* The cost of working around a bug that you can't fix. It would take several months to learn enough about Oo.o to fix a bug without introducing a new one. My time isn't free.
* The cost of interoperating with other people because you can't just give them a copy of the program you use. Most people use mainstream products and have no trouble interoperating. The most interesting interoperation happens on the web with platform agnostic applications.
* The cost of upgrading because you need a bug fix that is only in the new version. What? No workaround? This is rare but valid. On the other hand, a vendor is more likely to fix an error affecting ordinary users than a FOSS team who give most of their attention to errors that annoy developers.
* The cost of retraining because you can't just back-port bug fixes without getting a new UI. Nobody retrains and nobody "back-ports" bug fixes. New UIs are not restricted to proprietary software.
* The cost of migration to a new platform later. If the cost is an issue, why migrate? Also, the cost of migration to a new platform is almost entirely administrative, not software licenses.
* The cost of depending on a third party beyond your control with a monopoly on being able to modify software you use. You mean someone like Linus?
There is a big difference between what you can do in theory and what is reasonable in practice.
Some very small fraction of a percent of the population can or care to do this. Of the remainder, the vast majority don't even know what we are talking about, and those who do couldn't give a rat's ass.
FOSS has a community of developers and a community of users. The overlap between the developers and the users who knowingly use FOSS is about 100%. To anyone outside the community, the only difference between FOSS and proprietary is the price. What gets their attention is not Open but Free As In Beer. They aren't going to fork linux to personalize their netbook experience.
I can code, but I'm not going to mod Gnome or the Gimp. I have better things to do with my time.
It's all about the power distribution curve. Stallman and the rest of you guys on the upper left end just keep at it; the rest of us on the lower right are enjoying your work.
You know what's missing from this argument? Women. More specifically, beautiful naked women protesting that they'd rather go nude than use non-GPL software.
If Stallman could arrange that, he might make some converts.
I assume this is some kind of spoof. I certainly got a good laugh out of it. Reminds me of the ad with the gentle monk who won't kill anything, not even an insect, and cries out in anguish when he finds out that his mouthwash has just killed millions of bacteria.
If,on the other hand, RS is serious, it's time he got professional help.
If it was the French, we'd just poke fun at them; repelling a video game is a battle they can win (though they might suffer some casualties). But it's the Germans, and they are just too sad to poke fun at.
Given that the state is responsible for the cost of your health care, getting the chip won't be voluntary. Needless to say, if the monitors detected something life-threatening, they'd have to be able to send someone to help you; that means they also have to know where you are.
We know where you are, we can read all your bio-signs, and we are mandated to protect our investment in health care. Don't run so fast. Keep it down to one orgasm. Put down that cigarette. That's your last coffee for today. Sound silly? Remember when we were silly to suggest they'd be banning smoking in bars next?
Yah--we really look forward to having our chips installed. Am I the only one who would prefer a long painful death?
In the end, anyone with an IP address can act as a host or relay. If something wants to get through, it will.
There was an advantage to the uucp forwarding network, in that routing could be managed and the number of possible paths was immense. Anyone with a basic PC and a modem could install Waffle and become a uucp node. For two years when the wall was still up, I had an ongoing conversation with a mathematician/cryptographer in Minsk (no Tom Lear jokes, please). I was always concerned that the Soviets would find him out, but he never shared my concern. Messages between us usually took more than twenty hops, one of which was a diskette hand-carried between East and West Berlin.
A little-known fact is that the fall of the Soviet Union was in part coordinated via email carried on uucp and fidoNet. Mainly this was because these networks ran "below the radar", from one phone to another and could change their locations at will. There also was an advantage in these networks' use of Zmodem for exchange. Zmodem's error correction, rate adjustment and pig-headed retry made sure the message got through in spite of the really poor state of Soviet phone service.
The Internet's biggest weakness right now is that most of the traffic ends up on a small number of backbones. The only thing standing between the current tree-structured internet and a true network is incentive. Censorship would probably stimulate a change in topology.
Radio conversation released by the Chief
of Naval Operations 10.10.95
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a
collision. Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a
collision. Americans: This is the captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again: divert your
course. Canadians: No. I say again: divert YOUR course. Americans: THIS IS THE USS MISSOURI. WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT
YOUR COURSE NOW! Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
Assuming it's your intent to get paid to do something you enjoy rather than getting rich in the next two months, you can establish credibility by getting code included in a non-trivial open-source project.
Combine that with networking to meet programmers who have jobs and could recommend you to their firms.
Also, sign up with a few local IT consulting firms who can get you contract work while you are waiting for something substantial (who knows--you may enjoy contracting).
Social conservatives keep demanding laws to regulate everyone because their usual tools of ostracism and shame are only effective within their own communities.
I think if you check current usage, you'll find ostracism and shame are the liberal weapons of choice (environment, sexual preference, and oh! the children). These are techniques they learned from the christians when the christians were liberal.
All this nonsense is christian, not conservative. The christians switched to vote conservative because, faced with a choice between the liberals' anti-christian vitriol and the conservatives' good-humored tolerance, they chose conservative. Can't hardly blame them.
The christians no more define conservatism than the muslims define liberalism; it is in both cases a marriage of convenience. It's odd that no one ever refers to muslims as the religious left, though that is what they are.
Consider the possibilities, given a full-frame sensor with 6-10Mpx worth of fat 48-bit pixels. Put it on a sealed zoom SLR like the Nikon 5700 or P90 with great glass and there would be no picture you couldn't take. (I'm partial to those two because the flip viewfinder lets me shoot from the waist or arm out to the side like I could with my Rollei.)
For many years (when I was still young and handsome) I travelled constantly. There was one three-year period when I averaged four flights a week. This is the one part of my "previous life" that I miss.
To begin with, I always travelled "comfortable class", even if I had to foot the upgrade. A comfortable seat and attentive sloe-eyed stewardess makes all the difference.
And I always scheduled downtime at my destination. I was prepared to make it a condition of employment, but it never came to that - I have always chosen good managers to work for.
I never sat around in a hotel feeling sorry for myself; I got out and found things to do (hanging around Manhattan Beach chatting up the girls in bikinis comes to mind). When the sun set, I would walk down the street until I found a bar or coffee shop with people my age in it, walk in and introduce myself, and ask to join them. The best way to see a city is with a gang of natives intent on impressing you - especially if the girls are pretty.
Because, relatively speaking, they are friggin' monkeys.
Somewhere around Percentile 99.9 you have the ability to deliberately adjust your basic assumptions, see the world clearly, pick up anything that interests you and master it, see an opportunity and, with only a little thought, figure out how to exploit it. If your story is true, I'll wager you've never met a puzzle you couldn't solve and pretty much immediately lose interest in. I'll also wager that you've learned to dumb-down when explaining things to your clients and friends.
It's not your generation, it's the Gaussian curve; use it well.
"Bugs in software are nothing new, but when they're discussed in the open, how do open source projects adapt policy?
Policy adaptation is a care-requiring activity, especially if discussion in the open is involved. Closed projects may get away with customer defenestration, but open source projects are more susceptible to their developer community and enthusiastic users. How a project would adapt policy should be given a great deal of thought and dialog to ensure no one is left out of the loop.
Slashdot Mirror
* The cost of working around a bug that you can't fix. It would take several months to learn enough about Oo.o to fix a bug without introducing a new one. My time isn't free.
* The cost of interoperating with other people because you can't just give them a copy of the program you use. Most people use mainstream products and have no trouble interoperating. The most interesting interoperation happens on the web with platform agnostic applications.
* The cost of upgrading because you need a bug fix that is only in the new version. What? No workaround? This is rare but valid. On the other hand, a vendor is more likely to fix an error affecting ordinary users than a FOSS team who give most of their attention to errors that annoy developers.
* The cost of retraining because you can't just back-port bug fixes without getting a new UI. Nobody retrains and nobody "back-ports" bug fixes. New UIs are not restricted to proprietary software.
* The cost of migration to a new platform later. If the cost is an issue, why migrate? Also, the cost of migration to a new platform is almost entirely administrative, not software licenses.
* The cost of depending on a third party beyond your control with a monopoly on being able to modify software you use. You mean someone like Linus?
There is a big difference between what you can do in theory and what is reasonable in practice.
It's not a bell curve--it's a power curve, and the distinction is even more severe.
continue to use & modify perpetually
Some very small fraction of a percent of the population can or care to do this. Of the remainder, the vast majority don't even know what we are talking about, and those who do couldn't give a rat's ass.
FOSS has a community of developers and a community of users. The overlap between the developers and the users who knowingly use FOSS is about 100%. To anyone outside the community, the only difference between FOSS and proprietary is the price. What gets their attention is not Open but Free As In Beer. They aren't going to fork linux to personalize their netbook experience.
I can code, but I'm not going to mod Gnome or the Gimp. I have better things to do with my time.
It's all about the power distribution curve. Stallman and the rest of you guys on the upper left end just keep at it; the rest of us on the lower right are enjoying your work.
You know what's missing from this argument? Women. More specifically, beautiful naked women protesting that they'd rather go nude than use non-GPL software.
If Stallman could arrange that, he might make some converts.
I assume this is some kind of spoof. I certainly got a good laugh out of it. Reminds me of the ad with the gentle monk who won't kill anything, not even an insect, and cries out in anguish when he finds out that his mouthwash has just killed millions of bacteria.
If,on the other hand, RS is serious, it's time he got professional help.
It's Germany.
If it was the French, we'd just poke fun at them; repelling a video game is a battle they can win (though they might suffer some casualties). But it's the Germans, and they are just too sad to poke fun at.
You must be American.
It sounds like they're recommissioning the Black Chamber.
Given that the state is responsible for the cost of your health care, getting the chip won't be voluntary. Needless to say, if the monitors detected something life-threatening, they'd have to be able to send someone to help you; that means they also have to know where you are.
We know where you are, we can read all your bio-signs, and we are mandated to protect our investment in health care. Don't run so fast. Keep it down to one orgasm. Put down that cigarette. That's your last coffee for today. Sound silly? Remember when we were silly to suggest they'd be banning smoking in bars next?
Yah--we really look forward to having our chips installed. Am I the only one who would prefer a long painful death?
In the end, anyone with an IP address can act as a host or relay. If something wants to get through, it will.
There was an advantage to the uucp forwarding network, in that routing could be managed and the number of possible paths was immense. Anyone with a basic PC and a modem could install Waffle and become a uucp node. For two years when the wall was still up, I had an ongoing conversation with a mathematician/cryptographer in Minsk (no Tom Lear jokes, please). I was always concerned that the Soviets would find him out, but he never shared my concern. Messages between us usually took more than twenty hops, one of which was a diskette hand-carried between East and West Berlin.
A little-known fact is that the fall of the Soviet Union was in part coordinated via email carried on uucp and fidoNet. Mainly this was because these networks ran "below the radar", from one phone to another and could change their locations at will. There also was an advantage in these networks' use of Zmodem for exchange. Zmodem's error correction, rate adjustment and pig-headed retry made sure the message got through in spite of the really poor state of Soviet phone service.
The Internet's biggest weakness right now is that most of the traffic ends up on a small number of backbones. The only thing standing between the current tree-structured internet and a true network is incentive. Censorship would probably stimulate a change in topology.
This reminds me of an old story:
Radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10.10.95
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again: divert your course.
Canadians: No. I say again: divert YOUR course.
Americans: THIS IS THE USS MISSOURI. WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!
Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
You guys do know that the Patriot Act was written and passed into law by Democrats lead by your new VP -- don't you?
Assuming it's your intent to get paid to do something you enjoy rather than getting rich in the next two months, you can establish credibility by getting code included in a non-trivial open-source project.
Combine that with networking to meet programmers who have jobs and could recommend you to their firms.
Also, sign up with a few local IT consulting firms who can get you contract work while you are waiting for something substantial (who knows--you may enjoy contracting).
With any luck, this will finally put SOAP to REST.
I find it weird that you make a connection between Muslims and liberalism. I've never heard such a connection suggested before.
Let's look at it:
Does anything look familiar?
There is one big difference though: Islamic states don't require their citizens to be defenceless.
Social conservatives keep demanding laws to regulate everyone because their usual tools of ostracism and shame are only effective within their own communities.
I think if you check current usage, you'll find ostracism and shame are the liberal weapons of choice (environment, sexual preference, and oh! the children). These are techniques they learned from the christians when the christians were liberal.
All this nonsense is christian, not conservative. The christians switched to vote conservative because, faced with a choice between the liberals' anti-christian vitriol and the conservatives' good-humored tolerance, they chose conservative. Can't hardly blame them.
The christians no more define conservatism than the muslims define liberalism; it is in both cases a marriage of convenience. It's odd that no one ever refers to muslims as the religious left, though that is what they are.
Amen to that.
Consider the possibilities, given a full-frame sensor with 6-10Mpx worth of fat 48-bit pixels. Put it on a sealed zoom SLR like the Nikon 5700 or P90 with great glass and there would be no picture you couldn't take. (I'm partial to those two because the flip viewfinder lets me shoot from the waist or arm out to the side like I could with my Rollei.)
Turn off the red-eye reduction. The pre-flash is what's delaying the shot.
Business travel is awful.
What a waste!
For many years (when I was still young and handsome) I travelled constantly. There was one three-year period when I averaged four flights a week. This is the one part of my "previous life" that I miss.
To begin with, I always travelled "comfortable class", even if I had to foot the upgrade. A comfortable seat and attentive sloe-eyed stewardess makes all the difference.
And I always scheduled downtime at my destination. I was prepared to make it a condition of employment, but it never came to that - I have always chosen good managers to work for.
I never sat around in a hotel feeling sorry for myself; I got out and found things to do (hanging around Manhattan Beach chatting up the girls in bikinis comes to mind). When the sun set, I would walk down the street until I found a bar or coffee shop with people my age in it, walk in and introduce myself, and ask to join them. The best way to see a city is with a gang of natives intent on impressing you - especially if the girls are pretty.
lemonade = F(lemons)
why the fuck can't they?
Because, relatively speaking, they are friggin' monkeys.
Somewhere around Percentile 99.9 you have the ability to deliberately adjust your basic assumptions, see the world clearly, pick up anything that interests you and master it, see an opportunity and, with only a little thought, figure out how to exploit it. If your story is true, I'll wager you've never met a puzzle you couldn't solve and pretty much immediately lose interest in. I'll also wager that you've learned to dumb-down when explaining things to your clients and friends.
It's not your generation, it's the Gaussian curve; use it well.
"Bugs in software are nothing new, but when they're discussed in the open, how do open source projects adapt policy?
Policy adaptation is a care-requiring activity, especially if discussion in the open is involved. Closed projects may get away with customer defenestration, but open source projects are more susceptible to their developer community and enthusiastic users. How a project would adapt policy should be given a great deal of thought and dialog to ensure no one is left out of the loop.
A bit like his supply of grey cells.
Everybody has known this for years, except, it seems, the guys and girls at Polytechnique and their grant committee.
This article is not in any dialect of english that I know of. Can anyone out there translate this for us?
Who said anything about a conspiracy? Does the phrase "common cause" mean nothing?