German.
At some point, it almost felt like my college degree was being systematically ignored, which made me ponder whether I would be better off switching field rather than fighting the HR drones.I stopped sending out CVs and instead focused on contacting old friends, which paid off in spades: within a few weeks, I landed myself a CTO position at a really forward-looking startup where a mere acquaintance was working, based solely on his pitching my CV to his boss.
Since then, I haven't bothered with the CV mailing game; I utilize the power of social networking. It works.
Open Sourcedness is not the decisive factor, usability is. That's where Opera wins over any Mozilla variant, any day: it does what I want, right out of the box.
Now, if only they could just make it GTK2-based, instead of QT-based...
Esound requires too much manual fiddling to get working accross networked applications, while NAS was designed with exactly that in mind. NAS also happens to be supported out-of-the-box by several X terminal devices made by HP, NCD, etc.
From a written works author's perspective, nothing more frustrating than finding out that the GNOME people insisted on adopting a spellchecker framework for which hardly any dictionary is available outside the realms of the English language. Please dump that aspell crap and apply the MySpell/OpenOffice spellchecking infrastructure across the board ASAP!
Officially, Finland has an immigration policy of some sort. In practice, everybody is discouraged from putting down an application for a residence permit in the first place and then whenever someone dares apply anyhow, they get a refusal on shady basis that contradict several of this country's laws. The point is that they build a wall of hopelessness, betting on the idea that someone facing a refusal after waiting for a decision over a year willl not bother with appealing and will instead try their luck in another country. That assumption usually proves correct; few bother appealing, instead leaving full of bitterness and hatered against a country that advertises itself as being civilised and based on equal rights. Liars!
- real estate (house, summer place),
- monetary assets (bank, liquidity, stock),
- vehicles (car, motorcycle, boat),
- other valuables (antiques, silverware),
- personal goods (books, music),
- memory lane (letters, family pictures)
The point in common with all the above is that everything is a material asset whose location can easily and quickly be determined.The new thing since the proliferation of computers and the Internet is that people suddenly have immaterial assets to be considered too, but their existence might well be unknown or their location unclear.
Then, proving credentials to get access to the data can be difficult:
For instance, just think how Internic handles domain transfers when your ISP disappeared or locked you out - they want confirmation from the same e-mail address used to register the domain, yet you cannot access that account right now.
what if the deceased's data is hosted in a foreign country, in an attempt to escape local laws forbidding that type of online content? Picture a case where you know for fact that the deceased scanned and stored important data, uploaded it to a foreign server, but left no trace of the password anywhere. how do you recover the data?
Add to this the fact that people might create e-mail or shell accounts on different hosts for different purposes: free software development, meeting sex partners, job, other hobbies... How do you keep track of them all, yourself? Can you positively say whether you still have an account on the Dead Hackers Society BBS and what the password might be? What about that free e-mail account that you use to correspond with your mistress to whom you had promised to give that old but cozzy summer place nobody else but you and her knows about?
This being said, I just got married and these are all things I have to worry about, as I update my last will... *yikes*
- foobarsoft-base
- foobarsoft-configs
- foobarsoft-desktop
- foobarsoft-gnome-environment
- foobarsoft-openoffice
This allows me to get new computers setup in a matter of minutes, and to keep them all updated if I change my mind about which applications I like to standardize upon.Whatever I find absolutely essential on any Debian system.
Fills /etc with my favorite settings and environment variables.
X with IceWM and favorite commandline tools.
GNOME plus every GUI application I need for maximum comfort on a desktop.
My favorite selection of dictionaries, spellcheckers and localisation files for OpenOffice.
I really want an employer that, once I invest time into learning their methodology and fitting it with the senior staff, will not ditch me at the first sight of the CEO not being able to pocket his multi-million quarterly bonus.
So, what really ought to be considered is employee loyalty: care for your employees and stop firing them for no reason. Otherwise, if you treat everyone as temps, YOU are the one forcing them to look for another job 6 months after starting.
Nowadays, I'm living as someone who has been forced out of a well-paying job, following a work permit extension refusal, but who cannot leave the country either. Whatever I could be doing to keep myself busy and paying taxes, I'm not allowed to do (horrible story, but that's not the point).
Looking back, maybe this situation is not as bad as it looks: nowadays, I have plenty of time to actually enjoy whatever I'm doing with computers (music, Debian packages, creative writing, etc.) and absolutely none of the presure usually related to holding jobs and of the sense of burn-out we all too easily experience when whatever was our hobby becomes our dayjob; we no longer enjoy it.
Here, using Linux and touching a computer is not a burden or a liability, because it's not related to any job. In a sense, it's like I'm back in my dad's basement when I was a teenager typing short programs in BASIC on my CoCo 3, taking my time and really digging it. Isn't life precious enough that it should always be enjoyed this way?
With every damn kernel release, I try pulling the diff. Every other time, some hunk somewhere ends up fuzzy or downright being rejected.
- Provoke CIA-trained former ally.
- Former ally retaliates by crashing plane in WTC towers.
- Launch a war "against terrorism" to get even with former ally; kill his sons, rape his daughters and take over his (petroleum-filled) land.
- ??
- Proffit?
*sigh*Is there any friggin' free country left out there, which is not under the influence of the drug known as the World Trade Organisation? Hint: USA is not such a free country.
..who are just about to pass yet another reform of the Immigrations's act that will essentially make it impossible for anyone to immigrate to Finland; no more refugees, no more political asylum, no more immigration... nothing except other EU citizens. Add to this increased police surveillance of foreigners (under a presumption similar to the American "all Muslims are suspects" one-liner) and you've got a nice police state that stands proud of its Soviet heritage. Finlandization at its best. *sigh*
Jeff visited us last year at Alternative Party in Helsinki. He shared his stories on game development, animal fetishes and other Minter oddities. Then he accompanied a large group of visitors for a pint of Guinness at the nearest Irish pub, then partied like a Finn in the sauna after eating reindeer meat (thanks Nosfe!). Too bad he couldn't make it this year...
Was here in yesterday's thread about 2.4.25 and 2.6.3 releases.
The cause is a brand new ACPI implementation which has a cutoff date of January 1st 2001. If your computer's BIOS is older than that, any ACPI support that might be present will be completely ignored by the kernel. ACPI hacker Len Brown explains that while the cutoff date is indeed arbitrary, it was already being used by certain distributions who noticed a pattern in when BIOSes with broken ACPI support where manufactured, so the ACPI hackers stuck by that concensus.
If you know for fact that ACPI worked fine on your computer until 2.4.21, you can enable it again: the cure is to put acpi=force in your bootloader configuration options.
Len also noted that there might eventually be a whitelist of older BIOS versions whose ACPI support is spotless. If you feel that your motherboard is one of those that should be whitelisted, file a bug at Kernel.org. Len makes absolutely no promise whatsoever that such a whitelist will ever be implemented, but still leaves the door open for people to manifest their interest via the above bug report form.
Guitars, computers, electronic parts... you name it, Canadians and Yankees have it cheaper than Europe. Why? Because just about everything in Europe is sold at full list price, also adding all sorts of levies and taxes on import of non-EU goods. By comparision, North America is used to have everything at discounts often approaching 50% of list price.
Your part about man being patronized on any child-rearing issue, while women are presumed to have mastered it all upfront, it really hits home. Nice to see that I'm not the only one noticing how fathers have basically no rights and are presumed to be complete idiots when it comes to taking care of kids.
/Me safely goes back to sleep, knowing that no "leader" will ever agree to the above clause for themselves.
Looking back, the WAP place was typical of cash-burning zero-result startups from the dot-com era. All flash and no content. No wonder it failed! There is also something to be said about people who become so engrossed with themselves, just because they work at "company X" and get an indecently generous paycheck for no result. Kinda rhymes with cocktail lounges, dope and cheap girls. *shivers*
Luckily, I have more than one area of expertise up my sleeves, so I found myself a dreamjob in Network Security awhile after. The irony of it all is, that company also burned cash faster than it could find and retain customers (never mind that the products are also crappier than what any script kiddy could come up with) and, as such, according to former collegues, they are fairly close to filing for bankrupcy. *sigh*
ARGH!!! Don't the friggin suits ever learn anything?
N/T
Meanwhile, the BBC blackpaints Jon and anyone trying to access DVDs they rightfully own, with RIAA statements along the lines that yet another criminal got away.
The BBC also presents a statement that CSS is used be to prevent copying of DVDs (byte-copying the media does NOT require prior decoding, sorry). They should have said that CSS is an access-control technology, not a copy-protection technology; a technology that failed and that flies in the face of fair use jurisprudence, at that.