... this article. FTFA:"The "open-source" process of creating things is quickly becoming a threat"
TFA is littered with nonsense like this. So insightful. Sadly, PHBs will jump up and down when they read a snippit like this.
"The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality"
That explains why so much of it works so well. It lack conventional QA. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Its called 'peer review'. Those stupid scientists have been using it for years, and look where it got them. Stupid white coats, and no dates.
"Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality."
Never a problem in commercial software, or in any product development. Except windows and office, of course.
"In order to succeed, open-source projects have adopted management practices similar to those of the companies they vie to outdo"
See, they're just like us, when they "need to get 'er done". OSS doesn't exist, really, see?
"Projects that fail to cope with open source's vulnerabilities usually fall by the wayside. Indeed, almost all of them meet this end. Of the roughly 130,000 open-source projects on SourceForge.net, an online hub for open-source software projects, only a few hundred are active, and fewer still will ever lead to a useful product. The most important thing holding back the open-source model, apparently, is itself."
See - OSS will ultimately die out completely by killing itself. Die! Die! Die! Mhahahah!
"Traditional profit-seeking firms cannot usually rely on their customers to play an active role in their product development."
Explains why so much of it is badly done. I put Fluke's packet viewer product on a pc, alongside ethereal, to analyze packet captures. Fluke=crap++, ethereal=usefull++. Die, OSS, die.
The best way to get a lie accepted is to mix in just enough truth to make it look true, upon cursory inspection. Like this article. It just a slightly more clever version of FUD. Nothing to see here.
The nature of the activity does matter when compared to telephone or cable -- both are often local monopolies, and both exist in heavily regulated spheres. The customer remedies that exist there are not available in other service markets.
Actually, many do. In courts of law, its called "legal precedent", which means a principal ruling can be used as an arguement in dissimilar cases which fall under a common area of law - i.e. criminal, civil, contract, etc. Blizzard may have quit and exit clauses, but those will not take precedent in condradiction to existing legal precedent, just because blizzard is 'unique'.
If someone were to claim exemption from legal precedent on the grounds they are 'unique' or extra special in some way, then there would be no way for law to be applied to new cases in a consistant way. Offering a new service does not grant someone a carte blanc to do as they wish in the eyes of the law. If payment to blizzard is a subscription, then legal constraints and precedents that exist for other subscription based services apply to blizzard.
My point is that just because its a game subscription doesn't abrogate legal remedy or legal precedent. The guy probably has a right to a refund, legally. Once a person pays good money for something, even a game, it's not neccessarily a game anymore.
"This company refuses to take my money anymore! I'm suing.!"
I think the parent was thinking more of "we entered into an agreement evidenced in writing and and an exchange of money, and you acted in violation of the terms". Cable companies get sued for this kind of thing so often that many state attorney generals have online forms to file legal complaints specificaly for them.
It often plays out: The phone company says "you violated the terms of your agreement, so off with you". Customer replies "your TOS says I get at least a second chance". Cable company says "no way". Customer notifies the state attorney general's office, and files complaint. Cable company recants. (assuming the cable company did violate their TOS - in the blizzard case, it certainly looks like blizzard violated their own TOS). Actually, in some cases even if the TOS says 'no second chances', the service provider has to give one anyway, depending the the situation, although certainly not always.
It's not as material what the nature of the activity is, as the terms of the contract, and the agreements and representations made by those offering the service. Blizzard agreed to the TOS as much as did their customers.
And, in the long run, banning people in a manner against their own policy will hurt the overall game, not help it. It's in blizzard's best interest to avoid violating their own policies, and to avoid banning activity they profess to allow.
Although this is somewhat off the main article's topic, where I work we've got a DS3 and a 100Mb/s up link each to a different Tier 1 ISP. One of them suggested that we consider allowing traffic to route between them. I didn't like the idea, since the DS3 is charged on a scale, going up for additional bandwidth usage above certain points, and it would have eaten into the bandwidth we make available to our customers, among other things. Would this be a case of two tier 1's seeking a sort of a peering arrangement, using our bandwidth?
Google is just following good business practices in refusing to adopt a short-term earnings business slanted model. Since wall street wants to predict and analyze something they have no fundamental clue about, even with guidance they'd make bad predictions, which is bad for everybody. For Google to do things 'the wall street way' would substancially hurt their profitability, and be irresponsible to their shareholders, to whom they actually are responsible. For a business to become so dependant on Wall street capitalization that they change how they do things to suit wall street is likely a death knell or a sign of a long downward slide. People who know nothing about how to run a business should have zero say, especially in terms of short term considerations, which are by definition what WS deals with.
Other companies that run their own business without WS intervention (i.e. no earning guidance): Coca-Cola, Gillette and The Washington Post.
The question in my mind is whether or not the statement made by George Reyes about the stock tumbling could realistly cause such a drop, and to observe that of course while his stock sale was scheduled a year in advance, his statement about the comming tumble was not. Are there regulations preventing such a statement made by a significant shareholder just prior to a scheduled sale?
Cisco's been slurping up a number of firms that make products that kind fit in the networking scheme of things, and those products that aren't actual networking hardware and up being rolled into CiscoWorks. And, the hardware products they do acquire end up being managed via Ciscoworks.
Ciscoworks is one of the worst software packages ever inflicted on people. If you have any other java product on your PC, either it will stop working, or you won't be able to access ciscoworks in any way other than the console of the pc it runs one (or via remote console, if it will let you). That's just the Ciscoworks framework itself. Then, each product that Cisco drops into cisco works has its own way of doing things, and compatability issues, and they're not minor.
Even in the ciscoworks framework itself, there's no central set of configuration options to control where alerts get sent, what thresholds are, how to add/remove managed devices, and so forth (this list goes on and on and on). Ciscoworks leads you to think that its an integrated product, but that's as far from the truth as you can get. Its horribly schitzophrenic in the user interface to the point that if you figure out how to configure one sub-system, you're at a loss as to how to deal with the others. Its not unheardof for one ciscoworks component to be incompatible with other ciscoworks components, requiring multiple separate ciscoworks servers. Its like having multiple migraines. Oh, and ciscoworks pretends to run syslog, but has no log management capabilities or any real log analysis tools. Just a few precanned reports to try and make you happy.
If cisco rolls management of these products into Cisco!Works for setup and ongoing management, about the only thing you can be assured of is that whatever video does get recorded by the 'networked cisco video cameras', will not be viewable a significant portion of the time. I've used Cisco!works for years, and this is really not an eggageration.
I didn't get a chance to read the article, since it was dugg/slashdotted to death, but I don't think I need to. Its obvious marketeering - 'look how far behind they are'. Maybe MS is tire of being told how far behind they are, and thought they'd dish it out for a change.
Of course, from the common user point of view, it composes and formats text, inserts graphics and tables, exports to web pages, gripes about grammer, and annoys then nearly as much as Word does. Whining about group licenses and 'single user only' usage looks to me as though it doesn't address things from the end-user's point of view at all.
Even if GM does account for more market (I'm assuming you either meant revenues or employees or both) than all 30 person firms in the country combined (a statement that really merits either a reference or research or both), using size alone just doesn't reveal much about how mission critical an application is. To any business that depends on an application, that application is mission critical. Relegating some application to irrelevancy because of some assertion that its 'market' is too small reflects a lack of information about that application. That sounds more like a roundabout way to assert in some way the most OSS isn't mission critical. It really depends on the application, and how its used. The Internet for example, arguably runs on open sourced software. Were it not for OSS, you wouldn't be able to get to any or your favorite web sites, in more ways than one.
Either way, Ellison is still a hammer looking for nails when he asserts that OSS needs 'big business'. I don't think any 'big business' cares what OSS needs and what it doesn't. I'd say 'big business' needs good software, not the other way around. If anything, big business needs OSS. Right now, for another example, nearly all 'big businesses' are running their web sites using OSS, whether they're running windows, linux, solaris, or bsd. Those OS's are using an IP protocol stack based on open sourced software. That OSS software would have existed with or without big business (read: Oracle).
On the other hand, a single mega corp like GM, dying from the head downward though it may be, probably represents a market of roughly equal magnitude to all the 30- person businesses in the country.
Ellison is a hammer looking for nails. As for the above quoted statement, here are some facts:
From www.sba.gov (some headings clipped for brevity; link point to PDF file with full text):
The Office of Advocacy defines a small business for research purposes as an independent business having fewer than 500 employees.
Small firms - Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms. - Employ half of all private sector employees. - Pay 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll. - Have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade. - Create more than 50 percent of nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP). - Supplied more than 23 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts in FY 2004. - Produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited. - Are employers of 41 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers). - Are 53 percent home-based and 3 percent franchises. - Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 26 percent of the known export value in FY 2002.
In 2004, there were approximately 24.7 million businesses in the United States, according to Office of Advocacy estimates. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimates there were 29.3 million nonfarm business tax returns in 2004; however, this number may overestimate the number of firms, as one business can operate more than one taxable entity. Census data show there were 5.7 million firms with employees and 17.6 million without employees in 2002 (and 18.6 million without employees in 2003).
I've seen it at a couple of Universities that they require the students of a particular college to buy laptops from the university. When I've seen it, the U sells ths LT to the student at greatly inflated prices - to the tune of $300-$500 more than the exact model computer direct from the manufacturer. Doesn't seem right, somehow.
You fold it in half to more easily store it in some kind of carrying case, and open it to see the screen and access the pointing device and keyboard. What will they think of next - a graphicaly based interface to the operating system?
Slashdot Mirror
... this article. FTFA:"The "open-source" process of creating things is quickly becoming a threat"
TFA is littered with nonsense like this. So insightful. Sadly, PHBs will jump up and down when they read a snippit like this.
"The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality"
That explains why so much of it works so well. It lack conventional QA. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Its called 'peer review'. Those stupid scientists have been using it for years, and look where it got them. Stupid white coats, and no dates.
"Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality."
Never a problem in commercial software, or in any product development. Except windows and office, of course.
"In order to succeed, open-source projects have adopted management practices similar to those of the companies they vie to outdo"
See, they're just like us, when they "need to get 'er done". OSS doesn't exist, really, see?
"Projects that fail to cope with open source's vulnerabilities usually fall by the wayside. Indeed, almost all of them meet this end. Of the roughly 130,000 open-source projects on SourceForge.net, an online hub for open-source software projects, only a few hundred are active, and fewer still will ever lead to a useful product. The most important thing holding back the open-source model, apparently, is itself."
See - OSS will ultimately die out completely by killing itself. Die! Die! Die! Mhahahah!
"Traditional profit-seeking firms cannot usually rely on their customers to play an active role in their product development."
Explains why so much of it is badly done. I put Fluke's packet viewer product on a pc, alongside ethereal, to analyze packet captures. Fluke=crap++, ethereal=usefull++. Die, OSS, die.
The best way to get a lie accepted is to mix in just enough truth to make it look true, upon cursory inspection. Like this article. It just a slightly more clever version of FUD. Nothing to see here.
Move along.
The nature of the activity does matter when compared to telephone or cable -- both are often local monopolies, and both exist in heavily regulated spheres. The customer remedies that exist there are not available in other service markets.
Actually, many do. In courts of law, its called "legal precedent", which means a principal ruling can be used as an arguement in dissimilar cases which fall under a common area of law - i.e. criminal, civil, contract, etc. Blizzard may have quit and exit clauses, but those will not take precedent in condradiction to existing legal precedent, just because blizzard is 'unique'.
If someone were to claim exemption from legal precedent on the grounds they are 'unique' or extra special in some way, then there would be no way for law to be applied to new cases in a consistant way. Offering a new service does not grant someone a carte blanc to do as they wish in the eyes of the law. If payment to blizzard is a subscription, then legal constraints and precedents that exist for other subscription based services apply to blizzard.
My point is that just because its a game subscription doesn't abrogate legal remedy or legal precedent. The guy probably has a right to a refund, legally. Once a person pays good money for something, even a game, it's not neccessarily a game anymore.
"This company refuses to take my money anymore! I'm suing.!"
I think the parent was thinking more of "we entered into an agreement evidenced in writing and and an exchange of money, and you acted in violation of the terms". Cable companies get sued for this kind of thing so often that many state attorney generals have online forms to file legal complaints specificaly for them.
It often plays out: The phone company says "you violated the terms of your agreement, so off with you". Customer replies "your TOS says I get at least a second chance". Cable company says "no way". Customer notifies the state attorney general's office, and files complaint. Cable company recants. (assuming the cable company did violate their TOS - in the blizzard case, it certainly looks like blizzard violated their own TOS). Actually, in some cases even if the TOS says 'no second chances', the service provider has to give one anyway, depending the the situation, although certainly not always.
It's not as material what the nature of the activity is, as the terms of the contract, and the agreements and representations made by those offering the service. Blizzard agreed to the TOS as much as did their customers.
And, in the long run, banning people in a manner against their own policy will hurt the overall game, not help it. It's in blizzard's best interest to avoid violating their own policies, and to avoid banning activity they profess to allow.
Although this is somewhat off the main article's topic, where I work we've got a DS3 and a 100Mb/s up link each to a different Tier 1 ISP. One of them suggested that we consider allowing traffic to route between them. I didn't like the idea, since the DS3 is charged on a scale, going up for additional bandwidth usage above certain points, and it would have eaten into the bandwidth we make available to our customers, among other things. Would this be a case of two tier 1's seeking a sort of a peering arrangement, using our bandwidth?
Mysteriously, it'll run much faster than photoshop....
Hasn't this been going to for awhile?
Sounds good as long as they don't hire Microsoft's security czar. They'd want someone who can do something besides spin out of control.
Google is just following good business practices in refusing to adopt a short-term earnings business slanted model. Since wall street wants to predict and analyze something they have no fundamental clue about, even with guidance they'd make bad predictions, which is bad for everybody. For Google to do things 'the wall street way' would substancially hurt their profitability, and be irresponsible to their shareholders, to whom they actually are responsible. For a business to become so dependant on Wall street capitalization that they change how they do things to suit wall street is likely a death knell or a sign of a long downward slide. People who know nothing about how to run a business should have zero say, especially in terms of short term considerations, which are by definition what WS deals with.
Other companies that run their own business without WS intervention (i.e. no earning guidance): Coca-Cola, Gillette and The Washington Post.
The question in my mind is whether or not the statement made by George Reyes about the stock tumbling could realistly cause such a drop, and to observe that of course while his stock sale was scheduled a year in advance, his statement about the comming tumble was not. Are there regulations preventing such a statement made by a significant shareholder just prior to a scheduled sale?
Cisco's been slurping up a number of firms that make products that kind fit in the networking scheme of things, and those products that aren't actual networking hardware and up being rolled into CiscoWorks. And, the hardware products they do acquire end up being managed via Ciscoworks.
Ciscoworks is one of the worst software packages ever inflicted on people. If you have any other java product on your PC, either it will stop working, or you won't be able to access ciscoworks in any way other than the console of the pc it runs one (or via remote console, if it will let you). That's just the Ciscoworks framework itself. Then, each product that Cisco drops into cisco works has its own way of doing things, and compatability issues, and they're not minor.
Even in the ciscoworks framework itself, there's no central set of configuration options to control where alerts get sent, what thresholds are, how to add/remove managed devices, and so forth (this list goes on and on and on). Ciscoworks leads you to think that its an integrated product, but that's as far from the truth as you can get. Its horribly schitzophrenic in the user interface to the point that if you figure out how to configure one sub-system, you're at a loss as to how to deal with the others. Its not unheardof for one ciscoworks component to be incompatible with other ciscoworks components, requiring multiple separate ciscoworks servers. Its like having multiple migraines. Oh, and ciscoworks pretends to run syslog, but has no log management capabilities or any real log analysis tools. Just a few precanned reports to try and make you happy.
If cisco rolls management of these products into Cisco!Works for setup and ongoing management, about the only thing you can be assured of is that whatever video does get recorded by the 'networked cisco video cameras', will not be viewable a significant portion of the time. I've used Cisco!works for years, and this is really not an eggageration.
Thanks - I laughed hard enough to get a headache...
So blondes aren't going extinct after all - they're just just mutating into a more intelligent form.
I didn't get a chance to read the article, since it was dugg/slashdotted to death, but I don't think I need to. Its obvious marketeering - 'look how far behind they are'. Maybe MS is tire of being told how far behind they are, and thought they'd dish it out for a change.
Of course, from the common user point of view, it composes and formats text, inserts graphics and tables, exports to web pages, gripes about grammer, and annoys then nearly as much as Word does. Whining about group licenses and 'single user only' usage looks to me as though it doesn't address things from the end-user's point of view at all.
Typical anti-user Microsoft.
Even if GM does account for more market (I'm assuming you either meant revenues or employees or both) than all 30 person firms in the country combined (a statement that really merits either a reference or research or both), using size alone just doesn't reveal much about how mission critical an application is. To any business that depends on an application, that application is mission critical. Relegating some application to irrelevancy because of some assertion that its 'market' is too small reflects a lack of information about that application. That sounds more like a roundabout way to assert in some way the most OSS isn't mission critical. It really depends on the application, and how its used. The Internet for example, arguably runs on open sourced software. Were it not for OSS, you wouldn't be able to get to any or your favorite web sites, in more ways than one.
Either way, Ellison is still a hammer looking for nails when he asserts that OSS needs 'big business'. I don't think any 'big business' cares what OSS needs and what it doesn't. I'd say 'big business' needs good software, not the other way around. If anything, big business needs OSS. Right now, for another example, nearly all 'big businesses' are running their web sites using OSS, whether they're running windows, linux, solaris, or bsd. Those OS's are using an IP protocol stack based on open sourced software. That OSS software would have existed with or without big business (read: Oracle).
Ellison is a hammer looking for nails. As for the above quoted statement, here are some facts:
From www.sba.gov (some headings clipped for brevity; link point to PDF file with full text):
I've seen it at a couple of Universities that they require the students of a particular college to buy laptops from the university. When I've seen it, the U sells ths LT to the student at greatly inflated prices - to the tune of $300-$500 more than the exact model computer direct from the manufacturer. Doesn't seem right, somehow.
Thanks to years of diligent investing in greenhouse gases, its been a freakishly warm winter. Warmest January since 1846. Ya, for sure.
That would have been really cool...
As if there's any branch of the government capable of checking executive power anymore.
You fold it in half to more easily store it in some kind of carrying case, and open it to see the screen and access the pointing device and keyboard. What will they think of next - a graphicaly based interface to the operating system?
Junior won fair and square!
Now I can spill coffee directly on my porn, instead of my keyboard.
Governments repressive to human rights? Would that include Canada or South Dakota?
"wearable device that could provide"
Similar to a backpack capable of firing a ectoplasmic containment stream? Or portable power supply for a flux capacitor?
Flame wars get started mostly due to the aggressive nature of the human being.