Agreed. But this has nothing to do with the license. If you want some warranty, you have to pay. Nothing as a free lunch. Just contract a FOSS company.
it becomes arrogance of the highest order for the leader of a bunch of hobbyists (and, to be fair, a few engineers professionally employed on it) to tell us that anyone not using their software is behaving immorally!
You're interpreting. RMS says: use free software, he doesn't say you should this particular piece of software. This is a moral stand, not a technical one. So he is in his role to say that and there is no arrogance.
But GNU (or its leader, RMS) can't realistically say "we're going to do this" and have the same credibility as the head of a professional company saying "we're going to do this".
But he doesn't say that (AFAIK). OTOH, FOSS companies do say things like that and in general will do. IMHO, RedHat and al have some kind of professional-level credibility. Anyway, you don't need credibility, you need visibility. In most cases (but not always), FOSS give you more visibility than proprietary software. You know what you have, you know what you will have, you know how it behaves and you know you will be able to fix if needed. You don't know what the future development will be but this is the same for proprietary software. Which one has more visibility? GNU GCC or MS CC?
In the real world, every software engineer has a job to do: someone's told them what it is, and someone's got expectations of when it'll be done.
So you mean professional developpers. FYI, it also applies to the FOSS professional developpers. Developpers in FOSS companies are in the same situation than proprietary software companies. They have deadlines, QA,...
if you don't meet these two requirements then you'll lose their business.
Agreed. But that applies to both proprietary and free software and in exactly the same terms.
In a few years, they have come with a major complete operating system that is a direct competitor of Microsoft and Apple.
But the OS kernel was NOT produced by GNU - hence "GNU/Linux"
By "they", I mean the FOSS community. BTW, what do you call GNU?
One thing for sure though, FOSS would be at least 5 years behind where it is now if we'd been relying on RMS and GNU exclusively.
I agree a single person could not do every thing;) For the GNU side, I can not answer before knowing what you call GNU. BTW, in '92 there was already a dozen of free kernels. The community has focused on Linux but would have surely choose another one if Linux didn't fit the bill.
As an organisation of professional engineers, GNU is a dead loss.
How many professional engineers are working at "GNU"? What is a dead loss when:
1) you didn't pay anything
2) you get something better (IMHO) than the other products you had to pay for?
Honnestly, if I look at the amounts of money I spent on proprietary software and on free software and what I got, I know which one is the clear winner. BTW, this is not (only) a question of money.
The word "Customer" covers a lot more than it's literal definition these days.
If you want to call "customers" your colleagues and users, fine for you.
AFAIK, most software projects are not customer-driven. Please provide links.
Care to provide numbers?
On all the projects I participated, only one was driven by a customer (BTW, it was a failure). If you mean we should care about customers and asking them to participate, I wholy agree.
The point being that writing a portion of something used in a system does not make a developer or organization the maker of said system.
In the FOSS world, it does.
It's unfortunate, but there is no argument here to pick apart.
There is but it is well summarized: software projects fail, being FOSS or proprietary. Microsoft, Apple and the free software community all have a lot of projects that fail. The question is: if today I have a new project to start, will I use free or proprietary libs? what kind of developpers will I hire? what kind of companies will I contract? No definitive answer; that will depend on the project. But in some cases, it will be cheaper, faster and better to go with FOSS.
Hard to answer because I see your post as pure flamebait... By "real" job, I mean a job in which you are required to meet deadlines imposed by customers and to produce end products specified by customers
So you're clearly excluding almost every one... you'll naturally assume that all the other software engineers working on customer-driven projects are the minority.
AFAIK, most software projects are not customer-driven. Please provide links. there's no way in hell I'd be relying on GNU to develop the tools I needed.
Why would you? On which software editor do you rely? Their track record is simply appalling.
Their track record is simply amazing. In a few years, they have come with a major complete operating system that is a direct competitor of Microsoft and Apple. only an idiot would pay GNU to write it for them, bcos they've already proved their inability to do work to time.
You mean Microsoft? The only way I'd trust GNU to do it would be to hire the relevant GNU engineers directly and impose penalty clauses.
Wanna contract? There is plenty of FOSS-oriented firms that will offer you that. Just contact them. Of course, the price will be much higher than a donation. After all, this is for a "real" job.
Damn they don't use their own tech.
I RTFA and click on the shop.
Then "Flash Players".
Got:
Server Error in '/' Application. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\layout\default.as cx Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
...
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +731
Version Information: Microsoft.NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.573
(forgot once more the formating, should be read as:)
Did anyone noticed that there are reviews?
AFAIK, this is the first time Google introduces a human factor.
And cooperation (with Epinions).
Biased results?
Did anyone noticed that there are reviews?
AFAIK, this is the first time Google introduces a human factor.
And cooperation (with Epinions)
Biased results?
How does that work exactly, combining trust values?
Trust is probability.
If they are acting independently, P0+(1-P0)*P1+(1-P0-(1-P0)*P1)*P2+... with P sorted from the higher to the lower. If they are acting together, max(P0,P1,P2,...). If you don't know, interpolate;)
personnal theory
Well MS Office is still unable to open OpenDocument documents...
If they don't add quicly import/export features, MS Office will become irrelevant. Not because it is a bad product but because their users will be unable to open the documents they receive. Because companies/agencies are switching massively (from what I can see).
To be honest, I just checked, and while there are 1,030,000 Google results for "Cringely," there are no ads at all on the results page, indicating -- as many have long suspected -- that I have no commercial value whatsoever.
Minimum price for 'cringely': $0.42
Too expensive for me..
BTW, the article is quite bad. All the important information is missing like the positions, CTR, minimum prices and CPC. OTOH, the algo is probably quite complex and it seems the higher bidder is not the winner.
"We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you."
To summarize: they can do what ever they want. But you're right: it is not hidden.
there's a difference between collecting data, and collecting data by spying. The former is about doing it visibly, the other trying to hide it.
Is displaying an ad something visible? You know they record every click (since they will be audited). You know they count the impressions. You don't know what they record.
Before arguing the price for a search, I would question the value of the data itself.
What's your opinion about Alexa ranks? Reliable?
IMHO, there is too few users of the Alexa toolbar. It is also quite biased (IE, Windows). So except maybe for the top 30,000 websites, I'm not sure about the reliability of the stats.
That depends on your definition of what spyware is.
If you mean collecting data, then yes Alexa does it.
If you mean collecting personnal data, I don't think the toolbar does it.
Then what about Google? With AdSense running (almost) everywhere + your unique eternal Google ID, they surely collect a lot of data too. And with Google Analytics, they have also a lot of info.
So the question becomes: Is Google AdSense spyware?
Slashdot Mirror
1) Don't be confused when you're right
2) ???
3) Losses?
You can't *force* a hobbyist to do what you want
Agreed. But this has nothing to do with the license. If you want some warranty, you have to pay. Nothing as a free lunch. Just contract a FOSS company.
it becomes arrogance of the highest order for the leader of a bunch of hobbyists (and, to be fair, a few engineers professionally employed on it) to tell us that anyone not using their software is behaving immorally!
You're interpreting. RMS says: use free software, he doesn't say you should this particular piece of software. This is a moral stand, not a technical one. So he is in his role to say that and there is no arrogance.
But GNU (or its leader, RMS) can't realistically say "we're going to do this" and have the same credibility as the head of a professional company saying "we're going to do this".
But he doesn't say that (AFAIK). OTOH, FOSS companies do say things like that and in general will do. IMHO, RedHat and al have some kind of professional-level credibility. Anyway, you don't need credibility, you need visibility. In most cases (but not always), FOSS give you more visibility than proprietary software. You know what you have, you know what you will have, you know how it behaves and you know you will be able to fix if needed. You don't know what the future development will be but this is the same for proprietary software. Which one has more visibility? GNU GCC or MS CC?
As far as being slow, it is probably similar to other VM languages in speed, such as Java or Python.
You're probably right, now the real question is: Java or Python.
1) you didn't pay anything
2) you get something better (IMHO) than the other products you had to pay for?
Honnestly, if I look at the amounts of money I spent on proprietary software and on free software and what I got, I know which one is the clear winner. BTW, this is not (only) a question of money.
Hard to answer because I see your post as pure flamebait...
By "real" job, I mean a job in which you are required to meet deadlines imposed by customers and to produce end products specified by customers
So you're clearly excluding almost every one...
you'll naturally assume that all the other software engineers working on customer-driven projects are the minority.
AFAIK, most software projects are not customer-driven. Please provide links.
there's no way in hell I'd be relying on GNU to develop the tools I needed.
Why would you? On which software editor do you rely?
Their track record is simply appalling.
Their track record is simply amazing. In a few years, they have come with a major complete operating system that is a direct competitor of Microsoft and Apple.
only an idiot would pay GNU to write it for them, bcos they've already proved their inability to do work to time.
You mean Microsoft?
The only way I'd trust GNU to do it would be to hire the relevant GNU engineers directly and impose penalty clauses.
Wanna contract? There is plenty of FOSS-oriented firms that will offer you that. Just contact them. Of course, the price will be much higher than a donation. After all, this is for a "real" job.
I RTFA and click on the shop.
Then "Flash Players".
Got:
Com'on, the coolest computer ever was the Apple ][.
And it was killed by OS X.
It you can put the Ruby interpreter in 16K ROM, why not?
If you are still programming in your 40s instead of hiring other folks to program for you, you are probably a loser.
No, you're already a looser. Why to wait 20 years?
Start a business and let someone else be your code monkey.
You mean to give all the fun to the youth? No way!
By 50 if you are still staring at streams of code all day, you will fucking go blind.
At that time, we will all have direct neural interfaces.
Gosh! I feel so old...
No he would be the CEO of Google ;)
(forgot once more the formating, should be read as:)
Did anyone noticed that there are reviews?
AFAIK, this is the first time Google introduces a human factor.
And cooperation (with Epinions).
Biased results?
Did anyone noticed that there are reviews? AFAIK, this is the first time Google introduces a human factor. And cooperation (with Epinions) Biased results?
First Personal Computer
But if you mean a modern PC (personal microcomputer not sold in kit), it was french and named MICRAL. Ref.
How does that work exactly, combining trust values?
;)
Trust is probability.
If they are acting independently, P0+(1-P0)*P1+(1-P0-(1-P0)*P1)*P2+... with P sorted from the higher to the lower. If they are acting together, max(P0,P1,P2,...). If you don't know, interpolate
personnal theory
Well MS Office is still unable to open OpenDocument documents...
If they don't add quicly import/export features, MS Office will become irrelevant. Not because it is a bad product but because their users will be unable to open the documents they receive. Because companies/agencies are switching massively (from what I can see).
Do the people of these EU countries even elect their EU representatives directly?
;)
/..
A part of them (the parlement) is elected directly, another part is appointed by the governments.
Why do Americans have the right to a secret ballot?
It is very secret: even the algo is still unknown...
when was the last time the EU actually granted you any rights, Europeans?
Almost every day. There is plenty of new rights, decided by the EU, and progressively transcripted into the national laws.
Every time I look, you're either losing rights or fighting to keep them.
Seems logical. Negative is always more discussed than positive. Look at
To be honest, I just checked, and while there are 1,030,000 Google results for "Cringely," there are no ads at all on the results page, indicating -- as many have long suspected -- that I have no commercial value whatsoever.
Minimum price for 'cringely': $0.42
Too expensive for me..
BTW, the article is quite bad. All the important information is missing like the positions, CTR, minimum prices and CPC. OTOH, the algo is probably quite complex and it seems the higher bidder is not the winner.
Every one is bashing but did you test it?
strcmp("LAMJ","LAMP")
the reasons you cite also apply to the top 30,000 websites.
No, only the bias applies. For the top 30,000 websites, I think the daily sample is big enough to have at least a bit of meaning.
Do you really believe that MSN is more popular than Google?
Among the people that use the Alexa toolbar? yes. But of course, Alexa users are not representative of the internet population.
"We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you."
To summarize: they can do what ever they want. But you're right: it is not hidden.
there's a difference between collecting data, and collecting data by spying. The former is about doing it visibly, the other trying to hide it.
Is displaying an ad something visible? You know they record every click (since they will be audited). You know they count the impressions. You don't know what they record.
Edit: TFA is about the index, not the ranks...
Anyway the question remains: how good is the evaluation function of the search engine?
Before arguing the price for a search, I would question the value of the data itself.
What's your opinion about Alexa ranks? Reliable? IMHO, there is too few users of the Alexa toolbar. It is also quite biased (IE, Windows). So except maybe for the top 30,000 websites, I'm not sure about the reliability of the stats.
That depends on your definition of what spyware is.
If you mean collecting data, then yes Alexa does it.
If you mean collecting personnal data, I don't think the toolbar does it.
Then what about Google? With AdSense running (almost) everywhere + your unique eternal Google ID, they surely collect a lot of data too. And with Google Analytics, they have also a lot of info.
So the question becomes: Is Google AdSense spyware?
Same icons doesn't mean same widgets. (i.e. many FOS Java apps use the Gnome icons)