I like being able to migrate development over various platforms because you never know when Win32 will suddenly cease to be viable or Linux will pale next to Solaris for some high-performance server side code [hey, it could happen]...
More importantly, you aren't stranded when the company that owns it gets bought out by a competitor who give you an uncomfortable migration path to their product. That would be the competing product you rejected last year because it didn't do what you needed. And speaking of that, like all other GPL'ed projects, if you need a feature, add it, or offer to support a development team that will.
For anyone who wants the actual links. There's a press release here that contains links to the download pages on both the Intel and HP sites. The Intel link takes a bit of searching to find otherwise. HP puts a link to this press release prominently on their main page.
How can we possibly compete if open source spreadsheets don't credit their programming team via an obelisk that you have to find via the carefully hidden flight simulator built into the thing? Oh, wait, we might actually just put their names prominently on the project web site, and in the README or NEWS file, or provide a documented way to find information about the project.
I guess I am the only person in the world who uses several different computers with several different keyboards. Oh, and my typing patterns is absolutely identical across all of them. Not! Has anyone else had the misfortune of trying to play Rogue/Hack/Angband/etc. on an ergo keyboard that was clearly split by someone who doesn't understand that programmers type differently?
First of all, how many different distributions are there really? How many of the existing smaller distributions are offshoots of Redhat or Debian with different sets of packages, or different goals (security, frequent releases, whatever). However, that doesn't change the perception that there are lots of distros out there in the minds of people who aren't familiar with the family tree, and shouldn't have to be.
I think that there will have to be a convergence so that distributions are compatible, at least in the components that they all provide. The market is going to demand it. Let's face it, if I want the latest version of egcs and glibc, I'll download them and compile them. I know where they live, I know what new features I'm looking for, and if they break something I need, I know how to back them out. That isn't going to fly with hundreds of packages on dozens of servers for a business.
Nonetheless, there is a place for multiple distributions. There is no reason why the packages they have in common can't be compatible between Debian, Redhat, Slackware, etc. Debian is free (as in speech), Redhat is pushing safe and easy. Slackware is easy to tweak. Corel adds their apps. Each commercial distro offers some commercial apps and support for what they've packaged. So you install Star Office and Applix on a Corel Linux box. Corel may not support the apps. Big deal.
Forget video rental, it's pay-per-view only w/ (H)DTV.
That's funny. Then why do I find plenty of examples in nearly every medium of people willing to give me content for free and sell advertising space to sponsors. I find this on the radio, TV, the Web, some smaller newspapers, checkout aisle swapsheets and low budget newsprint computer magazines. And people who buy the latest home entertainment technology are a really enticing market niche to be able to sell advertising time in front of. They have disposable income and are willing to part with it for new gadgets. They are likely to be younger and novaphiles, so they may become repeat customers.
There will be plenty of pay-per-view content, but to build the market there will be content available for free or at a flat subscription rate like cable. And that content will be lucrative to provide, so it will continue.
I was thinking about the parallels between this and the various TV, videotape, and more recently HDTV standards. And the world has changed. The hardware necessary is cheap enough now that it will happen in software. New codecs can and will be developed. New viewing software will be downloadable. That wasn't possible for TVs or VCRs and was only on the horizon when the HDTV debate began. We are likely to see incremental improvements rather than needing a legislated concensus to get manufacturers to shift to a single new standard. Sometimes life is good.
Even the article in question points out that they may be making a play to be the PDA of choice for Linux users. Okay, I can respect that. But that alone is not a large enough market to sustain them I suspect. They are up against Palm, and WinCE PDAs. Palms are good, and they can allegedly be synced with Linux. WinCE is drawing the I-absolutely-must-be-able-to-interface-with-my-fav orite-windows-apps-and-don't-know-how- unless-spoon-fed crowd, but seem to be getting beaten on price by Palm. VTech has a tough fight ahead.
I have not seen the movie, and since it doesn't appear to be suitable for my young children, I suspect I won't. Nonetheless, based on the reviews I've seen so far, I love it for one reason. Some day, it may inspire a review like the one here of the Star Wars Christmas Special. Search for "I have seen this" about a third of the way down. I can still smell the coffee I snorted up months ago when I first read it.
Yes, we will have legally binding digital signatures, produced by software with EULAs (made enforceable by UCITA) that disclaim all liability for their security holes and prohibit their competitors and third parties from the very sort of peer review that is considered essential in cryptography.
I hate to sound like I'm picking nits, but what Perl needs is a specification (you did use that word) rather than a standard. There is really only one Perl implementation at the moment, and it is portable. But your point about bugs vs. features is exactly the issue that should be addressed.
In other responses to this article, it has been pointed out that what allows for mischief is acceptance in the mind of the public. It works to the corporations' benefit to blunt the distinctions available for public thought, so that just such trickery can evade notice.
True enough, although I have to say that corporate success is not, in itself, a bad thing. It is a measure of how successfully a corporation is selling its customers something they want or need. The question you are raising here is whether those wants and needs are being blurred and redirected. In too many cases, they are.
There is a need to market freedom and privacy. Let's remind people of the value of those concepts. And let's make sure that they know why free software promotes and protects them. (I know I used the term open source earlier. I use it in the sense of having the source code when I am specifically not talking about the other freedoms embodied in the concept of free software.)
Perhaps it is time to include some language into free software licenses that ennumerate some freedoms that are implicit in the other terms:
Your data belongs to you. Use of this software does not imply that the owner of the copyright on it has any rights over the data that you process with it.
The author of this software has no right to limit you to accessing your data to this software. The format and protocols used are documented and you may use other tools to access your data, or create new ones.
Your license to use this software, provided you do not violate its terms, is unlimited in both time and place. You may use it from any computer at any time for as long as you want to access your data. You may allow anyone else to do the same.
All of the actions I just described would violate the terms of at least some of the non-free licenses that I have seen. What benefits are actually worth the implication that the copyright holder on the software you use has any right whatsoever to limit your rights to your own data?
Good points. I'll take one thing you wrote and run with it:
We use the unrelenting capitalism of our society to define ourselves by.
This is just the current manifestation of the need to define ourselves. Over the millenia, people have used many things to identify themselves and others. Generally, it is driven by a need to find one's own kind, the people who share your values and with whom you feel safe. It takes many forms: clan, religion, language, nationality, profession, race, social class, collegiate affiliation,....
It is not always detrimental. While it does create categories of "us" and "them", where the goal is inclusive, to find others who share your experiences, it serves to build communities. It defines what the community is and attracts more people to it who will contribute to that definition. Slashdot is a case in point. (Incidentally, I own a Slashdot T-shirt from copyleft.net). It stands both as a news and discussion site and as a positive statement that geekdom is a viable subculture with something to offer those of us who participate in it.
One of the reasons that I use open source software is because it is a declaration of personal ownership and control of my computer and my data. There is nothing on my computer with a license that would permit anyone to revoke my use of the tools that access my data. The licenses state that I have all the rights that I associate with owning a copy of the software, and more. Furthermore, the open source community isn't building back doors into its software to aggressively hunt down copyright pirates that violate the privacy and security of every user.
I just wonder how far off we are from a law that will effectively outlaw open source software in its current state. When will we have a law that mandates back doors for law enforcement? That law will undoubtedly prohibit removal of the back door. From there, how many more steps are there to Stallman's dystopia in The Right to Read?
Our philosophies play a greater role in a greater number of our everyday decisions than most people realize. Simson Garfinkel argues at the end of his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy at the End of the 21st Century that technology is not ethically neutral. It is easier to ignore concerns of privacy, or to waive them aside in favor of particular narrow interests than it is to consistently favor privacy and security.
Remember, any code you write can and will be used against you.
Spam used to really annoy me, but over the years, I have gotten used to just deleting it every day. It takes me a few seconds. However, there are some facts to consider about spammers:
The cost of that few seconds multiplied by the number of employees in a large corporation or customers of a large ISP can justify a full time anti-spam position responsible for build filters. Spam does cost recipients money.
Many of the schemes that spammers are involved in are illegal in some of the jurisdictions they send to: cable descramblers, pump-and-dump stock scams, chain letter pyramid schemes, pirated software, etc.
Their headers are frequently forged, doing collateral damage in what sometimes amounts to an indirect DOS attack.
As for anonymity on the net, I'm actually for it. I also for a more secure network. And I have no problem with blocking sites and users that break the rules without needing to find out who they are. However, if this story is true, the spammers in question made no attempt to be anonymous. They revealed who they are through publically accessable information. Too bad.
I have read a couple of suggestions for persistent anonymous identities on the net. People can decide whether to do business with you based on the reputation of your anonymous identity. That would require a couple of important components:
Cryptographically secure authetication
Trusted sites for maintaining a record of those reputations
Certainly, there would be nothing to stop people from maintaining multiple identities or creating new ones on a whim. However, if your reputation was your ticket to transactions on the net (buying, selling, possibly even working), it would be worth a lot. Set your threshold at 2 and refuse to talk to the ACs and new users. The choice would be yours.
The bottom line on anonymity is that in a sense, true anonymity is impossible. To achieve that, it would have to be impossible to link anything I say or do to anything else about me. That would mean that every e-mail message, every web page, every Usenet post would be a disconnected entity. That isn't useful, and probably isn't possible.
What is useful is when I can go online and seek information about a medical condition I think I may have without leaving a trail that insurers can link to me as a customer. If they want to know something about my medical history that's fine. They should have to ask me. They can refuse to insure me if I refuse to divulge it. Limits on the scope of legitimate questions are a matter for the legal system.
Anonymous identities are most useful when they allow two-way communication. That requires persistence. And that means that they are subject to retaliation for their actions. The retaliation is simply limited to what you can do to an anonymous ID. You can wreck its reputation so that others won't do business with it. With a strong mechanism to accomplish that, imagine what would quickly happen to spammers. If we could identify them as spammers within minutes of the first offense, and nearly everyone used filters that would then refuse mail from them, how much of a business could they build?
Imagine if it became public knowledge that they had engaged in a pump-and-dump scam before the markets opened the morning after they sent their e-mail. Would you want to be a spammer holding 100,000 shares eVapor.com when NASDAQ halts trading on it because the pump-and-dump is reported before the opening bell? Watch the $80,000 you put into it turn into a complete loss.
In addition to not really escaping the DOJ, there's the tax and issues of getting 20,000 people to move.
Why would Micros~1 want to move all of their US based employees? That makes no sense at all. There is no reason why they can't comply with the court ruling, leave one or more of the resulting businesses here and start building a new operation in BC. If they do business in the US, the US courts can touch them and they aren't about to give up a market this big. But the US government has little power over their operations outside US borders. And they don't need to give up their operations in Redmond to pursue that strategy.
This license grants you, the user, the right to use eVapor. We eOpenLinuxVaporSoft.net.com disclaim any and all liability. We do not claim that eVapor is suitable for your specific use. You are specifically prohibited by this license from publishing negative reviews in any form through any media. This shall include, but not be limited to: books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, electronic mail, mailing lists, web pages, conference calls, radio and television broadcasts, fliers tacked to telephone polls or physical bulletin boards, or statements made at technical conferences, college courses and training.
Negative reviews shall include any statements pointing out limitations not covered by our own documentation, bugs we don't want the public to know about, lack of customer support for the product, removal of eVapor from a computer under your control, or any claims that any other product is superior. Claims of another product's superiority to eVapor shall include any claim that any other product has a feature that eVapor lacks, is best in class, has higher performance, is preferred by customers, enjoys a larger market share, or fails to kill cuddly animals implying that eVapor does in fact kill them.
For purposes of determining comparable products, eVapor is considered to be software. All other products and services that are software, contain software, or use software shall be considered competing products. eVapor shall not be unfavorably compared to any such competitor.
C++ was barely a blip on the radar when I graduated in '87. I certainly had never heard of Perl. And HTML didn't exist. I use them all now.
Don't ever fall into the trap of being the sole expert on a dying technology. Read about hot new things and be ready to jump on them when they come your way. Better still, be the local expert on things that are technology agnostic as well as having skills in current technologies. Those will carry you on to the next technology that supports what you do.
Maintain your network. This includes both inside and outside the company you work for. And don't assume that a network includes only other programmers.
Your company will train you for its own needs, when it trains you. Good companies train you for tomorrow, not today. You need to train yourself for the day after.
Now I have to clean out my basement. There's nowhere else in the house big enough for an S/390 and the disk farm that I'm going to want attached to it. And I'm definitely going to need something faster than a single cable modem. My heating problems are solved!
ome on, get real. Business is all about financial success. "Ethics" only counts when it happens to coincide with making money, as with Red Hat at the present time. If a CEO, or any employee, gets a crazy idea in his head that he or she is going to be all sweet and nice, to the detriment of the bottom line, he or she will not last long (except in cases of e.g. nepotism).
Yes, business is about making money. Your customers, employees and shareholders need to be able to trust you to keep your commitments. It isn't about being nice. The bottom line can be enhanced by a good reputation. Having a reputation for being a pushover isn't good.
If you want an example of building a good reputation, check the return policy for LL Bean. If it isn't right, they'll take it back, without any explanation. It costs them on the transactions when it happens, but it builds trust.
If you have any doubt about the amount of trust required to make our capitalist economy function, try getting cash in a foreign country two different ways. The first is using an ordinary ATM card. The second, is without any cards as tokens to identify yourself. Ask yourself how many relationships of trust there are in the simple transaction of drawing cash from a foreign ATM.
Yes, competition is brutal. I'll do everything I can to win customers away from a competitor if I can make a profit instead of him. And I will scrupulously adhere to any contracts I may have with that competitor as well. For a good reference on this, see The Economics of Contract from David Friedman's upcoming book Law's Order: An Economic Account.
You won't make it very far with exellent code without marketing.
Think of Richard Stallman for a moment. As much as he is a figure who is respected or hated by many who have encountered him, he is a good example of being good at both. Bear with me on this. I think we can all agree that RMS can code. He puts out both quantity and quality.
But what about the suit side of things? I certainly have never seen a picture of RMS in a suit. And his strident positions have alienated people. But he knew what he wanted and what he had to work with. He took a firm position and did not waver from it. He has something that is absolutely essential for a good suit, integrity. When you back him on an issue, you know where he stands, and you know he won't surprise you with an incomprehensible compromise.
He has been successful at winning programmers as converts to the free software community. But he has also had success in garnering corporate support. I'm not at all sure that RMS would like being called a "good suit". It is something that he had to do to further his primary goals. But I hope he will take it as a compliment when I say that suits aspiring to be good and win the respect of programmers should examine his record of integrity. Know what you stand for, and don't ever lose sight of it. Compromise on anything else, but never ethics.
Wonderful point - and I hope folks that are in the less than 1% crowd don't quit either! Even finding and fixing one line of code is a blessing.
I fully agree. And there is an important point that shouldn't be missed. The top author, FSF, is not only not a single person, but because of copyright assignments, it isn't even really a single organization. The FSF has been a valuable member of the free software community for a long time. In fact, arguably, free software might not exist as a viable force today without it. But that doesn't make the FSF a single contributor.
I know that there are some files out there with an FSF copyright on them that I wrote. I don't begrudge them the copyright assignment. They have taken the stewardship of the projects that I contributed those files to. For the sub one percent group, of which I am one, don't ever forget that our strength lies in both numbers and diversity. Jon Bentley quoted someone in his Programming Pearls chapter entitled Bumper Sticker Computer Science:
Each new user discovers a new class of bugs.
It would be easy enough to expand that to cover all of the relevant things that a new set of eyes bring to a free software project: new hardware configurations, a new language, new data.... But the original quote stands alone quite well.
To each and every contributor of code, bug reports, feature requests, reviews, documentation, translations, or anything else, I offer my thanks. The most obvious evidence that you are needed is that you made a contribution. You did what no one else did.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, you aren't stranded when the company that owns it gets bought out by a competitor who give you an uncomfortable migration path to their product. That would be the competing product you rejected last year because it didn't do what you needed. And speaking of that, like all other GPL'ed projects, if you need a feature, add it, or offer to support a development team that will.
For anyone who wants the actual links. There's a press release here that contains links to the download pages on both the Intel and HP sites. The Intel link takes a bit of searching to find otherwise. HP puts a link to this press release prominently on their main page.
How can we possibly compete if open source spreadsheets don't credit their programming team via an obelisk that you have to find via the carefully hidden flight simulator built into the thing? Oh, wait, we might actually just put their names prominently on the project web site, and in the README or NEWS file, or provide a documented way to find information about the project.
</sarcasm>
I guess I am the only person in the world who uses several different computers with several different keyboards. Oh, and my typing patterns is absolutely identical across all of them. Not! Has anyone else had the misfortune of trying to play Rogue/Hack/Angband/etc. on an ergo keyboard that was clearly split by someone who doesn't understand that programmers type differently?
First of all, how many different distributions are there really? How many of the existing smaller distributions are offshoots of Redhat or Debian with different sets of packages, or different goals (security, frequent releases, whatever). However, that doesn't change the perception that there are lots of distros out there in the minds of people who aren't familiar with the family tree, and shouldn't have to be.
I think that there will have to be a convergence so that distributions are compatible, at least in the components that they all provide. The market is going to demand it. Let's face it, if I want the latest version of egcs and glibc, I'll download them and compile them. I know where they live, I know what new features I'm looking for, and if they break something I need, I know how to back them out. That isn't going to fly with hundreds of packages on dozens of servers for a business.
Nonetheless, there is a place for multiple distributions. There is no reason why the packages they have in common can't be compatible between Debian, Redhat, Slackware, etc. Debian is free (as in speech), Redhat is pushing safe and easy. Slackware is easy to tweak. Corel adds their apps. Each commercial distro offers some commercial apps and support for what they've packaged. So you install Star Office and Applix on a Corel Linux box. Corel may not support the apps. Big deal.
That's funny. Then why do I find plenty of examples in nearly every medium of people willing to give me content for free and sell advertising space to sponsors. I find this on the radio, TV, the Web, some smaller newspapers, checkout aisle swapsheets and low budget newsprint computer magazines. And people who buy the latest home entertainment technology are a really enticing market niche to be able to sell advertising time in front of. They have disposable income and are willing to part with it for new gadgets. They are likely to be younger and novaphiles, so they may become repeat customers.
There will be plenty of pay-per-view content, but to build the market there will be content available for free or at a flat subscription rate like cable. And that content will be lucrative to provide, so it will continue.
I was thinking about the parallels between this and the various TV, videotape, and more recently HDTV standards. And the world has changed. The hardware necessary is cheap enough now that it will happen in software. New codecs can and will be developed. New viewing software will be downloadable. That wasn't possible for TVs or VCRs and was only on the horizon when the HDTV debate began. We are likely to see incremental improvements rather than needing a legislated concensus to get manufacturers to shift to a single new standard. Sometimes life is good.
Even the article in question points out that they may be making a play to be the PDA of choice for Linux users. Okay, I can respect that. But that alone is not a large enough market to sustain them I suspect. They are up against Palm, and WinCE PDAs. Palms are good, and they can allegedly be synced with Linux. WinCE is drawing the I-absolutely-must-be-able-to-interface-with-my-fav orite-windows-apps-and-don't-know-how-
unless-spoon-fed crowd, but seem to be getting beaten on price by Palm. VTech has a tough fight ahead.
I have not seen the movie, and since it doesn't appear to be suitable for my young children, I suspect I won't. Nonetheless, based on the reviews I've seen so far, I love it for one reason. Some day, it may inspire a review like the one here of the Star Wars Christmas Special. Search for "I have seen this" about a third of the way down. I can still smell the coffee I snorted up months ago when I first read it.
It gave Travolta something new to work on, sparing us the possibility of another sequel to "Look Who's Talking".
Yes, we will have legally binding digital signatures, produced by software with EULAs (made enforceable by UCITA) that disclaim all liability for their security holes and prohibit their competitors and third parties from the very sort of peer review that is considered essential in cryptography.
I hate to sound like I'm picking nits, but what Perl needs is a specification (you did use that word) rather than a standard. There is really only one Perl implementation at the moment, and it is portable. But your point about bugs vs. features is exactly the issue that should be addressed.
True enough, although I have to say that corporate success is not, in itself, a bad thing. It is a measure of how successfully a corporation is selling its customers something they want or need. The question you are raising here is whether those wants and needs are being blurred and redirected. In too many cases, they are.
There is a need to market freedom and privacy. Let's remind people of the value of those concepts. And let's make sure that they know why free software promotes and protects them. (I know I used the term open source earlier. I use it in the sense of having the source code when I am specifically not talking about the other freedoms embodied in the concept of free software.)
Perhaps it is time to include some language into free software licenses that ennumerate some freedoms that are implicit in the other terms:
All of the actions I just described would violate the terms of at least some of the non-free licenses that I have seen. What benefits are actually worth the implication that the copyright holder on the software you use has any right whatsoever to limit your rights to your own data?
This is just the current manifestation of the need to define ourselves. Over the millenia, people have used many things to identify themselves and others. Generally, it is driven by a need to find one's own kind, the people who share your values and with whom you feel safe. It takes many forms: clan, religion, language, nationality, profession, race, social class, collegiate affiliation,
It is not always detrimental. While it does create categories of "us" and "them", where the goal is inclusive, to find others who share your experiences, it serves to build communities. It defines what the community is and attracts more people to it who will contribute to that definition. Slashdot is a case in point. (Incidentally, I own a Slashdot T-shirt from copyleft.net). It stands both as a news and discussion site and as a positive statement that geekdom is a viable subculture with something to offer those of us who participate in it.
One of the reasons that I use open source software is because it is a declaration of personal ownership and control of my computer and my data. There is nothing on my computer with a license that would permit anyone to revoke my use of the tools that access my data. The licenses state that I have all the rights that I associate with owning a copy of the software, and more. Furthermore, the open source community isn't building back doors into its software to aggressively hunt down copyright pirates that violate the privacy and security of every user.
I just wonder how far off we are from a law that will effectively outlaw open source software in its current state. When will we have a law that mandates back doors for law enforcement? That law will undoubtedly prohibit removal of the back door. From there, how many more steps are there to Stallman's dystopia in The Right to Read?
Our philosophies play a greater role in a greater number of our everyday decisions than most people realize. Simson Garfinkel argues at the end of his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy at the End of the 21st Century that technology is not ethically neutral. It is easier to ignore concerns of privacy, or to waive them aside in favor of particular narrow interests than it is to consistently favor privacy and security.
Remember, any code you write can and will be used against you.
As for anonymity on the net, I'm actually for it. I also for a more secure network. And I have no problem with blocking sites and users that break the rules without needing to find out who they are. However, if this story is true, the spammers in question made no attempt to be anonymous. They revealed who they are through publically accessable information. Too bad.
I have read a couple of suggestions for persistent anonymous identities on the net. People can decide whether to do business with you based on the reputation of your anonymous identity. That would require a couple of important components:
Certainly, there would be nothing to stop people from maintaining multiple identities or creating new ones on a whim. However, if your reputation was your ticket to transactions on the net (buying, selling, possibly even working), it would be worth a lot. Set your threshold at 2 and refuse to talk to the ACs and new users. The choice would be yours.
The bottom line on anonymity is that in a sense, true anonymity is impossible. To achieve that, it would have to be impossible to link anything I say or do to anything else about me. That would mean that every e-mail message, every web page, every Usenet post would be a disconnected entity. That isn't useful, and probably isn't possible.
What is useful is when I can go online and seek information about a medical condition I think I may have without leaving a trail that insurers can link to me as a customer. If they want to know something about my medical history that's fine. They should have to ask me. They can refuse to insure me if I refuse to divulge it. Limits on the scope of legitimate questions are a matter for the legal system.
Anonymous identities are most useful when they allow two-way communication. That requires persistence. And that means that they are subject to retaliation for their actions. The retaliation is simply limited to what you can do to an anonymous ID. You can wreck its reputation so that others won't do business with it. With a strong mechanism to accomplish that, imagine what would quickly happen to spammers. If we could identify them as spammers within minutes of the first offense, and nearly everyone used filters that would then refuse mail from them, how much of a business could they build?
Imagine if it became public knowledge that they had engaged in a pump-and-dump scam before the markets opened the morning after they sent their e-mail. Would you want to be a spammer holding 100,000 shares eVapor.com when NASDAQ halts trading on it because the pump-and-dump is reported before the opening bell? Watch the $80,000 you put into it turn into a complete loss.
Why would Micros~1 want to move all of their US based employees? That makes no sense at all. There is no reason why they can't comply with the court ruling, leave one or more of the resulting businesses here and start building a new operation in BC. If they do business in the US, the US courts can touch them and they aren't about to give up a market this big. But the US government has little power over their operations outside US borders. And they don't need to give up their operations in Redmond to pursue that strategy.
This license grants you, the user, the right to use eVapor. We eOpenLinuxVaporSoft.net.com disclaim any and all liability. We do not claim that eVapor is suitable for your specific use. You are specifically prohibited by this license from publishing negative reviews in any form through any media. This shall include, but not be limited to: books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, electronic mail, mailing lists, web pages, conference calls, radio and television broadcasts, fliers tacked to telephone polls or physical bulletin boards, or statements made at technical conferences, college courses and training.
Negative reviews shall include any statements pointing out limitations not covered by our own documentation, bugs we don't want the public to know about, lack of customer support for the product, removal of eVapor from a computer under your control, or any claims that any other product is superior. Claims of another product's superiority to eVapor shall include any claim that any other product has a feature that eVapor lacks, is best in class, has higher performance, is preferred by customers, enjoys a larger market share, or fails to kill cuddly animals implying that eVapor does in fact kill them.
For purposes of determining comparable products, eVapor is considered to be software. All other products and services that are software, contain software, or use software shall be considered competing products. eVapor shall not be unfavorably compared to any such competitor.
C++ was barely a blip on the radar when I graduated in '87. I certainly had never heard of Perl. And HTML didn't exist. I use them all now.
Don't ever fall into the trap of being the sole expert on a dying technology. Read about hot new things and be ready to jump on them when they come your way. Better still, be the local expert on things that are technology agnostic as well as having skills in current technologies. Those will carry you on to the next technology that supports what you do.
Maintain your network. This includes both inside and outside the company you work for. And don't assume that a network includes only other programmers.
Your company will train you for its own needs, when it trains you. Good companies train you for tomorrow, not today. You need to train yourself for the day after.
Does anyone have a page listing alternative (preferably free) software to play the formats that Real Player supports?
On my budget, I'll have to buy a used one. Unfortunately, I won't be able to get the latest model.
Now I have to clean out my basement. There's nowhere else in the house big enough for an S/390 and the disk farm that I'm going to want attached to it. And I'm definitely going to need something faster than a single cable modem. My heating problems are solved!
Yes, business is about making money. Your customers, employees and shareholders need to be able to trust you to keep your commitments. It isn't about being nice. The bottom line can be enhanced by a good reputation. Having a reputation for being a pushover isn't good.
If you want an example of building a good reputation, check the return policy for LL Bean. If it isn't right, they'll take it back, without any explanation. It costs them on the transactions when it happens, but it builds trust.
If you have any doubt about the amount of trust required to make our capitalist economy function, try getting cash in a foreign country two different ways. The first is using an ordinary ATM card. The second, is without any cards as tokens to identify yourself. Ask yourself how many relationships of trust there are in the simple transaction of drawing cash from a foreign ATM.
Yes, competition is brutal. I'll do everything I can to win customers away from a competitor if I can make a profit instead of him. And I will scrupulously adhere to any contracts I may have with that competitor as well. For a good reference on this, see The Economics of Contract from David Friedman's upcoming book Law's Order: An Economic Account.
Think of Richard Stallman for a moment. As much as he is a figure who is respected or hated by many who have encountered him, he is a good example of being good at both. Bear with me on this. I think we can all agree that RMS can code. He puts out both quantity and quality.
But what about the suit side of things? I certainly have never seen a picture of RMS in a suit. And his strident positions have alienated people. But he knew what he wanted and what he had to work with. He took a firm position and did not waver from it. He has something that is absolutely essential for a good suit, integrity. When you back him on an issue, you know where he stands, and you know he won't surprise you with an incomprehensible compromise.
He has been successful at winning programmers as converts to the free software community. But he has also had success in garnering corporate support. I'm not at all sure that RMS would like being called a "good suit". It is something that he had to do to further his primary goals. But I hope he will take it as a compliment when I say that suits aspiring to be good and win the respect of programmers should examine his record of integrity. Know what you stand for, and don't ever lose sight of it. Compromise on anything else, but never ethics.
I fully agree. And there is an important point that shouldn't be missed. The top author, FSF, is not only not a single person, but because of copyright assignments, it isn't even really a single organization. The FSF has been a valuable member of the free software community for a long time. In fact, arguably, free software might not exist as a viable force today without it. But that doesn't make the FSF a single contributor.
I know that there are some files out there with an FSF copyright on them that I wrote. I don't begrudge them the copyright assignment. They have taken the stewardship of the projects that I contributed those files to. For the sub one percent group, of which I am one, don't ever forget that our strength lies in both numbers and diversity. Jon Bentley quoted someone in his Programming Pearls chapter entitled Bumper Sticker Computer Science:
It would be easy enough to expand that to cover all of the relevant things that a new set of eyes bring to a free software project: new hardware configurations, a new language, new data.... But the original quote stands alone quite well.
To each and every contributor of code, bug reports, feature requests, reviews, documentation, translations, or anything else, I offer my thanks. The most obvious evidence that you are needed is that you made a contribution. You did what no one else did.