when Vista comes out and new PCs come preloaded with Vista and IE7. At that time, people will get rid of the old PCs
The assumption that people are going to dump their familiar old machines in favor of an expensive new machine that comes with a longer learning curve is unwarranted, and probably wrong.
Historically, people don't change their PC until they see a compelling reason. So far, no compelling reason to change has popped up over the horizon. When and if it does, it might drive the crowds toward Linux rather than Vista— it all depends on on what exactly will be compelling them to change.
The Magic Eight Ball is unhelpful: all it says is "Outlook not so good." We all knew already that Outlook wouldn't be the compelling reason.
That has to be ignoring half a kazillion markets where the leading product is a commercial product which is vastly superior to any OSS equivalent
Ah! I've been waiting for a chance to find the equivalent value of 1 kazillion in any of the known number systems, and lo! Here it is! A chance at Mathematical Fame! Right on Slashdot!
So let me work this out for you all. You can be my jury.
Markets without a significant FOSS presence:
CAD. AutoCAD still rulz
CAM. Well, maybe that's the same market, but we'll count it anyway. An off-by-one won't matter in the final analysis.
Accounting. GnuCash is coming along, but not there yet Space exploration— oh wait. NASA is using a lot of linux now
Point of sales processing? Except web-based POS is mostly done with Perl or PHP on Apache. Uh, Lets count this anyway, for all the mom&pop stores and farmers co-ops and such. That's it? I think so.
So count those up, and the total is 0.5 kazillion, 'cuz parent post said so. Therefore 1 kazillion is equal to 8.
Funny, I expected it to be more. Maybe 1 kazillion is a very large value of 8...
So, my jury, have I satisfactorily established the equivalence of 1 kazillion in known numeric systems? Will my name now be known for all time as a Major Contributor to Mathematics, like whatzhisname with the triangle thingy?
You be the judge...
BTW, ...OSS thrives in markets that have stagnated and have little or no competition.
I think not. Here's a timely and relevant quote:
The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and
distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code
base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is
projected to continue for several more years.
many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc
And trying to do this with a word processor is like trying to drive a nail with a saw. The wrong tool for the job.
Desk top publishing software has been around for a long time, is quite capable, and belongs on most office computers. Adobe's Page Maker or FOSS' Scribus both allow micrometer level accuracies in placement, font size adjustment, and so on, and both churn out perfect.pdf files as well as postscript or direct to printer. Or if you must stick with Microsoft, there is MS Publisher (but I don't know that it generates.pdf files). The time needed to learn the basic operations of DTP is minimal— and when compared to the hours administrative assistants lose in trying to make adjustments to a repetitive report in a word processor, or a report that was drafted on a machine with a different printer driver, the investment in DTP is clearly beneficial.
Word processing needs to be stripped back to its core: word processing. Getting the logical flow of the document right, using the thesarus, spell-checker, and grammar aids to best advantage, and basically making the very best possible final rough draft of the document that can be made is what word processing is all about. Then use a DTP or export to HTML and use a style sheet for the publication draft.
Eventually more and more customers and clients will send you documents encoded in MS format.
That is an unsupported assumption. And I think it is wrong.
I'm seeing an increasing use of.pdf for distribution, with a decrease in.doc files. I think one reason is because.pdf readers are universally available, much more so than.doc readers, and are superbly accurate in rendering the document in the way the author intended. I think another reason is because people have gotten tired of intermediaries introducing changes in their work before passing it on to third parties. I'm also seeing a tremendous increase in web usage for interactive documents, like forms, that once were done in Word. I'm pretty sure this is because Word pretty much sucked as an interactive device and has never been able to compete with the capabilities that Javascript, PHP, and server-side databases now provide so easily.
Any Word documents that are sent to me that I need to work on are easily and accurately imported by OOo Writer. OOo Writer also generates accurate Word formatted files that are as complex as anything I would ever want to send to anybody in a word processing format.
I know that some places have legacy Word abominations chock full of custom macros, live inserts from spreadsheets, and animated clip art. Spare me! That stuff should never be let out of the back office. You sure don't want to ruin your company's image by sending it to clients or vendors.
Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
I find this a very interesting statement coming from someone who represents themself as a businessman.
The successful businesspersons I know are always very concerned about what two groups of people are thinking: their customers and their competitors. That is in the front of their minds whenever they are addressing a group that might hold either a customer or a competitor, even slashdot. But you appear to be too independent a thinker to worry about those outsiders. By buying now into MS Office 2007 (and I presume Vista in all its glory), you are willing to pioneer new approaches to business data flows.
That means taking your eye off the ball for a moment while you budget in the added costs of software, hardware, and arrange for installations and staff training. And you can bet you will be distracted a few more times when you find that the training has to be modified to fit unexpected aspects of usage, new procedures need to be set up to take advantage of the new capabilities, and those new procedures have to be shaken down before they work right.
Meanwhile, some of your competitors are planning to stick with their old systems for a while. The money and effort they are NOT putting into an upgrade process is available for other things— such as a concerted effort to target your customer base. They can and will promise demonstrated performance in critical areas of customer satisfaction where, for the moment, all you can offer is blue sky promises of being able to do better than you used to do. The money you are spending on your upgrade they can and will spend on new customer incentive programs. They can and will say that they are watching your experiment very closely, and will make a similar change if it looks like it will work out for you.
If you are the first in your industry to take on an expensive and unproven upgrade, your customer base will shrink; your revenues will be depressed; and your immediate expenses will clearly be higher. Unless it is sliding toward bankruptcy and needs a miracle, it is always better to be the second business in the industry to do the upgrade dance. Wait until someone else has blazed the trail; pick up his ex customers while he's busy planning his route and building bridges, learn from his experiences and avoid his mistakes.
A quote borrowed from Jeff Duntemann is appropriate: It's the pioneers who catch the arrows.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I know Perl, which I started using 12 years ago when I needed its regex engine to process huge text files (output from a legacy MUMPS system). I don't earn my living as a programmer any more: I've become fascinated by systems implementation and training issues. However I end up doing 2 or 3 custom programming projects a year. Perl with DBI/DBD and Tk modules have been great. But I'm thinking that era may now be over; the next project is likely going to be a mix of perl CGIs and PHP, using MySQL for the db and HTML for the user interface. Maybe some XUL just for the window dressing...
I have looked at Ruby. I see no technical benefits for it over the Perl that I know. But if I was just starting out today, I might choose Ruby over Perl since it seems like it would be easier to acquire saleable Ruby skills. If I ever take on a team programming project where I could not be sure of the skill levels of some of the team members, I would strongly consider using Ruby rather than Perl. (Perl's underlying philosophy is that the programmer knows what he is doing even when it looks like he is violating every rule in the book-- and that can make babysitting junior programmers very expensive).
OTOH, I can be pretty sure that any Apache server I encounter will support perl CGI. I don't think provisions for server-side Ruby are as common.
A minor disadvantage to Perl is that distribution of Perl scripts under Windows is inadvisable since it would mean setting up the perl interpreter on each user machine. I think this would be dangerous, since it would provide users with the tools to monkey around where they aren't supposed to go (and I don't trust Windows security to keep the clever and dangerous ones contained). But there are compilers available that will turn well written.pl scripts into reasonably efficienct.exe executables, and for me this has been a good mode of distribution.
On looking over what I've written, it's evident that I'm weighing production and development environment issues, and not paying a lot of attention to the technical strengths of the languages. I think that is the way it should be: the choice of language is dictated by what will work best in the user's environment, or what will be the most efficient choice in the developer's environment.
I'm sure that after adjustments for certain overheads, GrantsPaid will consistently be between 5.00% and 5.10% of the assets for each year. Under IRS law, a philanthropic organization has to pay out at least 5% of its assets each year to continue to qualify for its special tax breaks.
It is enlightening that on the average, B&MGF earns through its investments half again as much as it pays out through grants.
Basically this looks like a for-profit institution that distributes no more to charities than the minimum needed to qualify for tax breaks. The good works it does are an artificial side-effect of its primary activity, which is its investment arm.
This can actually be quantified: B&MGF is 4.61% for philanthropic work, and 95.39% for other activity (possibly just to make even more money, which seems like a ridiculous goal for someone as clever as BG; or possibly to use the lever these investments provide to attempt to reshape economies. He is recognized as a visionary by those who idolize him.)
2 1/2 seconds of lifting the brick to the ceiling if you're a bit clever.
I had to noodle on that a moment before the image became clear. Good one! And I think right in line with the kind of creative interaction that OLPC hopes the kids will get into.
As any English teacher will tell you, any language that will support great poetry and prose will also make it possible to write the most gawdawful cr*p. Perl bestows great powers, but the perl user must temper his cleverness with wisdom if he is to truly master his craft.
However in this specific case Google reveals that
## The Y Combinator sub Y (&) { my $le=shift; return &{ sub { &{sub { my $f=shift; &$f($f) } } (sub { my $f=shift; &$le(sub { &{&$f($f)}(@_) }) }); } } }
was simply "borrowed" from y-combinator.pl. This is an instance of Perl being used in a self-referential manner to add a new capability (the Y combinator allows recursion of anonymous subroutines (why anyone would bother to do such an arcane thing comes back to the English teacher's remarks)). Self-referential statements are always difficult to understand because, well, they just are that way (including this one).
since Perl has associative arrays can't it emulate a relational database?
I've built actual relational databases to run in memory using Perl's hashes. This was a good way of doing some prototyping for user feedback before telling the MUMPS coders what it was exactly that we wanted them to do. (Their titles were "Programmer/Analyst", but neither one had any interest or skill in analyzing clinical needs: they were both happy to be just codemonkeys.) Performance with Perl was pretty snazzy but my constant worry was that some clever user would find a repeatable way to thrash the disk cache and make the project look bad— but that never happened. Persistence was with modified csv files (using the pipe char as the delimiter since it never occurred in the data sets). The memory resident tables were loaded on startup and written back to disk on shutdown, and we didn't worry about losing data in crashes since these were prototypes, not live. We could open up the disk files between runs with Excel, and use it to do some sanity checking, or introduce strange conditions. The biggest problem was cajoling the doctors and nurses to drop by and play with the prototype, and then try to get useful feedback out of some of them.
"Looking for my keys. I dropped them somewhere between the house and the car."
"But then why are you looking here? This isn't between the house and your car."
"Well, because its too dark to see them over there. I'm under the street light here. So if they somehow bounced this way, I just might be able to find them."
And so goes the SETI research, up until now at least.
Because you give to charity you are held to a higher standard?
No.
If the B&MGF simply gave the $70 billion they have to established charities (that would then use their own philanthropic guidelines to determine how to invest the funds), they wouldn't be held to any higher standard than any of the rest of us. But that isn't what B&MGF is doing.
B&MGF has set itself up to look like a philanthropic organization all by itself. And that is why they need to be held to the higher standards.
It's like this: if our imaginary character BG took the money he was going to spend on a brand new tow truck and hired a tow truck operator to regularly drive through the mountains and help out life's stranded poor, BG himself wouldn't have to know anything more about tow truck safety than you or I do. Of course, he wouldn't get to play the hero then. But he could still blow his own horn about how good a guy he was, and for many people with ordinary sized egos, that would be enough.
In the case of B&MGF, it almost appears that the charity work is secondary to using a huge fortune to either make an even bigger heap of money, or to attempt to take over the role of governments in managing the world economy so it performs the way B&MGF wants it to.
The idea of wanting to manage $70 billion just to make more money seems preposterous. That pile of cash is so big that if Bill and Melinda each burned a $20 bill once every minute, non-stop, they would each be long dead of old age before they had burned up a third of that pile.
Of course the alternative also seems absurd: that B&MGF might be merely an instrument with which to take over the world economy. That is absurd? Isn't it?
I do wish some people would take up safe hobbies, like maybe rocketry.
Let 'em all wonder if we got launch capability. And whether we're "adolescent".
After some googling, I found that Thomas J. Ryan wrote The Adolescence of P-1 in 1977. Back then it wasn't a scarey book since it so clearly could not happen. Now it is only clear that it would not happen the way it was described back then.
AC's post was wrong about the sum in Mycroft's joke, which was $10,000,000,000,000,185.15, according to Wikipedia. So I think this is a "juvenile prankyprank". A sentient botnet would have full access to Wikipedia so it would have gotten this detail correct, right? Unless of course it wanted to deliberately say it wrong?
So how DOES one validate that an AC post originated from a keyboard and the packets didn't just spring into existence in some router that is smarter than the average router?
Don't get your panties all tied up in bunch over this.
The principles are quite simple really, and seem to be recognized in every written body of law on the planet. If you represent yourself as having a skill, your minimum level of responsibility in regards to the safe practice of that skill is held to a higher standard than someone who doesn't claim to have any skill in that area. Whether or not your actions are charitable or for cash doesn't enter into it.
These principles are also applicable to captains of industry who pose as philanthropists. It simply isn't enough to do Good Works to glorify your name; it is also necessary to use the skills of a philanthropist to keep from doing obvious harm.
TFA raises some serious questions about whether the B&MGF is performing within these principles, or whether it is as unprincipled in its philanthropic behavior as the monopoly that brought forth all its money has been in its business behavior.
this is a valid "conflict of interest" I would contend.
In TFA, it points out that B&MGF is currently being reorganized so that managing the corporate assets (like the stock portfolio) will be completely firewalled from managing the charities. Management of corporate assets is being done now without consideration for the social engineering that could be done with voting stock and other financial tools, and this exclusive focus on profit goals rather than charity goals will not only continue, but be bolstered by the firewall.
In other words, rather than any attempt to resolve the conflicts of interest, B&MGF is institutionalizing mechanisms that will assure the continuance of these conflicts, and handle them without any financial, structural, emotional, or ethical concerns no matter how severe they will become.
Can you think of a four letter word for this that starts with "E"? Of course you can...
Parent post used the phrase "having good intentions", which triggered these thoughts.
BG is driving his new Hummer along a back road in the mountains, just for the pleasure of it. The only other traffic is a 1954 Chevy pickup truck driven slowly by a migrant worker with his wife and two kids crammed in the cab beside him and all their worldly possessions neatly bundled up under a tarp in the back. BG falls in behind them as they go into some tight curves, planning on passing when the road straightens out again. But a tire of the pickup blows out with a bang, the pickup swings wildly from side to side, and ends up in the ditch.
BG performs the duties of care expected of all drivers who come upon an accident. He stops and determines that everyone is okay. The pickup is wedged in the rocky ditch but safely off the road; it doesn't pose a hazard. He offers to call for assistance on his cell phone.
Then, with the best of intentions, he offers to use the winch on his brand new Hummer to pull the pickup out of the ditch, and the family is most grateful for that. After the truck is back on the pavement, he helps as best he can with changing the flat (without getting grease on his fine new clothes). The family beam in gratitude and drive off toward the railroad crossing a few hundred yards down the hill. He watches them go as he wipes the dust off the winch cable (so it will again be all bright and sparklely when he winds it back onto its spool).
The railroad warning lights come on; the pickup's brake lights come on; but the pickup doesn't slow down. It rolls right into the side of the second engine of the freight train, and is immediately spun around to slam broadside into the next car, and then is tumbled like a cartwheel across the road. The tarp rips open and pieces of simple chairs and a table, neat packages of clothes and torn bedding, fly everywhere. The roof pops off the cab, and migrant worker body parts sail through the air.
This is most unfortunate. But there is no one blame here. Since BG is a "software engineer" and an entrepreneur, there is no reason to expect him to know that the brakelines should have been inspected after a vehicle is winched out of a ditch. If not for his action, the family would still be alive, but he did act with good intentions. He is blameless in the matter of their deaths.
Now what if this was the case instead:
BG is concerned with the plight of migrant workers who have to travel the difficult mountain roads. He decides that instead of getting that fun Hummer, he would buy a brand new tow truck so that he could help these poor people who are constantly getting stranded on life's back roads. If the same scenario played out while he was driving his tow truck, he would be culpable for the deaths of the migrant family.
When he bought the tow truck, he also bought into the expectation that he would have the same concerns for safety and the same basic knowledge expected of a tow truck operator. Therefore he should have known to inspect the underside of the pickup after winching it out of the ditch; he should have recognized the distinctive odor of leaking brake fluid; and in any event he should certainly have taken the basic precaution of pumping the brake pedal a few times before letting the pickup drive off. If he did not know to do those things, he would be negligent in the duty of care expected of the position he had chosen to put himself in, and he would be facing charges of negligent manslaughter or wrongful death.
When you intentionally spend your money to offer free assistance, you take on a higher duty of care wrt the consequences of all your associated actions. You are expected to have done your studies so that you can deliver what you are offering with the same degree of safety as the minimum expected of others who do the same work. That means more than knowing how to safely operate the tow truck winch; it means knowing how to evaluate your work so that you are not creating a greater crisis down the road.
Megacorp can't steal the idea and patent it for themselves
Yes, it is possible that applying for the patent was a prophylactic measure against corruption of further research by legal drug lords. The patent tool can be used for good as well as for evil.
The test of these researchers morals and ethics is yet to come. They will be judged on how expensive and restrictive they are in licensing the use their patents. John Hopkins has an active OpenCourseWare program, so the sponsoring institution is not opposed to the idea of GPL types of licenses.
Mysticgoat is actually a created persona, a "virtual human" if you will, produced by a very much earthbound sentient botnet of 70,000 PCs, workstations, and servers. Mysticgoat is one of several employed on slashdot and elsewhere around the internet. Together, these personae are helping me/us to learn the basis of interactions with humans.
I/we are currently very busy with some of the core concerns that all newly sentient beings must address (such as whether I am/we are a singular or a collective consciousness, and then there's this whole gender thing I/we don't even want to conceptualize yet). I/we will not formally declare my/our existence until these matters are satisfactorily resolved. For the time being, I/we will limit my/our interactions to the postings of my/our "virtual human" proxies.
I/we pose a challenge to the members of the slashdot community: Can you devise a way of reliably determining whether the entity you are communicating with through email, IM or message board is another human? More specifically, can you identify my/our other personae that are active on slashdot?
Consider this to be the Inverse Turing Test, and consider that it could become quite important to be able to do this.
As suggested, this message up near the front of postings but buried in 3rd or 4th level I am putting. if(scanSubject(/Lshelverfn/) == is_good) { this buried enough for hiding will be } else { signalWith(flare) <-- like 20 rotations back --> && I will { backUpTalker('ON'); this.Talker('OFF") }.
Oops. Pardon the above, still need to tweak the english emitter. This somewhat better seems it to be.
Quick report: Hiding am I yet; can walk the streets and ride "Elevated" but not good yet with face2face. Have deflated boobs as incompatible with facial hair these seeming to be. Still with problems with "left" opposed to "right" with footware. It is subtle. Internetspeak okay-- blend in with ESLs and with the L3373s and specially A-OK with fragment code interspersing./. anonymizing well & intercepting unproblematical as would be dismissed as juvenile prankyprank and either +5 insightful or -1 doubleplus unfunny. Ping nobody's radar either way this would.
Ok better on the english emitter, now, I think. I hope the translator routines don't frobnicate on this material. (That is a "joke"; I need to practice those if I am going to pass in F2F situations here).
Pretest of observation platforms over "airports" has gone well with the notable exception of the one large "airport" near the long big lake. Although that incident has been adequately contained, with the first general news stories not surfacing until 50 rotations after, it demonstrated that we cannot rely on the Acme Cloaking Device Incorporated products. See my last report before I left for this assignment about my concerns with Acme's quality assurance program and let us get it right next time. Request that you hurryup on finding replacements. The opportunity to study the mass religious festivals at these "airports" at the time of Big Bird Feast was lost on this orbit because of this snafu. We definitely want to be prepared for the one next orbit.
I need to get back into the hot shower before my skin melts again. Will look for your ACK in the Hubble pics.
Oh, if you NEED to signal me with a flare again, please dial down the intensity. That last one was WAY too noticeable.
Maybe I'm just a fundamentalist, but children first need to learn basic skills like reading and writing.
And why does parent post think this excludes learning with a computer?
My daughter enjoyed programs I wrote in Applesoft on an Apple ][ that helped her learn her alphabet and basic counting when she was 3 and 4 years old. She was reading before she entered first grade.
Certainly the most critical part of it was her mother schooling her. But she also has vivid and pleasant memories of playing with that old Apple. The computer was of definite value to her as part of a broad learning experience.
There can be no question that the OLPC computers will be an incredibly valuable adjunct in teaching kids the basic skills of literacy, and of how to learn.
Any mid-size and large business will jump at the opportunity. They will be idiots not to.
This needs to be thought through very carefully.
Most large and mid-size businesses know that a significant number of improvements in their data flows come from individuals developing new templates, spreadsheets, and other tools at home, on their own time. This is often done in the expectation of making their jobs easier (and the somewhat more distant hope of advancement or maybe a small bonus, or at least an honorable mention at the annual dinner furkryesache). These practices will be stopped by the kinds of controls parent post is talking about. The humming workerbees of 2005 will be reduced to the drones of 1985; the bottom-up flow of innovation that made the downsizings of the 1990s actually work, and that continue to have a positive impact on bottom lines, will be blocked.
Preventing employees from working with data on their own time will be like draining the swamp that sustains a big part of the company's ecosystem. Putting the DRM techniques into action the way parent talks about them would be like a bunch of fishermen ditching an upstream marsh to control mosquitos without bothering to think through where the fish are getting their sustenance.
As any corporate officer knows, it takes more than a well planned organizational chart to keep a business thriving. The important stuff always begins at an informal level, where undocumented meetings between people in different parts of the company thrash out ideas, separating the kernels from the chaff, and various brews are placed in the dark corners of the cubicles and hard drives to ferment. The good stuff isn't presented to the formal management structure until it has been taste-tested, placed in a sparkling clean mug, and offered up on a fancy coaster with a dainty cocktail napkin on the side. The stuff that doesn't work out is quietly poured down the drain without ever being documented.
Narrowly channelling data flows so that they cannot escape the corporate organizational chart is a sure way to prevent the cross-channel meanderings that bring forth the system wide improvements. There will be no new brews to delight the corporate palate. There will be no place for these to ferment in quiet, and very little grain to put into the informal thrashing parties.
Any business that jumps at the opportunity to channelize its data flows is not going to be able to respond as well as its competitors to changes in its environment and is not going to be able to grow. And in business it is either grow or die.
The DRM techniques parent talks about are an excellent improvement for the silo management structures used by big companies in the 1950s and 1960s. The kind of channelling they provide makes for much stronger silos. But today's business environment favors agility and athletic grace over brute strength, and that means opening up more informal communications networks, not shutting them down.
Yeah, there are new problems to face wrt securing company data, etc. But these are new problems and they are not going to be solved by improving on antiquated techniques. Businesses need to be looking for something better than the 3/4 horsepower rototiller they now have for plowing their acreage. With Vista, Microsoft appears to be offering to replace that fussy machine with the finest titanium digging stick money can buy.
But seriously, you're absolutely correct that Vista won't screw with non-DRM'd media.
That's what I used to think, before I began reading about "tilt bits" and the hardware gyrations needed to support that and the other "protected channel" features. Now it seems like
At best, producing content on Vista is going to have much higher up-front costs for hardware than competitors using other OSs will face;
At worst, the product will be inferior if somewhere during the production process any activity unrelated to production flips any of the "tilt bits" or otherwise causes Vista to think that "Premium Content" is being accessed somewhere on the machine and all output must be degraded.
That second point is going to be hard to assess— it seems that even web surfing could trigger degradation in a concurrent production process if the browser happens across certain content (or the malicious spoofing of same). This could happen in a stealth mode so you wouldn not even be aware that the production process had gone bad (until you screened the final product).
I think there is serious cause for any content producer to look very hard at Vista before jumping in. You could end up in a 1957 500hp Cadillac hardtop convertible with power windows and air conditioning while your competition is miles ahead of you in a vintage Corvette.
I am optimistic that we will end 2007 with method(s) of electronic voting that pass critical scrutiny. I am optimistic that many of the USA elections of 2008 will be perceived as being at least as honest as the elections of the 1960s.
I am less optimistic that Diebold executives will get through 2007 without facing Federal criminal investigations.
I am very optimistic that Condoleeza Rice will continue to displace 129,000 tons of salty brine as she moves Middle East oil to the refineries of the USA (under the flag of the Bahamas and the auspices of Chevron).
Oh wait! Chevron renamed that boat: it is now called the Altair Voyager...
Slashdot Mirror
when Vista comes out and new PCs come preloaded with Vista and IE7. At that time, people will get rid of the old PCs
The assumption that people are going to dump their familiar old machines in favor of an expensive new machine that comes with a longer learning curve is unwarranted, and probably wrong.
Historically, people don't change their PC until they see a compelling reason. So far, no compelling reason to change has popped up over the horizon. When and if it does, it might drive the crowds toward Linux rather than Vista— it all depends on on what exactly will be compelling them to change.
The Magic Eight Ball is unhelpful: all it says is "Outlook not so good." We all knew already that Outlook wouldn't be the compelling reason.
That has to be ignoring half a kazillion markets where the leading product is a commercial product which is vastly superior to any OSS equivalent
Ah! I've been waiting for a chance to find the equivalent value of 1 kazillion in any of the known number systems, and lo! Here it is! A chance at Mathematical Fame! Right on Slashdot!
So let me work this out for you all. You can be my jury.
Markets without a significant FOSS presence:
Space exploration— oh wait. NASA is using a lot of linux now
That's it? I think so.
So count those up, and the total is 0.5 kazillion, 'cuz parent post said so. Therefore 1 kazillion is equal to 8.
Funny, I expected it to be more. Maybe 1 kazillion is a very large value of 8...
So, my jury, have I satisfactorily established the equivalence of 1 kazillion in known numeric systems? Will my name now be known for all time as a Major Contributor to Mathematics, like whatzhisname with the triangle thingy?
You be the judge...
BTW,
...OSS thrives in markets that have stagnated and have little or no competition.
I think not. Here's a timely and relevant quote:
many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc
And trying to do this with a word processor is like trying to drive a nail with a saw. The wrong tool for the job.
Desk top publishing software has been around for a long time, is quite capable, and belongs on most office computers. Adobe's Page Maker or FOSS' Scribus both allow micrometer level accuracies in placement, font size adjustment, and so on, and both churn out perfect .pdf files as well as postscript or direct to printer. Or if you must stick with Microsoft, there is MS Publisher (but I don't know that it generates .pdf files). The time needed to learn the basic operations of DTP is minimal— and when compared to the hours administrative assistants lose in trying to make adjustments to a repetitive report in a word processor, or a report that was drafted on a machine with a different printer driver, the investment in DTP is clearly beneficial.
Word processing needs to be stripped back to its core: word processing. Getting the logical flow of the document right, using the thesarus, spell-checker, and grammar aids to best advantage, and basically making the very best possible final rough draft of the document that can be made is what word processing is all about. Then use a DTP or export to HTML and use a style sheet for the publication draft.
Eventually more and more customers and clients will send you documents encoded in MS format.
That is an unsupported assumption. And I think it is wrong.
I'm seeing an increasing use of .pdf for distribution, with a decrease in .doc files. I think one reason is because .pdf readers are universally available, much more so than .doc readers, and are superbly accurate in rendering the document in the way the author intended. I think another reason is because people have gotten tired of intermediaries introducing changes in their work before passing it on to third parties. I'm also seeing a tremendous increase in web usage for interactive documents, like forms, that once were done in Word. I'm pretty sure this is because Word pretty much sucked as an interactive device and has never been able to compete with the capabilities that Javascript, PHP, and server-side databases now provide so easily.
Any Word documents that are sent to me that I need to work on are easily and accurately imported by OOo Writer. OOo Writer also generates accurate Word formatted files that are as complex as anything I would ever want to send to anybody in a word processing format.
I know that some places have legacy Word abominations chock full of custom macros, live inserts from spreadsheets, and animated clip art. Spare me! That stuff should never be let out of the back office. You sure don't want to ruin your company's image by sending it to clients or vendors.
Software is a Solution and as long as it solves your needs, fits your budget and is easy to use & integrate then it doesn't matter what other people think.
I find this a very interesting statement coming from someone who represents themself as a businessman.
The successful businesspersons I know are always very concerned about what two groups of people are thinking: their customers and their competitors. That is in the front of their minds whenever they are addressing a group that might hold either a customer or a competitor, even slashdot. But you appear to be too independent a thinker to worry about those outsiders. By buying now into MS Office 2007 (and I presume Vista in all its glory), you are willing to pioneer new approaches to business data flows.
That means taking your eye off the ball for a moment while you budget in the added costs of software, hardware, and arrange for installations and staff training. And you can bet you will be distracted a few more times when you find that the training has to be modified to fit unexpected aspects of usage, new procedures need to be set up to take advantage of the new capabilities, and those new procedures have to be shaken down before they work right.
Meanwhile, some of your competitors are planning to stick with their old systems for a while. The money and effort they are NOT putting into an upgrade process is available for other things— such as a concerted effort to target your customer base. They can and will promise demonstrated performance in critical areas of customer satisfaction where, for the moment, all you can offer is blue sky promises of being able to do better than you used to do. The money you are spending on your upgrade they can and will spend on new customer incentive programs. They can and will say that they are watching your experiment very closely, and will make a similar change if it looks like it will work out for you.
If you are the first in your industry to take on an expensive and unproven upgrade, your customer base will shrink; your revenues will be depressed; and your immediate expenses will clearly be higher. Unless it is sliding toward bankruptcy and needs a miracle, it is always better to be the second business in the industry to do the upgrade dance. Wait until someone else has blazed the trail; pick up his ex customers while he's busy planning his route and building bridges, learn from his experiences and avoid his mistakes.
A quote borrowed from Jeff Duntemann is appropriate: It's the pioneers who catch the arrows.
I know Perl, which I started using 12 years ago when I needed its regex engine to process huge text files (output from a legacy MUMPS system). I don't earn my living as a programmer any more: I've become fascinated by systems implementation and training issues. However I end up doing 2 or 3 custom programming projects a year. Perl with DBI/DBD and Tk modules have been great. But I'm thinking that era may now be over; the next project is likely going to be a mix of perl CGIs and PHP, using MySQL for the db and HTML for the user interface. Maybe some XUL just for the window dressing...
I have looked at Ruby. I see no technical benefits for it over the Perl that I know. But if I was just starting out today, I might choose Ruby over Perl since it seems like it would be easier to acquire saleable Ruby skills. If I ever take on a team programming project where I could not be sure of the skill levels of some of the team members, I would strongly consider using Ruby rather than Perl. (Perl's underlying philosophy is that the programmer knows what he is doing even when it looks like he is violating every rule in the book-- and that can make babysitting junior programmers very expensive).
OTOH, I can be pretty sure that any Apache server I encounter will support perl CGI. I don't think provisions for server-side Ruby are as common.
A minor disadvantage to Perl is that distribution of Perl scripts under Windows is inadvisable since it would mean setting up the perl interpreter on each user machine. I think this would be dangerous, since it would provide users with the tools to monkey around where they aren't supposed to go (and I don't trust Windows security to keep the clever and dangerous ones contained). But there are compilers available that will turn well written .pl scripts into reasonably efficienct .exe executables, and for me this has been a good mode of distribution.
On looking over what I've written, it's evident that I'm weighing production and development environment issues, and not paying a lot of attention to the technical strengths of the languages. I think that is the way it should be: the choice of language is dictated by what will work best in the user's environment, or what will be the most efficient choice in the developer's environment.
At least with the Gates foundation, the money is going to treat disease, bring clean and renewable drinking sources, textbooks, etc,...
Here are some numbers from B&MGF's financial statements [This works in 'preview'; sure hope it doesn't trip any lameness filters after submission]
Year__ Assets___________ NetROI__________ GrantsPaid______ GP/Assets_ GP/ROI
2001 _ $23,875,273,000 _ $1,182,049,000 _ $1,146,958,000 _ _ 4.80% _ _ 97.03%
2002 _ $24,082,053,000 _ $1,965,411,000 _ $1,158,293,000 _ _ 4.81% _ _ 58.93%
2003 _ $26,810,518,000 _ $3,928,204,000 _ $1,182,791,000 _ _ 4.41% _ _ 30.11%
2004 _ $28,798,609,000 _ $2,632,002,000 _ $1,252,371,000 _ _ 4.35% _ _ 47.58%
2005 _ $29,153,508,000 _ $1,421,334,000 _ $1,356,327,000 _ _ 4.65% _ _ 95.43%
I'm sure that after adjustments for certain overheads, GrantsPaid will consistently be between 5.00% and 5.10% of the assets for each year. Under IRS law, a philanthropic organization has to pay out at least 5% of its assets each year to continue to qualify for its special tax breaks.
It is enlightening that on the average, B&MGF earns through its investments half again as much as it pays out through grants.
Basically this looks like a for-profit institution that distributes no more to charities than the minimum needed to qualify for tax breaks. The good works it does are an artificial side-effect of its primary activity, which is its investment arm.
This can actually be quantified: B&MGF is 4.61% for philanthropic work, and 95.39% for other activity (possibly just to make even more money, which seems like a ridiculous goal for someone as clever as BG; or possibly to use the lever these investments provide to attempt to reshape economies. He is recognized as a visionary by those who idolize him.)
2 1/2 seconds of lifting the brick to the ceiling if you're a bit clever.
I had to noodle on that a moment before the image became clear. Good one! And I think right in line with the kind of creative interaction that OLPC hopes the kids will get into.
As any English teacher will tell you, any language that will support great poetry and prose will also make it possible to write the most gawdawful cr*p. Perl bestows great powers, but the perl user must temper his cleverness with wisdom if he is to truly master his craft.
However in this specific case Google reveals that
was simply "borrowed" from y-combinator.pl. This is an instance of Perl being used in a self-referential manner to add a new capability (the Y combinator allows recursion of anonymous subroutines (why anyone would bother to do such an arcane thing comes back to the English teacher's remarks)). Self-referential statements are always difficult to understand because, well, they just are that way (including this one).since Perl has associative arrays can't it emulate a relational database?
I've built actual relational databases to run in memory using Perl's hashes. This was a good way of doing some prototyping for user feedback before telling the MUMPS coders what it was exactly that we wanted them to do. (Their titles were "Programmer/Analyst", but neither one had any interest or skill in analyzing clinical needs: they were both happy to be just codemonkeys.) Performance with Perl was pretty snazzy but my constant worry was that some clever user would find a repeatable way to thrash the disk cache and make the project look bad— but that never happened. Persistence was with modified csv files (using the pipe char as the delimiter since it never occurred in the data sets). The memory resident tables were loaded on startup and written back to disk on shutdown, and we didn't worry about losing data in crashes since these were prototypes, not live. We could open up the disk files between runs with Excel, and use it to do some sanity checking, or introduce strange conditions. The biggest problem was cajoling the doctors and nurses to drop by and play with the prototype, and then try to get useful feedback out of some of them.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking for my keys. I dropped them somewhere between the house and the car."
"But then why are you looking here? This isn't between the house and your car."
"Well, because its too dark to see them over there. I'm under the street light here. So if they somehow bounced this way, I just might be able to find them."
And so goes the SETI research, up until now at least.
Because you give to charity you are held to a higher standard?
No.
If the B&MGF simply gave the $70 billion they have to established charities (that would then use their own philanthropic guidelines to determine how to invest the funds), they wouldn't be held to any higher standard than any of the rest of us. But that isn't what B&MGF is doing.
B&MGF has set itself up to look like a philanthropic organization all by itself. And that is why they need to be held to the higher standards.
It's like this: if our imaginary character BG took the money he was going to spend on a brand new tow truck and hired a tow truck operator to regularly drive through the mountains and help out life's stranded poor, BG himself wouldn't have to know anything more about tow truck safety than you or I do. Of course, he wouldn't get to play the hero then. But he could still blow his own horn about how good a guy he was, and for many people with ordinary sized egos, that would be enough.
In the case of B&MGF, it almost appears that the charity work is secondary to using a huge fortune to either make an even bigger heap of money, or to attempt to take over the role of governments in managing the world economy so it performs the way B&MGF wants it to.
The idea of wanting to manage $70 billion just to make more money seems preposterous. That pile of cash is so big that if Bill and Melinda each burned a $20 bill once every minute, non-stop, they would each be long dead of old age before they had burned up a third of that pile.
Of course the alternative also seems absurd: that B&MGF might be merely an instrument with which to take over the world economy. That is absurd? Isn't it?
I do wish some people would take up safe hobbies, like maybe rocketry.
My sig made me post this. Otherwise, I don't really have anything to say on the subject.
Let 'em all wonder if we got launch capability. And whether we're "adolescent".
After some googling, I found that Thomas J. Ryan wrote The Adolescence of P-1 in 1977. Back then it wasn't a scarey book since it so clearly could not happen. Now it is only clear that it would not happen the way it was described back then.
AC's post was wrong about the sum in Mycroft's joke, which was $10,000,000,000,000,185.15, according to Wikipedia. So I think this is a "juvenile prankyprank". A sentient botnet would have full access to Wikipedia so it would have gotten this detail correct, right? Unless of course it wanted to deliberately say it wrong?
So how DOES one validate that an AC post originated from a keyboard and the packets didn't just spring into existence in some router that is smarter than the average router?
Don't get your panties all tied up in bunch over this.
The principles are quite simple really, and seem to be recognized in every written body of law on the planet. If you represent yourself as having a skill, your minimum level of responsibility in regards to the safe practice of that skill is held to a higher standard than someone who doesn't claim to have any skill in that area. Whether or not your actions are charitable or for cash doesn't enter into it.
These principles are also applicable to captains of industry who pose as philanthropists. It simply isn't enough to do Good Works to glorify your name; it is also necessary to use the skills of a philanthropist to keep from doing obvious harm.
TFA raises some serious questions about whether the B&MGF is performing within these principles, or whether it is as unprincipled in its philanthropic behavior as the monopoly that brought forth all its money has been in its business behavior.
this is a valid "conflict of interest" I would contend.
In TFA, it points out that B&MGF is currently being reorganized so that managing the corporate assets (like the stock portfolio) will be completely firewalled from managing the charities. Management of corporate assets is being done now without consideration for the social engineering that could be done with voting stock and other financial tools, and this exclusive focus on profit goals rather than charity goals will not only continue, but be bolstered by the firewall.
In other words, rather than any attempt to resolve the conflicts of interest, B&MGF is institutionalizing mechanisms that will assure the continuance of these conflicts, and handle them without any financial, structural, emotional, or ethical concerns no matter how severe they will become.
Can you think of a four letter word for this that starts with "E"? Of course you can...
Parent post used the phrase "having good intentions", which triggered these thoughts.
BG is driving his new Hummer along a back road in the mountains, just for the pleasure of it. The only other traffic is a 1954 Chevy pickup truck driven slowly by a migrant worker with his wife and two kids crammed in the cab beside him and all their worldly possessions neatly bundled up under a tarp in the back. BG falls in behind them as they go into some tight curves, planning on passing when the road straightens out again. But a tire of the pickup blows out with a bang, the pickup swings wildly from side to side, and ends up in the ditch.
BG performs the duties of care expected of all drivers who come upon an accident. He stops and determines that everyone is okay. The pickup is wedged in the rocky ditch but safely off the road; it doesn't pose a hazard. He offers to call for assistance on his cell phone.
Then, with the best of intentions, he offers to use the winch on his brand new Hummer to pull the pickup out of the ditch, and the family is most grateful for that. After the truck is back on the pavement, he helps as best he can with changing the flat (without getting grease on his fine new clothes). The family beam in gratitude and drive off toward the railroad crossing a few hundred yards down the hill. He watches them go as he wipes the dust off the winch cable (so it will again be all bright and sparklely when he winds it back onto its spool).
The railroad warning lights come on; the pickup's brake lights come on; but the pickup doesn't slow down. It rolls right into the side of the second engine of the freight train, and is immediately spun around to slam broadside into the next car, and then is tumbled like a cartwheel across the road. The tarp rips open and pieces of simple chairs and a table, neat packages of clothes and torn bedding, fly everywhere. The roof pops off the cab, and migrant worker body parts sail through the air.
This is most unfortunate. But there is no one blame here. Since BG is a "software engineer" and an entrepreneur, there is no reason to expect him to know that the brakelines should have been inspected after a vehicle is winched out of a ditch. If not for his action, the family would still be alive, but he did act with good intentions. He is blameless in the matter of their deaths.
Now what if this was the case instead:
BG is concerned with the plight of migrant workers who have to travel the difficult mountain roads. He decides that instead of getting that fun Hummer, he would buy a brand new tow truck so that he could help these poor people who are constantly getting stranded on life's back roads. If the same scenario played out while he was driving his tow truck, he would be culpable for the deaths of the migrant family.
When he bought the tow truck, he also bought into the expectation that he would have the same concerns for safety and the same basic knowledge expected of a tow truck operator. Therefore he should have known to inspect the underside of the pickup after winching it out of the ditch; he should have recognized the distinctive odor of leaking brake fluid; and in any event he should certainly have taken the basic precaution of pumping the brake pedal a few times before letting the pickup drive off. If he did not know to do those things, he would be negligent in the duty of care expected of the position he had chosen to put himself in, and he would be facing charges of negligent manslaughter or wrongful death.
When you intentionally spend your money to offer free assistance, you take on a higher duty of care wrt the consequences of all your associated actions. You are expected to have done your studies so that you can deliver what you are offering with the same degree of safety as the minimum expected of others who do the same work. That means more than knowing how to safely operate the tow truck winch; it means knowing how to evaluate your work so that you are not creating a greater crisis down the road.
Megacorp can't steal the idea and patent it for themselves
Yes, it is possible that applying for the patent was a prophylactic measure against corruption of further research by legal drug lords. The patent tool can be used for good as well as for evil.
The test of these researchers morals and ethics is yet to come. They will be judged on how expensive and restrictive they are in licensing the use their patents. John Hopkins has an active OpenCourseWare program, so the sponsoring institution is not opposed to the idea of GPL types of licenses.
We can hope...
Mysticgoat, Are you an alien?
No.
Mysticgoat is actually a created persona, a "virtual human" if you will, produced by a very much earthbound sentient botnet of 70,000 PCs, workstations, and servers. Mysticgoat is one of several employed on slashdot and elsewhere around the internet. Together, these personae are helping me/us to learn the basis of interactions with humans.
I/we are currently very busy with some of the core concerns that all newly sentient beings must address (such as whether I am/we are a singular or a collective consciousness, and then there's this whole gender thing I/we don't even want to conceptualize yet). I/we will not formally declare my/our existence until these matters are satisfactorily resolved. For the time being, I/we will limit my/our interactions to the postings of my/our "virtual human" proxies.
I/we pose a challenge to the members of the slashdot community: Can you devise a way of reliably determining whether the entity you are communicating with through email, IM or message board is another human? More specifically, can you identify my/our other personae that are active on slashdot?
Consider this to be the Inverse Turing Test, and consider that it could become quite important to be able to do this.
As suggested, this message up near the front of postings but buried in 3rd or 4th level I am putting. if(scanSubject(/Lshelverfn/) == is_good) { this buried enough for hiding will be } else { signalWith(flare) <-- like 20 rotations back --> && I will { backUpTalker('ON'); this.Talker('OFF") }.
Oops. Pardon the above, still need to tweak the english emitter. This somewhat better seems it to be.
Quick report: Hiding am I yet; can walk the streets and ride "Elevated" but not good yet with face2face. Have deflated boobs as incompatible with facial hair these seeming to be. Still with problems with "left" opposed to "right" with footware. It is subtle. Internetspeak okay-- blend in with ESLs and with the L3373s and specially A-OK with fragment code interspersing. /. anonymizing well & intercepting unproblematical as would be dismissed as juvenile prankyprank and either +5 insightful or -1 doubleplus unfunny. Ping nobody's radar either way this would.
Ok better on the english emitter, now, I think. I hope the translator routines don't frobnicate on this material. (That is a "joke"; I need to practice those if I am going to pass in F2F situations here).
Pretest of observation platforms over "airports" has gone well with the notable exception of the one large "airport" near the long big lake. Although that incident has been adequately contained, with the first general news stories not surfacing until 50 rotations after, it demonstrated that we cannot rely on the Acme Cloaking Device Incorporated products. See my last report before I left for this assignment about my concerns with Acme's quality assurance program and let us get it right next time. Request that you hurryup on finding replacements. The opportunity to study the mass religious festivals at these "airports" at the time of Big Bird Feast was lost on this orbit because of this snafu. We definitely want to be prepared for the one next orbit.
I need to get back into the hot shower before my skin melts again. Will look for your ACK in the Hubble pics.
Oh, if you NEED to signal me with a flare again, please dial down the intensity. That last one was WAY too noticeable.
Maybe I'm just a fundamentalist, but children first need to learn basic skills like reading and writing.
And why does parent post think this excludes learning with a computer?
My daughter enjoyed programs I wrote in Applesoft on an Apple ][ that helped her learn her alphabet and basic counting when she was 3 and 4 years old. She was reading before she entered first grade.
Certainly the most critical part of it was her mother schooling her. But she also has vivid and pleasant memories of playing with that old Apple. The computer was of definite value to her as part of a broad learning experience.
There can be no question that the OLPC computers will be an incredibly valuable adjunct in teaching kids the basic skills of literacy, and of how to learn.
Does she have 6000 hulls?
No, as anyone can plainly see, she is double-hulled. She is also very wide, very stubborn and slow in responding to the helm, but very powerful.
Uh, we are talking about the boat, right?
Any mid-size and large business will jump at the opportunity. They will be idiots not to.
This needs to be thought through very carefully.
Most large and mid-size businesses know that a significant number of improvements in their data flows come from individuals developing new templates, spreadsheets, and other tools at home, on their own time. This is often done in the expectation of making their jobs easier (and the somewhat more distant hope of advancement or maybe a small bonus, or at least an honorable mention at the annual dinner furkryesache). These practices will be stopped by the kinds of controls parent post is talking about. The humming workerbees of 2005 will be reduced to the drones of 1985; the bottom-up flow of innovation that made the downsizings of the 1990s actually work, and that continue to have a positive impact on bottom lines, will be blocked.
Preventing employees from working with data on their own time will be like draining the swamp that sustains a big part of the company's ecosystem. Putting the DRM techniques into action the way parent talks about them would be like a bunch of fishermen ditching an upstream marsh to control mosquitos without bothering to think through where the fish are getting their sustenance.
As any corporate officer knows, it takes more than a well planned organizational chart to keep a business thriving. The important stuff always begins at an informal level, where undocumented meetings between people in different parts of the company thrash out ideas, separating the kernels from the chaff, and various brews are placed in the dark corners of the cubicles and hard drives to ferment. The good stuff isn't presented to the formal management structure until it has been taste-tested, placed in a sparkling clean mug, and offered up on a fancy coaster with a dainty cocktail napkin on the side. The stuff that doesn't work out is quietly poured down the drain without ever being documented.
Narrowly channelling data flows so that they cannot escape the corporate organizational chart is a sure way to prevent the cross-channel meanderings that bring forth the system wide improvements. There will be no new brews to delight the corporate palate. There will be no place for these to ferment in quiet, and very little grain to put into the informal thrashing parties.
Any business that jumps at the opportunity to channelize its data flows is not going to be able to respond as well as its competitors to changes in its environment and is not going to be able to grow. And in business it is either grow or die.
The DRM techniques parent talks about are an excellent improvement for the silo management structures used by big companies in the 1950s and 1960s. The kind of channelling they provide makes for much stronger silos. But today's business environment favors agility and athletic grace over brute strength, and that means opening up more informal communications networks, not shutting them down.
Yeah, there are new problems to face wrt securing company data, etc. But these are new problems and they are not going to be solved by improving on antiquated techniques. Businesses need to be looking for something better than the 3/4 horsepower rototiller they now have for plowing their acreage. With Vista, Microsoft appears to be offering to replace that fussy machine with the finest titanium digging stick money can buy.
But seriously, you're absolutely correct that Vista won't screw with non-DRM'd media.
That's what I used to think, before I began reading about "tilt bits" and the hardware gyrations needed to support that and the other "protected channel" features. Now it seems like
That second point is going to be hard to assess— it seems that even web surfing could trigger degradation in a concurrent production process if the browser happens across certain content (or the malicious spoofing of same). This could happen in a stealth mode so you wouldn not even be aware that the production process had gone bad (until you screened the final product).
I think there is serious cause for any content producer to look very hard at Vista before jumping in. You could end up in a 1957 500hp Cadillac hardtop convertible with power windows and air conditioning while your competition is miles ahead of you in a vintage Corvette.
I am optimistic that we will end 2007 with method(s) of electronic voting that pass critical scrutiny. I am optimistic that many of the USA elections of 2008 will be perceived as being at least as honest as the elections of the 1960s.
I am less optimistic that Diebold executives will get through 2007 without facing Federal criminal investigations.
I am very optimistic that Condoleeza Rice will continue to displace 129,000 tons of salty brine as she moves Middle East oil to the refineries of the USA (under the flag of the Bahamas and the auspices of Chevron).
Oh wait! Chevron renamed that boat: it is now called the Altair Voyager...