I'm not sure where you got the idea that an open-source project could be "self-managing." Any open-source project with more than one contributor takes a significant amount of management. You have two scenarios:
Most of your development remains in-house but you get occasional outside contributions, or
A community of volunteers takes over most of the development tasks.
Number 1 is much more likely, and would leave you with the same management responsibilities as before, plus the extra job of communicating and coordinating with external contributors. You need to make your own development open to the community (make your mailing lists and code repositories public, give frequent updates on your status), and you need to give instant and useful feedback to developers who contact you with questions or contributions.
Number 2 will happen only if you are lucky. It will leave you with an even bigger management burden because you have no control over the outside developers, and much less coordination unless you do a really good job of managing and communicating with the community. If you want to make sure that your organization's needs are still met, you need to encourage contributions in the right areas without discouraging people from joining your project. You have to deal with the possibility of the community forking the code and drawing effort away from your goals. You have to keep everyone working together even though you and they have never met face-to-face.
Why are they wasting time and money on this? Are customers lining up to tell them, "We want interactive TV"? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see any real desire being addressed. I feel like I'm suddenly back in 1993, when technologists could throw around buzzwords like "interactive" and convince businesses to push new technology on their customers for no good reason.
Why doesn't the TV industry spend more effort figuring out what people actually like, instead of trying to convince us we want something that we really don't?
Recent articles at iLaw and Advogato raise the issue that the GNU GPL may be revocable in some jurisdictions. In at least one US state, courts have ruled that copyright licenses without explicit duration can be revoked at any time (see Walthal v. Rusk). But in the GPL FAQ, the Free Software Foundation claims that the GPL is non-revocable because "the public already has the right to use the program under the GPL, and this right cannot be withdrawn."
Do you believe this claim is correct in all US jurisdictions, or do some state laws allow licenses like the GPL to be revoked by the copyright holder?
I took the original (European) FLOSS last year, and was impressed at the amount of thought that obviously went into crafting the survey. FLOSS-US seems less polished, and much more annoying to fill out even though it was quite a bit shorter than FLOSS.
There were several questions that many developers might not be able to answer accurately (total lines of code in a project, lines of code in personal contributions), and some that required extra research by the survey-taker (select all the licenses your development tools fall under). Some questions were annoyingly redundant ("I launched my current project," yes/no?... Did you launch your current project?). Others forced you to answer inaccurately, like the questions asking "how much time did you spend on this?" where "none" was not an option. Also, the use of HTML forms was annoying, like having a <select multiple> with size="1", making it nearly impossible to use my browser.
Also, the questions seemed so arbitrary and unsystematic that I'm not sure how useful the results will be, even if they were accurate.
ACPI is in the Linux 2.5 development kernels, and it will be available in 2.4 soon. Hotswapping is improving in 2.5 also.
As for things like DirectX and user interface, I'll let others argue about whether SDL/OpenGL is a good DirectX equivalent, or whether KDE 3 and GNOME 2 are better than the Windows XP interface. It really depends on exactly how you use your system. For my needs, Linux is far better, but I'm sure you can come up with areas where it's lacking.
This reminds me of a story that the neurologist Oliver Sacks told in one of his books (from memory, I may not have the details right):
Brain surgery is often performed with the patient conscious. A neurosurgeon once mentioned to Sacks that during a surgery he had found an area that when stimulated caused the patient to hear a certain rock song quite vividly. Sacks (who studies memory) was excited by this. He thought of all sorts of experiments that could be done to find out more about musical memory, like having the patient compare the "remembered" song to the actual recording.
Sacks asked the neurosurgeon if he had explored this any further, and the surgeon said, "No. I hate rock music." Sacks asked if the patient would be returning for any followup procedures.
"Yes, but I can't do any more experiments on that area. It was excised during the procedure."
Sacks, disappointed: "Oh, it was too close to the tumor?"
I bought my VW Golf two years ago, and i'm very pleased with it, except for that crappy in-dash radio they MADE me buy. I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio. Maybe we can organize a Factory Radio Refund Day?
Lucky for you, they actually sold you the radio. That means you own the radio, and you can sell it if you don't like it.
When you buy a computer with Windows, they are only selling you a contract. If you don't sign the contract, you don't own anything. You have no rights to the software, and can't sell it to anyone else. That's why the contract explicitly states that you only need to pay for the license if you agree to its terms!
Have you considered homeschooling/unschooling? School works for some people, but for others it doesn't. Or maybe a half day in school and half day of homeschooling would be best for your daughter. Or a different type of school. Just remember that school isn't the only option. So the kid finds school frustrating and boring. Do you change the kid, or do you change the school?
CTRL-SHIFT-L to open a web address. Make it CTRL-O.
Have you tried using the plain old ctrl-L command? I can no longer use browsers that lack this feature. (IE5 for Mac was the first place I saw it.)
That article doesn't say that Wal-Mart is selling 300,000 Linux PCs per month. It says that Via is selling 300,000 C3s per month to buyers including Wal-Mart.
Bill Wyman the journalist has nothing to do with the billwyman.com domain. It is not a fan site. It is an official site, registered in the UK, presumably to associates of Bill Wyman the musician (Bill Wyman the journalist is in the US). The domain was not mentioned in the Slashdot article or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article. Repeat after me: It's not about the domain. It's not about the domain. It's not about the domain...
The audacity-help mailing list is open -- you can post without being subscribed, and we always cc the original sender when replying to bug reports and help requests. Users sending mail to that address don't even need to know that the recipient is a mailing list instead of a single person.
Mac On Linux will let you run MacOS (including OS X) on any PowerPC system that runs Linux -- even if MacOS won't run natively on the hardware. Mac On Linux provides a MacOS-compatible virtual machine (but it doesn't emulate the processor, so it's nearly as fast as running native).
Kernel Traffic has a good summary of the 2.6 vs 3.0 discussion. In one post, Linus writes:
I see no real reason to call it 3.0.
The order-of-magnitude threading improvements might just come closest to being a "new thing", but yeah, I still consider it 2.6.x. We don't have new architectures or other really fundamental stuff. In many ways the jump from 2.2 -> 2.4 was bigger than the 2.4 -> 2.6 thing will be, I suspect.
But hey, it's just a number. I don't feel that strongly either way. I think version number inflation (can anybody say "distribution makers"?) is a bit silly, and the way the kernel numbering works there is no reason to bump the major number for regular releases.
We've never had that as any criteria for major numbers in the kernel. Binary compatibility has _never_ been broken as a release policy, only as a "that code is old, and we've given people 5 years to migrate to the new system calls, the old ones are TOAST".
The only policy for major numbers has always been "major capability changes". 1.0 was "networking is stable and generally usable" (by the standards of that time), while 2.0 was "SMP and true multi-architecture support". My planned point for 3.0 was NuMA support, but while we actually have some of that, the hardware just isn't relevant enough to matter.
I forgot to mention, the Mozilla "Site Navigation bar" (accessible from the View->Show/Hide menu) also adds functionality for documents with link tags like those mentioned above.
The Mozilla approach could actually work. If any designers ever decide to use it.
The Mozilla approach already works on many documents on the web that have "rel=next" link tags -- especially documents generated from structured markup (DocBook, other SGML). If you're using Mozilla 1.2 beta, you can try it on various W3C recommendations or the GTK programmer's reference, and thousands of other structured documents on the web.
If you just start typing "moz...", typeahead will only find text that's part of a link. If you type "/moz..." instead, it will find any text. (Apologies if you already knew this.)
Slashdot Mirror
- Most of your development remains in-house but you get occasional outside contributions, or
- A community of volunteers takes over most of the development tasks.
Number 1 is much more likely, and would leave you with the same management responsibilities as before, plus the extra job of communicating and coordinating with external contributors. You need to make your own development open to the community (make your mailing lists and code repositories public, give frequent updates on your status), and you need to give instant and useful feedback to developers who contact you with questions or contributions.Number 2 will happen only if you are lucky. It will leave you with an even bigger management burden because you have no control over the outside developers, and much less coordination unless you do a really good job of managing and communicating with the community. If you want to make sure that your organization's needs are still met, you need to encourage contributions in the right areas without discouraging people from joining your project. You have to deal with the possibility of the community forking the code and drawing effort away from your goals. You have to keep everyone working together even though you and they have never met face-to-face.
Why doesn't the TV industry spend more effort figuring out what people actually like, instead of trying to convince us we want something that we really don't?
Do you believe this claim is correct in all US jurisdictions, or do some state laws allow licenses like the GPL to be revoked by the copyright holder?
There were several questions that many developers might not be able to answer accurately (total lines of code in a project, lines of code in personal contributions), and some that required extra research by the survey-taker (select all the licenses your development tools fall under). Some questions were annoyingly redundant ("I launched my current project," yes/no? ... Did you launch your current project?). Others forced you to answer inaccurately, like the questions asking "how much time did you spend on this?" where "none" was not an option. Also, the use of HTML forms was annoying, like having a <select multiple> with size="1", making it nearly impossible to use my browser.
Also, the questions seemed so arbitrary and unsystematic that I'm not sure how useful the results will be, even if they were accurate.
As for things like DirectX and user interface, I'll let others argue about whether SDL/OpenGL is a good DirectX equivalent, or whether KDE 3 and GNOME 2 are better than the Windows XP interface. It really depends on exactly how you use your system. For my needs, Linux is far better, but I'm sure you can come up with areas where it's lacking.
Brain surgery is often performed with the patient conscious. A neurosurgeon once mentioned to Sacks that during a surgery he had found an area that when stimulated caused the patient to hear a certain rock song quite vividly. Sacks (who studies memory) was excited by this. He thought of all sorts of experiments that could be done to find out more about musical memory, like having the patient compare the "remembered" song to the actual recording.
Sacks asked the neurosurgeon if he had explored this any further, and the surgeon said, "No. I hate rock music." Sacks asked if the patient would be returning for any followup procedures.
"Yes, but I can't do any more experiments on that area. It was excised during the procedure."
Sacks, disappointed: "Oh, it was too close to the tumor?"
"No, I told you. I hate rock music."
rdesktop is a free terminal services client for Unix/X11 based platforms.
Lucky for you, they actually sold you the radio. That means you own the radio, and you can sell it if you don't like it.
When you buy a computer with Windows, they are only selling you a contract. If you don't sign the contract, you don't own anything. You have no rights to the software, and can't sell it to anyone else. That's why the contract explicitly states that you only need to pay for the license if you agree to its terms!
Have you considered homeschooling/unschooling? School works for some people, but for others it doesn't. Or maybe a half day in school and half day of homeschooling would be best for your daughter. Or a different type of school. Just remember that school isn't the only option. So the kid finds school frustrating and boring. Do you change the kid, or do you change the school?
CTRL-SHIFT-L to open a web address. Make it CTRL-O. Have you tried using the plain old ctrl-L command? I can no longer use browsers that lack this feature. (IE5 for Mac was the first place I saw it.)
Where the slashdot story says "soon", the CNN article says the product is "likely to be available in seven years."
That didn't work so well the last time they tried it...
Wal-Mart also ships both low-end and mid-range Intel and AMD systems, with Linux or no operating system installed
That article doesn't say that Wal-Mart is selling 300,000 Linux PCs per month. It says that Via is selling 300,000 C3s per month to buyers including Wal-Mart.
Yes, the CitiBank site works with Mozilla. Washington Mutual uses it for online credit-card management.
Bill Wyman the journalist has nothing to do with the billwyman.com domain. It is not a fan site. It is an official site, registered in the UK, presumably to associates of Bill Wyman the musician (Bill Wyman the journalist is in the US). The domain was not mentioned in the Slashdot article or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article. Repeat after me: It's not about the domain. It's not about the domain. It's not about the domain...
The audacity-help mailing list is open -- you can post without being subscribed, and we always cc the original sender when replying to bug reports and help requests. Users sending mail to that address don't even need to know that the recipient is a mailing list instead of a single person.
Mac On Linux will let you run MacOS (including OS X) on any PowerPC system that runs Linux -- even if MacOS won't run natively on the hardware. Mac On Linux provides a MacOS-compatible virtual machine (but it doesn't emulate the processor, so it's nearly as fast as running native).
Nope. In this lkml thread, Linus says:
So what? From my experience running 'xlock -mode galaxy', this sort of thing happens all the time.
I forgot to mention, the Mozilla "Site Navigation bar" (accessible from the View->Show/Hide menu) also adds functionality for documents with link tags like those mentioned above.
The Mozilla approach already works on many documents on the web that have "rel=next" link tags -- especially documents generated from structured markup (DocBook, other SGML). If you're using Mozilla 1.2 beta, you can try it on various W3C recommendations or the GTK programmer's reference, and thousands of other structured documents on the web.
If you just start typing "moz...", typeahead will only find text that's part of a link. If you type "/moz..." instead, it will find any text. (Apologies if you already knew this.)