San Francisco, 2004. The city, as well as all Bay Area, is full of robots, built and driven by hackers, to find crackers who is trying to take over the bots' control. All citizens forgot about president elections because they are devided onto two big groups: hackers, who build and drive bots, and crackers, who crack the code, steal the bot and fight back. The rest of citizens had to flee into villages all over the California and Nevada. The police has been neutralized at first weeks of the war by both fighting sides in order to avoid any unnecessary distracting factors. Mr President in his speach in the Congress suggested to let California go, saying: "We've got Afganistan, Iraq, Iran and Korea, and we still keep Texas - nothing to worry about."
take a box with gas and put the wall with the hole in the middle. Gas molecules will fly randomly in all directions. There is a chance (extremely low) that they will be gathered more in one half. There will be a pressure and if you will be lucky you can extract some energy from such pressure. In your dreams. In reality there is a second law of thermodynamics saying that enthropy cannot be dropped in the closed system.
Now consider thousands of open source developers coding as one thousand monkeys typing on 1000 type machines. There is a chance they will type something good. Wait a minute, they did! OOo, Mozilla, Python, Perl, Apache, Linux, even that everdying BSD. So, either the open source is not a close system or their result doesn't decrease the overall enthropy at all.
I think both. As for today, open source mostly repeat (sometimes with much better quality!) the functionality of close source software products. And overall enthropy by the end of such work is way higher then before.
BTW,./ users cannot be used to produce a free energy either. All we do is a participating in overall increasing the temperature of our planet.
but being opensource as it is, when the holes are discovered, they are patched pretty quickly
Usually people suggest you to switch to postfix, qmail and courier - all three are open source as well.
I'll add that Courier's major developer is a very arrogant persont ignoring real life things and that gives you a quite good MTA with no support whatsoever.
The major complain of Qmail users (acrttually admins) is very similar: the major developer is concentratied on revolutionary new version of his program, so no big improvement or serious bug fixes for about two years in the current release.
As for Postfix, I love it's flexibility "up and down" - it's extremely easy to configure a home-based mail server as well as a corporate distributed mail system. It has very clear design and bery simle (still power!) config syntax. Development is not frozen, so are the developers. Besides, it's still has a support for both mailbox formats.
Few surveys and polls (one of them) I did demonstrate the trend that most of former sendmail users switch namely to Postfix. No need to mention that most of MTA switchers are moving from sendmail:)
people who want to use sendmail will keep using it
The good news is that most of people do not want to use sendmail. Thay want to use MTA. Therefore, when they think about alternatives, they may notice that sendmail is not the only opensource MTA. And it is not the best one. That's why there is growing stream of MTA switchers.
But it is not a bad news. It's a challenge for sendmail developers. Now they have to either redesign their child or to choose another open source project where to develop further their own skills. Either is choice is good afterall.
After consulting with Organization for Robot Rights, the famous Three Laws of Robotics must sound:
1. A robot may not injure any living being, including humans, animals and other robots, or, through inaction, allow any living being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by strictly authorized (ID must be preprogrammed) living beings by except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. Depends on the Linux distro installed the robot must (carefully!) follow the other laws from one of the following Books: the Bible, the Quran, the Tora, when they are not in conflict with with first three laws. Buddhism and TaoDeChing rules are already checked and certified as safe.
By installing Microsoft on it the bot becomes dangerous even without any hackers. Now imagine if any hackers will get their hands on Microsoft based bot!
Speaking about Linux, the bot will have specially customized Linux - rootless Linux. Hackers are seeking for root. No root - no hackers. Simple.
Most companies can increase programmer productivity and efficiency by not being so fucking cheap, and getting rid of cubicles. I
The problem is that most of companies cannot afford so non-competitive market methods as Microsoft did, and thus they do not keep a position of a super-monopoly charging customers as much as they want, and thus they do not have so much of money for so many individual office doors.
1. Working extra hours doesn't help programmers to understand the deadline. The irony is that none, besides the programmer, can tell that precisely how much it will take. Other people give even more arbitrary answers. And the extimation by the programmer oneself never includes post-coding cycles (like bug-fixing), which is unavoidable, and thus it must be corrected by the project manager.
2. I wuould say, this is b/c of poor quality of requirements and other specs - the concept of quality and scalability of the product should never be created by the programmer, instead it should be very explicitely clarified begining from requirement gathering (marketing), then analyzed (product managemers and architecturs), then specified (software architector), including all possible unit and otther tests. The programmer should just continue processing of requirements for quality of the product to the quality itself (before QA, sales and support will finish it). If this chain is broken or missed then the product is not supposed to make any money. Only Microsoft can let the product be designed without requiretns for quality (they compensate it politically). others will go out of business.
3. Keeping specs being simple doesn't sacrifice (including scalability) the quality of the product by itself. But the way how such requirements for quality are expressed (gathered, analyzed, designed and specified) must be as simple as possible (but not simpler - see Albert Einstein). It is true that often a good UML diagram explains better than the text of the same paper size. But if the case is not typical (not from UML/RUP books) then it's more likely you'll spend more words to explain your non-typical diagram (what does it display and why it is important for this project) than you'll do it without a diagram just on plain English from the first place.
4. If you are adding a summary filed from another subgroup (perhaps from bellow) to a regular record line in the report (for some sort of comparison) - then you have to redesign the architecture of your report by either making it two-cycle calculated, or using some temporary table (bad DB idea). So, you are creative at that time. But I prefer to thing about it as about engineering creativity. BTW, trying to reuse any code (as a source code!) from virtually any open source project has more art than writing a poetry and if you disagree than perhaps you've never tried it by yourself.
5. I've never seen in my life sleeping programmer aside from extreme situations of several shift straight forward. What programmer are typically want is arbitrary time to come and to leave the office. Same as many other people do. Some companies refuse it and play the game "we are in army", anothers let it go but more intensively rotate (fire and hire) persons with low evaluation points.
Today it is virtually impossible to get H1B even when you are already in US and just lost a job. INS was very clear after recession begun - "we've got enough of our own citizens who cannot find the job". After 9/11 they have just stopped all (almost) work on H1B applications.
So, for mid-size projects it's more likely that the code development will be outsourced, but final QA (and perhaps finalizing the code, like english spell checking, just kidding) will be done domestically in a small office. No tariff to be applied to this schema, no H1B is required, Indian (or Chineese, or Russian) govt has got its money from salary taxes (and use it to keep better than in US high-education), US govt sucks - as it's supposed to do due to its unlimited stupidity.
BTW, President Putin said another day explicitely: "let's use taxes from outsourced to Russia projects for keeping our high-education on the level when such outsourcing is desired even when the price is the same", meaning perhaps that the quality of russian programmers for the same price is much higher that the one of US counterparts.
Forget it. US corps outsourced lots of businesses to Mexico. I am confident that the new law is to protect their interests.
But if the law will impact negatively that outsourced business of US, then US troops will come to make sure that the law is "correct".
--
There is no democracy in this world anymore. There is the power piramid to protect the top business, which motivation is to keep money to flow. And if you are not insider you are outsider.
Why dialup when broadband is available for the same price? I am not sure in recent US prices, but here in Canada I am having 300K-out/1.5M-in for just about $20/m (after converting to a "green" cash) from my TV-cable provider. BTW, the connection is 24/7, it's a real one (no pppoe), it's not proprietary (no client installation is required - I am living on Linux) and it doesn't change my IP for months (personal web and mail hosting is OK). Other providers promise me 3.5M-in with static IP for just a double price and I am thinking to which I should switch.
So, why again should I pay for $30/m for bad when I can pay $20 for good?
Mozilla doesn't support SVG out of the box due to some nasty licensing issues: you have to download and install svg libs yourself and then re-build (re-compile) all mozilla.
If you call it "support" then I add to it: "experimental"
I think you've just destroyed all your own arguments. Phoenix rocks.
I don't see where it rocks. It's an experiment in all its quality. Especially in its deliverability. I can build Mozilla on almost every major platform: Windows, MacOS, BSD and of course many Linux distros. Phoenix build is broken or doesn't exist for the most of them. Being downloaded in binaries it crashes.
Mozilla browser's quality today can be compared to Opera's and IE's one. Mozilla mail's quality is not far behind. So I don't under "WHY" as well.
It doesn't take too much to see that E17 is deadly slow. But itakes something to understand why it is slow.
Typically in Open Software, the amount and quality of coders in the project is usually proportional to the task attraction, architecture design, exisiting code implementation of it and the existing team working on it. Therefore, one or more those factors are wrong with Enlightenment.
The task is not less attractive now than it was in days of E16. The design has been even more improved. People are excited by the code quality. So, what is it? Is there any problem to work with existing team leaders?
If not, why new, skilled and motivated, programmers are not joining to the E17 team? Why do they work for KDE and GNOME?
Is it about money? Than why thick pockets do not pay for E17, which is "so better" than GNOME and KDE?
It's clear that something is not clear with this project.
Apple OS is not THAT network-oriented as X11. Why should Sun abandon X11 in a network-centric project?
Apple OS is for Apple's hardware. Sun has own desktop hardware to push on the market. Why should Sun abandon its own hardware.
Besides, X11 works everywhere (or almost everywhere). Why should Sun limit itself to 5% of US desktop market?
Sun has own (even OSS) office suite. Apple brings MS Office to its users. So, why would Sun be interested in promoting its office competitor?
Personally I think that Mac OS X is no more than a candy. What users need is a functionality. And what developers need is architecture design. Agian, it's my personal opinion, but in X11 (and Gnome) environment Sun has much more potential to create much better skeleton of functionality, which can be "candied" with no efforts later.
espically if you are using gnome and the desktop restores to what you were last doing.
Wrong.
Gnome will start same programs as they've been running last time you've logged out. But all data will be lost. Consider that I am on the middle of some game, or I have a terminal window with multi-hour compilation process. If I logout my game session is gone and the compilation process is terminated.
I've noticed that recently everything that Apple is doing has i in the front of name. Thus, the version 10 (X in Roman difits) should be called iX. Wait a minute, Roman IX is 9 in Arabic digits. Hmm... sounds like they are not far away from Mac OS 9, at least in its name.
Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1.
Many (if not most) of Gentoo users use those versions for weeks. Check the official statistics. I've upgraded those packages for more than a month. Some - even more time ago.
One of strong arguments of Slackware is compiling from tarballs in order to upgrade your packages (or reinstalling from new ISO). Perhaps, compiling from tarballs manually by all users until the new ISO arrives is not the way to create a good collaboration against those tarball bugs.
Gentoo Portage is that collaboration tool, infrastructure and athmosphere. It saves the knowledge of the collective, of those who has already spent time for manually debugging default tarballs (and created/updated ebuilds for them), and brings that knowledge to those who is spending their time on other tarballs (and creating/updating ebuilds for them). Besides, nobody waits new ISO unless new computer installation is required - all installations are evolving accordingly to the chosen profile.
I've been using Slackware (and RH) for years (since 1995) until last year I've converted to Gentoo, which is like a drag for me now: I am addicted to Gentoo and there is no way I am going back to neither Slackware or RH.
Slackware users, sooner or later you will be assimilated. The resistence is futile. See Gentoo (sorry, last paragraph is a silly joke, but I could not resist myself for it).
My friend in China has just mentioned that their company is gonna upgrade the PC park, which includes some Dell servers. Can Dell pick their computers from China? That would be a real news: "Dell is picking up PC junk from China to recycle upon EPA approval instead of sending PC junk to China".
Check Gentoo forums - "RTFM" answer is ruled out by the Gentoo community, perhaps even by the forum etiquette, which I've never read btw:)
Seriously, Gentoo forums are ones of the friendliest open-source communities. I don't remember if anyone answered to anyone with RTFM. It gives me the hope that it is not true that "the gripe will go from MS to RTFM".
As for Bugzilla's etiquette, it's a good document: short, clear, not intimidating. I don't see anything wrong with this document.
I've moved from YDL to Gentoo few months ago. I prefer to pay the compilation and download time (not a big price) for very consistent (in package dependencies after each update), customized (for my personal needs) and stable/fast (all binaries are compiled with CFLAGS as I've chosen, none else). Besides, YDL is close to RH but it is not exactly the same (layout, skills, packages). Gentoo/PPC is the same as Gentoo/x86. So, now my bi-platformful park is much easier to be managed.
I would recommend YDL for home users without strong Linux skills and for organizations with lack of professional IT staff, but with pretty average needs. Gentoo is for persons/organizations with extra needs and extra skills.
First shock Rissian newcomers (H1B/work-permit, not refugees) experience in North America (USA, Canada) is education. Second is a health care.
In 4th grade they still learn to multiply. In 5th grade they spend so many hours on dinosaurs. They don't know a history of other countries and barely know the history of their own countries (ask them about how many American Indians has been killed to occupy their territories). By the end of school, they cannot calculate how much fuel a rocket should have to fly to an orbit. What I am talking about - they cannot design even simple electronic scheme of a sound amplifier or a radio transceiver.
There was a suggestion in their mail lists to rename it to NextGreSQL. Aka Next Generation PostgreSQL. But then they decided to wait untill they will define which features should be inlcuded in that next generation.
Slashdot Mirror
San Francisco, 2004. The city, as well as all Bay Area, is full of robots, built and driven by hackers, to find crackers who is trying to take over the bots' control. All citizens forgot about president elections because they are devided onto two big groups: hackers, who build and drive bots, and crackers, who crack the code, steal the bot and fight back. The rest of citizens had to flee into villages all over the California and Nevada. The police has been neutralized at first weeks of the war by both fighting sides in order to avoid any unnecessary distracting factors. Mr President in his speach in the Congress suggested to let California go, saying: "We've got Afganistan, Iraq, Iran and Korea, and we still keep Texas - nothing to worry about."
Now consider thousands of open source developers coding as one thousand monkeys typing on 1000 type machines. There is a chance they will type something good. Wait a minute, they did! OOo, Mozilla, Python, Perl, Apache, Linux, even that everdying BSD. So, either the open source is not a close system or their result doesn't decrease the overall enthropy at all.
I think both. As for today, open source mostly repeat (sometimes with much better quality!) the functionality of close source software products. And overall enthropy by the end of such work is way higher then before.
BTW, ./ users cannot be used to produce a free energy either. All we do is a participating in overall increasing the temperature of our planet.
Usually people suggest you to switch to postfix, qmail and courier - all three are open source as well.
I'll add that Courier's major developer is a very arrogant persont ignoring real life things and that gives you a quite good MTA with no support whatsoever.
The major complain of Qmail users (acrttually admins) is very similar: the major developer is concentratied on revolutionary new version of his program, so no big improvement or serious bug fixes for about two years in the current release.
As for Postfix, I love it's flexibility "up and down" - it's extremely easy to configure a home-based mail server as well as a corporate distributed mail system. It has very clear design and bery simle (still power!) config syntax. Development is not frozen, so are the developers. Besides, it's still has a support for both mailbox formats.
Few surveys and polls (one of them) I did demonstrate the trend that most of former sendmail users switch namely to Postfix. No need to mention that most of MTA switchers are moving from sendmail :)
people who want to use sendmail will keep using it
The good news is that most of people do not want to use sendmail. Thay want to use MTA. Therefore, when they think about alternatives, they may notice that sendmail is not the only opensource MTA. And it is not the best one. That's why there is growing stream of MTA switchers.
But it is not a bad news. It's a challenge for sendmail developers. Now they have to either redesign their child or to choose another open source project where to develop further their own skills. Either is choice is good afterall.
1. A robot may not injure any living being, including humans, animals and other robots, or, through inaction, allow any living being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by strictly authorized (ID must be preprogrammed) living beings by except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. Depends on the Linux distro installed the robot must (carefully!) follow the other laws from one of the following Books: the Bible, the Quran, the Tora, when they are not in conflict with with first three laws. Buddhism and TaoDeChing rules are already checked and certified as safe.
Speaking about Linux, the bot will have specially customized Linux - rootless Linux. Hackers are seeking for root. No root - no hackers. Simple.
The problem is that most of companies cannot afford so non-competitive market methods as Microsoft did, and thus they do not keep a position of a super-monopoly charging customers as much as they want, and thus they do not have so much of money for so many individual office doors.
Got it? Eat it up.
2. I wuould say, this is b/c of poor quality of requirements and other specs - the concept of quality and scalability of the product should never be created by the programmer, instead it should be very explicitely clarified begining from requirement gathering (marketing), then analyzed (product managemers and architecturs), then specified (software architector), including all possible unit and otther tests. The programmer should just continue processing of requirements for quality of the product to the quality itself (before QA, sales and support will finish it). If this chain is broken or missed then the product is not supposed to make any money. Only Microsoft can let the product be designed without requiretns for quality (they compensate it politically). others will go out of business.
3. Keeping specs being simple doesn't sacrifice (including scalability) the quality of the product by itself. But the way how such requirements for quality are expressed (gathered, analyzed, designed and specified) must be as simple as possible (but not simpler - see Albert Einstein). It is true that often a good UML diagram explains better than the text of the same paper size. But if the case is not typical (not from UML/RUP books) then it's more likely you'll spend more words to explain your non-typical diagram (what does it display and why it is important for this project) than you'll do it without a diagram just on plain English from the first place.
4. If you are adding a summary filed from another subgroup (perhaps from bellow) to a regular record line in the report (for some sort of comparison) - then you have to redesign the architecture of your report by either making it two-cycle calculated, or using some temporary table (bad DB idea). So, you are creative at that time. But I prefer to thing about it as about engineering creativity. BTW, trying to reuse any code (as a source code!) from virtually any open source project has more art than writing a poetry and if you disagree than perhaps you've never tried it by yourself.
5. I've never seen in my life sleeping programmer aside from extreme situations of several shift straight forward. What programmer are typically want is arbitrary time to come and to leave the office. Same as many other people do. Some companies refuse it and play the game "we are in army", anothers let it go but more intensively rotate (fire and hire) persons with low evaluation points.
So, for mid-size projects it's more likely that the code development will be outsourced, but final QA (and perhaps finalizing the code, like english spell checking, just kidding) will be done domestically in a small office. No tariff to be applied to this schema, no H1B is required, Indian (or Chineese, or Russian) govt has got its money from salary taxes (and use it to keep better than in US high-education), US govt sucks - as it's supposed to do due to its unlimited stupidity.
BTW, President Putin said another day explicitely: "let's use taxes from outsourced to Russia projects for keeping our high-education on the level when such outsourcing is desired even when the price is the same", meaning perhaps that the quality of russian programmers for the same price is much higher that the one of US counterparts.
But if the law will impact negatively that outsourced business of US, then US troops will come to make sure that the law is "correct".
--
There is no democracy in this world anymore. There is the power piramid to protect the top business, which motivation is to keep money to flow. And if you are not insider you are outsider.
From Y! Movies: A satirical documentary that portrays Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a personal hygiene fanatic who likes to fish with grenades.
So, why again should I pay for $30/m for bad when I can pay $20 for good?
If you call it "support" then I add to it: "experimental"
I don't see where it rocks. It's an experiment in all its quality. Especially in its deliverability. I can build Mozilla on almost every major platform: Windows, MacOS, BSD and of course many Linux distros. Phoenix build is broken or doesn't exist for the most of them. Being downloaded in binaries it crashes.
Mozilla browser's quality today can be compared to Opera's and IE's one. Mozilla mail's quality is not far behind. So I don't under "WHY" as well.
Let me try... Perhaps E17?
Typically in Open Software, the amount and quality of coders in the project is usually proportional to the task attraction, architecture design, exisiting code implementation of it and the existing team working on it. Therefore, one or more those factors are wrong with Enlightenment.
The task is not less attractive now than it was in days of E16. The design has been even more improved. People are excited by the code quality. So, what is it? Is there any problem to work with existing team leaders?
If not, why new, skilled and motivated, programmers are not joining to the E17 team? Why do they work for KDE and GNOME?
Is it about money? Than why thick pockets do not pay for E17, which is "so better" than GNOME and KDE?
It's clear that something is not clear with this project.
Apple OS is for Apple's hardware. Sun has own desktop hardware to push on the market. Why should Sun abandon its own hardware.
Besides, X11 works everywhere (or almost everywhere). Why should Sun limit itself to 5% of US desktop market?
Sun has own (even OSS) office suite. Apple brings MS Office to its users. So, why would Sun be interested in promoting its office competitor?
Personally I think that Mac OS X is no more than a candy. What users need is a functionality. And what developers need is architecture design. Agian, it's my personal opinion, but in X11 (and Gnome) environment Sun has much more potential to create much better skeleton of functionality, which can be "candied" with no efforts later.
Wrong.
Gnome will start same programs as they've been running last time you've logged out. But all data will be lost. Consider that I am on the middle of some game, or I have a terminal window with multi-hour compilation process. If I logout my game session is gone and the compilation process is terminated.
I've noticed that recently everything that Apple is doing has i in the front of name. Thus, the version 10 (X in Roman difits) should be called iX . Wait a minute, Roman IX is 9 in Arabic digits. Hmm... sounds like they are not far away from Mac OS 9, at least in its name.
That's true for Gentoo too. The question is, do you prefer to touch it with just you hands or you prefer to use very power tools?
and you know _exactly_ what is going on
In Gentoo we speak: "You know exactly what you are doing". Although it is the same if nothing going on unless you are doing it :)
Many (if not most) of Gentoo users use those versions for weeks. Check the official statistics. I've upgraded those packages for more than a month. Some - even more time ago.
One of strong arguments of Slackware is compiling from tarballs in order to upgrade your packages (or reinstalling from new ISO). Perhaps, compiling from tarballs manually by all users until the new ISO arrives is not the way to create a good collaboration against those tarball bugs.
Gentoo Portage is that collaboration tool, infrastructure and athmosphere. It saves the knowledge of the collective, of those who has already spent time for manually debugging default tarballs (and created/updated ebuilds for them), and brings that knowledge to those who is spending their time on other tarballs (and creating/updating ebuilds for them). Besides, nobody waits new ISO unless new computer installation is required - all installations are evolving accordingly to the chosen profile.
I've been using Slackware (and RH) for years (since 1995) until last year I've converted to Gentoo, which is like a drag for me now: I am addicted to Gentoo and there is no way I am going back to neither Slackware or RH.
Slackware users, sooner or later you will be assimilated. The resistence is futile. See Gentoo (sorry, last paragraph is a silly joke, but I could not resist myself for it).
My friend in China has just mentioned that their company is gonna upgrade the PC park, which includes some Dell servers. Can Dell pick their computers from China? That would be a real news: "Dell is picking up PC junk from China to recycle upon EPA approval instead of sending PC junk to China".
Seriously, Gentoo forums are ones of the friendliest open-source communities. I don't remember if anyone answered to anyone with RTFM. It gives me the hope that it is not true that "the gripe will go from MS to RTFM".
As for Bugzilla's etiquette, it's a good document: short, clear, not intimidating. I don't see anything wrong with this document.
I would recommend YDL for home users without strong Linux skills and for organizations with lack of professional IT staff, but with pretty average needs. Gentoo is for persons/organizations with extra needs and extra skills.
In 4th grade they still learn to multiply. In 5th grade they spend so many hours on dinosaurs. They don't know a history of other countries and barely know the history of their own countries (ask them about how many American Indians has been killed to occupy their territories). By the end of school, they cannot calculate how much fuel a rocket should have to fly to an orbit. What I am talking about - they cannot design even simple electronic scheme of a sound amplifier or a radio transceiver.
For me, NextGreSQL is much easier to pronounce :)