"Pictures of people who have made a mark in any of the following: programmable computer systems, computer networks, the Internet or the security involved with those systems." I don't recall Charles Babbage contributing to the internet. I believe he contributed to "programmable computer systems".
That's extremely widespread, and very common among microsofties. It's zealotry, plain and simple. Rather than accept that there are flaws in their beloved operating system, they launch personal attacks. Rather than dealing with reality, they paint you as stupid for not seeing things their way. That's zealotry at it's finest. Just look at the anon-coward idiot who thought he was so bright in this thread, telling people they couldn't bring up a real standard that MS needed to be open. Several were brought up, and look at the replies they recieved: "That's not a format"(regarding NTFS). "That's been depreciated"(regarding wins).
Fair enough, although that AC is not someone "I know" (for all I know, it's just some anonymous troll). I just don't happen to know any MS zealots. I know people who are pro-Linux and anti-Linux, but not people who are rabidly enamoured with MS.
Having read some of your anti-GPL rants and in particular your competition-as-we-know-it is broken posts (flaw in society), I think I know what you mean.
Yeah, I may tend to be a bit of an anti-zealotry zealot.
I think the "salaries should be kept confidential" idea is a company policy and most employees are willing to go along with it.
It's basically the law of supply and demand. You could have got X, but you were willing to settle for Y. Some people play the gambit of threatening to quit, and these people get paid more. (But sometimes their employer will call their bluff.)
I find it offensive that some people try to paint Open Source advocates as zealots, but Microsoft zealots are painted as "reasonable".
One sign of zealotry is that you obsess about something to the exclusion of everything else. What many people would call a flaw in your idea, you label a flaw in society.
This doesn't really describe any Microsoft users I know.
I don't consider 72% in favor of a "slim majority"...
Sure, maybe 72% were in favour of the war after the invasion had begun. That is because 10-20% of Americans appear to be mindless automatons who automatically support their president during wartime (a sensability that is much lauded by the American media).
In the weeks and months leading up to the war, public opinion fluctuated daily (also depending heavily on what question was asked). Go read some of the other surveys on the site you referred to, including this one, taken shortly before the war began, in which the exact words "slim majority" are used to describe support for an invasion without a new UN resolution.
I wonder if Mr. Cox has read the article on the 235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015. Maybe this is why he is getting an MBA?
I think it will be funny if during his MBA course he has to put together some kind of business proposal. Of course he puts forward an open source business case which his prof thinks is ridiculous, and maybe he fails the assignment?
England, Canada, Australia all joined the war after Germany had attacked 2 countries. The US waited and waited and didn't join the war until they were eventually attacked. Why? Because the majority of the US public was opposed to the war.
In the case of Iraq, a slim majority of the American populace was in favour of the war. In many other countries, public opinion was almost unanimously against the war, and yet the US berates them for not supporting it.
In my last job, I definitely suffered from not becoming friendly with upper management. I didn't get laid off, but after a few years, I was making a lot less money than I should have been. The people who played politics definitely got ahead. But usually they had a lot of people complaining about them behind their backs.
I was a longtime peon at my last job, but I was quickly promoted to middle management at my current one. I know that I did a good job right from the start, but I'm also fairly sure that going to lunch (and playing golf) with the right people helped a lot. I don't think people talk about me behind my back, but who knows.
The C.E.O. stopped me after only a couple sentences, telling me he didn't want to hear any more about it - and that I needed to discuss it with my direct manager instead.
If there's one thing most executives have in common, it's that they are very busy people. Every case is different, but in most cases they prefer to receive their information filtered through people they know and trust.
I don't know the specifics of your case, but for all I know the CEO knows you are a complainer and he was just trying to give you the brush off without offending you. In fact, the very idea that they get real offices with doors they can close automatically sends a message that the company thinks it's important that these people have a higher level of isolation than everyone else gets.
VPs get offices with closed doors because they are often discussing information that is of a sensitive nature. How would you like to have your annual review conducted within earshot of everyone else in the office?
Given the amount of turmoil, headache, as well as real monetary loss these crimes must have caused, it's amazing to me that they each spent less than two years locked up.
And furthermore, given their propensity for identity theft, how can we be sure that it's really them?
(I still can't get over the fact that in an article about identity theft, the photo that was supposed to be a black woman looked an awful lot like a fat white man.)
Bah... I read through this story with mod points and couldn't find anything worth modding up. Just a billion posts like the parent. Disingenuous ways of saying "Yay, now we can pirate music, unfettered by the rule of law." Whatever happened to the sensible minority that used to be the voice of reason here.
I didn't mean racist in the literal sense. Just think of it as arrogance if you want. Like you said, I work with Asian project managers every day. Most of them are immigrants who were educated in China. Maybe they came here for a masters degree or a PHD (if only to improve their chances of successful immigration). Sure, we may have a temporary lead in education, but the arrogance is in believing that we can sustain that lead for more than a couple more years.
Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.
I remember that a lot of my friends believed that in 1999, but who really buys that now? Sure, I've seen a few instances of remote managment. Some of the project managers at my company (who are Chinese immigrants) manage groups in China. But in the long run (and by long run I mean ~2 years), how can anyone truly believe that China can't produce enough capable product managers who are up to the task and willing to work for a fraction of an American wage? This quote is pure, unadultered (dare I say racist?) arrogance.
I have worked with some very good Russian programmers and some very bad ones. The common thread that binds many of them together is efficiency -- writing very tight, compact code. Some of them were able to harness this skill and apply it selectively. Others used it in situations where it wasn't called for, and the result was unreadable, unmaintainable code.
A list of 10,000 names and phone numbers can cost a mortgage company's telemarketing department tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's rather simple to place a dollar amount on the value on an individuals information.
Did you consider that if you open sourced your information, they could no longer make any money off it?
This isn't as ignorant or errant as it sounds. What if you don't know if the given large number is prime to start with. An "easy way to factor" then becomes "a fast primality test".
Except that we already have plenty of algorithms to do a fast primality test.
I didn't say majority is always right, I said enough people disagree with you that you should consider that possibility that you are wrong. Way different.
No, you said both:
First, if that were accurate, you wouldn't find so many people disagreeing with you. Consider the possibility that they know something you don't know.
You ignored the bit where I pointed out that the GPL is an exchange and BSD is a gift.
Indeed, since it didn't refute anything I had said. If you're going to come in midway through a conversation, you need to understand the context. What was saying was that GPL doesn't affect the mechanics of the collaborative development process (CVS, mailing lists, automake, etc). The only difference is the attitude of the developers. You call me greedy for wanting to commercialize other peoples' work. I call you petty for caring.
(BTW, what I found funny is that several other people called GPL'ed software a 'gift' in their rebuttals of my earlier posts.)
Actually, I just read over the 3 replies you posted to my comments and they're all dumb.
First you say that "the GPL is the cutthroat competition I asked for" (after editing out your grammar errors). Actually, if you were paying attention you would see that I said that cutthroat competition was a negative force. Complaining about the GPL and equating it with an alien invasion isn't likely to help.
I didn't equate the GPL with an alien invasion. I was trying to prove an unrelated point, so I deliberately chose an unrelated example.
Then you make some dumbass comment about how the majority is always right. (Especially dumb when you consider that/. is an island of conformity.)
You clearly have trouble with reading comprehension and basic logic. I guess you must have been sleeping during 5th grade.
On a completely different note, and I the only one of us who finds it mildly funny that we've been persuing a semi-argument for nearly 3 days after the FPP first appeared?
Actually, that happens all the time. The longest discussion I ever had probably lasted 3 weeks. (Although the posting frequency tends to peter out after awhile.)
What I find more (or less) amusing is the fact that moderators still bothered to mod me down 3 days later. (and also the fact that I also got mod points on a weekend when my karma took a serious dive)
"You conveniently ignored the part where I said I wasn't opposed to a BSD license. In that case, money is not involved and the only motive is to build high quality software." Not conveniently, I ignored it because I thought it was irrelivant.
Which is odd, since you repeated at least 3 times that my objection to the GPL seemed to be based solely on the fact that no money is exchanged.
"The added viral clause in the license is clearly an attempt to stick it to the man." Nonesense. Firstly if we define "viral" to mean "self propogating" than propriatary licenses are also "viral". After all, if I spend millions licensing the SCO (or MS, or Mac, or whoever) code than I am obligated to propigate its closed nature, and my own source is subject to the same license I received the original under.
I suppose... although note that this only applies to *changes* you make to the SCO source, and not to other libraries you link with. The big difference with the virility of the GPL is that it can infect completely unrelated libraries. If its bad for the GPL to be "viral" it must also be bad for any other license to be "viral". I won't concede that a double standard is acceptable here.
Now you're resorting to extremes. There is no rule of logic that says "X => Y therefore Y." Capitalism is clearly not an attempt to "stick it to the man" since there is a clear motive for profit. But the GPL does not have this rationale, so we must look for an ulterior motive. The fact that Free Software has successfully competed in a hostile environment tends to indicate a successful system. Possibly even a superior system. Possibly not, maybe its just the honeymoon effect (Communism, for example, usually looks quite successful for the first 10 years or so, then the rot begins to show...)
Yep, the honeymoon effect. My point here is that while limiting competition is valuable, we can't, as a species, afford to *eleminate* competition, or else stagnation sets in. You seem to be dedicated to the idea of eleminating competition to capitalism, please correct me if I've gotten the wrong impression here. This is why I said earlier that you seem to have an almost religious attachment to it.
I don't want to eliminate competition, but I think we need to prove that the scientific basis for a system is sound before allowing it to disrupt the status quo. Especially when the only basis for the system is the perversion of a law that was designed to defend the status quo. In legalese, that's called a loophole, and loopholes are designed to be closed.
Again, you are simply wringing your hands and wailing because money isn't involved. Money, while quite nice, is not the be all and end all of everyone's interest.
You conveniently ignored the part where I said I wasn't opposed to a BSD license. In that case, money is not involved and the only motive is to build high quality software. The added viral clause in the license is clearly an attempt to stick it to the man. Don't misunderstand me, game theory makes sense and works most of the time. But ultimately its just a model. The only way to see what system is better is to let them compete.
The idea I was trying to convey to you is that game theory proves that there are systems in which unfettered competition leads to a bad result for everyone. You *can't* just let the systems compete to see which is best. The solution is to seek a Nash equilibrium (which you may remember from that movie A Beautiful Mind).
Slashdot Mirror
"Pictures of people who have made a mark in any of the following: programmable computer systems, computer networks, the Internet or the security involved with those systems."
I don't recall Charles Babbage contributing to the internet.
I believe he contributed to "programmable computer systems".
-a
That's extremely widespread, and very common among microsofties. It's zealotry, plain and simple. Rather than accept that there are flaws in their beloved operating system, they launch personal attacks. Rather than dealing with reality, they paint you as stupid for not seeing things their way. That's zealotry at it's finest. Just look at the anon-coward idiot who thought he was so bright in this thread, telling people they couldn't bring up a real standard that MS needed to be open. Several were brought up, and look at the replies they recieved: "That's not a format"(regarding NTFS). "That's been depreciated"(regarding wins).
Fair enough, although that AC is not someone "I know" (for all I know, it's just some anonymous troll). I just don't happen to know any MS zealots. I know people who are pro-Linux and anti-Linux, but not people who are rabidly enamoured with MS.
-a
Having read some of your anti-GPL rants and in particular your competition-as-we-know-it is broken posts (flaw in society), I think I know what you mean.
Yeah, I may tend to be a bit of an anti-zealotry zealot.
-a
I think the "salaries should be kept confidential" idea is a company policy and most employees are willing to go along with it.
It's basically the law of supply and demand. You could have got X, but you were willing to settle for Y. Some people play the gambit of threatening to quit, and these people get paid more. (But sometimes their employer will call their bluff.)
-a
I find it offensive that some people try to paint Open Source advocates as zealots, but Microsoft zealots are painted as "reasonable".
One sign of zealotry is that you obsess about something to the exclusion of everything else. What many people would call a flaw in your idea, you label a flaw in society.
This doesn't really describe any Microsoft users I know.
-a
I don't consider 72% in favor of a "slim majority"...
Sure, maybe 72% were in favour of the war after the invasion had begun. That is because 10-20% of Americans appear to be mindless automatons who automatically support their president during wartime (a sensability that is much lauded by the American media).
In the weeks and months leading up to the war, public opinion fluctuated daily (also depending heavily on what question was asked). Go read some of the other surveys on the site you referred to, including this one, taken shortly before the war began, in which the exact words "slim majority" are used to describe support for an invasion without a new UN resolution.
-a
I wonder if Mr. Cox has read the article on the 235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015. Maybe this is why he is getting an MBA?
I think it will be funny if during his MBA course he has to put together some kind of business proposal. Of course he puts forward an open source business case which his prof thinks is ridiculous, and maybe he fails the assignment?
-a
England, Canada, Australia all joined the war after Germany had attacked 2 countries. The US waited and waited and didn't join the war until they were eventually attacked. Why? Because the majority of the US public was opposed to the war.
In the case of Iraq, a slim majority of the American populace was in favour of the war. In many other countries, public opinion was almost unanimously against the war, and yet the US berates them for not supporting it.
-a
In my last job, I definitely suffered from not becoming friendly with upper management. I didn't get laid off, but after a few years, I was making a lot less money than I should have been. The people who played politics definitely got ahead. But usually they had a lot of people complaining about them behind their backs.
I was a longtime peon at my last job, but I was quickly promoted to middle management at my current one. I know that I did a good job right from the start, but I'm also fairly sure that going to lunch (and playing golf) with the right people helped a lot. I don't think people talk about me behind my back, but who knows.
-a
With opinions like that, I'm sure you're the most popular guy in the office. :-)
-a
The C.E.O. stopped me after only a couple sentences, telling me he didn't want to hear any more about it - and that I needed to discuss it with my direct manager instead.
If there's one thing most executives have in common, it's that they are very busy people. Every case is different, but in most cases they prefer to receive their information filtered through people they know and trust.
I don't know the specifics of your case, but for all I know the CEO knows you are a complainer and he was just trying to give you the brush off without offending you.
In fact, the very idea that they get real offices with doors they can close automatically sends a message that the company thinks it's important that these people have a higher level of isolation than everyone else gets.
VPs get offices with closed doors because they are often discussing information that is of a sensitive nature. How would you like to have your annual review conducted within earshot of everyone else in the office?
-a
Given the amount of turmoil, headache, as well as real monetary loss these crimes must have caused, it's amazing to me that they each spent less than two years locked up.
And furthermore, given their propensity for identity theft, how can we be sure that it's really them?
(I still can't get over the fact that in an article about identity theft, the photo that was supposed to be a black woman looked an awful lot like a fat white man.)
-a
Bah... I read through this story with mod points and couldn't find anything worth modding up. Just a billion posts like the parent. Disingenuous ways of saying "Yay, now we can pirate music, unfettered by the rule of law." Whatever happened to the sensible minority that used to be the voice of reason here.
-a
Bush can't declare war. That takes an act of Congress.
Unless congress pre-emptively gives Bush the power to declare war.
-a
Whilst the Apache project was a good example - bear in mind that Apache is not indicative of every Open Source project.
Indeed. Apache isn't even GPL, and yet it still gets trotted out as a model project.
-a
I didn't mean racist in the literal sense. Just think of it as arrogance if you want. Like you said, I work with Asian project managers every day. Most of them are immigrants who were educated in China. Maybe they came here for a masters degree or a PHD (if only to improve their chances of successful immigration). Sure, we may have a temporary lead in education, but the arrogance is in believing that we can sustain that lead for more than a couple more years.
-a
I remember that a lot of my friends believed that in 1999, but who really buys that now? Sure, I've seen a few instances of remote managment. Some of the project managers at my company (who are Chinese immigrants) manage groups in China. But in the long run (and by long run I mean ~2 years), how can anyone truly believe that China can't produce enough capable product managers who are up to the task and willing to work for a fraction of an American wage? This quote is pure, unadultered (dare I say racist?) arrogance.
-a
I have worked with some very good Russian programmers and some very bad ones. The common thread that binds many of them together is efficiency -- writing very tight, compact code. Some of them were able to harness this skill and apply it selectively. Others used it in situations where it wasn't called for, and the result was unreadable, unmaintainable code.
-a
A list of 10,000 names and phone numbers can cost a mortgage company's telemarketing department tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's rather simple to place a dollar amount on the value on an individuals information.
Did you consider that if you open sourced your information, they could no longer make any money off it?
-a
This isn't as ignorant or errant as it sounds. What if you don't know if the given large number is prime to start with. An "easy way to factor" then becomes "a fast primality test".
Except that we already have plenty of algorithms to do a fast primality test.
-a
I didn't say majority is always right, I said enough people disagree with you that you should consider that possibility that you are wrong. Way different.
No, you said both:
You ignored the bit where I pointed out that the GPL is an exchange and BSD is a gift.
Indeed, since it didn't refute anything I had said. If you're going to come in midway through a conversation, you need to understand the context. What was saying was that GPL doesn't affect the mechanics of the collaborative development process (CVS, mailing lists, automake, etc). The only difference is the attitude of the developers. You call me greedy for wanting to commercialize other peoples' work. I call you petty for caring.
(BTW, what I found funny is that several other people called GPL'ed software a 'gift' in their rebuttals of my earlier posts.)
-a
Actually, I just read over the 3 replies you posted to my comments and they're all dumb.
/. is an island of conformity.)
First you say that "the GPL is the cutthroat competition I asked for" (after editing out your grammar errors). Actually, if you were paying attention you would see that I said that cutthroat competition was a negative force.
Complaining about the GPL and equating it with an alien invasion isn't likely to help.
I didn't equate the GPL with an alien invasion. I was trying to prove an unrelated point, so I deliberately chose an unrelated example.
Then you make some dumbass comment about how the majority is always right. (Especially dumb when you consider that
You clearly have trouble with reading comprehension and basic logic. I guess you must have been sleeping during 5th grade.
-a
I call Bullshit.
First, if that were accurate, you wouldn't find so many people disagreeing with you.
Hehe... in other words, 5 million Nazis can't be wrong.
(Sorry to have to invoke Godwin's law.)
-a
On a completely different note, and I the only one of us who finds it mildly funny that we've been persuing a semi-argument for nearly 3 days after the FPP first appeared?
Actually, that happens all the time. The longest discussion I ever had probably lasted 3 weeks. (Although the posting frequency tends to peter out after awhile.)
What I find more (or less) amusing is the fact that moderators still bothered to mod me down 3 days later. (and also the fact that I also got mod points on a weekend when my karma took a serious dive)
"You conveniently ignored the part where I said I wasn't opposed to a BSD license. In that case, money is not involved and the only motive is to build high quality software."
Not conveniently, I ignored it because I thought it was irrelivant.
Which is odd, since you repeated at least 3 times that my objection to the GPL seemed to be based solely on the fact that no money is exchanged.
"The added viral clause in the license is clearly an attempt to stick it to the man."
Nonesense. Firstly if we define "viral" to mean "self propogating" than propriatary licenses are also "viral". After all, if I spend millions licensing the SCO (or MS, or Mac, or whoever) code than I am obligated to propigate its closed nature, and my own source is subject to the same license I received the original under.
I suppose... although note that this only applies to *changes* you make to the SCO source, and not to other libraries you link with. The big difference with the virility of the GPL is that it can infect completely unrelated libraries.
If its bad for the GPL to be "viral" it must also be bad for any other license to be "viral". I won't concede that a double standard is acceptable here.
Now you're resorting to extremes. There is no rule of logic that says "X => Y therefore Y." Capitalism is clearly not an attempt to "stick it to the man" since there is a clear motive for profit. But the GPL does not have this rationale, so we must look for an ulterior motive.
The fact that Free Software has successfully competed in a hostile environment tends to indicate a successful system. Possibly even a superior system. Possibly not, maybe its just the honeymoon effect (Communism, for example, usually looks quite successful for the first 10 years or so, then the rot begins to show...)
Yep, the honeymoon effect.
My point here is that while limiting competition is valuable, we can't, as a species, afford to *eleminate* competition, or else stagnation sets in. You seem to be dedicated to the idea of eleminating competition to capitalism, please correct me if I've gotten the wrong impression here. This is why I said earlier that you seem to have an almost religious attachment to it.
I don't want to eliminate competition, but I think we need to prove that the scientific basis for a system is sound before allowing it to disrupt the status quo. Especially when the only basis for the system is the perversion of a law that was designed to defend the status quo. In legalese, that's called a loophole, and loopholes are designed to be closed.
-a
Again, you are simply wringing your hands and wailing because money isn't involved. Money, while quite nice, is not the be all and end all of everyone's interest.
You conveniently ignored the part where I said I wasn't opposed to a BSD license. In that case, money is not involved and the only motive is to build high quality software. The added viral clause in the license is clearly an attempt to stick it to the man.
Don't misunderstand me, game theory makes sense and works most of the time. But ultimately its just a model. The only way to see what system is better is to let them compete.
The idea I was trying to convey to you is that game theory proves that there are systems in which unfettered competition leads to a bad result for everyone. You *can't* just let the systems compete to see which is best. The solution is to seek a Nash equilibrium (which you may remember from that movie A Beautiful Mind).
-a