The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.
His commentary on crass commercialism basically became crass commercialism itself. Why shouldn't it? It was the same basic idea.
As a wise man once said, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
The idea behind open source is "people power." Instead of relying on government or corporations, we'll do it ourselves through a volunteer effort.
Unfortunately, as anyone involved in a serious volunteer effort (e.g. not your beer-drinking weekend "fun" activism) knows, volunteer efforts don't work without strong leadership.
They become "everybody do whatever they want" under the guise of "helping out," and the result is always pointless and bad.
So far, we've ignored problems. Bad code, no documentation, most products either (a) imitations of already successful commercial products or (b) academic projects gone on to a new life as volunteer efforts.
With Heartbleed, it became clear that "people power" in software is not a substitute for strong leadership. Just moving it from the commercial realm to the volunteer realm does not automatically make it good.
Now history has caught up. The open source era is over or at least fundamentally changed.
Technically you're correct. There were other search engines. AltaVista however struck me as the first really useable one and Google the first to do it on a large scale.
I think PageRank is a lesser way of getting things to work than some of those old technologies. It's really good at serving up what's popular, but that's usually also what's wrong or tangential.
I am not anti-volunteer; I spend a lot of my time volunteering.
But you need strong leadership.
Otherwise, everyone does what they want to, which leaves huge holes in the project.
Whether a piece of code is open source or closed source doesn't matter. The quality of the leadership of the team that produces it is vital in both cases.
A Great Leader will produce failed state software/company...
Great Leaders of the North Korean type come about because the people are so afraid of centralized power and capitalism that they support ideologues who promise equality and deliver instead Total Control.
When I first used Google, it was a competitive search engine. I kept using Altavista for a number of years; what ultimately made Google win out was the number of pages it indexed.
Now, I find Google's results are less than encouraging. Too much attention is paid to what products I might want, and how to bump pages like Wikipedia, YouTube and Google news to the top of search results. Google has its interests at heart before mine, and having my interests come first was what made Google a good product.
As it turns out, this is the path of monopoly that most companies, governments and social groups embark upon. They start out struggling, but when they gain power, they turn toward a defensive role which seeks to maintain position and instead of becoming more effective at their task, becoming more effective at widening margins.
The result is a less useful product and a stronger company. To justify itself, said company will begin various social engineering and charity products to convince all of us that they're good guys who are not evil. The reality is that their self-interest has eclipsed ours and now we are lambs to the slaughter.
About $1 billion has been poured into linux development - that is the only reason why it has any quality. Same goes for mozilla and the other minority of good open source projects.
That, and that originally Linux had a semi-fascist leader in Linus Torvalds.
Having corporate pressure on Open Source has generally seemed to improve it, but there are other projects into which money was dumped and results were less than inspiring.
Take OpenOffice. If it were a workable piece of software, it would have dominated offices across the world already. And yet...
A few open source projects have high code quality. Most are mediocre programmers with an attitude of "let me join, I can code" duty-abandonment. I've seen more projects fail not far from the start because of this attitude or the "everyone is an idiot, I'm doing it my way" which is more prevalent of perl/php/python/ruby script writers. Ever notice how there are more "frameworks" for doing things in another language than there are often actual projects to use said libraries? That's about the extent of C the framework writer knows.
Not trying to contradict your point, but I think this is where the need for leadership comes in: choosing what gets done and who does it. If open source could allocate its resources more efficiently, it could do a lot better.
This, by the way, is the exact same problem found in closed-source for-pay software projects. If leadership is sloppy, everyone does what they're comfortable doing, which is usually reinventing wheels and making the "fun" parts of the code work while the other parts are wobbly.
Take this malloc issue in OpenSSL. This was an entirely unnecessary thing for OpenSSL to do, but you see wheel-reinvention repeated in things like Perl.
I disagree. Most open source projects have high code quality. For one once you have your code available for everyone to see you make a greater effort to make something decent. For another most developers I know do not like having bugs on their code. I have known a couple of occasional open source projects with poor code quality which were led by artists or other non-programmers who do not know how to do better but the number of bugs is usually less than in equivalent closed source software I know of. Documentation can indeed be a problem as since the software is constantly evolving even if someone makes the effort to document it that documentation soon gets obsoleted and useless. The best examples in documentation are usually when it is tightly integrated into the code but this is usually only doable in frameworks and other technical products like that.
This whole thing is a non-sequitur. I am speaking of the methods required to make quality software, which involves leadership and the talent (to a degree) of the people involved. It was not a jeremiad against open source software or closed source software; it's an observation about the need they have in common for strong, clear leadership.
Every action that increases the cost of gasoline increases the profit in producing it.
Just a reminder: this includes regulation. It's a great excuse to charge more money and use what the laws do not specifically prohibit as a chance to make even more.
In the present day, the steam plant is located far from the occupants of the car, thus the cars are safer. But otherwise, it's the exact same technology. That's progress(tm)!
Come to think of it, have we made any really startling breakthrus since the internal combustion engine and computer itself? I mean, other than obvious stuff like improving those gadgets and linking them together.
Some things work best when lots of resources are focused on them, and having a strong executive can be very effective if the roles also come with accountability, which is of course where autocrats and many politicians fall down.
This is not a popular idea because it requires people to get over their personal drama and work together toward a goal, instead of finding reasons to justify doing whatever they personally want to do.
However, it's true. Strong leadership gets results. This country was much more "fascist" back in the days when we actually invented real stuff, instead of just moving bits around like a big game of "Puzzle."
Multiple eyes on code, security, these are things that are great about open source, except they aren't. This is a prime example of how bugs get through anyhow, major bugs. So it is now shown beyond a shadow of anyones doubt, open source is NOT superior in these respects.
Our modern malady is to look at methods, not histories.
Great software comes from great leadership and good-to-great talent. But mostly, it involves someone having a good idea and following it through.
Sometimes, that's a single programmer (Bill Atkinson). Most commonly, it's a group that needs a leader.
The quality of that leader then determines the quality of the product. But both industry and open source find this idea terrifying.
Industry would prefer to avoid this and promote exchangeable, replaceable cogs to the position of program/project manager. These people tend to be aggressive and thoughtless and produce gunk software.
Open source would prefer to avoid it because the big secret in open source is that people do what they want to do, not what needs doing. This is why products usually have the "fun, interesting parts" done but lag behind in the stuff no one finds thrilling, including finishing the boring parts of the code, debugging, documentation, etc.
Leadership is essential. The difference is that in open source, you can't fire people, so you can't tell them what to do.
I get the whole general protection of the average citizen from crimes, but we really need to shrink the reach and scope of these bastards.
That's the reason for political correctness: to expand the scope of government past immediate risks to ideological risks. It's a power grab.
The correct way to deal with this is not to be anti-politically correct, but to stop being politically correct. That deprives government of its justification for its new powers.
I recall something like that being the case for the Manning data.
You're right -- I've confused the two. Snowden was the one who took it and leaked it all to the Russians, in addition to leaking several hundred times more than was necessary to prove his point.
Thus... my point stands, although a minor technical error did occur.
I note none of these fanboys admitted that he leaked all of it to the Russians.
I notice he tried to dodge the question of the validity of the survey with "Well we repeated it three times!"...blatant dishonesty, or mental retardation, I can't tell.
Slashdot Mirror
The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.
His commentary on crass commercialism basically became crass commercialism itself. Why shouldn't it? It was the same basic idea.
As a wise man once said, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
The idea behind open source is "people power." Instead of relying on government or corporations, we'll do it ourselves through a volunteer effort.
Unfortunately, as anyone involved in a serious volunteer effort (e.g. not your beer-drinking weekend "fun" activism) knows, volunteer efforts don't work without strong leadership.
They become "everybody do whatever they want" under the guise of "helping out," and the result is always pointless and bad.
So far, we've ignored problems. Bad code, no documentation, most products either (a) imitations of already successful commercial products or (b) academic projects gone on to a new life as volunteer efforts.
With Heartbleed, it became clear that "people power" in software is not a substitute for strong leadership. Just moving it from the commercial realm to the volunteer realm does not automatically make it good.
Now history has caught up. The open source era is over or at least fundamentally changed.
Technically you're correct. There were other search engines. AltaVista however struck me as the first really useable one and Google the first to do it on a large scale.
I think PageRank is a lesser way of getting things to work than some of those old technologies. It's really good at serving up what's popular, but that's usually also what's wrong or tangential.
I am not anti-volunteer; I spend a lot of my time volunteering.
But you need strong leadership.
Otherwise, everyone does what they want to, which leaves huge holes in the project.
Whether a piece of code is open source or closed source doesn't matter. The quality of the leadership of the team that produces it is vital in both cases.
Great Leaders of the North Korean type come about because the people are so afraid of centralized power and capitalism that they support ideologues who promise equality and deliver instead Total Control.
When I first used Google, it was a competitive search engine. I kept using Altavista for a number of years; what ultimately made Google win out was the number of pages it indexed.
Now, I find Google's results are less than encouraging. Too much attention is paid to what products I might want, and how to bump pages like Wikipedia, YouTube and Google news to the top of search results. Google has its interests at heart before mine, and having my interests come first was what made Google a good product.
As it turns out, this is the path of monopoly that most companies, governments and social groups embark upon. They start out struggling, but when they gain power, they turn toward a defensive role which seeks to maintain position and instead of becoming more effective at their task, becoming more effective at widening margins.
The result is a less useful product and a stronger company. To justify itself, said company will begin various social engineering and charity products to convince all of us that they're good guys who are not evil. The reality is that their self-interest has eclipsed ours and now we are lambs to the slaughter.
That assumption is: "equality is good."
Universal good is a difficult concept by itself. Equality is a concept of mathematics, not the more complex nature of reality.
I'd rather have us pick good people and hand them lots of money so they can do even better things with their new power.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely," you might say. To which I respond: only if you assume people are identical. Many can handle power, but not all.
That, and that originally Linux had a semi-fascist leader in Linus Torvalds.
Having corporate pressure on Open Source has generally seemed to improve it, but there are other projects into which money was dumped and results were less than inspiring.
Take OpenOffice. If it were a workable piece of software, it would have dominated offices across the world already. And yet...
Not trying to contradict your point, but I think this is where the need for leadership comes in: choosing what gets done and who does it. If open source could allocate its resources more efficiently, it could do a lot better.
This, by the way, is the exact same problem found in closed-source for-pay software projects. If leadership is sloppy, everyone does what they're comfortable doing, which is usually reinventing wheels and making the "fun" parts of the code work while the other parts are wobbly.
Can you expand on this?
This whole thing is a non-sequitur. I am speaking of the methods required to make quality software, which involves leadership and the talent (to a degree) of the people involved. It was not a jeremiad against open source software or closed source software; it's an observation about the need they have in common for strong, clear leadership.
"Space Muslim" sounds like an ill-conceived spinoff of "Space Moose."
Either way, you've found me out. It's my covert goal to bring Sharia Law(tm) to the Moon.
Just a reminder: this includes regulation. It's a great excuse to charge more money and use what the laws do not specifically prohibit as a chance to make even more.
In the present day, the steam plant is located far from the occupants of the car, thus the cars are safer. But otherwise, it's the exact same technology. That's progress(tm)!
Come to think of it, have we made any really startling breakthrus since the internal combustion engine and computer itself? I mean, other than obvious stuff like improving those gadgets and linking them together.
This is not a popular idea because it requires people to get over their personal drama and work together toward a goal, instead of finding reasons to justify doing whatever they personally want to do.
However, it's true. Strong leadership gets results. This country was much more "fascist" back in the days when we actually invented real stuff, instead of just moving bits around like a big game of "Puzzle."
Our modern malady is to look at methods, not histories.
Great software comes from great leadership and good-to-great talent. But mostly, it involves someone having a good idea and following it through.
Sometimes, that's a single programmer (Bill Atkinson). Most commonly, it's a group that needs a leader.
The quality of that leader then determines the quality of the product. But both industry and open source find this idea terrifying.
Industry would prefer to avoid this and promote exchangeable, replaceable cogs to the position of program/project manager. These people tend to be aggressive and thoughtless and produce gunk software.
Open source would prefer to avoid it because the big secret in open source is that people do what they want to do, not what needs doing. This is why products usually have the "fun, interesting parts" done but lag behind in the stuff no one finds thrilling, including finishing the boring parts of the code, debugging, documentation, etc.
Leadership is essential. The difference is that in open source, you can't fire people, so you can't tell them what to do.
There are more sanctuary countries than Russia. Also, he opted to take the full unencrypted archive with him.
All of this was drama to cover up his desire to release the files to Russia. Now he's on TV, obviously repeating a Putin script.
He's Kim Philby the second and nothing more.
The real question is whether or not the probe screamed "Allahu Ackbar!" at the moment of the crash.
If it did, it goes to Heaven where it will be surrounded by 72 vintage Apple 6502 machines.
When Google finally reveals its true name, Skynet, this is the technology that will allow its T-1000s to exterminate most of humanity.
But don't worry, they'll be sure to take an instagram of your death and post it to your Google+ livestream so your friends and family can mourn.
(There will also be ads for bereavement-related products. Neither Google nor Skynet are monopolies, honest.)
That's the reason for political correctness: to expand the scope of government past immediate risks to ideological risks. It's a power grab.
The correct way to deal with this is not to be anti-politically correct, but to stop being politically correct. That deprives government of its justification for its new powers.
They didn't, apparently, as they were eager to get their hands on him.
Either that, or he was their designated source.
You're right -- I've confused the two. Snowden was the one who took it and leaked it all to the Russians, in addition to leaking several hundred times more than was necessary to prove his point.
Thus... my point stands, although a minor technical error did occur.
I note none of these fanboys admitted that he leaked all of it to the Russians.
Wonder why they "forgot"?
You're right, this guy is a liar.
I notice he tried to dodge the question of the validity of the survey with "Well we repeated it three times!" ...blatant dishonesty, or mental retardation, I can't tell.
Repeated survey isn't the same as a followup.
Are you going to post any more deceptive evasions?
You're denying he handed it over to the Russians? You lie.
You steal the docs, you're responsible for their provenance afterward. Not a hard concept.
Further: we all agree he handed them over to the Russians, right?
I see I'm arguing with subhumans.
Debate over -- I win.