Is it just the School's Out effect? Who would waste moderator points modding down the first five posters, all pointing out that this is a dupe. The point is, it is. So I figure, it's gotta be those millions of school boys and school girls running barefoot through the Slashdot grass, some of whom, having been blessed by the random mod fairie, are modding for the very first time. Or maybe they're just no good troublemakers.
Because the most complex piece of open source code you've written if "fetchmail", Eric.
Fetchmail is not trivial, and is widely used. I would characterize it as a category killer. In addition to that, Eric's development process exemplifies good open source practices.
"Your book is unpublishably bad. "
At last! A subject on which Eric is indeed an expert. Bad writing.
I beg to differ. I consider Eric's writing style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar a model of good essay style.
Except in a few instances, it's not the corporation that's "evil", but the people running it, or their policies. It's time to get past that simplistic view of big is bad and small is good.
This is not the way I see things. A small business is more likely to reflect the personality -- the values -- of its owners. Large corporations by their nature gravitate toward impersonal, dehumanising treatment of their employees, the surrounding community, even their customers. This was seen as a flaw of capitalism in general, but from where I stand, what matters is the size of a company.
Costco is large and not evil
Even Costco cannot look after its people the way Scrooge did after being visited by the three spirits. Managers are constrained by HR policies, memos from Legal, and paltry funding from the Comptroller. Big corporations stage supportive activities, but can no more care about an employee than I care about the ant I squashed on my way to work this morning.
I am grateful for IBM's action in this matter, but will always be wary of them starting to throw their weight around.
This case reminds me of the IBM vs. SCO case, and the Microsoft vs. Sun case, and so many others, in that of all the attempts to monetize free software and the Internet, those most likely to be profitable are lawsuits. Will the Internet be the last new open range for grazing lawyers on Earth? What next, then; the moon? The sun?
As I walk alone I wonder what went wrong
With our love a love that was so strong
And as I still walk on I think of
The things we've done together
While our hearts were young
I'm walking in the rain
Tears are falling and I feel the pain
Wishing you were here by me
To end this misery and I wonder
I won-won-won-won wonder Why why why why why why she ran away
And I wonder where she will stay
My little runaway run-run-run-run runaway
I'm walking in the rain
Tears are falling and I feel the pain
Wishing you were here by me
To end this mesery and I wonder
I won-won-won-won wonder Why why why why why why she ran away
And I wonder where she will stay
My little runaway run-run-run-run runaway
Run run run run runaway.....
My first big shock of disillusionment came while I was in college,
when I discovered (by reading the fine print on the box) that my favorite brand
of blueberry muffin mix contained no blueberries, just little chunks of apple
dyed purple with food coloring.
After reading Philip Greenspun's Dec 1st blog rant, that is pretty much the way
I feel about MIT's OpenCourseware. Who could have imagined that the same
institution that gave us X, Project Athena, Kerberos, the AI Lab, the Media Lab,
Nicholas Negroponte, and of all people Richard Stallman, would turn their back
on all this tradition? Call me naive, but I actually believed that
OpenCourseware was built upon open-source philosophy, that MIT had undertaken a
plan similar to the Chalk Dust portion of my Open Slate project. How sobering
that even at MIT, IT decisions are made the easy way -- read something in a
magazine, hear something at a vendorama, buy Microsoft and hire contractors to
build it.
Okay, so Philip Greenspun is a Harvard man. Hardly a disinterested party. This
may explain the motivation for writing the piece, but I see no reason to
discount his facts.
I am sooooo disappointed! Time to reach for a Bud. You know why I drink Bud?
Because they still deliver it with those horse-drawn wagons. Sometime you have
to brush a little manure off the edge of the can, but hey, that's life!
Devices such as this are a far cry from a plain vanille desktop PC -- notebooks present similar challenges. Getting power management working is bound to be hassel. The biggest challenge I've faced is handwriting recognition. Nothing in the PDA/Slate form factor beats the Newton there.
I am sure Google has better things to use bandwidth on than being/.ed by a bunch of bored geeks. Go pound on someone else's servers; set my google free.
That's $12M Hawaiian Dollars. Well, the 1883 vintage. Based on the current Federal COLA formula a dollar in Hawaii is worth roughly 8oz. in California. That's Classic. But still not enough to buy you a
SPAM Musubi.
I know exactly what you are going through. I hit the same patch of desert when I started the
Open Slate project.
It seems to me it should be simple enough to make a slate mobo, but I just can't find what I'm looking for. Several hardware nuts have suggested that the project begin there, but I'm no hardware geek; making a student-buildable slate is already enough of a reach for my creative insanity. But I can feel it in my bones, how great this world would be if only such a product existed. Open Slate could do for hardware what open-source has done for software.
BEGIN shamelessPlug
The Open Slate project needs more members. If you are male, or female, between the ages of 14 and 64, please join.
END shamelessPlug
"The action taken by SBC Internet Services is intended to protect the privacy of our customers," said SBC spokesman Larry Meyer.
That sounds plausible and laudable. Hooray for SBC. There is nothing gained by questioning their motives with the jab
So SBC, like Verizon, is concerned about the cost/hassle of complying with all the subpoenas it has been receiving.
Direct, tangible, near-term cost avoidance is certainly a prime motivator in corporate decision making, but let's not write off so quickly the possibility that SBC has a fully developed ethics gland. If we/.ers get incensed over the RIAA actions, so can SBC management. Could be a company to work for.
As to whether or not personal information should be turned over, I think the decision should be based largely on the nature of the complaint. If it is a capital crime (murder,...) then yeah. Rape, child sex, yeah. A barking dog, no. The RIAA complaints are a lot closer to a barking dog than a capital crime. The only way to sort this out is in front of a judge, and the DMCA cut them out.
I disagree. The decision makers in this case were, at MIT at least, students themselves at one time. They recall only too well the keg parties, panty raids, and VWs transported into dorm rooms of their student days. The 'net keeps the kids in their rooms, keeps 'em busy, keeps 'em out of trouble. Shut down the 'net? Are you insane? We cannot afford the consequences, the social turmoil, the civic unrest. Shut down the 'net? What's next, women athletes ripping off their tops? Tear up those subpoenas or face a wholesale return to the days of free sex!
I wonder if this stuff has its source in Redmond? Or is this just some SCO stockholders venting about their treatment here? Oh, wait. Summer school is out, and the Fall semester hasn't started yet. That explains it. Unsupervised children banging on papa's keyboard in the middle of the afternoon. No wonder mom can't get through on the phone.
Despite most of the comments so far being about globalization and the new world
order, I believe that the reason so many IT folks are hurting is that America is
still suffering the effects of the techno-binge that blew up just a couple years
ago.
Why is that? Why are so many/.ers experiencing the current softness in terms of
foreign competition? Is this territoriality in action?
To identify the cause as having been the meltdown would be to point the finger
of blame at ourselves, to admit to unchecked greed, of dreams of participating
in one good IPO and spending the rest of our lives skipping rocks across some
tropical bay.
What we have now is not so much a downturn as a return to normality, exacerbated
by deep, profound distrust of anyone outside our tribe. From this statement I
can argue that what is needed is better understanding between world cultures,
before we Americans invade every country we can't control. Bridge building. What
we need is bridge building.
The Society for Pointless Debates Revolving Around Semantics and Nomenclature or SPDRASN
Sorry, that name is already taken, by the
Libertarian Party. Of course, you must be 50+ to be a Spud Raisin; hence the attraction. Younger folk are more interested in
spud raising, and teens of course are totally into spud racing. The best thing about spud racing is that the only thing stolen is the speed over the posted limit, and many have claimed that exceeding the speed limit is neither theft nor a copyright violation.
This argument seems logical, but it is fallacious. I can't publish a version of a Beethoven symphony and claim a copyright to it, just because I "wrote the code."
The thing online classes can never have, IMHO, though is the magic that can take place when a talented professor lectures. Not only do you learn stuff, but they can make even tedious sounding material come alive ("Germany During the Reformation"). Reading books and doing online busywork can't compare.
First, I think you short-change good writing. Given more time, the move to on-line education could foster better writing skills. A "classroom" writing style akin to that of non-academic non-fiction, like Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov. There needs to be more pizzaz than today's acedemic culture approves of.
More to the point, the magic you speak of can be conveyed in video. Given good production, say on par with a decent music video. Good lighting, good angles, good cuts. That is the language of the student body.
Labs led by TAs lack depth. An on-line forum allows a senior faculty member to interact at their discretion with individual students while being watched by thousands more. There is a hint of TV to that, like watching a Barbara Walters interview. I don't think this context is being used effectively in education.
Hold on while I get
ReBirth spun up on my trusty old iMac... lookin' for a
mod... something with a mostly house sound but a little more edge. Now I'll just run these lyrics through text-to-speech and glue it all together in
Cubase. Phat!
I think Thaipad would be a good choice. It might just fool a bunch of Germans into thinking it is a brothel operated by Japanese who cater to bondage enthusiasts, and before the story gets straightened out the Thai government is a few million Euros richer. In fact, this would likely continue until the US decided to invade Thailand to stop the sale of tools of mass computing. While there, the Americans will insist on a new name for the capital city, one which can be spoken aloud in the presence of teens.
What disturbs me is the anti-trust odor of The Phone Co. limiting access to only their customers. Discounts -- fine. To exclude everyone else appears to be a coercive ploy to get people to drop their ISP and switch to Verizon. What's next... you'll need a Sony TV to watch a Sony DVD? Not picking on Sony here, just making a point, which is, evil intentions or not, it just plain looks bad.
Assuming that the decision to use an open-source OS (Linux, FreeBSD,...) on the workstation has been made, what alternatives are there to VFP in both the development role and the customer role? More specifically, what makes JAVA a good choice?
I have used tcl/tk on Linux to build nice windowed apps; works great. I have used Perl to build a cgi script tied to a postgresql database, which also works well. I understand that the tk windowing stuff is useable in Perl, and in Python. And a lot of folks speak well of Python.
Just because VFP can run on Linux under Wine does not mean applications should be developed to use that combination. I want to hear what other people are using in these situations, and what people think ought to be used.
Why not Class Action?
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
IANAL, but I think AOL would make a stronger case with a class action lawsuit. Especially a strategy that solicits input from other ISPs. While I'm glad to see some action against spam, I think AOL has miscalculated the impact of making the action appear to be self promotion. Even if that was not their intent, it has that "look what we are doing" tone.
Can someone familiar with legal matters explain the strategy of filing three of the five suits against unknown people at unknown locations? Is it a matter of discovery?
The
Open Slate design goals include the ability to send display data over the LAN. In particular, sending the output of an app running on the slate to a large display for group presentation, similar to plugging a laptop into a VGA projector. Does anyone have something like this working?
Just think of how much progress the Open Slate Project would make if it could harness the energy expended here on thrashing Microsoft's Smart Display, not to mention Cmdr Taco. A little help would be greatly appreciated.
For anyone still reading, Open Slate is not a thin client. The concept falls somewhere between a full portable computer and a diskless workstation. Linux or FreeBSD OS, X, Gnome, etc. Check it out.
This user model coupled with deregulation of VoIP can be the key to
implementation of computer technology in poor countries.
Who is regulating VoIP? To what specific problems does this phrase apply?
I don't see where the Digital Freedom Initiative wants to put a computer on
every desk. In fact, their agenda sounds pretty much the same as the proposed
alternative, namely to leverage the Internet cafes already there.
When you're talking about computers in Africa, every city is a village.
This is a nice line. Nice in the style of political campaign slogans. Bumper
Sticker Verbiage. All I get from it is that Africa is behind in computer
technology.
The Peace Corps has got to stop acting like Christian missionaries. The way to
help African countries is to help those who manage the country. Let them manage
their own lives. The conservative politics of the current administration assume
that we Americans -- including the Peace Corps. -- are better equipped to run
things than the people we are supposed to be helping. That approach is doomed to fail -- see
the history of colonialism.
I was especially offended
by the pro-commerce tone of the DFI web site. Classic conservatism, use
taxpayer's money to further "private" enterprise:
The Digital Freedom Initiative (DFI) will help meet the challenge by promoting
free market based regulatory and legal structures and placing volunteers in
businesses and community centers to provide small businesses and entrepreneurs
with the information and communications technology skills and knowledge to
operate more efficiently while competing in the global economy. These objectives
can be achieved in partnership with U.S. business entities whose voluntary,
innovative and entrepreneurial participation in the DFI provides access to new
markets and competitive opportunities for developing products and services in
emerging economies.
Whatever happened to population control, sanitation, natural resource
management, and basic education? Since when is it my government's job to help
business entrepreneurs in other countries get to market? So Walmart can sell
more cheap clothes? The Peace Corps needs to get back to basics of helping to
ensure a fundamental level of safety, health, and liberty for every human being.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just the School's Out effect? Who would waste moderator points modding down the first five posters, all pointing out that this is a dupe. The point is, it is. So I figure, it's gotta be those millions of school boys and school girls running barefoot through the Slashdot grass, some of whom, having been blessed by the random mod fairie, are modding for the very first time. Or maybe they're just no good troublemakers.
Fetchmail is not trivial, and is widely used. I would characterize it as a category killer. In addition to that, Eric's development process exemplifies good open source practices.
"Your book is unpublishably bad. "
At last! A subject on which Eric is indeed an expert. Bad writing.
I beg to differ. I consider Eric's writing style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar a model of good essay style.
This is not the way I see things. A small business is more likely to reflect the personality -- the values -- of its owners. Large corporations by their nature gravitate toward impersonal, dehumanising treatment of their employees, the surrounding community, even their customers. This was seen as a flaw of capitalism in general, but from where I stand, what matters is the size of a company.
Costco is large and not evil
Even Costco cannot look after its people the way Scrooge did after being visited by the three spirits. Managers are constrained by HR policies, memos from Legal, and paltry funding from the Comptroller. Big corporations stage supportive activities, but can no more care about an employee than I care about the ant I squashed on my way to work this morning.
I am grateful for IBM's action in this matter, but will always be wary of them starting to throw their weight around.
This case reminds me of the IBM vs. SCO case, and the Microsoft vs. Sun case, and so many others, in that of all the attempts to monetize free software and the Internet, those most likely to be profitable are lawsuits. Will the Internet be the last new open range for grazing lawyers on Earth? What next, then; the moon? The sun?
As I walk alone I wonder what went wrong
With our love a love that was so strong
And as I still walk on I think of
The things we've done together
While our hearts were young
I'm walking in the rain
Tears are falling and I feel the pain
Wishing you were here by me
To end this misery and I wonder
I won-won-won-won wonder
Why why why why why why she ran away
And I wonder where she will stay
My little runaway run-run-run-run runaway
I'm walking in the rain
Tears are falling and I feel the pain
Wishing you were here by me
To end this mesery and I wonder
I won-won-won-won wonder
Why why why why why why she ran away
And I wonder where she will stay
My little runaway run-run-run-run runaway
Run run run run runaway.....
After reading Philip Greenspun's Dec 1st blog rant, that is pretty much the way I feel about MIT's OpenCourseware. Who could have imagined that the same institution that gave us X, Project Athena, Kerberos, the AI Lab, the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, and of all people Richard Stallman, would turn their back on all this tradition? Call me naive, but I actually believed that OpenCourseware was built upon open-source philosophy, that MIT had undertaken a plan similar to the Chalk Dust portion of my Open Slate project. How sobering that even at MIT, IT decisions are made the easy way -- read something in a magazine, hear something at a vendorama, buy Microsoft and hire contractors to build it.
Okay, so Philip Greenspun is a Harvard man. Hardly a disinterested party. This may explain the motivation for writing the piece, but I see no reason to discount his facts.
I am sooooo disappointed! Time to reach for a Bud. You know why I drink Bud? Because they still deliver it with those horse-drawn wagons. Sometime you have to brush a little manure off the edge of the can, but hey, that's life!
Visit the Open Slate Project featuring Chalk Dust.
Devices such as this are a far cry from a plain vanille desktop PC -- notebooks present similar challenges. Getting power management working is bound to be hassel. The biggest challenge I've faced is handwriting recognition. Nothing in the PDA/Slate form factor beats the Newton there.
Diebold -- sounds like they probably will.
I am sure Google has better things to use bandwidth on than being /.ed by a bunch of bored geeks. Go pound on someone else's servers; set my google free.
That's $12M Hawaiian Dollars. Well, the 1883 vintage. Based on the current Federal COLA formula a dollar in Hawaii is worth roughly 8oz. in California. That's Classic. But still not enough to buy you a SPAM Musubi.
BEGIN shamelessPlug
The Open Slate project needs more members. If you are male, or female, between the ages of 14 and 64, please join.
END shamelessPlug
As to whether or not personal information should be turned over, I think the decision should be based largely on the nature of the complaint. If it is a capital crime (murder, ...) then yeah. Rape, child sex, yeah. A barking dog, no. The RIAA complaints are a lot closer to a barking dog than a capital crime. The only way to sort this out is in front of a judge, and the DMCA cut them out.
I disagree. The decision makers in this case were, at MIT at least, students themselves at one time. They recall only too well the keg parties, panty raids, and VWs transported into dorm rooms of their student days. The 'net keeps the kids in their rooms, keeps 'em busy, keeps 'em out of trouble. Shut down the 'net? Are you insane? We cannot afford the consequences, the social turmoil, the civic unrest. Shut down the 'net? What's next, women athletes ripping off their tops? Tear up those subpoenas or face a wholesale return to the days of free sex!
I wonder if this stuff has its source in Redmond? Or is this just some SCO stockholders venting about their treatment here? Oh, wait. Summer school is out, and the Fall semester hasn't started yet. That explains it. Unsupervised children banging on papa's keyboard in the middle of the afternoon. No wonder mom can't get through on the phone.
Why is that? Why are so many /.ers experiencing the current softness in terms of
foreign competition? Is this territoriality in action?
To identify the cause as having been the meltdown would be to point the finger of blame at ourselves, to admit to unchecked greed, of dreams of participating in one good IPO and spending the rest of our lives skipping rocks across some tropical bay.
What we have now is not so much a downturn as a return to normality, exacerbated by deep, profound distrust of anyone outside our tribe. From this statement I can argue that what is needed is better understanding between world cultures, before we Americans invade every country we can't control. Bridge building. What we need is bridge building.
Sorry, that name is already taken, by the Libertarian Party. Of course, you must be 50+ to be a Spud Raisin; hence the attraction. Younger folk are more interested in spud raising, and teens of course are totally into spud racing. The best thing about spud racing is that the only thing stolen is the speed over the posted limit, and many have claimed that exceeding the speed limit is neither theft nor a copyright violation.
This argument seems logical, but it is fallacious. I can't publish a version of a Beethoven symphony and claim a copyright to it, just because I "wrote the code."
First, I think you short-change good writing. Given more time, the move to on-line education could foster better writing skills. A "classroom" writing style akin to that of non-academic non-fiction, like Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov. There needs to be more pizzaz than today's acedemic culture approves of.
More to the point, the magic you speak of can be conveyed in video. Given good production, say on par with a decent music video. Good lighting, good angles, good cuts. That is the language of the student body.
Labs led by TAs lack depth. An on-line forum allows a senior faculty member to interact at their discretion with individual students while being watched by thousands more. There is a hint of TV to that, like watching a Barbara Walters interview. I don't think this context is being used effectively in education.
Hold on while I get ReBirth spun up on my trusty old iMac ... lookin' for a
mod ... something with a mostly house sound but a little more edge. Now I'll just run these lyrics through text-to-speech and glue it all together in
Cubase. Phat!
I think Thaipad would be a good choice. It might just fool a bunch of Germans into thinking it is a brothel operated by Japanese who cater to bondage enthusiasts, and before the story gets straightened out the Thai government is a few million Euros richer. In fact, this would likely continue until the US decided to invade Thailand to stop the sale of tools of mass computing. While there, the Americans will insist on a new name for the capital city, one which can be spoken aloud in the presence of teens.
Boy, am I ready for a long weekend!
What disturbs me is the anti-trust odor of The Phone Co. limiting access to only their customers. Discounts -- fine. To exclude everyone else appears to be a coercive ploy to get people to drop their ISP and switch to Verizon. What's next ... you'll need a Sony TV to watch a Sony DVD? Not picking on Sony here, just making a point, which is, evil intentions or not, it just plain looks bad.
Assuming that the decision to use an open-source OS (Linux, FreeBSD, ...) on the workstation has been made, what alternatives are there to VFP in both the development role and the customer role? More specifically, what makes JAVA a good choice?
I have used tcl/tk on Linux to build nice windowed apps; works great. I have used Perl to build a cgi script tied to a postgresql database, which also works well. I understand that the tk windowing stuff is useable in Perl, and in Python. And a lot of folks speak well of Python.
Just because VFP can run on Linux under Wine does not mean applications should be developed to use that combination. I want to hear what other people are using in these situations, and what people think ought to be used.
Can someone familiar with legal matters explain the strategy of filing three of the five suits against unknown people at unknown locations? Is it a matter of discovery?
Just think of how much progress the Open Slate Project would make if it could harness the energy expended here on thrashing Microsoft's Smart Display, not to mention Cmdr Taco. A little help would be greatly appreciated.
For anyone still reading, Open Slate is not a thin client. The concept falls somewhere between a full portable computer and a diskless workstation. Linux or FreeBSD OS, X, Gnome, etc. Check it out.
Who is regulating VoIP? To what specific problems does this phrase apply?
I don't see where the Digital Freedom Initiative wants to put a computer on every desk. In fact, their agenda sounds pretty much the same as the proposed alternative, namely to leverage the Internet cafes already there.
When you're talking about computers in Africa, every city is a village.
This is a nice line. Nice in the style of political campaign slogans. Bumper Sticker Verbiage. All I get from it is that Africa is behind in computer technology.
The Peace Corps has got to stop acting like Christian missionaries. The way to help African countries is to help those who manage the country. Let them manage their own lives. The conservative politics of the current administration assume that we Americans -- including the Peace Corps. -- are better equipped to run things than the people we are supposed to be helping. That approach is doomed to fail -- see the history of colonialism.
I was especially offended by the pro-commerce tone of the DFI web site. Classic conservatism, use taxpayer's money to further "private" enterprise:
The Digital Freedom Initiative (DFI) will help meet the challenge by promoting free market based regulatory and legal structures and placing volunteers in businesses and community centers to provide small businesses and entrepreneurs with the information and communications technology skills and knowledge to operate more efficiently while competing in the global economy. These objectives can be achieved in partnership with U.S. business entities whose voluntary, innovative and entrepreneurial participation in the DFI provides access to new markets and competitive opportunities for developing products and services in emerging economies.
Whatever happened to population control, sanitation, natural resource management, and basic education? Since when is it my government's job to help business entrepreneurs in other countries get to market? So Walmart can sell more cheap clothes? The Peace Corps needs to get back to basics of helping to ensure a fundamental level of safety, health, and liberty for every human being.
Fear Pox Americana.