Well, looks like my thoughts are echoed by a number of users here. I used Magnetic-Optical equipment from Iomega before they decided to become a mass retailer and was happy with the performance. With the introduction of the Jazz drives I purchased a number of units. All in all I have been disappointed with the quality of these units, not to mention the price.
Iomega was interested in gouging customers rather than making a dependable product. Costs were in my opinion excessive, plus their need to deliver a product to lock in users was complete BS.
As far as I am concerned Iomega burned their bridges with me and I will never purchase equipment from them again.
I'm having the same problem getting to planetquake currently.
I am using charter.net, ie cable, to access the net from home. At work I route to the planetquake servers just fine, but from home routing a traceroute reveals that that messages go through att.net and somewhere in there the networking is lost.
Is there a list of suggestions on determining what the problem is, currently I have talking with my cable provider and have sent messages to technical support at att.net, but have had little success. Been down about 3 weeks now.
Serveral games use p2p networking to update game information, ie original diablo.
Mirrors, seems to me that systems that sunsite.edu would fit into the classification of peer to peer for rapid disemination of files.
DNS, I have multiple DNS systems that feed each other information.
Failover synchronization: Hot swapping computers generally talk between each other to synchronize files and insure that if one machine goes down another has the same information... Haven't worked with clusters but they probably are the same.
News headers, seems to me that news sites, such as slashdot and fresh meat which exchange article headlines should be able to fall into this system.
These are just suggestions, should fall into P2P definition, if not perhaps someone can post what P2P means?
I wouldn't go counting on Bruce to affect any of those changes. In an email between Bruce and myself, he had pointed a couple of HP resource out to me to check. A couple of weeks ago I was interviewing for a position at HP and the development manager asked me a question that was in reference to those resources. I answered the question and dropped Bruce's name as the person that had pointed me to the site.
The development manager then said that Bruce was hired for public relations and that I shouldn't take any advice from him on technical matters.
From this response I come to the conclusion that this is either a case of sour grapes between this one developer and bruce, that developers as a whole at HP don't put much stock in Bruce or some combination thereof.
Myself, I didn't get the job, but I found the response to Bruce Perens from one of the developers at HP, shall we say, interesting.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I waited 2 months for the Linux version of the game to be released. It was originally scheduled to be released Dec 14th, but it never hit the store shelves. I tried to order directly from Loki, and got the runaround. Eventually, I purchased the Windows version.
Waiting months, until after Christmas was a real killer.
I am currently redesigning a system that has 220,00 lines of code, but the programmers that wrote the program in the first place never used libraries and there is a lot of repetition. Changes were made in different areas as problems were noted and never replicated to the other proceedures, etc, etc, etc.
As head developer, I made the decision not even to have my junior programmers work with this poorly writen code. Senior programmers and myself only. Once we have rewriten a function and made it available to the juniors, they can usually work out in a couple of hours what it took for a day for an experienced programmer to pull apart. So writing the code correctly takes a heck of a lot less time... Given that the code we are generating is well documented, juniors never have to even touch the functions just understand what the function does, this takes about 15 minutes max. I mean how many people have gone through the code for the printf function? Now how many people use it.
The article is slashdotted at the moment, so I have not read it, but from the comments it appears that he is just flinging "The Mythical Man-month" by Frederick Brooks out the window... Somehow I doubt that he has enough experience with programming to do so....
Ahhh,
This is the type of work I handle. In fact, I am actually responsible for handling all alarming in a large worldwide organization.
I have held similiar positions in other companies as well. I can tell you how the big boys typically handle it and possible solutions.
In the companies that I have worked for operations continue 24 hours a day. Having an outage at 3am in the morning is the same as an outage at 2pm in the afternoon in the comapany's viewpoint.
Typically, if there is a high volume of mission critical applications running around the clock changing the support staff to a 24x7 schedule is generally preferred with the two off shifts receiving a 10% pay bonus.
Also, the people working the 24x7 shifts are the front line defense. They are there to deal with user problems, ie tier I and moderate application problems (tier 2) they do not get on-call pay.
Tier 3 people are paid around $12-$20 dollars a shift for being oncall. Not much money, ie for me $192.00 a week, but they seldom get called.
An important note, is that my current company requires employees to be hired temp to perm. Temp employees are paid a minimum of 1 hour of time anytime they are called, ie 3 calls 3 hours billable time.
My preference of course is to have a 24x7 team that can handle most problems so that I rarely get called. I have on-call 2 weeks out of every 6 currently, but have had it for 16 weeks solid in the past.
As for the number of calls you are getting, I have the following suggestions.
Get rid of the customer calls, this is better handled by a help desk. Help desk people are far less expensive than the actual techs working for you.
Build a customer problem website. Create a website that lay's out what to do about frequent problems. Note, this will help a little, but some people refuse to use printed documentation to fix their problems and they will still call. If you are in the business of support though, these customers should not be abused. That's just the way some people are and you are still there to serve the customer. But this website would be helpful to your help desk people as well.
Reduce problems. Currently, I watch over a couple of thousand systems and I have very few problems. Look into automating a lot of the problems that occur. There are several packages out there that let you monitor and take corrective actions automatically so that you just get an email in the morning about all the problems fixed.
I can offer suggestions on how to set up automation to help if you would like.
Hopefully this is of some help. This is the type of environment that I enjoy working in. Most companies are not willing to pay for it.
Lando
PS. If you are going to try to get the company to change it's policies, you will have to collect metrics on the number of problem calls and the amount of time you spend on them.
PSS. Try getting some comp time out of your boss for time spent on work outside of work hours.
With all this discussion of managers, I figured I might as well jump in and give my 2 cents.
I work for a worldwide corporate, having left another job because of poor management, ie I was too good and thus could not be promoted and the payscale was set for my job position.
I took a 25% paycut to move into my current position, lost 2 weeks of vacation and now actually have to work... Strangely I am a lot more happy than I was at old job.
But even here there are problems, half my time is spent in meetings, I have a constant streams of distractions that prevent me from working on code, etc. I am accomplishing the job, as the corporate mentality expects it to be done, ie 8-5, no flextime, no work from home etc. So while I am happy, to a point I think that things could be better managed.
Which brings me to the reason I am responding to this message. I started a Computer services business about 3 years ago thinking that I could do it better. 6 months ago I started recruiting people. We currently have 14 people and business is picking up.
Recently I placed an ad for a senior developer with the following specs.
Position: Senior Developer
Requirements: Ability to work in a heavy coding environment, 4 years C Programing, 10 years Programming methodology
Pluses: Windows and UNIX experience, HTML, Java, Database design
Payrate: 70K+ DOE
Contact: Rebecca Jackson
Phone: 404-217-1498
email: jackson@cyberdawgs.com
Does anyone care to comment on the ad, give me pointers as to how it should be set up to attract the type of person I want?
I want a senior programer that can take a job from ground level up to running. Someone that knows how to organize the information and put it together.
This position is likely to develop into a lead developer position where the developer would manage between 2-6 programers.
My business is small and thus this represents a major expense for me, however being a senior programer myself, I am fairly certain of the requirements of the position and have tried to be as flexible as possible.
Absolutely correct. Why should the record companies have to watch their spending? After all, large parties, extremely pricey advertising and the costs of keeping non-signed bands off the charts are of vital importance.
If the record companies actually had to worry about receiving income, they might start having to satisfy the customer. Satisfying the customer would be a bad thing... Right?
Seriously though, by not having to worry about what bands they pick up is a bad thing. You get artists that are nothing more than advertising tools that the media companies create themselves. Putting a little responsibility into the equation would probably help stop record companies from deciding what they want to sell and instead focus on where the customer base wants to take the market.
Keep in mind that the worst thing that the record companies did to themselves recently was not supporting Hip Hop, that opened the door for a lot of independant publishers and started the move to liberate the music industry.
But this isn't about the script kiddies. The script kiddies are just the activists the were motivated by Nader's book. The Greyhats producing the scripts are the ones that should be equated with Nader.
The Greyhats are publishing code to demonstrate errors, but not demonstrating themselves, just like Nader probably didn't wreck a car himself, indeed script kiddies are just following in the footsteps and are being led around. They are just being used as a means to an end.
Check your network. One of the most frequent problem I find is that people are using hubs on their network rather than switches. A pretty small switch investment will improve your networking speeds quite a bit.
Sorry, Hate to interject here, but if you are after Anonymous file transfers you need to look at Freenet. Gnutella is a distributed file sharing system not an anonymous system.
For those of you interested, O'Reilly literally gave it's book to the samba group, http://www.samba.org.
Samba book online is located at http://us1.samba.org/samba/oreilly/ using_samba/ though you should probably log onto the closest mirror at the samba.org link about and go to the documentation from there.
The documentation should soon be available via cvs as well.
Ummm, Did your university take you out for dinner before they...
Seriously, why would you have to sign away your rights to software you develop. That's stupid. I know some working environments have these contracts, but a university?
Sigh,
I never sign these contracts. My employer has a right to 8 hours of my day. I refuse to sign over any of my design. Frankly, I have better equipment at home than my work provides.
It's my opinion that signing over all ideas that you develop without compensation is the worst form of slavery there is.
Hmmm, And how will it settle down? Computer software is going to change human nature? Sorry but it's not going to happen. I really cannot make head or tails about what the article is about, ie poorly written article with no substance.
Anyway. Your points are..
Traditional programming 1/2 century of maturity OSS 5 years to climb out of ad-hoc status
OSS rebellion and enterprise
Rebellions attract fractious people who have emotional attachments to "the Cause"
This will settle down when OSS is mainstream People start calmly devoting attention to process design rather than holy wars
In your opinion no one wants to be known as the asshole.
========================== Ewww, where to begin.
Traditional programming 1/2 century of maturity OSS 5 years to climb out of ad-hoc status
I don't see what criteria you are using to differentiate between open source software and traditional programming. The way I see it open source is traditional programming.
I have been sharing my work with others on bbs systems, tymnet, fido, etc for that last 20 years. As such I can definately attest to the fact that a majority of the code I dealt with during that time was open source. It might not have had the neat little OSS symbol, but it's been there. A lot of the programmers that work on coding in their free time also do so professionally. So in essence they are traditional programmers.
OSS rebellion and enterprise Rebellions attract fractious people who have emotional attachments to "the Cause"
The thing that strikes me is your reference that OSS is almost as much as a rebellion as an enterprise. But I don't understand how you can even consider it an enterprise. Enterprises have to do with business plans, profit and for profit ventures. This implies cash. The gain in OSS is the knowledge gained not a financial incentive.
Thus it is my opinion that we can do away with the enterprise and just say that OSS is a rebellion, which isn't correct either since I merely want something that works or that I can fix if there is a problem, but I'll leave that for another time.
So that leaves us with just the rebellion. Websters defines fractious, yes I had to look up the word,
fractious (frkshs) adj.
1.Inclined to make trouble; unruly.
2.Having a peevish nature; cranky.
This appears to be circular logic. OSS is a rebellion and thus attracts rebels? If someone is in a rebellion are they not considered by default rebels? And what pray tell has being a rebel to do with flaming someone? Or are you talking about the conformist rebel who rebels by doing the opposite of everything, ie drugs, break laws, exposing themselves to children, etc, ie behaving in the complete opposite of society? These people are not rebels they are conformist who conform to the opposite of social norms. Real rebels do what they feel is "right" not what society views as "wrong"..
Sorry for the rant...
This will settle down when OSS is mainstream
I don't know what you mean by mainstream. The normal business process is to produce your software and keep it closed source so that everyone else has to spend just as much money as you did developing it, thus limiting the playing field because it's expensive to make an OS. IBM pulled out of the competition because it was too expense for them and they could not compete with windows.
So in order for OSS to become mainstream it would probably have to become closed source and if it did that then it wouldn't be OSS.
Perhaps you meant that the mainstream comes to include OSS as a standard? But that isn't going to change the people in the communitee...
Ahhh, I see you meant when the communitee starts to get real programmers involved. Ah, is this because the current members are all a bunch of children? So where would the "real" programmers come from? I notice from your resume' that you have done MSaccess programming. Shall, I let the reader draw his/her own conclusions?
No, actually I won't. As a former MCP MSAcess and as a current Senior Oracle DBA, Senior UNIX administrator, Senior Developer, and Senior Automation Specialist. I think it's well within my knowledge to state that Access is a fairly good IDE, but shouldn't be used as a general database tool for the end user.
I have a number of reasons for this, but won't post them here. If you want to discuss it feel free to respond.
This will settle down when People start calmly devoting attention to process design rather than holy wars
This will never happen. The holy wars where held long ago, but human nature is still the same. It's a lot lower key, mostly Iran and Iraq aren't fighting at the moment but others are. And have you ever seen how many fights break out at professional football games?
Sorry, back to the point. The fact is that people have opinions and like to get their point across. This is not going to change. If you think that tradition programming doesn't happen you are mistaken. The article is mentioning the way a lot of these email messages are like hanging your laundry out so that anyone can see and thus hurting the communitee because financial types will see it as unstable. The truth though is that there are always disagreements no matter what line of business you are in. I occassionally have flame wars with my boss, though rarely with my coworkers. My boss and I understand that each of us come from a different background. He is production, ie fix it now ignore the bugs, and I am development, ie gotta make this thing bulletproof before releasing it. So we argue quite often. No voices are raised, we communicate in reasonable tones, but make no mistakes we overly critisize(sp?) quite a bit. It actually makes a good working environment for me. I fully respect my boss and he respects me. We say our peice try to influence the other one and usually come up to a mutually acceptable accomidation.
This is of course behind closed doors. Any time we go to a meeting, either my boss or I will take charge and the other one will not contradict the other. Thus everyone sees my group and a solid united whole, but appearances can be deceiving.
More on this in a sec, I want to wrap up your last point.
In your opinion no one wants to be known as the asshole.
I have to disagree with this. I frequently find people that enjoy being assholes. In fact, while I normally sit back and relax at times I like to jump up on my soapbox and do some screaming, ie like this post? Translation: I have too much work to do and I generally don't have enough time to talk to anyone else and express my opinions.
Now on to the actual article itself.
I'm not impressed by the article. The author jumps all over the place and never really clarifies his points. This is what I think he is saying.
There is a lot of flaming in the Open Source communitee
Everyone sees the bickering. This looks bad! There are other ways to communicate other than email, but they have problems too. We probably lose a lot of good people because they are flamed and attacked. If the financial communitee see's us bickering all the time, they may see us as unstable and not invest. This problem probably will not go away. Some people see this as a positive rather than a negative.
Basically, the author should have said something like, "This is what I see, anyone care to comment on the state of things?" He also should have more clearly organized his writing. But be that as it may, I wanted to reply.
The only way to get rid of the flamers is to institute some type of censorship. But if you do that you will probably start to stagnate because you will have to be part of the club to get heard.
This is human nature.
I see it as a benefit that anyone can talk. Most people are reasonable and not much actual flaming goes on. Most flamers are new people that have not found their place in the "virtual world" yet and are just showing how macho they are, because they are actually nervous about where they are. Some are grouchy by nature and will go away soon enough, some have a point they want to make, some just enjoy stirring it up, ie Katz anyone? Grin
The thing is, if someone is offending you, filter them out. Don't let the fact that someone else is being uncivil cause you to become upset.
As for the financial community... Who cares, the guys writing this stuff generally don't. I write code to fix problems I see. I appreciate others sharing their work with me. Thus I contribute to them. I work at a real job, I make enough money to live on. I don't work on projects because I need the money. I don't want a second job.
The only people that should be concerned about the financial community are companies like Redhat and Va Research. It should be very important to them. But for the rest of us, Linux is improving everyday. Hurd is coming along, Gnome and KDE are benefiting from competition. So the development community is thriving. It's nice that people outside the community are giving us such a lot of press and exposure, but in the end the community is still that a community where people are able to come and go as they please. It won't affect the community one way or another.
Linus leaving would just mean that he would be replaced. Someone would step up to the plate. Other people may or may not accept that and may choose a different leader. But things would work out because I have a os that works now. I don't have to upgrade.
And if linux can lose Linus and still keep running, there is no reason to worry about the financial community.
Hmmmph, Am I out in the cold, or should I say code? I've been thinking that Peter Bickford was the interface design god... Don't have a URL for him though... Someone care to enlighten me?
Just finished cleaning up the "hopefully" last y2k issue. Nothing major, just a couple of minor programs, ie closed source, that decided not to work this morning. I've got open source replacements ready to go, but have to wait for Monday to implement.
What really sucks is that I have to go into work Monday. Damn, was so looking forward to the world ending... Grin
Slashdot Mirror
Well, looks like my thoughts are echoed by a number of users here. I used Magnetic-Optical equipment from Iomega before they decided to become a mass retailer and was happy with the performance. With the introduction of the Jazz drives I purchased a number of units. All in all I have been disappointed with the quality of these units, not to mention the price.
Iomega was interested in gouging customers rather than making a dependable product. Costs were in my opinion excessive, plus their need to deliver a product to lock in users was complete BS.
As far as I am concerned Iomega burned their bridges with me and I will never purchase equipment from them again.
Lando
I'm having the same problem getting to planetquake currently.
I am using charter.net, ie cable, to access the net from home. At work I route to the planetquake servers just fine, but from home routing a traceroute reveals that that messages go through att.net and somewhere in there the networking is lost.
Is there a list of suggestions on determining what the problem is, currently I have talking with my cable provider and have sent messages to technical support at att.net, but have had little success. Been down about 3 weeks now.
Lando
Serveral games use p2p networking to update game information, ie original diablo.
Mirrors, seems to me that systems that sunsite.edu would fit into the classification of peer to peer for rapid disemination of files.
DNS, I have multiple DNS systems that feed each other information.
Failover synchronization: Hot swapping computers generally talk between each other to synchronize files and insure that if one machine goes down another has the same information... Haven't worked with clusters but they probably are the same.
News headers, seems to me that news sites, such as slashdot and fresh meat which exchange article headlines should be able to fall into this system.
These are just suggestions, should fall into P2P definition, if not perhaps someone can post what P2P means?
Lando
I wouldn't go counting on Bruce to affect any of those changes. In an email between Bruce and myself, he had pointed a couple of HP resource out to me to check. A couple of weeks ago I was interviewing for a position at HP and the development manager asked me a question that was in reference to those resources. I answered the question and dropped Bruce's name as the person that had pointed me to the site.
The development manager then said that Bruce was hired for public relations and that I shouldn't take any advice from him on technical matters.
From this response I come to the conclusion that this is either a case of sour grapes between this one developer and bruce, that developers as a whole at HP don't put much stock in Bruce or some combination thereof.
Myself, I didn't get the job, but I found the response to Bruce Perens from one of the developers at HP, shall we say, interesting.
"Don't try to take the blue pill, that is impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth. The blue pill does not exist..."
Lando
Hmmm, So NASA is looking at a HAL computer system,,, Anyone know what Dave thinks?
RANT ON
Hacking is hacking, criminals are criminals. The normal "press" may not understand that, but surely a majority of people on this site do.
When was the last time political assassination was called shootivism?
Rant Off
Lando
Try checking out the mud connecter and looking into some games.
Mud Connector
I don't know about the rest of you, but I waited 2 months for the Linux version of the game to be released. It was originally scheduled to be released Dec 14th, but it never hit the store shelves. I tried to order directly from Loki, and got the runaround. Eventually, I purchased the Windows version.
Waiting months, until after Christmas was a real killer.
20 years of development under my belt, but just started my own company... We'll see if I'm right or not in the next couple of months... Grin
I completely agree.
I am currently redesigning a system that has 220,00 lines of code, but the programmers that wrote the program in the first place never used libraries and there is a lot of repetition. Changes were made in different areas as problems were noted and never replicated to the other proceedures, etc, etc, etc.
As head developer, I made the decision not even to have my junior programmers work with this poorly writen code. Senior programmers and myself only. Once we have rewriten a function and made it available to the juniors, they can usually work out in a couple of hours what it took for a day for an experienced programmer to pull apart. So writing the code correctly takes a heck of a lot less time... Given that the code we are generating is well documented, juniors never have to even touch the functions just understand what the function does, this takes about 15 minutes max. I mean how many people have gone through the code for the printf function? Now how many people use it.
The article is slashdotted at the moment, so I have not read it, but from the comments it appears that he is just flinging "The Mythical Man-month" by Frederick Brooks out the window... Somehow I doubt that he has enough experience with programming to do so....
Lando
Ahhh,
This is the type of work I handle. In fact, I am actually responsible for handling all alarming in a large worldwide organization.
I have held similiar positions in other companies as well. I can tell you how the big boys typically handle it and possible solutions.
In the companies that I have worked for operations continue 24 hours a day. Having an outage at 3am in the morning is the same as an outage at 2pm in the afternoon in the comapany's viewpoint.
Typically, if there is a high volume of mission critical applications running around the clock changing the support staff to a 24x7 schedule is generally preferred with the two off shifts receiving a 10% pay bonus.
Also, the people working the 24x7 shifts are the front line defense. They are there to deal with user problems, ie tier I and moderate application problems (tier 2) they do not get on-call pay.
Tier 3 people are paid around $12-$20 dollars a shift for being oncall. Not much money, ie for me $192.00 a week, but they seldom get called.
An important note, is that my current company requires employees to be hired temp to perm. Temp employees are paid a minimum of 1 hour of time anytime they are called, ie 3 calls 3 hours billable time.
My preference of course is to have a 24x7 team that can handle most problems so that I rarely get called. I have on-call 2 weeks out of every 6 currently, but have had it for 16 weeks solid in the past.
As for the number of calls you are getting, I have the following suggestions.
Get rid of the customer calls, this is better handled by a help desk. Help desk people are far less expensive than the actual techs working for you.
Build a customer problem website. Create a website that lay's out what to do about frequent problems. Note, this will help a little, but some people refuse to use printed documentation to fix their problems and they will still call. If you are in the business of support though, these customers should not be abused. That's just the way some people are and you are still there to serve the customer. But this website would be helpful to your help desk people as well.
Reduce problems. Currently, I watch over a couple of thousand systems and I have very few problems. Look into automating a lot of the problems that occur. There are several packages out there that let you monitor and take corrective actions automatically so that you just get an email in the morning about all the problems fixed.
I can offer suggestions on how to set up automation to help if you would like.
Hopefully this is of some help. This is the type of environment that I enjoy working in. Most companies are not willing to pay for it.
Lando
PS. If you are going to try to get the company to change it's policies, you will have to collect metrics on the number of problem calls and the amount of time you spend on them.
PSS. Try getting some comp time out of your boss for time spent on work outside of work hours.
My company will be setting up a number of interships.
What I would like to know is what kinds of experience college students are looking for in an intership?
Who needs to be contacted at the college to set up an internship?
What other information should I be looking at while planning on offering interships?
Lando
Not really getting any good feedback on it though. Other than the statement that I am not willing to pay enough.
The question I had was is this a good layout for an ad or not?
With all this discussion of managers, I figured I might as well jump in and give my 2 cents.
I work for a worldwide corporate, having left another job because of poor management, ie I was too good and thus could not be promoted and the payscale was set for my job position.
I took a 25% paycut to move into my current position, lost 2 weeks of vacation and now actually have to work... Strangely I am a lot more happy than I was at old job.
But even here there are problems, half my time is spent in meetings, I have a constant streams of distractions that prevent me from working on code, etc. I am accomplishing the job, as the corporate mentality expects it to be done, ie 8-5, no flextime, no work from home etc. So while I am happy, to a point I think that things could be better managed.
Which brings me to the reason I am responding to this message. I started a Computer services business about 3 years ago thinking that I could do it better. 6 months ago I started recruiting people. We currently have 14 people and business is picking up.
Recently I placed an ad for a senior developer with the following specs.
Position: Senior Developer
Requirements: Ability to work in a heavy coding environment, 4 years C Programing, 10 years Programming methodology
Pluses: Windows and UNIX experience, HTML, Java, Database design
Payrate: 70K+ DOE
Contact: Rebecca Jackson
Phone: 404-217-1498
email: jackson@cyberdawgs.com
Does anyone care to comment on the ad, give me pointers as to how it should be set up to attract the type of person I want?
I want a senior programer that can take a job from ground level up to running. Someone that knows how to organize the information and put it together.
This position is likely to develop into a lead developer position where the developer would manage between 2-6 programers.
My business is small and thus this represents a major expense for me, however being a senior programer myself, I am fairly certain of the requirements of the position and have tried to be as flexible as possible.
Anyway, comments are appreciated.
Lando
Absolutely correct. Why should the record companies have to watch their spending? After all, large parties, extremely pricey advertising and the costs of keeping non-signed bands off the charts are of vital importance.
If the record companies actually had to worry about receiving income, they might start having to satisfy the customer. Satisfying the customer would be a bad thing... Right?
Seriously though, by not having to worry about what bands they pick up is a bad thing. You get artists that are nothing more than advertising tools that the media companies create themselves. Putting a little responsibility into the equation would probably help stop record companies from deciding what they want to sell and instead focus on where the customer base wants to take the market.
Keep in mind that the worst thing that the record companies did to themselves recently was not supporting Hip Hop, that opened the door for a lot of independant publishers and started the move to liberate the music industry.
Lando
But this isn't about the script kiddies. The script kiddies are just the activists the were motivated by Nader's book. The Greyhats producing the scripts are the ones that should be equated with Nader.
The Greyhats are publishing code to demonstrate errors, but not demonstrating themselves, just like Nader probably didn't wreck a car himself, indeed script kiddies are just following in the footsteps and are being led around. They are just being used as a means to an end.
Lando
Check your network. One of the most frequent problem I find is that people are using hubs on their network rather than switches. A pretty small switch investment will improve your networking speeds quite a bit.
Lando
Sorry,
Hate to interject here, but if you are after Anonymous file transfers you need to look at Freenet. Gnutella is a distributed file sharing system not an anonymous system.
Lando
Samba book online is located at http://us1.samba.org/samba/oreilly/ using_samba/ though you should probably log onto the closest mirror at the samba.org link about and go to the documentation from there.
The documentation should soon be available via cvs as well.
Lando
Hmmm,
Mercury, mars, most of the moons are probably too small to do something like this. But finally we have a use for Jupiter and Neptune... Grin.
Any ideas what effects this would cause in the local solar-system? Gravity cause any problems if we start compressing the outer planets?
Lando
Ummm, ...
Did your university take you out for dinner before they
Seriously, why would you have to sign away your rights to software you develop. That's stupid. I know some working environments have these contracts, but a university?
Sigh,
I never sign these contracts. My employer has a right to 8 hours of my day. I refuse to sign over any of my design. Frankly, I have better equipment at home than my work provides.
It's my opinion that signing over all ideas that you develop without compensation is the worst form of slavery there is.
Lando
And how will it settle down? Computer software is going to change human nature? Sorry but it's not going to happen. I really cannot make head or tails about what the article is about, ie poorly written article with no substance.
Anyway. Your points are..
Traditional programming 1/2 century of maturity OSS 5 years to climb out of ad-hoc status
OSS rebellion and enterprise
Rebellions attract fractious people who have emotional attachments to "the Cause"
This will settle down when
OSS is mainstream
People start calmly devoting attention to process design rather than holy wars
In your opinion no one wants to be known as the asshole.
==========================
Ewww, where to begin.
Traditional programming 1/2 century of maturity OSS 5 years to climb out of ad-hoc status
I don't see what criteria you are using to differentiate between open source software and traditional programming. The way I see it open source is traditional programming.
I have been sharing my work with others on bbs systems, tymnet, fido, etc for that last 20 years. As such I can definately attest to the fact that a majority of the code I dealt with during that time was open source. It might not have had the neat little OSS symbol, but it's been there. A lot of the programmers that work on coding in their free time also do so professionally. So in essence they are traditional programmers.
OSS rebellion and enterprise
Rebellions attract fractious people who have emotional attachments to "the Cause"
The thing that strikes me is your reference that OSS is almost as much as a rebellion as an enterprise. But I don't understand how you can even consider it an enterprise. Enterprises have to do with business plans, profit and for profit ventures. This implies cash. The gain in OSS is the knowledge gained not a financial incentive.
Thus it is my opinion that we can do away with the enterprise and just say that OSS is a rebellion, which isn't correct either since I merely want something that works or that I can fix if there is a problem, but I'll leave that for another time.
So that leaves us with just the rebellion. Websters defines fractious, yes I had to look up the word,
fractious (frkshs) adj.
This appears to be circular logic. OSS is a rebellion and thus attracts rebels? If someone is in a rebellion are they not considered by default rebels? And what pray tell has being a rebel to do with flaming someone? Or are you talking about the conformist rebel who rebels by doing the opposite of everything, ie drugs, break laws, exposing themselves to children, etc, ie behaving in the complete opposite of society? These people are not rebels they are conformist who conform to the opposite of social norms. Real rebels do what they feel is "right" not what society views as "wrong"..Sorry for the rant...
This will settle down when OSS is mainstream
I don't know what you mean by mainstream. The normal business process is to produce your software and keep it closed source so that everyone else has to spend just as much money as you did developing it, thus limiting the playing field because it's expensive to make an OS. IBM pulled out of the competition because it was too expense for them and they could not compete with windows.
So in order for OSS to become mainstream it would probably have to become closed source and if it did that then it wouldn't be OSS.
Perhaps you meant that the mainstream comes to include OSS as a standard? But that isn't going to change the people in the communitee...
Ahhh, I see you meant when the communitee starts to get real programmers involved. Ah, is this because the current members are all a bunch of children? So where would the "real" programmers come from? I notice from your resume' that you have done MSaccess programming. Shall, I let the reader draw his/her own conclusions?
No, actually I won't. As a former MCP MSAcess and as a current Senior Oracle DBA, Senior UNIX administrator, Senior Developer, and Senior Automation Specialist. I think it's well within my knowledge to state that Access is a fairly good IDE, but shouldn't be used as a general database tool for the end user.
I have a number of reasons for this, but won't post them here. If you want to discuss it feel free to respond.
This will settle down when People start calmly devoting attention to process design rather than holy wars
This will never happen. The holy wars where held long ago, but human nature is still the same. It's a lot lower key, mostly Iran and Iraq aren't fighting at the moment but others are. And have you ever seen how many fights break out at professional football games?
Sorry, back to the point. The fact is that people have opinions and like to get their point across. This is not going to change. If you think that tradition programming doesn't happen you are mistaken. The article is mentioning the way a lot of these email messages are like hanging your laundry out so that anyone can see and thus hurting the communitee because financial types will see it as unstable. The truth though is that there are always disagreements no matter what line of business you are in. I occassionally have flame wars with my boss, though rarely with my coworkers. My boss and I understand that each of us come from a different background. He is production, ie fix it now ignore the bugs, and I am development, ie gotta make this thing bulletproof before releasing it. So we argue quite often. No voices are raised, we communicate in reasonable tones, but make no mistakes we overly critisize(sp?) quite a bit. It actually makes a good working environment for me. I fully respect my boss and he respects me. We say our peice try to influence the other one and usually come up to a mutually acceptable accomidation.
This is of course behind closed doors. Any time we go to a meeting, either my boss or I will take charge and the other one will not contradict the other. Thus everyone sees my group and a solid united whole, but appearances can be deceiving.
More on this in a sec, I want to wrap up your last point.
In your opinion no one wants to be known as the asshole.
I have to disagree with this. I frequently find people that enjoy being assholes. In fact, while I normally sit back and relax at times I like to jump up on my soapbox and do some screaming, ie like this post? Translation: I have too much work to do and I generally don't have enough time to talk to anyone else and express my opinions.
Now on to the actual article itself.
I'm not impressed by the article. The author jumps all over the place and never really clarifies his points. This is what I think he is saying.
Basically, the author should have said something like, "This is what I see, anyone care to comment on the state of things?" He also should have more clearly organized his writing. But be that as it may, I wanted to reply.The only way to get rid of the flamers is to institute some type of censorship. But if you do that you will probably start to stagnate because you will have to be part of the club to get heard.
This is human nature.
I see it as a benefit that anyone can talk. Most people are reasonable and not much actual flaming goes on. Most flamers are new people that have not found their place in the "virtual world" yet and are just showing how macho they are, because they are actually nervous about where they are. Some are grouchy by nature and will go away soon enough, some have a point they want to make, some just enjoy stirring it up, ie Katz anyone? Grin
The thing is, if someone is offending you, filter them out. Don't let the fact that someone else is being uncivil cause you to become upset.
As for the financial community... Who cares, the guys writing this stuff generally don't. I write code to fix problems I see. I appreciate others sharing their work with me. Thus I contribute to them. I work at a real job, I make enough money to live on. I don't work on projects because I need the money. I don't want a second job.
The only people that should be concerned about the financial community are companies like Redhat and Va Research. It should be very important to them. But for the rest of us, Linux is improving everyday. Hurd is coming along, Gnome and KDE are benefiting from competition. So the development community is thriving. It's nice that people outside the community are giving us such a lot of press and exposure, but in the end the community is still that a community where people are able to come and go as they please. It won't affect the community one way or another.
Linus leaving would just mean that he would be replaced. Someone would step up to the plate. Other people may or may not accept that and may choose a different leader. But things would work out because I have a os that works now. I don't have to upgrade.
And if linux can lose Linus and still keep running, there is no reason to worry about the financial community.
Well time for me to get back to work.
Lando
Hmmmph,
Am I out in the cold, or should I say code? I've been thinking that Peter Bickford was the interface design god... Don't have a URL for him though... Someone care to enlighten me?
Lando
Just finished cleaning up the "hopefully" last y2k issue. Nothing major, just a couple of minor programs, ie closed source, that decided not to work this morning. I've got open source replacements ready to go, but have to wait for Monday to implement.
What really sucks is that I have to go into work Monday. Damn, was so looking forward to the world ending... Grin
Lando