It's all a part of a pattern that treats everyone, especially foreigners, with increasing hostility.
We no longer get care packages from our relatives overseas; it's too much of a hassle to fill out all of the required forms that the tea and the rice crackers aren't really nuclear weapons. Seriously; no one wants to mail us anything from overseas as the US government has made it too onerous. And if you fill the forms out wrong, they apparently discard the package, with no notice to anyone.
This particular website is only in English. If you don't speak English, don't bother coming to the US. Every other country I know of has their immigration materials in a variety of languages as courtesy to the visitors. Only the US remains adamantly arrogant in its "We don't care about you" stance. I know people who would like to visit, but don't - because they don't speak the language and they perceive this to be a hurdle.
You see it all the time; the US treats its citizens and visitors as criminals at the borders. Having just returned from overseas, I am increasingly frustrated with the arrogant, rude attitude of those who staff our borders.
Heh. My Outlook (at work) quit working with a cryptic DLL wrong version message the other day. No one, including several of our IT MSCEs, were able to figure out what exactly clobbered the DLL or how to replace it. The solution was to reinstall Office 2007.... There went all of my Outlook addresses.
And the driver thing - we have a digital video camera at work. Every time you plug it in, Windows insists that it needs drivers to talk to the bloody thing. But.... It's a mass storage device. It shows up as a removable drive. But you can't use it without all sorts of voodoo convinging windows that it really doesn't need any drivers.
The DRM thing is a matter of trust - I don't know what it is doing. I know it's there - but what exactly is it doing? Need I go on?
So the bulk of the article gushes all over the taskbar, with a bit of Aero thrown in...
Are the pundits so brain dead that they don't know the difference between an OS and a UI? A taskbar is not an OS.
The koolaid must be good.....
I want to hear what they did with the DRM. I want to hear what they've done to make the system more stable under load. I want to hear that they now have a package manager, instead of DLL hell. I want to hear that drivers now ship with the OS, and I don't have to install 70 MB of bloatware just to "install" a keyboard.
Oh wait, but look at that icon on the taskbar..... Slurp, slurp, damn that koolaid tastes good.
Actually, there are 'competing' systems. Often multiple water providers feed a large municipal system; mutliple collection systems feed a regional sewer plant.
The system works because the infrastructure is very, very expensive, it is very heavily regulated at all levels and because it has citizen oversight in the form of various commissions, councils, and boards. And if you cheat you can go to jail. (Try bypassing the sewage treatment plant, or hooking up your own well to the municipal water system.
There is no analogy whatsoever to the internet where the infrastructure is relatively cheap, which is relatively unregulated, and where there is little citizen oversight.
Cool! Logo is a great choice since it covers everything form the very, very basic to the really complex. Thanks for pointing out netLogo! That's one I can use.
Horsepuckey. A teacher has no right to confiscate my child's mp3 player than a thug on the street. Now if my kid uses it in class, OK. But as long as it is just in my kid's possession, without her using it, that's theft plain and simple.
While children and students have limited rights, they do not give up all of their first ammendment rights. I suspect a good constitutional lawyer could take this on and make the school district squirm.
Students pay to attend university. They are, in fact, paying customers. They are not a resourse to be milked of Daddy's money and told to shut up. Without the students, the university would shut down and the high-falutin' profs would be up shit's creek.
So let's do this the right way, shall we?
A business, of which I am a long time established customer to the tune of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, does something I don't like. I send email to every manager of the business that I can find. The IT person calls me and tells me to follow proper channels.
Now how many of us would say, "Sure, Mr. Geek, I'll follow propoer channels." Or would tell him/her to go fsck him/herself, you are the fscking customer, and someone in management had better pay some fscking attention?
Oh heck, read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. There you will find a war fought with the use of the catapult, pretty much the same thing as the Launch Loop, and predating it by 20 years.
I could, however, suggest a couple of places to launch Orion from....:-)
In a military trial, 'following orders' is not a valid defense. In other words, if I am your commander, and I issue a direct order for you to kill the prisoner, you will still be up on murder charges (along with me.) An illegal order is an illegal order. This has been established many times in military and civilian courts.
Apprantly, though, when the commander-in-chief issues an illegal order, he can then get the law changed to make it legal after the fact, and to protect his cronies from the consequences of his actions. An order is no less illegal when it comes from the top.
So now to the big worry-- how are developers going to make money? I'm not sure. There will be demand for software development, and where there's demand, there's money to be made. I don't know if it's through support and services alone, or if there's something else. Maybe you just have a shorter term to make your money, and that term starts when you offer a new innovation first, and ends when other people get around to offering it.
Well, no one pays you to go to school; you pay for that. Then hopefully someone pays you because what you know is valuable, and will help them with their bottom line. If you don't keep up with changes in the field, often on your own nickel, you will soon be out of work.
FOSS works the same way. No one pays you (the company) to develop software. But if your product is good, people will pay you for support and maintenance.
If your product is really cool and fills a niche, you'll make money.
If your product is a commodity, then the community will support it and your development costs will drive to zero, hopefully still enabling you to make money.
But the competition is far more brutal than in a proprietary market.
Surround yourself with people of all ages. I teach at a local gym; I'm one of the oldest instructors on staff. I get to hang out with lots of younger women in tight lycra.
Seriously, if you work out, and if your peer group consists of interesting people, you won't get old. Surround yourself with a bunch of geezers sucking their gums and you're done for.
I interview people for a variety of technical jobs...
Given the same intelligence and professionalism, younger people tend to be more aggressive, have a better grasp on the latest tech, and most likely be more willing early adopters. OTOH, the older people tend to be more cautious, weigh the options more, and not stumble as much.
You really want a mix of the two; you want older people to leaven the mix, provide balance and guidance (often both personal and professional) and younger people to be the shock troops of pushing the envelope.
I would never ask a point blank age related question; I would ask, however, things like
"You are the leader of a project team. You've been given a legacy application in a language that no one on your team is familiar with. You have partial documentation of the application and full documentation of the language. Describe your approach to developing a set of specifications and a work plan to re-implement this using current methodologies. Write a memo to your management outlining the issues and the work plan. Include requests for resources outside your team you may need."
If you were to do something like that you'd learn a lot about how people approach a problem. That's where experience comes in.
Think about this. The B1-B (and any other nuclear weapons platform) isn't going to be subject to some pimply kid running half-understood scripts at random.
Instead, the other side, whoever that might be, will be doing their utmost to subvert and, if that fails, disable the computers on board. Those computers must communicate with HQ, so they can be hacked.
You've got some of the best, brightest, most resourceful people working for the NSA and its equivalent in Russia, China, and probably Iran and a few other places trying to hack these systems. They have tools and budget that we can't really imagine.
I'd guess that your garden variety linux install would barely make it through the warmup round for these guys (and gals.)
Google 'piercing the corporate shield'. While the 'get a corporation and hide behind it' is a popular common fiction, it doesn't hold up in reality.
In brief, a corporation will only protect you if you are wealthy enough to staff up with lawyers. If you're a small company, especially a one-person part-time LLC that can't affort $400/hr for attorneys, a corporation offers almost no protection whatsoever.
As in most things legal, the system is set up to favor those with the deep pockets and big-name lawyers.
It's sort of like Home Depot and Grainger. Ever wonder why seemingly the same DeWalt drill costs twice as much at Grainger than it does at Home Depot?
Home Depot sells mostly to non-professionals, so they demand that DeWalt cut costs to meet a price point. Thus the drill gets sleeve bearings and plastic gears, and a weak motor. The Grainger version gets ball bearings, metal gears, and a motor that will break wrists. It also costs $200 more. I've smoked one of those Home Depot drills in an afternoon.
I blame the near-monopoly big box retailers and corporate greed on the part of the manufacturers, along with the general stupidity of the American consumer.
So it is with computers. You want cheap, you buy the cheapest knock off crap you can, you take out every bit of hardware you can and shove it into the software drivers, and then you stick in a high-speed CPU so you can publish big numbers. I bought some Dell SCSI drives some time ago; they wouldn't work with my RAID controller. I called up and asked why - I was told that the Dell drives only work with Dell versions of Windows, as Dell has removed a lot of the hardware from the drive controllers and put it into software. Maybe it saved them a few pennies per drive....
They're talking about balistic stretching with a different name. For crying out loud, that's a huge cause of injuries.
Static stretching should hold the stretch about 5 seconds; that's the time your muscles need to stretch before contracting. Anything longer than that is counter productive or unproductive at best.
Their recommended stretches are bizarre. You should never, ever do balistic stretches with cold muscles. And the bend over and walk thing is a really good cause of lower back injuries. I have no idea who wrote that section of TFA, but they clearly have no clue.
And, yes, I'm a certified personal trainer, cycling instructor, and work with people on improving their performance quite a bit.
I think your consultant was an idiot. The vast majority of Open Source devs are paid by their companies. At my last job I was paid relatively well to give my work away.:-)
Basically we layered some PHP scripts on top of modified elinks code to come up with an end-user configurable industrial panel.
I got paid, the company made money, no egos (other than perhaps the company president) involved.
Granted, I didn't become well-known in the OS world, but really... How many closed source programmers do you know by name? And friends don't count.
I actually did the research to answer this for my last employer. IIRC something like 60% (or maybe 80%) of Open Source developers are paid....
Heh.... I guess if I want to buy the latest quad core, 500W office heater I shouldn't worry about a slow OS...
But then again, if I buy that quad core, 500W heater and put a fast OS on it, it will be.... even faster? Like windows popping up like flashbulbs?
Mandatory car analogy: I have a van that has a GCVW of 13,000#. It will still accelerate pretty well with that load because it has a huge engine. Normally its curb weight is 5,800#. Guess what? It accelerates faster and uses less gas when running with a smaller load...
So tell me again, if I have a great bit powerful PC, why I shouldn't be concerned that my OS is a bloated pig?
I found a hole in your computer system. I can get all sorts of cool info. For $100 I'll tell you what it is."
So now they have the 'blackmail' stuff....
But for crying out loud, look at it as an educational opportunity. Maybe the kid is smart and needs challenge. Maybe he's a troublemaker. But teach the kid, don't throw him away....
Ummm... Angstrom? angstrom-distribution.org It's made to run on embedded devices. It's a PITA to build (I don't like bitbake) but you can't argue with the results.
I have a 200 MHz Arm board with 32 MB RAM running just fine with a 2.6.24 kernel. Stable as all getout. Haven't tried X11 on it (no graphics) but I might just for the hell of it. It's gotta be faster than my 486-DX4 laptop.:-)
And you can build just the parts you want so memory and footprint aren't a real problem.
I spent a lot of years in the military; threat assessment and defense was a part of my job.... The whole TSA inspection system is a joke. It is nothing but theater.
I could go on and on....
I used to fly with the Bomb.... A demonstration computer built into one of those medium sized toolbox cases. It had a bare board embedded computer, an LCD screen, a PLC, wires and cabling all over the place, the case was lined with a grounding plane, and it had bolts all over the case holding the guts in. It even had a remote control I built with 20 toggle switches and a bunch of LEDs. I hand carried this monster on dozens of flights and *never once* did anyone at TSA express any curiousity about this case.
Anyway, the Europeans do it much better than the TSA. Chase everyone out of the gate, set up the checkpoint, and screen and scan everyone as they board....
I think you're making my point for me. If a developer is small, has a loyal following, they will provide good service. This is true for FOSS as well as proprietary. The problem is once there is a lockin, and profit becomes a motivator, then service goes to shit. Lockin is much harder in FOSS as anyone can fork the project, so the service has to be much better.
I think you're arguing about two different things.
If a software vendor is trying to break in to a market, they give free demos, trials, etc. Once the software is established, and the changeover costs are high, then they no longer have any incentive to treat you nicely.
AutoDesk is a good example. They buy competitors and then the quality and responsiveness goes to shit. I know; I use one of their recent purchases. We no longer get bug fixes and feature updates like we used to, but we're locked in to a long-term contract so we can't change. Bingo, Autodesk no longer has any incentive to improve the product. By the time the contract is over, we will have too much in the proprietary format to change over; again, no incentive to change over.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all a part of a pattern that treats everyone, especially foreigners, with increasing hostility.
We no longer get care packages from our relatives overseas; it's too much of a hassle to fill out all of the required forms that the tea and the rice crackers aren't really nuclear weapons. Seriously; no one wants to mail us anything from overseas as the US government has made it too onerous. And if you fill the forms out wrong, they apparently discard the package, with no notice to anyone.
This particular website is only in English. If you don't speak English, don't bother coming to the US. Every other country I know of has their immigration materials in a variety of languages as courtesy to the visitors. Only the US remains adamantly arrogant in its "We don't care about you" stance. I know people who would like to visit, but don't - because they don't speak the language and they perceive this to be a hurdle.
You see it all the time; the US treats its citizens and visitors as criminals at the borders. Having just returned from overseas, I am increasingly frustrated with the arrogant, rude attitude of those who staff our borders.
Heh. My Outlook (at work) quit working with a cryptic DLL wrong version message the other day. No one, including several of our IT MSCEs, were able to figure out what exactly clobbered the DLL or how to replace it. The solution was to reinstall Office 2007.... There went all of my Outlook addresses.
And the driver thing - we have a digital video camera at work. Every time you plug it in, Windows insists that it needs drivers to talk to the bloody thing. But.... It's a mass storage device. It shows up as a removable drive. But you can't use it without all sorts of voodoo convinging windows that it really doesn't need any drivers.
The DRM thing is a matter of trust - I don't know what it is doing. I know it's there - but what exactly is it doing? Need I go on?
So the bulk of the article gushes all over the taskbar, with a bit of Aero thrown in...
Are the pundits so brain dead that they don't know the difference between an OS and a UI? A taskbar is not an OS.
The koolaid must be good.....
I want to hear what they did with the DRM. I want to hear what they've done to make the system more stable under load. I want to hear that they now have a package manager, instead of DLL hell. I want to hear that drivers now ship with the OS, and I don't have to install 70 MB of bloatware just to "install" a keyboard.
Oh wait, but look at that icon on the taskbar..... Slurp, slurp, damn that koolaid tastes good.
Actually, there are 'competing' systems. Often multiple water providers feed a large municipal system; mutliple collection systems feed a regional sewer plant.
The system works because the infrastructure is very, very expensive, it is very heavily regulated at all levels and because it has citizen oversight in the form of various commissions, councils, and boards. And if you cheat you can go to jail. (Try bypassing the sewage treatment plant, or hooking up your own well to the municipal water system.
There is no analogy whatsoever to the internet where the infrastructure is relatively cheap, which is relatively unregulated, and where there is little citizen oversight.
Cool! Logo is a great choice since it covers everything form the very, very basic to the really complex. Thanks for pointing out netLogo! That's one I can use.
Horsepuckey. A teacher has no right to confiscate my child's mp3 player than a thug on the street. Now if my kid uses it in class, OK. But as long as it is just in my kid's possession, without her using it, that's theft plain and simple.
While children and students have limited rights, they do not give up all of their first ammendment rights. I suspect a good constitutional lawyer could take this on and make the school district squirm.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Students pay to attend university. They are, in fact, paying customers. They are not a resourse to be milked of Daddy's money and told to shut up. Without the students, the university would shut down and the high-falutin' profs would be up shit's creek.
So let's do this the right way, shall we?
A business, of which I am a long time established customer to the tune of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, does something I don't like. I send email to every manager of the business that I can find. The IT person calls me and tells me to follow proper channels.
Now how many of us would say, "Sure, Mr. Geek, I'll follow propoer channels." Or would tell him/her to go fsck him/herself, you are the fscking customer, and someone in management had better pay some fscking attention?
Oh heck, read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. There you will find a war fought with the use of the catapult, pretty much the same thing as the Launch Loop, and predating it by 20 years.
I could, however, suggest a couple of places to launch Orion from.... :-)
Perhaps the submitter could have benefitted from those.....
Bad spelling and grammar not withstanding....
In a military trial, 'following orders' is not a valid defense. In other words, if I am your commander, and I issue a direct order for you to kill the prisoner, you will still be up on murder charges (along with me.) An illegal order is an illegal order. This has been established many times in military and civilian courts.
Apprantly, though, when the commander-in-chief issues an illegal order, he can then get the law changed to make it legal after the fact, and to protect his cronies from the consequences of his actions. An order is no less illegal when it comes from the top.
So now to the big worry-- how are developers going to make money? I'm not sure. There will be demand for software development, and where there's demand, there's money to be made. I don't know if it's through support and services alone, or if there's something else. Maybe you just have a shorter term to make your money, and that term starts when you offer a new innovation first, and ends when other people get around to offering it.
Well, no one pays you to go to school; you pay for that. Then hopefully someone pays you because what you know is valuable, and will help them with their bottom line. If you don't keep up with changes in the field, often on your own nickel, you will soon be out of work.
FOSS works the same way. No one pays you (the company) to develop software. But if your product is good, people will pay you for support and maintenance.
If your product is really cool and fills a niche, you'll make money.
If your product is a commodity, then the community will support it and your development costs will drive to zero, hopefully still enabling you to make money.
But the competition is far more brutal than in a proprietary market.
Surround yourself with people of all ages. I teach at a local gym; I'm one of the oldest instructors on staff. I get to hang out with lots of younger women in tight lycra.
Seriously, if you work out, and if your peer group consists of interesting people, you won't get old. Surround yourself with a bunch of geezers sucking their gums and you're done for.
I interview people for a variety of technical jobs...
Given the same intelligence and professionalism, younger people tend to be more aggressive, have a better grasp on the latest tech, and most likely be more willing early adopters. OTOH, the older people tend to be more cautious, weigh the options more, and not stumble as much.
You really want a mix of the two; you want older people to leaven the mix, provide balance and guidance (often both personal and professional) and younger people to be the shock troops of pushing the envelope.
I would never ask a point blank age related question; I would ask, however, things like
"You are the leader of a project team. You've been given a legacy application in a language that no one on your team is familiar with. You have partial documentation of the application and full documentation of the language. Describe your approach to developing a set of specifications and a work plan to re-implement this using current methodologies. Write a memo to your management outlining the issues and the work plan. Include requests for resources outside your team you may need."
If you were to do something like that you'd learn a lot about how people approach a problem. That's where experience comes in.
Think about this. The B1-B (and any other nuclear weapons platform) isn't going to be subject to some pimply kid running half-understood scripts at random.
Instead, the other side, whoever that might be, will be doing their utmost to subvert and, if that fails, disable the computers on board. Those computers must communicate with HQ, so they can be hacked.
You've got some of the best, brightest, most resourceful people working for the NSA and its equivalent in Russia, China, and probably Iran and a few other places trying to hack these systems. They have tools and budget that we can't really imagine.
I'd guess that your garden variety linux install would barely make it through the warmup round for these guys (and gals.)
Google 'piercing the corporate shield'. While the 'get a corporation and hide behind it' is a popular common fiction, it doesn't hold up in reality.
In brief, a corporation will only protect you if you are wealthy enough to staff up with lawyers. If you're a small company, especially a one-person part-time LLC that can't affort $400/hr for attorneys, a corporation offers almost no protection whatsoever.
As in most things legal, the system is set up to favor those with the deep pockets and big-name lawyers.
Ah, but it looks exactly the same, it has the same name/noemnclature (but slightly different model number), and it is advertised exactly the same way.
So it's definitely deceiving.
It's sort of like Home Depot and Grainger. Ever wonder why seemingly the same DeWalt drill costs twice as much at Grainger than it does at Home Depot?
Home Depot sells mostly to non-professionals, so they demand that DeWalt cut costs to meet a price point. Thus the drill gets sleeve bearings and plastic gears, and a weak motor. The Grainger version gets ball bearings, metal gears, and a motor that will break wrists. It also costs $200 more. I've smoked one of those Home Depot drills in an afternoon.
I blame the near-monopoly big box retailers and corporate greed on the part of the manufacturers, along with the general stupidity of the American consumer.
So it is with computers. You want cheap, you buy the cheapest knock off crap you can, you take out every bit of hardware you can and shove it into the software drivers, and then you stick in a high-speed CPU so you can publish big numbers. I bought some Dell SCSI drives some time ago; they wouldn't work with my RAID controller. I called up and asked why - I was told that the Dell drives only work with Dell versions of Windows, as Dell has removed a lot of the hardware from the drive controllers and put it into software. Maybe it saved them a few pennies per drive....
They're talking about balistic stretching with a different name. For crying out loud, that's a huge cause of injuries.
Static stretching should hold the stretch about 5 seconds; that's the time your muscles need to stretch before contracting. Anything longer than that is counter productive or unproductive at best.
Their recommended stretches are bizarre. You should never, ever do balistic stretches with cold muscles. And the bend over and walk thing is a really good cause of lower back injuries. I have no idea who wrote that section of TFA, but they clearly have no clue.
And, yes, I'm a certified personal trainer, cycling instructor, and work with people on improving their performance quite a bit.
I think your consultant was an idiot. The vast majority of Open Source devs are paid by their companies. At my last job I was paid relatively well to give my work away. :-)
Basically we layered some PHP scripts on top of modified elinks code to come up with an end-user configurable industrial panel.
I got paid, the company made money, no egos (other than perhaps the company president) involved.
Granted, I didn't become well-known in the OS world, but really... How many closed source programmers do you know by name? And friends don't count.
I actually did the research to answer this for my last employer. IIRC something like 60% (or maybe 80%) of Open Source developers are paid....
Heh.... I guess if I want to buy the latest quad core, 500W office heater I shouldn't worry about a slow OS...
But then again, if I buy that quad core, 500W heater and put a fast OS on it, it will be.... even faster? Like windows popping up like flashbulbs?
Mandatory car analogy: I have a van that has a GCVW of 13,000#. It will still accelerate pretty well with that load because it has a huge engine. Normally its curb weight is 5,800#. Guess what? It accelerates faster and uses less gas when running with a smaller load...
So tell me again, if I have a great bit powerful PC, why I shouldn't be concerned that my OS is a bloated pig?
I can conjecture the email like this:
"Hey Principal:
I found a hole in your computer system. I can get all sorts of cool info. For $100 I'll tell you what it is."
So now they have the 'blackmail' stuff....
But for crying out loud, look at it as an educational opportunity. Maybe the kid is smart and needs challenge. Maybe he's a troublemaker. But teach the kid, don't throw him away....
Ummm... Angstrom? angstrom-distribution.org It's made to run on embedded devices. It's a PITA to build (I don't like bitbake) but you can't argue with the results.
I have a 200 MHz Arm board with 32 MB RAM running just fine with a 2.6.24 kernel. Stable as all getout. Haven't tried X11 on it (no graphics) but I might just for the hell of it. It's gotta be faster than my 486-DX4 laptop. :-)
And you can build just the parts you want so memory and footprint aren't a real problem.
I spent a lot of years in the military; threat assessment and defense was a part of my job.... The whole TSA inspection system is a joke. It is nothing but theater.
I could go on and on....
I used to fly with the Bomb.... A demonstration computer built into one of those medium sized toolbox cases. It had a bare board embedded computer, an LCD screen, a PLC, wires and cabling all over the place, the case was lined with a grounding plane, and it had bolts all over the case holding the guts in. It even had a remote control I built with 20 toggle switches and a bunch of LEDs. I hand carried this monster on dozens of flights and *never once* did anyone at TSA express any curiousity about this case.
Anyway, the Europeans do it much better than the TSA. Chase everyone out of the gate, set up the checkpoint, and screen and scan everyone as they board....
I think you're making my point for me. If a developer is small, has a loyal following, they will provide good service. This is true for FOSS as well as proprietary. The problem is once there is a lockin, and profit becomes a motivator, then service goes to shit. Lockin is much harder in FOSS as anyone can fork the project, so the service has to be much better.
I think you're arguing about two different things.
If a software vendor is trying to break in to a market, they give free demos, trials, etc. Once the software is established, and the changeover costs are high, then they no longer have any incentive to treat you nicely.
AutoDesk is a good example. They buy competitors and then the quality and responsiveness goes to shit. I know; I use one of their recent purchases. We no longer get bug fixes and feature updates like we used to, but we're locked in to a long-term contract so we can't change. Bingo, Autodesk no longer has any incentive to improve the product. By the time the contract is over, we will have too much in the proprietary format to change over; again, no incentive to change over.