Is arguing with a 17 necessarily a waste of time? And does open-mindedness increase with age? Both of these are rhetorical questions. The point being that the most people get less open-minded as they get older, and that its quite possible that a 12 year old could be one of the best possible debate partners while your supposed 40-year (guessing here) would be the worst.
Look... Arguing with *anyone* may very well turn out to be a waste of time. For any given individual, it depends on a lot of factors, and I certainly don't mean to imply that every 40 year old can hold an intelligent discussion. But statistically speaking, the chances of meeting a 10 year old with the life experience and critical thinking skills to have an intelligent discussion about something like politics is fairly insignificant.
Oddly, all the things you list as negatives, I think of as positive. The Internet stops you knowing if the person talking is a minor? Good - maybe we shouldn't use our age to discount opinions.
Debating with a 25 year old about politics may or may not be a waste of time, depending on how smart & open-minded they are. However, arguing with a 10 year old about politics is always a waste of time.
I like OO but is isn't great for every task. For instance, logging (which is the default example for AOP) is really bad in OO. This is because you have to add something like
People with masters/PHDs have been trained for research positions, not real-world work. If you want a job in the real world, then you're better off spending the same time getting real-world experience.
Yeah, pretty much.
Many people with PhDs may turn out to be good software architects in the long run. But fresh out of university, PhDs usually haven't spent a lot of time churning out code, and they lack experience in evaluating the engineering tradeoffs that are commonplace in real world situations. I'm certainly not going to take someone with that kind of skill set and then parachute them into a leadership position.
I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.
I can tell you this... I've interviewed lots of guys who are coming out of university with a masters/PhD but no real-world work experience.
I can see the research work they did in university and it's always something very esoteric. I most certainly *do not* want them architecting major products.
"He probably likes his product but does not believe its useful for everyone. This is why would he would be surprised to see a million downloads that soon."
This is obviously a load of crap. 600K downloads in 48 hours? How would he be surprised to see a million downloads soon?
Heh... one day after the story about PR firms, and we're still discussing this?
This is a friggin' press release for god's sake. The CEO is not surprised about anything. This whole outrageous statement was no doubt just a plan to stir up attention. And no guarantee that Opera didn't pay to have this story published in Slashdot anyway.
There is a key difference - not between right and wrong, but between tactics.
But the RIAA collects coinicidental evidence for high volumes of people and, without nearly enough proof, accuses them all of breaking the law.
On the other hand, the/. zeitgeist has been opposed consistently to any attempt by the RIAA to accurately monitor who is violating their copyrights. Any time they try to get an ISP to release the name of a subscriber, the/. community is in an uproar.
When the RIAA went after the P2P servicew, gnutella advocates bragged about how their algorithm was decentralized and anonymous so there would be no one to sue. There is a big focus on obfuscation. Why? Wait... wasn't obfuscation what Fortinet was accused of in the article?
First of all RIAA are pimps going around bullying people and collecting money. That being said the intellectual property is not that of RIAA but actual artists most of whom don't even hold rights to their own creation
On the other hand GPL software is a creation of group of hard working individuals with profit being the last intent. In my books its completely differet.
I am always reading on/. that the GPL is not anti-business. But on the other hand, your comment nicely sums up what seems to be the prevaling attitude here. I.e. that rules ought to be applied selectively, depending on whether you are a big evil corporation that cares about profit, or a crusading who has "profit being the last intent".
So, he's also one of the copyright owners of initrd.
Which is kind of ironic, actually. Since Welte didn't write initrd - he just bought the copyright from someone else's. In a way, it makes him like the SCO of the free software world.
(Of course he didn't actually "buy" the copyright with real money. I guess he bought it with magic smoke, or whatever it is that fuels the economy of the free software world.)
And so nothing is worth talking about until its already been done.
Well, you might think that.
Of course it is appropriate to theorize. But to hear the masses pontificate on/., you'd think they each had a 30 year track of successfully predicting emerging business models.
You sound like a creationist - "Well, I guess I have to admit that 'micro-evolution' really does happen, but there still no chance that 'real' evolution could ever be true!"
As it happens, I am not a creationist. And like you, I have accused/. posters of sounding like a creationist before.:-)
But I'm glad you brought this up. Because while I certainly agree that micro-evolution happens, I don't believe that it is sufficient evidence for macro-evolution. And that ties in to what I said before about there being a difference between proving that something could happen and proving that it actually did happen.
Micro-evolution shows that species can change in small ways, and it also suggests that they can change in large ways. But there are still questions about the rate at which they can change. I believe in macro-evolution because of the combined effect of several sources of proof: micro-evolution, the fossil record, and lack of credibility of religious dogma. We don't know every detail about how it happens (e.g. punctuated equilibrium vs. steady change), but it is far more credible than any other theory.
Yah know, back in the days of Gutenberg, there were a whole lot of people that doubted that an author could actually write a book, or a composer write chamber music all on his own dime and then sell enough copies afterwards to make it worthwhile.
And at that time, you really couldn't. The fact that it was feasible several hundred years later didn't do those people very much good, did it?
It is precisely because of my personal experience doing commissioned work that I realized artists could do the same thing if they leveraged the internet to directly reach their customers rather than rely on the disintegrating business model of using (or really being used by) a distributor of physical goods.
Let me begin on a bit of a tangent and then connect it later.
The basic difference between math and physics is that math is based on a system in which any set of rules that are internally consistent are equally valid. Physics is a science in which many competing theories are internally consistent, but they are only valid if they describe the world in which we live.
So what have you done? You have claimed that most peoples' daily jobs are like a commission in that you are paid by someone to do work that they dictate. (I don't disagree with that, although I probably would have put it the other way - a commission is just a type of job, rather than vice-versa.)
But that's an example of an organized entity (a corporation) paying workers a substantial salary in an attempt to make a profit, subject to various legal restrictions. Going from that to having tens of thousands of people contributing small sums on the Internet involves changing several variables at once. It's just too much of a logical leap.
You didn't even mention recent Internet efforts to raise money to save Blender, Mandrake, ST:Enterprise, etc. that worked, to an extent. And hey, Howard Dean funded his political campaign with contributions from the Internet. But then again, he didn't win. Every cause is different. So whether this strategy can work for musicians doesn't seem clear to me. And whether it can work if thousands of other bands are using the same strategy is a further open question.
BTW, it's a logical fallacy to believe that just because a business model is "disintegrating" then the alternative must be better. Very often, an imperfect status quo is still preferable to all the alterantives.
You're paid to do it on company time, though. If you want to own it, do it on your own time and pick something else for company time.
Do you think that the average Google employee is expected to work an 8 hour day? What is your own time anyway? Probably, you just end up spending 8 hours a day on Google stuff and another 2 hours on personal stuff. You work unpaid overtime like everyone else, but at least you get to choose what to work on.
This doesn't seem that counter-intuitive though...High viscosity liquids have a greater molecular attraction to one another than low viscosity liquids. They would therefore show a resistance to spreading out on the glass. Zzzzz...
I wouldn't say it's counter-intuitive at all. Higher viscosity fluids will make a bigger mess when they splash. Therefore, by Murphy's law, it's completely obvious that high viscosity fluids will be more likely to splash.
"Like I said, If Daimaou wrote the code prior to the IP agreement than the code isn't his to release to the company. The GPL license holders own it."
I see you've bought the "GPL is viral" FUD. Daimaou's code is Daimaou's code. It may be non-functional without the surrounding GPL code, but it's his none the less.
Sounds like his company wants an *exclusive* right to the code. Sure, he can transfer his token copyright of the GPL'ed code to the company, but outside of the OSS world, that's not really considered ownership.
BTW, "GPL is viral" is FUD? Sure it's not viral if you use it for personal use, but it becomes viral as soon as you try to distribute it.
"It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web."
Well, at least someone realizes this, instead of tacitly - or overtly - arguing that it's okay for them to be unabashedly ripped off, coupled with myriad ridiculous justifications and semantic acrobatics about how it's not really "stealing".
Okay... *maybe* (big maybe), the movie studios would consent to using BitTorrent to distribute movies for a charge. But is that really the *biggest* obstacle to distributing content on the web? Fact is, movies are already being distributed on the web at Amazon.com, and the studios are making a healthy profit. -a
A lower TCO for your customer means less money for you. And here's the big kicker, if you open source your code and expect to make money off of support, what is going to prevent other companies competing against you on support? Look at IBM and redhat, they make money off supporting OSS projects, but you can't say they are main developers of these OSS projects. Whats to stop redhat bundling your product and offering support for it?
Well, of course you can make money from OSS. It's just a matter of scale. Even Stallman admitted that the GPL will lead to fewer jobs and lower pay for engineers. But there's still going to be lots of work for sysadmins, and tech support.
On the other hand, companies like Trolltech are going to be few and far between. Most companies with big ambitions require VC funding to grow. It's not going to be easy to get VC funding for OSS. VC's assume that 90% of companies are going to fail, so for the 10% of them that make it big, they expect a huge ROE. OSS generally doesn't offer sufficient prospects to make the investment worthwhile.
You, sir, are correct. The developers I work "with" who never write comments (and in fact argue against them), are the same ones who believe that all code not written by them is a big kludge and needs to be rewritten, and they are also the same ones who are always introducing subtle flaws because they modify code without understanding all the consequences.
I also need to take issue with the submitter's comment that inaccurate documentation (or comments) is worse than none at all. At least a document/comment tells you what someone *thought* the code was supposed to do.
An incorrect comment is verifiably false. Once you discover that the code doesn't match the comment, you can make an educated guess about which one is correct. On the other hand, when you are faced with suspicious code and no comments at all, you typically have no idea whether the code is broken or whether you just don't understand what it was intended to do (or in many cases *both*).
But I was fully prepared to be fired for my windmill charge. That was a definite possibility. When the situation is intolerable however, what's left to lose? And you've everything to gain.
Quite a lot, actually. In poker they call it "pot odds".
E.g. Imagine this "hypothetical" situation: you work for a startup, where you have invested several years of work and accumulated many stock options. The company has been reasonably successful so far, but you have a feeling that it's going to self destruct in the next year or two. Basically, my boss is micromanaging the development process without having any basic knowledge of project management.
This situation (high risk, high reward) is great in your stock portfolio where you are properly diversified, but it is gut-wrenching when you're gambling with your career. Your head tells you to stay, but your heart tells you to get out. I was in this situation recently, and I basically took the same attitude as the OP. I became a troublemaker and tried to change things.. but it didn't work. My boss is now even more convinced that he is right (cognitive dissonance), and we are on worse terms socially.
Location. IIRC, the salary you get at Google isn't just based on what you do and how well you do it, but also on where you do it. Remember the story about the Google facility they were building in rural OR. $70k in the Pacific NW goes a long way - at least compared to $70k in South Cali.
I think you'd have to pay me more to live in rural OR.
Slashdot Mirror
Is arguing with a 17 necessarily a waste of time? And does open-mindedness increase with age? Both of these are rhetorical questions. The point being that the most people get less open-minded as they get older, and that its quite possible that a 12 year old could be one of the best possible debate partners while your supposed 40-year (guessing here) would be the worst.
Look... Arguing with *anyone* may very well turn out to be a waste of time. For any given individual, it depends on a lot of factors, and I certainly don't mean to imply that every 40 year old can hold an intelligent discussion. But statistically speaking, the chances of meeting a 10 year old with the life experience and critical thinking skills to have an intelligent discussion about something like politics is fairly insignificant.
-a
Oddly, all the things you list as negatives, I think of as positive. The Internet stops you knowing if the person talking is a minor? Good - maybe we shouldn't use our age to discount opinions.
Debating with a 25 year old about politics may or may not be a waste of time, depending on how smart & open-minded they are. However, arguing with a 10 year old about politics is always a waste of time.
-a
Uhh...
Log << "some message " << someObject << endl;
I like OO but is isn't great for every task. For instance, logging (which is the default example for AOP) is really bad in OO. This is because you have to add something like
Log.printLog("some message " + someObject.toString());
not:
Log "some message " someObject endl;
???
-a
People with masters/PHDs have been trained for research positions, not real-world work. If you want a job in the real world, then you're better off spending the same time getting real-world experience.
Yeah, pretty much.
Many people with PhDs may turn out to be good software architects in the long run. But fresh out of university, PhDs usually haven't spent a lot of time churning out code, and they lack experience in evaluating the engineering tradeoffs that are commonplace in real world situations. I'm certainly not going to take someone with that kind of skill set and then parachute them into a leadership position.
-a
I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.
I can tell you this... I've interviewed lots of guys who are coming out of university with a masters/PhD but no real-world work experience.
I can see the research work they did in university and it's always something very esoteric. I most certainly *do not* want them architecting major products.
-a
"He probably likes his product but does not believe its useful for everyone. This is why would he would be surprised to see a million downloads that soon."
This is obviously a load of crap. 600K downloads in 48 hours? How would he be surprised to see a million downloads soon?
Heh... one day after the story about PR firms, and we're still discussing this?
This is a friggin' press release for god's sake. The CEO is not surprised about anything. This whole outrageous statement was no doubt just a plan to stir up attention. And no guarantee that Opera didn't pay to have this story published in Slashdot anyway.
-a
There is a key difference - not between right and wrong, but between tactics.
/. zeitgeist has been opposed consistently to any attempt by the RIAA to accurately monitor who is violating their copyrights. Any time they try to get an ISP to release the name of a subscriber, the /. community is in an uproar.
But the RIAA collects coinicidental evidence for high volumes of people and, without nearly enough proof, accuses them all of breaking the law.
On the other hand, the
When the RIAA went after the P2P servicew, gnutella advocates bragged about how their algorithm was decentralized and anonymous so there would be no one to sue. There is a big focus on obfuscation. Why? Wait... wasn't obfuscation what Fortinet was accused of in the article?
-a
First of all RIAA are pimps going around bullying people and collecting money. That being said the intellectual property is not that of RIAA but actual artists most of whom don't even hold rights to their own creation
/. that the GPL is not anti-business. But on the other hand, your comment nicely sums up what seems to be the prevaling attitude here. I.e. that rules ought to be applied selectively, depending on whether you are a big evil corporation that cares about profit, or a crusading who has "profit being the last intent".
On the other hand GPL software is a creation of group of hard working individuals with profit being the last intent. In my books its completely differet.
I am always reading on
Sorry, but that sounds anti-business to me.
-a
So, he's also one of the copyright owners of initrd.
Which is kind of ironic, actually. Since Welte didn't write initrd - he just bought the copyright from someone else's. In a way, it makes him like the SCO of the free software world.
(Of course he didn't actually "buy" the copyright with real money. I guess he bought it with magic smoke, or whatever it is that fuels the economy of the free software world.)
-a
And so nothing is worth talking about until its already been done.
/., you'd think they each had a 30 year track of successfully predicting emerging business models.
Well, you might think that.
Of course it is appropriate to theorize. But to hear the masses pontificate on
-a
You sound like a creationist - "Well, I guess I have to admit that 'micro-evolution' really does happen, but there still no chance that 'real' evolution could ever be true!"
/. posters of sounding like a creationist before. :-)
As it happens, I am not a creationist. And like you, I have accused
But I'm glad you brought this up. Because while I certainly agree that micro-evolution happens, I don't believe that it is sufficient evidence for macro-evolution. And that ties in to what I said before about there being a difference between proving that something could happen and proving that it actually did happen.
Micro-evolution shows that species can change in small ways, and it also suggests that they can change in large ways. But there are still questions about the rate at which they can change. I believe in macro-evolution because of the combined effect of several sources of proof: micro-evolution, the fossil record, and lack of credibility of religious dogma. We don't know every detail about how it happens (e.g. punctuated equilibrium vs. steady change), but it is far more credible than any other theory.
Yah know, back in the days of Gutenberg, there were a whole lot of people that doubted that an author could actually write a book, or a composer write chamber music all on his own dime and then sell enough copies afterwards to make it worthwhile.
And at that time, you really couldn't. The fact that it was feasible several hundred years later didn't do those people very much good, did it?
-a
Lots of people say that X works, therefore X' should work as well. A large percentage of the time, they are wrong. That's the gist of it.
-a
It is precisely because of my personal experience doing commissioned work that I realized artists could do the same thing if they leveraged the internet to directly reach their customers rather than rely on the disintegrating business model of using (or really being used by) a distributor of physical goods.
Let me begin on a bit of a tangent and then connect it later.
The basic difference between math and physics is that math is based on a system in which any set of rules that are internally consistent are equally valid. Physics is a science in which many competing theories are internally consistent, but they are only valid if they describe the world in which we live.
So what have you done? You have claimed that most peoples' daily jobs are like a commission in that you are paid by someone to do work that they dictate. (I don't disagree with that, although I probably would have put it the other way - a commission is just a type of job, rather than vice-versa.)
But that's an example of an organized entity (a corporation) paying workers a substantial salary in an attempt to make a profit, subject to various legal restrictions. Going from that to having tens of thousands of people contributing small sums on the Internet involves changing several variables at once. It's just too much of a logical leap.
You didn't even mention recent Internet efforts to raise money to save Blender, Mandrake, ST:Enterprise, etc. that worked, to an extent. And hey, Howard Dean funded his political campaign with contributions from the Internet. But then again, he didn't win. Every cause is different. So whether this strategy can work for musicians doesn't seem clear to me. And whether it can work if thousands of other bands are using the same strategy is a further open question.
BTW, it's a logical fallacy to believe that just because a business model is "disintegrating" then the alternative must be better. Very often, an imperfect status quo is still preferable to all the alterantives.
-a
Make your own way.
Release your current work to the net with a Creative Commons license. Promote your live performances, sell doodads.
[and so on...]
So how much money have you made so far?
Or are you talking out your ass?
That's what I thought...
-a
You're paid to do it on company time, though. If you want to own it, do it on your own time and pick something else for company time.
Do you think that the average Google employee is expected to work an 8 hour day? What is your own time anyway? Probably, you just end up spending 8 hours a day on Google stuff and another 2 hours on personal stuff. You work unpaid overtime like everyone else, but at least you get to choose what to work on.
-a
This doesn't seem that counter-intuitive though...High viscosity liquids have a greater molecular attraction to one another than low viscosity liquids. They would therefore show a resistance to spreading out on the glass. Zzzzz...
I wouldn't say it's counter-intuitive at all. Higher viscosity fluids will make a bigger mess when they splash. Therefore, by Murphy's law, it's completely obvious that high viscosity fluids will be more likely to splash.
-a
"Like I said, If Daimaou wrote the code prior to the IP agreement than the code isn't his to release to the company. The GPL license holders own it."
I see you've bought the "GPL is viral" FUD. Daimaou's code is Daimaou's code. It may be non-functional without the surrounding GPL code, but it's his none the less.
Sounds like his company wants an *exclusive* right to the code. Sure, he can transfer his token copyright of the GPL'ed code to the company, but outside of the OSS world, that's not really considered ownership.
BTW, "GPL is viral" is FUD? Sure it's not viral if you use it for personal use, but it becomes viral as soon as you try to distribute it.
-a
"It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web."
Well, at least someone realizes this, instead of tacitly - or overtly - arguing that it's okay for them to be unabashedly ripped off, coupled with myriad ridiculous justifications and semantic acrobatics about how it's not really "stealing".
Okay... *maybe* (big maybe), the movie studios would consent to using BitTorrent to distribute movies for a charge. But is that really the *biggest* obstacle to distributing content on the web? Fact is, movies are already being distributed on the web at Amazon.com, and the studios are making a healthy profit.
-a
A lower TCO for your customer means less money for you. And here's the big kicker, if you open source your code and expect to make money off of support, what is going to prevent other companies competing against you on support? Look at IBM and redhat, they make money off supporting OSS projects, but you can't say they are main developers of these OSS projects. Whats to stop redhat bundling your product and offering support for it?
Well, of course you can make money from OSS. It's just a matter of scale. Even Stallman admitted that the GPL will lead to fewer jobs and lower pay for engineers. But there's still going to be lots of work for sysadmins, and tech support.
On the other hand, companies like Trolltech are going to be few and far between. Most companies with big ambitions require VC funding to grow. It's not going to be easy to get VC funding for OSS. VC's assume that 90% of companies are going to fail, so for the 10% of them that make it big, they expect a huge ROE. OSS generally doesn't offer sufficient prospects to make the investment worthwhile.
-a
ALL code NEEDS commenting at ALL times.
You, sir, are correct. The developers I work "with" who never write comments (and in fact argue against them), are the same ones who believe that all code not written by them is a big kludge and needs to be rewritten, and they are also the same ones who are always introducing subtle flaws because they modify code without understanding all the consequences.
I also need to take issue with the submitter's comment that inaccurate documentation (or comments) is worse than none at all. At least a document/comment tells you what someone *thought* the code was supposed to do.
An incorrect comment is verifiably false. Once you discover that the code doesn't match the comment, you can make an educated guess about which one is correct. On the other hand, when you are faced with suspicious code and no comments at all, you typically have no idea whether the code is broken or whether you just don't understand what it was intended to do (or in many cases *both*).
-a
But I was fully prepared to be fired for my windmill charge. That was a definite possibility. When the situation is intolerable however, what's left to lose? And you've everything to gain.
Quite a lot, actually. In poker they call it "pot odds".
E.g. Imagine this "hypothetical" situation: you work for a startup, where you have invested several years of work and accumulated many stock options. The company has been reasonably successful so far, but you have a feeling that it's going to self destruct in the next year or two. Basically, my boss is micromanaging the development process without having any basic knowledge of project management.
This situation (high risk, high reward) is great in your stock portfolio where you are properly diversified, but it is gut-wrenching when you're gambling with your career. Your head tells you to stay, but your heart tells you to get out. I was in this situation recently, and I basically took the same attitude as the OP. I became a troublemaker and tried to change things.. but it didn't work. My boss is now even more convinced that he is right (cognitive dissonance), and we are on worse terms socially.
-a
Location. IIRC, the salary you get at Google isn't just based on what you do and how well you do it, but also on where you do it. Remember the story about the Google facility they were building in rural OR. $70k in the Pacific NW goes a long way - at least compared to $70k in South Cali.
I think you'd have to pay me more to live in rural OR.
-a
Just think, if this was CBS the someone would probably be forced to resign over this story.
-a
No. It's more like:
...
// Y = ceil(sqrt(X*100))
#define MAX_ENTRIES 10 (in a system header file)
const int entriesAllowed = MAX_ENTRIES;
Anyway, your example breaks down for anything more complicated than simple integer math.
#define X 50
#define Y 71
-a