They say loudly that they are only willing to accept developers to the project that they have vetted themselves, no one need apply. And with this attitude in front of them, they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
Then they say that they want people to submit patches and pitch in to help develop the product. But how is anyone supposed to do that without being a member? Well, obviously you don't have to be on the team to work for the team. But who wants to work for someone that isn't going to treat them as part of the same team?
At this point, the Firefox team is pretty well entrenched and the product itself is doing fairly well (still can't parse Slash code for shit, but that's just a hurdle to be overcome soon). So for this particular project, a thorny attitude towards newbs is not going to hurt them very much.
However, the spirit of OSS (at least on the BSD side of the world) is one of openness and acceptance. Turning people away or accepting a new member only through invitation smacks of elitism. Unfortunately when you deal with human beings, you will inevitably end up dealing with some who think themselves elite and worthy of looking down upon others from the heights of their snoots.
The main thing I think that keeps Google ahead of everyone else is that they seem to be some nice folks.
They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft), and they've never had to switch search engines every other month (Yahoo!). They've just put out a quality product and improved on it continuously.
They've got good tools that are both powerful and unobtrusive. They have very good search results. And they offer free services that make using their software a real pleasure.
Yahoo and Microsoft can try to do what they like, but they just aren't as cool as Google. I seem to recall a previous article on Slashdot that stated that most searches conducted at Micro$haft are done on Google, even over M$N search.
The basic idea of an "IT project" is to implement something that has never been implemented before, or to replace something wholesale.
This flies in the face of every software engineering textbook. Software, like flora, grows in its environment. Trying to introduce something brand new into an ecosystem is asking for widescale decimation of existing services as well as the increased likelihood of the introduced-species death.
So the key to getting working "IT projects" to succeed is to build on past successes. It's never the "Start from nothing, plan, implement" projects that do well. These typically go way over budget and way past the deadlines. It is the little "I need a little tool" projects that start off small and then are brought together or have extra features added to them that succeed.
Look at your bank's ATM system. When those machines first arrived, they didn't do half of what they can do now. It was through a gradual building upon what works and weeding out what doesn't that allows us the ease of personal banking today. Same with any system, even Linux. Linux started out as a small project to implement a Unix-like kernel. Now it is a huge business and the project itself is much larger in scope than the original idea of Torvald's.
Improvement, not creation, is the key to successful projects.
It is well known that the locks that hold doors closed, including both the main door knob as well as deadbolts, are the primary means of securing one's home. However, these only provide the illusion of safety and security.
Various means exist to circumvent these door locks. The easiest of these, trying the windows of a house, is already handled by the addition of locks for the windows, but since most windows are not made of unbreakable glass, these are still at risk. Also, the door itself is a weak point, being made typically of wood, it is easily defeated with a strong kick.
Some people go so far as to leave a spare key near the door in case they forget it or get locked out. This key is a fundamental user error and while it does not make the use of a door theoretically less secure, it does appear as a risk factor in real-life systems.
The upshot of this is that doors do not provide the level of security that they give the illusion of providing. This may lead a user to have the false impression that their house is safe because they have installed 'strong' locks such as deadbolts, etc. This is not safe behavior.
Door locks should not be used for home security. In fact, their use puts the homeowner at risk, due to being lulled into a sense of false security. Though an alternative does not exist, it is not recommended that locks be used to secure your home.
Criminals are dumb. They never would have figured this out on their own. Really. They just want to get into a car and get it to a chop shop before the cops catch them.
By giving this information to the world, these researchers have made the security of the owners of these cars just a little more tenuous.
I don't want to point out the obvious here, but Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. I guess it's lucky for them that they've got friends in the top ranks of government, otherwise a Justice department that was doing its job would be all over this kind of illegal expansion of business.
I've used that on several network fileservers, but for my main machine, I rely primarily on WindowsXP because of its ease of use. I have loaded Knoppix on this guy a few times when I want to play Shisen-sho or Mahjongg, but I always have that fear in the back of my that something is going to break on my base Windows system.
What precautions do these LiveCDs take to prevent damage from occuring to the installed base system? I trust Knoppix because I've used it a few times, but Ubuntu has a funny name, so I'm a little more wary of it.
So what we have here is software that is essentially free in just about any way you'd like to describe it. In general, the only thing that is different between this license and the BSD license is that you are not allowed to make a profit on the sale of any software you develop and you may not close the source.
The not closing the source is what the GPL is most interested in. Unfortunately, I think that just because the owner of the patents is not releasing them under the GPL, the GNU/FSF folks aren't going to be so willing to accept this as "True" free software.
See, this is what patents do. They give the holder of the patent the exclusive rights to licensing of that technology.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm not going to go as far as to say that the whole system ought to be scrapped, either. There are good things and bad things about the current system, but unless we can come up with a better system that will help promote the advancement of arts and sciences without trampling on the rights of inventors and creators, this is the only system we've got.
The best thing to do would be to take a hard look at the patent system and figure out how it can be rid of the badly-working parts and how to improve the parts that work well. Then perhaps we can have a fair and equitable system of patents.
How about they just do it the old fashioned way and revive the series by reversing polarity and firing anion thrusters to create a temporary wormhole that can act as a gateway to the ratings.
The redbook is about 200 pages, but it talks mostly about the migration of desktops by discussing server administration techniques rather than focusing on enabling users to upgrade painlessly.
Linux (nay, any OS) migration is tough work for the administrators *and* the users whom it affects.
It's not a surprise that they weren't able to do it.
There is very little good that come out of government meddling in the affairs of private companies when no one is being harmed. IBM wants to sell, Lenovo wants to buy. No harm, no foul.
The Chinese are not the Red Menace they are made out to be. If anything, they are about as far from Red as you can get. More a yellowish-tan... But they are capitalists through and through.
It's funny, the land of freedom and capitalism is taking steps that would make a communist plutocracy proud.
The optimal thing would be to pair this up with a strategy program that uses a simple algorithm like 'tit for tat' to beat human players.
I used 'tit for tat' in my last outing at the Ro Champ Beau world championships, and let's just say that I ended up with a bevy of tits at the end of the evening.
The reason QWERTY was designed was not to slow down typists. The problem was that each key was directly tied to the type head, so when certain letters were typed quickly, the heads would cross over each other and jam. The QWERTY keyboard is designed to move frequently-combo'd keys away from each other so that even if they do cross over each other, they will not jam.
Now, of course, there is no need for such a system seeing as how there are no type heads to jam. Even older ballhead typewriters didn't suffer from this problem. So we can finally move away from this design.
However, the research has shown that the speed of typing has very little to do with the layout of the keys. A person can type just as fast on a QWERTY layout as they can on a Dvorak layout. What matters is the proximity of certain keys to each other. Some layouts will be faster than others (the alphabetical being probably one of the worst ), because it is faster to type using alternating hands than alternating fingers, which is faster than using the same finger twice in a row.
This low learning curve keyboard is not going to have much usability. Anything, really, that has a low learning curve is so because features have been removed from it. Look at Linux, which has a very steep learning curve. Compared with Windows, it is much more difficult to learn, however, in the end it is much more powerful than Windows is.
In the history of the world, it has always been the power and vision of one single person that has created progress. This is another way to say that committees accomplish nothing.
Even with art, it's not the AIDS quilt we remember, it's Van Gogh's Starry Night. The individual is the creator of art. Art by committee is soulless.
The government is much more than a little agency like the FBI. I'd rather keep my ability to get information about the comings and goings of my government, thank you very much.
These museums, with very few exceptions are almost purely supported with government funds. They just can't make back the cost of upkeep, much less salaries, on the few dollars they make through admission fees.
There are a few that can make ends meet by appealing to private business, but for the most part these museums are supported with public money.
Now the point of all this government talk is that sometimes it takes the government to do something good and worthwhile for the general public. If it were up to the private sector, such an undertaking would 1) not have been undertaken in the first place and 2) if it were developed, it wouldn't have been released as OSS.
Hooray for these hackers! And thank god they've got an enlightened government supporting them.
Slashdot Mirror
They say loudly that they are only willing to accept developers to the project that they have vetted themselves, no one need apply. And with this attitude in front of them, they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
Then they say that they want people to submit patches and pitch in to help develop the product. But how is anyone supposed to do that without being a member? Well, obviously you don't have to be on the team to work for the team. But who wants to work for someone that isn't going to treat them as part of the same team?
At this point, the Firefox team is pretty well entrenched and the product itself is doing fairly well (still can't parse Slash code for shit, but that's just a hurdle to be overcome soon). So for this particular project, a thorny attitude towards newbs is not going to hurt them very much.
However, the spirit of OSS (at least on the BSD side of the world) is one of openness and acceptance. Turning people away or accepting a new member only through invitation smacks of elitism. Unfortunately when you deal with human beings, you will inevitably end up dealing with some who think themselves elite and worthy of looking down upon others from the heights of their snoots.
The main thing I think that keeps Google ahead of everyone else is that they seem to be some nice folks.
They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft), and they've never had to switch search engines every other month (Yahoo!). They've just put out a quality product and improved on it continuously.
They've got good tools that are both powerful and unobtrusive. They have very good search results. And they offer free services that make using their software a real pleasure.
Yahoo and Microsoft can try to do what they like, but they just aren't as cool as Google. I seem to recall a previous article on Slashdot that stated that most searches conducted at Micro$haft are done on Google, even over M$N search.
The basic idea of an "IT project" is to implement something that has never been implemented before, or to replace something wholesale.
This flies in the face of every software engineering textbook. Software, like flora, grows in its environment. Trying to introduce something brand new into an ecosystem is asking for widescale decimation of existing services as well as the increased likelihood of the introduced-species death.
So the key to getting working "IT projects" to succeed is to build on past successes. It's never the "Start from nothing, plan, implement" projects that do well. These typically go way over budget and way past the deadlines. It is the little "I need a little tool" projects that start off small and then are brought together or have extra features added to them that succeed.
Look at your bank's ATM system. When those machines first arrived, they didn't do half of what they can do now. It was through a gradual building upon what works and weeding out what doesn't that allows us the ease of personal banking today. Same with any system, even Linux. Linux started out as a small project to implement a Unix-like kernel. Now it is a huge business and the project itself is much larger in scope than the original idea of Torvald's.
Improvement, not creation, is the key to successful projects.
It is well known that the locks that hold doors closed, including both the main door knob as well as deadbolts, are the primary means of securing one's home. However, these only provide the illusion of safety and security.
Various means exist to circumvent these door locks. The easiest of these, trying the windows of a house, is already handled by the addition of locks for the windows, but since most windows are not made of unbreakable glass, these are still at risk. Also, the door itself is a weak point, being made typically of wood, it is easily defeated with a strong kick.
Some people go so far as to leave a spare key near the door in case they forget it or get locked out. This key is a fundamental user error and while it does not make the use of a door theoretically less secure, it does appear as a risk factor in real-life systems.
The upshot of this is that doors do not provide the level of security that they give the illusion of providing. This may lead a user to have the false impression that their house is safe because they have installed 'strong' locks such as deadbolts, etc. This is not safe behavior.
Door locks should not be used for home security. In fact, their use puts the homeowner at risk, due to being lulled into a sense of false security. Though an alternative does not exist, it is not recommended that locks be used to secure your home.
Criminals are dumb. They never would have figured this out on their own. Really. They just want to get into a car and get it to a chop shop before the cops catch them.
By giving this information to the world, these researchers have made the security of the owners of these cars just a little more tenuous.
Thanks a lot, assholes.
I don't want to point out the obvious here, but Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. I guess it's lucky for them that they've got friends in the top ranks of government, otherwise a Justice department that was doing its job would be all over this kind of illegal expansion of business.
I was drownding in debt. There was no where to turn. My wife left me, my friends all left me. Even my dog, he left me too. I had to do something.
That's when I found Binary XML. They were able to help with the debt. They got the creditors off my back and got me back on my feet.
Thanks Binary XML!
(I thought this was going to be about a standardization of compressing XML files that got rid of the excess bloat in the markup.)
I've used that on several network fileservers, but for my main machine, I rely primarily on WindowsXP because of its ease of use. I have loaded Knoppix on this guy a few times when I want to play Shisen-sho or Mahjongg, but I always have that fear in the back of my that something is going to break on my base Windows system.
What precautions do these LiveCDs take to prevent damage from occuring to the installed base system? I trust Knoppix because I've used it a few times, but Ubuntu has a funny name, so I'm a little more wary of it.
Is that really what passes for a laptop in the UK? I thought those old beasts went the way of the wooly mammoth 5 years ago.
Well, either way, whatever. The chip is faster, blah blah blah. Intel's got OEMs onboard. Looks like another winner. etc.
But seriously, is that what laptops look like these days?
It was sunny today.
The news was unable to predict either of these to any accuracy only 24 hours prior to the weather event.
You want to believe that they can predict the weather 100 years from now?
So what we have here is software that is essentially free in just about any way you'd like to describe it. In general, the only thing that is different between this license and the BSD license is that you are not allowed to make a profit on the sale of any software you develop and you may not close the source.
The not closing the source is what the GPL is most interested in. Unfortunately, I think that just because the owner of the patents is not releasing them under the GPL, the GNU/FSF folks aren't going to be so willing to accept this as "True" free software.
Even though it is for all intents and purposes.
How about a museum glorifying Douglas Adams? Or a towering monument in his honor? Or if all of his fans gave $100 to his family?
There are tons of things that are more fitting than to have your name attached to some dead rock floating in space.
IMHO.
See, this is what patents do. They give the holder of the patent the exclusive rights to licensing of that technology.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm not going to go as far as to say that the whole system ought to be scrapped, either. There are good things and bad things about the current system, but unless we can come up with a better system that will help promote the advancement of arts and sciences without trampling on the rights of inventors and creators, this is the only system we've got.
The best thing to do would be to take a hard look at the patent system and figure out how it can be rid of the badly-working parts and how to improve the parts that work well. Then perhaps we can have a fair and equitable system of patents.
SRAM is much faster, closer to the core of the CPU, and plentiful (if the chip manufacturers wanted it to be).
Who needs a gig of RAM when you can have a gig of cache?
If they need swap space, they can always write back out directly to a disk-based swap file.
How about they just do it the old fashioned way and revive the series by reversing polarity and firing anion thrusters to create a temporary wormhole that can act as a gateway to the ratings.
No... That didn't work at all for Voyager...
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246380.htm l
The redbook is about 200 pages, but it talks mostly about the migration of desktops by discussing server administration techniques rather than focusing on enabling users to upgrade painlessly.
Linux (nay, any OS) migration is tough work for the administrators *and* the users whom it affects.
It's not a surprise that they weren't able to do it.
There is very little good that come out of government meddling in the affairs of private companies when no one is being harmed. IBM wants to sell, Lenovo wants to buy. No harm, no foul.
The Chinese are not the Red Menace they are made out to be. If anything, they are about as far from Red as you can get. More a yellowish-tan... But they are capitalists through and through.
It's funny, the land of freedom and capitalism is taking steps that would make a communist plutocracy proud.
The optimal thing would be to pair this up with a strategy program that uses a simple algorithm like 'tit for tat' to beat human players.
I used 'tit for tat' in my last outing at the Ro Champ Beau world championships, and let's just say that I ended up with a bevy of tits at the end of the evening.
The reason QWERTY was designed was not to slow down typists. The problem was that each key was directly tied to the type head, so when certain letters were typed quickly, the heads would cross over each other and jam. The QWERTY keyboard is designed to move frequently-combo'd keys away from each other so that even if they do cross over each other, they will not jam.
Now, of course, there is no need for such a system seeing as how there are no type heads to jam. Even older ballhead typewriters didn't suffer from this problem. So we can finally move away from this design.
However, the research has shown that the speed of typing has very little to do with the layout of the keys. A person can type just as fast on a QWERTY layout as they can on a Dvorak layout. What matters is the proximity of certain keys to each other. Some layouts will be faster than others (the alphabetical being probably one of the worst ), because it is faster to type using alternating hands than alternating fingers, which is faster than using the same finger twice in a row.
This low learning curve keyboard is not going to have much usability. Anything, really, that has a low learning curve is so because features have been removed from it. Look at Linux, which has a very steep learning curve. Compared with Windows, it is much more difficult to learn, however, in the end it is much more powerful than Windows is.
Real, all these operating systems are yours, except Linux. Do not attempt any loadings onto Linux.
Why would they do that?
"Do no evil" does not also mean "Do stupid".
In the history of the world, it has always been the power and vision of one single person that has created progress. This is another way to say that committees accomplish nothing.
Even with art, it's not the AIDS quilt we remember, it's Van Gogh's Starry Night. The individual is the creator of art. Art by committee is soulless.
The government is much more than a little agency like the FBI. I'd rather keep my ability to get information about the comings and goings of my government, thank you very much.
These museums, with very few exceptions are almost purely supported with government funds. They just can't make back the cost of upkeep, much less salaries, on the few dollars they make through admission fees.
There are a few that can make ends meet by appealing to private business, but for the most part these museums are supported with public money.
Now the point of all this government talk is that sometimes it takes the government to do something good and worthwhile for the general public. If it were up to the private sector, such an undertaking would 1) not have been undertaken in the first place and 2) if it were developed, it wouldn't have been released as OSS.
Hooray for these hackers! And thank god they've got an enlightened government supporting them.