Not reasonable- debugging stuff on the mindstorms is a serious PITA. The best course of action is to write it right the First Time- not something that often happens with first years. That said, if you taught them to program something PC side that then remotely controlled the robot, it might be debuggable/doable for first years while providing a/lot/ more interesting feedback than typical first-year projects.
1) I won't link directly, because in this case, it's a Bad Thing(TM), but go check Bugzilla for Sawfish... it's a nasty sight. Many, many, many thanks;)
This is particularly a problem for sawfish; not only is it a complex, niche codebase involving fairly obscure stuff (X) that not as many people have experience with, it is also in Lisp, which narrows down the number of potential hackers even more. Nothing wrong with Lisp, mind you, just not as many proficient lisp hackers in the community as there are C hackers. And that does make a difference to community supported projects.
Every time you buy a DVD you are paying the salaries of the lawyers who put Johansen in jail, you are paying the bribes^Wdonations for the congressmen who wrote the DMCA, and you are paying for more propaganda from the MPAA. It doesn't matter what player you are using, as long as you are paying for the DVD in the first place.
Duke has had IPv6 available on resnet since at least some time during the '99-'00 academic year, so at least two and nearly three years. You just had to know who to ask to get an IP address:)
The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies? Speaking personally, not for Ximian: this question assumes that GNOME is in some way 'American'. That's... fairly wrong. Ximian has employees all over the place; GNOME definitely has contributors on every continent, except maybe Africa, and Sun's GNOME effort has always been based in Ireland. And of course the project was started by our favorite Mexican. So... I don't know. The answer to your question might be interesting or relevant if GNOME were an American project. But it isn't, so the question is at best misleading and at worst just dumb.
A number of Wipro patches have already been rejected and sent back for reworking. Ximian and Sun can not and will not force maintainers to accept patches from them. Of course, Sun may apply those patches to their own builds of GNOME, but they could do that no matter what. It's important to remember that using GNOME doesn't make sense for Sun if they destroy the community in the process.
[Ximian hat on] This contract doesn't affect our work with Mono in any way, nor does it affect the interaction between GNOME and Mono (none of which would be happening for years anyway.) [Ximian+Sun hat off] How does it benefit Sun to keep Mono off their platform? Either.Net takes off, in which case Sun needs Mono to remain competitive, or.Net fails, in which case it still doesn't hurt to have Mono around just in case. Mono is not going to decide whether or not.Net succeeds- it'll stand or fall on MS's own skill in promoting it and FUDing Java.
If the performance of GNOME/Solaris ever equals GNOME/Linux, I'll be surprised. Part of the Sun work will involve serious performance analysis and work. Hopefully this will benefit both GNOME/Linux and GNOME/Solaris, but obviously it'll be focused on GNOME/Solaris, and should make GNOME/Solaris a lot snappier.
Re:They sure release often
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
·
· Score: 2
Well, from where I stand, it looks reasonably stable. There are very few bugs being filed against it right now, and I use it every day with very few problems [well, nautilus is crashy as all get out, but otherwise everything seems to work fairly well.]
Caveat: like I say, pretty few bugs are getting filed but it's hard to say if that is because of the number of people using it or the number of actual bugs. We'll know better after the beta.
I do see what you mean, Russ, but I have to call you out too, because you're wrong:)
Freedom #3; freedom to redistribute with modifications. See, for example, the SISSL, which is accepted by OSI but does not allow one to redistribute changes that aren't compatible with the standards setting body. [See section 3.1.] Or the revocation clause in the APSL, which is one of the three reasons the APSL isn't free.
All of that said... the point you're trying to make, Russ, is a sound one- the basic OSI philosophy is not incompatible with that of the FSF. But the FSF's philosophy is a superset of the OSI's- it isn't just 'see the source', which the OSI cares about, it also includes 'have freedom to use the source once you've seen it'- which the OSI doesn't care about, and which is why RMS dislikes them so much.
[up front: I'm a Ximian employee; I don't think that makes any difference to this point but I don't want to be accused of hiding it in an article about Miguel.]
It can't really be 'taken closed' in a meaningful sense; didn't mean to imply that, but I can see how it came off that way. I just meant that NS can make a proprietary version of the code base [i.e., NS 6.2] which isn't typically the case with the GPL [though obviously there are exceptions to that as well.]
Umm... the Moz Public License allowed them to take it closed whenever they wanted after they bought it. And as much as I love Moz it was completely unusable when AOL bought Netscape. If AOL had cut off funding then, sure, the community would have source, but the community would have nobody who understood the source and no one with time to work on it. AOL has paid for hundreds of people to work on Moz for three years now. So... you'd have no Moz without AOL. Period.
For a much, much shorter period of time than India, and it was never as well integrated into the Empire, particularly with regards to infrastructure- the British built tons and tons of (among other things) schools in India, rightly regarded as the crown jewel of the empire.
English is spoken widely just about everywhere in the world that has an educated class. But there is a world of difference between working with native speakers and with working with those who have it as a second language. Ask anyone who grew up in Miami- lots of people speak English that is perfectly passable in everyday life but doesn't fly for constant use in a working, technical environment. My girlfriend calls it a 'tourist' language- you can get by for things like asking directions, ordering meals, and having simple, formalistic interactions, but complex technical discussions are difficult at best. Literally hundreds of millions of Indians speak English as a native tongue, and it shows. [And I say this not just because I'm a big fan of Salman Rushdie;)]
The other relevant factor is English. Having been a former colony, the English of the average technically educated Indian is excellent- slightly odd accent for us Americans to get used to but otherwise it's a native tongue. Not so for non-Hong Kong Asians- there are many who speak excellent English, but for every one of those there are many more whose English is a... work in progress:) That definitely makes a difference when trying to work with American companies and programmers, and it's a big strike against the Koreas when compared to India.
But what I'm saying is that 802.11 clouds aren't terribly insecure either- at least, lots of fairly security-conscious companies are implementing them with simple MAC-based access control policies, which are fairly safe (assuming you use SSH/SSL for all transactions, since WEP is crap.) So... if it's as bad as 802.11, corporations will probably use it rather quickly.
No better or worse than 802.11, and businesses are adopting that left and right. Hell, not substantially better or worse than good old cat 5 in a fairly modern office space. Relying on 'well, thet can't find a plug so they can't crack the network' is an extremely, extremely naive approach to security, and any business that rules this out based on that probably has a lot of other security holes they should be worrying about.
Slashdot Mirror
Not reasonable- debugging stuff on the mindstorms is a serious PITA. The best course of action is to write it right the First Time- not something that often happens with first years. That said, if you taught them to program something PC side that then remotely controlled the robot, it might be debuggable/doable for first years while providing a /lot/ more interesting feedback than typical first-year projects.
1) I won't link directly, because in this case, it's a Bad Thing(TM), but go check Bugzilla for Sawfish... it's a nasty sight. ;)
Many, many, many thanks
This is particularly a problem for sawfish; not only is it a complex, niche codebase involving fairly obscure stuff (X) that not as many people have experience with, it is also in Lisp, which narrows down the number of potential hackers even more. Nothing wrong with Lisp, mind you, just not as many proficient lisp hackers in the community as there are C hackers. And that does make a difference to community supported projects.
rhythmbox.
Every time you buy a DVD you are paying the salaries of the lawyers who put Johansen in jail, you are paying the bribes^Wdonations for the congressmen who wrote the DMCA, and you are paying for more propaganda from the MPAA. It doesn't matter what player you are using, as long as you are paying for the DVD in the first place.
Dunno when you started at Duke... if you're a youngster and not a crotchety old alum like myself you might not be expected to know such things. :)
Duke has had IPv6 available on resnet since at least some time during the '99-'00 academic year, so at least two and nearly three years. You just had to know who to ask to get an IP address :)
You can watch the pain at his ISP's stats page.
The bottom line question is: does the benefit provided by GNOME being improved outweigh the overall costs of supporting the chain of national dependencies?
Speaking personally, not for Ximian: this question assumes that GNOME is in some way 'American'. That's... fairly wrong. Ximian has employees all over the place; GNOME definitely has contributors on every continent, except maybe Africa, and Sun's GNOME effort has always been based in Ireland. And of course the project was started by our favorite Mexican. So... I don't know. The answer to your question might be interesting or relevant if GNOME were an American project. But it isn't, so the question is at best misleading and at worst just dumb.
Definitely. So when are you going to come hang out in #bugs, Janne? :)
A number of Wipro patches have already been rejected and sent back for reworking. Ximian and Sun can not and will not force maintainers to accept patches from them. Of course, Sun may apply those patches to their own builds of GNOME, but they could do that no matter what. It's important to remember that using GNOME doesn't make sense for Sun if they destroy the community in the process.
[Ximian hat on] This contract doesn't affect our work with Mono in any way, nor does it affect the interaction between GNOME and Mono (none of which would be happening for years anyway.) .Net takes off, in which case Sun needs Mono to remain competitive, or .Net fails, in which case it still doesn't hurt to have Mono around just in case. Mono is not going to decide whether or not .Net succeeds- it'll stand or fall on MS's own skill in promoting it and FUDing Java.
[Ximian+Sun hat off] How does it benefit Sun to keep Mono off their platform? Either
If the performance of GNOME/Solaris ever equals GNOME/Linux, I'll be surprised.
Part of the Sun work will involve serious performance analysis and work. Hopefully this will benefit both GNOME/Linux and GNOME/Solaris, but obviously it'll be focused on GNOME/Solaris, and should make GNOME/Solaris a lot snappier.
Well, from where I stand, it looks reasonably stable. There are very few bugs being filed against it right now, and I use it every day with very few problems [well, nautilus is crashy as all get out, but otherwise everything seems to work fairly well.]
Caveat: like I say, pretty few bugs are getting filed but it's hard to say if that is because of the number of people using it or the number of actual bugs. We'll know better after the beta.
Well, she did take too long to post :) Sadly, I had mod points yesterday but they expired.
... take it upon themselves to mod down the other +5s as '-1, not Kathleen's reply'? :)
Freedom #3; freedom to redistribute with modifications. See, for example, the SISSL, which is accepted by OSI but does not allow one to redistribute changes that aren't compatible with the standards setting body. [See section 3.1.] Or the revocation clause in the APSL, which is one of the three reasons the APSL isn't free.
All of that said... the point you're trying to make, Russ, is a sound one- the basic OSI philosophy is not incompatible with that of the FSF. But the FSF's philosophy is a superset of the OSI's- it isn't just 'see the source', which the OSI cares about, it also includes 'have freedom to use the source once you've seen it'- which the OSI doesn't care about, and which is why RMS dislikes them so much.
[up front: I'm a Ximian employee; I don't think that makes any difference to this point but I don't want to be accused of hiding it in an article about Miguel.]
It can't really be 'taken closed' in a meaningful sense; didn't mean to imply that, but I can see how it came off that way. I just meant that NS can make a proprietary version of the code base [i.e., NS 6.2] which isn't typically the case with the GPL [though obviously there are exceptions to that as well.]
Umm... the Moz Public License allowed them to take it closed whenever they wanted after they bought it. And as much as I love Moz it was completely unusable when AOL bought Netscape. If AOL had cut off funding then, sure, the community would have source, but the community would have nobody who understood the source and no one with time to work on it. AOL has paid for hundreds of people to work on Moz for three years now. So... you'd have no Moz without AOL. Period.
Doh. :)
For a much, much shorter period of time than India, and it was never as well integrated into the Empire, particularly with regards to infrastructure- the British built tons and tons of (among other things) schools in India, rightly regarded as the crown jewel of the empire.
English is spoken widely just about everywhere in the world that has an educated class. But there is a world of difference between working with native speakers and with working with those who have it as a second language. Ask anyone who grew up in Miami- lots of people speak English that is perfectly passable in everyday life but doesn't fly for constant use in a working, technical environment. My girlfriend calls it a 'tourist' language- you can get by for things like asking directions, ordering meals, and having simple, formalistic interactions, but complex technical discussions are difficult at best. Literally hundreds of millions of Indians speak English as a native tongue, and it shows. [And I say this not just because I'm a big fan of Salman Rushdie ;)]
The other relevant factor is English. Having been a former colony, the English of the average technically educated Indian is excellent- slightly odd accent for us Americans to get used to but otherwise it's a native tongue. Not so for non-Hong Kong Asians- there are many who speak excellent English, but for every one of those there are many more whose English is a... work in progress :) That definitely makes a difference when trying to work with American companies and programmers, and it's a big strike against the Koreas when compared to India.
But what I'm saying is that 802.11 clouds aren't terribly insecure either- at least, lots of fairly security-conscious companies are implementing them with simple MAC-based access control policies, which are fairly safe (assuming you use SSH/SSL for all transactions, since WEP is crap.) So... if it's as bad as 802.11, corporations will probably use it rather quickly.
No better or worse than 802.11, and businesses are adopting that left and right. Hell, not substantially better or worse than good old cat 5 in a fairly modern office space. Relying on 'well, thet can't find a plug so they can't crack the network' is an extremely, extremely naive approach to security, and any business that rules this out based on that probably has a lot of other security holes they should be worrying about.