Fine. Not all OSS software is fit for use. Not all of it is regularly maintained. Fair enough, you don't have time to work on OSS. As countless people have, said, "then don't!"
If you find a good piece of software which you need to utilise commercially and are worried because it hasn't been maintained, well then as you would with any commercial component, do the CBA.
Does it make more sense to save on licences and adopt this tool in its current state? Perhaps your organisation is going to fork it for their own use anyway? So you guys become the maintainers.
Perhaps, it makes more sense for you to go and buy a pricey product which is sold as more than it actually is?
That's your call. Either way, don't take away my choice.
We have the freedom to weigh the degree of professionalism, support, security, etc, on a given open source project, comparing this with what is being offered off the shelf.
If you choose to use one open source component, you don't have to bow down and face Finland 5 times a day. You don't need to carry Linus' picture in your underpants. Well, no more than you need to carry Bill's. Oh? You want to keep Bill in there??
It actually boils down to analogues between compression and optimisations relating to subterranean plant parts (as a true root or a bulb, tuber, rootstock, or other modified stem) especially when fleshy and edible.
As a case in point, Raats and Feddes refer to optimal root distributions and their effect on the mesoscopic scale interaction between root and ground water.
So, what we had suggested was that the bz2 compression process, compression ratios and resulting output would be analogous to the optimal-root (biomass), in the context of its osmotic interchange, growth-rates and the optimality of the resulting bio-tree.
In light of this, I believe that my previous comment still stands
No, I'm saying that bz2 is more HOTOL like and represents the optimal root (using standard tools) to compress your tar balls. I mean, if you can't get fanatical about your compression software, what can you get fanatical about? That is, other than your OS, window manager, hardware, shell, development langauge... etc:)
Hmm. Do you think that we're at risk of becoming suicide bz2'ers?
If my code throws an exception, I expect it to get caught and handled. If the exception is frequent and represents a bug in my code, it should bloody well have been isolated and ironed out in testing 'BEFORE' releasing it to the wider and stupider world.
If I'm going to keep a log of my exception, I'll do it for >100 exception and log these locally in a format which I can write a script to analyse and clear out, running in my own dev environment. I don't want my code to break when their soap daemon dies - I mean, whose going to log 'that' exception?!!
That's well and good, but you're still logging into your schools web-server and running desktop apps. Be it dreamweaver or an xterm, my general attitude is that you have servers for daemons and you have desktops for mortals. One of the practical reasons for which I'd never allow this is that I don't want to put a web monkey using dreamweaver in front of my box with physical access to consoles and a big neon-blue 'power' button. That's alright at home, but not with a 'school's' webserver. Especially if your users are naturally curious kids.
Further, the web-monkey's user experience would probably be completely ruined by latency once the school's web site got /.'ed.
Further it would totally ruin the slash-dotters experience once mr. user decided to go off and try using something like croquet ( well it slowed my mac down when I tried it; )
High School and, as everyone else has pointed out, EVERYTHING which follows is just plain brain damaged:
Through school and high school, I got harassed, teased and when others were baking their own rear-ends, I was also depended on for my 'skill with computers.'
You earned respect from teachers. You earned more of a stigma from students. Finally, you were distrusted by the same stupid teachers if something went wrong. You'd show someone one of your programs and they'd be like, 'how do you do something like that?' Not that they'd listen to your answer. I really hated that question!
Through University, I was distrusted ( validly ) when spending nights in our labs. I was condemned for finding obvious security holes. Still, this was the most sane ( other than the dot-coms I worked in ), situation I've seen.
I once quit a stupid tell-sales holiday job, calling my employer a 'computer-illiterate moron,' after being suspected of 'changing the bloody date to 1980 on a stupid PC.' Why? Because I was 'good with computers.'
Through REAL work.. The dot-com years were tolerable. Then I went for real money and well it goes on and on. Now that everyone is ready to proclaim his/herself a computer expert, you have to put up with more distrust, shit and even stupider 'imposed' solutions. Ignorant backlash to good suggestions. And then some.
My point was.. well I'm pissed that these kids were prosecuted in the first place. If anything the kids should be encouraged and rewarded, while the school learns a thing or two about sensible security. The world may be brain damaged, however at least we can look down on everyone else.
Nerds should have their own country. Kind of like Isreal. We can encourage other nerds to enter and have a 0 tolerance policy to all other imigrants - unless they're cute and attracted to nerds.
I'm sick to death with paper and important papers in particular. I think that in this day and age, it is really a joke that I have worry about draws filled with crumpled and unread letters printed in red ink.
With all the fuss over identity theft and so forth, I propose SPIT ( Spit on PDA Id Tracking )which boils down to a Pocket PC's which you SPIT on. After your spit has been authenticated, you can use your snot key to decrypt all documents which were previously paper based!
Please feel free to contribute your own spit to this new project.
All this talk about digital comics and not a peep about UserFriendly?? This 'is'/. right?
I check it daily and have several of the books in print. It's a great example of how well comic strips can work online; in fact the books actually feel like they are lacking in comparison to the web site.
What I'm really waiting for is the digital comic as invented by Tom Hank in Big, all those years ago. I don't know about the rest of you, but it made me drool at the time. So, my powerbook is a bit bigger, but I can pretend.
It actually boils down to the Americans being totally brain dead to the fact that there are countries outside of their borders; if they grasp the concepts of borders in the first place.
That said, it would not realy be in Google's interests to set up a chain of wi-fi hotspots in countries where most people are still on dial up.
It's rather screwed up and good to bash, but if you are able to learn about good government from it, you're half way on your journey to understanding most political systems.
I bash BASIC a lot, but as many posters have said a hell of a lot of us started out using BASIC and those who didn't run for US Congress went on to master a hell of a lot of other languages which our contemporaries never got to grips with.
I think that BASIC is not a bad language to start developing with ( the 'B' does stand for 'Beginners' ), however I'd have to exclude that whole subset of languages which are pre-fixed with 'visual.' I'm quite certain that I'd be another 9-5 moron had I grown up clicking all over the place.
I'd usually suggest the following languages to beginners:
i) Java - If you can start out with Java, you start off with a decent head-start in understanding o.o. and data types.
ii) Perl - If you start with perl, I think that your guys will be off the ground quicker than with most other languages. The degree of delving into O.O., regular expressions or anything else which you add is up to you.
I'd also advocate PASCAL, Python.. or Jython. Or BBC BASIC V:).
That said, I used to be bias against Java as a learners language, until my techno-phobe sister took a class in it and seemed to understand what she was doing. She now develops in C and Fortran.
Well, that's the beauty of running os-x and mac apps on an x86 PC. You buy yourself a computer, xbox and ps2. In fact, if you're so into games, you buy yourself one desktop, puke windoze onto it and then run os-x through VM ware as-per-the-the-article.
I've got a ps2 and X-box (which I'm not proud of) for games, which I never play. I have G4 powermac for show, because I got it cheap. I have a linux box for work, because I don't like windows. I have a windows box because I've got a girlfriend. Oh, and a couple of sparcs - just because.
Interestingly, the cheapest and lowest spec'd box in my house is the linux box which I use more than all the others ( other than my ibook - which I don't really classify as a box - more a thin helium balloon which floats and glows in the dark.:) )
On another tangent - sure, if you can run a hacked OS-X version on your PC, it's a good thing for the future of Apple. MS-S#ite would not have gotten where it is today had it not been for the vast availability of its predecessors. The morons on the desks around me would not have had visual studios to offer them Idiotic Dummy Environments, had it not been for MS-S#ite's conquest of a world which was locked to its OS - soley because every person's neighbour's son had a copy to upgrade their PC with. Same deal with the most popular choice of games platform being the most popular choice of games platform.
If we have a community of people who live, eat and chew on games, many of these people would make good game designers, I'm sure. They have an insight into gaming, gained from years of sitting square eyed in front of their tele's.
The problem is that we're talking about a profession here which requires dedication, education and time spent not-gaming. I'm sure that no matter what ethnicity these gamers come from, without the drive to do something other than playing games, they'll never cross over to the other side.
What portion of beer drinkers actually make their own beer?
Is it just me or did anyone else notice the "Cyberdyne Systems" trade mark on the under side of one of the four fore-fingers. I tell you, this is the begining of the end! Bet they found it in one of their factories!
Hmm.. true. Although this will also depend on the actual implementation - and your skills at implementing in either/or language.. That said, java is easier to bloat with.
Dude. They only sounds so weird because they are forced to learn to speak in a fake American accent.
I think the problem is that guys over there do actually take on really low level puzzles for research projects, as opposed to fun.
Every Indian developer I've met has an excellent grasp for theoretical cs, sw engineering methodologies and the tools available to him. Just for giggles they also then to throw in some number theory to read about whilst on the toilet.
Sure, there are some of us out in the west who this also describes. The downside is that majority of developers whom I have worked with are unfortunately quite the opposite.
Still, this has little to do with puzzles. Ask them to write a SAT solver? I had an eastern european friend who worked on one for 'fun.' We are going to be in real trouble unless with pull our thumbs out of our.. wherever they are.
I recently hammered a management friend of mine ( here in the UK ) with an essay in response to his telling me that senior IT manageers in our firm had decided that they would be able to take care of our moral problem by throwing increased and guaranteed bonuses in our general direction.
People lose morale and feel unappreciated because they are. The structure of your working environment is put together by people hire up who are often a lot less enformed than a lot of the 'good' ( we'll ignore the bad ) IT people below. As a result people end up working towards gluing together an inefficent architecture which I'm sure other studies have shown cause developers to spend huge portions of their day maintaining and interfacing badly designed cr@p in a poor architecture conjured by the wrong people. With so much panzy, refactoring and redesign to be done over and over again, it's no wonder that IT guys are valued. The problem is shoveling 5#1t causes one to lose his self-worth.
It sounds insane but imho architectural decisions should have to endure an RFC process which allows technical bashing and adjustment from those lower down the food chain. And those above should trust their in house skills base to contribute towards designing an architecture which works and creates an environment where everyone is challanged in working to his/her full potential/satisfaction ( - the usual daily laziness ).
And your problem is? I've had it up to 'here ( somewhere near the international space station )' with half-hearted-developers who learn one technology and use it until the end of their lives without care for fitting a correct solution to a particular problem. You guys get into work at 9am and leave at 5pm, spending the intermin period pretending to be software engineers, whilst developing bloated code which others will have to puke over for the next 10 years.
There are so many of 'you' out there, it makes me noxtious! As someone further down pointed out, read the f** man pages. Read the API docs, use the tools you have to. When your company says 'we develop in perl,' point out the benefits of interfacing this with C or Java. When you're asked to correlate everything in the universe against everything in the universe, write it in C, or tell them that it's dumb. When an API is only available in Java, use it. When you're forced to write in VB, tell them where to stick it. Be an engineer again and make informed decisions when designing your software, forsake dogma and be a good developer - in any language. Even lisp is fun when you can talk mangement into letting you use it. Go home and be a 9 year old again - code if you're a coder. If you're not, there are a hell of a lot of other functions out there, but do quit complaining. The 'best and brightest' are simply the open minded.
Peace.
Slashdot Mirror
If you find a good piece of software which you need to utilise commercially and are worried because it hasn't been maintained, well then as you would with any commercial component, do the CBA.
Does it make more sense to save on licences and adopt this tool in its current state? Perhaps your organisation is going to fork it for their own use anyway? So you guys become the maintainers.
Perhaps, it makes more sense for you to go and buy a pricey product which is sold as more than it actually is?
That's your call. Either way, don't take away my choice.
We have the freedom to weigh the degree of professionalism, support, security, etc, on a given open source project, comparing this with what is being offered off the shelf.
If you choose to use one open source component, you don't have to bow down and face Finland 5 times a day. You don't need to carry Linus' picture in your underpants. Well, no more than you need to carry Bill's. Oh? You want to keep Bill in there??
Either way, it's your call.
As a case in point, Raats and Feddes refer to optimal root distributions and their effect on the mesoscopic scale interaction between root and ground water.
So, what we had suggested was that the bz2 compression process, compression ratios and resulting output would be analogous to the optimal-root (biomass), in the context of its osmotic interchange, growth-rates and the optimality of the resulting bio-tree.
In light of this, I believe that my previous comment still stands
. Sith scum-bag!
: - )
Wooosh
Hmm. Do you think that we're at risk of becoming suicide bz2'ers?
If you want to compress an archive you use bz2 - that's it. Using gzip would be like picking a Lotus Esprit over the space shuttle.
If I'm going to keep a log of my exception, I'll do it for >100 exception and log these locally in a format which I can write a script to analyse and clear out, running in my own dev environment. I don't want my code to break when their soap daemon dies - I mean, whose going to log 'that' exception?!!
Further, the web-monkey's user experience would probably be completely ruined by latency once the school's web site got /. 'ed.
Further it would totally ruin the slash-dotters experience once mr. user decided to go off and try using something like croquet ( well it slowed my mac down when I tried it; )
That said, I wonder if 'isql' is any more likely to be an existing trade mark than say 'ls' or, for that matter, 'mknod.'
So.. you're running the school's webserver off your workstation? Ahem.
You're one of those sys. admins from that school in Kuztown, PA, aren't you?
I know that, you know that, but they didn't believe it. So I told her where to stick it.
You earned respect from teachers. You earned more of a stigma from students. Finally, you were distrusted by the same stupid teachers if something went wrong. You'd show someone one of your programs and they'd be like, 'how do you do something like that?' Not that they'd listen to your answer. I really hated that question!
My point was.. well I'm pissed that these kids were prosecuted in the first place. If anything the kids should be encouraged and rewarded, while the school learns a thing or two about sensible security. The world may be brain damaged, however at least we can look down on everyone else.
Nerds should have their own country. Kind of like Isreal. We can encourage other nerds to enter and have a 0 tolerance policy to all other imigrants - unless they're cute and attracted to nerds.
With all the fuss over identity theft and so forth, I propose SPIT ( Spit on PDA Id Tracking )which boils down to a Pocket PC's which you SPIT on. After your spit has been authenticated, you can use your snot key to decrypt all documents which were previously paper based!
Please feel free to contribute your own spit to this new project.
I check it daily and have several of the books in print. It's a great example of how well comic strips can work online; in fact the books actually feel like they are lacking in comparison to the web site.
What I'm really waiting for is the digital comic as invented by Tom Hank in Big, all those years ago. I don't know about the rest of you, but it made me drool at the time. So, my powerbook is a bit bigger, but I can pretend.
It actually boils down to the Americans being totally brain dead to the fact that there are countries outside of their borders; if they grasp the concepts of borders in the first place. That said, it would not realy be in Google's interests to set up a chain of wi-fi hotspots in countries where most people are still on dial up.
It's rather screwed up and good to bash, but if you are able to learn about good government from it, you're half way on your journey to understanding most political systems.
:).
I bash BASIC a lot, but as many posters have said a hell of a lot of us started out using BASIC and those who didn't run for US Congress went on to master a hell of a lot of other languages which our contemporaries never got to grips with.
I think that BASIC is not a bad language to start developing with ( the 'B' does stand for 'Beginners' ), however I'd have to exclude that whole subset of languages which are pre-fixed with 'visual.' I'm quite certain that I'd be another 9-5 moron had I grown up clicking all over the place.
I'd usually suggest the following languages to beginners:
i) Java - If you can start out with Java, you start off with a decent head-start in understanding o.o. and data types.
ii) Perl - If you start with perl, I think that your guys will be off the ground quicker than with most other languages. The degree of delving into O.O., regular expressions or anything else which you add is up to you.
I'd also advocate PASCAL, Python.. or Jython. Or BBC BASIC V
That said, I used to be bias against Java as a learners language, until my techno-phobe sister took a class in it and seemed to understand what she was doing. She now develops in C and Fortran.
Just my 0.02 Euros.
I've got a ps2 and X-box (which I'm not proud of) for games, which I never play. I have G4 powermac for show, because I got it cheap. I have a linux box for work, because I don't like windows. I have a windows box because I've got a girlfriend. Oh, and a couple of sparcs - just because.
Interestingly, the cheapest and lowest spec'd box in my house is the linux box which I use more than all the others ( other than my ibook - which I don't really classify as a box - more a thin helium balloon which floats and glows in the dark. :) )
On another tangent - sure, if you can run a hacked OS-X version on your PC, it's a good thing for the future of Apple. MS-S#ite would not have gotten where it is today had it not been for the vast availability of its predecessors. The morons on the desks around me would not have had visual studios to offer them Idiotic Dummy Environments, had it not been for MS-S#ite's conquest of a world which was locked to its OS - soley because every person's neighbour's son had a copy to upgrade their PC with. Same deal with the most popular choice of games platform being the most popular choice of games platform.
If we have a community of people who live, eat and chew on games, many of these people would make good game designers, I'm sure. They have an insight into gaming, gained from years of sitting square eyed in front of their tele's. The problem is that we're talking about a profession here which requires dedication, education and time spent not-gaming. I'm sure that no matter what ethnicity these gamers come from, without the drive to do something other than playing games, they'll never cross over to the other side. What portion of beer drinkers actually make their own beer?
Is it just me or did anyone else notice the "Cyberdyne Systems" trade mark on the under side of one of the four fore-fingers. I tell you, this is the begining of the end! Bet they found it in one of their factories!
Hmm.. true. Although this will also depend on the actual implementation - and your skills at implementing in either/or language.. That said, java is easier to bloat with.
Dude. They only sounds so weird because they are forced to learn to speak in a fake American accent. I think the problem is that guys over there do actually take on really low level puzzles for research projects, as opposed to fun. Every Indian developer I've met has an excellent grasp for theoretical cs, sw engineering methodologies and the tools available to him. Just for giggles they also then to throw in some number theory to read about whilst on the toilet. Sure, there are some of us out in the west who this also describes. The downside is that majority of developers whom I have worked with are unfortunately quite the opposite. Still, this has little to do with puzzles. Ask them to write a SAT solver? I had an eastern european friend who worked on one for 'fun.' We are going to be in real trouble unless with pull our thumbs out of our .. wherever they are.
I recently hammered a management friend of mine ( here in the UK ) with an essay in response to his telling me that senior IT manageers in our firm had decided that they would be able to take care of our moral problem by throwing increased and guaranteed bonuses in our general direction. People lose morale and feel unappreciated because they are. The structure of your working environment is put together by people hire up who are often a lot less enformed than a lot of the 'good' ( we'll ignore the bad ) IT people below. As a result people end up working towards gluing together an inefficent architecture which I'm sure other studies have shown cause developers to spend huge portions of their day maintaining and interfacing badly designed cr@p in a poor architecture conjured by the wrong people. With so much panzy, refactoring and redesign to be done over and over again, it's no wonder that IT guys are valued. The problem is shoveling 5#1t causes one to lose his self-worth. It sounds insane but imho architectural decisions should have to endure an RFC process which allows technical bashing and adjustment from those lower down the food chain. And those above should trust their in house skills base to contribute towards designing an architecture which works and creates an environment where everyone is challanged in working to his/her full potential/satisfaction ( - the usual daily laziness ).
And your problem is? I've had it up to 'here ( somewhere near the international space station )' with half-hearted-developers who learn one technology and use it until the end of their lives without care for fitting a correct solution to a particular problem. You guys get into work at 9am and leave at 5pm, spending the intermin period pretending to be software engineers, whilst developing bloated code which others will have to puke over for the next 10 years. There are so many of 'you' out there, it makes me noxtious! As someone further down pointed out, read the f** man pages. Read the API docs, use the tools you have to. When your company says 'we develop in perl,' point out the benefits of interfacing this with C or Java. When you're asked to correlate everything in the universe against everything in the universe, write it in C, or tell them that it's dumb. When an API is only available in Java, use it. When you're forced to write in VB, tell them where to stick it. Be an engineer again and make informed decisions when designing your software, forsake dogma and be a good developer - in any language. Even lisp is fun when you can talk mangement into letting you use it. Go home and be a 9 year old again - code if you're a coder. If you're not, there are a hell of a lot of other functions out there, but do quit complaining. The 'best and brightest' are simply the open minded. Peace.