This is the crux of the problem, and the beef Groklaw has with this announcement (It's been nearly 12 hours now, surely groklaw as an entity would have apologized or amended this posting by now otherwise in light of community feedback) based on the evidence at hand is the notion that OpenXml might have more momentum in the OSS community than ODF has had in the proprietary marketplace. ODF came first. It's been around for a while. Where is the proprietary support for ODF? How does Jane-paid-for-latest-office-version open an ODF document?
One might also question the OSS community's philosophical decision to support all open document formats regardless of origin and/or politics. A key agreement/consensus among the OSS community that has undoubtedly factored into many organizational decisions to support/embrace OSS-developed technology alongside the propietary until today.
Except Google is not in the business of hosting arbitrary vertical ecommerce sites. Properly building such a business unit and entering into open-ended agreements with arbitrary businesses would likely cost more than establishing a legal precedent here.
Translation:
Me, I, wow, me, I wow, me wow, wow, wow, me. I wow boycott Vista. Me wow, I me Vista wow boycott.
Such cogent criticisms, I fear, may fall on deaf ears.
Evangelism is ultimately a form of sales. Computer Guys generally aren't trained in or otherwise naturally skilled in this area, and should save this conversation for users specifically looking for advice regarding a new hardware/software purchase, or expressing frustration with their current OS (spyware/malware, support expiring, etc.).
It is important to understand that a user who's recently purchased an OS and corresponding software packages, and established a working knowledge of those products has little to gain tossing out that investment, and may not appreciate an unsolicited suggestion to do so.
People simply let go all safeguards when going online. Why, I don't know, but they do.
One could argue that many otherwise socially-responsible individuals also let go their moral conscience when going online. One could write this behavior off as temporary virtual suspension of disbelief...
nslookup www.mit.edu 207.69.188.187. Interesting, and I fail to see the wisdom in providing DNS services to non-paying users... unless of course this captive audience could somehow be tapped for ad revenue via some kind of typosquatting scheme.:)
See also: HTTP + port 80 being used for everything from chat to file sharing to video streaming to RPC. Add to that HTTP status 200 + HTML being increasingly used to represent every possible response status.
...if I were to DDOS www.this-site-does-not-exist-but-earthlink-resolve s-it-anway.something would I act criminally?
If you were to DDOS www.this-site-does-not-exist-but-earthlink-resolve s-it-anway.something, you would be an Earthlink subscriber violating your TOS. Your account would simply be cancelled by Earthlink.
It took roughly 6 months for Sony's rootware to surface on a closed system with relatively few kernel-mode experts. I'd venture to guess that if such a payload were targeted at an open platform, it's discovery would be measured in the space of hours or days, not weeks or months. Surely the brand-loyalty of the F/OSS community is worth more than the eternal-alienation of this growing market segment.
Under VMWare Player, the video drivers included in the latest version of vmware-tools do support partial hardware-accelerated 3d. From the site:
Experimental support includes the following limitations:
Workstation accelerates DirectX 8 applications, and DX9 applications which use only the subset of DX8.
Performance/speed of 3D applications is not yet optimized.
OpenGL applications run in software emulation mode.
All aspects of 3D acceleration are not enabled. Some 3D features that are not yet accelerated include:
Pixel and vertex shaders
Multiple vertex streams are not supported.
Hardware bump-mapping, environment mapping
Projected textures
1, 3, or 4 dimensional textures
So if I catch you disobeying my civics, jamming my culture, or wrenching my monkeys (whatever that means), can I safely assume that you consider me an enemy, and have declared war on me?
If your opponent has not openly declared war on you, then you must ask yourself whether these forms of _X_ are in violation of criminal law. If not, perhaps you should respond with some form of intelligence gathering. Perhaps your opponent seeks increased moral/cultural influence and is simply playing loose with the rules of friendly competition. In the US one need not look far for examples -- consider Jerry Falwell and Howard Stern. Falwell and Stern have each declared cultural war vs. the stats quo for the past quarter century. So what? You base your response on intelligence. Heck maybe you can get your opponent to help win an election (ala GW).
If your opponent is on the other hand in violation of criminal law, your decision to apprehend him/her will be rightly perceived as your formal declaration of war. An intelligent opponent's response will then involve the following factors (in order):
Probability of legal victory
Probability of elusion
Geneva convention
Value of own life vs cause
That pretty much summarizes all forms of sub-national conflict methinks.
And if that's the case, would you agree that, since we're at war, I'm totally justified in disobeying your civics, jamming your culture, and wrenching your monkeys?
In other words, fairly compete for moral/political/cultural mindshare? By all means, compete.
More than that, would you agree that I'm in fact limited in my choice of weapons and tactics to use against you, only by whatever limitations my own moral code place on me, just as you are limited only by your own moral code?
If we are at war by above definition and not just entertaining friendly competition, certainly. But you don't seem to like friendly competition much... If we're talking totalitarianism then basically anyone who disagrees with the party line is at war. So what is it?
Because frankly, if you think we're at war, then I think that defeating you is a pretty good idea.
And would everyone please stop talking about how this is Isreal vs. Muslims. Lebanon is 40% Christain. This is not Isreal vs. Muslims, its Isreal vs. anyone not jewish.
Israel's action in Lebanon is no more an action against Lebanon than the thousands of rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon represent Lebanese foreign policy. This conflict has two well defined opponents, Israel & a vastly uderestimated microstate, Hezbollah. I'll leave it an exercise for the reader to determine the side which most indiscriminately chose to establish base-camp amongst non-partisan, civilian population centers on its eve of battle.
Imagine for a moment you lived in a high-density urban area. How would you feel if neighbors you had never met suddenly initiated a wholesale assault on a neighboring country without your government's knowledge or consent?
Encourage everyone to blacklist their TLD until they start letting their people use it for real content, which will happen as soon as someone is in control who understands (and cares) that the nation will benefit more from it.
As any government-operated business, the quality of Cameroon's typo-squatting service is definitely lacking in comparison to high-end commercial offerings. Enterprising private typo-squatters wishing to register second-level domains under.cm the TLD may apply here.
Presumably , the argument is not about breaking traffic laws, it's about proactively informing local police on the movement of 'hot' plates, nevermind of course whether said plate is in fact guilty or otherwise associated with violation of state/federeal law.
You are confusing requirements definition with application design. To rephrase the GP's analogy, requirements definition:: black-belt, while application design (sword manufacture):: black-smith. Quality products are thus a result of quality analysis (translation of requirements to design), which is fundamentally nothing more than the partnership between the domain expert and the engineer.
In this gig Microsoft is at a disadvantage as their competitors are a) Free, and b) can be taken under total control by the DOD.
Yes, with the Free in point a) directly facilitating point b). Financially, the largest cost of any such project is in the systems integration work, leaving no competitor at a particular disadvantage.
Aside from the positive endorsement associated with this adoption by the DoD, the F/OSS community stands to gain very little: as the DoD aren't in the business of redistributing software it will have no contractual obligation to share its enhancements to the packages it consumes.
One small stroke for man, one giant lap for cybernetics. This is but one of the dozen (or so) important milestones needed to establish computer-aided augemntation of the human form as both acceptable and desirable in every-day application.
The real question here is, to what extent would a rational organization look to Oracle for non Oracle-ralated RHEL support? Sure a handful of companies might, but the vast majority will continue to sign RedHat support contracts for all non-Oracle related system support needs.
To put it another way, Oracle wants to see its Linux business grow, but recognizes that support is a significant pain point for its install base: If you want something done right...
"Addressing....open issues at each moment" implies a baseline issue tracking mechanism in which end-user feedback is logged, collated, prioritized, and assigned. Am I being unreasonable?
Or, to put a finer point on it, what does it actually mean? Other than just artificially defining the terms ("highest priority open issues," "baseline enhancements" and "strategic application development") to support your conclusion.... is it just buzzword stew?
I merely expressed my position as concisely as possible, using unambiguous terminology. I'll rephrase my earlier response:
To say "You have your team focus on addressing the highest priority open issues at each moment" is to focus on a set of individual modifications to an existing system with no consideration given to large-scale modification of that system, or the development of an entirely new system in support of the long-term growth of the organization.
Can you actually give a cogent defense of this claim?
Glad you asked. In the spirit of intelligent discourse I chose to politely ignore the blatantly disingenuous comparison you made between market forecasting and project estimation -- a comparison upon which you appear to have based your entire argument. After reading _that_, I'm still not convinced this isn't just a sophisticated troll.
My original claim was stated thus: "Any cohesive strategy requires coordination at the organizational level (of which IT represents only one of several components) -- coordnation that simply cannot be achieved without detailed planning."
This concept is virtually dogma, representing a cornerstone of decades of project management theory. I merely stated it in an effort to remind our readers that real businesses rightly consult professional staff when preparing project plans. Plans that are not only useful in measuring the effectiveness of a project team, but which may in fact also be required by law.
Yes, and the answer is (or should be) well known: in general, there is no way to determine the time it will take to complete a software project that takes less time than actually doing the work and seeing how long it took.
Agreed -- assuming of course the problem this project solves has in fact never been solved. The vast majority of problems being solved at any given time in IT however, have been solved a hundred times over in other contexts, by other teams. It is the familiarity of these problems and their solution patterns that distinguish experienced software engineers from those, well, new to the field.
If you want the theoretical underpinnings, just note that software development is a subset of the halting problem.
Algorithm development != Software development. Algorithms solve very specifc problems, to exactitude. The problems businesses ask software engineers to solve are more general in nature. General problems resembling general patterns upon which general solutions may be based. The differences between algorithm and application development are so vast one could argue the two are completely unrelated.
To say "You have your team focus on addressing the highest priority open issues at each moment" is to focus on baseline enhancements to the exclusion of strategic application development.
Now, I thought the OP had a question of project estimation theory. If baseline enhancements are really the topic of discussion here, then you are right, I am missing the point completely. Somehow, I suspect SubliminalVortex's question is larger than that however.
To some extent this may apply to the R&D market, but, enlightened as this may sound, don't expect to win any production contracts without estimates. Remember, a software application represents nothing more than an automated part of a larger process (the notaable exception being entertainment software).
Once business identifies the need to implement a particular process, it generally does so in recognition of a strategic goal. By definition, any cohesive strategy requires coordination at the organizational level (of which IT represents only one of several components) -- coordnation that simply cannot be achieved without detailed planning. If you find yourself a member of an organization whose leadership is willing to accept this notion that the software development process may unfold absent any sort of planning, there are two logical conclusions:
1. Your project is simply not important. You may find discretionary projects interesting, but they are generally not good for career develoment as such projects are easily outsourced.
2. Your project is critical to the growth of your organization, and leadership lacks the sense of urgency needed to properly manage risk. In short, your project is unlikely meet its stated objectives, leaving your organization vulnerable to loss of profitability, marketshare or both.
The Stallman-esque extremists who want to avoid anything that they think is in some way capitalist are just as bad, though.
There is nothing Stallman-esque about avoiding all things capitalist. Stallman's philosophy is distilled in what he calls the "Four Freedoms". These are:
0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
3. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The FSF supports any (legitimate) business/revenue model which respects these four freedoms.
Any market with no barriers to entry would be quickly saturated with anyone and everyone interested in a slice of the pie. The barriers as I see them consist of:
The cost of a complete full-text index of the www and usenet (the two information spaces currently indexed by the major players -- other spaces soon to follow include the loc, pixels, & hollywood.
The cost of maintaining that index real-time.
Credibility. A complete index is not enough -- that index must aim for 100% meaningful content. Good luck ferreting out all so-called "google-bombs", sophisticated click-fraud schemes, meta-indexes, etc.
Availability. Even a single-digit marketshare will require a massive, highly sophisticated datacenter to handle capacity.
Marketing/mind-share. Those US$30 mil superbowl ads paid for by ask.com year after year have done little to bring this dot-com darling closer to 30% marketshare than chapter-11 (and iirc this is a company that relies on others for all of the above).
In your humble opinion, how are these not barriers to entry for your average mom & pop info-search play?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the crux of the problem, and the beef Groklaw has with this announcement (It's been nearly 12 hours now, surely groklaw as an entity would have apologized or amended this posting by now otherwise in light of community feedback) based on the evidence at hand is the notion that OpenXml might have more momentum in the OSS community than ODF has had in the proprietary marketplace. ODF came first. It's been around for a while. Where is the proprietary support for ODF? How does Jane-paid-for-latest-office-version open an ODF document?
One might also question the OSS community's philosophical decision to support all open document formats regardless of origin and/or politics. A key agreement/consensus among the OSS community that has undoubtedly factored into many organizational decisions to support/embrace OSS-developed technology alongside the propietary until today.
Except Google is not in the business of hosting arbitrary vertical ecommerce sites. Properly building such a business unit and entering into open-ended agreements with arbitrary businesses would likely cost more than establishing a legal precedent here.
Translation: Me, I, wow, me, I wow, me wow, wow, wow, me. I wow boycott Vista. Me wow, I me Vista wow boycott. Such cogent criticisms, I fear, may fall on deaf ears.
Evangelism is ultimately a form of sales. Computer Guys generally aren't trained in or otherwise naturally skilled in this area, and should save this conversation for users specifically looking for advice regarding a new hardware/software purchase, or expressing frustration with their current OS (spyware/malware, support expiring, etc.).
It is important to understand that a user who's recently purchased an OS and corresponding software packages, and established a working knowledge of those products has little to gain tossing out that investment, and may not appreciate an unsolicited suggestion to do so.
nslookup www.mit.edu 207.69.188.187. Interesting, and I fail to see the wisdom in providing DNS services to non-paying users... unless of course this captive audience could somehow be tapped for ad revenue via some kind of typosquatting scheme. :)
See also: HTTP + port 80 being used for everything from chat to file sharing to video streaming to RPC. Add to that HTTP status 200 + HTML being increasingly used to represent every possible response status.
It took roughly 6 months for Sony's rootware to surface on a closed system with relatively few kernel-mode experts. I'd venture to guess that if such a payload were targeted at an open platform, it's discovery would be measured in the space of hours or days, not weeks or months. Surely the brand-loyalty of the F/OSS community is worth more than the eternal-alienation of this growing market segment.
I don't believe ESR's focus here is winning the number one market position from XYZ, rather, merely addressing obstacles to healthy growth.
Ubuntu Dapper: apt-get install vmware-player
If your opponent has not openly declared war on you, then you must ask yourself whether these forms of _X_ are in violation of criminal law. If not, perhaps you should respond with some form of intelligence gathering. Perhaps your opponent seeks increased moral/cultural influence and is simply playing loose with the rules of friendly competition. In the US one need not look far for examples -- consider Jerry Falwell and Howard Stern. Falwell and Stern have each declared cultural war vs. the stats quo for the past quarter century. So what? You base your response on intelligence. Heck maybe you can get your opponent to help win an election (ala GW).
If your opponent is on the other hand in violation of criminal law, your decision to apprehend him/her will be rightly perceived as your formal declaration of war. An intelligent opponent's response will then involve the following factors (in order):
That pretty much summarizes all forms of sub-national conflict methinks.
In other words, fairly compete for moral/political/cultural mindshare? By all means, compete.
If we are at war by above definition and not just entertaining friendly competition, certainly. But you don't seem to like friendly competition much... If we're talking totalitarianism then basically anyone who disagrees with the party line is at war. So what is it?
A redundancy, but we'll take it.
Israel's action in Lebanon is no more an action against Lebanon than the thousands of rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon represent Lebanese foreign policy. This conflict has two well defined opponents, Israel & a vastly uderestimated microstate, Hezbollah. I'll leave it an exercise for the reader to determine the side which most indiscriminately chose to establish base-camp amongst non-partisan, civilian population centers on its eve of battle.
Imagine for a moment you lived in a high-density urban area. How would you feel if neighbors you had never met suddenly initiated a wholesale assault on a neighboring country without your government's knowledge or consent?
Presumably , the argument is not about breaking traffic laws, it's about proactively informing local police on the movement of 'hot' plates, nevermind of course whether said plate is in fact guilty or otherwise associated with violation of state/federeal law.
You are confusing requirements definition with application design. To rephrase the GP's analogy, requirements definition :: black-belt, while application design (sword manufacture) :: black-smith. Quality products are thus a result of quality analysis (translation of requirements to design), which is fundamentally nothing more than the partnership between the domain expert and the engineer.
Yes, with the Free in point a) directly facilitating point b). Financially, the largest cost of any such project is in the systems integration work, leaving no competitor at a particular disadvantage.
Aside from the positive endorsement associated with this adoption by the DoD, the F/OSS community stands to gain very little: as the DoD aren't in the business of redistributing software it will have no contractual obligation to share its enhancements to the packages it consumes.
One small stroke for man, one giant lap for cybernetics. This is but one of the dozen (or so) important milestones needed to establish computer-aided augemntation of the human form as both acceptable and desirable in every-day application.
The real question here is, to what extent would a rational organization look to Oracle for non Oracle-ralated RHEL support? Sure a handful of companies might, but the vast majority will continue to sign RedHat support contracts for all non-Oracle related system support needs.
To put it another way, Oracle wants to see its Linux business grow, but recognizes that support is a significant pain point for its install base: If you want something done right...
To say "You have your team focus on addressing the highest priority open issues at each moment" is to focus on a set of individual modifications to an existing system with no consideration given to large-scale modification of that system, or the development of an entirely new system in support of the long-term growth of the organization.
Glad you asked. In the spirit of intelligent discourse I chose to politely ignore the blatantly disingenuous comparison you made between market forecasting and project estimation -- a comparison upon which you appear to have based your entire argument. After reading _that_, I'm still not convinced this isn't just a sophisticated troll.My original claim was stated thus: "Any cohesive strategy requires coordination at the organizational level (of which IT represents only one of several components) -- coordnation that simply cannot be achieved without detailed planning."
This concept is virtually dogma, representing a cornerstone of decades of project management theory. I merely stated it in an effort to remind our readers that real businesses rightly consult professional staff when preparing project plans. Plans that are not only useful in measuring the effectiveness of a project team, but which may in fact also be required by law.
Agreed -- assuming of course the problem this project solves has in fact never been solved. The vast majority of problems being solved at any given time in IT however, have been solved a hundred times over in other contexts, by other teams. It is the familiarity of these problems and their solution patterns that distinguish experienced software engineers from those, well, new to the field. Algorithm development != Software development. Algorithms solve very specifc problems, to exactitude. The problems businesses ask software engineers to solve are more general in nature. General problems resembling general patterns upon which general solutions may be based. The differences between algorithm and application development are so vast one could argue the two are completely unrelated.To say "You have your team focus on addressing the highest priority open issues at each moment" is to focus on baseline enhancements to the exclusion of strategic application development.
Now, I thought the OP had a question of project estimation theory. If baseline enhancements are really the topic of discussion here, then you are right, I am missing the point completely. Somehow, I suspect SubliminalVortex's question is larger than that however.
To some extent this may apply to the R&D market, but, enlightened as this may sound, don't expect to win any production contracts without estimates. Remember, a software application represents nothing more than an automated part of a larger process (the notaable exception being entertainment software).
Once business identifies the need to implement a particular process, it generally does so in recognition of a strategic goal. By definition, any cohesive strategy requires coordination at the organizational level (of which IT represents only one of several components) -- coordnation that simply cannot be achieved without detailed planning. If you find yourself a member of an organization whose leadership is willing to accept this notion that the software development process may unfold absent any sort of planning, there are two logical conclusions:
1. Your project is simply not important. You may find discretionary projects interesting, but they are generally not good for career develoment as such projects are easily outsourced.
2. Your project is critical to the growth of your organization, and leadership lacks the sense of urgency needed to properly manage risk. In short, your project is unlikely meet its stated objectives, leaving your organization vulnerable to loss of profitability, marketshare or both.
0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
3. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The FSF supports any (legitimate) business/revenue model which respects these four freedoms.
- The cost of a complete full-text index of the www and usenet (the two information spaces currently indexed by the major players -- other spaces soon to follow include the loc, pixels, & hollywood.
- The cost of maintaining that index real-time.
- Credibility. A complete index is not enough -- that index must aim for 100% meaningful content. Good luck ferreting out all so-called "google-bombs", sophisticated click-fraud schemes, meta-indexes, etc.
- Availability. Even a single-digit marketshare will require a massive, highly sophisticated datacenter to handle capacity.
- Marketing/mind-share. Those US$30 mil superbowl ads paid for by ask.com year after year have done little to bring this dot-com darling closer to 30% marketshare than chapter-11 (and iirc this is a company that relies on others for all of the above).
In your humble opinion, how are these not barriers to entry for your average mom & pop info-search play?