"... funny reference to Pynchon's Crying of lot 49".
To those who understand the reference, it may be funny. To everyone else, it
is just confusing.
FreeBSD's little devil logo is well-drawn and cute. But the logo doesn't match
the subject. FreeBSD is seriously important! It's the OS of choice for those
who want to run a secure web server. It's not clear to me why FreeBSD is
chosen more than the other BSDs, but FreeBSD has become important to the
world. The FreeBSD license allows mixing with closed source software, and
commercial sale, and that's important to many commercial users. But does the
logo say that? No, the logo tells first-time visitors to expect something
cute.
NetBSD is also extremely important. It allows commercial companies to strip
out everything unnecessary and to sell an OS that is dedicated to being an
extremely secure mail server, for example. However, I don't understand the
connection with a bunch of devils taking
ownership over a few broken-looking computers. The FreeBSD logo gives the
initial impression that it is the OS of choice for computers gotten from a
dumpster.
I often need to go to people who don't have much technical knowledge and
explain to them why I have chosen a software package. You can save me hours!
You can save me hours of boring, repetitive explanation that the software is
great, it is just the communication skills that are lacking.
Also, good managers know that communication is a large part of the total cost
of implementation of software. They are correct to be scared when they see
evidence of poor communication.
Please don't confuse communication with making money. It is not fun if the
name you have chosen for your project causes some people to avoid it. Part of
what makes a project a success is communicating about it.
Marketing is just communicating about your product or idea. It's true that
most marketing contains some element of dishonesty, but that is due to the
intellectual limitations of the people who write commercial ads and brochures and web
sites, and their managers, and not due to the concept itself. Most people learn to hate the idea of marketing because they hate the lies, but communicating persuasively is often necessary for success.
"Some of us simply don't care, to put it bluntly."
I agree that's true, but I think it is unfortunate. It's true that
communication largely determines how much you will be offered in pay when you
get a new job, so money is sometimes involved. But communication also largely determines how well you will do
in finding a significant other. Communication is a large percentage of
everything people do.
I found it very, very difficult learning how to communicate better, but the
results were worth the many years of effort.
You need communication every time you want people to go in a different
direction than they would have chosen on their own. You need communication
every time you want to manage or lead or convince.
My grandparent post got 14 replies in 6 hours. Why? Why didn't people just
ignore it? Because I thought a lot about what I wanted to say, and then used
my skill in writing to communicate it. Because it was well communicated,
people could more easily decide whether they agreed or disagreed.
Part of learning how to communicate well is deciding that communication is
important to you. I'm hoping to help convince some OSS authors that
communication is important because I spend many hours evaluating and trying to
implement open source software. Often open source web sites don't even contain
explanations about the purpose of the project.
Here's an open source project that does it right: cURL. I had no trouble learning to use cURL.
On the other hand, I spent 5 hours last Saturday night learning how to set
parameters for another open source project. Five hours is a lot of time to
lose! And that's just for one project. Multiply the lost time on one project
by thousands of projects and millions of users. The lost time because of poor
communication is huge!
It amazes me how bad open source people are at marketing. Why make your
project, which requires a huge amount of excellent thinking, the butt of
jokes?
Why give a name to your open source project that will cause those who have
less than complete technical knowledge to feel uncomfortable about adopting
what you have done?
One question is, how bad can it get? Will there one day be a "Worthless"
project? There is already a "Waste".
The funniest bad name for an open source project was "Killustrator". It's easy
to see how the name was chosen. Everything in KDE began with a K, as much as
possible, and Killustrator is an open source illustration program. It didn't
seem to bother anyone that the first syllable of the name was "Kill". I can
imagine the Killustrator author thinking how convenient it is that the word
illustrator begins with a vowel; that makes it easy, just put a K at the
beginning, and you have a name!
The name Killustrator gave everyone a million dollars worth of laughs, and did
perhaps $10 million damage to Adobe's reputation when the CEO of Adobe
overreacted, saying people would confuse Killustrator with Adobe Illustrator.
Do open source authors believe that there are only a few concepts available,
not enough for everyone? Why copy the FreeBSD devil idea?
And Why did the FreeBSD project adopt that idea? I know FreeBSD is an
excellent OS, and the favorite BSD for ISPs, but there are some who will be
discouraged by the amateurish baby red devil marketing scheme.
In Windows, it is better to use WinZip, since so many people are accustomed to it. Also, Windows XP supports Zip files, but not tar.
Gnu Privacy Guard is the most peer-reviewed of the encryption programs, I think.
The goal is usually to transmit one compressed file safely that encloses all the files needed to be transferred, and then use those files from within the enclosing compressed file. The value of WinZip is not just in compression, but in providing 32-bit CRCs that WinZip uses to give error messages if files are corrupt. If there are no error messages after testing with WinZip, then we know the transfer was successful.
Another factor that is sometimes useful is that WinZip also supports TAR and other methods of compression and binding files together.
Perhaps the underlying problem could be solved by creating a registry database of disclosures of patentable ideas. Anyone having an idea that he or she doesn't want to patent could contribute. If there were 10 million entries, software patents might be seen to be of less value because of the possibility there was prior art in the database, that was not found with a search engine.
For proof of prior art, the original contributor could come forward, and would then have a complete defense against the patent.
The case you cited is one is which obviousness is being argued when there is no case of someone else making the same invention. Where FOSS has a special problem is when a FOSS author makes the same invention after an application has been filed with the patent office, but before it issues.
After a patent issues, the FOSS author would need to apply for a license.
Most software patents seem utterly obvious to me, so the whole issue is unfortunate.
Suppose a company applies for a patent. Before it is issued, a FOSS author independently begins using the idea in the patent. The fact that the FOSS author found the same idea in routine programming is a defense against the patent's claim of invention.
FOSS == obvious to skilled practitioner
on
Patents and the Penguin
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If it is in FOSS software, it is, by definition, obvious to someone who is skilled in the art. Therefore, it is not patentable.
To a lesser degree, American women feel compelled to pretend to agree with the group. So, the same problems occur in the United States. The learn this habit because they want what the U.S. culture supposedly will give them.
Also, it is good to mention that Japanese who live with the openness of the U.S. culture often learn to like it a lot, and sometimes have difficulty being accepted when they go home.
The AC post above this comment (now at -1) is so typical. Something terrible happens in
technology, and, instead of talking about the technology, technically
knowledgeable being attacking each other!
The parent post is exactly right: "I'm an EE in Microelectronics, and I had
been very disappointed in Intel's tricks to get MHz up."
Intel agrees! The whole point of abandoning the Pentium 4 is that Intel is
dissapointed, also. Certainly the engineers at Intel did not know it would
happen this way.
The Inquirer article says the same thing: "The heat dissipation/power
consumption problems the company has had with the first 90nm desktop Pentium
4, 'Prescott', may well have convinced it that if it's to bring multi-core
CPUs to market, its needs to completely rethink the architecture of those
cores."
Not very long ago, AMD had 8 to 10 percent of the desktop market, now the
share is closer to 50 percent.
Intel has not been doing well. I've had extensive conversations with people
who work for Intel, including people who help design Intel microprocessors. In
my opinion, it seems that Intel is suffering from years of bad management.
Intel has been a company that treated its employees badly, and now the entire
company is suffering.
The self-destruction of Intel seems to me to be related to the
self-destruction of other U.S. companies, like Enron and WorldCom and the Tyco
. It is my understanding that the self-destruction of these companies is
related to a general social breakdown that is happening in the United States.
I've written a draft of an article about the problems: Social Breakdown in the United
States. (This is only the May 7, 2004, 12:46, draft version.)
Both FireFox and Mozilla have this memory leak bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222660 . (Copy and paste the URL. Mozilla does not allow direct linking from Slashdot.)
Still, FireFox is the best browser I've used, by far.
Not only does FireFox crash, but it makes Windows XP so unstable that it is necessary to reboot. That's the real story.
There's no real connection between the psychology of Slashdot and the
management of VA Linux. The managers wisely decided to leave Slashdot as it
was before they bought it. Slashdot is the same, with all its strengths and
warts. (Except there is very little talk now about Signal11 and Natalie
Portman.)
I've been employed, and very busy, the entire time I have read Slashdot.
Slashdot is very helpful. I have no better way to learn all that I need to
learn about what's happening in the computer industry. I became friends with a
woman who worked for a well-known computer industry magazine. She had very
little technical knowledge and very little caring about technical issues. She
owned a Mac, but she wrote about PCs. The quality of computer magazines is
very low, and is influenced by advertisers.
In contrast, I am informed every day by Slashdot about the industry by people
who are actually doing the work. It's true that I have to wade through a lot
of comments that are of no interest to me, but I have found no better way.
Slashdot is very important in my thinking and in the thinking of other people
who are and will be the leaders of the computer industry.
There is a bug in the SlashCode that sometimes prevents users from seeing all
the comments. Nothing has been done about that serious bug for YEARS.
I tried to write an article about the shortcomings of Windows XP: Windows
XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. I found that, even if I worked
all day every day, I could not clearly document all the problems with
Microsoft's adversarial, un-idealistic approach to business management. This
is not an exaggeration.
It's not true that non-technical people don't have opinions about Microsoft.
In fact, many well-educated, well-informed people who don't work in the
computer industry are very negative toward Microsoft. They've read the
newspaper coverage. They thought Bill Gates lied to the court during the
anti-trust trial; they don't like it when big companies try to corrupt the
government.
You see a lot of teenage attitudes represented on Slashdot. Some of the
teenagers are in their twenties. That's life. Just ignore it. Slashdot is not
the only place where there are opinions that don't seem well informed. Don't
forget, the evangelicals and born-again Christians, 40% of U.S. voters, voted 87% for George W. Bush, and strongly support the violence in Iraq.
"GNU" is not the fault of Slashdot. "GNU/Linux" is a trademark designed by a
very intelligent man who benefited the entire computer industry with his
socially advanced ideas, but who is very backward in marketing. I bow down to
him with respect even though I think GNU is a very poor trademark, and the
drawing of the Gnu even worse.
From the parent comment: "Slashdot professes to be some sort of golden
defender of consumer copyright law." Slashdot is a group of maybe 100,000
people who have many very varied opinions.
That's my impression, also. Microsoft managers learned IBM's abusiveness. But then they pioneered their own; Microsoft is a company known for its innovation.
I'm glad you went into more detail. I like the idea of port-scanning on login.
It seems to me that software firewalls on each machine should also be a matter of often-repeated company policy. I know managers who will not tolerate ignorance of computer use rules. People adjust. Most people are safe drivers, and learning to drive is much more complicated than learning to use a computer safely.
"Firewalling all client workstations is pretty new..."
I don't understand all the problems with this. I thought it was absolutely standard, since January 2000 when ZoneAlarm was first released, to run 3rd-party software firewalls on every Windows computer.
Slashdot Mirror
The link works for me. Gee, maybe our religious extremists are not less crazy than their religious extremists.
Not only is the writing sadly funny, but I learned something. I learned that the Apple Darwin logo is named Hexley.
"... funny reference to Pynchon's Crying of lot 49".
To those who understand the reference, it may be funny. To everyone else, it is just confusing.
FreeBSD's little devil logo is well-drawn and cute. But the logo doesn't match the subject. FreeBSD is seriously important! It's the OS of choice for those who want to run a secure web server. It's not clear to me why FreeBSD is chosen more than the other BSDs, but FreeBSD has become important to the world. The FreeBSD license allows mixing with closed source software, and commercial sale, and that's important to many commercial users. But does the logo say that? No, the logo tells first-time visitors to expect something cute.
NetBSD is also extremely important. It allows commercial companies to strip out everything unnecessary and to sell an OS that is dedicated to being an extremely secure mail server, for example. However, I don't understand the connection with a bunch of devils taking ownership over a few broken-looking computers. The FreeBSD logo gives the initial impression that it is the OS of choice for computers gotten from a dumpster.
I often need to go to people who don't have much technical knowledge and explain to them why I have chosen a software package. You can save me hours! You can save me hours of boring, repetitive explanation that the software is great, it is just the communication skills that are lacking.
Also, good managers know that communication is a large part of the total cost of implementation of software. They are correct to be scared when they see evidence of poor communication.
"Why does everything have to be commercialized?"
Please don't confuse communication with making money. It is not fun if the name you have chosen for your project causes some people to avoid it. Part of what makes a project a success is communicating about it.
Marketing is just communicating about your product or idea. It's true that most marketing contains some element of dishonesty, but that is due to the intellectual limitations of the people who write commercial ads and brochures and web sites, and their managers, and not due to the concept itself. Most people learn to hate the idea of marketing because they hate the lies, but communicating persuasively is often necessary for success.
"Some of us simply don't care, to put it bluntly."
I agree that's true, but I think it is unfortunate. It's true that communication largely determines how much you will be offered in pay when you get a new job, so money is sometimes involved. But communication also largely determines how well you will do in finding a significant other. Communication is a large percentage of everything people do.
I found it very, very difficult learning how to communicate better, but the results were worth the many years of effort.
You need communication every time you want people to go in a different direction than they would have chosen on their own. You need communication every time you want to manage or lead or convince.
My grandparent post got 14 replies in 6 hours. Why? Why didn't people just ignore it? Because I thought a lot about what I wanted to say, and then used my skill in writing to communicate it. Because it was well communicated, people could more easily decide whether they agreed or disagreed.
Part of learning how to communicate well is deciding that communication is important to you. I'm hoping to help convince some OSS authors that communication is important because I spend many hours evaluating and trying to implement open source software. Often open source web sites don't even contain explanations about the purpose of the project.
Here's an open source project that does it right: cURL. I had no trouble learning to use cURL.
On the other hand, I spent 5 hours last Saturday night learning how to set parameters for another open source project. Five hours is a lot of time to lose! And that's just for one project. Multiply the lost time on one project by thousands of projects and millions of users. The lost time because of poor communication is huge!
The editors reserve the right to be off topic.
Woooo! It's scary:
YOU will see HELL. .
YOU will smell HELL. .
YOU will breathe HELL. .
YOU will hear HELL. .
YOU will feel HELL. .
YOU WILL BE HELL. . .
It amazes me how bad open source people are at marketing. Why make your project, which requires a huge amount of excellent thinking, the butt of jokes?
Why give a name to your open source project that will cause those who have less than complete technical knowledge to feel uncomfortable about adopting what you have done?
One question is, how bad can it get? Will there one day be a "Worthless" project? There is already a "Waste".
The funniest bad name for an open source project was "Killustrator". It's easy to see how the name was chosen. Everything in KDE began with a K, as much as possible, and Killustrator is an open source illustration program. It didn't seem to bother anyone that the first syllable of the name was "Kill". I can imagine the Killustrator author thinking how convenient it is that the word illustrator begins with a vowel; that makes it easy, just put a K at the beginning, and you have a name!
The name Killustrator gave everyone a million dollars worth of laughs, and did perhaps $10 million damage to Adobe's reputation when the CEO of Adobe overreacted, saying people would confuse Killustrator with Adobe Illustrator.
Do open source authors believe that there are only a few concepts available, not enough for everyone? Why copy the FreeBSD devil idea?
And Why did the FreeBSD project adopt that idea? I know FreeBSD is an excellent OS, and the favorite BSD for ISPs, but there are some who will be discouraged by the amateurish baby red devil marketing scheme.
In Windows, it is better to use WinZip, since so many people are accustomed to it. Also, Windows XP supports Zip files, but not tar.
Gnu Privacy Guard is the most peer-reviewed of the encryption programs, I think.
The goal is usually to transmit one compressed file safely that encloses all the files needed to be transferred, and then use those files from within the enclosing compressed file. The value of WinZip is not just in compression, but in providing 32-bit CRCs that WinZip uses to give error messages if files are corrupt. If there are no error messages after testing with WinZip, then we know the transfer was successful.
Another factor that is sometimes useful is that WinZip also supports TAR and other methods of compression and binding files together.
Secure WinZip: Put files together with WinZip. Then run The GNU Privacy Guard.
"It's nice living in Oregon."
Because the Oregon Sales tax is 0.00 percent.
I can see now that you are correct.
Perhaps the underlying problem could be solved by creating a registry database of disclosures of patentable ideas. Anyone having an idea that he or she doesn't want to patent could contribute. If there were 10 million entries, software patents might be seen to be of less value because of the possibility there was prior art in the database, that was not found with a search engine.
For proof of prior art, the original contributor could come forward, and would then have a complete defense against the patent.
To me, the overall meaning is that Intel is not good at marketing.
Good reference.
I'm not sure I read about that case, but I did read one that may be like it.
I think my earlier comment #9117326 still applies.
The case you cited is one is which obviousness is being argued when there is no case of someone else making the same invention. Where FOSS has a special problem is when a FOSS author makes the same invention after an application has been filed with the patent office, but before it issues.
After a patent issues, the FOSS author would need to apply for a license.
Most software patents seem utterly obvious to me, so the whole issue is unfortunate.
Fertilizer tax, anyone?
Service tax?
Eliminate tax incentives?
Trucking registration fee increase?
The only thing worse than a tax-and-spend Democrat is a don't-tax-and-spend-anyway Republican.
If you are tired, sleep.
Also, it is legal in India.
Suppose a company applies for a patent. Before it is issued, a FOSS author independently begins using the idea in the patent. The fact that the FOSS author found the same idea in routine programming is a defense against the patent's claim of invention.
If it is in FOSS software, it is, by definition, obvious to someone who is skilled in the art. Therefore, it is not patentable.
Is this reasonable?
Excellent comment.
To a lesser degree, American women feel compelled to pretend to agree with the group. So, the same problems occur in the United States. The learn this habit because they want what the U.S. culture supposedly will give them.
Also, it is good to mention that Japanese who live with the openness of the U.S. culture often learn to like it a lot, and sometimes have difficulty being accepted when they go home.
The social pressure in Japan is HUGE.
MOD PARENT UP! Very impressive analysis.
The AC post above this comment (now at -1) is so typical. Something terrible happens in technology, and, instead of talking about the technology, technically knowledgeable being attacking each other!
The parent post is exactly right: "I'm an EE in Microelectronics, and I had been very disappointed in Intel's tricks to get MHz up."
Intel agrees! The whole point of abandoning the Pentium 4 is that Intel is dissapointed, also. Certainly the engineers at Intel did not know it would happen this way.
The Inquirer article says the same thing: "The heat dissipation/power consumption problems the company has had with the first 90nm desktop Pentium 4, 'Prescott', may well have convinced it that if it's to bring multi-core CPUs to market, its needs to completely rethink the architecture of those cores."
Not very long ago, AMD had 8 to 10 percent of the desktop market, now the share is closer to 50 percent.
Intel has not been doing well. I've had extensive conversations with people who work for Intel, including people who help design Intel microprocessors. In my opinion, it seems that Intel is suffering from years of bad management. Intel has been a company that treated its employees badly, and now the entire company is suffering.
The self-destruction of Intel seems to me to be related to the self-destruction of other U.S. companies, like Enron and WorldCom and the Tyco . It is my understanding that the self-destruction of these companies is related to a general social breakdown that is happening in the United States. I've written a draft of an article about the problems: Social Breakdown in the United States. (This is only the May 7, 2004, 12:46, draft version.)
Both FireFox and Mozilla have this memory leak bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22266
Still, FireFox is the best browser I've used, by far.
Not only does FireFox crash, but it makes Windows XP so unstable that it is necessary to reboot. That's the real story.
There's no real connection between the psychology of Slashdot and the management of VA Linux. The managers wisely decided to leave Slashdot as it was before they bought it. Slashdot is the same, with all its strengths and warts. (Except there is very little talk now about Signal11 and Natalie Portman.)
I've been employed, and very busy, the entire time I have read Slashdot.
Slashdot is very helpful. I have no better way to learn all that I need to learn about what's happening in the computer industry. I became friends with a woman who worked for a well-known computer industry magazine. She had very little technical knowledge and very little caring about technical issues. She owned a Mac, but she wrote about PCs. The quality of computer magazines is very low, and is influenced by advertisers.
In contrast, I am informed every day by Slashdot about the industry by people who are actually doing the work. It's true that I have to wade through a lot of comments that are of no interest to me, but I have found no better way.
Slashdot is very important in my thinking and in the thinking of other people who are and will be the leaders of the computer industry.
There is a bug in the SlashCode that sometimes prevents users from seeing all the comments. Nothing has been done about that serious bug for YEARS.
I tried to write an article about the shortcomings of Windows XP: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. I found that, even if I worked all day every day, I could not clearly document all the problems with Microsoft's adversarial, un-idealistic approach to business management. This is not an exaggeration.
It's not true that non-technical people don't have opinions about Microsoft. In fact, many well-educated, well-informed people who don't work in the computer industry are very negative toward Microsoft. They've read the newspaper coverage. They thought Bill Gates lied to the court during the anti-trust trial; they don't like it when big companies try to corrupt the government.
You see a lot of teenage attitudes represented on Slashdot. Some of the teenagers are in their twenties. That's life. Just ignore it. Slashdot is not the only place where there are opinions that don't seem well informed. Don't forget, the evangelicals and born-again Christians, 40% of U.S. voters, voted 87% for George W. Bush, and strongly support the violence in Iraq.
"GNU" is not the fault of Slashdot. "GNU/Linux" is a trademark designed by a very intelligent man who benefited the entire computer industry with his socially advanced ideas, but who is very backward in marketing. I bow down to him with respect even though I think GNU is a very poor trademark, and the drawing of the Gnu even worse.
From the parent comment: "Slashdot professes to be some sort of golden defender of consumer copyright law." Slashdot is a group of maybe 100,000 people who have many very varied opinions.
Have you ever been abused that same way before? If you haven't, that's innovation.
That's my impression, also. Microsoft managers learned IBM's abusiveness. But then they pioneered their own; Microsoft is a company known for its innovation.
I'm glad you went into more detail. I like the idea of port-scanning on login.
It seems to me that software firewalls on each machine should also be a matter of often-repeated company policy. I know managers who will not tolerate ignorance of computer use rules. People adjust. Most people are safe drivers, and learning to drive is much more complicated than learning to use a computer safely.
"Firewalling all client workstations is pretty new..."
I don't understand all the problems with this. I thought it was absolutely standard, since January 2000 when ZoneAlarm was first released, to run 3rd-party software firewalls on every Windows computer.