There is as much abandoned OSS as abandoned closed commercial software.
Really? "as much"? Wasn't there a/. story two days ago about an OSS dev not interested in supporting his own app unless he got paid?
There's got to be waay more OSS abandonware than closed source because the proprietary people get paid for their work and therefore work hard to make sure the money keeps flowing in. Whereas the OSS guy quits after he's satisfied scratching his itch and there's nothing new left to explore/clone.
I doubt it. I have shelves full of commercial "abandonware". Mostly just in case I need to fire up an antique system for the sole purpose of dealing with some dust-ridden data. At least with OSS, you can usually get the source and do something with it. If a commercial product is truly abandoned and the vendor is defunct, you've got to reverse-engineer it and hope patent/copyright laws aren't going to get you. If it's something worse - like an OS/2 version of a Norton/Symantec product, you can basically give it up, unless you have enough cash to make them listen. And for some products/vendors, that would have to be a lot of cash indeed. Think about Windows XP and various world governments, for example.
I see you've been living under a rock and never heard of these things called patent trolls, or SCO, or Oracle.
And how, pray tell, are any of those entities going to find out about your private little contract with a vendor to fix your particular instance of whatever code?
Software audits. Oracle and Microsoft are famous for going on-site and sifting through computers looking for non-compliance. Non-compliance doesn't only mean using unauthorized copies of software, it also means unauthorized use of authorized software. And if that isn't enough, the DMCA can be used on you for reverse-engineering a product in order to modify or augment it. It also tends to "void the warranty" on your legitimate uses.
Open Source isn't necessarily the Solution to Everything, but most OSS has a license that explicitly permits customization for private use, at least. And no one's going to come around auditing it.
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
OK. There's one of you. Alone. Proud. Independent. And with bills coming due.
There's an entire corporation on the other side of the table. They're not hiring someone who's unique and indispensible, they're hiring someone to do a job after interviewing a whole raft of "special snowflakes" just like you. And one of their decision points is who they can get cheapest, but there are enough potential hires that they can afford to pick and choose. In other words, they're holding each other's hands. Them and the corporation down the street, and the corporation downtown and so forth. They also have the reserves to play a waiting game, just like a certain company in my town I've been watching who keeps advertising even though they won't offer wages at the local market rate. Waiting for the market rate to drop when you get desperate enough that it's either buckle or lose your house. Or they'll use the "lack of available talent" to justify bringing in cheap H1-Bs.
The President of the United States of America routinely does a lot of his job from locations other than the White House or even withing the USA at all. Or are American CEOs so magical that they cannot do likewise?
And if so, why do they like to move their incorporations to tax-haven countries while maintaining their real-world presence in the USA?
The world isn't binary. There are middle grounds between corporate capitalism and communism.
Precisely. Computers have freed us to be able to think great thoughts. Why is is that the more powerful computers get, the more we seem to downgrade our own, more nuanced systems of logic developed over the centuries?
Why also does everything have to be a straight line or a hyperbola? Can't we accept that many phenomena have one or more maxima and minima or may even go abruptly discontinuous?
The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money
Maybe. The shift seems to be towards people who have a lot of money separating from people who make money. They are more likely to trade large sums of money back and forth as game counters than they are to go out and consume.
After all, if 1 million unemployed formerly middle-class people can no longer afford steak dinners, are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the Koch brothers going to use their fortunes to go out and consume 1 million steaks a week in the place of the unemployed? Are they going to buy enough cellphones and Xmas toys to keep those industries afloat?
If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?
No jobs, no money in consumers hands, no demand.
What "rest of the economy" is left after all the good jobs have gone overseas?
--PM
Then there will be overseas consumers.
Consumers are consumers. American consumers aren't more sacred than overseas consumers.
And why should they buy consumer goods from American companies with their overpaid executives? Logic dictates that the way to get the true low price is to eliminate all excessive costs.
So just cut the USA out of the loop entirely and buy from a Chinese or Indian company.
In my town the local predecessor to Wal-Mart sold little Dennison pocket guides for maybe $1.00 each (it was a LONG time ago, you nasty little lawn-walker!)
One of my favorites was a book of tables with 6-digit precision. Loved the symmetry: Log 2 = 0.301030!
Many transcendental functions are the result of some sort of series formula and most of them have values where the series converges very rapidly or very slowly.
To get the most precise answer in the minimum amount of time, the computer implementations of these functions pull exactly the same sort of tricks to fold computations over into the fast zone.
Protecting bad/incompetent workers is something that Bar associations and Medical Associations have also often been accused of. But then again, a Union by any other name...
Think about it. Would a sane person really want to give up belonging to an association that protects good workers just because it also protects bad workers? Especially if it's your job that's protected, no matter how good or bad you are perceived to be?
The reason that people around my part of the (right-to-work) world hate unions is mostly because they've been told over and over that "Unions is Communism" and Communism is Liberalism and being a Liberal around in this part of the USA is practically a hanging offense.
The current hype around STEM jobs hides the fact that knowing people is still a much better way of being successful than knowing things. STEM jobs are like garbage pickup: It's very important that somebody does it, but you don't want your kids to end up doing the hard work for little money. Yes, I know that STEM jobs are considered well-paying, but with the same work ethic and intellectual ability that they require, one could easily make more money in other fields. An innate talent for science and technology, which appears to be correlated with mild autism spectrum disorders and thus a much lower chance of getting along with people, is as much an evolutionary advantage as being on the other end of the bell curve: The world works best for the people in the middle, not for the outliers.
One of the real handicaps of being socially awkward is that employers can take advantage of you. Even if you are in a highly-skilled profession.
Doctors and lawyers are generally "people persons". It's practically a job requirement. They form professional organizations which can lobby governments and otherwise make the world more pleasant to them.
Techies are generally not people persons, even when they aren't actually autistic. They don't form protective organizations. In fact, they're often anti-union (and face it, just because the AMA doesn't call itself a union doesn't mean that it doesn't carry many union traits) and they often subscribe to a Libertarian/Randian ideal that they can sit all high and isolated and self-sufficient. Ironic, since the Randian Bible (Atlas Shrugged) is premised on the idea that the oligarchs (falsely equated to the majority of creative people) form what is for all practical purposes a union and go on strike (the "Shrug"). Oligarchs pretty much have to be people persons too, of course.
In short, if you have few social skills, you're screwed.
A baby boomer with autism may get a job as a mainframe system administrator. He may still have a job today, but increasingly threatened as such systems are being retired.
I think you draw your lines too narrowly. I think it likely that an autistic mainframe operator would transition fairly naturally from big iron to distributed servers. What is more likely to be the case is that an autistic person used to running systems would have a hard time being transferred to a help desk.
Labelling/stereotyping is "bad" in that it is a simplification mechanism. Simplification is essential for us to deal with a complex world without becoming totally overloaded, but it also means that we have deliberately donned blinders and we often forget that just because we don't see something, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And can turn around suddenly and bite you.
I started studying in 1987. And we already had 'internet' then. Not sure what all is called 'internet' though.
I had to look up the History of the Internet to find that out - evidently the term "internet" was in use since 1974 to describe interconnected networks, but it wasn't THE Internet until NSFNET connected the major NSF supercomputer centers in 1988.
Interestingly, Wikipedia cites Tanenbaum's Computer Networks for this information.:)
The Internet came gradually to civilians. When I was an Amiga developer circa 1987, the primary way we communicated with Commodore was via CompuServe. It was, actually, one of the things I liked about them. Unlike most major manufacturers, which either tend to ignore you or be outright hostile, Commodore's principal developers were friendly, attentive, and actually incorporated your advice sometimes. But that's secondary. They also had true Internet email addresses and Commodore was routing between its own internal network, BITNet and undoubtedly others that I've forgotten. CompuServe served as my first gateway to the emerging Internet services before I actually got a direct ISP hookup.
Oddly, you know what WD models to avoid, it seems. I haven't been given a choice.
I do get to choose Seagate drives, and although I've worn a few out over the years, they've generally done well for me. Although perhaps it's just because I'm the Seagate equivalent of you. One of Seagates's original selling points for me was that back then you had models with 7-year warranties.
The object-oriented GUI was one of the few bright stars in an otherwise dismal system. To this day, I don't know of another OS whose desktop system allows you to open directory windows that are customized to show one particular type of object the way that the Warp desktop could. I think that maybe the Mac Finder desktop had some similar capability, but nothing modern that I know of.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? "as much"? Wasn't there a /. story two days ago about an OSS dev not interested in supporting his own app unless he got paid?
There's got to be waay more OSS abandonware than closed source because the proprietary people get paid for their work and therefore work hard to make sure the money keeps flowing in. Whereas the OSS guy quits after he's satisfied scratching his itch and there's nothing new left to explore/clone.
I doubt it. I have shelves full of commercial "abandonware". Mostly just in case I need to fire up an antique system for the sole purpose of dealing with some dust-ridden data. At least with OSS, you can usually get the source and do something with it. If a commercial product is truly abandoned and the vendor is defunct, you've got to reverse-engineer it and hope patent/copyright laws aren't going to get you. If it's something worse - like an OS/2 version of a Norton/Symantec product, you can basically give it up, unless you have enough cash to make them listen. And for some products/vendors, that would have to be a lot of cash indeed. Think about Windows XP and various world governments, for example.
I see you've been living under a rock and never heard of these things called patent trolls, or SCO, or Oracle.
And how, pray tell, are any of those entities going to find out about your private little contract with a vendor to fix your particular instance of whatever code?
Software audits. Oracle and Microsoft are famous for going on-site and sifting through computers looking for non-compliance. Non-compliance doesn't only mean using unauthorized copies of software, it also means unauthorized use of authorized software. And if that isn't enough, the DMCA can be used on you for reverse-engineering a product in order to modify or augment it. It also tends to "void the warranty" on your legitimate uses.
Open Source isn't necessarily the Solution to Everything, but most OSS has a license that explicitly permits customization for private use, at least. And no one's going to come around auditing it.
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
OK. There's one of you. Alone. Proud. Independent. And with bills coming due.
There's an entire corporation on the other side of the table. They're not hiring someone who's unique and indispensible, they're hiring someone to do a job after interviewing a whole raft of "special snowflakes" just like you. And one of their decision points is who they can get cheapest, but there are enough potential hires that they can afford to pick and choose. In other words, they're holding each other's hands. Them and the corporation down the street, and the corporation downtown and so forth. They also have the reserves to play a waiting game, just like a certain company in my town I've been watching who keeps advertising even though they won't offer wages at the local market rate. Waiting for the market rate to drop when you get desperate enough that it's either buckle or lose your house. Or they'll use the "lack of available talent" to justify bringing in cheap H1-Bs.
Sound fair?
Next you'll be telling us that tax cuts for the unemployed don't work either!
The President of the United States of America routinely does a lot of his job from locations other than the White House or even withing the USA at all. Or are American CEOs so magical that they cannot do likewise?
And if so, why do they like to move their incorporations to tax-haven countries while maintaining their real-world presence in the USA?
The world isn't binary.
There are middle grounds between corporate capitalism and communism.
Precisely. Computers have freed us to be able to think great thoughts. Why is is that the more powerful computers get, the more we seem to downgrade our own, more nuanced systems of logic developed over the centuries?
Why also does everything have to be a straight line or a hyperbola? Can't we accept that many phenomena have one or more maxima and minima or may even go abruptly discontinuous?
The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money
Maybe. The shift seems to be towards people who have a lot of money separating from people who make money. They are more likely to trade large sums of money back and forth as game counters than they are to go out and consume.
After all, if 1 million unemployed formerly middle-class people can no longer afford steak dinners, are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the Koch brothers going to use their fortunes to go out and consume 1 million steaks a week in the place of the unemployed? Are they going to buy enough cellphones and Xmas toys to keep those industries afloat?
If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?
No jobs, no money in consumers hands, no demand.
What "rest of the economy" is left after all the good jobs have gone overseas?
--PM
Then there will be overseas consumers.
Consumers are consumers. American consumers aren't more sacred than overseas consumers.
And why should they buy consumer goods from American companies with their overpaid executives? Logic dictates that the way to get the true low price is to eliminate all excessive costs.
So just cut the USA out of the loop entirely and buy from a Chinese or Indian company.
Well, we call the onshore ones "architects" in my town.
Yep. We wouldn't let self-proclaimed civil engineers build bridges.
Why do we let self-proclaimed programmers write important software?
Because that kind is cheaper and doesn't waste time on producing a robust product.
In my town the local predecessor to Wal-Mart sold little Dennison pocket guides for maybe $1.00 each (it was a LONG time ago, you nasty little lawn-walker!)
One of my favorites was a book of tables with 6-digit precision. Loved the symmetry: Log 2 = 0.301030!
News flash: Computers do that, too.
Many transcendental functions are the result of some sort of series formula and most of them have values where the series converges very rapidly or very slowly.
To get the most precise answer in the minimum amount of time, the computer implementations of these functions pull exactly the same sort of tricks to fold computations over into the fast zone.
Protecting bad/incompetent workers is something that Bar associations and Medical Associations have also often been accused of. But then again, a Union by any other name...
Think about it. Would a sane person really want to give up belonging to an association that protects good workers just because it also protects bad workers? Especially if it's your job that's protected, no matter how good or bad you are perceived to be?
The reason that people around my part of the (right-to-work) world hate unions is mostly because they've been told over and over that "Unions is Communism" and Communism is Liberalism and being a Liberal around in this part of the USA is practically a hanging offense.
The current hype around STEM jobs hides the fact that knowing people is still a much better way of being successful than knowing things. STEM jobs are like garbage pickup: It's very important that somebody does it, but you don't want your kids to end up doing the hard work for little money. Yes, I know that STEM jobs are considered well-paying, but with the same work ethic and intellectual ability that they require, one could easily make more money in other fields. An innate talent for science and technology, which appears to be correlated with mild autism spectrum disorders and thus a much lower chance of getting along with people, is as much an evolutionary advantage as being on the other end of the bell curve: The world works best for the people in the middle, not for the outliers.
One of the real handicaps of being socially awkward is that employers can take advantage of you. Even if you are in a highly-skilled profession.
Doctors and lawyers are generally "people persons". It's practically a job requirement. They form professional organizations which can lobby governments and otherwise make the world more pleasant to them.
Techies are generally not people persons, even when they aren't actually autistic. They don't form protective organizations. In fact, they're often anti-union (and face it, just because the AMA doesn't call itself a union doesn't mean that it doesn't carry many union traits) and they often subscribe to a Libertarian/Randian ideal that they can sit all high and isolated and self-sufficient. Ironic, since the Randian Bible (Atlas Shrugged) is premised on the idea that the oligarchs (falsely equated to the majority of creative people) form what is for all practical purposes a union and go on strike (the "Shrug"). Oligarchs pretty much have to be people persons too, of course.
In short, if you have few social skills, you're screwed.
A baby boomer with autism may get a job as a mainframe system administrator. He may still have a job today, but increasingly threatened as such systems are being retired.
I think you draw your lines too narrowly. I think it likely that an autistic mainframe operator would transition fairly naturally from big iron to distributed servers. What is more likely to be the case is that an autistic person used to running systems would have a hard time being transferred to a help desk.
Labelling/stereotyping is "bad" in that it is a simplification mechanism. Simplification is essential for us to deal with a complex world without becoming totally overloaded, but it also means that we have deliberately donned blinders and we often forget that just because we don't see something, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And can turn around suddenly and bite you.
I had to look up the History of the Internet to find that out - evidently the term "internet" was in use since 1974 to describe interconnected networks, but it wasn't THE Internet until NSFNET connected the major NSF supercomputer centers in 1988.
Interestingly, Wikipedia cites Tanenbaum's Computer Networks for this information. :)
The Internet came gradually to civilians. When I was an Amiga developer circa 1987, the primary way we communicated with Commodore was via CompuServe. It was, actually, one of the things I liked about them. Unlike most major manufacturers, which either tend to ignore you or be outright hostile, Commodore's principal developers were friendly, attentive, and actually incorporated your advice sometimes. But that's secondary. They also had true Internet email addresses and Commodore was routing between its own internal network, BITNet and undoubtedly others that I've forgotten. CompuServe served as my first gateway to the emerging Internet services before I actually got a direct ISP hookup.
MINIX is obsolete.
Yeah, no kidding, that's why they made a new version. Try to keep up.
Taking a page from OS/2 Warp?
I have some Tanenbaum books as well. They're among the best-written, most understandable tech books I've got.
If he had made Minix a little more open back when Linus Torvalds was still in school, OS history might have been completely different.
Oddly, you know what WD models to avoid, it seems. I haven't been given a choice.
I do get to choose Seagate drives, and although I've worn a few out over the years, they've generally done well for me. Although perhaps it's just because I'm the Seagate equivalent of you. One of Seagates's original selling points for me was that back then you had models with 7-year warranties.
Rejoice, power companies! Your crappy old OS/2 systems can be supported again!
What do you mean, again? The place I worked dropped OS/2 because didn't get any support even back when it was still a mainstream product.
The object-oriented GUI was one of the few bright stars in an otherwise dismal system. To this day, I don't know of another OS whose desktop system allows you to open directory windows that are customized to show one particular type of object the way that the Warp desktop could. I think that maybe the Mac Finder desktop had some similar capability, but nothing modern that I know of.
I liked OS/2 - especially Warp. It ran well on the hardware of the day
As long as it wasn't Enterprise-grade Dell or Compaq running their proprietary disk controllers.
But some day the scars will heal, I know they will.
I've always said, where is the OS for the Transgendered African-American-Polynesian Differently-abled community?
I think that's a Linux distro.
Lemmings Thankyouverymuch!