I must say however that this doesn't include the part about the applications, but 'only' on the hardware. The application-reporting is the bad part here. Many bug report tools automatically include the available hardware and I don't have any problem with that.
Nice claims, but we the free part of the article doesn't show any actual examples of data that's transmitted. At least not data apart from some generic xml tags.
Any easy way to verify this ourself?
I'm suspecting their claim is true, but I'd like to see the data...
I'm doing research in the building industry and many of the things you mention are valid in the building industry too. In a different wording:
Allmost everything is a one-off project. We ain't building 10000 volkswagens of about the same type. THEN you can do some "traditional" engineering and some heavy process optimisations. Basically the building industry builds prototypes only (apart from soviet housing blocks).
Changing requirements. Yes. The architect changes his mind. The customer changes his mind. The constructor has to do it. Faults creep into the design, the constructor has to compensate for it.
Perhaps an extra analogy:
BAD BAD professional relationship between customer and contractor. The customer wants the cheepest ride possible. The contractor has to accept it. But the customer unvariably made errors in his specification. The contractor is quite happy to do a bit more work to correct that, but he attaches a hefty price tag to it.
Both the construction and the software industry have their big problems. Some can be cured by better processes, some by a culture change, some by better information. But probably not all.
Well, that's where we engineers are for, isn't it? Solving nice problems!
This story at kde.dot.org tells about an effort to translate KDE into all seven official languages in South Africa. No way any commercial program (like windows) is going to go through that effort.
But open source software allows you to do it yourself. KDE is a nice one in that regard because they have good tools for translations and a good process for dealing with it. Before a big release is made, there's plenty of time for the translators to do their job. There is a "string freeze" to allow every translation to get completed.
(Other big projects probably 've got something similar, KDE is just an example where I know it worked).
So: You want the functionality badly? You pay for it (with time or money) and there is nothing to stop you from getting it! Nice, that open source software.
A different style of fantasy hit my bookshelf a year ago. David (and Leigh) Eddings are the authors. The fun thing about their books is that it doesn't start out all-hopeless for the main character set.
You know, LotR. Nice army Rohan 's got, as does Gondor. But a wee bit underpowered when you look at all those nice, huge armies Sauron has got. Basically hopeless from the beginning.
Many other books keep averting disaster throughout a book by having the main wizard drown the enemy in avelanges, fires and steaming lakes. But without him/her they would be done for.
In come the series by the Eddingses. Especially in their 3-book Tamuli series the good guys have some 100,000 heavily armed knights at their disposal. And a little girl of course:-) Enough to competently trample the opposition. There's some damage, but two chapters later they're back in the saddle.
It is eneourmously refreshing compared to the rest of the genre.
If you want to try something of Eddings, beware. There are two 5-piece series and two 3-piece series. The last two belonging together. The most recent book stands on itself though, so that's your best bet. It's called "the redemption of Althalus". It's typical of their genre and mayor fun to read.
... there'd be no lisensing issues. KDE was foolish for choosing a toolkit with such a license
BRING BACK HARMONY. (....) Harmony is a GPL replacement toolkit....
I'm getting the feeling that the poster doesn't know that QT now comes under the GPL license (instead of their original non-GPL one). The poster loves KDE, but loaths it's licence. The license is GPL! Nothing wrong with that (as the poster likes linux).
Funny (or not) thing is that RMS is basically backing gnome (LGPL) while at the same time advising everyone to stay clear of the LGPL because it is an inferior language. GPL is preferred. KDE&QT is GPL, so it would be better to put the FSF's weight more (and more openly) behind KDE. By "better" I mean from a purely FSF-political standpoint.
That was an awful blow to germany. Especially because a french TGV derailed at top speed earlier. The last part of the train derailed, but everything stayed upright, causing just a few minor injuries, even though this train set a high speed record for derailments (http://mercurio.iet.unipi.it/tgv/wrecks.html, browse down to 21 december 1993).
The main reason the german accident was so terribly fatal was that the derailed train hit a viaduct passing overhead, got stuck and piled up.
On a more smiling note, you could see a bit of german-french difference in attitude when you look at their original designs for their high speed trains. Or more exactly to their reactions on the other's creation.
The germans considered the french trains to be awfully fragile. The french thought the german one to be a heavy, unelegant brute:-)
Currently, the french ones are starting to look a bit more solid and the german ones lighter and more elegant...
So all the smart people get filtered out, leaving only dumbasses. Well, the sites they visit often must belong to stupid companies. Tada, instant stupidity-rating!:-)
Hmmm. I tried to figure out what they actually offer. It *sounds* like it includes apple's desktop-on-top-of-unix, a kernel, tools/programs around it, etcetera.
But I can't find any real info on their site. I'm suspecting it to be just a collection of those few programs mentioned (gimp, fortran) that can be gotten from other locations too...
Darwin OS on the x86? I don't remember apple doing that...
This probably is the thing he tries to tell. It is consistent with what redhat does (copy our cd's by all means, but don't sell it for $1 with OUR BRAND on it).
But if only they would utter the sentence you typed instead of that management-speak-filled they usually utter when confronted with this question. What they *say* keeps curling my toes. I really like SuSE, so I hate it when they say it in a hacker-irritating way...
I'm doing some sysadmin work for a small christian foundation which' street address is "faust drive"... Did *that* give me a hard time not to go for lucifer-type names....
I've got a serious question about moderation. My original post was (when I wrote this) modded down twice really quickly as "offtopic".
I was really surprised at this, because it wasn't some first-post or other obvious "offtopic"-candidate. The article was (to me) about retreating from the "real" world into the "virtual" world of the internet. The songtext was the very first thing that sprang to my mind. Now, it might be that poetry and so isn't considered on-topic on slashdot (if so, please reply...). But just look at the following short quote which - to me - is spot-on regarding this article:
I need some friends and conversation
the keyboard shapes the words I'd like to share
my mind's on-line for hard communication
and open to the wider world aware
Here's some songtext from the scottish band "Pallas"
[ insomnia = prolonged and usually abnormal inability to obtain adequate sleep (read: surfing at night)]
Insomniac
the world asleep outside my window
a peaceful orange glow upon the streets
a midnight clear enough for thoughts to breed in
and grow into ideas I'd like to keep
I'd like to keep
I need some friends and conversation
the keyboard shapes the words I'd like to share
my mind's on-line for hard communication
and open to the wider world aware
(and down the wire to the server miles away
I'm calling out to those
who'd help me deal with insomnia)
and down the wire to the server miles away
a world awakens
reaching out to me in my insomnia
diving deep into the flow of information
where I escape from my life of despair
I am free to pursue inspiration
while you're contented just to dream
in your beds - unaware
riding high on the waves of the ether
I am alive with the thrill of the chase
I could stay in this moment forever
and last forever and a day
in a hard interface
I wish that I could crumble to dust
leaving my body - powder and rust
I could remain here - virtual man
cloned into digits - beyond return
no one would miss me - I am alone
ghost at the window - shadow of stone
nothing to lose and heaven to gain
knowledge is power - freed from my sad insomnia
I'm the light - shining bright in the darkness
I am the bearer of knowledge and pain
I am pure as the wind in December
my spirit burns clean as a virtual flame
There is mention in the beginning of the article about it being strange to have so much non-hightech work in such a hightech-area. That's not so strange if you think about it. The whole ecommerce thing is about selling stuff. The stuff that gets sold normally can't be send over the internet, so you need FedEx, the postal service, etc. What they're missing out on letters that get send, they're gaining in packages...
And the high-tech (?) printers and so also in the end need packaging, sending, assembling. You can automate some parts, but...
When you read a story like this, it just keeps reminding me of early 20th century conditions that made socialists movements all too understandable... Some people just don't seem to care. Or not to be allowed to care by some system...
> > It's kinda funny, even people from the same party are disagreeing, one proclaiming the gospel of linux, the other (being half sponsored by Redmond) denouncing it as a threath to Germany's software industry as a whole:-)
>Think about SAP and all the other big companies, is it a good idea to say their work has no value? because that is what you say when you use linux.
?? It's MS that directly links "linux" and "I don't want traditional software". That's not the way I think. I've happily dished out $$$ to VMware for their great product, for example. SAP does have it's value!
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. It wasn't there when I read the article.
I must say however that this doesn't include the part about the applications, but 'only' on the hardware. The application-reporting is the bad part here. Many bug report tools automatically include the available hardware and I don't have any problem with that.
Reinout
No it didn't when the article first appeared on slashdot. They added this info later.
..... article.
I *did* read the
Nice claims, but we the free part of the article doesn't show any actual examples of data that's transmitted. At least not data apart from some generic xml tags.
Any easy way to verify this ourself?
I'm suspecting their claim is true, but I'd like to see the data...
Reinout
Let the oil flow, mix it with a few supertankers of soap, ignite.... No more Saddam!
Great idea!
Reinout
Complete in agreement.
I'm doing research in the building industry and many of the things you mention are valid in the building industry too. In a different wording:
Allmost everything is a one-off project. We ain't building 10000 volkswagens of about the same type. THEN you can do some "traditional" engineering and some heavy process optimisations. Basically the building industry builds prototypes only (apart from soviet housing blocks).
Changing requirements. Yes. The architect changes his mind. The customer changes his mind. The constructor has to do it. Faults creep into the design, the constructor has to compensate for it.
Perhaps an extra analogy:
BAD BAD professional relationship between customer and contractor. The customer wants the cheepest ride possible. The contractor has to accept it. But the customer unvariably made errors in his specification. The contractor is quite happy to do a bit more work to correct that, but he attaches a hefty price tag to it.
Both the construction and the software industry have their big problems. Some can be cured by better processes, some by a culture change, some by better information. But probably not all.
Well, that's where we engineers are for, isn't it? Solving nice problems!
Reinout
I liked your article.
Just needed to say it as only trolls replied to your post till now...
Reinout
You're right. Eleven it is. I must have forgotten to put on all my fingers this morning. It's tricky to count that way. :-)
Reinout
This story at kde.dot.org tells about an effort to translate KDE into all seven official languages in South Africa. No way any commercial program (like windows) is going to go through that effort.
But open source software allows you to do it yourself. KDE is a nice one in that regard because they have good tools for translations and a good process for dealing with it. Before a big release is made, there's plenty of time for the translators to do their job. There is a "string freeze" to allow every translation to get completed.
(Other big projects probably 've got something similar, KDE is just an example where I know it worked).
So: You want the functionality badly? You pay for it (with time or money) and there is nothing to stop you from getting it! Nice, that open source software.
Reinout
A different style of fantasy hit my bookshelf a year ago. David (and Leigh) Eddings are the authors. The fun thing about their books is that it doesn't start out all-hopeless for the main character set.
:-) Enough to competently trample the opposition. There's some damage, but two chapters later they're back in the saddle.
You know, LotR. Nice army Rohan 's got, as does Gondor. But a wee bit underpowered when you look at all those nice, huge armies Sauron has got. Basically hopeless from the beginning.
Many other books keep averting disaster throughout a book by having the main wizard drown the enemy in avelanges, fires and steaming lakes. But without him/her they would be done for.
In come the series by the Eddingses. Especially in their 3-book Tamuli series the good guys have some 100,000 heavily armed knights at their disposal. And a little girl of course
It is eneourmously refreshing compared to the rest of the genre.
If you want to try something of Eddings, beware. There are two 5-piece series and two 3-piece series. The last two belonging together. The most recent book stands on itself though, so that's your best bet. It's called "the redemption of Althalus". It's typical of their genre and mayor fun to read.
Reinout
BRING BACK HARMONY. (....) Harmony is a GPL replacement toolkit ....
I'm getting the feeling that the poster doesn't know that QT now comes under the GPL license (instead of their original non-GPL one). The poster loves KDE, but loaths it's licence. The license is GPL! Nothing wrong with that (as the poster likes linux).
Funny (or not) thing is that RMS is basically backing gnome (LGPL) while at the same time advising everyone to stay clear of the LGPL because it is an inferior language. GPL is preferred. KDE&QT is GPL, so it would be better to put the FSF's weight more (and more openly) behind KDE. By "better" I mean from a purely FSF-political standpoint.
Reinout
That was an awful blow to germany. Especially because a french TGV derailed at top speed earlier. The last part of the train derailed, but everything stayed upright, causing just a few minor injuries, even though this train set a high speed record for derailments (http://mercurio.iet.unipi.it/tgv/wrecks.html, browse down to 21 december 1993).
The main reason the german accident was so terribly fatal was that the derailed train hit a viaduct passing overhead, got stuck and piled up.
Reinout
On a more smiling note, you could see a bit of german-french difference in attitude when you look at their original designs for their high speed trains. Or more exactly to their reactions on the other's creation.
:-)
The germans considered the french trains to be awfully fragile. The french thought the german one to be a heavy, unelegant brute
Currently, the french ones are starting to look a bit more solid and the german ones lighter and more elegant...
Reinout
So all the smart people get filtered out, leaving only dumbasses. Well, the sites they visit often must belong to stupid companies. Tada, instant stupidity-rating! :-)
Reinout
Thanks for the clear info. I *was* messing up the difference between apples darwin and aqua.
Hmmm. I tried to figure out what they actually offer. It *sounds* like it includes apple's desktop-on-top-of-unix, a kernel, tools/programs around it, etcetera.
But I can't find any real info on their site. I'm suspecting it to be just a collection of those few programs mentioned (gimp, fortran) that can be gotten from other locations too...
Darwin OS on the x86? I don't remember apple doing that...
Reinout
thanks, I hadn't looked at tomcat 4 yet. I'll install it and take a look. Probably they've solved one other small problem I had with 3.x too :-)
Reinout
This reply also mentions hot-deploy (and is a bit more technical in it's utterings :-))
I tried a jboss/tomcat combo a few months ago and jboss made tomcat reload .war files without restarting.
.war file in the deploy directory and requesting something out of that context and... automagical reloading.
Just dropping a new
Perhaps tomcat4 does this too.
P.s. this was with the older version 2 jboss. From what I understand jboss 3 blows away everything.
Reinout
This probably is the thing he tries to tell. It is consistent with what redhat does (copy our cd's by all means, but don't sell it for $1 with OUR BRAND on it).
But if only they would utter the sentence you typed instead of that management-speak-filled they usually utter when confronted with this question. What they *say* keeps curling my toes. I really like SuSE, so I hate it when they say it in a hacker-irritating way...
I'm doing some sysadmin work for a small christian foundation which' street address is "faust drive"... Did *that* give me a hard time not to go for lucifer-type names....
I've got a serious question about moderation. My original post was (when I wrote this) modded down twice really quickly as "offtopic".
I was really surprised at this, because it wasn't some first-post or other obvious "offtopic"-candidate. The article was (to me) about retreating from the "real" world into the "virtual" world of the internet. The songtext was the very first thing that sprang to my mind. Now, it might be that poetry and so isn't considered on-topic on slashdot (if so, please reply...). But just look at the following short quote which - to me - is spot-on regarding this article:
I need some friends and conversation
the keyboard shapes the words I'd like to share
my mind's on-line for hard communication
and open to the wider world aware
I need conversation - but I do it only online...
Here's some songtext from the scottish band "Pallas"
[ insomnia = prolonged and usually abnormal inability to obtain adequate sleep (read: surfing at night)]
Insomniac
the world asleep outside my window
a peaceful orange glow upon the streets
a midnight clear enough for thoughts to breed in
and grow into ideas I'd like to keep
I'd like to keep
I need some friends and conversation
the keyboard shapes the words I'd like to share
my mind's on-line for hard communication
and open to the wider world aware
(and down the wire to the server miles away
I'm calling out to those
who'd help me deal with insomnia)
and down the wire to the server miles away
a world awakens
reaching out to me in my insomnia
diving deep into the flow of information
where I escape from my life of despair
I am free to pursue inspiration
while you're contented just to dream
in your beds - unaware
riding high on the waves of the ether
I am alive with the thrill of the chase
I could stay in this moment forever
and last forever and a day
in a hard interface
I wish that I could crumble to dust
leaving my body - powder and rust
I could remain here - virtual man
cloned into digits - beyond return
no one would miss me - I am alone
ghost at the window - shadow of stone
nothing to lose and heaven to gain
knowledge is power - freed from my sad insomnia
I'm the light - shining bright in the darkness
I am the bearer of knowledge and pain
I am pure as the wind in December
my spirit burns clean as a virtual flame
There is mention in the beginning of the article about it being strange to have so much non-hightech work in such a hightech-area. That's not so strange if you think about it. The whole ecommerce thing is about selling stuff. The stuff that gets sold normally can't be send over the internet, so you need FedEx, the postal service, etc. What they're missing out on letters that get send, they're gaining in packages...
And the high-tech (?) printers and so also in the end need packaging, sending, assembling. You can automate some parts, but...
When you read a story like this, it just keeps reminding me of early 20th century conditions that made socialists movements all too understandable... Some people just don't seem to care. Or not to be allowed to care by some system...
Reinout
You're right.
:-)
I half meant "every computer in that building", the other half was me being not German, but from the Netherlands
Reinout
> > It's kinda funny, even people from the same party are disagreeing, one proclaiming the gospel of linux, the other (being half sponsored by Redmond) denouncing it as a threath to Germany's software industry as a whole :-)
>Think about SAP and all the other big companies, is it a good idea to say their work has no value? because that is what you say when you use linux.
?? It's MS that directly links "linux" and "I don't want traditional software". That's not the way I think. I've happily dished out $$$ to VMware for their great product, for example. SAP does have it's value!
Reinout