The problem with that is that the app "not being an effective DRM app" is specifically tuned to target the US DMCA, wheras the GPL has to survive internationally. Other countries, other definitions, so: 1) Who says that "not being an effective DRM app" is any good at defeating the local DMCA equivalent of country X? and 2) Who says that it isn't in conflict with national law regarding what consititutes DRM in country Y?
The potential danger of this type of metafile record was recognized and some applications (Internet Explorer, notably) will not process any metafile record of type META_ESCAPE, the overall type of the SetAbortProc record. That restriction is the reason it's not possible to exploit this vulnerability by simply referencing an image directly in HTML. IE just won't process it.
So yes, they did indeed know about it before the world did.
Nope, I do not mean the sample pictures. I actually did see it do what I described. I installed as a user with admin priviledges (not even the real administrator account!) and imported a of my own few pictures to test the installation. Guess where they ended up. I initially found out because when starting to use the thing for real as a normal limited user, those test pictures were already there when opening up the "new" catalog.
In any case, even if I f*cked that up somewhere, the silly warning that I mentioned is extremely real. I actually fired up Photoshop just to make sure that I got the wording right.
The problem is that even the concept of "admin" and "non-admin" account is alien to the typical end user.
It's worse. Even many programers in the Windows world still don't get it.
Have you ever run Photoshop as a non-admin user? It works just fine, *BUT* the very first thing that it does when starting is to put up a dialog box that says "You are logged on as a limited user and therefore have limited access privileges on this system." Is there a better way to scare clueless users into using admin?
And that's not the only sign that Photoshop still hasn't embraced multi-user either. Have a guess where its default catalog is stored? Yep: Under "All Users". Because it is just sooooo nice to share everything with everyone by default. Especially since we all know that in the PC world "everyone" is just one physical person anyway. Someone who sometimes will log on as an admin and sometimes as a limited user. Surely he or she would be confused if both account's don't show the same sets of photos...
That of someone with a 3-digit/. UID obviously...:-)
More to the point: I was there too (I got on the net - the real one, that is, not just BBs-es - in 1988). IMHO, both grandparent posters were right.
The net was very real back then, and multi-user machines were in common use in engineering (I used graphical DomainOS Apollo workstations for my master's thesis, while we mostly still had an experimental and barely usable X11R2 floating about on some of the non-Apollo workstations). But security was indeed very lax in those days. We pulled some amazing pranks on each other back then and didn't really see the true potential impact of what we could do. It was just "having fun amongst the good guys at each other's expense". The bad guys were the ones that wrote viruses for MS-DOS. But since everyone knew that MS-DOS was a toy for kids, it really didn't matter. Once the kid's clever enough to write viruses would grow up a bit and go to college, they'd surely repent. And since they were that clever around computers, they'd be eagerly welcomed "on the job" as soon as they had a CS degree of their own.
Hell, the only security X had was xhost. Get past that, something horribly trivial (especially if open remote access to X is the default as it used to be), and you can do anything you want with people's machines and easily captured passwords. We didn't even need buffer overflows or callback-based image formats to get anything nasty done back then...:-)
My first real understanding of what was about to happen came "only" in 1991 when I spent a year in the Belgian Navy (conscripted) and when one day I had to pull the plug on the network of an entire Navy school due to some stupid but harmless virus that was spreading through the network. Up to that point' I'd never seen standard PC's and any sort of network in ome combination. So that day I really did "see some of the light".
But even so I didn't really get it yet. Back then I thought I'd done a very good job: stopped the spread, got the network cleaned, and defined some rules about not bringing "aboard" untrusted floppies that weren't needed for the job. Now I know what a fool I was: I'd been on the real Internet for several years; I'd just seen "live" what a network could do when combined with MicroSoft toyware; but since that particular school was not on the Internet (after all, they were not using UNIX:-), I imagined that things would be and remain under control if only people would implement a few rules about bringing in floppy disks form home. Real computer users didn't use PCs anyway... Silly me!
One wonders how long MicroSoft themselves have known about this one. Despite them being "The Incompetent Company", they do have a lot of very competent software people working for them. I'd be willing to bet some money that some of those have identified this particular flaw some time ago already but that, after looking at the consequences of fixing it properly, the company decided to hope that nobody would notice until they finally get around to publicly breaking backward compatibility.
With stuff like this in their closet, one surely can understand at least to some extent why they advocate closed source. The feature in question is likely well documented, and thus reasonably "open", but the idea of what might happen if crackers get access to all the non-safe zombie code that dates from their pre-history truly must horrify them.
Corporation: no. But consortium: yep, it's coming, because development costs for 45 and beyond are so horrendous that nobody can/wants afford them on his own anymore.
Things will start with a few consortia (of which this Japanese one is an example) because governments still want to push their local economies (esp. the Japanese one does so very much), but over time even those few consortia will either merge or die.
The thing that is really going to surprise a few people (though not the insiders), is that the key research developments will eventually be performed in "neutral" countries that do not have a major local chip making industry. Why, you ask? Because of the "neutrality", of course! This is starting to happen already (check out IMEC), and the Japanese "recent" moves towards a "national" consortium will only enhance it by giving the others an incentive to put aside their differences.
Note, though, that this is not the first time that the Japanese industry and government have tried to setup a counterweight for Silicon Valley and Taiwan. All their previous attempts ended up as failures. But the costs of 45nm and beyond allow them to have another go at it.
There is no corollation between intelligence and religous belief.
Yes there is. The more intellegent people are, the less likely they are to be religious. Pointers to plenty of studies that show this can be found here.
The fact that there are indeed famous intelligent and religious people is not a proof of the contrary (as any intelligent person will know:-).
Besides, when refering to people like Da Vinci, one has to take into account the society that they lived in and the corresponding education that they recieved.
The fact that a portion of your execs are also professors isn't necessarily a boon. It's that old difference between theory and practice. In theory, practice and theory are the same, in practice, they aren't..
I don't necessarily think that the behaviour patterns gained from working extensively in academia translate well to the world at large.
I can only agree! That's in fact part of what I was saying: technical people (such as these professors, amongst others) are not by definition the ones who know best what should be done. Neither do the non-technical execs, for that matter.
But those visionaries are (in the tech world) almost exclusively the technically educated.
Again I agree: I haven't said that the visionaries shouldn't be the technically educated ones. Even those prototypical nerds who have no real view of the (potential) impact or market of what they are doing can provide the key thing that makes the difference in the end. Keep in mind, though, that non-technical people can just as well have the key vision that turns a company into something that puts out crazy new ideas that succeed (Richard Branson comes to mind as an example).
All I wanted to point out, is that "let engineers develop solutions in search of a problem" isn't be definition the right aproach. I've seen far too many "solutions in search of a problem" that went nowhere and of which many people predicted that they wouldn't even when the ideas were still being developed. And yet, development of these things dragged on until somehow sense was beaten into the techies either by some bean counter who counted the (sometimes huge) losses, or by a "techie with a clue stick" who was "lucky" enough to be promoted into a junior manager position.
PS: I'm an engineer myself (and not a professor:-). I'm also not an exec.
Long live executives who are smart enough to let engineers develop solutions in search of a problem and then discover a way to market them... Long live engineers smart enough to propose products in search of a user and then discover a way to realize them.
While that sounds very nice, I have to disagree as well. I've worked for the past 16+ years in a company that can be considered "normal" in that the executives are "in charge" (as oposed to the engineers), but that is very abnormal in that almost all of the executives are engineers by education (and by the time they become executives also part-time professors) and have remained so "in their heart". The result is an endless stream of nice solutions looking for a problem (or aimed at solving an artificial problem that was only created by earlier badly thought out solutions), intermixed with the occasional gem that (only just) keeps things running money-wise.
We don't need solutions looking for a problem. What we do need is visionaries who see the important future problems and who then proactively create solutions for those.
Sending a bunch of male programmers advertisements for a four hour extended version of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan is useful.
Maybe it's useful on average for the movie industry, but it's not useful for me. I'm a male programmer, but explicitly not interested in this Star Trek drivel.
Always remember that it's my time and my computer! I'm not Joe Average, I'm me.
Indeed! This is one of my *really* big complaints about the Windows UI: all the autoraising windows and popups that steal keyboard focus from under whatever you as a user really want to do at that specific moment.
Nonsense. The latency problem has done nothing but getting worse for the past x years, as CPUs have been speeding up way faster than memories. In the future this is only going to get worse.
Yes there are software developers that have spent years optimizing code to mitigate the impacts of latency. In fact I and my team earn a living by researching methods and producing tools that help in doing this. We do this (and can afford to do so) only because it is very clear that we do not run any risk of being obsoleted simply by the SAMSUNGs of this world designing lower latency modules. In fact, SAMSUNG is so much aware of this themselves, that they licensed our tools for use in their own end-user product design flow and that we have SAMSUNG engineers permanently posted within our company so as to learn how all of our stuff works.
Yes, IBM did break their contract in that case. But that in turn does not affect Linux. SCO has itself released the code under GPL and has for over a year not revoked those releases as having happened "only because of IBM's misbehaviour". This makes the entire case irrelevant. No matter the outcome of the contractual dispute, Linux is not legally affected in any way.
Why not just take away symlinks to directories? They're really most useful for files, anyway.
Ahem...
prompt> pwd /some/where/packages/xfig prompt> ls -l total 12 drwxr-xr-x 9 me software 4096 Mar 19 2003 3.2.3d/ drwxr-xr-x 9 me software 4096 Mar 19 2003 3.2.4/ lrwxr-xr-x 1 me software..11 May 15 2004 bin -> current/bin/ lrwxr-xr-x 1 me software...5 May 15 2004 current ->3.2.4/ lrwxr-xr-x 1 me software..11 May 15 2004 man -> current/man/
We have hundreds of those over here, and we're not alone in the universe...
That's a fair clarification. The obvious follow-up question is this: what's the relevance of the distributed development paradigm to the usability of Linux distributions? Nearly every major distribution is assembled by paid developers.
Assembled yes, built no.
Here's an interesting question: does Solaris meet most users' needs? How about most of the needs of its users?
Solaris does not meet most user's needs, but then again I never claimed that it did "simply because it is a commercial product". Windows, on the other hand, does meet most user's needs. I really hate to say that, because I myself fo sure am one of the users whose needs are not met by Windows. But then again, as I've said before on/. while attacking the on-size-fits all problem of Windows: I'm not "most users" or an "average user", I'm me.
However, the key need of 99.9999% of users that is met by Windows, is that it just works out of the box. Maybe not optimally and definitely not securely, but it does simply work. And that's what the original discussion was about: Linux must have that as well, before it will ever stand a chance at really taking off. And the GPL does sometimes impede this (see below).
I suggest that if Linux distributions don't meet most users' needs, it's not due to Open Source licenses or to the "distributed volunteer" development methodology.
I hereby submit that at least the GPL is part of the reason, as it "prevents" certain/many hardware companies from providing drivers. Sometimes for non-valid reasons, sometimes because the vendors themselves simply do not have the required IP rights to open up the drivers. But whatever the reason, that's what happens. Also, the open source nature of Linux and the "distributed volunteer" development methodology inherently cause that there are way to many different non-compatible versions, releases, and modified releases out there to allow smaller hardware vendors to provide Linux support without nightmares.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favour of Linux being GPL-ed and everybody being able to do his own thing. But the sad consequences of that are what they are, including the difficulty of getting Linux ready for - and accepted - on the desktop.
(... though it might be inherent to systems developed solely by hobbyists in their spare time, which happens to describe most small open source projects.)
The latter is what I meant. My apologies for not being 100% clear on that from the start.
The point that you are missing is that the parent post does not say that open source is not good. All the freedom it gives is very valuable and valued. Instead, said post says that as such open source (at least as is practised today, but the problem may wel be inherently tied to it) is not a/the solution to the needs of most users.
Yes, I can fix it myself. If I have the time, that is.
Yes, I can get a friend to do it for me (well, not always but I'll ignore that for now). But I'm a CS major with CS major friends (and EE ones with many years of solid software experience). That makes me at least slightly non-average in terms of suitable friends.
Yes, I can pay someone to do it for me. Provided that I know how to find such a person, that is. He or she must be willing, must have the relevant knowledge and experience, must be affordable, must be worth the hassles of getting him or her paid in the first place,...
Fixing the typical "damn, it doesn't run properly on this machine", "it doesn't compile for me", "why the !@#$%^&* hell is this machine eating my print jobs without actually printing them", etc. problem is by no means in the same league of difficulty as changing a spark plug, hanging a picture, or adding a room partition.
Open source is great. I'm all in favour of it. Infact, I have been so for 16 years now, i.e. since long before the word had been coined (my first personal open source project dates from 1989, and is still out there being used on a daily basis by many thousands of people), BUT Open source does NOT magically solve the problem of the majority of users. As long as we open source fans are unwilling to see that, we don't stand a chance of having real impact outside our own little narrow world. And no, I am NOT saying that closed source is the solution.
I'm a diehard in terms of sticking to using good ol' technology such as the command line and some GUI tools that others would describe as utterly cluncky relics of UNIX prehisory, but I couldn't agree more with what you write..
The whole shebang should just work out of the box, nicely and cleanly intregated etc. etc. Then, if I really want do do something different, I can still spend the effort to set that stuff up "my way". But at least in the mean time, I don't have to fight with basic subsystems that I'm not particularly interested in, other than that they must work.
For the worshippers of The Holy Source Code: I have and still use a 8 years old Linux box (currently running 2.6.y) on which the kernel and every single binary except Mozilla and the X server has been tuned and compiled from the source by myself. I love that machine for being set up "my way", but there is no way in hell that I can afford to do the same for my current main machine. I simply do not have the time for that, especially as the usual answer that I get when raising an issue is: "You've got the source, go scratch your own itch.". Sadly, the new one is a (dual boot) laptop and Linux has some issues with it. So nowadays I find myself using Windows more often than Linux when at home. To fully understand how "big" that problem is for me, read my signature.
Allow me, as I don't have mod points and your post is already at +5 anyway (and yet still being buried amongst all the blabber of the sexually obsessed zero-brains around here), to hereby express a "+1 insightfull" in a different way.
I read about this in my local newspaper last night, and was thinking exactly the same thing. And not only that: the measurement she was taking was "indirect" and also included a reference to her self (or for those who consider that one should not use that word in this context: to her own body). It was not just a case of "is this stick longer than that piece of water is wide" (the lengths of which can easily be compare visually in one go), it was a case of "is this water deeper (something that can not be observed directly) than my body can tolerate without risking nasty consequences for myself". Really impressive.
The key problem OpenMOSIX has for me right now, is that threaded applications do not migrate.
That's a real killer if your number 1 CPU eater is called Matlab, if Matlab uses a separate thread for nothing else than its licensing heartbeat (it does so by default), and if you can't afford the number of licenses you'd have to buy (check out the commercial prices for Matlab: they're horrible (we could easily buy our current cluster hardware several times over with nothing else than our annual Matlab maintainance expense)) in case you disable the separarate thraed (which is technically possible, in which case Matlab does indeed nicely migrate).
And no, Octave does not cut it as a Matlab replacement for our purposes. If only it did...
You got the pronounciation wrong for that one. It is pronounced vader with a v. I should know: Dutch is my mother tongue. And I speak English and German (and French, but...), so I know the difference in pronounciation in all these languages first-hand.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that the app "not being an effective DRM app" is specifically tuned to target the US DMCA, wheras the GPL has to survive internationally. Other countries, other definitions, so: 1) Who says that "not being an effective DRM app" is any good at defeating the local DMCA equivalent of country X? and 2) Who says that it isn't in conflict with national law regarding what consititutes DRM in country Y?
The potential danger of this type of metafile record was recognized and some applications (Internet Explorer, notably) will not process any metafile record of type META_ESCAPE, the overall type of the SetAbortProc record. That restriction is the reason it's not possible to exploit this vulnerability by simply referencing an image directly in HTML. IE just won't process it.
So yes, they did indeed know about it before the world did.
Libel, he? Then what about http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/13/151 9204
In any case, even if I f*cked that up somewhere, the silly warning that I mentioned is extremely real. I actually fired up Photoshop just to make sure that I got the wording right.
It's worse. Even many programers in the Windows world still don't get it.
Have you ever run Photoshop as a non-admin user? It works just fine, *BUT* the very first thing that it does when starting is to put up a dialog box that says "You are logged on as a limited user and therefore have limited access privileges on this system." Is there a better way to scare clueless users into using admin?
And that's not the only sign that Photoshop still hasn't embraced multi-user either. Have a guess where its default catalog is stored? Yep: Under "All Users". Because it is just sooooo nice to share everything with everyone by default. Especially since we all know that in the PC world "everyone" is just one physical person anyway. Someone who sometimes will log on as an admin and sometimes as a limited user. Surely he or she would be confused if both account's don't show the same sets of photos...
More to the point: I was there too (I got on the net - the real one, that is, not just BBs-es - in 1988). IMHO, both grandparent posters were right.
The net was very real back then, and multi-user machines were in common use in engineering (I used graphical DomainOS Apollo workstations for my master's thesis, while we mostly still had an experimental and barely usable X11R2 floating about on some of the non-Apollo workstations). But security was indeed very lax in those days. We pulled some amazing pranks on each other back then and didn't really see the true potential impact of what we could do. It was just "having fun amongst the good guys at each other's expense". The bad guys were the ones that wrote viruses for MS-DOS. But since everyone knew that MS-DOS was a toy for kids, it really didn't matter. Once the kid's clever enough to write viruses would grow up a bit and go to college, they'd surely repent. And since they were that clever around computers, they'd be eagerly welcomed "on the job" as soon as they had a CS degree of their own.
Hell, the only security X had was xhost. Get past that, something horribly trivial (especially if open remote access to X is the default as it used to be), and you can do anything you want with people's machines and easily captured passwords. We didn't even need buffer overflows or callback-based image formats to get anything nasty done back then... :-)
My first real understanding of what was about to happen came "only" in 1991 when I spent a year in the Belgian Navy (conscripted) and when one day I had to pull the plug on the network of an entire Navy school due to some stupid but harmless virus that was spreading through the network. Up to that point' I'd never seen standard PC's and any sort of network in ome combination. So that day I really did "see some of the light".
But even so I didn't really get it yet. Back then I thought I'd done a very good job: stopped the spread, got the network cleaned, and defined some rules about not bringing "aboard" untrusted floppies that weren't needed for the job. Now I know what a fool I was: I'd been on the real Internet for several years; I'd just seen "live" what a network could do when combined with MicroSoft toyware; but since that particular school was not on the Internet (after all, they were not using UNIX :-), I imagined that things would be and remain under control if only people would implement a few rules about bringing in floppy disks form home. Real computer users didn't use PCs anyway... Silly me!
With stuff like this in their closet, one surely can understand at least to some extent why they advocate closed source. The feature in question is likely well documented, and thus reasonably "open", but the idea of what might happen if crackers get access to all the non-safe zombie code that dates from their pre-history truly must horrify them.
Things will start with a few consortia (of which this Japanese one is an example) because governments still want to push their local economies (esp. the Japanese one does so very much), but over time even those few consortia will either merge or die.
The thing that is really going to surprise a few people (though not the insiders), is that the key research developments will eventually be performed in "neutral" countries that do not have a major local chip making industry. Why, you ask? Because of the "neutrality", of course! This is starting to happen already (check out IMEC), and the Japanese "recent" moves towards a "national" consortium will only enhance it by giving the others an incentive to put aside their differences.
Note, though, that this is not the first time that the Japanese industry and government have tried to setup a counterweight for Silicon Valley and Taiwan. All their previous attempts ended up as failures. But the costs of 45nm and beyond allow them to have another go at it.
Yes there is. The more intellegent people are, the less likely they are to be religious. Pointers to plenty of studies that show this can be found here. The fact that there are indeed famous intelligent and religious people is not a proof of the contrary (as any intelligent person will know :-).
Besides, when refering to people like Da Vinci, one has to take into account the society that they lived in and the corresponding education that they recieved.
Then they're not solutions looking for a problem. Consequently we don't disagree.
I can only agree! That's in fact part of what I was saying: technical people (such as these professors, amongst others) are not by definition the ones who know best what should be done. Neither do the non-technical execs, for that matter.
But those visionaries are (in the tech world) almost exclusively the technically educated.
Again I agree: I haven't said that the visionaries shouldn't be the technically educated ones. Even those prototypical nerds who have no real view of the (potential) impact or market of what they are doing can provide the key thing that makes the difference in the end. Keep in mind, though, that non-technical people can just as well have the key vision that turns a company into something that puts out crazy new ideas that succeed (Richard Branson comes to mind as an example).
All I wanted to point out, is that "let engineers develop solutions in search of a problem" isn't be definition the right aproach. I've seen far too many "solutions in search of a problem" that went nowhere and of which many people predicted that they wouldn't even when the ideas were still being developed. And yet, development of these things dragged on until somehow sense was beaten into the techies either by some bean counter who counted the (sometimes huge) losses, or by a "techie with a clue stick" who was "lucky" enough to be promoted into a junior manager position.
PS: I'm an engineer myself (and not a professor :-). I'm also not an exec.
While that sounds very nice, I have to disagree as well. I've worked for the past 16+ years in a company that can be considered "normal" in that the executives are "in charge" (as oposed to the engineers), but that is very abnormal in that almost all of the executives are engineers by education (and by the time they become executives also part-time professors) and have remained so "in their heart". The result is an endless stream of nice solutions looking for a problem (or aimed at solving an artificial problem that was only created by earlier badly thought out solutions), intermixed with the occasional gem that (only just) keeps things running money-wise.
We don't need solutions looking for a problem. What we do need is visionaries who see the important future problems and who then proactively create solutions for those.
Maybe it's useful on average for the movie industry, but it's not useful for me. I'm a male programmer, but explicitly not interested in this Star Trek drivel.
Always remember that it's my time and my computer! I'm not Joe Average, I'm me.
Indeed! This is one of my *really* big complaints about the Windows UI: all the autoraising windows and popups that steal keyboard focus from under whatever you as a user really want to do at that specific moment.
Yes there are software developers that have spent years optimizing code to mitigate the impacts of latency. In fact I and my team earn a living by researching methods and producing tools that help in doing this. We do this (and can afford to do so) only because it is very clear that we do not run any risk of being obsoleted simply by the SAMSUNGs of this world designing lower latency modules. In fact, SAMSUNG is so much aware of this themselves, that they licensed our tools for use in their own end-user product design flow and that we have SAMSUNG engineers permanently posted within our company so as to learn how all of our stuff works.
Yes, IBM did break their contract in that case. But that in turn does not affect Linux. SCO has itself released the code under GPL and has for over a year not revoked those releases as having happened "only because of IBM's misbehaviour". This makes the entire case irrelevant. No matter the outcome of the contractual dispute, Linux is not legally affected in any way.
Ahem...
We have hundreds of those over here, and we're not alone in the universe...
Assembled yes, built no.
Here's an interesting question: does Solaris meet most users' needs? How about most of the needs of its users?
Solaris does not meet most user's needs, but then again I never claimed that it did "simply because it is a commercial product". Windows, on the other hand, does meet most user's needs. I really hate to say that, because I myself fo sure am one of the users whose needs are not met by Windows. But then again, as I've said before on /. while attacking the on-size-fits all problem of Windows: I'm not "most users" or an "average user", I'm me.
However, the key need of 99.9999% of users that is met by Windows, is that it just works out of the box. Maybe not optimally and definitely not securely, but it does simply work. And that's what the original discussion was about: Linux must have that as well, before it will ever stand a chance at really taking off. And the GPL does sometimes impede this (see below).
I suggest that if Linux distributions don't meet most users' needs, it's not due to Open Source licenses or to the "distributed volunteer" development methodology.
I hereby submit that at least the GPL is part of the reason, as it "prevents" certain/many hardware companies from providing drivers. Sometimes for non-valid reasons, sometimes because the vendors themselves simply do not have the required IP rights to open up the drivers. But whatever the reason, that's what happens. Also, the open source nature of Linux and the "distributed volunteer" development methodology inherently cause that there are way to many different non-compatible versions, releases, and modified releases out there to allow smaller hardware vendors to provide Linux support without nightmares.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favour of Linux being GPL-ed and everybody being able to do his own thing. But the sad consequences of that are what they are, including the difficulty of getting Linux ready for - and accepted - on the desktop.
(... though it might be inherent to systems developed solely by hobbyists in their spare time, which happens to describe most small open source projects.) The latter is what I meant. My apologies for not being 100% clear on that from the start.
Yes, I can fix it myself. If I have the time, that is. ...
Yes, I can get a friend to do it for me (well, not always but I'll ignore that for now). But I'm a CS major with CS major friends (and EE ones with many years of solid software experience). That makes me at least slightly non-average in terms of suitable friends.
Yes, I can pay someone to do it for me. Provided that I know how to find such a person, that is. He or she must be willing, must have the relevant knowledge and experience, must be affordable, must be worth the hassles of getting him or her paid in the first place,
Fixing the typical "damn, it doesn't run properly on this machine", "it doesn't compile for me", "why the !@#$%^&* hell is this machine eating my print jobs without actually printing them", etc. problem is by no means in the same league of difficulty as changing a spark plug, hanging a picture, or adding a room partition.
Open source is great. I'm all in favour of it. Infact, I have been so for 16 years now, i.e. since long before the word had been coined (my first personal open source project dates from 1989, and is still out there being used on a daily basis by many thousands of people), BUT Open source does NOT magically solve the problem of the majority of users. As long as we open source fans are unwilling to see that, we don't stand a chance of having real impact outside our own little narrow world. And no, I am NOT saying that closed source is the solution.
The whole shebang should just work out of the box, nicely and cleanly intregated etc. etc. Then, if I really want do do something different, I can still spend the effort to set that stuff up "my way". But at least in the mean time, I don't have to fight with basic subsystems that I'm not particularly interested in, other than that they must work.
For the worshippers of The Holy Source Code: I have and still use a 8 years old Linux box (currently running 2.6.y) on which the kernel and every single binary except Mozilla and the X server has been tuned and compiled from the source by myself. I love that machine for being set up "my way", but there is no way in hell that I can afford to do the same for my current main machine. I simply do not have the time for that, especially as the usual answer that I get when raising an issue is: "You've got the source, go scratch your own itch.". Sadly, the new one is a (dual boot) laptop and Linux has some issues with it. So nowadays I find myself using Windows more often than Linux when at home. To fully understand how "big" that problem is for me, read my signature.
Fortunately my office PC still is a Linux one...
Which makes the /. article and title even more biased.
I read about this in my local newspaper last night, and was thinking exactly the same thing. And not only that: the measurement she was taking was "indirect" and also included a reference to her self (or for those who consider that one should not use that word in this context: to her own body). It was not just a case of "is this stick longer than that piece of water is wide" (the lengths of which can easily be compare visually in one go), it was a case of "is this water deeper (something that can not be observed directly) than my body can tolerate without risking nasty consequences for myself". Really impressive.
That's a real killer if your number 1 CPU eater is called Matlab, if Matlab uses a separate thread for nothing else than its licensing heartbeat (it does so by default), and if you can't afford the number of licenses you'd have to buy (check out the commercial prices for Matlab: they're horrible (we could easily buy our current cluster hardware several times over with nothing else than our annual Matlab maintainance expense)) in case you disable the separarate thraed (which is technically possible, in which case Matlab does indeed nicely migrate).
And no, Octave does not cut it as a Matlab replacement for our purposes. If only it did...
You got the pronounciation wrong for that one. It is pronounced vader with a v. I should know: Dutch is my mother tongue. And I speak English and German (and French, but...), so I know the difference in pronounciation in all these languages first-hand.