This is a geek site, isn't it? Where is the Linux version? What you say? XBOX Version but no Linux version? OK. Bye.
I'm not buying any new windows games anymore. Yet I am thinking about how diffcult it would be to build an free/open sneak person shooter like Metal Gear Solid/Thief/Splinter Cell. Especially with engines like this one.
Well, Mr. Balmer, I would say that Microsoft isn't doing to well in Munich either. Harharharhar.
Nobody said migration would be cheaper or easier, stupid. On the contrary, _everybody_ said it would be more tedious and expensive. But the majority also said it would pay of in the long run _and_ serve as a landmark for free software growth. And would be a desireble political statement.
Just go on. The more the process of migration recieves a bashing from MS, the stronger the impact will be when Munich migration has succeeded.
Instead of doing what OSS can do best and provide a nice, thourough documented/etc/cups/cupsconfig the cups team goes out of their way to produce something like 5 different GUIs, at least one of them web based, and leave each half finished. Shure OSS is free, but programmers want people to use their software, so this is nothing but a good advice and a hint at some major bugs in the GUI. And a bad one in the GUI has the rank of a bug. Or at least it should. If you don't like that - don't bother with a GUI. It's that simple.
Stress == anxiety caused by the lack of consciousness about the where's, why's and how's of general impediments of everyday life.
Given the definition above, which, imho, is quite percise, and the fact that we live in an age which is growing more and more complex in the material world I'd say yes, stress is more or less directly proportional to the 'amount' of tech around you.
Quite fitting that I've spend half my day today trying to hush my PC a little more with a fanless powerunit and a fanless grafics cooler. A lot of stress is caused by noise that we aren't directly aware of.
Ranting how crappy Gimp is compared to [fill in comercial product here] is just as unfitting as stating that Gimp is about as good as PS.
I'm a mulimediadesinger and have worked with a wide range of tool on a professional level. Gimp 1.3 actually _is_ a usefull tool. It's not the tool of choice for most things, but in some scenarios it can actually deliver results were other grafics tools get in their own way with feature and algorithim bloat. The habit of putting every thing in it's own window made pre-1.3 Gimp absolutely unbearable for production. Unless you had Fluxbox, maybe. But the simple level Anti-Aliasig and some other nice features along with the one or other workaroud trick make Gimp a nice Pixeleditor to work with. Praise the Gimp team for getting the message and introducing tabs and other must-haves for GUI work.
On top of that, - and this is one of the most notable things of this OSS project imho - as long as I can remember, Gimp has allways been an absolute breeze to install. I wish all OSS would install that way. For instance, right now I'm debugging a default Postgres/ODBC Setup and it's taken up 30 workhours allready with no end in sight...
To me the undo stack in Gimp 2.0 looks promising, as it hints in the direction of the PS protokoll. Which, btw, proves that PS is still waaaaay ahead of any competition, be it comercial or OSS.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Gimp 2. Cudos to the Gimp team for their good work.
"GNU / Linux and OSS has us and our business model by the balls and we're crapping our pants over it. That's why I can't answer your questions with coherent sentences and have to do the chewbacka defense and mutter something about big macs and diet cokes. While saying this I'll also admit that we don't have a firewall and that Linux is gaining serious ground in scientific computing, clustering and public service and hope that you won't notice that it's gainging with IBM, HP and Co. aswell and on top of that also gaining in every other f*cking direction you look. And we only get it on in the 'I bought a new PC and it happend to come with XP' market. So please be distracted and continue to give ur your money right now."
Industry Leader, leading gaming system, performance leader in the interactive industry...
Isn't this in the U.S., where you can sue people for harrasment because their wearing to bright colors? How come this plain and utter nuissance of a company even still exists? Isn't their any law preventing a company from spreading bullshit or is it all ok under that 1st amendment thing?
We've got free speach in germany too. But if you go on bullshitting the public on that level over here, you're bound to recieve some major legal ass-chewing from the Boersenaufsicht (german SEC) or some court. Just like SCO Germany. They we're hushed within a few months time last year. Shut up, proove your public statements on pay a large fine. Is it that hard to establish an exempt ruling that does the same in the US? I mean, coffee spillers can sue MCs for large sums, so where is the problem?
In this area I find the US law system a tad unbalanced, don't your think so too?
I don't see any problem either, even with linking GPLd stuff against it. After all the additions needed to make XFree compliant with it's license and the GPL have nothing to do with sourcecode but with copyright notices. I see no big deal in mixing both licenses and complying with both. No?
Who is going to be writing open source software when where all unemployed and unable to purchase computers when our current ones breakdown?
IT Unemlployment isn't going to grow indefinitely. IT jobs are shifting to service rather than coding and selling closed source.This will also bring back jobs to where the customers are. And it will even strengthen OSS. Closed source and large proprietary software families are a thing of the past. That's the big thing that's changing. And that's the only reason it's actually feasable to outsource big time. Whenever an industry does that it's about to change big time anyway. That doesn't mean we're all going unemployed for the rest of our life. I lost a job as a developer and now do freelance stuff with lot's of OSS and a strong service orientation, close to the people in other fields of business. That 40 hrs. keypunching on proprietary stuff is _never_ going to come back. Not for me it is anyway. And in the end, I thank God for it. Now i sit at my desk or laptop for half the time at most. The rest of the time I go out, talk to customers and am much closer in touch with reality than any coder could ever be. I know I'll get my customers top-range software for nearly all their need for zero money and they'll gladly pay me to custom design and programm their supply chain management, rich media framework, web-cms or whatnot. And in the end I get to GPL the code! Dig it: My customers _pay_ me to do _real_ fun computer stuff, they are thankfull for me doing it and in the end I can publish it as OSS. I got layed off and I adapted and I'll _never_ look back!
Once again, to all coders out there: 8.5 hrs a day keypunching proprietary software along with selling closed source is deader than a doornail and is done with. - - - IT IS OVER! - -
The last stuff that proprietary can do to make money is so measyly IT HAS TO BE DONE BY SUPER CHEAP LABOR. And that, my dear geek friends IS A GOOD THING for the _global_ economy! Coding has become a service and custom craftmanship and ceased being a assembly line mass production. Get that into your skull and fucking adapt. The earlyer, the better. I thought/. was a place of future and OSS aware geeks...
Cheez, coming to think of it, I guess I should consider myseld lucky being layed off early enough.
..is that in general, people (geeks and non-geeks) don't seem to see that massive IT work on a beehive scale probably isn't going to last very long in india either. 99% of software related work I do today I do with software that I get for free of the net. It's called OSS.
What's still missing in the OSS dept?
Feasable ERP and usable Multimedia (video NLE/Compositing, animation, 3D). And games maybe. What else? Niche stuff at most.
That being said, wouldn't it be cool for western geeks to collect something like the 100 000 $ for Blender to have a large team in india do some grunt work on XFree, GNU Enterprise or something else? Or maybe the base for the blender 3.0 redoo, with NLE, NLA, crystal space engine integration and all that?
Some 50 programmers or so could actually make a living over there and we'd all be on the winning side. I personally would LOVE to call myself a sharehoplder of the 'Indian Team OSS Group' or so. What do other slashdotters think about this? Am I making sense?
You've got the points. Debian is all about finding your way through the XF86Setup-4 suckage - especially with NVidia stuff - and grasping the apt way of doing things. Which isn't trivial, but very powerfull in the end.
..because what you're going to try to do is my very business. We're doing OSS migration and OSS project customization for small copmanies and _very_ large corporations (Pharmacy) and I'd could come up with a billion things to say. Since I've been working this field all day for a few months without an end I'll cut it short: The world of closed source has ended. Period. It's that simple. I wouldn't bet another single dime on a company focusing on a businessmodel that concentrates on the selling of closed source. Hell, even Macromedia - one of the few that actually made a steady revenue with closed source, mind you - has set up their newest product as a _service_ ('breeze') and not as the usual enveloped CD in a box of air!
Not convinced? Do it the other way around: Tell me why _should_ a company _go_ closed source? Stick with it till it's amortised? Ok. SAP has another few years, maybe even a decade, and only a maniac would try to migrate a company the size of, let's say, Volkswagen, from SAP to a custom compiere or GNUe enviroment or something simular right now. Nuclear Plants are also a special thing. But they are in various ways and are somewhat another league where closedness or openess doesn't really count. For all else goes this: Every day I'm helping companies do the transition and make the first steps. These companies are in time. In 5 years from now we'll all be the computer software craftsmen/women and MS and Co. will have a hard time adapting. The companies without the awareness to leave the update treadmill will just waste another round of cash and lose it in the end.
Closed Source has had it's day. It's really that simple. If you're building something new or restrucutring, follow up or waste big money. That's all there is to it.
A friend got me hooked into this multiplayer capture the flag (ctf) fps thing a few years ago with Unreal Tournament Game of the year edition. By then it was 2 years old, had a rock solid Linux client and was de-facto bug free, due to a persistent update policy. It was the most popular multiplayer online game with something like 80 000 player online at a time. I had to pratice 3-4 weeks to actually survive longer than 30 seconds in the public servers but it got me hooked. I have come to think of UT and its follow ups as the classic FPS game. The follow ups are of equal rank in quality and gameplay. It's fast, it's fun and - hence the name - doesn't take realisim to serious to get boring. The weapons are cool, the maps and the modding community are amongst the best and it is a very complex and demanding game at high skill levels (exept for deathmatch and TeamDeathmatch maybe). On top of that the Unreal team has allways gone lengths to deliver a reference grade quality Linux client, which is a very honorable thing, imho. They deserve your money. If you've ever though of getting a FPS for inbetween or just to chek out the genre, I can warmly recommend UT. You won't be dissapointed.
Also note that the german mass computer 'newspaper' (think: Daily Computer Sun) has a Knoppix in it's recent Edition, heavyly addvertising it's Virus safety and vendor spyware / vendor 'all-your-base' registration freeness.
Here's the link: http://www.computerbild.de/2004/indexcb.htm
This all is showing a fast growing trend - people switching Linux for safety reasons alone - no matter what Windows addictions or OSS shortcomings they might still have to deal with.
I do not even have any desire or plans to get rid of all the Microsoft boxes. We will still use Quickbooks for the back end accounting.
AAAARRRGH! "FICKBOOKS!" (German for 'Fuckbooks') THAT's the programm that was my last reason to migrate billing/accounting to OSS as fast as possible! I admire your pain threshhold! LOL.
We will still do desktop publishing using BSA-approved software (although the GIMP has replaced Photoshop in our non-print work).
Here I absolutely agree.
The one shining beacon of hope for me is that, even though I have not significantly reduced the number of Windows machines at my business, I have significantly increased the number of FreeBSD and Linux servers, and I have not ever upgraded my Windows NT 4.0 workstation licenses!
My advice is to use OSS whereever you can, and proprietary software whereever you must. Always make technology decisions that give you the option to migrate to OSS if the option presents itself.
In my opinion you absolutely right on. Once OSS has fully cracked the ERP case, it's gonna be payback time for all the pioneer work.
We - a small group of freelancers that I've managed to gather - are building an ERP infrastructure for a small local E-Commerce business, with Billing, Supply Chain Management and some other stuff joinging the mix almost right on site with one of our clients. From what I have expierienced, even with finacial and CRM software is that it in the end even isn't worthwhile looking at commercial proprietary software. My strong advice: Get an OSS expierienced programmer who is realistic and can ask you the right questions. He absolutely has to be capable of understanding the needs of pragmatic business solutions and your need to also evalutate proprietary products even if he's grown to be very sceptical (like I have). He should also be able to recognize where the bottlenecks in your business are and if the software which screenshots you like so much:-) really is worth it. We are using OSS all the way through, exept for the businessguy who hasn't gotten around to ditching his Win2K Desktop - which he almost is as anoyed about as the rest of us, since managing all those emails is a major suck with outlook. (Yeah, I know, sounds insane, doesn't it?)
All the rest is done with either solid OSS solutions - in this case InterChange for the e-Commerce plattform - or custom Code in Python. Compiere gives me the creeps aswell, but just the other day I've checked with the GNU Enterprise team, and after pocking them with questions on IRC for 90 minutes I'd say their foundation work seems the way to go for me. Take a look for yourself: ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnue/project/what.html )
Just now the business has it's model sorted out and we're making the transition from a bunch of patched and modded gluecode scripts to a front line ERP/SCM/CRM system and we are going to join the GNUe folks, contribute to the project and use the gnue-common stuff to build the precise things we need. It may be a struggle at times, but all in all the crap we've put up with in proprietary systems we've shurely had enough of.
I don't know your field of business, but _if_ you choose to use proprietary software I'd suggest you do thourough evaluation of in-the-field qualities and take a VERY close look at true TCO.
Remeber: THIS is the area we're the software vendors move into serious bullshitting territory in a way that in comparsion one could think the MS Desktop devision is a trustworthy non-profit organization!
Bottom Line: If you have good and solid, non-quirky fanatics-free OSS coders and experts at hand I'd suggest you trust them with your money, otherwise be _extremely_ carefull before you buy yourself into a lock-in with a crappy line of software products. You can't imagine what proprietary rubbish people sell for money.
BTW: If you happen to reside in germany or benelux, I'd be happy to have a talk and look if I can maybe be of use and able to toss you a pitch. Feel free to drop me a line if you think I can help you. (Here's my public mailbox: r_i-t_s-c_h-r_a-t_s-c_h @ g-m_x-_-. d_-_e without the Hyphens, Spaces and Underscores)
What comes after this, where do we go after outsourcing knowledge jobs? We've got the same in europe. There is a publisher in poland who just started issueing a php magazin, a hacking magazine and for almost a year now publish a red hat linux derivate called 'aurox' linux. The articles are written by polish stundents, the distro is maintained by polish geeks - the best of which probably work for half a week what I take for an hour - and all are translated once a month and once a release respectively into 8 different european languages, printed in poland over night for something like a handfull of euros per 'europalette' and shipped to all target countries. Probalbly within 36 hrs. the most.
See for yourself: Aurox Linux, PHP Solutions Magazine and Hackin9 magazine. Top quality stuff. I've actually bought both the first and the second issue of "hackin9" and am probably gonna get myself a subscription. I got the newest Aurox distro too (codename "water" - they're useing up the elements first I presume:-) ). Suse, Xandros, Red Hat: Prepare for incoming.
So, again, my fellow slashdotters, where is this all heading?
The article give a hint in the right direction: High Tech Companies right beside slums and favelas.
Figure: Companies spread across the entire planet, connected by virtual networks. You find a person tied to the ABC-XYZ Software company culture everywhere on the planet but you also start finding strong cultural transitions just by walking half a block. No matter if you'Re in a first or third world country. Cultural shifts and differences become more and more independant of physical distance and the area you live in has less and less effect on or relation to your actual real personal wealth.
There is a very distincive term for this type of future culture to come, coined by the liturature that describes this very essence:
It's called cyberpunk.
I personally over the last 7 years or so have sticked with plain and simply calling this developement 'cyberpunkization'.
I have yet to be met with the evidence that this term is not entirely appropriate. On the contrary.
Bottom line: 1.) Read Gibson and Stephenson with a critical but open mind applying them to the real world. 2.) Then look at the world as it is now and how (fast) it has become that way. 3.) Do the math and make the best of it. After all, you're a geek, aren't you?
I actually installed this full-range x86 emulator on Linux and then installed Win95 on it. Aside from the fact that Win95 does a bazillion low level operations that all have to be emulated, Bochs itself really is _s_l_o_w_. Other than checking for low level compliance with basic x86 stuff it's completely useless on a productive application usage level. Then again, I have to say that Win95 actually *did* run. Err, make that crawl.
One of my clients/partners sounds like he could be you. He's a top-notch dermatologist and has worked as a consultant for the most advanced imaging system available for dermatology - one that can automatically diagnose dermal anomalies such as skin cancer. He's got a company that expertises in medical E-Learning for medical personell and works for various medical organizations and the pharma industry. I'd suggest that if you want to study because it interests you, get used to the idea of studying for fun. When you've got your degree you can still decide what to do with it. On the other hand, I'd suggest you either stick with your jobs which has something around a bazillion advantages over CS and IT or you combine both with medical consulting for pharma companies and other organizationhs in IT related medical projects. Or medical related IT projects. You could even do it parttime until your business is going. As for my client/partner, he hasn't got a CS degree but he spends 2 days a week dealing with the field and it's geeks (me). His Webdesign is horrid and I'm having a hard time talking him out of it, but his medicine skill and expertise combined with my computer expertise gets us to sit together with the really big boys in pharmacy, who have so much money they light up their chimney with 500 Euro bills.:-) My partner is really anoyed about the materialistic extremeties in todays medical world and he thrives to evade it by that combination of strategies: True Continous Medical Education (you see, I know the buzzwords allready:-) ) and part-time dealing with a field he has a hobbyists interest for. Just the right thing for you too, I'd suggest. Bottom line: Get into _one_ field that interrests you in CS/IT that you think could go well with what you've got allready. If you've got the brains you won't need a degreed - don't forget: medicine has been around since 10000 years, but computerwise we're still in a stone age, with maybe 100 years of knowlege in the field! It's all about brains and what ideas _you_ come up with. Technologies change and evolve on a half-year basis. Not a good enviroment for a usefull degree, if you ask me. My partner and I use open source + custom code only and we're 2 people competing and outrunning companies with 100 employees and more - I'd strongly suggest you go that way too. When you're firm enough get yourself a contractor/partner like me;-) who knows what he's talking about and also has some business and social skills. Note that I'm originally an artist and also come from another field than CS/IT. When you start a business, know where your power lies and learn to pass on the parts that you're not good in, even if you would like to do everything yourself. That's one part of success. Best of luck to you.
I'm getting myself an IBook. I'm not gonna ditch Panter, since I have some stuff to do in Flash. Other than that I'll stick with OSS and use Java. After all, the Java integration in MacOSX is phenomenal. I'm looking forward to just firing up JEdit without skinning and all and have it not look like someone did doo-doo on my screen but instead really cool with native AA fonts and all that stuff. Jippeee! It might be that I install Debian PPC on a different Partition though. Probably sometime later. Apart from MacOSX being proprietary Apple did just the right thing, imho: Use a refernce grade OS with solid OSS support as base and design a high end GUI around it. To me OSX and Linux aren't that far apart. I used it the other day and it even has ZShell installed! OSS *nix goodness with Apple Eyecandy and high end design tools and Java run natively. Just how cool is that? No, I probably won't feel guilty.:-)
The text of book is under an Open Source license, as with all books in my series. A few months after publication, both source and unencrypted PDF will be uploaded.
It don't understand this. M$ can't be _that_ stupid, can they?
Step number one was completly negleting OSS and hoping customers wouldn't notice. *That* was a time when M$ should have prepared to sell it's own Linux distro with DX 9 and some other embrace and extend stuff. They missed it and screwed up. Lucky was we.
Step two was bashing the GPL as 'unamerican' and other bullshit and bringing customers to look twice at licensing where they used to give a hoot about the small print. Thus causing them to also look at M$ licenses and notice what BS they have been subscribing to for years allready. Ballmer backed of merely a half a year later and admited it was a bad plan to draw so much attention to OSS by bashing Linux/GPL in such a way.
Step three: Publish studies were everybody with more than 2 braincells notices in an instant that Linux/OSS is on top of things and M$ knows nothing other to do about it than flail the bullshitting-club left right and center.
Can a company of this size with marketing departments on a budget as big as the anual throughput of something like the third of afrika be so stupid and windows focused to pull such a mindless stunt? Honestly, if I were a stockholder of M$ I'd be somewhat pissed and would want a question or two answered on that matter. M$ better get a grip and start preparing to change their business model or else they're gonna be in deep shit faster than any of us had ever hoped for.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a geek site, isn't it?
Where is the Linux version? What you say?
XBOX Version but no Linux version?
OK. Bye.
I'm not buying any new windows games anymore. Yet I am thinking about how diffcult it would be to build an free/open sneak person shooter like Metal Gear Solid/Thief/Splinter Cell. Especially with engines like this one.
Well, Mr. Balmer, I would say that Microsoft isn't doing to well in Munich either. Harharharhar.
Nobody said migration would be cheaper or easier, stupid. On the contrary, _everybody_ said it would be more tedious and expensive. But the majority also said it would pay of in the long run _and_ serve as a landmark for free software growth. And would be a desireble political statement.
Just go on. The more the process of migration recieves a bashing from MS, the stronger the impact will be when Munich migration has succeeded.
Instead of doing what OSS can do best and provide a nice, thourough documented /etc/cups/cupsconfig the cups team goes out of their way to produce something like 5 different GUIs, at least one of them web based, and leave each half finished.
Shure OSS is free, but programmers want people to use their software, so this is nothing but a good advice and a hint at some major bugs in the GUI.
And a bad one in the GUI has the rank of a bug. Or at least it should.
If you don't like that - don't bother with a GUI. It's that simple.
Stress == anxiety caused by the lack of consciousness about the where's, why's and how's of general impediments of everyday life.
Given the definition above, which, imho, is quite percise, and the fact that we live in an age which is growing more and more complex in the material world I'd say yes, stress is more or less directly proportional to the 'amount' of tech around you.
Quite fitting that I've spend half my day today trying to hush my PC a little more with a fanless powerunit and a fanless grafics cooler. A lot of stress is caused by noise that we aren't directly aware of.
Ranting how crappy Gimp is compared to [fill in comercial product here] is just as unfitting as stating that Gimp is about as good as PS.
I'm a mulimediadesinger and have worked with a wide range of tool on a professional level.
Gimp 1.3 actually _is_ a usefull tool. It's not the tool of choice for most things, but in some scenarios it can actually deliver results were other grafics tools get in their own way with feature and algorithim bloat.
The habit of putting every thing in it's own window made pre-1.3 Gimp absolutely unbearable for production. Unless you had Fluxbox, maybe.
But the simple level Anti-Aliasig and some other nice features along with the one or other workaroud trick make Gimp a nice Pixeleditor to work with. Praise the Gimp team for getting the message and introducing tabs and other must-haves for GUI work.
On top of that, - and this is one of the most notable things of this OSS project imho - as long as I can remember, Gimp has allways been an absolute breeze to install. I wish all OSS would install that way. For instance, right now I'm debugging a default Postgres/ODBC Setup and it's taken up 30 workhours allready with no end in sight...
To me the undo stack in Gimp 2.0 looks promising, as it hints in the direction of the PS protokoll. Which, btw, proves that PS is still waaaaay ahead of any competition, be it comercial or OSS.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Gimp 2. Cudos to the Gimp team for their good work.
And also good for your spine:
http://www.swopper.de/
"GNU / Linux and OSS has us and our business model by the balls and we're crapping our pants over it. That's why I can't answer your questions with coherent sentences and have to do the chewbacka defense and mutter something about big macs and diet cokes.
While saying this I'll also admit that we don't have a firewall and that Linux is gaining serious ground in scientific computing, clustering and public service and hope that you won't notice that it's gainging with IBM, HP and Co. aswell and on top of that also gaining in every other f*cking direction you look.
And we only get it on in the 'I bought a new PC and it happend to come with XP' market.
So please be distracted and continue to give ur your money right now."
Industry Leader, leading gaming system, performance leader in the interactive industry...
Isn't this in the U.S., where you can sue people for harrasment because their wearing to bright colors?
How come this plain and utter nuissance of a company even still exists?
Isn't their any law preventing a company from spreading bullshit or is it all ok under that 1st amendment thing?
We've got free speach in germany too. But if you go on bullshitting the public on that level over here, you're bound to recieve some major legal ass-chewing from the Boersenaufsicht (german SEC) or some court. Just like SCO Germany. They we're hushed within a few months time last year. Shut up, proove your public statements on pay a large fine.
Is it that hard to establish an exempt ruling that does the same in the US?
I mean, coffee spillers can sue MCs for large sums, so where is the problem?
In this area I find the US law system a tad unbalanced, don't your think so too?
I don't see any problem either, even with linking GPLd stuff against it. After all the additions needed to make XFree compliant with it's license and the GPL have nothing to do with sourcecode but with copyright notices. I see no big deal in mixing both licenses and complying with both. No?
Who is going to be writing open source software when where all unemployed and unable to purchase computers when our current ones breakdown?
/. was a place of future and OSS aware geeks...
IT Unemlployment isn't going to grow indefinitely.
IT jobs are shifting to service rather than coding and selling closed source.This will also bring back jobs to where the customers are. And it will even strengthen OSS.
Closed source and large proprietary software families are a thing of the past. That's the big thing that's changing. And that's the only reason it's actually feasable to outsource big time. Whenever an industry does that it's about to change big time anyway. That doesn't mean we're all going unemployed for the rest of our life. I lost a job as a developer and now do freelance stuff with lot's of OSS and a strong service orientation, close to the people in other fields of business. That 40 hrs. keypunching on proprietary stuff is _never_ going to come back. Not for me it is anyway.
And in the end, I thank God for it. Now i sit at my desk or laptop for half the time at most. The rest of the time I go out, talk to customers and am much closer in touch with reality than any coder could ever be. I know I'll get my customers top-range software for nearly all their need for zero money and they'll gladly pay me to custom design and programm their supply chain management, rich media framework, web-cms or whatnot. And in the end I get to GPL the code!
Dig it: My customers _pay_ me to do _real_ fun computer stuff, they are thankfull for me doing it and in the end I can publish it as OSS. I got layed off and I adapted and I'll _never_ look back!
Once again, to all coders out there:
8.5 hrs a day keypunching proprietary software along with selling closed source is deader than a doornail and is done with.
- - - IT IS OVER! - -
The last stuff that proprietary can do to make money is so measyly IT HAS TO BE DONE BY SUPER CHEAP LABOR.
And that, my dear geek friends IS A GOOD THING for the _global_ economy!
Coding has become a service and custom craftmanship and ceased being a assembly line mass production. Get that into your skull and fucking adapt. The earlyer, the better.
I thought
Cheez, coming to think of it, I guess I should consider myseld lucky being layed off early enough.
..is that in general, people (geeks and non-geeks) don't seem to see that massive IT work on a beehive scale probably isn't going to last very long in india either.
99% of software related work I do today I do with software that I get for free of the net. It's called OSS.
What's still missing in the OSS dept?
Feasable ERP and usable Multimedia (video NLE/Compositing, animation, 3D). And games maybe.
What else? Niche stuff at most.
That being said, wouldn't it be cool for western geeks to collect something like the 100 000 $ for Blender to have a large team in india do some grunt work on XFree, GNU Enterprise or something else? Or maybe the base for the blender 3.0 redoo, with NLE, NLA, crystal space engine integration and all that?
Some 50 programmers or so could actually make a living over there and we'd all be on the winning side. I personally would LOVE to call myself a sharehoplder of the 'Indian Team OSS Group' or so. What do other slashdotters think about this? Am I making sense?
You've got the points.
Debian is all about finding your way through the XF86Setup-4 suckage - especially with NVidia stuff - and grasping the apt way of doing things. Which isn't trivial, but very powerfull in the end.
..because what you're going to try to do is my very business. We're doing OSS migration and OSS project customization for small copmanies and _very_ large corporations (Pharmacy) and I'd could come up with a billion things to say. Since I've been working this field all day for a few months without an end I'll cut it short:
The world of closed source has ended. Period.
It's that simple. I wouldn't bet another single dime on a company focusing on a businessmodel that concentrates on the selling of closed source. Hell, even Macromedia - one of the few that actually made a steady revenue with closed source, mind you - has set up their newest product as a _service_ ('breeze') and not as the usual enveloped CD in a box of air!
Not convinced? Do it the other way around: Tell me why _should_ a company _go_ closed source? Stick with it till it's amortised? Ok. SAP has another few years, maybe even a decade, and only a maniac would try to migrate a company the size of, let's say, Volkswagen, from SAP to a custom compiere or GNUe enviroment or something simular right now. Nuclear Plants are also a special thing. But they are in various ways and are somewhat another league where closedness or openess doesn't really count.
For all else goes this:
Every day I'm helping companies do the transition and make the first steps. These companies are in time. In 5 years from now we'll all be the computer software craftsmen/women and MS and Co. will have a hard time adapting. The companies without the awareness to leave the update treadmill will just waste another round of cash and lose it in the end.
Closed Source has had it's day. It's really that simple. If you're building something new or restrucutring, follow up or waste big money. That's all there is to it.
A friend got me hooked into this multiplayer capture the flag (ctf) fps thing a few years ago with Unreal Tournament Game of the year edition. By then it was 2 years old, had a rock solid Linux client and was de-facto bug free, due to a persistent update policy. It was the most popular multiplayer online game with something like 80 000 player online at a time.
I had to pratice 3-4 weeks to actually survive longer than 30 seconds in the public servers but it got me hooked.
I have come to think of UT and its follow ups as the classic FPS game. The follow ups are of equal rank in quality and gameplay. It's fast, it's fun and - hence the name - doesn't take realisim to serious to get boring. The weapons are cool, the maps and the modding community are amongst the best and it is a very complex and demanding game at high skill levels (exept for deathmatch and TeamDeathmatch maybe).
On top of that the Unreal team has allways gone lengths to deliver a reference grade quality Linux client, which is a very honorable thing, imho. They deserve your money.
If you've ever though of getting a FPS for inbetween or just to chek out the genre, I can warmly recommend UT. You won't be dissapointed.
Also note that the german mass computer 'newspaper' (think: Daily Computer Sun) has a Knoppix in it's recent Edition, heavyly addvertising it's Virus safety and vendor spyware / vendor 'all-your-base' registration freeness.
m
Here's the link:
http://www.computerbild.de/2004/indexcb.ht
This all is showing a fast growing trend - people switching Linux for safety reasons alone - no matter what Windows addictions or OSS shortcomings they might still have to deal with.
I do not even have any desire or plans to get rid of all the Microsoft boxes. We will still use Quickbooks for the back end accounting.
AAAARRRGH! "FICKBOOKS!" (German for 'Fuckbooks')
THAT's the programm that was my last reason to migrate billing/accounting to OSS as fast as possible! I admire your pain threshhold! LOL.
We will still do desktop publishing using BSA-approved software (although the GIMP has replaced Photoshop in our non-print work).
Here I absolutely agree.
The one shining beacon of hope for me is that, even though I have not significantly reduced the number of Windows machines at my business, I have significantly increased the number of FreeBSD and Linux servers, and I have not ever upgraded my Windows NT 4.0 workstation licenses!
My advice is to use OSS whereever you can, and proprietary software whereever you must. Always make technology decisions that give you the option to migrate to OSS if the option presents itself.
In my opinion you absolutely right on. Once OSS has fully cracked the ERP case, it's gonna be payback time for all the pioneer work.
We - a small group of freelancers that I've managed to gather - are building an ERP infrastructure for a small local E-Commerce business, with Billing, Supply Chain Management and some other stuff joinging the mix almost right on site with one of our clients. :-) really is worth it.
l )
From what I have expierienced, even with finacial and CRM software is that it in the end even isn't worthwhile looking at commercial proprietary software.
My strong advice:
Get an OSS expierienced programmer who is realistic and can ask you the right questions. He absolutely has to be capable of understanding the needs of pragmatic business solutions and your need to also evalutate proprietary products even if he's grown to be very sceptical (like I have). He should also be able to recognize where the bottlenecks in your business are and if the software which screenshots you like so much
We are using OSS all the way through, exept for the businessguy who hasn't gotten around to ditching his Win2K Desktop - which he almost is as anoyed about as the rest of us, since managing all those emails is a major suck with outlook. (Yeah, I know, sounds insane, doesn't it?)
All the rest is done with either solid OSS solutions - in this case InterChange for the e-Commerce plattform - or custom Code in Python.
Compiere gives me the creeps aswell, but just the other day I've checked with the GNU Enterprise team, and after pocking them with questions on IRC for 90 minutes I'd say their foundation work seems the way to go for me. Take a look for yourself:
( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnue/project/what.htm
Just now the business has it's model sorted out and we're making the transition from a bunch of patched and modded gluecode scripts to a front line ERP/SCM/CRM system and we are going to join the GNUe folks, contribute to the project and use the gnue-common stuff to build the precise things we need. It may be a struggle at times, but all in all the crap we've put up with in proprietary systems we've shurely had enough of.
I don't know your field of business, but _if_ you choose to use proprietary software I'd suggest you do thourough evaluation of in-the-field qualities and take a VERY close look at true TCO.
Remeber: THIS is the area we're the software vendors move into serious bullshitting territory in a way that in comparsion one could think the MS Desktop devision is a trustworthy non-profit organization!
Bottom Line:
If you have good and solid, non-quirky fanatics-free OSS coders and experts at hand I'd suggest you trust them with your money, otherwise be _extremely_ carefull before you buy yourself into a lock-in with a crappy line of software products. You can't imagine what proprietary rubbish people sell for money.
BTW: If you happen to reside in germany or benelux, I'd be happy to have a talk and look if I can maybe be of use and able to toss you a pitch. Feel free to drop me a line if you think I can help you.
(Here's my public mailbox: r_i-t_s-c_h-r_a-t_s-c_h @ g-m_x-_-. d_-_e without the Hyphens, Spaces and Underscores)
What comes after this, where do we go after outsourcing knowledge jobs? We've got the same in europe. There is a publisher in poland who just started issueing a php magazin, a hacking magazine and for almost a year now publish a red hat linux derivate called 'aurox' linux. The articles are written by polish stundents, the distro is maintained by polish geeks - the best of which probably work for half a week what I take for an hour - and all are translated once a month and once a release respectively into 8 different european languages, printed in poland over night for something like a handfull of euros per 'europalette' and shipped to all target countries. Probalbly within 36 hrs. the most.
:-) ).
See for yourself: Aurox Linux, PHP Solutions Magazine and Hackin9 magazine.
Top quality stuff. I've actually bought both the first and the second issue of "hackin9" and am probably gonna get myself a subscription. I got the newest Aurox distro too (codename "water" - they're useing up the elements first I presume
Suse, Xandros, Red Hat: Prepare for incoming.
So, again, my fellow slashdotters, where is this all heading?
The article give a hint in the right direction: High Tech Companies right beside slums and favelas.
Figure:
Companies spread across the entire planet, connected by virtual networks. You find a person tied to the ABC-XYZ Software company culture everywhere on the planet but you also start finding strong cultural transitions just by walking half a block. No matter if you'Re in a first or third world country.
Cultural shifts and differences become more and more independant of physical distance and the area you live in has less and less effect on or relation to your actual real personal wealth.
There is a very distincive term for this type of future culture to come, coined by the liturature that describes this very essence:
It's called cyberpunk.
I personally over the last 7 years or so have sticked with plain and simply calling this developement 'cyberpunkization'.
I have yet to be met with the evidence that this term is not entirely appropriate. On the contrary.
Bottom line:
1.) Read Gibson and Stephenson with a critical but open mind applying them to the real world.
2.) Then look at the world as it is now and how (fast) it has become that way.
3.) Do the math and make the best of it. After all, you're a geek, aren't you?
I actually installed this full-range x86 emulator on Linux and then installed Win95 on it.
Aside from the fact that Win95 does a bazillion low level operations that all have to be emulated, Bochs itself really is _s_l_o_w_.
Other than checking for low level compliance with basic x86 stuff it's completely useless on a productive application usage level.
Then again, I have to say that Win95 actually *did* run. Err, make that crawl.
Germany: Highest amount of Linux users per capita.
:-)
I personally expect Germany to be the first 'first world' country in which Linux reaches serious critcal mass.
In fact, that's what I build my business on.
( www.richdale.de )
One of my clients/partners sounds like he could be you. :-) My partner is really anoyed about the materialistic extremeties in todays medical world and he thrives to evade it by that combination of strategies: True Continous Medical Education (you see, I know the buzzwords allready :-) ) and part-time dealing with a field he has a hobbyists interest for. Just the right thing for you too, I'd suggest. ;-) who knows what he's talking about and also has some business and social skills. Note that I'm originally an artist and also come from another field than CS/IT. When you start a business, know where your power lies and learn to pass on the parts that you're not good in, even if you would like to do everything yourself. That's one part of success. Best of luck to you.
He's a top-notch dermatologist and has worked as a consultant for the most advanced imaging system available for dermatology - one that can automatically diagnose dermal anomalies such as skin cancer. He's got a company that expertises in medical E-Learning for medical personell and works for various medical organizations and the pharma industry.
I'd suggest that if you want to study because it interests you, get used to the idea of studying for fun. When you've got your degree you can still decide what to do with it.
On the other hand, I'd suggest you either stick with your jobs which has something around a bazillion advantages over CS and IT or you combine both with medical consulting for pharma companies and other organizationhs in IT related medical projects. Or medical related IT projects. You could even do it parttime until your business is going.
As for my client/partner, he hasn't got a CS degree but he spends 2 days a week dealing with the field and it's geeks (me). His Webdesign is horrid and I'm having a hard time talking him out of it, but his medicine skill and expertise combined with my computer expertise gets us to sit together with the really big boys in pharmacy, who have so much money they light up their chimney with 500 Euro bills.
Bottom line:
Get into _one_ field that interrests you in CS/IT that you think could go well with what you've got allready. If you've got the brains you won't need a degreed - don't forget: medicine has been around since 10000 years, but computerwise we're still in a stone age, with maybe 100 years of knowlege in the field! It's all about brains and what ideas _you_ come up with. Technologies change and evolve on a half-year basis. Not a good enviroment for a usefull degree, if you ask me.
My partner and I use open source + custom code only and we're 2 people competing and outrunning companies with 100 employees and more - I'd strongly suggest you go that way too. When you're firm enough get yourself a contractor/partner like me
I'm getting myself an IBook. :-)
I'm not gonna ditch Panter, since I have some stuff to do in Flash. Other than that I'll stick with OSS and use Java. After all, the Java integration in MacOSX is phenomenal. I'm looking forward to just firing up JEdit without skinning and all and have it not look like someone did doo-doo on my screen but instead really cool with native AA fonts and all that stuff. Jippeee!
It might be that I install Debian PPC on a different Partition though. Probably sometime later.
Apart from MacOSX being proprietary Apple did just the right thing, imho: Use a refernce grade OS with solid OSS support as base and design a high end GUI around it. To me OSX and Linux aren't that far apart. I used it the other day and it even has ZShell installed! OSS *nix goodness with Apple Eyecandy and high end design tools and Java run natively. Just how cool is that? No, I probably won't feel guilty.
The text of book is under an Open Source license, as with all books in my series. A few months after publication, both source and unencrypted PDF will be uploaded.
Cool. Thanks.
In related News:
Sky is blue.
It don't understand this. M$ can't be _that_ stupid, can they?
Step number one was completly negleting OSS and hoping customers wouldn't notice. *That* was a time when M$ should have prepared to sell it's own Linux distro with DX 9 and some other embrace and extend stuff. They missed it and screwed up. Lucky was we.
Step two was bashing the GPL as 'unamerican' and other bullshit and bringing customers to look twice at licensing where they used to give a hoot about the small print. Thus causing them to also look at M$ licenses and notice what BS they have been subscribing to for years allready. Ballmer backed of merely a half a year later and admited it was a bad plan to draw so much attention to OSS by bashing Linux/GPL in such a way.
Step three: Publish studies were everybody with more than 2 braincells notices in an instant that Linux/OSS is on top of things and M$ knows nothing other to do about it than flail the bullshitting-club left right and center.
Can a company of this size with marketing departments on a budget as big as the anual throughput of something like the third of afrika be so stupid and windows focused to pull such a mindless stunt?
Honestly, if I were a stockholder of M$ I'd be somewhat pissed and would want a question or two answered on that matter. M$ better get a grip and start preparing to change their business model or else they're gonna be in deep shit faster than any of us had ever hoped for.