"Their motivation is not the satisfaction of users... [they] write code because that's what they love to do."
I'd say most open source hobbyist coders do it for both reasons actually. While noone would do it if they didn't enjoy coding, it really is very satisfying to get emails from users telling you how cool they think your software is.
"The result is code that only another coder would love."
What are you saying here? - surely the only people qualified to appreciate code are coders.
"...away from cool code and toward ease-of-use."
There's no link between the quality of the code and how easy to use it is. An easy to use interface is not indicative of the quality of the code and vice versa.
"...make mainstream code, not coder's code?"
If by "coder's code" you mean good elegant code that's not cranked out to meet commercially driven deadlines, I'll take that anytime.
Spot on - I was thinking exactly the same thing the other night. Unfortunately, I've got a feeling that such a setup would have to be able to handle really complex themes, and many developers of lightweight toolkits would baulk at having to implement them.
Still, Linux is all about choice - if you want a consistant feel, you can always stick to only installing apps that use one toolkit or download RedHats Bluecurve or something.
...with yet another shortcut being taken by the Evil Intellectual Property Developers at the World IP Organisation's copyright committee. Here's the scene: the IPers want to create a bundle of new IP rights: not for creative artists, but for those who package and broadcast their works on air or online. The idea is that a broadcaster can record a public domain or Creative Commons licensed work, claim "FIXATION RIGHTS" to it, and retain control of that expression for the next twenty years. Did I say twenty? I'm sorry - that's what they used to want. Now it's *fifty* years, to match Sonny Bono inflation in copyright extensions. WIPO thought this was a done deal (after all, who could complain about more rights?) - until a few of the developing countries and those pesky open source advocates started taking note. Developing countries: not so keen on yet another round of having their native cultures air-lifted out of their control. OSS folk: not thrilled about a WIP definition of "broadcasting" that could include docs, files, or executables. Could you take a GPL'd program, "broadcast" it on the Net, and then claim exclusive copyright control on that expression? No-one at WIPO knew. The end result: not for the first or last time, the developing world teamed up with the free software folk to backburn the proposal. Well, all except Kenya, who went on about how they'd passed a law banning people from taking photos of TV broadcasts to prove what a good IP world citizen they were. Better to back the Bitching Boys than the Fat Cats on this particular track, we think...
"I find it very difficult to have respect for governments who think they need to control the information their populous sees."
That's priceless coming from an American. Read this
WASHINGTON, Oct 2 (IPS) - The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released here Thursday.
And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
...
But news sources also accounted for major differences in misperceptions, according to PIPA, which asked more than 3,300 respondents since May where they ''tended to get most of (their) news''. Eighty percent identified broadcast media, while 19 percent cited print media.
Among those who said broadcast media, 30 percent said two or more networks; 18 percent, Fox News; 16 percent, CNN; 24 percent, the three big networks -- NBC (14 percent), ABC (11 percent), CBS (9 percent); and three percent, the two public networks, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far.
Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.
"I'd just like to see Symbian controlled by people who actually like technology rather than the somewhat PHBish people who have controlled them so far"
I've got a mate who works for Symbian, and after he first got the job back in 2000 he was always enthusing about how great they were. I clearly remember him telling me how most of the higher managers were from a technical/engineering background.
"What if SCO *wants* to be purchased by MS? What would happen to Linux if MS owned the rights to UNIX?"
There seems to be lot of confusion over this. SCO does not own UNIX, and if Microsft were to buy SCO they would not own UNIX either. Novell holds the patents and the OpenGroup owns the trademark.
...that it's more cost effective to pay out bounties and scare virus writers into not exploting their security problems then it is to actually fix the code in the first place.
"I expect I am going to be mocked by some for even proposing... that the European system might be better in this regard"
Not by me - here's is an interesting article that compares the economies of the EU and the USA, and dispells the myths that the American economic model is better:
According to the International Monetary Fund, an institution more often accused of imposing Washington's ways than of knocking them, Europe's has. Over the past three years, living standards, as measured by GDP per person, have risen by 5.8 percent in the European Union but by only 1 percent in the United States. An unfair comparison, perhaps, given America's recent recession? Then look at how the European Union and the United States size up since 1995, a period that includes the go-go late '90s, when America apparently advanced by leaps and bounds. While living standards in the United States have risen by a healthy 16.1 percent over the past eight years, they are up by 18.3 percent in the European Union. Another statistical sleight of hand? Not at all. Pick any year between 1995 and 2000 as your starting point, and the conclusion is the same: Europe's economy has outperformed America's.
"identified Finland as being the most competitive country in the world from a business perspective, despite it being a fully paid up member of the EU and the Euro currency"
Why "despite" it being a member of the EU and Euro? One of the reasons for the EU and the Euro is to create a single European trade block, and as everyone knows, the larger the block and the less barriers to free trade exist, the more competition there is within the block.
How very enlightened you are. The fact remains that your (the USAs) liberties ARE being eroded.
Your suggestion that "people like myself speak up and let people like you know what is going on" is not a guarantee that things will not get worse - the sorry truth is that the vast majority of western electorates are not aware of the recent clampdown on civil liberties, and even if they were are too apothetic to do anything about it.:(
Intellisense is a MS feature in Visual Studio. When coding, typing '.' or '->' after an object's or pointer's name brings up a combobox containing the methods and attributes that can be accessed for that object. As the user types in more of the characters that make up the method/attribute name, the items in the combobox change to show those that match what the user's typed. I suppose this only works with object orientated languages.
Apparently there's more to Intellisense then just auto-completion - other features might be things like tooltips that show the types needed by a method.
Someone should invent a logo for the crackers - otherwise all the script kiddies will start using our one, and they'll be more of the usual hacker/cracker confusion.
What are the chances we start seeing web site defacements with this logo soon?
And that's remarkably different from the way oil is treated now... like, Iraqi people getting the fair market price for themselves, right? It's not, like, used to rebuild country that was demolished by an invading army; contracts handed out by party responsible for destruction, paid for by assets they confiscated?
And more. Apparently large amounts of the oil are going to the US as reparations for the first Gulf War (despite the fact that Iraqs neighbours have already paid for it). See here
As far as I can see, it's not just the French, it's the rest of the world (Blair was on the Bushs side in an attempt to moderate his actions). As time goes on it's becoming increasingly obvious that Bush and his PNAC advisors are a risk to global security (threatening Iran and approving of Isreali attacks on Syria - WTF?), and while the rest of the world can't get rid of him, we can certainly oppose him in the UN and hope that the US electorate will vote him out. That said, a depressingly large number of Americans seem to think that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda (thankyou Fox News), so who knows?
It might have been interesting for ESR to have mentioned Plumbing as seem in Plan 9. Arguably (as with much in Plan 9), the idea is a natural evolution of the UNIX model (in this case pipes):
Plumbing is a new mechanism for inter-process communication in Plan 9, specifically the passing of messages between interactive programs as part of the user interface. Although plumbing shares some properties with familiar notions such as cut and paste, it offers a more general data exchange mechanism without imposing a particular user interface.
The core of the plumbing system is a program called the plumber, which handles all messages and dispatches and reformats them according to configuration rules written in a special-purpose language. This approach allows the contents and context of a piece of data to define how it is handled. Unlike with drag and drop or cut and paste, the user doesn't need to deliver the data; the contents of a plumbing message, as interpreted by the plumbing rules, determine its destination.
The plumber has an unusual architecture: it is a language-driven file server. This design has distinct advantages. It makes plumbing easy to add to an existing, Unix-like command environment; it guarantees uniform handling of inter-application messages; it off-loads from those applications most of the work of extracting and dispatching messages; and it works transparently across a network.
I've just upgraded from Firebird 0.6 to 0.7 and I've lost my vertical scrollbar (thank God for my mouse wheel), comboboxes (dropdowns) no longer dropdown and my Googlebar gives me my results in Spanish.
What I never understood was the order of the numeric keys. Take your mobile phone out and look at its "key" layout. Its in ascending order right? Surely that makes more sense than descending like the PCs numeric keypad. Also note that on your mobile, the numeric pad and the top row, 0 comes after 9. As a geek, I'm pretty sure that should come before 1. Oh well...
Totally agree. Who wants to slow their machine down with the window manager? Also, it tends to be the smaller window managers that are trying out new ideas. My current favourite is WindowLab, it's small and the author has managed to combine a number of influences and totally original features really well IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
"Their motivation is not the satisfaction of users... [they] write code because that's what they love to do."
I'd say most open source hobbyist coders do it for both reasons actually. While noone would do it if they didn't enjoy coding, it really is very satisfying to get emails from users telling you how cool they think your software is.
"The result is code that only another coder would love."
What are you saying here? - surely the only people qualified to appreciate code are coders.
"...away from cool code and toward ease-of-use."
There's no link between the quality of the code and how easy to use it is. An easy to use interface is not indicative of the quality of the code and vice versa.
"...make mainstream code, not coder's code?"
If by "coder's code" you mean good elegant code that's not cranked out to meet commercially driven deadlines, I'll take that anytime.
Spot on - I was thinking exactly the same thing the other night. Unfortunately, I've got a feeling that such a setup would have to be able to handle really complex themes, and many developers of lightweight toolkits would baulk at having to implement them.
Still, Linux is all about choice - if you want a consistant feel, you can always stick to only installing apps that use one toolkit or download RedHats Bluecurve or something.
According to NTK
...with yet another shortcut being taken by the Evil Intellectual Property Developers at the World IP Organisation's copyright committee. Here's the scene: the IPers want to create a bundle of new IP rights: not for creative artists, but for those who package and broadcast their works on air or online. The idea is that a broadcaster can record a public domain or Creative Commons licensed work, claim "FIXATION RIGHTS" to it, and retain control of that expression for the next twenty years. Did I say twenty? I'm sorry - that's what they used to want. Now it's *fifty* years, to match Sonny Bono inflation in copyright extensions. WIPO thought this was a done deal (after all, who could complain about more rights?) - until a few of the developing countries and those pesky open source advocates started taking note. Developing countries: not so keen on yet another round of having their native cultures air-lifted out of their control. OSS folk: not thrilled about a WIP definition of "broadcasting" that could include docs, files, or executables. Could you take a GPL'd program, "broadcast" it on the Net, and then claim exclusive copyright control on that expression? No-one at WIPO knew. The end result: not for the first or last time, the developing world teamed up with the free software folk to backburn the proposal. Well, all except Kenya, who went on about how they'd passed a law banning people from taking photos of TV broadcasts to prove what a good IP world citizen they were. Better to back the Bitching Boys than the Fat Cats on this particular track, we think...
another Jamie Love song
wish they all could be non-infringing
"I find it very difficult to have respect for governments who think they need to control the information their populous sees."
...
That's priceless coming from an American. Read this
WASHINGTON, Oct 2 (IPS) - The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released here Thursday.
And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
But news sources also accounted for major differences in misperceptions, according to PIPA, which asked more than 3,300 respondents since May where they ''tended to get most of (their) news''. Eighty percent identified broadcast media, while 19 percent cited print media.
Among those who said broadcast media, 30 percent said two or more networks; 18 percent, Fox News; 16 percent, CNN; 24 percent, the three big networks -- NBC (14 percent), ABC (11 percent), CBS (9 percent); and three percent, the two public networks, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far.
Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.
Try visiting London (England) some time.
"I'd just like to see Symbian controlled by people who actually like technology rather than the somewhat PHBish people who have controlled them so far"
I've got a mate who works for Symbian, and after he first got the job back in 2000 he was always enthusing about how great they were. I clearly remember him telling me how most of the higher managers were from a technical/engineering background.
"What if SCO *wants* to be purchased by MS? What would happen to Linux if MS owned the rights to UNIX?"
There seems to be lot of confusion over this. SCO does not own UNIX, and if Microsft were to buy SCO they would not own UNIX either. Novell holds the patents and the OpenGroup owns the trademark.
...that it's more cost effective to pay out bounties and scare virus writers into not exploting their security problems then it is to actually fix the code in the first place.
Not by me - here's is an interesting article that compares the economies of the EU and the USA, and dispells the myths that the American economic model is better:
"identified Finland as being the most competitive country in the world from a business perspective, despite it being a fully paid up member of the EU and the Euro currency"
Why "despite" it being a member of the EU and Euro? One of the reasons for the EU and the Euro is to create a single European trade block, and as everyone knows, the larger the block and the less barriers to free trade exist, the more competition there is within the block.
It should read #ifdefs surely?
How very enlightened you are. The fact remains that your (the USAs) liberties ARE being eroded.
:(
Your suggestion that "people like myself speak up and let people like you know what is going on" is not a guarantee that things will not get worse - the sorry truth is that the vast majority of western electorates are not aware of the recent clampdown on civil liberties, and even if they were are too apothetic to do anything about it.
Intellisense is a MS feature in Visual Studio. When coding, typing '.' or '->' after an object's or pointer's name brings up a combobox containing the methods and attributes that can be accessed for that object. As the user types in more of the characters that make up the method/attribute name, the items in the combobox change to show those that match what the user's typed. I suppose this only works with object orientated languages.
Apparently there's more to Intellisense then just auto-completion - other features might be things like tooltips that show the types needed by a method.
That's cool but it's going the wrong way round - do us a favour and rotate it would you...
Crackers are not a subset of hackers.
Someone should invent a logo for the crackers - otherwise all the script kiddies will start using our one, and they'll be more of the usual hacker/cracker confusion.
What are the chances we start seeing web site defacements with this logo soon?
"One who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and one who remains a socialist at 40 has no head," - George Bernard Shaw
And that's remarkably different from the way oil is treated now... like, Iraqi people getting the fair market price for themselves, right? It's not, like, used to rebuild country that was demolished by an invading army; contracts handed out by party responsible for destruction, paid for by assets they confiscated?
And more. Apparently large amounts of the oil are going to the US as reparations for the first Gulf War (despite the fact that Iraqs neighbours have already paid for it). See here
As far as I can see, it's not just the French, it's the rest of the world (Blair was on the Bushs side in an attempt to moderate his actions). As time goes on it's becoming increasingly obvious that Bush and his PNAC advisors are a risk to global security (threatening Iran and approving of Isreali attacks on Syria - WTF?), and while the rest of the world can't get rid of him, we can certainly oppose him in the UN and hope that the US electorate will vote him out. That said, a depressingly large number of Americans seem to think that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda (thankyou Fox News), so who knows?
It might have been interesting for ESR to have mentioned Plumbing as seem in Plan 9. Arguably (as with much in Plan 9), the idea is a natural evolution of the UNIX model (in this case pipes):
Plumbing is a new mechanism for inter-process communication in Plan 9, specifically the passing of messages between interactive programs as part of the user interface. Although plumbing shares some properties with familiar notions such as cut and paste, it offers a more general data exchange mechanism without imposing a particular user interface.
The core of the plumbing system is a program called the plumber, which handles all messages and dispatches and reformats them according to configuration rules written in a special-purpose language. This approach allows the contents and context of a piece of data to define how it is handled. Unlike with drag and drop or cut and paste, the user doesn't need to deliver the data; the contents of a plumbing message, as interpreted by the plumbing rules, determine its destination.
The plumber has an unusual architecture: it is a language-driven file server. This design has distinct advantages. It makes plumbing easy to add to an existing, Unix-like command environment; it guarantees uniform handling of inter-application messages; it off-loads from those applications most of the work of extracting and dispatching messages; and it works transparently across a network.
They weren't at the time. See Googles cache:w w.pidget .org
http://www.google.com.ni/search?q=cache:w
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Those left-hand-nav links don't work on Opera 6.11. Ho hum.
I've just upgraded from Firebird 0.6 to 0.7 and I've lost my vertical scrollbar (thank God for my mouse wheel), comboboxes (dropdowns) no longer dropdown and my Googlebar gives me my results in Spanish.
Any ideas?
What I never understood was the order of the numeric keys. Take your mobile phone out and look at its "key" layout. Its in ascending order right? Surely that makes more sense than descending like the PCs numeric keypad. Also note that on your mobile, the numeric pad and the top row, 0 comes after 9. As a geek, I'm pretty sure that should come before 1. Oh well...
Totally agree. Who wants to slow their machine down with the window manager? Also, it tends to be the smaller window managers that are trying out new ideas. My current favourite is WindowLab, it's small and the author has managed to combine a number of influences and totally original features really well IMHO.