Actually, some of us got into computers and stay there because we honestly and deeply believe they are or at least can be a major force in changing the world for the better. I didn't devote all those hours and days to computers because I couldn't figure out what to do with myself otherwise or because I couldn't/didn't have a life. I did it and do it because I think that is where I have the most leverage to make a difference. I don't believe I am alone in this.
Same old stuff. The system and the technology and the society somehow conspire to do "it" to "us" whatever "it" and whoever "us" happen to be. Individuals have nothing to do with and don't get to decide any part of their fate I guess? Much of science and technology has been a predominantly male domain for some time. But that is not the fault of science and technology. Nor, imho, will wringing our hands as if it were built into sci/tech or as if we need to rewrite a feminist sci/tech (goddess help us) and some feminists claim, help at all to changing these ratios. They will change as we change as a society but especially as we empower males and females to think fully for themselves and to chart their own life courses.
To me, a database is just as much a protectable entity as a book in that it is a particular collection of information in a particular fixed form. The data itself is no more copyrightable than are the words in a book. But the collection is unique. Can it be duplicated? Sure. But an out and out copy is a copy of someone else's work and it is up to them what limits they wish to impose on that. The flip side of open licensing is respect for people's licensing decisions, after all.
Before we declare it a non-event I suggest we wait a few weeks. It will take a little while to see fall out among smaller suppliers having trouble keeping their books and commitments straight and the ripples up the economy from that. If it happens at all of course.
This is the first day back to work in the millenium for most of us. It isn't time to celebrate its non-seriousness just yet.
Re:Katz and Social Justice...
on
The Timekeeper
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· Score: 1
Justice? So is justice only shared by everyone having equally everything? What if the haves to some extent have because they and/or their ancestors and associates exercised more initiative, more diligence, better (in terms of more productive of values) value systems and so on? In such a case their having is a natural consequence of the values they exercised relative to those who did not (relatively speaking). If there is no difference in effect, if everyone has and has not equally no matter what values they pursue, then where is there any incentive toward effort or any means of determining what is and is not a better path to pursue?
Is "social justice" some variant of justice that ignores reality? Reality does not in the least guarantee equal consequences for all parties. Why is it supposed that this is what we should do?
I am more than a little tired of hearing Brother Katz's diatribe ever so often on here. Is this Jon's bully pulpit or what? Most of it is smacks much too much of tired old dark musings about how the world sucks and how all our efforts to make it suck less are likely to come to naught.
Wake up Jon! Most of us are into this stuff because we are wild-eyed dreamers and revolutionaries determined to change the world where we can for the better through technology. If the vision and dreams are missing or misplaced then show us how to dream and vision better and to make it real.
Bah, humbug! Ligthweight OS? I want a full Linux machine in a small tight little light package that fits snugly on a hip or in the small of my back. I want to run anything on the wearable I can run on my desktop including having high-speed internet access. I might not have traditional hard disk but there are ways around that problem. Actually the way disk technology is going the unit might well include real spinning platters without too much overhead.
The ideal unit would offer full visual sharpness by means such as direct stimulation of the retina with tuned lasers (already exists in military applications). Good voice recognition is required of course. The virtual mouse/virtual keyboard through handwaving would be a nice plus (such a virtual keyboard exists today). I would like to program my own gestures to mean things to the computer. A good pair of lightweight nearly invisible earphones would complete the picture. The headsup display would be a simple flip down on a pair of glasses. The mike could be very small or even a subvocalization patch. The entire unit except the cpu box would be nearly invisible.
The applications are separate matters. First give us the machines with good general ability at a decent price. The applications will come quite quickly.
In what way? The only things I was disturbed by was that the technology shown wasn't anywhere near state-of-the-art and that I can't go and buy such a device for myself right now at a reasonable price. Clearly to truly be extensions of human capacity the machines have to become more portable and/or ubiquitous. Ultimately we will have chips wired into ourselves. It is only a matter of time. Personally I need a device yesterday that is always present and can access the WEB, take notes, offer reminders, bring up stuff to read and/or work on and so on. Something that doesn't require lugging around a backpack full of stuff. Or tying up the hands. Sign me up for the beta models!
I am also quite excited that some of the notion of wearable computers and it being chic to have such is going more mainstream. In 5 years I doubt you will find many professional people who don't own a wearable.
I expect hoopla-ed beta software to actually run without segfaulting and actually have its main features working! I don't know if the culture has changed that much but there was a time when putting out software that crashed that easily was seen as extremely poor form. If there is as much library incompatibility as the above states then static linking is needed. Show me one Linux platform and configuration this program is stable on before I take this excuse at all seriously.
Chill out yourself. I am tired of krap. If the environment inspires undependability then the environment must be changed. But krap is krap.
Your claim for Netscape is not true btw. It locks up often but it does not crash for me on bad URLs.
I am really, really tired of waiting forever for a browser that works without problems on Linux. What the hell? This beta is a rush job that doesn't half work. Why bother? Where the hell is Netscape 5 or a version of Mozilla that doesn't crash even more often than Netscape 4? Where is the much vaunted advantage of Open Source when it comes to producing a simple browser? This is really beginning to burn me. Do I have to drop my own work and projects and go write my own? Why is Konqueror all bundled up with the rest of KDE? Why not break some of these things loose on their own to fill such pressing needs? Or did the code end up so tightly coupled and entangled that this isn't possible? If so, what does this say about the way we are designing and implementing these tools?
I don't mean to be a grinch but it sure looks like I won't be getting one thing I very much wanted for Christmas.
I agree two pairs of eyes are better than one in code reviews, walkthroughs, debugging sessions and such. I emphatically do not agree that two pairs are better at design and code construction time. Program construction is NOT a team sport in my 20 years of experience and it is damn frustrating when management takes it into their pointy little heads to make it such. May as well do tag team symphony writing or fine art. I especially resent and am fed up with management notions of design by committee. I've wasted months in such attempts to "get consensus". It does not work. Let those who have notions of how to design a subsystem go do so and then review it. Don't try to review it while it is still a bunch of abstractions everyone would like to stick a ego-tag or two into.
Re:Collecting E-mail adresses? For spam?
on
Win an AIBO
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· Score: 1
It is still spam. They are just using the AIBO as bait to encourage you to let them spam your friends in order to spam more people. The spam is the message to come enter and give them more people to spam. And, of course, while you are there, maybe purchase some of their products.
Hey, Does being our geekie selves mean we can't manage to put a caption on a few measly photos or put them on the web in thumbnail size that can be expanded? I mean, have we sworn off making things remotely user-friendly when it come to a simple web page or something? No one ever tells me these things.
They are asking the opinions of religious leaders? Why am I NOT reassured by this? They are asking opinions of the same folks who tell people that using birth control is a mortal sin or who order a religious execution of someone who speaks against their faith or who say the world is just an illusion and not important? Are we supposed to believe that these people can make sound decisions about the use of the latest technology? I was excited by the post and thought maybe the human race might be growing up in capabilities and ability to direct its own growth until I came across this consulting religious leaders bit. The race is way young as long as it thinks ethics is the sole province of those who are avowedly mystical and quite often anti-science and anti-reason.
Uh, you might note blackdown released their RC to the world on Nov 29, less than 10 days before Sun puts out their RC. How much value could Sun have added in 10 days? I find the timing interesting. Having used the Blackdown RC I will be curious to see what exactly was added (if much of anything).
Your comments do not justify branding legitimate concern over Sun's faux pas (to be very generous) as "another witch hunt".
W3C and IETF are not in the business of language standards nor should they be. It would at least be good if Sun could get together more with OMG over distributed computing and Java but I hear there are problems even with that from Sun's side.
Well... now there is the small problme than Visio has joined the Dark Side. It is now owned by Microsoft. Also, Visio Enterprise already includes UML templates. Unfortunately most of the players store their UML stuff in proprietary ways (although not too hard to crack). It would help if they all used XML so they could interchange designs easier.
It would be a whole lot better for everyone if a product (preferably Open Source of course) came out that gave full WEB access to UML diagrams. Imagine, Open Source projects with actual design documents freely available on the WEB. Also having these things on the WEB would potentially greatly expand collaborative design efforts and general software knowledge dissemination.
The "Three Amigos" work for Rational. Their somewhat different case tools were combined to form the basis for UML. But UML itself is a project of OMG. It is not owned by Rational. Rational builds some very nice tools but usually targets big bucks development environments in their pricing, espcially for design tools and software engineering environment offerings. More is the pity.
Personally I think having rational own J++ will be the end of this psuedo-Java mutation. Unless of course they bring it back to the rest of the Java world and integrate it strongly with good design tools at a reasonable price. I'm not holding my breath. Too many other companies are already making CASE tools that directly generate and round trip standard Java.
As far as Microsoft and so-called XML replacement of DCOM, using XML is just another way to transport messages and data and to store information needed by (among other things) distributed object environments. Only using http limits bandwidth and clutters web channels unnecessarily in my opinion. A simple new message protocol and way of storing meta-information is not going to replace full distributed object capabilities simply because it does not come close to addressing all the needs of distributed object computing. But then Microsoft has been cutting off pieces of this area, departing from all industry standards, and claiming it is their own invention and gives you everything you ever need for a long time.
This electro-hippy action is nothing more or less than a form of cyber-warfare against some group whose ideas and/or actions do not appeal to you. Is anyone thinking far enough ahead to realize that groups you heavily favor can also be subject to such attacks? Do we really want the net clogged with harrassing traffic every time some group disagrees with another and has a few machine cycles available for virtually attacking their machines? Do we really think creating denial-of-service attacks through overloading web servers does anything good for anybody?
Count me out. This sucks big time and leads to web anarchy at best and serious backlash at worse.
Agreed. Also the internet has succeeded largely because there are no usage barriers and because it is possible to surf information for free in large quantity. I personally believe that the current system where content providers figure out how to pay for their time and energy or not is much more equitable than asking for nickles and dimes per so many pages hit. Nothing could strangle the WEB faster. The notion of being licensed to surf makes about as much sense as being licensed to read books. After all books are dangerous things.
The entire piece tells me that even a major visionary can get swallowed up in control fantasies to stamp out his/her favorite evils. To hell with freedom and rights as long as the evils can be combatted by more overseeing by Big Brother. No thanks.
If some of these things like micro-payments come to pass you will see the WEB fragment into free and non-free zones with the free zones forming even more of a cyber underground than in anyone's wildest fantasies.
Re:But *programmers* should be licensed...
on
License to Surf
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· Score: 1
Whoa there! What about the responsibility of management who came up with the impossible schedules the code might have been done under and effectively told the programmers to put up with it or work elsewhere? What of their companies that have no software infrastructure and no real software engineering environment? I think you should license IT managers first and foremost and the marketing droids second of all. Don't tell me I am responsible for what I do not control.
So what does the entire brouhaha have to do with GPL? It seems a comment was desired to say the GPL is not sacred when what was said about the GPL actually applies to all contracts of any kind and has zero GPL specificity that I see.
This is silly. At most the contract was a misguided attempt to insure the contractee was able to enter into a binding agreement. Pretty common meaningless wording over extended as far as I see. No nefarious plot here.
Personally I am starting to get quite burned out on the notion that I work for some company or that a company somehow owns my talent or works. Unless of course the company is my own. I used to think that being "on the inside" gave more insight into the overall strategy and planning of the future and more control over whether success or failure ultimately ensued. Now I no longer believe that. I've seen too many companies with broken internal communication, lack of any real design or planning, and even very senior people feeling powerless to change much or even to have their input heard. To me, it is these things that are most important, especially in a fulltime regular employee situation. Empower your people, involve them, challenge them and regularly reward them. Whether they get time and a half for overtime is pretty irrelevant. I can get time and a half at McDonalds.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, some of us got into computers and stay there because we honestly and deeply believe they are or at least can be a major force in changing the world for the better. I didn't devote all those hours and days to computers because I couldn't figure out what to do with myself otherwise or because I couldn't/didn't have a life. I did it and do it because I think that is where I have the most leverage to make a difference. I don't believe I am alone in this.
Same old stuff. The system and the technology and the society somehow conspire to do "it" to "us" whatever "it" and whoever "us" happen to be. Individuals have nothing to do with and don't get to decide any part of their fate I guess? Much of science and technology has been a predominantly male domain for some time. But that is not the fault of science and technology. Nor, imho, will wringing our hands as if it were built into sci/tech or as if we need to rewrite a feminist sci/tech (goddess help us) and some feminists claim, help at all to changing these ratios. They will change as we change as a society but especially as we empower males and females to think fully for themselves and to chart their own life courses.
To me, a database is just as much a protectable entity as a book in that it is a particular collection of information in a particular fixed form. The data itself is no more copyrightable than are the words in a book. But the collection is unique. Can it be duplicated? Sure. But an out and out copy is a copy of someone else's work and it is up to them what limits they wish to impose on that. The flip side of open licensing is respect for people's licensing decisions, after all.
Before we declare it a non-event I suggest we wait a few weeks. It will take a little while to see fall out among smaller suppliers having trouble keeping their books and commitments straight and the ripples up the economy from that. If it happens at all of course.
This is the first day back to work in the millenium for most of us. It isn't time to celebrate its non-seriousness just yet.
Justice? So is justice only shared by everyone having equally everything? What if the haves to some extent have because they and/or their ancestors and associates exercised more initiative, more diligence, better (in terms of more productive of values) value systems and so on? In such a case their having is a natural consequence of the values they exercised relative to those who did not (relatively speaking). If there is no difference in effect, if everyone has and has not equally no matter what values they pursue, then where is there any incentive toward effort or any means of determining what is and is not a better path to pursue?
Is "social justice" some variant of justice that ignores reality? Reality does not in the least guarantee equal consequences for all parties. Why is it supposed that this is what we should do?
I am more than a little tired of hearing Brother Katz's diatribe ever so often on here. Is this Jon's bully pulpit or what? Most of it is smacks much too much of tired old dark musings about how the world sucks and how all our efforts to make it suck less are likely to come to naught.
Wake up Jon! Most of us are into this stuff because we are wild-eyed dreamers and revolutionaries determined to change the world where we can for the better through technology. If the vision and dreams are missing or misplaced then show us how to dream and vision better and to make it real.
Individuals have little chance? Give me a break.
Bah, humbug! Ligthweight OS? I want a full Linux machine in a small tight little light package that fits snugly on a hip or in the small of my back. I want to run anything on the wearable I can run on my desktop including having high-speed internet access. I might not have traditional hard disk but there are ways around that problem. Actually the way disk technology is going the unit might well include real spinning platters without too much overhead.
The ideal unit would offer full visual sharpness by means such as direct stimulation of the retina with tuned lasers (already exists in military applications). Good voice recognition is required of course. The virtual mouse/virtual keyboard through handwaving would be a nice plus (such a virtual keyboard exists today). I would like to program my own gestures to mean things to the computer. A good pair of lightweight nearly invisible earphones would complete the picture. The headsup display would be a simple flip down on a pair of glasses. The mike could be very small or even a subvocalization patch. The entire unit except the cpu box would be nearly invisible.
The applications are separate matters. First give us the machines with good general ability at a decent price. The applications will come quite quickly.
In what way? The only things I was disturbed by was that the technology shown wasn't anywhere near state-of-the-art and that I can't go and buy such a device for myself right now at a reasonable price. Clearly to truly be extensions of human capacity the machines have to become more portable and/or ubiquitous. Ultimately we will have chips wired into ourselves. It is only a matter of time. Personally I need a device yesterday that is always present and can access the WEB, take notes, offer reminders, bring up stuff to read and/or work on and so on. Something that doesn't require lugging around a backpack full of stuff. Or tying up the hands. Sign me up for the beta models!
I am also quite excited that some of the notion of wearable computers and it being chic to have such is going more mainstream. In 5 years I doubt you will find many professional people who don't own a wearable.
I expect hoopla-ed beta software to actually run without segfaulting and actually have its main features working! I don't know if the culture has changed that much but there was a time when putting out software that crashed that easily was seen as extremely poor form. If there is as much library incompatibility as the above states then static linking is needed. Show me one Linux platform and configuration this program is stable on before I take this excuse at all seriously.
Chill out yourself. I am tired of krap. If the environment inspires undependability then the environment must be changed. But krap is krap.
Your claim for Netscape is not true btw. It locks up often but it does not crash for me on bad URLs.
Lesstif certainly does work with Amaya as that is the way I built it in my environment.
I am really, really tired of waiting forever for a browser that works without problems on Linux. What the hell? This beta is a rush job that doesn't half work. Why bother? Where the hell is Netscape 5 or a version of Mozilla that doesn't crash even more often than Netscape 4? Where is the much vaunted advantage of Open Source when it comes to producing a simple browser? This is really beginning to burn me. Do I have to drop my own work and projects and go write my own? Why is Konqueror all bundled up with the rest of KDE? Why not break some of these things loose on their own to fill such pressing needs? Or did the code end up so tightly coupled and entangled that this isn't possible? If so, what does this say about the way we are designing and implementing these tools?
I don't mean to be a grinch but it sure looks like I won't be getting one thing I very much wanted for Christmas.
I agree two pairs of eyes are better than one in code reviews, walkthroughs, debugging sessions and such. I emphatically do not agree that two pairs are better at design and code construction time. Program construction is NOT a team sport in my 20 years of experience and it is damn frustrating when management takes it into their pointy little heads to make it such. May as well do tag team symphony writing or fine art. I especially resent and am fed up with management notions of design by committee. I've wasted months in such attempts to "get consensus". It does not work. Let those who have notions of how to design a subsystem go do so and then review it. Don't try to review it while it is still a bunch of abstractions everyone would like to stick a ego-tag or two into.
It is still spam. They are just using the AIBO as bait to encourage you to let them spam your friends in order to spam more people. The spam is the message to come enter and give them more people to spam. And, of course, while you are there, maybe purchase some of their products.
Hey,
Does being our geekie selves mean we can't manage to put a caption on a few measly photos or put them on the web in thumbnail size that can be expanded? I mean, have we sworn off making things remotely user-friendly when it come to a simple web page or something? No one ever tells me these things.
They are asking the opinions of religious leaders? Why am I NOT reassured by this? They are asking opinions of the same folks who tell people that using birth control is a mortal sin or who order a religious execution of someone who speaks against their faith or who say the world is just an illusion and not important? Are we supposed to believe that these people can make sound decisions about the use of the latest technology? I was excited by the post and thought maybe the human race might be growing up in capabilities and ability to direct its own growth until I came across this consulting religious leaders bit. The race is way young as long as it thinks ethics is the sole province of those who are avowedly mystical and quite often anti-science and anti-reason.
Uh, you might note blackdown released their RC to the world on Nov 29, less than 10 days before Sun puts out their RC. How much value could Sun have added in 10 days? I find the timing interesting. Having used the Blackdown RC I will be curious to see what exactly was added (if much of anything).
Your comments do not justify branding legitimate concern over Sun's faux pas (to be very generous) as "another witch hunt".
W3C and IETF are not in the business of language standards nor should they be. It would at least be good if Sun could get together more with OMG over distributed computing and Java but I hear there are problems even with that from Sun's side.
Well... now there is the small problme than Visio has joined the Dark Side. It is now owned by Microsoft. Also, Visio Enterprise already includes UML templates. Unfortunately most of the players store their UML stuff in proprietary ways (although not too hard to crack). It would help if they all used XML so they could interchange designs easier.
It would be a whole lot better for everyone if a product (preferably Open Source of course) came out that gave full WEB access to UML diagrams. Imagine, Open Source projects with actual design documents freely available on the WEB. Also having these things on the WEB would potentially greatly expand collaborative design efforts and general software knowledge dissemination.
May the Source be with you!
The "Three Amigos" work for Rational. Their somewhat different case tools were combined to form the basis for UML. But UML itself is a project of OMG. It is not owned by Rational. Rational builds some very nice tools but usually targets big bucks development environments in their pricing, espcially for design tools and software engineering environment offerings. More is the pity.
Personally I think having rational own J++ will be the end of this psuedo-Java mutation. Unless of course they bring it back to the rest of the Java world and integrate it strongly with good design tools at a reasonable price. I'm not holding my breath. Too many other companies are already making CASE tools that directly generate and round trip standard Java.
As far as Microsoft and so-called XML replacement of DCOM, using XML is just another way to transport messages and data and to store information needed by (among other things) distributed object environments. Only using http limits bandwidth and clutters web channels unnecessarily in my opinion. A simple new message protocol and way of storing meta-information is not going to replace full distributed object capabilities simply because it does not come close to addressing all the needs of distributed object computing. But then Microsoft has been cutting off pieces of this area, departing from all industry standards, and claiming it is their own invention and gives you everything you ever need for a long time.
This electro-hippy action is nothing more or less than a form of cyber-warfare against some group whose ideas and/or actions do not appeal to you. Is anyone thinking far enough ahead to realize that groups you heavily favor can also be subject to such attacks? Do we really want the net clogged with harrassing traffic every time some group disagrees with another and has a few machine cycles available for virtually attacking their machines? Do we really think creating denial-of-service attacks through overloading web servers does anything good for anybody?
Count me out. This sucks big time and leads to web anarchy at best and serious backlash at worse.
Agreed. Also the internet has succeeded largely because there are no usage barriers and because it is possible to surf information for free in large quantity. I personally believe that the current system where content providers figure out how to pay for their time and energy or not is much more equitable than asking for nickles and dimes per so many pages hit. Nothing could strangle the WEB faster. The notion of being licensed to surf makes about as much sense as being licensed to read books. After all books are dangerous things.
The entire piece tells me that even a major visionary can get swallowed up in control fantasies to stamp out his/her favorite evils. To hell with freedom and rights as long as the evils can be combatted by more overseeing by Big Brother. No thanks.
If some of these things like micro-payments come to pass you will see the WEB fragment into free and non-free zones with the free zones forming even more of a cyber underground than in anyone's wildest fantasies.
Whoa there! What about the responsibility of management who came up with the impossible schedules the code might have been done under and effectively told the programmers to put up with it or work elsewhere? What of their companies that have no software infrastructure and no real software engineering environment? I think you should license IT managers first and foremost and the marketing droids second of all. Don't tell me I am responsible for what I do not control.
So what does the entire brouhaha have to do with GPL? It seems a comment was desired to say the GPL is not sacred when what
was said about the GPL actually applies to all contracts of any kind and has zero GPL specificity that I see.
What am I missing?
This is silly. At most the contract was a misguided attempt to insure the contractee was able to enter into a binding agreement. Pretty common meaningless wording over extended as far as I see. No nefarious plot here.
Personally I am starting to get quite burned out on the notion that I work for some company or that a company somehow owns my talent or works. Unless of course the company is my own. I used to think that being "on the inside" gave more insight into the overall strategy and planning of the future and more control over whether success or failure ultimately ensued. Now I no longer believe that. I've seen too many companies with broken internal communication, lack of any real design or planning, and even very senior people feeling powerless to change much or even to have their input heard. To me, it is these things that are most important, especially in a fulltime regular employee situation. Empower your people, involve them, challenge them and regularly reward them. Whether they get time and a half for overtime is pretty irrelevant. I can get time and a half at McDonalds.