"WAVE America is a private, for-profit school-safety program gearing up in North Carolina -- with the enthusiastic support of the governor -- and going nationwide. It offers incentives (caps, T-shirts, cash) to students who call a toll-free number and anonymously turn in classmates they believe to be depressed or dangerous. "
So if the tipsters are anonymous, how do they get their caps, t-shirts and most importantly, cash?
On the other hand, having open source projects run by volunteers offers a very nice bloat-filter. If a feature isn't really needed, it won't get added.
Nobody's going to bolt on some half-baked feature that nobody wants, just because it's their job to maintain it, and by gosh they'd better look like they're doing something.
The whole idea of "software engineer" is a crock. Writing software well is more art than science. It's not like building bridges or radios or washing machines. The problems encountered are typically much more unique and trying to find some "standards" so that the question may be asked, "is this code 'up to code'?" as you might ask "is this building 'up to code'" is a fool's errand.
That's why, though my title contains the word engineer, I put "programmer" on my 1040. That's what I do, I program computers. I don't "engineer software".
The ACLU gets a lot of flak, but, they're idealists, and they do stand up for what they believe in, and they do stick to their guns. They remind me a lot of RMS. (and make me want to reconsider my sig...)
You know what's the weirdest thing about project Gutenberg? (The weirdest thing I noticed anyway).
Take a look at the "standard.new" and "NEWUSER.GUT" files on the FTP sites.
Check out that justification! The text is formatted so that it's left AND right justified, with a fixed width font and with no extra spaces. i.e. The text was carefully written in such a way that it just happened to fit perfectly.
"the goal is not for Linux to be the OS of the elite..."
Well, YES, it IS, for many people, Linux has made computing _fun_ again, which for a long time it wasn't. Sure you can use linux to do real work, but the main point for me and for a lot of people out there coding for free is that Linux is fun. If it weren't fun, they wouldn't be writing all that code.
And to many of those people, a brain-dead straight-jacket of a GUI isn't fun. (Lucky for you, for some of them, it is fun.)
GUIs have their place, but, so does the shell.
And PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!! if any of you out there are thinking of writing GUI interfaces for system adminstration tasks please make certain you can still do things the old way... If you can't (also) do it with "vi", then you've broken the rules and are going down the Windows road to ruin...
And so what? "free" software, "open source" whatever you want to call it, is not in business, and cares not for market share.
Now the likes of RedHat may change that for certain portions of open source software, e.g. Linux...other parts will probably remain in a "small niche" of the market...e.g. CVS. So what? I still fail to see the problem.
If you don't like the UI, change it. It's probably GPL'ed, nobody can stop you.
If you're just going to whine, then get out of the way.
You can use the GPL for a book, to wit:
on
GPL for Books?
·
· Score: 1
Some chapters of Karl Fogel's book about CVS, (the Concurrent Version System, the source code control system used by many a free software project) are available under the GPL.
Barbarians all! I saw one post describing how easy it was to steal GPL'ed code, disguise it by various means so the resulting binary would not look suspiciously similar to GPL'ed code, and release it under another (more restrictive, of course) license for "fun" and profit. How despicable. How low. How depressing.... Well, in a sufficiently large population, anything and everything is bound to occur. Even the Truly Evil, capable of willingly subverting the GPL. Well, the love of money is the root of all evil. But jeez, in these internet IPO times, isn't it easy enough to make money without resorting to such tactics? I mean, get a stock broker if money is what you want. Leave the GPL'ed code alone. And now, as MetalHead, I invoke the first book of the (un)holy Metallica: Kill 'em All!
I'll add my two cents. As was recently pointed out on the info-cvs mailing list, IDEs have been *miserable* failures at providing any long term stability in build environments. They keep changing. Good old Makefiles and configure.in scripts just keep on going though. The last thing we need is yet another GUI front end to "make" and "autoconf" that stores its data in some un-archivable un-versionalble un-readable un-editable un-common format. There's a reason make and autoconf have lasted so long. They work, and they work in a lot of inhospitable environments. One of the strengths of Open Source is that Open Source programs will usually compile and run on a lot of different platforms. Any replacement for make or autoconf would have to run on just as many platforms to be as successful, and would consequently have just as many warts as make or autoconf. Sure they are not the prettiest, or easiest things to use for a beginner, but they work, and do what they were intended to do, and they stand the test of time. This proposal strikes me as changing things just to be changing things, without giving anything specific about the presumed "problems" with "make" and "autoconf" that are to be addressed by these proposed new tools. (well, I still write my own troff macros, so maybe I'm just incurably old-school.)
acme is a real English word. Look it up in the dictionary. It means the "top, or highest point.", like summit, apex, or pinnacle.
(I guess) it was just so overused in the early part of the last century of the last millennium (heh heh, didn't used to able to say *that*) in company and product names that people forgot, (or never knew) its real meaning. And the Road Runner cartoons didn't help people out any on that score.
A chance like this (to see what happens) comes along only once every 1000 years. I'm curious what happens. Bring it on, baby, bring it on.
I agree, bringing your sites down voluntarily is no different than letting some y2k bug bring them down for you. by doing so you are essentially betting that there is some bug triggered *by the transition* into y2k. (i.e. I'm assuming you plan to bring your site back up once "safely" into y2k....This seems like an unlikely bug...
However, I can imagine some ROM bugs causing machines not to (re)boot after y2k...
I'm replying to this a bit late, so there's the distinct possibility nobody will read this. So what.
A couple of points. First. Software is *incredibly* IMPOSSIBLY difficult to make bug free. IMPOSSIBLY difficult. In other words, it is a practical (possibly even a theoritical) impossibility to prove that a given non-trivial program is bug-free. (on the other hand it is generally trivial to prove any non-trivial program is not bug-free:-).
Second. With commercial software, you typically pay some money for a binary which purportedly serves some purpose (though the license probably states that its suitability for *any* purpose is questionable or non-existent.)
With open-source software, you typically pay *nothing*, and, are given the source, and are told that whatever it is, is *as-is* no warranty, etc.
As a user of CVS, (see http://www.sourcegear.com) a GPL'ed source code control system, it does not bother me one bit that there is nobody to sue should things go wrong.
On several occasions things *have* gone wrong (only slightly, no real damage) or gone slightly differently than what I would have preferred. ON those occasions, guess what? I had the source! Instead of calling up some company and complaining, or instructing lawyers to make threatening phone calls, I posted a query to the relevant mailing list, or fixed the problem myself and posted the fix to the mailing list, and bang! everybody's happy. And as ESR's Cathedral & Bazaar paper pointed out, I was probably even happier having found and fixed the problem myself than I would have been in the bug-free case!
According to the dirty old man in "Catch 22", (which I just re-read thanks to recent publicity on/., thanks guys, great read.) the saying is that it's "better to live on your feet than die on your knees." It really makes much more sense this way!
Geez. Lizardman? Seems to me Slashdot has gotten noticeably lamer since the IPO of Andover.net. I guess if I were a 24, (oh, sorry, was it 23?, 22?) year old millionare, I wouldn't be working too hard either...no blame, just stating the facts apparent to me...(maybe it's all the posters to/. that have invested in the LNUX IPO at $30/share and subsequently quit submitting stories...)
I see an opening here. Slashdot has had it, it's been there done that. == deadmeat.com. (well, that one's probably taken)
www.crashnot.com doesn't seem to be taken.
Would be a good url with a high-reliability connotation (would invite the crackers. tho)...For the anti-MS spoof-site, www.crashnaut.com would be good.
Point being, any of you cyber-dudes looking to bust into the slashdot-esque website business, looks like slashdot is getting old. I for one waiting to (re)load the new game in town.
'nother words. Quality at/. seems to be down. Bring it back up, & fast. Please.
"Some of their best work lately." Talk about a backhanded compliment!
As a former employee (and still recovering refugee) of a NASA contractor though, I can testify that present-day NASA suffers from much more than its share of Dilbert-syndrome. Long gone are the days of Apollo. I think a lot of the really smart people left NASA years ago driven out by the bureaucrats.
When I heard they (NASA) were looking for the parachute of the failed Mars probe, I just naturally assumed they were looking for it in a warehouse down in Florida in order to verify the presumption that they'd simply forgotten to pack it! :-)
An excellent, very interesting book on the subject of translation (not how-to, but about the kinds of issues that come up and some very impressive examples of translating lots of things considered to be untranslatable) is "Le Ton Beau de Marot", by Douglas R. Hofstadter, (author of Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, another excellent book.)
This book talks some about machine translation, but mostly about translation in general. Highly recommended to anybody interested in languages & translation.
You can get the effect you suggest, can't you? Just turn the thing off until you need assistance. From what this thing is purported to do, it can do everything you suggest, since what you suggest is a subset of what it can do.
Accuracy is another matter though. Even so I think it would be a cool thing for someone trying to learn a language.
The article says 45% of *customers* have *tried* linux. It does *NOT* say 50% of Compaq servers are running linux. Beware lies, damned lies, but especially statistics. Somebody moderate down the comment to which this is a reply. It was perhaps written a little hastily.
It strikes me that a lot of Open source code is out there in CVS repositories, much of it available by anonymous CVS. It also strikes me that the maintainers of this code *want* to maintain control of their repositories to make sure that things like backups happen to their satisfaction, etc, so it seems unlikely that a *centralized* place for repositories will appear, and even if it did, it doesn't seem too appealing. The decentralized disorganized spread-out chaotic highly-excessively redundant nature of the current state of things probably has something to do with its success.
So, back in the old days, there was archie, which used to go out and search FTP sites anonymously and make a giant index of what was out there. Now we have web crawlers.
How about something like archie or web-crawlers except it goes out probing port 2401 (cvspserver) and catalogs what it finds (maybe does a "cvs co -c")
An extension to CVS to allow a sort of description of what's in the repository (freshmeat style?) to be probed might be cool.
i.e. maybe a "cvs -d wherever whatchagot" command, that could just spit out the contents of some files in CVSROOT, perhaps without even requiring a "cvs login" And a standardized anonymous CVS login and password might help...
Hmmm. Maybe I'll propose this in info-cvs@gnu.org. But it's kind of a chicken & egg thing. Without the cvs-indexer-robot, what use is the new command, (and everybody would need to upgrade to the newer CVS server) and without the new command, the web-indexer isn't really feasible.
Hmm. Maybe I'll just implement the damn thing (the cvs mod, not the cvs robot, I'll leave that to someone else with the bandwidth and the hardware to do it with.) and submit the patch to bug-cvs@gnu.org...
What if Linux wasn't Open Source? Well, then it would be like SCO. SCO has some cool stuff, especially the non-stop cluster stuff they're doing with Compaq...and they have some warts, like all unix variants. (What I'd like to know is...where can I get the One True Unix all these variants are varying from?)
Slashdot Mirror
"WAVE America is a private, for-profit school-safety program gearing up in North Carolina -- with the enthusiastic support of the governor -- and going nationwide. It offers incentives (caps, T-shirts, cash) to students who call a toll-free number and anonymously turn in classmates they believe to be depressed or dangerous. "
So if the tipsters are anonymous, how do they get their caps, t-shirts and most importantly, cash?
On the other hand, having open source projects run by volunteers offers a very nice bloat-filter. If a feature isn't really needed, it won't get added.
Nobody's going to bolt on some half-baked feature that nobody wants, just because it's their job to maintain it, and by gosh they'd better look like they're doing something.
The whole idea of "software engineer" is a crock. Writing software well is more art than science. It's not like building bridges or radios or washing machines. The problems encountered are typically much more unique and trying to find some "standards" so that the question may be asked, "is this code 'up to code'?" as you might ask "is this building 'up to code'" is a fool's errand.
That's why, though my title contains the word engineer, I put "programmer" on my 1040. That's what I do, I program computers. I don't "engineer software".
A bit late, and perhaps pointless, this post. But, perhaps you might want to visit:
www.aclu.org
The ACLU gets a lot of flak, but, they're idealists, and they do stand up for what they believe in, and they do stick to their guns. They remind me a lot of RMS. (and make me want to reconsider my sig...)
You know what's the weirdest thing about project Gutenberg? (The weirdest thing I noticed anyway).
Take a look at the "standard.new" and "NEWUSER.GUT" files on the FTP sites.
Check out that justification! The text is
formatted so that it's left AND right justified,
with a fixed width font and with no extra spaces. i.e. The text was carefully written in such a way that it just happened to fit perfectly.
Pretty strange.
"the goal is not for Linux to be the OS of the elite..."
Well, YES, it IS, for many people, Linux has made computing _fun_ again, which for a long time it wasn't. Sure you can use linux to do real work, but the main point for me and for a lot of people out there coding for free is that Linux is fun. If it weren't fun, they wouldn't be writing all that code.
And to many of those people, a brain-dead straight-jacket of a GUI isn't fun. (Lucky for you, for some of them, it is fun.)
GUIs have their place, but, so does the shell.
And PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!! if any of you out there are thinking of writing GUI interfaces for system adminstration tasks please make certain you can still do things the old way... If you can't (also) do it with "vi", then you've broken the rules and are going down the Windows road to ruin...
And so what? "free" software, "open source" whatever you want to call it, is not in business, and cares not for market share.
Now the likes of RedHat may change that for certain portions of open source software, e.g. Linux...other parts will probably remain in a "small niche" of the market...e.g. CVS.
So what? I still fail to see the problem.
I fail to see how this is a problem.
If you don't like the UI, change it. It's probably GPL'ed, nobody can stop you.
If you're just going to whine, then get out of the way.
Some chapters of Karl Fogel's book about CVS, (the Concurrent Version System, the source code control system used by many a free software project) are available under the GPL.
Barbarians all! I saw one post describing how easy it was to steal GPL'ed code, disguise it by various means so the resulting binary would not look suspiciously similar to GPL'ed code, and release it under another (more restrictive, of course) license for "fun" and profit. How despicable. How low. How depressing. ... Well, in a sufficiently large population, anything and everything is bound to occur. Even the Truly Evil, capable of willingly subverting the GPL. Well, the love of money is the root of all evil. But jeez, in these internet IPO times, isn't it easy enough to make money without resorting to such tactics? I mean, get a stock broker if money is what you want. Leave the GPL'ed code alone. And now, as MetalHead, I invoke the first book of the (un)holy Metallica: Kill 'em All!
I'll add my two cents. As was recently pointed out on the info-cvs mailing list, IDEs have been *miserable* failures at providing any long term stability in build environments. They keep changing. Good old Makefiles and configure.in scripts just keep on going though. The last thing we need is yet another GUI front end to "make" and "autoconf" that stores its data in some un-archivable un-versionalble un-readable un-editable un-common format. There's a reason make and autoconf have lasted so long. They work, and they work in a lot of inhospitable environments. One of the strengths of Open Source is that Open Source programs will usually compile and run on a lot of different platforms. Any replacement for make or autoconf would have to run on just as many platforms to be as successful, and would consequently have just as many warts as make or autoconf. Sure they are not the prettiest, or easiest things to use for a beginner, but they work, and do what they were intended to do, and they stand the test of time. This proposal strikes me as changing things just to be changing things, without giving anything specific about the presumed "problems" with "make" and "autoconf" that are to be addressed by these proposed new tools. (well, I still write my own troff macros, so maybe I'm just incurably old-school.)
acme is a real English word. Look it up in the dictionary. It means the "top, or highest point.", like summit, apex, or pinnacle.
(I guess) it was just so overused in the early part of the last century of the last millennium (heh heh, didn't used to able to say *that*) in company and product names that people forgot, (or never knew) its real meaning. And the Road Runner cartoons didn't help people out any on that score.
--metalhead
SCO gave away a garishly painted yellow and blue VW bug dubbed the "Y2k bug" at SCO forum 1999.
Saw it with my own eyes.
Hell No!!!! I'm not bring my sites down!!!!
A chance like this (to see what happens) comes
along only once every 1000 years. I'm curious what happens. Bring it on, baby, bring it on.
I agree, bringing your sites down voluntarily is no different than letting some y2k bug bring them down for you. by doing so you are essentially betting that there is some bug triggered *by the transition* into y2k. (i.e. I'm assuming you plan to bring your site back up once "safely" into y2k....This seems like an unlikely bug...
However, I can imagine some ROM bugs causing machines not to (re)boot after y2k...
I'm replying to this a bit late, so there's the distinct possibility nobody will read this. So what.
:-).
A couple of points. First. Software is *incredibly* IMPOSSIBLY difficult to make bug free. IMPOSSIBLY difficult. In other words, it is a practical (possibly even a theoritical) impossibility to prove that a given non-trivial program is bug-free. (on the other hand it is generally trivial to prove any non-trivial program is not bug-free
Second. With commercial software, you typically pay some money for a binary which purportedly serves some purpose (though the license probably states that its suitability for *any* purpose is questionable or non-existent.)
With open-source software, you typically pay *nothing*, and, are given the source, and are told that whatever it is, is *as-is* no warranty, etc.
As a user of CVS, (see http://www.sourcegear.com) a GPL'ed source code control system, it does not bother me one bit that there is nobody to sue should things go wrong.
On several occasions things *have* gone wrong (only slightly, no real damage) or gone slightly differently than what I would have preferred. ON those occasions, guess what? I had the source! Instead of calling up some company and complaining, or instructing lawyers to make threatening phone calls, I posted a query to the relevant mailing list, or fixed the problem myself and posted the fix to the mailing list, and bang! everybody's happy. And as ESR's Cathedral & Bazaar paper pointed out, I was probably even happier having found and fixed the problem myself than I would have been in the bug-free case!
Just my thoughts.
-- Metalhead
According to the dirty old man in "Catch 22", (which I just re-read thanks to recent publicity on /., thanks guys, great read.) the saying is that it's "better to live on your feet than die on your knees." It really makes much more sense this way!
-- Metalhead.
Geez. Lizardman? Seems to me Slashdot has gotten noticeably lamer since the IPO of Andover.net. I guess if I were a 24, (oh, sorry, was it 23?, 22?) year old millionare, I wouldn't be working too hard either...no blame, just stating the facts apparent to me...(maybe it's all the posters to /. that have invested in the LNUX IPO at $30/share and subsequently quit submitting stories...)
/. seems to be down. Bring it back up, & fast. Please.
I see an opening here. Slashdot has had it, it's been there done that. == deadmeat.com. (well, that one's probably taken)
www.crashnot.com doesn't seem to be taken.
Would be a good url with a high-reliability connotation (would invite the crackers. tho)...For the anti-MS spoof-site, www.crashnaut.com would be good.
Point being, any of you cyber-dudes looking to bust into the slashdot-esque website business, looks like slashdot is getting old. I for one waiting to (re)load the new game in town.
'nother words. Quality at
"Some of their best work lately." Talk about a backhanded compliment!
:-)
As a former employee (and still recovering refugee) of a NASA contractor though, I can testify that present-day NASA suffers from much more than its share of Dilbert-syndrome. Long gone are the days of Apollo. I think a lot of the really smart people left NASA years ago driven out by the bureaucrats.
When I heard they (NASA) were looking for the parachute of the failed Mars probe, I just naturally assumed they were looking for it in a warehouse down in Florida in order to verify the presumption that they'd simply forgotten to pack it!
(just joking, mostly.)
"Baited breath?" Been eating sushi?
An excellent, very interesting book on the subject of translation (not how-to, but about the kinds of issues that come up and some very impressive examples of translating lots of things considered to be untranslatable) is "Le Ton Beau de Marot", by Douglas R. Hofstadter, (author of Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, another excellent book.)
This book talks some about machine translation, but mostly about translation in general. Highly recommended to anybody interested in languages & translation.
I want 2 of 'em and start 'em off translating back & forth in a feedback loop, as in the two famous examples:
input: "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" -> russian -> back to english -> "the vodka is good but the meat is rotton"
input: "out of sight, out of mind" -> russian -> back to english -> "blind idiot"
etc.
You can get the effect you suggest, can't you? Just turn the thing off until you need assistance. From what this thing is purported to do, it can do everything you suggest, since what you suggest is a subset of what it can do.
Accuracy is another matter though. Even so I think it would be a cool thing for someone trying to learn a language.
The article says 45% of *customers* have *tried* linux. It does *NOT* say 50% of Compaq servers are running linux. Beware lies, damned lies, but especially statistics. Somebody moderate down the comment to which this is a reply. It was perhaps written a little hastily.
It strikes me that a lot of Open source code is out there in CVS repositories, much of it available by anonymous CVS. It also strikes me that the maintainers of this code *want* to maintain control of their repositories to make sure that things like backups happen to their satisfaction, etc, so it seems unlikely that a *centralized* place for repositories will appear, and even if it did, it doesn't seem too appealing. The decentralized disorganized spread-out chaotic highly-excessively redundant nature of the current state of things probably has something to do with its success.
So, back in the old days, there was archie, which used to go out and search FTP sites anonymously and make a giant index of what was out there. Now we have web crawlers.
How about something like archie or web-crawlers except it goes out probing port 2401 (cvspserver) and catalogs what it finds (maybe does a "cvs co -c")
An extension to CVS to allow a sort of description of what's in the repository (freshmeat style?) to be probed might be cool.
i.e. maybe a "cvs -d wherever whatchagot" command, that could just spit out the contents of some files in CVSROOT, perhaps without even requiring a "cvs login" And a standardized anonymous CVS login and password might help...
Hmmm. Maybe I'll propose this in info-cvs@gnu.org. But it's kind of a chicken & egg thing. Without the cvs-indexer-robot, what use is the new command, (and everybody would need to upgrade to the newer CVS server) and without the new command, the web-indexer isn't really feasible.
Hmm. Maybe I'll just implement the damn thing (the cvs mod, not the cvs robot, I'll leave that to someone else with the bandwidth and the hardware to do it with.) and submit the patch to bug-cvs@gnu.org...
Later, got to look into some code!
What if Linux wasn't Open Source? Well, then it would be like SCO. SCO has some cool stuff, especially the non-stop cluster stuff they're doing with Compaq...and they have some warts, like all unix variants. (What I'd like to know is...where can I get the One True Unix all these variants are varying from?)