There is an online gaming forum that I use; it has all kinds of interesting content provided by the members and the owner of the site (who is also a gammer himself). It uses no advertising to fund the site. Recently there has been discussion about how to continue funding the site because of shortfalls.
In the past someone always came through and donated the needed funds. In the current economic climate, that is not happening - so the owner is considering various options for funding from the user community.
The site costs about $3000 per year for the network connectivity and to maintain in a datacenter environment - someone has to pay for it. The owner doesn't have the cash to eat the costs not covered by the anonymous doners.
The owner asked for input from the users to determine how best to handle it, and several options were put forward:
1. Set up a paypal account for the site, and ask for donations from the users - have a 'counter' that shows how much of the total yearly bill is left to pay. 2. Charge membership dues - with 300 users - each person would pay $10. 3. Bring in advertising (with only 300 users - that is probably not a viable solution).
The point is someone has to pay - particularly if the site in question grows beyond the capacity of a single person to maintain out-of-pocket.
The upshot of all this is there is certainly truth in the phrase "patience is a virtue".
It is much better to keep control of your own operations and grow slowly, than to become beholden to VCs - who will more than likely take over and destroy your hard work.
The issues you bring up point to a major issue with I have with developers:
By and large they do not understand how to apply the KISS principle to their design and implementation problem.
In some respects it might be an artform - because understanding how to simplify something that is very complex is very difficult. Nevertheless if you approach the original problem with that in mind you can minimize the effort in maintaining an understanding of the state (possible paths/interactions) of your application in your head and thus refactor your code with ease.
Know thyself; work within your own limitations. This makes deployment faster, iterative deployment possible, and testing more efficient.
Every wizard I have met was a master at the art of simplifying the complex.
I write seperate functional specifications. If the implementation requires new machines and installation by our operations department, then I might do a presentation showing why we need it, and how to hook it up (for most things this is pretty much standard boilerplate) - and perhaps how to pay for it in an appendix to the spec.
The software design documentation is in the code in the form of a detailed comment at the begining of the main code module explaining my design choices for each piece. I like to use languages, such as Perl, that allow me to format and extract documentation directly from my source code. I also like it to be inside of the code so I can make changes to my documentation at the same time that I make changes to the code. This is much more efficient for me - things don't get lost in the shuffle.
Going forward my goal is to generate XML documentation for not only the design document, but also the user manual, and other documentation from the same source code. I'll have a makefile sitting in my revision control archive that will generate all of my documentation for all apps in one command. BAM! I'm done, and can then read and edit my docs at my leisure.
The hard part is getting everyone else who touches my code to follow the same procedures.
We have to justify any exceptions to our security policy.
By their nature the security guys want everything tight as a drum. On the other hand the realities of running applications (some of which may be 20 years old) makes it cost prohibitive to make global changes.
For example the security gurus banned FTP. However we had old code that depended upon FTP, and would have cost too much to modify to use other alternatives (sftp etc..). You could justify these sorts of exceptions based upon the needs of the business - in this case the need not to break the budget. To ameliorate the problem we do routing/firewall configurations that only allow the two boxes in question to talk to one another using the forbidden protocol - a much cheaper solution.
When you put things in dollar terms the powers that be tend to shy away from knee jerk reactions based on the advice of 'experts'.
While we in the West predominantly hold that view, there are many among us and in other parts of the world that believe otherwise and would gladly force their version of religious 'law' upon everyone.
This is why I am Buddist/Agnostic - I find it hypocritical on the one hand 'loving thy neighbor', and on the other hand damning him to hell for being Hindu (or whatever - take your pick).
Thankfully the 1st Amendment grants Americans the freedom to pursue whatever religion they see fit - which is a good thing, given the hare-brained interpretations of religious 'law' I see coming from religeous fundamentalists of many faiths - and the deadly consequences of not following the 'law' in some parts of the world.
Religious intollerance is just another form of xenophobia.
I have a linksys switch as the core of my internal network. It has a feature that allows me to do crude traffic shaping.
I can specify if a particular MAC address gets low, normal, or high priority for various protocols.
Needless to say my machines are set up at high priority for all protocols. My daughter's machine is set up with low priority on transport protocols, and my wife has normal priority. I did this upon installing the network, so no one is the wiser (except me, of course).
This means my gaming sessions never lag out due to internal network/gateway traffic congestion (internet traffic issues can still cause problems though - nothing I can do about that since it is external to my network).
I've been using Zope 2 for about a year now - and just starting to dig into the guts of it (for example, I've built simplified applications through the interface and as external methods - but have not built a full-blown zope product as of yet), and have been trying to figure out the Zope 3 'lay of the land'. I love the object database - it does things simply that took much time and effort using SQL DBMSs and java or perl. However, some things that are straightforward via the command line (perl/python) are another matter when trying to interface with the ZODB through the web interface.
I've had experience with java - but not J2EE, or Beans or any other java development environment/libraries. Everything I've done with java has been either using what was already available in the base classes, or building my own - so these extended frameworks/classes/libraries have always been questionable in my mind from a productivity standpoint (it was many times easier for me to build it than to figure out how to use a library). Add to that my encounters with several venders who used proprietary (black box) libraries which ended up causing problems which we had to code around, and you can probably see why I am not fond of java solutions.
On the other hand, I have had nothing but good things happen as a result of using Zope 2 - I've been able to acquire or build some fairly complicated interfaces relatively easily - and quickly, and save money and time.
My hope is that Zope 3 will be an improvement over Zope 2; at the same token, I am worried that much of my assumptions regarding how Zope 2 functions will be useless with Zope 3. Either way, I'm comfortable where I am; I refuse to go back to Java and Perl for web application development - so will make the best of it. I can't afford to start over from scratch either from a development standpoint, or from a learning curve standpoint (language mostly - debugging python is way easier than perl - and framework secondarily).
I'm swamped now, but once I get into maintenance mode, perhaps next year I can devote some time to examining Rails - or who knows what will be available by then?
The important point in all of this is that most people want to see content, and have little time for viewing attempts to get their attention and sell them something they don't want or need.
I think Google has got it right on their Gmail service: I see links in a small pane off to the right side that are related to the subjects of the emails I am viewing. This has proven very useful to me, and I am not annoyed by flashing logos, sounds or other attempts to 'push' something I don't want.
Pop-ups take over your computer for the few seconds they are up - and if you add the thousands of pop-ups you have probably seen over the last year, it adds up to the advertisers stealing many hours (and thousands of mouse clicks) of your time (the time needed to deal with the pop-up/unders) without compensation to you.
Would a company allow me to come onto their premises and put up signs in their front lobby extolling the virtues of my hand-made 'chia-pets' (for sale - only $9.99)? No, they would not. Nor should we allow companies or thier proxies (in the case of ad agencies) to get away with essentially the same thing on our computers.
The big problem is ad agencies and businesses are stuck thinking that the new medium is just another television set - and the users are just a captive audience. They don't "get it" - and are trying to put the square peg called 'the internet' into the round hole of 'the television'. My computer is not a television and I am insulted when I go to a site that thinks otherwise.
The very best message we can give businesses on the web is to not frequent the sites that put thier marketing above the public's desire to find content that is useful to them.
Once upon a time, the internet was a place where you could do research and quickly find what you needed without the noise (in a communications sense) created by the advent of pop-up ads. Interestingly we see a parallel between the internet and cable TV. In the begining you payed premium prices for cable TV not just for the selection of channels, but also for the commercial-free content. Heck, if I wanted to see commercials I would just watch broadcast television, right? Then slowly but surely more and more commercials invaded cable TV. Not only am I paying a premium price for my cable service now, I am also getting bombarded, once again, by commercials! I am paying to see commercials!
With cable, I basically have two choices: I can watch the shows I wanted to watch and live with the commercials or stop watching the shows (I don't have a DVR - so don't go there). However, on the Internet I have an added choice: I can frequent other sites (many times non-commercial) that don't have the commercial pop-up ads. And this is what I do. This rewards those sites that put content over commericialism, and punishes those sites that don't. And don't get me wrong, I am not adverse to any advertising, but it needs to be subtle. The Google links I mentioned before are an excellent example of how this can be done right - and should serve as a model for other businesses on the internet.
If a business wants to have an internet 'presense', then they need to understand that entails not only pushing their product, but also providing some useful content to the internet community (in the form of online manuals to their products, reviews, and information about how the company is performing - maybe whitepapers of research they have done etc...). Of course, some will not want to publicize how bad they are, but I think the 'natural selection' of the web will cull the fly-by-night outfits out of the picture over time. In the end, providing the end user of the browser with the power to control what sites are allowed privileged access to their computer will only help the situation. The users of the internet are growing up, are more savvy and want tools that allow them to be less of a passive observer and more an active participant.
That is why I have always used plain text for the most part.
The files I wrote in the late '70s are still around today, and completely readable and editable.
Whatever editor I used (I used edlin for a very short time, and then WordPerfect and MS Word - as well as several no-name apps - on DOS machines - later I found vi and emacs under Unix - and have dabbled in OpenOffice and Abiword on my Linux systems) I made sure it had the option of saving the files as plain text - or I quickly stopped using it.
Nowadays I am using XML for anything significant (that I think I may want to publish - on the web or in print) - and plain text for everything else (and XML is really plain text from a software standpoint).
I don't have any software incompatibilities because I don't use proprietary formats to begin with.
Everyone doesn't think like that, however I am trying to educate as many as possible. Some yahoo sent me a Visio drawing the other day; I sent him a message saying, "save it as jpeg or png so I can read it". He did, and I was happy (not to mention I could easily incorporate his drawing in my own documentation/notes or translate it to some other format if needed).
This happens all the time, someone sends me a Microsoft Project file, or some other format that I do not have software for. I force them to change it to an open format - and after awhile they learn (at least to send me data that fits my open model - or that I can translate to something open). When their tools are dead and their files are useless, I will still be able to reference information that happened in the past.
So, your argument about software is only valid if you use proprietary file formats (only readable by one software application). I do not - and so your argument is not valid for me.
No one should use proprietary file formats for this reason - proprietary file formats hinder the migration of data from one technology to another (hardware or software).
Something folks haven't considered yet is that digital media is easily migrated. This can not be said for stone carvings, paper based writings, or clay tablets. In fact, digital media (in the form of digital cameras and scanners) allow us to preserve stone carvings, paper based writings and clay tablets - which are mostly 'one of a kind' in their native antiquated formats.
In my own experience I have files that have existed on magnetic tape at one point in their life. These same files were migrated to floppy disk (various formats), and then further migrated to hard disk, to CD Rom, and finally to solid state memory devices (usb flash drive).
So the concept of 'lifespan' of the data is effectively 'forever'. However, the degradation of its current storage medium could corrupt the data before it has been migrated. I have had data that was corrupted - some recoverable and some irrecoverable from magnetic floppy drive media after 10 years. On the other hand, I have CDROM media that has yet to show signs of any degradation after 15 years.
The key to successfully managing data that needs to have long life-spans is to determine the average lifespan of the medium and plan for moving the data to new media when the time comes. I have done this successfully for personal writings and other information. For large organizations this can be a daunting task - but is well worth the effort when considering the value of the data.
It is quite a bit cheaper to produce your own music now than it used to be:
$500 - 1.4 GHZ P4 computer w/24bit soundcard - parts built by myself - I was able to find some good deals - for example I spent $10 for the case. $75 - 24bit compatible multitrack recording software (N-Track) $99 - good quality condenser mic $79 - good quality cardoid mic $25 - two mic stands $30 - enough DIN cable to choke a horse (for connecting the mics to the mixing board) $50 - decent 6 channel mixing board $30 - misc other gear (RCA cables etc...) $60 - BOSE computer speakers (excellent sound quality and onboard amp and 2 inputs - for mixing down your stereo master). ---- $948 - Total (not including instruments - I assume if you are a musician you already have your instrument).
So, for about a grand you can have your own home recording studio that can produce as good sound quality as any professional studio out there. Of course, you have to spend the time to learn how to properly record sound - but there are books out there you can buy that take you through it in detail - from how to properly set up an acoustic environment to microphone placement to setting recording levels and how parametric equalization works etc...
Recording ain't cheap for those who can't or don't know how to do it themselves. Those who can do. They are doing it today and going indie, or even posting their tunes for free if they are not interested in the business side of music. http://music.myspace.com has a good selection - and there are other sites as well that allow users to post their MP3 recordings for download and/or streaming.
With the sorry state of pop music today, more and more people are finding a viable alternative online via free downloads and sales of independently produced music. With the closure of traditional outlets for advertising certain genres (Rolling Stone is reporting that Clear Channel is closing down a large number of Rock stations in favor of urban/hip hop formats - at the same time as we are seeing a renewal in interest in Rock! Where will Rock artists go to get exposure? I think it will be the web - and in a big way due to the lack of air-time in the traditional form).
Anyway, I believe the traditional big record labels are going to be around in the future, but they are not going to be as 'big' as they once were - and quality music that is not spoon-fed vanilla pop will be more and more a web phenomenon.
The problem of piracy has always been around, and will always be around.
However, the economic impact of it is miniscule compared to the revenue stream these companies already enjoy. Additionally, their over-priced products probably do more to spur piracy than anything else (the recording industry lost a class action lawsuit last year regarding price-gougeing(sic) - so they are not the poor innocents in all of this).
Fair use is a concept enshrined in the legal precidence(sic) of copyright law. It is the foundation that allows progress to be made in research and publication of new ideas, and in the education of our children. It is wrong-headed to erode that concept because the RIAA is running around screaming 'the sky is falling'. It has been shown that sharing music actually increases overall record sales - particularly important in this time when other venues for various genres of music (radio for example) are being removed from the airways (the most recent issue of Rolling Stone reports that radio stations dedicated to Rock are being shut down in favor of urban and hip-hop music genres; while a resurgence of interest in Rock sales is being reported...it seems Clear Channel is using out-of-date statistics to make decisions that could effect record sales for a large segment of the industry far in excess of any piracy going on).
Learn about the issues before making knee jerk reactions - and apply the reasonability test. Is it reasonable to throw out the baby with the bathwater? No, it is not.
Oh... and when you see the bill from legal counsel for going after every single "individual", you sh*t yourself and close the doors to your business...
That is a crock of sh*t. There are plenty of businesses that deal with these kind of issues on a regular basis. What do they do? They target the big operators and get the biggest bang for the buck - they don't go after everyone. The only reason the RIAA has gone after some 'small fish' is publicity - to scare all the little fish. They don't have the resources to go after everyone - nor will they. Additionally, it plays into their hands to make it look like 'everyone' is doing it - so they can get stiffer DRM and copyright laws passed.
We are not talking about businesses that are in any way shape or form being threatened with having to close their doors due to piracy - the RIAA's clients control multi-billion dollar businesses, which are only showing a 7% drop in sales over the previous years - less than 1% of which can be attributed to piracy. The remaining 6% is due to a focus on the 'business' of trying to sell cr*p, rather than quality music the public desires. Once the recording 'industry' lost sight of the art of music they sealed their own fate. This is a market adjustment that is a long time overdue.
Finally, what makes me really sick is the focus on the poor starving artists by the RIAA. But the real piracy is the way record companies discard artists as soon as they can to keep costs down, while signing new (read: low cost) artists as fast as they can (without much regard for the quality of thier work - obviously from listening to the latest 'popular' music). They don't compensate artists as they should, and they line their own pockets by selling us dogfood quality music at steak quality prices. I don't know about you, but for $18 I would like a filet mignon, rather than 'puppy chow'. I can and do download/buy free and indy music that is better quality than the major labels at a fraction of the cost - and I can pick and choose what tracks I want for the most part. The market will adjust to the new reality; will the record companies? Will we see them lobbying Congress for protectionist measures instead? (I do not want to see my tax dollars going to the entertainment industry - because its survival is not an absolute necessity).
In 1987 (or thereabouts) I had a Toshiba T1200 - it was very advanced for its time:
First use of back-lit supertwist LCD screen that I am aware of (CGA 640x480 4 color monochrome graphics - it had a very bright easy to read screen as a result; I used to play the flight simulator game 'Flight of the Intruder' on it without any problems). It also had built-in ramdisk management functionality (you could allocate a certain amount of the 1mb of ram as a ramdisk) - and had the ability to hybernate (to save battery juice you would put it in hybernate mode - everything would remain active - including the ramdisk).
DOS was already onboard in the form of a ROM chip - and it would boot into DOS directly without having to insert a floppy disk (I had the model that did not have a hard-drive - it was cheaper, and I was a student at the time...)
It was a great little workhorse - I used it to learn Assembly and C programming - as well as taking notes in class, and playing video games.
I traded it in for a 386 desktop; I wish I had kept it instead now - I would still be using it today for note taking/writing. Sadly, the battery technology was its shortcoming (really all portables from that era); refurbished batteries with more advanced technology would have made that machine useful into the present time (it was built like a tank - but very light compared to its peers).
There was nothing on the market that could touch it until the early '90s (believe me - I shopped around at that time). It always seems to be overlooked in these historical teatments. The best bang for the buck from 1987 thru 1989 IMHO.
There is already plenty of law that can be used to bring pirates to justice and regain lost compensation.
DRM is the 'easy' way out for the media business - if they can lock up everything, then they don't have to pay lawyers to enforce their rights.
However the side effect of the DRM approach is that it tramples on the rights of people to gain fair use of copyrighted material for teaching, for personal archiving and any other non-infringing right accorded by legal precidence.
Of course, businesses would love to control all of the media on your devices - even the media you yourself have created. That way you have to pay them for their hardware and software to view anything and everything - another 'Microsoft Tax' in the making.
Just say NO to DRM of any kind. It doesn't work, and it ends up making criminals out of hobbyists - when the lawyers should be spending their time doing real investigations of the real criminals instead.
There is no responsiblity for the developers of Open Source / Free software to fill every need of every user (or even the needs of the majority of users). They only have to scratch their own itch - which is primarily what they do (unless of course, they are paid by someone to write open-source).
That being said, if there is a real need that is not being 'filled' by a particular project and the issue is urgent enough someone will fork the project to satisfy the need. We have seen it before in the past and we will see it again in the future.
Each project is different due to the personalities involved. While I agree that everyone can and will have their concerns heard if they desire (via publication on various websites - such as/. - or even in traditional media), that does not mean that the developers are in any way beholden to those users. That is as it should be; the developers, by and large, are not doing this for you, they are doing it for themselves - and your enjoyment or dislike of solutions they pick is only a side effect. If they are wrong (or perhaps 'unpopular' is a better term to use) then the fork will gain wider acceptance than the original development line and the original will become irrelevant.
There is no need to get worried or angry about it - unless, of course you have a vested interest in changing the direction of, or forking the development. I am not going to lose any sleep over it - because I will either continue to use Gnome as it exists in the current development path, or select the new fork (if there is enough interest to fork it) if I desire the allegedly 'missing' functionality.
The sky is not falling. Find something more interesting to run please.
It is the actions that I see as evil. An evil act is a deliberate act that does harm to others - no matter how small or large.
Taken in isolation, one event does not make a *person* 'evil' unless it is a significantly immoral act (like murder). However, many 'small' acts repeated over and over again (such as stealing, lieing, cheating) can point to the overall character of a person as being evil - they obviously have no remorse about their actions.
The bottom line is I was focusing on the act itself, as informing the character of the individual. If someone does something wrong that is not heinous then apologizes and does no wrong from then on, I would not consider that evil. However, if someone continues to injure me over and over - I will at some point determine that the person does not have a shred of moral fibre in them - and thus will break off contact, or in the case of Microsoft I will stop buying their products.
This is why Microsoft is evil - their accumulation of wrongs lead me to believe they do not have the best interests of their customers or society in general at heart. If you can not see that - then you either work for them, have a very skewed view of right and wrong, or both.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is - why did they choose to use TCL? There are much more efficient interpreters (from an executable standpoint) - such as Python...
There is an online gaming forum that I use; it has all kinds of interesting content provided by the members and the owner of the site (who is also a gammer himself). It uses no advertising to fund the site. Recently there has been discussion about how to continue funding the site because of shortfalls.
In the past someone always came through and donated the needed funds. In the current economic climate, that is not happening - so the owner is considering various options for funding from the user community.
The site costs about $3000 per year for the network connectivity and to maintain in a datacenter environment - someone has to pay for it. The owner doesn't have the cash to eat the costs not covered by the anonymous doners.
The owner asked for input from the users to determine how best to handle it, and several options were put forward:
1. Set up a paypal account for the site, and ask for donations from the users - have a 'counter' that shows how much of the total yearly bill is left to pay.
2. Charge membership dues - with 300 users - each person would pay $10.
3. Bring in advertising (with only 300 users - that is probably not a viable solution).
The point is someone has to pay - particularly if the site in question grows beyond the capacity of a single person to maintain out-of-pocket.
Actually numerous attempts and plots were made to kill Hitler during his life without success.
The upshot of all this is there is certainly truth in the phrase "patience is a virtue".
It is much better to keep control of your own operations and grow slowly, than to become beholden to VCs - who will more than likely take over and destroy your hard work.
This makes the false assumption that M$ only agrees with creditable sources.
The issues you bring up point to a major issue with I have with developers:
By and large they do not understand how to apply the KISS principle to their design and implementation problem.
In some respects it might be an artform - because understanding how to simplify something that is very complex is very difficult. Nevertheless if you approach the original problem with that in mind you can minimize the effort in maintaining an understanding of the state (possible paths/interactions) of your application in your head and thus refactor your code with ease.
Know thyself; work within your own limitations. This makes deployment faster, iterative deployment possible, and testing more efficient.
Every wizard I have met was a master at the art of simplifying the complex.
I write seperate functional specifications. If the implementation requires new machines and installation by our operations department, then I might do a presentation showing why we need it, and how to hook it up (for most things this is pretty much standard boilerplate) - and perhaps how to pay for it in an appendix to the spec.
The software design documentation is in the code in the form of a detailed comment at the begining of the main code module explaining my design choices for each piece. I like to use languages, such as Perl, that allow me to format and extract documentation directly from my source code. I also like it to be inside of the code so I can make changes to my documentation at the same time that I make changes to the code. This is much more efficient for me - things don't get lost in the shuffle.
Going forward my goal is to generate XML documentation for not only the design document, but also the user manual, and other documentation from the same source code. I'll have a makefile sitting in my revision control archive that will generate all of my documentation for all apps in one command. BAM! I'm done, and can then read and edit my docs at my leisure.
The hard part is getting everyone else who touches my code to follow the same procedures.
We have to justify any exceptions to our security policy.
By their nature the security guys want everything tight as a drum. On the other hand the realities of running applications (some of which may be 20 years old) makes it cost prohibitive to make global changes.
For example the security gurus banned FTP. However we had old code that depended upon FTP, and would have cost too much to modify to use other alternatives (sftp etc..). You could justify these sorts of exceptions based upon the needs of the business - in this case the need not to break the budget. To ameliorate the problem we do routing/firewall configurations that only allow the two boxes in question to talk to one another using the forbidden protocol - a much cheaper solution.
When you put things in dollar terms the powers that be tend to shy away from knee jerk reactions based on the advice of 'experts'.
While we in the West predominantly hold that view, there are many among us and in other parts of the world that believe otherwise and would gladly force their version of religious 'law' upon everyone.
This is why I am Buddist/Agnostic - I find it hypocritical on the one hand 'loving thy neighbor', and on the other hand damning him to hell for being Hindu (or whatever - take your pick).
Thankfully the 1st Amendment grants Americans the freedom to pursue whatever religion they see fit - which is a good thing, given the hare-brained interpretations of religious 'law' I see coming from religeous fundamentalists of many faiths - and the deadly consequences of not following the 'law' in some parts of the world.
Religious intollerance is just another form of xenophobia.
I'm kinda partial to the law of gravity myself...
I have a linksys switch as the core of my internal network. It has a feature that allows me to do crude traffic shaping.
I can specify if a particular MAC address gets low, normal, or high priority for various protocols.
Needless to say my machines are set up at high priority for all protocols. My daughter's machine is set up with low priority on transport protocols, and my wife has normal priority. I did this upon installing the network, so no one is the wiser (except me, of course).
This means my gaming sessions never lag out due to internal network/gateway traffic congestion (internet traffic issues can still cause problems though - nothing I can do about that since it is external to my network).
Everyone is happy.
PS -
I wonder if there is a single document that really describes the differences between all of these approaches? That would be worth buying.
Thanks. That puts it in perspective for me.
I've been using Zope 2 for about a year now - and just starting to dig into the guts of it (for example, I've built simplified applications through the interface and as external methods - but have not built a full-blown zope product as of yet), and have been trying to figure out the Zope 3 'lay of the land'. I love the object database - it does things simply that took much time and effort using SQL DBMSs and java or perl. However, some things that are straightforward via the command line (perl/python) are another matter when trying to interface with the ZODB through the web interface.
I've had experience with java - but not J2EE, or Beans or any other java development environment/libraries. Everything I've done with java has been either using what was already available in the base classes, or building my own - so these extended frameworks/classes/libraries have always been questionable in my mind from a productivity standpoint (it was many times easier for me to build it than to figure out how to use a library). Add to that my encounters with several venders who used proprietary (black box) libraries which ended up causing problems which we had to code around, and you can probably see why I am not fond of java solutions.
On the other hand, I have had nothing but good things happen as a result of using Zope 2 - I've been able to acquire or build some fairly complicated interfaces relatively easily - and quickly, and save money and time.
My hope is that Zope 3 will be an improvement over Zope 2; at the same token, I am worried that much of my assumptions regarding how Zope 2 functions will be useless with Zope 3. Either way, I'm comfortable where I am; I refuse to go back to Java and Perl for web application development - so will make the best of it. I can't afford to start over from scratch either from a development standpoint, or from a learning curve standpoint (language mostly - debugging python is way easier than perl - and framework secondarily).
I'm swamped now, but once I get into maintenance mode, perhaps next year I can devote some time to examining Rails - or who knows what will be available by then?
Attach a VPN access concentrator with IPSEC to your wireless access point - and the problem will go away.
The important point in all of this is that most people want to see content, and have little time for viewing attempts to get their attention and sell them something they don't want or need.
I think Google has got it right on their Gmail service: I see links in a small pane off to the right side that are related to the subjects of the emails I am viewing. This has proven very useful to me, and I am not annoyed by flashing logos, sounds or other attempts to 'push' something I don't want.
Pop-ups take over your computer for the few seconds they are up - and if you add the thousands of pop-ups you have probably seen over the last year, it adds up to the advertisers stealing many hours (and thousands of mouse clicks) of your time (the time needed to deal with the pop-up/unders) without compensation to you.
Would a company allow me to come onto their premises and put up signs in their front lobby extolling the virtues of my hand-made 'chia-pets' (for sale - only $9.99)? No, they would not. Nor should we allow companies or thier proxies (in the case of ad agencies) to get away with essentially the same thing on our computers.
The big problem is ad agencies and businesses are stuck thinking that the new medium is just another television set - and the users are just a captive audience. They don't "get it" - and are trying to put the square peg called 'the internet' into the round hole of 'the television'. My computer is not a television and I am insulted when I go to a site that thinks otherwise.
The very best message we can give businesses on the web is to not frequent the sites that put thier marketing above the public's desire to find content that is useful to them.
Once upon a time, the internet was a place where you could do research and quickly find what you needed without the noise (in a communications sense) created by the advent of pop-up ads. Interestingly we see a parallel between the internet and cable TV. In the begining you payed premium prices for cable TV not just for the selection of channels, but also for the commercial-free content. Heck, if I wanted to see commercials I would just watch broadcast television, right? Then slowly but surely more and more commercials invaded cable TV. Not only am I paying a premium price for my cable service now, I am also getting bombarded, once again, by commercials! I am paying to see commercials!
With cable, I basically have two choices: I can watch the shows I wanted to watch and live with the commercials or stop watching the shows (I don't have a DVR - so don't go there). However, on the Internet I have an added choice: I can frequent other sites (many times non-commercial) that don't have the commercial pop-up ads. And this is what I do. This rewards those sites that put content over commericialism, and punishes those sites that don't. And don't get me wrong, I am not adverse to any advertising, but it needs to be subtle. The Google links I mentioned before are an excellent example of how this can be done right - and should serve as a model for other businesses on the internet.
If a business wants to have an internet 'presense', then they need to understand that entails not only pushing their product, but also providing some useful content to the internet community (in the form of online manuals to their products, reviews, and information about how the company is performing - maybe whitepapers of research they have done etc...). Of course, some will not want to publicize how bad they are, but I think the 'natural selection' of the web will cull the fly-by-night outfits out of the picture over time. In the end, providing the end user of the browser with the power to control what sites are allowed privileged access to their computer will only help the situation. The users of the internet are growing up, are more savvy and want tools that allow them to be less of a passive observer and more an active participant.
I wonder how Zope 3 (python web application framework+more) compares to these?
That is why I have always used plain text for the most part.
The files I wrote in the late '70s are still around today, and completely readable and editable.
Whatever editor I used (I used edlin for a very short time, and then WordPerfect and MS Word - as well as several no-name apps - on DOS machines - later I found vi and emacs under Unix - and have dabbled in OpenOffice and Abiword on my Linux systems) I made sure it had the option of saving the files as plain text - or I quickly stopped using it.
Nowadays I am using XML for anything significant (that I think I may want to publish - on the web or in print) - and plain text for everything else (and XML is really plain text from a software standpoint).
I don't have any software incompatibilities because I don't use proprietary formats to begin with.
Everyone doesn't think like that, however I am trying to educate as many as possible. Some yahoo sent me a Visio drawing the other day; I sent him a message saying, "save it as jpeg or png so I can read it". He did, and I was happy (not to mention I could easily incorporate his drawing in my own documentation/notes or translate it to some other format if needed).
This happens all the time, someone sends me a Microsoft Project file, or some other format that I do not have software for. I force them to change it to an open format - and after awhile they learn (at least to send me data that fits my open model - or that I can translate to something open). When their tools are dead and their files are useless, I will still be able to reference information that happened in the past.
So, your argument about software is only valid if you use proprietary file formats (only readable by one software application). I do not - and so your argument is not valid for me.
No one should use proprietary file formats for this reason - proprietary file formats hinder the migration of data from one technology to another (hardware or software).
Something folks haven't considered yet is that digital media is easily migrated. This can not be said for stone carvings, paper based writings, or clay tablets. In fact, digital media (in the form of digital cameras and scanners) allow us to preserve stone carvings, paper based writings and clay tablets - which are mostly 'one of a kind' in their native antiquated formats.
In my own experience I have files that have existed on magnetic tape at one point in their life. These same files were migrated to floppy disk (various formats), and then further migrated to hard disk, to CD Rom, and finally to solid state memory devices (usb flash drive).
So the concept of 'lifespan' of the data is effectively 'forever'. However, the degradation of its current storage medium could corrupt the data before it has been migrated. I have had data that was corrupted - some recoverable and some irrecoverable from magnetic floppy drive media after 10 years. On the other hand, I have CDROM media that has yet to show signs of any degradation after 15 years.
The key to successfully managing data that needs to have long life-spans is to determine the average lifespan of the medium and plan for moving the data to new media when the time comes. I have done this successfully for personal writings and other information. For large organizations this can be a daunting task - but is well worth the effort when considering the value of the data.
It is quite a bit cheaper to produce your own music now than it used to be:
$500 - 1.4 GHZ P4 computer w/24bit soundcard - parts built by myself - I was able to find some good deals - for example I spent $10 for the case.
$75 - 24bit compatible multitrack recording software (N-Track)
$99 - good quality condenser mic
$79 - good quality cardoid mic
$25 - two mic stands
$30 - enough DIN cable to choke a horse (for connecting the mics to the mixing board)
$50 - decent 6 channel mixing board
$30 - misc other gear (RCA cables etc...)
$60 - BOSE computer speakers (excellent sound quality and onboard amp and 2 inputs - for mixing down your stereo master).
----
$948 - Total (not including instruments - I assume if you are a musician you already have your instrument).
So, for about a grand you can have your own home recording studio that can produce as good sound quality as any professional studio out there. Of course, you have to spend the time to learn how to properly record sound - but there are books out there you can buy that take you through it in detail - from how to properly set up an acoustic environment to microphone placement to setting recording levels and how parametric equalization works etc...
Recording ain't cheap for those who can't or don't know how to do it themselves. Those who can do. They are doing it today and going indie, or even posting their tunes for free if they are not interested in the business side of music. http://music.myspace.com has a good selection - and there are other sites as well that allow users to post their MP3 recordings for download and/or streaming.
With the sorry state of pop music today, more and more people are finding a viable alternative online via free downloads and sales of independently produced music. With the closure of traditional outlets for advertising certain genres (Rolling Stone is reporting that Clear Channel is closing down a large number of Rock stations in favor of urban/hip hop formats - at the same time as we are seeing a renewal in interest in Rock! Where will Rock artists go to get exposure? I think it will be the web - and in a big way due to the lack of air-time in the traditional form).
Anyway, I believe the traditional big record labels are going to be around in the future, but they are not going to be as 'big' as they once were - and quality music that is not spoon-fed vanilla pop will be more and more a web phenomenon.
The problem of piracy has always been around, and will always be around.
However, the economic impact of it is miniscule compared to the revenue stream these companies already enjoy. Additionally, their over-priced products probably do more to spur piracy than anything else (the recording industry lost a class action lawsuit last year regarding price-gougeing(sic) - so they are not the poor innocents in all of this).
Fair use is a concept enshrined in the legal precidence(sic) of copyright law. It is the foundation that allows progress to be made in research and publication of new ideas, and in the education of our children. It is wrong-headed to erode that concept because the RIAA is running around screaming 'the sky is falling'. It has been shown that sharing music actually increases overall record sales - particularly important in this time when other venues for various genres of music (radio for example) are being removed from the airways (the most recent issue of Rolling Stone reports that radio stations dedicated to Rock are being shut down in favor of urban and hip-hop music genres; while a resurgence of interest in Rock sales is being reported...it seems Clear Channel is using out-of-date statistics to make decisions that could effect record sales for a large segment of the industry far in excess of any piracy going on).
Learn about the issues before making knee jerk reactions - and apply the reasonability test. Is it reasonable to throw out the baby with the bathwater? No, it is not.
That is a crock of sh*t. There are plenty of businesses that deal with these kind of issues on a regular basis. What do they do? They target the big operators and get the biggest bang for the buck - they don't go after everyone. The only reason the RIAA has gone after some 'small fish' is publicity - to scare all the little fish. They don't have the resources to go after everyone - nor will they. Additionally, it plays into their hands to make it look like 'everyone' is doing it - so they can get stiffer DRM and copyright laws passed.
We are not talking about businesses that are in any way shape or form being threatened with having to close their doors due to piracy - the RIAA's clients control multi-billion dollar businesses, which are only showing a 7% drop in sales over the previous years - less than 1% of which can be attributed to piracy. The remaining 6% is due to a focus on the 'business' of trying to sell cr*p, rather than quality music the public desires. Once the recording 'industry' lost sight of the art of music they sealed their own fate. This is a market adjustment that is a long time overdue.
Finally, what makes me really sick is the focus on the poor starving artists by the RIAA. But the real piracy is the way record companies discard artists as soon as they can to keep costs down, while signing new (read: low cost) artists as fast as they can (without much regard for the quality of thier work - obviously from listening to the latest 'popular' music). They don't compensate artists as they should, and they line their own pockets by selling us dogfood quality music at steak quality prices. I don't know about you, but for $18 I would like a filet mignon, rather than 'puppy chow'. I can and do download/buy free and indy music that is better quality than the major labels at a fraction of the cost - and I can pick and choose what tracks I want for the most part. The market will adjust to the new reality; will the record companies? Will we see them lobbying Congress for protectionist measures instead? (I do not want to see my tax dollars going to the entertainment industry - because its survival is not an absolute necessity).
In 1987 (or thereabouts) I had a Toshiba T1200 - it was very advanced for its time:
First use of back-lit supertwist LCD screen that I am aware of (CGA 640x480 4 color monochrome graphics - it had a very bright easy to read screen as a result; I used to play the flight simulator game 'Flight of the Intruder' on it without any problems). It also had built-in ramdisk management functionality (you could allocate a certain amount of the 1mb of ram as a ramdisk) - and had the ability to hybernate (to save battery juice you would put it in hybernate mode - everything would remain active - including the ramdisk).
DOS was already onboard in the form of a ROM chip - and it would boot into DOS directly without having to insert a floppy disk (I had the model that did not have a hard-drive - it was cheaper, and I was a student at the time...)
Here is a link to a write-up of at OLD-COMPUTERS.COM for more details.
It was a great little workhorse - I used it to learn Assembly and C programming - as well as taking notes in class, and playing video games.
I traded it in for a 386 desktop; I wish I had kept it instead now - I would still be using it today for note taking/writing. Sadly, the battery technology was its shortcoming (really all portables from that era); refurbished batteries with more advanced technology would have made that machine useful into the present time (it was built like a tank - but very light compared to its peers).
There was nothing on the market that could touch it until the early '90s (believe me - I shopped around at that time). It always seems to be overlooked in these historical teatments. The best bang for the buck from 1987 thru 1989 IMHO.
There is already plenty of law that can be used to bring pirates to justice and regain lost compensation.
DRM is the 'easy' way out for the media business - if they can lock up everything, then they don't have to pay lawyers to enforce their rights.
However the side effect of the DRM approach is that it tramples on the rights of people to gain fair use of copyrighted material for teaching, for personal archiving and any other non-infringing right accorded by legal precidence.
Of course, businesses would love to control all of the media on your devices - even the media you yourself have created. That way you have to pay them for their hardware and software to view anything and everything - another 'Microsoft Tax' in the making.
Just say NO to DRM of any kind. It doesn't work, and it ends up making criminals out of hobbyists - when the lawyers should be spending their time doing real investigations of the real criminals instead.
There is no responsiblity for the developers of Open Source / Free software to fill every need of every user (or even the needs of the majority of users). They only have to scratch their own itch - which is primarily what they do (unless of course, they are paid by someone to write open-source).
/. - or even in traditional media), that does not mean that the developers are in any way beholden to those users. That is as it should be; the developers, by and large, are not doing this for you, they are doing it for themselves - and your enjoyment or dislike of solutions they pick is only a side effect. If they are wrong (or perhaps 'unpopular' is a better term to use) then the fork will gain wider acceptance than the original development line and the original will become irrelevant.
That being said, if there is a real need that is not being 'filled' by a particular project and the issue is urgent enough someone will fork the project to satisfy the need. We have seen it before in the past and we will see it again in the future.
Each project is different due to the personalities involved. While I agree that everyone can and will have their concerns heard if they desire (via publication on various websites - such as
There is no need to get worried or angry about it - unless, of course you have a vested interest in changing the direction of, or forking the development. I am not going to lose any sleep over it - because I will either continue to use Gnome as it exists in the current development path, or select the new fork (if there is enough interest to fork it) if I desire the allegedly 'missing' functionality.
The sky is not falling. Find something more interesting to run please.
It is the actions that I see as evil. An evil act is a deliberate act that does harm to others - no matter how small or large.
Taken in isolation, one event does not make a *person* 'evil' unless it is a significantly immoral act (like murder). However, many 'small' acts repeated over and over again (such as stealing, lieing, cheating) can point to the overall character of a person as being evil - they obviously have no remorse about their actions.
The bottom line is I was focusing on the act itself, as informing the character of the individual. If someone does something wrong that is not heinous then apologizes and does no wrong from then on, I would not consider that evil. However, if someone continues to injure me over and over - I will at some point determine that the person does not have a shred of moral fibre in them - and thus will break off contact, or in the case of Microsoft I will stop buying their products.
This is why Microsoft is evil - their accumulation of wrongs lead me to believe they do not have the best interests of their customers or society in general at heart. If you can not see that - then you either work for them, have a very skewed view of right and wrong, or both.