What is the value of cheaper retail products if people are out of work or in lower paying jobs?
My company outsourced a bunch of people nine months ago. It hurt. The people who had to leave were hurt. The people who remained were hurt. All trust on upper management has disappeared. So let me get this off my chest right up front: OUTSOURCING SUCKS.
However, out of 1,000 employees, only 20 got outsourced. Think about it. Considering that the current unemployment rate is 5.7% (which is pretty good), the actual impact of outsourcing on the nation seems to be primarily emotional rather than economic.
here is no reason to think that they would make it pretty for other browsers when they only ever intended to properly use it once, and on a Mozilla browser.
I think the core problem is that at least some Mozilla developers write non-portable HTML/CSS by default. They don't write their external documents this way, so why are they writing their internal documents for Mozilla only?
Personally, I've tried installing Debian a few times, and given up just as many times.
I can install FreeBSD in my sleep, upside down and backwards looking in a mirror. But I've not once been able to endure the frustration level required to install Debian. So your experience has nothing to do with your newbieness.
p.s. I'm not knocking Debian, but it's installer is not definitely not intuitive to the Debian outsider.
It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there.
I must respectfully disagree. I am using FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS at home and at work. I'ts fully "GUIified". KDE 3.2. MPlayer, Xmms, yada, yada, yada.
While setting stuff up isn't automatically done for you before you even insert the install CD, it still isn't that difficult. Thanks to XFree86 (the true hero of the desktop), the days of having to manually compute modelines is ancient history. Run the command "XFree86 -configure" and you are done! You may want to tweak stuff afterwards, but the meat of the configuration is done.
Of course, if even the briefest glimpse of a command line is give you a case of the heebie jeebies, perhaps you should stay away.
Not having used the NetBSD LiveCD, I may be off base here. But your typical "live" CD is a much different beast than your Knoppix/FreeSBIE style CD. The former are meant for emergency recovery and stuff. No one uses them on a day to day basis for the desktop needs. On the other hand, I can use Knoppix or FreeSBIE as my primary desktop OS. In fact, with a USB thumb drive, I don't even NEED a harddrive anymore!
Of course, even Knoppix isn't new. I was using Slackware '96 off of a CD with a floppy for/etc and/home.
The GNOME bugsquad works tightly with the usability, documentation, and accessibility teams to ensure that those issues are first priority issues for the community, and has for years.
That may be so, but their webpage is pretty much focused on just bugs.
But please stop telling the world that this is something new and innovative in free software.
While it may be relatively unusual in Free Software, I don't think KDE is claiming innovation.
Reading through the site, I realize that two important elements of QA are missing. They won't be as fun to do, but it would be great if someone did them.
1) Requirements and specifications. Also known as what you need before you start coding. Otherwise known as the official arbiter of whether the program is doing what it is supposed to be doing.
This is thankless gruntwork, but it is very valuable. Some KDE apps already have some, but all need them. Take an email client for example. Go grab all the RFC's relevant to POP3, IMAP, etc, and distill them down into a set of requirements stating what the program is supposed to do. Open Source is informal enough that we could get away with combining requirements and specifications into one document.
2) Test procedures. Now take that requirements document and write a comprehensive test procedure. Include regression testing. Now anyone can take this procedure and simply execute it to find out if the program follows its requirements. If a step fails, log a detailed bug that states which requirement is not met.
Not only would these two things aid the the developer in creating and improving the application, they would also improve the quality of bug reports. Instead of bug reports saying "it doesn't do what I think it should do", you get bug reports saying "it does x but the requirements say do y." If the applications still doesn't do what you want it to do, examine the requirements yourself, and if they aren't complete, propose a new one.
Requirements are your road map, and test procedures are the person in the passenger seat reading it to make sure you take the correct exit to Albuquerque.
Of course, all the cool design work and programming, and artistry, etc, will be done by the core team - who will, of course, accept all the credit.
Okay, here's an idea. The KDE About dialog is already has a "fill-in-the-blank" API. Why not add a Quality Team field to it? Make this an official part of the libs, and you suddenly get an official suggestion to credit the quality people for your application.
The GNOME effort is directed solely at bugs. The KDE Quality Team is directed at bugs, documentation, usability, process, etc, etc. We're trying to go beyond the traditional Open Source mentality of "it doesn't crash so mark it 'release'".
There are moral people who harm no one, and there are immoral people who violate the lives, liberties and properties of others. If the acts of violation are against the law of the land, these people are known as "criminals". If the acts of violation are allowed by law, shielded by law, or otherwise given special dispensation by society, these people are known as "government."
Trite example. Star Trek's "Piece of the Action". Enterprise discovers a society ruled by mobsters. The actions of these mobsters are crimes. They go around extorting people and putting hits out on their competition. Kirk's solution to this problem was to merely change the terminology of the society. Instead of criminals, they suddenly became legitimate governments. And oh, the Federation got a 10% "Piece of the Action" from their extortion rackets.
Real world example: The Dark Ages of Europe. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, bandits roamed the countryside terrorizing the farmers. Some decided to stop roaming and settle down in one spot. They called themselves "lords", and feudal manorial society sprung up from these bandits.
Re:OT - Re:Urban Legend Time.
on
See Spot Surf
·
· Score: 1
Way back in grade school we used to tease a guy by calling him "horse dick". Why we did it I will never know. But he obviously did not like it.
How much does this affect people? I did not see him for the next five years, as he went off to another school. But I ran into him once by happenstance, and out of nowhere he physically attacked me, screaming that he did not have a horse dick. This was five years later!
We had obviously damaged him through our teasing. It probably wasn't his primary damage (I'm suspecting a bad family situation), but it was enough that it had a firm enough hold on his subconscious that he instinctly attacked one of his teasers half a decade after the incident.
Doesn't anyone see the blatant barratry portrayed in this letter? If they had a legitimate gripe, they would sue ALL of them. Instead, they're picking and choosing their victim, indicating that they aren't the least bit interested in their rights, but keenly aware of the pocket depths of their intended mark.
It's like shoveling jelly beans into your mouth at the candy store - sure, it rots your teeth out and you end up with diabetes, but it tastes so damned good you can't help yourself.
I stopped smoking today. For the last twelve hours I have been gnawing on my fingernails, and fighting a desire to go to the pet store to get a cute little puppy so I can kick it in frustration!
But now you've brought up the possibility of substituting my smoking vice with a jelly bean vice. These sugar-free Trident gums I've been jawing on sure aren't doing the trick. Now let's see. Jelly beans might be the answer. Now do I want to lose a lung through smoking, or a leg through diabetes...
You were productive in Wordperfect. Ergo, Wordperfect could not have had a "usable" interface. If it did have a usable interface people would be too busy raving about how wonderful it was to have gotten any actual work done.
You're doing something wrong then. Or maybe it's a bug in Gentoo. Updating a 100MHz Pentium laptop from base FreeBSD to all KDE ports from source takes me only about two days.
Hey, don't worry about unemployment being high, it's going to be falling soon along with your wages!
Actually our domestic tech wages are way too high. US companies simply don't like giving out pay cuts. It's much less painful to them to layoff an employee and outsource his work to India, than to reduce his pay. I don't know why this is, but I would rather have a 50% pay cut than a 100% layoff.
I'm in the position right now at work where I am asking my boss not to give me a raise, because I don't want to be in the "radar scope" the next time the budget gets tight.
This guy is living on another planet if he thinks people should get paid for every since act they do. His perception of Free Software developers seems to be of a starving unwashed bum writing valuable and salable code between sob stories to the tourists. If that were true, he might have a point.
But we Free Software developers are not starving unwashed bums giving away our livelihood. In my own case, I write proprietary software for pay during the day, and Free Software for fun and itch-scratching on weekends. Others write non-product software during the day, and Free Software on weekends. For others programming is pure hobby, as they do none of it while at work. The rare individual might actually get paid to write the Free Software itself.
But in no cases are we taking our metaphorical paychecks and tearing them up!
Why must we try to squeeze every penny out of every action? Maybe I should charge my neighbor a fee when he borrows my lawn mower. Maybe I should charge my kid when I repair his broken bicycle seat. Heck, maybe I should charge my wife for washing the dishes!
I write Free Software as a hobby. I also brew beer as a hobby. Is this guy going to be bitching that homebrew hobbyists need to get a life and open up a commercial brewhouse and stop wasting their time puttering about in the garage on weekends? "Oh man! You could have sold that beer, but you gave it away for free to your neighbor! Are you stupid?"
Sorry, it's hard to pick you out from the crowd of prejudiced and closeminded Jackson haters.
Re:It's time for a redesign, anyway.
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, but still, you can link BSD-licensed code with a GPL-licensed library.
Only if the resulting executable is licensed under the GPL. Since the FSF considers dynamic linking to be derivation, I am FORBIDDEN to distribute any BSD licensed work that links to GPL libraries.
However, the crap they did to Denethor and Faramir really did bug me. Not because I think Tolkien is God or his word is golden or some such crap, but simply because Jackson took interesting, nuanced characters and turned them into something less interesting and less developed.
Interesting how one's mind twists the novel into the mold one's mind insists upon.
While Jackon's changes to Faramir were against the Sacred and Holy Canon of LOTR, it actually made Faramir MORE interesting and MORE developed. In the books, if you turn off your automatic mental redaction engine, Faramir was the epitome of the "goody-two-shoes" supporting cast member with no weaknesses. Gandalf was terrified of the ring's *temptation*, and he was immortal, yet Faramir wouldn't touch it if he found it lying in the road. Get real! Name one character flaw that Tolkien gave to Faramir.
You've got it backwards. There are many licenses that are compatible with the GPL, but the GPL is not in turn compatible with those licenses. In fact, the GPL is compatible ONLY with itself. By design.
Let's take just one license as an example, the MIT license. It is compatible with the GPL, because you can include MIT code in a GPL project and distribute the whole under the GPL. But you CANNOT do the reverse. You cannot include GPL code in an MIT licensed project and distribute the whole under the MIT license. No way, no how. GPL compatibility is a one way street.
which predates the OpenSource movement, and all this other Free licenses
It predated the name "Open Source", but it did not predate all other Free and Open Source licenses. The BSD and MIT licenses are two that predated the GPL. In addition, the idea of Free Software predates the GPL by at least two decades, though it was RMS who first insisted on the capitalization of the term.
if you Beleive in Free Software, there is no real reason to use a license other than the GPL.
If you believe in Democracy, there is no real reason to vote for any but the Democrat Party candidate! Now be a good citizen and vote like I tell you to vote...
Slashdot Mirror
What is the value of cheaper retail products if people are out of work or in lower paying jobs?
My company outsourced a bunch of people nine months ago. It hurt. The people who had to leave were hurt. The people who remained were hurt. All trust on upper management has disappeared. So let me get this off my chest right up front: OUTSOURCING SUCKS.
However, out of 1,000 employees, only 20 got outsourced. Think about it. Considering that the current unemployment rate is 5.7% (which is pretty good), the actual impact of outsourcing on the nation seems to be primarily emotional rather than economic.
here is no reason to think that they would make it pretty for other browsers when they only ever intended to properly use it once, and on a Mozilla browser.
I think the core problem is that at least some Mozilla developers write non-portable HTML/CSS by default. They don't write their external documents this way, so why are they writing their internal documents for Mozilla only?
Personally, I've tried installing Debian a few times, and given up just as many times.
I can install FreeBSD in my sleep, upside down and backwards looking in a mirror. But I've not once been able to endure the frustration level required to install Debian. So your experience has nothing to do with your newbieness.
p.s. I'm not knocking Debian, but it's installer is not definitely not intuitive to the Debian outsider.
It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there.
I must respectfully disagree. I am using FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS at home and at work. I'ts fully "GUIified". KDE 3.2. MPlayer, Xmms, yada, yada, yada.
While setting stuff up isn't automatically done for you before you even insert the install CD, it still isn't that difficult. Thanks to XFree86 (the true hero of the desktop), the days of having to manually compute modelines is ancient history. Run the command "XFree86 -configure" and you are done! You may want to tweak stuff afterwards, but the meat of the configuration is done.
Of course, if even the briefest glimpse of a command line is give you a case of the heebie jeebies, perhaps you should stay away.
Not having used the NetBSD LiveCD, I may be off base here. But your typical "live" CD is a much different beast than your Knoppix/FreeSBIE style CD. The former are meant for emergency recovery and stuff. No one uses them on a day to day basis for the desktop needs. On the other hand, I can use Knoppix or FreeSBIE as my primary desktop OS. In fact, with a USB thumb drive, I don't even NEED a harddrive anymore!
/etc and /home.
Of course, even Knoppix isn't new. I was using Slackware '96 off of a CD with a floppy for
What a sweet testimonial to the ease of migration to Linux!
More of a testiment to the benefits of coding to standards. I suspect that a simple recompile did 95% of the work.
The GNOME bugsquad works tightly with the usability, documentation, and accessibility teams to ensure that those issues are first priority issues for the community, and has for years.
That may be so, but their webpage is pretty much focused on just bugs.
But please stop telling the world that this is something new and innovative in free software.
While it may be relatively unusual in Free Software, I don't think KDE is claiming innovation.
Reading through the site, I realize that two important elements of QA are missing. They won't be as fun to do, but it would be great if someone did them.
1) Requirements and specifications. Also known as what you need before you start coding. Otherwise known as the official arbiter of whether the program is doing what it is supposed to be doing.
This is thankless gruntwork, but it is very valuable. Some KDE apps already have some, but all need them. Take an email client for example. Go grab all the RFC's relevant to POP3, IMAP, etc, and distill them down into a set of requirements stating what the program is supposed to do. Open Source is informal enough that we could get away with combining requirements and specifications into one document.
2) Test procedures. Now take that requirements document and write a comprehensive test procedure. Include regression testing. Now anyone can take this procedure and simply execute it to find out if the program follows its requirements. If a step fails, log a detailed bug that states which requirement is not met.
Not only would these two things aid the the developer in creating and improving the application, they would also improve the quality of bug reports. Instead of bug reports saying "it doesn't do what I think it should do", you get bug reports saying "it does x but the requirements say do y." If the applications still doesn't do what you want it to do, examine the requirements yourself, and if they aren't complete, propose a new one.
Requirements are your road map, and test procedures are the person in the passenger seat reading it to make sure you take the correct exit to Albuquerque.
Of course, all the cool design work and programming, and artistry, etc, will be done by the core team - who will, of course, accept all the credit.
Okay, here's an idea. The KDE About dialog is already has a "fill-in-the-blank" API. Why not add a Quality Team field to it? Make this an official part of the libs, and you suddenly get an official suggestion to credit the quality people for your application.
The GNOME effort is directed solely at bugs. The KDE Quality Team is directed at bugs, documentation, usability, process, etc, etc. We're trying to go beyond the traditional Open Source mentality of "it doesn't crash so mark it 'release'".
Libertarianism 101:
There are moral people who harm no one, and there are immoral people who violate the lives, liberties and properties of others. If the acts of violation are against the law of the land, these people are known as "criminals". If the acts of violation are allowed by law, shielded by law, or otherwise given special dispensation by society, these people are known as "government."
Trite example. Star Trek's "Piece of the Action". Enterprise discovers a society ruled by mobsters. The actions of these mobsters are crimes. They go around extorting people and putting hits out on their competition. Kirk's solution to this problem was to merely change the terminology of the society. Instead of criminals, they suddenly became legitimate governments. And oh, the Federation got a 10%
"Piece of the Action" from their extortion rackets.
Real world example: The Dark Ages of Europe. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, bandits roamed the countryside terrorizing the farmers. Some decided to stop roaming and settle down in one spot. They called themselves "lords", and feudal manorial society sprung up from these bandits.
Way back in grade school we used to tease a guy by calling him "horse dick". Why we did it I will never know. But he obviously did not like it.
How much does this affect people? I did not see him for the next five years, as he went off to another school. But I ran into him once by happenstance, and out of nowhere he physically attacked me, screaming that he did not have a horse dick. This was five years later!
We had obviously damaged him through our teasing. It probably wasn't his primary damage (I'm suspecting a bad family situation), but it was enough that it had a firm enough hold on his subconscious that he instinctly attacked one of his teasers half a decade after the incident.
Doesn't anyone see the blatant barratry portrayed in this letter? If they had a legitimate gripe, they would sue ALL of them. Instead, they're picking and choosing their victim, indicating that they aren't the least bit interested in their rights, but keenly aware of the pocket depths of their intended mark.
No, you are giving away the livelihood of someone else who could be earning money for what you are giving away.
A specious argument. If I wrote proprietary software instead of Free Software, I would STILL be taking away the livelihood of that someone else.
Excuse me, I have to run. I need to prepare for court tomorrow morning. Sara Lee is suing me for donating a cheesecake to the church bakesale...
It's like shoveling jelly beans into your mouth at the candy store - sure, it rots your teeth out and you end up with diabetes, but it tastes so damned good you can't help yourself.
I stopped smoking today. For the last twelve hours I have been gnawing on my fingernails, and fighting a desire to go to the pet store to get a cute little puppy so I can kick it in frustration!
But now you've brought up the possibility of substituting my smoking vice with a jelly bean vice. These sugar-free Trident gums I've been jawing on sure aren't doing the trick. Now let's see. Jelly beans might be the answer. Now do I want to lose a lung through smoking, or a leg through diabetes...
Oh go take a long walk off of a short pier! I want my OS/2 and Lotus Smartsuite back...
You were productive in Wordperfect. Ergo, Wordperfect could not have had a "usable" interface. If it did have a usable interface people would be too busy raving about how wonderful it was to have gotten any actual work done.
You're doing something wrong then. Or maybe it's a bug in Gentoo. Updating a 100MHz Pentium laptop from base FreeBSD to all KDE ports from source takes me only about two days.
Hey, don't worry about unemployment being high, it's going to be falling soon along with your wages!
Actually our domestic tech wages are way too high. US companies simply don't like giving out pay cuts. It's much less painful to them to layoff an employee and outsource his work to India, than to reduce his pay. I don't know why this is, but I would rather have a 50% pay cut than a 100% layoff.
I'm in the position right now at work where I am asking my boss not to give me a raise, because I don't want to be in the "radar scope" the next time the budget gets tight.
This guy is living on another planet if he thinks people should get paid for every since act they do. His perception of Free Software developers seems to be of a starving unwashed bum writing valuable and salable code between sob stories to the tourists. If that were true, he might have a point.
But we Free Software developers are not starving unwashed bums giving away our livelihood. In my own case, I write proprietary software for pay during the day, and Free Software for fun and itch-scratching on weekends. Others write non-product software during the day, and Free Software on weekends. For others programming is pure hobby, as they do none of it while at work. The rare individual might actually get paid to write the Free Software itself.
But in no cases are we taking our metaphorical paychecks and tearing them up!
Why must we try to squeeze every penny out of every action? Maybe I should charge my neighbor a fee when he borrows my lawn mower. Maybe I should charge my kid when I repair his broken bicycle seat. Heck, maybe I should charge my wife for washing the dishes!
I write Free Software as a hobby. I also brew beer as a hobby. Is this guy going to be bitching that homebrew hobbyists need to get a life and open up a commercial brewhouse and stop wasting their time puttering about in the garage on weekends? "Oh man! You could have sold that beer, but you gave it away for free to your neighbor! Are you stupid?"
Sorry, it's hard to pick you out from the crowd of prejudiced and closeminded Jackson haters.
Sure, but still, you can link BSD-licensed code with a GPL-licensed library.
Only if the resulting executable is licensed under the GPL. Since the FSF considers dynamic linking to be derivation, I am FORBIDDEN to distribute any BSD licensed work that links to GPL libraries.
However, the crap they did to Denethor and Faramir really did bug me. Not because I think Tolkien is God or his word is golden or some such crap, but simply because Jackson took interesting, nuanced characters and turned them into something less interesting and less developed.
Interesting how one's mind twists the novel into the mold one's mind insists upon.
While Jackon's changes to Faramir were against the Sacred and Holy Canon of LOTR, it actually made Faramir MORE interesting and MORE developed. In the books, if you turn off your automatic mental redaction engine, Faramir was the epitome of the "goody-two-shoes" supporting cast member with no weaknesses. Gandalf was terrified of the ring's *temptation*, and he was immortal, yet Faramir wouldn't touch it if he found it lying in the road. Get real! Name one character flaw that Tolkien gave to Faramir.
You've got it backwards. There are many licenses that are compatible with the GPL, but the GPL is not in turn compatible with those licenses. In fact, the GPL is compatible ONLY with itself. By design.
Let's take just one license as an example, the MIT license. It is compatible with the GPL, because you can include MIT code in a GPL project and distribute the whole under the GPL. But you CANNOT do the reverse. You cannot include GPL code in an MIT licensed project and distribute the whole under the MIT license. No way, no how. GPL compatibility is a one way street.
which predates the OpenSource movement, and all this other Free licenses
It predated the name "Open Source", but it did not predate all other Free and Open Source licenses. The BSD and MIT licenses are two that predated the GPL. In addition, the idea of Free Software predates the GPL by at least two decades, though it was RMS who first insisted on the capitalization of the term.
if you Beleive in Free Software, there is no real reason to use a license other than the GPL.
If you believe in Democracy, there is no real reason to vote for any but the Democrat Party candidate! Now be a good citizen and vote like I tell you to vote...