Here's a hint: Fanboys of any stripe can never take criticism. It's nothing particular to OSS. Microsoft, Linux, Apple, Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek, nVidia, ATI, Matrox, Blizzard, XBox, GameCube, PS2, Christian, Muslim, Scientologist... makes no difference. Fanboys are just a subspecies of zealot. And we are all hopefully aware of just how rational zealots tend to be.
And you have proof that querencia there has bitched about MS being the dominant monoculture? Why are you assuming that he's one of the people who insists that clueless end-user n00bs switch to Linux?
I'm beginning to come around to the point of view that, basically, Linux is for people who are willing to deal with the ugly technical side. Don't like it? Too bad. Linux is not for you. Go use a friendlier operating system. Want it to be friendlier? WRITE IT!
The obvious response is, "You won't get any converts with an attitude like that!" And of course the counter-response is, I don't want converts. So I'll keep my attitude, thanks!
Command-line software (open source, or otherwise) is particularly prone to exhibit this problem, often to the same extent as the BIOS example. When executed with a "-?" option (or whatever), most programs will give a list of options, but rarely tell the user anything other than the existence of the option. This is no better than a dialog box asking a yes/no question with no further explanation.
Isn't this what man pages are for? At least when it comes to command-line programs, anyway. Certainly a GUI program might reasonably be expected to have integrated help, but with CLI-level stuff, it would add a lot of extra crud to programs that are otherwise fairly slim.
I think a lot of that attitude comes from a historical perspective on the severe abuse of wealth and power. Certainly no one disagrees that at this point in history, money and power are generally interchangeable. And so peoples who have long cultural experience with being abused by powerful institutions (e.g. the monarchies of Europe, whose existence was predicated on the oppression and ignorance of the populace), now that they've gotten democracy and other modern social structures, realize what a danger it is when too few people hold too much power.
I won't claim that this doesn't get perverted into rabid anti-capitalism, just as happens with virtually every ideology, but that doesn't mean there's no sound reason behind it all, no historical basis, or that a majority of people in such places share that fanatical belief. And honestly, what is there to be gained by calling people names and getting all bitter about what other people think? Aren't we all better served by a rational, thoughtful, informed approach to our world, rather than relying on fear and anger? I know I don't even hold myself up to that standard all the time, but I know that I should (and I do try).
I'm not sure how aware you are of this, but the term "Free Software" (in the Stallman sense) predates the term "Open Source" by more than ten years.
Anyway, just a tidbit -- the way you describe it, you sound like open source was around and now people are trying to come in and say, "Call it 'free software' instead" when what really happened was the other way around (for good or ill).
now we'll have Roman Catholic Zealots join forces with the Linux Zealots?
I just hope they don't bring any Protoss Zealots along with them. Wait, actually, that would be cool. "My life for Aiur! --er, that is, my life for Jesus!" Mmm... Popecraft.
When I say X,Y,Z needs to happen before GIMP can beat photoshop, I am saying "Hey, GIMP developers, I am supporting you!, if you guys want some ideas on how to make your pet project the best it can be, think about adding these features." It might not be as helpful as actually coding, but I know that I find it helpful to have people tell me what they would like to see happen with my projects.
I'm sure that's what you mean, but using the word "beat" means something completely different. It's like saying, "I punched that guy," and someone says you shouldn't hit people, you say, "No, no, I didn't actually touch him, what I meant was that I looked at him funny." Fine, maybe that's not what you mean, but you're going to confuse people if you say something and intend it to mean something that it normally would never mean!
And anyway, most people who say things like "If GIMP wants to beat Photoshop..." really DO think that there's some imperative for the GIMP programmers to somehow out-compete Photoshop in the capitalistic sense. They're not saying, "The GIMP people should take more pride in their work by adding these features." Notice that that statement doesn't mention Photoshop. If what they're actually trying to say doesn't involve Photoshop, why do they mention Photoshop in what they're actually saying?
Of course there's nothing wrong with taking pride in something you've created, or trying to write better software as a matter of principle, but that's not what I'm responding to. I'm responding to those who are (or appear to be) implying that the GIMP programmers need to be *worried* that they won't out-compete Photoshop. Further, your statements imply that some/most/all open source programmers work on OS projects because they want status, respect, have big egos, etc. What about people who write software because they need a particular tool to do a particular thing, and don't care how many other people use it?
Hey, editors, can we have a "-1: Bitching about MDI or SDI" moderation? Because I'm sick to death of seeing posts like the above every-single-goddamn-time Slashdot has a GIMP article. "I love SDI, it's so great!" "You're crazy, I can't stand MDI, I don't see how anyone could like it, everyone who claims to must either be insane, stupid, or lying!"
Okay, done ranting, feel better now. I just wish people would stop carping over which is better. Who cares? It's a matter of personal preference. Acting like you can't understand why someone would like it the other way is just being ign'ant.
(Of course, the best are people like me, who can use MDI and SDI with equal aplomb, and don't have any trouble with either interface style. Ha! I win!)
The gimp is a fine project as projects go, but it seems to me that there are a few things gimp needs before it will be able to really compete with Photoshop
The GIMP doesn't need to compete with Photoshop. It's free. Its continued existence doesn't depend on how many people use it. It bothers me when people act like an open-source equivalent to some popular proprietary program must be in direct competition with it. GIMP has nothing to lose -- the whole point of it was to have a decent image manipulation program that didn't cost $649.
Granted, some people will feel a burning need for GIMP to be used by more people than Photoshop -- some kind of irrational pride thing, I guess. I don't want or need GIMP to somehow "beat" Photoshop (if that was even a meaningful thing to say). What I do sometimes want is to be able to get friends or family using a particular open-source program instead of the closed-source equivalent.
If you say, "My wife/friend/kids/whatever won't use this program until X, Y, Z." The closed-source response to the latter is, "Hmm, a bunch of people are asking for X, Y, and Z, we better do it before they go buy Photoshop." The open source response to the latter is, "Good for you. Why don't you learn how to program and add those features?" Whether or not you use GIMP literally doesn't affect them.
So the hung out with the same groups, sat near each other at rallies, and shared the same political convictions.
Your leaps in logic are truly staggering. They sat near each other at one rally, before Jane went to North Korea. They definitely shared one political conviction: the war in Vietnam was a bad idea. (Later on, Jane revealed her stupidity about it, but at the time, no one, including Kerry, could have known what Jane was planning to do.)
Therefore they believed exactly the same things (despite the fact that Kerry decried Fonda's actions when she went to North Vietnam). Right. What planet are you on? (And lest you think my bias is showing, I'm not voting for Kerry in the primary here in California.)
Yeah, I don't get why Democrats bother with that old stuff, when they can just hold up his record as President -- pissing off most of the rest of the world, sending hundreds of Americans to die in a pointless war, wasting billions of dollars, trying to eliminate the First Amendment (aw, heck, the whole Constitution really). What's a little coke and abortion compared to a man doing his damnedest to make everyone hate him?
(Not that any other president has been much better, really. Just less egregious.)
If you went to a Republican convention with Pat Robertson I could hold that against you. Hang with me here. I think Pat Robertson behavior is not acceptable and by attending an event with him as a speaker, you are condoning him his actions.
What if I'm a reporter who's been assigned to attend the convention? What if I'm a Democrat who wonders why Republicans believe the things they believe, and want to get an "inside" view of the Republican mindset? There are countless reasons someone could go to a Republican convention featuring Pat Robertson as a speaker, without agreeing with anything Robertson said, or "supporting" him in any way.
I suppose you could say he "supported" Robertson in the sense of simply showing up -- a larger crowd implies more support, after all. But that's not the same thing as going because you want to support him, and going because you have some other reason.
Probably not what the gp is referring to, specifically, but yeah, I've always through the way the Milieu handled government was ideal. Of course, they have psychic powers and so can accurately determine whether a particular individual would not want the job... not quite applicable to our real life situation.
Seriously, though: random assignment would probably work better than our current system.
The situation you describe is *not* what's happening in this article. What's happening here is more like this:
Bob comes up with a definition for spam. He manually classifies 5000 emails as spam or non-spam, then writes a filter that almost perfectly matches his classifications.
Then he gives the emails to Fred and has Fred classify them. Fred's classification differs from Bob's enough that Fred's "accuracy" according to Bob's definition is worse than Bob's filter.
Yeah, I agree with you, in the situation you described, Fred is likely to make some mistakes, even using his own definition of spam. But that's not what's happening here.
Here, "mistake" can mean reading an email you thought was valid but it turned out to be spam; or deleting an email you thought was spam but it really was valid.
The problem is, what the guys who ran the test define as "spam" may not match what one of the test subjects defines as "spam." So a test subject might see a mail, think, "That's not spam!" and mark it as real. I don't mean that he reads it wrong: I mean that no matter how much he inspected it, he'd say, "No, I wouldn't call this spam." Even if you specify a universal definition, whether a piece of spam matches that definition can be arguable.
Just like if you give a person a document and say "find all the spelling errors" they will probably miss some. This is not because they have a different definition of how those words are spelt, it is because they made some mistakes.
The situation is different, because though we do have standard spellings of words, we don't have a standard definition for what constitutes spam -- because whether or not an email is spam depends on whether the recipient thinks it's spam. In other words, if two people receive the same email, there's a chance that one of them will think it's spam, and the other will say, no, it's not spam. So did the second guy make a "mistake?" If so, why? Why is his definition of spam less valid than the other guy's?
(Of course if you want to get pedantic, "standard" spellings of words are those which happen to be agreed upon by the overwhelming majority. Overwhelming to such a degree, in fact, that you can "prove" you're right about the spelling of a word: look it up in the dictionary. But whether or not a particular piece of email qualifies as "spam," assuming you've settled upon a particular definition (which would vary from person to person), is still in the eye of the beholder.)
That's all well and good, until a very irregularly-shaped asteroid decides to come extremely close to the massive body known as "Earth".
If the asteroid is close enough to Earth for Earth's gravity to cause a tidal pull (and give it significant tumbling), it's going to be hitting earth very shortly. The MADMAN project would be used when the asteroid is still a long ways away, maybe years away from striking Earth, and not close enough to any significant gravity source for tidal forces to be problematic.
There may be examples to the contrary, but to the best of my knowledge there are no "large-scale" solutions that I know of which have "first" been implemented as open-source and then aped (or not) in some proprietory form.
Web servers. FTP servers. IRC servers. In fact, most server applications for common protocols were developed and invented by those who developed the protocols, which, usually being open, naturally led to open servers. Actually, I think web browsers and other network applications also quite often fall into this category.
Although I could be wrong. Does anyone have any more detailed knowledge of this? A quick Google search was inconclusive.
I dunno. I never get headaches from staring at monitors. Never have, not even after 16 hours straight. Not that I do that a lot, but I stare at a monitor for 8 hours a day at work, and then I usually go home and stare at a monitor for another 1-4 hours.
I almost never get headaches at all, but I never get headaches or eyestrain (or carpal tunnel) from using a computer. And these are all CRTs. No LCDs in sight. Granted, my experience may not extend to everyone, but, at least it can happen.
If the suspect gives name and says they didn't do anything, the officer should just move along?
If the suspect gives his name and says he doesn't do anything, and the officer actually bothers to look around and see whether there's any evidence of a crime (because we all know that nobody would ever fake an anonymous tip just to cause trouble!), AND FINDS NONE, then yes, he should just move along. The sheriff in question didn't look for evidence, didn't see whether any crime had been committed. The very first thing he did was ask for ID, and when the guy said no (not that he could have given him ID, he didn't have any), the officer didn't bother to investigate the scene, he just arrested the guy.
An anonymous tip doesn't by itself give an officer probable cause to start searching people, arresting them, demanding papers, etc. There needs to be some actual evidence that a crime was or is being committed.
One problem with this situation is that the cop didn't even ask the guy his name. He didn't ask them if they'd been fighting, he didn't look at Mimi to see if she looked like she'd been struck. He just demanded ID. Hiibel said he didn't have ID, and the cop kept asking for it. He never once asked Hiibel his name.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a hint: Fanboys of any stripe can never take criticism. It's nothing particular to OSS. Microsoft, Linux, Apple, Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek, nVidia, ATI, Matrox, Blizzard, XBox, GameCube, PS2, Christian, Muslim, Scientologist... makes no difference. Fanboys are just a subspecies of zealot. And we are all hopefully aware of just how rational zealots tend to be.
And you have proof that querencia there has bitched about MS being the dominant monoculture? Why are you assuming that he's one of the people who insists that clueless end-user n00bs switch to Linux?
I'm beginning to come around to the point of view that, basically, Linux is for people who are willing to deal with the ugly technical side. Don't like it? Too bad. Linux is not for you. Go use a friendlier operating system. Want it to be friendlier? WRITE IT!
The obvious response is, "You won't get any converts with an attitude like that!" And of course the counter-response is, I don't want converts. So I'll keep my attitude, thanks!
I think a lot of that attitude comes from a historical perspective on the severe abuse of wealth and power. Certainly no one disagrees that at this point in history, money and power are generally interchangeable. And so peoples who have long cultural experience with being abused by powerful institutions (e.g. the monarchies of Europe, whose existence was predicated on the oppression and ignorance of the populace), now that they've gotten democracy and other modern social structures, realize what a danger it is when too few people hold too much power.
I won't claim that this doesn't get perverted into rabid anti-capitalism, just as happens with virtually every ideology, but that doesn't mean there's no sound reason behind it all, no historical basis, or that a majority of people in such places share that fanatical belief. And honestly, what is there to be gained by calling people names and getting all bitter about what other people think? Aren't we all better served by a rational, thoughtful, informed approach to our world, rather than relying on fear and anger? I know I don't even hold myself up to that standard all the time, but I know that I should (and I do try).
I'm not sure how aware you are of this, but the term "Free Software" (in the Stallman sense) predates the term "Open Source" by more than ten years.
Anyway, just a tidbit -- the way you describe it, you sound like open source was around and now people are trying to come in and say, "Call it 'free software' instead" when what really happened was the other way around (for good or ill).
And anyway, most people who say things like "If GIMP wants to beat Photoshop..." really DO think that there's some imperative for the GIMP programmers to somehow out-compete Photoshop in the capitalistic sense. They're not saying, "The GIMP people should take more pride in their work by adding these features." Notice that that statement doesn't mention Photoshop. If what they're actually trying to say doesn't involve Photoshop, why do they mention Photoshop in what they're actually saying?
Of course there's nothing wrong with taking pride in something you've created, or trying to write better software as a matter of principle, but that's not what I'm responding to. I'm responding to those who are (or appear to be) implying that the GIMP programmers need to be *worried* that they won't out-compete Photoshop. Further, your statements imply that some/most/all open source programmers work on OS projects because they want status, respect, have big egos, etc. What about people who write software because they need a particular tool to do a particular thing, and don't care how many other people use it?
Hey, editors, can we have a "-1: Bitching about MDI or SDI" moderation? Because I'm sick to death of seeing posts like the above every-single-goddamn-time Slashdot has a GIMP article. "I love SDI, it's so great!" "You're crazy, I can't stand MDI, I don't see how anyone could like it, everyone who claims to must either be insane, stupid, or lying!"
Okay, done ranting, feel better now. I just wish people would stop carping over which is better. Who cares? It's a matter of personal preference. Acting like you can't understand why someone would like it the other way is just being ign'ant.
(Of course, the best are people like me, who can use MDI and SDI with equal aplomb, and don't have any trouble with either interface style. Ha! I win!)
Granted, some people will feel a burning need for GIMP to be used by more people than Photoshop -- some kind of irrational pride thing, I guess. I don't want or need GIMP to somehow "beat" Photoshop (if that was even a meaningful thing to say). What I do sometimes want is to be able to get friends or family using a particular open-source program instead of the closed-source equivalent.
If you say, "My wife/friend/kids/whatever won't use this program until X, Y, Z." The closed-source response to the latter is, "Hmm, a bunch of people are asking for X, Y, and Z, we better do it before they go buy Photoshop." The open source response to the latter is, "Good for you. Why don't you learn how to program and add those features?" Whether or not you use GIMP literally doesn't affect them.
Therefore they believed exactly the same things (despite the fact that Kerry decried Fonda's actions when she went to North Vietnam). Right. What planet are you on? (And lest you think my bias is showing, I'm not voting for Kerry in the primary here in California.)
Yeah, I don't get why Democrats bother with that old stuff, when they can just hold up his record as President -- pissing off most of the rest of the world, sending hundreds of Americans to die in a pointless war, wasting billions of dollars, trying to eliminate the First Amendment (aw, heck, the whole Constitution really). What's a little coke and abortion compared to a man doing his damnedest to make everyone hate him?
(Not that any other president has been much better, really. Just less egregious.)
I suppose you could say he "supported" Robertson in the sense of simply showing up -- a larger crowd implies more support, after all. But that's not the same thing as going because you want to support him, and going because you have some other reason.
Probably not what the gp is referring to, specifically, but yeah, I've always through the way the Milieu handled government was ideal. Of course, they have psychic powers and so can accurately determine whether a particular individual would not want the job... not quite applicable to our real life situation.
Seriously, though: random assignment would probably work better than our current system.
Why does it matter who we vote for? On no account should any person who wants to be president be allowed to have the job.
The situation you describe is *not* what's happening in this article. What's happening here is more like this:
Bob comes up with a definition for spam. He manually classifies 5000 emails as spam or non-spam, then writes a filter that almost perfectly matches his classifications.
Then he gives the emails to Fred and has Fred classify them. Fred's classification differs from Bob's enough that Fred's "accuracy" according to Bob's definition is worse than Bob's filter.
Yeah, I agree with you, in the situation you described, Fred is likely to make some mistakes, even using his own definition of spam. But that's not what's happening here.
(Of course if you want to get pedantic, "standard" spellings of words are those which happen to be agreed upon by the overwhelming majority. Overwhelming to such a degree, in fact, that you can "prove" you're right about the spelling of a word: look it up in the dictionary. But whether or not a particular piece of email qualifies as "spam," assuming you've settled upon a particular definition (which would vary from person to person), is still in the eye of the beholder.)
Although I could be wrong. Does anyone have any more detailed knowledge of this? A quick Google search was inconclusive.
I dunno. I never get headaches from staring at monitors. Never have, not even after 16 hours straight. Not that I do that a lot, but I stare at a monitor for 8 hours a day at work, and then I usually go home and stare at a monitor for another 1-4 hours.
I almost never get headaches at all, but I never get headaches or eyestrain (or carpal tunnel) from using a computer. And these are all CRTs. No LCDs in sight. Granted, my experience may not extend to everyone, but, at least it can happen.
An anonymous tip doesn't by itself give an officer probable cause to start searching people, arresting them, demanding papers, etc. There needs to be some actual evidence that a crime was or is being committed.
One problem with this situation is that the cop didn't even ask the guy his name. He didn't ask them if they'd been fighting, he didn't look at Mimi to see if she looked like she'd been struck. He just demanded ID. Hiibel said he didn't have ID, and the cop kept asking for it. He never once asked Hiibel his name.