Mod the parent up. Why do we consider ourselves consumers first and citizens second? Consumers can be ranked by the value of their goods consumed. Citizens are not ranked in a democracy. We should Stand together as equals, not in a priority queue based upon personal consumption and/or net worth.
Newton's Law of Gravitation doesn't correctly predict the precession of perihelion of Mercury, so perhaps we should stop teaching Newtonian mechanics. If a law isn't perfect, it can still have value.
I don't believe that many in the open source community dogmatically accept the shallow-bugs arguement as a universally applicable rule of software development. It seems to me that any reasonable person would agree that
Not all eyeballs are equal. Theo and Linus are vastly better at code reviews than the average Slashdot reader, for example. So, there is a wide range of eyeball quality.
Bugs have a wide distribution of subtlety. The bug in this article seems to be high on the subtlety scale.
The 'with enough eyes all bugs are shallow' statement is universally recoginized as simplification. For example, ESR states that a better statement is:
What is true is that (1) with many eyes, shallow bugs get caught very quickly, and (2) that the more eyes there are, the more likely it is that some member of the group has sufficiently penetrating vision to catch the deeper-swimming bugs.
So, yes, if you start with the sound bite version of a 'law' and apply it to a statistical anomaly, you can 'disprove' the law. We now agree that the sound bite doesn't perfectly correlate with 'real world' So, you are now forced to decide if the relationship expressed in the 'law' is uncorrelated (bug fixing uncorrelated with eyeballs) , anti-correlated (eyeballs hinder bug fixing) or correlated (eyeballs often help bug fixing). I believe that the law is still a good rule of thumb and that the correlation between 'many eyes' and 'bug get found' is strong.
Captain Obvious, is that you? Isn't this one of the first lessons in the second year class for undergrad statistics? I hope we can assume that PhD statisticians are not going to use in-sample data and call it a 'prediction'. That's like 'predicting' last week's score.
I do not defend Castro's dictatorship, but for many he seems to have been a 'benevolent' dictator. This is something of an oxymoron, so what I mean is this: For many working class Cubans, Castro's government has established a strong safety net and an egalitarian society. There is no question that Castro was also ruthless in dealing with political adversaries and I would not have liked to live in such a closed society. But like any other government, his was neither purely good nor purely evil. What did he do well and what did he do poorly?
He did work hard to address the needs of 'his' people. A controlled economy with a strong safety net does result in an economy with a lower average income, but how strongly does is affect the median income? Is it better to be an average Cuban or an average Mexican? Both seem to be willing to take great risks to get out. GDP per capita, the standard measure of a nation's economy, doesn't address income distribution: The average income of Bill Gates and 9 Slashdotters is simply 10% of Bill Gates income + round off error.
I would like to see economic analysis of developing nations that is measured by percent of population living below a locally adjusted poverty line. Does anyone know of such a study?
Everybody already knows that Microsoft has been playing dirty. This is just their attempt to say 'everyone is doing it'. If they can spread enough FUD, most people will just turn around in disgust and most of them will just be muttering something about 'What a mess, I guess everyone's hands are dirty to some degree' without trying to understand the difference between bribery on one hand and advocacy on the other.
I worked for a year and a half in France. Doctors made house calls for children because 1) they didn't want to spread infections and 2) they didn't need an army of clerks to fight with insurance companies. When I did go to the doctor's office, I just signed in on a sheet of paper. The doctor came out, looked to see if anyone was in need of urgent attention and called the next name on the list. But of course, this cannot possibly be a workable system because it is socialized medicine.
All you need is an embedded computer with an accelerometer and a transmitter on the bottom of the seat. This will make it quite unlikely to break, even if thrown.
Look at http://scan.coverity.com/. This is a great project to improve the stability of open source projects by looking for all sorts of coding errors that can be very hard to spot manually. It may not be true that with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But is it very clear that the Coverity eyeballs are exceptionally good at exposing lots of bug. It is all clear that the open source developers are excellent at fixing these bugs. If KDE can get 4.0 out the door and drive their Coverity defects closer to zero, then I think that we will see a very robust, efficient KDE 4.0 by year's end. The number of defects in my Linux/X.org/KDE 'desktop stack' has dramatically dropped, at least as measured by Coverity. Sorry for sounding like an advertisement. I know that there are other ways to find defects, but I am just so impressed with how open source developers have closed thousands of coding errors that have been identified by these automated code audits. This is the sorts of constant improvement that quietly leads to better stability and security.
What good is a Weapon of Mass Destruction without Ammunition of Mass Destruction? An ICBM without a warhead is just a rocket crashing. A water truck without anthrax is only useful for agriculture. It's the ammunition that counts as much as the weapon. So actually, WMD is a lot closer to AMD that you suggest.
This doesn't happen with 'hacking' by government agents. This is not war, this is espionage. Especially in the US, we must avoid labeling anything 'serious' as a war. There is a bright line distinction between the widespread killing that accompanies a war and the economic losses that could be inflicted by espionage over the internet or the chaos that could follow a deliberate 'cyber attack'. Espionage is also a continuation of politics, but that doesn't make it war.
how do paying customers benefit when MS reveals unknown...
Central to any theory of efficient markets is the assumption that both consumers and producers can make informed decisions free of coercion. If the consumers do not have information, they cannot make an informed decision. Companies are not generally obliged to share all information about their products, but they are prohibited from intentionally deceiving customers. Cigarette makers were not sued because cigarettes cause cancers, but because they had determined internally that cigarettes caused cancers and they then made claims to the contrary. That is, they intentionally deceived both the consumer and the regularly agencies.
By analogy, Microsoft can say 'we build secure software' all day long. But if they claim, 'we develop more secure software than our competitors' they open themselves up for liability IF it is determined that they are making claims that they know to be false. In this case this seems to be hypothetical. But it is a testable hypothesis. And after reading the internal memos made public in Combs v. Microsoft, it is a quite plausible hypothesis.
My first image was of children playing in a cardboard box. They have cut out a hole for their heads and painted a race car on the side. Now they have a race car! It too is un(der)powered, but not in their imaginations. The author puts lipstick on a pig and says its now more attractive. Of course, what we call imagination in children we call fiction when it comes from writers.
I completely agree with you when the weather is nice. But, running on summer days (90 deg F +, 80%+ humidity) or on winter days ( 10 deg F, no humidity) is a lot harder than running/swimming in a gym. I hate running indoors because of the cotton mouth that usually results, but it is better than not running at all. I do make sure that I don't make extra trips to go only to the gym.
This is a trick question because you don't even need the oxygen. First you need enough hydrogen to form a big star. It will maintain the needed temperature and pressure to make lots of helium. Wait a few billion years until you have enough helium to go supernova. Then you will get carbon. However, since faculty members are already close to death when they become a team lead and grad students only have about 6 years to get a PhD, nobody has tried experimentally verified this.
Doc Ruby gave an example involving Republicans. When examples of Democratic corruption were given, he agreed that they to should have been voted out of office. He did notice that some people wanted to rant about other types of crime (e.g. Ted Kennedy's drunk driven/manslaughter). He considered these off topic with respect to his post. To me, this indicated clear thinking on his part. Many of us are partisan, but that doesn't mean that we want to apply double standards. So your final statement seems way off base.
Can you provide references about the tire slitting? It would be interesting to understand the details. A dumb, overzealous kid could be at fault, or there could be evidence of a wider conspiracy. The former is a misdemeanor, the latter should result in a significant criminal investigation.
Laissez-faire means you simply let it be. WRT to a market, fair means that all competitors have an equal opportunity to compete. Open means that there are not artificial barriers to entry. This difference is clearest if you look at the stereotypical 'protection racket' of organized crime. This isn't fair and it certainly isn't open, but if you strictly apply 'Laissez-faire', you would not interfere and would wait for the oppressed 'sheeple' to revolt against the criminals. The problem with laissez-faire is that Gary Cooper's character in 'High Noon' is so rare outside of movies. We organize governments to respond to our needs. In the case of predatory businesses, that means enforcement of anti-trust laws.
Microsoft's manipulate protocols that were developed by the public so that they intentionally break compatibility (SMB, Kerberos,...). The OS group is constantly changing the OS (every patch Tuesday), they don't test competing products with the same vigour that they test Microsoft products. This means that you can expect more days of down time if you don't buy into the whole Microsoft stack. Microsoft Office uses many unpublished APIs that are not disclosed to Office competitors. In both the US and UE courts have found them guilty.
In my opinion, only a strict advocate of laissez-faire economics would oppose action againts Microsoft. Their market manipulations are neither fair nor open.
By all means, if you like Microsoft products, call yourself a consumer and keep using Visual Studio to develop.Net applications. And please, enjoy your vicarious pride in Microsoft's products. I never understand people who claim pride in someone else's work. Its like sports fans claiming that 'we' beat you, even when they did nothing more physical than spill beer when shouting at a television broadcast. I feel the same way about Linux fans that take pride in the kernel developers or even chicken hawks that take pride in the performance of the US military - I both cases I feel admiration and gratitude, but certainly not pride.
The article stated the simple fact that as hardware prices drop, that software prices become quite comparable to hardware costs. If open source can provide 'good enough' software and costs almost nothing (in comparison with hardware costs), then there is a market opportunity. This is almost exactly the argument that was used in the mid 90's to support Windows over Unix. Sure, the Unix was 'better' and there was more advanced software, but Windows was good enough and it's cost only added about 10-25% to the cost of a PC. Unix licensing was often more expensive than the hardware it ran on. As I recall, this price advantage was quite convincing to many CTOs, CFOs and CEOs.
So perhaps we are at the same sort of tipping point that lead to the growth of Windows over Unix, only now it would be the growth of Open Source over Microsoft. Now we see that Windows + Office often costs more than a budget PC. But you can install Ubuntu + OpenOffice.org for free. As long as Sun, IBM and others can gain from breaking the Windows Monopoly, they can easily afford to staff a few open source projects. The PC revolution took place in homes and in departments that had not been computerized. Scientists and engineers that had been using Unix often kept using Unix as other around them began using PCs. Similarly. countries that are currently using Windows extensively are not likely to rapidly switch to Linux-based solutions. However, there are lots of demographics in this world that do not have PCs. These are the demographics that are discussed in the article.
PS. Based upon the huge progress demonstrated at scan.coverity.com, I would not claim that open source is merely 'good enough'. But it seems quite clear that it is at least good enough for the sort of use discussed in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
This coward is right. This is only a story about Danes protesting to Denmark and the ISO.
Mod the parent up. Why do we consider ourselves consumers first and citizens second? Consumers can be ranked by the value of their goods consumed. Citizens are not ranked in a democracy. We should Stand together as equals, not in a priority queue based upon personal consumption and/or net worth.
I don't believe that many in the open source community dogmatically accept the shallow-bugs arguement as a universally applicable rule of software development. It seems to me that any reasonable person would agree that
- Not all eyeballs are equal. Theo and Linus are vastly better at code reviews than the average Slashdot reader, for example. So, there is a wide range of eyeball quality.
- Bugs have a wide distribution of subtlety. The bug in this article seems to be high on the subtlety scale.
- The 'with enough eyes all bugs are shallow' statement is universally recoginized as simplification. For example, ESR states that a better statement is:
So, yes, if you start with the sound bite version of a 'law' and apply it to a statistical anomaly, you can 'disprove' the law. We now agree that the sound bite doesn't perfectly correlate with 'real world' So, you are now forced to decide if the relationship expressed in the 'law' is uncorrelated (bug fixing uncorrelated with eyeballs) , anti-correlated (eyeballs hinder bug fixing) or correlated (eyeballs often help bug fixing). I believe that the law is still a good rule of thumb and that the correlation between 'many eyes' and 'bug get found' is strong.Captain Obvious, is that you? Isn't this one of the first lessons in the second year class for undergrad statistics? I hope we can assume that PhD statisticians are not going to use in-sample data and call it a 'prediction'. That's like 'predicting' last week's score.
You need elite prosecutors to take on Microsoft, so it only makes sense. Now who hacked the exchange rates to honor Neelie Kroes?
I do not defend Castro's dictatorship, but for many he seems to have been a 'benevolent' dictator. This is something of an oxymoron, so what I mean is this: For many working class Cubans, Castro's government has established a strong safety net and an egalitarian society. There is no question that Castro was also ruthless in dealing with political adversaries and I would not have liked to live in such a closed society. But like any other government, his was neither purely good nor purely evil. What did he do well and what did he do poorly? He did work hard to address the needs of 'his' people. A controlled economy with a strong safety net does result in an economy with a lower average income, but how strongly does is affect the median income? Is it better to be an average Cuban or an average Mexican? Both seem to be willing to take great risks to get out. GDP per capita, the standard measure of a nation's economy, doesn't address income distribution: The average income of Bill Gates and 9 Slashdotters is simply 10% of Bill Gates income + round off error. I would like to see economic analysis of developing nations that is measured by percent of population living below a locally adjusted poverty line. Does anyone know of such a study?
That may work in the House of the Future, but it will never be approved by the Senate of the Future.
Everybody already knows that Microsoft has been playing dirty. This is just their attempt to say 'everyone is doing it'. If they can spread enough FUD, most people will just turn around in disgust and most of them will just be muttering something about 'What a mess, I guess everyone's hands are dirty to some degree' without trying to understand the difference between bribery on one hand and advocacy on the other.
What's funny is that he dares to use a lower case G.
I worked for a year and a half in France. Doctors made house calls for children because 1) they didn't want to spread infections and 2) they didn't need an army of clerks to fight with insurance companies. When I did go to the doctor's office, I just signed in on a sheet of paper. The doctor came out, looked to see if anyone was in need of urgent attention and called the next name on the list. But of course, this cannot possibly be a workable system because it is socialized medicine.
All you need is an embedded computer with an accelerometer and a transmitter on the bottom of the seat. This will make it quite unlikely to break, even if thrown.
Look at http://scan.coverity.com/. This is a great project to improve the stability of open source projects by looking for all sorts of coding errors that can be very hard to spot manually. It may not be true that with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But is it very clear that the Coverity eyeballs are exceptionally good at exposing lots of bug. It is all clear that the open source developers are excellent at fixing these bugs. If KDE can get 4.0 out the door and drive their Coverity defects closer to zero, then I think that we will see a very robust, efficient KDE 4.0 by year's end. The number of defects in my Linux/X.org/KDE 'desktop stack' has dramatically dropped, at least as measured by Coverity. Sorry for sounding like an advertisement. I know that there are other ways to find defects, but I am just so impressed with how open source developers have closed thousands of coding errors that have been identified by these automated code audits. This is the sorts of constant improvement that quietly leads to better stability and security.
the Republicans don't seem to mind all that much; just make sure that the red in comes due when the next generation will have to pay it.
and float.
To misquote Capt. Barbossa, "They aren't laws so much a guidelines."
What good is a Weapon of Mass Destruction without Ammunition of Mass Destruction? An ICBM without a warhead is just a rocket crashing. A water truck without anthrax is only useful for agriculture. It's the ammunition that counts as much as the weapon. So actually, WMD is a lot closer to AMD that you suggest.
This doesn't happen with 'hacking' by government agents. This is not war, this is espionage. Especially in the US, we must avoid labeling anything 'serious' as a war. There is a bright line distinction between the widespread killing that accompanies a war and the economic losses that could be inflicted by espionage over the internet or the chaos that could follow a deliberate 'cyber attack'. Espionage is also a continuation of politics, but that doesn't make it war.
Central to any theory of efficient markets is the assumption that both consumers and producers can make informed decisions free of coercion. If the consumers do not have information, they cannot make an informed decision. Companies are not generally obliged to share all information about their products, but they are prohibited from intentionally deceiving customers. Cigarette makers were not sued because cigarettes cause cancers, but because they had determined internally that cigarettes caused cancers and they then made claims to the contrary. That is, they intentionally deceived both the consumer and the regularly agencies.
By analogy, Microsoft can say 'we build secure software' all day long. But if they claim, 'we develop more secure software than our competitors' they open themselves up for liability IF it is determined that they are making claims that they know to be false. In this case this seems to be hypothetical. But it is a testable hypothesis. And after reading the internal memos made public in Combs v. Microsoft, it is a quite plausible hypothesis.
My first image was of children playing in a cardboard box. They have cut out a hole for their heads and painted a race car on the side. Now they have a race car! It too is un(der)powered, but not in their imaginations. The author puts lipstick on a pig and says its now more attractive. Of course, what we call imagination in children we call fiction when it comes from writers.
Eff dot dee-ex if for a stair stepper, or torque dot dee-theta if you pedal it.
I completely agree with you when the weather is nice. But, running on summer days (90 deg F +, 80%+ humidity) or on winter days ( 10 deg F, no humidity) is a lot harder than running/swimming in a gym. I hate running indoors because of the cotton mouth that usually results, but it is better than not running at all. I do make sure that I don't make extra trips to go only to the gym.
This is a trick question because you don't even need the oxygen. First you need enough hydrogen to form a big star. It will maintain the needed temperature and pressure to make lots of helium. Wait a few billion years until you have enough helium to go supernova. Then you will get carbon. However, since faculty members are already close to death when they become a team lead and grad students only have about 6 years to get a PhD, nobody has tried experimentally verified this.
Can you provide references about the tire slitting? It would be interesting to understand the details. A dumb, overzealous kid could be at fault, or there could be evidence of a wider conspiracy. The former is a misdemeanor, the latter should result in a significant criminal investigation.
Laissez-faire means you simply let it be. WRT to a market, fair means that all competitors have an equal opportunity to compete. Open means that there are not artificial barriers to entry. This difference is clearest if you look at the stereotypical 'protection racket' of organized crime. This isn't fair and it certainly isn't open, but if you strictly apply 'Laissez-faire', you would not interfere and would wait for the oppressed 'sheeple' to revolt against the criminals. The problem with laissez-faire is that Gary Cooper's character in 'High Noon' is so rare outside of movies. We organize governments to respond to our needs. In the case of predatory businesses, that means enforcement of anti-trust laws. Microsoft's manipulate protocols that were developed by the public so that they intentionally break compatibility (SMB, Kerberos,...). The OS group is constantly changing the OS (every patch Tuesday), they don't test competing products with the same vigour that they test Microsoft products. This means that you can expect more days of down time if you don't buy into the whole Microsoft stack. Microsoft Office uses many unpublished APIs that are not disclosed to Office competitors. In both the US and UE courts have found them guilty. In my opinion, only a strict advocate of laissez-faire economics would oppose action againts Microsoft. Their market manipulations are neither fair nor open.
By all means, if you like Microsoft products, call yourself a consumer and keep using Visual Studio to develop .Net applications. And please, enjoy your vicarious pride in Microsoft's products. I never understand people who claim pride in someone else's work. Its like sports fans claiming that 'we' beat you, even when they did nothing more physical than spill beer when shouting at a television broadcast. I feel the same way about Linux fans that take pride in the kernel developers or even chicken hawks that take pride in the performance of the US military - I both cases I feel admiration and gratitude, but certainly not pride.
The article stated the simple fact that as hardware prices drop, that software prices become quite comparable to hardware costs. If open source can provide 'good enough' software and costs almost nothing (in comparison with hardware costs), then there is a market opportunity. This is almost exactly the argument that was used in the mid 90's to support Windows over Unix. Sure, the Unix was 'better' and there was more advanced software, but Windows was good enough and it's cost only added about 10-25% to the cost of a PC. Unix licensing was often more expensive than the hardware it ran on. As I recall, this price advantage was quite convincing to many CTOs, CFOs and CEOs.
So perhaps we are at the same sort of tipping point that lead to the growth of Windows over Unix, only now it would be the growth of Open Source over Microsoft. Now we see that Windows + Office often costs more than a budget PC. But you can install Ubuntu + OpenOffice.org for free. As long as Sun, IBM and others can gain from breaking the Windows Monopoly, they can easily afford to staff a few open source projects. The PC revolution took place in homes and in departments that had not been computerized. Scientists and engineers that had been using Unix often kept using Unix as other around them began using PCs. Similarly. countries that are currently using Windows extensively are not likely to rapidly switch to Linux-based solutions. However, there are lots of demographics in this world that do not have PCs. These are the demographics that are discussed in the article.
PS. Based upon the huge progress demonstrated at scan.coverity.com, I would not claim that open source is merely 'good enough'. But it seems quite clear that it is at least good enough for the sort of use discussed in the article.