True, but I'm guessing that/.'s lawyers took into account the nature of the Co$. The Co$ has a proven track record of going after stuff they don't like in a very viscous manner. When they see something they don't like, they will sick their lawyers on you, whether you broke the law or not, and try (often successfully) to ruin you financially by either winning the case or by disintegrating you in legal costs. If/. didn't back down, I think we can be sure that the Co$ would have taken them down by financial ruin (and probably by association OSDN and VA Linux). Virtue is on the side of/., but $ is on the side of the Co$, and as we all know, $ is what counts.
Fair enough, I had to write a full compiler as well (c compiler, one semester project, only one for that class). However, now that you are in the workforce (I'm assuming you are in the workforce, you said went to school), how do you feel it stacks up against real, in the trenches professional development work? Do you feel there is any real substitute for professional experience? The point I was trying to make to that kid was that there really isn't a substitute for professional experience, and that he should get an internship, both to enhance his skills, and to make himself more attractive to employers.
At least this will help to dispell all the qualms about linux not suitable for mission critical apps. Now we've got astronauts' lives dependent on linux. How much more mission critical do you get than that?
SQL="SELECT * FROM OneClickShoppers WHERE OneClickShopper.UserID=" & Reqest.Cookies("UserID")
Set RS=DSNString
RS.Open SQL, ConnectString
Call ProcessOneClickOrder
Else
Call DisplayNormalUserForm
End If
End Sub
To any programmer with a couple months experience, this is not novel, this is obvious. This is a standard feature of the web. Unfortunately, I'm too tired to go searching for pre-Amazon examples of this usage (and let's face it, most if not all of them have probably gone tits up).
Every time I think about the one click patent, it never ceases to amaze me that a company can put a patent on a language/standard feature. The most obvious use of cookies is to enable one click features such as that of Amazon's. Maybe it's just me, but when I did my first site with a scripting language, and came upon cookies, that usage was obvious. It's like putting a patent on walking when everyone has two legs.
And I think one of the main problem area is in the way the current education process is. The school I went to, as well as schools that friends have gone to and schools I've checked out, don't effectively teach foresightedness. The problem is that CS classes (speaking from the ones I've seen) for the most part have you do 5 to 10 or so small projects in a semester (less than 2000 lines). That should be changed to doing one larger project per semester per class that incorporates not only all the skills that you would normally learn, but also the skills that are necessary in the workplace. Most importantly, how choosing a certain design effects the overall stability, security, and scalability of the finished program. For the most part, the code you right in school isn't effectively tested against real life situations, and so a lot of mistakes that you might make as you learn are never fully impacted on you so that you may correct them. Larger, team oriented projects could, IMHO, definitly help to correct this situation.
No offense, but you should have gotten an internship already. I've been in the position to hire people before, and I never even looked at someone who had no work experience. Please note that college degree != work experience. Not even close. That will be one of the first things that you learn at your first job.
An Example:
Last summer when I was looking for a job, I simply posted my resume on monster.com and computerjobs.com. Within 2 days I had a contact list of 60 recruiters and was booked solid for 3 weeks of interviews. Two friends who had just graduated, without work experience (one with honors no less), posted their resumes as well. For the next six months they averaged about 3 interviews a month before finding positions that were more help desk related than programming related.
The moral of the story is that you will have a much harder time finding work without an internship. And internships aren't nearly as hard to land. Most companies will take a longer look at someone without experience if they know the person is looking for an internship because it's not as much of a risk. My advice to you, if you want to get a job in a reasonable amount of time, GO GET AN INTERNSHIP TODAY!
"However nobly intended, revolutions begin when masses of people share particular, idealistic interests, Arendt wrote. And they tend to get derailed when private interests invade the public domain, diluting and corrupting the agenda of the people seeking change, creating innovations, or making the revolutions."
Unlike other revolutions such as the American or the French, business is necessary for the Net revolution. Without Cisco, there would be no routers for traffic. Without OEMs, there would be no servers. Without Unix to operate the servers, it wouldn't have started. And without companies like Microsoft to piss us off with their proprietary attempt at control, there wouldn't be much of an OSS movement. The American revolution was about tyranny, and so is the OSS revolution. The instigator is necessary. As much as we all hate them, they are necessary.
I have my doubts, and as far as releasing the code on newsgroups (as suggested by another post), I'm not sure anyone has the balls to do something like that. If you put the source on a newsgroup, Microsoft will have a feeding frenzy. If someone does something with that source, we won't be hearing from them for a long long time. What needs to happen, IMHO, is a clean room project to strip M$ of their power. A "Clean Room", if you've never heard the term, is very common in the hardware industry. The way it works is you have a group of people in one room submitting parameters to an object, and then recording what the given feedback is. They then slip the results through a slit in the wall to a team of engineers in another room. This team of engineers then take the information, and create objects that take in and put out the same parameter/result set. It's perfectly legal, doesn't infringe on any copyrights. The idea is that you're not copying what it is but rather recreating what it does. All legal. Then you just tweak it so it doesn't crash every ten seconds, and open source it so the world can have free windows. Bill Gates has said it himself a number of times that a couple of kids with nothing better to do could put him out of business. It's the same sort of relation between Intel and AMD. That said, I think it's time to boot up the 10K node beowulf and get to work.
I actually tried to post this as an AskSlashdot a couple weeks ago, but apparently I'm not important enough to actually have a front page story, but in any case, here's my $.02:
A simple fact remains for most home users: They aren't going to pay $500 so that lil' Johnny can make prettier school reports. What happens currently is that they borrow the copy from work, bring it home, and they have it for free. Problem solved. Now, they aren't going to be able to do that because it's going to be easier for M$ to track the software, and thus companies will be less willing to look the other way when employees borrow a copy. What's left for Joe-Six-Pack to do? Well, hopefully with the increasing demand for something reasonably priced for him to use, the OSS community will port some of free word processing programs over to winblowz. Give them a couple weeks using it, watch lil' Johnny create an 'A' report with it, and next thing you know, Joe-Six-Pack is at the water cooler telling his buddies how "this OSS shit ain't all that bad.. and it's FREE!" That's how you get into the home market people. M$ is going to lead the average user to us by disgusting them and making it harder and harder for them to use the crap they push.
Two months ago I broke down and bought my fiance a new windows box (compaq). Brought it home, booted it up, installed some software, everything was running fine.. blah blah blah. But then it happened. I installed the dsl software. Windows needed more files from the cd that weren't on the system. So I dug through the box for the win98 disc. Lo and behold, it wasn't there. This is a common thing these days. OEM's don't ship a full win disk with the boxen anymore, they ship a half ass image, with only what they think you'll need. I installed the dsl software anyways, and it runs, but not well. It hangs the machine on a daily basis. Sometime later I installed IE 5.5 on her machine. Now it hangs the machine regularly as well. She was becoming frustrated real quick.
Last week I came home to find her on my RH 7 box, happily using the internet. I was so proud of her. She used a nice social engineering hack to figure out my password (I talk about computers too much in my sleep). She looked at my RH7 book for 5 minutes and figured out how to use man -k and | more to find information on roaring penguin pppoe to use the dsl line. And 10 minutes after turning on the monitor she had figured out how to use linux for her everyday basic needs.
Point is that, at least with RH7, we are almost there. My fiance is the type of end user who couldn't get Word2k to change the point size. In my opinion, we need to tell users what the first person who showed me unix told me to do: if you don't know how to do it, use man -k | more to figure it out. I still think that works much better than winblowz help system. Next up, testing this on my parents.
Ok, this talk of not being able to make a business of free stuff is getting ridiculous, especially when I see fellow/.ers nodding their heads.
Everyone keeps saying that a linux business model is new and risky and blah blah blah. But the truth is, it is the oldest business model known to man. Commodities ranging from corn to metal follows the same model. You can grow food for free, and you can dig up iron or copper ore for free. We know it's there, and if we want it, we get it (or grow it). OR we PAY someone to dig it, grow it, whatever and package it or process it into the form that is most useful for us. A linux business isn't modeled around selling free software, it's modeled around taking that raw material (the kernel), and packaging it to fit our needs. Yeah any business can go out and grab the kernel or a stripped distro for free. But what they pay for is the processing of that raw material into what fits their needs. Some of the distros will realize this, and they will succeed by wrapping and configuring the kernel into a nice neat little package that your average CIO doesn't have to think twice about. It will happen, and it will be a beautiful day.
I have recently started an OSS project here that will hopefully solve many of these problems. I know where you're coming from, I run into many problems with both of the popular platforms. With Windows media, you can send and receive parameters to make the content more interactive, however getting that done is a feat considering M$FT's documentation (it's disgusting), not to mention of course that it's not cross-platform. Real doesn't have as many features, which limits your ability, and it's expensive as all hell. I know what it's like, you just wanna rip your hair out. Well hopefully the OSS project that I listed above will solve all this. It's in the planning stage right now (mainly I just need to find the time to get a feature list out so that people can start thinking about how it can be done). Help is needed and everyone is welcome!
I think that this would be great service to some of us. I plan on starting my own business of selling linux based networks to small and medium sized businesses, and a manual customized to what i'm selling would be a great feature to offer my customer's. I think it would greatly reduce joe six-pack's fear of linux by having a nice reference for him when i'm not immediately available (more user-friendly than man -k xxxxx | more). And I think this is where you're market would really lie, in those of us who are going to be working to get beginner's up to speed.
Slashdot Mirror
$man microsoft
nation state is political science terms for what we would just call a nation
$man microsoft
$man microsoft
$man microsoft
Sub OneClick
If Request.Cookies("oneclick") = "TRUE" Then
Dim SQL, RS
SQL="SELECT * FROM OneClickShoppers WHERE OneClickShopper.UserID=" & Reqest.Cookies("UserID")
Set RS=DSNString
RS.Open SQL, ConnectString
Call ProcessOneClickOrder
Else
Call DisplayNormalUserForm
End If
End Sub
To any programmer with a couple months experience, this is not novel, this is obvious. This is a standard feature of the web. Unfortunately, I'm too tired to go searching for pre-Amazon examples of this usage (and let's face it, most if not all of them have probably gone tits up).
$man microsoft
$man microsoft
And I think one of the main problem area is in the way the current education process is. The school I went to, as well as schools that friends have gone to and schools I've checked out, don't effectively teach foresightedness. The problem is that CS classes (speaking from the ones I've seen) for the most part have you do 5 to 10 or so small projects in a semester (less than 2000 lines). That should be changed to doing one larger project per semester per class that incorporates not only all the skills that you would normally learn, but also the skills that are necessary in the workplace. Most importantly, how choosing a certain design effects the overall stability, security, and scalability of the finished program. For the most part, the code you right in school isn't effectively tested against real life situations, and so a lot of mistakes that you might make as you learn are never fully impacted on you so that you may correct them. Larger, team oriented projects could, IMHO, definitly help to correct this situation.
$man microsoft
An Example:
Last summer when I was looking for a job, I simply posted my resume on monster.com and computerjobs.com. Within 2 days I had a contact list of 60 recruiters and was booked solid for 3 weeks of interviews. Two friends who had just graduated, without work experience (one with honors no less), posted their resumes as well. For the next six months they averaged about 3 interviews a month before finding positions that were more help desk related than programming related.
The moral of the story is that you will have a much harder time finding work without an internship. And internships aren't nearly as hard to land. Most companies will take a longer look at someone without experience if they know the person is looking for an internship because it's not as much of a risk. My advice to you, if you want to get a job in a reasonable amount of time, GO GET AN INTERNSHIP TODAY!
$man microsoft
$man microsoft
Unlike other revolutions such as the American or the French, business is necessary for the Net revolution. Without Cisco, there would be no routers for traffic. Without OEMs, there would be no servers. Without Unix to operate the servers, it wouldn't have started. And without companies like Microsoft to piss us off with their proprietary attempt at control, there wouldn't be much of an OSS movement. The American revolution was about tyranny, and so is the OSS revolution. The instigator is necessary. As much as we all hate them, they are necessary.
$man microsoft
$man microsoft
A simple fact remains for most home users: They aren't going to pay $500 so that lil' Johnny can make prettier school reports. What happens currently is that they borrow the copy from work, bring it home, and they have it for free. Problem solved. Now, they aren't going to be able to do that because it's going to be easier for M$ to track the software, and thus companies will be less willing to look the other way when employees borrow a copy. What's left for Joe-Six-Pack to do? Well, hopefully with the increasing demand for something reasonably priced for him to use, the OSS community will port some of free word processing programs over to winblowz. Give them a couple weeks using it, watch lil' Johnny create an 'A' report with it, and next thing you know, Joe-Six-Pack is at the water cooler telling his buddies how "this OSS shit ain't all that bad.. and it's FREE!" That's how you get into the home market people. M$ is going to lead the average user to us by disgusting them and making it harder and harder for them to use the crap they push.
Here's to a properous future!
$man microsoft
Two months ago I broke down and bought my fiance a new windows box (compaq). Brought it home, booted it up, installed some software, everything was running fine.. blah blah blah. But then it happened. I installed the dsl software. Windows needed more files from the cd that weren't on the system. So I dug through the box for the win98 disc. Lo and behold, it wasn't there. This is a common thing these days. OEM's don't ship a full win disk with the boxen anymore, they ship a half ass image, with only what they think you'll need. I installed the dsl software anyways, and it runs, but not well. It hangs the machine on a daily basis. Sometime later I installed IE 5.5 on her machine. Now it hangs the machine regularly as well. She was becoming frustrated real quick.
Last week I came home to find her on my RH 7 box, happily using the internet. I was so proud of her. She used a nice social engineering hack to figure out my password (I talk about computers too much in my sleep). She looked at my RH7 book for 5 minutes and figured out how to use man -k and | more to find information on roaring penguin pppoe to use the dsl line. And 10 minutes after turning on the monitor she had figured out how to use linux for her everyday basic needs.
Point is that, at least with RH7, we are almost there. My fiance is the type of end user who couldn't get Word2k to change the point size. In my opinion, we need to tell users what the first person who showed me unix told me to do: if you don't know how to do it, use man -k | more to figure it out. I still think that works much better than winblowz help system. Next up, testing this on my parents.
$man microsoft
Enjoy!
$man microsoft
Everyone keeps saying that a linux business model is new and risky and blah blah blah. But the truth is, it is the oldest business model known to man. Commodities ranging from corn to metal follows the same model. You can grow food for free, and you can dig up iron or copper ore for free. We know it's there, and if we want it, we get it (or grow it). OR we PAY someone to dig it, grow it, whatever and package it or process it into the form that is most useful for us. A linux business isn't modeled around selling free software, it's modeled around taking that raw material (the kernel), and packaging it to fit our needs. Yeah any business can go out and grab the kernel or a stripped distro for free. But what they pay for is the processing of that raw material into what fits their needs. Some of the distros will realize this, and they will succeed by wrapping and configuring the kernel into a nice neat little package that your average CIO doesn't have to think twice about. It will happen, and it will be a beautiful day.
$man microsoft
Try this one
$man microsoft
$man microsoft
$man microsoft