You've just said too much. Now everybody knows who you are.
Any developer who stops learning new languages, tools, techniques, etc. has decided they want to work on legacy apps for the rest of their life.
Whereas people who save their documents in OOXML have decided they want to lose access to them over time (if not immediately). And C# and.NET developers want to write code they'll have to port to next year's Next Big Thing. That's job security there, Maynard. And re-porting the same stuff over and over means you'll never make progress after the first evolution. Congratulations. You've just found a way to get someone to pay you to avoid doing useful work.
Meanwhile, ODF is portable and, well, C. What can you say? If that's not standing the test of time in programming then what is?
I wonder if you'd like to try that standard on anything else, for example Congress. If we burned them down every time the process was subverted by riders or they passed unconstitutional laws or just did things that in retrospect were considered horrible, horrible screwups we wouldn't have time to rebuild before we'd have to burn them again.
You say that like it's a bad thing... For both ISO and Congress. I wonder how others feel on this subject. Mark Twain had a useful quote but I can't find it.
As a wiser poster than me observed some time ago, that ISO failed to have management processes in place a year in advance of predictable environment changes is evidence they fail even at following their own standards.
That they've let this issue go so long past its natural conclusion - laughing at a proposal to fast-track a 6000 page un-implemented proprietary standard - is evidence they are themselves compromised by agents of an external entity.
If they abort this atrocity all is not yet well. Until they dig out and expel every agent that perverted their mission and monitor for some time that their processes do now work, they will remain suspect.
If they fail to do the right thing, well, they're done. Stick a fork in them. The nations of the world would prefer to return to the bad old days of setting their own standards and negotiating equivalence by treaty. They will not stand for having their standards dictated to them by a US corporation, even through a puppet ISO.
I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this.
But it had to be said. Many thousands will read this thread. Already this thread is the number one hit on google news for "ISO". While there's still time to change the outcome the downside risk must be made very clear to the people making the decision. It was important that the first comment not be some GNAA garbage.
The ISO's stock in trade is their reputation. If they will not defend it they deserve to fade away.
Well in 2008 I'm still having a hard time imagining it.
Well get yourself a secondhand high school microscope and a petri dish with some agar. Introduce some bacteria - I recommend a swab from your kitchen counter or your keyboard, but a simple fingerprint will do - especially if you wipe your fingers through your eyebrows first. Then you can watch life evolving yourself first hand. It takes a few weeks for the interesting colonies to evolve and outcompete the standard strains of salmonella found in a kitchen sink.
When they deprecate.NET the squeals will be heard 'round the world. Developers are dumb. Cats are smart. You can't catch the same cat in the same trap twice.
Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?
No?
Anybody? Anybody at all?
I thought not.
Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down.
Their problem is that they haven't supported these standards based browsers up to now. Their sites have been IE only. Now they have to code to standards, which is work. Boo Hoo.
All this does is point out that the recent trend of building supercomputers out of inexpensive general purpose CPUs may not be a good idea for all applications.
And... a screwdriver is not always a prybar. A tool's a tool - they have preferred usage but if your requirement is specific and you're creative enough, you can do some fine work outside of the tool's intended purpose. Like this guy. Kudos to him.
Perhaps some more creative people finding this information will now discover if their specific requirements can be met by this interesting configuration. That will save them large quantities of cash or possibly enable some facility that was not previously available because supercomputers cost a grip-o-cash.
Of course for general purpose supercomputing you would want to use modified PS3s.
Developers are developers. Expecting them to deliver anything more than code is a poor idea.
Actually, most FOSS developers are just people who needed their computer to do something. They didn't care about the interface at all as long as the thing they needed got done. Because the implementor was the user, the interface was minimal. This isn't the case for major projects -- just for the millions of little things which are so handy. Everybody that writes code spins this stuff off automatically as they serve their own needs. Take "grep" as an ideal example. It was not always so easy to scan multiple files for ocurrences of a particular string. It was only after a great many people had re-solved this problem over and over that grep was created. A great many other solutions were also put forward and some of them persist to this day but none of them is as popular as the GNU project grep and its derivations.
The author then published the result for everybody else because to do otherwise seemed, well, wasteful. This is the step that allows others to save the effort needed to re-solve the same problem and is very important. Being able to find the tool that others built is also important and this is part of why Sourceforge and Google are so popular.
It's only after several people adapt that simplest solution to add their slightly different requirement to it and re-publish it that the need served becomes a more general need and is adopted as a cause by someone who needs a more flexible tool and puts a more flexible interface on it. This is an evolution and evolution takes time.
Perhaps it seems wasteful that so many people publish so many unsuccessful free applications that aren't developed and fall from use because people who need an answer find a better answer in a similar but different free application. This isn't really wasteful at all. If you publish an app that you made to solve your problem, the publication is practically "free" because you already needed the effort required to produce it in order to solve your own problem. If it helps one other person ever, the effort to publish it was not wasted. Because of the world's diverse and specific needs published code almost never goes unused and so there is very little waste.
I'll agree that many FOSS projects need better interfaces and documentation (as do most commercial applications). Perhaps if we heap upon the more prolific and astute documentors and interface designers more praise, more will volunteer to serve that common need. For every problem that it's possible for a computer to help with there are many people who need a particular utility. By making their code free a programmer helps all the other people with common needs. For each special interest that shares code in this way the more programmers who free their code the faster the general progress of the art, which serves the people who free their code as well as all people with similar needs.
I have no mod points to give you. There's insightful, informative and funny in there.
Twitter's antics are amusing. The anti-twitter trolls are also amusing. Sometimes I wonder if Twitter isn't trolling himself for added drama. Is there a munchausen trolling syndrome? That would be expressing some extreme dedication to our amusement.
Oh, I need to post an on-topic tidbit. The Atom products released next week are going to rock! Not all of them are mini-laptops like this one. There's lots of stuff from in-car audio to ebooks to phones to refrigerators and more! Your dryer will be able to browse the Internet to discover the ideal drying temperature and relative humidity for your permanent press slacks. You'll be able to google the provenance of your archeology find without surfacing from your dive in the Mediterranean. You'll be able to work on your spreadsheets at the beach! Your email will find you everywhere. Isn't that great?
Based on what we know about Earth, they say that it's difficult to imagine life arising in acidic, oxidizing brines like those inferred for ancient Mars.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159-167
Wm. Shakespeare
Two billion years from now it may be difficult to imagine life evolving on the Earth. If you can still find the Earth, that is. Time has a way of hiding things.
The false dichotomy is that it's an either/or thing.
There will be SSD components with high speed and low power and their price/GB will decrease very quickly. Largest capacities will always be expensive. For a long time they will cost more than magnetic media, but it probably won't always be so. Their speed and reliability will improve as vendors build out the drive intelligence that abstracts the physical media from the logical media and parallelize atomic access with internal RAID to compensate for the slowness of individual cells. These products will sell to users who are interested in their benefits and the manufacturers will make lots of money. Ultimately the speed of random reads and writes of SSD media will be limited only by the interface as solid state components are "always on" and each block of data is as accessible as any other.
Magnetic media will continue to drop in price as well. As storage increases today's hard drives will find their way to the recycling center in record time. The optimal price/performance will continue to improve as will maximum capacity. Speed will not increase as much, particularly with random reads and writes, because the data is still stored on a rotating physical object and a physical read/write head must move to the correct track and wait for the data block to fly under the head before data can be read or written. These products will continue to sell well for a long time to users interested in their benefits and the manufacturers will continue to make lots of money.
Both will be popular for a long time. There are other technologies in the works also.
Ultimately at 60MB/s it takes 1,000,000 seconds (11.5 days) to write 60tB to a (currently theoretical) rotating platter drive. At 6tB/second (interface TBA) it takes 10 seconds to write the same data to a solid state device. The ultimate winner in this one is clear, but it will be a long time.
Let me be the first to say: "that's a lot of porn."
How many OSS webpages don't even EXPLAIN WHAT THE PRODUCT IS, much less document it, on their website?
Let me introduce you to Symantec. They make an application called "Ghostcast server", which is used to clone PCs in bulk. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out which product they offer contains this application, how much it costs and how it works. Give it a shot. It's like Where's Waldo for geeks.
Even when OSS project show some potential, they inevitably fork over some bullshit tussle between developers.
Like X? That was over quickly. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft decided to change their windowing environment and its terms, and it was so hated nobody would want it. Wait -- you don't have to pretend.
Repeal copyright. All of it. If they want to fight, give 'em a fight. Let us not piddle about minor interpretations of legalisms. Let's gut the whole thing. Patents too. Both of them were designed to promote progress and now the serve the opposite purpose. They should be done away with.
Patents shall not issue. Copyrights shall not be granted. All patents and copyrights are void. (New amendment)
Say whatever you want, virus are a gold mine but there is no gold in the Linux lands, just wait when it gets more market share.
I've been hearing this since 1993. What's been lacking is evidence. There are a lot of reasons why this cannot be true, but I'm not prepared to go into them right now. I recommend "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" by Eric Raymond for those who are curious about these things. You would think that if it were true we would have some proof by now. It has been 15 years.
... he is trying to make a point comparing how he, a geek, use Linux versus how a grandma uses Windows
No, actually I was commenting on my own experience using and supporting users of Windows (since version 1.0, actually) and Linux since v 0.8 or so. Security is not funny and anything I can do to help people improve theirs also improves mine because we're connected by a network. People need to understand how to secure their computers and recognize when their security is compromised and what to do about it. Sometimes a bit of ridicule is the motivator they need.
I use both and I keep both crystal clean; thought Windows needs more attention.
Both need attention. That is what I meant in this post by "No OS is 100% secure. Good administration and usage matters far more than the software package." If you're using Windows the tips there will save you some work. When you find yourself rebuilding your Windows box (again) my journal on the subject may also be helpful. You're welcome.
Oh, and by the way, have you heard of free speech the semi-ideal of Linux fanboys? How comes you are saying that my post shouldn't be allowed.
Your post above was moderated "funny". You might want to consider why that happened. Apparently the moderator thought there was something funny about what you said. I approve of you being allowed to say whatever you want. You might not be prepared for the response here on slashdot but that's on you. A lot of the moderators know stuff.
I hate mac fanboys, but Linux fanboys, they are the worst of all because they think they are sooo smart and never have a second thought; just like any standard religion I must say.
For the record, I was born into IT before there was an IBM PC and grew into professional IT with Unix long before there was a Windows. I've used every version of DOS and Windows there ever was, and many many other systems. Some I liked more than others. Currently my preferences depend on the use and I would recommend Windows in some circumstances but Vista in none. They're tools and you use the right one for the job. For my own use I use several versions of Windows, several distributions of Linux, several builds of BSD, one XServe with OS-X Tiger, device oriented stuff that's peculiar to the device (mostly routers), and some stuff I wrote myself but don't share (performance anxiety). I wouldn't touch Unix with a ten foot pole and before I touched anything from SCO I'd rather find honest work in a new trade. Dismissing me as a "fanboi" might be a bit of a reach. Perhaps "seasoned opinion" might be more appropriate. Fanboi should be reserved for people who are fond of the one thing they know. This is slashdot so there are people here that are qualified to lecture me about my preferences and opinions. Some few here are qualified to consider me a noob. Trust me: you're not one of them. It's ok, though. Once I asked Ward Christensen why he thought he was the boss of programming and so wound up in the motd file of every linux distro on earth (thankfully attributed
No human effort is free. All human efforts require time and energy, overhead and maintenance. This is more so true when the efforts are subsidized by a company. When a contributor gives effort to the improvement of software that is to be made freely available to all he (or she) is engaged in a contract wherein he can expect a benefit called "progress."
Such a contributor may offer this up for the benefit of all, but that point is not important to the contract. As long as there are two contributors in the world so involved that their efforts benefit each other the terms of the contract are kept and the benefit is achieved. That there are many, many contributors so engaged amplifies the benefit for all.
Progress benefits us everyone. Perhaps "free" isn't the right word after all.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just said too much. Now everybody knows who you are.
Whereas people who save their documents in OOXML have decided they want to lose access to them over time (if not immediately). And C# and .NET developers want to write code they'll have to port to next year's Next Big Thing. That's job security there, Maynard. And re-porting the same stuff over and over means you'll never make progress after the first evolution. Congratulations. You've just found a way to get someone to pay you to avoid doing useful work.
Meanwhile, ODF is portable and, well, C. What can you say? If that's not standing the test of time in programming then what is?
Don't despair yet. We're giving this issue the one thing it cannot stand: Light.
You say that like it's a bad thing... For both ISO and Congress. I wonder how others feel on this subject. Mark Twain had a useful quote but I can't find it.
As a wiser poster than me observed some time ago, that ISO failed to have management processes in place a year in advance of predictable environment changes is evidence they fail even at following their own standards.
That they've let this issue go so long past its natural conclusion - laughing at a proposal to fast-track a 6000 page un-implemented proprietary standard - is evidence they are themselves compromised by agents of an external entity.
If they abort this atrocity all is not yet well. Until they dig out and expel every agent that perverted their mission and monitor for some time that their processes do now work, they will remain suspect.
If they fail to do the right thing, well, they're done. Stick a fork in them. The nations of the world would prefer to return to the bad old days of setting their own standards and negotiating equivalence by treaty. They will not stand for having their standards dictated to them by a US corporation, even through a puppet ISO.
But it had to be said. Many thousands will read this thread. Already this thread is the number one hit on google news for "ISO". While there's still time to change the outcome the downside risk must be made very clear to the people making the decision. It was important that the first comment not be some GNAA garbage.
The ISO's stock in trade is their reputation. If they will not defend it they deserve to fade away.
Well get yourself a secondhand high school microscope and a petri dish with some agar. Introduce some bacteria - I recommend a swab from your kitchen counter or your keyboard, but a simple fingerprint will do - especially if you wipe your fingers through your eyebrows first. Then you can watch life evolving yourself first hand. It takes a few weeks for the interesting colonies to evolve and outcompete the standard strains of salmonella found in a kitchen sink.
When they deprecate .NET the squeals will be heard 'round the world. Developers are dumb. Cats are smart. You can't catch the same cat in the same trap twice.
Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?
No?
Anybody? Anybody at all?
I thought not.
Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down.
Goodbye ISO.
Their problem is that they haven't supported these standards based browsers up to now. Their sites have been IE only. Now they have to code to standards, which is work. Boo Hoo.
Next week friend, next week. The anticipation is killing me.
And... a screwdriver is not always a prybar. A tool's a tool - they have preferred usage but if your requirement is specific and you're creative enough, you can do some fine work outside of the tool's intended purpose. Like this guy. Kudos to him.
Perhaps some more creative people finding this information will now discover if their specific requirements can be met by this interesting configuration. That will save them large quantities of cash or possibly enable some facility that was not previously available because supercomputers cost a grip-o-cash.
Of course for general purpose supercomputing you would want to use modified PS3s.
It does not run Linux.
Can it? Anybody?
By the benchmark that they solve the particular problem of this specific application in 1/300th of the time?
Actually, most FOSS developers are just people who needed their computer to do something. They didn't care about the interface at all as long as the thing they needed got done. Because the implementor was the user, the interface was minimal. This isn't the case for major projects -- just for the millions of little things which are so handy. Everybody that writes code spins this stuff off automatically as they serve their own needs. Take "grep" as an ideal example. It was not always so easy to scan multiple files for ocurrences of a particular string. It was only after a great many people had re-solved this problem over and over that grep was created. A great many other solutions were also put forward and some of them persist to this day but none of them is as popular as the GNU project grep and its derivations.
The author then published the result for everybody else because to do otherwise seemed, well, wasteful. This is the step that allows others to save the effort needed to re-solve the same problem and is very important. Being able to find the tool that others built is also important and this is part of why Sourceforge and Google are so popular.
It's only after several people adapt that simplest solution to add their slightly different requirement to it and re-publish it that the need served becomes a more general need and is adopted as a cause by someone who needs a more flexible tool and puts a more flexible interface on it. This is an evolution and evolution takes time.
Perhaps it seems wasteful that so many people publish so many unsuccessful free applications that aren't developed and fall from use because people who need an answer find a better answer in a similar but different free application. This isn't really wasteful at all. If you publish an app that you made to solve your problem, the publication is practically "free" because you already needed the effort required to produce it in order to solve your own problem. If it helps one other person ever, the effort to publish it was not wasted. Because of the world's diverse and specific needs published code almost never goes unused and so there is very little waste.
I'll agree that many FOSS projects need better interfaces and documentation (as do most commercial applications). Perhaps if we heap upon the more prolific and astute documentors and interface designers more praise, more will volunteer to serve that common need. For every problem that it's possible for a computer to help with there are many people who need a particular utility. By making their code free a programmer helps all the other people with common needs. For each special interest that shares code in this way the more programmers who free their code the faster the general progress of the art, which serves the people who free their code as well as all people with similar needs.
I have no mod points to give you. There's insightful, informative and funny in there.
Twitter's antics are amusing. The anti-twitter trolls are also amusing. Sometimes I wonder if Twitter isn't trolling himself for added drama. Is there a munchausen trolling syndrome? That would be expressing some extreme dedication to our amusement.
Oh, I need to post an on-topic tidbit. The Atom products released next week are going to rock! Not all of them are mini-laptops like this one. There's lots of stuff from in-car audio to ebooks to phones to refrigerators and more! Your dryer will be able to browse the Internet to discover the ideal drying temperature and relative humidity for your permanent press slacks. You'll be able to google the provenance of your archeology find without surfacing from your dive in the Mediterranean. You'll be able to work on your spreadsheets at the beach! Your email will find you everywhere. Isn't that great?
Came here to post this. Thanks for beating me to it. The roads must roll!
er, ahem --
Two billion years from now it may be difficult to imagine life evolving on the Earth. If you can still find the Earth, that is. Time has a way of hiding things.
The false dichotomy is that it's an either/or thing.
There will be SSD components with high speed and low power and their price/GB will decrease very quickly. Largest capacities will always be expensive. For a long time they will cost more than magnetic media, but it probably won't always be so. Their speed and reliability will improve as vendors build out the drive intelligence that abstracts the physical media from the logical media and parallelize atomic access with internal RAID to compensate for the slowness of individual cells. These products will sell to users who are interested in their benefits and the manufacturers will make lots of money. Ultimately the speed of random reads and writes of SSD media will be limited only by the interface as solid state components are "always on" and each block of data is as accessible as any other.
Magnetic media will continue to drop in price as well. As storage increases today's hard drives will find their way to the recycling center in record time. The optimal price/performance will continue to improve as will maximum capacity. Speed will not increase as much, particularly with random reads and writes, because the data is still stored on a rotating physical object and a physical read/write head must move to the correct track and wait for the data block to fly under the head before data can be read or written. These products will continue to sell well for a long time to users interested in their benefits and the manufacturers will continue to make lots of money.
Both will be popular for a long time. There are other technologies in the works also.
Ultimately at 60MB/s it takes 1,000,000 seconds (11.5 days) to write 60tB to a (currently theoretical) rotating platter drive. At 6tB/second (interface TBA) it takes 10 seconds to write the same data to a solid state device. The ultimate winner in this one is clear, but it will be a long time.
Let me be the first to say: "that's a lot of porn."
Let me introduce you to Symantec. They make an application called "Ghostcast server", which is used to clone PCs in bulk. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out which product they offer contains this application, how much it costs and how it works. Give it a shot. It's like Where's Waldo for geeks.
Like X? That was over quickly. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft decided to change their windowing environment and its terms, and it was so hated nobody would want it. Wait -- you don't have to pretend.
I bought repealcopyright.com. I'm going to need some suggestions for site software and some volunteers to admin the thing.
Let's get on it. Who's in?
Replies here for suggestions, touch the obvious gmail for access.
Repeal copyright. All of it. If they want to fight, give 'em a fight. Let us not piddle about minor interpretations of legalisms. Let's gut the whole thing. Patents too. Both of them were designed to promote progress and now the serve the opposite purpose. They should be done away with.
Patents shall not issue. Copyrights shall not be granted. All patents and copyrights are void. (New amendment)
I've been hearing this since 1993. What's been lacking is evidence. There are a lot of reasons why this cannot be true, but I'm not prepared to go into them right now. I recommend "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" by Eric Raymond for those who are curious about these things. You would think that if it were true we would have some proof by now. It has been 15 years.
No, actually I was commenting on my own experience using and supporting users of Windows (since version 1.0, actually) and Linux since v 0.8 or so. Security is not funny and anything I can do to help people improve theirs also improves mine because we're connected by a network. People need to understand how to secure their computers and recognize when their security is compromised and what to do about it. Sometimes a bit of ridicule is the motivator they need.
Both need attention. That is what I meant in this post by "No OS is 100% secure. Good administration and usage matters far more than the software package." If you're using Windows the tips there will save you some work. When you find yourself rebuilding your Windows box (again) my journal on the subject may also be helpful. You're welcome.
Your post above was moderated "funny". You might want to consider why that happened. Apparently the moderator thought there was something funny about what you said. I approve of you being allowed to say whatever you want. You might not be prepared for the response here on slashdot but that's on you. A lot of the moderators know stuff.
For the record, I was born into IT before there was an IBM PC and grew into professional IT with Unix long before there was a Windows. I've used every version of DOS and Windows there ever was, and many many other systems. Some I liked more than others. Currently my preferences depend on the use and I would recommend Windows in some circumstances but Vista in none. They're tools and you use the right one for the job. For my own use I use several versions of Windows, several distributions of Linux, several builds of BSD, one XServe with OS-X Tiger, device oriented stuff that's peculiar to the device (mostly routers), and some stuff I wrote myself but don't share (performance anxiety). I wouldn't touch Unix with a ten foot pole and before I touched anything from SCO I'd rather find honest work in a new trade. Dismissing me as a "fanboi" might be a bit of a reach. Perhaps "seasoned opinion" might be more appropriate. Fanboi should be reserved for people who are fond of the one thing they know. This is slashdot so there are people here that are qualified to lecture me about my preferences and opinions. Some few here are qualified to consider me a noob. Trust me: you're not one of them. It's ok, though. Once I asked Ward Christensen why he thought he was the boss of programming and so wound up in the motd file of every linux distro on earth (thankfully attributed
Another game where the only way to win is not to play.
No human effort is free. All human efforts require time and energy, overhead and maintenance. This is more so true when the efforts are subsidized by a company. When a contributor gives effort to the improvement of software that is to be made freely available to all he (or she) is engaged in a contract wherein he can expect a benefit called "progress."
Such a contributor may offer this up for the benefit of all, but that point is not important to the contract. As long as there are two contributors in the world so involved that their efforts benefit each other the terms of the contract are kept and the benefit is achieved. That there are many, many contributors so engaged amplifies the benefit for all.
Progress benefits us everyone. Perhaps "free" isn't the right word after all.
T minus 8 Days.