That's certainly going to be looked at and argued for. I'd love to do it if security, bandwidth, and other issues are not a problem. We have some other ideas for supporting the OSS community as well. It may be a while (it'll take us a while to learn the ins and outs of adminning the box after it's delivered), so please be patient.
"Student" is the proper description now. I did indeed work for Clarkson a number of years ago... supporting MS Windows (though not with a tech crew). It was that experience, particularly the abysmal support for managing several labs worth of computers, and Window's tendency to change things behind your back without telling you, that brought me to my senses about Open Source. I left that job and went back to being a student. It took a while, with some detours, but I got my Masters a year or two back and am now working toward my PhD. (If you want more proof, just look at my paycheck: Grad student stipend.) Just before the beginning of this school year, I had the chance to point out to the Provost that Open Source software can play an important role in CS education. Those discussions led to establishing the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI). I got to be the director (it's nice being in a small school where these things can happen), and that's what my stipend is for.
I did look at the eligibility rules. They didn't exclude returning or non-traditional students, they didn't exclude graduate students, and they didn't exclude people who'd worked supporting Windows.
One of the unfortunate but inevitable driving forces behind software development, once it becomes seriously involved in the commercial world, is feature-creep: adding more features so the market perceives the software as more modern, up-to-date, and desireable.
We're all aware of how this dynamic drives the feature-rich but bug- and complexity-riddled MS offerings, but it appears that this is starting to happen in the Linux world as well. Most of the Linux users I personally know have switched from RedHat due to problems with 6.x being too unwieldy. One would hope for better from a relatively expensive boxed distro produced by a company with a huge recent IPO. (Don't flame me!... I run FreeBSD, and I'm only reporting what I really hear friends saying).
Will there be binding, concrete mechanisms, such as user-community input into decisions, or something like the sepate foundation set up to mediate the Troll/QT relationship, to prevent feature-creep from warping FreeBSD out of shape? What will these mechanisms be?
The ready answer, of course, is that the BSD license and market forces, combined with the philosophyies of the principal players in the merged company, will prevent this from happening. However, I worry that these aren't enough to stand up against the lure of big money --- or the pressure of big money from wealthy outside companies.
Yep. It's copy-on-write. Been done: standard stuff for storing strings.
Sounds like an idea as bad or worse that the Windows registry. Is it going to be like the registry in that it ignores creation and modification dates? If so, how does it interact with "touch"; or worse, what does it do to version control systems?
The registry is nice and stable, of course, and never collects useless garbage; but if it does, it's a simple matter to put everything right... right? And it's simple enough so that every program that accesses it does exactly what it's supposed to do and never messes anything up. And it's impervious to virus and trojan attacks, and always survives crashes completely intact!
In addition to writing Amazon declaring your willingness to boycott them (and evangelize the boycott as well), consider offering them a suggestion as to an alternative approach. They would score geek points, plus make a "PR Event", if they dropped the suit (among suitable press hoopla), declared their support of OSS, and possibly even donated to EFF or some such organization. Of course, for this to work, the boycott itself would first have to become a widely-known event generating some bad press and investor questioning. Which it might... everything starts small.
Yes!! Now it clicks. That was one of the best B5 episodes; I thoroughly enjoyed it. The monastary scenes resonated, but I didn't think about it much, putting it down to post-apocalypse SF in general, and to a particular Rudyard Kipling story in particular, not to _Canticle_. But the connection is clear now.
I read _Canticle_ a *long* time ago. It made such an impression that although I've forgotten almost all details, I'd still put it on a "Top SF" list, based on how awed I remember being.
About the Kipling story: not a joke. He wrote some great SF-like stuff. David Drake put together the anthology _Heads To The Storm_, a tribute by SF authors who acknowledge Kipling as a major influence; the book includes a Kipling short about a medieval monk who invents a microscope. The characters wrestle with whether the world is ready for the revelations the invention will provide. Good stuff.
It looks like he's part of a group of OSS folks working on technologies to enable just the things he lists at the start of the exam. The language/environment they're using (developing?) is called "E" and tied in with Java.
Is anyone familiar with this development effort? Can anyone point to a serious critique of the crypto and protocols involved?
My recollection is of an actual ad exec idea; not something from RAH. But I could be wrong.
What I heard about this was that Pepsi's logo wouldn't fit and still be generally legible... but Coke's would. However, Pepsi might still want to buy the advertising rights (from whatever organization would have (a) the jurisdiction and (b) the willingness to debase itself). They would do this, it was said, to prevent Coke from putting their logo up there. The plan I heard was to put up a dusting of reflective particles. A thin dusting would do --- just enough to noticeably affect the albedo of certain areas.
As far as putting Pizza Hut logos on rockets for $$, well, no big deal. It goes up, it splashes down. Sold for scrap, smelted, re-used.
But if only that were all... I toured a bunch of the robotics labs at Carnegie-Mellon a few years ago. The researchers said that since a lot of DOD funding had dried up, many labs were being approached by big entertainment firms (you know, like the one with big ears) to sponsor space shots and space robotics/teleoperation. The plan for one moon rover was that the scientists would get to use it for 50% of the time, and the remaining time would be available for said yuk-yuk provider to sell to overly-rich yahoos, who could tele-drive it around for my yearly income per minute. or maybe hour. In return, the entertainment firm would fund half the moon shot.
Pretty sad. Maybe the economy is good enough now so that the scientists can get the funding they need. I don't know.
Agreed. I see advertising on the moon, or spoiling my experience of the Milky Way (I have a great view from where I live), and I'll never buy a thing from that company for the rest of my life.
Is anyone circulating a petition to protest such a gawdawful idea? Are there any efforts, say through the UN, to take a proactive stance in international law against "defamation of the heavens"?
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That's certainly going to be looked at and argued for. I'd love to do it if security, bandwidth, and other issues are not a problem. We have some other ideas for supporting the OSS community as well. It may be a while (it'll take us a while to learn the ins and outs of adminning the box after it's delivered), so please be patient.
"Student" is the proper description now. I did indeed work for Clarkson a number of years ago ... supporting MS Windows (though not with a tech crew). It was that experience, particularly the abysmal support for managing several labs worth of computers, and Window's tendency to change things behind your back without telling you, that brought me to my senses about Open Source. I left that job and went back to being a student. It took a while, with some detours, but I got my Masters a year or two back and am now working toward my PhD. (If you want more proof, just look at my paycheck: Grad student stipend.) Just before the beginning of this school year, I had the chance to point out to the Provost that Open Source software can play an important role in CS education. Those discussions led to establishing the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI). I got to be the director (it's nice being in a small school where these things can happen), and that's what my stipend is for.
I did look at the eligibility rules. They didn't exclude returning or non-traditional students, they didn't exclude graduate students, and they didn't exclude people who'd worked supporting Windows.
One of the unfortunate but inevitable driving forces behind software development, once it becomes seriously involved in the commercial world, is feature-creep: adding more features so the market perceives the software as more modern, up-to-date, and desireable.
... I run FreeBSD, and I'm only reporting what I really hear friends saying).
We're all aware of how this dynamic drives the feature-rich but bug- and complexity-riddled MS offerings, but it appears that this is starting to happen in the Linux world as well. Most of the Linux users I personally know have switched from RedHat due to problems with 6.x being too unwieldy. One would hope for better from a relatively expensive boxed distro produced by a company with a huge recent IPO. (Don't flame me!
Will there be binding, concrete mechanisms, such as user-community input into decisions, or something like the sepate foundation set up to mediate the Troll/QT relationship, to prevent feature-creep from warping FreeBSD out of shape? What will these mechanisms be?
The ready answer, of course, is that the BSD license and market forces, combined with the philosophyies of the principal players in the merged company, will prevent this from happening. However, I worry that these aren't enough to stand up against the lure of big money --- or the pressure of big money from wealthy outside companies.
> It's more than suggested.
... right? And it's simple enough so that every program that accesses it does exactly what it's supposed to do and never messes anything up. And it's impervious to virus and trojan attacks, and always survives crashes completely intact!
Yep. It's copy-on-write. Been done: standard stuff for storing strings.
Sounds like an idea as bad or worse that the Windows registry. Is it going to be like the registry in that it ignores creation and modification dates? If so, how does it interact with "touch"; or worse, what does it do to version control systems?
The registry is nice and stable, of course, and never collects useless garbage; but if it does, it's a simple matter to put everything right
Awesome file system havoc on the horizon.
In addition to writing Amazon declaring your willingness to boycott them (and evangelize the boycott as well), consider offering them a suggestion as to an alternative approach. They would score geek points, plus make a "PR Event", if they dropped the suit (among suitable press hoopla), declared their support of OSS, and possibly even donated to EFF or some such organization. Of course, for this to work, the boycott itself would first have to become a widely-known event generating some bad press and investor questioning. Which it might ... everything starts small.
Yes!! Now it clicks. That was one of the best B5 episodes; I thoroughly enjoyed it. The monastary scenes resonated, but I didn't think about it much, putting it down to post-apocalypse SF in general, and to a particular Rudyard Kipling story in particular, not to _Canticle_. But the connection is clear now.
I read _Canticle_ a *long* time ago. It made such an impression that although I've forgotten almost all details, I'd still put it on a "Top SF" list, based on how awed I remember being.
About the Kipling story: not a joke. He wrote some great SF-like stuff. David Drake put together the anthology _Heads To The Storm_, a tribute by SF authors who acknowledge Kipling as a major influence; the book includes a Kipling short about a medieval monk who invents a microscope. The characters wrestle with whether the world is ready for the revelations the invention will provide. Good stuff.
It looks like he's part of a group of OSS folks working on technologies to enable just the things he lists at the start of the exam. The language/environment they're using (developing?) is called "E" and tied in with Java.
Is anyone familiar with this development effort? Can anyone point to a serious critique of the crypto and protocols involved?
--- When life gives you lemons, make coffee ---
My recollection is of an actual ad exec idea; not something from RAH. But I could be wrong.
... but Coke's would. However, Pepsi might still want to buy the advertising rights (from whatever organization would have (a) the jurisdiction and (b) the willingness to debase itself). They would do this, it was said, to prevent Coke from putting their logo up there. The plan I heard was to put up a dusting of reflective particles. A thin dusting would do --- just enough to noticeably affect the albedo of certain areas.
What I heard about this was that Pepsi's logo wouldn't fit and still be generally legible
As far as putting Pizza Hut logos on rockets for $$, well, no big deal. It goes up, it splashes down. Sold for scrap, smelted, re-used.
... I toured a bunch of the robotics labs at Carnegie-Mellon a few years ago. The researchers said that since a lot of DOD funding had dried up, many labs were being approached by big entertainment firms (you know, like the one with big ears) to sponsor space shots and space robotics/teleoperation. The plan for one moon rover was that the scientists would get to use it for 50% of the time, and the remaining time would be available for said yuk-yuk provider to sell to overly-rich yahoos, who could tele-drive it around for my yearly income per minute. or maybe hour. In return, the entertainment firm would fund half the moon shot.
But if only that were all
Pretty sad. Maybe the economy is good enough now so that the scientists can get the funding they need. I don't know.
M. Selene, where have you gone? We need you.
Agreed. I see advertising on the moon, or spoiling my experience of the Milky Way (I have a great view from where I live), and I'll never buy a thing from that company for the rest of my life.
Is anyone circulating a petition to protest such a gawdawful idea? Are there any efforts, say through the UN, to take a proactive stance in international law against "defamation of the heavens"?
> Let's talk "where is the visual development tools for Linux".
I've been looking for OS/free VisDev tools lately. Haven't had the time to try & evaluate, but you might find the following interesting:
* Code Crusader (Code Warrior-inspired): http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~jafl/jcc/
* Code Medic (GUI for gdb): http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~glenn/medic/
* ddd (GUI for GDB, DBX, JDB, WDB, XDB, the Perl debugger, and the Python debugger, maybe more): http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/
You'll find a list GUI/IDE links at the bottom of the ddd web page. Feast.