Part of the success of an Open Source project vs. traditional methods is, I think lack of overhead and taking advantage of better communications.
People do not have to commute in to work in the same place, they do not have meetings in the same room, they do not have to fill out request forms, submit reports and deal with pointy haired bosses.
That is the no overhead part.
The better communications part is using email, CVS, IRC, Web and FTP. Businesses use these also but they throw in the physical meetings, telephone calls and reports. The latter dilute the former. If people are limited to email et al. things actually become IMHO, more efficient, not less because of the limitation.
(I waste a lot of time in pointless meetings where I work, and I believe others do also).
People involved in Open Source Projects seem (I am not in one) to only do work, not deal so much in administrivia.
I always wanted a digital version of the old railroad pocket watches. They should get some apple compunter designers to whip up a retro/21st century case for this and make a pocket watch out of it.
The accessory market in gold chains and watch fobs would be huge all by itself.
:)
Transmeta bought back the rights for 600,000 shares of stock not for Cash. If IBM and Toshiba think that Transmeta is worthless wouldn't the Stock be worthless too? They the should have held out for Cash.
I will try not get mixed up in the right vs. left arguement here but there are a few things I would differ with you on here:
Just because China will no longer be Communist in say, 25 years, does not mean it will be a freedom loving, democratic country like the US and the EU countries. Deep and extensive control of the lives of most of the population by a central government of one kind or another has existed in China for thousands of years, so much so that it is part of the culture (see Confusionism).
Individualism and personal freedom will have a very hard time becoming widespread in China, no matter what the government calls itself.
As part of that culture of centralized control, a relatively few people have say as to what goals the resources of the nation are directed towards.
If that direction is toward the betterment of the people then a leftist would feel that this is a good system, and an American leftist would think it was OK as long as it wasn't called "Communism", even if it was centrally controlled and provided no individual rights.
The worst case would be central control that harms the people, as in North Korea.
A libertarian, or someone more right wing than the above leftist, would feel that the very lack of individual freedom is not worth whatever benefits the central control provided.
Now, if China went the way of North Korea, then we would have a right to fear it and any capabilities it had for Nuclear War. China would not have to invade Taiwan or the US. It could just blow up, or threaten to blow up a few cities. The whole point of the US nuking Japan at the end of WWII was to save it from invading and using conventional weapons and manpower. Something, that at that point in history, after a long and costly war on two fronts, the US could argueably be said, did not have the resources to do.
North Korea now is in a situation where the ruling party can not feed it's people but is using the (implied) threat of military action against South Korea and the US to provide the aid that is keeping it in power. If the existing government there was not able to have control over the the distribution of foreign aid they would have been kicked out of the country by now. The US and South Korea are working together to keep the ruling party, and the lack of individual freedom in North Korea, in place in the interests of peace, stability and a foreign policy of engagement in hopes of gradually changing the policies of the North Korean government.
I could see something similiar occuring in China. Something that could take generations if it happens at all. Meanwhile, billions of people will live out their lives without the personal freedoms that many people take for granted in other parts of the world.
So I do see China as a threat to her own people. I see the economic and political power of China as a bargaining chip to pervert the policies of the US to overlook human rights abuses there, for instance, to ignore goings on in Tibet and probably, eventually to hand over Taiwan in the interests of appeasement and "engagement".
World Peace, brotherly love and happiness is a nice goal. Communism is dead or dying. But neither of these, together or seperately, mean that every country, big business, or other concentration of power will play fairly with the rights of indiviuals or groups less powerful than they are. So we cannot all disband our militaries and stop keeping an eye on China, Russia, the Middle East, or the EU. And they cannot stop keeping an eye on each other and rest the US also.
4000 Years before Episode 1: "For the game, LucasArts and BioWare are creating an entirely original storyline set some four thousand years before Star Wars: Episode I. The ancient era is dominated by an epic struggle between the Jedi and the evil Sith. "
All email is transmitted from place to place using the well-known SMTP port (port 25).
Bzzt...
You're wrong too. Exchange from Microsoft does not use SMTP by default. Exchange to Exchange communication is non-standard,proprietary and widespread. I am sure the FBI would like to look at that mail too.
I don't think Cringely is completely wrong. In a situation like he describes, they would not need to shut down the whole internet. They could shut down access to specific servers because they are engaged in "criminal activity" with a vague enough definition of criminal activity that they could block out anyone. They could shut down specific ISP's because of failure to comply with government censorship laws if the government decides to implement them. They could shut down Napster traffic or Gnutella etc on all major ISP's. They could threaten to do all or any of these things if ISP's do not cooperate in other ways. Enforcement Agencies sometimes threaten to give targets traffic tickets and do IRS audits on people to get them comply with there wishes even if the people are not themselves criminals. A situation like Cringely describes is just more leverage.
I would like to see some open source designs for some hardware to automate putting base pairs together. Then hook it up to a computer and have another team write a gcc- cross compiler that compiles genes. Step three is to write a really high level language so we could write a script such as: PromDate { Blond Blue Eyes 5 foot 10 inches 36-24-36 }
Feed it to the compiler and out come a set of chromosomes.
Then no geek would ever be dateless to the prom again.
As it is, the closest thing to this PCR I ever did was bake yeast bread. That took three tries because the first two times I killed the yeast when I made the water too hot.
People have mentioned that Gibson already went over some of these questions about reality. If we want to trot out older stories try Philip K. Dick with Ubik or We Can Dream It For You Wholesale (which became Total Recall), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner). Dick wasn't a techie so he was vague about how he produced the alternate realities. He didn't use computers or use the phrase "Virtual Reality", but he played with whether the existence we live in is real, who we are is real, the people and society around us are real etc. The movies made from his stories don't overemphasize these aspects but the stories do to a much greater extent. The cop in Blade Runner worries if he is just and android with implanted false memories. In Total Recall the spy was a bad guy who had his memories altered so that he would believe he is a good guy and then doesn't want to be the bad guy anymore. Both people are part of a virtual reality type dream that may not even exist. Ubik was about consumer products that are sold as air fresheners and cleaning supplies and perfume and loads of other things whose use sustains reality. If people stopped using them the reality we know everyday would fade out of existence.
We could go on with other writers. Asimov's robot stories are about identity, free will, and what it means to be human. Heinlen (sp) stories are filled with alternative libertarian political speculations. Frank Herbert's Dune series is about the conflicts between politics and religion, clashes of cultures, the benefits and drawbacks of a stable (and therefore static and stagnant) and peaceful society (God Emperor of Dune).
Even Star Trek TNG did the alternate reality deal with the episode where Moriarty the character from Sherlock Holmes reporgrams the holodeck to make Picard, Geordy and Data think he has escaped the Holodeck in order to trick them into coming up with a way to actually help him escape. They realize that they are in still in the holodeck and have never left. They create another level of illusion and let Moriarity escape into that.
Plato's Republic (well Timeaus, the Atlantis one) and Moore's Utopia would be classified as Science Fiction if they were written today.
That is part of why I used to enjoy SF so much. I would tell other people that I read that stuff and they would think ray guns and spaceships and laugh. Then when I took my intro philosphy courses I already knew all about issues of free will vs. determinism, solipsism, and the various categories of political systems and the possible benfits and drawbacks of each. Of course SF is not all I ever read but it is a good way to tie lots of different ideas together including Science, Technology, History, Religion, Philosophy, Ethics et al.
A course like this that uses a piece of SF as a jumping off point is a good way to relate the everyday to bigger ideas and deeper knowledge.
Maybe we users can start some nice class action suits against M$. Anyone have ulcers from having to support Windows at work? Not gotten a job because the company wanted your resume in M$ Word format?
Oh Yeah, sell all your Microsoft Stock and invest it in some Law Firms.
I have read the posts that were moderated up and they say that Linux doesn't need a browser. Linux needs a nice GUI. We are not at War. That if I, as an individual, like the current feature set of Linux it need not change yadda yadda yadda.
The truth is Computers and Software are subject to the Networking Effect. The more people that use them the more valuable they are. This goes double for Open Source Software because the best motivation for an Open Source Project is when a user wants to do something on Linux, finds he can't and then sets out to add that ability. That's how you get new software. From users who are also programmers.
10,000 whiners on some internet forum wishing they had a free version of some utility doesn't make that utility appear out of nowhere. 1 user hacking code does.
That is 1 USER. Not some programmer being paid to work on a project he doesn't like on an OS he hates. No USER, No program. More USERS more programs.
If we don't attract and keep other users, Linux will wither and die. Some people may like to see that. They would like to be one of the proud few that hack Linux. Well, they can join the guy I know who has an old VAX in his basement. Really cool guy, but what the hell is the VAX at home good for? Can you play Quake on it? If we don't have the ability to get full use out of the Web with Linux then no one in the future will use it. If no one uses it why bother porting QUAKE XXXV to it? Or anything else? It will shrivel and die. The dream will be over. And you will have to pay Microsoft in order to sneeze.
A Few Comments: 1. Great Idea! 2. Can we break up existing code into pieces and organize them? There is a lot of it out there in all the other Opensource projects 3. The infrastructure and ideas are similiar to the Trove Project (which is similiar to Freshmeat) http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/trove/
I have the book on my desk right now. When I read it I instantly saw how Linux fit in. The point was that there are these products that are "good enough" for some jobs. They are nowhere near as good as the industry leaders at most jobs. Pick a random job that the industry leader is good at and the new guy can't do it. But it can do some jobs "good enough".
So the new guy charges less and learns how to produce his product for less in order to survive. Then he starts to improve his product. (If he doesn't charge less or improve his product he remains a niche player or disappears so we don't care about him.) Since he has an inferior product he has more room for improvement. He delivers the improvement at the cheaper price because he is used to the working cheaper and also he can cut corners because he just has to be "good enough" not "the best in the industry". The cheap product actually opens up a bigger market because it is cheaper (think sub $600 PC's for instance.)
Meanwhile, the industry leader is making improvements but at a slower rate. He is at the top of the line and is the best in the business. It is HARD for him to improve. The new competitor may never get to the point that the top guy is at now but he can get to a point just below the top guy and do it at a cheaper price. Soon everyone but the very top customers is buying the new guy's stuff and the leader can't afford to compete.
Right now Linux is "good enough" to be a web server or a file server or a mail server. It will probably become the OS of choice on really cheap PC's, dedicated 1 function servers and embedded devices because it is "good enough" and cheaper than Solaris or some NT variant. Whether it takes the desktop or really high end server market or not is irrelevant in the near future. The desktop will become a small percentage in the overall market. Your Fridge and Microwave will probably run something like Linux. Not because it has a journaling file system or supports 5 Terabyte individual files. It will because it is good enough and cheap.
It will improve because anyone who wants to will improve it for various reasons. Individual fanatics. Computer science students. Big companies trying to run Bill Gates out of business. Hardware companies wanting to sell hardware etc. These improvements will be cheap because the improvers aren't out to make a buck on the software. They make money elsewhere. Solaris and NT may always be better than Linux but Linux will improve, be "good enough" for more and more things AND be cheaper.
If they come out with a new edition of the book Linux should be used as a case study. They have hard drives and the Intel Celeron chip in there as examples. Linux should be a good one too.
That's what the book says to me. It's small and has applications to almost any area of business. I recommend it highly.
The roving bands of technology freaks in Distraction used reputation servers to ascertain there status in their society. Are you familiar with the moderation system on Slashdot? Do you see parallels? Any suggestion on improvements/changes to the moderation system here. Is the whole open source/gift culture/Linux community an inspiration for these bands or a parallel developement?
According to Economics 101 you also dont spend X amount of dollars to develope IE 5.0 and then give it away for free like MS did.
According to Economics 201 though, you might want to give things away for free to open up new markets (centralized application servers) or hurt competitors (MS Office). MS must have spent quite a lot on IE 5.0 but still gave it away to undercut Netscape.
Sun wants to have their cake and eat it to. Take advantage of the Opensource hype and hurt MS at the same time.
The moderation system seems to me like a gentic algorithm, survival of the fittest. Those users and comments that score highest in the fitness function are rewarded and those that don't are discarded and the loop go on.
The thing to be worried about is overadaption to certain ecological niches. Creatures that are supremely adapted to a particular environment don't survive when that environment changes. It is better to maintain flexibility and variety so that different and what appear to be useless and wasteful traits still appear in a population. That way when the the environment changes, when new abilities are needed, they exist in the population. If they don't the population dies out.
To translate back to slashdot. If people who are liked at slashdot are the only ones who score well at slashdot then the varied points of view, the genetic diversity, dies out and we get a bunch of people patting each other on the backs and telling each other how smart they are to use linux and read slashdot. No variety of ideas or insights. No robustness in the population. When things change in the computer industry (well nothing ever changes in computers;o) ) then slashdot gets left behind.
Maybe there should be a lottery function thrown in. At random times random idiots should get a whole lot of moderation points regardless of their merit and past performance. Or even because they were such jerks in the past. That way, people would be more cautious how they treat others and what they say because the people "on the outs" with those who temporarily have the "power" might not be the ones with "power" tomorrow.
Read Juan Louis Borges short story I think it is "The Lottery in Babylon"
The guy that runs Antionline often talks about how he tracks various crackers and turns the info over to the authorities. While one can describe this as good citizenship, I would not attempt to crack something Antionline is concerned with, even if it is a game. They may at somepoint turn your info over as potential suspects in some future investigation.
I thought it was an April fool's day RFC but this is August.
Skip the guy's English (I have a headache from reading it) and jump down to the tables in section 5. It seems to me like he is proposing to use the subnet mask not as a mask but as a subnet identifier that is tacked on to an address. I think it is a bunch of hooey.
There are a large number of "geeky" people I know who are libertarians. They believe in minimal government because they do not like large, badly designed inefficient systems. Distributed, independently working modules cooperating when necessary and going there own way when not is a good design for more than just software. Minimal government is "conservative".
The large monolithic state is an idea of the Left. It is "liberal".
Most of the "geeky" people I know also believe in the idea that there are good ways to do things and bad ways to do things. Social relativitism, the idea that all choices or all approaches to life are "equally valid" goes against the grain of their thinking. Social relativism is "liberal".
However, they (and I) believe that, as Perl programmers say, "there is more than one way to do it". They are pragmatic in that a working solution is better than no solution, that some working solutions are better than others and that if there aren't enough time and resources to do it the "right" way we can go with what works. This goes along with the many small modules view of government. If you have many small parts then some can do things one way (but not the best way) and you can do it your way.
Many conservatives think there is one best way to do something (their way) and everyone should do it that way. I am not that far right. But if "The State", big government, is doing everything for you there is only room for one way. Where is the choice in that?
There are libertarians who do not believe in God or religion. I happen to want to believe in God. I like to think of myself as both intelligent and educated. I get irritated when people assume that anyone who believes in God is a moron. I was raised a Catholic. In regards to the recent events in Kansas, I would like to point out that officially, Catholics believe in evolution. Most Catholics probably don't know that but it is true. A lot of them are brainwashed into thinking , by other religious groups, that the two ideas, God and science are mutually exclusive. They are not. So though I am a religious person I also have a great interest in Science. In fact, the greater a person's knowledge about the uiniverse and how it is put together, the greater one's appreciation can be for God. Anyone who creates anything, from artwork to a program, must appreciate the idea that the individual is revealed through his or her works.
Though I am a conservative, I do not believe in ideas of racism, or hatred of any group. Being religious should eliminate that as a possibilty but unfortunately it does not seem to for some people. But hatred and stereotyping is not limited to conservatives or religious people. Liberals, upon hearing I beleive in God or am against expansion of government programs catorgorize me as a Nazi and are quite intolerant and hateful themselves.
To summarize. All "Geeks" aren't liberals. All conservatives aren't Nazis. Even in computers, once you get past the bit level everything is not black and white.
I agree with the article. Linux is fashionable at the moment and some of the reason is that it is "cool". But if and when Linux goes out of fashion well designed open source projects will make the jump to the new system easily. Any new system I would consider going to would have: * A CLI able to access all the resources of the machine. * All of the system configuration and administration could be done over a telnet session and without a GUI. * It would store all its info in ASCII text files. * It would be OpenSource and standards based. * All the GNU tools could be easily ported over (resulting in a Unix like environment) * Run on commonly available and relatively inexpensive hardware.
This is what "Linux" means to me even though technically "Linux" is just the kernel. Linux has been evolving since day 1. If in 10 years every line of code and even the architecture has changed, if it has the above it wil be "Linux" enough for me.
Slashdot Mirror
How much Karma can I get for one Mojo?
Are there going to be Mojo whores out there?
Part of the success of an Open Source project vs. traditional methods is, I think lack of overhead and taking advantage of better communications.
People do not have to commute in to work in the same place, they do not have meetings in the same room, they do not have to fill out request forms, submit reports and deal with pointy haired bosses.
That is the no overhead part.
The better communications part is using email, CVS, IRC, Web and FTP. Businesses use these also but they throw in the physical meetings, telephone calls and reports. The latter dilute the former. If people are limited to email et al. things actually become IMHO, more efficient, not less because of the limitation.
(I waste a lot of time in pointless meetings where I work, and I believe others do also).
People involved in Open Source Projects seem (I am not in one) to only do work, not deal so much in administrivia.
I always wanted a digital version of the old railroad pocket watches. They should get some apple compunter designers to whip up a retro/21st century case for this and make a pocket watch out of it.
The accessory market in gold chains and watch fobs would be huge all by itself.
:)
Transmeta bought back the rights for 600,000 shares of stock not for Cash. If IBM and Toshiba think that Transmeta is worthless wouldn't the Stock be worthless too? They the should have held out for Cash.
I will try not get mixed up in the right vs. left arguement here but there are a few things I would differ with you on here:
Just because China will no longer be Communist in say, 25 years, does not mean it will be a freedom loving, democratic country like the US and the EU countries. Deep and extensive control of the lives of most of the population by a central government of one kind or another has existed in China for thousands of years, so much so that it is part of the culture (see Confusionism).
Individualism and personal freedom will have a very hard time becoming widespread in China, no matter what the government calls itself.
As part of that culture of centralized control, a relatively few people have say as to what goals the resources of the nation are directed towards.
If that direction is toward the betterment of the people then a leftist would feel that this is a good system, and an American leftist would think it was OK as long as it wasn't called "Communism", even if it was centrally controlled and provided no individual rights.
The worst case would be central control that harms the people, as in North Korea.
A libertarian, or someone more right wing than the above leftist, would feel that the very lack of individual freedom is not worth whatever benefits the central control provided.
Now, if China went the way of North Korea, then we would have a right to fear it and any capabilities it had for Nuclear War. China would not have to invade Taiwan or the US. It could just blow up, or threaten to blow up a few cities. The whole point of the US nuking Japan at the end of WWII was to save it from invading and using conventional weapons and manpower. Something, that at that point in history, after a long and costly war on two fronts, the US could argueably be said, did not have the resources to do.
North Korea now is in a situation where the ruling party can not feed it's people but is using the (implied) threat of military action against South Korea and the US to provide the aid that is keeping it in power. If the existing government there was not able to have control over the the distribution of foreign aid they would have been kicked out of the country by now. The US and South Korea are working together to keep the ruling party, and the lack of individual freedom in North Korea, in place in the interests of peace, stability and a foreign policy of engagement in hopes of gradually changing the policies of the North Korean government.
I could see something similiar occuring in China. Something that could take generations if it happens at all. Meanwhile, billions of people will live out their lives without the personal freedoms that many people take for granted in other parts of the world.
So I do see China as a threat to her own people. I see the economic and political power of China as a bargaining chip to pervert the policies of the US to overlook human rights abuses there, for instance, to ignore goings on in Tibet and probably, eventually to hand over Taiwan in the interests of appeasement and "engagement".
World Peace, brotherly love and happiness is a nice goal. Communism is dead or dying. But neither of these, together or seperately, mean that every country, big business, or other concentration of power will play fairly with the rights of indiviuals or groups less powerful than they are. So we cannot all disband our militaries and stop keeping an eye on China, Russia, the Middle East, or the EU. And they cannot stop keeping an eye on each other and rest the US also.
That's the way it is.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence"
And probably eternal right wing paranoia.
http://www.scruz.net/~asharpe/humor/meat.html
Sorry, not Niven
Terry Bisson. I read it in an Anthology and it reminded me of a Larry Niven Draco Tavern Story
It's not "Classic Internet Humor" it is a story by Larry Niven.
I think it was in his "Limits" collection.
As far as I remember this seems close to a word by word quote.
4000 Years before Episode 1: "For the game, LucasArts and BioWare are creating an entirely original storyline set some four thousand years before Star Wars: Episode I. The ancient era is dominated by an epic struggle between the Jedi and the evil Sith. "
All email is transmitted from place to place using the well-known SMTP port (port 25).
Bzzt...
You're wrong too. Exchange from Microsoft does not use SMTP by default. Exchange to Exchange communication is non-standard,proprietary and widespread. I am sure the FBI would like to look at that mail too.
I don't think Cringely is completely wrong. In a situation like he describes, they would not need to shut down the whole internet. They could shut down access to specific servers because they are engaged in "criminal activity" with a vague enough definition of criminal activity that they could block out anyone.
They could shut down specific ISP's because of failure to comply with government censorship laws if the government decides to implement them. They could shut down Napster traffic or Gnutella etc on all major ISP's.
They could threaten to do all or any of these things if ISP's do not cooperate in other ways. Enforcement Agencies sometimes threaten to give targets traffic tickets and do IRS audits on people to get them comply with there wishes even if the people are not themselves criminals. A situation like Cringely describes is just more leverage.
Co-locating equipment is just a foot in the door.
I would like to see some open source designs for some hardware to automate putting base pairs together. Then hook it up to a computer and have another team write a gcc- cross compiler that compiles genes.
Step three is to write a really high level language so we could write a script such as:
PromDate
{
Blond
Blue Eyes
5 foot 10 inches
36-24-36
}
Feed it to the compiler and out come a set of chromosomes.
Then no geek would ever be dateless to the prom again.
As it is, the closest thing to this PCR I ever did was bake yeast bread. That took three tries because the first two times I killed the yeast when I made the water too hot.
People have mentioned that Gibson already went over some of these questions about reality. If we want to trot out older stories try Philip K. Dick with Ubik or We Can Dream It For You Wholesale (which became Total Recall), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner).
Dick wasn't a techie so he was vague about how he produced the alternate realities. He didn't use computers or use the phrase "Virtual Reality", but he played with whether the existence we live in is real, who we are is real, the people and society around us are real etc. The movies made from his stories don't overemphasize these aspects but the stories do to a much greater extent. The cop in Blade Runner worries if he is just and android with implanted false memories. In Total Recall the spy was a bad guy who had his memories altered so that he would believe he is a good guy and then doesn't want to be the bad guy anymore. Both people are part of a virtual reality type dream that may not even exist.
Ubik was about consumer products that are sold as air fresheners and cleaning supplies and perfume and loads of other things whose use sustains reality. If people stopped using them the reality we know everyday would fade out of existence.
We could go on with other writers. Asimov's robot stories are about identity, free will, and what it means to be human. Heinlen (sp) stories are filled with alternative libertarian political speculations.
Frank Herbert's Dune series is about the conflicts between politics and religion, clashes of cultures, the benefits and drawbacks of a stable (and therefore static and stagnant) and peaceful society (God Emperor of Dune).
Even Star Trek TNG did the alternate reality deal with the episode where Moriarty the character from Sherlock Holmes reporgrams the holodeck to make Picard, Geordy and Data think he has escaped the Holodeck in order to trick them into coming up with a way to actually help him escape. They realize that they are in still in the holodeck and have never left. They create another level of illusion and let Moriarity escape into that.
Plato's Republic (well Timeaus, the Atlantis one) and Moore's Utopia would be classified as Science Fiction if they were written today.
That is part of why I used to enjoy SF so much. I would tell other people that I read that stuff and they would think ray guns and spaceships and laugh. Then when I took my intro philosphy courses I already knew all about issues of free will vs. determinism, solipsism, and the various categories of political systems and the possible benfits and drawbacks of each. Of course SF is not all I ever read but it is a good way to tie lots of different ideas together including Science, Technology, History, Religion, Philosophy, Ethics et al.
A course like this that uses a piece of SF as a jumping off point is a good way to relate the everyday to bigger ideas and deeper knowledge.
Maybe we users can start some nice class action suits against M$. Anyone have ulcers from having to support Windows at work? Not gotten a job because the company wanted your resume in M$ Word format?
Oh Yeah, sell all your Microsoft Stock and invest it in some Law Firms.
I have read the posts that were moderated up and they say that Linux doesn't need a browser. Linux needs a nice GUI. We are not at War. That if I, as an individual, like the current feature set of Linux it need not change yadda yadda yadda.
The truth is Computers and Software are subject to the Networking Effect. The more people that use them the more valuable they are. This goes double for Open Source Software because the best motivation for an Open Source Project is when a user wants to do something on Linux, finds he can't and then sets out to add that ability. That's how you get new software. From users who are also programmers.
10,000 whiners on some internet forum wishing they had a free version of some utility doesn't make that utility appear out of nowhere. 1 user hacking code does.
That is 1 USER. Not some programmer being paid to work on a project he doesn't like on an OS he hates. No USER, No program. More USERS more programs.
If we don't attract and keep other users, Linux will wither and die. Some people may like to see that. They would like to be one of the proud few that hack Linux. Well, they can join the guy I know who has an old VAX in his basement. Really cool guy, but what the hell is the VAX at home good for? Can you play Quake on it? If we don't have the ability to get full use out of the Web with Linux then no one in the future will use it. If no one uses it why bother porting QUAKE XXXV to it? Or anything else? It will shrivel and die. The dream will be over. And you will have to pay Microsoft in order to sneeze.
A Few Comments:
1. Great Idea!
2. Can we break up existing code into pieces and organize them? There is a lot of it out there in all the other Opensource projects
3. The infrastructure and ideas are similiar to the Trove Project (which is similiar to Freshmeat)
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/trove/
That's all
I have the book on my desk right now. When I read it I instantly saw how Linux fit in. The point was that there are these products that are "good enough" for some jobs. They are nowhere near as good as the industry leaders at most jobs. Pick a random job that the industry leader is good at and the new guy can't do it. But it can do some jobs "good enough".
So the new guy charges less and learns how to produce his product for less in order to survive. Then he starts to improve his product. (If he doesn't charge less or improve his product he remains a niche player or disappears so we don't care about him.) Since he has an inferior product he has more room for improvement. He delivers the improvement at the cheaper price because he is used to the working cheaper and also he can cut corners because he just has to be "good enough" not "the best in the industry". The cheap product actually opens up a bigger market because it is cheaper (think sub $600 PC's for instance.)
Meanwhile, the industry leader is making improvements but at a slower rate. He is at the top of the line and is the best in the business. It is HARD for him to improve. The new competitor may never get to the point that the top guy is at now but he can get to a point just below the top guy and do it at a cheaper price. Soon everyone but the very top customers is buying the new guy's stuff and the leader can't afford to compete.
Right now Linux is "good enough" to be a web server or a file server or a mail server. It will probably become the OS of choice on really cheap PC's, dedicated 1 function servers and embedded devices because it is "good enough" and cheaper than Solaris or some NT variant. Whether it takes the desktop or really high end server market or not is irrelevant in the near future. The desktop will become a small percentage in the overall market. Your Fridge and Microwave will probably run something like Linux. Not because it has a journaling file system or supports 5 Terabyte individual files. It will because it is good enough and cheap.
It will improve because anyone who wants to will improve it for various reasons. Individual fanatics. Computer science students. Big companies trying to run Bill Gates out of business. Hardware companies wanting to sell hardware etc. These improvements will be cheap because the improvers aren't out to make a buck on the software. They make money elsewhere. Solaris and NT may always be better than Linux but Linux will improve, be "good enough" for more and more things AND be cheaper.
If they come out with a new edition of the book Linux should be used as a case study. They have hard drives and the Intel Celeron chip in there as examples. Linux should be a good one too.
That's what the book says to me. It's small and has applications to almost any area of business. I recommend it highly.
The roving bands of technology freaks in Distraction used reputation servers to ascertain there status in their society. Are you familiar with the moderation system on Slashdot? Do you see parallels? Any suggestion on improvements/changes to the moderation system here. Is the whole open source/gift culture/Linux community an inspiration for these bands or a parallel developement?
According to Economics 101 you also dont spend X amount of dollars to develope IE 5.0 and then give it away for free like MS did.
According to Economics 201 though, you might want to give things away for free to open up new markets (centralized application servers) or hurt competitors (MS Office). MS must have spent quite a lot on IE 5.0 but still gave it away to undercut Netscape.
Sun wants to have their cake and eat it to. Take advantage of the Opensource hype and hurt MS at the same time.
Sorry, right title wrong first name:
Jorge Louis Borges.
Good writer by the way
The moderation system seems to me like a gentic algorithm, survival of the fittest. Those users and comments that score highest in the fitness function are rewarded and those that don't are discarded and the loop go on.
;o) ) then slashdot gets left behind.
The thing to be worried about is overadaption to certain ecological niches. Creatures that are supremely adapted to a particular environment don't survive when that environment changes. It is better to maintain flexibility and variety so that different and what appear to be useless and wasteful traits still appear in a population. That way when the the environment changes, when new abilities are needed, they exist in the population. If they don't the population dies out.
To translate back to slashdot. If people who are liked at slashdot are the only ones who score well at slashdot then the varied points of view, the genetic diversity, dies out and we get a bunch of people patting each other on the backs and telling each other how smart they are to use linux and read slashdot. No variety of ideas or insights. No robustness in the population. When things change in the computer industry (well nothing ever changes in computers
Maybe there should be a lottery function thrown in. At random times random idiots should get a whole lot of moderation points regardless of their merit and past performance. Or even because they were such jerks in the past. That way, people would be more cautious how they treat others and what they say because the people "on the outs" with those who temporarily have the "power" might not be the ones with "power" tomorrow.
Read Juan Louis Borges short story I think it is "The Lottery in Babylon"
The guy that runs Antionline often talks about how he tracks various crackers and turns the info over to the authorities. While one can describe this as good citizenship, I would not attempt to crack something Antionline is concerned with, even if it is a game. They may at somepoint turn your info over as potential suspects in some future investigation.
I thought it was an April fool's day RFC but this is August.
Skip the guy's English (I have a headache from reading it) and jump down to the tables in section 5. It seems to me like he is proposing to use the subnet mask not as a mask but as a subnet identifier that is tacked on to an address.
I think it is a bunch of hooey.
Labels.
There are a large number of "geeky" people I know who are libertarians. They believe in minimal government because they do not like large, badly designed inefficient systems. Distributed, independently working modules cooperating when necessary and going there own way when not is a good design for more than just software. Minimal government is "conservative".
The large monolithic state is an idea of the Left. It is "liberal".
Most of the "geeky" people I know also believe in the idea that there are good ways to do things and bad ways to do things. Social relativitism, the idea that all choices or all approaches to life are "equally valid" goes against the grain of their thinking. Social relativism is "liberal".
However, they (and I) believe that, as Perl programmers say, "there is more than one way to do it". They are pragmatic in that a working solution is better than no solution, that some working solutions are better than others and that if there aren't enough time and resources to do it the "right" way we can go with what works. This goes along with the many small modules view of government. If you have many small parts then some can do things one way (but not the best way) and you can do it your way.
Many conservatives think there is one best way to do something (their way) and everyone should do it that way. I am not that far right. But if "The State", big government, is doing everything for you there is only room for one way. Where is the choice in that?
There are libertarians who do not believe in God or religion. I happen to want to believe in God. I like to think of myself as both intelligent and educated. I get irritated when people assume that anyone who believes in God is a moron. I was raised a Catholic. In regards to the recent events in Kansas, I would like to point out that officially, Catholics believe in evolution. Most Catholics probably don't know that but it is true. A lot of them are brainwashed into thinking , by other religious groups, that the two ideas, God and science are mutually exclusive. They are not.
So though I am a religious person I also have a great interest in Science. In fact, the greater a person's knowledge about the uiniverse and how it is put together, the greater one's appreciation can be for God. Anyone who creates anything, from artwork to a program, must appreciate the idea that the individual is revealed through his or her works.
Though I am a conservative, I do not believe in ideas of racism, or hatred of any group. Being religious should eliminate that as a possibilty but unfortunately it does not seem to for some people. But hatred and stereotyping is not limited to conservatives or religious people. Liberals, upon hearing I beleive in God or am against expansion of government programs catorgorize me as a Nazi and are quite intolerant and hateful themselves.
To summarize. All "Geeks" aren't liberals. All conservatives aren't Nazis. Even in computers, once you get past the bit level everything is not black and white.
I say great for any programmers that made money in the IPO. Now quit your day jobs and work on Linux full time and make me a better OS. :)
I agree with the article. Linux is fashionable at the moment and some of the reason is that it is "cool". But if and when Linux goes out of fashion well designed open source projects will make the jump to the new system easily. Any new system I would consider going to would have:
* A CLI able to access all the resources of the machine.
* All of the system configuration and administration could be done over a telnet session and without a GUI.
* It would store all its info in ASCII text files. * It would be OpenSource and standards based.
* All the GNU tools could be easily ported over (resulting in a Unix like environment)
* Run on commonly available and relatively inexpensive hardware.
This is what "Linux" means to me even though technically "Linux" is just the kernel. Linux has been evolving since day 1. If in 10 years every line of code and even the architecture has changed, if it has the above it wil be "Linux" enough for me.