And what happens when the original developers get bought away by a company with bad intentions? you can bet that lousy management and unresponsiveness will result...
Then, if the code is unreadable and documentation is missing, in all likelihood, nobody will fork the project, or the new developers will probably do a bad job.
The real question, how "open" is an open source project?
If the code is one big spaghetti soup and there's virtually no documentation, then I'd say the project isn't really "open", and the "forkability" of the project is close to zero, as new developers aren't likely to pick up the project once its original developers get bought away... instead, in that case, it's more likely that new developers will stand up and write something new from scratch, although that may take a while of course.
On the other hand, if the code is structured well, with good documentation (not a machine-generated function-by-function reference, but also documentation on the conceptual level), where the documentation has been made commentable by the community, etc. etc., then such a project is much more viable.
Actually, I think someone should stand up and write some guidelines for good open-source projects to follow, and such guidelines can then also be used to rate open-source projects. Perhaps this is an idea for meta-sites such as freshmeat, sourceforge, googlecode, etc. (?)
i'd feel sorry for them, because they always have to wait longer for their feature updates and security fixes, and they'd always be in fear of the phone companies finding them out and shutting them out.
For example, I can imagine that a 3d graphics guru is just not that interested in basic legacy networking stuff (most of the networking abstractions are ill-designed anyway, from a modern perspective)
actually, lifeforms will probably be much smaller due to the gravity...
ever wondered why mammals the size of a whale do not exist on land (on earth)? they would instantly collapse; actually when a whale gets stranded on a beach, it collapses...
if nobody picks up the idea, then another solution is to develop a tool that reads this universal file format and writes the KDE and GNOME configuration files according to the preferences... if this tool reaches acceptance, then perhaps after a while the window managers will add support for the file format...
i think in order for somebody to pick up the idea, it needs to be elaborated a bit more, by giving examples and perhaps even by writing an example preferences file... also the reason for the idea should be explained very well...
i'm a little too busy for that (yes even on x-mas day), but if you'd like to do it, then kudos, and thanks!
It'd never work because different pieces of software have different kinds of capabilities.
<sarcasm> You mean like webbrowsers have different capabilities? But... that would mean that HTML would never work and reach widespread acceptance... </sarcasm>
(hey even the sarcasm tag seems to have been widely accepted)
perhaps there should be some "universal" preference file format...
for example, a file ".preferences" in your home directory, that every distribution and window manager can read, so that you only have to copy that file after you've installed a new distro. basically the file contains things such as: "when i click a link, a new window should open". or: "i like to have 4 virtual desktops", etc.
Google is a great search engine that is liked by a lot of people. However, too much power in the hands of one company is undesirable, as we all know. For example, when the service starts to break down, like in this instance.
Therefore, I believe that search engines should be made more interchangeable, just like other products, e.g., email programs (gmail vs. yahoo), processors (Intel vs AMD), etc. Google is commoditizing the software world, which is a good thing (well not for some developers), but search engines should be just as interchangeable. In some respect, search engines are already interchangeable, since you can just go to any other search site (yahoo, etc.). However, it turns out that users do not easily make the switch. This has to do (mostly, I think) with user-experience.
So how can we improve the situation? By allowing the user to have the same (or almost the same) experience independent of the chosen search engine. This can be achieved by having an open search API that can be accessed by web-browsers (or third-party websites), so that the user-interface is decoupled from the search-engine. Such an API should implement things like "give me the first 10 search results for some query", "give me a cached version", "give me similar links", etc.
Of course, major search engines would not easily switch to such a method, since their influence on the user would be restricted by that (they cannot anymore control the placement of ads, other than in the search result list). However, the smaller search engines (altavista, yahoo, bing) could start to support such a scheme, and cooperate with browser implementors (mozilla), to gain more market share.
Nice idea. However, it would be nicer if you or somebody else also gave some idea about how to bring such a system into acceptance.
Perhaps an idea would be to create something like the creative-commons initiative (or modify it), except allow artists to specify a reduced copyright period. That would fill a gap in the copyright arena, since (no doubt) there are many content-creators that dislike the current state of copyright, and would happily allow a reduced copyright period for their work (after all, the content they create is often an incremental improvement of other people's work). Once there is sufficient leverage, the system could become accepted by governments, and renewal fees could be implemented.
Slashdot Mirror
This proves that cellphone radiation actually interacts with matter in the brain... which is something to be afraid of, in my opinion.
And what happens when the original developers get bought away by a company with bad intentions? you can bet that lousy management and unresponsiveness will result...
Then, if the code is unreadable and documentation is missing, in all likelihood, nobody will fork the project, or the new developers will probably do a bad job.
That's my point.
The real question, how "open" is an open source project?
If the code is one big spaghetti soup and there's virtually no documentation, then I'd say the project isn't really "open", and the "forkability" of the project is close to zero, as new developers aren't likely to pick up the project once its original developers get bought away... instead, in that case, it's more likely that new developers will stand up and write something new from scratch, although that may take a while of course.
On the other hand, if the code is structured well, with good documentation (not a machine-generated function-by-function reference, but also documentation on the conceptual level), where the documentation has been made commentable by the community, etc. etc., then such a project is much more viable.
Actually, I think someone should stand up and write some guidelines for good open-source projects to follow, and such guidelines can then also be used to rate open-source projects. Perhaps this is an idea for meta-sites such as freshmeat, sourceforge, googlecode, etc. (?)
sorry people, you'll all have to stand... we removed all chairs as a precaution
if you use one half of the 60fps for each eye, you have 30fps in 3d... that's probably one reason for the drift back to 30fps.
If you use, instead of a circle, a turning wheel with spokes, you can "see" the wheel suddenly going backward as you drop the framerate.
(chrome is doing better in this respect)
can we also have gui in a separate thread from the networking stuff?
too often i find the gui is frozen for a few fractions of a second (or more), while the browser is fetching stuff over the network
with 20.7 frames per second?
that's not what i call solid performance...
i'd feel sorry for them, because they always have to wait longer for their feature updates and security fixes, and they'd always be in fear of the phone companies finding them out and shutting them out.
For example, I can imagine that a 3d graphics guru is just not that interested in basic legacy networking stuff (most of the networking abstractions are ill-designed anyway, from a modern perspective)
actually, lifeforms will probably be much smaller due to the gravity...
ever wondered why mammals the size of a whale do not exist on land (on earth)? they would instantly collapse; actually when a whale gets stranded on a beach, it collapses...
if nobody picks up the idea, then another solution is to develop a tool that reads this universal file format and writes the KDE and GNOME configuration files according to the preferences... if this tool reaches acceptance, then perhaps after a while the window managers will add support for the file format...
i think in order for somebody to pick up the idea, it needs to be elaborated a bit more, by giving examples and perhaps even by writing an example preferences file... also the reason for the idea should be explained very well...
i'm a little too busy for that (yes even on x-mas day), but if you'd like to do it, then kudos, and thanks!
It'd never work because different pieces of software have different kinds of capabilities.
<sarcasm>
You mean like webbrowsers have different capabilities? But... that would mean that HTML would never work and reach widespread acceptance...
</sarcasm>
(hey even the sarcasm tag seems to have been widely accepted)
obviously what one likes, the other may not like.
perhaps there should be some "universal" preference file format...
for example, a file ".preferences" in your home directory, that every distribution and window manager can read, so that you only have to copy that file after you've installed a new distro. basically the file contains things such as: "when i click a link, a new window should open". or: "i like to have 4 virtual desktops", etc.
saves a lot of tweedling with the settings...
wake me up when mono is ms-patent-free
that's the "slashdot effect for search engines" ...
Google is a great search engine that is liked by a lot of people. However, too much power in the hands of one company is undesirable, as we all know.
For example, when the service starts to break down, like in this instance.
Therefore, I believe that search engines should be made more interchangeable, just like other products, e.g., email programs (gmail vs. yahoo), processors (Intel vs AMD), etc.
Google is commoditizing the software world, which is a good thing (well not for some developers), but search engines should be just as interchangeable. In some respect, search engines are already interchangeable, since you can just go to any other search site (yahoo, etc.). However, it turns out that users do not easily make the switch. This has to do (mostly, I think) with user-experience.
So how can we improve the situation? By allowing the user to have the same (or almost the same) experience independent of the chosen search engine.
This can be achieved by having an open search API that can be accessed by web-browsers (or third-party websites), so that the user-interface is decoupled from the search-engine. Such an API should implement things like "give me the first 10 search results for some query", "give me a cached version", "give me similar links", etc.
Of course, major search engines would not easily switch to such a method, since their influence on the user would be restricted by that (they cannot anymore control the placement of ads, other than in the search result list). However, the smaller search engines (altavista, yahoo, bing) could start to support such a scheme, and cooperate with browser implementors (mozilla), to gain more market share.
Nice idea. However, it would be nicer if you or somebody else also gave some idea about how to bring such a system into acceptance.
Perhaps an idea would be to create something like the creative-commons initiative (or modify it), except allow artists to specify a reduced copyright period. That would fill a gap in the copyright arena, since (no doubt) there are many content-creators that dislike the current state of copyright, and would happily allow a reduced copyright period for their work (after all, the content they create is often an incremental improvement of other people's work). Once there is sufficient leverage, the system could become accepted by governments, and renewal fees could be implemented.
Well luckily, we computernerds still have this V8.
Time for a new format of robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Conditions: only_when_delist_possible
Remarks: please_leave_your_name_when_done
The Canadian people are supposed to make our laws.
Actually, after this shouldn't the EU take a more humble standpoint?
(You may say that this is an outdated argument, but in any case, it was less than 70 years ago, which is the minimum duration of copyright.)
bah, megapixels mean nothing...
what about signal to noise ratio, dynamic range, plenoptic capabilities, etc.
they have to be cute.
there's a lot of intelligent people working at that place, who would certainly not work there if there wasn't anything noble about the job.