Oh, for trolling sake. Then write your own desktop environment. I hate XFCE and KDE4, but love gnome-shell, for instance. If you are not happy with the Desktop Summit contents, don't go there, or post here. Why wasting bytes here when you have all the choice you need (including cranking up some code?). These people put a lot of effort into a release, and the summit is a great occasion to sit down and try to understand what was rushed, what worked well, etc.
Do you think that any high-school student receiving a free console will study anything for the next year?
Of course, you might point out that most of these students already own a console (often a Xbox, too). Then these might be sold on eBay to Taiwanese students, and at least it's worth 40-50 $.
The only downside is that there isn't a client for this. Instead, Linux and Mac users need to install a Google Talk video and voice plug-in to their Web browsers.
Actually, this is not entirely true. I've managed to get my Skype account deleted definitively exactly today, but I'm using Empathy 3.x since a couple of weeks to make daily voice and video calls. Video is actually a bit shakey, but voice is okay. This is for the on-line VoIP part. There have been pointers that Empathy might be estended to support landline calls too, it's just matter of time.
Troll. If you think that a license does not suit you, do not use it, use another one. Nobody is taking away your freedom as a developer to choose the license you prefer, or to write your own implementation. But as a developer myself, I don't see why you should benefit from my code, my hard work and my creativeness, close-source it, and invest maybe some marketing resources in it to drive me out of the market.
Fantasy? No. Personal experience. A loss of several thousands of euro from my part. So, keep your BSD license, I'll keep my GPL, thanks.
Well, most of those projects have satisfying alternatives, except one (at least for me): Banshee. Rhythmbox just plainly sucks in comparison.
Beagle: is it widespread anymore? I thought Tracker did win the race.
GNOME Do: use Kupfer or Synapse. As soon as they get momentum, more plugins will be available.
Pinta: do we *really* need paintbrush ported to GNOME? I guess Inkscape can be fun for kids anyway.
F-Spot: ugly and slow piece of software. I switched to Shotwell a lot of time ago.
Gbrainy: no real alternative in the same class, but it is not too big to perform a port.
MonoTorrent: Transmission works for me. Other alternatives abound.
Tomboy: use Gnote.
I am not claiming the alternatives are perfect (nor the originals). But they can quickly improve if needed.
In my opinion, it is time Vala developers write a decent enough manual for it (improve the main points that undermine its use), and the free world switches to it. It works well, it is fast, and you can link other C libraries to your Vala programs. FLOSS has reached some sort of maturity where it can produce something good without looking at Microsoft or the now-defunct Sun to do it for us.
I do miss your point. Software engineering is mostly about concentrating on a higher level (architecture, design, how pieces fit together, a bit of project management, requirements engineering, reliability models, etc.) than not programming. You want to outsource to code monkeys for that, nowadays. As a master student in software engineering, I barely wrote any code at all up to now (and I don't foresee any of that in the future). I think you are confusing a software engineer for a software developer. They are different jobs and they have a very different salary too.
...and yet another platform for App developers to target. It won't work.
From a marketing perspective it's suicide. Everyone wants iOS or Android nowadays, because it's sexy, it's all the rage, and because of the huge number of Apps you can get from their stores. And with Microsoft entering the arena, I very much doubt there is space for anyone else.
I predict a painful death like for Symbian, only quick instead of slow.
These sites support the rapid free sharing of information, thus reducing the ability of authors to profit from the books they write, of singers to profit from the songs they sing, of directors to profit from the films they create. In turn, this reduces their motivation to create such works, and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
Piracy helps these people stay alive, even if they don't realize it. It allows authors for a nice route to make themselves known, and many "pirates" then buy their work. I've bought more than one album I downloaded, and the same with movies, but I would have never done so if I could not have evaluated it beforehand. Also, I don't buy "shitty" content anymore: blockbuster movies and the likes stay on the shelves as far as I'm concerned. I buy things that I can pass down to my children. Perhaps the industry is scared they can't push heavily-marketed, utterly-hollow movies/books/music on us anymore?
Also, you are forgetting that 95% of the revenue from sells go to labels, publishers, and the likes; not to the authors. If they really want to cut on the piracy, they should jump over the middle man and start selling eBooks or digital content themselves at low prices (3-4 € for a book, for example). Many are doing that and profiting from it.
And yes, the main point is not "quite simple", man. You said it: These sites support the rapid free sharing of information.. Try going into a shop and asking for a copy of Metropolis with the '80s restoration, of an album by Gianluigi Trovesi, a live from Area, or "The Year of the Angry Rabbit". And explain to me why Jamendo, Free Software and many other free as in speech and as in beer community work and produce a huge amount of material without any hinder on creativity.
I don't want to live in a Fahranheit 451-like world, where DRM and power drunk people can decide what I can read and what not. *All* information should be free. I wish we could educate children from elementary school that the right way to support authors is through donations.
Btw, my advice is to read some books from Lawrence Lessig. It may prove interesting.
The whole point is to make it annoying, so that the easily-scared father of a family will feel ill at ease when confronted with a big warning he is doing something illegal (--> deterrent, it makes you feel a criminal), or give up because he has to find a crack through a website full of pr0n, or call in a kiddie next door. I'm not saying it works very well, just that the rationale is that for the 1% that fall for it.
In other words: having to input a key, legit or fake, makes you acquire *conscience* of what you are doing, either legal or illegal. Clicking on the "next" button when confronted with the EULA doesn't, since you to it mechanically and never read through it anyway.
Oh, c'mon! XHTML main rule: you opened a tag, you close that tag. It can be so "elitist"!
I remember back in 1997 wondering why not all tags were being closed.
I started leaving them open just for sloppiness, or because others did that too.
It'd probably be more easier for people to understand in a well-structured way like HTML than leaving them looking why that freakin' div doesn't display correctly and then realising they have closed a "li" element outside a "div" element or other crap like that.
PS. given that, I totally agree with you that people should be encouraged to create web pages, and all that "only people who have a master degree in CS should touch the web" nonsense should go away.
C'mon, first rule of PR: everything they'll give you to sell will suck.
Solution: lie about it.
This guy doesn't even try.
A good PR boy is one that can smile while he says "...and this service is soooo fantastic, 'cause it enables you to replenish your ice-cube stock while you're on holidays at the Arctic pole. Oh, and it also make a wonderful coffee with nothing more than water, electricity and some beans!"
Never read Dilbert?
AMD says will result in 'dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.'
Okay, that's marketing talk. I think that at virtually *ANY* presentation of a new CPU in the last twenty years someone had said that.
Me, I just have a 6-yrs-old P4 laptop which, compared to nowadays new models w/ Core Duo, isn't much different.
This because there are other bottlenecks: hd speed, RAM, etc.
So, why upgrade, for a desktop user? Even for middle business servers, we live with two 8-yrs-old Sun machines which are more than adequate for keeping up all the services we need internally. We never have CPU spikes.
Sometimes I just wonder if all this isn't just a grab at customer pockets.
Most arachnides have only two or three neurons, and watch what complex things they can do with them... the webs they build, how they capture the trapped insects, how they feel the weather change.
Anyway, I think that it's more a matter of interconnections (synapses) than of the neurons' number.
Can anyone really believe that a war was fought for oil if it costs more (just in money!) to FIGHT the war than to just buy the oil?
Yes, if the money that is spent for war expenses is mine and yours, while the net income that is earnt by oil sales goes in the hands of the few that really pushed for the war (mmmh... I wonder how Bush senior got rich in the first place, huh? "Bush-Overby Oil Development Co" does ring a bell?)
Also remember to put into account the fact that oil reached ~70$ per barrel here in Europe after the USA bravado in Iraq. Guess who's getting richer? I give you a hint. Not me.
It's not how much. It's who.
(Of course, it's not only for the oil; there are a lot of corporations like weapon producers that are feasting on the war.)
...I wonder why they hadn't renamed it to "nude pics", or even "fr33 p0rn 4U". Downloads would have reached a bizzillion in far less than week.
On a more serious note, I wonder if this is just the old renowned way to force something down users' throat: just one more occasion to make users agree on a if-we-blow-your-computer-you-can't-sue-us, will-send-your-private-infos-to-third-parties, your-old-programs-won't-work-after-this EULA.
Since a lot of spam I received through the ages tries to have you to download some (fake) patch to protect you to some non-existant virus, exploiting your trust on a well-known trademark, it could be that this time it is the vendor that is (again) trying to make you "buy" something you don't need.
Nothing new in this, I know. Just pointing it out.
Actually, you don't have to wait. Arguably, most of what builds up a game nowadays isn't code, but artworks, storyline, 3d models and such.
You can thus release the "engine" under the GPL, for example, and your commercial opponents will anyway have to produce their own artworks/material for their own game, even if they use your code. This can take a year or more for a well-done job; in the mean time the engine "as it is" would probably be obsolete for a _new_ game to hit the shelves, so it isn't a big lose on the long run for your company.
Moreover, using something like the GPL, if another company improves upon your code you'll immediately have access to it when it's released.
On the other hand, releasing the source means improved software support, free bugfixing, greatly extends the product life-cycle span, and ensures great portability for new platforms, potentially making it played for decades.
If I had Starcraft code under hand, for example, I would be even now porting it to GNU/Linux, and adding features! And it's a 1998 game, if I recall correctly.
So here's my recipe: free the code under the GPL, and instead retain copyright under a restrictive license for all the rest of the game, what really defines it. People will have to buy a copy of the game to get the "contents" anyway, while they can hack away on the code.
Yes, it's very basic, targeted mostly at newbies. However, bringing also these articles to the attention of the masses isn't inherently bad. There could be always new./ visitors who can benefit from a simple tutorial about a (for some of us) well known feature which is obscure to them, or people that can point out a simple article like this to a not-so-tech-savvy friend of theirs.
I would rather complain about the increasingly frequent Slashdot dupes and karma-pumping tabloid stories than these articles (although I admit a less "epic" title from the editor would have been preferred).
A huge iceberg didn't spare the Titanic... ...and a nuclear strike wouldn't spare Rambo [*].
Because something isn't a "security-catch-all" it doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently bad. See safe belts in your car. They wouldn't save you from a frontal crash with a truck. I just will keep fastening them, thanks very much.
As for IPC overhead, see L4 implementations. If carefully done, a microkernel doesn't do it so bad at all. See also http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/pubs/sosp97/ and search the net for other Liedtke's articles.
[*] Although, maybe Chuck Norris... okay, too frightening to consider.
(Applies to Italy, but maybe to other countries too).
I'm near my Bachelor's degree in CS, and I'm as glad to enter IT as to enter a pool full of hungry sharks. If I'm able to, I'll take some other job; journalism, for example, or become a teacher. Why?
Of course, money isn't the problem: you earn quite well, at least compared to the standard factory workman. Rather, it's because IT (at least, here in Italy) don't do anything related to my fields of interest. Most of them offer consulting via new technologies (but that is a lot far from being IT), some web application development, a little bit of Java here and there, and no real challenge. Mostly, they deploy pre-made systems (often Microsoft or IBM products), and just stand there watching other - foreign, mostly US - companies steer the wheel at their leasure.
I mean: a lot of engineers are glad to become DBAs, or to do remunerative jobs programming cell phones applications with J2ME. Most of us CS students, however, have an interest in software engineering, for example, or algorithmic complexity, in compilers, operating systems, networks and so on. Sadly, innovation in the IT field is almost as stone dead, here in Italy.
We need some spark of interest to enter IT, not just building boring systems to manage a warehouse. Bring in the innovation! So: IT *is* a dead-end. Doing paperwork and SQL for the rest of my life? Writing Java applets or Flash actionscripts? Are you kidding? It's not work, but slavery.
As many, many others born in the first half of the '80, I remember writing BASIC games like Snake on lonely Saturday evenings, when a child. Playing with LEGOs and reading a lot. All this is lost for the new generations... both due to increased complexity (when the model you grow up with is Final Fantasy two-thousand-fifty, who's going to program a Tris game in console?) and changes in our society (general disinterest, maybe because scared by a too complex world).
If someone in the world outside the US discovers something, then there is a 99% chance that the US media interview some remotely connected person in the US instead of the person who made the discovery
Like the Meucci-Bell affair. US officially admitted only some years ago that the Italian inventor originally came up with the idea, 113 years after the litigation began.
US has a great thing that's called "national pride", a thing many Europeans unfortunately lack. But sometimes it seems to us that this pride goes all the way up to jingoism.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, for trolling sake. Then write your own desktop environment. I hate XFCE and KDE4, but love gnome-shell, for instance. If you are not happy with the Desktop Summit contents, don't go there, or post here. Why wasting bytes here when you have all the choice you need (including cranking up some code?). These people put a lot of effort into a release, and the summit is a great occasion to sit down and try to understand what was rushed, what worked well, etc.
This is free software. Don't like it? Fork it.
Do you think that any high-school student receiving a free console will study anything for the next year?
Of course, you might point out that most of these students already own a console (often a Xbox, too). Then these might be sold on eBay to Taiwanese students, and at least it's worth 40-50 $.
Actually, this is not entirely true. I've managed to get my Skype account deleted definitively exactly today, but I'm using Empathy 3.x since a couple of weeks to make daily voice and video calls. Video is actually a bit shakey, but voice is okay. This is for the on-line VoIP part. There have been pointers that Empathy might be estended to support landline calls too, it's just matter of time.
Hah, they should try that test with us GNU/Linux users on Slashdot.
We probably qualify directly as saints.
You are insulting the legal system in a full-fledged attempt to mockery, but I can't read any rationale among your words why you are doing that.
If you just criticize them, and don't explain why you are doing it (I'm sorry, it is not obvious to me), then you are trolling.
Your reply to Livius below doesn't help to make things clearer.
It'd be time for some people to learn how to argument their positions, instead to spit venom on anything moving nearby.
Troll. If you think that a license does not suit you, do not use it, use another one. Nobody is taking away your freedom as a developer to choose the license you prefer, or to write your own implementation. But as a developer myself, I don't see why you should benefit from my code, my hard work and my creativeness, close-source it, and invest maybe some marketing resources in it to drive me out of the market.
Fantasy? No. Personal experience. A loss of several thousands of euro from my part. So, keep your BSD license, I'll keep my GPL, thanks.
Well, most of those projects have satisfying alternatives, except one (at least for me): Banshee. Rhythmbox just plainly sucks in comparison.
I am not claiming the alternatives are perfect (nor the originals). But they can quickly improve if needed.
In my opinion, it is time Vala developers write a decent enough manual for it (improve the main points that undermine its use), and the free world switches to it. It works well, it is fast, and you can link other C libraries to your Vala programs. FLOSS has reached some sort of maturity where it can produce something good without looking at Microsoft or the now-defunct Sun to do it for us.
...with rot13.
I do miss your point. Software engineering is mostly about concentrating on a higher level (architecture, design, how pieces fit together, a bit of project management, requirements engineering, reliability models, etc.) than not programming. You want to outsource to code monkeys for that, nowadays. As a master student in software engineering, I barely wrote any code at all up to now (and I don't foresee any of that in the future). I think you are confusing a software engineer for a software developer. They are different jobs and they have a very different salary too.
...and yet another platform for App developers to target. It won't work.
From a marketing perspective it's suicide. Everyone wants iOS or Android nowadays, because it's sexy, it's all the rage, and because of the huge number of Apps you can get from their stores. And with Microsoft entering the arena, I very much doubt there is space for anyone else.
I predict a painful death like for Symbian, only quick instead of slow.
Piracy helps these people stay alive, even if they don't realize it. It allows authors for a nice route to make themselves known, and many "pirates" then buy their work. I've bought more than one album I downloaded, and the same with movies, but I would have never done so if I could not have evaluated it beforehand. Also, I don't buy "shitty" content anymore: blockbuster movies and the likes stay on the shelves as far as I'm concerned. I buy things that I can pass down to my children. Perhaps the industry is scared they can't push heavily-marketed, utterly-hollow movies/books/music on us anymore?
Also, you are forgetting that 95% of the revenue from sells go to labels, publishers, and the likes; not to the authors. If they really want to cut on the piracy, they should jump over the middle man and start selling eBooks or digital content themselves at low prices (3-4 € for a book, for example). Many are doing that and profiting from it.
And yes, the main point is not "quite simple", man. You said it: These sites support the rapid free sharing of information.. Try going into a shop and asking for a copy of Metropolis with the '80s restoration, of an album by Gianluigi Trovesi, a live from Area, or "The Year of the Angry Rabbit". And explain to me why Jamendo, Free Software and many other free as in speech and as in beer community work and produce a huge amount of material without any hinder on creativity.
I don't want to live in a Fahranheit 451-like world, where DRM and power drunk people can decide what I can read and what not. *All* information should be free. I wish we could educate children from elementary school that the right way to support authors is through donations.
Btw, my advice is to read some books from Lawrence Lessig. It may prove interesting.
You want something that allows you to search upon semantic data, for example for authors, title or other content.
I use Tracker for that, and it works fine.
The whole point is to make it annoying, so that the easily-scared father of a family will feel ill at ease when confronted with a big warning he is doing something illegal (--> deterrent, it makes you feel a criminal), or give up because he has to find a crack through a website full of pr0n, or call in a kiddie next door. I'm not saying it works very well, just that the rationale is that for the 1% that fall for it.
In other words: having to input a key, legit or fake, makes you acquire *conscience* of what you are doing, either legal or illegal. Clicking on the "next" button when confronted with the EULA doesn't, since you to it mechanically and never read through it anyway.
Oh, c'mon! XHTML main rule: you opened a tag, you close that tag. It can be so "elitist"!
I remember back in 1997 wondering why not all tags were being closed.
I started leaving them open just for sloppiness, or because others did that too.
It'd probably be more easier for people to understand in a well-structured way like HTML than leaving them looking why that freakin' div doesn't display correctly and then realising they have closed a "li" element outside a "div" element or other crap like that.
PS. given that, I totally agree with you that people should be encouraged to create web pages, and all that "only people who have a master degree in CS should touch the web" nonsense should go away.
C'mon, first rule of PR: everything they'll give you to sell will suck. Solution: lie about it. This guy doesn't even try. A good PR boy is one that can smile while he says "...and this service is soooo fantastic, 'cause it enables you to replenish your ice-cube stock while you're on holidays at the Arctic pole. Oh, and it also make a wonderful coffee with nothing more than water, electricity and some beans!" Never read Dilbert?
Okay, that's marketing talk. I think that at virtually *ANY* presentation of a new CPU in the last twenty years someone had said that.
Me, I just have a 6-yrs-old P4 laptop which, compared to nowadays new models w/ Core Duo, isn't much different.
This because there are other bottlenecks: hd speed, RAM, etc.
So, why upgrade, for a desktop user? Even for middle business servers, we live with two 8-yrs-old Sun machines which are more than adequate for keeping up all the services we need internally. We never have CPU spikes.
Sometimes I just wonder if all this isn't just a grab at customer pockets.
Most arachnides have only two or three neurons, and watch what complex things they can do with them... the webs they build, how they capture the trapped insects, how they feel the weather change.
Anyway, I think that it's more a matter of interconnections (synapses) than of the neurons' number.
Can anyone really believe that a war was fought for oil if it costs more (just in money!) to FIGHT the war than to just buy the oil?
Yes, if the money that is spent for war expenses is mine and yours, while the net income that is earnt by oil sales goes in the hands of the few that really pushed for the war (mmmh... I wonder how Bush senior got rich in the first place, huh? "Bush-Overby Oil Development Co" does ring a bell?)
Also remember to put into account the fact that oil reached ~70$ per barrel here in Europe after the USA bravado in Iraq. Guess who's getting richer? I give you a hint. Not me.
It's not how much. It's who.
(Of course, it's not only for the oil; there are a lot of corporations like weapon producers that are feasting on the war.)
...I wonder why they hadn't renamed it to "nude pics", or even "fr33 p0rn 4U". Downloads would have reached a bizzillion in far less than week.
On a more serious note, I wonder if this is just the old renowned way to force something down users' throat: just one more occasion to make users agree on a if-we-blow-your-computer-you-can't-sue-us, will-send-your-private-infos-to-third-parties, your-old-programs-won't-work-after-this EULA.
Since a lot of spam I received through the ages tries to have you to download some (fake) patch to protect you to some non-existant virus, exploiting your trust on a well-known trademark, it could be that this time it is the vendor that is (again) trying to make you "buy" something you don't need.
Nothing new in this, I know. Just pointing it out.
Actually, you don't have to wait. Arguably, most of what builds up a game nowadays isn't code, but artworks, storyline, 3d models and such.
You can thus release the "engine" under the GPL, for example, and your commercial opponents will anyway have to produce their own artworks/material for their own game, even if they use your code. This can take a year or more for a well-done job; in the mean time the engine "as it is" would probably be obsolete for a _new_ game to hit the shelves, so it isn't a big lose on the long run for your company.
Moreover, using something like the GPL, if another company improves upon your code you'll immediately have access to it when it's released.
On the other hand, releasing the source means improved software support, free bugfixing, greatly extends the product life-cycle span, and ensures great portability for new platforms, potentially making it played for decades.
If I had Starcraft code under hand, for example, I would be even now porting it to GNU/Linux, and adding features! And it's a 1998 game, if I recall correctly.
So here's my recipe: free the code under the GPL, and instead retain copyright under a restrictive license for all the rest of the game, what really defines it. People will have to buy a copy of the game to get the "contents" anyway, while they can hack away on the code.
Just my 2 -cents.
Yes, it's very basic, targeted mostly at newbies. However, bringing also these articles to the attention of the masses isn't inherently bad. There could be always new ./ visitors who can benefit from a simple tutorial about a (for some of us) well known feature which is obscure to them, or people that can point out a simple article like this to a not-so-tech-savvy friend of theirs.
I would rather complain about the increasingly frequent Slashdot dupes and karma-pumping tabloid stories than these articles (although I admit a less "epic" title from the editor would have been preferred).
A huge iceberg didn't spare the Titanic...
...and a nuclear strike wouldn't spare Rambo [*].
Because something isn't a "security-catch-all" it doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently bad. See safe belts in your car. They wouldn't save you from a frontal crash with a truck. I just will keep fastening them, thanks very much.
As for IPC overhead, see L4 implementations. If carefully done, a microkernel doesn't do it so bad at all. See also http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/pubs/sosp97/ and search the net for other Liedtke's articles.[*] Although, maybe Chuck Norris... okay, too frightening to consider.
It's a bit more complicated than that... if you read the law the French government tried to pass, you'd know it.
(Applies to Italy, but maybe to other countries too).
I'm near my Bachelor's degree in CS, and I'm as glad to enter IT as to enter a pool full of hungry sharks. If I'm able to, I'll take some other job; journalism, for example, or become a teacher. Why?
Of course, money isn't the problem: you earn quite well, at least compared to the standard factory workman. Rather, it's because IT (at least, here in Italy) don't do anything related to my fields of interest. Most of them offer consulting via new technologies (but that is a lot far from being IT), some web application development, a little bit of Java here and there, and no real challenge. Mostly, they deploy pre-made systems (often Microsoft or IBM products), and just stand there watching other - foreign, mostly US - companies steer the wheel at their leasure.
I mean: a lot of engineers are glad to become DBAs, or to do remunerative jobs programming cell phones applications with J2ME. Most of us CS students, however, have an interest in software engineering, for example, or algorithmic complexity, in compilers, operating systems, networks and so on.
Sadly, innovation in the IT field is almost as stone dead, here in Italy.
We need some spark of interest to enter IT, not just building boring systems to manage a warehouse. Bring in the innovation!
So: IT *is* a dead-end. Doing paperwork and SQL for the rest of my life? Writing Java applets or Flash actionscripts? Are you kidding? It's not work, but slavery.
As many, many others born in the first half of the '80, I remember writing BASIC games like Snake on lonely Saturday evenings, when a child. Playing with LEGOs and reading a lot. All this is lost for the new generations... both due to increased complexity (when the model you grow up with is Final Fantasy two-thousand-fifty, who's going to program a Tris game in console?) and changes in our society (general disinterest, maybe because scared by a too complex world).
If someone in the world outside the US discovers something, then there is a 99% chance that the US media interview some remotely connected person in the US instead of the person who made the discovery
Like the Meucci-Bell affair. US officially admitted only some years ago that the Italian inventor originally came up with the idea, 113 years after the litigation began.
US has a great thing that's called "national pride", a thing many Europeans unfortunately lack. But sometimes it seems to us that this pride goes all the way up to jingoism.