Do I feel like John O'Gaunt railing against the tide of change.
Nope. OSS doesn't rewrite the business model it mearly changes part of it. OSS has proved itself to be a wonderful tool the way of developing.... well tools. But most business/software decisions are about updating or creating systems. An area in which OSS has little or no experience and impact.
Take the following example
Company A have received $2 million in first round funding, they have to build a website and get it running in 5 months to ensure 2nd round funding.
Now how does OSS get them to their goal ? They need an intelligent searching agent that works on fungii, for this is fungalinfection.com, this has a lot of spiffy features and is the unique feature of the site. So they approach a company who USES OSS tools, like Apache, maybe Enhydra and a big old commercial database like DB2 for there are many transactional and critical pieces that go into breeding your own fungal infection online.
This is old style but using the tools of OSS.
The examples are endless. If someone can show me why OSS changes this model I'd like to know. Taking the example above. Lets say that fungalinfection.com release ALL of their code. And here comes fungalbreeder.com within a week.
Not enough to convince you that there are many different parts to the software industry ? Okay here is another...
Company A has a legacy system that they want to replace in stages, first to be replaced are the screens with spiffy Java clients. Next up is part of the product catalogue, next up is the ordering process, then comes their warehousing system, and on and on.
These will probably use many OSS or other "free" software products but the final piece of software will have been created closed source. There is the argument that then releasing it would open it to the world and thus mean 10,000 people fixing bugs.
Rubbish. The only people who would care would be competitors, why would 10,000 people look at a warehousing system. There are enough 1 or 2 people projects out there to prove that its mostly the "sexy" ones that get done.
I appreciate OSS, I use OSS, I've even submitted patches to OSS and FSF but while it may make me a Luddite I don't see how anyone is going to build bespoke systems using OSS.
Lets put it this way, it takes 10+ years and 000s of developers to build an Air Traffic Control System, do you think this would work well in the bazzare enviroment ?
Books... Ipv6 : The Next Generation Internet Protocol Stewart S. Miller; Paperback
IP Addressing & Subnetting Including IPv6 Syngress Media; Paperback
Ipv6 Networks Marcus Goncalves, Kitty Niles; Paperback
And of course IPv6.org is an excellent source of info on the next generation for the internet.
Its already here as a networking technology and for many areas its increased security model enables things that couldn't previously be done. Big privacy question marks over it though.
I've worked on Enterprise level applications most of my working life, the largest being 10 year Air Traffic Control behemoths. Not having someone who understands all of the code is an indication of a large scale system. It doesn't mean that there isn't an understanding of the source but that the understanding resides in several heads. IMO this is better than having it just in one.
I think its disgusting that Slashdot are advocating releasing forged source for an Open Source Software project. If we go down the road of counterfit code it will be the end of the OSS movement.
HI, THIS MACHINE HAS CAUGHT A VIRUS FROM VIRAL INFECTIONS CORPORATION A CURE FOR THIS VIRUS CAN BE PURCHASED FROM WWW.VIRALINFECTIONS.COM AT $2 PER MACHINE, THE ID FOR THIS MACHINE IS 239884623
Umm so lets get this straight. I write a malicious virus that encrypts every file on the system so you can't access them without knowing the key. I distribute this around the world and 1,000,000 people use it. I then charge them $1000 dollars a time (hey I'm allowing the fix out and I can name my price as they're buggered if they don't) to send them the patch.
This has to be just about the 3rd stupidest idea I've heard so far this month.
There is a name for the above mentioned "legalised virus industry" its called "blackmail" or "extortion".
People who write this stuff deserve to be forced to pay the associated costs of the damage they cause, and if they can't they should be declare bankrupt and sent to prison. There is NO noble side to virus writing.
Look at the South Sea Bubble of 250 years ago for yet another example that
a) Stockbrokers are like sheep b) people are greedy
The market _relies_ on the sheep and herd mentality to get by. Economics is a psuedo-science that postulates theories that cannot be used. The Best Economics theory is by an ex-Head of the London School of Economics after the disasterous use of an economic theory by Margret Thatchers goverment... "Any economic theory that is used to determine policy shall cease to become valid". In other words folks it doesn't work at all.
I laugh out loud when I hear of yet another wonder theory in the field of economics, remember Hedge Funds ? The great way to make a profit guarenteed.... didn't work did it ?
The tech sector is a classic example of economists and brokers attempting to proscribe generalities to a broad sector. Most "reports" place Sun, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle in the same bag as Boo.com, etrade.com and various other.com only enterprises. There is NOTHING wrong with IBM et al, they are not bubble companies, they have relatively low P/E ratios and are solid as a rock.
However when the market plunges expect them to take a hit. And when they do... buy them. Parts of the tech sector are over-valued, but not ALL of the tech sector is over-valued.
Astro physics is one area where they just love to throw away theories and start with new ones. Black Holes have been postulated and the postulations found to be correct. The problem is viewing something that by definition doesn't emit light because its as dense as a Christian Coalition convention.
A lot of Astro-physicists would just love to be the one who writes the seminal paper
"The big bang is bollocks, the Universe is created from paper clips and buttons that disappear down the backs of sofas"
The aim of scientists is to be respected, and respect is earnt by proving others right beyond any doubt or best of all proving as many people wrong as possible.
The interesting thing I found about this is that unlike the reasoning behind Hubble (the atmosphere distorts light so get outside it) the Cangaroo II telescopes will use that very distortion to view the black holes.
I'd assume that the Southern Skies are a lot less mapped than their Northern cousins given the dearth of countries south of the equator.
But if they'd really wanted to go to a place where the atmosphere distorts the view then a Cafe Bar in Amsterdam would be their best bet:-)
I'm sure there is going to be a lot of slamming of the "mySQL is quick and it rocks on site X" variety. But the points raised are valid. There are certain things that are required for RDBMS to be worthy of the name. One such element is transactions, when maintaining critical data it is paramount to ensure that an adverse changes can be removed when the change is found to be invalid. There are others but in most of the systems I've worked in this has been the key requirement, to bunch up a load of calls which are interspursed with coding logic and at the point where you reach a magic if statement that determines that something has changed and now the request is invalid to remove all traces of that request.
"It isn't enough to be quick, you have to be accurate" as many a Western movie has pointed out. mySQL is a fine system for maintaining data that can be the right choices in certain instances. But don't go betting the company on it handling your business logic.
For the first real Company that effected policy you have to hop across the pond to have a look at the East India Trading company over the course of 250 years it determined much of British foreign policy and was a large reason for the growth of the British Empire.
Now there was a company that makes Microsoft look reasonable and harmless.
As an inveterate hater of Wednesdays (middle of the week, its three days since you last had fun and 3 more before you have some more, Wednesday should be a holiday) I've always wondered.
Why did you pick Thursday as the day for that Arthur Dent never got the hang of ?
Oh and if I do get to ask a question I'd better ask another....
There was a Radio Series, a TV series, the books... but no film. What stopped Zaphod becomming the most self-centred person in Hollywood ?
1) Microsoft did not turn the PC from its haven of the techy into the realm of the user. That title went to the Mac, good _marketing_ gave the PC its edge as well as the massive failure of IBM to spot its power.
2) The rise of the PC and of Microsoft is of the same sort of community that is contained in/. it was technically capable people who created the software. While some wish for things to be complex, most people here on/. appear to like things being more popular.
Now onto the rest. Microsoft _has_ done a good job in promoting and extending the PC. The problem is that it has done this _at the expense_ of the consumer on many occasions. Few would argue that MS-DOS was better than DR-DOS, yet strangely DR-DOS died. This was a result of MS pushing out the opposition by using their dominante position.
Microsoft have succeeded by realising two things 1) Quality doesn't matter, being first matters 2) Marketing can over come most evils.
Using these two commandments they have created the PC market place. However when competition loomed they used their command of the market to crush the competition, not in the interests of the consumer or because their product was "better", soley because they have the first hook that every user sees. This is bad.
The internet, windows, the web, the mouse and all the other things that make the world a better place for the average user were not invented or even best implemented by MS. They were best marketed by them and opposition removed by other means.
Why powered on all the time ?
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 2
Bit confused as to why the laptop would have to be on. The tracking device needs only to be an emitor. Fairly low power (just like the ones you can attach to cars). To add in GPS is again not a big deal, nice big area as an antenna (the laptop itself) and the calculations are fairly low power.
Gentlemen, we have a dongle. A fixed one on the actual motherboard maybe, but still a self powered dongle.
Humpf... With the advent of IPv6 and its super duper security model we can all look forward to big brother knowing where we are... but at least we can encrypt the packets.
Take every item on an interface(page) and ask yourself if the page is still as usable. If you have taken away something that reduces the usability of the page then you put it back, otherwise you have IMPROVED the page by removing it.
Umm, I'd argue that this is arse. While it is possible to write bad code in any language it is without doubt easier to read _average_ code in one language over another. As always with these things lets take the example to an extreme.
In the blue corner we have PentiumIII assembler, in the red corner the beast of all languages Ada, your task is to write a Multi Radar Processing system. We estimate it will take 3 years with 10 people to write. It is classified as being mission and safety critical (cat 1).
Do you think that the assembler app will be as maintainable or as manageable as the Ada app ?
Of course not. Certain languages are tailored towards certain things, FFT in FORTRAN is a breeze, I'd image its slightly harder in VB.
I've seen systems (as in had to interface to) written in many different languages (including all those written above, + Ada, COBOL, Perl, Assembler et al) assuming that most were written by a team and thus the ability is around the average I can safely say that certain languages lend theirselves to extendability and comprehension. Other can produce good and readable code but their normal standard is lower than the normal standard of other languages.
VB isn't one of the best mind. In fact that honour goes to Ada IMO. There have been many studies done on development times/maintainance times in different languages and it DOES make a difference what you code in.
Otherwise we'd all be using Turing Machine Instruction sets.
If you want all of this now in a reliable package Psion have it. Full compatibility with Word, Excel etc. A full Java 1.1.4 runtime so a Full Web browser. Never crashes, boots in milliseconds.
All of that is here now it runs using EPOC. And as with the rest of the mobile revolution the major players are in Europe and using it right now, not in some fluffy time in the future.
Free Software and its variant has proved to be very successful in the product arena, Emacs, Linux, sendmail et al. And with the likes of Enhydra the supply to the enterprise is there. However most of the work I've ever done has been working on large scale systems that cost millions of dollars over several years and have a definate business defined delivery date.
I just don't see how Free Software scales as an idea into the enterprise arena. To take one example:
I worked on an Air Traffic Control system which will take in total around 10 years and $4 billion. How would the free software model meet the rigours and demands of this sort of enviroment ?
The most valuable thing I learn't at University was about interaction with others, I've found since that the most productive team members are not always the best read, but the best able to communicate their ideas.
Re:Swing - Good idea, badly implemented
on
Swing
·
· Score: 2
Very true in the first release, have a look at JDK1.3 the speed up in Swing is impressive. The other option is to get the Truffle lightweight version for Personal Java which is very sleek (not sure why Sun don't push it more).
Re:Java will find a limited niche
on
Swing
·
· Score: 2
Oh I love the superior tone "Java isn't for hardcore people"
C is a crap language, I used it for years, I wrote Radar Display lists in it, I wrote X Server modifications, but fundametally its a poor project language. Its debug cycle is a nightmare on large scale projects. It works in Open Source thanks to the "many eyes" philosophy.
For myself the enterprise is an application with 000s of concurrent users and a lifecycle of around 10 years "active" (normally means 20). VB is not appropriate for that sort of enviroment as it does not guide the developer towards the sort design methodologies that save time on large scale projects.
Many people look down on Java as they see OO et al as an abomination. You can hack in C better than in Java, but you can code in a team better in Java.
So far with Java I've done servlets, client server, database, MQ, legacy et al et al et al. Pure Java does work, but it still requires a skillful designer. It isn't a silver bullet, but its better than #include.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I feel like John O'Gaunt railing against the tide of change.
Nope. OSS doesn't rewrite the business model it mearly changes part of it. OSS has proved itself to be a wonderful tool the way of developing.... well tools. But most business/software decisions are about updating or creating systems. An area in which OSS has little or no experience and impact.
Take the following example
Company A have received $2 million in first round funding, they have to build a website and get it running in 5 months to ensure 2nd round funding.
Now how does OSS get them to their goal ? They need an intelligent searching agent that works on fungii, for this is fungalinfection.com, this has a lot of spiffy features and is the unique feature of the site. So they approach a company who USES OSS tools, like Apache, maybe Enhydra and a big old commercial database like DB2 for there are many transactional and critical pieces that go into breeding your own fungal infection online.
This is old style but using the tools of OSS.
The examples are endless. If someone can show me why OSS changes this model I'd like to know. Taking the example above. Lets say that fungalinfection.com release ALL of their code. And here comes fungalbreeder.com within a week.
Not enough to convince you that there are many different parts to the software industry ? Okay here is another...
Company A has a legacy system that they want to replace in stages, first to be replaced are the screens with spiffy Java clients. Next up is part of the product catalogue, next up is the ordering process, then comes their warehousing system, and on and on.
These will probably use many OSS or other "free" software products but the final piece of software will have been created closed source. There is the argument that then releasing it would open it to the world and thus mean 10,000 people fixing bugs.
Rubbish. The only people who would care would be competitors, why would 10,000 people look at a warehousing system. There are enough 1 or 2 people projects out there to prove that its mostly the "sexy" ones that get done.
I appreciate OSS, I use OSS, I've even submitted patches to OSS and FSF but while it may make me a Luddite I don't see how anyone is going to build bespoke systems using OSS.
Lets put it this way, it takes 10+ years and 000s of developers to build an Air Traffic Control System, do you think this would work well in the bazzare enviroment ?
Books...
Ipv6 : The Next Generation Internet Protocol Stewart S. Miller; Paperback
IP Addressing & Subnetting Including IPv6 Syngress Media; Paperback
Ipv6 Networks Marcus Goncalves, Kitty Niles; Paperback
And of course IPv6.org is an excellent source of info on the next generation for the internet.
Its already here as a networking technology and for many areas its increased security model enables things that couldn't previously be done. Big privacy question marks over it though.
I've worked on Enterprise level applications most of my working life, the largest being 10 year Air Traffic Control behemoths. Not having someone who understands all of the code is an indication of a large scale system. It doesn't mean that there isn't an understanding of the source but that the understanding resides in several heads. IMO this is better than having it just in one.
I think its disgusting that Slashdot are advocating releasing forged source for an Open Source Software project. If we go down the road of counterfit code it will be the end of the OSS movement.
:-)
1) Everyone continuing to use Outlook
2) Someone wondering why I don't just write my own CORBA ORB
Like paying the Fire Brigade not to set fire to your house.
Get a brain, get a virus checker and read up on the subject.
Either way you look at it, the proposal amounts to blackmail and extortion.
HI, THIS MACHINE HAS CAUGHT A VIRUS FROM VIRAL INFECTIONS CORPORATION A CURE FOR THIS VIRUS CAN BE PURCHASED FROM WWW.VIRALINFECTIONS.COM AT $2 PER MACHINE, THE ID FOR THIS MACHINE IS 239884623
Umm so lets get this straight. I write a malicious virus that encrypts every file on the system so you can't access them without knowing the key. I distribute this around the world and 1,000,000 people use it. I then charge them $1000 dollars a time (hey I'm allowing the fix out and I can name my price as they're buggered if they don't) to send them the patch.
This has to be just about the 3rd stupidest idea I've heard so far this month.
There is a name for the above mentioned "legalised virus industry" its called "blackmail" or "extortion".
People who write this stuff deserve to be forced to pay the associated costs of the damage they cause, and if they can't they should be declare bankrupt and sent to prison. There is NO noble side to virus writing.
Look at the South Sea Bubble of 250 years ago for yet another example that
a) Stockbrokers are like sheep
b) people are greedy
The market _relies_ on the sheep and herd mentality to get by. Economics is a psuedo-science that postulates theories that cannot be used. The Best Economics theory is by an ex-Head of the London School of Economics after the disasterous use of an economic theory by Margret Thatchers goverment... "Any economic theory that is used to determine policy shall cease to become valid". In other words folks it doesn't work at all.
I laugh out loud when I hear of yet another wonder theory in the field of economics, remember Hedge Funds ? The great way to make a profit guarenteed.... didn't work did it ?
The tech sector is a classic example of economists and brokers attempting to proscribe generalities to a broad sector. Most "reports" place Sun, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle in the same bag as Boo.com, etrade.com and various other
However when the market plunges expect them to take a hit. And when they do... buy them. Parts of the tech sector are over-valued, but not ALL of the tech sector is over-valued.
Umm so modern Astro-physics is all bollocks then.
Astro physics is one area where they just love to throw away theories and start with new ones. Black Holes have been postulated and the postulations found to be correct. The problem is viewing something that by definition doesn't emit light because its as dense as a Christian Coalition convention.
A lot of Astro-physicists would just love to be the one who writes the seminal paper
"The big bang is bollocks, the Universe is created from paper clips and buttons that disappear down the backs of sofas"
The aim of scientists is to be respected, and respect is earnt by proving others right beyond any doubt or best of all proving as many people wrong as possible.
The interesting thing I found about this is that unlike the reasoning behind Hubble (the atmosphere distorts light so get outside it) the Cangaroo II telescopes will use that very distortion to view the black holes.
I'd assume that the Southern Skies are a lot less mapped than their Northern cousins given the dearth of countries south of the equator.
But if they'd really wanted to go to a place where the atmosphere distorts the view then a Cafe Bar in Amsterdam would be their best bet
I'm sure there is going to be a lot of slamming of the "mySQL is quick and it rocks on site X" variety. But the points raised are valid. There are certain things that are required for RDBMS to be worthy of the name. One such element is transactions, when maintaining critical data it is paramount to ensure that an adverse changes can be removed when the change is found to be invalid. There are others but in most of the systems I've worked in this has been the key requirement, to bunch up a load of calls which are interspursed with coding logic and at the point where you reach a magic if statement that determines that something has changed and now the request is invalid to remove all traces of that request.
"It isn't enough to be quick, you have to be accurate" as many a Western movie has pointed out. mySQL is a fine system for maintaining data that can be the right choices in certain instances. But don't go betting the company on it handling your business logic.For the first real Company that effected policy you have to hop across the pond to have a look at the East India Trading company over the course of 250 years it determined much of British foreign policy and was a large reason for the growth of the British Empire.
Now there was a company that makes Microsoft look reasonable and harmless.
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Just think folks, 102 years ago the most that people could kill with one weapon was about a hundred people. What an enlightened time we now live in.
As an inveterate hater of Wednesdays (middle of the week, its three days since you last had fun and 3 more before you have some more, Wednesday should be a holiday) I've always wondered.
Why did you pick Thursday as the day for that Arthur Dent never got the hang of ?
Oh and if I do get to ask a question I'd better ask another....
There was a Radio Series, a TV series, the books... but no film. What stopped Zaphod becomming the most self-centred person in Hollywood ?
I see a rather large smoking gun at the scene of the crime....
ZDNet is running from.... an Apache Webserver.
1) Microsoft did not turn the PC from its haven of the techy into the realm of the user. That title went to the Mac, good _marketing_ gave the PC its edge as well as the massive failure of IBM to spot its power.
2) The rise of the PC and of Microsoft is of the same sort of community that is contained in
Now onto the rest. Microsoft _has_ done a good job in promoting and extending the PC. The problem is that it has done this _at the expense_ of the consumer on many occasions. Few would argue that MS-DOS was better than DR-DOS, yet strangely DR-DOS died. This was a result of MS pushing out the opposition by using their dominante position.
Microsoft have succeeded by realising two things
1) Quality doesn't matter, being first matters
2) Marketing can over come most evils.
Using these two commandments they have created the PC market place. However when competition loomed they used their command of the market to crush the competition, not in the interests of the consumer or because their product was "better", soley because they have the first hook that every user sees. This is bad.
The internet, windows, the web, the mouse and all the other things that make the world a better place for the average user were not invented or even best implemented by MS. They were best marketed by them and opposition removed by other means.
Bit confused as to why the laptop would have to be on. The tracking device needs only to be an emitor. Fairly low power (just like the ones you can attach to cars). To add in GPS is again not a big deal, nice big area as an antenna (the laptop itself) and the calculations are fairly low power.
Gentlemen, we have a dongle. A fixed one on the actual motherboard maybe, but still a self powered dongle.
Humpf... With the advent of IPv6 and its super duper security model we can all look forward to big brother knowing where we are... but at least we can encrypt the packets.
Take every item on an interface(page) and ask yourself if the page is still as usable. If you have taken away something that reduces the usability of the page then you put it back, otherwise you have IMPROVED the page by removing it.
Umm, I'd argue that this is arse. While it is possible to write bad code in any language it is without doubt easier to read _average_ code in one language over another. As always with these things lets take the example to an extreme.
In the blue corner we have PentiumIII assembler, in the red corner the beast of all languages Ada, your task is to write a Multi Radar Processing system. We estimate it will take 3 years with 10 people to write. It is classified as being mission and safety critical (cat 1).
Do you think that the assembler app will be as maintainable or as manageable as the Ada app ?
Of course not. Certain languages are tailored towards certain things, FFT in FORTRAN is a breeze, I'd image its slightly harder in VB.
I've seen systems (as in had to interface to) written in many different languages (including all those written above, + Ada, COBOL, Perl, Assembler et al) assuming that most were written by a team and thus the ability is around the average I can safely say that certain languages lend theirselves to extendability and comprehension. Other can produce good and readable code but their normal standard is lower than the normal standard of other languages.
VB isn't one of the best mind. In fact that honour goes to Ada IMO. There have been many studies done on development times/maintainance times in different languages and it DOES make a difference what you code in.
Otherwise we'd all be using Turing Machine Instruction sets.
If you want all of this now in a reliable package
Psion have it. Full compatibility with Word, Excel etc. A full Java 1.1.4 runtime so a Full Web browser. Never crashes, boots in milliseconds.
All of that is here now it runs using EPOC. And as with the rest of the mobile revolution the major players are in Europe and using it right now, not in some fluffy time in the future.
Free Software and its variant has proved to be very successful in the product arena, Emacs, Linux, sendmail et al. And with the likes of Enhydra the supply to the enterprise is there. However most of the work I've ever done has been working on large scale systems that cost millions of dollars over several years and have a definate business defined delivery date.
I just don't see how Free Software scales as an idea into the enterprise arena. To take one example:
I worked on an Air Traffic Control system which will take in total around 10 years and $4 billion. How would the free software model meet the rigours and demands of this sort of enviroment ?
The most valuable thing I learn't at University was about interaction with others, I've found since that the most productive team members are not always the best read, but the best able to communicate their ideas.
Very true in the first release, have a look at JDK1.3 the speed up in Swing is impressive. The other option is to get the Truffle lightweight version for Personal Java which is very sleek (not sure why Sun don't push it more).
Oh I love the superior tone "Java isn't for hardcore people"
C is a crap language, I used it for years, I wrote Radar Display lists in it, I wrote X Server modifications, but fundametally its a poor project language. Its debug cycle is a nightmare on large scale projects. It works in Open Source thanks to the "many eyes" philosophy.
For myself the enterprise is an application with 000s of concurrent users and a lifecycle of around 10 years "active" (normally means 20). VB is not appropriate for that sort of enviroment as it does not guide the developer towards the sort design methodologies that save time on large scale projects.
Many people look down on Java as they see OO et al as an abomination. You can hack in C better than in Java, but you can code in a team better in Java.
So far with Java I've done servlets, client server, database, MQ, legacy et al et al et al. Pure Java does work, but it still requires a skillful designer. It isn't a silver bullet, but its better than #include.