200 years ago, a transplant was impossible. In 200 years, many if not most (or all) of the issues will be dealt with. Cloning will become easy at some point. It probably will happen much sooner than that. There is too much financial incentive in the live stock (pet) world to have clones.
Hmm.. Are you familiar with the Internet? Writing websites is the same economy as IBM's (or RedHat, Novell, etc) linux. HTML, XML, Java, Javascript, etc cost nothing to use. Yet, there is a billion dollar industry based on providing services for these *languages*. Think hardware, consulting, design, and other paid for services.
It is a sea of free softwares with services being the profit. There is already a model in place for companies to contribute smaller amounts of cash (and pooling it) to have custom features developed for linux. Do you see IBM passing that up? How many people make a living consulting on linux, supporting it, writing applications for it? Do you see IBM and others passing those service incomes up? I do not pass them up.
The system works. It will work better as it matures. There will be efforts to *steal* linux for private use by unethical companies. There will be supporters to fight that. Linux (or whatever the OS is at the time) will always be being developed, improved because people can (same reason so many people jump out of airplanes, climb mountains, start businesses,...). The only danger I see on the horizon today is software patents being allowed to kill the free interchange of ideas in software design.
There are plenty of good patents out there. My uncle holds many. But, I have seen no good software patents as of yet (there may be some, but I have not seen them). For instance Amazon one click patent. Come on? What hard engineering or technical details are there to that?
A good measure of a bad patent is when it is so broadly defined that a different approach can not be engineered. It is the time spent engineering the approach that a patent should protect.
Some of the most profitable companies in the world are pharmas. They control products that people literally can not live without. They have patents that allow this. They also tend to spend billions in research and development of their products. Those products are narrowly defined as a chemical A that targets receptor site B and causes effect C as well as the chemical itself being patented, not a process by which a vaguely referred to chemical causes another vaguely referred to chemical to start a reaction that winds up with a lower level of a vaguely referred to bad chemical in the body.
Unfortunately, most software patents seem to be defined that way. Not engineered and vague. The patent writers are not coming up with good engineering in most cases (which would be ok to patent), but are patenting things that are not feats of engineering or research. A similar problem exists in biotech with companies wanting to patent genes they discover and all of the obvious one offs.
The reality is once you have a few bits of information on people, you can continue to delve up more bits of information. The amount of information I can dredge up on prospective employees is frightening and legal (so is the prospect of hiring some of the ones who lie on their resume/application). The informaiton held on individuals is incredibly invasive and almost completely unregulated. It is a good thing that most identity theft is commited by two bit thieves who are not smart enough to do it right.
It is just like virus writers. The good ones write viri you never notice. The talented thieves steal identities in such a way that it might be a decade before you know it has happened.
You are correct. However, I believe from my studies (bioinformatics) and the data I am munching for researchers that in the next 50 years we will have the technology to regrow most organs in the body, thus greatly increasing the potential lifespan.
I also believe that we will have a cure for the four biggest ailments facing people in *modern* countries. Keeping the brain *young* is another trick although, as causing new cell growth in the brain may (not sure) cause some serious cognitive issues. We may be able to have very young bodies with very old brains. I am not sure what the maximum life span of the neurons in the brain might be.
RFID chip implants would accomplish this quietly. You would be tagged, and the database would have the information. You would not know what the tag means, nor what the information says about you. Kind of like the credit agencies today, but far more invasive. Watch for it to come as an extra to a program that is publicly good, like health information or credit information (in place already). If you doubt the existance of information like this, do some seartches online, have a company research your SSN, your name, etc. I like shocking people with the information we dredge up no them from these sources. Kind of brings back to reality.
Do you know what information different group shave stored on you? Do you want to know? Odds are it is not correct.
I think you mistake providing services and support with providing code. True, these organizations provide some *internally developed* code, but what they really provide are services.
The service they provide is tested and packaged code and tech support. In a nutshell, they are paid to help companies minimize risk. They are doing some development, but to my knowledge it is released based on the license of the code it was derived from. I think we will see more commerical products being sold for use on *nix, buit the commerical Linux distros that I am aware of make their monies on linux services, packages and QA of said software.
I actually like this model of OS and Commercial software. There are aspects of software development that most people will not perform, and most of them not for free. With a business model that provides a paid incentive to do these other functions, the software will not only get better, but will become much more widely accepted and used.
Despite his claims to the contrary, there is NOTHING in teh BSD license to stop hiom from relicensing his code and selling it commercially.
It is the spirit of the license that is the issue. In many cases, what is not conatined in a license is more important than what is contained in a license. The *viral* part of the GPL license is the part that allows a developer to make money more readly on their creation. Many commercial concerns will pay for a license that allows them to use the code without that part. A BSD license has no requirements to make a commercial concern want to buy license to use your software. There is nothing to compel a company to pay him to use code that has already been given away for free with no restrictions on its usage. I use GPL for the same reason. I will not use BSD. My experience is the same as his. When you give it away as BSD lic, you almost never get paid for commercial use. When you release it under GPL, commerical concerns tend to pay you for a non-GPL license to use the product.
The BSD license is intended to allow this to happen. That makes it very bad for people who want to make some money on the code they have written. You can still make money, but you eliminate some big options with BSD. You eliminate a smaller number of options with GPL. I think the trade off with GPL makes more sense than BSD.
The only problem with common sense is it is normally wrong.
The best way to understand common sense is to to realize what it is as opposed to what it is defined as.
Common sense is defined as Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge; native good judgment. Think of the contradiction in that definition alone. Sound judgement based on a lack of knowledge. The term worked hundreds of years ago because there was very little if any specialized knowledge. Most *knowledge* were really beliefs (still have a lot of that today). Now, we do have many specialists. As we go forward, specialization will become more and more the only way to qualify for work or to understand what is understood about something as the amoun of knowledge we aquire grows. It will be the only way people will be acepted for what they know. Common sense is on the way out as people realize that common sense really is the same as common ignorance.
How many of you would hire someone to render advice on orthodontics that fits this definition (common sense) with regards to teeth? True, our hero in the story is not a dentist. He is a thinker he has a hunger to understand and aquire information about many things seemingly unrelated to what he does (write books on computer technology). How is that different from the billions of *normal* people who can spew all kinds of totally useless stats about sports and entertainment figure from around the world? It is a mind set. That is why you need to hire people for how they think as much as if not more so than what they currently know. So, this gentleman focuses on knowing things, on thinking about how things are done. As opposed to other people who focus on sports scores and, pop entertainment and what else?
A common person has very little knowledge about much of anything (hence the term commoner is not a good thing Unrefined or coarse in manner; vulgar: behavior that branded him as common). Some things in the realm of common sense are quite obvious (gravity), but still, it took until Sir Isaac Newton to *discover* gravity. Common sense was, the world had edges (four corners), the Earth was the center of the universe, leeching will cure disease, disease is spread via foul odor (vapor), and many more. Common sense is merely what people in general tend to agree upon. Later they will shown to be idiots. The trully smart people just tend to show them as idiots before they are ready to be shown as idiots.
If brushing our teeth correclty is something not to be thought about, and something that we do right the way we do it, then why do we need dentists and regular checkups? Because the way we brush our teeth is nowhere near *good enough*.
Most of us are idiots about most things and we cling to our idiot thoughts and beliefs as a comfortable chair on a sinking cruise liner. It is far more comforting to believe the ship you are on is not sinking then to be looking frantically for a patch for the large hole we call common sense. Of course, once the water is at your feet, it is too late (stock market crashes, WWI and WWII, VietNam, Oil, Environment, SETI, Education, Debt, Health, Profiteering, Corporations,...)
You appear to be suffering from expertitis snobosia.
So, as a ${professional} you are saying that I have an excessive preoccupation with people actually knowing what is happening? And that is snobbish? Hmm... Not sure if I am to be insulted or complimented. In reality, your little jab refers to a few things that provided me with some good reading. Thank you for that. What I found when googling were things like these (though I am obviously not an expert with the term you "layed down"), here, and . Unless I mistake your intent, you meant this "Another major barrier to creativity is "expertitis": the assumption of knowledge. If we think we know everything about a subject or a problem, we close ourselves off to new input and to new ideas". This has nothing to do with insisting on a minimum amount of knowledge before I am going to waste my time listening to you. If you can demonstrate that you grasp enough knowledge, then I will listen. On the other hand, most people who give opinions on subjects they are not well aquainted with tend to sound like ignorant trash. Many times they are called gossips (or worse).
Your implying that a person can only know all or know nothing on a particular subject.
I have no idea how you imagined that is what I meant when I typed "However, to have an opinion that means something (valid), one has to have a solid knowledge of the subject at hand." You might think that is an all or nothing approach, however it is not! Even with the example given, total knowledge is not needed to realize changing the thermostat fixes the problem.
"I'm an expert therefore I'm always right and your not therefore your always wrong."
There are plenty of so called experts selling all kinds of medical cures that are worthless and many times harmful if not fatal. You can always study, learn and become knowledgable in the subject matter and become an expert. Until then you are a snake oil salesman. Nothing more than an ignorant pontificant. There are plenty of those in this world. Many of them get elected because the people that vote for them think with next to no knowledge on subjects they too are exerts and do not bother learning anything more than their television will tell them to believe.
Experts can, should and do disagree with each other. Having the same set of knowledge does not mean they will agree on what it means. It merely means that each is equally qualified to submit a position, validate their reasoning for their position and argue comprehensibly for their backing that position. In fact, the more the experts disagree, the more work gets done fleshing out what is known about the subject material and what is correct or erroneous.
A solid knowledge in something is not perfect knowledge, nor all reaching, however, it does mean that a normal conversation between two experts in a field will not leave you searching for definitions and theories to understand the conversation they are having. I personally know noone who knows everything about any subject matter. I personally know many experts at different subject matters, and I can not keep up with them in their fields of expertise. I have no ability to hold a valid opinion in those areas of expertise as I do not know enough about the area to produce any meaningful opinion.
Maybe, if more people actually looked for real experts on things before taking what other people said (opinion) as sensible, we might have fewer wacked out issues in this country (US). But, as it is, knowledge seems to be accepted as a soundbite. String enough of those together, and people seem to start thinking they are experts. I know a bunch of real experts. If I know anything about their lines of expertise, it is because
Nothing personal, but yes. Anyone can have an opinion on anything without being knowledgeable. Hence, the expression "Opinions are like a**holes, everyone has one and it smells."
However, to have an opinion that means something (valid), one has to have a solid knowledge of the subject at hand. If you do not have solid knowledge in an area, then you can not (beyond luck) form an opinion that has much to do with the whole issue. This is like being in a house that is warm while it is cold outside. You are standing in a room by the thermostat. You do not know what a thermostat is, but you know opening the windows in the room will cool you off. You open the windows, and the thermostat thinks the whole house is cold and overheats everything else because of you. My oldest child did this when he was five - it works that way.
If you are not so young as to not have had the experience of graduate school, or if you are not too old to remember it, then think of how hard it was for most people to get 'A's in class. Many of them had to study a lot, because they did not know enough about the subject at hand to simply fake it, which is what an uninformed opinion is, fake. I would even go so far to say that those who claim to have opinions on things without knowledge are merely lying to themselves and the world in general to make themselves feel better.
Very simply, who would you ask tax advice from? Your taxi driver or a local tax expert (professional)? Who would you get legal advice from in defending yourself in a law suit? An accountant or a lawyer? This is the difference between opinion with knowledge and opinion without (sufficient) knowledge. There is always the problem of knowing whether or not a person is truly an expert, an expert with a paid opinion, or a loudmouth who is not an expert.
I apologize is this comes across as harsh, but responding at 1:30 in the morning is leaving my brain a little fuzzy and I am having a hard time thinking... So, I am the one who needs help here, not you...;-)
Can you name a single task that MS Word can't do, but some business has paid a consultant to develop as a custom feature for a F/OSS word processor?
Your question misses the point I was making. Buying COTS is not bad. Buying COTS without consideration for how it fits into the current environment is bad. A word processor, no matter who makes it is a widget in the workflow. As you will note, I did say that the real issue is open standards, not open source.
As far as a company that has paid an OOS developer to include some new feature in an OOS word processor, I can not personally site one. I have personally been involved in trying to expand MS Word's functionality to do things it could not do, or to try to fit it into a workflow. VBA is only able to do so much. Other tools have can have distribution limitations (I have never run into a mainframe that uses MS Word.)
Despite all this potential for customisation and consultancy work that the F/OSS community likes to advertise, the dominant and best word processor is still Microsoft Word,
Every customer I have moved to OO has not moved back. All of them prefer OO to MS Office (MS Word dominant - agree, best - not agree). And, it is not the price they like, it is the product. They paid me to set it up and install it, so they did not get it for free. True, cheaper, but not free. I have only one client who has had any crashes in OO. All of them have lost documents in MS Office. Same for Firefox from IE and Thunderbird from Outlook, though OO seems to be a better product. The major difference between me making money installing and setting up OO and a store selling a copy of MS Word, is the amount of money they (the store) can make on MS Word. If you were a retail store, would you sell the product that makes you a few dollars, or the one that makes you almsot a hundred dollars (or twenty for discounters)? MS Office is dominant because it is pushed through more channels. It has more exposure. It is included with every MS OS on every OEM that I am aware of (though you may have to pay for it to use it still). Many people are under the illusions that only MS Office works with MS Office and therefore do not try anything else. I can not remember the last time I needed MS Office.
I confess to not understanding your arguments about customisation of COTS either.
Most people (most businesses) buy COTS with the expectation (based on the sales and marketing materials) that the COTS package will do everything they need to do. They base their projections, cost analyses and future business on these false assumptions. Compounding that problem is/are the people who sell the stuff who have a bad habit of saying I don't see why you could not do that (plausible deniability, they never said it could). Accounting has big issues there. Especially tieing it into workflow. Customizing COTS package is typically much harder to do unless you have much experience with the package's quirks, errors and traps. At least if the package uses open source, you can figure out what the documentation really should be saying. If it at least uses open standards, then there is also a chance that work can be done outside the COTS app.
COTS is a great tool sometimes. Sometimes it is a business killer. Businesses have gone under by not using the correct software solution. COTS fails just as often at the task as roll your own. Thie problem with COTS is it takes you down a path you have little control over without very large resources. I have had several clients who have had to change the way they do business to match what a COTS product could do because they became so locke dinto the COTS. It killed several of them until I helped them get off the solutions. Things like word processor
Considering that the business model has been working successfully for years
The business model works particularly well for consultants like myself who are needed to go in and customize COTS solutions when the COTS does not do what the user thought it would. It does not work as well for the end user, but as they do not know enough to roll their own, or find alternative solutions, they buy what has been sold to them. They do not know if the marketing is correct. They do not know how to determine whether or not the software will take them into the future. They only know what they have been told in advertisements and reviews (another form of advertising in most cases).
What's more disturbing is the recent trend for open source fanboys to prioritise access to source code and/or immediate interoperability concerns ahead of getting software that actually does the job well
I find this amusing. "Actually does the job well" (IMO) means does it work with what you have (interoperability) and can you extend it for future needs (open standards or in some cases, open source). Buying a COTS application that can not be adapted to your business model is kind of like buying a car that can not travel the roads you need to drive on, only much more expensive. When a COTS applications is put into place, you are accepting the limitations of the software. When you start running into the dead ends, the only solutions are to hire developers to customize the COTS, pay the COTS company to customize, change your business model to match the software or do nothing and do without. Choose one that makes actual fiscal sense.
I have worked with everything from one of the top five document producing companies in the world to little corner stores. My experience is that open standards are the real issue. Open source is nice for finding bugs that mess up your system, but open standards allow you to add business functionality that otherwise would be cost prohibitive in the COTS world.
In one of the shops, we used to kick out so much mail that we had our own zip code. We were in the top five mailers in the world. We had several document creation systems. All of them were open standard and all of them had our hacks attached to do things the original authors never imagined, nor were they (original developers) willing to do once we imagined doing them. By being able to use open standards documents, we were on one project alone, able to save over $35 million per year in manpower, customer satisfaction, fee prevention and fine prevention by writing our own code. Using COTS models (except one small company) at that time and today would not have been possible. Certain companies may be willing for a fee to disclose some of their standards (though most do not disclose enough, let alone provide correct documentation), but normally the COTS providers do not provide anything terribly useful for end user customization. MS at least tries with their VBA, OLE, DLLs, et al but falls far short of the stuff I have used that is truly open standard (not nescesarily open source).
All I can say is that if more COTS companies start implementing open standards (QIF, OFX, etc) instead of copyrighted, encumered standards then the market will improve dramatically for COTS and end users.
As is always, that which helps to protect the innocent can be used to protect the *evil*. The problem is the innocent do not know what is being done, and the *evil* are studying and learning to use and abuse. Nothing new there.
I have code from seven year ago that I still use and once in a while add something to. It is well written, documented, uses white space and easy to maintain. It is also in perl.
I have some other people's code from this past summer that I am going through to find a few bugs. It is hard to read, not very well commented and spaghetti like. It is written in C.
This is more about blaming the language for the shortcomings of an individuals ability to communicate than it is anything to do with a language. It goes in the same category as any written language from English to French. If you are not able to clearly communicate your ideas, people will not understand what you are saying or what you are doing.
The programmer makes the code readable. The language does not make the programmer readable. If you have had a harder time reading things done in perl, then it is because those who have written in perl had not taken the time to learn how to program or how to program in perl. Same problems exist with Java, C, C++ et al. I agree, some of the worst code I have seen is in perl in the obfu contests (which come from C IIRC), but some of the best code I have also seen in perl.
I like this suggestion for getting companies to be responsible for some of their data insecurities. Of course, if it is not illegal, would it not be better to report it to homeland insecurity?
An anonymous hotline. Kind of like for drunk drivers, but in this case wayward or ignorant corporations. Then, they can be notified of the issue, there is a legal record of them being notified and they can not scape goat the good samaritan.
Hmmm.. Maybe we can get one of those set up for fraud and other things as well.
Drug pushers are hard working people as well. I still do not want them in my neighborhood, on my phone or in my life.
I know several people in telemarketing. I know many many more who lef tit once they discovered just what kind of *work* they would be performing. Most of them left based on ethical issues (and many more never took a job like that). If your ethics are so low as to do the things that many telemarketers do for a living, then you get no sympathy from me.
If on the other hand you are one of those telemarketers who actually applies ethics to your work, then I feel sorry for you being tainted by the quasi-criminal intent/activity of the majority of your peers.
Ooohh.. I just love trying to explain things like this to people, and watch their eyes glaze over. lol.
Most people I know are so limited to the popular press that they think of neural activity as merely being neurons firing in mass avalanches of activity. They have not even considered the chemicals like serotonin or norepinephrine.
My thinking on this is that we will find the *human* factor in computational *thought* in the mixture of chemicals more so than in the neural firings even though they are strongly tied together. The reason I think this is that manipulating the levels of certain *brain* chemicals manipulates how much we feel or *experience*. There are also significat statistical links between the ability of the brain to uptake serotonin and the level of thrill-seeking people tend to *need* to get an experience out of life.
I could be completely mistaken, but this stuff is fun. It is as exciting to me as the days I first learned assembly code.
I will be the first to admit it has been a while since I worked with SGML, but IIRC, in the DTD for an SGML doc, you mark optional tags with an O, so that it would look like this:
<!ELEMENT elemname - O (#PCDATA) >
where the - means the opening tag is required, and the O means the closing tag is not required.
Whether or not I think I remember it, OFX has sent me back to books I have had in boxes for almost a decade now. Normally when I pull old books out like that, they are picture albums for the family, not old programming and data manuals.
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That is one reason why I still firmly believe that distributors of content and producers of content are an unholy marriage.
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It is a sea of free softwares with services being the profit. There is already a model in place for companies to contribute smaller amounts of cash (and pooling it) to have custom features developed for linux. Do you see IBM passing that up? How many people make a living consulting on linux, supporting it, writing applications for it? Do you see IBM and others passing those service incomes up? I do not pass them up.
The system works. It will work better as it matures. There will be efforts to *steal* linux for private use by unethical companies. There will be supporters to fight that. Linux (or whatever the OS is at the time) will always be being developed, improved because people can (same reason so many people jump out of airplanes, climb mountains, start businesses, ...). The only danger I see on the horizon today is software patents being allowed to kill the free interchange of ideas in software design.
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A good measure of a bad patent is when it is so broadly defined that a different approach can not be engineered. It is the time spent engineering the approach that a patent should protect.
Some of the most profitable companies in the world are pharmas. They control products that people literally can not live without. They have patents that allow this. They also tend to spend billions in research and development of their products. Those products are narrowly defined as a chemical A that targets receptor site B and causes effect C as well as the chemical itself being patented, not a process by which a vaguely referred to chemical causes another vaguely referred to chemical to start a reaction that winds up with a lower level of a vaguely referred to bad chemical in the body.
Unfortunately, most software patents seem to be defined that way. Not engineered and vague. The patent writers are not coming up with good engineering in most cases (which would be ok to patent), but are patenting things that are not feats of engineering or research. A similar problem exists in biotech with companies wanting to patent genes they discover and all of the obvious one offs.
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The reality is once you have a few bits of information on people, you can continue to delve up more bits of information. The amount of information I can dredge up on prospective employees is frightening and legal (so is the prospect of hiring some of the ones who lie on their resume/application). The informaiton held on individuals is incredibly invasive and almost completely unregulated. It is a good thing that most identity theft is commited by two bit thieves who are not smart enough to do it right.
It is just like virus writers. The good ones write viri you never notice. The talented thieves steal identities in such a way that it might be a decade before you know it has happened.
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I also believe that we will have a cure for the four biggest ailments facing people in *modern* countries. Keeping the brain *young* is another trick although, as causing new cell growth in the brain may (not sure) cause some serious cognitive issues. We may be able to have very young bodies with very old brains. I am not sure what the maximum life span of the neurons in the brain might be.
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Do you know what information different group shave stored on you? Do you want to know? Odds are it is not correct.
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The service they provide is tested and packaged code and tech support. In a nutshell, they are paid to help companies minimize risk. They are doing some development, but to my knowledge it is released based on the license of the code it was derived from. I think we will see more commerical products being sold for use on *nix, buit the commerical Linux distros that I am aware of make their monies on linux services, packages and QA of said software.
I actually like this model of OS and Commercial software. There are aspects of software development that most people will not perform, and most of them not for free. With a business model that provides a paid incentive to do these other functions, the software will not only get better, but will become much more widely accepted and used.
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It is the spirit of the license that is the issue. In many cases, what is not conatined in a license is more important than what is contained in a license. The *viral* part of the GPL license is the part that allows a developer to make money more readly on their creation. Many commercial concerns will pay for a license that allows them to use the code without that part. A BSD license has no requirements to make a commercial concern want to buy license to use your software. There is nothing to compel a company to pay him to use code that has already been given away for free with no restrictions on its usage. I use GPL for the same reason. I will not use BSD. My experience is the same as his. When you give it away as BSD lic, you almost never get paid for commercial use. When you release it under GPL, commerical concerns tend to pay you for a non-GPL license to use the product.
The BSD license is intended to allow this to happen. That makes it very bad for people who want to make some money on the code they have written. You can still make money, but you eliminate some big options with BSD. You eliminate a smaller number of options with GPL. I think the trade off with GPL makes more sense than BSD.
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The only problem with common sense is it is normally wrong.
The best way to understand common sense is to to realize what it is as opposed to what it is defined as.
Common sense is defined as Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge; native good judgment. Think of the contradiction in that definition alone. Sound judgement based on a lack of knowledge. The term worked hundreds of years ago because there was very little if any specialized knowledge. Most *knowledge* were really beliefs (still have a lot of that today). Now, we do have many specialists. As we go forward, specialization will become more and more the only way to qualify for work or to understand what is understood about something as the amoun of knowledge we aquire grows. It will be the only way people will be acepted for what they know. Common sense is on the way out as people realize that common sense really is the same as common ignorance.
How many of you would hire someone to render advice on orthodontics that fits this definition (common sense) with regards to teeth? True, our hero in the story is not a dentist. He is a thinker he has a hunger to understand and aquire information about many things seemingly unrelated to what he does (write books on computer technology). How is that different from the billions of *normal* people who can spew all kinds of totally useless stats about sports and entertainment figure from around the world? It is a mind set. That is why you need to hire people for how they think as much as if not more so than what they currently know. So, this gentleman focuses on knowing things, on thinking about how things are done. As opposed to other people who focus on sports scores and, pop entertainment and what else?
A common person has very little knowledge about much of anything (hence the term commoner is not a good thing Unrefined or coarse in manner; vulgar: behavior that branded him as common ). Some things in the realm of common sense are quite obvious (gravity), but still, it took until Sir Isaac Newton to *discover* gravity. Common sense was, the world had edges (four corners), the Earth was the center of the universe, leeching will cure disease, disease is spread via foul odor (vapor), and many more. Common sense is merely what people in general tend to agree upon. Later they will shown to be idiots. The trully smart people just tend to show them as idiots before they are ready to be shown as idiots.
If brushing our teeth correclty is something not to be thought about, and something that we do right the way we do it, then why do we need dentists and regular checkups? Because the way we brush our teeth is nowhere near *good enough*.
Most of us are idiots about most things and we cling to our idiot thoughts and beliefs as a comfortable chair on a sinking cruise liner. It is far more comforting to believe the ship you are on is not sinking then to be looking frantically for a patch for the large hole we call common sense. Of course, once the water is at your feet, it is too late (stock market crashes, WWI and WWII, VietNam, Oil, Environment, SETI, Education, Debt, Health, Profiteering, Corporations, ...)
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You appear to be suffering from expertitis snobosia.
So, as a ${professional} you are saying that I have an excessive preoccupation with people actually knowing what is happening? And that is snobbish? Hmm... Not sure if I am to be insulted or complimented. In reality, your little jab refers to a few things that provided me with some good reading. Thank you for that. What I found when googling were things like these (though I am obviously not an expert with the term you "layed down"), here, and . Unless I mistake your intent, you meant this "Another major barrier to creativity is "expertitis": the assumption of knowledge. If we think we know everything about a subject or a problem, we close ourselves off to new input and to new ideas". This has nothing to do with insisting on a minimum amount of knowledge before I am going to waste my time listening to you. If you can demonstrate that you grasp enough knowledge, then I will listen. On the other hand, most people who give opinions on subjects they are not well aquainted with tend to sound like ignorant trash. Many times they are called gossips (or worse).
Your implying that a person can only know all or know nothing on a particular subject.
I have no idea how you imagined that is what I meant when I typed "However, to have an opinion that means something (valid), one has to have a solid knowledge of the subject at hand." You might think that is an all or nothing approach, however it is not! Even with the example given, total knowledge is not needed to realize changing the thermostat fixes the problem.
"I'm an expert therefore I'm always right and your not therefore your always wrong."
There are plenty of so called experts selling all kinds of medical cures that are worthless and many times harmful if not fatal. You can always study, learn and become knowledgable in the subject matter and become an expert. Until then you are a snake oil salesman. Nothing more than an ignorant pontificant. There are plenty of those in this world. Many of them get elected because the people that vote for them think with next to no knowledge on subjects they too are exerts and do not bother learning anything more than their television will tell them to believe.
Experts can, should and do disagree with each other. Having the same set of knowledge does not mean they will agree on what it means. It merely means that each is equally qualified to submit a position, validate their reasoning for their position and argue comprehensibly for their backing that position. In fact, the more the experts disagree, the more work gets done fleshing out what is known about the subject material and what is correct or erroneous.
A solid knowledge in something is not perfect knowledge, nor all reaching, however, it does mean that a normal conversation between two experts in a field will not leave you searching for definitions and theories to understand the conversation they are having. I personally know noone who knows everything about any subject matter. I personally know many experts at different subject matters, and I can not keep up with them in their fields of expertise. I have no ability to hold a valid opinion in those areas of expertise as I do not know enough about the area to produce any meaningful opinion.
Maybe, if more people actually looked for real experts on things before taking what other people said (opinion) as sensible, we might have fewer wacked out issues in this country (US). But, as it is, knowledge seems to be accepted as a soundbite. String enough of those together, and people seem to start thinking they are experts. I know a bunch of real experts. If I know anything about their lines of expertise, it is because
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However, to have an opinion that means something (valid), one has to have a solid knowledge of the subject at hand. If you do not have solid knowledge in an area, then you can not (beyond luck) form an opinion that has much to do with the whole issue. This is like being in a house that is warm while it is cold outside. You are standing in a room by the thermostat. You do not know what a thermostat is, but you know opening the windows in the room will cool you off. You open the windows, and the thermostat thinks the whole house is cold and overheats everything else because of you. My oldest child did this when he was five - it works that way.
If you are not so young as to not have had the experience of graduate school, or if you are not too old to remember it, then think of how hard it was for most people to get 'A's in class. Many of them had to study a lot, because they did not know enough about the subject at hand to simply fake it, which is what an uninformed opinion is, fake. I would even go so far to say that those who claim to have opinions on things without knowledge are merely lying to themselves and the world in general to make themselves feel better.
Very simply, who would you ask tax advice from? Your taxi driver or a local tax expert (professional)? Who would you get legal advice from in defending yourself in a law suit? An accountant or a lawyer? This is the difference between opinion with knowledge and opinion without (sufficient) knowledge. There is always the problem of knowing whether or not a person is truly an expert, an expert with a paid opinion, or a loudmouth who is not an expert.
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I apologize is this comes across as harsh, but responding at 1:30 in the morning is leaving my brain a little fuzzy and I am having a hard time thinking... So, I am the one who needs help here, not you... ;-)
Can you name a single task that MS Word can't do, but some business has paid a consultant to develop as a custom feature for a F/OSS word processor?
Your question misses the point I was making. Buying COTS is not bad. Buying COTS without consideration for how it fits into the current environment is bad. A word processor, no matter who makes it is a widget in the workflow. As you will note, I did say that the real issue is open standards, not open source.
As far as a company that has paid an OOS developer to include some new feature in an OOS word processor, I can not personally site one. I have personally been involved in trying to expand MS Word's functionality to do things it could not do, or to try to fit it into a workflow. VBA is only able to do so much. Other tools have can have distribution limitations (I have never run into a mainframe that uses MS Word.)
Despite all this potential for customisation and consultancy work that the F/OSS community likes to advertise, the dominant and best word processor is still Microsoft Word,
Every customer I have moved to OO has not moved back. All of them prefer OO to MS Office (MS Word dominant - agree, best - not agree). And, it is not the price they like, it is the product. They paid me to set it up and install it, so they did not get it for free. True, cheaper, but not free. I have only one client who has had any crashes in OO. All of them have lost documents in MS Office. Same for Firefox from IE and Thunderbird from Outlook, though OO seems to be a better product. The major difference between me making money installing and setting up OO and a store selling a copy of MS Word, is the amount of money they (the store) can make on MS Word. If you were a retail store, would you sell the product that makes you a few dollars, or the one that makes you almsot a hundred dollars (or twenty for discounters)? MS Office is dominant because it is pushed through more channels. It has more exposure. It is included with every MS OS on every OEM that I am aware of (though you may have to pay for it to use it still). Many people are under the illusions that only MS Office works with MS Office and therefore do not try anything else. I can not remember the last time I needed MS Office.
I confess to not understanding your arguments about customisation of COTS either.
Most people (most businesses) buy COTS with the expectation (based on the sales and marketing materials) that the COTS package will do everything they need to do. They base their projections, cost analyses and future business on these false assumptions. Compounding that problem is/are the people who sell the stuff who have a bad habit of saying I don't see why you could not do that (plausible deniability, they never said it could). Accounting has big issues there. Especially tieing it into workflow. Customizing COTS package is typically much harder to do unless you have much experience with the package's quirks, errors and traps. At least if the package uses open source, you can figure out what the documentation really should be saying. If it at least uses open standards, then there is also a chance that work can be done outside the COTS app.
COTS is a great tool sometimes. Sometimes it is a business killer. Businesses have gone under by not using the correct software solution. COTS fails just as often at the task as roll your own. Thie problem with COTS is it takes you down a path you have little control over without very large resources. I have had several clients who have had to change the way they do business to match what a COTS product could do because they became so locke dinto the COTS. It killed several of them until I helped them get off the solutions. Things like word processor
The business model works particularly well for consultants like myself who are needed to go in and customize COTS solutions when the COTS does not do what the user thought it would. It does not work as well for the end user, but as they do not know enough to roll their own, or find alternative solutions, they buy what has been sold to them. They do not know if the marketing is correct. They do not know how to determine whether or not the software will take them into the future. They only know what they have been told in advertisements and reviews (another form of advertising in most cases).
What's more disturbing is the recent trend for open source fanboys to prioritise access to source code and/or immediate interoperability concerns ahead of getting software that actually does the job well
I find this amusing. "Actually does the job well" (IMO) means does it work with what you have (interoperability) and can you extend it for future needs (open standards or in some cases, open source). Buying a COTS application that can not be adapted to your business model is kind of like buying a car that can not travel the roads you need to drive on, only much more expensive. When a COTS applications is put into place, you are accepting the limitations of the software. When you start running into the dead ends, the only solutions are to hire developers to customize the COTS, pay the COTS company to customize, change your business model to match the software or do nothing and do without. Choose one that makes actual fiscal sense.
I have worked with everything from one of the top five document producing companies in the world to little corner stores. My experience is that open standards are the real issue. Open source is nice for finding bugs that mess up your system, but open standards allow you to add business functionality that otherwise would be cost prohibitive in the COTS world.
In one of the shops, we used to kick out so much mail that we had our own zip code. We were in the top five mailers in the world. We had several document creation systems. All of them were open standard and all of them had our hacks attached to do things the original authors never imagined, nor were they (original developers) willing to do once we imagined doing them. By being able to use open standards documents, we were on one project alone, able to save over $35 million per year in manpower, customer satisfaction, fee prevention and fine prevention by writing our own code. Using COTS models (except one small company) at that time and today would not have been possible. Certain companies may be willing for a fee to disclose some of their standards (though most do not disclose enough, let alone provide correct documentation), but normally the COTS providers do not provide anything terribly useful for end user customization. MS at least tries with their VBA, OLE, DLLs, et al but falls far short of the stuff I have used that is truly open standard (not nescesarily open source).
All I can say is that if more COTS companies start implementing open standards (QIF, OFX, etc) instead of copyrighted, encumered standards then the market will improve dramatically for COTS and end users.
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I have some other people's code from this past summer that I am going through to find a few bugs. It is hard to read, not very well commented and spaghetti like. It is written in C.
This is more about blaming the language for the shortcomings of an individuals ability to communicate than it is anything to do with a language. It goes in the same category as any written language from English to French. If you are not able to clearly communicate your ideas, people will not understand what you are saying or what you are doing.
The programmer makes the code readable. The language does not make the programmer readable. If you have had a harder time reading things done in perl, then it is because those who have written in perl had not taken the time to learn how to program or how to program in perl. Same problems exist with Java, C, C++ et al. I agree, some of the worst code I have seen is in perl in the obfu contests (which come from C IIRC), but some of the best code I have also seen in perl.
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An anonymous hotline. Kind of like for drunk drivers, but in this case wayward or ignorant corporations. Then, they can be notified of the issue, there is a legal record of them being notified and they can not scape goat the good samaritan.
Hmmm.. Maybe we can get one of those set up for fraud and other things as well.
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I know several people in telemarketing. I know many many more who lef tit once they discovered just what kind of *work* they would be performing. Most of them left based on ethical issues (and many more never took a job like that). If your ethics are so low as to do the things that many telemarketers do for a living, then you get no sympathy from me.
If on the other hand you are one of those telemarketers who actually applies ethics to your work, then I feel sorry for you being tainted by the quasi-criminal intent/activity of the majority of your peers.
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Most people I know are so limited to the popular press that they think of neural activity as merely being neurons firing in mass avalanches of activity. They have not even considered the chemicals like serotonin or norepinephrine.
My thinking on this is that we will find the *human* factor in computational *thought* in the mixture of chemicals more so than in the neural firings even though they are strongly tied together. The reason I think this is that manipulating the levels of certain *brain* chemicals manipulates how much we feel or *experience*. There are also significat statistical links between the ability of the brain to uptake serotonin and the level of thrill-seeking people tend to *need* to get an experience out of life.
I could be completely mistaken, but this stuff is fun. It is as exciting to me as the days I first learned assembly code.
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Whether or not I think I remember it, OFX has sent me back to books I have had in boxes for almost a decade now. Normally when I pull old books out like that, they are picture albums for the family, not old programming and data manuals.
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