How are they going to fuck it up exactly? They can submit patches to the maintainers, but they probably won't have commit rights. Even if they did, the changes can be caught and removed in pre-release testing. Worst case they get backed out in the next release. Given a pattern of bad behavior, I'm sure their commit rights would be revoked.
They're making a donation, not buying carte blanche to do whatever they want to the main code base. If they want to fork it and fuck up their own version, well, so be it. Just don't call it "Apache".
Really, people need to back off these guys a bit. I don't mean stop being suspicious and guarded, but sometimes it seems like this reaches levels of the paranoid delusional.
Because the markets don't only work on hard fact. They also work on:
Fear and expectation
Rumors and lies
The desire to sell it for more than you bought it.
Just think of all the things that would drive your buying decisions for something basic, say, rice.
If your diet consists largely of rice, then news of a potential shortage would cause you to stock up on it. If, like speculators, you were making deals to buy your rice three months in advance, you might strike a deal based on this rumored shortage for more than you usually pay for it, assuming that it could be much more expensive at that point in the future. That's you making assumptions based on your expectation of the future -- not because of any actual shortage.
This happened a few months ago. Remember news of Costco limiting sales of rice to two bags per customer? It was even a joke on the Daily Show (or was it Colbert?).
Consider that futures traders aren't only trying to feed themselves but turn a profit, and you see how they'd be very sensitive to rumor and expectation. That's also why prices go up every time someone mentions "war" and "Iran" in the same sentence.
Oil began its sharp decline immediately after Bush's speech. Before the speech, it had been hitting records daily.
Besides, it's been *talk* of shortages pushing the prices up. At one point I heard the figure was $60/barrel over actual value simply because of speculation. Even OPEC of all people were saying it was overpriced.
Why aren't the republicans letting the "market" take care of it?
Because Republicans aren't conservatives anymore. If you want that sort of thinking, look Libertarian.
Unfortunately, they can't seem to get a decent candidate to run against the jerks the Rs and Ds are putting up, and everyone seems to think that if you don't vote R or D, you're throwing your vote away.
I've even had this discussion with my family. They think you should vote for "the lesser of two evils" between the R and D. If you're not doing that, your vote doesn't count. It's hard to tell someone that your vote counts for more if you vote 3rd party because it shows a desire for something different. Where you place that vote shows what kind of different you want.
Votes aren't to make R or D win the election. They're to tell government what you want. If you don't want R or D, don't vote R or D.
Me, I'm voting L this fall. They don't stand a snowball's chance, but at least my vote will show that there's (hopefully growing) interest in non-socialist government. If it grows enough over the next several elections, they might even get a decent candidate and stand a real chance of winning.
Well really, you just can't beat the convenience. I can have access to all my bomb plans and airplane schematics from anywhere! All I need is a computer and an internet connection! Go Google, you capitalist pig-dog infidel geniuses! </terrormastermind>
While I'm obviously being snarky and possibly a little offensive, your idea isn't as ridiculous as it sounds at first. The entire point of strong encryption is to allow a message to be in an untrusted place with a reasonable assurance that it cannot be read by unauthorized people. Hypothetical NSA SuperDuperComputers aside, there's nothing patently absurd about this scheme.
Sort of like the handbag searches they do in the NYC subways (or, were doing anyway. I haven't worked there in a couple years.)
The thing was that they could search bags at random. If you object, you're free not to ride the subway. I don't *think* they could force you to submit to a search, they'd just bar you from entering the turnstiles.
Never happened to me because I very seldom carried a bag or briefcase, but that's how I was told it worked. Anyone with better experience in the matter feel free to add or correct.
Don't know -- I used it precisely because it's a cliche and is generally accepted as an example of endangering others by being an asshat. I don't really know the legal standing behind it.
The point is that the amendments can't be taken at face value anymore, because there have been exceptions made by the courts. Even for the recent 2nd amendment ruling, the courts seem to have dampened the "shall not be infringed" and ruled that reasonable regulation is acceptable. The current interpretation certainly isn't the absolute that the original reading would suggest.
I didn't say it was *my* argument. I said it was the argument being used -- "however dubious".
Anyway, I think it's one of those cases where the courts allow infringement of rights in the interest of the common good. Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater isn't generally protected by the First Amendment either, and neither is giving a false statement to the police.
The funny thing is that it won't help anything. The thing about computers is that you can use this neat thing called the "Internet" to transfer data internationally at any time.
If I'm a terrorist who wants to bring data into the US, I'll encrypt it and put it on a web site somewhere, go to the US sans computer, and download it when I get there. Don't like web sites? Substitude SSH tunnels, VPN, whatever back to country of origin and you have a nice, easily available way to bring data into the country. I'm not sure why they believe terrorists and other ne'er-do-wells won't think of that.
You have to be *in* the US for your rights to be in effect. Once you're at border security, you're not in the US anymore, so your rights don't apply. At least that's the argument, however dubious.
I have a Toshiba Tecra with an NVidia card. Damn thing was getting extremely hot -- too hot to touch sometimes. I brought it in for service and they replaced the video card, thermostat, mainboard, and a bunch of other stuff. When they gave it back to me, it had a bad video card in it. Damn thing goes blank for seconds at a time, and the GPU Errors is over 50 in nividia-settings. Sometimes it even crashes X -- doubly so when I have an external monitor hooked up.
I have to send it back to get the card replaced again, but I hate being without my computer for two weeks.
I agree, and that's my point in a nutshell. You show off your prowess in a way that benefits others in the process. You work for your own self interest in a way that's constructive to the FOSS community.
MS, through their tactics, has isolated itself from a huge group of people. At this point, we have no need of MS simply because they've been so hostile and we've created alternatives in response. If they were like Sun, IBM, RedHat, MySQL, etc, and contributed where it makes sense for them to contribute, Microsoft would be another "hero" of FOSS, and we'd probably be using MS Office Open Source Edition on our Linux boxes, and they could be using GCC instead of maintaining their own compilers. (Just an example folks -- don't get all hot and bothered.)
Unfortunately, they've taken the confrontational route and have created an us-or-them situation that's going to take some effort for them to fix before all of us can begin working to our mutual advantage.
Maybe, but consider, hypothetically of course, the good that could be done if MS' interests could be aligned with ours.
The secret to good diplomacy is to make others want the same things you want, to show them that your way works for them. You will *never* get someone to stop acting in their own best interests, but you may get them to realize that your way *is* in their best interests.
Think about it: why do you use FOSS? Because you consider it to be in your best interest. Why do people write software and give it away? Because in some way it's in their best interests.
Altruism isn't a permanent motivation in the vast majority of cases, and it isn't a business motivation at all. However, if you consider altruism in the equation while determining how to go about achieving your goals, you wind up with something like FOSS -- helping others while you help yourself. There's no reason that your business's primary methodology has to be absolute winner-take-all cutthroat competition.
That's the thing MS and lots of other companies don't understand. FOSS doesn't mean giving away the store. It just means going about things differently and having a different mindset when you make your plans. It's possible to have a thriving business while peacefully coexisting with your competitors.
That said, it's incumbent on MS to stop the cutthroat tactics and move into peaceful coexistence mode. It's not us who are trying to use the legal system to wipe them out. We're not Goliath in this story -- we're David with stones and slingshot in hand. If Goliath wants to talk peace, that's fine, but he'd better put down the sword first, AND the dagger he's got hidden in his robe, and start talking sincerely.
I saw this too. The way I understand it (and I'm no lawyer, but...), I am not buying support or subscription, so I'm not obligated to keep records. This seems like a piece of boilerplate that doesn't really apply to a free eval version. Is there a different way to read that that I'm missing?
This is what I was thinking too. It's the first real public exposure they've had. Likely they need to make some money first before they can hire programmers to get the problems resolved. Chicken and egg, really.
Also, I seem to remember trying Google way back when it first opened up and being a bit underwhelmed as well. It's tough to begin a project as big as this, and it takes millions of man-hours to get it right. Think about it: they're trying to come up with relevant answers from petabytes of unstructured data/information/crap of varying quality and unknown source. Cut 'em some slack.
I liked the site's layout. It did draw some odd associations, but I think what they're trying to do is a good idea. They just need to refine the process quite a bit.
Lots of folks go into college wanting to be programmers, but don't want to learn how to design programming languages. They approach it as a vocation rather than an entire field of study. Blacksmiths work metal, but aren't metallurgists. Some folks might want to program without being full-fledged computer scientists. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know, but it's certainly where many people are.
Actually, all that math is an abstraction of electronics, and electronics is just an abstraction of physics.
Yep, it's turtles all the way down.
So "researchers" are no more Computer Scientist that "programmers" are because neither of them comprehend the entirety of the physics that are driving the electrons that make it possible for that computer to do the math that has been abstracted to a high level 'English-like' readable language./sarcasm
It's not a pissing match, and I said nothing about one being more or less skilled. I said they were not the same. My point was that programming is one skillset and computer science is another. They both work with computers, and mechanics and automobile designers both work with cars. Both work on layers of abstraction, but they're different layers of abstraction that allow them to do what they do best.
Is statistics the same as mathematics? Statistics is surely mathematics applied to a certain set of problems, but when you say "mathematics", you surely think of a field broader than statistics. In other words, one is a subset of the other, applied to a specific problem set.
Programming is a subset of computer science, applied to solving a specific type of problem -- billing, accounting, physics simulations, etc. Computer science is a much larger field. Oddly enough, some computer scientists don't ever write programs. Programming requires a knowledge of the field in which you will be doing the programming. As a programmer in the financial industry, I need to know about stocks, bonds, derivatives, mortgages, etc. In fact, if you're planning on programming for a living, I would encourage you to minor in the field in which you expect to program.
I'll leave you with a quote from the Computer Science entry in Wikipedia:
Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the science of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.[1][2][3] Computer science has many sub-fields; some emphasize the computation of specific results (such as computer graphics), while others relate to properties of computational problems (such as computational complexity theory). Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations. For example, programming language theory studies approaches to describing computations, while computer programming applies specific programming languages to solve specific computational problems. A further subfield, human-computer interaction, focuses on the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable and universally accessible to people.
I used to agree with what you're saying, but that was before I realized a few things:
1. Computer Science != Programming
Computer science is more about research, not about writing accounting and billing programs. The mistake colleges make is not mixing computer science with math, it's making the assumption that all programmers must be computer scientists.
2. You can only get away with being a programmer while sucking at math because of the many layers of abstractions that have been built on top of the math. The math is still at the bottom, but we now have higher-level, more right-brained ways of expressing that math.
An example might be SQL and relational databases. SQL is a very English-like language that is interpreted into relational algebra by the database engine. You don't really need to thoroughly understand all of the relational algebra to write basic SQL, but there it is nevertheless.
Slashdot Mirror
How are they going to fuck it up exactly? They can submit patches to the maintainers, but they probably won't have commit rights. Even if they did, the changes can be caught and removed in pre-release testing. Worst case they get backed out in the next release. Given a pattern of bad behavior, I'm sure their commit rights would be revoked.
They're making a donation, not buying carte blanche to do whatever they want to the main code base. If they want to fork it and fuck up their own version, well, so be it. Just don't call it "Apache".
Really, people need to back off these guys a bit. I don't mean stop being suspicious and guarded, but sometimes it seems like this reaches levels of the paranoid delusional.
Because the markets don't only work on hard fact. They also work on:
Just think of all the things that would drive your buying decisions for something basic, say, rice.
If your diet consists largely of rice, then news of a potential shortage would cause you to stock up on it. If, like speculators, you were making deals to buy your rice three months in advance, you might strike a deal based on this rumored shortage for more than you usually pay for it, assuming that it could be much more expensive at that point in the future. That's you making assumptions based on your expectation of the future -- not because of any actual shortage.
This happened a few months ago. Remember news of Costco limiting sales of rice to two bags per customer? It was even a joke on the Daily Show (or was it Colbert?).
Consider that futures traders aren't only trying to feed themselves but turn a profit, and you see how they'd be very sensitive to rumor and expectation. That's also why prices go up every time someone mentions "war" and "Iran" in the same sentence.
>
It was talk about drilling?
Oil began its sharp decline immediately after Bush's speech. Before the speech, it had been hitting records daily.
Besides, it's been *talk* of shortages pushing the prices up. At one point I heard the figure was $60/barrel over actual value simply because of speculation. Even OPEC of all people were saying it was overpriced.
Why aren't the republicans letting the "market" take care of it?
Because Republicans aren't conservatives anymore. If you want that sort of thinking, look Libertarian.
Unfortunately, they can't seem to get a decent candidate to run against the jerks the Rs and Ds are putting up, and everyone seems to think that if you don't vote R or D, you're throwing your vote away.
I've even had this discussion with my family. They think you should vote for "the lesser of two evils" between the R and D. If you're not doing that, your vote doesn't count. It's hard to tell someone that your vote counts for more if you vote 3rd party because it shows a desire for something different. Where you place that vote shows what kind of different you want.
Votes aren't to make R or D win the election. They're to tell government what you want. If you don't want R or D, don't vote R or D.
Me, I'm voting L this fall. They don't stand a snowball's chance, but at least my vote will show that there's (hopefully growing) interest in non-socialist government. If it grows enough over the next several elections, they might even get a decent candidate and stand a real chance of winning.
Well really, you just can't beat the convenience. I can have access to all my bomb plans and airplane schematics from anywhere! All I need is a computer and an internet connection! Go Google, you capitalist pig-dog infidel geniuses! </terrormastermind>
While I'm obviously being snarky and possibly a little offensive, your idea isn't as ridiculous as it sounds at first. The entire point of strong encryption is to allow a message to be in an untrusted place with a reasonable assurance that it cannot be read by unauthorized people. Hypothetical NSA SuperDuperComputers aside, there's nothing patently absurd about this scheme.
Well, it certainly is a way to justify something akin to the Great Firewall of China to the not-so-technically-savvy.
The terrorists are using encryption and the internet to destroy us. Therefore we must outlaw strong encryption and build an all-scanning web proxy.
One more shaky justification for the government to invade our privacy. All in the interest of the common good, you understand. </snark>
Sort of like the handbag searches they do in the NYC subways (or, were doing anyway. I haven't worked there in a couple years.)
The thing was that they could search bags at random. If you object, you're free not to ride the subway. I don't *think* they could force you to submit to a search, they'd just bar you from entering the turnstiles.
Never happened to me because I very seldom carried a bag or briefcase, but that's how I was told it worked. Anyone with better experience in the matter feel free to add or correct.
Don't know -- I used it precisely because it's a cliche and is generally accepted as an example of endangering others by being an asshat. I don't really know the legal standing behind it.
The point is that the amendments can't be taken at face value anymore, because there have been exceptions made by the courts. Even for the recent 2nd amendment ruling, the courts seem to have dampened the "shall not be infringed" and ruled that reasonable regulation is acceptable. The current interpretation certainly isn't the absolute that the original reading would suggest.
I didn't say it was *my* argument. I said it was the argument being used -- "however dubious".
Anyway, I think it's one of those cases where the courts allow infringement of rights in the interest of the common good. Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater isn't generally protected by the First Amendment either, and neither is giving a false statement to the police.
The funny thing is that it won't help anything. The thing about computers is that you can use this neat thing called the "Internet" to transfer data internationally at any time.
If I'm a terrorist who wants to bring data into the US, I'll encrypt it and put it on a web site somewhere, go to the US sans computer, and download it when I get there. Don't like web sites? Substitude SSH tunnels, VPN, whatever back to country of origin and you have a nice, easily available way to bring data into the country. I'm not sure why they believe terrorists and other ne'er-do-wells won't think of that.
You have to be *in* the US for your rights to be in effect. Once you're at border security, you're not in the US anymore, so your rights don't apply. At least that's the argument, however dubious.
I have a Toshiba Tecra with an NVidia card. Damn thing was getting extremely hot -- too hot to touch sometimes. I brought it in for service and they replaced the video card, thermostat, mainboard, and a bunch of other stuff. When they gave it back to me, it had a bad video card in it. Damn thing goes blank for seconds at a time, and the GPU Errors is over 50 in nividia-settings. Sometimes it even crashes X -- doubly so when I have an external monitor hooked up.
I have to send it back to get the card replaced again, but I hate being without my computer for two weeks.
I agree, and that's my point in a nutshell. You show off your prowess in a way that benefits others in the process. You work for your own self interest in a way that's constructive to the FOSS community.
MS, through their tactics, has isolated itself from a huge group of people. At this point, we have no need of MS simply because they've been so hostile and we've created alternatives in response. If they were like Sun, IBM, RedHat, MySQL, etc, and contributed where it makes sense for them to contribute, Microsoft would be another "hero" of FOSS, and we'd probably be using MS Office Open Source Edition on our Linux boxes, and they could be using GCC instead of maintaining their own compilers. (Just an example folks -- don't get all hot and bothered.)
Unfortunately, they've taken the confrontational route and have created an us-or-them situation that's going to take some effort for them to fix before all of us can begin working to our mutual advantage.
Why land? Just hook up a pipeline to the space elevator. :-)
Maybe, but consider, hypothetically of course, the good that could be done if MS' interests could be aligned with ours.
The secret to good diplomacy is to make others want the same things you want, to show them that your way works for them. You will *never* get someone to stop acting in their own best interests, but you may get them to realize that your way *is* in their best interests.
Think about it: why do you use FOSS? Because you consider it to be in your best interest. Why do people write software and give it away? Because in some way it's in their best interests.
Altruism isn't a permanent motivation in the vast majority of cases, and it isn't a business motivation at all. However, if you consider altruism in the equation while determining how to go about achieving your goals, you wind up with something like FOSS -- helping others while you help yourself. There's no reason that your business's primary methodology has to be absolute winner-take-all cutthroat competition.
That's the thing MS and lots of other companies don't understand. FOSS doesn't mean giving away the store. It just means going about things differently and having a different mindset when you make your plans. It's possible to have a thriving business while peacefully coexisting with your competitors.
That said, it's incumbent on MS to stop the cutthroat tactics and move into peaceful coexistence mode. It's not us who are trying to use the legal system to wipe them out. We're not Goliath in this story -- we're David with stones and slingshot in hand. If Goliath wants to talk peace, that's fine, but he'd better put down the sword first, AND the dagger he's got hidden in his robe, and start talking sincerely.
I saw this too. The way I understand it (and I'm no lawyer, but...), I am not buying support or subscription, so I'm not obligated to keep records. This seems like a piece of boilerplate that doesn't really apply to a free eval version. Is there a different way to read that that I'm missing?
This is what I was thinking too. It's the first real public exposure they've had. Likely they need to make some money first before they can hire programmers to get the problems resolved. Chicken and egg, really.
Also, I seem to remember trying Google way back when it first opened up and being a bit underwhelmed as well. It's tough to begin a project as big as this, and it takes millions of man-hours to get it right. Think about it: they're trying to come up with relevant answers from petabytes of unstructured data/information/crap of varying quality and unknown source. Cut 'em some slack.
I liked the site's layout. It did draw some odd associations, but I think what they're trying to do is a good idea. They just need to refine the process quite a bit.
It also has a headline link at drudgereport.com.
"START YOUR ENGINES: 'CUIL' TAKES ON 'GOOGLE'..."
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Heh.
IIRC a Slashdot article a day or two ago, it said that Childs gave the passwords to the Mayor. I'd guess that's how they wound up with the DA.
I guess they don't teach politicians good IT security policy. Color me surprised.
That might be closer to the mark.
Lots of folks go into college wanting to be programmers, but don't want to learn how to design programming languages. They approach it as a vocation rather than an entire field of study. Blacksmiths work metal, but aren't metallurgists. Some folks might want to program without being full-fledged computer scientists. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know, but it's certainly where many people are.
Yep, it's turtles all the way down.
It's not a pissing match, and I said nothing about one being more or less skilled. I said they were not the same. My point was that programming is one skillset and computer science is another. They both work with computers, and mechanics and automobile designers both work with cars. Both work on layers of abstraction, but they're different layers of abstraction that allow them to do what they do best.
Is statistics the same as mathematics? Statistics is surely mathematics applied to a certain set of problems, but when you say "mathematics", you surely think of a field broader than statistics. In other words, one is a subset of the other, applied to a specific problem set.
Programming is a subset of computer science, applied to solving a specific type of problem -- billing, accounting, physics simulations, etc. Computer science is a much larger field. Oddly enough, some computer scientists don't ever write programs. Programming requires a knowledge of the field in which you will be doing the programming. As a programmer in the financial industry, I need to know about stocks, bonds, derivatives, mortgages, etc. In fact, if you're planning on programming for a living, I would encourage you to minor in the field in which you expect to program.
I'll leave you with a quote from the Computer Science entry in Wikipedia:
emphasis mine.
I used to agree with what you're saying, but that was before I realized a few things:
1. Computer Science != Programming
Computer science is more about research, not about writing accounting and billing programs. The mistake colleges make is not mixing computer science with math, it's making the assumption that all programmers must be computer scientists.
2. You can only get away with being a programmer while sucking at math because of the many layers of abstractions that have been built on top of the math. The math is still at the bottom, but we now have higher-level, more right-brained ways of expressing that math.
An example might be SQL and relational databases. SQL is a very English-like language that is interpreted into relational algebra by the database engine. You don't really need to thoroughly understand all of the relational algebra to write basic SQL, but there it is nevertheless.
Whoa. Someone didn't watch enough cartoons as a child.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E8gsaDdqGzA
That's true, but the point is that I don't want the ';' as part of the quote. Putting the ';' inside the quotes causes it to be part of the literal.
That's a rule I've never understood. I try to force myself to put the punctuation inside, but it's just anathema to me as a coder.
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "This is a test;"
It's just wrong.