I'd have to agree.
Open source is fantastic but it doesn't mesh well with that kind of setup.
I wouldn't say the open source community should get nothing though.
Perhaps treat it like a particularly social minded club that does charity work.
Lots of OSS is developed by teams within commercial companies. This would be the same, but with government supplying the salaries - pretty scary on the face of it, but a worthy development project in its own right, how to decide how to split up the development fund pool.
My first rule would be that anyone who spends more than 20 hours in the previous 12 months "lobbying" in the funds allocation process is automatically cut off for the next 12 months. Second rule is that anyone who is not eligible for funding has zero vote in how it is actually allocated.
Every single VC startup I have been a part of or seen close up are nothing more than a "buddy's clubhouse" where they waste money on stupid crap and dont really use their windfall of money for the real task at hand. If you have a personal investment into the company then you will work hard to make it succeed.
If you got your beer idea on a napkin that you convinced some moron to give you $800,000 to start doing, you're gonna screw off and try to play "rich guy" until the money runs out.
Can I join the clubhouse? Pleeeeeease? I've seen both sides, where the rich kids play there's tremendous flair and waste (see: ENRON, the smartest guys in the room for a nice illustration, I wasn't at ENRON, but another Houston company with startlingly similar stories in the halls.) When you get to the traditional North-East US VC outfits, they are tighter with their money and control than any normal company - and that really sucks for morale and productivity, while it totally crushes creativity and ingenuity. They also expect to fail 95% of the time. Cheerful bunch, they are.
So, what's better? I'd like to see a system inspired by Whuffie where there's a OSS development grant pool and somehow the developers who are getting the most merit points (most satisfied users, best peer reviews, etc.) get the compensation. It's a flawed system, at best, highly vulnerable to gaming and other manipulations, but if the rewards were in the moderate range - say, ranging from basic subsistence salary up to maybe triple that for the "best" of the grantees... maybe a self-policing mechanism could be worked out.
Not nearly as much fun as burning through $80K per month on good hotels, fine dining and cool gadgets, but maybe people who want to live like that should figure out a way to do it without having the money handed to them.
Free software needs real hardware to run on, test on, host the project on, etc. Grants for amazon S3 space or a shot in the arm to sourceforge to bring back/update the compile farm would be nice.
How about stopping the wiretapping analysis project and opening up the NSA compute farm instead?
Open source doesn't need the money, and the taxpayer will thank us not to take it.
Good fortune is where you find it... if there are talented OSS developers who are presently standing in soup-lines, I'd rather give them a salary and have them spend time developing code.
All government documents should be in an open, well documented format.
Not a bad start - Florida has what they call "Online Sunshine" where they publish all laws and similar public info online.
Unfortunately, if you check the current federal spending pie-chart, a majority of the software consuming dollars (mostly the military ones) are in projects that are closed due to national security justifications.
By utilizing OSS in the public sector you create jobs in both
I have a hard time getting my head around this one - the creators of OSS software don't typically have paying jobs per-se, unless they're subsidized by some entity that wants their product... so, are you asking government to start employing software developers directly? As a software developer, I wouldn't be very happy to work at civil servant pay-scales.
I wish the world worked that way around me. In Miami, there are guys that spend 8 hours a day, 6 months a year standing on street corners with hand out for a "subsidy" - they certainly look hungry. I got to know a couple of them who worked near my home for over 10 years - they'd summer up north and winter in Miami, they had a well funded recreational substance consumption hobby, most years they'd clear well over $100K in off the books income.
Unfortunately, I think that easily available subsidy leads more to that kind of behavior and less to highly socially integrated people who are productive because otherwise they'd be bored.
Obama is an elected official, he is obliged to serve the will of the people of the United States.
To be isolationist about it: this is a stimulus from US taxpayers for the recovery of the US economy. Open Source knows no borders, stimulus into open source will benefit the whole world, not just the US.
To be union-minded about it: open source is a disruptive technology, it destroys established highly profitable service industries and replaces their products with free alternatives. It reduces the scale of the software economy from one that includes compensation for development, sales, marketing, investor returns and support to one that only generates significant revenue in support. In short, open source is a short-term net destroyer of jobs.
To be PAC minded about it: open source doesn't have the deep pockets of the established software industry. There are 25 closed source lobbyists in Washington D.C. for every open source one.
In summary: the American voter doesn't think beyond next week's paycheck, whether or not they can afford the next larger flat-screen TV, or to keep that 4500 sq. ft. McMansion they bought 4 years ago when the balloon payment comes due. Obama is up for re-election, and he has a mandate to make Joe the Plumber happy before November 2012. Investments in Open Source have long-term global returns that are difficult to demonstrate during a 30 second sound-bite on the nightly news. Regardless of how massive that ultimate ROI might be, it's not something that will put Barack back in office in 2012.
Sorry OSS, you are noble, just and worthy, but you've just got no chance of making it on American Idol.
In the mid 1980s, we had cable TV with bad grounding, sparks would jump from the tuner box to the TV and back when lightning would strike up to several miles to the north - was kinda cool, because you'd hear the arcing before the thunder - if the curtains were open you could see that the arcing happened in sync with the strikes (seemed delayed by a fraction of a second, capacitance in the line, I guess.)
Never had the big boom take out electronics on me, though last year we had a 50' oak tree 40' from the house take a strike that turned 1/3 of the trunk into splinters 8 and 9 feet long, some of which were shot across the yard 20' or so. Every computer in the house was on, none of them even blinked, that we could tell at least, the white flash coming in the windows was more than a little dazzling.
For C++, I like Qt - with it, you can have your Linux server do "distributed builds" for your netbook. You can also host your code in git or svn and manage your project in trac - all very easily installable and maintainable on your Linux box - I have a setup running at home for my hobby stuff just because it was so easy to do again after setting up at work. The QtCreator IDE is showing promise, but not 100% released yet.
As for hardware, I bought an eeeBox (Atom desktop) to replace my wife's 8 year old e-mail and browser machine - it's awesome, quiet, tiny, cheap, and 2x more powerful than the already adequate machine it replaced. Since that machine is left on 24-7, the reduced 20W power draw (down from 65W in the old machine) will pay for the purchase price in a couple of years. I'm trying to resist further temptation at least until the Freescale netbooks drop - I might still buy an Atom N280, but I'd like to see some competitive offerings first.
Focus on the business at hand (e.g. coding) and quit wasting time on infrastructure (version control, defect tracking, build systems, backup & recovery, server sizing, etc...).
In the past 2 years, I have spent 3490 hours on the "business at hand" (e.g. coding, documentation, meetings, etc.), 10 hours on infrastructure (setup and maintenance of trac, svn, backups, VPN) and 500 hours on lunch. It's a small company, I'm a programmer and the nominal back-end sys-admin.
We easily spend more time configuring people's POP & SMTP settings on their e-mail than we do on our trac and svn servers, which are used daily by 75% of the company.
The real infrastructure inefficiency happens when you give somebody the title "infrastructure guy" with no other responsibilities. Based on our experience, you should need one full time guy for roughly every 300 programmers. Problem is that he also configures people's e-mail, printer connectivity, etc. so when that 1/1000 programmer's support call comes, he's clueless.
Student with attitude gets authorities upset with her and ends up charged with disorderly conduct. Doesn't this happen at least 10 times a day somewhere?
I actually approve of what the Chinese businessman who allowed lead paint on millions of toys did to attone for his transgression (suicide). In reality, he probably got off light when you consider that there are at least hundreds, if not thousands of children with significant lifelong neurological disorders as a result of his greed and/or sloth.
On the other hand, he was likely silencing himself to avoid exposing other conspirators, probably in his family...
So, if someone wrongly incarcerates 5000 people for 3 months each, does it follow that they should be incarcerated themselves for 1250 years? Would that be the punishment fitting the crime?
The problem isn't that it was a commercially operated prison. The problem is that the payment structure was set up in such a way as to benefit the operator for an increased number of incarcerations. It shouldn't just be illegal, it should be unconstitutional for any contract or law to provide benefit to one party when another is found guilty of a crime.
Should be illegal - yes, might be made illegal in the next decade, yes. Might be implemented before we are all dead? Doubtful.
What's the point of that?
Maybe you'd have a point if the public had to intervene - if there was no other recourse - but as is stands the damage is done and they've been caught. None of it will be fixed by killing them in some brutish rage.
In a system that doles out capital punishment, I think the broken cogs in that system could use some strong incentive to behave properly. If (when?) there's profits to be made in execution, the wronged will be more than emotionally scarred.
True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
Also operated on commercial grounds? Because the very concept of a commercial prison to me seems...something out of a really bad science fiction movie....
The Visitor wasn't science fiction - they did a pretty good job of portraying a real commercial prison.
Welcome to the U.S. of A. land of the fee, home of the depraved?
It might not be as thrilling as blowing something up, but the principles behind Foccault's pendulum and it's daily precession seem to fit the stated timescale and budget. If you've got appropriate facilities, you could have the students construct a model or two (maybe one big one outdoors and a smaller one in a more controlled environment), attempt to derive predictions about what's going to happen, then at the end of the experiment do some statistical analysis to see if the class as a whole performed better than chance at predicting the outcome.
The problem on a planet of many billion people who have recorded history over dozens generations is that finding a truly "new", "interesting", and "worthwhile" experiment that can be accomplished in 72 man-hours with minimal funding can be rather difficult. You could easily spend 72 man-hours on the problem selection research alone.
The cool thing about intro to physics courses is that they aren't concerned with breaking new ground, they get to present easily demonstrated and understood principles so that some of the students might be able to advance to real experiments later on.
Could easily use beer as the thrust media, if the support boat was a Budweiser tanker.
Presumably before you filled it with beer, you'd have to empty the Budweiser out?
Using the term loosely, of course. Budweiser would be the appropriate thrust media to spray into an ocean or lake.
If you hooked a device like that up to a Guinness tanker you'd likely be arrested and prosecuted for high crimes, unless the jet-wash was directed at a football stadium or some-such.
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I'd have to agree. Open source is fantastic but it doesn't mesh well with that kind of setup.
I wouldn't say the open source community should get nothing though. Perhaps treat it like a particularly social minded club that does charity work.
Lots of OSS is developed by teams within commercial companies. This would be the same, but with government supplying the salaries - pretty scary on the face of it, but a worthy development project in its own right, how to decide how to split up the development fund pool.
My first rule would be that anyone who spends more than 20 hours in the previous 12 months "lobbying" in the funds allocation process is automatically cut off for the next 12 months.
Second rule is that anyone who is not eligible for funding has zero vote in how it is actually allocated.
somebody has to pay the price for the US trade imbalances.
Why? It's never been done before.
Every single VC startup I have been a part of or seen close up are nothing more than a "buddy's clubhouse" where they waste money on stupid crap and dont really use their windfall of money for the real task at hand. If you have a personal investment into the company then you will work hard to make it succeed.
If you got your beer idea on a napkin that you convinced some moron to give you $800,000 to start doing, you're gonna screw off and try to play "rich guy" until the money runs out.
Can I join the clubhouse? Pleeeeeease? I've seen both sides, where the rich kids play there's tremendous flair and waste (see: ENRON, the smartest guys in the room for a nice illustration, I wasn't at ENRON, but another Houston company with startlingly similar stories in the halls.) When you get to the traditional North-East US VC outfits, they are tighter with their money and control than any normal company - and that really sucks for morale and productivity, while it totally crushes creativity and ingenuity. They also expect to fail 95% of the time. Cheerful bunch, they are.
So, what's better? I'd like to see a system inspired by Whuffie where there's a OSS development grant pool and somehow the developers who are getting the most merit points (most satisfied users, best peer reviews, etc.) get the compensation. It's a flawed system, at best, highly vulnerable to gaming and other manipulations, but if the rewards were in the moderate range - say, ranging from basic subsistence salary up to maybe triple that for the "best" of the grantees... maybe a self-policing mechanism could be worked out.
Not nearly as much fun as burning through $80K per month on good hotels, fine dining and cool gadgets, but maybe people who want to live like that should figure out a way to do it without having the money handed to them.
Free software needs real hardware to run on, test on, host the project on, etc. Grants for amazon S3 space or a shot in the arm to sourceforge to bring back/update the compile farm would be nice.
How about stopping the wiretapping analysis project and opening up the NSA compute farm instead?
The open source movement is exactly what should be funded. Create a grant application program for open source projects.
How does open source funding compare to the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts)? I hope Apache is at least as well funded as Robert Mapelthorpe...
Open source doesn't need the money, and the taxpayer will thank us not to take it.
Good fortune is where you find it... if there are talented OSS developers who are presently standing in soup-lines, I'd rather give them a salary and have them spend time developing code.
leave red hat out of it :-) at least they haven't joined the dark side
He will join the Emperor, or he will DIE!!!!!
All government documents should be in an open, well documented format.
Not a bad start - Florida has what they call "Online Sunshine" where they publish all laws and similar public info online.
Unfortunately, if you check the current federal spending pie-chart, a majority of the software consuming dollars (mostly the military ones) are in projects that are closed due to national security justifications.
By utilizing OSS in the public sector you create jobs in both
I have a hard time getting my head around this one - the creators of OSS software don't typically have paying jobs per-se, unless they're subsidized by some entity that wants their product... so, are you asking government to start employing software developers directly? As a software developer, I wouldn't be very happy to work at civil servant pay-scales.
Subsidy is a reality-- we all have to eat.
I wish the world worked that way around me. In Miami, there are guys that spend 8 hours a day, 6 months a year standing on street corners with hand out for a "subsidy" - they certainly look hungry. I got to know a couple of them who worked near my home for over 10 years - they'd summer up north and winter in Miami, they had a well funded recreational substance consumption hobby, most years they'd clear well over $100K in off the books income.
Unfortunately, I think that easily available subsidy leads more to that kind of behavior and less to highly socially integrated people who are productive because otherwise they'd be bored.
Because open source isn't typically a large lobbying group.
That's the right answer to the wrong question.
I'd say instead that's the wrong view on a very important question.
It's not a screw or be screwed world out there, buddy.
You clearly have not dealt with the upper echelons of American business.
Obama is an elected official, he is obliged to serve the will of the people of the United States.
To be isolationist about it: this is a stimulus from US taxpayers for the recovery of the US economy. Open Source knows no borders, stimulus into open source will benefit the whole world, not just the US.
To be union-minded about it: open source is a disruptive technology, it destroys established highly profitable service industries and replaces their products with free alternatives. It reduces the scale of the software economy from one that includes compensation for development, sales, marketing, investor returns and support to one that only generates significant revenue in support. In short, open source is a short-term net destroyer of jobs.
To be PAC minded about it: open source doesn't have the deep pockets of the established software industry. There are 25 closed source lobbyists in Washington D.C. for every open source one.
In summary: the American voter doesn't think beyond next week's paycheck, whether or not they can afford the next larger flat-screen TV, or to keep that 4500 sq. ft. McMansion they bought 4 years ago when the balloon payment comes due. Obama is up for re-election, and he has a mandate to make Joe the Plumber happy before November 2012. Investments in Open Source have long-term global returns that are difficult to demonstrate during a 30 second sound-bite on the nightly news. Regardless of how massive that ultimate ROI might be, it's not something that will put Barack back in office in 2012.
Sorry OSS, you are noble, just and worthy, but you've just got no chance of making it on American Idol.
In the mid 1980s, we had cable TV with bad grounding, sparks would jump from the tuner box to the TV and back when lightning would strike up to several miles to the north - was kinda cool, because you'd hear the arcing before the thunder - if the curtains were open you could see that the arcing happened in sync with the strikes (seemed delayed by a fraction of a second, capacitance in the line, I guess.)
Never had the big boom take out electronics on me, though last year we had a 50' oak tree 40' from the house take a strike that turned 1/3 of the trunk into splinters 8 and 9 feet long, some of which were shot across the yard 20' or so. Every computer in the house was on, none of them even blinked, that we could tell at least, the white flash coming in the windows was more than a little dazzling.
For C++, I like Qt - with it, you can have your Linux server do "distributed builds" for your netbook. You can also host your code in git or svn and manage your project in trac - all very easily installable and maintainable on your Linux box - I have a setup running at home for my hobby stuff just because it was so easy to do again after setting up at work. The QtCreator IDE is showing promise, but not 100% released yet.
As for hardware, I bought an eeeBox (Atom desktop) to replace my wife's 8 year old e-mail and browser machine - it's awesome, quiet, tiny, cheap, and 2x more powerful than the already adequate machine it replaced. Since that machine is left on 24-7, the reduced 20W power draw (down from 65W in the old machine) will pay for the purchase price in a couple of years. I'm trying to resist further temptation at least until the Freescale netbooks drop - I might still buy an Atom N280, but I'd like to see some competitive offerings first.
Focus on the business at hand (e.g. coding) and quit wasting time on infrastructure (version control, defect tracking, build systems, backup & recovery, server sizing, etc...).
In the past 2 years, I have spent 3490 hours on the "business at hand" (e.g. coding, documentation, meetings, etc.), 10 hours on infrastructure (setup and maintenance of trac, svn, backups, VPN) and 500 hours on lunch. It's a small company, I'm a programmer and the nominal back-end sys-admin.
We easily spend more time configuring people's POP & SMTP settings on their e-mail than we do on our trac and svn servers, which are used daily by 75% of the company.
The real infrastructure inefficiency happens when you give somebody the title "infrastructure guy" with no other responsibilities. Based on our experience, you should need one full time guy for roughly every 300 programmers. Problem is that he also configures people's e-mail, printer connectivity, etc. so when that 1/1000 programmer's support call comes, he's clueless.
Student with attitude gets authorities upset with her and ends up charged with disorderly conduct. Doesn't this happen at least 10 times a day somewhere?
I actually approve of what the Chinese businessman who allowed lead paint on millions of toys did to attone for his transgression (suicide). In reality, he probably got off light when you consider that there are at least hundreds, if not thousands of children with significant lifelong neurological disorders as a result of his greed and/or sloth.
On the other hand, he was likely silencing himself to avoid exposing other conspirators, probably in his family...
So, if someone wrongly incarcerates 5000 people for 3 months each, does it follow that they should be incarcerated themselves for 1250 years? Would that be the punishment fitting the crime?
The problem isn't that it was a commercially operated prison. The problem is that the payment structure was set up in such a way as to benefit the operator for an increased number of incarcerations. It shouldn't just be illegal, it should be unconstitutional for any contract or law to provide benefit to one party when another is found guilty of a crime.
Should be illegal - yes, might be made illegal in the next decade, yes. Might be implemented before we are all dead? Doubtful.
What's the point of that? Maybe you'd have a point if the public had to intervene - if there was no other recourse - but as is stands the damage is done and they've been caught. None of it will be fixed by killing them in some brutish rage.
In a system that doles out capital punishment, I think the broken cogs in that system could use some strong incentive to behave properly. If (when?) there's profits to be made in execution, the wronged will be more than emotionally scarred.
True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
Also operated on commercial grounds? Because the very concept of a commercial prison to me seems...something out of a really bad science fiction movie....
The Visitor wasn't science fiction - they did a pretty good job of portraying a real commercial prison.
Welcome to the U.S. of A. land of the fee, home of the depraved?
It might not be as thrilling as blowing something up, but the principles behind Foccault's pendulum and it's daily precession seem to fit the stated timescale and budget. If you've got appropriate facilities, you could have the students construct a model or two (maybe one big one outdoors and a smaller one in a more controlled environment), attempt to derive predictions about what's going to happen, then at the end of the experiment do some statistical analysis to see if the class as a whole performed better than chance at predicting the outcome.
The problem on a planet of many billion people who have recorded history over dozens generations is that finding a truly "new", "interesting", and "worthwhile" experiment that can be accomplished in 72 man-hours with minimal funding can be rather difficult. You could easily spend 72 man-hours on the problem selection research alone.
The cool thing about intro to physics courses is that they aren't concerned with breaking new ground, they get to present easily demonstrated and understood principles so that some of the students might be able to advance to real experiments later on.
Presumably before you filled it with beer, you'd have to empty the Budweiser out?
Using the term loosely, of course. Budweiser would be the appropriate thrust media to spray into an ocean or lake.
If you hooked a device like that up to a Guinness tanker you'd likely be arrested and prosecuted for high crimes, unless the jet-wash was directed at a football stadium or some-such.