And just as with real-world laws, there's a limit to how much you can specify clearly enough, or how many restrictions you actually want to set.
In fact, I think we'd both agree that it would be a Bad Idea to have all laws be set to match social customs. There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt, and I would not want to live in a place that had such a law -- yet you probably still wouldn't want me to do that, and society in general would probably disapprove.
"Don't be a dick" can't be coded into law, but it's still good advice.
Using the term open source to apply to absolutely anything is stupid. All books are open source - just open one up and there's the plainly understandable content.
You could say that about many things that we don't consider "open source". Sure, I can read it, but it's going to be as tedious to retype it all, let alone preserve formatting, as it might be to disassemble a program and try to make changes. Give me the original document, in machine readable form, then we'll call it "open source".
However, I tend to use "open source" as a replacement for "free software", as it's a much easier to misunderstand term. "Open source" generally means "remixable" -- you don't often have something claim to be "open", yet have a license that prevents derivate versions.
What you're describing isn't even like open source, where anyone can start up a project and the project itself changes constantly. What you're talking about is plain old "free."
Free as in freedom, yes. But this is precisely why I tried not to use that term -- I just read "free" and assumed you meant "zero dollars".
The project itself changing constantly is not required for open source. It's usually a result, but not required.
What you want is someone who's a recognized expert to edit the thing, and a bunch of other experts to write chapters for it. Then you publish it on the web for free and maybe charge cost or cost + a little for hard copies.
I don't see how this forces it to be at cost. You can't completely gouge, but it's unlikely you'll have people lining up to print their own competing editions.
It's also not what I'm suggesting. That may well be a good structure for providing that content, but again, "open source" is just the way it's licensed -- does not imply zero cost, does not imply any particular model of contribution. Some have a large pool of trusted people with commit access to some common SVN branch. Some are more distributed -- a network of Git repositories, but you still probably want your patches signed off on by someone in the loop. Some have an official version controlled by a corporation, and some are so chaotic as to have no leadership at all.
But then, if by "open source" you meant "wiki", you can see my confusion. I have never seen the wiki model used for software development -- only, y'know, wikis. Software development has pretty much always forced you to either be trusted, get your patch signed off on by someone who is trusted, or fork it and try to build your own web of trust.
It's basically an argument from ignorance -- or rather, an appeal to "common sense".
Ok, yes, appeal to common sense can be done well, but there are things to which common sense just doesn't apply, and we actually have to use critical thought and science.
Example: Common sense tells you light doesn't travel, it's just instantaneous. When you flip a light switch, light is just on. However, no one questions when science tells us that light does travel.
Common sense can't even begin to grasp the weirdness that gravity is a bending of space-time.
For what it's worth, Gmail has been just the opposite for me. It's Yahoo and AOL which randomly decide to block me -- sometimes with some cause, sometimes just because it's on a residential connection.
Yet Gmail never so much as greylists me -- everything goes straight through, every time.
"Open source" isn't such a good idea, because you'd like a little more reliability in your text books than, for instance Wikipedia.
*facepalm*
Open source != Wiki.
Just because anyone can submit a patch to the Linux kernel, doesn't mean it has to be accepted. Just because anyone can fork the Linux kernel, doesn't make the new one official.
All this would mean is a creative commons license, so that no one entity can have a monopoly on all future versions of a given textbook, and so that people can fork when needed -- for example, a professor might want their own edition...
It in no way means that a given edition would be editable by anyone, or would be any less trustworthy than if it were under a different license. There's no particular reason you can't have a respected author and editor release just as reliable a text under Creative Commons as they would under "All Rights Reserved."
Though, the choice of 14 minutes seems dangerously close in it's biological basis as "7 minute abs"... if you manage to get the heart rate up with this, give it 20 minutes and it will pay off a lot more than those extra 6 minutes are worth.
That's what I've been told, and I have been doing that, now that I'm unemployed. However, the magical thing about 14 minutes is, there is no excuse. If it was 15 minutes, you might have an excuse, but everyone has a gap in their calendar somewhere.
If you looked at the calorie and general nutritional value of pizza (given at least moderate care to choose a GOOD pizza with fresh mozzarella and some vegetables, not some sodium laced frozen crap), it's probably a fairly good mix of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. The difference is, do you eat 1 slice and 300 calories, or 4 slices and 1200 calories?
Trouble is, once slice isn't a meal. Not even now that I'm snacking more. I typically had three slices.
No, my approach has been, don't eat pizza regularly. If I'm going to eat pizza, I'll eat a few slices, even half a pizza, but I don't do it every day, or even every week.
And not just "don't eat pizza", but rather, "What can I eat instead of pizza?" My initial answer was a grilled chicken wrap from a local place -- not really more expensive than the pizza, still had mozzarella, but more vegetables and much more protein, and left me feeling much fuller.
Add a giant side of fries and 24oz of non-diet soda and yes, you are now taking in over 1000 calories.
I still find this isn't an effective place to focus, because the result you tend to get here is, people start thinking, "Oh, I should have a diet soda instead."
And you end up with comical things like someone drinking a diet coke and eating a twinkie, as if these somehow cancel each other out.
I tend to have non-diet things, mostly because the ways in which that diet coke has been changed to make it taste something like Coke, but have fewer calories -- that can't be healthy. Not that coke is healthy to begin with... Same approach, though, I just don't drink soda every day.
the MOST annoying thing (which takes us back to the original article!) is when someone wants some miracle solution that doesn't involve ACTUAL EFFORT
I'll agree with that, but at the same time, it's really not that hard.
I mean, I added a 14 minute workout, actually added snacks to where it felt like I was eating more, and made some simple swaps (wrap instead of pizza) -- and hey, I think the wrap tastes better anyway.
I understand that for some people, it's difficult. But I think part of the reason people jump on the miracle stuff is that when you tell them a cold hard truth, it sounds like you're telling them they have to work hard and suffer.
I wonder how many people are willing to pay a 25% premium to run Windows on Amazon EC2?
It may be difficult for any startup, open source or not, to gain a foothold here. But when you're looking to reduce costs as much as possible, to sell a utility computing model, I don't see why you'd be adding extra software costs right away.
In fact, the summary mentions other things, like Puppet and Hadoop, that make an impact.
I don't know that anyone is claiming open source could provide such a service, any more than open source could provide free and open hardware. Even if you have a completely opendesign, you still probably need some sort of corporate entity to build and sell it.
But at the same time, I don't see why any "cloud" provider in their right mind would pass up things like Puppet or Eucalyptus. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of place where the typical objections to open source hold no water -- merely providing a service is most likely not going to force you to disclose any changes, and that assumes you have to change the project at all.
There is still, initially, a conscious effort made to set a certain number of meals, and especially to eat breakfast, to get yourself properly into that mode.
Because when eating three or four large-ish meals a day, one of which was pizza, I certainly thought I was eating when I was hungry, and not eating when I wasn't. And now, when I have a little snack, I generally have the whole snack -- protein bar, sandwich, whatever.
No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat. Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
Flush as in, carries with it, into the toilet. Then you flush.
Either way, the effect is the same.
Protein doesn't build muscle, muscle is made of protein.
Fine. Close enough.
That one I agree with:) Though aerobic exercise in the morning will do a lot more.
in the end WHAT you eat is completely secondary to HOW MUCH...
Maybe I could be more scientific about it, but I eat way more often, and I eat a lot. Add it up, I'm probably eating more than before I started, both in volume and in calories.
What I'm not doing is eating pizza for lunch every day, or stupid things like that.
Or, a case could be made that you still have to at least get up and walk around. I don't think a high-protein diet would be a bad thing, even with no exercise.
I actually haven't reduced carbohydrates, so much as added protein and fiber. I may crave carbs less, but then, my metabolism can burn a lot more of them now.
The formula is, add, then subtract. If you start by limiting yourself, you're going to resent it.
I think the point being made was that a successful IT company like Google is probably much better positioned to know WTF it's doing with regards to IT stuff. Oracle clients may have no clue.
And no, "object-based" is not the only alternative.
Shovelglove seems like it fits perfectly, especially the "schedulistically significant time" concept.
That is, if you're in America, you won't find a calendar with a granularity of less than 15 minutes, so you have no excuse for not working out for 14. If you have any time at all, including the time you wasted submitting this Slashdot article, you have time.
But at the same time, there are different divisions of the company.
And it is the responsibility of the company itself to ensure that these devisions stay in line.
If you buy a product of theirs that is actually GOOD (the ebook reader comes with SD, not just their closed memory stick and support for open ebook formats - epub), you can vote with your wallet. If they make BAD products (ie rootkit music cds) and we don't buy those, they will be forced to make a change in that area.
Erm, not really. The R&D for those bad products come from profits on the good products. You're basically telling Sony they can still occasionally release something terrible, and the worst they have to fear is that you won't buy that, you'll instead buy something else of theirs.
It's a bit like kill -- technically, shouldn't cause problems (especially if it's not -9), but can, and there's no reason to.
That, and I like not losing whatever I had open (but not saved).
Ctrl+Alt+Backspace is excellent when something goes wrong, and you don't know how to fix it -- much faster than a full reboot. However, it is not a substitute for a properly working xrandr, or whatever it's called.
Macs seem to suffer when they go out of their comfort zone; they may often Just Work when Linux doesn't, but there's also times Linux Just Works when Macs don't
What I find is that Macs more often Just Work, while Linux often needs tweaking. However, Macs completely fall apart when you go off the Jobs-approved path, and devolve into things like hand-editing XML files with pretty much no documentation, if that even works -- whereas when weird things happen in Linux,
P.S. I notice that you said "Powerbook", so I'm guessing when you say "nvidia stuff" you were running Linux on a PowerPC computer
No, I never got that set up. That was two laptops ago, and I'm pretty sure it was an ATI card. I don't remember what the problem is, but I never got Linux working, and eventually decided that OS X was working well enough for me.
This one is a Dell, which came with Ubuntu. Reformated it with a 64-bit Kubuntu. Basically, I got sick of dealing with the issues -- nvidia-settings would do things one way, KDE's System Settings would do it another way, and Xorg would do something else.
So I gave up -- I now hand-edit xorg.conf when I switch monitors from left to right, and I have to restart X when I plug in or unplug a monitor. It's not too bad, considering the only second monitor I usually plug in is going to be a 1080p screen via HDMI.
Still, this could be so much better. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but when I unplug HDMI, my system should detect it and dump everything from that monitor to another desktop/workspace. When I plug it in, my desktops should unfold. I should be able to pick up my laptop from my desk, where I have a nice 24" monitor connected to it, and just keep working as I relax on the couch, then go back to the desk when I need the extra space.
If that happened, I'd call this better than Windows or Mac. As it is, I have to restart X, while a Windows person could hit fn+f8.
Considering some people (not me) actually use capslock instead of shift (and claim to be faster with it), I imagine this would piss them off even more. (Apple has screwed with capslock before...)
First of all, developers are far from the only Firefox users, even on a Mac. People like their addons.
Second, Firefox was an example -- it's trivial to find inconsistency even in Apple's own software, before you get to third-party stuff. And Windows is even worse. The fact that people can paint "inconsistency" as a major weakness on Linux just strikes me as absurd -- the differences between Qt and GTK apps are nothing compared to the differences between various Windows apps I've seen.
All that said, Firefox tends to be a fairly decent UI, no matter what platform it's on, so I think that disproves the "open source can't design" theory.
Slashdot Mirror
So much that you're actually posting on a forum dedicated to gaming?
And just as with real-world laws, there's a limit to how much you can specify clearly enough, or how many restrictions you actually want to set.
In fact, I think we'd both agree that it would be a Bad Idea to have all laws be set to match social customs. There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt, and I would not want to live in a place that had such a law -- yet you probably still wouldn't want me to do that, and society in general would probably disapprove.
"Don't be a dick" can't be coded into law, but it's still good advice.
Well, that has to do with this story, which was featured on Slashdot.
Using the term open source to apply to absolutely anything is stupid. All books are open source - just open one up and there's the plainly understandable content.
You could say that about many things that we don't consider "open source". Sure, I can read it, but it's going to be as tedious to retype it all, let alone preserve formatting, as it might be to disassemble a program and try to make changes. Give me the original document, in machine readable form, then we'll call it "open source".
However, I tend to use "open source" as a replacement for "free software", as it's a much easier to misunderstand term. "Open source" generally means "remixable" -- you don't often have something claim to be "open", yet have a license that prevents derivate versions.
What you're describing isn't even like open source, where anyone can start up a project and the project itself changes constantly. What you're talking about is plain old "free."
Free as in freedom, yes. But this is precisely why I tried not to use that term -- I just read "free" and assumed you meant "zero dollars".
The project itself changing constantly is not required for open source. It's usually a result, but not required.
What you want is someone who's a recognized expert to edit the thing, and a bunch of other experts to write chapters for it. Then you publish it on the web for free and maybe charge cost or cost + a little for hard copies.
I don't see how this forces it to be at cost. You can't completely gouge, but it's unlikely you'll have people lining up to print their own competing editions.
It's also not what I'm suggesting. That may well be a good structure for providing that content, but again, "open source" is just the way it's licensed -- does not imply zero cost, does not imply any particular model of contribution. Some have a large pool of trusted people with commit access to some common SVN branch. Some are more distributed -- a network of Git repositories, but you still probably want your patches signed off on by someone in the loop. Some have an official version controlled by a corporation, and some are so chaotic as to have no leadership at all.
But then, if by "open source" you meant "wiki", you can see my confusion. I have never seen the wiki model used for software development -- only, y'know, wikis. Software development has pretty much always forced you to either be trusted, get your patch signed off on by someone who is trusted, or fork it and try to build your own web of trust.
It's basically an argument from ignorance -- or rather, an appeal to "common sense".
Ok, yes, appeal to common sense can be done well, but there are things to which common sense just doesn't apply, and we actually have to use critical thought and science.
Example: Common sense tells you light doesn't travel, it's just instantaneous. When you flip a light switch, light is just on. However, no one questions when science tells us that light does travel.
Common sense can't even begin to grasp the weirdness that gravity is a bending of space-time.
For what it's worth, Gmail has been just the opposite for me. It's Yahoo and AOL which randomly decide to block me -- sometimes with some cause, sometimes just because it's on a residential connection.
Yet Gmail never so much as greylists me -- everything goes straight through, every time.
"Open source" isn't such a good idea, because you'd like a little more reliability in your text books than, for instance Wikipedia.
*facepalm*
Open source != Wiki.
Just because anyone can submit a patch to the Linux kernel, doesn't mean it has to be accepted. Just because anyone can fork the Linux kernel, doesn't make the new one official.
All this would mean is a creative commons license, so that no one entity can have a monopoly on all future versions of a given textbook, and so that people can fork when needed -- for example, a professor might want their own edition...
It in no way means that a given edition would be editable by anyone, or would be any less trustworthy than if it were under a different license. There's no particular reason you can't have a respected author and editor release just as reliable a text under Creative Commons as they would under "All Rights Reserved."
Though, the choice of 14 minutes seems dangerously close in it's biological basis as "7 minute abs"... if you manage to get the heart rate up with this, give it 20 minutes and it will pay off a lot more than those extra 6 minutes are worth.
That's what I've been told, and I have been doing that, now that I'm unemployed. However, the magical thing about 14 minutes is, there is no excuse. If it was 15 minutes, you might have an excuse, but everyone has a gap in their calendar somewhere.
If you looked at the calorie and general nutritional value of pizza (given at least moderate care to choose a GOOD pizza with fresh mozzarella and some vegetables, not some sodium laced frozen crap), it's probably a fairly good mix of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. The difference is, do you eat 1 slice and 300 calories, or 4 slices and 1200 calories?
Trouble is, once slice isn't a meal. Not even now that I'm snacking more. I typically had three slices.
No, my approach has been, don't eat pizza regularly. If I'm going to eat pizza, I'll eat a few slices, even half a pizza, but I don't do it every day, or even every week.
And not just "don't eat pizza", but rather, "What can I eat instead of pizza?" My initial answer was a grilled chicken wrap from a local place -- not really more expensive than the pizza, still had mozzarella, but more vegetables and much more protein, and left me feeling much fuller.
Add a giant side of fries and 24oz of non-diet soda and yes, you are now taking in over 1000 calories.
I still find this isn't an effective place to focus, because the result you tend to get here is, people start thinking, "Oh, I should have a diet soda instead."
And you end up with comical things like someone drinking a diet coke and eating a twinkie, as if these somehow cancel each other out.
I tend to have non-diet things, mostly because the ways in which that diet coke has been changed to make it taste something like Coke, but have fewer calories -- that can't be healthy. Not that coke is healthy to begin with... Same approach, though, I just don't drink soda every day.
the MOST annoying thing (which takes us back to the original article!) is when someone wants some miracle solution that doesn't involve ACTUAL EFFORT
I'll agree with that, but at the same time, it's really not that hard.
I mean, I added a 14 minute workout, actually added snacks to where it felt like I was eating more, and made some simple swaps (wrap instead of pizza) -- and hey, I think the wrap tastes better anyway.
I understand that for some people, it's difficult. But I think part of the reason people jump on the miracle stuff is that when you tell them a cold hard truth, it sounds like you're telling them they have to work hard and suffer.
I wonder how many people are willing to pay a 25% premium to run Windows on Amazon EC2?
It may be difficult for any startup, open source or not, to gain a foothold here. But when you're looking to reduce costs as much as possible, to sell a utility computing model, I don't see why you'd be adding extra software costs right away.
In fact, the summary mentions other things, like Puppet and Hadoop, that make an impact.
I don't know that anyone is claiming open source could provide such a service, any more than open source could provide free and open hardware. Even if you have a completely open design, you still probably need some sort of corporate entity to build and sell it.
But at the same time, I don't see why any "cloud" provider in their right mind would pass up things like Puppet or Eucalyptus. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of place where the typical objections to open source hold no water -- merely providing a service is most likely not going to force you to disclose any changes, and that assumes you have to change the project at all.
Yes and no.
There is still, initially, a conscious effort made to set a certain number of meals, and especially to eat breakfast, to get yourself properly into that mode.
Because when eating three or four large-ish meals a day, one of which was pizza, I certainly thought I was eating when I was hungry, and not eating when I wasn't. And now, when I have a little snack, I generally have the whole snack -- protein bar, sandwich, whatever.
you want him to spend his one spare hour working out?
Well, if it's sex...
But no, seriously, a lot can be done in fourteen minutes, even if it's not every single day.
No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat. Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
Flush as in, carries with it, into the toilet. Then you flush.
Either way, the effect is the same.
Protein doesn't build muscle, muscle is made of protein.
Fine. Close enough.
That one I agree with :) Though aerobic exercise in the morning will do a lot more.
I do both -- though admittedly, not much exercise.
in the end WHAT you eat is completely secondary to HOW MUCH...
Maybe I could be more scientific about it, but I eat way more often, and I eat a lot. Add it up, I'm probably eating more than before I started, both in volume and in calories.
What I'm not doing is eating pizza for lunch every day, or stupid things like that.
And exercise is easy enough, too...
Or, a case could be made that you still have to at least get up and walk around. I don't think a high-protein diet would be a bad thing, even with no exercise.
I actually haven't reduced carbohydrates, so much as added protein and fiber. I may crave carbs less, but then, my metabolism can burn a lot more of them now.
The formula is, add, then subtract. If you start by limiting yourself, you're going to resent it.
I think the point being made was that a successful IT company like Google is probably much better positioned to know WTF it's doing with regards to IT stuff. Oracle clients may have no clue.
And no, "object-based" is not the only alternative.
I bet these people could die in their 90's and people will still be using relational dbs and sql.
They'll probably still be using FORTRAN and COBOL. If your only argument is job security, you win.
being against sql is just plain dumb.
And making a blanket statement like that is just plain uninformed.
Shovelglove seems like it fits perfectly, especially the "schedulistically significant time" concept.
That is, if you're in America, you won't find a calendar with a granularity of less than 15 minutes, so you have no excuse for not working out for 14. If you have any time at all, including the time you wasted submitting this Slashdot article, you have time.
Not entirely true.
Ok, yes, you can't just eat what you want. However, it's not as simple as just "more calories".
Fiber will flush calories.
Protein builds muscle, and muscle burns more calories than fat.
Small snacks throughout the day, and especially a proper breakfast, help your metabolism go faster.
Missing the point. No one has mandated it yet. Sony is just ahead of the curve.
Maybe it'll be mandated, maybe not.
But at the same time, there are different divisions of the company.
And it is the responsibility of the company itself to ensure that these devisions stay in line.
If you buy a product of theirs that is actually GOOD (the ebook reader comes with SD, not just their closed memory stick and support for open ebook formats - epub), you can vote with your wallet. If they make BAD products (ie rootkit music cds) and we don't buy those, they will be forced to make a change in that area.
Erm, not really. The R&D for those bad products come from profits on the good products. You're basically telling Sony they can still occasionally release something terrible, and the worst they have to fear is that you won't buy that, you'll instead buy something else of theirs.
Gimp != photoshop.
True. However, Gimp is also more than good enough for most of what us non-graphic designers need, and it doesn't cost $700.
No working equivalent for Access.
Most would consider this a good thing. Ok, something similar would be nice, but Access itself is an abomination.
No working equivalent for iTunes that works with my iTouch.
Amarok doesn't?
Can't say much about the rest -- no idea what Mapmaker or Omnifocus is.
Also, what's the fear of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
It's a bit like kill -- technically, shouldn't cause problems (especially if it's not -9), but can, and there's no reason to.
That, and I like not losing whatever I had open (but not saved).
Ctrl+Alt+Backspace is excellent when something goes wrong, and you don't know how to fix it -- much faster than a full reboot. However, it is not a substitute for a properly working xrandr, or whatever it's called.
Macs seem to suffer when they go out of their comfort zone; they may often Just Work when Linux doesn't, but there's also times Linux Just Works when Macs don't
What I find is that Macs more often Just Work, while Linux often needs tweaking. However, Macs completely fall apart when you go off the Jobs-approved path, and devolve into things like hand-editing XML files with pretty much no documentation, if that even works -- whereas when weird things happen in Linux,
P.S. I notice that you said "Powerbook", so I'm guessing when you say "nvidia stuff" you were running Linux on a PowerPC computer
No, I never got that set up. That was two laptops ago, and I'm pretty sure it was an ATI card. I don't remember what the problem is, but I never got Linux working, and eventually decided that OS X was working well enough for me.
This one is a Dell, which came with Ubuntu. Reformated it with a 64-bit Kubuntu. Basically, I got sick of dealing with the issues -- nvidia-settings would do things one way, KDE's System Settings would do it another way, and Xorg would do something else.
So I gave up -- I now hand-edit xorg.conf when I switch monitors from left to right, and I have to restart X when I plug in or unplug a monitor. It's not too bad, considering the only second monitor I usually plug in is going to be a 1080p screen via HDMI.
Still, this could be so much better. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but when I unplug HDMI, my system should detect it and dump everything from that monitor to another desktop/workspace. When I plug it in, my desktops should unfold. I should be able to pick up my laptop from my desk, where I have a nice 24" monitor connected to it, and just keep working as I relax on the couch, then go back to the desk when I need the extra space.
If that happened, I'd call this better than Windows or Mac. As it is, I have to restart X, while a Windows person could hit fn+f8.
Considering some people (not me) actually use capslock instead of shift (and claim to be faster with it), I imagine this would piss them off even more. (Apple has screwed with capslock before...)
First of all, developers are far from the only Firefox users, even on a Mac. People like their addons.
Second, Firefox was an example -- it's trivial to find inconsistency even in Apple's own software, before you get to third-party stuff. And Windows is even worse. The fact that people can paint "inconsistency" as a major weakness on Linux just strikes me as absurd -- the differences between Qt and GTK apps are nothing compared to the differences between various Windows apps I've seen.
All that said, Firefox tends to be a fairly decent UI, no matter what platform it's on, so I think that disproves the "open source can't design" theory.
No. However, from the name, I'm guessing that's the DOM/CSS inspector part.
Ok, where's my JavaScript console/debugger? How about my network analyzer? Or the Cookie tab?