Git has integrity checking built into it already, presuming you trust the source. The only way this can happen is if someone gets access to the git repository and commits malicious code. No project is safe from that case.
It's not a waste. You should be able to run a Linux or BSD on it. Your choices are limited, but you don't have to run solaris. You may also be able to get an open source fork of opensolaris to run on it.
I'm baffled by this part " even when iTunes was DRMing their media". You do realize that most content on iTunes is still DRM'd. Just because iTunes plus and iTunes Match fixed most of the music, doesn't mean that video, apps and books are DRM free.
As for Steam, it entirely depends on the publisher how bad the DRM is. The upside is that I can install steam on my PC and Mac and play games I bought originally for Windows on my Mac and vice versa. It's a great way to test performance differences between the machines. It's also great for strategy games that I don't care about performance. First person shooters still suck on the Mac and you have to buy a third party mouse with real right click rather than that touch BS on the mighty mouse. Heaven forbid you have to press the right and left mouse buttons at the same time in a FPS.
Also, you can add links to games you've locally installed on the computer to steam just like you can add music you ripped yourself to iTunes.
Linux adoption needs to happen in business first. Linux can compete with Windows in that arena. It's going to take a long time before we can consume content on Linux effectively. It's not a technical problem, it's a lack of interest from DRM loving companies.
Linux needs business apps and lots of them. They need quickbooks, good office suites, clients for various ibm and oracle products, etc. If anything, the lack of consuming content can be a feature right now in this space. It means the employees won't stream every video on the internet at work and kill your network connectivity.
My initial problem with wayland was the network support. I've realized I can live with using VNC or some other monster instead. The real issue with wayland is that it's Linux only. Remember when Linux was a clone of UNIX? Now it's trying to drag us all every which way and reinvent everything. This is a real pain for BSD developers and probably lousy for Oracle, IBM and HP too. The latter can "afford" it... but still.
I hate to say this, but Zynga has a point. Consider how many crappy b movies are made in Hollywood related to hits. It's particularly bad with children's movies, but it also happened to Jaws and Jurassic Park. I heard on NPR recently that they're making a big comeback since digital distribution has taken over. It's easier to get on Netflix or Amazon's service than in stores. How is it different to copy a game versus a movie?
My big problem with Zynga isn't that they copy games shamelessly from EA and others, it's that they have serious issues with privacy and they treat their employees like crap. EA's just pissed they didn't think of it first.
At my current job, most of the developers think commenting is weak. I've dealt with this problem before, but it's awkward when I'm the only one that wants to comment. Funny thing is, every time we hit a program that a former developer wrote that my boss can't understand, he makes us rewrite it. Having comments in the code might save a lot of development time.
When I managed a team, I required commented code. It saved our butts more times than I can count. I also use it to look for bugs. It's amazing what code review can do a few weeks after you wrote something or having another developer look at. When code doesn't match comments, there's a bug.
I'm not going to boycott Apple or Samsung. Both of them have copied IP to get where they are. For apple, it was entering the cell phone market without licensing various things from Motorola or other companies. They waited to get sued too. Samsung copied Apple and various other companies. They're now a huge conglomerate because of this behavior. They're not any better (or worse) than Apple.
Yesterday, I bought a Samsung monitor. Next year, I'll buy a new Mac. I'm fueling the mutual destruction campaign that Apple and Samsung are in because it's entertaining. I'm hoping it will prove the patent system needs reform. Things will get worse before they get better. We all need to realize that. For every person on slashdot that won't buy Apple products because of this, there will be a guy who won't buy Samsung too. Samsung makes a LOT more stuff.
As a side note, I was going to put the Samsung monitor on my Mac for humor's sake, but the bastards don't include DVI ports on their displays anymore. HDMI + VGA only. It's not Mac compatible without an adapter.:)
I guess the big difference for me is a commercial company making a proprietary product is going to steal my code or idea whether I put it under GPL or BSDL. By putting it under the BSDL, I just wave my hands in the air to that problem. When it's another open source developer using the code and locking it in, I feel that they should know better. If I were to contribute code to GCC or Firefox or whatever, I would license it under whatever license those developers have chosen. Conversely, if I release code under the BSDL, I expect contributions or improvements that are for PUBLIC CONSUMPTION to be under the same license. It's the right thing to do. My issue with the GPL isn't the license itself, but rather how it's used by some folks.
I had a pentium 100 in 1996 and it took me much longer than 45 minutes to encode a CD's worth of music. First I had to dump it to WAV files which back then dumped at near regular playback speed. Then i setup a batch script to run the command line client to convert the wav to an mp3. Due to limited disk space, I couldn't queue up too many at a time. My PC only had an 850MB HDD and it was only 5400RPM. That was before I had winamp too.. playing back an MP3 used like 25% of my CPU in stereo. For disk reasons, I only kept tracks that I really liked, not whole CDs. I'd burn them to a CD using a friend's burner starting around 97. It was pretty awesome.
As for buying music electronically, check out Amazon. They give you MP3's. No DRM. Apple has some of their audio in DRM free format, but it costs extra. Plus amazon hosts the files for you in thier cloud player for free so you can play them from any browser in additional to having the files locally. Things have changed.
I think the problem you're having is that you're looking at the whole thing from the perspective of a end user. There is nothing wrong with the GPL for an end user. They can use the software however they want and if they don't modify it, there is no hassle.
The problem with the GPL for us BSD folk is entirely on the development side of things. The GPL prevents me from using code in my other projects because it requires that I change the terms of my entire project if I wish to use it. From the developer perspective, the GPL translates to software is more important than I am. The software gets the freedom, not the person.
The next problem with understanding this topic from our side is that we like it when people use our source code. We don't care if they give us code back. We just want people to use our software any way they want. It makes us feel good that people are using our software. Sometimes companies give back and sometimes they don't.
I use GPL software all the time. I do treat it similarly to commercial software. As a BSD guy, I don't have a problem with people making money on software. They have to pay the bills and so do I. Developers need a way to make money. Personally, I prefer MySQL to PostgreSQL. As an end user, it doesn't matter which license they have. I can use them as much as I want. If I ever had a need to embed a database or do some custom programming on one, I'd have to go with PostgreSQL. Why? I need the freedom to develop under my terms.
I guess when I give the bum a dollar, I don't expect him to wash my windows.
I'm in the camp that thinks we should have consistent user interfaces. However, I just want to point out that nearly every popular device uses inconsistent interfaces now. It's in. Consider the iPad, Android devices, etc. Every application looks differently.
The current crop of programmers doesn't even know what HCI is.
Except there are whole classes of programs you can't buy. For instance, many popular disk utilities are not available on the app store or if they are, they only work on removable media. If I want to defragment my boot disk, I have to buy from the vendor directly. Few antivirus applications are available on the app store for the same reason.
Most games on the app store are crippled too. The online gaming component is disable or similar restrictions are put on the games. Duke Nukem Forever or Rage are examples. You're better off buying games on steam.
The app store is useful to buy apple apps, but I can't even get Microsoft Office on there. They need to encourage companies to sell products on there not the other way around.
Some of the strangers are interesting. I've been following a lot of tech people including Linus and several FreeBSD developers. There is a totally different user base on G+. The content is interesting and not stupid cards and signs spamming my Facebook feed. People use the site differently. It's not a replacement for Facebook. It's like the intellectual's social network in comparison.
I'm the first to agree that Agile doesn't work for every company or every situation. However, if done correctly, it's a very useful process and I've personally seen it succeed. Most people ignore some of the rules and that's where they get into problems. I've seen craziness like project owners also be team leads or have direct hire/fire power. The second someone has to worry about their job, idiocy is not pointed out as it should be. Agile lets you change course, but it's not meant to make things 2000% faster to develop. Any failure of agile or the other extreme, waterfall, is always because someone didn't follow the rules and didn't implement the process correctly. I've never seen waterfall work correctly because it requires a lot more planning up front and everyone wants to change course in the middle of the process.
Business people don't want process. They want speed. That has to change. No one cares about quality or bugs until customers are complaining and sales are lost. Business people need to learn patience. Developers need to learn to stand up for process. I used to doubt it myself until I worked at a company with a functioning process. Today, I'm working for a company with no process again and it's a nightmare.
The best thing about agile is that you have clear deadlines and actually feel like you're making progress during the programming process. If done right, it can be a real morale booster.
XML is too big. If anything, we need to compress the response not make it ten times larger. The header thing can be annoying at times, but it's important to know what you're going to send the client anyway. You must figure it out by the end of the document, why not at the beginning? Many files have a header including shell scripts, image files, BOM on XML documents or even the xml declaration. it's common in the industry.
AJAX doesn't solve the real problem. If anything it necessitates making responses smaller and faster. We have to do many connections and deal with the overhead of that. Pipelining can help some, but if we continue down this road, we must make the protocol more efficient. XML is the opposite of that goal. I don't agree with anything less compact than what we have now, but you could at least argue for JSON as it's already supported by browsers and much faster to parse.
As there are vastly different goals with the next generation of HTTP, I think it's best not to rush into anything. We'll be stuck with this new protocol. If it doesn't take off, it's just a hassle and if it does, it could be devastating to the internet if it's bloated or doesn't solve any real problems. I don't always agree with PHK, but he has a point that the current proposals do not solve all current or future issues. HTTP must be extendable, backward compatible, work with proxy servers, and allow for the continued growth of the internet. HTTP's lack of state is a problem for many of us now, but it was a feature in the early days. It made the protocol light weight and fast at a time when internet connections were slow. Cookies are abused. Many are created. I don't think adding state to the protocol is going to solve the underlying problem that developers store too much crap in it. Only a session id is necessary. Everything else should be stored server side or in a host page. A nice addition might be to limit where cookies are sent/received from beyond the same domain. That would take away the overhead of sending cookies for every image file, ajax request, etc. They're not always necessary. This can be worked around with a separate domain for images, but it's a hassle to setup.
I think some people have forgotten KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Seems like everything is getting more complex only to force us back into what we were trying to get away from to begin with. Take NoSQL. Most people are still going strong with map reduce, yet google has been moving away from it. They're now trying to store indexes and incrementally update them. Gee what does a relational database server do.. it has indexes that get UPDATED. They're trying to reinvent SQL and they don't know it. Similarly, a bunch of cruft is getting added to the HTTP protocol and that will stay with us for a long time. Get it wrong and we end up with NoSQL all over again. NoSQL solves a few problems and creates others. It has use cases. HTTP on the other hand has to work for everything. It's critical it's done right.
It's almost as bad as using MidnightBSD.org. I just checked Google analytics and it's showing 54% use Firefox, 26.59% on chrome, 11.59% on safari, 7.78% on IE and 4.92% on Opera. Any site that caters to technically savvy people is a bad indicator of general population.
If we based this magic percentage on hits to my BSD project site, it would look even worse for Microsoft. It's just not fair to do so.
Interestingly 47% of visitors are using Windows on my site and the second highest number is Linux at 31%. Are we going to assume Linux has 30% marketshare in desktops now too?
I'm not a big RMS fan, but he's been warning people about proprietary services like this for years and we've all been bitten by them. I just had to move the contents of my mobile me iDisk to Amazon Cloud Drive. That took some time to download everything and upload it again. (7GB of data) I'll have to deal with it again when Amazon kills their service someday.
We need an open source, p2p like network for our data so there's redundant copies everywhere.
That's easy. The traffic has a unique signature. It's very easy to do this and many ISPs throttle it. Even with encryption, it's still possible to take a guess at the protocol by the size and flow of packets.
You are absolutely right. I looked into purchasing an older IA64 box on ebay last year. Prices were still to high to justify the cost for something I barely know anything about. Then trying to figure out what OS to run on it was another problem. I would have ended up with FreeBSD, but it's certainly not a viable platform at this point.
RAID 10 is much safer than RAID 6. Either way, you should backup your data. I just migrated my home file server to ZFS with two mirrors in the pool. It's working well. It's also quite easy to add drives to the pool as you need to grow. The other advantage is that you don't have to use identically sized disks for everything.. only two of them need to be the same size. Several mirrors can be setup with different disks over time and it's quite economical.
Slashdot Mirror
Git has integrity checking built into it already, presuming you trust the source. The only way this can happen is if someone gets access to the git repository and commits malicious code. No project is safe from that case.
It's not a waste. You should be able to run a Linux or BSD on it. Your choices are limited, but you don't have to run solaris. You may also be able to get an open source fork of opensolaris to run on it.
I'm baffled by this part " even when iTunes was DRMing their media". You do realize that most content on iTunes is still DRM'd. Just because iTunes plus and iTunes Match fixed most of the music, doesn't mean that video, apps and books are DRM free.
As for Steam, it entirely depends on the publisher how bad the DRM is. The upside is that I can install steam on my PC and Mac and play games I bought originally for Windows on my Mac and vice versa. It's a great way to test performance differences between the machines. It's also great for strategy games that I don't care about performance. First person shooters still suck on the Mac and you have to buy a third party mouse with real right click rather than that touch BS on the mighty mouse. Heaven forbid you have to press the right and left mouse buttons at the same time in a FPS.
Also, you can add links to games you've locally installed on the computer to steam just like you can add music you ripped yourself to iTunes.
Not every colony was used for prisoners. It does explain Georgia though :)
Linux adoption needs to happen in business first. Linux can compete with Windows in that arena. It's going to take a long time before we can consume content on Linux effectively. It's not a technical problem, it's a lack of interest from DRM loving companies.
Linux needs business apps and lots of them. They need quickbooks, good office suites, clients for various ibm and oracle products, etc. If anything, the lack of consuming content can be a feature right now in this space. It means the employees won't stream every video on the internet at work and kill your network connectivity.
My initial problem with wayland was the network support. I've realized I can live with using VNC or some other monster instead. The real issue with wayland is that it's Linux only. Remember when Linux was a clone of UNIX? Now it's trying to drag us all every which way and reinvent everything. This is a real pain for BSD developers and probably lousy for Oracle, IBM and HP too. The latter can "afford" it... but still.
I hate to say this, but Zynga has a point. Consider how many crappy b movies are made in Hollywood related to hits. It's particularly bad with children's movies, but it also happened to Jaws and Jurassic Park. I heard on NPR recently that they're making a big comeback since digital distribution has taken over. It's easier to get on Netflix or Amazon's service than in stores. How is it different to copy a game versus a movie?
My big problem with Zynga isn't that they copy games shamelessly from EA and others, it's that they have serious issues with privacy and they treat their employees like crap. EA's just pissed they didn't think of it first.
That makes sense.. make regulators think you're providing real bandwidth. They forgot some of those folks don't always stay in DC :)
At my current job, most of the developers think commenting is weak. I've dealt with this problem before, but it's awkward when I'm the only one that wants to comment. Funny thing is, every time we hit a program that a former developer wrote that my boss can't understand, he makes us rewrite it. Having comments in the code might save a lot of development time.
When I managed a team, I required commented code. It saved our butts more times than I can count. I also use it to look for bugs. It's amazing what code review can do a few weeks after you wrote something or having another developer look at. When code doesn't match comments, there's a bug.
I'm not going to boycott Apple or Samsung. Both of them have copied IP to get where they are. For apple, it was entering the cell phone market without licensing various things from Motorola or other companies. They waited to get sued too. Samsung copied Apple and various other companies. They're now a huge conglomerate because of this behavior. They're not any better (or worse) than Apple.
Yesterday, I bought a Samsung monitor. Next year, I'll buy a new Mac. I'm fueling the mutual destruction campaign that Apple and Samsung are in because it's entertaining. I'm hoping it will prove the patent system needs reform. Things will get worse before they get better. We all need to realize that. For every person on slashdot that won't buy Apple products because of this, there will be a guy who won't buy Samsung too. Samsung makes a LOT more stuff.
As a side note, I was going to put the Samsung monitor on my Mac for humor's sake, but the bastards don't include DVI ports on their displays anymore. HDMI + VGA only. It's not Mac compatible without an adapter. :)
I guess the big difference for me is a commercial company making a proprietary product is going to steal my code or idea whether I put it under GPL or BSDL. By putting it under the BSDL, I just wave my hands in the air to that problem. When it's another open source developer using the code and locking it in, I feel that they should know better. If I were to contribute code to GCC or Firefox or whatever, I would license it under whatever license those developers have chosen. Conversely, if I release code under the BSDL, I expect contributions or improvements that are for PUBLIC CONSUMPTION to be under the same license. It's the right thing to do. My issue with the GPL isn't the license itself, but rather how it's used by some folks.
I had a pentium 100 in 1996 and it took me much longer than 45 minutes to encode a CD's worth of music. First I had to dump it to WAV files which back then dumped at near regular playback speed. Then i setup a batch script to run the command line client to convert the wav to an mp3. Due to limited disk space, I couldn't queue up too many at a time. My PC only had an 850MB HDD and it was only 5400RPM. That was before I had winamp too.. playing back an MP3 used like 25% of my CPU in stereo. For disk reasons, I only kept tracks that I really liked, not whole CDs. I'd burn them to a CD using a friend's burner starting around 97. It was pretty awesome.
As for buying music electronically, check out Amazon. They give you MP3's. No DRM. Apple has some of their audio in DRM free format, but it costs extra. Plus amazon hosts the files for you in thier cloud player for free so you can play them from any browser in additional to having the files locally. Things have changed.
I think the problem you're having is that you're looking at the whole thing from the perspective of a end user. There is nothing wrong with the GPL for an end user. They can use the software however they want and if they don't modify it, there is no hassle.
The problem with the GPL for us BSD folk is entirely on the development side of things. The GPL prevents me from using code in my other projects because it requires that I change the terms of my entire project if I wish to use it. From the developer perspective, the GPL translates to software is more important than I am. The software gets the freedom, not the person.
The next problem with understanding this topic from our side is that we like it when people use our source code. We don't care if they give us code back. We just want people to use our software any way they want. It makes us feel good that people are using our software. Sometimes companies give back and sometimes they don't.
I use GPL software all the time. I do treat it similarly to commercial software. As a BSD guy, I don't have a problem with people making money on software. They have to pay the bills and so do I. Developers need a way to make money. Personally, I prefer MySQL to PostgreSQL. As an end user, it doesn't matter which license they have. I can use them as much as I want. If I ever had a need to embed a database or do some custom programming on one, I'd have to go with PostgreSQL. Why? I need the freedom to develop under my terms.
I guess when I give the bum a dollar, I don't expect him to wash my windows.
I'm in the camp that thinks we should have consistent user interfaces. However, I just want to point out that nearly every popular device uses inconsistent interfaces now. It's in. Consider the iPad, Android devices, etc. Every application looks differently.
The current crop of programmers doesn't even know what HCI is.
Except there are whole classes of programs you can't buy. For instance, many popular disk utilities are not available on the app store or if they are, they only work on removable media. If I want to defragment my boot disk, I have to buy from the vendor directly. Few antivirus applications are available on the app store for the same reason.
Most games on the app store are crippled too. The online gaming component is disable or similar restrictions are put on the games. Duke Nukem Forever or Rage are examples. You're better off buying games on steam.
The app store is useful to buy apple apps, but I can't even get Microsoft Office on there. They need to encourage companies to sell products on there not the other way around.
Some of the strangers are interesting. I've been following a lot of tech people including Linus and several FreeBSD developers. There is a totally different user base on G+. The content is interesting and not stupid cards and signs spamming my Facebook feed. People use the site differently. It's not a replacement for Facebook. It's like the intellectual's social network in comparison.
I'm the first to agree that Agile doesn't work for every company or every situation. However, if done correctly, it's a very useful process and I've personally seen it succeed. Most people ignore some of the rules and that's where they get into problems. I've seen craziness like project owners also be team leads or have direct hire/fire power. The second someone has to worry about their job, idiocy is not pointed out as it should be. Agile lets you change course, but it's not meant to make things 2000% faster to develop. Any failure of agile or the other extreme, waterfall, is always because someone didn't follow the rules and didn't implement the process correctly. I've never seen waterfall work correctly because it requires a lot more planning up front and everyone wants to change course in the middle of the process.
Business people don't want process. They want speed. That has to change. No one cares about quality or bugs until customers are complaining and sales are lost. Business people need to learn patience. Developers need to learn to stand up for process. I used to doubt it myself until I worked at a company with a functioning process. Today, I'm working for a company with no process again and it's a nightmare.
The best thing about agile is that you have clear deadlines and actually feel like you're making progress during the programming process. If done right, it can be a real morale booster.
XML is too big. If anything, we need to compress the response not make it ten times larger. The header thing can be annoying at times, but it's important to know what you're going to send the client anyway. You must figure it out by the end of the document, why not at the beginning? Many files have a header including shell scripts, image files, BOM on XML documents or even the xml declaration. it's common in the industry.
AJAX doesn't solve the real problem. If anything it necessitates making responses smaller and faster. We have to do many connections and deal with the overhead of that. Pipelining can help some, but if we continue down this road, we must make the protocol more efficient. XML is the opposite of that goal. I don't agree with anything less compact than what we have now, but you could at least argue for JSON as it's already supported by browsers and much faster to parse.
As there are vastly different goals with the next generation of HTTP, I think it's best not to rush into anything. We'll be stuck with this new protocol. If it doesn't take off, it's just a hassle and if it does, it could be devastating to the internet if it's bloated or doesn't solve any real problems. I don't always agree with PHK, but he has a point that the current proposals do not solve all current or future issues. HTTP must be extendable, backward compatible, work with proxy servers, and allow for the continued growth of the internet. HTTP's lack of state is a problem for many of us now, but it was a feature in the early days. It made the protocol light weight and fast at a time when internet connections were slow. Cookies are abused. Many are created. I don't think adding state to the protocol is going to solve the underlying problem that developers store too much crap in it. Only a session id is necessary. Everything else should be stored server side or in a host page. A nice addition might be to limit where cookies are sent/received from beyond the same domain. That would take away the overhead of sending cookies for every image file, ajax request, etc. They're not always necessary. This can be worked around with a separate domain for images, but it's a hassle to setup.
I think some people have forgotten KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Seems like everything is getting more complex only to force us back into what we were trying to get away from to begin with. Take NoSQL. Most people are still going strong with map reduce, yet google has been moving away from it. They're now trying to store indexes and incrementally update them. Gee what does a relational database server do.. it has indexes that get UPDATED. They're trying to reinvent SQL and they don't know it. Similarly, a bunch of cruft is getting added to the HTTP protocol and that will stay with us for a long time. Get it wrong and we end up with NoSQL all over again. NoSQL solves a few problems and creates others. It has use cases. HTTP on the other hand has to work for everything. It's critical it's done right.
There are several pieces of the FreeBSD kernel that use this technique as well. It's a great example of real world code.
It's almost as bad as using MidnightBSD.org. I just checked Google analytics and it's showing 54% use Firefox, 26.59% on chrome, 11.59% on safari, 7.78% on IE and 4.92% on Opera. Any site that caters to technically savvy people is a bad indicator of general population.
If we based this magic percentage on hits to my BSD project site, it would look even worse for Microsoft. It's just not fair to do so.
Interestingly 47% of visitors are using Windows on my site and the second highest number is Linux at 31%. Are we going to assume Linux has 30% marketshare in desktops now too?
I'm not a big RMS fan, but he's been warning people about proprietary services like this for years and we've all been bitten by them. I just had to move the contents of my mobile me iDisk to Amazon Cloud Drive. That took some time to download everything and upload it again. (7GB of data) I'll have to deal with it again when Amazon kills their service someday.
We need an open source, p2p like network for our data so there's redundant copies everywhere.
That's easy. The traffic has a unique signature. It's very easy to do this and many ISPs throttle it. Even with encryption, it's still possible to take a guess at the protocol by the size and flow of packets.
To be fair, it would be a cluster of skateboards.
You are absolutely right. I looked into purchasing an older IA64 box on ebay last year. Prices were still to high to justify the cost for something I barely know anything about. Then trying to figure out what OS to run on it was another problem. I would have ended up with FreeBSD, but it's certainly not a viable platform at this point.
RAID 10 is much safer than RAID 6. Either way, you should backup your data. I just migrated my home file server to ZFS with two mirrors in the pool. It's working well. It's also quite easy to add drives to the pool as you need to grow. The other advantage is that you don't have to use identically sized disks for everything.. only two of them need to be the same size. Several mirrors can be setup with different disks over time and it's quite economical.