Git wasn't really designed for Windows (where you lack the fork() call and must do everything using CreateProcess()-like API), and therefore the Cygwin port or the state-of-the-art in Git for Windows is horribly slow and inconvenient to use.
Documentation is not optimal either; in some places you need to get accustomed with 2 or 3 different terms meaning the same thing, and often you must dig under the hood and learn how the underlying storage works in order to grasp the high-level functions (which doesn't happen in Mercurial's case, for example).
For me the #1 blocker is the Windows thing because I'm not an idealist and I need to compromise, I suspect it's even more true in the corporate world.
Sun released the patents only under their Creative OSI-approved license. The rest of the open source software, including GNU-based or MPL-based, is still in the air.
This creates the precedent to have open source GNU-based programs that violate the patents and Creative-based programs that are perfectly legal.
It certainly seems like a smart thing to do from Sun's point of view (trying to attract open source developers to their license scheme by giving access to software patents).
>> IBM wants to sell, Lenovo wants to buy. No harm, no foul.
There is no connection between the first sentence and the second. In order to determine if there is any harm or not, a lot of factors need to be considered, mainly related to whether or not a company will increase what economists call "market power" and will get closer to a monopol status.
>> It's funny, the land of freedom and capitalism is taking steps that would make a communist plutocracy proud.
There is such a term in economy called "market power", which describes companies that have key resources and strategic positions on the market. In those cases, the "invisible hand" of offer and demand, that balances prices on the market, no longer works, because a firm is clearly advantaged compared to the others and in a position to get a monopoly status (Does Microsoft ring any bells?:) ). In those cases, the government is expected and does regulate economic activity in order to re-balance the market.
I'm not saying that this is the case here; however, simply adjusting the balance doesn't mark this approach as communist. Depending on your position on the political spectrum, you might find this implication of government into the market more or less suitable. Still, no matter that, it is still far away from communist.
>> First, the illusion of anonymity -- an illusion because Internet use can be easily tracked
"Easily tracked" comes most often in conjunction with peer to peer and movie/audio sharing. The solution for this is encryption, and it's quite a popular Slashdot topic when it comes to peer to peer and sharing files. If the traffic would be encrypted, then there would be no more RIAA law-suits and debates because they couldn't figure out what does the traffic represent.
Sadly, the technology allowing anonymous traffic would also allow this kind of activities. If you ask me, the right to anonymity should be above all, but it kinda makes you sad when you think how encryption could be used by these molesters in order to avoid police, FBI and such.
'upholding the public sense of morality is not even a legitimate state interest.'
Sure.
But how about providing suitable ratings, movie-like, in order to guide minors/children and to inform them about the content that they're about to view? Should that be a legitimate state interest in an ideal world?
Am I the only one reading on Slashdot: "The Race Is On For.net" and thinking that Microsoft launched some sort of competition for their.NET platform?:-)
>> The biggest problem with search engines is that they return too many answers not too few. [...] What we need is ways to make the answer set smaller, not larger.
The problem that annoys you is not the size of the answer set, but the lack of a proper sorting function (by relevance) to satisfy you. The fact that you find your desired answer at the 10th or the 30th position is a sign that sorting doesn't work like you'd expect it to. It has nothing to do with the size of the answer set.
I don't want a smaller answer set, I want a bigger one. As long as the sorting function works like expected, I always want to see the results sorted by relevance, and I want to have a bigger pool of those so that the first one is truly the most relevant.
From https://www.ciphirebeta.com/about/facts.html:
Q: Are you going to publish your source code? A: Yes. Once the code is stable and we've had independent code audits, we'll publish the source code.
Hmm, I wonder if this practice is popular among wanna-be open-source security projects. For a regular software project, I'd expect the normal cycle to be: open source it, gather feedback, improve it, and then repeat the cycle.
However, they seem to do it in another order. Is this due to the fact that it's a security product? I don't see why they would do things differently, because as far as I understand it's still an "under construction" project for "testing purposes" without any implied guarantees. More eyes on the source earlier means sooner quality product delivery.
I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.
Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.
However, in open source, the freedom to fork is often given as an excuse for allowing one person to be the benevolent dictator of the whole thing. On good merits, it seems, because many argue that if it weren't for that, things would never get done and stuff. But this "dictator" stuff gives the project owner a lot of power and a lot of discretion, and someone said once "power corrupts".
Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?
This is not the first time when Google (and search engines in general) changed how we do things.
Nowadays copyrighters use Google to search for potential violations of their intelectual property. Plagiarism is easy to detect nowadays thanks to Google as well. Instead of using rather expensive systems in order to search for duplicate work, teachers are now one search away in distinguishing original work from the rest.
I think it's great that this kind of phenomenen starts to happen in open source.
Asa Dotzler is trilled as well. According to this, he thought "blogs would become a more important tool in Mozilla communications, offering a new level of insight and transparency".
As people grow wiser and more experienced inside a company, they tend to move upwards towards mentoring/management-like activities.
Probably because their experience with coding makes them more suitable for taking decisions regarding project lead and also more suitable for giving answers to questions (in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again).
I've noticed that most companies do this - use their internal pool of experienced programmers in order to push them into mentoring/management positions, instead of throwing the management openings at the public and accepting CVs for it.
On one side, it's a good practice, because only those with previous experience inside the company will have access to those places, and by the time they get there they should know the process inside out. On the other hand, not throwing those positions towards the public makes them lose a full range of potential employees.
This is the classic problem of freedom versus security.
If all documents were open, terorists could abuse them and find out presidential itineraries and stuff. If all documents would be private, the whole point of Freedom of Information Act would collapse.
The issue is finding the balance and drawing the line somewhere in the middle, so that security is still decent, but freedom is still kept.
My company has around 100 employees, and our net connection is a 1 Mbps line. Needless to say that not all of us can afford a decent 128 kbps streaming.
This new format is good not only for dial-up but also for broadband corporate connections that seem to die to a crawl when people start using current streaming technologies over them.
>> Linux is loaded with applications, everything you need.
That doesn't seem true to me. There are lots of areas where Linux applications could use improvement. Photoshop for example (GIMP, while on the good track, is still way to go in this area).
I mainly agree with the points outlined, but not everything is perfect, and Linux still has some catch-up to do in some areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Git wasn't really designed for Windows (where you lack the fork() call and must do everything using CreateProcess()-like API), and therefore the Cygwin port or the state-of-the-art in Git for Windows is horribly slow and inconvenient to use. Documentation is not optimal either; in some places you need to get accustomed with 2 or 3 different terms meaning the same thing, and often you must dig under the hood and learn how the underlying storage works in order to grasp the high-level functions (which doesn't happen in Mercurial's case, for example). For me the #1 blocker is the Windows thing because I'm not an idealist and I need to compromise, I suspect it's even more true in the corporate world.
Lisp is the answer. Paul Graham explains it at http://paulgraham.com/icad.html .
Sun released the patents only under their Creative OSI-approved license. The rest of the open source software, including GNU-based or MPL-based, is still in the air.
This creates the precedent to have open source GNU-based programs that violate the patents and Creative-based programs that are perfectly legal.
It certainly seems like a smart thing to do from Sun's point of view (trying to attract open source developers to their license scheme by giving access to software patents).
I wonder how much it would take Google to come up with something similar.
Another case where competition is benefic for the end-users.
>> Let's see if the Linux community can match his generosity.
It already did. Several times.
Think of all those "donations" that happen implicitly every time a poor guy in a 3rd world country uses a legal Linux box instead of commiting piracy.
This is kind of "give me all your money and I'll donate 5% to charity!" compared to "I don't want any money from you".
>> IBM wants to sell, Lenovo wants to buy. No harm, no foul.
:) ). In those cases, the government is expected and does regulate economic activity in order to re-balance the market.
There is no connection between the first sentence and the second. In order to determine if there is any harm or not, a lot of factors need to be considered, mainly related to whether or not a company will increase what economists call "market power" and will get closer to a monopol status.
>> It's funny, the land of freedom and capitalism is taking steps that would make a communist plutocracy proud.
There is such a term in economy called "market power", which describes companies that have key resources and strategic positions on the market. In those cases, the "invisible hand" of offer and demand, that balances prices on the market, no longer works, because a firm is clearly advantaged compared to the others and in a position to get a monopoly status (Does Microsoft ring any bells?
I'm not saying that this is the case here; however, simply adjusting the balance doesn't mark this approach as communist. Depending on your position on the political spectrum, you might find this implication of government into the market more or less suitable. Still, no matter that, it is still far away from communist.
>> First, the illusion of anonymity -- an illusion because Internet use can be easily tracked
"Easily tracked" comes most often in conjunction with peer to peer and movie/audio sharing. The solution for this is encryption, and it's quite a popular Slashdot topic when it comes to peer to peer and sharing files. If the traffic would be encrypted, then there would be no more RIAA law-suits and debates because they couldn't figure out what does the traffic represent.
Sadly, the technology allowing anonymous traffic would also allow this kind of activities. If you ask me, the right to anonymity should be above all, but it kinda makes you sad when you think how encryption could be used by these molesters in order to avoid police, FBI and such.
In addition, there are organizations with the aim of providing IT technologies to 3rd world countries, that need this kind of donation.
A Pentium 2 with 64 MB of memory could be top of the tech-tree for some people in African countries.
'upholding the public sense of morality is not even a legitimate state interest.'
Sure.
But how about providing suitable ratings, movie-like, in order to guide minors/children and to inform them about the content that they're about to view? Should that be a legitimate state interest in an ideal world?
This reminds me of the wonderful essay of Paul Graham, What You Can't Say (which could be easily transformed in What You Can't Watch).
Am I the only one reading on Slashdot: "The Race Is On For .net" and thinking that Microsoft launched some sort of competition for their .NET platform? :-)
>> The biggest problem with search engines is that they return too many answers not too few. [...] What we need is ways to make the answer set smaller, not larger.
The problem that annoys you is not the size of the answer set, but the lack of a proper sorting function (by relevance) to satisfy you. The fact that you find your desired answer at the 10th or the 30th position is a sign that sorting doesn't work like you'd expect it to. It has nothing to do with the size of the answer set.
I don't want a smaller answer set, I want a bigger one. As long as the sorting function works like expected, I always want to see the results sorted by relevance, and I want to have a bigger pool of those so that the first one is truly the most relevant.
From https://www.ciphirebeta.com/about/facts.html :
Q: Are you going to publish your source code?
A: Yes. Once the code is stable and we've had independent code audits, we'll publish the source code.
Hmm, I wonder if this practice is popular among wanna-be open-source security projects. For a regular software project, I'd expect the normal cycle to be: open source it, gather feedback, improve it, and then repeat the cycle.
However, they seem to do it in another order. Is this due to the fact that it's a security product? I don't see why they would do things differently, because as far as I understand it's still an "under construction" project for "testing purposes" without any implied guarantees. More eyes on the source earlier means sooner quality product delivery.
I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.
Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.
However, in open source, the freedom to fork is often given as an excuse for allowing one person to be the benevolent dictator of the whole thing. On good merits, it seems, because many argue that if it weren't for that, things would never get done and stuff. But this "dictator" stuff gives the project owner a lot of power and a lot of discretion, and someone said once "power corrupts".
Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?
This is not the first time when Google (and search engines in general) changed how we do things.
Nowadays copyrighters use Google to search for potential violations of their intelectual property. Plagiarism is easy to detect nowadays thanks to Google as well. Instead of using rather expensive systems in order to search for duplicate work, teachers are now one search away in distinguishing original work from the rest.
>> the difficulties posed to information privacy by the widespread use of ID numbers to verify identity
So they actually used an "username" with the purpose of representing both an username and a password.
That is a security issue by design. What were they thinking?
I think it's great that this kind of phenomenen starts to happen in open source. Asa Dotzler is trilled as well. According to this, he thought "blogs would become a more important tool in Mozilla communications, offering a new level of insight and transparency".
As people grow wiser and more experienced inside a company, they tend to move upwards towards mentoring/management-like activities.
Probably because their experience with coding makes them more suitable for taking decisions regarding project lead and also more suitable for giving answers to questions (in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again).
I've noticed that most companies do this - use their internal pool of experienced programmers in order to push them into mentoring/management positions, instead of throwing the management openings at the public and accepting CVs for it.
On one side, it's a good practice, because only those with previous experience inside the company will have access to those places, and by the time they get there they should know the process inside out. On the other hand, not throwing those positions towards the public makes them lose a full range of potential employees.
Robert Zemeckis was also the director of Forrest Gump. This movie has the potential to have a pretty wild success.
This is the classic problem of freedom versus security.
If all documents were open, terorists could abuse them and find out presidential itineraries and stuff. If all documents would be private, the whole point of Freedom of Information Act would collapse.
The issue is finding the balance and drawing the line somewhere in the middle, so that security is still decent, but freedom is still kept.
My company has around 100 employees, and our net connection is a 1 Mbps line. Needless to say that not all of us can afford a decent 128 kbps streaming.
This new format is good not only for dial-up but also for broadband corporate connections that seem to die to a crawl when people start using current streaming technologies over them.
>> Linux is loaded with applications, everything you need.
That doesn't seem true to me. There are lots of areas where Linux applications could use improvement. Photoshop for example (GIMP, while on the good track, is still way to go in this area).
I mainly agree with the points outlined, but not everything is perfect, and Linux still has some catch-up to do in some areas.