Well. This is funny. If you put the effort which goes into ReactOS into developing a driver layer for the linux kernel which allows to expose windows driver functions after loading windows drivers to sw which may be interested and polishing wine a little bit, you have much better chances of developing a working Desktop replacment.
Moreover: Linux may be failing on the desktop (somthing to be disputed), but linux is awfully sucessful everywhere else. The turning point probably was that sony startet to put linux in all their products (from e-book readers to televisions and cameras) and linux (android) is replacing windows systems at a tremendous rate. I must be really bored to fire up the email reader on my laptop. Usually all my communications go via my phone, and thats what i observe anywhere. I see people buyn tablets with android who would have been hard-core "i need MS Office" followers.
ReactOS is a nice idea and an interesting project. But it you ask me for the shortest route to replacing windoes desktops, it wont be involved.
I dont like DRM. However i dont like it even less that it comes in some undefined ways. Makes it diffcult to avoid or at least estimate its extend. I would prefer it very much if my browser had a warning (similar to the warnings regarding encryption etc) which *shows me* when a webpage tries it.
So i appeciate if we could direct this into a more ordered way.
Windows 7 was a real step forward. A true sucesssor to XP. BTW. XP is still a perfectly fine OS. It runs fine with less than 2GB of HD and 256MB of ram (in a VM) and just works. Unless something forces me to use windows 8, i will switch to WIndows 7 when the XP support runs out an hope that 8 will be a lesson on what customers want in the same way Vista (shuffle features in the users back which are *just not ready*) or Windows 2000 (too little, too late) was.
Nothing better than a solid overestimation of the own understanding of physics.
The net transfer of energy will be from warmer to colder. However, the coler part nevertheless radiates and its energy will contribute to the heat gain of the warmer body. The warmer to colder body is, the more energy it will radiate towards the warmer body, thus reducing the net flow of energy.
Well. You can ask them indirectly. There is a shitload of ways to ask people about something without them realizing that.
Its like if i ask somebody to tell me about his mather thesis its definitely not because i want to know that. In the YEC case i would plainly ask for which things besides work or hobbies he uses his scientific or technical skills (i meant its not like i havent been asked that question).
And about your threatening comment: I am not afraid of that. Trivial to counter it.
In my job a lack of looking at existing knowledge is even worse. Most people who are bad at math or physics know their limits and will ask when unsure.
I take care not to misidentify everybody. And i am good at that. Let me rephrase it: i would for sure still interview him/her, and think of how to test for the thing which matters:
I am working as a technical consultant (doing simulations). Somebody publically stating that YEC is scientific shows such a great deal of misconception of the reality (that there no way to connect this to normal science) that it is not acceptable to have him representign a project where scientific objectivity in evaluating things is the main demand.
I accept religious views. I accept that somobody creates his own paralell version of science and rejects the "mainstream science".
But he has to accept that the method we "mainstream scientists" are using enabled most of the things humans are using in the world today (as we use them today).
I did never say i would be reading blog posts about cow tipping. I said that i find them irrelevant to thing i want to know.
The YEC example would be relevant however, since a public display of self-perception as objectively and scientifically driven would be extremely relevant for co-workers in my job (technical-scientific consultant). If he/she keeps that private and nobody ever figures it out, and his math and physics is solid, no problem with it. I accidentally work in an area (Building energy mangement/renewable energy) where people may be inclined to put in their personal view in the result. If i estimate the extected performance of a system, i dont want somebody contributing who obviously publically asserts that fairy-tales and bad science from 150 years ago represent the up-to date knowlegde of the world. If he does bad work, that could result in ugly questions.
The data is definitely *not* of poor quality. We have the fundamental meterial properties, which we know, we have theories which can be tested, and we have a load of experimental data. What is of poor quality is the representation in the media. The usual cycle:
Climate scientists: Earth will be warming by x+-sigma degrees in y years Media: I am freaking out, we will die in a big flood wave and the rest of the planet will be a huge desert and unslee we do *NOW* wel will all die Climate scientists: no.. wait.. its not like that... We said Earth will be warming by x degrees in y years, There will be no big flood wave Media: Dont worry, hoooray, continue everything as before. Global warming is cancelled Climate scientists: We said Earth will be warming by x degrees in y years, and thats a serious thing. We need to decide what to do. Media: oh my god, we are all going to die....
No the intellectual property (copyright) is protected by the usual copyright laws. Without these, the GPL would be be meaningless.
The GPL creates a well defined usage under which the programmer permits to use the code. It will remain under his copyright forever. There is no way that he will not be the creator of the specific parts of the code in the sense of the law (that would obviously apply to undocumented intentional backdoors placed in the code).
Regarding the "socialistic": i think the irony should have been clear.
Today, googleling sombody who i get in contact with is standard. Be it just for finding his master/phd thesis or publications. I would never google to figure out somebodies personal views on somthing. But (really happened) if i google to find something about his academic/profressional life and the only thing which turns up is that he was active in the student church or students christian mission, then i cant help but being biased, for several reasons:
a) i take that as an inciator which precedence his private life takes over his academic aspirations.
b) it may appear that it contradicts a materialistic local objective world view i will find him unfit for certain aspects. In my world a single entry in an online forum identiofying him as a young earth creationist will eliminate him from the list of candicates for some tasks. Way way worse than having a picture in BDSM fashion or a drunken picture, or a blog entry about cow-tipping.
c) There is the possibility to extract real and valid infromation from this. If you exhibit a pessimistic view towards you current employer, then it is a bad sign.
Sorry. I really wish google had a button to "display only results likely to be relevant for professional life" but they dont have.
No, its just usual to have even good developers licensing somtheing under a license without having read and understood these or other licenses.
The top misunderstanding is actually the one about the GPL mandatign you to publish the source code openly, which lies at the heart of the "Softwar as a service" problem.
To state that clearly: The only thing the GPL mandates is what you should give to the people to whom you give your software product. The GPL is designed for the freedom of the user (or customer), not the intellectual property protection of the programmer or as socialistic "software mus be open for everybody". If you distribute a product inside a company, the person you are distributing it to will have certain rights *as a part of the company*. However there is nothing wrong with a company rule which does not allow him to exercise these rights, like confidentiality agreements. Currently i am working for a company where the GPL is blacklisted due to that misunderstanding.
Yes. I dont work on weekends and i possess and use a smartphone.
Working on the weekends means
a) You have a job which inherently needs to be done on the weekends
b) You cant say "no" to new tasks even if you realistically would have see that there is no way of doing them in the planned time The reason for this could be not being able to resistss pressure from your (stupid) boss or not being able to estimate you own work speed
c) You projekt manager fucks up and while the abolute amount of tasks is right, needed input only arrives at you on Friday instead of Monday.
d) (My previous life) You work in research, which is a combination of the points above on a regular base
Schmidt stated the obvious, but if you are a developer and you took the bait and thought the rumors might be true, you already read enough of Google Chrome or Google Android documentation before Schmidt's clarification and confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid."
Yes. Developers who read documentaiton may have known it. Mangers however may get excited on the idea that they understand the world know that everything is open source and linux.
There is no mandate that the poster should share the general opinion of slashdot all the time or that has to believe that a specific instance of what is demanded is easily doable.
Well I live in europe. Recently a very similar case happened. a sportswoman publically mentioned on facebook that somebody send her emails with his naked photos against her will, and as far as i can tell the only thing which happened was a shitstorm, but no lawsuit against her, but she sued him. A journalist who was getting remarks very similar to the ones as the woman in the article from a politician in a semi-professional setting made it public and was not sued.
I find it ok to make people making offensive jokes public. Iff its no problem to make the joke public, then its no problem to tell it. However the male fraction of the population who finds these ok when they are applied to women, probably would stop finding these ok if their female manager would make remarks over the size of their **** in their presence - well knowing that the really insensitive remarks start when the corresponding gender has left the room.
They would call it unprofessional, and that is what it is. I (male) work under a quite young male manager from a country with less sensitivity in these issues, and even if he is really ok he manages to piss me off in that respect. For example when he in one minute talks about the looks of women and in the next one ask us if we would not need a woman in our team. Even vaguely hinting that my professional opinion and at the same time my jugdement about former employees may be affected by the gender pisses me off. Especially because we recently had some young female colleague in the team of which i professionally think very highly due her skills in mathematics.
However i see that certain levels of certain professions come with an increased contact with morons and an required increased tolerance to inacceptable behaviour. I personally would count anything with social media in that category. If you have some function like this and you are somewhere in this function, you need to balance the actions exactly as carefully as when you would make jokes on a public conference. Both show a lack of jugdement of appropitate behaviour, your standing and your possibility to represent your employer properly.
When it comes to employer an sexual harrassment (which i count offensive jokes as), they alway would like to settle it in private. For a multitiude of reasons, the most important one that each public case means a "the company sends women to places where they are harrased" and that the public does not distinct between "realities of the trade" and "active participation". If not everything is well withing a company this can be a public relations desaster beyond what the company deserves. E.g. in this case a hostess working for the compnay on some fair could tune in and unse the media attention for her five minutes of fame, and the media would be very happy to paint the picture of "company sends women to nerds to be harrased there".
So what to do if you encounter inappropriate behaviour? In a company with good governance, just report to the superior of the corresponding person or to the ombudsman. If not, then its more difficult and i guess pressing for a lawsuit may be a good idea since that will stimulate the laziest of the bosses.
a) A conference is a public place. Taking photos there is no crime and reporting what you could hear by natural hearing neither.
b) If you have twitter followers for some reason, what you write will be observed
c) If you are somewhere representing a company on social media, and you use this channel for other things, no matter if you did it for the best and the worst, and these other things start to interfere with your capability to efficiently represent the company in a solely positive way, you will be fired. And rightly so. A company does not judge if you are right or wrong in doing something. They see somebody who can create a positive image for them. If you have such a job, then you have to know that creating unwanted attention which prevents you from doing the job gets you fired. Sorry thatâ(TM)s life. If you have a Job behind a desk, programming, you can do whatever you want on twitter.
and that is exactly the reason why i believe it must be standardized. When i get a program or a file i want to answer the question "does it use DRM" easily.
I had recently a very bad experience with an deployment tool, which did not mention DRM at all but actually used DRM methods to protect code from being changed without telling so. I got a little suspicious and after drilling the support for 1h they admitted that the real purpose of the "encryption" was not to "protect the code on the way to the customer" (as the advertisements loosely suggested), but to prevent modification without their deployment tool, in order to protect their freely distributed (powerful) runtime from being used by people not in possession of the deployment tool. Was not so funny since we needed to exclude this part from the builds in order to fulfill GPLv3 requirements.
So: yes, ok, if you like to DRM, please use it. But at least give me the option to systematically see/avoid these parts. Dont fuck me with "you have to buy device x because its technologically so brilliant" if you really mean "to push our own media store, we used a lot of engineering to hide the keys for decryption deep in the device". I would like to see a warning label on things which use DRM which say "this content can not be used anywhere. You dont posess it.".
A small side remark: Are HTML5 files with DRM as documentation GPL3 compliant? I think not....
Online text editors all suck. Forgive me the formulation. I can not say it in another way. They have capabilies somwhere between word 5.0 running from 3.5 inch floppy disk on ms-dos and ami pro running on win3.1 a 4MB 386sx 22years ago, I have actually not seen a single one which would outdo ami pro from back then, on a machine with 1/1000 of the ram and 1/1000 of the computational power.
My top ten of fuckups in the online text editos (actually some also many android office suites:
1) Formulas 2) Focus on decent style sheet support 3) Decent floatign objects 4) Decent Table of content etc. support 5) Serial letter functions? 6) Integrated thesaurus (yes, word 5.0 for dos had that) 7) Decent working in non-WYSIWIG modes 8) Equivalent of draft mode/outline mode....
the dialog is pointless becaus nobody does it right. The people would pretty quickly learn that it does not kill 1000 kittens in average.
Correct would be to write: in one of hundred times, clicking on this will cause a malware infection. If it does, it department will send 1000 killed kittens via in-house mail to your table. That's 10 kittens in average per click. Good luck.
I am sure after one or two times burying the desktop of some office assistant under dead kittens and posting it on the companies homepage you may have your employees attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Well. This is funny. If you put the effort which goes into ReactOS into developing a driver layer for the linux kernel which allows to expose windows driver functions after loading windows drivers to sw which may be interested and polishing wine a little bit, you have much better chances of developing a working Desktop replacment.
Moreover: Linux may be failing on the desktop (somthing to be disputed), but linux is awfully sucessful everywhere else. The turning point probably was that sony startet to put linux in all their products (from e-book readers to televisions and cameras) and linux (android) is replacing windows systems at a tremendous rate. I must be really bored to fire up the email reader on my laptop. Usually all my communications go via my phone, and thats what i observe anywhere. I see people buyn tablets with android who would have been hard-core "i need MS Office" followers.
ReactOS is a nice idea and an interesting project. But it you ask me for the shortest route to replacing windoes desktops, it wont be involved.
I dont like DRM. However i dont like it even less that it comes in some undefined ways. Makes it diffcult to avoid or at least estimate its extend. I would prefer it very much if my browser had a warning (similar to the warnings regarding encryption etc) which *shows me* when a webpage tries it.
So i appeciate if we could direct this into a more ordered way.
Windows 7 was a real step forward. A true sucesssor to XP. BTW. XP is still a perfectly fine OS. It runs fine with less than 2GB of HD and 256MB of ram (in a VM) and just works. Unless something forces me to use windows 8, i will switch to WIndows 7 when the XP support runs out an hope that 8 will be a lesson on what customers want in the same way Vista (shuffle features in the users back which are *just not ready*) or Windows 2000 (too little, too late) was.
Unlikely.
Let the legal aspects be my concern. You have no information wether i am involved directly in a formal hiring process, nor know my whereabouts.
As far as i am aware using publically available information (no login) is allowed in most places of the world.
Nothing better than a solid overestimation of the own understanding of physics.
The net transfer of energy will be from warmer to colder. However, the coler part nevertheless radiates and its energy will contribute to the heat gain of the warmer body. The warmer to colder body is, the more energy it will radiate towards the warmer body, thus reducing the net flow of energy.
Well. You can ask them indirectly. There is a shitload of ways to ask people about something without them realizing that.
Its like if i ask somebody to tell me about his mather thesis its definitely not because i want to know that. In the YEC case i would plainly ask for which things besides work or hobbies he uses his scientific or technical skills (i meant its not like i havent been asked that question).
And about your threatening comment: I am not afraid of that. Trivial to counter it.
In my job a lack of looking at existing knowledge is even worse. Most people who are bad at math or physics know their limits and will ask when unsure.
I take care not to misidentify everybody. And i am good at that. Let me rephrase it: i would for sure still interview him/her, and think of how to test for the thing which matters:
I am working as a technical consultant (doing simulations). Somebody publically stating that YEC is scientific shows such a great deal of misconception of the reality (that there no way to connect this to normal science) that it is not acceptable to have him representign a project where scientific objectivity in evaluating things is the main demand.
I accept religious views. I accept that somobody creates his own paralell version of science and rejects the "mainstream science".
But he has to accept that the method we "mainstream scientists" are using enabled most of the things humans are using in the world today (as we use them today).
I did never say i would be reading blog posts about cow tipping. I said that i find them irrelevant to thing i want to know.
The YEC example would be relevant however, since a public display of self-perception as objectively and scientifically driven would be extremely relevant for co-workers in my job (technical-scientific consultant). If he/she keeps that private and nobody ever figures it out, and his math and physics is solid, no problem with it. I accidentally work in an area (Building energy mangement/renewable energy) where people may be inclined to put in their personal view in the result. If i estimate the extected performance of a system, i dont want somebody contributing who obviously publically asserts that fairy-tales and bad science from 150 years ago represent the up-to date knowlegde of the world. If he does bad work, that could result in ugly questions.
The data is definitely *not* of poor quality. We have the fundamental meterial properties, which we know, we have theories which can be tested, and we have a load of experimental data. What is of poor quality is the representation in the media. The usual cycle:
Climate scientists: Earth will be warming by x+-sigma degrees in y years
Media: I am freaking out, we will die in a big flood wave and the rest of the planet will be a huge desert and unslee we do *NOW* wel will all die
Climate scientists: no.. wait.. its not like that... We said Earth will be warming by x degrees in y years, There will be no big flood wave
Media: Dont worry, hoooray, continue everything as before. Global warming is cancelled
Climate scientists: We said Earth will be warming by x degrees in y years, and thats a serious thing. We need to decide what to do.
Media: oh my god, we are all going to die....
Try to figure it out. Shoud not be difficult for somebody as wise as you are.
No the intellectual property (copyright) is protected by the usual copyright laws. Without these, the GPL would be be meaningless.
The GPL creates a well defined usage under which the programmer permits to use the code. It will remain under his copyright forever. There is no way that he will not be the creator of the specific parts of the code in the sense of the law (that would obviously apply to undocumented intentional backdoors placed in the code).
Regarding the "socialistic": i think the irony should have been clear.
Memo to everybody:
Today, googleling sombody who i get in contact with is standard. Be it just for finding his master/phd thesis or publications. I would never google to figure out somebodies personal views on somthing. But (really happened) if i google to find something about his academic/profressional life and the only thing which turns up is that he was active in the student church or students christian mission, then i cant help but being biased, for several reasons:
a) i take that as an inciator which precedence his private life takes over his academic aspirations.
b) it may appear that it contradicts a materialistic local objective world view i will find him unfit for certain aspects. In my world a single entry in an online forum identiofying him as a young earth creationist will eliminate him from the list of candicates for some tasks. Way way worse than having a picture in BDSM fashion or a drunken picture, or a blog entry about cow-tipping.
c) There is the possibility to extract real and valid infromation from this. If you exhibit a pessimistic view towards you current employer, then it is a bad sign.
Sorry. I really wish google had a button to "display only results likely to be relevant for professional life" but they dont have.
No, its just usual to have even good developers licensing somtheing under a license without having read and understood these or other licenses.
The top misunderstanding is actually the one about the GPL mandatign you to publish the source code openly, which lies at the heart of the "Softwar as a service" problem.
To state that clearly: The only thing the GPL mandates is what you should give to the people to whom you give your software product. The GPL is designed for the freedom of the user (or customer), not the intellectual property protection of the programmer or as socialistic "software mus be open for everybody". If you distribute a product inside a company, the person you are distributing it to will have certain rights *as a part of the company*. However there is nothing wrong with a company rule which does not allow him to exercise these rights, like confidentiality agreements. Currently i am working for a company where the GPL is blacklisted due to that misunderstanding.
Yes. I dont work on weekends and i possess and use a smartphone.
Working on the weekends means
a) You have a job which inherently needs to be done on the weekends
b) You cant say "no" to new tasks even if you realistically would have see that there is no way of doing them in the planned time The reason for this could be not being able to resistss pressure from your (stupid) boss or not being able to estimate you own work speed
c) You projekt manager fucks up and while the abolute amount of tasks is right, needed input only arrives at you on Friday instead of Monday.
d) (My previous life) You work in research, which is a combination of the points above on a regular base
Schmidt stated the obvious, but if you are a developer and you took the bait and thought the rumors might be true, you already read enough of Google Chrome or Google Android documentation before Schmidt's clarification and confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid."
Yes. Developers who read documentaiton may have known it. Mangers however may get excited on the idea that they understand the world know that everything is open source and linux.
There is no mandate that the poster should share the general opinion of slashdot all the time or that has to believe that a specific instance of what is demanded is easily doable.
So yes, you probably got that right.
Well I live in europe. Recently a very similar case happened. a sportswoman publically mentioned on facebook that somebody send her emails with his naked photos against her will, and as far as i can tell the only thing which happened was a shitstorm, but no lawsuit against her, but she sued him. A journalist who was getting remarks very similar to the ones as the woman in the article from a politician in a semi-professional setting made it public and was not sued.
I find it ok to make people making offensive jokes public. Iff its no problem to make the joke public, then its no problem to tell it. However the male fraction of the population who finds these ok when they are applied to women, probably would stop finding these ok if their female manager would make remarks over the size of their **** in their presence - well knowing that the really insensitive remarks start when the corresponding gender has left the room.
They would call it unprofessional, and that is what it is. I (male) work under a quite young male manager from a country with less sensitivity in these issues, and even if he is really ok he manages to piss me off in that respect. For example when he in one minute talks about the looks of women and in the next one ask us if we would not need a woman in our team. Even vaguely hinting that my professional opinion and at the same time my jugdement about former employees may be affected by the gender pisses me off. Especially because we recently had some young female colleague in the team of which i professionally think very highly due her skills in mathematics.
However i see that certain levels of certain professions come with an increased contact with morons and an required increased tolerance to inacceptable behaviour. I personally would count anything with social media in that category. If you have some function like this and you are somewhere in this function, you need to balance the actions exactly as carefully as when you would make jokes on a public conference. Both show a lack of jugdement of appropitate behaviour, your standing and your possibility to represent your employer properly.
When it comes to employer an sexual harrassment (which i count offensive jokes as), they alway would like to settle it in private. For a multitiude of reasons, the most important one that each public case means a "the company sends women to places where they are harrased" and that the public does not distinct between "realities of the trade" and "active participation". If not everything is well withing a company this can be a public relations desaster beyond what the company deserves. E.g. in this case a hostess working for the compnay on some fair could tune in and unse the media attention for her five minutes of fame, and the media would be very happy to paint the picture of "company sends women to nerds to be harrased there".
So what to do if you encounter inappropriate behaviour? In a company with good governance, just report to the superior of the corresponding person or to the ombudsman. If not, then its more difficult and i guess pressing for a lawsuit may be a good idea since that will stimulate the laziest of the bosses.
Its the only way to be sure.
a) A conference is a public place. Taking photos there is no crime and reporting what you could hear by natural hearing neither.
b) If you have twitter followers for some reason, what you write will be observed
c) If you are somewhere representing a company on social media, and you use this channel for other things, no matter if you did it for the best and the worst, and these other things start to interfere with your capability to efficiently represent the company in a solely positive way, you will be fired. And rightly so. A company does not judge if you are right or wrong in doing something. They see somebody who can create a positive image for them. If you have such a job, then you have to know that creating unwanted attention which prevents you from doing the job gets you fired. Sorry thatâ(TM)s life. If you have a Job behind a desk, programming, you can do whatever you want on twitter.
Yes. Use these whenever i want to typeset a serious document.
Can you read first lines of posts?
and that is exactly the reason why i believe it must be standardized. When i get a program or a file i want to answer the question "does it use DRM" easily.
I had recently a very bad experience with an deployment tool, which did not mention DRM at all but actually used DRM methods to protect code from being changed without telling so. I got a little suspicious and after drilling the support for 1h they admitted that the real purpose of the "encryption" was not to "protect the code on the way to the customer" (as the advertisements loosely suggested), but to prevent modification without their deployment tool, in order to protect their freely distributed (powerful) runtime from being used by people not in possession of the deployment tool. Was not so funny since we needed to exclude this part from the builds in order to fulfill GPLv3 requirements.
So: yes, ok, if you like to DRM, please use it. But at least give me the option to systematically see/avoid these parts. Dont fuck me with "you have to buy device x because its technologically so brilliant" if you really mean "to push our own media store, we used a lot of engineering to hide the keys for decryption deep in the device". I would like to see a warning label on things which use DRM which say "this content can not be used anywhere. You dont posess it.".
A small side remark: Are HTML5 files with DRM as documentation GPL3 compliant? I think not....
Online text editors all suck. Forgive me the formulation. I can not say it in another way. They have capabilies somwhere between word 5.0 running from 3.5 inch floppy disk on ms-dos and ami pro running on win3.1 a 4MB 386sx 22years ago, I have actually not seen a single one which would outdo ami pro from back then, on a machine with 1/1000 of the ram and 1/1000 of the computational power.
My top ten of fuckups in the online text editos (actually some also many android office suites:
1) Formulas ....
2) Focus on decent style sheet support
3) Decent floatign objects
4) Decent Table of content etc. support
5) Serial letter functions?
6) Integrated thesaurus (yes, word 5.0 for dos had that)
7) Decent working in non-WYSIWIG modes
8) Equivalent of draft mode/outline mode
the dialog is pointless becaus nobody does it right. The people would pretty quickly learn that it does not kill 1000 kittens in average.
Correct would be to write: in one of hundred times, clicking on this will cause a malware infection. If it does, it department will send 1000 killed kittens via in-house mail to your table. That's 10 kittens in average per click. Good luck.
I am sure after one or two times burying the desktop of some office assistant under dead kittens and posting it on the companies homepage you may have your employees attention.