A thing that really struck me while reading this interview, was his view on the working situation. He said at least three things that indicates, that creative work is hard work and can be done in business hours:
He states that if you make a plan of what needs to be done and do that, you will meet the schedule.
He hates seeing people half a sleep at work.
He will not hire people so "creative", that they don't function socially.
These words are hard words and are kinda counter-geeky too. If he is right in his views, this is bad news for a lot of geeks, where geek here means a person who marvel in his technical knowledges and skills but totally out of habits and abilities to work in the classical sense: Getting up in the morning, work between hours and take orders from your immidiate boss on what to do and how.
These skills are often fraunded upon, but I know from several jobs, that this is more that not the reason for early termination of employments. It is sad to see collegues that are quite skilled have to leave simply because of lifestyle.
Does it matter? Yes, because without it your own work will block because your workmate didn't finish on time while being busy doing other things. Everything blocks up, and you find yourself doing things you are not skilled at, because otherwise it will not be done.
Don't get me wrong: I like people being different and I am not in favor of any dresscode. I work at a place where we have a very relaxed atmosphere and it is good, but we do have a line of authority and people must do what they have been asked to do, which luckily is not more restrictive than nessesary. And it works.
If I recall correct the most dominant OSS projects always succeeded on these two premises: I work as if I have to do it myself, I coorporate as if I can't do it (all) alone. Most OSS failures have to do with the deception that "if I set up this big pot, people will be generous enough to put their stuff in it." Cook the soup. If people likes it, they will spice it up and keep the soup aboil. Nothing more, nothing less.
Re:Reminds me of this UNIX "virus" I recieved once
on
Gnutella VBS Worm
·
· Score: 1
The worst is that I got one, that drew money from my account. It contained a fill-out-the-blanks credit card payment slip. The e-mail instructed me to fill it out and return it, or my harddisk would be gone! I was so scared, that I didn't dare to ignore it, and now they draw $120 bucks a month on my mastercard. And there is nothing I can do about it.
How do you claim a national sovereignty? There exists actually no procedures foe claiming a new nation. If you look to the history you find only ad hoc recognition of new national independency, not even when new land is found. To liberate the United States of America from the English Crown, it was nesassery to fight a war, because the common practice was (and is) that new land is claimed by the jurisdiction of the nation to which the discoverer belongs.
What normally happens when new states are recognised, is that a ethnic fraction of an existing country has fought for and won a piece of land and has been able to maintain for a while. Then some other countries start to recognise its existance and deal with this new situation. When it has been like this for a while, they get a seat in UN and a toplevel domain and other priviledges.
But the question is: If nobody before has claim the island, it is not within the 200 nt. mile zone of territory, and the one who has discovered the island want to declare it as a nation, how should he apply to UN for recognition? Under which premises will he get it and how can he avoid the jurisdiction of his nationality overrules his claim?
So, as I had imagined previously, it's back to being a programmer problem. The hardware exists and works just fine. But the software is faulty. So, one of you hot shot programmers go make it work.
Sorry if I am biting a bait here, but I think this needs a few words.
At times I come across this attitude and I get stunned each time of how childish adults actually may happen to be. It reminds me of a child I once saw, whining and yelling at its parents, because they bought the wrong icecream.
Linux/Xfree86/RH6/... is offered for free. Yes free. Free as free speech AND free as free beer. I don't drink beer (true!), but I don't whine when somebody offers a free beer. I don't like it, and I just say: "Thanks, but no thanks." That simple!
Xfree86 may at times take a hassle to get to work. I can resist the temptation to compare to other X servers or displaying systems, because it isn't the point. But it does take a hassle. If you mind, go buy a workstation/VA box/X terminal or even another kind of system like MS Windows; it might even be cheaper if you are in business hours. Go do it!
Open source software serves a higher purpose: It is a university! You may be enrolled for the cost of a spare partion on your harddisk and participate in making a system of your choice. It is not finished yet, but you may put your thumbprints on it and learn something too. You don't have to, but it is the offer.
As said: There is freedom here and it goes both ways, take it for free or leave it for free. But do me this favour: Don't insult those that give you stuff they used their sparetime to produce. You are handed an offer which you may decline, but do it politely, since the guys are doing it for the sake of goodness, not to make you unhappy.
What we really need is a flag day where the Net turns the knob to IPng and goes on like that. The transition all falls down on that it is a setback to go to a (nonvalid IPv4) IPng address.
It would also force the delopers to meet the deadline and get the fine software ready or be out of business (are we all in shape from Y2K deadline.)
I would go for an IPng class, but not until it makes sense, and it doesn't make sense before we all got IPng addresses.
As long as somebody can be punished for illegal content (which really is another issue) someone must take the responsibility in a legal manner.
Imagine this: I put up an FTP server where the incomming directory is world readable. I intend this to be my rogue site for illegal content, and when somebody ask me to remove this or that, I simply move it away for a couple of days and move it back.
If I get sued I say: "I didn't place it there. This server is ment for legal content and I can't check everything. If I am asked to remove stuff I will do it, but it just returns because people keeps uploading it..."
It all boils down to this: If I house illegal activities and hinder the procecution of the trespassers, then I am responsible. I provide the means to illegal activities. It is the same as owning a warehouse building and not securing it, you may end up being responsible for drug possesion since it is found on your property.
But... as I see it... it all comes down to this: Isn't the issue here, that we find it stupid to have an illegal content problem? If we, for the sake of argument, assume that some content is wrong (kiddieporn etc.), shouldn't it be illegal to house it? I mean it is the content policies we don't like, eh?
> in my eyes the reputation of the journalist is > tarnished for being dumb enough to get > themselves a virus -- and then they double that > with telling the world just how stupid they are.:-)
Yes... I saw the smiley. I have some comments though. My PHB read these magasines and thinks they are trustworthy. It may be the rise and fall of my issue that Linux is more secure. Before get a chance to argue my PHB flashes this article in my face and on the next picture you see me installing NT on this funky new server. This is not a good comic strip!
> The more experienced user understands that root > is reserved for administrative tasks
Yes. But... As with the HIV virus: The more careless people are getting HIV, the more the careful vulnable needs luck. Think bleeders here. Even if clever crafted virii exists, they still have a hard time spreading. If we get more careless people in the community, we will see more infected system that are not careless maintained. (If you don't know what I am talking about, let me ask you this: How did you check your source tar.gz last time you installed something? Oh, you saw the date stamps.)
Right now the issues mentioned is in working, but it may change over time. It all depends on the user base and the program they use. If we imagine the big rush-in into the Linux world, and all sorts of non-OSS programs get installed quicker than warnings can be propagated, things will be different. As all of you guys know, Linux is just the kernel. If Linux is moved away from the Unix model, to something more "install-n-run" like system the problem will persist. No sweat, If you do as you always have done nothing is different, but it may hurt the reputation of Linux, if some stupid ComputerWorld journalist gets infected because he installs all kind of soiled binaries and gets burned.
If Linux splits it self all the time, then a system cannot be compromised since each time someone breaks in, the system immidiately splits and kills the compromised other part.
Of course Linux is forking... it is forking all the time! From the init process is started 'till the shutdown process is running the kernel is issuing almost nothing but fork() calls.
... is the development model. The problem with "release early, let the crowd find the bugs" is, it will always lead to an endless stream of bugs. The focal point is always (wrongly) placed at the exploit/fix gap, but I don't give a d*** about this gap, I WANT NO HOLES! Is it possible to write software without bugs? It is, but it needs another development model. The developers must have a strategy in which they identify the risks in the project, and then always decides where the risks affects the software and then you PROVE each line of code agains those risks. I know it takes much longer time, but that is what mainframe developers do, and when did you last hear of exploits in mainframes? (which happens to be quite closed source...)
For the first two years the only distro I knew was Slackware and things were "weird" in RH2.1 in my view at that time.
Still, when talk falls on Sl.W, people kinda finds it "outdated", mostly because they ran it once and now they don't so it must be outdated.
All is a matter of taste, but last I checked it worked more than fine, it even still installs from 3.5"'s, and it may save some old notebooks from the/dev/null
A "clueless" user asks some questions in a forum (Usenet/slashdot/irc/...) and get RTFM'ed before he has a chance of figuring out, where to get The Fine Manual. When he asks how to make apache do this or that people reply "vi access.conf" and expect him to in a flash of light be totally sure what to do.
A "clueless" user who is not unixified yet asks: "Why is X configured so many places?", "Why is there an stty, a termcap, a keyb.conf, an xkeymap, a resource file floating all over?" or another finger-on-sore-spot question and immidiately is flamed as Microserf of Gates lover or other verbal abuse.
A "clueless" user has a need for a program to do this or that. He is not a programmer but quite knowledgable in his field of profession, and poses an idea for an OSS project. Some replies that "If he wants this $&?! program he can do it him self!", and some gives some suggestions under the parole "if you don't program, you don't know what you are talking about."
. . .
My girlfriend is a fashion modeler and uses programs under another OS to make models for sewers. She don't know a thing about programming but all about clothes and asked me, how such a modeling program would come to be in an OSS world. She is the "clueless" user of computers, but the skilled modeler, who desires to contribute to the OSS with her knowledge if she can convince a programmer to transform this knowledge into programs.
If feedback an input from users are weighted solemnly on the user's computer skills, the OSS community will never go beyond making programming tools.
3) Society decides that it has had enough of this corporate bondage and fully supports open formats like mp3. Society also decides it will no longer accept the crap that is spoon fed to them, and becomes pro-active about which music they listen to. All music corporations die, as all music is now purchased directly from the artist at a very low fee that covers studio costs, bandwidth costs, and a bit of profit.
And this is probably the way we want to go.
In the traditional music industry it takes a certain volume to release a piece of music. If a band wants to make a record, they go to a record company that will audit it and decide if it will have chance to break through. If it does, they will spend more than a few bucks to market it, and if not you are SOL.
The record industry tell most new bands, that their music is redundant, to old, to new, to narrow, to political to... -- so the flip side of the problem is, that there are to many musical creators out there that would give their right arm (don't take me too literal on this) to get anybody to listen to their music, because they has a message to the world.
Most interesting bands do music for the same reason the hackers code, simply for the purpose, the joy and the heck of it in any individual order.
But it can be different now! the mp3 technology secures that everyone can be heard, if their doings are worth a listen. But somebody has to choose it, like OSS software.
It is only a couple of years ago the idea of OSS slipped through to the broad audients, now we have to sell the idea of listening to OCM (open content music). Last time I checked at www.mp3.com there were loads of music to be downloaded and some of it was more than allright.
Ugh, no. No standards on GUI, please. The great thing about using Linux is that there isn't just one way to do something.
This statement doesn't make sense!
Standards are the fundatation of usability! Think here: LaTeX, Emacs, CSS and... Slashdot!
When I started to use LaTeX, I thought: Cool, I don't need to be a layout-geek for this to look nice. The standard was nice, and sufficed for more than three years! Now I make my own styles allright, but it was fine then.
Emacs is fine (I use vi, but to h*** with that) and you may configure it like it suits you, but the settings are fine for a place to start. It is easy to change, but it makes it difficult to jump in at anothers seat (and account) and do stuff.
It boils down to this:
Make things changable but create good defaults.
Make things consistent but don't tye it so.
Place substance over function.
No one wants to take your config files from you, but that doesn't mean that it is irrelevant to discuss the desktop presented to totally newbies.
A friend of my cracked this joke: I made this program, that can do anything. Right now it is just a main() function writing a copyright message, but it can easily be extended to do what ever you like.
IPv6 requires 128(!) bit IP addresses in place of the current 32 bit addresses. It is the end of anonymity on the 'net. Some of the extra bits will identify you as a particular user, others will be for routing to your location. HTTP cookies would become redundant.
This is the most absurd nonsense I have heard in many years!
IPv6 is meant to solve a very big problem, namely a close run-out of vacant IP numbers. As it is now, several things have been done to delay the run-out: The old A-classes are being reclaimed, since no organisation may sit on 16 million IP numbers when the third world is starving (on IP's too). The C-classes are neither handed out anymore without a prove or demonstrated likeliness of the need -- you don't get it, just by asking.
The new protocol will make it possible to give IP's freely without a lack or smallness. It is so that 48 bits alone is set aside for a MAC number, which in itself should be unique. This still yields 80 (or 76 if you are nitty-gritty) bits left for routing -- more than the double number of bits in IPv4, meaning that there could be a whole internet behind each IP number of IPv4 and we still talk about addresses on the routing level.
This combined with the other features (dynamic allocation/routing, bigger packets, multi-/any-casting etc.) should convince us, that the sooner we get IPv6 in action the better.
That said, we still want our anonymity. First of all, we don't want intruders into our systems. This kind of privacy is not affected by the big migration, except maybe for the fact that the masquerating system often is the the firewall, per se.
Secondly, we don't want meenies to catalog us, from the crude kind we know from spamming to the subtile kind in registrating our IP numbers, when we just surf around. As you see it, this is easlier done, when we all have separate IP numbers. But the IP number will be of very shortlived value. Most IP numbers will change as the net reorganises itself and be of very little value after that. Secondly, nothing hinders your organisation from hidding the host part (48 bits earlier mentioned) and do a secret one-to-one match network address translation.
Thirdly, we may at times want to further disguise our doings on the net. We may want to send anonymous letters, browse pages that don't concern others etc. This may be done by relay application placed on the net for the same purpose and here lays a work to be done by freedom fighters. Just remember: as it is the right to be anonymous, it is too the right of other people not response to anonymous requests. So the freedom goes both ways.
The point here is: IPv6 is a stronger tool for an increasingly larger Internet. It may be used or abused like everything else, but it is not in it self designed to be pro control. Think axe here: bigger axe do better job, smaller axe cuts less fingers.
Slashdot Mirror
A thing that really struck me while reading this interview, was his view on the working situation. He said at least three things that indicates, that creative work is hard work and can be done in business hours:
These words are hard words and are kinda counter-geeky too. If he is right in his views, this is bad news for a lot of geeks, where geek here means a person who marvel in his technical knowledges and skills but totally out of habits and abilities to work in the classical sense: Getting up in the morning, work between hours and take orders from your immidiate boss on what to do and how.
These skills are often fraunded upon, but I know from several jobs, that this is more that not the reason for early termination of employments. It is sad to see collegues that are quite skilled have to leave simply because of lifestyle.
Does it matter? Yes, because without it your own work will block because your workmate didn't finish on time while being busy doing other things. Everything blocks up, and you find yourself doing things you are not skilled at, because otherwise it will not be done.
Don't get me wrong: I like people being different and I am not in favor of any dresscode. I work at a place where we have a very relaxed atmosphere and it is good, but we do have a line of authority and people must do what they have been asked to do, which luckily is not more restrictive than nessesary. And it works.
If I recall correct the most dominant OSS projects always succeeded on these two premises: I work as if I have to do it myself, I coorporate as if I can't do it (all) alone.
Most OSS failures have to do with the deception that "if I set up this big pot, people will be generous enough to put their stuff in it."
Cook the soup. If people likes it, they will spice it up and keep the soup aboil. Nothing more, nothing less.
The worst is that I got one, that drew money from my account. It contained a fill-out-the-blanks credit card payment slip. The e-mail instructed me to fill it out and return it, or my harddisk would be gone! I was so scared, that I didn't dare to ignore it, and now they draw $120 bucks a month on my mastercard. And there is nothing I can do about it.
How do you claim a national sovereignty? There exists actually no procedures foe claiming a new nation. If you look to the history you find only ad hoc recognition of new national independency, not even when new land is found. To liberate the United States of America from the English Crown, it was nesassery to fight a war, because the common practice was (and is) that new land is claimed by the jurisdiction of the nation to which the discoverer belongs.
What normally happens when new states are recognised, is that a ethnic fraction of an existing country has fought for and won a piece of land and has been able to maintain for a while. Then some other countries start to recognise its existance and deal with this new situation. When it has been like this for a while, they get a seat in UN and a toplevel domain and other priviledges.
But the question is: If nobody before has claim the island, it is not within the 200 nt. mile zone of territory, and the one who has discovered the island want to declare it as a nation, how should he apply to UN for recognition? Under which premises will he get it and how can he avoid the jurisdiction of his nationality overrules his claim?
That makes me wonder...
At times I come across this attitude and I get stunned each time of how childish adults actually may happen to be. It reminds me of a child I once saw, whining and yelling at its parents, because they bought the wrong icecream.
Linux/Xfree86/RH6/... is offered for free. Yes free. Free as free speech AND free as free beer. I don't drink beer (true!), but I don't whine when somebody offers a free beer. I don't like it, and I just say: "Thanks, but no thanks." That simple!
Xfree86 may at times take a hassle to get to work. I can resist the temptation to compare to other X servers or displaying systems, because it isn't the point. But it does take a hassle. If you mind, go buy a workstation/VA box/X terminal or even another kind of system like MS Windows; it might even be cheaper if you are in business hours. Go do it!
Open source software serves a higher purpose: It is a university! You may be enrolled for the cost of a spare partion on your harddisk and participate in making a system of your choice. It is not finished yet, but you may put your thumbprints on it and learn something too. You don't have to, but it is the offer.
As said: There is freedom here and it goes both ways, take it for free or leave it for free. But do me this favour: Don't insult those that give you stuff they used their sparetime to produce. You are handed an offer which you may decline, but do it politely, since the guys are doing it for the sake of goodness, not to make you unhappy.
First it states it is an Alpha release and later an IA-64 release; which one is it?
Yes, it even scrolls faster now.
Do you know if Samba has been ported to NT4? I run NT at work and would like have a Samba server... Never mind.
What we really need is a flag day where the Net turns the knob to IPng and goes on like that. The transition all falls down on that it is a setback to go to a (nonvalid IPv4) IPng address.
It would also force the delopers to meet the deadline and get the fine software ready or be out of business (are we all in shape from Y2K deadline.)
I would go for an IPng class, but not until it makes sense, and it doesn't make sense before we all got IPng addresses.
As long as somebody can be punished for illegal content (which really is another issue) someone must take the responsibility in a legal manner.
Imagine this: I put up an FTP server where the incomming directory is world readable. I intend this to be my rogue site for illegal content, and when somebody ask me to remove this or that, I simply move it away for a couple of days and move it back.
If I get sued I say: "I didn't place it there. This server is ment for legal content and I can't check everything. If I am asked to remove stuff I will do it, but it just returns because people keeps uploading it..."
It all boils down to this: If I house illegal activities and hinder the procecution of the trespassers, then I am responsible. I provide the means to illegal activities. It is the same as owning a warehouse building and not securing it, you may end up being responsible for drug possesion since it is found on your property.
But... as I see it... it all comes down to this: Isn't the issue here, that we find it stupid to have an illegal content problem? If we, for the sake of argument, assume that some content is wrong (kiddieporn etc.), shouldn't it be illegal to house it? I mean it is the content policies we don't like, eh?
If the virus can set a system semaphore it can gain exclusive access to common resources AND MAY PERFORM ATOMIC OPERATIONS!!!
> in my eyes the reputation of the journalist is :-)
> tarnished for being dumb enough to get
> themselves a virus -- and then they double that
> with telling the world just how stupid they are.
Yes... I saw the smiley.
I have some comments though. My PHB read these magasines and thinks they are trustworthy. It may be the rise and fall of my issue that Linux is more secure. Before get a chance to argue my PHB flashes this article in my face and on the next picture you see me installing NT on this funky new server.
This is not a good comic strip!
> The more experienced user understands that root
> is reserved for administrative tasks
Yes. But...
As with the HIV virus: The more careless people are getting HIV, the more the careful vulnable needs luck. Think bleeders here.
Even if clever crafted virii exists, they still have a hard time spreading. If we get more careless people in the community, we will see more infected system that are not careless maintained.
(If you don't know what I am talking about, let me ask you this: How did you check your source tar.gz last time you installed something? Oh, you saw the date stamps.)
Right now the issues mentioned is in working, but it may change over time. It all depends on the user base and the program they use.
If we imagine the big rush-in into the Linux world, and all sorts of non-OSS programs get installed quicker than warnings can be propagated, things will be different.
As all of you guys know, Linux is just the kernel. If Linux is moved away from the Unix model, to something more "install-n-run" like system the problem will persist.
No sweat, If you do as you always have done nothing is different, but it may hurt the reputation of Linux, if some stupid ComputerWorld journalist gets infected because he installs all kind of soiled binaries and gets burned.
If Linux splits it self all the time, then a system cannot be compromised since each time someone breaks in, the system immidiately splits and kills the compromised other part.
Smart!
Of course Linux is forking... it is forking all
the time! From the init process is started 'till the shutdown process is running the kernel is issuing almost nothing but fork() calls.
It is a feature!
... is the development model. The problem with "release early, let the crowd find the bugs" is, it will always lead to an endless stream of bugs. The focal point is always (wrongly) placed at the exploit/fix gap, but I don't give a d*** about this gap, I WANT NO HOLES!
Is it possible to write software without bugs? It is, but it needs another development model. The developers must have a strategy in which they identify the risks in the project, and then always decides where the risks affects the software and then you PROVE each line of code agains those risks.
I know it takes much longer time, but that is what mainframe developers do, and when did you last hear of exploits in mainframes? (which happens to be quite closed source...)
For the first two years the only distro I knew was Slackware and things were "weird" in RH2.1 in my view at that time.
/dev/null
Still, when talk falls on Sl.W, people kinda finds it "outdated", mostly because they ran it once and now they don't so it must be outdated.
All is a matter of taste, but last I checked it worked more than fine, it even still installs from 3.5"'s, and it may save some old notebooks from the
A "clueless" user asks some questions in a forum (Usenet/slashdot/irc/...) and get RTFM'ed before he has a chance of figuring out, where to get The Fine Manual. When he asks how to make apache do this or that people reply "vi access.conf" and expect him to in a flash of light be totally sure what to do.
A "clueless" user who is not unixified yet asks: "Why is X configured so many places?", "Why is there an stty, a termcap, a keyb.conf, an xkeymap, a resource file floating all over?" or another finger-on-sore-spot question and immidiately is flamed as Microserf of Gates lover or other verbal abuse.
A "clueless" user has a need for a program to do this or that. He is not a programmer but quite knowledgable in his field of profession, and poses an idea for an OSS project. Some replies that "If he wants this $&?! program he can do it him self!", and some gives some suggestions under the parole "if you don't program, you don't know what you are talking about."
. . .
My girlfriend is a fashion modeler and uses programs under another OS to make models for sewers. She don't know a thing about programming but all about clothes and asked me, how such a modeling program would come to be in an OSS world. She is the "clueless" user of computers, but the skilled modeler, who desires to contribute to the OSS with her knowledge if she can convince a programmer to transform this knowledge into programs.
If feedback an input from users are weighted solemnly on the user's computer skills, the OSS community will never go beyond making programming tools.
And this is probably the way we want to go.
In the traditional music industry it takes a certain volume to release a piece of music. If a band wants to make a record, they go to a record company that will audit it and decide if it will have chance to break through. If it does, they will spend more than a few bucks to market it, and if not you are SOL.
The record industry tell most new bands, that their music is redundant, to old, to new, to narrow, to political to ... -- so the flip side of the problem is, that there are to many musical creators out there that would give their right arm (don't take me too literal on this) to get anybody to listen to their music, because they has a message to the world.
Most interesting bands do music for the same reason the hackers code, simply for the purpose, the joy and the heck of it in any individual order.
But it can be different now! the mp3 technology secures that everyone can be heard, if their doings are worth a listen. But somebody has to choose it, like OSS software.
It is only a couple of years ago the idea of OSS slipped through to the broad audients, now we have to sell the idea of listening to OCM (open content music). Last time I checked at www.mp3.com there were loads of music to be downloaded and some of it was more than allright.
Isn't it the way to go?
Is a compiler farm a place they do egcs?
This statement doesn't make sense!
Standards are the fundatation of usability! Think here: LaTeX, Emacs, CSS and... Slashdot!
When I started to use LaTeX, I thought: Cool, I don't need to be a layout-geek for this to look nice. The standard was nice, and sufficed for more than three years! Now I make my own styles allright, but it was fine then.
Emacs is fine (I use vi, but to h*** with that) and you may configure it like it suits you, but the settings are fine for a place to start. It is easy to change, but it makes it difficult to jump in at anothers seat (and account) and do stuff.
It boils down to this:
No one wants to take your config files from you, but that doesn't mean that it is irrelevant to discuss the desktop presented to totally newbies.
A friend of my cracked this joke: I made this program, that can do anything. Right now it is just a main() function writing a copyright message, but it can easily be extended to do what ever you like.
Content is the diffence!
Appliances with Linux, cool!
I have allways wanted to write Perl scripts for food processors and lawn mowers. That'll be great!