Open Source (and Free Software, to a degree) have been retroactively defined. Google for "Open Source Definition", or "Debian Free Software Guidelines".
For free software, you can just read fsf.org to catch up on how that's being redefined on a regular basis.
Then again, if you're searching the guts of a function/method/subroutine, chances are you're coding poorly as it is and your functions are too long. Break them out so all you have to do is search for the names of the routines.
This is exactly why I can't put much educational weight into liberal arts.
Sure, Dante Aligheri spent a lot of time writing "The Divine Comedy". What it amounts to, is a rather self-absorbed view into political views and a comparison of him to someone regarded as a "master" in his time.
What makes this any more important than the average slashdot comment outside of a historical context?
It's good to see that there's at least a few sane people posting in this thread.
Kudos. I find it strange but not surprising that people are defending this... Really, the users (the children) should have been given a choice. Not everyone wants to learn about how a computer works, some people just want to use them.
Re:Sendmail? In a secure system
on
Hardening Linux
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I don't see the logic in your statement, at all.
Currently there is no compelling reason to buy an apple computer to run an alternative OS. Sure, you can run Linux and NetBSD, but not many people are doing that (well, perhaps on XServe, but I even doubt that). Virtual PC is bundled with Office for a reason, it doesn't actually sell many copies on it's own. I can't think of many people who enjoy spending most of their time in VPC. You can even run GNOME and KDE under the X11 layer if you want - nope, not many people doing that, either.
While this obviously isn't empirical data, I know plenty of mac users and not a single one of them are using macs primarily because of the hardware. This kind of counters your complete speculation.
I blew $2000 this year on an iMac because I wanted a nice computer that ran Mac OS X. I did the same last year on a laptop. There's no real benefit to buying a $2000 computer in this day and age without a compelling, exclusive reason. My PC's certainly didn't cost that much.
Personally, instead of this x86 bullshit, I'd rather they fixed the damn finder, already.
You don't want to buy the OS, you don't want to buy the hardware. You want to write programs for it, but you bitch about that as if it's the last thing you'd ever want to do.
5.x is the first BSD where they actually honor that you can do a direct upgrade. In previous versions, the recommended path was always reformat/reinstall, with the warning that upgrades was asking for it.
Frankly, having several 5.x servers deployed and dealing with the mess that was upgrading from 4.x, I'm happy to hear this.
I agree that there is a line, but I think you are making too many strong assertions here. Using a lot of personal examples doesn't always count for much.
For starters, 2 weeks to design and code anything of enough girth that requires design time is an insane deadline to meet, or code way to small to bother with UML. UML is for larger systems, and works nicely if you have a system like dia2code or Visio's setup that allow you to generate the classes from the diagrams.
I haven't investigated extreme programming much, frankly, the name turns me off. However, the loop of constant checking with the user, compared to a waterfall design where the code is expected to magically pop out working, sane and meets the user's expectations isn't exactly sound, either. I don't think many design methodologies make much sense, as they don't really account for variables much. However, extreme programming is a step in the right direction towards a better system, even if it's not it.
I once had to rewrite an entire development library because it sucked so hard.. took nearly 4 days...
OTOH you can't become too wedded to code reuse.. sometimes the spec is just different, and constantly modifying the same routine to do multiple things it wasn't designed to do creates an unmaintainable mess real quickly.. that's where refactoring and rewriting starts...
With those quotes extracted, do you see the problem you're presenting for yourself? Modifying the same routine constantly indicates a design flaw, not an invitation to throw more cruft at it. If you nip them early, they tend to not turn into giant messes in the long run.
You need to install the php-session port - the PHP modules are now separated into different ports to make life simpler. (It really is better on the administrator)
If you decrease time, you will decrease quality unless you increase money.
While your other points are right on the money, this is such B.S. that there's a whole profession surrounding it (Project Management), and tons of books on the subject. One could read The Cathedral and The Bazaar, The mythical man-month, or Death March and that point would be defeated in the first few paragraphs, with empirical evidence.
_Everything_ is a work in progress, deadlines are rarely met, or if they are the stress and rush is rarely worth the satisfaction of meeting the deadline.
An ever-extending deadline is an excuse to procrastinate. A deadline that encompasses too much is impossible to meet on time.
Between the lines there's a vast middle ground that works well for companies that know how to exploit it. Microsoft makes software geared around doing just that (and I've experienced personally how properly organizing and knowing your team's strengths and putting them on the right parts of the chain can not only meet your deadlines, but beat them leaving a week to blow what's left on the corp amex on expensive scotch.)
He sets his watch 3 minutes fast so he's "ahead of the world", and always takes advantage of those 5 or so minute waits to make lists of things to do and whatnot.
My wife does that with the alarm clock.
Every morning I see her get up, look at it reading 7:30, say "I've got 7 more minutes", hit the snooze button and go back to bed.
Oh yeah - check out Larry Wall's description of "Laziness" and see if that's the same "Laziness" you're describing compensating for.
As I understand it, Aspergers is normally characterized in "real-time" communication, as the afflicted either cannot organize their thoughts before communicating properly, or cannot focus on the conversation.
As a person with my own afflictions, I took it upon myself to study at least an overview of many of these "disorders".
What I find hilarious is that while people appropriately call them disorders, the stigma associated them is one of exclusivity - as if only/some/ people have them.
Read the DSM IV sometime - there are a few references on the web, and when you realize that the only people that don't have disorders are characters acted in some thursday night sitcom, you might have a rude awakening. If you want to dismiss it as a "soft science", remember that the next time your doctor offers you a prescription for your RSI troubles.
Psychology is a science, and as with most medical sciences, a good portion of guess work with miniscule emperical evidence or "case studies". However, the goal is not only to map out those who have serious problems, but everything. I'd shudder to think of the consequences if chemists around the world agreed that the components of air were pointless to study.
As a result, knowing even a "10,000 foot view" of psychology has an amazing effect on recognizing your own misgivings, mostly reactionary or autonomous. It can also help you isolate issues with others and smart people will learn to react to them appropriately. I find that all that most people know about Psych is that Freud says you want to fuck your mother and that coke is good food, of course, that boy in "Deliverance" sure could play a mean banjo.
Some people call this "Street Smarts", but for those intent on batch producing stickers to place on people so they can figure them out, "Psychology" will have to do.
To put it nicely, expecting perfection, or even a high-standing ideal out of anyone is a fault of yours, not anyone else's. You become the social equivalent of "Nick Burns, your company's computer guy" and are hated by many and loved by few. Everyone's limit is different of course, but realizing that the guy that has trouble forming sentences that other people understand, and the guy that just "doesn't know english", and how you treat them differently is more of a reflection on you than anyone else.
I'm willing to bet that a significant portion of the upper echelons of academia and big business are cracked in the head somehow - realistically, Fred and Wilma seem closer to aligned than most of the people I've met in those professions. The sheer demands on the psyche require at least a small bit of insanity, if not only a need to continually generate rationale for hubris.
No one likes to work with intolerant people, but everyone works with imperfect ones.
(egh, that was long - to be clear, the word "you" is abstract.)
That's why some of us camp here with a torch and lighter, light ourselves on fire, and then see if anyone can put us out.
It's much more entertaining that way. Even "real" computer geek can't do it most of the time. They're too busy flapping their arms and yelling "fire!" to figure out that if they just put it out, they'd have no reason to freak out.
Well, obviously your isolationist view is making a lot of difference.
Seriously, no one gives a shit about your ideas unless you have a backbone that makes them worth listening to. Otherwise, like you and I are right now, you're just bellowing in a sound-proof box on a crappy weblog. If you need an example, look at how political parties treat each other in the U.S. - no matter how good they are with a single policy, it's diverted away even by those who stand to gain nothing, but believe in the ideal that the party as a whole is a good thing. As a result, no one takes them seriously but themselves.
That's a false dilemma.. For an example, take a look at the dot-com bust, and take a look at what companies are demanding now out of techs.... What they were demanding (while the skills change, the bar remains the same) in about 1994 or so.
The reality is, those in the dot-com era that didn't know jack still don't know jack, and now they work jobs that pay jack. Ergo, the decrease in CS enrollment and the increase in enrollment in other fields, it's merely not very "sexy" anymore. The people who haven't chosen to go back to school have either risen to management, or gone to other jobs (in the case where there is no management left). Either way, they're out of the coding business.
My point is, as India requires more talent, they will get a lot of non-talent to supplant that need.. And similar to what happened here in the U.S., they will get paid great for a few years, inflate everything and then reality will set in and jobs will start getting cut, the loss in production (as numbers often weigh more than quality in the short-term) will cause them to raise their contract rates or reduce the salary of employees. This is not much different than what happened here. India is where the U.S. was at about... 7 years ago.
Vicodin makes me puke. They thought they'd give me oxycodone instead, which has a great history of addiction. Worked great, 3 weeks later after the operation, I was popping like 10 a day - someone pointed it out to me and I stopped. Yay. The bottle of Vicodin I do have is 40 pills for a damn toothache I was to get repaired the next week.
Vioxx is some scary shit, especially with how quick doctors are to prescribe it - I have a bag of samples here along with some celebrex, which were combined from two bags of each that I got from the same doctor for completely different ailments.
Regardless, I've done my rounds with all sorts of prescriptions for legitimate reasons (the mini-pharmacy I have is for a partially good reason and is mostly the result of one major ailment, the other "minor" one being a sporadic case of RSI), but I don't think the pills are the problem, other than the side effects.
Doctors (and I have a few of them in my family that would hate hearing this) are so quick to throw pills at the problem when there are simpler solutions to so many things - my doctor gave me a wrist brace for my RSI and a bucket of anti-inflammatories... I haven't even looked in the bag since I've got them, but I put that brace on and take a walk when my hands hurt. It's having a very positive effect.
It's your responsibility, not the doctor's, to research the side effects of your drugs - and unless you're in/serious/ pain, stay the hell away from a pain killer. The body is a natural healer and if you just target the cause of your pain, and reduce the frequency of the cause, you'll find that the body will do the rest.
The same goes for naturopathy - sure, some of it might work - but I'm inclined to believe that like prescription drugs, most of it just works "on accident" or over-corrects the problem, as we see here with Vioxx. A friend who is BiPolar once visited a Naturopath once... who recommended St. John's Wort. I wonder when that doesn't work, they'll suggest Snake Oil instead. "I don't know" would have been a better spent dollar.
Of course, if I were a doctor and getting "fix me" all day, I'd probably get lazy and throw pills at the problem too.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be scared to imagine if Mirabilis had to sell flowers.....
Or Apple had to sell produce...
Or Sun had to sell solar systems.
Open Source (and Free Software, to a degree) have been retroactively defined. Google for "Open Source Definition", or "Debian Free Software Guidelines".
For free software, you can just read fsf.org to catch up on how that's being redefined on a regular basis.
In INTERCAL, you just say "PLEASE".
Someone should give you an obscure math pun award.
I was wondering the same exact thing.
Then again, if you're searching the guts of a function/method/subroutine, chances are you're coding poorly as it is and your functions are too long. Break them out so all you have to do is search for the names of the routines.
My $.02, but it tends to be very effective.
This is exactly why I can't put much educational weight into liberal arts.
Sure, Dante Aligheri spent a lot of time writing "The Divine Comedy". What it amounts to, is a rather self-absorbed view into political views and a comparison of him to someone regarded as a "master" in his time.
What makes this any more important than the average slashdot comment outside of a historical context?
It's good to see that there's at least a few sane people posting in this thread.
Kudos. I find it strange but not surprising that people are defending this... Really, the users (the children) should have been given a choice. Not everyone wants to learn about how a computer works, some people just want to use them.
What, are you still using 8.11 or something?
How about coming back to modern times?
Most people here are too young for that.
Actually, I don't see the logic in your statement, at all.
Currently there is no compelling reason to buy an apple computer to run an alternative OS. Sure, you can run Linux and NetBSD, but not many people are doing that (well, perhaps on XServe, but I even doubt that). Virtual PC is bundled with Office for a reason, it doesn't actually sell many copies on it's own. I can't think of many people who enjoy spending most of their time in VPC. You can even run GNOME and KDE under the X11 layer if you want - nope, not many people doing that, either.
While this obviously isn't empirical data, I know plenty of mac users and not a single one of them are using macs primarily because of the hardware. This kind of counters your complete speculation.
I blew $2000 this year on an iMac because I wanted a nice computer that ran Mac OS X. I did the same last year on a laptop. There's no real benefit to buying a $2000 computer in this day and age without a compelling, exclusive reason. My PC's certainly didn't cost that much.
Personally, instead of this x86 bullshit, I'd rather they fixed the damn finder, already.
So let me get this straight....
You don't want to buy the OS, you don't want to buy the hardware. You want to write programs for it, but you bitch about that as if it's the last thing you'd ever want to do.
What is your motivation again?
5.x is the first BSD where they actually honor that you can do a direct upgrade. In previous versions, the recommended path was always reformat/reinstall, with the warning that upgrades was asking for it.
Frankly, having several 5.x servers deployed and dealing with the mess that was upgrading from 4.x, I'm happy to hear this.
I agree that there is a line, but I think you are making too many strong assertions here. Using a lot of personal examples doesn't always count for much.
For starters, 2 weeks to design and code anything of enough girth that requires design time is an insane deadline to meet, or code way to small to bother with UML. UML is for larger systems, and works nicely if you have a system like dia2code or Visio's setup that allow you to generate the classes from the diagrams.
I haven't investigated extreme programming much, frankly, the name turns me off. However, the loop of constant checking with the user, compared to a waterfall design where the code is expected to magically pop out working, sane and meets the user's expectations isn't exactly sound, either. I don't think many design methodologies make much sense, as they don't really account for variables much. However, extreme programming is a step in the right direction towards a better system, even if it's not it.
I once had to rewrite an entire development library because it sucked so hard.. took nearly 4 days...
OTOH you can't become too wedded to code reuse.. sometimes the spec is just different, and constantly modifying the same routine to do multiple things it wasn't designed to do creates an unmaintainable mess real quickly.. that's where refactoring and rewriting starts...
With those quotes extracted, do you see the problem you're presenting for yourself? Modifying the same routine constantly indicates a design flaw, not an invitation to throw more cruft at it. If you nip them early, they tend to not turn into giant messes in the long run.
You need to install the php-session port - the PHP modules are now separated into different ports to make life simpler. (It really is better on the administrator)
If you decrease time, you will decrease quality unless you increase money.
While your other points are right on the money, this is such B.S. that there's a whole profession surrounding it (Project Management), and tons of books on the subject. One could read The Cathedral and The Bazaar, The mythical man-month, or Death March and that point would be defeated in the first few paragraphs, with empirical evidence.
_Everything_ is a work in progress, deadlines are rarely met, or if they are the stress and rush is rarely worth the satisfaction of meeting the deadline.
An ever-extending deadline is an excuse to procrastinate. A deadline that encompasses too much is impossible to meet on time.
Between the lines there's a vast middle ground that works well for companies that know how to exploit it. Microsoft makes software geared around doing just that (and I've experienced personally how properly organizing and knowing your team's strengths and putting them on the right parts of the chain can not only meet your deadlines, but beat them leaving a week to blow what's left on the corp amex on expensive scotch.)
He sets his watch 3 minutes fast so he's "ahead of the world", and always takes advantage of those 5 or so minute waits to make lists of things to do and whatnot.
My wife does that with the alarm clock.
Every morning I see her get up, look at it reading 7:30, say "I've got 7 more minutes", hit the snooze button and go back to bed.
Oh yeah - check out Larry Wall's description of "Laziness" and see if that's the same "Laziness" you're describing compensating for.
As I understand it, Aspergers is normally characterized in "real-time" communication, as the afflicted either cannot organize their thoughts before communicating properly, or cannot focus on the conversation.
/some/ people have them.
As a person with my own afflictions, I took it upon myself to study at least an overview of many of these "disorders".
What I find hilarious is that while people appropriately call them disorders, the stigma associated them is one of exclusivity - as if only
Read the DSM IV sometime - there are a few references on the web, and when you realize that the only people that don't have disorders are characters acted in some thursday night sitcom, you might have a rude awakening. If you want to dismiss it as a "soft science", remember that the next time your doctor offers you a prescription for your RSI troubles.
Psychology is a science, and as with most medical sciences, a good portion of guess work with miniscule emperical evidence or "case studies". However, the goal is not only to map out those who have serious problems, but everything. I'd shudder to think of the consequences if chemists around the world agreed that the components of air were pointless to study.
As a result, knowing even a "10,000 foot view" of psychology has an amazing effect on recognizing your own misgivings, mostly reactionary or autonomous. It can also help you isolate issues with others and smart people will learn to react to them appropriately. I find that all that most people know about Psych is that Freud says you want to fuck your mother and that coke is good food, of course, that boy in "Deliverance" sure could play a mean banjo.
Some people call this "Street Smarts", but for those intent on batch producing stickers to place on people so they can figure them out, "Psychology" will have to do.
To put it nicely, expecting perfection, or even a high-standing ideal out of anyone is a fault of yours, not anyone else's. You become the social equivalent of "Nick Burns, your company's computer guy" and are hated by many and loved by few. Everyone's limit is different of course, but realizing that the guy that has trouble forming sentences that other people understand, and the guy that just "doesn't know english", and how you treat them differently is more of a reflection on you than anyone else.
I'm willing to bet that a significant portion of the upper echelons of academia and big business are cracked in the head somehow - realistically, Fred and Wilma seem closer to aligned than most of the people I've met in those professions. The sheer demands on the psyche require at least a small bit of insanity, if not only a need to continually generate rationale for hubris.
No one likes to work with intolerant people, but everyone works with imperfect ones.
(egh, that was long - to be clear, the word "you" is abstract.)
You just made my day. Thank you.
That's why some of us camp here with a torch and lighter, light ourselves on fire, and then see if anyone can put us out.
It's much more entertaining that way. Even "real" computer geek can't do it most of the time. They're too busy flapping their arms and yelling "fire!" to figure out that if they just put it out, they'd have no reason to freak out.
Yes, because women are so victimized at the Chanel counter.
Seriously.
Bring me holographic monitors, and I'll bring you a person interested in 3d UI's.
Until then, uh, I'll stick to counter-strike. I'm not trying to get any real work done there.
Well, obviously your isolationist view is making a lot of difference.
Seriously, no one gives a shit about your ideas unless you have a backbone that makes them worth listening to. Otherwise, like you and I are right now, you're just bellowing in a sound-proof box on a crappy weblog. If you need an example, look at how political parties treat each other in the U.S. - no matter how good they are with a single policy, it's diverted away even by those who stand to gain nothing, but believe in the ideal that the party as a whole is a good thing. As a result, no one takes them seriously but themselves.
That's a false dilemma.. For an example, take a look at the dot-com bust, and take a look at what companies are demanding now out of techs.... What they were demanding (while the skills change, the bar remains the same) in about 1994 or so.
... 7 years ago.
The reality is, those in the dot-com era that didn't know jack still don't know jack, and now they work jobs that pay jack. Ergo, the decrease in CS enrollment and the increase in enrollment in other fields, it's merely not very "sexy" anymore. The people who haven't chosen to go back to school have either risen to management, or gone to other jobs (in the case where there is no management left). Either way, they're out of the coding business.
My point is, as India requires more talent, they will get a lot of non-talent to supplant that need.. And similar to what happened here in the U.S., they will get paid great for a few years, inflate everything and then reality will set in and jobs will start getting cut, the loss in production (as numbers often weigh more than quality in the short-term) will cause them to raise their contract rates or reduce the salary of employees. This is not much different than what happened here. India is where the U.S. was at about
Vicodin makes me puke. They thought they'd give me oxycodone instead, which has a great history of addiction. Worked great, 3 weeks later after the operation, I was popping like 10 a day - someone pointed it out to me and I stopped. Yay. The bottle of Vicodin I do have is 40 pills for a damn toothache I was to get repaired the next week.
/serious/ pain, stay the hell away from a pain killer. The body is a natural healer and if you just target the cause of your pain, and reduce the frequency of the cause, you'll find that the body will do the rest.
Vioxx is some scary shit, especially with how quick doctors are to prescribe it - I have a bag of samples here along with some celebrex, which were combined from two bags of each that I got from the same doctor for completely different ailments.
Regardless, I've done my rounds with all sorts of prescriptions for legitimate reasons (the mini-pharmacy I have is for a partially good reason and is mostly the result of one major ailment, the other "minor" one being a sporadic case of RSI), but I don't think the pills are the problem, other than the side effects.
Doctors (and I have a few of them in my family that would hate hearing this) are so quick to throw pills at the problem when there are simpler solutions to so many things - my doctor gave me a wrist brace for my RSI and a bucket of anti-inflammatories... I haven't even looked in the bag since I've got them, but I put that brace on and take a walk when my hands hurt. It's having a very positive effect.
It's your responsibility, not the doctor's, to research the side effects of your drugs - and unless you're in
The same goes for naturopathy - sure, some of it might work - but I'm inclined to believe that like prescription drugs, most of it just works "on accident" or over-corrects the problem, as we see here with Vioxx. A friend who is BiPolar once visited a Naturopath once... who recommended St. John's Wort. I wonder when that doesn't work, they'll suggest Snake Oil instead. "I don't know" would have been a better spent dollar.
Of course, if I were a doctor and getting "fix me" all day, I'd probably get lazy and throw pills at the problem too.
You think they might be a little distracted?
Seriously, where the fuck are your priorities?