> You must be confused or something. I never said > anything negative about Microsoft
It is a sad fact of the English language that singular and plural second person are the same word, but most people learn to deal with this ambiguity by the age of ten.
> In the specific case of Kettle ETL......representing less than one thousandth of one percent of the open source community and thus meaning roughly JACK SHIT.
> Resorting to name-calling and spreading FUD > is not winning you any points here.
That would be why I'm not doing it.
Open source projects overwhelmingly fail. Those that succeed take much longer to do so than comparable closed-source projects. The only defense the community has ever been able to muster is to redefine both "project" and "failure", which is simply not rational.
Not one single name has been called there, and no FUD is involved. These are simply the facts.
And here you are denying them, which is exactly what I said was the problem.
> I think he was talking about GNU userland programs
I wouldn't call any of those even remotely comparable to commercial offerings. The open source community has struggled for years with the problem of not having user-friendly applications, and they've really not made much progress that wasn't outright copied from Apple and Microsoft.
Furthermore, most of GNU's userland programs are not original. They're copies of existing projects, most of which came out of a commercial environment where they simply weren't seen as a salable product. The rapid development of these projects isn't really due to efficiency in creation, but efficiency in duplication.
The general case of the open source project is no longer a few brilliant people tackling an interesting problem. It's a dozen kids with big dreams and no experience trying to take on the corporate machine all by themselves, and they're inevitably doomed to fail.
> Yes, that's just about all that they have in common.
I fail to see your point. Regardless of whether I produce a hammer by mass production or hand-forging, the measure of success remains "does the hammer work". While the only thing the two hammers may have in common is that they drive nails, as the tool's user, I don't really care about anything else.
> All these things are vastly different from CSS software.
Yes, because the benefits of closed source software apply primarily to the customer - not the development and support teams.
> Indeed, just "Using" FOSS doesn't make open source any > better, participation in the communities is required > before that happens.
You really don't understand what I'm saying, do you? POPULARITY is not QUALITY. You seem to understand this perfectly when people say it about Microsoft, so what's the breakdown here?
> folks that, unlike you, grasp the concept of FOSS
Oh, I grasp the concept just fine. It's the infinite monkeys fallacy. If you just have enough people look at something, eventually one of them will improve it.
But it doesn't matter how many monkeys you have, they're still just monkeys. Once you get your project to a certain level of sophistication, they're incapable of improving it, and they become worthless.
No, FORKED in 2003 from a 1998 codebase. Not a new project - a continuation of an existing one. Which, in turn, was based off an even older codebase dating back to 1992. And Firefox still isn't 100% standards-compliant. They've tried to cover that up by saying they're "more standards-compliant", but IMO "not compliant" equals "not compliant" no matter how you do the math... so they still aren't there yet.
So there's fourteen years. Although, to be fair, four of them were spent as closed source... and remarkably, it was during those four that the codebase was first made usable and became the brand leader! Isn't that strange? But let's call it ten.
> Also GNU. Development started in 1984, and by 1990...they had only just begun work on the kernel. And the Hurd was completed in what... 1996? Twelve years!
> The Linux kernel. Started in
1991, reached feature-parity with commercial UNIX variants in roughly 2001.
Looks like about ten years!
Hmm. Ten, twelve, ten... ten and two thirds years. Drop the fraction. Ten years!
Thank you for playing, please try again.
> If it doesn't produce any code, it can > hardly be called a project. It's the > equivalent of a "Coming Soon" page on > the internet that's been up there for > ten years.
I already said the time averages only apply to successful projects. A failure can take FIFTY years, and it doesn't affect the average.
> Ok, then by your logic, Microsoft has never > released a successful project. [...] > If there is one bug somewhere that caused an > invalid result or a crash or something, then > it fails your test.
Oh! I'm sorry - I didn't know you were retarded. Let me put it another way:
> FOSS projects operate in a totally different ecosystem > from commercial closed source software.
Really? Because I use them on the same servers in the same data centers for the same purposes.
> The success of closed source / commercial software could > simply be measured by the amount of money it makes for the > creator.
No it can't. That's not success of the project, it's success of the product. It's a whole different question. Microsoft Bob was a successful project, because it did what it set out to do. It was a wholly unsuccessful product, because nobody wanted it.
> FOSS success is less trivial to measure.
Not really. Does the project do what it set out to do? Yes or no. Very simple.
> You might as well say that the success of > FOSS itself could be measured by the number > of abandoned projects / period of time.
All projects are abandoned. Failed projects are abandoned before they work reliably. As long as there is either a development team actively working on the project, or an active user community available to effectively support it, the project is not yet a failure. It only fails if the developers AND the community abandon it AND leave it in an effectively unusable state.
> Does that mean that thos FOSS projects where > a failure? Obviously not
Yes, obviously not. So what's the problem?
> I don't need any "Homer Simpson" statistics to > know that open source is getting more popular
But that doesn't make it any more effective. The open source community is getting larger, but it is not becoming more responsive to support requests - quite the opposite. The use of successful open source projects is growing, but that is not making the projects successful any faster, nor is it making them successful any more often. Running fifty servers instead of five on a Linux distribution does not make the Linux kernel any more than the one successful project it was when you were testing it on your desktop.
More people using open source does not mean open source is getting better.
Experience. Name an open source project that is directly comparable feature-for-feature to a commercial software product, has similar reliability, and took less than five years to get there.
You can't. There aren't any. You don't find any until you get up around the seven and eight year mark. The open source development methodology does not compete with commercial software for productivity, because reputation is a shitty short-term motivator. Of course, money is a shitty long-term one.
> And where does this 99% come from?
Again, experience.
> Only count projects that have some semblance of actual code.
If the project doesn't produce actual code, why isn't it a failure?
> I think you left out the Bubble from your closed-source figures.
No, the bubble was full of very long-term failures. A company would spend several years promising and never delivering. That doesn't go into the time average, and it's absolutely dwarfed by the failed projects at companies which were *also* producing successful ones.
> How many thousands of open source projects are there?
Hundreds of thousands.
> And you're saying only 1 in 100 succeed?
Less.
> What is your definition of failure?
Abandonment by the development team before the project is reliable, coupled with a general lack of community support availability. Many open source projects have been abandoned and are unreliable, but have a thriving community readily available for user support; I do not count these as failures unless they don't actually accomplish their intended purpose.
> If you were correct, there would almost be one open source > project for every member of the human race.
If an open source project were successfully completed every single day since 1960, and fully 100 more failed every single day, there would not even be half as many open source projects as there are people in the city of Los Angeles.
So unless you propose that there are in fact FOUR hundred THOUSAND projects failing every single day, I think the bullshit you smell is your own.
> certain people make statements with little or no > concern for whether or not they are true
Like, for example, pretending a question was a statement.
> It has been shown recently that particulate pollution may > have in fact reduced the sunlight reaching the Earth's surface, > causing a cooling effect that masked the warming effect caused > by greenhouse gas emissions (called "Global Dimming").
So the two effects are so closely balanced that they precisely support your existing agenda? How... what's the word?... CONVENIENT. Doesn't that set off any alarms for you?
"The flaw you pointed out in our argument is not really a flaw. There is, in fact, an effect roughly equivalent in magnitude and importance to the effect we demonstrated, which we had simply never noticed."
If it's roughly equivalent in magnitude and importance to an effect you're trying to demonstrate, then wouldn't you say it's largely incompetent not to notice it? I would. The alternative is that they noticed, but didn't tell us. So are they stupid or dishonest?
Actually, there's a third option: they may have noticed, but thought it was unimportant. So they might just be sloppy. Unfortunately, stupid, sloppy, and dishonest ALL fall into the category of "bad science". Which is precisely what I suggested in the first place.
> you have a very limited knowledge of the issues surrounding climate change.
Well, yes, which is why I'm watching Al Gore's movie instead of reading my complimentary subscription to "Climate Monthly" or whatever climatologists get to stay abreast of their field. I already said I wasn't an expert.
> you are offering opinions on a subject that you seem not to understand
Let's examine that opinion.
Al Gore's movie has many inconsistencies that I cannot reconcile, and Al Gore himself is unqualified and unbelievable, so I am not convinced.
Consensus is NOT all we have. We have good scientific practice.
Al Gore has two graphs. Here is one showing the global temperature going up and up and up. And here is one showing a drastic drop in the man-made chemical content of Antarctic ice when we passed the Clean Air Act. That's great. But where's the Clean Air Act on the temperature graph? Why, exactly, is the temperature graph not the least bit affected by something which radically altered our atmosphere for the better?
This inconsistency is just one in a long list of questions that come up. I look at Al Gore's arguments, and I say "but wait". I'm not an expert; maybe there's something I don't know. If you explained, I would probably not entirely understand it. But I can check it through sampling and bullshit detection. I can latch onto one or two things I understand about the argument, and I can go look them up. I can ask experts small parts of the question without referencing global warming, and see if their answers match yours. And most importantly, I can generally tell (after my many years of talking to tech industry managers) whether a person is completely full of shit.
Al Gore sets off my bullshit detectors all over the place. He stated outright not so long ago that secondhand smoke was a major contributor to global warming. That's some absolutely STUNNING bullshit. Why do I have a problem with his movie? Because it's a for-profit production. Why can't all the thousands of scientists who support this movie get together and donate, say, ten thousand dollars for the education of the American public? Why can't they start a fund, and say "anyone who wants to see the movie can do so for free; in a theatre, we'll pay for the tickets, and if you call this number we'll send you the DVD"?
The global warming advocacy community is composed primarily of anti-industrial activists. They don't support the global warming hypothesis so much as they support the inevitable effects: a tightening of the government screws on industry. Stronger regulations on emissions, production capacity, community outreach, all sorts of things. They want the political outcome, not the scientific outcome.
So when a former vice-president makes a for-profit film that mobilises a number of whack jobs to band together and shout with one voice, I am not convinced that he is right. He has cherry-picked the data to make his point, handwaved the inconsistencies in his story, and made statements that are clearly false. That's bad science, but good politics.
And hey - isn't Al Gore a politician? You know, as opposed to a scientist?
This isn't about the science. If it was about the scientist, we would have a solid and respected member of the scientific community standing up there making the presentation. He'd be one hundred percent accurate. Where's the global warming community's Richard Feynman?
And yet, Linux continues to be the same impossible-to-use monstrosity it has always been.
It is truly fascinating how the open source community can stand there like deer in the headlights congratulating themselves on how their most powerful competitor is learning so much from them. Microsoft is now creating open standards, open formats, even open source applications - not one hundred percent of the time, but hey, they're doing it! They're starting to look more and more like us.
Hey, wait a minute. Why don't we look more like Microsoft? Where's our readily accessible documentation localised in dozens of languages? Where's our toll-free licensing hotline? Where's our reliable and knowledgeable tech support team? Our software assurance subscription that actually sends a disc in the mail when there's an update?
You know what really bugs me? That last one. I used to pay $4.95 a month for a quarterly package of three major Linux distributions. I liked that. So how come now I only get that from Microsoft?
Honestly, people. Why is Microsoft getting so much better, while *we're* really starting to SUCK?
And on a more pressing note, just look how much closer those headlights are getting! So how many seconds to *SPLAT*?
The failure of the Net Yaroze was that it was only provided to a Japanese audience; American developers like me could never get our grubby little hands on it. XNA is available to everyone. I think that's going to be far more successful than Sony's Nippon-centric garbage.
Don't get me wrong; Sony has a perfect right to release products only in Japan. It's just a wee bit hypocritical when they claim their Japanese-only product is designed to foster and encourage community. If Microsoft did the same, it would be called racist and anti-competitive.
Re:"Interesting" projects? It depends ...
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As an SDET in Windows Mobile with a long history in the defense industry, I can say I have never worked at a better company. I've worked for the massive companies like EDS, the beltway bandits like CRC and HFSI, the internet startups like Telmaron and Chili!Soft, and various small companies that wanted to make a difference. I even ran my own company for five years. I enjoyed most of the places I worked, for what they were.
In retrospect, they all sucked. I love it here.
Microsoft is still a large corporate environment. It's much more open and relaxed than, say, Bell Atlantic... but it is very much a large company like other large companies. There's an org chart. There's a heirarchy. There's a structure. It's a loose structure - I have never encountered anyone here saying that he's a PM and I'm just a contractor, for example, although I have had that happen in other places - but the structure is still there.
Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about Microsoft is that I always wonder which is the real face of Microsoft, and which is dictated by necessity. Is Microsoft a large corporation that paints a false face of camaraderie and caring, or a fraternal group of motivated engineers who have grudgingly accepted the need for large corporate structure? I can't really tell. I don't think anyone can. Like economics, the peculiar synthesis of Microsoft's corporate culture is the result of human action, but not of human intent... so you just pick the one you'd like to believe and believe it.
I've never worked at Google. My impression is that Google is like the war stories we hear about Microsoft in the early days, so I suspect Google will eventually become much like Microsoft is now. If you're young and just starting out, Google is probably a great place to start and build your career. If you're older, like me, and you want to find the next step... I don't see Google being a good place to go.
I am, of course, biased. Around seven months ago, I was talking to a very interested Google hiring manager; when he asked how much experience I had in the field, I could *hear* the recoil in his voice after I said 15 years. It may have just been that manager, but I got the distinct impression that Google wants to hire young, and if that's a significant factor in their corporate culture - well, as a late-career hire, you'd be in a bad position from day one.
The original questioner, of course, isn't in that position. I'm clarifying purely for the benefit of anyone else who may be reading the thread.
> Most of the time when you're doing EE you'll be > working with equations in which the variables > represent numbers.
That's true, but the question is about higher mathematics. Algebra I is not higher mathematics. About 80% of what I do for a living could be done by a four-year CS grad, but I'm far more interested in the 20% that can't... and so is my employer.
> Properly explained, the idea is incredibly simple.
Define "proper". Define "simple". Sure, a definite integral is the area under the curve defined by a function; that's proper. That's simple. And it's completely incomprehensible to the average student new to calculus.
> Your teachers must have been awful. And despite the fact that > I have a PhD in math
Stop right there. You are not normal. Most people are not interested in a PhD in the first place, and if they do decide to pursue one, it will certainly not be in math. You can't do anything with a PhD in math... except more math. If you made that choice, you are completely unqualified to advise anyone about math except other freaks and weirdos like you.
Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad there *are* freaks and weirdos like you. Thanks to you, we have wonderful error detection and correction algorithms, cheap and fast cryptography, fucking AWESOME digital audio effect processors, the list goes on. But you're still freaks and weirdos, and you shouldn't forget it.
The math you learned in primary and secondary school, where it's numbers that have distinct values, is no longer really applicable. Don't try to "grasp" the concepts. It's not a small step like algebra was, it's a quantum leap. You are working with a fundamentally different question, which is the question of infinity. You need to learn new rules. Don't try to use the rules you learned with numbers; they don't apply. Your way of thinking needs to be fundamentally altered.
Where I always screwed up in learning higher mathematics was in trying to somehow relate it back to arithmetic. That doesn't work. If you keep trying to connect those two dots, you will be perpetually frustrated. Just learn it for what it is. It doesn't matter if you understand it any more than it mattered if you knew why 2 + 3 was 5 in elementary school. Trust me: you will be able to understand it later, once you know a certain critical mass of concepts, but you need to have enough dots before you can connect them into anything remotely like a picture.
This will take roughly your entire pre-calculus class and probably half of your first actual calculus class. You will be confused. It will not make sense. You will feel like you are learning nothing. The answers you give on exams will feel memorised and formulaic, almost like you are cheating.
But eventually, you will have that "Aha!" moment where you really do finally understand what a definite integral is. You just have to trust that the material you're learning is going to get you there, even if you don't know how.
Likewise, it's not really true that higher mathematics doesn't connect back to arithmetic. It just won't connect back for a really long time, and it's not productive to look that far ahead right now.
I struggle with this. Raising kids is hard. The hardest part is figuring out how exactly you fit this whole other person into your life.
I think most people have trouble fitting themselves into their lives. They just don't have enough time to work, socialise, and relax to their own satisfaction. When you add a child on top of that, all kinds of mess comes out of it - and ultimately, your own self-interest carries more weight, so the children often end up on the losing end.
At some point, things need to be reduced and removed to make room. What screws that up is the general inability of most people to make real sacrifices... it's one thing to say you put your child first, but it's quite another to actually do it when you're down to your last few dollars. Even though this level of desperation is rarely an issue for most parents, there are innumerable little ways that parents deprive their children in ways mom and dad might not even notice: you can't afford the $4 bag of cookies your child wants, but you buy an $18 bottle of wine later in the same trip. Could you have perhaps gotten a $12 bottle of wine instead, and used the savings to buy cookies? Of course. The child sees and understands this, even if you don't, and by adolescence there's a massive buildup of frustration from it.
The message we give our children is that as adults, we get to do what we want, and children have to shut up and make do with what we deign to provide them. This doesn't just make our family lives difficult when the kids hit their teenage years, it also raises essentially infantile adults - they've been trained to be selfishly indulgent their whole lives.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. I think you have to actually understand what you do and how it looks to your children, which unfortunately requires you to think about how other people view your behavior... and a lot of people just seem incapable of that.
There is this weird pipe-dream people have that if no computing platform supports DRM natively, then DRM will go away.
This is not true.
The initial IBM PCs and compatibles didn't have any inherent support for copy protection, which is essentially primitive DRM. Yet many people refused to release software without copy protection, and as a result many schemes were enacted which ultimately hurt the consumer *and* sales of the software.
DRM is the same. Many copyright holders refuse to release works on digital media without some sort of DRM. If modern operating systems do not provide DRM natively, then third-party developers will provide it - much like Sony did with their rootkit-infested CDs. We don't want anything else like that, do we?
In the end, DRM will probably go the way of copy protection. The fears that DRM is designed to address are largely illusory, and those that aren't will not really be terribly impacted by DRM. Once companies figure out that DRM is really not worth having, they'll stop having it.
But we can't make them do that any sooner than they're ready. If you try to cram the message down their throat, they'll just fight that much harder to have their DRM, and they'll do much more offensive and draconian things. So relax and be secure in the idea that eventually, DRM will prove ineffective and drop off the radar because it's just not worth the effort.
This breaks how I help Wikipedia
on
More Wiki Than Ever
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I go to Wikipedia to look things up. Usually, I'll click through to a few related links. If I happen to see that something is vandalised or blatantly wrong, I will log in and either fix it or stick one of the dispute bugs on the page and open a talk issue about it.
The important thing here is that I am NORMALLY not logged in. If the most-vandalised pages are version flagged, I will never see the vandalism, and thus I will never fix it.
I don't know how many people browse this way, but if there are enough of them, it will have an impact on how the whole wiki concept works.
Slashdot Mirror
> You have no argument
I have an argument. You just aren't worthy of it.
> You must be confused or something. I never said
...representing less than one thousandth of one percent of the open source community and thus meaning roughly JACK SHIT.
> anything negative about Microsoft
It is a sad fact of the English language that singular and plural second person are the same word, but most people learn to deal with this ambiguity by the age of ten.
> In the specific case of Kettle ETL...
> Resorting to name-calling and spreading FUD
> is not winning you any points here.
That would be why I'm not doing it.
Open source projects overwhelmingly fail. Those that succeed take much longer to do so than comparable closed-source projects. The only defense the community has ever been able to muster is to redefine both "project" and "failure", which is simply not rational.
Not one single name has been called there, and no FUD is involved. These are simply the facts.
And here you are denying them, which is exactly what I said was the problem.
> I think he was talking about GNU userland programs
I wouldn't call any of those even remotely comparable to commercial offerings. The open source community has struggled for years with the problem of not having user-friendly applications, and they've really not made much progress that wasn't outright copied from Apple and Microsoft.
Furthermore, most of GNU's userland programs are not original. They're copies of existing projects, most of which came out of a commercial environment where they simply weren't seen as a salable product. The rapid development of these projects isn't really due to efficiency in creation, but efficiency in duplication.
The general case of the open source project is no longer a few brilliant people tackling an interesting problem. It's a dozen kids with big dreams and no experience trying to take on the corporate machine all by themselves, and they're inevitably doomed to fail.
> Yes, that's just about all that they have in common.
I fail to see your point. Regardless of whether I produce a hammer by mass production or hand-forging, the measure of success remains "does the hammer work". While the only thing the two hammers may have in common is that they drive nails, as the tool's user, I don't really care about anything else.
> All these things are vastly different from CSS software.
Yes, because the benefits of closed source software apply primarily to the customer - not the development and support teams.
> Indeed, just "Using" FOSS doesn't make open source any
> better, participation in the communities is required
> before that happens.
You really don't understand what I'm saying, do you? POPULARITY is not QUALITY. You seem to understand this perfectly when people say it about Microsoft, so what's the breakdown here?
> folks that, unlike you, grasp the concept of FOSS
Oh, I grasp the concept just fine. It's the infinite monkeys fallacy. If you just have enough people look at something, eventually one of them will improve it.
But it doesn't matter how many monkeys you have, they're still just monkeys. Once you get your project to a certain level of sophistication, they're incapable of improving it, and they become worthless.
> Firefox. Started in 2003, 1.0 release in 2004.
...they had only just begun work on the kernel. And the Hurd was completed in what... 1996? Twelve years!
No, FORKED in 2003 from a 1998 codebase. Not a new project - a continuation of an existing one. Which, in turn, was based off an even older codebase dating back to 1992. And Firefox still isn't 100% standards-compliant. They've tried to cover that up by saying they're "more standards-compliant", but IMO "not compliant" equals "not compliant" no matter how you do the math... so they still aren't there yet.
So there's fourteen years. Although, to be fair, four of them were spent as closed source... and remarkably, it was during those four that the codebase was first made usable and became the brand leader! Isn't that strange? But let's call it ten.
> Also GNU. Development started in 1984, and by 1990
> The Linux kernel. Started in
1991, reached feature-parity with commercial UNIX variants in roughly 2001.
Looks like about ten years!
Hmm. Ten, twelve, ten... ten and two thirds years. Drop the fraction. Ten years!
Thank you for playing, please try again.
> If it doesn't produce any code, it can
> hardly be called a project. It's the
> equivalent of a "Coming Soon" page on
> the internet that's been up there for
> ten years.
I already said the time averages only apply to successful projects. A failure can take FIFTY years, and it doesn't affect the average.
> Ok, then by your logic, Microsoft has never
> released a successful project.
[...]
> If there is one bug somewhere that caused an
> invalid result or a crash or something, then
> it fails your test.
Oh! I'm sorry - I didn't know you were retarded. Let me put it another way:
Shut the fuck up. You're retarded.
> FOSS projects operate in a totally different ecosystem
> from commercial closed source software.
Really? Because I use them on the same servers in the same data centers for the same purposes.
> The success of closed source / commercial software could
> simply be measured by the amount of money it makes for the
> creator.
No it can't. That's not success of the project, it's success of the product. It's a whole different question. Microsoft Bob was a successful project, because it did what it set out to do. It was a wholly unsuccessful product, because nobody wanted it.
> FOSS success is less trivial to measure.
Not really. Does the project do what it set out to do? Yes or no. Very simple.
> You might as well say that the success of
> FOSS itself could be measured by the number
> of abandoned projects / period of time.
All projects are abandoned. Failed projects are abandoned before they work reliably. As long as there is either a development team actively working on the project, or an active user community available to effectively support it, the project is not yet a failure. It only fails if the developers AND the community abandon it AND leave it in an effectively unusable state.
> Does that mean that thos FOSS projects where
> a failure? Obviously not
Yes, obviously not. So what's the problem?
> I don't need any "Homer Simpson" statistics to
> know that open source is getting more popular
But that doesn't make it any more effective. The open source community is getting larger, but it is not becoming more responsive to support requests - quite the opposite. The use of successful open source projects is growing, but that is not making the projects successful any faster, nor is it making them successful any more often. Running fifty servers instead of five on a Linux distribution does not make the Linux kernel any more than the one successful project it was when you were testing it on your desktop.
More people using open source does not mean open source is getting better.
> Where does this 'ten years' crap come from?
Experience. Name an open source project that is directly comparable feature-for-feature to a commercial software product, has similar reliability, and took less than five years to get there.
You can't. There aren't any. You don't find any until you get up around the seven and eight year mark. The open source development methodology does not compete with commercial software for productivity, because reputation is a shitty short-term motivator. Of course, money is a shitty long-term one.
> And where does this 99% come from?
Again, experience.
> Only count projects that have some semblance of actual code.
If the project doesn't produce actual code, why isn't it a failure?
> I think you left out the Bubble from your closed-source figures.
No, the bubble was full of very long-term failures. A company would spend several years promising and never delivering. That doesn't go into the time average, and it's absolutely dwarfed by the failed projects at companies which were *also* producing successful ones.
> How many thousands of open source projects are there?
Hundreds of thousands.
> And you're saying only 1 in 100 succeed?
Less.
> What is your definition of failure?
Abandonment by the development team before the project is reliable, coupled with a general lack of community support availability. Many open source projects have been abandoned and are unreliable, but have a thriving community readily available for user support; I do not count these as failures unless they don't actually accomplish their intended purpose.
> If you were correct, there would almost be one open source
> project for every member of the human race.
If an open source project were successfully completed every single day since 1960, and fully 100 more failed every single day, there would not even be half as many open source projects as there are people in the city of Los Angeles.
So unless you propose that there are in fact FOUR hundred THOUSAND projects failing every single day, I think the bullshit you smell is your own.
> There is nothing wrong with the FOSS community
That's exactly what's wrong with it: the open source community does not believe that anything is wrong.
Let's look commercial closed-source projects.
- Roughly 48% of commercial projects fail
- Those that succeed take roughly fourteen months
Now let's look at open source.
- More than 99% of open source projects fail
- Those that succeed take roughly ten years
I don't know. Is there a problem there? It certainly looks that way to me.
Half of your database expenses aren't your software.
> The problem is, when you pair this with something like
> Microsoft's activation/WGA scheme, it means that they
> can...
I always just read whatever comes after this as "put themselves out of business", and then the whole complaint seems stupid.
> certain people make statements with little or no
> concern for whether or not they are true
Like, for example, pretending a question was a statement.
> It has been shown recently that particulate pollution may
> have in fact reduced the sunlight reaching the Earth's surface,
> causing a cooling effect that masked the warming effect caused
> by greenhouse gas emissions (called "Global Dimming").
So the two effects are so closely balanced that they precisely support your existing agenda? How... what's the word?... CONVENIENT. Doesn't that set off any alarms for you?
"The flaw you pointed out in our argument is not really a flaw. There is, in fact, an effect roughly equivalent in magnitude and importance to the effect we demonstrated, which we had simply never noticed."
If it's roughly equivalent in magnitude and importance to an effect you're trying to demonstrate, then wouldn't you say it's largely incompetent not to notice it? I would. The alternative is that they noticed, but didn't tell us. So are they stupid or dishonest?
Actually, there's a third option: they may have noticed, but thought it was unimportant. So they might just be sloppy. Unfortunately, stupid, sloppy, and dishonest ALL fall into the category of "bad science". Which is precisely what I suggested in the first place.
> you have a very limited knowledge of the issues surrounding climate change.
Well, yes, which is why I'm watching Al Gore's movie instead of reading my complimentary subscription to "Climate Monthly" or whatever climatologists get to stay abreast of their field. I already said I wasn't an expert.
> you are offering opinions on a subject that you seem not to understand
Let's examine that opinion.
Al Gore's movie has many inconsistencies that I cannot reconcile, and Al Gore himself is unqualified and unbelievable, so I am not convinced.
So... what's the problem?
Consensus is NOT all we have. We have good scientific practice.
Al Gore has two graphs. Here is one showing the global temperature going up and up and up. And here is one showing a drastic drop in the man-made chemical content of Antarctic ice when we passed the Clean Air Act. That's great. But where's the Clean Air Act on the temperature graph? Why, exactly, is the temperature graph not the least bit affected by something which radically altered our atmosphere for the better?
This inconsistency is just one in a long list of questions that come up. I look at Al Gore's arguments, and I say "but wait". I'm not an expert; maybe there's something I don't know. If you explained, I would probably not entirely understand it. But I can check it through sampling and bullshit detection. I can latch onto one or two things I understand about the argument, and I can go look them up. I can ask experts small parts of the question without referencing global warming, and see if their answers match yours. And most importantly, I can generally tell (after my many years of talking to tech industry managers) whether a person is completely full of shit.
Al Gore sets off my bullshit detectors all over the place. He stated outright not so long ago that secondhand smoke was a major contributor to global warming. That's some absolutely STUNNING bullshit. Why do I have a problem with his movie? Because it's a for-profit production. Why can't all the thousands of scientists who support this movie get together and donate, say, ten thousand dollars for the education of the American public? Why can't they start a fund, and say "anyone who wants to see the movie can do so for free; in a theatre, we'll pay for the tickets, and if you call this number we'll send you the DVD"?
The global warming advocacy community is composed primarily of anti-industrial activists. They don't support the global warming hypothesis so much as they support the inevitable effects: a tightening of the government screws on industry. Stronger regulations on emissions, production capacity, community outreach, all sorts of things. They want the political outcome, not the scientific outcome.
So when a former vice-president makes a for-profit film that mobilises a number of whack jobs to band together and shout with one voice, I am not convinced that he is right. He has cherry-picked the data to make his point, handwaved the inconsistencies in his story, and made statements that are clearly false. That's bad science, but good politics.
And hey - isn't Al Gore a politician? You know, as opposed to a scientist?
This isn't about the science. If it was about the scientist, we would have a solid and respected member of the scientific community standing up there making the presentation. He'd be one hundred percent accurate. Where's the global warming community's Richard Feynman?
Don't have one. Wonder why.
But isn't the keyboard technically just a hundred-button mouse with really crappy resolution?
And yet, Linux continues to be the same impossible-to-use monstrosity it has always been.
It is truly fascinating how the open source community can stand there like deer in the headlights congratulating themselves on how their most powerful competitor is learning so much from them. Microsoft is now creating open standards, open formats, even open source applications - not one hundred percent of the time, but hey, they're doing it! They're starting to look more and more like us.
Hey, wait a minute. Why don't we look more like Microsoft? Where's our readily accessible documentation localised in dozens of languages? Where's our toll-free licensing hotline? Where's our reliable and knowledgeable tech support team? Our software assurance subscription that actually sends a disc in the mail when there's an update?
You know what really bugs me? That last one. I used to pay $4.95 a month for a quarterly package of three major Linux distributions. I liked that. So how come now I only get that from Microsoft?
Honestly, people. Why is Microsoft getting so much better, while *we're* really starting to SUCK?
And on a more pressing note, just look how much closer those headlights are getting! So how many seconds to *SPLAT*?
The failure of the Net Yaroze was that it was only provided to a Japanese audience; American developers like me could never get our grubby little hands on it. XNA is available to everyone. I think that's going to be far more successful than Sony's Nippon-centric garbage.
Don't get me wrong; Sony has a perfect right to release products only in Japan. It's just a wee bit hypocritical when they claim their Japanese-only product is designed to foster and encourage community. If Microsoft did the same, it would be called racist and anti-competitive.
As an SDET in Windows Mobile with a long history in the defense industry, I can say I have never worked at a better company. I've worked for the massive companies like EDS, the beltway bandits like CRC and HFSI, the internet startups like Telmaron and Chili!Soft, and various small companies that wanted to make a difference. I even ran my own company for five years. I enjoyed most of the places I worked, for what they were.
In retrospect, they all sucked. I love it here.
Microsoft is still a large corporate environment. It's much more open and relaxed than, say, Bell Atlantic... but it is very much a large company like other large companies. There's an org chart. There's a heirarchy. There's a structure. It's a loose structure - I have never encountered anyone here saying that he's a PM and I'm just a contractor, for example, although I have had that happen in other places - but the structure is still there.
Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about Microsoft is that I always wonder which is the real face of Microsoft, and which is dictated by necessity. Is Microsoft a large corporation that paints a false face of camaraderie and caring, or a fraternal group of motivated engineers who have grudgingly accepted the need for large corporate structure? I can't really tell. I don't think anyone can. Like economics, the peculiar synthesis of Microsoft's corporate culture is the result of human action, but not of human intent... so you just pick the one you'd like to believe and believe it.
I've never worked at Google. My impression is that Google is like the war stories we hear about Microsoft in the early days, so I suspect Google will eventually become much like Microsoft is now. If you're young and just starting out, Google is probably a great place to start and build your career. If you're older, like me, and you want to find the next step... I don't see Google being a good place to go.
I am, of course, biased. Around seven months ago, I was talking to a very interested Google hiring manager; when he asked how much experience I had in the field, I could *hear* the recoil in his voice after I said 15 years. It may have just been that manager, but I got the distinct impression that Google wants to hire young, and if that's a significant factor in their corporate culture - well, as a late-career hire, you'd be in a bad position from day one.
The original questioner, of course, isn't in that position. I'm clarifying purely for the benefit of anyone else who may be reading the thread.
> Most of the time when you're doing EE you'll be
> working with equations in which the variables
> represent numbers.
That's true, but the question is about higher mathematics. Algebra I is not higher mathematics. About 80% of what I do for a living could be done by a four-year CS grad, but I'm far more interested in the 20% that can't... and so is my employer.
> Properly explained, the idea is incredibly simple.
Define "proper". Define "simple". Sure, a definite integral is the area under the curve defined by a function; that's proper. That's simple. And it's completely incomprehensible to the average student new to calculus.
> Your teachers must have been awful. And despite the fact that
> I have a PhD in math
Stop right there. You are not normal. Most people are not interested in a PhD in the first place, and if they do decide to pursue one, it will certainly not be in math. You can't do anything with a PhD in math... except more math. If you made that choice, you are completely unqualified to advise anyone about math except other freaks and weirdos like you.
Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad there *are* freaks and weirdos like you. Thanks to you, we have wonderful error detection and correction algorithms, cheap and fast cryptography, fucking AWESOME digital audio effect processors, the list goes on. But you're still freaks and weirdos, and you shouldn't forget it.
It took me a long time to figure this out.
The math you learned in primary and secondary school, where it's numbers that have distinct values, is no longer really applicable. Don't try to "grasp" the concepts. It's not a small step like algebra was, it's a quantum leap. You are working with a fundamentally different question, which is the question of infinity. You need to learn new rules. Don't try to use the rules you learned with numbers; they don't apply. Your way of thinking needs to be fundamentally altered.
Where I always screwed up in learning higher mathematics was in trying to somehow relate it back to arithmetic. That doesn't work. If you keep trying to connect those two dots, you will be perpetually frustrated. Just learn it for what it is. It doesn't matter if you understand it any more than it mattered if you knew why 2 + 3 was 5 in elementary school. Trust me: you will be able to understand it later, once you know a certain critical mass of concepts, but you need to have enough dots before you can connect them into anything remotely like a picture.
This will take roughly your entire pre-calculus class and probably half of your first actual calculus class. You will be confused. It will not make sense. You will feel like you are learning nothing. The answers you give on exams will feel memorised and formulaic, almost like you are cheating.
But eventually, you will have that "Aha!" moment where you really do finally understand what a definite integral is. You just have to trust that the material you're learning is going to get you there, even if you don't know how.
Likewise, it's not really true that higher mathematics doesn't connect back to arithmetic. It just won't connect back for a really long time, and it's not productive to look that far ahead right now.
> Micrsoft has long proven itself incapable of
> understanding comptuer security
That's funny. My understanding was that "Writing Secure Code" was among the best books of its kind. Are there better ones?
This is a very good point to consider.
Let's take the old adage "good, fast, cheap: pick two", and use that as our basis.
Both PostgreSQL and MySQL chose cheap. PostgreSQL then chose good, while MySQL chose fast.
Which approach is better? It's hard to say, but FAST benefits everyone, while GOOD benefits only the elite.
From a pure business perspective, the choice to be fast was of greater benefit to more users, and hence should have been higher priority.
I struggle with this. Raising kids is hard. The hardest part is figuring out how exactly you fit this whole other person into your life.
I think most people have trouble fitting themselves into their lives. They just don't have enough time to work, socialise, and relax to their own satisfaction. When you add a child on top of that, all kinds of mess comes out of it - and ultimately, your own self-interest carries more weight, so the children often end up on the losing end.
At some point, things need to be reduced and removed to make room. What screws that up is the general inability of most people to make real sacrifices... it's one thing to say you put your child first, but it's quite another to actually do it when you're down to your last few dollars. Even though this level of desperation is rarely an issue for most parents, there are innumerable little ways that parents deprive their children in ways mom and dad might not even notice: you can't afford the $4 bag of cookies your child wants, but you buy an $18 bottle of wine later in the same trip. Could you have perhaps gotten a $12 bottle of wine instead, and used the savings to buy cookies? Of course. The child sees and understands this, even if you don't, and by adolescence there's a massive buildup of frustration from it.
The message we give our children is that as adults, we get to do what we want, and children have to shut up and make do with what we deign to provide them. This doesn't just make our family lives difficult when the kids hit their teenage years, it also raises essentially infantile adults - they've been trained to be selfishly indulgent their whole lives.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. I think you have to actually understand what you do and how it looks to your children, which unfortunately requires you to think about how other people view your behavior... and a lot of people just seem incapable of that.
> Vista's extreme support for DRM is my concern.
There is this weird pipe-dream people have that if no computing platform supports DRM natively, then DRM will go away.
This is not true.
The initial IBM PCs and compatibles didn't have any inherent support for copy protection, which is essentially primitive DRM. Yet many people refused to release software without copy protection, and as a result many schemes were enacted which ultimately hurt the consumer *and* sales of the software.
DRM is the same. Many copyright holders refuse to release works on digital media without some sort of DRM. If modern operating systems do not provide DRM natively, then third-party developers will provide it - much like Sony did with their rootkit-infested CDs. We don't want anything else like that, do we?
In the end, DRM will probably go the way of copy protection. The fears that DRM is designed to address are largely illusory, and those that aren't will not really be terribly impacted by DRM. Once companies figure out that DRM is really not worth having, they'll stop having it.
But we can't make them do that any sooner than they're ready. If you try to cram the message down their throat, they'll just fight that much harder to have their DRM, and they'll do much more offensive and draconian things. So relax and be secure in the idea that eventually, DRM will prove ineffective and drop off the radar because it's just not worth the effort.
I go to Wikipedia to look things up. Usually, I'll click through to a few related links. If I happen to see that something is vandalised or blatantly wrong, I will log in and either fix it or stick one of the dispute bugs on the page and open a talk issue about it.
The important thing here is that I am NORMALLY not logged in. If the most-vandalised pages are version flagged, I will never see the vandalism, and thus I will never fix it.
I don't know how many people browse this way, but if there are enough of them, it will have an impact on how the whole wiki concept works.