Before the meltdown, I would have argued with you. In order to assess risk, insurance companies need to understand the business and do the same things an auditor would do. After the meltdown it was found that the insurance companies just sold a lot of insurance, their execs got bonuses, and when things crashed, they went bankrupt (or sought a bailout)
How many man hours would be spent figuring that out?
The IRS gives the responsibility to determine the tax to the taxpayer (that's you). However if you make a mistake, you have to pay a penalty. So you have to figure it out and show your work to the IRS. If they think you made a mistake, you pay.
Next they'll tax the air you breath and the rain that falls on your property. If you think that's far fetched, there was a report the other day about a western state that made it legal to collect the rain that used to run off your house. Since it was illegal, and is now legal, it must be income, and thus taxable.
There's a cartoon in Don Lancaster's "Incredible Secret Money Machine" by b. kliban that shows a bum-like dude on a beach and an accountant at a desk with a clock in the background. The title is "Wasted and Useful Lives".
Perhaps the short end of the stick isn't the worst end. I've been told that amongst the northwest Native Americans, the lowest figure on the totem pole is the chief, the one that carries everyone else. Our culture interprets the "Low Man on the Totem Pole", to be the worst job, perhaps we need a change of view.
It's interesting that after the US helps rebuild a country, we give it a better constitution and legal system than what we have. This is how it should be, but it's obvious that we should backport the best of the new legal systems to our own.
This doesn't happen of course, because vested interests are making money from the current systems. If the inefficiencies are fixed, they might have to find a new job. To quote the movie "Risky Business", "You don't f*ck with a man's livelihood." People will fight you tooth and nail, and even try to kill you if you try to interfere with their way of life. (No matter how good or bad that way of life is, they want it to remain the same)
Good lawyers are actually legal hackers. They look for the edge cases where the law is broken for the good of their client. There's really a lot in common between programmers and lawyers.
Philo I Farnsworth got screwed out of the rights to Television. Inventors almost always get the short end of the stick, unless they sell out and become businessmen. Who's richer Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak? Edison got rich because he was a great businessman.
Yes, pick bulbs with color temp and CRI that match what you want to light. My wife and I painted a room, but didn't like the color when lit with regular incandescent bulbs. I switch to 5000K CFLs and the room looks great. (More like daylight)
I've had an incandescent bulb shatter explosively when I turned it on. If there is a small scratch in the glass, the heat and cool cycle will shatter any type of bulb. If the glass is defect free, there's no reason for it to break.
Try your experiment again with a known good bulb that doesn't have any scratches.
B.t.w. I've been told that DC will burn out an incandescent bulb sooner than AC, but I've never tried it experimentally.
People need to ask the question, what is the business driver for an enterprise to spend money on OpenSource?
If a business can use a product like say lsof, gnu grep, or gcc, as-is, more power to them. You're right, there's no business driver to contribute. When updates come out, follow the updates and they are gold.
If a large financial company needs to add SecurID to a free product, they should give the code back to the community. Many eyes will quickly tell them if an inside programmer tried to install a back door into the code, intentionally or not. Keeping the code secret could open them up a lot of risk.
Yes, this a real example, and yes, the large financial company didn't give back. It's now on government life support. Coincidence? I don't think so...
Lawyers will often choose the safe route of paying a fixed amount of money up front for a commercial license, rather than face the possibility of a suit for an undisclosed amount later on because someone forgot to mention that module 27A was based off code written by Joe Bloggs.
The fly in the ointment is that nothing is risk free. Lawyers and Mangers work on perceived risk, not measured or tested risk. Many, many companies have had to sue their proprietary software suppliers, or simply been cut off with no recourse. If they had gone with open source, they could take the source and find a new vendor, or bring it in house. I knew programmers that worked for the parent company of a large hotel chain that were working on an important application in Visual Basic version 4.x. They ran into a memory leak and after much debugging, Microsoft said, "Fixed in the next major release". The told MS that the next major release wouldn't run their code without many expensive changes. Microsoft said, "Sorry, Fixed in the next major release." If they had written their code in Tk/Tcl or Perl, or even GCC, they wouldn't have this problem.
Proper legal risk assessment assigns a risk of being sued or needing to sue and multiplies that by the expected cost of being sued or suing or living with the problem. I worked for a company whose lawyers wouldn't let us use a piece of free software because the license allowed us to have the software free of charge, but didn't specifically allow us to use the software. This risk of being sued was vanishingly small, and the cost of being sued was about zero, but our director wanted to live in a risk free la-la land.
Yes, of course enterprise IT should give back to open source - who would have an objection to that?
Um, the people in charge? The PHB's that can't see beyond next quarter's balance sheet? The manager who think that their software is so much better than anyone else's, yet only pay industry average pay scale?
Bah, Free Software isn't a gift given to you freely. It's free to use, once you acquire it. The publisher can't make demands on how you use the software. You can also publish it, for any price, but after that, you can't make demands on how your customers use it.
Free Software is about freedom to use the software, not free to receive.
Anyway, most of the time you should contribute. If the software has a bug and you fix it, contribute the fix, or the bug will still be there in any updates, making it harder for you to upgrade.
If you don't modify the software yourself, you can still contribute money to the project, or it may stagnate, leaving you out in the cold when you need to update your systems.
Open source software isn't about receiving, it is about giving.
Nope.
The free software movement was started because one programmer couldn't get the code to fix a bug in a printer driver. It's about Freedom. If I write software, you can't take that software and keep someone else from doing what they want with it. You can do what you want with the software, including publishing it, but you can't attach your own restrictions on that software.
Contributing to Free Software is just gravy that makes it all taste good. It's not necessary for any one individual to contribute to make the system work.
No, that's the correct response. If everyone did that, free software would get a great boost.
Did you emphasize the money and time savings by opening the source? Were there unmet needs of the software, or was it "Good Enough?" If to management the software was "Good Enough", and offered them a competitive advantage, then in their eyes they were doing the right thing. I can be a hard argument to make. "If we open the code, we lose our competitive advantage, but an unknown number of people might contribute an unknown amount of code." Management would rather hire an outside firm that promises to write N lines of code for M dollars, even thought we technical types know the outsourcer is lying through their teeth. (Plus, there's no way of knowing what N lines of code will really do to the software.)
Management doesn't like unknowns. At all. They dislike unknowns so much, they would rather have guesses and lies in the place of unknowns. Many people have climbed hight on the corporate ladder simply by plugging in guesses and lies into a spreadsheet or Gant chart.
Many organizations use open source, but actively have policies that prevent giving code back. Systems to prevent this may backfire, because if an organization *had* to give back, they might just think it's safer to go with closed source. True or not, many lawyers prefer a draconian closed source license that has been paid for over an open license that hasn't. The closed source license is perceived to have been more tested by the courts. Since closed licenses are all different, while GPL, Apache, BSD, and CC are published, well researched, and not overreaching, I don't know why they would reach that conclusion. Some companies have exclusive contracts that have only been seen by a handful of attorneys, while the major open source license have been seen and debated by the World.
Most companies have an overinflated view of the value of their contributions, (although they only paid their programmers industry standard wages) so they put up internal barriers that make it difficult or impossible to give back.
There's already better techniques for breaking up kidney stones. One sends a small signal out and looks for a bounce from the stones. Once it sees the stones, and has measured their resonances, it sends a larger pulse along multiple paths to destroy the stone. I don't know if the new system is available out of the lab yet though.
Already been done. There are radar systems that essentially use a burst of microwave noise. Bats and dolphins use multiple frequencies. It's unlikely this system in it's present state would fool a dolphin.
Now, if you designed the system with electrically variable cavities, you'd be able to adjust it on the fly. The first few waves of a ping would bounce back, then you would disappear...
Take it to a local computer store and tell the salesdroid you are looking to buy a replacement, but it has to boot faster than the Model 100. Ask to see the slick $5000 super-wiz-bang models, then ask "Why are they so slow?"
F.y.i. For those of you with H89s, TRS-80s or Apple II's that want to keep them working, this guy sells a virtual floppy drive that allows you to save disk images to a Windows or Linux machine and access them on you vintage machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Before the meltdown, I would have argued with you. In order to assess risk, insurance companies need to understand the business and do the same things an auditor would do. After the meltdown it was found that the insurance companies just sold a lot of insurance, their execs got bonuses, and when things crashed, they went bankrupt (or sought a bailout)
How many man hours would be spent figuring that out?
The IRS gives the responsibility to determine the tax to the taxpayer (that's you). However if you make a mistake, you have to pay a penalty. So you have to figure it out and show your work to the IRS. If they think you made a mistake, you pay.
Next they'll tax the air you breath and the rain that falls on your property. If you think that's far fetched, there was a report the other day about a western state that made it legal to collect the rain that used to run off your house. Since it was illegal, and is now legal, it must be income, and thus taxable.
Who audits the auditors?
The auditor's insurance companies. They are the ones that will have to pay if the auditor loses the lawsuit.
There's a cartoon in Don Lancaster's "Incredible Secret Money Machine" by b. kliban that shows a bum-like dude on a beach and an accountant at a desk with a clock in the background. The title is "Wasted and Useful Lives".
Perhaps the short end of the stick isn't the worst end. I've been told that amongst the northwest Native Americans, the lowest figure on the totem pole is the chief, the one that carries everyone else. Our culture interprets the "Low Man on the Totem Pole", to be the worst job, perhaps we need a change of view.
You're certainly healthier both physically and mentally.
Hydraulic computers are used in some military aircraft because they are very reliable and can withstand EMP.
It's interesting that after the US helps rebuild a country, we give it a better constitution and legal system than what we have. This is how it should be, but it's obvious that we should backport the best of the new legal systems to our own.
This doesn't happen of course, because vested interests are making money from the current systems. If the inefficiencies are fixed, they might have to find a new job. To quote the movie "Risky Business", "You don't f*ck with a man's livelihood." People will fight you tooth and nail, and even try to kill you if you try to interfere with their way of life. (No matter how good or bad that way of life is, they want it to remain the same)
Good lawyers are actually legal hackers. They look for the edge cases where the law is broken for the good of their client. There's really a lot in common between programmers and lawyers.
Philo I Farnsworth got screwed out of the rights to Television. Inventors almost always get the short end of the stick, unless they sell out and become businessmen. Who's richer Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak? Edison got rich because he was a great businessman.
the light out of fluorescent bulbs
Yes, pick bulbs with color temp and CRI that match what you want to light. My wife and I painted a room, but didn't like the color when lit with regular incandescent bulbs. I switch to 5000K CFLs and the room looks great. (More like daylight)
I've had an incandescent bulb shatter explosively when I turned it on. If there is a small scratch in the glass, the heat and cool cycle will shatter any type of bulb. If the glass is defect free, there's no reason for it to break.
Try your experiment again with a known good bulb that doesn't have any scratches.
B.t.w. I've been told that DC will burn out an incandescent bulb sooner than AC, but I've never tried it experimentally.
People need to ask the question, what is the business driver for an enterprise to spend money on OpenSource?
If a business can use a product like say lsof, gnu grep, or gcc, as-is, more power to them. You're right, there's no business driver to contribute. When updates come out, follow the updates and they are gold.
If a large financial company needs to add SecurID to a free product, they should give the code back to the community. Many eyes will quickly tell them if an inside programmer tried to install a back door into the code, intentionally or not. Keeping the code secret could open them up a lot of risk.
Yes, this a real example, and yes, the large financial company didn't give back. It's now on government life support. Coincidence? I don't think so...
Lawyers will often choose the safe route of paying a fixed amount of money up front for a commercial license, rather than face the possibility of a suit for an undisclosed amount later on because someone forgot to mention that module 27A was based off code written by Joe Bloggs.
The fly in the ointment is that nothing is risk free. Lawyers and Mangers work on perceived risk, not measured or tested risk. Many, many companies have had to sue their proprietary software suppliers, or simply been cut off with no recourse. If they had gone with open source, they could take the source and find a new vendor, or bring it in house. I knew programmers that worked for the parent company of a large hotel chain that were working on an important application in Visual Basic version 4.x. They ran into a memory leak and after much debugging, Microsoft said, "Fixed in the next major release". The told MS that the next major release wouldn't run their code without many expensive changes. Microsoft said, "Sorry, Fixed in the next major release." If they had written their code in Tk/Tcl or Perl, or even GCC, they wouldn't have this problem.
Proper legal risk assessment assigns a risk of being sued or needing to sue and multiplies that by the expected cost of being sued or suing or living with the problem. I worked for a company whose lawyers wouldn't let us use a piece of free software because the license allowed us to have the software free of charge, but didn't specifically allow us to use the software. This risk of being sued was vanishingly small, and the cost of being sued was about zero, but our director wanted to live in a risk free la-la land.
Yes, of course enterprise IT should give back to open source - who would have an objection to that?
Um, the people in charge? The PHB's that can't see beyond next quarter's balance sheet? The manager who think that their software is so much better than anyone else's, yet only pay industry average pay scale?
Bah, Free Software isn't a gift given to you freely. It's free to use, once you acquire it. The publisher can't make demands on how you use the software. You can also publish it, for any price, but after that, you can't make demands on how your customers use it.
Free Software is about freedom to use the software, not free to receive.
Anyway, most of the time you should contribute. If the software has a bug and you fix it, contribute the fix, or the bug will still be there in any updates, making it harder for you to upgrade.
If you don't modify the software yourself, you can still contribute money to the project, or it may stagnate, leaving you out in the cold when you need to update your systems.
Contribute, it's good for you.
Open source software isn't about receiving, it is about giving.
Nope.
The free software movement was started because one programmer couldn't get the code to fix a bug in a printer driver. It's about Freedom. If I write software, you can't take that software and keep someone else from doing what they want with it. You can do what you want with the software, including publishing it, but you can't attach your own restrictions on that software.
Contributing to Free Software is just gravy that makes it all taste good. It's not necessary for any one individual to contribute to make the system work.
No, that's the correct response. If everyone did that, free software would get a great boost.
Did you emphasize the money and time savings by opening the source? Were there unmet needs of the software, or was it "Good Enough?" If to management the software was "Good Enough", and offered them a competitive advantage, then in their eyes they were doing the right thing. I can be a hard argument to make. "If we open the code, we lose our competitive advantage, but an unknown number of people might contribute an unknown amount of code." Management would rather hire an outside firm that promises to write N lines of code for M dollars, even thought we technical types know the outsourcer is lying through their teeth. (Plus, there's no way of knowing what N lines of code will really do to the software.)
Management doesn't like unknowns. At all. They dislike unknowns so much, they would rather have guesses and lies in the place of unknowns. Many people have climbed hight on the corporate ladder simply by plugging in guesses and lies into a spreadsheet or Gant chart.
Exactly right. Using free software, all companies are able to be Freeloaders. But, all good corporate citizens should give back where they can.
Many organizations use open source, but actively have policies that prevent giving code back. Systems to prevent this may backfire, because if an organization *had* to give back, they might just think it's safer to go with closed source. True or not, many lawyers prefer a draconian closed source license that has been paid for over an open license that hasn't. The closed source license is perceived to have been more tested by the courts. Since closed licenses are all different, while GPL, Apache, BSD, and CC are published, well researched, and not overreaching, I don't know why they would reach that conclusion. Some companies have exclusive contracts that have only been seen by a handful of attorneys, while the major open source license have been seen and debated by the World.
Most companies have an overinflated view of the value of their contributions, (although they only paid their programmers industry standard wages) so they put up internal barriers that make it difficult or impossible to give back.
There's already better techniques for breaking up kidney stones. One sends a small signal out and looks for a bounce from the stones. Once it sees the stones, and has measured their resonances, it sends a larger pulse along multiple paths to destroy the stone. I don't know if the new system is available out of the lab yet though.
Already been done. There are radar systems that essentially use a burst of microwave noise. Bats and dolphins use multiple frequencies. It's unlikely this system in it's present state would fool a dolphin.
Now, if you designed the system with electrically variable cavities, you'd be able to adjust it on the fly. The first few waves of a ping would bounce back, then you would disappear...
Take it to a local computer store and tell the salesdroid you are looking to buy a replacement, but it has to boot faster than the Model 100. Ask to see the slick $5000 super-wiz-bang models, then ask "Why are they so slow?"
F.y.i. For those of you with H89s, TRS-80s or Apple II's that want to keep them working, this guy sells a virtual floppy drive that allows you to save disk images to a Windows or Linux machine and access them on you vintage machine.
http://www.thesvd.com/SVD/
I haven't used one yet, but when I find some time, I plan to hook one to my H89.
I still have my Heathkit H89 packed away in the basement. I tell my wife that it's my payment into the Old Programmers home when I retire...