> Will open source reduce the corporate demand for computer programmers?
With a growing pool of free software tools and libraries to draw on, programmers can become more and more productive. It becomes practical to tailor existing software to the needs of a particular corporation, thus creating a whole range of jobs in the bespoke software business. Nevertheless, this is a hypocritical question, coming from the industry which has charged ahead into destroying more traditional jobs than any other industry (though at the same time creating many more service jobs).
> What limits are there on the kind of products that can be created? Obviously games are out of the picture since 1 company would develop the engine and the others would leech off their work.
The Quake engine is already GPL'd. If a few free engines get very good, it may become cheaper to tailor these engines to your game's needs than to build a new engine from scratch. It makes more sense for game companies to concentrate the "content" rather than the engine; this is what happens in the non-electronic world. Monopoly is a popular game because of how it works, not because of the wood pulp it is printed on.
RMS believes people should be able to keep their code private. (And also other knowledge)
He, and the FSF, just believe that you shouldn't be able to prevent others from sharing the code that you give them, or to not provide someone with source code if you expect them to be able to run your binaries.
RMS must be the most misquoted hacker of all time. His, and the FSF's, position are made quite clear in about 3 pages of text here, yet people seem to continually misunderstand.
> if you are in the database you have previously committed a crime
Not quite. If you are in the database you have been *convicted* of a crime. You may not have actually been guilty. For this reason, your previous track record cannot legally be taken into account when deciding whether you are guilty.
Doesn't this show that we never can be sure quite how sure we are? However convinced we are that somebody is guilty, they may in fact be innocent. This is an irrefutable argument against the death penalty IMHO.
Right, 37 million to one is not very big odds when you're doing 245 billion independent tests. If the probability of a false positive in any individual test is p, then the probability of conducting n tests without getting any false positives is (1-p)^n. As pointed out, this means that if enough tests are done you'll almost certainly convict an innocent person. If you have two crimes with DNA evidence that is only this reliable, then more than likely some innocent person in the UK would test guilty. Actually, it's worse than this because people don't have independent DNA - they're likely to be distantly related. This makes false positives even more likely. If there are n people and you want the probabilility that any of them test positive to be less than x then you need 1 - (1-p)^n < x, which is nearly the same as 1 - p*n < x. So to be fairly sure that nobody in the world falsely tests positive you need p to be less than about 1 in 80 billion.
Hmmm it just works straight off for me. Maybe it is only partally implemented, so it works on some stuff but not other stuff, or something like that. Where are you having problems?
Are you saying that it's important to have a web browser which can access hotmail, but it's not important to ensure that other people can't then access your hotmail account? Or reformat your hard disk?
Seems ok to me... if you ignore the MS nagger screen saying "get IE" that is. But if there are any problems, then remember that hotmail is MS and that writing a browser which can parse shit in the same way as IE, yet is also standards compliant, is a very difficult and moving target. BTW, at least in Linux, it is *never* necessary for something to have X amount of RAM, though it will run bloody slowly if you don't have a certain amount.
Erm... hacking IE isn't possible unless you're Microsoft, cos you don't have the source. You can possibly embed the rendering engine in your own app but no more than that. And in future, if MS wish to remove certain functionality from IE for their own reasons (e.g. breaking HTML 4 compliance some more to make it harder for other browsers to compete), then IE users get left high and dry.
Instead, for the last two years people have been hacking Netscape into something more useable. You will have a good web solid web browser and nobody can stop anybody from adding building on it. Sounds like a much safer future IMO.
I think it's silly to care what version number Netscape gets. I believe it is a marketing ploy. But given that it is a marketing ploy, I see nothing wrong with it. The consumer is not being decieved. There really is a big difference between this and Netscape 4.7.
Windows 98 is very similar to Windows 95, so the differential version numbering is more likely to give a false impression that there's a big difference. But then again, if you're stupid enough to buy something on the basis of its version number, then you're buying the hype and not the product, so you've got what you paid for.
Go on then, what's stopping it? Remember that nearly the whole of Netscape is now using and working on Mozilla (since M12ish) and that bugs can be squashed very rapidly once the program is feature-complete.
Yes, M13 (the most recent development release) doesn't reload the page when you resize the window. It also remembers which bit of a page you were up to, when you press the back button.
I don't know how you managed to get that impression from the poster's comments. He just said "IE had an advantage cos ISPs could customise it". And also that there are things he hates about IE.
I'm getting tired of pointing this out, but you can't say that the final Mozilla will be slow just because the alpha is slow. Prerelease versions are full of debugging code which slow things down but make it easier to spot bugs. When a final version is released, all this will be gone. So wait for a release before you judge Mozilla's speed.
> slashdot is [turning into] a linuxuser vs msuser forum.
I don't agree. Many people here are very angry at MS for forcing shoddy software onto them for many years (via OEM sales, illegal monopoly activities etc.) and see linux as the first genuine choice for a long time. So naturally some people react (over-)violently to anti-linux FUD. But in general most posters give an informative statement of their informed opinion. Articles like this are an exception rather than a rule.
There are a lot of knowledgeable people here who lucidly expound their arguments. Try finding a similar level of informed discussion on a pro-MS site. (Here I discount grits/natalie portman trolls - browse at 0 if you don't want to see these).
Big organisations rarely buy 36000 copies of a piece of shrinkwrapped software. They negotiate a contract with the software house, whereby the software house guarantees that the software will serve its purpose (e.g.) 99.9% of the time. A "best endeavour" contract says that the software house will do everything in its power to make this happen, even if it bankrupts them to do it. So the army bloke has probably got his fingers burnt in a contract like this.
One of the ways the free market operates is that feedback about goods on sale becomes public knowledge. So if a company rips one person off, they can tell everyone else before the whole market gets ripped off. As far as I can see, the army guy is just exercising this right/responsibility.
I agree with you that the number "63000" is completely meaningless in this context. However, if W2K were free of significant bugs, why would they put out a service pack before it's even been released? I'd guess there were quite a few biggies left.
Slashdot Mirror
> Will open source reduce the corporate demand for computer programmers?
With a growing pool of free software tools and libraries to draw on, programmers can become more and more productive. It becomes practical to tailor existing software to the needs of a particular corporation, thus creating a whole range of jobs in the bespoke software business. Nevertheless, this is a hypocritical question, coming from the industry which has charged ahead into destroying more traditional jobs than any other industry (though at the same time creating many more service jobs).
> What limits are there on the kind of products that can be created? Obviously games are out of the picture since 1 company would develop the engine and the others would leech off their work.
The Quake engine is already GPL'd. If a few free engines get very good, it may become cheaper to tailor these engines to your game's needs than to build a new engine from scratch. It makes more sense for game companies to concentrate the "content" rather than the engine; this is what happens in the non-electronic world. Monopoly is a popular game because of how it works, not because of the wood pulp it is printed on.
RMS believes people should be able to keep their code private. (And also other knowledge)
He, and the FSF, just believe that you shouldn't be able to prevent others from sharing the code that you give them, or to not provide someone with source code if you expect them to be able to run your binaries.
RMS must be the most misquoted hacker of all time. His, and the FSF's, position are made quite clear in about 3 pages of text here, yet people seem to continually misunderstand.
No, the original poster was right. The chance of a false match on the file is
1 - (1 - 1/37million) ^ 660,000
which is nearly the same as
660,000 / 37million = 1/56.
> if you are in the database you have previously committed a crime
Not quite. If you are in the database you have been *convicted* of a crime. You may not have actually been guilty. For this reason, your previous track record cannot legally be taken into account when deciding whether you are guilty.
Doesn't this show that we never can be sure quite how sure we are? However convinced we are that somebody is guilty, they may in fact be innocent. This is an irrefutable argument against the death penalty IMHO.
The probability of a false positive match approaches 1 as the number of samples approaches oo.
P(false positive) = 1 - P(no false positives)
= 1 - (P(correct answer))^n
= 1 - (1-p)^n
-> 1 as n -> oo.
This is ignoring the probability of a false negative; this is very low since only one person can commit a crime!
Right, 37 million to one is not very big odds when you're doing 245 billion independent tests.
If the probability of a false positive in any individual test is p, then the probability of conducting n tests without getting any false positives is (1-p)^n. As pointed out, this means that if enough tests are done you'll almost certainly convict an innocent person. If you have two crimes with DNA evidence that is only this reliable, then more than likely some innocent person in the UK would test guilty.
Actually, it's worse than this because people don't have independent DNA - they're likely to be distantly related. This makes false positives even more likely.
If there are n people and you want the probabilility that any of them test positive to be less than x then you need
1 - (1-p)^n < x, which is nearly the same as 1 - p*n < x. So to be fairly sure that nobody in the world falsely tests positive you need p to be less than about 1 in 80 billion.
Hmmm it just works straight off for me. Maybe it is only partally implemented, so it works on some stuff but not other stuff, or something like that. Where are you having problems?
Are you saying that it's important to have a web browser which can access hotmail, but it's not important to ensure that other people can't then access your hotmail account? Or reformat your hard disk?
Seems ok to me ... if you ignore the MS nagger screen saying "get IE" that is. But if there are any problems, then remember that hotmail is MS and that writing a browser which can parse shit in the same way as IE, yet is also standards compliant, is a very difficult and moving target. BTW, at least in Linux, it is *never* necessary for something to have X amount of RAM, though it will run bloody slowly if you don't have a certain amount.
Erm ... hacking IE isn't possible unless you're Microsoft, cos you don't have the source. You can possibly embed the rendering engine in your own app but no more than that. And in future, if MS wish to remove certain functionality from IE for their own reasons (e.g. breaking HTML 4 compliance some more to make it harder for other browsers to compete), then IE users get left high and dry.
Instead, for the last two years people have been hacking Netscape into something more useable. You will have a good web solid web browser and nobody can stop anybody from adding building on it. Sounds like a much safer future IMO.
Thanks for that rant. Mozilla M13 handles that behaviour correctly, and works fine on /. so it may be what you're looking for.
Try selling it to your boss as Netscape; you'll find it much easier than as Mozilla.
I think it's silly to care what version number Netscape gets. I believe it is a marketing ploy. But given that it is a marketing ploy, I see nothing wrong with it. The consumer is not being decieved. There really is a big difference between this and Netscape 4.7.
Windows 98 is very similar to Windows 95, so the differential version numbering is more likely to give a false impression that there's a big difference. But then again, if you're stupid enough to buy something on the basis of its version number, then you're buying the hype and not the product, so you've got what you paid for.
Go on then, what's stopping it? Remember that nearly the whole of Netscape is now using and working on Mozilla (since M12ish) and that bugs can be squashed very rapidly once the program is feature-complete.
Yes, M13 (the most recent development release) doesn't reload the page when you resize the window. It also remembers which bit of a page you were up to, when you press the back button.
I don't know how you managed to get that impression from the poster's comments. He just said "IE had an advantage cos ISPs could customise it". And also that there are things he hates about IE.
I'm getting tired of pointing this out, but you can't say that the final Mozilla will be slow just because the alpha is slow. Prerelease versions are full of debugging code which slow things down but make it easier to spot bugs. When a final version is released, all this will be gone. So wait for a release before you judge Mozilla's speed.
> slashdot is [turning into] a linuxuser vs msuser forum.
I don't agree. Many people here are very angry at MS for forcing shoddy software onto them for many years (via OEM sales, illegal monopoly activities etc.) and see linux as the first genuine choice for a long time. So naturally some people react (over-)violently to anti-linux FUD. But in general most posters give an informative statement of their informed opinion. Articles like this are an exception rather than a rule.
There are a lot of knowledgeable people here who lucidly expound their arguments. Try finding a similar level of informed discussion on a pro-MS site. (Here I discount grits/natalie portman trolls - browse at 0 if you don't want to see these).
Sorry, my mistake. I stand corrected.
Big organisations rarely buy 36000 copies of a piece of shrinkwrapped software. They negotiate a contract with the software house, whereby the software house guarantees that the software will serve its purpose (e.g.) 99.9% of the time. A "best endeavour" contract says that the software house will do everything in its power to make this happen, even if it bankrupts them to do it.
So the army bloke has probably got his fingers burnt in a contract like this.
One of the ways the free market operates is that feedback about goods on sale becomes public knowledge. So if a company rips one person off, they can tell everyone else before the whole market gets ripped off. As far as I can see, the army guy is just exercising this right/responsibility.
They may be better in some respects but not overall. They may implement things that MS obviously could without any difficulty but haven't.
If MS is better overall, it doesn't mean that they haven't missed out on some really obvious features that people need.
Except maybe Balmer will get shot, not Gates.
I agree with you that the number "63000" is completely meaningless in this context. However, if W2K were free of significant bugs, why would they put out a service pack before it's even been released? I'd guess there were quite a few biggies left.