It seems that adding a computer to any old way of doing business is worthy of patent or trade secret protection these days. Priceline's model doesn't strike me as radically different from the bidding that takes place on stock exchanges, other than the fact that they have expanded it to a variety of products and services.
If Microsoft had stolen unpublished code, customer lists, internal design documents or the like, I would wish Priceline well. But from where I sit, it looks to me like MS is simply trying to compete in the market niche that Priceline defined.
I guess you are as incoherent when you wake up as I am. After all, normally, any eyestrain associated with reading by the light of the moon should be the result of poor contrast in low light rather than the painful dazzling that transfixes many a woodland animal. Just a hint, if the "moon" has a twin, and makes a sound even vaguely similar to your neighbor's 4x4, go with your instinct and dive for cover.
I wonder if Mr. Gore's handlers are so inept that they would allow him to show up for an event that would guarantee hundreds of knowledgeable hecklers, many of whom would go on to post detailed transcripts on a geek website that the mainstream press actually reads.
I can't believe that no one else has posted a link to the Extreme Programming web site yet. A former coworker pointed it out to me. It is worth the time to read. Some of the ideas are excellent. The one I particularly liked which I have seen used by a group I work with is coupling an automated regression test suite with a requirement that all code changes must pass that suite before they can be committed.
Perhaps. But there is also the possibility that this is the push that will be needed to get other players to jump into the market. There will certainly be markt niches that Verisign won't be filling. Other players can work on those. This round goes to Verisign, but the game isn't over.
By the way, I don't have any personal axe to grind against Verisign. I like to see a competitive marketplace with some choices. When the only choice is whether to feed the big gorilla, or stroll over to the park and watch the ducks because there aren't any other primates left....
I've been installing X under Linux since back in the SLS days, and later under Slackware and then Redhat. It has gotten better. Unfortunately, it has not reached the point where Grandma can do it. If the intension is to sell to mainstream users, it has to be that easy.
Yes, RTFM will help. I read the original guidelines on doing the calculations back in the mid-90's. It was annoying, but I got it working.
These days, I pretty much select my monitor from a list and go. But I am using one of the monitors that someone else has already gone to the trouble of working out the configuration for. I think Linux has reached the point where there is a demand for somebody to do this packaging of the information. Somebody need to have a lab where they generate and test the configurations for various monitors.
I can't imagine being half as productive with Emacs if I didn't have both the Emacs Manual and the Emacs Lisp Manual available for immediate browsing. I admit that I use the man pages for things like textutils, fileutils, etc. Things I use from Emacs, I use info files for. Things I use from bash, I use man pages for.
Perhaps credit is due in this thread to Prof. Knuth for the fact that texinfo, without which the excellent print and online documentation for Emacs, et al would have required more tool development, was based on TeX. All I want to know is whether we can nominate him again next year.
I can't dispute the choice because I don't know the reasons. However, I would be inclined to vote for Knuth when Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming comes out. Admittedly, the book won't be a contribution to free software, per se, but it would be an appropriate time to recognize Prof. Knuth, if for no other reason than the fact that the first three volumes inspired his work on TeX and Metafont.
I've been wondering for a couple of years now where I am going to be looking for real Y2K entertainment online on 12/31 and 1/1. I think I'll be here. I'm hoping to find a couple of good stories and threads going on what went down, what didn't and who is in a panic. My Linux box will be up and running through the New Year if I can believe the assurances of my friend over at the local power company. And the real problem with people getting online for the New Year is likely to be people picking up the phone to see if it is working rather than any technological issues.
It seems that there may be several open source internationalization and localization projects springing up with some overlap. I won't suggest that they should necessarily merge. There a re a variety of goals and tasks here. However, anyone with interest in one of them should know about the others. Take a look at the Free Translation Project. It has been going for several years now. At the very least, I would love to see the web sites for each of the projects contain links to the others. Let's build on each other's work rather than duplicate it.
I'm not trying to force Esperanto on the whole world, but if there are other Esperantists reading this who would like to help out the Free Translation Project, the Esperanto Team can use you help. The mailing list for the team is down right now, so e-mail me at dsplat@rochester.rr.com for details. English or Esperanto queries are welcome.
Let's drop the idea that we are going to get everybody speaking a single language. Esperanto isn't even intended to be that. It is supposed to be a universal second language so that speakers of different native languages can communicate with each other.
More to the point, one of the most important reasons for internationalization is because regardless of whether users can understand menu items and error messages, they want to be able to use text in their native languages. If you have a database of clients, you'll want their names represented in a form that the clients and the post office will recognize.
As for believing you about Esperanto, I'm the Team Leader of the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project. I can't think of any better way that I can support it than to make it easier to use free software in Esperanto and for editing Esperanto text. One recurring theme in soc.culture.esperanto is the complaint about the lack of software support for the Esperanto alphabet.
I don't think that there is a standard distinction between the terms "geek" and "nerd", although I use them roughly the way you described. And I don't think we can draw conclusions about the real world social skills of people posting to Slashdot from what they write here. The differences between an online forum and either normal correspondence or a conversation will naturally lead to differences in styles of interaction between online fora and more traditional ones.
That aside, I do get an overall impression of people I interact with online. I have fine-tuned how I do that over the years with feedback from meeting them in person. I have found that I misjudge age frequently. And I tend to polarize people into categories of "similar to me" and "different from me". Because of that, I am suspicious of my own tendency to see other Slashdot posters as being like me
I have a theory about the reason that Open Source is succeeding and also attracting a sizable libertarian contingient. Your points about dislike of central control are certainly on the mark. However, it is very simple once stated. The net has made possible an interesting phenomenon. It has lowered the cost of sharing work in a collaborative way. The marginal cost to me of one more person downloading something I put on the net is negligible. At the same time, it has slightly raised the marginal benefit of having additional users by making it easier for them so contribute (bug reports or fixes, etc.). Suddenly, for all sort of projects that could not be cost effectively done this way, the impediments are gone.
So here is his summary of the similarities between Soviet Communism and Open Source, with my comments interspersed:
Although the Soviet Union has long disappeared, the proponents of the Californian ideology are still appropriating the theoretical legacy of Stalinist communism:
vanguard party digerati
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't take anyone who uses the term "digerati" seriously.
The Five-Year Plan The New Paradigm
What New Paradigm? Five-Year Plans were made from above and imposed from above. The whole idea of paradigm shifts is that good ideas stand on their own merits. They out-perform the competition.
boy-meets-tractor nerd-meets-Net
Geek laughs out loud!
Third International Third Wave
Third generation language? Come on, the coincidence of the word "third" is not enough to prove a connection.
Moscow Silicon Valley
There are always places where interesting things are happening. With Open Source, they include Finland, Cambridge MA, and a few thousand others. It is decentralized. That was hardly true of Soviet Communism. It takes advantage of and values local knowledge. It gives power to any individual who wants it to control his own computing and share the benefits if he decides to.
Pravda Wired
Except that there was no room for Pravda to be superceded by anything. Slashdot has surplanted Wired in many respects.
party line unique thought
Oh yeah. I can see how authoritarian dictatorship and individual freedom are really just the same thing.;-)
Soviet democracy electronic town halls
'Scuse me? I wasn't aware we were passing the power over to an online democratic authority any more than we do in the physical world.
Lysenkoism memetics
I can't refute this one. I'm not sure what he is getting at.
society-as-factory society-as-hive
Oh yeah. A factory produces many of the same thing over and over again. Society-as-hive doesn't fit open source. Certainly, we're collaborative. But it isn't the interchangibility of individuals that is stressed. Instead it is the sum of the many unique contributions we make.
New Soviet Man post-humans
Okay, idealists of all stripes have believed that their ideals would improve the lot of mankind.
Stakhanovite norm-busting overworked contract labour
Every change is a change. Every revolution is a rejection of the status quo. Wanting something different does not make someone the same as everyone else who has ever wanted something different.
purges downsizing
When has an Open Source project downsized anyone?
Russian nationalism Californian chauvinism
Oh yeah, everyone I know in the Open Source movement is in California or wants to be.
He has confused Open Source and corporate empires built around software businesses. After mixing the two and calling them one, he wants to equate disparate features of both with Soviet communism. This shows a lack of understanding of the subject.
I will not be marginalized by someone building a one-dimensional model of an aspect of human behavior that puts me at one extreme. I suggest that we give him honest answers, from a large number of people who share certain characteristics. I would guess that it is fair to say that the average Slashdot reader is more saavy about the net, has more experience with it, is more likely to be a programmer, etc. than the average net user. Perhaps he needs to hear about long hours spent collaborating with innumerable others on open source projects. Or perhaps he needs to hear how we have gotten excellent free software and improved it. Or even all of the people we keep in touch with from around the globe and how inexpensively we can do it.
The good doctor has provided adequate room for comments. Wouldn't it be nice if he had to write up a section in the next edition of his book describing how some online communities have made excellent use of the internet as a mechanism for collaborative work? Does anyone want to provide him with the URLs for some of Eric Raymond's articles?
Checking for the symbols is easy enough. nm will give you that. It seems that I have to make use of it every time we upgrade a third party tool here at work, because some folks are constantly renaming libraries and moving things around.
How to remove the ones you don't want might be a bit tougher. One possiblity would be to do it by hand, going through glibc looking at the contents of the files and removing what you don't need, for a trimmed down version.
While Marko has reason to believe that I may not be a completely typical programmer in terms of literacy, I will assert that some programmers can write. There are two very important skills to consider for a designer. The first is the ability to actually produce a good design. Nothing will eliminate the need for it. The second is the ability to communicate it.
Now let me suggest how you can achieve useful results. First, set the goals for the design. It serves two purposes. The first is to communicate the information that the programmers writing the code need. The second is to specify how the requirements are being met. That indicates two different sets of reviewers. Write to both audiences, not necessarily in every paragraph. The high level portions of a design document must indicate what the requirements are and which portions of the code meet each one. The lower level portions need to specify other things that programmers will need. The one thing that should always go into formal documentation is the interfaces, both between major components and with the outside world.
My final piece of advice, and I admit that I have been terse, is that no design document should be considered final until it has been reviewed again when the code is complete. It should reflect last minute additions and changes because the information in it should serve as a resource for maintenance and support.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that adding a computer to any old way of doing business is worthy of patent or trade secret protection these days. Priceline's model doesn't strike me as radically different from the bidding that takes place on stock exchanges, other than the fact that they have expanded it to a variety of products and services.
If Microsoft had stolen unpublished code, customer lists, internal design documents or the like, I would wish Priceline well. But from where I sit, it looks to me like MS is simply trying to compete in the market niche that Priceline defined.
I guess you are as incoherent when you wake up as I am. After all, normally, any eyestrain associated with reading by the light of the moon should be the result of poor contrast in low light rather than the painful dazzling that transfixes many a woodland animal. Just a hint, if the "moon" has a twin, and makes a sound even vaguely similar to your neighbor's 4x4, go with your instinct and dive for cover.
I wonder if Mr. Gore's handlers are so inept that they would allow him to show up for an event that would guarantee hundreds of knowledgeable hecklers, many of whom would go on to post detailed transcripts on a geek website that the mainstream press actually reads.
I can't believe that no one else has posted a link to the Extreme Programming web site yet. A former coworker pointed it out to me. It is worth the time to read. Some of the ideas are excellent. The one I particularly liked which I have seen used by a group I work with is coupling an automated regression test suite with a requirement that all code changes must pass that suite before they can be committed.
Perhaps. But there is also the possibility that this is the push that will be needed to get other players to jump into the market. There will certainly be markt niches that Verisign won't be filling. Other players can work on those. This round goes to Verisign, but the game isn't over.
....
By the way, I don't have any personal axe to grind against Verisign. I like to see a competitive marketplace with some choices. When the only choice is whether to feed the big gorilla, or stroll over to the park and watch the ducks because there aren't any other primates left
I've been installing X under Linux since back in the SLS days, and later under Slackware and then Redhat. It has gotten better. Unfortunately, it has not reached the point where Grandma can do it. If the intension is to sell to mainstream users, it has to be that easy.
Yes, RTFM will help. I read the original guidelines on doing the calculations back in the mid-90's. It was annoying, but I got it working.
These days, I pretty much select my monitor from a list and go. But I am using one of the monitors that someone else has already gone to the trouble of working out the configuration for. I think Linux has reached the point where there is a demand for somebody to do this packaging of the information. Somebody need to have a lab where they generate and test the configurations for various monitors.
I can't imagine being half as productive with Emacs if I didn't have both the Emacs Manual and the Emacs Lisp Manual available for immediate browsing. I admit that I use the man pages for things like textutils, fileutils, etc. Things I use from Emacs, I use info files for. Things I use from bash, I use man pages for.
Perhaps credit is due in this thread to Prof. Knuth for the fact that texinfo, without which the excellent print and online documentation for Emacs, et al would have required more tool development, was based on TeX. All I want to know is whether we can nominate him again next year.
I can't dispute the choice because I don't know the reasons. However, I would be inclined to vote for Knuth when Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming comes out. Admittedly, the book won't be a contribution to free software, per se, but it would be an appropriate time to recognize Prof. Knuth, if for no other reason than the fact that the first three volumes inspired his work on TeX and Metafont.
I've been wondering for a couple of years now where I am going to be looking for real Y2K entertainment online on 12/31 and 1/1. I think I'll be here. I'm hoping to find a couple of good stories and threads going on what went down, what didn't and who is in a panic. My Linux box will be up and running through the New Year if I can believe the assurances of my friend over at the local power company. And the real problem with people getting online for the New Year is likely to be people picking up the phone to see if it is working rather than any technological issues.
There is a group calling themselves The Duras Sisters. I don't think I would call what they do Klingon Opera though.
It seems that there may be several open source internationalization and localization projects springing up with some overlap. I won't suggest that they should necessarily merge. There a re a variety of goals and tasks here. However, anyone with interest in one of them should know about the others. Take a look at the Free Translation Project. It has been going for several years now. At the very least, I would love to see the web sites for each of the projects contain links to the others. Let's build on each other's work rather than duplicate it.
I'm not trying to force Esperanto on the whole
world, but if there are other Esperantists reading this who would like to help out the Free Translation Project, the Esperanto Team can use you help. The mailing list for the team is down right now, so e-mail me at dsplat@rochester.rr.com for details. English or Esperanto queries are welcome.
Let's drop the idea that we are going to get everybody speaking a single language. Esperanto isn't even intended to be that. It is supposed to be a universal second language so that speakers of different native languages can communicate with each other.
More to the point, one of the most important reasons for internationalization is because regardless of whether users can understand menu items and error messages, they want to be able to use text in their native languages. If you have a database of clients, you'll want their names represented in a form that the clients and the post office will recognize.
As for believing you about Esperanto, I'm the Team Leader of the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project. I can't think of any better way that I can support it than to make it easier to use free software in Esperanto and for editing Esperanto text. One recurring theme in soc.culture.esperanto is the complaint about the lack of software support for the Esperanto alphabet.
I don't think that there is a standard distinction between the terms "geek" and "nerd", although I use them roughly the way you described. And I don't think we can draw conclusions about the real world social skills of people posting to Slashdot from what they write here. The differences between an online forum and either normal correspondence or a conversation will naturally lead to differences in styles of interaction between online fora and more traditional ones.
That aside, I do get an overall impression of people I interact with online. I have fine-tuned how I do that over the years with feedback from meeting them in person. I have found that I misjudge age frequently. And I tend to polarize people into categories of "similar to me" and "different from me". Because of that, I am suspicious of my own tendency to see other Slashdot posters as being like me
I have a theory about the reason that Open Source is succeeding and also attracting a sizable libertarian contingient. Your points about dislike of central control are certainly on the mark. However, it is very simple once stated. The net has made possible an interesting phenomenon. It has lowered the cost of sharing work in a collaborative way. The marginal cost to me of one more person downloading something I put on the net is negligible. At the same time, it has slightly raised the marginal benefit of having additional users by making it easier for them so contribute (bug reports or fixes, etc.). Suddenly, for all sort of projects that could not be cost effectively done this way, the impediments are gone.
So here is his summary of the similarities between Soviet Communism and Open
;-)
Source, with my comments interspersed:
Although the Soviet Union has long disappeared, the proponents of the
Californian ideology are still appropriating the theoretical legacy of
Stalinist communism:
vanguard party digerati
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't take anyone who uses the term
"digerati" seriously.
The Five-Year Plan The New Paradigm
What New Paradigm? Five-Year Plans were made from above and imposed from
above. The whole idea of paradigm shifts is that good ideas stand on their
own merits. They out-perform the competition.
boy-meets-tractor nerd-meets-Net
Geek laughs out loud!
Third International Third Wave
Third generation language? Come on, the coincidence of the word "third" is
not enough to prove a connection.
Moscow Silicon Valley
There are always places where interesting things are happening. With Open
Source, they include Finland, Cambridge MA, and a few thousand others. It is
decentralized. That was hardly true of Soviet Communism. It takes advantage
of and values local knowledge. It gives power to any individual who wants it
to control his own computing and share the benefits if he decides to.
Pravda Wired
Except that there was no room for Pravda to be superceded by anything.
Slashdot has surplanted Wired in many respects.
party line unique thought
Oh yeah. I can see how authoritarian dictatorship and individual freedom are
really just the same thing.
Soviet democracy electronic town halls
'Scuse me? I wasn't aware we were passing the power over to an online
democratic authority any more than we do in the physical world.
Lysenkoism memetics
I can't refute this one. I'm not sure what he is getting at.
society-as-factory society-as-hive
Oh yeah. A factory produces many of the same thing over and over again.
Society-as-hive doesn't fit open source. Certainly, we're collaborative. But
it isn't the interchangibility of individuals that is stressed. Instead it is
the sum of the many unique contributions we make.
New Soviet Man post-humans
Okay, idealists of all stripes have believed that their ideals would improve
the lot of mankind.
Stakhanovite norm-busting overworked contract labour
Every change is a change. Every revolution is a rejection of the status quo.
Wanting something different does not make someone the same as everyone else
who has ever wanted something different.
purges downsizing
When has an Open Source project downsized anyone?
Russian nationalism Californian chauvinism
Oh yeah, everyone I know in the Open Source movement is in California or wants
to be.
He has confused Open Source and corporate empires built around software
businesses. After mixing the two and calling them one, he wants to equate
disparate features of both with Soviet communism. This shows a lack of
understanding of the subject.
I will not be marginalized by someone building a one-dimensional model of an aspect of human behavior that puts me at one extreme. I suggest that we give him honest answers, from a large number of people who share certain characteristics. I would guess that it is fair to say that the average Slashdot reader is more saavy about the net, has more experience with it, is more likely to be a programmer, etc. than the average net user. Perhaps he needs to hear about long hours spent collaborating with innumerable others on open source projects. Or perhaps he needs to hear how we have gotten excellent free software and improved it. Or even all of the people we keep in touch with from around the globe and how inexpensively we can do it.
The good doctor has provided adequate room for comments. Wouldn't it be nice if he had to write up a section in the next edition of his book describing how some online communities have made excellent use of the internet as a mechanism for collaborative work? Does anyone want to provide him with the URLs for some of Eric Raymond's articles?
Checking for the symbols is easy enough. nm will give you that. It seems that I have to make use of it every time we upgrade a third party tool here at work, because some folks are constantly renaming libraries and moving things around.
How to remove the ones you don't want might be a bit tougher. One possiblity would be to do it by hand, going through glibc looking at the contents of the files and removing what you don't need, for a trimmed down version.
Saluton Marko,
While Marko has reason to believe that I may not be a completely typical programmer in terms of literacy, I will assert that some programmers can write. There are two very important skills to consider for a designer. The first is the ability to actually produce a good design. Nothing will eliminate the need for it. The second is the ability to communicate it.
Now let me suggest how you can achieve useful results. First, set the goals for the design. It serves two purposes. The first is to communicate the information that the programmers writing the code need. The second is to specify how the requirements are being met. That indicates two different sets of reviewers. Write to both audiences, not necessarily in every paragraph. The high level portions of a design document must indicate what the requirements are and which portions of the code meet each one. The lower level portions need to specify other things that programmers will need. The one thing that should always go into formal documentation is the interfaces, both between major components and with the outside world.
My final piece of advice, and I admit that I have been terse, is that no design document should be considered final until it has been reviewed again when the code is complete. It should reflect last minute additions and changes because the information in it should serve as a resource for maintenance and support.
- Dale Gulledge