Simple. Infrastructure code is not a competitive advantage. If we don't GPL it, our others will simply build effectively the same infrastructure on their own.
If we GPL it, though, other people will adopt it instead of writing their own. We then reap the benefits of their improvements to the infrastructure.
And just to be clear: We aren't GPLing our code that makes us unique & that is our real value.
Not to mention the goodwill GPLing the code will generate for the company. Or possibly good press. Or the karmic benefits of giving back after having leveraged PHP & other open source code in building our business.
I'm appalled by the fact that philosophy isn't a peer subject along with science, math, history, & literature. How can you understand math without logic? How can you understand science without epistemology?
Besides, we'd be able to route creationism & intelligent design & anything else metaphysics related from the science classroom to philosophy where it belongs.
(FWIW: I believe almost every conflict between science & faith comes down to a misunderstanding of one or both.)
Mach & BSD have been available on Intel forever. It is not a threat to Linux on Intel.
Whether a desktop system that's trying to play in the same space as the Mac OS is based on Linux or not is as irrelevant as the fact that the Mac OS is built atop Mach with a BSD personality.
Is Mac OS on Intel a threat to open source desktop system on Intel? Yes, but no worse a threat than any proprietary system is to its open source counterparts.
1% is completely bogus. It was more than that when I worked at a 5 person company. It was small enough to be workable, though.
Later I worked at a c. 30 person company & another programmer had this problem. It took way more than 1% of his time. It was a problem, & the boss recognized it & did something about it.
So, if you can't convince him up front, keep a good record of the time you spend doing non-programming tasks. Don't complain. Do make ultimatums or challenges. Just let him see the record of what is actually happening.
Personally, if the boss can't be convinced upfront, I'd rather take on the extra duties that refuse them. If the boss ends up being right, fine. If not, I demonstrate that to him. In any case, I want to do everything I can to be a positive force & make my company the biggest success it can be.
Let me assure you, your fears are well founded. This signals the end of the Mac. Switch to developing for Microsoft Windows now!
But, before you go...um...what was your product? Oh, just curious. Yeah, we're right behind you...we're going to give up Mac development too...um...next month or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. So...what was your product again?
PowerPC made sense at the time Apple adopted it. Things have chages, IBM has decided it doesn't want to give Apple what it needs today, & Intel can supply what Apple needs today.
Although, if I were Jobs, I would've either partnered with AMD--or even better--just announced I was switching to IA--not any specific vendor--& not bring the Intel guy on stage.
I can't say I'm a big fan of Intel's archetecture, but the processor arch hasn't matter much for most purposes for a very long time now.
I suspect Jobs figured they might as well switch to IA when he first came to Apple. He just knew that--along with all the other changes--that would be a bit too much. He had to wait for the right time to make the switch.
(BTW, when I say "PC" below, I mean "personal computer", not "wintel PC".)
I dunno. I can't believe little-endian has now -completely- won in the PC market. I think there were some benefits from having another processor arch in the PC world even in the small numbers that Apple has.
That's the trend. It's slow, but it has been happening for a while.
There will always be PC games, but as time goes on, there will be fewer & fewer people buying the latest & greatest PC hardware just to play games. Although there will always be a few people who do that.
The biggest problem is that the consoles makers need to realize that they need a greater variety of games. It is having a gazillion games that each sell a realitively low number of units--along with the fewer games that sell in a large number of units--that will really shift things more away from PCs to consoles.
There are other things that have to happen too: More common code that all games leverage for common tasks. (Saving a game should work the same on all games.) Enabling developers to easily implement on-the-fly saving. Figuring out the right alternate controllers for games for which the standard controller doesn't work well. et alia ad nauseum. Continuing to increase the variety of games & gameplay available, though, is the key.
People often assume that I care about whether others use OSS or not.
In truth, though, I don't really care. Sometimes I recommend that others don't use OSS! e.g. My wife & kids use Macs. (Although they use some OSS on the Macs.)
What I do, though, is ask people why they let software vendors get away with charging money for a product that doesn't have the features that similar OS product has.
(Of course, they can ask why my software doesn't have a feature that theirs has. To which I say: I have no one to blame but myself. If a feature is important enough to me, I have the freedom to implement it myself without recreating the entire application. Since I didn't have to pay for the software, I have nothing but thanks rather than complaints for those who created it.)
Plus, I tend to complain when people send me data in proprietary formats that are harder for me to deal with. But I still don't care what software they're using. I'm quick to point out that their software can write to open formats just fine.
Don't treat them differently because they aren't going to be full time programmers. Just teach them to program.
(The history courses I took weren't "history lite" because the instructors new I wasn't going to be a full time historian.)
More importantly, don't teach them some RAD system. Teach them how a large scale/scalable project is developed. Teach them when RAD is not applicable & why.
I'd love to see more anime on CN, but I won't miss what they've been playing.
Only 3 times have I seen anime on CN and it not been DBZ, which I don't really care for.
I saw an ep of Cowboy Beebop once, but couldn't get into it from just that one ep. I don't know that its the kind of show I'd bother getting into, anyway.
All I can say is "hurrah!" It is WAY past time that the appliances took over the computer game industry. My PC is a great (extremely) general purpose tool, and I'm always going to use it to "play" to a certain extent. But if I plop down $50+ for a game, it needs to be an order of magnitude more reliable than my PC needs to be.
Oh, and no, I have little desire to play Quake III arena in front of any screen. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good FPS now and then, but that's a candy-bar, not meat.
I can only hope that the PS2 and successors will get more of the types of games and peripherals that are currently only available on PCs.
Toupsie wrote, "Looking at just web browsing speed on an OS is not a great reason to choose one over an another."
Well, if web browsing is the primary purpose of your computer, (and for some, this is the case) then it is the best reason to choose one over another.
For myself, web browsing speed certainly isn't the only criterion, but web browsing has definately become one of the primary purposes of my computer, so web browsing speed is an important criterion.
In fact, back in 1996/7ish when I switched from Mac to NT, web browsing speed was definately a big factor in my decision. (Even then, web browsing speed had a tangible effect on my productivity.) All other things being equal, both IE and Netscape on Mac crawled compared to IE and Netscape on NT. Combined with the real productivity boost of preemptive multitasking and true virtual memory with memory protection, I found myself much more productive on my NT system than on my beloved Mac. (The boosts more than made up for the ease-of-use penalty.)
My transition to Linux was definately hampered by the quality of Netscape on Linux compared to Netscape on Windows.
Now, my wife uses her computer for email, web browsing, and printing photos from the digital camera. That's pretty much it.
Some years ago, before printing photos was added to that list, when I made her use Linux, she found Netscape to be a real hinderance. (It was really bad at the time.)
She found Windows harder to use than Linux, but overall she was happier since her web experience was now so much better.
Now that Mac OS X is here, I'm thinking that may be a good choice for her next computer. But if she's going to find web browsing frustrating, then the idea is a non-starter.
Back when I was still fairly new to Unix/Linux, there came a point when I had to reconfigure my Linux machine's IP address. It had initially been configured by the user-friendly install program. I was sure there was a user-friendly tool for changing it, but I didn't know what it was. So, this is what I did:
find/etc -type f | xargs grep "192.168.0.2" > files-with-old-address.txt find/etc -type f | xargs grep "255.255.255.0" > files-with-old-netmask.txt find/etc -type f | xargs grep "192.168.0.1" > files-with-old-gateway.txt
Where "192.168.0.2" was replaced with my old IP address and "192.168.0.1" was replaced with my old gateway address. Of course, I didn't go searching and replacing willy-nilly. But by looking at the results of those commands, it became clear what I needed to change. And looking at a few man pages based on what I found helped me make sure I was doing the right thing.
The point of which is, on Linux and many Unix systems, if you need to figure out how to change a configuration, there's a good chance that a find/grep on/etc will turn up all the clues you need. How to do that should be one of the first skills to be learned by anyone who wants to be somewhere between just-a-user and full-blown-sysadmin.
For Microsoft people, it's analogous to searching the registry, though (in my experience) searching/etc turns up the right answer faster and more reliably than searching the registry.
Reference: There aren't enough tech books that are pure (or fairly pure) references. The O'Reilly POSIX Programmer's Guide is a great example of a good reference. (In fact, the non-reference portions are, IMHO, so shallow that they could be removed without the book losing any value.)
Complete Reference Books: I've got a great little C/C++ programmer's reference, but it doesn't tell me what include file I need to get the thing I just looked up. This hinders its usefulness greatly.
Complex examples: Simple examples can be good, but often a simple example leaves you with no clue how to implement the more complex real-world task before you.
Paper: I may have two monitors, but I still don't have enough screen real estate. Paper has a lot going for it.
Electronic: The value of a reference book increases by an order of magnitude if it is paper and electronic. But the electronic version can't have any copy protection. (That's DRM for the younger generation.) I need to be able to slice and dice the content and build a custom search & extract program. A copy protected ebook is about as useful to me as an x86 binary on an Apple ][.
A colleague and I had a long debate on this topic. We both used to be Mac users/developers. He now uses Windows and Visual C++. I'm using Linux, vi, g++, etc. more these days.
In the end, we had to agree that both GUI development tools and CLI development tools are about equal when you consider everything. For everything the GUI does well, there's a CLI alternative. For everything the CLI does well, there's a GUI alternative.
He can't type, and even if he ever does Linux development, he's going to need a GUI environment to be productive. I, on the other hand, find myself more productive in a CLI environment.
To me, "hard science fiction" is fiction with realistic science/technology in it. For example, almost everything I've read by Arthur C. Clarke qualifies.
The Harry Potter series? Very derivitive, but I try not to hold that against anyone. All great art is derivative to some extent. Personally, Quidditch seems like such an unlikely game (with or without magic) that it detracts from the books. In any case, I've enjoyed them. I also like that the style grows with Harry.
Let the Hugo voters choose whatever they will. Personally, I don't think art is a competition. I'm not ranking all the fiction/authors on my shelf. I just like them all.
They may not be dead yet, but (IMHO) Loki should die. I don't mean to be mean spirited about it. I love the idea of Loki, but it just doesn't seem practical to me anymore.
I virtually stopped buying games for my PC back when I upgraded from Sega Genesis to Sony Playstation. For me, gaming has moved into the appliance faze.
A Linux PC is (and should be) the farthest thing from an appliance. Of course the technologies in it can be used to build appliances, but this Linux PC on my desktop isn't an appliance, and I don't want it to be.
For gaming, I want an appliance. Sure, the console market isn't perfect, but it's good enough and it is getting better.
(In point of fact, I do use my PC for gaming. I play Same GNOME whenever I need a little mind-numbing escape from the grind. I definately use my PC a lot to support my non-computer-RPG habit. But for the serious shell-out-sixty-bucks gaming, it's PS2 all the way. Oh, wait -- I do use my PC to look up tips and cheat codes on the web...)
These days, I mostly listen to talk radio. (I like music, but I hate most music radio stations.) It'd be great if I could listen to my favorite talk radio shows but with ads for stuff I care about instead of Gold Bond Powder. I seriously doubt my favorite talk radio programs will be online with targeted ads anytime soon, though.
For the programming I do, C++ and Perl are adequate.
I looked at Ruby some time ago and was really quite impressed.
I'll probably look into Ruby again periodically, but so far, I haven't seen anything to convince me it's worth using myself.
Quick - how many brand names or logos are visible on the outside of your clothing? Your computer equipment?
Let's see, I'm wearing a (non-T) shirt and jeans from Old Navy. Neither have visible logos, despite Old Navy's propensity for such things.
My computer? It's a generic Intel box. No logos whatsoever. (Although, there is a place to stick one if I had one to stick there.)
In the USA today, it may not be possible to live logo free. Even if I could, I don't know that I'd want to. Logos aren't all bad. But my point is that there are logoless options out there.
Someone wrote: "I for one don't think people should be allowed to soak up domain names for profit. If they don't put a domain name to use they should lose it."
Hmm. That seems to have a few difficulties -- one of which is that it would be easy to use the domain name for something. Just set up some email aliases.
I think a better idea is to simply make it so that domain names cannot be resold. The only money that should be paid for a domain name is the registration fee. Anything else should be considered extortion.
If people cannot (legally) profit from holding domain names, then they'll give them up and let the system work the way it was meant to.
The great thing about the early Simpsons was not that the moral was subtle, it was that the show didn't take sides. They'd show the good and bad aspects of both sides of an issue, and lampoon both equally.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple. Infrastructure code is not a competitive advantage. If we don't GPL it, our others will simply build effectively the same infrastructure on their own.
If we GPL it, though, other people will adopt it instead of writing their own. We then reap the benefits of their improvements to the infrastructure.
And just to be clear: We aren't GPLing our code that makes us unique & that is our real value.
Not to mention the goodwill GPLing the code will generate for the company. Or possibly good press. Or the karmic benefits of giving back after having leveraged PHP & other open source code in building our business.
I'm appalled by the fact that philosophy isn't a peer subject along with science, math, history, & literature. How can you understand math without logic? How can you understand science without epistemology?
Besides, we'd be able to route creationism & intelligent design & anything else metaphysics related from the science classroom to philosophy where it belongs.
(FWIW: I believe almost every conflict between science & faith comes down to a misunderstanding of one or both.)
Mach & BSD have been available on Intel forever. It is not a threat to Linux on Intel.
Whether a desktop system that's trying to play in the same space as the Mac OS is based on Linux or not is as irrelevant as the fact that the Mac OS is built atop Mach with a BSD personality.
Is Mac OS on Intel a threat to open source desktop system on Intel? Yes, but no worse a threat than any proprietary system is to its open source counterparts.
Yep. This is what I was going to say.
1% is completely bogus. It was more than that when I worked at a 5 person company. It was small enough to be workable, though.
Later I worked at a c. 30 person company & another programmer had this problem. It took way more than 1% of his time. It was a problem, & the boss recognized it & did something about it.
So, if you can't convince him up front, keep a good record of the time you spend doing non-programming tasks. Don't complain. Do make ultimatums or challenges. Just let him see the record of what is actually happening.
Personally, if the boss can't be convinced upfront, I'd rather take on the extra duties that refuse them. If the boss ends up being right, fine. If not, I demonstrate that to him. In any case, I want to do everything I can to be a positive force & make my company the biggest success it can be.
Let me assure you, your fears are well founded. This signals the end of the Mac. Switch to developing for Microsoft Windows now!
But, before you go...um...what was your product? Oh, just curious. Yeah, we're right behind you...we're going to give up Mac development too...um...next month or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. So...what was your product again?
PowerPC made sense at the time Apple adopted it. Things have chages, IBM has decided it doesn't want to give Apple what it needs today, & Intel can supply what Apple needs today.
Although, if I were Jobs, I would've either partnered with AMD--or even better--just announced I was switching to IA--not any specific vendor--& not bring the Intel guy on stage.
I can't say I'm a big fan of Intel's archetecture, but the processor arch hasn't matter much for most purposes for a very long time now.
I suspect Jobs figured they might as well switch to IA when he first came to Apple. He just knew that--along with all the other changes--that would be a bit too much. He had to wait for the right time to make the switch.
(BTW, when I say "PC" below, I mean "personal computer", not "wintel PC".)
I dunno. I can't believe little-endian has now -completely- won in the PC market. I think there were some benefits from having another processor arch in the PC world even in the small numbers that Apple has.
That's the trend. It's slow, but it has been happening for a while.
There will always be PC games, but as time goes on, there will be fewer & fewer people buying the latest & greatest PC hardware just to play games. Although there will always be a few people who do that.
The biggest problem is that the consoles makers need to realize that they need a greater variety of games. It is having a gazillion games that each sell a realitively low number of units--along with the fewer games that sell in a large number of units--that will really shift things more away from PCs to consoles.
There are other things that have to happen too: More common code that all games leverage for common tasks. (Saving a game should work the same on all games.) Enabling developers to easily implement on-the-fly saving. Figuring out the right alternate controllers for games for which the standard controller doesn't work well. et alia ad nauseum. Continuing to increase the variety of games & gameplay available, though, is the key.
People often assume that I care about whether others use OSS or not.
In truth, though, I don't really care. Sometimes I recommend that others don't use OSS! e.g. My wife & kids use Macs. (Although they use some OSS on the Macs.)
What I do, though, is ask people why they let software vendors get away with charging money for a product that doesn't have the features that similar OS product has.
(Of course, they can ask why my software doesn't have a feature that theirs has. To which I say: I have no one to blame but myself. If a feature is important enough to me, I have the freedom to implement it myself without recreating the entire application. Since I didn't have to pay for the software, I have nothing but thanks rather than complaints for those who created it.)
Plus, I tend to complain when people send me data in proprietary formats that are harder for me to deal with. But I still don't care what software they're using. I'm quick to point out that their software can write to open formats just fine.
Don't treat them differently because they aren't going to be full time programmers. Just teach them to program.
(The history courses I took weren't "history lite" because the instructors new I wasn't going to be a full time historian.)
More importantly, don't teach them some RAD system. Teach them how a large scale/scalable project is developed. Teach them when RAD is not applicable & why.
"More U.S. Homes have Outhouses then TiVos"
And I thought the fallacy that you had to have 100% marketshare to be considered successful was an artifact of the personal computer market.
I'd love to see more anime on CN, but I won't miss what they've been playing.
Only 3 times have I seen anime on CN and it not been DBZ, which I don't really care for.
I saw an ep of Cowboy Beebop once, but couldn't get into it from just that one ep. I don't know that its the kind of show I'd bother getting into, anyway.
Gunsmith Cats was fun.
All I can say is "hurrah!" It is WAY past time that the appliances took over the computer game industry. My PC is a great (extremely) general purpose tool, and I'm always going to use it to "play" to a certain extent. But if I plop down $50+ for a game, it needs to be an order of magnitude more reliable than my PC needs to be.
Oh, and no, I have little desire to play Quake III arena in front of any screen. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good FPS now and then, but that's a candy-bar, not meat.
I can only hope that the PS2 and successors will get more of the types of games and peripherals that are currently only available on PCs.
Toupsie wrote, "Looking at just web browsing speed on an OS is not a great reason to choose one over an another."
Well, if web browsing is the primary purpose of your computer, (and for some, this is the case) then it is the best reason to choose one over another.
For myself, web browsing speed certainly isn't the only criterion, but web browsing has definately become one of the primary purposes of my computer, so web browsing speed is an important criterion.
In fact, back in 1996/7ish when I switched from Mac to NT, web browsing speed was definately a big factor in my decision. (Even then, web browsing speed had a tangible effect on my productivity.) All other things being equal, both IE and Netscape on Mac crawled compared to IE and Netscape on NT. Combined with the real productivity boost of preemptive multitasking and true virtual memory with memory protection, I found myself much more productive on my NT system than on my beloved Mac. (The boosts more than made up for the ease-of-use penalty.)
My transition to Linux was definately hampered by the quality of Netscape on Linux compared to Netscape on Windows.
Now, my wife uses her computer for email, web browsing, and printing photos from the digital camera. That's pretty much it.
Some years ago, before printing photos was added to that list, when I made her use Linux, she found Netscape to be a real hinderance. (It was really bad at the time.)
She found Windows harder to use than Linux, but overall she was happier since her web experience was now so much better.
Now that Mac OS X is here, I'm thinking that may be a good choice for her next computer. But if she's going to find web browsing frustrating, then the idea is a non-starter.
Back when I was still fairly new to Unix/Linux, there came a point when I had to reconfigure my Linux machine's IP address. It had initially been configured by the user-friendly install program. I was sure there was a user-friendly tool for changing it, but I didn't know what it was. So, this is what I did:
/etc -type f | xargs grep "192.168.0.2" > files-with-old-address.txt /etc -type f | xargs grep "255.255.255.0" > files-with-old-netmask.txt /etc -type f | xargs grep "192.168.0.1" > files-with-old-gateway.txt
/etc will turn up all the clues you need. How to do that should be one of the first skills to be learned by anyone who wants to be somewhere between just-a-user and full-blown-sysadmin.
/etc turns up the right answer faster and more reliably than searching the registry.
find
find
find
Where "192.168.0.2" was replaced with my old IP address and "192.168.0.1" was replaced with my old gateway address. Of course, I didn't go searching and replacing willy-nilly. But by looking at the results of those commands, it became clear what I needed to change. And looking at a few man pages based on what I found helped me make sure I was doing the right thing.
The point of which is, on Linux and many Unix systems, if you need to figure out how to change a configuration, there's a good chance that a find/grep on
For Microsoft people, it's analogous to searching the registry, though (in my experience) searching
Reference: There aren't enough tech books that are pure (or fairly pure) references. The O'Reilly POSIX Programmer's Guide is a great example of a good reference. (In fact, the non-reference portions are, IMHO, so shallow that they could be removed without the book losing any value.)
Complete Reference Books: I've got a great little C/C++ programmer's reference, but it doesn't tell me what include file I need to get the thing I just looked up. This hinders its usefulness greatly.
Complex examples: Simple examples can be good, but often a simple example leaves you with no clue how to implement the more complex real-world task before you.
Paper: I may have two monitors, but I still don't have enough screen real estate. Paper has a lot going for it.
Electronic: The value of a reference book increases by an order of magnitude if it is paper and electronic. But the electronic version can't have any copy protection. (That's DRM for the younger generation.) I need to be able to slice and dice the content and build a custom search & extract program. A copy protected ebook is about as useful to me as an x86 binary on an Apple ][.
A colleague and I had a long debate on this topic. We both used to be Mac users/developers. He now uses Windows and Visual C++. I'm using Linux, vi, g++, etc. more these days.
In the end, we had to agree that both GUI development tools and CLI development tools are about equal when you consider everything. For everything the GUI does well, there's a CLI alternative. For everything the CLI does well, there's a GUI alternative.
He can't type, and even if he ever does Linux development, he's going to need a GUI environment to be productive. I, on the other hand, find myself more productive in a CLI environment.
To me, "hard science fiction" is fiction with realistic science/technology in it. For example, almost everything I've read by Arthur C. Clarke qualifies.
The Harry Potter series? Very derivitive, but I try not to hold that against anyone. All great art is derivative to some extent. Personally, Quidditch seems like such an unlikely game (with or without magic) that it detracts from the books. In any case, I've enjoyed them. I also like that the style grows with Harry.
Let the Hugo voters choose whatever they will. Personally, I don't think art is a competition. I'm not ranking all the fiction/authors on my shelf. I just like them all.
They may not be dead yet, but (IMHO) Loki should die. I don't mean to be mean spirited about it. I love the idea of Loki, but it just doesn't seem practical to me anymore.
I virtually stopped buying games for my PC back when I upgraded from Sega Genesis to Sony Playstation. For me, gaming has moved into the appliance faze.
A Linux PC is (and should be) the farthest thing from an appliance. Of course the technologies in it can be used to build appliances, but this Linux PC on my desktop isn't an appliance, and I don't want it to be.
For gaming, I want an appliance. Sure, the console market isn't perfect, but it's good enough and it is getting better.
(In point of fact, I do use my PC for gaming. I play Same GNOME whenever I need a little mind-numbing escape from the grind. I definately use my PC a lot to support my non-computer-RPG habit. But for the serious shell-out-sixty-bucks gaming, it's PS2 all the way. Oh, wait -- I do use my PC to look up tips and cheat codes on the web...)
These days, I mostly listen to talk radio. (I like music, but I hate most music radio stations.) It'd be great if I could listen to my favorite talk radio shows but with ads for stuff I care about instead of Gold Bond Powder. I seriously doubt my favorite talk radio programs will be online with targeted ads anytime soon, though.
For the programming I do, C++ and Perl are adequate. I looked at Ruby some time ago and was really quite impressed. I'll probably look into Ruby again periodically, but so far, I haven't seen anything to convince me it's worth using myself.
Let's see, I'm wearing a (non-T) shirt and jeans from Old Navy. Neither have visible logos, despite Old Navy's propensity for such things.
My computer? It's a generic Intel box. No logos whatsoever. (Although, there is a place to stick one if I had one to stick there.)
In the USA today, it may not be possible to live logo free. Even if I could, I don't know that I'd want to. Logos aren't all bad. But my point is that there are logoless options out there.
Someone wrote: "I for one don't think people should be allowed to soak up domain names for profit. If they don't put a domain name to use they should lose it."
Hmm. That seems to have a few difficulties -- one of which is that it would be easy to use the domain name for something. Just set up some email aliases.
I think a better idea is to simply make it so that domain names cannot be resold. The only money that should be paid for a domain name is the registration fee. Anything else should be considered extortion.
If people cannot (legally) profit from holding domain names, then they'll give them up and let the system work the way it was meant to.
The great thing about the early Simpsons was not that the moral was subtle, it was that the show didn't take sides. They'd show the good and bad aspects of both sides of an issue, and lampoon both equally.