I dunno. Does my actual implementation of a distributed backup system written using web-services (I shit you not - I'll email you the source) count as prior art?
Unfortunately, not really, unless someone wants to give me a few mill to take them on with.:-)
And you are a really nasty person with a complete lack of vision and no understanding of running a company.
That's true for the president of Boeing too. There's no way he could engineer the likes of the 777 with just the top level executives. He hires the right people to design, test and build these wonders of technology. Rather than waste our investors money on hiring full time engineers that could not succeed within the timeframe allowed by the dollars available, we subcontract. Outsourcing is not a new concept, and it saves companies quite a bit of money and time.
Notice the answer completely unrelated to the question and the 'spin'.
That looked like a valid answer to me. Who is this mythical expert who could undertake possibly the most amazing engineering feat in the history of mankind by himself? Actually, are you sure you know what 'spin' means?
Because all engineers make good business administrators? Engineers are (and this is a generalization, I admit) generally too cautious. Innovators are risk takers. Entrepeneurs are risk takers. Engineers want triple redundancy and safety factors. To run a company for 4 years off a $200,000 investment takes talent. Granted, much more was invested by Mr. Laine himself, from his personal income, to keep this business running.
More spin - and the fantastic claim that running a business for $200k for four years implies some kind of 'talent'. Heck, I could run a business for two *centuries* with that kind of investment. (It wouldn't produce a profit - but it would be 'run' and about as effective as LiftPort.)
You really are just an asshole. These people aren't producing a product for you to buy, they are researching something that has never been done before. And how much would you pay yourself per year running for 200 years with 200k? That's before tax, by the way.
If it weren't for the costs, we could build one this year.
To put it bluntly - this is an outright lie. Period. if it were true - why is LiftPort spending money on R&D rather than production?
Because they have 200k and an intent to come up with a cheap(er) way of making the space tether, not infinity dollars and an intent to build a space tether today. Did you bother to read *any* of this in context?
We're going to decline to comment on the personal attacks against our corporate officer, Michael Laine. His past business venture failed. Most entrepreneurs can also claim that dubious distinction on one or more occasions. It is better to have tried and failed than to have not tried at all.
Funny how you fail to mention the fact of your past failures on your webite - in fact, you represent them as sucesses. I suspect much of what he represents as 'personal attacks' are nothing more than inconvient facts like these.
I take it you've never failed at anything before? Did you qualify your post with a list of your past failures? No, and only a child would expect an R&D company to do the same. *Especially* an R&D company. Remember Edison and his light bulb? Should the box have listed all the failed methods he developed?
The problem isn't that Micheal is a crackpot or a huckster - he sincerly believes what he is selling. The problem is that once he gets a Vision, facts need no longer apply - his Vision overrides all.
And you, my friend, have neither facts nor vision but you chose to criticise someone who is working on both.
Consider this: your personal attacks stop this man from even *trying* to build a space tether. In 30-40 years the human race is all but wiped out by global warming. Might the space tether have saved us all? We'll never know because of the moronic bitching of people who don't believe in anything they didn't invent or see in the window at Tandy.
I'm guessing you're the sort of guy who scoffs at the possible advantages of dual-core computing
I don't think you should defend their product when it lacks such obvious features, but sadly you're probably right. At the same time, I can't see that it would take more than a few weeks for a small programming team to come up with the same level of functionality. I'm amazed that noone has chimed in with a list of open source projects aiming to match Outlook, and if I can't find any I think I'm going to start one.
So what you're saying is that an office package in which I can't do something as simple as search my own multiple mailboxes is 'doing a good job'? I'm a 100% Windows guy who supports this useless frack of an app on a daily basis, and it makes me positively nauseous just thinking of the entire world using the same piece of utter shite to manage their schedule and contacts every day.
The 'integration' you're talking about? Yes, they've stuck three sub-standard programs into one and called it a suite. I'll admit that I personally have never seen an 'integrated' package that does everything Outlook does (although I'd be truly *astounded* if none exist, especially in Linux land), but there are *far* better alternatives to organising your day, managing contacts and reading your emails.
For all the scheduling that Outlook does, I still can't set rules like 'there must be one person still at the office at any given time' or 'alert me if two people book in the same client on the same day'. The list goes on and on: looking for contacts in multiple address books, total lack of SPAM protection, undeletable conflicts folders, failure to fill out the 'To:' field, can't search contacts while printing an email to fax... argh!
If you think back over the years, you'll realise that MS hasn't invested a single dime in making Outlook more useful since Office 97. It still does *exactly* the same shitty job at all three of its primary roles. The improvements have all been either cosmetic or half-assed attempts to fix broken philosophies. How much frigging money has Outlook cost the world in this time? How much *extra* time was wasted dealing with Outlook's general inability to perform? Hundreds of man hours per day? Thousands?
Moving on from the end user now, anyone who has dealt with *external* integration knows it is a complete hack, rather like the internal integration. Publish a security form in public folders to allow access by external programs - Yes, all of them. WTFnF? Let me just grab my eyebrows from the roof! I can't imagine *any* alternative product would be this annoying or unsafe to work with.
That's not to say they haven't made significant 'improvements' to administering the back end over the years, like Active Directories. Otherwise known as 'half decent security management and a lame attempt at tying it to some sort of real logon credentials'.
And shucks, constantly using 600MB of memory and 20-30% of a fast P4 to handle six mailboxes that get maybe 20 messages a day is pretty damn efficient, right?
Shall I get started on Windows Domains themselves? I hope you've now learned your lesson.:-p
If you think the museum is scary, what do you think of the idea that in 100 years time your children could be considered a heretic or a cultist for not having an orthodox enough view for the prevailing views of the society of the time?
I don't think human-kind can ever shake religion completely, and it seems to me we're doomed to cycle in and out of various dark-ages - the Creatonist 'Museum', and the 'War' On 'Terror' is the kind of stuff you see perpetrated right at the point where a society is getting dumb and complacent enough to be talked into doing something *really* crazy. I can think of some examples but I'll refrain from inadvertently casting aspersions on anybody's grandparents.:-)
Everyone knows the only reason you need a hardware RAID card is because all the mobo manufacturers dicked us for IDE headers. 8 SATA connectors is no good to someone with over a TB of IDE drives.
Given that I don't know what that is and Google only gives 54 hits I'll assume that you either meant something more common or something so far fetched it doesn't really come into the discussion, at least in the foreseeable future.
I guess you're talking about a fusion reactor efficient enough to generate more power from one unit of hydrogen than the most efficient chemical means of extracting one unit from some commonly found material. That sounds like a nice idea, but given the above I can only stress my point - let's stop talking about the 'hydrogen economy' and keep talking about the 'ways to make more energy without carbon'.
I just hope that in my lifetime nuclear power becomes commonplace. I think we've clearly shown that some radioactive stuff you can bury is still way more controllable than millions of tons of a seemingly harmless gas.
Did you read TFA at all? You can't reuse Al2O3 because the energy involved in turning that back into pure aluminium is very high. Catalysts can quite often be salvaged from such a system, but the reactants rarely can.
PS Everyone stop talking about the 'Hydrogen Economy'. If you really are interested in an economy where fuel is expensive and inefficient then by all means go ahead, but when used as a catch phrase I can't stand that term: For the record hydrogen has one of the lowest energy/weight ratios and we *still* haven't found a single viable way to produce it in large quantities. It's like talking about 'Horse and Buggy' before 'Buggy' has been invented.
The entire EU is 4.4 million square km (1.7 million sq mi). The US is approximately 9.1 million square km (3.5 million sq mi). That distance matters.
Not going to look up the exact figure, but Australia is roughly the size of the US. I can't really accept that two people brought up in the same country, no matter how far apart, can claim to be more different than two people brought up in completely different cultures and vastly more diverse religions than just two brands of the same one.
I'd 99.99% certain there is more difference between people in France and Sweden than there is between me and a guy in Perth. There *could* be a vast difference since he could be a Sudanese refugee who is a Muslim (and I could be an Asian laptop wholesaler), but that's a different argument.
Actually there's only one guy in Perth. His name is Bruce, but we've never met.
very nasty clause, that patents must be obtainable in any technical field
That's great! Has anyone got a brother who is a plumber? Bricklayer? Panel beater? If someone patents something obvious in a field more people can relate to, it could be enough to shift the tide against all this.
...and has done for a good handful of decades (at least on computers). Not only is this not news, it's misclassified. This should be story about stupid patents (and how the IQ of the average slashdot readers seems to now be in single-figure land).
OK, this is definitely my last post on this subject.:-)
Firstly just one small thing, my revisions were done as code. My technical docs are now a side project that attempts to keep up with what is implemented. The simple fact is that noone will be interested in these docs until there is a much larger number of people interested in the binary. The best source of technical information about my project right now is my source code, which I take pains to comment well.
I agree that not many people can imagine a complete system and get it right the first time, but the majority of OSS projects address a very specific (or very simple and generalised) need. My HTML code documenter was completely written before I opened the SourceForge project for it - the whole thing took me a weekend.
The reason design shortcomings and spec shift are disastrous normally is that you have a fixed timeframe within which to complete the project. Any setbacks can cost you huge amounts of the negotiated price, or worse, the contract and possibly your job. This is why we teach a formal design process, it is the only way we can be sure to allocate the resources and time (and if you're smart, the extra time for specification creep) that will get the job done.
In the open source world, there is rarely a deadline, and most people are doing this entirely of their own volition in their spare time, so resource allocation is a very hit and miss affair. What's more important is to keep working towards your (original, well thought out) goal despite any setbacks and to keep making your work accessible to your audience in order to one day attract help. It happens in the real world too, but again when you are working by yourself and taking suggestions from every Jimmy Bloggs *after* you start working there will *always* be things you didn't think of. Classic examples are those projects that end up becoming part of someone else's completely unrelated project, or those that someone decides to extend in a way the author never intended to.
I mean have the ability to break a goal into subprojects, and to analyse a need in terms of what a computer can and can't do. I'm saying that if you aren't the sort of person that can easily conceptualise a small project and think about it as a system you probably aren't going to succeed anyway. That being the case, documenting what you're doing is only wasting your own time and making you go over old ideas.
Only a very seasoned developer could hope to completely nail a more complex system the first time around by himself. Even having done so, he would feel there are bits that weren't 'elegant' enough. These are things that wouldn't get fixed in a commercial situation, but which can be done without any of the bad consequences in an OSS environment. Again, excessive documentation as would normally be required would in this case be a waste of time. In this case, and especially with open source software, they are more likely to be needed *after* the first stable release (and otherwise not at all:-D )
To sum up my position, if you aren't working on a large project with many other people, where a clear design and delegation of tasks is necessary, then you're probably working alone as one of the parent posts mentioned. In this situation, excessive documenting and analysis would actually detract from the developer's focus and take away from time better spend prototyping and thinking laterally about their idea. I know I am not alone in holding this opinion although I can't think what to google in order to prove it. The more well-known theory is that one man working alone (ie without losing focus) will write better (more consistent) code, sometimes in shorter time, than two people working with the best design and breakdown possible. I'm extending that to say that one man can conceptualise a system better if he doesn't lose focus or indeed completely waste his time by putting it on paper for other people to understand.
That and in an OSS situation where something like 80% of projects fail because the developer gets bored or trumped by a superior project, clearly designing things will only *increase* the chance that you never reach a point where people would care.;-)
Personally I spent a couple of months getting down on paper what I was going to do, since I was planning a relatively complex project (modular, multithreaded etc). I certainly didn't go through a 10 step process to identify and correlate all my own thoughts, however. And I'm glad I didn't because I made mistakes arising from false assumptions (something that would only be embarrassing if put on paper:-D ), and as always, specs shift over time. This would have been disastrous in a commercial situation but in the OSS world it resulted in a better app, because I could freely decide to take the time to go back and rework something from the ground up, making it better than I had originally envisioned possible. Had I created reams of designs heavily relying on these particular subsystems it would have all become worthless after a night's coding 'in the zone'.
Sorry, I was talking about the 1% of open source projects whose creators can actually code.
If you don't see everything as a conceptual system from the start, you aren't the sort of person who is going to take an idea and turn it into a computer program anyway.
14) Wish you'd skipped steps 1-9 because you're writing OSS, not an OS.
Seriously, speccing and coming up with working releases is NOT a requirement for starting an OSS project, and IMO it's not even advisable. Of course it is important to have a clear idea where you're going and whether you can realistically get there, but not like in a commercial environment where missing the goal or taking too long is as bad as doing nothing at all.
Get into the swing of packaging your releases and interfacing with your audience as early as possible. Don't get bogged down on it, but make sure you have a clear idea of how your release is going to look: again don't waste time, but take a bit of effort to make help files and readmes, otherwise your project won't take off no matter how good the code is. This is especially true for complex projects where some user training is required.
This flies in the face of traditional software development, but remember that in 99% of OSS projects there is no deadline and no budget. You don't need to get it right the first time, you need to keep people interested *while* you're doing it. It's important to make your code feel solid to the end user - it's not acceptable to release for Windows in a ZIP file unless your project is exceedingly small and simple. Make an installer: you need to display the GPL somewhere anyway.:-)
That's my 2c as someone who has invested over three years in a project that gets plenty of downloads, but still no feedback or 'community' as someone else mentioned. What will drive your downloads is making sure there is always a new release available - most people check maybe once a month *tops*.
Bah, this is typical/. MS bashing. For starters, it is already well and truly possible to write.NET code that runs on many platforms. The biggest hurdle is that MS is not interested (and yes, money is the reason) in making an IDE or releasing its windowing API on other platforms. When you're talking cross-platform development there are actually very few viable options for APIs anyway, so most developers wouldn't find themselves too surprised to be looking at things like PortAudio and Gtk rather than relying on everything coming from MS.
So MS didn't know what.NET was going to do? You're probably right, they couldn't have imagined things like ATI drivers requiring.NET 2.0 for their flash control panel, or any one of the million other 'strange' places where developers have found.NET a convenient way to accomplish tasks from minute to mammoth.
As for their mandating that code developed under.NET for other platforms be open source, I'm in two minds. Clearly it could have been great if they'd decided not to do that, but when you consider that they've released a free IDE and framework I'm sure it would irk even the most philanthropic MS exec to see the resulting explosion of cross-platform compatibility and ensuing increase in the net viability of having Linux or Mac machines in your office alongside your Windows boxen.
Anyway... back to coding my cross platform app with my free tools from MS.
Should I use unpatched Mozarella, which runs anything from anyone on a page request? I use IE7 with the nagging security hardening turned on, and while I'm sure there's an option or add-on for Firefox that does the same, I doubt *average* users of it or other major browsers have any idea what they are getting into when they surf the net.
Just my 2c as someone who spends all day unp0wning computers that only use Firefox just as often (per capita) as I do those running unpatched IE6 or worse.
Yes I've owned about a thousand of those in my time. I'd like my $16,000 please. I also 'own' numerous educational and corporate editions of Office. Are those worth more?
In my experience, IE7 is buggy as hell on many sites, and the security 'hardening' feature makes most of the remainder stop working or become an absolute pain. SourceForge for instance is really annoying at the moment with their requests to 'https://', which funnily enough cannot be added to either the trusted or restricted zones.
So don't be too hard on the web devs, they're struggling with the ridiculous quirks of all browsers that result from the fact we're still trying to make HTML/HTTP do something it never could have conceived of at the time it was invented. Anyone remember how XML was going to standardise information for us all? Funny I thought information was pretty standard already.:-) What it did do was give a lot of people exposure to a single way to agree on packaging information. A really really crappy one, but a well-known one none the less.
The sad fact is that even new ideas in HTML/JS/etc. can't get a foothold against the mass of legacy support that the internet has become, and I'd even guess a fair slab of readers here make their daily bread from that fact. HTML in 10 years? Think POP3/SMTP right now. We're stuck with it, and it totally sucks ass.
So basically, the bugginess is not something new nor unique to one browser, nor is it something I see going away soon. Face it, the internet right now sucks. It'll get better over time slowly just as it has over the last 10-15 years, but it's grown too big for the sweeping sudden changes that let it become what we all saw through Netscape Navigator all those years ago. My hat goes off to the projects breaking MS's stronghold on where the protocols go, because that will accelerate the changes we *all* need.
USB drives autorun on Windows just like a CD when they are mounted. As for detecting the virus, if you have the first and only copy in existence on the USB drive, Norton's ain't gonna detect it. And all that's assuming they haven't just found a new way to comporomise Media Player 11 with an MP3.
So congratulations: You just hypothetically got p0wned by teh hax0r.
Nothing 'moves' files faster than Server 2K3 with 'Advanced Disk Performance' enabled.;-) If the file operation involves less disk space than you have free RAM, it happens instantly. I would guess Linux is at least that good too (I only run it inside VMWare).
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. Does my actual implementation of a distributed backup system written using web-services (I shit you not - I'll email you the source) count as prior art?
:-)
Unfortunately, not really, unless someone wants to give me a few mill to take them on with.
That's true for the president of Boeing too. There's no way he could engineer the likes of the 777 with just the top level executives. He hires the right people to design, test and build these wonders of technology. Rather than waste our investors money on hiring full time engineers that could not succeed within the timeframe allowed by the dollars available, we subcontract. Outsourcing is not a new concept, and it saves companies quite a bit of money and time.
Notice the answer completely unrelated to the question and the 'spin'.
That looked like a valid answer to me. Who is this mythical expert who could undertake possibly the most amazing engineering feat in the history of mankind by himself? Actually, are you sure you know what 'spin' means?
Because all engineers make good business administrators? Engineers are (and this is a generalization, I admit) generally too cautious. Innovators are risk takers. Entrepeneurs are risk takers. Engineers want triple redundancy and safety factors. To run a company for 4 years off a $200,000 investment takes talent. Granted, much more was invested by Mr. Laine himself, from his personal income, to keep this business running.
More spin - and the fantastic claim that running a business for $200k for four years implies some kind of 'talent'. Heck, I could run a business for two *centuries* with that kind of investment. (It wouldn't produce a profit - but it would be 'run' and about as effective as LiftPort.)
You really are just an asshole. These people aren't producing a product for you to buy, they are researching something that has never been done before. And how much would you pay yourself per year running for 200 years with 200k? That's before tax, by the way.
If it weren't for the costs, we could build one this year.
To put it bluntly - this is an outright lie. Period. if it were true - why is LiftPort spending money on R&D rather than production?
Because they have 200k and an intent to come up with a cheap(er) way of making the space tether, not infinity dollars and an intent to build a space tether today. Did you bother to read *any* of this in context?
We're going to decline to comment on the personal attacks against our corporate officer, Michael Laine. His past business venture failed. Most entrepreneurs can also claim that dubious distinction on one or more occasions. It is better to have tried and failed than to have not tried at all.
Funny how you fail to mention the fact of your past failures on your webite - in fact, you represent them as sucesses. I suspect much of what he represents as 'personal attacks' are nothing more than inconvient facts like these.
I take it you've never failed at anything before? Did you qualify your post with a list of your past failures? No, and only a child would expect an R&D company to do the same. *Especially* an R&D company. Remember Edison and his light bulb? Should the box have listed all the failed methods he developed?
The problem isn't that Micheal is a crackpot or a huckster - he sincerly believes what he is selling. The problem is that once he gets a Vision, facts need no longer apply - his Vision overrides all.
And you, my friend, have neither facts nor vision but you chose to criticise someone who is working on both.
Consider this: your personal attacks stop this man from even *trying* to build a space tether. In 30-40 years the human race is all but wiped out by global warming. Might the space tether have saved us all? We'll never know because of the moronic bitching of people who don't believe in anything they didn't invent or see in the window at Tandy.
I'm guessing you're the sort of guy who scoffs at the possible advantages of dual-core computing
I don't think you should defend their product when it lacks such obvious features, but sadly you're probably right. At the same time, I can't see that it would take more than a few weeks for a small programming team to come up with the same level of functionality. I'm amazed that noone has chimed in with a list of open source projects aiming to match Outlook, and if I can't find any I think I'm going to start one.
LOL this *has* to be a troll. OK I'll bite. :-)
:-p
So what you're saying is that an office package in which I can't do something as simple as search my own multiple mailboxes is 'doing a good job'? I'm a 100% Windows guy who supports this useless frack of an app on a daily basis, and it makes me positively nauseous just thinking of the entire world using the same piece of utter shite to manage their schedule and contacts every day.
The 'integration' you're talking about? Yes, they've stuck three sub-standard programs into one and called it a suite. I'll admit that I personally have never seen an 'integrated' package that does everything Outlook does (although I'd be truly *astounded* if none exist, especially in Linux land), but there are *far* better alternatives to organising your day, managing contacts and reading your emails.
For all the scheduling that Outlook does, I still can't set rules like 'there must be one person still at the office at any given time' or 'alert me if two people book in the same client on the same day'. The list goes on and on: looking for contacts in multiple address books, total lack of SPAM protection, undeletable conflicts folders, failure to fill out the 'To:' field, can't search contacts while printing an email to fax... argh!
If you think back over the years, you'll realise that MS hasn't invested a single dime in making Outlook more useful since Office 97. It still does *exactly* the same shitty job at all three of its primary roles. The improvements have all been either cosmetic or half-assed attempts to fix broken philosophies. How much frigging money has Outlook cost the world in this time? How much *extra* time was wasted dealing with Outlook's general inability to perform? Hundreds of man hours per day? Thousands?
Moving on from the end user now, anyone who has dealt with *external* integration knows it is a complete hack, rather like the internal integration. Publish a security form in public folders to allow access by external programs - Yes, all of them. WTFnF? Let me just grab my eyebrows from the roof! I can't imagine *any* alternative product would be this annoying or unsafe to work with.
That's not to say they haven't made significant 'improvements' to administering the back end over the years, like Active Directories. Otherwise known as 'half decent security management and a lame attempt at tying it to some sort of real logon credentials'.
And shucks, constantly using 600MB of memory and 20-30% of a fast P4 to handle six mailboxes that get maybe 20 messages a day is pretty damn efficient, right?
Shall I get started on Windows Domains themselves? I hope you've now learned your lesson.
If you think the museum is scary, what do you think of the idea that in 100 years time your children could be considered a heretic or a cultist for not having an orthodox enough view for the prevailing views of the society of the time?
:-)
I don't think human-kind can ever shake religion completely, and it seems to me we're doomed to cycle in and out of various dark-ages - the Creatonist 'Museum', and the 'War' On 'Terror' is the kind of stuff you see perpetrated right at the point where a society is getting dumb and complacent enough to be talked into doing something *really* crazy. I can think of some examples but I'll refrain from inadvertently casting aspersions on anybody's grandparents.
Everyone knows the only reason you need a hardware RAID card is because all the mobo manufacturers dicked us for IDE headers. 8 SATA connectors is no good to someone with over a TB of IDE drives.
Given that I don't know what that is and Google only gives 54 hits I'll assume that you either meant something more common or something so far fetched it doesn't really come into the discussion, at least in the foreseeable future.
I guess you're talking about a fusion reactor efficient enough to generate more power from one unit of hydrogen than the most efficient chemical means of extracting one unit from some commonly found material. That sounds like a nice idea, but given the above I can only stress my point - let's stop talking about the 'hydrogen economy' and keep talking about the 'ways to make more energy without carbon'.
I just hope that in my lifetime nuclear power becomes commonplace. I think we've clearly shown that some radioactive stuff you can bury is still way more controllable than millions of tons of a seemingly harmless gas.
Just my 2c.
Did you read TFA at all? You can't reuse Al2O3 because the energy involved in turning that back into pure aluminium is very high. Catalysts can quite often be salvaged from such a system, but the reactants rarely can.
PS Everyone stop talking about the 'Hydrogen Economy'. If you really are interested in an economy where fuel is expensive and inefficient then by all means go ahead, but when used as a catch phrase I can't stand that term: For the record hydrogen has one of the lowest energy/weight ratios and we *still* haven't found a single viable way to produce it in large quantities. It's like talking about 'Horse and Buggy' before 'Buggy' has been invented.
The entire EU is 4.4 million square km (1.7 million sq mi). The US is approximately 9.1 million square km (3.5 million sq mi). That distance matters.
Not going to look up the exact figure, but Australia is roughly the size of the US. I can't really accept that two people brought up in the same country, no matter how far apart, can claim to be more different than two people brought up in completely different cultures and vastly more diverse religions than just two brands of the same one.
I'd 99.99% certain there is more difference between people in France and Sweden than there is between me and a guy in Perth. There *could* be a vast difference since he could be a Sudanese refugee who is a Muslim (and I could be an Asian laptop wholesaler), but that's a different argument.
Actually there's only one guy in Perth. His name is Bruce, but we've never met.
very nasty clause, that patents must be obtainable in any technical field
That's great! Has anyone got a brother who is a plumber? Bricklayer? Panel beater? If someone patents something obvious in a field more people can relate to, it could be enough to shift the tide against all this.
Uhm... a culture that has to use way more words to justify their position/explain their feelings in electronic communication than anyone else? :-)
(That means I'm only messing with you.)
...and has done for a good handful of decades (at least on computers). Not only is this not news, it's misclassified. This should be story about stupid patents (and how the IQ of the average slashdot readers seems to now be in single-figure land).
OK, this is definitely my last post on this subject. :-)
:-)
Firstly just one small thing, my revisions were done as code. My technical docs are now a side project that attempts to keep up with what is implemented. The simple fact is that noone will be interested in these docs until there is a much larger number of people interested in the binary. The best source of technical information about my project right now is my source code, which I take pains to comment well.
I agree that not many people can imagine a complete system and get it right the first time, but the majority of OSS projects address a very specific (or very simple and generalised) need. My HTML code documenter was completely written before I opened the SourceForge project for it - the whole thing took me a weekend.
The reason design shortcomings and spec shift are disastrous normally is that you have a fixed timeframe within which to complete the project. Any setbacks can cost you huge amounts of the negotiated price, or worse, the contract and possibly your job. This is why we teach a formal design process, it is the only way we can be sure to allocate the resources and time (and if you're smart, the extra time for specification creep) that will get the job done.
In the open source world, there is rarely a deadline, and most people are doing this entirely of their own volition in their spare time, so resource allocation is a very hit and miss affair. What's more important is to keep working towards your (original, well thought out) goal despite any setbacks and to keep making your work accessible to your audience in order to one day attract help. It happens in the real world too, but again when you are working by yourself and taking suggestions from every Jimmy Bloggs *after* you start working there will *always* be things you didn't think of. Classic examples are those projects that end up becoming part of someone else's completely unrelated project, or those that someone decides to extend in a way the author never intended to.
Take it easy, and check out my project.
I mean have the ability to break a goal into subprojects, and to analyse a need in terms of what a computer can and can't do. I'm saying that if you aren't the sort of person that can easily conceptualise a small project and think about it as a system you probably aren't going to succeed anyway. That being the case, documenting what you're doing is only wasting your own time and making you go over old ideas.
:-D )
;-)
:-D ), and as always, specs shift over time. This would have been disastrous in a commercial situation but in the OSS world it resulted in a better app, because I could freely decide to take the time to go back and rework something from the ground up, making it better than I had originally envisioned possible. Had I created reams of designs heavily relying on these particular subsystems it would have all become worthless after a night's coding 'in the zone'.
:-)
Only a very seasoned developer could hope to completely nail a more complex system the first time around by himself. Even having done so, he would feel there are bits that weren't 'elegant' enough. These are things that wouldn't get fixed in a commercial situation, but which can be done without any of the bad consequences in an OSS environment. Again, excessive documentation as would normally be required would in this case be a waste of time. In this case, and especially with open source software, they are more likely to be needed *after* the first stable release (and otherwise not at all
To sum up my position, if you aren't working on a large project with many other people, where a clear design and delegation of tasks is necessary, then you're probably working alone as one of the parent posts mentioned. In this situation, excessive documenting and analysis would actually detract from the developer's focus and take away from time better spend prototyping and thinking laterally about their idea. I know I am not alone in holding this opinion although I can't think what to google in order to prove it. The more well-known theory is that one man working alone (ie without losing focus) will write better (more consistent) code, sometimes in shorter time, than two people working with the best design and breakdown possible. I'm extending that to say that one man can conceptualise a system better if he doesn't lose focus or indeed completely waste his time by putting it on paper for other people to understand.
That and in an OSS situation where something like 80% of projects fail because the developer gets bored or trumped by a superior project, clearly designing things will only *increase* the chance that you never reach a point where people would care.
Personally I spent a couple of months getting down on paper what I was going to do, since I was planning a relatively complex project (modular, multithreaded etc). I certainly didn't go through a 10 step process to identify and correlate all my own thoughts, however. And I'm glad I didn't because I made mistakes arising from false assumptions (something that would only be embarrassing if put on paper
Hope this makes it all clear.
Sorry, I was talking about the 1% of open source projects whose creators can actually code.
If you don't see everything as a conceptual system from the start, you aren't the sort of person who is going to take an idea and turn it into a computer program anyway.
14) Wish you'd skipped steps 1-9 because you're writing OSS, not an OS.
:-)
Seriously, speccing and coming up with working releases is NOT a requirement for starting an OSS project, and IMO it's not even advisable. Of course it is important to have a clear idea where you're going and whether you can realistically get there, but not like in a commercial environment where missing the goal or taking too long is as bad as doing nothing at all.
Get into the swing of packaging your releases and interfacing with your audience as early as possible. Don't get bogged down on it, but make sure you have a clear idea of how your release is going to look: again don't waste time, but take a bit of effort to make help files and readmes, otherwise your project won't take off no matter how good the code is. This is especially true for complex projects where some user training is required.
This flies in the face of traditional software development, but remember that in 99% of OSS projects there is no deadline and no budget. You don't need to get it right the first time, you need to keep people interested *while* you're doing it. It's important to make your code feel solid to the end user - it's not acceptable to release for Windows in a ZIP file unless your project is exceedingly small and simple. Make an installer: you need to display the GPL somewhere anyway.
That's my 2c as someone who has invested over three years in a project that gets plenty of downloads, but still no feedback or 'community' as someone else mentioned. What will drive your downloads is making sure there is always a new release available - most people check maybe once a month *tops*.
HTH
Sourceforge has the correct advice: Release Early, Release Often. I still get no feedback but I'm getting plenty of downloads.
I can add that the new.edu.au proxies must be signed into with the student's name. They aren't just filtering, they're watching closely.
Bah, this is typical /. MS bashing. For starters, it is already well and truly possible to write .NET code that runs on many platforms. The biggest hurdle is that MS is not interested (and yes, money is the reason) in making an IDE or releasing its windowing API on other platforms. When you're talking cross-platform development there are actually very few viable options for APIs anyway, so most developers wouldn't find themselves too surprised to be looking at things like PortAudio and Gtk rather than relying on everything coming from MS.
.NET was going to do? You're probably right, they couldn't have imagined things like ATI drivers requiring .NET 2.0 for their flash control panel, or any one of the million other 'strange' places where developers have found .NET a convenient way to accomplish tasks from minute to mammoth.
.NET for other platforms be open source, I'm in two minds. Clearly it could have been great if they'd decided not to do that, but when you consider that they've released a free IDE and framework I'm sure it would irk even the most philanthropic MS exec to see the resulting explosion of cross-platform compatibility and ensuing increase in the net viability of having Linux or Mac machines in your office alongside your Windows boxen.
So MS didn't know what
As for their mandating that code developed under
Anyway... back to coding my cross platform app with my free tools from MS.
Should I use unpatched Mozarella, which runs anything from anyone on a page request? I use IE7 with the nagging security hardening turned on, and while I'm sure there's an option or add-on for Firefox that does the same, I doubt *average* users of it or other major browsers have any idea what they are getting into when they surf the net.
Just my 2c as someone who spends all day unp0wning computers that only use Firefox just as often (per capita) as I do those running unpatched IE6 or worse.
Yes I've owned about a thousand of those in my time. I'd like my $16,000 please. I also 'own' numerous educational and corporate editions of Office. Are those worth more?
In my experience, IE7 is buggy as hell on many sites, and the security 'hardening' feature makes most of the remainder stop working or become an absolute pain. SourceForge for instance is really annoying at the moment with their requests to 'https://', which funnily enough cannot be added to either the trusted or restricted zones.
:-) What it did do was give a lot of people exposure to a single way to agree on packaging information. A really really crappy one, but a well-known one none the less.
So don't be too hard on the web devs, they're struggling with the ridiculous quirks of all browsers that result from the fact we're still trying to make HTML/HTTP do something it never could have conceived of at the time it was invented. Anyone remember how XML was going to standardise information for us all? Funny I thought information was pretty standard already.
The sad fact is that even new ideas in HTML/JS/etc. can't get a foothold against the mass of legacy support that the internet has become, and I'd even guess a fair slab of readers here make their daily bread from that fact. HTML in 10 years? Think POP3/SMTP right now. We're stuck with it, and it totally sucks ass.
So basically, the bugginess is not something new nor unique to one browser, nor is it something I see going away soon. Face it, the internet right now sucks. It'll get better over time slowly just as it has over the last 10-15 years, but it's grown too big for the sweeping sudden changes that let it become what we all saw through Netscape Navigator all those years ago. My hat goes off to the projects breaking MS's stronghold on where the protocols go, because that will accelerate the changes we *all* need.
i especially love the sub-title for this story. suddenly we all have balanced views on security.
USB drives autorun on Windows just like a CD when they are mounted. As for detecting the virus, if you have the first and only copy in existence on the USB drive, Norton's ain't gonna detect it. And all that's assuming they haven't just found a new way to comporomise Media Player 11 with an MP3.
So congratulations: You just hypothetically got p0wned by teh hax0r.
Nothing 'moves' files faster than Server 2K3 with 'Advanced Disk Performance' enabled. ;-) If the file operation involves less disk space than you have free RAM, it happens instantly. I would guess Linux is at least that good too (I only run it inside VMWare).