IMHO if someone isn't willing to identify themselves, then how can I believe what they're saying? There are too many people online who are just here to stir up sh!t.
I think it's irresponsible of the media to use Anonymous Coward postings from Slashdot as News (which happens - our local newspaper printed an article about Corel's GPL violation and used some very damning quotes by Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot to validate their story).
I'd like to think the news I'm seeing on CNN, ABC, etc., isn't being made up by bored, anonymous Internet posters.
- Steve
(Of course an IP address isn't the way to do it.. there's always going to be some level of abstraction when you're accepting people who you've never met.. maybe making them give you an email address and verifying that it exists before allowing them would help. Sure, hotmail addresses are a dime a dozen, but at least you can still email the person after the chat is over and ask for more info or whatever if it's important to you).
Actually isn't it just that the source has to be available? I don't think it has to be actually included. Have any of the beta testers received binaries of GPL'ed code, requested source and been denied it?
CIBC in Canada (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) uses OS/2 on the systems that their loan officers and (I believe) tellers have on their desks.
It seems to be mainly a terminal though - showing multiple text consoles connecting to various applications running elsewhere. I didn't see any GUI apps running on the local machine - so which OS was being used was largely irrelevant.
This sounds like the Commodore 64 crowd back when Commodore was making Amigas. There were a lot of Commodore 64's selling, especially into developing countries where an inexpensive computer was the perfect thing - but nobody at Commodore really had any interest in making them or selling them.
Bwahaha.. no.. it's funny though how people who know me from the Amiga days still ask me about every new product name which ends with X.
(For those of you to whom this makes no sense, I wrote mostly freeware stuff on the Amiga - things like DiskX, ScreenX, TaskX, VirusX, WindX, FEdX, PointerX... It made it really easy to come up with a name for a new program).
Hey - I gave out source for some of those, too. Why didn't RedHat send me an invitation to their IPO?:)
Someone should write up a License Generator webpage.
Have it pick an acronym at random using a database of buzzwords ("open", "community", "free", "public", etc) and have sliders for the level of openness you want, of protection for your source, your patents, or whatever else it is that people write up their own licenses for...
Imagine you're an employee of Amiga, Inc. You'd never know, when you arrived in the morning, what you'd be doing that day. Are there any employees doing real work? I haven't actually seen anything come out of Amiga Inc. in a long, long time.
Oh, to make a liar out of me, on their website, they talk about AmigaOS 3.5. I guess that's something. I don't see any mention of anything beyond evolution of the existing AmigaOS, though.
Hey they've got a caching CDFS. They shoulda included my CacheX utility:)
Check out the AmigaOS 3.5 feature list. It's funny seeing some of the advancements they've made when you're coming from a world where those things are expected (like DHCP support).
Cool that they got 2500 applications to beta test it.. guess a lot of people are still using their Amiga.
They're going to be at a big show in Cologne in November. The ad says "Come to experience the computer revolution of the next millennium with us". Funny that this sentence is the only one on the poster that alludes to anything new.
The Amiga wasn't just about a computer.. to me anyway the Amiga was a community, and a set of developers who we all respected, and some applications that we loved (partly because we all kinda knew the people who were working on them)...
I don't think this is something that can ever be recaptured as Amiga. It's too late for that now. Be has the same flavour to it (are there any Amiga people involved in that?) as did the Atari Lynx and the 3DO.. both of those had some of the Amiga crew onboard at some point.
The Linux community is the same way, really, but it's grown so big that it's really hard to feel like you're a part of it these days. (Maybe that's what will make the Hurd catch on).
Anyone else remember Dave Haynie and RJ Mical and Jay Minor and Bryce Nesbitt and Dale Luck and the rest of the original Amiga crew?
Is there an encryption algorithm that would allow decryption by, say, one of ten keys or one of some number of keys, but only those keys?
You could use it for something like this, so that the completely safe stuff (or the unrated stuff) would be unencrypted, the violence encrypted with one key, the sex with another key, (hey who took my sex key?) or however you want to rate it... then you can take the keys that decrypt those things off the computer. Kiddies wouldn't have any way of reading that data even if they figured out how to get it.
Unless they had their own (or managed to find) copies of the keys.. doh. Maybe some variation of this idea...
It's not very often that you see companies actually announce that they're dropping something.. usually it just kinda fades from memory and someday someone asks "Whatever happened to..."
What about doing networking in your house through power lines, though? Maybe they could take the technology they developed here and adapt it for that (X10 on steroids).
Wouldn't there have been security concerns, what with your traffic being on the same wires as basically everyone else who's using your power station? Their web site says they take the Internet service from a local substation right into your house... Unless they installed filters somewhere outside my house, my neighbor's traffic would be there too...
Tho I guess we have that now with cable modems and we don't seem to mind.
This whole issue has been fun to watch. When I read the first message about how Microsoft had the NSA key in Windows, I kinda wondered if they would really do that.. Couldn't really decide either way.
But the number of people that read it and instantly assumed it was true was astounding. I've had friends ask me out of the blue about it. I've heard of it through mainstream media. I've seen story after story about it.
Most of the the media people still won't admit it was jumping to conclusions. That's what really bothers me. They're mostly sticking to the "well Microsoft says it's false but who can know for sure" lines to cover their own asses (and credibility).
A Wired story says "Questions lingered Friday over whether or not security experts overreacted to a scientist's charge that Microsoft built a backdoor in Windows for a US spy agency to enter". Isn't it fairly clear that they overreacted? Or is this going to happen again the next time?
(If it's a real issue, like the Hotmail thing, then they deserve to get slammed... but come on, let's verify this stuff before we go nuts).
One danger I wonder about is this: We know that we can't really build machines this small; most of the talk I've seen has been about building tiny machines to build these tiny machines (basically self-replicating). I don't think we've ever done this in any other field...
How do you test something like that? You let it go (in a controlled environment) and see what happens. Now, if they're building those machines anything like the way I write code, they're occasionally going to go nuts and do something unexpected (oh come on it happens to you too).
Imagine a tiny factory that could duplicate itself using only water. Now drop it in the ocean...
The media are believing all the supposed computer "experts" that are coming to them and saying "oh my God the world is going to end".
Look at the Microsoft NSA story. Someone sees the NSA symbol in MS code, makes an assumption, and the media buys it hook line and sinker. But almost every media article quotes some "expert" as saying that it's a real - the media guys don't want to say that themselves. That way, when it turns out to be bogus, they're clean.
I think we could use some sort of trusted agency that would verify computer-related or security-related news stories. Actually we have this in the CIAC and similar agencies don't we? If a CNN story quotes the CIAC, and not "Security Expert Bob Fishpond from Funny Creek, Missouri" then I'd be a lot more likely to believe it.
Contractors aren't going to care about your project the way you do. I work for a big company and I've seen us hire contractors to come in and do work, and the code that gets written (although occasionally okay) is often terrible.
A contractor might be tempted to think that if they don't do this exactly the right way (in a way that won't scale well, perhaps) then it won't be them that will have to fix it. Or if it is them that has to fix it, they'll get more $$ for doing so.
OTOH there are a few truly gifted programmers doing freelance contract work. Find one, someone you can trust, who does good work, and hire them:)
- SteveX
(And then there's the "I've taken a six week course in Visual Basic and now I'm a big money contractor" sort)
Why would a hardware company target a hardware product as being for a particular operating system? Make the best hardware you can, and then make drivers for everything (or release specs so others can)...
I have four computers at home - three run Linux, one runs NT. If the NT box locks up, it's simply because "NT Sucks". If one of the Linux boxes locks up, it's because my kernel is out of date, or because I need a new driver for this, or I need this other thing - it's never simply because "Linux Sucks".
At least, this is what I hear from friends who run Linux (Hi James) and what I'd expect to hear from folks on Slashdot.
Okay, I'm a bit of a Windows guy so this might be a tainted viewpoint, but there are some good lessons to learn from MFC and Visual Studio.
First, keep the framework simple - extensible is incredibly important but if the framework itself is easy to understand and doesn't require intense knowledge of the latest C++ tricks (like so many I've seen) then it will be a lot easier for programmers (especially folks who know C) to start using it.
The other important lesson is that good tool support is vital. Visual Studio isn't the tool you're going to use to maintain your classes in a million line mega-app, but it's an awesome tool for doing up quick GUIs for simple apps, or even medium-sized apps. And don't just make your GUI-builder dump out code, it has to be able to go back and let you make changes to it (add message handlers, etc). MFC isn't so good at this.
Nah, I see it more like this: The world didn't really want SGI NT boxes but this guy liked NT and believed in it and convinced the rest of the company to do it - but when the world didn't buy it, he took the rap for it. If he really does like Microsoft and NT and believes that it was a good direction for SGI, then it makes sense that when SGI turfed him, he'd want to go work for Microsoft.
I'm not that familiar with SGI's other products but I've been using a Visual Workstation 320 (with that awesome flat screen monitor.. drool) and while the graphics are mind-numbingly fast (compared to the "Regular" PC I'm writing the OpenGL code on) it doesn't seem all that fast at compiling..
Still - hardware with character is awfully hard to come by.
Ever see that guy (the stocky muscular guy with short blonde hair) on the Home Shopping Channel who shouts at you for a half hour straight about how great his product is? That's how I picture AOL TV.
Every site you visit these days wants to be the only site you visit. It's not good enough to be a news site - you've got to try to include all the other news sites on your site. I guess this is the road that ad-supported sites will lead us down.
I think what's next (at least what I'd like to see) is that the people that write the news start getting more attention than the news sites. I want to read articles by Chris Hecker, not articles by ZDNet or any other publication.
The role the publishers play is the role that the record labels play - they screen all stuff they get and decide what is worth passing on. MP3 is proving we don't need them for music, but what about news?
My milk isn't Y2k compliant. It expires way before then. Same with my bread. I wonder if, as we get close to the millennium, they will start stamping perishables as Y2k Compliant?
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO if someone isn't willing to identify themselves, then how can I believe what they're saying? There are too many people online who are just here to stir up sh!t.
I think it's irresponsible of the media to use Anonymous Coward postings from Slashdot as News (which happens - our local newspaper printed an article about Corel's GPL violation and used some very damning quotes by Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot to validate their story).
I'd like to think the news I'm seeing on CNN, ABC, etc., isn't being made up by bored, anonymous Internet posters.
- Steve
(Of course an IP address isn't the way to do it.. there's always going to be some level of abstraction when you're accepting people who you've never met.. maybe making them give you an email address and verifying that it exists before allowing them would help. Sure, hotmail addresses are a dime a dozen, but at least you can still email the person after the chat is over and ask for more info or whatever if it's important to you).
Actually isn't it just that the source has to be available? I don't think it has to be actually included. Have any of the beta testers received binaries of GPL'ed code, requested source and been denied it?
CIBC in Canada (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) uses OS/2 on the systems that their loan officers and (I believe) tellers have on their desks.
It seems to be mainly a terminal though - showing multiple text consoles connecting to various applications running elsewhere. I didn't see any GUI apps running on the local machine - so which OS was being used was largely irrelevant.
This sounds like the Commodore 64 crowd back when Commodore was making Amigas. There were a lot of Commodore 64's selling, especially into developing countries where an inexpensive computer was the perfect thing - but nobody at Commodore really had any interest in making them or selling them.
No wonder they're dead.
Maybe IBM could learn a lesson there...
Bwahaha.. no.. it's funny though how people who know me from the Amiga days still ask me about every new product name which ends with X.
:)
(For those of you to whom this makes no sense, I wrote mostly freeware stuff on the Amiga - things like DiskX, ScreenX, TaskX, VirusX, WindX, FEdX, PointerX... It made it really easy to come up with a name for a new program).
Hey - I gave out source for some of those, too. Why didn't RedHat send me an invitation to their IPO?
- Steve
If you haven't already.
Ender's Game was one of the first Science Fiction books I read, and it was the first book I read start to finish without putting it down.
I still count it as one of the best books I've ever read (up there with Greg Bear's Eon, another excellent book from an excellent author).
- Steve
Someone should write up a License Generator webpage.
Have it pick an acronym at random using a database of buzzwords ("open", "community", "free", "public", etc) and have sliders for the level of openness you want, of protection for your source, your patents, or whatever else it is that people write up their own licenses for...
Imagine you're an employee of Amiga, Inc. You'd never know, when you arrived in the morning, what you'd be doing that day. Are there any employees doing real work? I haven't actually seen anything come out of Amiga Inc. in a long, long time.
:)
Oh, to make a liar out of me, on their website, they talk about AmigaOS 3.5. I guess that's something. I don't see any mention of anything beyond evolution of the existing AmigaOS, though.
Hey they've got a caching CDFS. They shoulda included my CacheX utility
Check out the AmigaOS 3.5 feature list. It's funny seeing some of the advancements they've made when you're coming from a world where those things are expected (like DHCP support).
Cool that they got 2500 applications to beta test it.. guess a lot of people are still using their Amiga.
They're going to be at a big show in Cologne in November. The ad says "Come to experience the computer revolution of the next millennium with us". Funny that this sentence is the only one on the poster that alludes to anything new.
- Steve
The Amiga wasn't just about a computer.. to me anyway the Amiga was a community, and a set of developers who we all respected, and some applications that we loved (partly because we all kinda knew the people who were working on them)...
:)
I don't think this is something that can ever be recaptured as Amiga. It's too late for that now. Be has the same flavour to it (are there any Amiga people involved in that?) as did the Atari Lynx and the 3DO.. both of those had some of the Amiga crew onboard at some point.
The Linux community is the same way, really, but it's grown so big that it's really hard to feel like you're a part of it these days. (Maybe that's what will make the Hurd catch on).
Anyone else remember Dave Haynie and RJ Mical and Jay Minor and Bryce Nesbitt and Dale Luck and the rest of the original Amiga crew?
Whatever happened to Leo Schwab anyway?
Is there an encryption algorithm that would allow decryption by, say, one of ten keys or one of some number of keys, but only those keys?
You could use it for something like this, so that the completely safe stuff (or the unrated stuff) would be unencrypted, the violence encrypted with one key, the sex with another key, (hey who took my sex key?) or however you want to rate it... then you can take the keys that decrypt those things off the computer. Kiddies wouldn't have any way of reading that data even if they figured out how to get it.
Unless they had their own (or managed to find) copies of the keys.. doh. Maybe some variation of this idea...
It's not very often that you see companies actually announce that they're dropping something.. usually it just kinda fades from memory and someday someone asks "Whatever happened to..."
What about doing networking in your house through power lines, though? Maybe they could take the technology they developed here and adapt it for that (X10 on steroids).
Wouldn't there have been security concerns, what with your traffic being on the same wires as basically everyone else who's using your power station? Their web site says they take the Internet service from a local substation right into your house... Unless they installed filters somewhere outside my house, my neighbor's traffic would be there too...
Tho I guess we have that now with cable modems and we don't seem to mind.
This whole issue has been fun to watch. When I read the first message about how Microsoft had the NSA key in Windows, I kinda wondered if they would really do that.. Couldn't really decide either way.
But the number of people that read it and instantly assumed it was true was astounding. I've had friends ask me out of the blue about it. I've heard of it through mainstream media. I've seen story after story about it.
Most of the the media people still won't admit it was jumping to conclusions. That's what really bothers me. They're mostly sticking to the "well Microsoft says it's false but who can know for sure" lines to cover their own asses (and credibility).
A Wired story says "Questions lingered Friday over whether or not security experts overreacted to a scientist's charge that Microsoft built a backdoor in Windows for a US spy agency to enter". Isn't it fairly clear that they overreacted? Or is this going to happen again the next time?
(If it's a real issue, like the Hotmail thing, then they deserve to get slammed... but come on, let's verify this stuff before we go nuts).
One danger I wonder about is this: We know that we can't really build machines this small; most of the talk I've seen has been about building tiny machines to build these tiny machines (basically self-replicating). I don't think we've ever done this in any other field...
How do you test something like that? You let it go (in a controlled environment) and see what happens. Now, if they're building those machines anything like the way I write code, they're occasionally going to go nuts and do something unexpected (oh come on it happens to you too).
Imagine a tiny factory that could duplicate itself using only water. Now drop it in the ocean...
The media are believing all the supposed computer "experts" that are coming to them and saying "oh my God the world is going to end".
Look at the Microsoft NSA story. Someone sees the NSA symbol in MS code, makes an assumption, and the media buys it hook line and sinker. But almost every media article quotes some "expert" as saying that it's a real - the media guys don't want to say that themselves. That way, when it turns out to be bogus, they're clean.
I think we could use some sort of trusted agency that would verify computer-related or security-related news stories. Actually we have this in the CIAC and similar agencies don't we? If a CNN story quotes the CIAC, and not "Security Expert Bob Fishpond from Funny Creek, Missouri" then I'd be a lot more likely to believe it.
Contractors aren't going to care about your project the way you do. I work for a big company and I've seen us hire contractors to come in and do work, and the code that gets written (although occasionally okay) is often terrible.
:)
A contractor might be tempted to think that if they don't do this exactly the right way (in a way that won't scale well, perhaps) then it won't be them that will have to fix it. Or if it is them that has to fix it, they'll get more $$ for doing so.
OTOH there are a few truly gifted programmers doing freelance contract work. Find one, someone you can trust, who does good work, and hire them
- SteveX
(And then there's the "I've taken a six week course in Visual Basic and now I'm a big money contractor" sort)
Why would a hardware company target a hardware product as being for a particular operating system? Make the best hardware you can, and then make drivers for everything (or release specs so others can)...
I have four computers at home - three run Linux, one runs NT. If the NT box locks up, it's simply because "NT Sucks". If one of the Linux boxes locks up, it's because my kernel is out of date, or because I need a new driver for this, or I need this other thing - it's never simply because "Linux Sucks".
At least, this is what I hear from friends who run Linux (Hi James) and what I'd expect to hear from folks on Slashdot.
Okay, I'm a bit of a Windows guy so this might be a tainted viewpoint, but there are some good lessons to learn from MFC and Visual Studio.
First, keep the framework simple - extensible is incredibly important but if the framework itself is easy to understand and doesn't require intense knowledge of the latest C++ tricks (like so many I've seen) then it will be a lot easier for programmers (especially folks who know C) to start using it.
The other important lesson is that good tool support is vital. Visual Studio isn't the tool you're going to use to maintain your classes in a million line mega-app, but it's an awesome tool for doing up quick GUIs for simple apps, or even medium-sized apps. And don't just make your GUI-builder dump out code, it has to be able to go back and let you make changes to it (add message handlers, etc). MFC isn't so good at this.
My two cents.
- Steve
Nah, I see it more like this: The world didn't really want SGI NT boxes but this guy liked NT and believed in it and convinced the rest of the company to do it - but when the world didn't buy it, he took the rap for it. If he really does like Microsoft and NT and believes that it was a good direction for SGI, then it makes sense that when SGI turfed him, he'd want to go work for Microsoft.
I'm not that familiar with SGI's other products but I've been using a Visual Workstation 320 (with that awesome flat screen monitor.. drool) and while the graphics are mind-numbingly fast (compared to the "Regular" PC I'm writing the OpenGL code on) it doesn't seem all that fast at compiling..
Still - hardware with character is awfully hard to come by.
Ever see that guy (the stocky muscular guy with short blonde hair) on the Home Shopping Channel who shouts at you for a half hour straight about how great his product is? That's how I picture AOL TV.
Every site you visit these days wants to be the only site you visit. It's not good enough to be a news site - you've got to try to include all the other news sites on your site. I guess this is the road that ad-supported sites will lead us down.
I think what's next (at least what I'd like to see) is that the people that write the news start getting more attention than the news sites. I want to read articles by
Chris Hecker, not articles by ZDNet or any other publication.
The role the publishers play is the role that the record labels play - they screen all stuff they get and decide what is worth passing on. MP3 is proving we don't need them for music, but what about news?
- Steve
My milk isn't Y2k compliant. It expires way before then. Same with my bread. I wonder if, as we get close to the millennium, they will start stamping perishables as Y2k Compliant?