Re:The same trend for the whole PC infrastructure
on
The Last GUADEC?
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· Score: 1
Looking at Gnome and GTK as an Example for them going extinct specifically is pretty stupid. You see declining trends for microsoft, dell and KDE as well while playing with Google Trends.
Indeed, it's not like Microsoft, KDE or Dell are declining, it is imposs
"The day Linux will have Windows marketshare, it will also have botnets".
Maybe. But, until that day, use Linux. Currently, you have *a lot* less chances to be infected on a Linux computer. When it will change (if it changes someday), we will reconsider the situation.
Using a broken system for the sole reason that the proposed replacement might be broken too in the future is, at best, stupid.
That's highly annoying. Even more if this is a web proxy password and that, each month, you have to change the proxy password for every f*** application that connect to the web (That Windows OS is really really bad).
2) of course, they won't change. So consider : what will you loose if you password is corrupted ? Nothing personal. Only stuffs from the company that didn't want to hear you. Should you have a more complicated life because they are too dumb ?
3) if the answer is no, simply change your password to : yearmonth. That makes it : january2010. Easy to remember and will change all the time.
4) Share the tip with your collegues. Anyway, they should have access to my files, you are working together, isn't it ? Guess what ? Most thought it's a good idea and do the same.
Result : easier work for everybody. Security ? You tried to improve it, you were not listened. That's their problem now.
PS: of course, be careful to analyse what you are sharing and what are the risk. I will never do that for my personal stuffs.
PPS: even better solution. Try to think about systems that cannot change their password, like the backup system. Usually, that login/password has access to everything in the company, doesn't change and is really easy to find if you know where to look. (and is, 99%, something like "permanent_pass" or "autologin"). That's make your life even more easier.
Harry Potter is not complete fiction : this is the story of a teenager who loose his parents and has a bad time. It happens. It's true.
Statistically, the probability of having a book that is 100% false, 100% pure non-sense is really low. Maybe the Voynich manuscript try to address this, just like David Lynch did for movies. So, of course, some parts of the Bible are not complete fiction.
You are implying that lawyers are part of the so-called "humans". While it's evident that religious zealots, dictators, maniacs, economists and murderers are humans, I'm still not convinced about lawyers and all my experience seems to prove that they are not.
indeed, I had the same feeling since a few months. What I find completely astonishing is the "no blog" policy.
I'm not a real wikipedia contributor but, sometimes, I correct a mistake or add an information I know. In the recent months, nearly all my edits were reverted because of "no source". And when I add a source, it's often a blog and deleted as "not acceptable, it's a blog". Worst : all blog references are now purchased and deleted. I was recently reading the french entry about freediving. For months, the external links section contained a few links to very interesting blogs about the subjet. I was really happy to find them and I would not have discovered them without wikipedia. Last week, I discovered than one link was dead so I removed it : immediatly after, an editor removed all the links with the comment "no blogs allowed". The article doesn't have an external links section anymore. What's the benefit of thatÂ???
There's also the "notability" problem. Sometimes, when I look for something and don't find a page, I start it, putting the raw information IÂhave. So far it has always been deleted because "it was not notable" enough. I agree that it's often specialized and, if you are not interested by the subject, you might not knowing it. As an answer, I will provide links to articles speaking about the subject, links of blog created specifically for that matter. But no, those are blogs so it means the subject is not important enough. I even saw twice that I was not the first to try to create a given page. I know that it's specialized but Wikipedia even has pages for Porn actor !
In the end, I don't contribute anymore to wikipedia because : 1) It will be deleted anyway 2) It will raise the page I'm editing under the "veteran editor" radar and they will likely delete stuffs on that page or even remove the page completely (yes, it happened to me that the page I contributed after finding it was removed because "non notable" after my edit).
On the other hand, pages that haven't been touched since the 2007 golden era are pretty safe. Out-of-date, maybe, but at least safe.
There's no need to judge TPB on a moral ground. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad".
It's just that your way of getting money is becoming obsolete. Just like candles manufacturers who fighted electricity, you are not relevant anymore in the current world.
Don't take me bad : you are right to do as much money as you can right now. But you must stay realistic : it won't stay like that forever :
1) A free software equivalent of your softwares might be created.
2) A big proprietary monopolistic vendor might do a software with the same features for half the price.
So, whatever you are doing, you know that it's a short term gain.
Now, let analyse your situation with your software being on TPB. Have you any evidence that it makes you loose money ?
If I told you that : - 90% of people downloading your softwares would have never bought it anyway. - 8% of those people weren't sure about your software and would have never bought it but after using the pirated version for more than one year, they choosed to buy an official version because "hey, it worth it". - 2% of people wanted to buy the official version and stayed with the cracked one.
In this example, having your soft on TPB was a profit increase for you !
So please, just stop thinking with your guts and start using your brain. You have no evidence that file-sharing is bad for you. Not at all. Just an intuition driven by the music/software industry propganda.
Also, you know that it can't be stopped. It's an evolution. You can maybe make it a little slower (that's what RIAA is trying to do) but it will never be stopped. So, instead of crying, trying to slow evolution at all cost (conservative position), why not trying to take advantage of the future ?
"but that things follow mathematical laws so exactly. It's no wonder that no one twigged to this fact for so long"
It's not the universe that follows the mathematical rules. It's the mathematics that were designed to explain the universe. So of course it's wonderful how the mathematics are so fine-tuned to match the universe : that's why they exist in the first place !
Isn't it incredible that all falling apples are following Newton's law ?
Maybe Pessulus and Sabayon are not perfect for the poster needs (I never tried them) but the fact that they were not even mentionned in the article is the proof that the poster didn't even bothered to look for an alternative.
The fact that he talks about using "gconf" to lockdown stations makes me doubt a lot about his Linux admin capabilities.
Also, I believe that a migration to Linux done by admin who don't understand Linux as well as Windows will do more harm than good to the Linux perception.
So it's just another post : "OMG,Linux sucks because softwares on Linux don't have the same name as they have on Windows and that I will have to look for them on google but I'm tired."
But the/. crowd is not better because all they can reply is : "What do you want to do ? Lockdown ? You don't want to do that !".
It is stated that the "Fat_Gourg" has a fan club of thousands of people in France.
The fact is that the fact gourg started as a running joke on a website/forum after someone found this picture online. The game, between approximately 20 people, was to found the author of the picture. One of those 20 people was a regular wikipedia editor with a good record and created this page with false statement like "Thousand of people".
Ultimately, the fat gourg joke came to a journalist in UK who interviewed someone on the forum which, of course, putted some exageration and emphasis in his description. The journalist then wrote an article saying that "it was an huge phenomemon in France followed by thousands of people". This artcile was followed by a very small television reportage in the school of the child who drawed the Fat Gourg.
The article was then added as a source on Wikipedia.
I tried two or three times to correct that page but : - a (otherwise) respected wikipedia editor which is part of the joke always undo my changes - my version is now in conflict with all of the sources in the article (which are, in fact, comming from one and only one person)
So I look like a liar because Wikipedian the television and newspapers say something but, ultimately, nobody in France know about the Fat Gourg except a few tenth of people on a forum.
And yes, I feel that something is bad but I have no real solution.
1) There's no scientific theory that would explain that our "spirit" still live after our death. At the opposite, we can easily conceive that our "spirit" (or soul or personnality or whatever you called it) use our brain as an hardware support and that destroying the hardware also destroy the spirtir/soul/...
2) There're are no fact that could lead us to think after-life exists (from a scientifical point of view)
3) There are no facts that could be explained in an easier way if we admit the existence of an after-life. Instead, it makes things a lot more complicated.
Any logical mind would infer that after-life do not exist (or has little chance to do) from one of those 3 points. So the 3 points together make it highly logical that we just die with our body.
I know that some will invoke traditions and culture, telling that, if people believe it or even have evidence, it might be true. Yeah, sure. Same apply for Little tooth fairy, santa claus, UFOs and God.
Yes because gurus should be able to learn new things.
The problem with proprietary solutions is not the cost : it's that you are tight by the balls !
If you have Oracle Gurus and you don't want to switch because of that, your gurus will become even more expert in Oracle only and you will hire only Oracle gurus making the situation even worse regarding an eventual migration.
You must always keep in mind that the question is not "Will the migration happen" but "When will it happen".
If you choose it deliberately, at least you have time, you can prepare, you can choose the best moment for it.
If not, you are just playing with fire and waiting for one of : - Oracle change the licensing scheme for one that you cannot afford - Oracle just declares bankrupcy (don't say it will never happen and look for examples of company that were "too big to fail") - Oracle new version remove a feature that is essential to your business - Oracle drop support for the version essential to your business -
Of course those problem could happen with a free software product but : 1) There's a fairly good chance that the community could handle, at least for some time, a lot of the support 2) You can choose to support it yourself for your internal use and to correct/add what you need
In the worst case, it gives you a lot more time to prepare a migration and it makes your business solid and not "one-product-only" dependant.
1) Think it would be cool to have a walking robot
2) Thinking about a method to build a walking robot
3) Studying the physics behind the mechanism of a walking robot.
4) Call this a new field of science : "Walking mechanics".
5) Publish some papers about "Walking mechanics"
6) Make a conference with the experts of "Walking mechanics".
7) Try to make it popular to the public so you get fund. It's called vulgarisation.
8) Discover that, in order to further develop "Walking mechanics", you have to develop "Walking automation".
9) Repeat steps 4 t 8 for Walking automation
10) Repeat step 4 to 8 for "Walking sensors"
11) Try to generalize
12) Repeat step 4 to 8 for "Automation of movable devices"
13) repeat step 4 to 8 for "Transfer mathematics"
14) Abstract all your classes and use design patterns
15) Wait... forget 14, it's part of something else
16) Forget about robots and develop science for the sake of science
17) Get asked by a young child about a walking robot
18) Explain to the public/young child how the development of your "Field quantum mathematic" theory could allow us to have walking robots as soon as 2045
No building a walking robot, the Wu's way :
1) Think it would be cool to have a walking robot
2) Put together a few electric motors and some gears
3) Paint your walking robot according to your preference
4) Enjoy...
So obviously, his robot sucks, the guy doesn't know nothing about sensors, feedback loop.
And *it is* the machine's fault. Or the designer's fault.
Since when is a PhD in Computer Science needed to register a vote ?
If it was easy to cast a vote with a pencil and a paper and now it's not that easy, then *it is* machine fault.
Anyway, even with the best machine you could think of, the fact that some people could go out of the voting room without being sure for who they voted is a non-go for the electronic voting. As long as you don't have the insurance that your vote was well registered and that it will be counted in this way, electronic voting are a non go. (They are also other problems like secrecy but it's not related)
That's a very good point that also applies to bzr.
(I personnaly use bzr and I've never used git but I think that most bzr functionnalities are available in git).
I use bzr over svn because when I start a project, I don't have to create (or have) a server, I don't have to make a complicated import. I just go in the folder and type "bzr init". VoilÃ, my project is under bzr.
I use bzr because I can commit even when I'm offline and I'm not afraid of small untested commits because they are local. It's really a lot more confortable.
I use bzr because if I want to test something on an existing project, I know that branching and merging will be trivial. By comparison, just look at how many pages the branching chapter of the subversion book has.
I use bzr because I cannot use svn without breaking my local folder every week. I very often delete and rename file with using the svn command. I move a complete folder and, poof, all is broken. It takes a lot of time to repaire. Most of the time, I end by doing a new checkout and manually copying the modified files in the new checkout. When it happens, I hate subversion. Really. I also cannot recommand svn for non geek users. Bzr simply works and I never had any problem like that.
Finally, I use bzr because I don't care about my VCS, I just use it. Bzr is still young. The documentation is far from perfect. Using it is easing but advanced stuff like setting a shared server over Apache are still not well documented and not features complete but, still, if you take a few days/weeks to learn it then to use it, you will wonder how you have been doing before. Really
But anyway, even if you can honnestly say you would never have thought of that, there are thousand of people who will have. Because they face the same problem and basically have the same culture/background/education.
The problem is even more subtle because, yeah, we are against "bad" patents but not against "good" patents (think "non-software"). But this is a bit stupid because any software method can be implemented in hardware. You invented a new lightbuld ? Fine, but if you never really make it, you only did a simulation on your computer as a proof of concept, is your lightbulb software or hardware ?
In fact, the "software" patent case is only the tip of the iceberg. With software patent, it is obvious that something is wrong. And then, we have the wrong conclusion that "software is not patentable".
This is not the case at all. The whole "first-to-get-its-paper-in-the-patent-office-win" process is wrong. All patents made a completely wrong assumption : if you do something as described in a patent, you are infringing this patent. This has nothing to do with software or not software.
And it is very simple to fix : enforce that anyone attacking someone else for patent infrigement should bring the proof that this someone else could not have done what he had done without reading the patent/reverse engineer your product/spy your documents. Just do that and you will discover that software patents are perfectly acceptable. It would means that you would not be able anymore to infringe a patent without even knowing that someone else patented it before. How can EvilCompany attacks you and bring the proof that you copied the ObviousMethod by looking at their product when everybody can think about ObviousMethod. Also, it still leave patent very useful for non-obvious thing (like drug industry, advanced design,...).
Unfortunatly, I'm observing that companies do not even see what they are doing with patent. They are all trying to patent whatever can be patented. I see with my own eyes that the money spend just to read other patents is huge. Patenting need to be outsourced and cost a lot more money than anything else but is seen as the only way to make money in the future. Having a good idea : from one day to a few weeks Implementing a prototype of this idea : from 6 months to 1 year Patenting the idea : 1 year of non full time work for the inventor but also for 2-3 people and for an outsourcing company
Unfortunatly, patent is also a visible output. Management often cannot understand something else from their R&D department. The department must produce X patents each year.
And because they always lived like that, you cannot even try to tell them you disagree. It's too deep in the culture, like a religion.
I've build my own "invisible" captcha mechanism :
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?150-the-invisible-captcha-mechanism-icm-against-form-spam
And in 2 years, it was so efficient that I almost completely forgot the existence of spam on my blog. And nobody ever complained about a false positive.
The only drawback I see is that if you write a script to attack me now, it could work well and spam me for one day before my captcha block it.
If you started to watch Nasa's video streaming on a PDP-11, I will agree that you are not a newbie and I will welcome our new w32codec overlord !
If not, your rant is just useless. Do you imagine the Wright brothers getting into an Airbus A380 or a F22 raptor and saying : "We invented the airplane, we are not newbie, if we cannot pilot this plane then this plane has a problem"
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at Gnome and GTK as an Example for them going extinct specifically is pretty stupid. You see declining trends for microsoft, dell and KDE as well while playing with Google Trends.
Indeed, it's not like Microsoft, KDE or Dell are declining, it is imposs
Oh, wait!
Am I the only one shocked by the fact that the whole rhetoric here cannot even imagine that the husband would stay at home and the wife would work?
What the hell, people ? It's XXIst century !
Exactly.
"The day Linux will have Windows marketshare, it will also have botnets".
Maybe. But, until that day, use Linux. Currently, you have *a lot* less chances to be infected on a Linux computer. When it will change (if it changes someday), we will reconsider the situation.
Using a broken system for the sole reason that the proposed replacement might be broken too in the future is, at best, stupid.
That's highly annoying. Even more if this is a web proxy password and that, each month, you have to change the proxy password for every f*** application that connect to the web (That Windows OS is really really bad).
I took another approach :
1) informing the computer dpt that it's a very bad idea. Here are some links:
http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/password-change-myths/
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/images/dilbert.png
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?177-le-gilet-de-sauvetage-et-le-tgv (in french)
2) of course, they won't change. So consider : what will you loose if you password is corrupted ? Nothing personal. Only stuffs from the company that didn't want to hear you. Should you have a more complicated life because they are too dumb ?
3) if the answer is no, simply change your password to :
yearmonth. That makes it : january2010. Easy to remember and will change all the time.
4) Share the tip with your collegues. Anyway, they should have access to my files, you are working together, isn't it ? Guess what ? Most thought it's a good idea and do the same.
Result : easier work for everybody.
Security ? You tried to improve it, you were not listened. That's their problem now.
PS: of course, be careful to analyse what you are sharing and what are the risk. I will never do that for my personal stuffs.
PPS: even better solution. Try to think about systems that cannot change their password, like the backup system. Usually, that login/password has access to everything in the company, doesn't change and is really easy to find if you know where to look. (and is, 99%, something like "permanent_pass" or "autologin"). That's make your life even more easier.
I really like the fact that Benjamin Mako Hill call that "antifeatures" :http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20090624-00
A great great way to explain the problem.
See also the DRMequation:http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?145-do-i-have-to-protect-my-content-with-drm-the-drm-equation
That's why I'm moderately excessive and I piss on all those excessively moderated bastard.
Harry Potter is not complete fiction : this is the story of a teenager who loose his parents and has a bad time. It happens. It's true.
Statistically, the probability of having a book that is 100% false, 100% pure non-sense is really low. Maybe the Voynich manuscript try to address this, just like David Lynch did for movies. So, of course, some parts of the Bible are not complete fiction.
And then? What is the conclusion?
You are implying that lawyers are part of the so-called "humans". While it's evident that religious zealots, dictators, maniacs, economists and murderers are humans, I'm still not convinced about lawyers and all my experience seems to prove that they are not.
indeed, I had the same feeling since a few months. What I find completely astonishing is the "no blog" policy.
I'm not a real wikipedia contributor but, sometimes, I correct a mistake or add an information I know. In the recent months, nearly all my edits were reverted because of "no source". And when I add a source, it's often a blog and deleted as "not acceptable, it's a blog". Worst : all blog references are now purchased and deleted. I was recently reading the french entry about freediving. For months, the external links section contained a few links to very interesting blogs about the subjet. I was really happy to find them and I would not have discovered them without wikipedia. Last week, I discovered than one link was dead so I removed it : immediatly after, an editor removed all the links with the comment "no blogs allowed". The article doesn't have an external links section anymore. What's the benefit of thatÂ???
There's also the "notability" problem.
Sometimes, when I look for something and don't find a page, I start it, putting the raw information IÂhave. So far it has always been deleted because "it was not notable" enough. I agree that it's often specialized and, if you are not interested by the subject, you might not knowing it. As an answer, I will provide links to articles speaking about the subject, links of blog created specifically for that matter. But no, those are blogs so it means the subject is not important enough. I even saw twice that I was not the first to try to create a given page. I know that it's specialized but Wikipedia even has pages for Porn actor !
In the end, I don't contribute anymore to wikipedia because :
1) It will be deleted anyway
2) It will raise the page I'm editing under the "veteran editor" radar and they will likely delete stuffs on that page or even remove the page completely (yes, it happened to me that the page I contributed after finding it was removed because "non notable" after my edit).
On the other hand, pages that haven't been touched since the 2007 golden era are pretty safe. Out-of-date, maybe, but at least safe.
"You're not just a sitting duck, y'know?"
You must be new hereâ¦
There's no need to judge TPB on a moral ground. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad".
It's just that your way of getting money is becoming obsolete. Just like candles manufacturers who fighted electricity, you are not relevant anymore in the current world.
Don't take me bad : you are right to do as much money as you can right now. But you must stay realistic : it won't stay like that forever :
1) A free software equivalent of your softwares might be created.
2) A big proprietary monopolistic vendor might do a software with the same features for half the price.
So, whatever you are doing, you know that it's a short term gain.
Now, let analyse your situation with your software being on TPB. Have you any evidence that it makes you loose money ?
If I told you that :
- 90% of people downloading your softwares would have never bought it anyway.
- 8% of those people weren't sure about your software and would have never bought it but after using the pirated version for more than one year, they choosed to buy an official version because "hey, it worth it".
- 2% of people wanted to buy the official version and stayed with the cracked one.
In this example, having your soft on TPB was a profit increase for you !
So please, just stop thinking with your guts and start using your brain. You have no evidence that file-sharing is bad for you. Not at all. Just an intuition driven by the music/software industry propganda.
Also, you know that it can't be stopped. It's an evolution. You can maybe make it a little slower (that's what RIAA is trying to do) but it will never be stopped. So, instead of crying, trying to slow evolution at all cost (conservative position), why not trying to take advantage of the future ?
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?145-do-i-have-to-protect-my-content-with-drm-the-drm-equation
"but that things follow mathematical laws so exactly. It's no wonder that no one twigged to this fact for so long"
It's not the universe that follows the mathematical rules. It's the mathematics that were designed to explain the universe. So of course it's wonderful how the mathematics are so fine-tuned to match the universe : that's why they exist in the first place !
Isn't it incredible that all falling apples are following Newton's law ?
Or, easier explanation : those who are very afraid to die are more likely to look for consolation in the religion and then to try to live longer.
So it's not a relation :
Pious -> Wants life-prolonging care
It's more :
X -> Pious and X -> Wants life-prolonging care
And I think (but that's my opinion) that X could be "Really afraid to die because feel bad with life")
There it is ! That's my stappler. I told them..that I wanted my stappler. I will not change my desk anymore.
Maybe Pessulus and Sabayon are not perfect for the poster needs (I never tried them) but the fact that they were not even mentionned in the article is the proof that the poster didn't even bothered to look for an alternative.
The fact that he talks about using "gconf" to lockdown stations makes me doubt a lot about his Linux admin capabilities.
Also, I believe that a migration to Linux done by admin who don't understand Linux as well as Windows will do more harm than good to the Linux perception.
So it's just another post : "OMG,Linux sucks because softwares on Linux don't have the same name as they have on Windows and that I will have to look for them on google but I'm tired."
But the /. crowd is not better because all they can reply is : "What do you want to do ? Lockdown ? You don't want to do that !".
Wikipedia-fr is already affected from a long time in this article :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Gourg
It is stated that the "Fat_Gourg" has a fan club of thousands of people in France.
The fact is that the fact gourg started as a running joke on a website/forum after someone found this picture online. The game, between approximately 20 people, was to found the author of the picture. One of those 20 people was a regular wikipedia editor with a good record and created this page with false statement like "Thousand of people".
Ultimately, the fat gourg joke came to a journalist in UK who interviewed someone on the forum which, of course, putted some exageration and emphasis in his description. The journalist then wrote an article saying that "it was an huge phenomemon in France followed by thousands of people". This artcile was followed by a very small television reportage in the school of the child who drawed the Fat Gourg.
The article was then added as a source on Wikipedia.
I tried two or three times to correct that page but :
- a (otherwise) respected wikipedia editor which is part of the joke always undo my changes
- my version is now in conflict with all of the sources in the article (which are, in fact, comming from one and only one person)
So I look like a liar because Wikipedian the television and newspapers say something but, ultimately, nobody in France know about the Fat Gourg except a few tenth of people on a forum.
And yes, I feel that something is bad but I have no real solution.
Simple scientific procedure :
1) There's no scientific theory that would explain that our "spirit" still live after our death. At the opposite, we can easily conceive that our "spirit" (or soul or personnality or whatever you called it) use our brain as an hardware support and that destroying the hardware also destroy the spirtir/soul/...
2) There're are no fact that could lead us to think after-life exists (from a scientifical point of view)
3) There are no facts that could be explained in an easier way if we admit the existence of an after-life. Instead, it makes things a lot more complicated.
Any logical mind would infer that after-life do not exist (or has little chance to do) from one of those 3 points. So the 3 points together make it highly logical that we just die with our body.
I know that some will invoke traditions and culture, telling that, if people believe it or even have evidence, it might be true. Yeah, sure. Same apply for Little tooth fairy, santa claus, UFOs and God.
Yes because gurus should be able to learn new things.
The problem with proprietary solutions is not the cost : it's that you are tight by the balls !
If you have Oracle Gurus and you don't want to switch because of that, your gurus will become even more expert in Oracle only and you will hire only Oracle gurus making the situation even worse regarding an eventual migration.
You must always keep in mind that the question is not "Will the migration happen" but "When will it happen".
If you choose it deliberately, at least you have time, you can prepare, you can choose the best moment for it.
If not, you are just playing with fire and waiting for one of :
- Oracle change the licensing scheme for one that you cannot afford
- Oracle just declares bankrupcy (don't say it will never happen and look for examples of company that were "too big to fail")
- Oracle new version remove a feature that is essential to your business
- Oracle drop support for the version essential to your business
-
Of course those problem could happen with a free software product but :
1) There's a fairly good chance that the community could handle, at least for some time, a lot of the support
2) You can choose to support it yourself for your internal use and to correct/add what you need
In the worst case, it gives you a lot more time to prepare a migration and it makes your business solid and not "one-product-only" dependant.
Building a walking robot, the western way :
1) Think it would be cool to have a walking robot 2) Thinking about a method to build a walking robot 3) Studying the physics behind the mechanism of a walking robot. 4) Call this a new field of science : "Walking mechanics". 5) Publish some papers about "Walking mechanics" 6) Make a conference with the experts of "Walking mechanics". 7) Try to make it popular to the public so you get fund. It's called vulgarisation. 8) Discover that, in order to further develop "Walking mechanics", you have to develop "Walking automation". 9) Repeat steps 4 t 8 for Walking automation 10) Repeat step 4 to 8 for "Walking sensors" 11) Try to generalize 12) Repeat step 4 to 8 for "Automation of movable devices" 13) repeat step 4 to 8 for "Transfer mathematics" 14) Abstract all your classes and use design patterns 15) Wait... forget 14, it's part of something else 16) Forget about robots and develop science for the sake of science 17) Get asked by a young child about a walking robot 18) Explain to the public/young child how the development of your "Field quantum mathematic" theory could allow us to have walking robots as soon as 2045
No building a walking robot, the Wu's way :
1) Think it would be cool to have a walking robot 2) Put together a few electric motors and some gears 3) Paint your walking robot according to your preference 4) Enjoy ...
So obviously, his robot sucks, the guy doesn't know nothing about sensors, feedback loop.
And *it is* the machine's fault. Or the designer's fault.
Since when is a PhD in Computer Science needed to register a vote ?
If it was easy to cast a vote with a pencil and a paper and now it's not that easy, then *it is* machine fault.
Anyway, even with the best machine you could think of, the fact that some people could go out of the voting room without being sure for who they voted is a non-go for the electronic voting. As long as you don't have the insurance that your vote was well registered and that it will be counted in this way, electronic voting are a non go. (They are also other problems like secrecy but it's not related)
That's a very good point that also applies to bzr.
(I personnaly use bzr and I've never used git but I think that most bzr functionnalities are available in git).
I use bzr over svn because when I start a project, I don't have to create (or have) a server, I don't have to make a complicated import. I just go in the folder and type "bzr init". VoilÃ, my project is under bzr.
I use bzr because I can commit even when I'm offline and I'm not afraid of small untested commits because they are local. It's really a lot more confortable.
I use bzr because if I want to test something on an existing project, I know that branching and merging will be trivial. By comparison, just look at how many pages the branching chapter of the subversion book has.
I use bzr because I cannot use svn without breaking my local folder every week. I very often delete and rename file with using the svn command. I move a complete folder and, poof, all is broken. It takes a lot of time to repaire. Most of the time, I end by doing a new checkout and manually copying the modified files in the new checkout. When it happens, I hate subversion. Really. I also cannot recommand svn for non geek users. Bzr simply works and I never had any problem like that.
Finally, I use bzr because I don't care about my VCS, I just use it. Bzr is still young. The documentation is far from perfect. Using it is easing but advanced stuff like setting a shared server over Apache are still not well documented and not features complete but, still, if you take a few days/weeks to learn it then to use it, you will wonder how you have been doing before. Really
But anyway, even if you can honnestly say you would never have thought of that, there are thousand of people who will have. Because they face the same problem and basically have the same culture/background/education.
The problem is even more subtle because, yeah, we are against "bad" patents but not against "good" patents (think "non-software"). But this is a bit stupid because any software method can be implemented in hardware. You invented a new lightbuld ? Fine, but if you never really make it, you only did a simulation on your computer as a proof of concept, is your lightbulb software or hardware ?
In fact, the "software" patent case is only the tip of the iceberg. With software patent, it is obvious that something is wrong. And then, we have the wrong conclusion that "software is not patentable".
This is not the case at all. The whole "first-to-get-its-paper-in-the-patent-office-win" process is wrong. All patents made a completely wrong assumption : if you do something as described in a patent, you are infringing this patent. This has nothing to do with software or not software.
And it is very simple to fix : enforce that anyone attacking someone else for patent infrigement should bring the proof that this someone else could not have done what he had done without reading the patent/reverse engineer your product/spy your documents. Just do that and you will discover that software patents are perfectly acceptable. It would means that you would not be able anymore to infringe a patent without even knowing that someone else patented it before. How can EvilCompany attacks you and bring the proof that you copied the ObviousMethod by looking at their product when everybody can think about ObviousMethod. Also, it still leave patent very useful for non-obvious thing (like drug industry, advanced design, ...).
Unfortunatly, I'm observing that companies do not even see what they are doing with patent. They are all trying to patent whatever can be patented. I see with my own eyes that the money spend just to read other patents is huge. Patenting need to be outsourced and cost a lot more money than anything else but is seen as the only way to make money in the future.
Having a good idea : from one day to a few weeks
Implementing a prototype of this idea : from 6 months to 1 year
Patenting the idea : 1 year of non full time work for the inventor but also for 2-3 people and for an outsourcing company
Unfortunatly, patent is also a visible output. Management often cannot understand something else from their R&D department. The department must produce X patents each year.
And because they always lived like that, you cannot even try to tell them you disagree. It's too deep in the culture, like a religion.
I've build my own "invisible" captcha mechanism : http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?150-the-invisible-captcha-mechanism-icm-against-form-spam And in 2 years, it was so efficient that I almost completely forgot the existence of spam on my blog. And nobody ever complained about a false positive. The only drawback I see is that if you write a script to attack me now, it could work well and spam me for one day before my captcha block it.
Firstly, they must see if they will make profit with DRM. See the DRM equation for this :
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?145-do-i-have-to-protect-my-content-with-drm-the-drm-equation
If you started to watch Nasa's video streaming on a PDP-11, I will agree that you are not a newbie and I will welcome our new w32codec overlord !
If not, your rant is just useless. Do you imagine the Wright brothers getting into an Airbus A380 or a F22 raptor and saying : "We invented the airplane, we are not newbie, if we cannot pilot this plane then this plane has a problem"