No-one expects a fresh CS graduate to be immediately capable of writing production quality code,
Excluding, of course, those graduates. Every one I've met is quite sure that they are immediately capable of production work. This goes double for people with Master's degrees, and triple for fresh-minted PhDs.
Of course, in theory, theory and practice are the same...
What you're saying is like someone walking into a Civil Engineering department and being horrified that none of the students had ever built a real bridge!
If the tools and materials needed to build bridges cost $200 on EBay, I'd expect that, too. If an art student had spent four years in school and didn't have a broad overview of the topic plus a bunch of specific skills and an ok portfolio, I'd wonder what was wrong with 'em. Why shouldn't I expect that of a CS student?
To: thomas.ahlerup@intentia.se Subject: The Reuters incident
As an American, I thought we led the world in creative ways to use the legal system to avoid admitting our own foolishness. I am heartened to see that Sweden is following our lead!
From what I understand, you put your earnings report on a computer that was connected so as to be accessible to the entire world. Further, you had specifically configured the server to serve documents in certain directories to anybody who asked for them, be they in Afghanistan or Zimbabwe.
And now you are shocked (shocked, I say!) that the computer and network did exactly what they had been designed and configured to do. Were you a firm that made, say, lingonberry juice, that would be almost believable. But it appears you are a software company, one with "providing security" in large type on the front page. You have managed to arouse even an American's sense of incredulity!
So I look forward to my next visit to Sweden, knowing that I will be able to indulge in that famous American sport of suing anybody for anything I don't like. Has any Swede yet made millions from spilling hot coffee on themselves? If not, maybe you should try that; it could substantially improve next quarter's revenues.
Regards,
[signature]
The lingonberry, by the way, is a sort of Swedish cranberry. If you're curious, you can get them at Ikea.
It appears to be "overhyped nonsence", because the outcry got people out there fixing code before it happened. In fact, the mass hysteria was needed to get the dollars to flow to get the fixes in place on time.
That sounds good, and that's certainly what the Y2K gurus will have you believe.
But they have a hard time explaining why countries who didn't have massive Y2K remediation efforts didn't have big problems, either. That was the case in large parts of Asia and Africa, where, thanks to buying secondhand tech, had a much higher percentage of systems from the era where Y2K glitches were present.
Re:Your dressed casually to the first day of work?
on
Cool Work Shirts?
·
· Score: 2
There is nothing I hate more than sales people coming in in wrinkled khakis and polos trying to sell me $1 Million+ in goods and/or services.
Local conditions, I guess.
When I worked for financial traders in Chicago, anybody wandering around the office with a suit was instantly recognized as a marketroid. The more polished their images, the more it was assumed they were out to cheat us. Generally, that was the case.
Here in San Francisco, styles are pretty informal, so the division isn't casual vs suits, it's scruffy casual vs expensive, stylish casual.
Traditional development fixes scope in a spec, and cost in a budget, and time to delivery in a schedule. If the initial estimate is poor, then sustainability takes it on the chin, generally by burning out the developers and shipping crappy stuff. Managers promise that they'll make up for it "later", which really means never.
XP turns that around by fixing time and sustainability, while letting the businessfolk play with cost (which they generally fix, too) and scope. Each week, the team delivers new features, albeit small ones. When the businessfolk decide that the pain of not shipping is worse than the pain of shipping, then the product ships.
This sounds like it could never work, but it does. Check out this programmer's diary of a transition from a project like the OP describes to an XP project.
The rational person doesn't jump at shadows [...] I'm smart enough to realize that the chances of dying from a shooter such as this are very small. [...]
Possibly true, for you. (Although until you're living under those conditions, you can't be sure, can you?) Certainly untrue for the vast majority of humanity. It would seem that the odds of getting offed by DC's random shooter are higher than the lottery, and look how many people play that.
Saying, "If everybody were rational..." is an interesting hypothetical, but it will remain a hypothetical.
The only reason to make a big policy flap about it is political posturing, because policy cannot affect the problem.
Wow! You not only know what the problem with the person doing this and the social context that surrounds him, but have a general theory of sociology that allows you to make proofs! Really, you should share it with us.
Heck, the shooter may have bought the gun from a thief, and all the ballistic fingerprinting in the world wouldn't make it any easier to find him. What then, will you say "Oops, the premise behind this law is a mistake and this will only add to our public expenditures without improving safety, so let's forget the idea"? C'mon, be honest here: would you, or wouldn't you?
I haven't yet expressed an opinion yet either way on the law. I don't know enough yet to say either way. It depends on the cost/benefit tradeoffs.
As a general rule of thumb, I favor registration of dangerous things, including bombs, guns, cars, and toxic and polluting chemicals, and people who make dangerous things. I also generally favor licensing of people who use dangerous things, including all of the above, and including the recreational drugs that are currently illegal.
But I don't feel that either registration or licensing need be done by the government. I would love to try an experiment where we just require that a gun be registered somewhere, and to allow the NRA to operate a registry and perform licensing of gun owners.
But turn it around. If this case (or another one) would have turned out so that lives were saved by ballistic fingerprinting, would you then favor the law?
If that's the case, it's pointless because of the 200 million or so guns already privately owned that won't be included in the database.
I guess the same would apply to gun serial number databases, right?
Oh, but wait! Those already exist. And they somehow help solve some crimes. By your logic, that must be because they created the database when they first started stamping serial numbers on guns, yes?
How many people died in traffic accidents in the Washington DC metro area during the last two weeks? How many people died in falls? As a public-health problem or a public-policy problem, this isn't worthy of any action; it is purely a police matter.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't live in the area. Or any area where random gun violence is a problem.
The effects on the people in the DC are substantial, wide-ranging, and will be long-lasting. People are not robots. This will affect decisions to visit DC, to work in DC, and to move companies to DC. It will change how people feel about their neighbors and their neighborhoods. A quick comparison of, say, various African or South American nations will show that how safe people feel has a very large effect on the economy and on society.
That's not to say whether fingerprinting guns is a good idea; I wouldn't know. But pretending that this is just a police matter is sticking your head in the sand.
Nobody has paid for the their SS money 'up front'.
Then how do you explain that the SSA sends you a statement with your contributions? And that the amount you get upon retirement is dependent on what you put in?
Although the underlying financial mechanism is as you describe, the government tries pretty hard to pretend that it's a lot like retirement savings. The guy isn't a troll just because he believes the bullshit that the SSA sends him in the mail.
In the San Francisco area there's a similar outfit called City CarShare, although if I recall correctly, ZipCar is a for-profit concern; City CarShare is a nonprofit.
I've been a member for a year or so, and I love it. On the rare occasions I need a car, I reserve one via the web and walk a couple of blocks to pick it up. Every month they send me a bill. I don't have to worry about insurance, repairs, parking tickets, breakins, or any of the other car owner headaches. They even take care of gas; when the car is running low, there's a fleet card in the glovebox that lets you fuel up almost anywhere.
The drawbacks are pretty minor: If I need a car on a weekend day, I have to reserve a few days in advance. And the rates are such that if I'm going more than about 30 miles away, I'm better off just getting a car from Enterprise.
But overall, it's great! Since I live in an urban area, I just don't need a car very often, and so I end up saving a lot of money by just getting one for the few hours a month I actually use one.
I'm thinking of getting their audio recorder version to use for interviews and whatnot.
I'm sure some slashdotters must have purchased one; what do they think of the audio recording features? Is the sound good? Is the interface good? What's good and bad about it?
Now I'm not saying right now there is no reason to use proprietary software - the issue at hand is the attitude "if its the best product, use it". It is a naive attitude that does not reflect real-world concerns. It tends to reward nasty, anti-competitve companies like Microsoft that use monopolistic practices to create the "best" product, but only because they stifled competition.
If the goal is not to reward monopolistic jerks, that's great, but free software is only one way of achieving that.
I haven't paid a nickel to MS, even via the MS new machine tax, in at least five years. But I'm happy to reward good software products with actual cash. This is especially true for ones that increase my productivity, as that allows me to give more back to the community.
If every kernel developer had to pay Microsoft $1000 to get a VCS license just to work on the kernel, I'd say that this was something other than a tempest in a teapot. But BitKeeper hardly has a monopoly even in their market segment, and lots of people contribute to the kernel without using BitKeeper. Your principle of not rewarding monoplies is a good one (and one I follow myself), but as far as this issue goes, irrelevant.
I see somebody had an extra bowl of Drama Flakes for breakfast.
RIAA and MPAA want complete control over all media distribution so that they can extract monopoly rents. They eagerly manipulate public opinion, corrupt our government, and sue anybody they can.
BitKeeper has so far only tried to exercise a modicum of control over the free version of their own software, so that you don't use it to put them out of business. Plus they don't want their price list public, a pretty common thing for businesses to do.
I know this is Slashdot, but you should at least try to keep your hyperbole plausible.
McVoy said that the guy was in violation, ergo no license.
The bit you're complaining about was meant to show that even if McVoy felt like being nice, it was clear that Collins had been a prick about exactly the kind of issue he was complaining about now, so that any request to keep using BitKeeper for free even though he was in clear violation of the license was hypocritical.
No, I am upset because it is used to develop Linux (which is free) and because is the only non free tool used to do it.
Then perhaps you should go out there and write something so that kernel development can go smoothly without the use of commercial tools.
Until you release that, perhaps the Linux kernel team could carry on as it is. Linux benefits millions of people and is the poster child for the open source movement. I'd say tiny questions about its philosophical purity are vastly outweighed by the benefits that come from its progress.
This is not to say people who sell code are 'bad guys' but I fail to understand how they hope to compete with those commie open source hackers. Sure your start out with an edge and a superior product, but how long are you going to stay that way?
Right now, I strictly sell services, but were I to sell a product, this would not worry me. The way for any software company (or any company whose main skill is innovation) to stay on top is to avoid commoditization. Take a look at 3M. They have a corporate goal that 30% of revenue come from new products, which forces them to keep coming out with new stuff all the time. That means that they get to charge premium prices until their competitors catch up.
Were I running a software product company, I'd be tempted to just GPL the source code to any version more than, say, 5 years old. Not only would that contribute to the open source community and thus the broader public, but it would create stiff low-end competition for any of my competitors, making it harder for them to get a foothold that would let them come after my lead on the high end.
Any software company that is really dependent for revenue on old code isn't really in the business of making products or selling services; they're in the business of making monopolies.
Give me one good scenario in which a version control system would be the appropriate place to archive binaries.
When developing Java code, I always check in all the libraries my project depends on. That way any developer can build the whole thing by just checking out the project.
Often projects have raw data included; often the best way to store that is in binary.
When developing web sites, I check in images.
In my documentation for almost any project, I often include all sorts of diagrams.
I know of a project that checks a whole copy of Tomcat in, so that they have a clear reference platform in the repository. That makes automated testing much easier.
Some people will use their repository to check in full compiled versions, so that they can easily get a copy of whatever it is that they shipped.
Oh, and let's note that not everybody happens to speak a language that fits well into 7-bit ASCII; maybe they would like to check in something that they think of as "plain text", even if CVS doesn't.
And that's just off the top of my head; I'm sure others could suggest more.
The question should really be, "Why should a version control system be allowed to insist that I only use 7-bit ASCII files?"
But if businesses had their way, there would be no free software - and you don't find that the least bit scary?
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with, there.
It's true that some businesses don't want some software to be free. But it's clearly false that all businesses want no software to be free.
So you have a choice - live in a world where free software is a critical force for maintaining the rights of consumers, or live in a world where you just want whats "best", and therefor implying that the world would be just fine without free software.
That's a lovely dichotomy; it's a pity it's false.
How about we live in a world where we make free software the "best" for many purposes? That way we don't have to have the Freedom Police goose-stepping their way onto my computer to make sure I'm making the right choices for the benefit of "society at large".
Happily, that's the world I live in. When free software is the best, I use it. When it's not, I pay up. And either way, I contribute back to the community, widening the space in which free software is the best.
Fine, but you don't seem to understand that if everybody did what you do, you wouldn't have free software to enjoy.
That's just wrong. Larry Wall wrote Perl because he needed it. Linus wrote Linux because it was interesting and fun. Neither of them did it out of any mystical dedication to Free Software, hallowed be its name. Millions of people use them not because RMS told them to, but because Linux and Perl kick ass.
The existence of free software doesn't depend on people using crappy software just because it fits with some political agenda. It depends on people making cool things and then giving them away, which in turn inspires others to do the same.
I have used a Wiki happily for collaboration between a distributed team of eight (all working fractional amounts) over the course of the last ten months. We used it to track all requirements, to keep manuals, and as a general project intranet. Our project enough of a success that it was covered twice in the New York Times, so we must have done something right.
On another project, I successfully used it to keep a distributed team of architects in touch, building a common coding standard, a common design standard and as a repository for a lot of tools, tips, and tricks.
he links are never UptoDate, there are LeafPages everywhere with NoContent. Or even worse there are LeafPages that say 'Note to self, put content here.' Half the pages should just be RetiredYesterday but no one ever seems to DoIt.
Is the problem that nobody in the team gives a fuck about communicating or writing things down? Or is it that they put the information somewhere other than the Wiki?
www.worldforge.org is a PrimeExample. I'd love to know where they are in their CurrentDevelopment, but I can't find a DamnThing on the site.
Then maybe you could GetOffYourAss and write it. Content doesn't magically appear in Wikis. Somebody has to put it there, and the person who wants it is often the best person for the job.
Note also that you may be trying to use Wikis for the wrong thing. Wikis are topic-based; things like a StatusReport will only get updated if the people who have the knowledge find it useful to put the knowledge there.
If you want a Wiki to be adopted, you need to rig things so that the people with the knowledge find that the easiest thing to do is to put the knowledge in the Wiki.
All businessfolk understand cost/benefit calculations. They also should all understand risk vs reward. If an idea is obviously dumb to you, then you should be able to explain it in one of those models. E.g.:
Using the other team's servers would create a common failure point and an opportunity for one project to interfere with another. Although this would save us $100,000, we estimate that this would take our uptime from four nines to three, which is outside your requirements for the project.
Also, you should work on changing your attitude. They think their questions are all smart and reasonable. That's because they know different things than you. If you take the time to help educate them, then they will ask better questions next time. Your goal should be to leave them feeling like smart people who just happened to be missing a fact, rather than pathetic assholes who are lucky they have you around.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! You didn't even try to read an answer!
A: Zero.
No-one expects a fresh CS graduate to be immediately capable of writing production quality code,
Excluding, of course, those graduates. Every one I've met is quite sure that they are immediately capable of production work. This goes double for people with Master's degrees, and triple for fresh-minted PhDs.
Of course, in theory, theory and practice are the same...
What you're saying is like someone walking into a Civil Engineering department and being horrified that none of the students had ever built a real bridge!
If the tools and materials needed to build bridges cost $200 on EBay, I'd expect that, too. If an art student had spent four years in school and didn't have a broad overview of the topic plus a bunch of specific skills and an ok portfolio, I'd wonder what was wrong with 'em. Why shouldn't I expect that of a CS student?
The lingonberry, by the way, is a sort of Swedish cranberry. If you're curious, you can get them at Ikea.
It appears to be "overhyped nonsence", because the outcry got people out there fixing code before it happened. In fact, the mass hysteria was needed to get the dollars to flow to get the fixes in place on time.
That sounds good, and that's certainly what the Y2K gurus will have you believe.
But they have a hard time explaining why countries who didn't have massive Y2K remediation efforts didn't have big problems, either. That was the case in large parts of Asia and Africa, where, thanks to buying secondhand tech, had a much higher percentage of systems from the era where Y2K glitches were present.
There is nothing I hate more than sales people coming in in wrinkled khakis and polos trying to sell me $1 Million+ in goods and/or services.
Local conditions, I guess.
When I worked for financial traders in Chicago, anybody wandering around the office with a suit was instantly recognized as a marketroid. The more polished their images, the more it was assumed they were out to cheat us. Generally, that was the case.
Here in San Francisco, styles are pretty informal, so the division isn't casual vs suits, it's scruffy casual vs expensive, stylish casual.
Agreed! It worked for me.
I look at my developing as a tradeoff between
- time to delivery,
- scope,
- cost, and
- sustainability (including code quality, product reliability, developer morale, etc).
Traditional development fixes scope in a spec, and cost in a budget, and time to delivery in a schedule. If the initial estimate is poor, then sustainability takes it on the chin, generally by burning out the developers and shipping crappy stuff. Managers promise that they'll make up for it "later", which really means never.XP turns that around by fixing time and sustainability, while letting the businessfolk play with cost (which they generally fix, too) and scope. Each week, the team delivers new features, albeit small ones. When the businessfolk decide that the pain of not shipping is worse than the pain of shipping, then the product ships.
This sounds like it could never work, but it does. Check out this programmer's diary of a transition from a project like the OP describes to an XP project.
The rational person doesn't jump at shadows [...] I'm smart enough to realize that the chances of dying from a shooter such as this are very small. [...]
Possibly true, for you. (Although until you're living under those conditions, you can't be sure, can you?) Certainly untrue for the vast majority of humanity. It would seem that the odds of getting offed by DC's random shooter are higher than the lottery, and look how many people play that.
Saying, "If everybody were rational..." is an interesting hypothetical, but it will remain a hypothetical.
The only reason to make a big policy flap about it is political posturing, because policy cannot affect the problem.
Wow! You not only know what the problem with the person doing this and the social context that surrounds him, but have a general theory of sociology that allows you to make proofs! Really, you should share it with us.
Heck, the shooter may have bought the gun from a thief, and all the ballistic fingerprinting in the world wouldn't make it any easier to find him. What then, will you say "Oops, the premise behind this law is a mistake and this will only add to our public expenditures without improving safety, so let's forget the idea"? C'mon, be honest here: would you, or wouldn't you?
I haven't yet expressed an opinion yet either way on the law. I don't know enough yet to say either way. It depends on the cost/benefit tradeoffs.
As a general rule of thumb, I favor registration of dangerous things, including bombs, guns, cars, and toxic and polluting chemicals, and people who make dangerous things. I also generally favor licensing of people who use dangerous things, including all of the above, and including the recreational drugs that are currently illegal.
But I don't feel that either registration or licensing need be done by the government. I would love to try an experiment where we just require that a gun be registered somewhere, and to allow the NRA to operate a registry and perform licensing of gun owners.
But turn it around. If this case (or another one) would have turned out so that lives were saved by ballistic fingerprinting, would you then favor the law?
If that's the case, it's pointless because of the 200 million or so guns already privately owned that won't be included in the database.
I guess the same would apply to gun serial number databases, right?
Oh, but wait! Those already exist. And they somehow help solve some crimes. By your logic, that must be because they created the database when they first started stamping serial numbers on guns, yes?
How many people died in traffic accidents in the Washington DC metro area during the last two weeks? How many people died in falls? As a public-health problem or a public-policy problem, this isn't worthy of any action; it is purely a police matter.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't live in the area. Or any area where random gun violence is a problem.
The effects on the people in the DC are substantial, wide-ranging, and will be long-lasting. People are not robots. This will affect decisions to visit DC, to work in DC, and to move companies to DC. It will change how people feel about their neighbors and their neighborhoods. A quick comparison of, say, various African or South American nations will show that how safe people feel has a very large effect on the economy and on society.
That's not to say whether fingerprinting guns is a good idea; I wouldn't know. But pretending that this is just a police matter is sticking your head in the sand.
Nobody has paid for the their SS money 'up front'.
Then how do you explain that the SSA sends you a statement with your contributions? And that the amount you get upon retirement is dependent on what you put in?
Although the underlying financial mechanism is as you describe, the government tries pretty hard to pretend that it's a lot like retirement savings. The guy isn't a troll just because he believes the bullshit that the SSA sends him in the mail.
In the San Francisco area there's a similar outfit called City CarShare, although if I recall correctly, ZipCar is a for-profit concern; City CarShare is a nonprofit.
I've been a member for a year or so, and I love it. On the rare occasions I need a car, I reserve one via the web and walk a couple of blocks to pick it up. Every month they send me a bill. I don't have to worry about insurance, repairs, parking tickets, breakins, or any of the other car owner headaches. They even take care of gas; when the car is running low, there's a fleet card in the glovebox that lets you fuel up almost anywhere.
The drawbacks are pretty minor: If I need a car on a weekend day, I have to reserve a few days in advance. And the rates are such that if I'm going more than about 30 miles away, I'm better off just getting a car from Enterprise.
But overall, it's great! Since I live in an urban area, I just don't need a car very often, and so I end up saving a lot of money by just getting one for the few hours a month I actually use one.
I'm thinking of getting their audio recorder version to use for interviews and whatnot.
I'm sure some slashdotters must have purchased one; what do they think of the audio recording features? Is the sound good? Is the interface good? What's good and bad about it?
Who needs USA Today when there's, you guessed it, www.usatoday.com?
Now that you mention it, who needs either one of them?
Now I'm not saying right now there is no reason to use proprietary software - the issue at hand is the attitude "if its the best product, use it". It is a naive attitude that does not reflect real-world concerns. It tends to reward nasty, anti-competitve companies like Microsoft that use monopolistic practices to create the "best" product, but only because they stifled competition.
If the goal is not to reward monopolistic jerks, that's great, but free software is only one way of achieving that.
I haven't paid a nickel to MS, even via the MS new machine tax, in at least five years. But I'm happy to reward good software products with actual cash. This is especially true for ones that increase my productivity, as that allows me to give more back to the community.
If every kernel developer had to pay Microsoft $1000 to get a VCS license just to work on the kernel, I'd say that this was something other than a tempest in a teapot. But BitKeeper hardly has a monopoly even in their market segment, and lots of people contribute to the kernel without using BitKeeper. Your principle of not rewarding monoplies is a good one (and one I follow myself), but as far as this issue goes, irrelevant.
RIAA, MPAA, BK
I see somebody had an extra bowl of Drama Flakes for breakfast.
RIAA and MPAA want complete control over all media distribution so that they can extract monopoly rents. They eagerly manipulate public opinion, corrupt our government, and sue anybody they can.
BitKeeper has so far only tried to exercise a modicum of control over the free version of their own software, so that you don't use it to put them out of business. Plus they don't want their price list public, a pretty common thing for businesses to do.
I know this is Slashdot, but you should at least try to keep your hyperbole plausible.
You're missing the point.
McVoy said that the guy was in violation, ergo no license.
The bit you're complaining about was meant to show that even if McVoy felt like being nice, it was clear that Collins had been a prick about exactly the kind of issue he was complaining about now, so that any request to keep using BitKeeper for free even though he was in clear violation of the license was hypocritical.
No, I am upset because it is used to develop Linux (which is free) and because is the only non free tool used to do it.
Then perhaps you should go out there and write something so that kernel development can go smoothly without the use of commercial tools.
Until you release that, perhaps the Linux kernel team could carry on as it is. Linux benefits millions of people and is the poster child for the open source movement. I'd say tiny questions about its philosophical purity are vastly outweighed by the benefits that come from its progress.
This is not to say people who sell code are 'bad guys' but I fail to understand how they hope to compete with those commie open source hackers. Sure your start out with an edge and a superior product, but how long are you going to stay that way?
Right now, I strictly sell services, but were I to sell a product, this would not worry me. The way for any software company (or any company whose main skill is innovation) to stay on top is to avoid commoditization. Take a look at 3M. They have a corporate goal that 30% of revenue come from new products, which forces them to keep coming out with new stuff all the time. That means that they get to charge premium prices until their competitors catch up.
Were I running a software product company, I'd be tempted to just GPL the source code to any version more than, say, 5 years old. Not only would that contribute to the open source community and thus the broader public, but it would create stiff low-end competition for any of my competitors, making it harder for them to get a foothold that would let them come after my lead on the high end.
Any software company that is really dependent for revenue on old code isn't really in the business of making products or selling services; they're in the business of making monopolies.
- When developing Java code, I always check in all the libraries my project depends on. That way any developer can build the whole thing by just checking out the project.
- Often projects have raw data included; often the best way to store that is in binary.
- When developing web sites, I check in images.
- In my documentation for almost any project, I often include all sorts of diagrams.
- I know of a project that checks a whole copy of Tomcat in, so that they have a clear reference platform in the repository. That makes automated testing much easier.
- Some people will use their repository to check in full compiled versions, so that they can easily get a copy of whatever it is that they shipped.
- Oh, and let's note that not everybody happens to speak a language that fits well into 7-bit ASCII; maybe they would like to check in something that they think of as "plain text", even if CVS doesn't.
And that's just off the top of my head; I'm sure others could suggest more.The question should really be, "Why should a version control system be allowed to insist that I only use 7-bit ASCII files?"
But if businesses had their way, there would be no free software - and you don't find that the least bit scary?
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with, there.
It's true that some businesses don't want some software to be free. But it's clearly false that all businesses want no software to be free.
So you have a choice - live in a world where free software is a critical force for maintaining the rights of consumers, or live in a world where you just want whats "best", and therefor implying that the world would be just fine without free software.
That's a lovely dichotomy; it's a pity it's false.
How about we live in a world where we make free software the "best" for many purposes? That way we don't have to have the Freedom Police goose-stepping their way onto my computer to make sure I'm making the right choices for the benefit of "society at large".
Happily, that's the world I live in. When free software is the best, I use it. When it's not, I pay up. And either way, I contribute back to the community, widening the space in which free software is the best.
Fine, but you don't seem to understand that if everybody did what you do, you wouldn't have free software to enjoy.
That's just wrong. Larry Wall wrote Perl because he needed it. Linus wrote Linux because it was interesting and fun. Neither of them did it out of any mystical dedication to Free Software, hallowed be its name. Millions of people use them not because RMS told them to, but because Linux and Perl kick ass.
The existence of free software doesn't depend on people using crappy software just because it fits with some political agenda. It depends on people making cool things and then giving them away, which in turn inspires others to do the same.
I have never seen a WikiWork
I have used a Wiki happily for collaboration between a distributed team of eight (all working fractional amounts) over the course of the last ten months. We used it to track all requirements, to keep manuals, and as a general project intranet. Our project enough of a success that it was covered twice in the New York Times, so we must have done something right.
On another project, I successfully used it to keep a distributed team of architects in touch, building a common coding standard, a common design standard and as a repository for a lot of tools, tips, and tricks.
he links are never UptoDate, there are LeafPages everywhere with NoContent. Or even worse there are LeafPages that say 'Note to self, put content here.' Half the pages should just be RetiredYesterday but no one ever seems to DoIt.
Is the problem that nobody in the team gives a fuck about communicating or writing things down? Or is it that they put the information somewhere other than the Wiki?
www.worldforge.org is a PrimeExample. I'd love to know where they are in their CurrentDevelopment, but I can't find a DamnThing on the site.
Then maybe you could GetOffYourAss and write it. Content doesn't magically appear in Wikis. Somebody has to put it there, and the person who wants it is often the best person for the job.
Note also that you may be trying to use Wikis for the wrong thing. Wikis are topic-based; things like a StatusReport will only get updated if the people who have the knowledge find it useful to put the knowledge there.
If you want a Wiki to be adopted, you need to rig things so that the people with the knowledge find that the easiest thing to do is to put the knowledge in the Wiki.
Here's one method for he backups: Somebody has taken the time to put together a nice page on how to do snapshots with rsync.
All businessfolk understand cost/benefit calculations. They also should all understand risk vs reward. If an idea is obviously dumb to you, then you should be able to explain it in one of those models. E.g.: Also, you should work on changing your attitude. They think their questions are all smart and reasonable. That's because they know different things than you. If you take the time to help educate them, then they will ask better questions next time. Your goal should be to leave them feeling like smart people who just happened to be missing a fact, rather than pathetic assholes who are lucky they have you around.