That's a pretty good trick. They really should write a better version (ooffice --stayResident, ooffice --restartResident, and a ooffice --killResident) or something. As your script consumes a bunch of CPU and memory when you close the last of the OO.org window. Then possibly incorporate that into a toolbar icon for Gnome/KDE.
I'm willing to trade a 4-5M of memory to have OO.org start that much faster. As it's loading the 4-5M from disk to RAM that causes the most disruption. Between the splash screen that is "always on top" and centered on my desktop. It wouldn't be so bad if it was 1/3 the size in each dimension. It takes so long to start, the not having it can lead me to believe something is wrong when I open.csv or.doc files via a brower.
However, you are correct in asserting that the legal protections they provide are completely different. Yes, the original poster did incorrectly use "patent" in the subject.
I believe Microsoft can't use "Windows" or "Word", as several other people have said in this story, they have a copyright on "Microsft Word", or "MS Word". I've noticed they have a tendenacy to always include "MS" or "Microsoft" any time they refer to Word or Windows (or they refer to a specific version of Windows, like Windows 95, or Windows XP).
Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted;-)
Curious, I'd always been told it was becase the Mac's used variable density floppies (which actually dated back to the Apple, and it was because huge amounts of storage was wasted if you didn't change the density/motor speed), and PC based floppy drivers were incapable of dealing with that.
This
link shows roughly what I remember of the history.
There were programs that could read them back in the mid 90's. I'm fairly confident that any lawyer on the planet worth their salt could show that HFS couldn't be copyrighted (it might be patentable). It's like an API, they can't be copyrighted. A description of them can be copyrighted, but the actual API can't (see POSIX, anyone can implement POSIX, but the actual documentation of how it works is in fact copyrighted). You can't copyright something that breaks compatibility. I can't cite the case law off hand, but I know I've seen several people on slashdot talk about it. Maybe one of them can help me out.
I'm not sure what the pieces about the wireless mean. I'm fairly confident that getting the FCC mad at you as large company that sells radio equipment is a fairly bad idea. "Individual violates FCC regulations, news at 11". Company violates FCC, "big ass fines" and threats of revoking their license to produce radio equipment... "Stockholder meeting tomorrow, 10:30 sharp"...
As to why it is valuable IP, try getting into a cut-throat commodity business where margin's are 1-2%. If you make it possible for your competitor to undercut you on price by 1-2%, your in big trouble (that's your profit margin). Commodity hardware is very, very price dependent. I've worked on embedded systems. Drop in replacements, and "wire compatible" parts are very valuable. I know we used to swap out parts all the time on the basis of "drop in replacement". If the part was 0.10 cheaper on a $15.00 part, if you are purchasing 150,000 of them, it adds up. If I had to talk with a SCSI card and they told me that someone else had a SCSI card that was a drop in replacement based on the published docs that was 1% cheaper. We would try out a couple of samples. Debug what we didn't work. If after 2-3 days it worked, we switched parts.
The PCI card market might not be quite the same, but I can see how a lot of vendors see it that way. They sell a lot of hardware to custom hardware developers.
Not really, trust me, as some one who writes software, it's much easier to build something that fits a working model, then it is to build a working model and write software for it.
I've dealt with hardware guys, building drop in replacements is much easier then building an original working model in a lot of ways. While in constrains the design, it also creates a definitive goal. There is no argument about "should it do X or Y". Just look at the specs. They'll tell you exactly how it should behave.
Try and think of it as "Test Oriented Development". You now have the tests to develop something. If you want to know if it is correct, you run the test. The result of the test is spelled out in the documentation. Ask anyone who has done lots of development, about unit testing and how wonderful it is to have. Design specifications are very close to unit testing. Especially if you have a working driver from the company.
Besides all that, just ask Pepsi how valuable Coca-Cola classic's secret recipe is. In the end, no one has been able to reproduce the damn thing despite ~130 years of trying, and literally billions of dollars in incentive. While a lot of Coca-Cola is branding, don't underestimate that they got big based on their taste. I've tried a lot of other soda's. Most of them are horrific.
Technically speaking, that's not true. A friend of mine's Mom and Step Dad, were in charge of NE Department of State Revenue and a lawyer in charge of Tax Fraud prosocutions (respectively).
Anytime they purchased something from out of state via mail order, there was a local office they would drive the receipt down to and pay the tax on it. It's technically speaking a violation of the law not to do it. They did it because it was literally both their jobs to see that people did this. So out of a sense of duty, they paid them. Not to mention how much trouble the step-father could have gotten into for letting his own family get away with Tax Fraud.
However, it's incredibly difficult to enforce and very unpopular. So nobody actually does it. However, in most states there is a law on the books that says anything you purchase from out of state, you must drive pay the tax on it. The reason you pay it if the business has a prescense in your state is because, the business can be held accountable, and have to pay the tax because they are within the states jursidiction (and are probably licensed to do business there). It is cost effective to go after businesses that don't pay the sales tax.
It's very similar to why the gov't requires business to withold taxes from your check. If they don't, the business has assests and is cost effective to go after if they are of any size.
It's the same reason that the DMV is the one who collects the sales tax on cars. Even if you purchase the car out of state, you have to pay sales tax in your local jursdiction (along with all of the local property taxes).
In a lot of ways, yes it is a very small number. First off, I'm not sure which documentation you are discussing from NetCraft. A link would be useful, but I'm too lazy to dig one up. The two stats to remember, are that something like 80% of the domains out there in the world run non-Windows OS's (read people who probably need access to the documentation). I want to say, only 30% of the IP's (possibly physical machines) out there, run non-Window's OS's. So in the end, even on the Internet, Windows is fairly dominate in terms of "numbers of machines". Which is a crying shame in my opinion, but oh well (most hosting companies, use non-Windows machines for deployment).
Now, the number of machines on the acting as servers on the Internet is dwarfed by the number of machines not acting as servers on the Internet. Not a contest. Not even close to a contest. Finally, most hardware vendor's that produce high end hardware do get it. Look at the number of SCSI devices that have documentation or drivers. Not the crappy low end ones, but the really good stuff. Sorry, the crappy low end adaptec IDE RAID cards aren't ever going into a high end server. Most internet servers don't really need a good 3D card from Nvidia or ATI. Look at the e1000? Yep, got a lot of those sold, and some really good documentation available to the public. Now look at the wireless chipsets, never going in a server. Not going to get public release based off domination in the "NetCraft" stats. 90% of all wireless cards will never ever be put in a machine that is counted by "NetCraft". They will be put in machines that say, 90-95% of all shipping computers have a Microsoft OS on them.
So depending on the product, yes, the NetCraft numbers are insigificant, both in terms of percentage and raw numbers.
For other products, the NetCraft numbers make a lot of sense. Look at the number of Open Source drivers for high end SAN cards. Look at the number of Gigabit cards that have open source drivers. Look at the number of highend RAID cards that have open documentation.
The other thing they are confusing is "won't release specs", versus won't allow re-distribution of the firmware. For a lot of wireless cards, it's that they can't re-distribute the firmware which is necessary for the hardware to work, not that they don't have the specs for the actual hardware. (I believe a number of OpenBSD's issues with Wireless Intel chipsets are this issue). The other issue with Wireless is that releasing the specs could invite FCC issues. I'm not sure of how much teeth those could have, but it sounds like a legitimate concern. If the FCC could say, well people are using your part with your documentation to drive it out of complaince, your wireless cards can no longer be sold. That'd be a real problem for Intel or Cisco.
Finally, releasing the specs, would allow a competitor to say they clean room, backward engineered without having to do the documentation. It's really expensive to do that testing and documentation. So they could sell a competing product at a much lower price. It's much easier to match an existing specification, that it is to write a good known working specification. It is valuable IP. Personally, I think it's wonderful when they release it. For a lot of hardware they do. Especially for the really high end hardware that needs high reliability.
Okay, this doesn't sound like Open Source. It sounds like they are just realizing what their own employee's knew 30 years ago....
When I read what he is saying they want to do, it sure sounds a lot like reading Fred Brooke's "Mythical Man Month". They are realizing that writting high quality, re-usable components with good documentation is very expensive. I believe "MMM", discussed this in the very first chapter. There are two orthognal qualities (I believe re-usable, and quality documentation, but it's a really long time since I read the book) that add a factor of 3 in each direction. If you wanted both it would take 9 times as long.
Stratigically, it makes sense to invest in creating those, if you have features that will be needed in enough different projects and areas. It sounds like they are planning on breaking down internal barriers, and providing highly re-usable, and well documented internally, and then ensuring that people know of it's existance.
Providing the source is a good idea. Ensuring that the fixes get moved upstream is a good idea. However, this sounds like good Engineering Practices (which I suppose is what a lot of "Open Source" advocates say you get, where as "Free Software" advocates, say it's purely an ethical issue).
It sure seems like this has little to do with "Open Source", and a lot to do with solid Engineering. It just so happens that Open Source has a lot of solid engineering behind it. It sure looks like a no brainer to re-use source you already have access to. If you are going to re-use it, it should probably be designed for that. If people who didn't write it are going to use it, it should probably be documented fairly well. Some how this seems fairly obvious, as opposed to, "we add features as we need them, to resolve some personal niche", which is the crux of "Open Source" according to CatB.
Just curious, how precisely does Intel "drop support for Microsoft?". In the list of poorly thought out concepts of I've read on slashdot that aren't trolls, this one rates pretty high on my personal list.
Their CPU's run instructions. Microsoft feeds the CPU's with instructions to run. I see no practical way for an Intel CPU to tell the difference between Linux instructions, and Microsoft instructions.
It's not like Intel has a stanglehold on the BIOS business. I'm fairly confident BioStar, Pheonix and Award are all going to continue shipping a BIOS that will boot a Microsoft OS.
Once you get past the BIOS, I don't see Intel having any way of letting anyone develop for their CPU/Chipsets, but excluding Microsoft..
I don't believe I said no Oil originates here, I believe something on the order of 80-90% of our oil is imported (I thought Texas was mostly tapped out, but Alaska has a huge amount of oil). Hence I said "it's not like most of the Oil originates here".
Technically speaking, one doesn't "pump" oil in Canada (at least if you are discussing the Oil Shoals, essentially Oil embedded in soil, which is what I've been told is the largest known supply of Oil in the world, there is also a lot of this in Scandanavian countries if I remember correctly). One processes the soil/rock/mineral and Oil is a by-product of the process. They are called the "Candaian Oil Planes" I believe. I don't believe it's "under" Canada, I believe a lot of it is literally just sitting on the ground, or is a mining/escavation issue, not a "drill" issue (it's not a liquid essentially). I've heard the number quoted as $30-50/barrel before Canda starts making money, however, I don't know if that is only a small percentage of it. There might be some that $80/barrel is correct (if you have a source for that number, I'd be interested in seeing it).
The Alaskan Oil pipeline I believe can only supply 5% of the current US demand when running at peak capacity (which it almost never does). I had this argument with a friend recently who claimed that we could become Oil self-sufficient via Alaska. While they have the oil, we'd need a long time to expand the capacity to transport the Oil out of Alaska.
I've been told that the single largest liquid Oil deposit ever found is supposed to be off the shores of California in an area the U.S. has the rights to. I think that's highly exaggerated, but the claim was that it was larger then all other known oil supplies in the Earth. The problem with it is that it's well below the depth at which we have equipment to deal with it. I'll have to go see if I can find the source for that stat. (It's in my e-mail, but I believe that e-mail is archived, so digging it up off CD will take a while).
Good god man, move closer to work, or stop driving an A1M1. I drive a Ford F150, and only manage to go thru 10-15 gal a week. At one point in my life, I drank fairly close to that much milk in a week.
I'm still not sure how much a family drinks has to do with the price of tea in china, or the price of gas in the U.S. Yes, it does in fact have economy of scale over most other liquids, but we are talking about gasoline here. It's a fairly high demand substance, which should drive the price up. It's not like it grows on trees. I'm fairly confident gas has a bit more processing done to it then Milk (why am I dreading the diatribe someone will tell me about pasturization). It's not like most of the gas or Oil in this country originates here. I'm guessing getting it from the Middle East to here, isn't cheap. I'm sure feeding and caring for my grandma's cow bessy isn't cheap, but I'm willing to bet, pumping oil out of the ground isn't precisely free either.
You should get out in the world more. $2/gal is pretty darn cheap worldwide (I know it's lots more expensive in Europes, I'm fairly sure it's more expensive in the Middle East). In fact, gas isn't currently more then 66% of the way to it's peak price accounting for inflation in the U.S.
Name three liquids besides water that you can get cheaper?
Gas is one of the worlds cheapest liquids period. Other then tap water, nothing even comes close (or it didn't until the recent run up in price). I still think a gallon of milk is about 2.50-3.00 (I don't pay any attention to the price, but I pretty sure it's over $2/gal). Pretty much anything else is more expensive by the gallon. Cleaners, Juice, heck even lots of bottled water is more expensive, soda is generally more expensive. Gas is cheap. Call me when it hit's $4-$5/gal. Then you might have a point. The problem with gas prices is that the U.S. Economy is so incredibly sensitive to it's price. Simple stuff like agriculture, is something like 90% based on the price of gas (between the fertilizers, transportation, and actual farm equipment, 90% of the costs come down to how much gas does it take to do that step). It'd be even cheaper without the taxes (I believe it's like 35-50% of the price of gas where I live is pretty much taxes).
Color me doubtful that any court on the planet will ever interpret it that way. In some weird utopian society, that might be true.
I've programmed professionally for a living for about 10 years. Never met anyone who edit patchs or changesets as their primary method editing code. I've seen people fix up patches and then apply them (even that is very rare). I've seen them review the history of the code via the VCS. However, not a single person I've ever met, generates a patch from scratch and then applies it to the source. They edit the source and generate patches. The patches are there merely as a convienent way to express the changes.
Comments you might have a point (lacking the comments, I could see a legitimate argument that it's a simplified form of variable and function obfusication), but patchsets are completely irrelavent, they are a by-product of the editting, they aren't necessary to build the source. They aren't what anyone edits to create source. I never have to edit an old patchset to fix a problem. I just go edit the source code.
Patchsets are useful for pulling in other peoples changes, they aren't useful for making changes to the software yourself. Nobody will interpret what you want that to mean in a legal sense.
That's fairly inane. The preferred form means, they can't run it thru a code obfusicator and distribute the source, or claim: we gave you the source, it's all right there in assembly. They have no obligation to provide patches. As a matter of fact, providing only patches would leave them out of compliance with the license. They must provide a tarball of the entire source tree. The license (which in this case I believe to be the LGPL, not the GPL), specifically requires that they provide all of the files necessary to build the source. About the only the only thing I see done all the time in terms of a GPL violation that others do is (2.a), or (2.b) in the LGPL. I know I've modified GPL'ed code and not notated that I did it or the date.
I've worked with several people who are grad students or professors in this area. The first thing you'll probably want to do when looking for research, is use the term "expert systems", possibly in place of "Artificial Intelligence", possibly in conjunction with it. Full Disclosure: I don't know anything about this area really, they just used me as a sounding board to practice presentations, or get ideas about how to tweak an algorithm or two.
My former boss was working on his Master's Thesis, what worked on recongizing shapes based on edge boundary analaysis (among other things as I recall). He worked with the professor who as an expert in "Artificial Intelligence". However, they generally referred to the types of work my boss was doing as "Expert Systems", not as "Artificial Intelligence".
Are you saying that the H-1B visa's aren't being applied (or accepted) because enough people aren't attemting to immigrate. If that is what you are saying, I find that relatively shocking.
If you are saying that there are people with H-1B visa's that arne't being hired, that also sounds hard to believe. You must be sponsered by an employer to get an H-1B. If they let you go or you leave, I believe you have 30-90 days to find someone else to sponsor you. If you don't you get deported. Actually, I believe there are two types of H-1B visas, and with one of them you aren't tethered to employment, but I believe they have an incredibly low quota and hence very rare, most people you run into with an H-1B have to be employed. The only reason they are allowed into the country is because presumably they have some set of skills that can't be found by a US citizen.
I've worked with several guys who were H-1B, and they couldn't leave their jobs, and got treated like dirt. Everyone knew they couldn't leave, so just abusing the hell out of them was something for which they had no defense. While a lot of them were eminently employable elsewhere, the hassle of taking over the paperwork kept a lot of employers from hiring them.
Unless I miss my guess, 8.6% profit on commodity hardware is spectacular. My guess is that SAN are what StorageTek makes, and StorageTek isn't precisely commodity.
Commodity hardware is really brutal. You can drop that "hardware" out of that sentence and still be accurate. Being in a commodity business is brutal. All you really have to compete on is price. With SAN's, there's lots of other stuff to compete on. SAN's aren't as competitive as say the PC market. So I'm far less impressed by that then you appear to be. If they were making 8.6% in the PC market while competing against Gateway, Compaq and Dell, yep that's really impressive.
Technically speaking, the FSF requires that you give up the copyright to them for it to be included in their source tree for GNU projects. The FSF won't allow code they don't hold the copyright on to be in their release of the software.
anything to do with a filesystem that is only available on Linux - XFS, JFS, Lustre for example
You do realize that XFS is a port from SGI's UNIX varient (IRIX I believe). That JFS is ported from OS/2 to Linux (and was originally written for AIX and the s390 Mainframe if I recall the details correctly).
Lustre might be Linux only. I believe it started out life as a Linux-only project. I believe that ReiserFS is fairly Linux only (I thought they had ports to other OS's, but I can't find anything on there website about it the last time I looked). GFS to the best of my knowledge is a Linux only filesystem. Ext2/3 is primarily a Linux thing (I believe several other *BSD's have the ability to mount them, and a few odd Win32 drivers). Not sure about the other oddities (JFFS,CramFS,RomFS,SquashFS).
It's my understanding, that headlining strippers actually make money posing for pictures before and after their act. You can either get polariods right on the spot, or a signed professional print (obviously you aren't in that).
So yes, strippers do actually generate income standing next the fact bald guy (or signing picture for him). Or so I've heard. Never been to a strip club, but cable channels periodically as a "Day in the Life" of strippers show that is interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes. It's a different lifestyle, that's for sure.
Personally, it's a lap dance that I would find the most degrading. There you get to rub yourself up against the fat, smelly, balding guy. Boy oh boy, what fun.
Yes, I read it a week ago when it was posted. Just like I read it most weeks. Cringly's a pretty sharp guy, he's reasonably accurate, and generally pretty entertaining.
Any chance you read the article? At no point did he mention "pre-rendering" flash. He mentions specifically "taking responsibility for rendering Flash, for example". Precisely what he means I don't know. However, he specifically didn't say what you are saying makes him an idiot.
In the article you link to (which I read when it came out), he didn't say XP is DOS based, he said that "there is a disk operating system under there somewhere". In the end, he's right. In fact, until NT 4, the GUI interface wasn't in the kernel. The only reason it was added to the kernel was to avoid userspace-to-kernel transition overhead of fiddling with the video hardware. The fact of the matter is that the XP interface could be written as a service. The fact that services exist and work, without interacting with the GUI is proof enough that "there is a disk operating system under there somewhere".
In the end, the logic is right (just because there is an application that acts like a terminal you can't make the implication he does, but in the end no sane OS doesn't work without the GUI). What he is saying is accurate. That the important parts of XP that make it XP to a user, has zip to do with the guts of the OS, and everything to do with user interface. If they shipped the GUI, and the applications were portable. Given that Microsoft has the code to Win32, I'm fairly confident that they can do a better job then the Wine guys, so think of Wine as the prove of concept to what he is saying would work. They could maintain a program like X-Windows that renders to the screen, and gives you a desktop environment.
Just because you like to jump to conclusions about what someone said, doesn't make them wrong.
Because it's something I know about. Because it is supposed to be the next technological advance that changes the economy. Just like education of the masses, just like the invention of the steam engine. Just like any other technological advice. I could focus on something else, but I'd known a lot less then I do about IT.
Spend less on anything and that leaves you more.
That's utterly naive. Look up the definition "Return on Investment". Using that logic, the best thing you could possibly do with your money is nothing. It'd leave all of it for you. The concept it to spend the proper amount of money on IT to maximize the profit for the company. Lookup marginal benefit, apply it to IT spending. The author of the book, and the post I was responding too, say that the marginal benefit of spending less is positive. I just want someone to explain why that is, and at what point is it no longer true.
Most companies spend more on buildings than on IT.
Depending on how you define "IT" that might be true. If you include the wages of the people in the IT department, I seriously doubt it. The IT department costs my company more then the building we currently work in a year, hands down.
IT spending has been what people deemed neccessary, just like anything else. Companies do not spend "too much" on IT. They never have.
What people deemed necessary isn't always what is right. If someone arbitrarily decided that 75% of all spending must by on "IT", does that make him "right"? If it does, then what if someone else decides at 30% and makes more money? Clearly there needs to be a balance. So far, the author, and post I was responding to agree that currently we are spending too much in general. Using your logic, any amount someone chooses, must be the necessary amount. That's just blantantly wrong.
There are times when IT spending is wasteful. Getting better at identifing that and eliminating it is obviously a good idea. So no, what is "deemed neccessary", can most definitely be "too much". I've been present when we did it.
I would agree that it is obvoius if you did 's/in order to/and/'
However, how you spend less and get more is not "utterly obvious" to me. Clearly that's a very good thing, and everyone should try and do it.
I understand that giving IT less resources forces them to try and be efficient, but it's not obvious that they will be able to accomplish all that they need to.
I also understand that very profitable companies are the ones that spend the smallest percentage of their budget on IT (there are various studies that show that, I believe at least one of them has been posted here).
Maybe you could make it clear to me by the marginal benefit analysis. If it is obvious that spending less on IT is uniformily better, then there would be no IT industry (or at the least, all other industries would be better off with no IT industry). The question is where is the optimal point in the curve. What I currently do, couldn't exist without IT, but then again there are 4-5 IT people, and ~60 people at my company. I believe we spend a fairly small percentage of our money on IT. You and the author appear to agree that companies uniformally spend too much if you agree that it's obvious they need to spend less and would get better results. They question is what is optimal.
So draw me the diagram. I'm clueless as to how that statement could possibly be "utterly obvious".
For whatever it's worth, I do believe a lot of companies just throw money at IT hoping that technology can overcome a lot of problems. In a lot of cases, that is wasted money. They don't do a good job of analysis to see what new problems the IT will create, and how well it will resolve the old problems.
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I'm willing to trade a 4-5M of memory to have OO.org start that much faster. As it's loading the 4-5M from disk to RAM that causes the most disruption. Between the splash screen that is "always on top" and centered on my desktop. It wouldn't be so bad if it was 1/3 the size in each dimension. It takes so long to start, the not having it can lead me to believe something is wrong when I open .csv or .doc files via a brower.
Kirby
However, you are correct in asserting that the legal protections they provide are completely different. Yes, the original poster did incorrectly use "patent" in the subject.
I believe Microsoft can't use "Windows" or "Word", as several other people have said in this story, they have a copyright on "Microsft Word", or "MS Word". I've noticed they have a tendenacy to always include "MS" or "Microsoft" any time they refer to Word or Windows (or they refer to a specific version of Windows, like Windows 95, or Windows XP).
Kirby
Curious, I'd always been told it was becase the Mac's used variable density floppies (which actually dated back to the Apple, and it was because huge amounts of storage was wasted if you didn't change the density/motor speed), and PC based floppy drivers were incapable of dealing with that.
This link shows roughly what I remember of the history.
There were programs that could read them back in the mid 90's. I'm fairly confident that any lawyer on the planet worth their salt could show that HFS couldn't be copyrighted (it might be patentable). It's like an API, they can't be copyrighted. A description of them can be copyrighted, but the actual API can't (see POSIX, anyone can implement POSIX, but the actual documentation of how it works is in fact copyrighted). You can't copyright something that breaks compatibility. I can't cite the case law off hand, but I know I've seen several people on slashdot talk about it. Maybe one of them can help me out.
Kirby
As to why it is valuable IP, try getting into a cut-throat commodity business where margin's are 1-2%. If you make it possible for your competitor to undercut you on price by 1-2%, your in big trouble (that's your profit margin). Commodity hardware is very, very price dependent. I've worked on embedded systems. Drop in replacements, and "wire compatible" parts are very valuable. I know we used to swap out parts all the time on the basis of "drop in replacement". If the part was 0.10 cheaper on a $15.00 part, if you are purchasing 150,000 of them, it adds up. If I had to talk with a SCSI card and they told me that someone else had a SCSI card that was a drop in replacement based on the published docs that was 1% cheaper. We would try out a couple of samples. Debug what we didn't work. If after 2-3 days it worked, we switched parts.
The PCI card market might not be quite the same, but I can see how a lot of vendors see it that way. They sell a lot of hardware to custom hardware developers.
Kirby
I've dealt with hardware guys, building drop in replacements is much easier then building an original working model in a lot of ways. While in constrains the design, it also creates a definitive goal. There is no argument about "should it do X or Y". Just look at the specs. They'll tell you exactly how it should behave.
Try and think of it as "Test Oriented Development". You now have the tests to develop something. If you want to know if it is correct, you run the test. The result of the test is spelled out in the documentation. Ask anyone who has done lots of development, about unit testing and how wonderful it is to have. Design specifications are very close to unit testing. Especially if you have a working driver from the company.
Besides all that, just ask Pepsi how valuable Coca-Cola classic's secret recipe is. In the end, no one has been able to reproduce the damn thing despite ~130 years of trying, and literally billions of dollars in incentive. While a lot of Coca-Cola is branding, don't underestimate that they got big based on their taste. I've tried a lot of other soda's. Most of them are horrific.
Kirby
Anytime they purchased something from out of state via mail order, there was a local office they would drive the receipt down to and pay the tax on it. It's technically speaking a violation of the law not to do it. They did it because it was literally both their jobs to see that people did this. So out of a sense of duty, they paid them. Not to mention how much trouble the step-father could have gotten into for letting his own family get away with Tax Fraud.
However, it's incredibly difficult to enforce and very unpopular. So nobody actually does it. However, in most states there is a law on the books that says anything you purchase from out of state, you must drive pay the tax on it. The reason you pay it if the business has a prescense in your state is because, the business can be held accountable, and have to pay the tax because they are within the states jursidiction (and are probably licensed to do business there). It is cost effective to go after businesses that don't pay the sales tax.
It's very similar to why the gov't requires business to withold taxes from your check. If they don't, the business has assests and is cost effective to go after if they are of any size.
It's the same reason that the DMV is the one who collects the sales tax on cars. Even if you purchase the car out of state, you have to pay sales tax in your local jursdiction (along with all of the local property taxes).
Kirby
Now, the number of machines on the acting as servers on the Internet is dwarfed by the number of machines not acting as servers on the Internet. Not a contest. Not even close to a contest. Finally, most hardware vendor's that produce high end hardware do get it. Look at the number of SCSI devices that have documentation or drivers. Not the crappy low end ones, but the really good stuff. Sorry, the crappy low end adaptec IDE RAID cards aren't ever going into a high end server. Most internet servers don't really need a good 3D card from Nvidia or ATI. Look at the e1000? Yep, got a lot of those sold, and some really good documentation available to the public. Now look at the wireless chipsets, never going in a server. Not going to get public release based off domination in the "NetCraft" stats. 90% of all wireless cards will never ever be put in a machine that is counted by "NetCraft". They will be put in machines that say, 90-95% of all shipping computers have a Microsoft OS on them.
So depending on the product, yes, the NetCraft numbers are insigificant, both in terms of percentage and raw numbers.
For other products, the NetCraft numbers make a lot of sense. Look at the number of Open Source drivers for high end SAN cards. Look at the number of Gigabit cards that have open source drivers. Look at the number of highend RAID cards that have open documentation.
The other thing they are confusing is "won't release specs", versus won't allow re-distribution of the firmware. For a lot of wireless cards, it's that they can't re-distribute the firmware which is necessary for the hardware to work, not that they don't have the specs for the actual hardware. (I believe a number of OpenBSD's issues with Wireless Intel chipsets are this issue). The other issue with Wireless is that releasing the specs could invite FCC issues. I'm not sure of how much teeth those could have, but it sounds like a legitimate concern. If the FCC could say, well people are using your part with your documentation to drive it out of complaince, your wireless cards can no longer be sold. That'd be a real problem for Intel or Cisco.
Finally, releasing the specs, would allow a competitor to say they clean room, backward engineered without having to do the documentation. It's really expensive to do that testing and documentation. So they could sell a competing product at a much lower price. It's much easier to match an existing specification, that it is to write a good known working specification. It is valuable IP. Personally, I think it's wonderful when they release it. For a lot of hardware they do. Especially for the really high end hardware that needs high reliability.
Kirby
When I read what he is saying they want to do, it sure sounds a lot like reading Fred Brooke's "Mythical Man Month". They are realizing that writting high quality, re-usable components with good documentation is very expensive. I believe "MMM", discussed this in the very first chapter. There are two orthognal qualities (I believe re-usable, and quality documentation, but it's a really long time since I read the book) that add a factor of 3 in each direction. If you wanted both it would take 9 times as long.
Stratigically, it makes sense to invest in creating those, if you have features that will be needed in enough different projects and areas. It sounds like they are planning on breaking down internal barriers, and providing highly re-usable, and well documented internally, and then ensuring that people know of it's existance.
Providing the source is a good idea. Ensuring that the fixes get moved upstream is a good idea. However, this sounds like good Engineering Practices (which I suppose is what a lot of "Open Source" advocates say you get, where as "Free Software" advocates, say it's purely an ethical issue).
It sure seems like this has little to do with "Open Source", and a lot to do with solid Engineering. It just so happens that Open Source has a lot of solid engineering behind it. It sure looks like a no brainer to re-use source you already have access to. If you are going to re-use it, it should probably be designed for that. If people who didn't write it are going to use it, it should probably be documented fairly well. Some how this seems fairly obvious, as opposed to, "we add features as we need them, to resolve some personal niche", which is the crux of "Open Source" according to CatB.
Kirby
Their CPU's run instructions. Microsoft feeds the CPU's with instructions to run. I see no practical way for an Intel CPU to tell the difference between Linux instructions, and Microsoft instructions.
It's not like Intel has a stanglehold on the BIOS business. I'm fairly confident BioStar, Pheonix and Award are all going to continue shipping a BIOS that will boot a Microsoft OS.
Once you get past the BIOS, I don't see Intel having any way of letting anyone develop for their CPU/Chipsets, but excluding Microsoft..
Kirby
Technically speaking, one doesn't "pump" oil in Canada (at least if you are discussing the Oil Shoals, essentially Oil embedded in soil, which is what I've been told is the largest known supply of Oil in the world, there is also a lot of this in Scandanavian countries if I remember correctly). One processes the soil/rock/mineral and Oil is a by-product of the process. They are called the "Candaian Oil Planes" I believe. I don't believe it's "under" Canada, I believe a lot of it is literally just sitting on the ground, or is a mining/escavation issue, not a "drill" issue (it's not a liquid essentially). I've heard the number quoted as $30-50/barrel before Canda starts making money, however, I don't know if that is only a small percentage of it. There might be some that $80/barrel is correct (if you have a source for that number, I'd be interested in seeing it).
The Alaskan Oil pipeline I believe can only supply 5% of the current US demand when running at peak capacity (which it almost never does). I had this argument with a friend recently who claimed that we could become Oil self-sufficient via Alaska. While they have the oil, we'd need a long time to expand the capacity to transport the Oil out of Alaska.
I've been told that the single largest liquid Oil deposit ever found is supposed to be off the shores of California in an area the U.S. has the rights to. I think that's highly exaggerated, but the claim was that it was larger then all other known oil supplies in the Earth. The problem with it is that it's well below the depth at which we have equipment to deal with it. I'll have to go see if I can find the source for that stat. (It's in my e-mail, but I believe that e-mail is archived, so digging it up off CD will take a while).
Kirby
I'm still not sure how much a family drinks has to do with the price of tea in china, or the price of gas in the U.S. Yes, it does in fact have economy of scale over most other liquids, but we are talking about gasoline here. It's a fairly high demand substance, which should drive the price up. It's not like it grows on trees. I'm fairly confident gas has a bit more processing done to it then Milk (why am I dreading the diatribe someone will tell me about pasturization). It's not like most of the gas or Oil in this country originates here. I'm guessing getting it from the Middle East to here, isn't cheap. I'm sure feeding and caring for my grandma's cow bessy isn't cheap, but I'm willing to bet, pumping oil out of the ground isn't precisely free either.
Kirby
Name three liquids besides water that you can get cheaper?
Gas is one of the worlds cheapest liquids period. Other then tap water, nothing even comes close (or it didn't until the recent run up in price). I still think a gallon of milk is about 2.50-3.00 (I don't pay any attention to the price, but I pretty sure it's over $2/gal). Pretty much anything else is more expensive by the gallon. Cleaners, Juice, heck even lots of bottled water is more expensive, soda is generally more expensive. Gas is cheap. Call me when it hit's $4-$5/gal. Then you might have a point. The problem with gas prices is that the U.S. Economy is so incredibly sensitive to it's price. Simple stuff like agriculture, is something like 90% based on the price of gas (between the fertilizers, transportation, and actual farm equipment, 90% of the costs come down to how much gas does it take to do that step). It'd be even cheaper without the taxes (I believe it's like 35-50% of the price of gas where I live is pretty much taxes).
Kirby
I've programmed professionally for a living for about 10 years. Never met anyone who edit patchs or changesets as their primary method editing code. I've seen people fix up patches and then apply them (even that is very rare). I've seen them review the history of the code via the VCS. However, not a single person I've ever met, generates a patch from scratch and then applies it to the source. They edit the source and generate patches. The patches are there merely as a convienent way to express the changes.
Comments you might have a point (lacking the comments, I could see a legitimate argument that it's a simplified form of variable and function obfusication), but patchsets are completely irrelavent, they are a by-product of the editting, they aren't necessary to build the source. They aren't what anyone edits to create source. I never have to edit an old patchset to fix a problem. I just go edit the source code.
Patchsets are useful for pulling in other peoples changes, they aren't useful for making changes to the software yourself. Nobody will interpret what you want that to mean in a legal sense.
Kirby
Kirby
My former boss was working on his Master's Thesis, what worked on recongizing shapes based on edge boundary analaysis (among other things as I recall). He worked with the professor who as an expert in "Artificial Intelligence". However, they generally referred to the types of work my boss was doing as "Expert Systems", not as "Artificial Intelligence".
Kirby
Think Geek's Tool page has most of the things you want on a swiss army knife, or a leatherman tool. You just have to go look for it.
Kirby
Are you saying that the H-1B visa's aren't being applied (or accepted) because enough people aren't attemting to immigrate. If that is what you are saying, I find that relatively shocking.
If you are saying that there are people with H-1B visa's that arne't being hired, that also sounds hard to believe. You must be sponsered by an employer to get an H-1B. If they let you go or you leave, I believe you have 30-90 days to find someone else to sponsor you. If you don't you get deported. Actually, I believe there are two types of H-1B visas, and with one of them you aren't tethered to employment, but I believe they have an incredibly low quota and hence very rare, most people you run into with an H-1B have to be employed. The only reason they are allowed into the country is because presumably they have some set of skills that can't be found by a US citizen.
I've worked with several guys who were H-1B, and they couldn't leave their jobs, and got treated like dirt. Everyone knew they couldn't leave, so just abusing the hell out of them was something for which they had no defense. While a lot of them were eminently employable elsewhere, the hassle of taking over the paperwork kept a lot of employers from hiring them.
Kirby
Commodity hardware is really brutal. You can drop that "hardware" out of that sentence and still be accurate. Being in a commodity business is brutal. All you really have to compete on is price. With SAN's, there's lots of other stuff to compete on. SAN's aren't as competitive as say the PC market. So I'm far less impressed by that then you appear to be. If they were making 8.6% in the PC market while competing against Gateway, Compaq and Dell, yep that's really impressive.
Kirby
Kirby
You do realize that XFS is a port from SGI's UNIX varient (IRIX I believe). That JFS is ported from OS/2 to Linux (and was originally written for AIX and the s390 Mainframe if I recall the details correctly).
Lustre might be Linux only. I believe it started out life as a Linux-only project. I believe that ReiserFS is fairly Linux only (I thought they had ports to other OS's, but I can't find anything on there website about it the last time I looked). GFS to the best of my knowledge is a Linux only filesystem. Ext2/3 is primarily a Linux thing (I believe several other *BSD's have the ability to mount them, and a few odd Win32 drivers). Not sure about the other oddities (JFFS,CramFS,RomFS,SquashFS).
Kirby
So yes, strippers do actually generate income standing next the fact bald guy (or signing picture for him). Or so I've heard. Never been to a strip club, but cable channels periodically as a "Day in the Life" of strippers show that is interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes. It's a different lifestyle, that's for sure.
Personally, it's a lap dance that I would find the most degrading. There you get to rub yourself up against the fat, smelly, balding guy. Boy oh boy, what fun.
Kirby
Any chance you read the article? At no point did he mention "pre-rendering" flash. He mentions specifically "taking responsibility for rendering Flash, for example". Precisely what he means I don't know. However, he specifically didn't say what you are saying makes him an idiot.
In the article you link to (which I read when it came out), he didn't say XP is DOS based, he said that "there is a disk operating system under there somewhere". In the end, he's right. In fact, until NT 4, the GUI interface wasn't in the kernel. The only reason it was added to the kernel was to avoid userspace-to-kernel transition overhead of fiddling with the video hardware. The fact of the matter is that the XP interface could be written as a service. The fact that services exist and work, without interacting with the GUI is proof enough that "there is a disk operating system under there somewhere".
In the end, the logic is right (just because there is an application that acts like a terminal you can't make the implication he does, but in the end no sane OS doesn't work without the GUI). What he is saying is accurate. That the important parts of XP that make it XP to a user, has zip to do with the guts of the OS, and everything to do with user interface. If they shipped the GUI, and the applications were portable. Given that Microsoft has the code to Win32, I'm fairly confident that they can do a better job then the Wine guys, so think of Wine as the prove of concept to what he is saying would work. They could maintain a program like X-Windows that renders to the screen, and gives you a desktop environment.
Just because you like to jump to conclusions about what someone said, doesn't make them wrong.
Kirby
Because it's something I know about. Because it is supposed to be the next technological advance that changes the economy. Just like education of the masses, just like the invention of the steam engine. Just like any other technological advice. I could focus on something else, but I'd known a lot less then I do about IT.
That's utterly naive. Look up the definition "Return on Investment". Using that logic, the best thing you could possibly do with your money is nothing. It'd leave all of it for you. The concept it to spend the proper amount of money on IT to maximize the profit for the company. Lookup marginal benefit, apply it to IT spending. The author of the book, and the post I was responding too, say that the marginal benefit of spending less is positive. I just want someone to explain why that is, and at what point is it no longer true. Depending on how you define "IT" that might be true. If you include the wages of the people in the IT department, I seriously doubt it. The IT department costs my company more then the building we currently work in a year, hands down.What people deemed necessary isn't always what is right. If someone arbitrarily decided that 75% of all spending must by on "IT", does that make him "right"? If it does, then what if someone else decides at 30% and makes more money? Clearly there needs to be a balance. So far, the author, and post I was responding to agree that currently we are spending too much in general. Using your logic, any amount someone chooses, must be the necessary amount. That's just blantantly wrong.
There are times when IT spending is wasteful. Getting better at identifing that and eliminating it is obviously a good idea. So no, what is "deemed neccessary", can most definitely be "too much". I've been present when we did it.
Kirby
However, how you spend less and get more is not "utterly obvious" to me. Clearly that's a very good thing, and everyone should try and do it.
I understand that giving IT less resources forces them to try and be efficient, but it's not obvious that they will be able to accomplish all that they need to.
I also understand that very profitable companies are the ones that spend the smallest percentage of their budget on IT (there are various studies that show that, I believe at least one of them has been posted here).
Maybe you could make it clear to me by the marginal benefit analysis. If it is obvious that spending less on IT is uniformily better, then there would be no IT industry (or at the least, all other industries would be better off with no IT industry). The question is where is the optimal point in the curve. What I currently do, couldn't exist without IT, but then again there are 4-5 IT people, and ~60 people at my company. I believe we spend a fairly small percentage of our money on IT. You and the author appear to agree that companies uniformally spend too much if you agree that it's obvious they need to spend less and would get better results. They question is what is optimal.
So draw me the diagram. I'm clueless as to how that statement could possibly be "utterly obvious".
For whatever it's worth, I do believe a lot of companies just throw money at IT hoping that technology can overcome a lot of problems. In a lot of cases, that is wasted money. They don't do a good job of analysis to see what new problems the IT will create, and how well it will resolve the old problems.
Kirby
However, if really wants to maximize his TCO, I'm more then willing to do some very expensive consulting for him.
Kirby