I've always had the sneaking feeling that fuel cell technology was just another way for the petrochemical industries to keep their jobs when the wells run dry.
If you can find a way to run cars on alternative fuels and let everyone affected "keep their jobs when the wells run dry", you are 98% of the way to implementing that change.
It's about reducing risk. Take seven projects, have the group work on each, they'll all pretty much succeed equally. Assign each to an individual, and your risk of tanking at least one shoots up.
Nobody cares if a single-developer open source project tanks. Just have fun. But the approach does have the vices of its virtues...
This proposal sounds to me like proposing Ford Motors be liable for Fords crashing... which is not the way that works, and everyone knows why. The operator makes a big difference.
Not that "common best practice" insurance for security liability wouldn't be a bad thing - it's so much easier to cost justify "running this will take our insurance premiums up $x" than it is to say "running this will increase our risk of Something Bad Happening some unknown percentage." But it's the operators that bear that cost, not the manufacturers.
If you wanna run that FlashyRedSportscar 1.0 software that makes it more likely you hit a wall at 140 MPH - your risk, your call. Providing FlashyRedSportscar Software, Inc. was diligent in its processes, they shouldn't have to hire lawyers when you meet the wall.
If you mostly get a charge out of getting your semicolons in the right place and enjoy bellowing about randomness at every requirements change, skip the MBA. We'll all be happier.
If you have the urge to understand what happens to cause requirements changes, get the MBA. You'll be happier.
If you think the highest goal is to guide systems through long, graceful, and profitable business lifetimes, get the MBA and use it wisely. You'll be happier, those who pay you will be happier, your bank account will be happier.
Let's say you pitch them, they're impressed, you fix it as best it can be fixed, they give you a wad of dough, and victory is achieved all around. Sounds good, eh?
Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong at that place ever again, it will now be Your Fault. Someone on your team will have to spend their precious time on this earth persuading them that you are not liable for fixing it free - after all, you took their money to make them secure, why shouldn't it be Your Fault if they're no longer secure because of next week's vulnerability?
Run. Flee. Screen out their incoming calls with caller ID. Be thankful. Move on.
If they valued what you were selling, they'd have bought it already.
(I'm having something of a cynical day here, obviously, but this could still be actual useful advice...)
It was all layed out in the GNU Manifesto in the 80's. Stallman plainly understood the effect GPL'ed software would have on the business environment. He says straight out that the way to make money with free software is to sell support, or do contract programming.
Does Stallman also mention in the manifesto that these ways to make money are about as scalable as a mosquito?
If you want your software on one customer's boxes... doing it as work made for hire pays the bills.
If you want your software on dozens of customers' machines, release it GPL and sell the service of keeping the software up to snuff to pay the bills. As long as you can add value individually, for folks who know where to send the money and why, you can make a living with added value services. As long as you can stay ahead of the costs of finding the added value needs, you're OK. (It costs effort to discover and track that Fred needs a cancel button here, and George needs a data munger there.)
If you want your software on thousands of customers' machines, you're going to have trouble adding value individually - you have a two-ton mosquito to feed, and you'll lose a lot of blood just figuring out how you can make your consulting service worth the money. You'll have trouble just reminding everyone that it's nice to send a check.
It's at that scale and above that giving away the core source code, the part that (as Mundie points out) is most valuable anyway, starts to look astonishingly stupid from the standpoint of trying to pay the bills.
It's not surprising that Love is seeing this too. He's got to think about adding value for thousands of customers - he's got stockholders to feed. Stallman doesn't have to think about that, and Linus doesn't, and ESR doesn't - if the family's fed from their added value services, they don't have to worry about scaling it any higher. They can rebut Mundie until doomsday, and it won't change Love's problem at all.
Incidentally, this line of reasoning is why I think RedHat has a chance - everyone knows how to send them a check, and they're providing added value that can scale up above the dozens-of-customers level without pain. (Think prompt and automatic security patches - easy to find something specific which adds value for thousands of people, easy to distribute it, easy to collect the subscription money from those who appreciate it financially).
Sorry for the tangential rant, but this post triggered my lingering annoyance about Stallman's writings... despite his firm rejection of the intellectual property assumptions that make software commercially scalable, he insists on talking past the Microsofts and Calderas - which exist solely to make software commercially scalable - whenever the opportunity presents itself. I don't mind his philosophies, but it does bother me that he tries to drag them beyond their areas of application.
In one of those Slashdot cosmic coincidences, I called Amazon to change my password yesterday. (Same reason - tired of the email.) It was a very pleasant, quick, and effective phone call... but there was an unsettling thing about it.
I'd not ordered from Amazon since 3/98, and the credit card number I'd given was expired (and cancelled - I switch cards occasionally). After some readings of the last five digits of my current cards, the account rep noticed this problem, and allowed me to use my billing address instead as identification.
So, if you know the email address and meatspace address of someone who's been boycotting Amazon for a while, call Amazon and see if their credit card has expired in the interim. If you bingo on this, you can find out whatever goat porn they like to read, etc. (And a free expired credit card number!)
Awfully rude to the pleasant people on the phone at Amazon, but it might work...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm warezing .NET too.
Grab it, d000dz!
Yeesh.
(OK, cheap shot. I doubt there's much well-described fact in the original link, myself - that's why I never read 'em...)
Let me say up front that this is way cool.
But reading the summary, I kept expecting to hear how you ID'd the limo from the vanity plate.
Party on!
One of my finest moments was getting a call from Sprint offering to change my long distance service.
"I'm sorry, I don't have a phone."
(pause, pause, pause) "Then how am I talking to you?"
"I'm... not really sure."
(pause, pause, pause) "Thank you." {click}
Um, it's not about increasing efficiency?
It's about reducing risk. Take seven projects, have the group work on each, they'll all pretty much succeed equally. Assign each to an individual, and your risk of tanking at least one shoots up.
Nobody cares if a single-developer open source project tanks. Just have fun. But the approach does have the vices of its virtues...
This proposal sounds to me like proposing Ford Motors be liable for Fords crashing... which is not the way that works, and everyone knows why. The operator makes a big difference.
Not that "common best practice" insurance for security liability wouldn't be a bad thing - it's so much easier to cost justify "running this will take our insurance premiums up $x" than it is to say "running this will increase our risk of Something Bad Happening some unknown percentage." But it's the operators that bear that cost, not the manufacturers.
If you wanna run that FlashyRedSportscar 1.0 software that makes it more likely you hit a wall at 140 MPH - your risk, your call. Providing FlashyRedSportscar Software, Inc. was diligent in its processes, they shouldn't have to hire lawyers when you meet the wall.
Well, back in 1995, Microsoft had a good strategy for Quicken, but guess what happened...
"The case would have been a diversion from its main task, which is to compete aggressively in a way that will lead to lower prices and consumer benefits."
Wonder where Netscape would be had they been interested in playing ball with MS, even a little bit...
D'oh. Maybe he put that one in when he mispelt "huzzah" later on.
Oh God, I'm ripping the spelling of a marriage proposal... what have I become...
Again, Taco, Kathleen, all the best to you both.
No typos. Passable grammar.
Kathleen, he actually thought about this one...
All the best to ya both.
Microsoft does have a pretty strong track record of hearing what their big customers want to buy, and then building it.
I'm not surprised that they're hearing about security... and I won't be surprised if they find a way to build it.
Hey, I'm just sayin'.
Is there some sort of steganography going on in the typos of this interview?
Build-your-own rockmount servers.
Thought you should know.
If you mostly get a charge out of getting your semicolons in the right place and enjoy bellowing about randomness at every requirements change, skip the MBA. We'll all be happier.
If you have the urge to understand what happens to cause requirements changes, get the MBA. You'll be happier.
If you think the highest goal is to guide systems through long, graceful, and profitable business lifetimes, get the MBA and use it wisely. You'll be happier, those who pay you will be happier, your bank account will be happier.
(signed: BA in CSci + MBA)
Let's say you pitch them, they're impressed, you fix it as best it can be fixed, they give you a wad of dough, and victory is achieved all around. Sounds good, eh?
Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong at that place ever again, it will now be Your Fault. Someone on your team will have to spend their precious time on this earth persuading them that you are not liable for fixing it free - after all, you took their money to make them secure, why shouldn't it be Your Fault if they're no longer secure because of next week's vulnerability?
Run. Flee. Screen out their incoming calls with caller ID. Be thankful. Move on.
If they valued what you were selling, they'd have bought it already.
(I'm having something of a cynical day here, obviously, but this could still be actual useful advice...)
If you want your software on one customer's boxes... doing it as work made for hire pays the bills.
If you want your software on dozens of customers' machines, release it GPL and sell the service of keeping the software up to snuff to pay the bills. As long as you can add value individually, for folks who know where to send the money and why, you can make a living with added value services. As long as you can stay ahead of the costs of finding the added value needs, you're OK. (It costs effort to discover and track that Fred needs a cancel button here, and George needs a data munger there.)
If you want your software on thousands of customers' machines, you're going to have trouble adding value individually - you have a two-ton mosquito to feed, and you'll lose a lot of blood just figuring out how you can make your consulting service worth the money. You'll have trouble just reminding everyone that it's nice to send a check.
It's at that scale and above that giving away the core source code, the part that (as Mundie points out) is most valuable anyway, starts to look astonishingly stupid from the standpoint of trying to pay the bills.
It's not surprising that Love is seeing this too. He's got to think about adding value for thousands of customers - he's got stockholders to feed. Stallman doesn't have to think about that, and Linus doesn't, and ESR doesn't - if the family's fed from their added value services, they don't have to worry about scaling it any higher. They can rebut Mundie until doomsday, and it won't change Love's problem at all.
Incidentally, this line of reasoning is why I think RedHat has a chance - everyone knows how to send them a check, and they're providing added value that can scale up above the dozens-of-customers level without pain. (Think prompt and automatic security patches - easy to find something specific which adds value for thousands of people, easy to distribute it, easy to collect the subscription money from those who appreciate it financially).
Sorry for the tangential rant, but this post triggered my lingering annoyance about Stallman's writings... despite his firm rejection of the intellectual property assumptions that make software commercially scalable, he insists on talking past the Microsofts and Calderas - which exist solely to make software commercially scalable - whenever the opportunity presents itself. I don't mind his philosophies, but it does bother me that he tries to drag them beyond their areas of application.
OK, feel free to get back on topic now...
Homer
Lack of proper authentification...
That's authentimacation , thank you very much.
Homer
"Hi, I'm calling from (insert name of long-distance pusher here)..."
"But... I don't have a phone."
"Then how are we talking?"
"I Have No Idea."
(this one's a personal favorite of mine...)
In one of those Slashdot cosmic coincidences, I called Amazon to change my password yesterday. (Same reason - tired of the email.) It was a very pleasant, quick, and effective phone call... but there was an unsettling thing about it.
I'd not ordered from Amazon since 3/98, and the credit card number I'd given was expired (and cancelled - I switch cards occasionally). After some readings of the last five digits of my current cards, the account rep noticed this problem, and allowed me to use my billing address instead as identification.
So, if you know the email address and meatspace address of someone who's been boycotting Amazon for a while, call Amazon and see if their credit card has expired in the interim. If you bingo on this, you can find out whatever goat porn they like to read, etc. (And a free expired credit card number!)
Awfully rude to the pleasant people on the phone at Amazon, but it might work...