If it's a software vendor, there's one question: "What's your Microsoft plan?" Though for some spaces, it might better be phrased "What's your Apple plan?"
They capture 30% of whatever market they enter -- by bundling with other agreements, by marketing more effectively, occasionally even by making a product that people want. Add in pressure to expand into new markets so you can show growth to Wall Street, and it's obvious that sooner or later there's going to be an 800 lb gorilla in the cage with you.
Potential responses: 1) "They're not interested in this space." Either the employer's got their head in the sand, or they're right... and there's not enough money there for long term viability. 2) "We've already faced that threat and won, and we're doing some innovative things to stay ahead." This is good. 3) "I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you." They could be right, and you're going to be working in a very strange environment... or they could just be paranoid loonies, and you're going to be working in a very strange environment.
Can you look yourself in the mirror while you say those words?
To each his own, I suppose, but it is my considered opinion that Apple's laptops are what you'd get if Sony had the same level of control over driver software and OS. Flashy ideas marred by poor execution and a complete disregard for usability, maintainability, and consistency.
If you're bored, code something in your spare time. Read books on dealing with dysfunctional organizations; over time, you might be able to improve the place.
I highly recommend Machiavelli (no, I'm not joking). I checked it out from the library as soon as I got back from my second interview with my current employer, and the precepts have been crucial to survival and success here.
I'm not saying it's good or bad or indifferent that reading The Prince is necessary, it's just a realization. If the place you're going to work is run on politics, you need to understand the rules. If you think that the place you work isn't run on politics, that just means that the people in charge agree with you and are taking care of your needs for you.
Making career decisions based on Slashdot discussions is insane. You might as well go ask the guys huffing glue in back of the gas station. Fewer people around here actually have paying jobs in the field than would like to present themselves as having such.
Code is easier and more fun to write than it is to read. The first hurdle in front of this magical "re-usable resource" is that no one even wants to take the time to read it and decide if it's any good; the natural inclination is to write your own.
Secondly, programmers are just as crowd-driven as anyone else; re-using code from a failed project is swimming upstream, just like writing code in an unpopular language.
Third strike -- potential legal encumbrance. On the off chance that your project is successful, who know who might come out of the woodwork with a potential claim against it? Look at the SCO Linux lawsuit; even if the claims against your project are totally bogus, they'll still suck years out of your life.
Regardless of whether it's right to download pirated material, there is a law against it and there are fines which can be levied. The risks of getting caught and fined are on par with those related to jaywalking.
Now, watch a busy downtown intersection with a lot of young people in the area; I live near a downtown which is between a high school and a university, so this is a common scene. The students blithely jaywalk in any situation which will not lead to death. Granny in a compact? Jaywalk. Bus? Don't jaywalk. Bike cop sitting at the corner? Jaywalk, s/he won't do anything, because everyone knows that you can't pay the $400 ticket. Now, witness the cop's reaction if an adult wearing a suit joins the crowd of jaywalkers...
People with careers, houses, families and cars are less likely to risk their material well-being for a few dollars worth of entertainment.
You're not understanding the code word. He doesn't mean "a call center full of tech support people" when he says support, he means "a cheap replacement for your sorry butt".
In the first corner, Free software supported by a relatively rare and relatively expensive "classic IT guy", AKA BOFH-in-training.
In the second corner, Expensive software which everyone with a pulse and a DeVry certificate knows at least a little about. Every vendor he talks to, every resume across his desk, every consultant in the door knows the basics.
Let's walk through a scenario: What email platform should we use?
Free: Well, there's four serious options, three of which are options in my favorite OS's package management system. I'll be happy to benchmark them all and try out the three different AV solutions and four different mailbox delivery options... yeah, that's a different function, we'll be using IMAP on MAILDIR of course so we can ignore the seven old school solutions. Don't worry, the whole thing will be held together with some Perl and Procmail-fu, I'll understand it completely. Sure Outlook will work, but I'll have to figure out something for calendaring... everything for that is in beta, but a couple of them look really promising (never mind that their pages were last updated in 2004 just before the lead developer graduated).
Expensive: Microsoft Exchange. We'll need AV, would you prefer Symantec or McAfee? I don't know how to do any of this, but here's a VAR who's done it fifty times and can knock it out from bare metal to migrated end users in ten days. That includes (barely) enough training to keep me from screwing the pooch, and a support line I can call.
I'll add something to this otherwise excellent list: Bear your audience in mind, and adjust expectations accordingly.
I write open source utilities for a commercial desktop management system, names withheld, &c. Downloads are in the hundreds, but I've gotten one actual patch and two ideas from my user community in four years. The reason why? I write in Perl, and very few desktop management people know Perl. They know Microsoft languages, and they know how to use AutoIT or InstallShield, and they don't have any more time to learn a new language than I do.
I'm not going to start over in a new language, and they're not going to learn Perl, so the "open source"-ness of the code is completely meaningless and useless. I could include a few pages of a Swahili dictionary, call that the source, and get the same amount of help. "Many eyes make bugs shallow" is BS -- "A lot of attention makes bugs shallow", and attention to your source requires someone who knows the language, knows the tools that you use to create, maintain, test and publish... in short, knows at least a little about how to be a developer.
Since that is the way that it is, I have just accepted that I won't be getting any help. I like the projects, so I keep doing them anyway and posting them for free. If it gets to be too much like work, I'll start to charge a few bucks and see what happens. You might need to do the same, and accept the inevitable drop off in users. Presumably you're writing the code at least partially for fun, but you're publishing it for lots of reasons... altruism, self-promotion, and cash are all good reasons, and you don't have to pick any one of them.
Those who've read some software history might recognize this point as the place where the rest of the world branched away from RMS:)
Yes, exactly like any other dead technology, open source or otherwise... relegated to an ever smaller niche, and finally disappearing completely when the effort of support becomes too much.
This industry drops old technologies and reinvents new and shiny all the time for no good reason, while avoiding the real, difficult problems. Why should ReiserFS's fate be any different?
Take a look at some contribution statistics for open source projects; the vast majority are one or two person shows, with maybe a handful of patches over vast stretches of time. That picture improves a bit for bigger projects, but ReiserFS doesn't really count as a big project. You'll of course appreciate this interview comment:
"I do not think that just being arrested will affect anything so long as Hans is not actually convicted," says Oleg Drokin, the former release manager at Namesys. "If he is convicted, that might cause problems for Namesys [because] it is operated solely by Hans."
The main concern, according to Drokin, is whether Namesys employees, many of whom live in Russia, will continue to receive their salaries. If the money stops flowing, "some people will stop working, of course."
However, Drokin thinks that situation is unlikely. "Hans suspected that he would be suspected from the very beginning," he adds. "I would think he took necessary steps for Namesys employees to continue to work even in his absence and even Namesys itself is safe for at least some time." -- http://www.linux.com/feature/57759, bold emphasis mine.
And sure enough, http://www.namesys.com is gone, and here's the article marking their demise: http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9851703-39.html. So yes, the code is still out there... just waiting for some developer to take a look at it, shrug, and demand that the whole thing be rewritten from scratch, because no one ever wants to take on an existing project and finish it off.
It's dead, Jim. The source code is out there, but without anyone to work on it, it might as well be a collection of ads for whalebone corsets. Of course, that's just my opinion, and if I'm wrong, so much the better for Linux.
Sorry what didn't work for me? Red Hat 5.0? Linux eventually did work for me, where OS/2 and BSD didn't. However, it's not my primary operating system any more, though I still use it for servers. I gave up on it as a desktop/laptop OS in 2004. Every now and then I'll try the latest Ubuntu on a laptop, but there's always some glaring problem that keeps it from getting anywhere.
You say the story is an illustration of Linux's strength, but actually it's an illustration of Linux's greatest weakness. It's fabulous that there's More Than One Way To Do It, in theory. In practice, half of the ways don't work, and if you dig into why you find out that the path you were following was some side project that worked once, got posted to the web, and hasn't been touched since. The other options are divided into two or more ideological camps in a steel cage deathmatch, building, destroying, and rebuilding multiple wheels.
And oh, how I cursed them. I forget the details, but some application needed to update the OS was shipped broken. This was Red Hat 5.0, mind you, when you still had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to milk the cow. I eventually got Red Hat to work, but I've never liked their approach. For a while there Mandrake and SuSE would trade spots as "the working Red Hat", but Debian just kept getting better and better and better.
If it's filling four racks, assuming that 1/4 of the space is taken up with punch panels, it's enough gear to have some fans. Ever enjoyed the presence of a backbone switch like the Catalyst 6500 series? Even a stack of 2900s will produce a significant amount of noise and heat.
I took that class, in January of 2001. I still write in Perl when I need to code something (not that often anymore). It's certainly possible to write bad code in Perl, but then it's also pretty easy to write bad stories in English.
I find it deeply disturbing that after reading the 59 comments available at threshold 2, I haven't seen any that demonstrate the slightest familiarity with how a HIPS program works.
Your IT administrator sets the whitelist by using learn mode, not Symantec.
I have a Logitech trackball, and a three button mouse, and an Apple whatever-they-call-that-fancy-mouse-with-no-button s, still in shrinkwrap (it was free). All gather dust because I use laptops exclusively now. I use laptops because they're portable. They're less portable if they've got to deal with an external mouse, so I use the trackpad.
It's DRM free. I've been a happy customer for years, and they sell totally unencumbered high bit rate MP3 files. No iTunes, no iPod required: I play my music on Squeezeboxes and a rockboxed iRiver iHP-120.
...and who have an above-average impact on what other people will buy....
while I agree with most of your post, that's a questionable statement unless you're referring to inverse impact. While "our" purchasing choices are certainly bellwethers to a class of goods, the actual products that we buy are almost never the ones that see wide commercial success. iPods and Tivos are both excellent examples of herd products that were dismissed as junk by the geeks until the leaders we bought are no longer available in the market. On a broader scale, think laser disc versus VCR.
I agree that code written to the Tcl/Tk style guide is clean, though messy Tcl exists. Sort of like Perl, the language everyone loves to blame for their sophomore code.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obviously the Thuktun Flishithy
maybe they're just as parochial as we are... nah.
If it's a software vendor, there's one question: "What's your Microsoft plan?" Though for some spaces, it might better be phrased "What's your Apple plan?"
They capture 30% of whatever market they enter -- by bundling with other agreements, by marketing more effectively, occasionally even by making a product that people want. Add in pressure to expand into new markets so you can show growth to Wall Street, and it's obvious that sooner or later there's going to be an 800 lb gorilla in the cage with you.
Potential responses:
1) "They're not interested in this space." Either the employer's got their head in the sand, or they're right... and there's not enough money there for long term viability.
2) "We've already faced that threat and won, and we're doing some innovative things to stay ahead." This is good.
3) "I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you." They could be right, and you're going to be working in a very strange environment... or they could just be paranoid loonies, and you're going to be working in a very strange environment.
averages 18,500 hits per day
my stats say:
Robots 27 %
Unknown 6 %
Firefox 8 %
MSIE 3 %
Really?
I mean, really?
Can you look yourself in the mirror while you say those words?
To each his own, I suppose, but it is my considered opinion that Apple's laptops are what you'd get if Sony had the same level of control over driver software and OS. Flashy ideas marred by poor execution and a complete disregard for usability, maintainability, and consistency.
If you're bored, code something in your spare time. Read books on dealing with dysfunctional organizations; over time, you might be able to improve the place.
I highly recommend Machiavelli (no, I'm not joking). I checked it out from the library as soon as I got back from my second interview with my current employer, and the precepts have been crucial to survival and success here.
I'm not saying it's good or bad or indifferent that reading The Prince is necessary, it's just a realization. If the place you're going to work is run on politics, you need to understand the rules. If you think that the place you work isn't run on politics, that just means that the people in charge agree with you and are taking care of your needs for you.
Making career decisions based on Slashdot discussions is insane. You might as well go ask the guys huffing glue in back of the gas station. Fewer people around here actually have paying jobs in the field than would like to present themselves as having such.
and that is why I write big programs in Perl... so that they don't have to be bigger.
Code is easier and more fun to write than it is to read. The first hurdle in front of this magical "re-usable resource" is that no one even wants to take the time to read it and decide if it's any good; the natural inclination is to write your own.
Secondly, programmers are just as crowd-driven as anyone else; re-using code from a failed project is swimming upstream, just like writing code in an unpopular language.
Third strike -- potential legal encumbrance. On the off chance that your project is successful, who know who might come out of the woodwork with a potential claim against it? Look at the SCO Linux lawsuit; even if the claims against your project are totally bogus, they'll still suck years out of your life.
They're about risk.
Regardless of whether it's right to download pirated material, there is a law against it and there are fines which can be levied. The risks of getting caught and fined are on par with those related to jaywalking.
Now, watch a busy downtown intersection with a lot of young people in the area; I live near a downtown which is between a high school and a university, so this is a common scene. The students blithely jaywalk in any situation which will not lead to death. Granny in a compact? Jaywalk. Bus? Don't jaywalk. Bike cop sitting at the corner? Jaywalk, s/he won't do anything, because everyone knows that you can't pay the $400 ticket. Now, witness the cop's reaction if an adult wearing a suit joins the crowd of jaywalkers...
People with careers, houses, families and cars are less likely to risk their material well-being for a few dollars worth of entertainment.
Sir, you restore my hope in Slashdot and bring a little tear to my eye. Well-said.
You're not understanding the code word. He doesn't mean "a call center full of tech support people" when he says support, he means "a cheap replacement for your sorry butt".
In the first corner, Free software supported by a relatively rare and relatively expensive "classic IT guy", AKA BOFH-in-training.
In the second corner, Expensive software which everyone with a pulse and a DeVry certificate knows at least a little about. Every vendor he talks to, every resume across his desk, every consultant in the door knows the basics.
Let's walk through a scenario: What email platform should we use?
Free: Well, there's four serious options, three of which are options in my favorite OS's package management system. I'll be happy to benchmark them all and try out the three different AV solutions and four different mailbox delivery options... yeah, that's a different function, we'll be using IMAP on MAILDIR of course so we can ignore the seven old school solutions. Don't worry, the whole thing will be held together with some Perl and Procmail-fu, I'll understand it completely. Sure Outlook will work, but I'll have to figure out something for calendaring... everything for that is in beta, but a couple of them look really promising (never mind that their pages were last updated in 2004 just before the lead developer graduated).
Expensive: Microsoft Exchange. We'll need AV, would you prefer Symantec or McAfee? I don't know how to do any of this, but here's a VAR who's done it fifty times and can knock it out from bare metal to migrated end users in ten days. That includes (barely) enough training to keep me from screwing the pooch, and a support line I can call.
I'll add something to this otherwise excellent list: Bear your audience in mind, and adjust expectations accordingly.
:)
I write open source utilities for a commercial desktop management system, names withheld, &c. Downloads are in the hundreds, but I've gotten one actual patch and two ideas from my user community in four years. The reason why? I write in Perl, and very few desktop management people know Perl. They know Microsoft languages, and they know how to use AutoIT or InstallShield, and they don't have any more time to learn a new language than I do.
I'm not going to start over in a new language, and they're not going to learn Perl, so the "open source"-ness of the code is completely meaningless and useless. I could include a few pages of a Swahili dictionary, call that the source, and get the same amount of help. "Many eyes make bugs shallow" is BS -- "A lot of attention makes bugs shallow", and attention to your source requires someone who knows the language, knows the tools that you use to create, maintain, test and publish... in short, knows at least a little about how to be a developer.
Since that is the way that it is, I have just accepted that I won't be getting any help. I like the projects, so I keep doing them anyway and posting them for free. If it gets to be too much like work, I'll start to charge a few bucks and see what happens. You might need to do the same, and accept the inevitable drop off in users. Presumably you're writing the code at least partially for fun, but you're publishing it for lots of reasons... altruism, self-promotion, and cash are all good reasons, and you don't have to pick any one of them.
Those who've read some software history might recognize this point as the place where the rest of the world branched away from RMS
Yes, exactly like any other dead technology, open source or otherwise... relegated to an ever smaller niche, and finally disappearing completely when the effort of support becomes too much.
This industry drops old technologies and reinvents new and shiny all the time for no good reason, while avoiding the real, difficult problems. Why should ReiserFS's fate be any different?
Take a look at some contribution statistics for open source projects; the vast majority are one or two person shows, with maybe a handful of patches over vast stretches of time. That picture improves a bit for bigger projects, but ReiserFS doesn't really count as a big project. You'll of course appreciate this interview comment:
"I do not think that just being arrested will affect anything so long as Hans is not actually convicted," says Oleg Drokin, the former release manager at Namesys. "If he is convicted, that might cause problems for Namesys [because] it is operated solely by Hans."
The main concern, according to Drokin, is whether Namesys employees, many of whom live in Russia, will continue to receive their salaries. If the money stops flowing, "some people will stop working, of course."
However, Drokin thinks that situation is unlikely. "Hans suspected that he would be suspected from the very beginning," he adds. "I would think he took necessary steps for Namesys employees to continue to work even in his absence and even Namesys itself is safe for at least some time." -- http://www.linux.com/feature/57759, bold emphasis mine.
And sure enough, http://www.namesys.com is gone, and here's the article marking their demise: http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9851703-39.html. So yes, the code is still out there... just waiting for some developer to take a look at it, shrug, and demand that the whole thing be rewritten from scratch, because no one ever wants to take on an existing project and finish it off.
It's dead, Jim. The source code is out there, but without anyone to work on it, it might as well be a collection of ads for whalebone corsets. Of course, that's just my opinion, and if I'm wrong, so much the better for Linux.
Sorry what didn't work for me? Red Hat 5.0? Linux eventually did work for me, where OS/2 and BSD didn't. However, it's not my primary operating system any more, though I still use it for servers. I gave up on it as a desktop/laptop OS in 2004. Every now and then I'll try the latest Ubuntu on a laptop, but there's always some glaring problem that keeps it from getting anywhere.
You say the story is an illustration of Linux's strength, but actually it's an illustration of Linux's greatest weakness. It's fabulous that there's More Than One Way To Do It, in theory. In practice, half of the ways don't work, and if you dig into why you find out that the path you were following was some side project that worked once, got posted to the web, and hasn't been touched since. The other options are divided into two or more ideological camps in a steel cage deathmatch, building, destroying, and rebuilding multiple wheels.
And oh, how I cursed them. I forget the details, but some application needed to update the OS was shipped broken. This was Red Hat 5.0, mind you, when you still had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to milk the cow. I eventually got Red Hat to work, but I've never liked their approach. For a while there Mandrake and SuSE would trade spots as "the working Red Hat", but Debian just kept getting better and better and better.
If it's filling four racks, assuming that 1/4 of the space is taken up with punch panels, it's enough gear to have some fans. Ever enjoyed the presence of a backbone switch like the Catalyst 6500 series? Even a stack of 2900s will produce a significant amount of noise and heat.
I took that class, in January of 2001. I still write in Perl when I need to code something (not that often anymore). It's certainly possible to write bad code in Perl, but then it's also pretty easy to write bad stories in English.
About twelve years ago I had a meeting with a guy who used "brick" for "image", as in imaging PCs.
"Will your company brick all our desktops?"
"WTF are you talking about?"
After it got straightened out, he insisted that this was mainframe speak. I've never heard the term used that way again, though.
I find it deeply disturbing that after reading the 59 comments available at threshold 2, I haven't seen any that demonstrate the slightest familiarity with how a HIPS program works.
Your IT administrator sets the whitelist by using learn mode, not Symantec.
I have a Logitech trackball, and a three button mouse, and an Apple whatever-they-call-that-fancy-mouse-with-no-button s, still in shrinkwrap (it was free). All gather dust because I use laptops exclusively now. I use laptops because they're portable. They're less portable if they've got to deal with an external mouse, so I use the trackpad.
It's DRM free. I've been a happy customer for years, and they sell totally unencumbered high bit rate MP3 files. No iTunes, no iPod required: I play my music on Squeezeboxes and a rockboxed iRiver iHP-120.
...and who have an above-average impact on what other people will buy....
while I agree with most of your post, that's a questionable statement unless you're referring to inverse impact. While "our" purchasing choices are certainly bellwethers to a class of goods, the actual products that we buy are almost never the ones that see wide commercial success. iPods and Tivos are both excellent examples of herd products that were dismissed as junk by the geeks until the leaders we bought are no longer available in the market. On a broader scale, think laser disc versus VCR.
What about me? I'm not important and I hardly ever post here any more, so... oh, wait.
n t&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&site=chm_collection&client =chm_collection&proxystylesheet=chm_collection&out put=xml_no_dtd1 .html
And to apologize for that lame joke, here's some research:
The Computer History Museum has transcripts and interviews, but no source: http://search.computerhistory.org/search?q=macpai
Another interview with the original reference to putting MacPaint in there: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/00
I agree that code written to the Tcl/Tk style guide is clean, though messy Tcl exists. Sort of like Perl, the language everyone loves to blame for their sophomore code.