A congressional bill, as it evolves and eventually maybe becomes law, is a living document. In every sphere of the real world where multiple authors work collaboratively on a same document, we use content management systems, that allow versioning, attribution, and history. It makes changes to a document transparent. Businesses use it, non-profits use it. Why not demand our Congress to use it and stop this monkey business of "was slipped into the bill"? Sounds like conversation you'd here in the playground, for gods' sake..
Avoid duplication. Duplication, whether found in the constants of a program, snippets of code, whatever, is the enemy of good design. Duplication is mitigated by centralization (e.g. #define).
Avoid information sharing. When a piece of code needs to know about how a lot of other code is structured and works, that piece of code shares information with a lot of other parts of the code. That makes the overall code brittle and unmaintainable. Information sharing is mitigated by such techniques as layering, modularization, and separation of concerns.
Avoid complexity. The process of making code and architecture better (e.g. refactoring) involves simplifying complexity. But beware: number of lines of code is a poor measure of complexity.
A better solution is to be able to do it freely, you actually have to show up at the lab and be able to certify you are who you say you are.
Nice proposal: the part about actually having to show up at the lab. This makes it somewhat harder to spy on other people's genetic information.
The second part of parent's proposal, though, I think should be the exact opposite: the lab shall not require the identity of the customer. That way, only you have the power to attach a name to your genetic data.
The rate at which hardware prices are dropping is simply breathtaking. Consider it from the seller's angle: a $500 drop in price from say $1500 represents a 33% drop in revenue; a $500 drop in price from $1000, on the other hand, represents a 50% drop in revenue. This wreaks havoc on a lot of business models--and of course, creates a lot of new ones.
Looking at this price trend, it seems like every home will soon be littered with a lot of portables--some fairly new, others, say, one or two years old. There might be one on every coffee table, you might throw one in the bathroom, as well as the one in the bedroom, and so on. Managing and maintaining the software on all these devices will be a chore.
In an article I co-wrote for the FaunOS project project, we argue that making the boot device detachable and largely hardware agnostic is an attractive solution. The idea is that users carry and maintain only a single copy of an operating environment which they can run on pretty much any device of their choosing. That way, the user accumulates and maintains know-how on a single evolving operating environment rather than having to duplicate that effort across multiple machines. Does this makes sense?
Okay. My only take away from this article--reading between Enderale's lines--is
".. Microsoft is.. pounding on a lot of doors, I think this is.. a problem." Translation: they've pounded my door, and I dutifully came up with this bullshit noise.
I've been booting from USB for the better part of a year now. (I'm on such a system as I type this.) It's a lot easier to manage an operating environment on a USB than one on an internal HD. Especially, if you're in the habit of switching machines frequently. The OS I use is FaunOS. As the price of this kind of hardware drops, it's easier to buy into the vision of portable environments.
Portable environments have to be "live" systems. They present interesting, unique challenges, but as FaunOS and a number of other distros show, portable systems are increasingly becoming quite usable. It'll be interesting to see whether a new ecosystem builds around their use.
I'm an Obama fan. Reading his book, and look to maybe contributing some time to his campaign. And I love to discuss politics. But this story is stupid. It's not even an ask/. entry.
No, it would be silly to put up a sourceforge project for a candidate. Better concentrate on how best to use existing tools.
I think I can make an argument why it has to be from Google. Here are the "facts" FTA:
The original submitted document bears the word Google.
The submission is later updated with the word Google removed.
All this happens on a site controlled by the
Australian watchdog.
The watchdog knows, in fact, who the anonymous submitters are.
We know that last fact from
The ACCC is able to categorise submissions as anonymous if the submitter can argue that there are commercial-in-confidence reason not to reveal their identity.
An ACCC spokeswoman said the ACCC had received the document from the parties in a PDF form for posting on the public register in that format.
She said it was not the ACCC's responsibility to check that all the identifiers had been stripped out because the parties insisted it was fine.
Now consider the counter-case where the document was not originally authored by Google. The watchdog would have then learned that one of its submitters is attempting to masquerade as another. Now that would be a story. The watchdog could, and would, easily argue that the "terms of anonymity agreement" have been breached and come out the name of the submitter. At the very least, the watchdog would feel compelled to say "it's not from Google."
But none of this has happened. So it's gotta be Google.
Everyone does once in a while. The difference here is that for Google this is described as "a clerical error". If it were an oil company making this mistake, the article would be all over the incompetence of old world business types.
You do realize, though, that if the solar generated electricity is consumed inside the building, the laws of thermodynamics dictate that the electrical power consumed eventually dissipates as heat inside the building. I have nothing against skylights, per se, but this is the same heat you're worried about letting in through the skylight. And besides, what are you proposing here? steam powered laptops?
IANALB it seems obvious that a red cross is too generic a mark for trademark purposes. This is an old symbol and is a poor choice for use as a trademark for commercial purposes, anyway. Apparently, it took an act of congress to make this "red cross" a mark protected under the law.
Now as a consumer of band-aids I have a confession to make: I think I've always subliminally associated the product with the Red Cross. So from my viewpoint, it could be argued that it is J&J that has been infringing on the American Red Cross's mark.
To my surprise there was no clear winner or loser..
Forget what you *think* you're measuring (code quality). Instead, consider whether you're measuring anything at all. That is, is there any information in the data you've measured?
Now given your sample space, it is highly unlikely that you'd measure something (anything!) and the measurement comes out more or less the same for every sample. The more likely conclusion, is that you haven't measured *anything*.
When someone reports a bug, rather than fix the bug, guide them on how to fix the bug. Maintain a developer forum and direct users to post bugs over there. (I bet you aren't doing this.) Even if you end up practically fixing the bug yourself, share the credit with the guy you guided. Share the cred: in the end, that is the only currency of FOSS development.
Set up a wiki and encourage users to document. Use excerpts from forum discussions to build the wiki initially.
You have users for god's sake: that means whether you know it or not, you have a community. If they're nagging at you w/ requests, that means you already have a conversation going. Give them the tools and incentive (that means you stop fixing things alone) to contribute. Involve them. At the very least you can ask them to prioritize the feature requests.
Stop coding now. You're buried too deep to see the bigger picture. (I'm guessing, of course.)
Finally, have fun. If it's no longer fun, either make it fun, or stop doing it.
As a number of other posts here indicated, an organization can and indeed we do use our own domain name for email addresses when using GMail. (Our MX record points to GMail servers.)
The major missing piece in Google Apps, as I've posted before ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=400364&cid=21837674 ) I think is the fact that you can't use the thing as a file system to store and share arbitrary file types. This should be easy to implement, and I think it is silly that Google hasn't.
As a small business user of GMail, I find the service hard to beat. After all, it's still free, and free is really hard to beat. GMail is by far the best component of the Google Apps business suite, but their other components (calendar comes to mind, for example) are slowly and surely maturing, also.
The web-based solution to the common IT needs of small and medium sized organizations, in my mind, is a no brainer. And so far, Google is offering the best value in this space.
Why a no brainer? Because managing computing resources yourself (i.e. in-house IT) is a waste of money. Forget about the cost of proprietary software: suppose you go all open source. You'll still have to manage this stuff and that cost money.
And from a privacy angle, it's also a no brainer to use a web based service for a small or medium sized organization. Correspondence in an organization is not all that *private* any way. Quite the contrary, the more transparent (with appropriate user access control mechanisms), the better for the organization.
So these factors and my own very favorable experience with GMail suggest to me that this would-be Office competitor is missing the point: the battleground for productivity suites will occur on the web, not on shrink wrapped software.
He argues in the article even a 1% drop of TV viewing hours redirected to collaborative output (multiplayer online games, forum discussions, such as this one, all count as *output*) can have transformative societal effects (about 1000 wikipedias / yr, if I read that correctly). So even a small shift away from pure couch potato consumption, to collaborative production (remember the online multiplayer game isn't worth a damn without the other players), he claims, represents a huge shift in societal output. And if this collaborative production thing actually snowballs, then the 1% estimate will seem a bit too tame..
Compared to USB flash memory keys, the write performance of the SSD you get in Eee, I understand, is much faster. Since you already pay for this expensive component when you buy an Eee, I thought it would have been nice if it were detachable: as fast as they are, FaunOS, DSL, or Puppy, still run a lot faster on an SSD, I imagine, than on a common flash memory key. My point was that if the SSD were detachable, an Eee would be an even greater value proposition--both because you can reuse the SSD, and because it also happens to bring value to each Eee platform.
-- Since when when you want to use something other than the way intended, are you missing the point?
Rather than this windows XP gimmick (which according to the article, they had to sacrifice hardware to keep price parity with the Linux version), I would have liked to have seen the Eee series' SSDs be easy to attach and detach. Then you could conceivably run a given operating environment on multiple Eee platforms. I use a portable OS on a USB called FaunOS. The logic of centralizing my operating environment on a single detachable device has sunk in for me. Now with the Eee PCs, I think it would be cool if Asus packaged a detachable SSD so that you could unplug it from the Eee in the kitchen, and plug it back in to the Eee in the bedroom. Best of all, each of my kids could have their own SSD, so that we wouldn't muck around with each other's OS's. I could probably pull this off with
FaunOS [Google search], but I think it would have been much cooler if I could use the Eee's SSD like I'm using the USB.
Late to the party as usual.. but I have to share this..
A while back when I managed a talented group of programmers, one of them handed me a book called The Introvert Advantage and added, "Read it. It is my user's manual." The book, I find out now, was actually
reviewed here.
The author Marti Olsen Laney asserts that introversion is not a psychological condition: it is genetically decided. Moreover, 1 in 5 of us is introverted. She goes on to argue that this statistic does not suggest some type of genetic disease of the species; rather, societies that don't produce the right mix of introverts are at a disadvantage to those that do.
Laney speculates prehistoric social groups needed introverts in a variety of roles: tool makers, sages, thinkers.
Finally, introverts *can* be leaders. They just lead differently than your typical extrovert. The book cites many successful introvert leaders both dead and living.
--
I didn't become an introvert; I was born as one.
Go ahead and give it a try:-) I'm using the *shadow* version as I post this. It's speedy and comes with an easy-to-use package manager. Backups are simple. So far, it hasn't been a PITA to maintain: quite the contrary, it's easily the easiest system I've had to maintain.
I haven't tried this distro, but will give it a shot. Talking new distros, especially live ones, I've been playing with FaunOS, a Linux-based live system for USBs. It's based on Arch, and its pretty damn fast. The other USB based distro that I've tried Puppy Linux is better if you want to run old hardware, or don't have enough RAM; but I find FaunOS just more complete. Anyone else out there booting from USB?
I've always thought that the only viable answer to the increasing privacy invasion we face by both government and business is to turn the camera around and look back at the innards of the one that's doing the looking. What this German hacker club has accomplished is to say, "If you're gonna look here [our fingerprints], we can look back. Any hey, people are much more interested in *your* fingerprints, than some joe shmo wanna be."
That there will be more and more eyes in the future is inescapable. If we developed technology that allowed us to see who's doing the looking, I believe, then a protocol would develop. It would be roughly like the protocol people observe in a park when eye meets eye. If you catch a stranger looking too much, or without apparent reason, then you stare them down.
Slashdot Mirror
A congressional bill, as it evolves and eventually maybe becomes law, is a living document. In every sphere of the real world where multiple authors work collaboratively on a same document, we use content management systems, that allow versioning, attribution, and history. It makes changes to a document transparent. Businesses use it, non-profits use it. Why not demand our Congress to use it and stop this monkey business of "was slipped into the bill"? Sounds like conversation you'd here in the playground, for gods' sake..
I don't see the problem. They give you a number or a receipt. Couple of days later you show up with your receipt and get the results from the lab. (?)
As for what HIPAA current requires, that's besides the point. We're discussing a proposal here, not the status quo. :-)
Here's are some themes of things to avoid..
Nice proposal: the part about actually having to show up at the lab. This makes it somewhat harder to spy on other people's genetic information.
The second part of parent's proposal, though, I think should be the exact opposite: the lab shall not require the identity of the customer. That way, only you have the power to attach a name to your genetic data.
The rate at which hardware prices are dropping is simply breathtaking. Consider it from the seller's angle: a $500 drop in price from say $1500 represents a 33% drop in revenue; a $500 drop in price from $1000, on the other hand, represents a 50% drop in revenue. This wreaks havoc on a lot of business models--and of course, creates a lot of new ones.
Looking at this price trend, it seems like every home will soon be littered with a lot of portables--some fairly new, others, say, one or two years old. There might be one on every coffee table, you might throw one in the bathroom, as well as the one in the bedroom, and so on. Managing and maintaining the software on all these devices will be a chore.
In an article I co-wrote for the FaunOS project project, we argue that making the boot device detachable and largely hardware agnostic is an attractive solution. The idea is that users carry and maintain only a single copy of an operating environment which they can run on pretty much any device of their choosing. That way, the user accumulates and maintains know-how on a single evolving operating environment rather than having to duplicate that effort across multiple machines. Does this makes sense?
--
Have USB, Will Travel - http://www.faunos.com/
I've been booting from USB for the better part of a year now. (I'm on such a system as I type this.) It's a lot easier to manage an operating environment on a USB than one on an internal HD. Especially, if you're in the habit of switching machines frequently. The OS I use is FaunOS. As the price of this kind of hardware drops, it's easier to buy into the vision of portable environments.
Portable environments have to be "live" systems. They present interesting, unique challenges, but as FaunOS and a number of other distros show, portable systems are increasingly becoming quite usable. It'll be interesting to see whether a new ecosystem builds around their use.
--
Have USB will travel - http://www.faunos.com/
No, it would be silly to put up a sourceforge project for a candidate. Better concentrate on how best to use existing tools.
--
Have USB will travel - http://www.faunos.com/
- The original submitted document bears the word Google.
- The submission is later updated with the word Google removed.
- All this happens on a site controlled by the
Australian watchdog.
- The watchdog knows, in fact, who the anonymous submitters are.
We know that last fact from The ACCC is able to categorise submissions as anonymous if the submitter can argue that there are commercial-in-confidence reason not to reveal their identity.An ACCC spokeswoman said the ACCC had received the document from the parties in a PDF form for posting on the public register in that format.
She said it was not the ACCC's responsibility to check that all the identifiers had been stripped out because the parties insisted it was fine.
Now consider the counter-case where the document was not originally authored by Google. The watchdog would have then learned that one of its submitters is attempting to masquerade as another. Now that would be a story. The watchdog could, and would, easily argue that the "terms of anonymity agreement" have been breached and come out the name of the submitter. At the very least, the watchdog would feel compelled to say "it's not from Google."But none of this has happened. So it's gotta be Google.
Everyone does once in a while. The difference here is that for Google this is described as "a clerical error". If it were an oil company making this mistake, the article would be all over the incompetence of old world business types.
--
Avoid brand-think.
You do realize, though, that if the solar generated electricity is consumed inside the building, the laws of thermodynamics dictate that the electrical power consumed eventually dissipates as heat inside the building. I have nothing against skylights, per se, but this is the same heat you're worried about letting in through the skylight. And besides, what are you proposing here? steam powered laptops?
--
[FaunOS]
IANALB it seems obvious that a red cross is too generic a mark for trademark purposes. This is an old symbol and is a poor choice for use as a trademark for commercial purposes, anyway. Apparently, it took an act of congress to make this "red cross" a mark protected under the law.
Now as a consumer of band-aids I have a confession to make: I think I've always subliminally associated the product with the Red Cross. So from my viewpoint, it could be argued that it is J&J that has been infringing on the American Red Cross's mark.
-- IANALB: IANAL but..
Forget what you *think* you're measuring (code quality). Instead, consider whether you're measuring anything at all. That is, is there any information in the data you've measured?
Now given your sample space, it is highly unlikely that you'd measure something (anything!) and the measurement comes out more or less the same for every sample. The more likely conclusion, is that you haven't measured *anything*.
When someone reports a bug, rather than fix the bug, guide them on how to fix the bug. Maintain a developer forum and direct users to post bugs over there. (I bet you aren't doing this.) Even if you end up practically fixing the bug yourself, share the credit with the guy you guided. Share the cred: in the end, that is the only currency of FOSS development.
Set up a wiki and encourage users to document. Use excerpts from forum discussions to build the wiki initially.
You have users for god's sake: that means whether you know it or not, you have a community. If they're nagging at you w/ requests, that means you already have a conversation going. Give them the tools and incentive (that means you stop fixing things alone) to contribute. Involve them. At the very least you can ask them to prioritize the feature requests.
Stop coding now. You're buried too deep to see the bigger picture. (I'm guessing, of course.)
Finally, have fun. If it's no longer fun, either make it fun, or stop doing it.
Do post back here, then, when the Linux version is ready, please...
Yes to both.
As a number of other posts here indicated, an organization can and indeed we do use our own domain name for email addresses when using GMail. (Our MX record points to GMail servers.)
The major missing piece in Google Apps, as I've posted before ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=400364&cid=21837674 ) I think is the fact that you can't use the thing as a file system to store and share arbitrary file types. This should be easy to implement, and I think it is silly that Google hasn't.
As a small business user of GMail, I find the service hard to beat. After all, it's still free, and free is really hard to beat. GMail is by far the best component of the Google Apps business suite, but their other components (calendar comes to mind, for example) are slowly and surely maturing, also.
The web-based solution to the common IT needs of small and medium sized organizations, in my mind, is a no brainer. And so far, Google is offering the best value in this space.
Why a no brainer? Because managing computing resources yourself (i.e. in-house IT) is a waste of money. Forget about the cost of proprietary software: suppose you go all open source. You'll still have to manage this stuff and that cost money.
And from a privacy angle, it's also a no brainer to use a web based service for a small or medium sized organization. Correspondence in an organization is not all that *private* any way. Quite the contrary, the more transparent (with appropriate user access control mechanisms), the better for the organization.
So these factors and my own very favorable experience with GMail suggest to me that this would-be Office competitor is missing the point: the battleground for productivity suites will occur on the web, not on shrink wrapped software.
He argues in the article even a 1% drop of TV viewing hours redirected to collaborative output (multiplayer online games, forum discussions, such as this one, all count as *output*) can have transformative societal effects (about 1000 wikipedias / yr, if I read that correctly). So even a small shift away from pure couch potato consumption, to collaborative production (remember the online multiplayer game isn't worth a damn without the other players), he claims, represents a huge shift in societal output. And if this collaborative production thing actually snowballs, then the 1% estimate will seem a bit too tame..
Compared to USB flash memory keys, the write performance of the SSD you get in Eee, I understand, is much faster. Since you already pay for this expensive component when you buy an Eee, I thought it would have been nice if it were detachable: as fast as they are, FaunOS, DSL, or Puppy, still run a lot faster on an SSD, I imagine, than on a common flash memory key. My point was that if the SSD were detachable, an Eee would be an even greater value proposition--both because you can reuse the SSD, and because it also happens to bring value to each Eee platform.
--
Since when when you want to use something other than the way intended, are you missing the point?
--
the glass is half broken
Late to the party as usual.. but I have to share this..
A while back when I managed a talented group of programmers, one of them handed me a book called The Introvert Advantage and added, "Read it. It is my user's manual." The book, I find out now, was actually reviewed here.
The author Marti Olsen Laney asserts that introversion is not a psychological condition: it is genetically decided. Moreover, 1 in 5 of us is introverted. She goes on to argue that this statistic does not suggest some type of genetic disease of the species; rather, societies that don't produce the right mix of introverts are at a disadvantage to those that do.
Laney speculates prehistoric social groups needed introverts in a variety of roles: tool makers, sages, thinkers.
Finally, introverts *can* be leaders. They just lead differently than your typical extrovert. The book cites many successful introvert leaders both dead and living.
-- I didn't become an introvert; I was born as one.Go ahead and give it a try :-) I'm using the *shadow* version as I post this. It's speedy and comes with an easy-to-use package manager. Backups are simple. So far, it hasn't been a PITA to maintain: quite the contrary, it's easily the easiest system I've had to maintain.
I haven't tried this distro, but will give it a shot. Talking new distros, especially live ones, I've been playing with FaunOS, a Linux-based live system for USBs. It's based on Arch, and its pretty damn fast. The other USB based distro that I've tried Puppy Linux is better if you want to run old hardware, or don't have enough RAM; but I find FaunOS just more complete. Anyone else out there booting from USB?
I've always thought that the only viable answer to the increasing privacy invasion we face by both government and business is to turn the camera around and look back at the innards of the one that's doing the looking. What this German hacker club has accomplished is to say, "If you're gonna look here [our fingerprints], we can look back. Any hey, people are much more interested in *your* fingerprints, than some joe shmo wanna be."
That there will be more and more eyes in the future is inescapable. If we developed technology that allowed us to see who's doing the looking, I believe, then a protocol would develop. It would be roughly like the protocol people observe in a park when eye meets eye. If you catch a stranger looking too much, or without apparent reason, then you stare them down.