I am in a small (8 programmers company). Even with this little people, management only gets involved once every few months in a review of the project, and this reviews always add new "features" (some of them forcing to rewrite a good part of the project and changing its philosophy).
The project itself was thought to use a prototype life cycle, adding new features and rewritting and redesigning it when needed. Of course, there has never been time to rewrite it now that we know (or we think we know) what we want, so we have to fight with code that sometimes does just the opposite of what would be logic.
The project management has tried to manage this adjusting more and more time for "bug tracking" and "alpha testing". Pointless, because more time in these stages gives the company management more time to add features.
Of course, when something crashes the company management feels that the one to blame are the programmers instead of them.
It is not a matter of hindsight. You can say that if you are talking of SMTP or something alike. When BT was developed, it should have known that allowing any device to connect to yours is a security risk. And it should have been known that 90% of the users won't RTFM if its device just works. So, by default, BT devices should have been set by default to connect only to known devices. Or, at least, the first time a customer uses it, he should be asked. The reason it was not done was probably it would make easier for John Doe to connect his devices without really knowing not even the most basic things about them, and to make people think that the technology was "easy to use" and "secure" ("if I do not need to do anything to keep my BT configured to be safe, then it must be safe, isn'it?")
I swear that including OpenSource in the Bill is more because it is just a new buzzword than anything else. I do not want to discuss the matter of more secure/less secure, because that is not the issue here; the issue is the safety of the vote results.
I think that the main threat to an electoral process will come from the company providing the service (as the single point of failure); and they can just make all of the code completely Open Source and just load in the machines another compiled, thus making the complete Open Source useless.
The big issue in this Bill is remind that votes should be verifiable against mistakes and manipulations and, hence, a receipt should be print to:
a) Asure all the people that the results are correct, and hence there is no room for complaining, and
b) Asure all the people that the results are correct and so the new elected officials meet all the moral requirements to be obeyed (as long as the law stablishes).
The Open Source "buzzword" is more harmful than anything, because a Bill with a simple objective now has two and this can distract people (what happens if the Congress do accept that the software is Open Source but does not require the receipts to be prompt? A minor gain for a major loss).
I have browsed through the comments and I am shocked to see that people comments show that the only thing that should worry BoA about this issue is the PR problem or if they piss off some VIP by revealing its data. One of them even claimed that the bank could benefit from this.
The data of a company is one of its most important actives, and forever (long before the computers hage) the companies have tried to lock it, because it shows everything about its costumers, but also it shows everything about the companies themselves.
Now if a bank gets hold of that data, they can browse and find out which are the good customers(a lot of transactions, no problems with payment or delays, big benefits) and try to offer them better conditions than their current ones and which one are the bad customers (little movement, debts, bad financial situation) and must be rejected if they go to their bank.
Aside from the legal and PR stances, the companies own interest is to protect its data, and it is enough to make me sure that some heads have been already cut...
My name is Zambeze Nile. As chief of intelligence of the late and loved president Laurent Kabila, I have come in contact with the current address of the owner of the LokiTorrent site. Having heard of his delictive acts and of the outrage that they have caused to the honest, law-lover members of the Slashdot (/.) community, I would like to help you to bring him to the justice, by sending some of my best men to capture him.
Unfortunately, due to the precarious state of the country, our department can not afford the cost of the operation. So we ask you to use the paypal button that comes with this e-mail to help to provide us funding for the salaries, travel tickets and legal help (if any) for my men.
Please distribute this e-mail as widely as possible to make quicker to send that thief to justice.
Yours sincerely, Mr. Zambeze Nile.
Let me state that the more generous you are, the quicker you will get to recover the floating TWENTY MILLIONS DOLLARS ($20.000.000) that exists in every Nigerian bank.
You can also see it from Microsoft's point of view: "Hello, Microsoft, we are some people that want to authenticate other people and we need you to authenticate you. You may have not heard about us, or maybe you have and you know we have no real money that could be used to pay for liabilities if we do the things wrong, but wouldn't it be good for you to have that new security hole on your OS? And yes, we may be good guys today, but tomorrow maybe we'll have left the project and the certificates will be in who knows what hands."
I do not mean that some money doesn't help, but there are other reasons here too...
I do not understand how people can be so cinnic. They do believe municipal WiFi is free? If the city town spends money on it, then it will have to recover them from somewhere else (maybe raising the taxes to all the population, maybe giving less funding to an area that may be more important, or maybe by charging the users -as any company-). It can't just assume its costs and get in red for that.
I think the true reason/.ers like it is because, beeing usually more computer savvy -and having all of them internet- they want their neighbours that do not connect to share the connection costs.
BTW, a previous topic did state that europeans are switching from a public telephonic network to a private one because it is better... nothing more far from reality. Companies that provide social services (Postal, Communications) were often owned by the states(that granted them the monopoly) to ensure that they did provide their service to everyone, even if it was not economical (for example, providing postal service for remote small towns, where the cost of going and check if there is something to send is always bigger than any expected revenue). The reason of privatizing them now has been to allow more competence and to avoid that a state locks its country for other EU companies, and now to get the same social benefits the prefered way is for the state to sponsor them (and I can tell that some of the canges have been for worse; because the greed of the companies to win a contract and earn money often can be noted in the QoS).
It would be an abuse of monopoly if Microsoft did something as "the only tool that will work on Windows is ours" or even "we will allow more tools but ours will be always, by default, available".
If neither of these are true, then it is just a new branch of its bussiness that does not support on its monopoly, and therefore completaly legal and ethical.
If they were telling you that in September, 30 of 2050 the maximum temperature at your city will be 29.5C, it would be. But the think is quite simpler, they just calculate how much energy is heating the earth, how much is dissipated, and the difference is the global (note the "global" word) warming. In some places, the "warming" may even cause a colder climate cause to streams changing, and in general it will lead to more extreme temperature changes during the year until the atmosphera patterns adapt to this effect.
A little more marketing is needed... to get people to accept that the Earth is suffering, you shoud have to tell something like:
"The other people (not you) is responsible for the global warming and the other people (not you) must start using energy more efficiently and consuming less"
Saudi Arabia may be rich, but if its wealth is not distributed the poor men in Saudi Arabia will find that of little use.
Things are not always black or white. Being poor does not make a man a terrorist. But a lot of poverty will create a good environment for the radicals the meet. I mean, I am pretty sure knows "that guy" that is a little more aggresive than the others and claims for justice "at any price", but when he says that in the middle of a lot of people who just want to get a life he is ignored or he even has the police sent to him.
But when that "same guy" speaks to people who hate the police that protects the richs and that do not have a way to "get a life", he will find many people that will listen to him. And some of them that will help to provide him information and materials. And a few that will join him in his fight.
You can't help someone getting a gun, or a car, and going into a rampage killing anyone until he is arrested. But getting the people to see these acts as crimes that must be avoided, instead of acts of justice/revenge that must be kept until the victory.
And for the terrorist leaders been wealthy, it is not strange that, with the constant need of money that these groups, those who can afford it can "buy" power, but those exceptions do not mean that all the terrorist are rich; it is just that some rich has become crazy or the hate climate has expanded from its original nest.
And just for the record, if someone did invade my country I'd like to see the politics fighting for it as hard as Arafat did... I am not saying that I would vote Arafat (it looks like he ended being pretty corrupt) but I can help wonder how much whould have Bush done for his country if he was in the situation Arafat was...
Or maybe he did convince them that going against the kid or his parents would not make much more (because they do not have it) and that it will make more profit suing a big company (because the big companies do have money and the juries are prone to condemn them).
There are more of these issues in Stella Awards, although this case is not covered yet.
If Sourceforge tries to force a change of licenses, it is very likely that sooner than later there will appear new sites to host the orphaned projects. Maybe with a lots of ADs to get money, but something will appear.
The LGPL will be covered by the Commercial GPL? Many of the protocol implementations come with it. Anyway, after RTFA it seems that maybe it is not so important, the OSI does not decide which licenses are valid, it just enforces some of them, so those approved by the OSI would still be in use (Or at least this is what I understood from it)
What I suffer more for are for design docs. I am not askind ERD, DFD or UML, but inline docs. For functionality docs there exist automated ways to make sure that developers write a minimum documentation (v.g., checkstyle can force people to document all Java methods if they want to commit them to CVS). The trouble is when I see a code (and I am not refering to OSS only) that performs the functionality in what looks like an odd way, just because the programmer did not care to write that "if you do it in the way you are thinking, you'll find those troubles".
And, in a code that is tipically subject to change by a larger group of developers (and with less formal and informal communication channels) this can lead to adding the same bug again and again...
Creationism just says that there is no evolution. It comes from reading literally the Genesis that says that God directly created all the life forms as they are. So they are mutually exclusive.
Some people may point out that God was out there "pushing the things". This is a question of faith, so I won't waste my time fighting it (it is not the theme of the article). But, for God's sake, do not scream "God" anything something is complex or hard to explain, because "God" explains everything (and for this reason, "God" is a bad explanation for anything). It was the way the men at the Middle Age did think and it did not serve them well, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
I am in a small (8 programmers company). Even with this little people, management only gets involved once every few months in a review of the project, and this reviews always add new "features" (some of them forcing to rewrite a good part of the project and changing its philosophy).
The project itself was thought to use a prototype life cycle, adding new features and rewritting and redesigning it when needed. Of course, there has never been time to rewrite it now that we know (or we think we know) what we want, so we have to fight with code that sometimes does just the opposite of what would be logic.
The project management has tried to manage this adjusting more and more time for "bug tracking" and "alpha testing". Pointless, because more time in these stages gives the company management more time to add features.
Of course, when something crashes the company management feels that the one to blame are the programmers instead of them.
And by the way, I'm not Dilbert.
It would be him if it was just an X
It is not a matter of hindsight. You can say that if you are talking of SMTP or something alike. When BT was developed, it should have known that allowing any device to connect to yours is a security risk. And it should have been known that 90% of the users won't RTFM if its device just works. So, by default, BT devices should have been set by default to connect only to known devices. Or, at least, the first time a customer uses it, he should be asked. The reason it was not done was probably it would make easier for John Doe to connect his devices without really knowing not even the most basic things about them, and to make people think that the technology was "easy to use" and "secure" ("if I do not need to do anything to keep my BT configured to be safe, then it must be safe, isn'it?")
I swear that including OpenSource in the Bill is more because it is just a new buzzword than anything else. I do not want to discuss the matter of more secure/less secure, because that is not the issue here; the issue is the safety of the vote results.
I think that the main threat to an electoral process will come from the company providing the service (as the single point of failure); and they can just make all of the code completely Open Source and just load in the machines another compiled, thus making the complete Open Source useless.
The big issue in this Bill is remind that votes should be verifiable against mistakes and manipulations and, hence, a receipt should be print to:
a) Asure all the people that the results are correct, and hence there is no room for complaining, and
b) Asure all the people that the results are correct and so the new elected officials meet all the moral requirements to be obeyed (as long as the law stablishes).
The Open Source "buzzword" is more harmful than anything, because a Bill with a simple objective now has two and this can distract people (what happens if the Congress do accept that the software is Open Source but does not require the receipts to be prompt? A minor gain for a major loss).
I have browsed through the comments and I am shocked to see that people comments show that the only thing that should worry BoA about this issue is the PR problem or if they piss off some VIP by revealing its data. One of them even claimed that the bank could benefit from this.
The data of a company is one of its most important actives, and forever (long before the computers hage) the companies have tried to lock it, because it shows everything about its costumers, but also it shows everything about the companies themselves.
Now if a bank gets hold of that data, they can browse and find out which are the good customers(a lot of transactions, no problems with payment or delays, big benefits) and try to offer them better conditions than their current ones and which one are the bad customers (little movement, debts, bad financial situation) and must be rejected if they go to their bank.
Aside from the legal and PR stances, the companies own interest is to protect its data, and it is enough to make me sure that some heads have been already cut...
Dear Mr CowboyMcNeal:
My name is Zambeze Nile. As chief of intelligence of the late and loved president Laurent Kabila, I have come in contact with the current address of the owner of the LokiTorrent site. Having heard of his delictive acts and of the outrage that they have caused to the honest, law-lover members of the Slashdot (/.) community, I would like to help you to bring him to the justice, by sending some of my best men to capture him.
Unfortunately, due to the precarious state of the country, our department can not afford the cost of the operation. So we ask you to use the paypal button that comes with this e-mail to help to provide us funding for the salaries, travel tickets and legal help (if any) for my men.
Please distribute this e-mail as widely as possible to make quicker to send that thief to justice.
Yours sincerely, Mr. Zambeze Nile.
Let me state that the more generous you are, the quicker you will get to recover the floating TWENTY MILLIONS DOLLARS ($20.000.000) that exists in every Nigerian bank.
You can also see it from Microsoft's point of view: "Hello, Microsoft, we are some people that want to authenticate other people and we need you to authenticate you. You may have not heard about us, or maybe you have and you know we have no real money that could be used to pay for liabilities if we do the things wrong, but wouldn't it be good for you to have that new security hole on your OS? And yes, we may be good guys today, but tomorrow maybe we'll have left the project and the certificates will be in who knows what hands."
I do not mean that some money doesn't help, but there are other reasons here too...
I do not understand how people can be so cinnic. They do believe municipal WiFi is free? If the city town spends money on it, then it will have to recover them from somewhere else (maybe raising the taxes to all the population, maybe giving less funding to an area that may be more important, or maybe by charging the users -as any company-). It can't just assume its costs and get in red for that.
/.ers like it is because, beeing usually more computer savvy -and having all of them internet- they want their neighbours that do not connect to share the connection costs.
I think the true reason
BTW, a previous topic did state that europeans are switching from a public telephonic network to a private one because it is better... nothing more far from reality. Companies that provide social services (Postal, Communications) were often owned by the states(that granted them the monopoly) to ensure that they did provide their service to everyone, even if it was not economical (for example, providing postal service for remote small towns, where the cost of going and check if there is something to send is always bigger than any expected revenue). The reason of privatizing them now has been to allow more competence and to avoid that a state locks its country for other EU companies, and now to get the same social benefits the prefered way is for the state to sponsor them (and I can tell that some of the canges have been for worse; because the greed of the companies to win a contract and earn money often can be noted in the QoS).
It would be an abuse of monopoly if Microsoft did something as "the only tool that will work on Windows is ours" or even "we will allow more tools but ours will be always, by default, available".
If neither of these are true, then it is just a new branch of its bussiness that does not support on its monopoly, and therefore completaly legal and ethical.
If they were telling you that in September, 30 of 2050 the maximum temperature at your city will be 29.5C, it would be. But the think is quite simpler, they just calculate how much energy is heating the earth, how much is dissipated, and the difference is the global (note the "global" word) warming. In some places, the "warming" may even cause a colder climate cause to streams changing, and in general it will lead to more extreme temperature changes during the year until the atmosphera patterns adapt to this effect.
A little more marketing is needed... to get people to accept that the Earth is suffering, you shoud have to tell something like:
"The other people (not you) is responsible for the global warming and the other people (not you) must start using energy more efficiently and consuming less"
Saudi Arabia may be rich, but if its wealth is not distributed the poor men in Saudi Arabia will find that of little use. Things are not always black or white. Being poor does not make a man a terrorist. But a lot of poverty will create a good environment for the radicals the meet. I mean, I am pretty sure knows "that guy" that is a little more aggresive than the others and claims for justice "at any price", but when he says that in the middle of a lot of people who just want to get a life he is ignored or he even has the police sent to him. But when that "same guy" speaks to people who hate the police that protects the richs and that do not have a way to "get a life", he will find many people that will listen to him. And some of them that will help to provide him information and materials. And a few that will join him in his fight. You can't help someone getting a gun, or a car, and going into a rampage killing anyone until he is arrested. But getting the people to see these acts as crimes that must be avoided, instead of acts of justice/revenge that must be kept until the victory. And for the terrorist leaders been wealthy, it is not strange that, with the constant need of money that these groups, those who can afford it can "buy" power, but those exceptions do not mean that all the terrorist are rich; it is just that some rich has become crazy or the hate climate has expanded from its original nest. And just for the record, if someone did invade my country I'd like to see the politics fighting for it as hard as Arafat did... I am not saying that I would vote Arafat (it looks like he ended being pretty corrupt) but I can help wonder how much whould have Bush done for his country if he was in the situation Arafat was...
Or maybe he did convince them that going against the kid or his parents would not make much more (because they do not have it) and that it will make more profit suing a big company (because the big companies do have money and the juries are prone to condemn them). There are more of these issues in Stella Awards, although this case is not covered yet.
If Sourceforge tries to force a change of licenses, it is very likely that sooner than later there will appear new sites to host the orphaned projects. Maybe with a lots of ADs to get money, but something will appear.
The LGPL will be covered by the Commercial GPL? Many of the protocol implementations come with it. Anyway, after RTFA it seems that maybe it is not so important, the OSI does not decide which licenses are valid, it just enforces some of them, so those approved by the OSI would still be in use (Or at least this is what I understood from it)
Anyway, as long as it is not against its duty, there is not also too much problem letting him call wherever he (the former or the new one) wants to.
What I suffer more for are for design docs. I am not askind ERD, DFD or UML, but inline docs. For functionality docs there exist automated ways to make sure that developers write a minimum documentation (v.g., checkstyle can force people to document all Java methods if they want to commit them to CVS). The trouble is when I see a code (and I am not refering to OSS only) that performs the functionality in what looks like an odd way, just because the programmer did not care to write that "if you do it in the way you are thinking, you'll find those troubles". And, in a code that is tipically subject to change by a larger group of developers (and with less formal and informal communication channels) this can lead to adding the same bug again and again...
Creationism just says that there is no evolution. It comes from reading literally the Genesis that says that God directly created all the life forms as they are. So they are mutually exclusive. Some people may point out that God was out there "pushing the things". This is a question of faith, so I won't waste my time fighting it (it is not the theme of the article). But, for God's sake, do not scream "God" anything something is complex or hard to explain, because "God" explains everything (and for this reason, "God" is a bad explanation for anything). It was the way the men at the Middle Age did think and it did not serve them well, isn't it?
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