If you don't like it then write your own. If your just bitching cus they don't have enough money then try coughing up a donation to pay for the work they've done. If you use an opensource program or think you might in the future then get off your arse and send them a payment. Donating $5 per program you'd have to pay for otherwise would be a good start.
I am an open souce developer and working on a project that happens to be open source doesn't give me the right not to have my work criticized.
As a software user, if I'm going to try out new software, I'd like to know everyone's opinion on it, good or bad, before I install it. It doesn't matter if the software is free and it doesn't matter if the software is open -- I don't want to create myself the hassle and the frustration of installing a software that won't work on my machine. I, for one, am glad he told us about the sound card issue (my FreeBSD machine doesn't have a sound card either) and now I can use the time he saved me to evaluate the remaining options.
Stephan
PS: As noble as your intentions may be, simply donating money may not be the most practical option for every user out there.
The disagreement wasn't over the patent, the disagreement was over a fact. The judge felt the defendant was lying. Again, the defendant didn't lose because of a legal technicality -- He lost because the judge thought he was lying.
I agree completely with Sun on this one. They have to make a buck, and when a free OS comes along wanting to utilize its systems and take away from its revenue.
Sun is a hardware company, not a software company. The student version of the Solaris OS used to be $10 and they don't really check whether you're a student or not. On the other hand, I had to pay $40 for a set of CDs for my free OS.
Some airports and some commercial areas have outdoor moving sidewalks. Because of the guardrails, they look like flat escalators, but with the legal atmosphere here -- I don't see those handrails going away anytime soon.
All present and accounted for -- always....
Family, friends and co-workers will be able to instantly see where you are,
------------
I think this will come much sooner and, by 2012, will be gone again once everyone realises how bloody awful it is.
--------
It will never reach those two extremes. There are a couple of pilot programs out there and they are already using the metaphor of the Instant Messaging buddy list. In other words, you can make your presence known to everyone, if you wish, and you can also make yourself invisible to anyone you want to (except law enforcement).
It will become like my cell phone. I could give out my cell phone number to everyone I know, but I don't. And I could answer every phone call I receive without even looking at my caller id, but again I don't. Please give the marketplace some credit for leaving us those choices.
1) I would set up this message as an automatic reply that replies to every message that contains those extensions.
2) I would mention no other reason than security. Companies don't mind talking about taking extra security measures, but companies will mind saying that the Microsoft solution is "expensive". In fact many of the top technological/financial institutions in the world don't even allow their employees to have access to a floppy drive.
Here is your message again, with my modifications in bold.
Dear Sir or Madam:
You have sent a file to me in a format I can't read. Since the extension is (xls|doc|whatever), I assume this is a Microsoft office file. You can save this file in a format that is more useable to me and others by opening the file, using the File->SaveAs menus and selecting (text|RichTextFormat|HTML|whatever) and saving. Please send me the file that results.
While I regret any inconvenience this may cause, it is necessary for our ongoing technology upgrade, as a part of our new security measures.
"The Editing Trap [Substituting Writing for Thinking]
Computers seem to tempt people to substitute writing for thinking. When they write with a computer, instead of rethinking their drafts for purpose, audience, content, strategy, and effectiveness, most untrained writers just keep editing the words they first wrote down. I have seen reports go through as many as six versions without one important improvement in the thought. In such writing, I find sentences that have had their various parts revised four or five times on four or five different days. Instead of focusing, simplifying, and enlivening the prose, these writers tend to graft on additional phrases, till even the qualifiers are qualified and the whole, lengthening mess slows to a crawl.
Drawn in by the word processor's ability to facilitate small changes, such writers neglect the larger steps in writing. They compose when they need to be planning, edit when they need to be revising.
[...]
Reused Prose
Writers easily become attached to what they have written, even when it serves the purpose badly. The computer frees many writers from this attachment by making the text fluid and continuously editable; for some writers, though, computers make this attachment harder to break. Typewriters challenge this attachment; in writing with a typewriter, writers typically retype each passage several times, which forces them to reread word for word and presents an excellent occasion to hear the passage and make changes. By contrast, a word processor enables writers to reuse passages from the developing piece so easily that reuse becomes a universal, invisible step in writing.
Being pragmatic, professionals often reuse blocks of material from previous reports. A good writer can do this well, but a less accomplished writer easily succumbs to a clumsy kind of self-plagiarism. Most of the adult writers I have worked with reuse "boilerplate" materials in a simple, modular fashion, stacking blocks of self-contained material in the midst of new passages, having little sense of how to combine the different parts. Most of them are tone deaf to the lurches, shifts in convention, and changes in tone between new and old writings.
I often advise authors to throw out these drafts and rewrite from scratch, but no one ever has. In part, they are always too busy; but more important, they are not writers. They are unaccustomed to taking responsibility for a piece of writing, devising an effective strategy, and seeing it through. Few of them have developed an effective writing process, and their approaches to writing lack flexibility. Such people do not need an editor; they need a writing instructor-something they lack but your students are fortunate enough to have.
[...]
Distortions of Length: Prolix and Telegraphic
The ease of writing on a microcomputer liberates many writers: And though this liberation helps reticent students, aids brainstorming, and makes many professionals more productive, the very ease of writing can lead to problems. People who have little to say suddenly take a long time to say it. Word-inflation multiplies. Instead of saying it well one time, unfocused writers devise dozens of ways of coming close to saying what they mean. They continue writing. The words pile up. The results look impressive, but I never know quite what the writers meant to say.
Computers have the opposite effect on other writers. Normally intelligible, they become cryptic. Each mysterious word stands for phrases, sentences, even whole pages of unwritten intentions. I have to pry the words apart to uncover the thoughts concealed between them.
I won't dispute that there are legitimate cleanups, but if a developer couldn't do it right the first time, I have my doubts that round two is going to be much better.
What do you mean by first time? Do you mean when the developer first got it compiled? Or do you mean when the developer first wrote the pseudo-code? And then when do you think we should stop refactoring? When the code has gotten to be 20 lines? Or when the code has gotten to be 20,000 lines?
"Constantly reworking code that does the very same thing that it did before is often a pointless exercise - by time you have the internals "clean", new requirements demand a drastic addition or total rewrite anyway. "
One last point:
Constantly reworking code is not about reusing "clean" code, it is about increasing your understanding of the code. Sometimes, the same piece of functionality that originally took you three months to write can be rewritten from scratch in just a few days.
"Constantly reworking code that does the very same thing that it did before is often a pointless exercise - by time you have the internals "clean", new requirements demand a drastic addition or total rewrite anyway."
As long as the total rewrite also satisfies the old requirements (unit tests), a total rewrite is a recommended form of refactoring.
"Dwelling upon one particular snapshot of requirements presumes that your code will have a long active lifespan, which it often doesn't. In my own case, my code has lived on in productive use for about four years on average after it has been written (after which it is often junked entirely), with a creation time often near a year."
Dweling upon one particular snapshot of requirements presumes that *some* of your old requirements will live on in the next iteration or in the next application. If the old requirements will not be used in the next application/iteration, or for that matter, if you're sure there won't be any new requirements; then there is no need to use refactoring.
c) A great deal of open source software violates all sorts of other government regulations and the government would end up having to bring these systems into compliance.
I don't know what regulations open source is suppose to violate, but a great deal of closed source software violates second sourcing regulations.
Second sourcing, having a minimum of two suppliers, has been in use for fifty years by the DoD and the military. Suppliers didn't like it then, suppliers are not going to like it now.
This is what I got for the Emeryville, CA area code. It's somewhat accurate, but it's missing a couple of smaller demographic clusters.
47 Inner Cities Inner-City, Single Parent Families Age group: Under 18, 18-34 Blue-Collar/Service Household income: 16,500 1.86% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster. This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to... Buy baby food Buy soul/r&b/black music Pay bills by phone Watch pay-per-view sports Read National Enquirer
30 Mid-City Mix African-American Singles & Families Age group: Under 18, 25-34 White-Collar/Service Household income: 35,000 1.09% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster. This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to... Use 3-way calling feature Shop at T.J. Maxx Drink Pepsi Free Watch Nightline Read Muscle and Fitness
8 Young Literati Upscale Urban Singles & Couples Age group: 25-44 Professional Household income: 63,400 0.92% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster. This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to... Plan for large purchases Take vitamins Use a discount broker Watch Bravo Read GQ
6 Urban Gold Coast Elite Urban Singles Age group: 45-64 Professional Household income: 73,500 0.57% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster. This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to... Attend the theater Use olive oil Bank online Watch Mystery Read Self
Consider Buffy. By any reasonable measurement, Buffy is not a popular show. But it's widely lauded, and generally considered to be very good. (This season, especially, has had more than its fair share of tight writing and "goddamn!" moments.)
Open source is just like artificial intelligence. Everyone uses both, but noone has any idea they are already using them. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were both initially University-sponsored open source projects. That's pretty mainstream I say.
"Why doesn't the back button on my intellimouse work with it? It works with explorer."
Speaking of the Microsoft Intellimouse, mine permanently disabled my Windows 98 computer, but it worked fine under Linux Red Hat 7.0. On my windows, it made me lose control of my mouse pointer by jumping all over the screen.
It even did that after I plugged in another mouse and uninstalled its driver, intellipoint 3.1. I am not making this up either. At the time, 20% of the download.com user reviewers complained about the same thing.
Eventually, I found Opera, to quickly browse the web only with keyboard shortcuts.
A single attack was able to take out a large amount of net routing software. A similar attack, targeted at one of the net's chokepoints could be disasterous. It's not just a silly reference. It's a demonstration of the fact that an attack like that could have dire consequenses to the net, and at this point, there's not much we can do about it.
We could hold insurance companies and private companies accountable for future terrorist attacks. By promising immunity to future attacks, our government has effectively taken away any incentives for insurance companies and corporations to lower their exposure to terrorist threats.
If you were the CEO of a large american company, why should you decentralize anything if the government was going to bail you out. There is no business case for it. If you underwrote and insured the future World Trade Center, are you going to be as cautious as you need to be if the government was going to bail you out. I don't think so.
I guess you found this out already, but the Second Edition of Windows 98 is the worst version of Windows 98 and Windows 98 is the worst version of the entire Windows family.
I remember the reviews for it when it first came out. The reviewers said it was a very stable version. The whores were in fact given free laptops with the preloaded and preconfigured OS on it. No doubt, their reviews wouldn't have been as glowing if they had bought their own software and installed it on their own unique machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Can I have their idle store employees run my hot dog stand.
I spend 10 hours a day every day there.
It has gotten so bad, I've lost my girlfriend, I've dropped out of school, and all their employees know me by name.
Next year, I will move to Florida, so I can go to Disneyworld.
His viewpoint seems to be about sensory deprivation in the physical world. To me, this reminds me of The Matrix.
I am an open souce developer and working on a project that happens to be open source doesn't give me the right not to have my work criticized.
As a software user, if I'm going to try out new software, I'd like to know everyone's opinion on it, good or bad, before I install it. It doesn't matter if the software is free and it doesn't matter if the software is open -- I don't want to create myself the hassle and the frustration of installing a software that won't work on my machine. I, for one, am glad he told us about the sound card issue (my FreeBSD machine doesn't have a sound card either) and now I can use the time he saved me to evaluate the remaining options.
Stephan
PS: As noble as your intentions may be, simply donating money may not be the most practical option for every user out there.
I guess I'm the only one who got the South Park reference. Everyone else thought this post was serious. : )
The disagreement wasn't over the patent, the disagreement was over a fact. The judge felt the defendant was lying. Again, the defendant didn't lose because of a legal technicality -- He lost because the judge thought he was lying.
"...Justice MacKay concluded that Mr. Schmeiser's arguments were implausible. "4 76.htm
http://www.seedquest.com/News/releases/2002/may/4
Sun is a hardware company, not a software company. The student version of the Solaris OS used to be $10 and they don't really check whether you're a student or not. On the other hand, I had to pay $40 for a set of CDs for my free OS.
The best tools we have right now for doing speech recognition are neural networks. Neural networks are not algorithms.
Some airports and some commercial areas have outdoor moving sidewalks. Because of the guardrails, they look like flat escalators, but with the legal atmosphere here -- I don't see those handrails going away anytime soon.
------------
I think this will come much sooner and, by 2012, will be gone again once everyone realises how bloody awful it is.
--------
It will never reach those two extremes. There are a couple of pilot programs out there and they are already using the metaphor of the Instant Messaging buddy list. In other words, you can make your presence known to everyone, if you wish, and you can also make yourself invisible to anyone you want to (except law enforcement).
It will become like my cell phone. I could give out my cell phone number to everyone I know, but I don't. And I could answer every phone call I receive without even looking at my caller id, but again I don't. Please give the marketplace some credit for leaving us those choices.
1) I would set up this message as an automatic reply that replies to every message that contains those extensions.
2) I would mention no other reason than security. Companies don't mind talking about taking extra security measures, but companies will mind saying that the Microsoft solution is "expensive". In fact many of the top technological/financial institutions in the world don't even allow their employees to have access to a floppy drive.
Here is your message again, with my modifications in bold.
Dear Sir or Madam:
You have sent a file to me in a format I can't read. Since the extension is (xls|doc|whatever), I assume this is a Microsoft office file. You can save this file in a format that is more useable to me and others by opening the file, using the File->SaveAs menus and selecting (text|RichTextFormat|HTML|whatever) and saving. Please send me the file that results.
While I regret any inconvenience this may cause, it is necessary for our ongoing technology upgrade, as a part of our new security measures.
Thank you very much.
The British should know this word, they got all their latin from us.
Before the queen, we used to own their asses for 300 years.
"The Editing Trap [Substituting Writing for Thinking]
Computers seem to tempt people to substitute writing for thinking. When they write with a computer, instead of rethinking their drafts for purpose, audience, content, strategy, and effectiveness, most untrained writers just keep editing the words they first wrote down. I have seen reports go through as many as six versions without one important improvement in the thought. In such writing, I find sentences that have had their various parts revised four or five times on four or five different days. Instead of focusing, simplifying, and enlivening the prose, these writers tend to graft on additional phrases, till even the qualifiers are qualified and the whole, lengthening mess slows to a crawl.
Drawn in by the word processor's ability to facilitate small changes, such writers neglect the larger steps in writing. They compose when they need to be planning, edit when they need to be revising.
[...]
Reused Prose
Writers easily become attached to what they have written, even when it serves the purpose badly. The computer frees many writers from this attachment by making the text fluid and continuously editable; for some writers, though, computers make this attachment harder to break. Typewriters challenge this attachment; in writing with a typewriter, writers typically retype each passage several times, which forces them to reread word for word and presents an excellent occasion to hear the passage and make changes. By contrast, a word processor enables writers to reuse passages from the developing piece so easily that reuse becomes a universal, invisible step in writing.
Being pragmatic, professionals often reuse blocks of material from previous reports. A good writer can do this well, but a less accomplished writer easily succumbs to a clumsy kind of self-plagiarism. Most of the adult writers I have worked with reuse "boilerplate" materials in a simple, modular fashion, stacking blocks of self-contained material in the midst of new passages, having little sense of how to combine the different parts. Most of them are tone deaf to the lurches, shifts in convention, and changes in tone between new and old writings.
I often advise authors to throw out these drafts and rewrite from scratch, but no one ever has. In part, they are always too busy; but more important, they are not writers. They are unaccustomed to taking responsibility for a piece of writing, devising an effective strategy, and seeing it through. Few of them have developed an effective writing process, and their approaches to writing lack flexibility. Such people do not need an editor; they need a writing instructor-something they lack but your students are fortunate enough to have.
[...]
Distortions of Length: Prolix and Telegraphic
The ease of writing on a microcomputer liberates many writers: And though this liberation helps reticent students, aids brainstorming, and makes many professionals more productive, the very ease of writing can lead to problems. People who have little to say suddenly take a long time to say it. Word-inflation multiplies. Instead of saying it well one time, unfocused writers devise dozens of ways of coming close to saying what they mean. They continue writing. The words pile up. The results look impressive, but I never know quite what the writers meant to say.
Computers have the opposite effect on other writers. Normally intelligible, they become cryptic. Each mysterious word stands for phrases, sentences, even whole pages of unwritten intentions. I have to pry the words apart to uncover the thoughts concealed between them.
[...]"
How Computers Cause Bad Writing by Gerald Grow, PhD
What do you mean by first time? Do you mean when the developer first got it compiled? Or do you mean when the developer first wrote the pseudo-code? And then when do you think we should stop refactoring? When the code has gotten to be 20 lines? Or when the code has gotten to be 20,000 lines?
One last point:
Constantly reworking code is not about reusing "clean" code, it is about increasing your understanding of the code. Sometimes, the same piece of functionality that originally took you three months to write can be rewritten from scratch in just a few days.
If you were going to be sarcastic, please use (sarcasm)(/sarcasm) tags. Buffy the vampire slayer is a horrible, horrible, show.
As long as the total rewrite also satisfies the old requirements (unit tests), a total rewrite is a recommended form of refactoring.
"Dwelling upon one particular snapshot of requirements presumes that your code will have a long active lifespan, which it often doesn't. In my own case, my code has lived on in productive use for about four years on average after it has been written (after which it is often junked entirely), with a creation time often near a year."
Dweling upon one particular snapshot of requirements presumes that *some* of your old requirements will live on in the next iteration or in the next application. If the old requirements will not be used in the next application/iteration, or for that matter, if you're sure there won't be any new requirements; then there is no need to use refactoring.
hint...
hint...
I don't know what regulations open source is suppose to violate, but a great deal of closed source software violates second sourcing regulations. Second sourcing, having a minimum of two suppliers, has been in use for fifty years by the DoD and the military. Suppliers didn't like it then, suppliers are not going to like it now.
This is what I got for the Emeryville, CA area code. It's somewhat accurate, but it's missing a couple of smaller demographic clusters.
47 Inner Cities
Inner-City, Single Parent Families
Age group: Under 18, 18-34
Blue-Collar/Service
Household income: 16,500
1.86% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster.
This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to...
Buy baby food
Buy soul/r&b/black music
Pay bills by phone
Watch pay-per-view sports
Read National Enquirer
30 Mid-City Mix
African-American Singles & Families
Age group: Under 18, 25-34
White-Collar/Service
Household income: 35,000
1.09% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster.
This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to...
Use 3-way calling feature
Shop at T.J. Maxx
Drink Pepsi Free
Watch Nightline
Read Muscle and Fitness
8 Young Literati
Upscale Urban Singles & Couples
Age group: 25-44
Professional
Household income: 63,400
0.92% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster.
This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to...
Plan for large purchases
Take vitamins
Use a discount broker
Watch Bravo
Read GQ
6 Urban Gold Coast
Elite Urban Singles
Age group: 45-64
Professional
Household income: 73,500
0.57% of U.S. households belong to this PRIZM Cluster.
This PRIZM Cluster is most likely to...
Attend the theater
Use olive oil
Bank online
Watch Mystery
Read Self
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ?
Open source is just like artificial intelligence. Everyone uses both, but noone has any idea they are already using them. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were both initially University-sponsored open source projects. That's pretty mainstream I say.
Speaking of the Microsoft Intellimouse, mine permanently disabled my Windows 98 computer, but it worked fine under Linux Red Hat 7.0. On my windows, it made me lose control of my mouse pointer by jumping all over the screen. It even did that after I plugged in another mouse and uninstalled its driver, intellipoint 3.1. I am not making this up either. At the time, 20% of the download.com user reviewers complained about the same thing.
Eventually, I found Opera, to quickly browse the web only with keyboard shortcuts.
We could hold insurance companies and private companies accountable for future terrorist attacks. By promising immunity to future attacks, our government has effectively taken away any incentives for insurance companies and corporations to lower their exposure to terrorist threats.
If you were the CEO of a large american company, why should you decentralize anything if the government was going to bail you out. There is no business case for it. If you underwrote and insured the future World Trade Center, are you going to be as cautious as you need to be if the government was going to bail you out. I don't think so.
I remember the reviews for it when it first came out. The reviewers said it was a very stable version. The whores were in fact given free laptops with the preloaded and preconfigured OS on it. No doubt, their reviews wouldn't have been as glowing if they had bought their own software and installed it on their own unique machines.