If the poor kid must deal with Windows, install cygwin. Show them a little about how to manuever in the bash shell. Show them how to read the relevant newsgroups for the language(s) that they're interested in. Buy them an introductory book or two. They can do shell scripting, python, perl, c, c++, guile, whatever. They could use a simple text editor, or you could introduce them to vim. If the kid is really interested in programming, this is real programming. If the kid isn't really interested in programming, then this thread doesn't pertain to them.
The next thing you should do is install a real operating sytem for them. Or short of that, download Knoppix (Linux which boots from CD - doesn't affect what you currently have on your hard drive). Save work to a floppy or CD-RW.
do they realize what value they are already getting from open source
I think that's the ticket right there. Point out that the value your company recieves from free software far exceeds the value of what you are proposing to give back. And one of the primary reasons that your company recieves the benefits it does from free software is that other people do exactly as you are proposing.
Why do people spend time answering questions on usenet without getting paid? For various reasons, I'm sure. But one of them is that they get more back than they put in. The public commons just works that way.
You're not proposing that you spend all day doing this. Here and there, you find reasons to spruce up this or that package, and you'd like to contribute those improvements back to the community which gave you the package in the first place. It's an eminently sensible idea; and if your bosses don't see that, perhaps you should consider working someplace with more enlightened management.
Solid state is going to take off big time. Combine a solid state disk drive with a fanless CPU and you have a general purpose computer competing against appliances that have historically been able to charge a premium for their solid-state reliability.
This raises some interesting questions. What if you can buy a computer today that will last for, say, 50 years? What are the implications? Software reliability comes to the fore as never before.
If solid state drives are good enough for Mars Rovers, they're good enough for me.
I guess this implies that I would like to be a Mars rover...:/
What I'd like to know is why does an organization that sets United States federal technology policy guidelines post their policies on the web by scanning a paper document into PDF format! So we can all see a facsimile of John P. Stenbit's signature?!
Before we get completely bogged down by the ever-increasing number of often conflicting "standards", we need to adopt a "Standard Standard". That is to say, a standard which standardizes the standardization of standards. The first self-referential standard in this meta standard must say, of course, that "Standard Standard" is the standard standard standard. Anyone who implements this standard standard will immediately realize huge profits corresponding to the savings accrued by eliminating the standard duplication of standards which has become the standard.
And yes, yes I know, "code to standards", which is the way it *should* be...
I think Microsoft should be given a good dose of their own medicine. Code to XPFE. Write remotely distributed web applications using XUL and friends. Link to your application from a plain vanilla web site that contains an "only works w/ Mozilla" icon that points to the Mozilla site.
Of course there's a big difference between coding Mozilla specific applications and coding MS/IE only applications. Mozilla is an open-source project built on open standards. MS could, if they so choose, implement any of Mozilla's features they like. The converse is not true.
If enough people get Mozilla on their desktop, and enough people start writing good XFPE applications, this could put a serious dent in MS's plans for world domination. Among other things, Mozilla doesn't require Windows. If you write a Mozilla application, you're doing cross-platform development. If the Oracles, IBM's, SAP's, ERP vendors and the like don't see the value of this, they are missing a golden opportunity.
Take the on-line banking example people seem to be so fond of today. You could build an extraordinarily rich on-line banking application on top of Mozilla today, than virtually anyone using any operating system could access. They would have to download Mozilla, which is free. Contrast that w/ writing to IE. Perhaps MS will someday offer an intriguing feature, but if you want your clients to enjoy the experience they will need to run the latest version of MS Windows. Unless they have a recent PC, it will cost them money to use your site. That's assuming they have a PC, and have reserved room on their hard drive to install an MS OS.
And then there's AOL. After years of investing in Mozilla, at a time when their labors are bearing fruition, they ink an ignominious deal with their biggest enemy. The board of directors should take the people responsible for this to the woodshed, spank them soundly, and send them packing. How could management be so ignorant of the value of their own assets? They could do things on AOL using XPFE that would make the MSN droids drool. What dopes. On top of that, how much further development do you think a billion dollar settlement would have funded?
Safari for the Mac is one of the fastest and innovative browsers on the market.
Let's give credit where credit is due. Safari on the Mac is not solely an Apple innovation. Safari is the KDE project's Konqueror browser with some tweaks.
Since browsing technology has likely reached it's apex, all that's left are the small things.
Microsoft didn't give AOL a billion dollars (well, they didn't actually give them jack shit if AOL is so stupid as to assign value to the "right" to use MS's browser, but that's another topic) for nothing.
People want to deploy distrubuted multi-user applications. How? This is the big money bag. MS will lose a lot more than their shirt if people start deploying applications to XPFE.
It doesn't have to be sci-fi to be mind-bending. Try "The Crying of Lot 49" by Pynchon. Almost anything by Nabokov is great. If you don't want to invest in a whole novel, try his "Nabokov's dozen" collection of short stories. Short stories in general are a lot of fun. Get one of those big fat books of collected short stories - American Authors, Great Fiction, etc. It's a great way to introduce yourself to authors you might otherwise never read. If you like their short stuff, then you might decide to invest time in some of their more substantial work. Collections of Sci-Fi short stories are fun in the same way. Twain. Dostoevsky. Dickens. These names have staying power for a reason. Myself, I'm not very good at picking up contemporary authors. I let the test of time do my work for me. Pure laziness. But I'll accept suggestions from people I trust. And I put books down and quit when I don't like them. You're not obligated to finish... Don't buy them. Use the library.
Gas pipelines are more expensive, and more dangerous, than water pipes.
Well, yeah. But the hydrogen will still need to be transported somehow. Unless every home and gas station has a mini-nuclear facility on-site. That would be cool...;)
I'm pro-nuke all the way. There are safe designs etc. I always thought the problem was one of scaling up the supply of uranium. There are breeder reactors, but they're not so safe. I really don't know what I'm talking about here, so I'll stop before I spout yet another bout of run-on BS...
Yes. SCO will suffer. But I want more. I want to see that the people behind this pay some consequences. They already have many of the legal protections afforded by corporate immunity. But we could at least draw them out from behind the cloak of "SCO did it" anonymity. Who the hell are these people? I want to make sure I know where they go after this. I think they should become executive pariahs, that no company interested in keeping customers would want to touch. Before that can happen, though, they need to have their names splattered all over tarnation so that everyone can clearly make the association between the people and their actions.
Yes. Creativity is not a beautiful act of crystalline novelty. Creativity is an evolutionary process. Start somewhere, and revise, revise, revise. Which is why the whole "All I see is first person shooters" whining is such bullshit. I don't care what you see, it's better that what you saw last year. Which is better than what you saw the year before. The number of new games is legion, and their sophistication continues to increase. People try to mask this trend w/ gross generalizations like "all we see are first person shooters" etc. Fuck 'em. They are ignorant and who cares what they think. Video games are the premier art form of this era. Period. The bitchers and moaners are just feeling a bit disconnected. They should plug in, or shut up.
I'm don't believe it's entirely correct to speak of matter tunneling out. IIRC, the basic idea is that black holes dissapate energy when they move around, spin, and so forth. Give a black hole a charge by feeding it electrons, for example, and then start jostling it around and it will produce electromagnetic radiation. E=MC**2 and so the mass dissipates. How this might work for a black hole w/ no charge I don't know. Gravity waves? IANAP.
Alright, I'm the same page with you about that. It's not a network I want to use, but's that's a different story.
You know, whenever I've thought about Microsoft's Xbox strategy (which isn't a whole lot), I've always considered it a play into the low-cost commody computing business. Maybe that's wrong. It's not the box, and maybe not even really the games. Microsoft is building a network. One that they control. Something altogether opposite to the end-to-end Internet. The box is just another entry point.
I should have been more articulate. Our standard of living is not getting worse and worse. That's not what I said. Class disparity, the degree of control people have over their own lives, the rich running things, the rest of us tagging along - that's what's getting worse. And the problem is people like you, who believe that as long as nobody is shooting at you it's all well and good to stick your thumb up your ass and watch your Tivo. The problem is people like you, who are unable to imagine anything could be better.
I love that they ban cheaters and people who are just assholes.
But they don't stop there. The larger issue is that after you have paid them money for a box, they want to control how you use it. They can't abide the fact that people run Linux on an Xbox, for example. You say the network belongs to MS. How do you feel about the box itself? The one that you paid for.
Do you really think this passes the Patent Office's uniquiness criteria? PKI is not new. They appear to be applying PKI principles to authenticate the console. Why does applying PKI to a specific problem make this worthy of a patent? Why not patent "using PKI to authenticate a dog collar"?
As you say, I'm sure Microsoft (and others) would find such an application of PKI useful. But usefulness does not make an idea patent worthy. What are they doing that is truly innovative?
You've got to be shitting me. But you're not. They are essentially attempting to patent host-based authentication 'for a gaming console'. Oh, for a 'gaming console' - that's unique. And this should be considered innovative? Goddamn I hate this company.
As a citizen of the United States of America, we can expect to have certain rights. As employees/customers of an American corporation, we can expect diddley. And according to Microsoft, that's just the way it should be. The guy at least deserves credit for being forthright about where things stand.
It's not just Microsoft, though. We live in a democracy. We have a free market. Nonetheless, corporations whose modus operandi resembles that of a feudal fiefdom by and large dominate our working lives. And when we leave work, we owe them our allegiance as 'customers'.
But who cares? We all have bread on the table. A glass of wine. A Tivo. A comfortable chair.
Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever. Perhaps more so. The only reason people aren't storming the castles with pitchforks is that they're too busy watching TV. That's the scary part. Seems to me that things are just getting worse and worse, but nobody cares. Why should they?
The reason why, of course, is that they deserve better. And if wealth was distributed more equitably, they would have better. But people are just too damn content to agitate for change.
So Bill Gates will continue to bitch-slap mod-chippers, all the while crying about his constitutional 'right' to do what he wants. Asshole.
I hope you're right. However, given our current system, I'm dubious.
The problem is that the pro-DMCA folks will try again. And again. And again. In this venue and that. Turning words and phrases, but never really veering from their intended purpose.
The problem is that laws are easier to enact than to retract. The fact that this legislation made it as far as it did is unnerving. If this proposal had been rejected outright by the legislature, that might be different. But we see here that a small shift in the balance of power would result in this bill's enactment.
The problem is that the general population does not feel like issue such as this are important enough to sway their votes against advocates of such legislation. Unless they change their minds, it's only a matter of time...
Slashdot Mirror
Friday the 13th?! Is this a really bad movie, or what?
If the poor kid must deal with Windows, install cygwin. Show them a little about how to manuever in the bash shell. Show them how to read the relevant newsgroups for the language(s) that they're interested in. Buy them an introductory book or two. They can do shell scripting, python, perl, c, c++, guile, whatever. They could use a simple text editor, or you could introduce them to vim. If the kid is really interested in programming, this is real programming. If the kid isn't really interested in programming, then this thread doesn't pertain to them.
The next thing you should do is install a real operating sytem for them. Or short of that, download Knoppix (Linux which boots from CD - doesn't affect what you currently have on your hard drive). Save work to a floppy or CD-RW.
You can't lie to shareholders, but you can lie to customers, in other words.
Why slashdot gave gollum billing over the skimpily clad dancing lesbians that shortly followed is beyond me. This is news for nerds, after all.
you can't fix the people who are morons, which is where the real problem lies.
do they realize what value they are already getting from open source
I think that's the ticket right there. Point out that the value your company recieves from free software far exceeds the value of what you are proposing to give back. And one of the primary reasons that your company recieves the benefits it does from free software is that other people do exactly as you are proposing.
Why do people spend time answering questions on usenet without getting paid? For various reasons, I'm sure. But one of them is that they get more back than they put in. The public commons just works that way.
You're not proposing that you spend all day doing this. Here and there, you find reasons to spruce up this or that package, and you'd like to contribute those improvements back to the community which gave you the package in the first place. It's an eminently sensible idea; and if your bosses don't see that, perhaps you should consider working someplace with more enlightened management.
Microsoft must âoeimprove business consistencyâ
The best way to improve "business consistency" is to stop upgrading your Microsoft products. Just keep them the same.
Solid state is going to take off big time. Combine a solid state disk drive with a fanless CPU and you have a general purpose computer competing against appliances that have historically been able to charge a premium for their solid-state reliability.
:/
This raises some interesting questions. What if you can buy a computer today that will last for, say, 50 years? What are the implications? Software reliability comes to the fore as never before.
If solid state drives are good enough for Mars Rovers, they're good enough for me.
I guess this implies that I would like to be a Mars rover...
What I'd like to know is why does an organization that sets United States federal technology policy guidelines post their policies on the web by scanning a paper document into PDF format! So we can all see a facsimile of John P. Stenbit's signature?!
Before we get completely bogged down by the ever-increasing number of often conflicting "standards", we need to adopt a "Standard Standard". That is to say, a standard which standardizes the standardization of standards. The first self-referential standard in this meta standard must say, of course, that "Standard Standard" is the standard standard standard. Anyone who implements this standard standard will immediately realize huge profits corresponding to the savings accrued by eliminating the standard duplication of standards which has become the standard.
And yes, yes I know, "code to standards", which is the way it *should* be...
I think Microsoft should be given a good dose of their own medicine. Code to XPFE. Write remotely distributed web applications using XUL and friends. Link to your application from a plain vanilla web site that contains an "only works w/ Mozilla" icon that points to the Mozilla site.
Of course there's a big difference between coding Mozilla specific applications and coding MS/IE only applications. Mozilla is an open-source project built on open standards. MS could, if they so choose, implement any of Mozilla's features they like. The converse is not true.
If enough people get Mozilla on their desktop, and enough people start writing good XFPE applications, this could put a serious dent in MS's plans for world domination. Among other things, Mozilla doesn't require Windows. If you write a Mozilla application, you're doing cross-platform development. If the Oracles, IBM's, SAP's, ERP vendors and the like don't see the value of this, they are missing a golden opportunity.
Take the on-line banking example people seem to be so fond of today. You could build an extraordinarily rich on-line banking application on top of Mozilla today, than virtually anyone using any operating system could access. They would have to download Mozilla, which is free. Contrast that w/ writing to IE. Perhaps MS will someday offer an intriguing feature, but if you want your clients to enjoy the experience they will need to run the latest version of MS Windows. Unless they have a recent PC, it will cost them money to use your site. That's assuming they have a PC, and have reserved room on their hard drive to install an MS OS.
And then there's AOL. After years of investing in Mozilla, at a time when their labors are bearing fruition, they ink an ignominious deal with their biggest enemy. The board of directors should take the people responsible for this to the woodshed, spank them soundly, and send them packing. How could management be so ignorant of the value of their own assets? They could do things on AOL using XPFE that would make the MSN droids drool. What dopes. On top of that, how much further development do you think a billion dollar settlement would have funded?
Safari for the Mac is one of the fastest and innovative browsers on the market.
Let's give credit where credit is due. Safari on the Mac is not solely an Apple innovation. Safari is the KDE project's Konqueror browser with some tweaks.
Since browsing technology has likely reached it's apex, all that's left are the small things.
Microsoft didn't give AOL a billion dollars (well, they didn't actually give them jack shit if AOL is so stupid as to assign value to the "right" to use MS's browser, but that's another topic) for nothing.
People want to deploy distrubuted multi-user applications. How? This is the big money bag. MS will lose a lot more than their shirt if people start deploying applications to XPFE.
This is not an original thought. MS want to squish this bug badly.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
It doesn't have to be sci-fi to be mind-bending. Try "The Crying of Lot 49" by Pynchon. Almost anything by Nabokov is great. If you don't want to invest in a whole novel, try his "Nabokov's dozen" collection of short stories. Short stories in general are a lot of fun. Get one of those big fat books of collected short stories - American Authors, Great Fiction, etc. It's a great way to introduce yourself to authors you might otherwise never read. If you like their short stuff, then you might decide to invest time in some of their more substantial work. Collections of Sci-Fi short stories are fun in the same way. Twain. Dostoevsky. Dickens. These names have staying power for a reason. Myself, I'm not very good at picking up contemporary authors. I let the test of time do my work for me. Pure laziness. But I'll accept suggestions from people I trust. And I put books down and quit when I don't like them. You're not obligated to finish... Don't buy them. Use the library.
Gas pipelines are more expensive, and more dangerous, than water pipes.
;)
Well, yeah. But the hydrogen will still need to be transported somehow. Unless every home and gas station has a mini-nuclear facility on-site. That would be cool...
I'm pro-nuke all the way. There are safe designs etc. I always thought the problem was one of scaling up the supply of uranium. There are breeder reactors, but they're not so safe. I really don't know what I'm talking about here, so I'll stop before I spout yet another bout of run-on BS...
Yes. SCO will suffer. But I want more. I want to see that the people behind this pay some consequences. They already have many of the legal protections afforded by corporate immunity. But we could at least draw them out from behind the cloak of "SCO did it" anonymity. Who the hell are these people? I want to make sure I know where they go after this. I think they should become executive pariahs, that no company interested in keeping customers would want to touch. Before that can happen, though, they need to have their names splattered all over tarnation so that everyone can clearly make the association between the people and their actions.
Yes. Creativity is not a beautiful act of crystalline novelty. Creativity is an evolutionary process. Start somewhere, and revise, revise, revise. Which is why the whole "All I see is first person shooters" whining is such bullshit. I don't care what you see, it's better that what you saw last year. Which is better than what you saw the year before. The number of new games is legion, and their sophistication continues to increase. People try to mask this trend w/ gross generalizations like "all we see are first person shooters" etc. Fuck 'em. They are ignorant and who cares what they think. Video games are the premier art form of this era. Period. The bitchers and moaners are just feeling a bit disconnected. They should plug in, or shut up.
I'm don't believe it's entirely correct to speak of matter tunneling out. IIRC, the basic idea is that black holes dissapate energy when they move around, spin, and so forth. Give a black hole a charge by feeding it electrons, for example, and then start jostling it around and it will produce electromagnetic radiation. E=MC**2 and so the mass dissipates. How this might work for a black hole w/ no charge I don't know. Gravity waves? IANAP.
Alright, I'm the same page with you about that. It's not a network I want to use, but's that's a different story.
You know, whenever I've thought about Microsoft's Xbox strategy (which isn't a whole lot), I've always considered it a play into the low-cost commody computing business. Maybe that's wrong. It's not the box, and maybe not even really the games. Microsoft is building a network. One that they control. Something altogether opposite to the end-to-end Internet. The box is just another entry point.
I should have been more articulate. Our standard of living is not getting worse and worse. That's not what I said. Class disparity, the degree of control people have over their own lives, the rich running things, the rest of us tagging along - that's what's getting worse. And the problem is people like you, who believe that as long as nobody is shooting at you it's all well and good to stick your thumb up your ass and watch your Tivo. The problem is people like you, who are unable to imagine anything could be better.
I love that they ban cheaters and people who are just assholes.
But they don't stop there. The larger issue is that after you have paid them money for a box, they want to control how you use it. They can't abide the fact that people run Linux on an Xbox, for example. You say the network belongs to MS. How do you feel about the box itself? The one that you paid for.
Do you really think this passes the Patent Office's uniquiness criteria? PKI is not new. They appear to be applying PKI principles to authenticate the console. Why does applying PKI to a specific problem make this worthy of a patent? Why not patent "using PKI to authenticate a dog collar"?
As you say, I'm sure Microsoft (and others) would find such an application of PKI useful. But usefulness does not make an idea patent worthy. What are they doing that is truly innovative?
You've got to be shitting me. But you're not. They are essentially attempting to patent host-based authentication 'for a gaming console'. Oh, for a 'gaming console' - that's unique. And this should be considered innovative? Goddamn I hate this company.
Wow, that's beautiful.
As a citizen of the United States of America, we can expect to have certain rights. As employees/customers of an American corporation, we can expect diddley. And according to Microsoft, that's just the way it should be. The guy at least deserves credit for being forthright about where things stand.
It's not just Microsoft, though. We live in a democracy. We have a free market. Nonetheless, corporations whose modus operandi resembles that of a feudal fiefdom by and large dominate our working lives. And when we leave work, we owe them our allegiance as 'customers'.
But who cares? We all have bread on the table. A glass of wine. A Tivo. A comfortable chair.
Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever. Perhaps more so. The only reason people aren't storming the castles with pitchforks is that they're too busy watching TV. That's the scary part. Seems to me that things are just getting worse and worse, but nobody cares. Why should they?
The reason why, of course, is that they deserve better. And if wealth was distributed more equitably, they would have better. But people are just too damn content to agitate for change.
So Bill Gates will continue to bitch-slap mod-chippers, all the while crying about his constitutional 'right' to do what he wants. Asshole.
I hope you're right. However, given our current system, I'm dubious.
The problem is that the pro-DMCA folks will try again. And again. And again. In this venue and that. Turning words and phrases, but never really veering from their intended purpose.
The problem is that laws are easier to enact than to retract. The fact that this legislation made it as far as it did is unnerving. If this proposal had been rejected outright by the legislature, that might be different. But we see here that a small shift in the balance of power would result in this bill's enactment.
The problem is that the general population does not feel like issue such as this are important enough to sway their votes against advocates of such legislation. Unless they change their minds, it's only a matter of time...