Your quote: If it weren't for the good old US of A, France, Britain and the rest of Europe would have been living under Stalin.
His quote: Otto: Well, would you like to know what you'd be without us, the good ol' U.S. of A. to protect you? I'll tell you. The smallest fucking province in the Russian Empire, that's what. So don't call me stupid, lady. Just thank me!
Blender for me typifies how free as in beer can work well. It's doesn't quite fit the mould because you have an option to pay for a commercial license which unlocks certain advanced features. The manual is also separately available at a price.
But it can be downloaded for zero price with no restrictions on its use. The money people - including myself - have paid for manuals and keys has gone back into the development of the program. I believe the Blender team were at E3 showing off version 2.0 which is touted to be a game development modelling system.
The team have not ruled out GPL'ed source in the future but right now it makes no sense to them given the way they manage their source tree. If they don't release the source so what? There are plenty of GPL'ed modellers out there for anyone to download and improve. It's just that the quality of Blender and the enthusiasm of its user base gives it more than enough momentum right now.
Q: What is LSDVD? A: A wicked awesome audio/visual experiance that allows you to witness the awe and mystery of true DVD playback under Linux with AC3 and all the goodies. Look elsewhere on this site for more information.
Q: Oh yes! DVD under Linux! Hooray! A: We thought you would be happy.
Q: Since this is a Linux project it's going to be open sourced and gpl'd, right? A: No.
Q: WHAT?! Why (optional profanity) not? A: Unfortunately the DVD Forum, Dolby and MPEGLA have proprietary rights to AC3 and decoding schemas (as well as much needed hardware specs). In order to legally develop this program we are going to have to pay a huge licensing fee to each and (on top of that) royalties on every program distriputed. Hence, we have to charge for it, but not too much hopefully.
Q: You're sure it won't be free? A: Positive.
Q: Not even for me? I am "eleet dude", come on! A: Nope, not even for you.
Q: Well how about a beta then. Can I be a beta tester? A: No, all of our testing is going to be done internally with the developers and other hand picked individuals.
Q: When will it be released? A: Eventually.
Q: Eventually? Eventually!?!? How soon is that! A: How soon do you think it is?
Q: Can I please have a beta? A: No.
Q: So how much did you say it was going to cost? A: I didn't say. How much are you willing to give us?
Dunno about you but this doesn't give me much of a warm fuzzy feeling inside. The folks over at LiViD may have some work to do still, but at least I can see their progress, and help contribute to the source tree where I can. Not that I don't welcome projects like LSDVD - but I'll believe it when I see it. FWIW the LiViD CVS tarball features AC3 decoding, decryption and authorisation of discs, mpeg playback and a whole lot of other bonus features - including hacked up hardware acceleration for DXr2 and Matrox owners.
The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer-operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said
Don't about the the other two but you can get a brilliant CD from Bobby Prince music which has 20 tracks of the MIDIs from Doom I and Doom II. All the music is played by him on some high-end synths with some additional remixing and orchestration. It makes a really great Quake CD as well - all the tracks are ordered for Quake I/II play.
Bobby Prince is one of the nicest guys around as well. His Web site used to have loads of trivia about id, the making of Doom and what inpiration the different tracks had. He also had some white papers on music, atmosphere in games, sampling and composing. When I ordered the CD, I had to send cash because I was between credit cards. I couldn't get change for the exact amount so I sent him a bit more than the price. Lo and behold, I get *two* CDs for the price of just more than one - plus a nice personal letter from his wife. Made my day...
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
I think this is an unfair generalisation. The vast majority of code I work with is clean, well-designed, and adheres to one of the style and coding standards out there. That includes the kernel sources, Glib, Gtk+, the Gnome libs, python, Perl, and loads of others. If you mean that the vast majority of small applications are complete crap, you could be right. But don't knock the single programmer who need to scratch an itch. If enough people are interested in his or her project, they'll help - including design and style improvements and suggestions.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Seems to be doing just fine so far - the OSS community is pretty aggressive about coding standards already.
The Gnome Developer's site has some strongly worded docs on style, consistency, robustness and correctness for prospective developers.
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-coding-style .txt has Linus's words on the subject of style.
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
Whereas of course closed-source software is bound to survive since all development houses rigidly enforce coding standards? Bollocks. Been there, done that, shipped it because it compiled. In the bazaar model and peer review style of the OSS world, you can't get away with crappy code or bad design for very long. If your project's well designed, maintainable, useful and easy to read as well as being robust, it will survive. If not, then you can't get away with shipping only binaries to some poor customer.
More than anything else I think, the GPL has been the most influential thing you've ever created. Do you think the time will come when the GPL will get tested in court? If it is upheld I think free software developers everywhere will be happy.
The fact of the matter is, CTOs at most companies don't care about issues of ideology. They have no idea about who Richard Strawlman is,
I had just written a long reply to this, complete with links to informative sites, examples of case studies, Apache market share figures and witty prose about the brain capacity of CTOs implied by this when I looked again at the spelling of Richard Stallman's name.
Here's a formula for success. After polite requests for information emphasising that many Linux users would love to have hardware-accelerated OpenGL, a hardware vendor releases some specs to enable the writing of a low-level driver. Maybe they don't release them all, but certainly enough to write a usable driver. Mesa is available, solid and most importantly as correct an OpenGL implementation as possible given that it's not formally approved.
A mailing list is started and bunches of expert hardware hackers pound on the code, improving it to a very usable state in a matter of months. Sometimes progress is slow, but that's OK because everything is open souce, and if you wanted things to speed up, you could help. In less than a year, and helped along by major OpenGL vendors releasing more information, the low level driver is extremely usable, stable and fast. The project also expands to include other chipsets and manages to incorporate 3DNow, MMX and SIMD capabilities.
Fantasy? No, I'm talking about the Utah GLX project which has more or less followed the pattern I've described above. If you have a Matrox G200, a G400, and ATi RagePro, Intel 810, RivaTNT or an S3 Virge, Utah GLX will support your card as a loadable module under XFree 3.3.x. Matrox support is so good that my G400 can run Quake 3 at between 50 and 60fps on a Celeron 400 machine.
Now I'm not at all clear whether the GLX module as it stands will just plug directly in to XFree 4.0. I suspect not. But if I have to wait a bit for it to be integrated, I'd much rather do that than get a card with binary only drivers that won't support the spirit (and the letter) of the new DRI.
Sometimes all it takes is a bit of patience. It can be irritating to hear GeForce owners boast about their frame rates. But if everyone's willing to contribute to the open source way of doing things, we'll end up with better drivers, better support and also encourage the current development teams that they're doing The Right Thing - which they are.
Now that FLT has been proven, what about Fermat's comment about his "great proof"? Do modern mathematicians believe he was joking? Or did he have some different, simpler proof?
IIRC the three schools of thought in the study of the history of mathematics are: a) he was joking b) he really thought he had found a proof
c) he really thought he had found a proof and was teasing his readers by not printing it.
There is absolutely no way his proof (if it existed) was anything remotely similar to the one Wiles found. Wiles' proof is a thing of incredible beauty. Far from being just a pure exercise in theory, it links hitherto unrelated disciplines in mathematics together.
..saying that a "recent effort yielded a proof to Fermat's Last Theorem" is a bit of an understatement. Andrew Wiles' proof of FLT runs into the hundreds of pages and makes use of vast tracts of number theory, some dating back hundreds of years. It can probably only be understood in full by a handful of top mathematicians. It took him something like seven years of concentrated work with no guarantee of success and included one horrible non-proof which he was able to fix to produce the Real Thing some months later.
Yes, it is possible that the Goldbach conjecture may be proved or disproved by a lay person but it's far more likely to be solved by someone with a sound grasp of lots of number theory who is already studying the properties of numbers for a living.
BTW I have a truly marvellous proof of the Goldbach conjecture but there is no margin on the submit form to write it in:)
..because they are key to the MS sales cycle. Part of a letter quoted on the site:
It sounds good when Donna M. Senko (Director of Certification and Skills Assessment) writes: "We expect any individuals who choose to certify in the MCSE track to assume a leadership role in helping their employers or clients stay competitive." But there is a little discrepancy in this sentence with the reality: After you have done all the investments in education (time and money) and you have passed all the necessary exams to become a MCSE, you are not able to "help your employer or client to stay competitive" because you have to invest into the education for the next MCSE certifications.
This guy correctly points out the major problem with vendor certification - it's expensive and often useless. It's also dangerous to annoy people who have the potential to drive sales from within an organisation. From within is really important - no matter how many salespeople approach from outside, the MCSE-trained bloke inside is far more likely to be up to date on the latest solutions, updates, bugfixes et al. From there its a simple matter for Microsoft to keep him supplied with the latest goodies, invite him to regular brainwas^H^H^H^H^training functions and keep him warm and fuzzy. He might not have influence now, but he may have in the future - perhaps as an IT manager.
Personally I think MS are being mightily arrogant by cutting off the NT 4.0 courses. Instead of everyone falling over themselves to upgrade to Win2k, I suspect lots of potentials will be checking out the alternatives.
GGAD by Havoc Pennington is a very nice online book dealing with the title (obviously). When you check it out of CVS and upack it, it comes with the Open Publication License 0.4 and a little file that says:
Don't commit to this module without asking me, Havoc Pennington . Thanks:-)
The filename?
README.REALLY.I.MEAN.IT
Perhaps we should ask him whether this has helped in the fight against third-parties attempting to rewrite his prose:)
Nice looking library with lots of potential. It's about a 500k download and compiles out of the box on my RH 6.0 installation. There's no INSTALL and the configure scripts are lurking in the OS-specific directories but they work fine. Make and make test work fine - make install doesn't but I haven't checked why. All the test programs run like a charm on this SB Live! Value and some of them are pretty damn impressive. From the./docs/specification.html file:
OpenAL includes several separate sub-libraries:
AL - core audio library services, including specifying listener orientation; environment geometry and material characteristics; sample data; and source orientation, radiation, and other characteristics.
ALU - a utility library for AL which provides functionality for doing sample conversion, preset material properties, and a compatability layer for doing simple stereo audio from within AL's 3D spatial framework.
ALC - a platform specific library for managing OpenAL contexts, including resource sharing, locking, and unlocking. This includes, but is not limited to, ALC/Linux and ALC/Windows.
ALUT - a cross-platform library for creating an OpenAL context, with support for simple file loading. It also provides a simple API for accessing CD audio.
It looks like the developers have thought carefully about the spec and managed to combine a clean API with lots of flexibility. Environments can be defined in terms of geometry and materials and "listeners" can have position, velocity and orientation, leading to all sorts of cool stuff like doppler effects and sound radiosity. And yes, if you know OpenGL it takes about ten minutes to get your head around OpenAL. Great job Loki.
From the article: The answer is relatively simple: The Open Source movement has no feedback loop to end-users, and no imperative to create one.
That is entirely up to the developers. As someone on their way to releasing a GPL'ed music program for Linux, the last thing I want is to make the interface suck. There will be copious reminders to the effect that if you want something changed or have a feature/interface suggestion TO PLEASE MAIL THE AUTHOR. Just because the users in my case won't be programmers doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully to a project. I think many people are scared that if they can't program, they can't help an OSS project. This is not true: there's nothing more motivating to a developer than receiving lots of e-mails that say "great program but it would be nice if I could use the function keys to switch between windows."
For applications there are plenty of strategies to improve UIs:
Make sure you've read and digested sites such as the Interface Hall of Shame. Yes it's funny, but there's a ton of wisdom in here that I certainly hadn't thought about regarding intuitiveness.
If you're using Gnome, consider using libglade to make your UI a runtime loadable XML spec
Allow users to customise anything they want - keys, layout, functions, look and feel
Stick to the way your window manager/environment of choice does things
Seperate your back-end completely from your front end. That way someone with more time and inclination can write a spiffy UI, leaving you to concentrate on the fun stuff.
If possible, try and make sure command line options are there for advanced users. Don't assume everyone will want to point and click.
Thats a pretty sad group of programmers then. The problem is that you believe that sterotype that all Win32 programmers use app wizards. Some do, mainly hobbyists, but I know that in circles of serious programmers, even using something like MFC is frowned upon. Most can dig down into the roots to find a difficult problem.
True - the point I was making that depth of knowledge of Win32 seems to produce programmers with less ability or willingness to dig a little deeper. Again, this is only my experience but it is based on constant contact with a wide range of commercial developers across both platforms. BTW I don't believe the stereotype because I used to be a Win32 programmer and rarely used Wizards.
Second, I never said that windows was properly documented. For the course of a few years of college training however, you're not going to need anything more than Petzold's books and some books and algorithms. Sure there are a bunch of undocumented things, but there their mainly because your not supposed to use them. You can't critisize MS's documentation guys. DirectDraw alone has 600 pages of documentation in a word file.
I see your point but I still think there's a big difference between a CS course that uses Windows as a teaching course and one that uses Linux. If its basic algorithms and some stuff on data structures et al, then fine. WIndows + VC is more than adequate. But a CS course over "a few years of college training" to use your words would IMO be much richer using something like Linux. Want to teach how the OS works? Virtual memory? Paging? Swapping? Scheduling? Check out the code. Dig around. Write your own. Make it better. Really understand why things happen when they happen and how they were designed that way. Interestingly enough Vinod Vallopillil, the Microsoft engineer who authored the Halloween documents describes his experience with fiddling around with Linux in similar terms.
I used to have the same argument may years ago with my friends who said ASM was a waste of time. My reasoning was that to really know what's going on at the hardware level, you should know some assembler. I still believe that knowledge makes you a better programmer - even today. In fact, especially today. So yeah sure, take this copy of Windows and VC and after a few years you'll be a great programmer? Shudder. Maybe I'm just biased - but then I've worked extensively in both...
As for CS degrees in algorithms, A) Windows is friendlier and more familier to work with If you call crashing all the time friendly - something which happened to me often as a newbie Windows developer. And as for the familiar argument, I know what my daughters will grow up using:)
B) VisualC++ is $99 for educational purposes. My high school has hundreds of licenses for it. Whats so expensive about it?
It's frigging expensive where I live - even for students. Besides, hundreds of licenses * 99$ is a bit more money than hundreds of free installtions of RedHat.
For: In the end, the losers will be those who love music, because the breadth and depth of the musical talent supported by the music industry cannot exist without financial support.
Read: In the end the losers will be us, the RIAA, as we will no longer be able to skim the 40% off the top that we're used to.
People can be master programmers without ever having touched UNIX. There are many reasons, but the main ones are... A) Everyone uses Windows. Face it, a deep knowledge of Win32 is much more usefull than a deep knowledge of UNIX in the commercial application world.
My experience says otherwise. I know patch-installing, MS Dev subscribing, hands-on Windows MCSE/MCSD gurus who can definitely be said to have a deep knowledge of Win32. But that's it. Win32. One set of APIs. The Microsoft-centric way of doing things. "Click on these wizards here and it will do it all for you" kind of programming. Of course when it comes to having to digging down to the bones to find out what is going on - perhaps to solve a difficult problem - they're clueless. They don't have the source to the OS so they can only make educated guesses at best as to what might be going on. B) The Win32 is easier to learn and has more coherent resources. Sure the UNIX APIs have much more documentation, but the books put out by MS give a pretty good overview of the entire API. Ever wondered why there aren't any books titled "Undocumented Linux" or "Debian Secrets - What the Developers haven't told you"? These kind of books are two a penny for Windows precisely because the API is not properly documented or overviewed anywhere (except possible Petzold). Windows application development at a low level is all about workarounds and waiting for the next patches to Visual C. At a high level it's all about clicking buttons and following instructions.
C) CS degrees can also be in algorithms and programming techniques. In that case it doesn't matter what OS one uses, becuase most calls will be standard C or C++ library calls. If you're learning programming and all you're doing is making library calls, you're learning squat. A decent course on algorithms and programming techniques needs a couple of things:
A decent environment
Development tools that a) work b) are real-world and c) don't cost a fortune
D) CS degrees can also be in computer graphics, in that case windows is the best OS to use because it has the best hardware support for graphics APIs. And if your programming so low level that you're not using OpenGL or something of the sort, then your probably using DOS. Just because many people use it in the CS field doesn't mean its the only way to go. DOS is probably the best for beginning level CS courses, and for application design, BeOS is probably best because its API is so easy to use. For scientific and other hardcore stuff, UNIX is probably the way to go.
Here is a stunning example of how to be really effective when pushing for change in the system. Instead of screaming, shouting and slamming Amazon as Just Another Evil Corporate worthy of a boycott, Tim O'Reilly has gone out of his way to make sure both sides of the story are presented. He's made sure his views are clear while keeping an open mind to the possibility that Amazon might just have a point or two in its favour.
Now he has considerable influence - the fact that "Jeff called me" should be proof enough of that - but is using that influence in a mature way. Just to get Amazon's real position on the whole thing out in the open is a major achievement. I've really changed my views on the patent after reading both articles - I think Amazon does have points in its favour and judging from some other posters here, B&N don't seem to be pure as the driven snow.
Tim O'Reilly has shown that just by being polite and fair to the other side, you can get further without necessarily compromising your views.
Why no single programming language can solve every need. By Bjarne Stroustrup The Red Herring magazine From the April 1999 issue Why would investors or executives care what programming languages their companies use? After all, customers don't care, and shouldn't. When I dial an 800 number, I don't stop to consider which language was used to write the program that translates it into the number of a phone on someone's desk. But software is crucial to the products and services we deliver -- and the programming languages we use to write that software can make the difference between success and failure.
[an error occurred while processing this directive] LANGUAGE ARTS A good programming language allows programmers to express the ideas of an application simply, directly, and affordably. It gives programmers who want to improve on a program a decent chance of grasping the structure of the system. This is critical for a software development organization's effectiveness: a programming language that makes the structure explicit helps engineers and makes it easier for software tools to analyze and display programs.
I'm not sure that the programming language used to write the software that generated this page has made that difference between success and failure:)
I have original printings of most of Wyndham's books thanks to my Mom who also introduced me to him early on (thanks Mom:)). This is definitely my favourite of them all - a highly disturbing look at the nature of The Outsider from Within. Of course the book's theme is not new and much of the futuristic technology has not worn well with age but somehow Wyndham puts his finger on what makes people who are different so unwelcome in society. I guess the man grew up in a small town for his descriptions of small-town politics, relationships and characters are true to life. Perhaps it's this aspect that's so unsettling: behind all the sci-fi aspects of telepathy and technology is this quiet, rural environment that hides the community's basic fears: fear of strangers, fear of power, fear of the God who demands physical purity, and most of all, the fear that someone you know has power beyond your imagination. Very worthwhile reading.
Here's the key line for me: The military famously prizes effectiveness rather than efficiency: it matters more that you beat the enemy than that you get high productivity per manhour out of your troops. So, too, in software.
I think this analogy reveals more about the inner workings of Microsoft than the rest of this interesting article. It shows just how much the developer culture has changed within the organisation. In the early days of Microsoft's relationship with IBM, there were many fights between MS developers - who regarded the Institute of Blue Men's programmers as morons, and the IBM developers - who regarded the MS developers as cowboys. Programming geniuses like Zbikowski and Simonyi often found creative ways to solve programming problems (in the true hacker spirit) while the IBM programmers - since they were paid per line of code - would often go out of their way to produce inneficient code. Microsoft developers complained that IBM developers were inefficient while trying to maximise their own efficiency. This is all pretty well documented in Paul Carroll's "Big Blues - the unmaking of IBM" (and elsewhere). My point? Efficiency is far more important in software than effectiveness. I don't mean the efficiency of the actual running software, but the development process and the motivation that drives it. Microsoft's early developers were loose cannons with raw talent that was used to maximum advantage (along with some hard selling from Bill and Steve). But now they are just cogs - albeit important ones - in the huge effectiveness machine that is out to crush the competition. By contrast, the OSS movement has little to do with effectiveness since there isn't a central powerful body overseeing everything. But its efficiency is high thanks to the work of small numbers of skilled programmers. The effectiveness vs. efficiency model works well when applied to say, governments or nation states, but in software, I think it works the other way around.:)
Re:Linux gaining momentum in South Africa
on
Open Source Africa
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· Score: 1
If South African programmers are that much cheaper then it would make sence for some cash strapped U.S. companies to hire south afircan programmers to do things for them remotly. Dose this happen now?
It does happen - I know a company in Johannesburg that specialises in remote admin for some U.S. clients. Their prices are very competitive because of the exchange rate and they work in shifts to provide a round-the-clock service. But more often what actually happens is that S African programmers get tired of a) being paid $1100 per month or less b) treated like sh*t in the workplace and c) the crime levels in the country and so they emigrate to the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or Australia. Those are skills that this country can ill afford to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
If it weren't for the good old US of A, France, Britain and the rest of Europe would have been living under Stalin.
His quote:
Otto: Well, would you like to know what you'd be without us, the good ol' U.S. of A. to protect you? I'll tell you. The smallest fucking province in the Russian Empire, that's what. So don't call me stupid, lady. Just thank me!
But it can be downloaded for zero price with no restrictions on its use. The money people - including myself - have paid for manuals and keys has gone back into the development of the program. I believe the Blender team were at E3 showing off version 2.0 which is touted to be a game development modelling system.
The team have not ruled out GPL'ed source in the future but right now it makes no sense to them given the way they manage their source tree. If they don't release the source so what? There are plenty of GPL'ed modellers out there for anyone to download and improve. It's just that the quality of Blender and the enthusiasm of its user base gives it more than enough momentum right now.
A: A wicked awesome audio/visual experiance that allows you to witness the awe and mystery of true DVD playback under Linux with AC3 and all the goodies. Look elsewhere on this site for more information.
Q: Oh yes! DVD under Linux! Hooray!
A: We thought you would be happy.
Q: Since this is a Linux project it's going to be open sourced and gpl'd, right?
A: No.
Q: WHAT?! Why (optional profanity) not?
A: Unfortunately the DVD Forum, Dolby and MPEGLA have proprietary rights to AC3 and decoding schemas (as well as much needed hardware specs). In order to legally develop this program we are going to have to pay a huge licensing fee to each and (on top of that) royalties on every program distriputed. Hence, we have to charge for it, but not too much hopefully.
Q: You're sure it won't be free?
A: Positive.
Q: Not even for me? I am "eleet dude", come on!
A: Nope, not even for you.
Q: Well how about a beta then. Can I be a beta tester?
A: No, all of our testing is going to be done internally with the developers and other hand picked individuals.
Q: When will it be released?
A: Eventually.
Q: Eventually? Eventually!?!? How soon is that!
A: How soon do you think it is?
Q: Can I please have a beta?
A: No.
Q: So how much did you say it was going to cost?
A: I didn't say. How much are you willing to give us?
Dunno about you but this doesn't give me much of a warm fuzzy feeling inside. The folks over at LiViD may have some work to do still, but at least I can see their progress, and help contribute to the source tree where I can. Not that I don't welcome projects like LSDVD - but I'll believe it when I see it.
FWIW the LiViD CVS tarball features AC3 decoding, decryption and authorisation of discs, mpeg playback and a whole lot of other bonus features - including hacked up hardware acceleration for DXr2 and Matrox owners.
Support them /.'ers - they need your help.
The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer-operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said
Indeed :)
Bobby Prince is one of the nicest guys around as well. His Web site used to have loads of trivia about id, the making of Doom and what inpiration the different tracks had. He also had some white papers on music, atmosphere in games, sampling and composing. When I ordered the CD, I had to send cash because I was between credit cards. I couldn't get change for the exact amount so I sent him a bit more than the price. Lo and behold, I get *two* CDs for the price of just more than one - plus a nice personal letter from his wife. Made my day...
I think this is an unfair generalisation. The vast majority of code I work with is clean, well-designed, and adheres to one of the style and coding standards out there. That includes the kernel sources, Glib, Gtk+, the Gnome libs, python, Perl, and loads of others.
If you mean that the vast majority of small applications are complete crap, you could be right. But don't knock the single programmer who need to scratch an itch. If enough people are interested in his or her project, they'll help - including design and style improvements and suggestions.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Seems to be doing just fine so far - the OSS community is pretty aggressive about coding standards already.
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
Whereas of course closed-source software is bound to survive since all development houses rigidly enforce coding standards?
Bollocks. Been there, done that, shipped it because it compiled. In the bazaar model and peer review style of the OSS world, you can't get away with crappy code or bad design for very long. If your project's well designed, maintainable, useful and easy to read as well as being robust, it will survive. If not, then you can't get away with shipping only binaries to some poor customer.
What if it isn't? What then?
I had just written a long reply to this, complete with links to informative sites, examples of case studies, Apache market share figures and witty prose about the brain capacity of CTOs implied by this when I looked again at the spelling of Richard Stallman's name.
Strawlman? You almost got me :)
Slashd0t f0und3rs tr0ll
Sudd3nly ACs R p1ss3d
B00t 0n 0th3r f00t
A mailing list is started and bunches of expert hardware hackers pound on the code, improving it to a very usable state in a matter of months. Sometimes progress is slow, but that's OK because everything is open souce, and if you wanted things to speed up, you could help. In less than a year, and helped along by major OpenGL vendors releasing more information, the low level driver is extremely usable, stable and fast. The project also expands to include other chipsets and manages to incorporate 3DNow, MMX and SIMD capabilities.
Fantasy? No, I'm talking about the Utah GLX project which has more or less followed the pattern I've described above. If you have a Matrox G200, a G400, and ATi RagePro, Intel 810, RivaTNT or an S3 Virge, Utah GLX will support your card as a loadable module under XFree 3.3.x. Matrox support is so good that my G400 can run Quake 3 at between 50 and 60fps on a Celeron 400 machine.
Now I'm not at all clear whether the GLX module as it stands will just plug directly in to XFree 4.0. I suspect not. But if I have to wait a bit for it to be integrated, I'd much rather do that than get a card with binary only drivers that won't support the spirit (and the letter) of the new DRI.
Sometimes all it takes is a bit of patience. It can be irritating to hear GeForce owners boast about their frame rates. But if everyone's willing to contribute to the open source way of doing things, we'll end up with better drivers, better support and also encourage the current development teams that they're doing The Right Thing - which they are.
In some cases its quite easy. Here's a proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers.
Q = (1*2*3*4*....*(P-1)*(P))+1
No computing, no billions of cacluations or systems with 64-bit integers needed :)
IIRC the three schools of thought in the study of the history of mathematics are:
a) he was joking
b) he really thought he had found a proof
c) he really thought he had found a proof and was teasing his readers by not printing it.
There is absolutely no way his proof (if it existed) was anything remotely similar to the one Wiles found. Wiles' proof is a thing of incredible beauty. Far from being just a pure exercise in theory, it links hitherto unrelated disciplines in mathematics together.
Yes, it is possible that the Goldbach conjecture may be proved or disproved by a lay person but it's far more likely to be solved by someone with a sound grasp of lots of number theory who is already studying the properties of numbers for a living.
BTW I have a truly marvellous proof of the Goldbach conjecture but there is no margin on the submit form to write it in :)
It sounds good when Donna M. Senko (Director of Certification and Skills Assessment) writes: "We expect any individuals who choose to certify in the MCSE track to assume a leadership role in helping their employers or clients stay competitive." But there is a little discrepancy in this sentence with the reality: After you have done all the investments in education (time and money) and you have passed all the necessary exams to become a MCSE, you are not able to "help your employer or client to stay competitive" because you have to invest into the education for the next MCSE certifications.
This guy correctly points out the major problem with vendor certification - it's expensive and often useless. It's also dangerous to annoy people who have the potential to drive sales from within an organisation. From within is really important - no matter how many salespeople approach from outside, the MCSE-trained bloke inside is far more likely to be up to date on the latest solutions, updates, bugfixes et al. From there its a simple matter for Microsoft to keep him supplied with the latest goodies, invite him to regular brainwas^H^H^H^H^training functions and keep him warm and fuzzy. He might not have influence now, but he may have in the future - perhaps as an IT manager.
Personally I think MS are being mightily arrogant by cutting off the NT 4.0 courses. Instead of everyone falling over themselves to upgrade to Win2k, I suspect lots of potentials will be checking out the alternatives.
Don't commit to this module without asking me, Havoc Pennington . Thanks :-)
The filename?
README.REALLY.I.MEAN.IT
Perhaps we should ask him whether this has helped in the fight against third-parties attempting to rewrite his prose :)
From the
OpenAL includes several separate sub-libraries:
It looks like the developers have thought carefully about the spec and managed to combine a clean API with lots of flexibility. Environments can be defined in terms of geometry and materials and "listeners" can have position, velocity and orientation, leading to all sorts of cool stuff like doppler effects and sound radiosity. And yes, if you know OpenGL it takes about ten minutes to get your head around OpenAL.
Great job Loki.
That is entirely up to the developers. As someone on their way to releasing a GPL'ed music program for Linux, the last thing I want is to make the interface suck. There will be copious reminders to the effect that if you want something changed or have a feature/interface suggestion TO PLEASE MAIL THE AUTHOR. Just because the users in my case won't be programmers doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully to a project. I think many people are scared that if they can't program, they can't help an OSS project. This is not true: there's nothing more motivating to a developer than receiving lots of e-mails that say "great program but it would be nice if I could use the function keys to switch between windows."
For applications there are plenty of strategies to improve UIs:
True - the point I was making that depth of knowledge of Win32 seems to produce programmers with less ability or willingness to dig a little deeper. Again, this is only my experience but it is based on constant contact with a wide range of commercial developers across both platforms. BTW I don't believe the stereotype because I used to be a Win32 programmer and rarely used Wizards.
Second, I never said that windows was properly documented. For the course of a few years of college training however, you're not going to need anything more than Petzold's books and some books and algorithms. Sure there are a bunch of undocumented things, but there their mainly because your not supposed to use them. You can't critisize MS's documentation guys. DirectDraw alone has 600 pages of documentation in a word file.
I see your point but I still think there's a big difference between a CS course that uses Windows as a teaching course and one that uses Linux. If its basic algorithms and some stuff on data structures et al, then fine. WIndows + VC is more than adequate. But a CS course over "a few years of college training" to use your words would IMO be much richer using something like Linux. Want to teach how the OS works? Virtual memory? Paging? Swapping? Scheduling? Check out the code. Dig around. Write your own. Make it better. Really understand why things happen when they happen and how they were designed that way. Interestingly enough Vinod Vallopillil, the Microsoft engineer who authored the Halloween documents describes his experience with fiddling around with Linux in similar terms.
I used to have the same argument may years ago with my friends who said ASM was a waste of time. My reasoning was that to really know what's going on at the hardware level, you should know some assembler. I still believe that knowledge makes you a better programmer - even today. In fact, especially today.
So yeah sure, take this copy of Windows and VC and after a few years you'll be a great programmer? Shudder. Maybe I'm just biased - but then I've worked extensively in both...
As for CS degrees in algorithms, A) Windows is friendlier and more familier to work with If you call crashing all the time friendly - something which happened to me often as a newbie Windows developer. And as for the familiar argument, I know what my daughters will grow up using :)
B) VisualC++ is $99 for educational purposes. My high school has hundreds of licenses for it. Whats so expensive about it?
It's frigging expensive where I live - even for students. Besides, hundreds of licenses * 99$ is a bit more money than hundreds of free installtions of RedHat.
Read: In the end the losers will be us, the RIAA, as we will no longer be able to skim the 40% off the top that we're used to.
A) Everyone uses Windows. Face it, a deep knowledge of Win32 is much more usefull than a deep knowledge of UNIX in the commercial application world.
My experience says otherwise. I know patch-installing, MS Dev subscribing, hands-on Windows MCSE/MCSD gurus who can definitely be said to have a deep knowledge of Win32. But that's it. Win32. One set of APIs. The Microsoft-centric way of doing things. "Click on these wizards here and it will do it all for you" kind of programming. Of course when it comes to having to digging down to the bones to find out what is going on - perhaps to solve a difficult problem - they're clueless. They don't have the source to the OS so they can only make educated guesses at best as to what might be going on. B) The Win32 is easier to learn and has more coherent resources. Sure the UNIX APIs have much more documentation, but the books put out by MS give a pretty good overview of the entire API. Ever wondered why there aren't any books titled "Undocumented Linux" or "Debian Secrets - What the Developers haven't told you"? These kind of books are two a penny for Windows precisely because the API is not properly documented or overviewed anywhere (except possible Petzold). Windows application development at a low level is all about workarounds and waiting for the next patches to Visual C. At a high level it's all about clicking buttons and following instructions.
C) CS degrees can also be in algorithms and programming techniques. In that case it doesn't matter what OS one uses, becuase most calls will be standard C or C++ library calls. If you're learning programming and all you're doing is making library calls, you're learning squat. A decent course on algorithms and programming techniques needs a couple of things:
D) CS degrees can also be in computer graphics, in that case windows is the best OS to use because it has the best hardware support for graphics APIs. And if your programming so low level that you're not using OpenGL or something of the sort, then your probably using DOS. Just because many people use it in the CS field doesn't mean its the only way to go. DOS is probably the best for beginning level CS courses, and for application design, BeOS is probably best because its API is so easy to use. For scientific and other hardcore stuff, UNIX is probably the way to go.
Now he has considerable influence - the fact that "Jeff called me" should be proof enough of that - but is using that influence in a mature way. Just to get Amazon's real position on the whole thing out in the open is a major achievement. I've really changed my views on the patent after reading both articles - I think Amazon does have points in its favour and judging from some other posters here, B&N don't seem to be pure as the driven snow.
Tim O'Reilly has shown that just by being polite and fair to the other side, you can get further without necessarily compromising your views.
Why no single programming language can solve every need. By Bjarne Stroustrup
The Red Herring magazine
From the April 1999 issue
Why would investors or executives care what programming languages their companies use? After all, customers don't care, and shouldn't. When I dial an 800 number, I don't stop to consider which language was used to write the program that translates it into the number of a phone on someone's desk. But software is crucial to the products and services we deliver -- and the programming languages we use to write that software can make the difference between success and failure.
[an error occurred while processing this directive] LANGUAGE ARTS
A good programming language allows programmers to express the ideas of an application simply, directly, and affordably. It gives programmers who want to improve on a program a decent chance of grasping the structure of the system. This is critical for a software development organization's effectiveness: a programming language that makes the structure explicit helps engineers and makes it easier for software tools to analyze and display programs.
I'm not sure that the programming language used to write the software that generated this page has made that difference between success and failure :)
Of course the book's theme is not new and much of the futuristic technology has not worn well with age but somehow Wyndham puts his finger on what makes people who are different so unwelcome in society. I guess the man grew up in a small town for his descriptions of small-town politics, relationships and characters are true to life. Perhaps it's this aspect that's so unsettling: behind all the sci-fi aspects of telepathy and technology is this quiet, rural environment that hides the community's basic fears: fear of strangers, fear of power, fear of the God who demands physical purity, and most of all, the fear that someone you know has power beyond your imagination.
Very worthwhile reading.
I think this analogy reveals more about the inner workings of Microsoft than the rest of this interesting article. It shows just how much the developer culture has changed within the organisation. :)
In the early days of Microsoft's relationship with IBM, there were many fights between MS developers - who regarded the Institute of Blue Men's programmers as morons, and the IBM developers - who regarded the MS developers as cowboys. Programming geniuses like Zbikowski and Simonyi often found creative ways to solve programming problems (in the true hacker spirit) while the IBM programmers - since they were paid per line of code - would often go out of their way to produce inneficient code. Microsoft developers complained that IBM developers were inefficient while trying to maximise their own efficiency. This is all pretty well documented in Paul Carroll's "Big Blues - the unmaking of IBM" (and elsewhere).
My point? Efficiency is far more important in software than effectiveness. I don't mean the efficiency of the actual running software, but the development process and the motivation that drives it. Microsoft's early developers were loose cannons with raw talent that was used to maximum advantage (along with some hard selling from Bill and Steve). But now they are just cogs - albeit important ones - in the huge effectiveness machine that is out to crush the competition.
By contrast, the OSS movement has little to do with effectiveness since there isn't a central powerful body overseeing everything. But its efficiency is high thanks to the work of small numbers of skilled programmers.
The effectiveness vs. efficiency model works well when applied to say, governments or nation states, but in software, I think it works the other way around.
It does happen - I know a company in Johannesburg that specialises in remote admin for some U.S. clients. Their prices are very competitive because of the exchange rate and they work in shifts to provide a round-the-clock service.
But more often what actually happens is that S African programmers get tired of a) being paid $1100 per month or less b) treated like sh*t in the workplace and c) the crime levels in the country and so they emigrate to the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or Australia. Those are skills that this country can ill afford to lose.