So is it just not possible for a group of Free Software programmers to be non-political?
That's correct.
The best path is to be as rational and non-judgemental as possible. If you want to further technical development of free and open source software, then you aren't required to spend time ranting against the DMCA (even though you know it's not good legislation). In the words of a recent talk, "You don't have to drink the Kool-aid". Not that it isn't a good cause, and something to be done, just don't burn so much of your emotional energy railing against The Machine that you aren't able to do anything positive.
Inevitably, no matter how carefully you avoid arguments or making inflammatory remarks, etc., others may want to define you as having a "political" agenda. That's because success of free and open source software can have a significant impact on the economy, where those harvesting certain existing money streams are in jeopardy of losing revenue because of the impact of free and open source software. Then, anyone working on free and open source software gets a label thrown at them.
In today's mass production world we already know what the customer wants.
The customer wants
to feel good about himself.
Target your pitch that way and you'll get the sheep coming in to be sheared, as you praise them for being adventurious, vigorous, attractive, and knowledgeable sheep (or wolves, if they like being called wolves better)....
Pretend to listen to your customer, because if they think you're listening to them and care about them, then they feel good about themselves and you are achieving an important objective.
I believe that a diet rich in sugar is at least as hard on your kidneys as a diet rich in protein.
Good advice in any event is to drink plenty of water.
And, having done the related Protein Power diet myself a couple of years ago, I'd say that it's very important to eat plenty of vegetables and to get plenty of potassium.
Considering how easy it is for potassium imbalances to occur during this diet, I'd not recommend it for anyone with a weak heart.
Practically, BTW, the diet works, is a bitch to keep on for very long. The only thing you can eat from the convenience store is water and beef jerky.
Also, at the 3 day point into the macronutrient switch I felt like I'd been hit with a killer hangover.
After everything is said and done, though, I'm going more towards a balanced diet, trying to mimic foods that were eaten 20K years ago; I'll have some complex carbs and avoid refined sugar, refined flour, high starch potatoes. But I'm not crazy about trying to get my total carbs under 100g/day anymore.
Finally, protein rich diets are more like underclocking IMO. A high sugar diet is a sure way to burn out fast.
I take it that Hungarian notation has been left by the waysideon the road to less complexity:)
I agree wholeheartedly with the complexity issue.
I measure my success as a programmer by whether or not another programmer (or myself far in the future) can throw my work onto the screen and understand very quickly what the code is trying to do.
Bugs can be fixed, features can be added and performance can be enhanced later. But not very easily if the code is too complex or, equivalently, has too much abstraction.
IMO, that's not the greatest engineering feat associated with the pipeline.
I'd reserve that honor for the resilience of the pipeline to a much slower amplitude shaking.
Namely, frost heaves from permafrost, ground that is normally frozen year-round. Scrape off a little ground cover to build a house, a road, or plant a utility pole and suddenly there's a difference freeze/thaw cycle that will do real Bad Things.
You have to either keep all frozen all the time, or largely unfrozen and fairly dry soil.
There's a reason that roads have 6 ft of gravel on them for insulation to protect the underlying permafrost.
While I've looked to LDP for Howto's and information about specific Linux setup issues, there's another entirely different reason I keep tabs on them:
To find out their recommended practice for document native formats.
They're interested in being able to automatically generate high quality documents in a variety of formats, including both LaTeX and HTML.
I've been interested in authoring options using DocBook that would enable me to produce highly flexible document sources based on open standards that would be useful long into the future.
MS has never had the concept of seperating O/S functions from application functions.
Not quite.
Earlier public statements by Microsoft executives indicated a "Chinese wall" [11,2] that separated the application developers and operating system developers. Professing such a separation was meant to allay fears of unfair early access to vital API's by Windows application developers.
It seems their public statements can be at odds with reality; certainly it was the case in the context that particular "firewall" policy.
Take heart: maybe Bill's lying again and really thinks code should be perfect, in which case we'd be better off than we are with "acceptably imperfect" code.
Three parties are responsible for providing a secure computing environment:
The software creator or vendor: needs to code carefully, to test exhaustively, to debug, and to audit.
The exploit writer, releaser: ought to publicize the vulnerability by describing it and illustrating protection measures before hammering the world with a working exploit to illustrate the deficiencies of the other two parties.
The user hooking up his purchased system to the net. Should be listening to the other two parties about what's vulnerable, how to mitigate it in the short term and patch for the long term.
I see all three parties not wanting to fulfill their responsibilities and trying to shift blame on to the other two parties.
Until Bill Gates starts to act more like Theo de Raadt, I don't belive he's upholding his part.
So what I'm hearing about this lawsuit is that by watching The Simpsons on Fox Entertainment I'm really being exposed to what is essentially a news item.
I guess this is balanced, since what comes on Fox News, I'm fairly confident, is aimed at entertaining audiences.
Definitely, though, I'd pay to see a WWF-style smackdown between Krusty the Clown and Brit Hume.
So I still use bash, despite all it's deficiencies.
It would be nice for a next generation shell to look more like Python, IMHO.
But, has anyone been brave enough to spend 100% of their command line time in python instead of/bin/sh? Some of the syntax needed to get hold of files and doing grep inside python is still verbose compared to sh.
The idea of a super pipe with more powerful communications between seems intriguing, something using say XML-RPC between the parts instead of just a byte stream.
It's clear that Microsoft recognizes the value of Google's technology.
I don't know about you, but my web browsing relies heavily on Google to find sites that I will look at. I mean, that level of reliance is almost like how I rely on libc. And any businesses that I might find on the other end probably consider high Google rank worth a lot of money.
Microsoft, of course, loves to be in a position where people and businesses have to rely upon them heavily. It's potentially quite profitable.
Until now, people have relied on Google's goodwill not to use their powerful position unfairly. Since there are monetary incentives for Googles business to "manage" those searches differently, I'm alway apprehensive and would be appalled if a company with Microsoft's track record were to gain that additional power (as if they aren't sufficiently powerful now).
I have a relative who has been using his Mac happily for about a decade, but when I queried him about whether he was running OS X he said no, that it was "too different".
Meanwhile, having lived in UNIX land myself for a long time, I'm intrigued about getting a laptop that can simultaneously serve as a native UNIX development platform (using command line, config files) as well as handling the ubiquitous.doc and.ppt files.
Up until Mac OS X, I was leery of Mac's because they seemed to wrap stuff up in GUI's to where you couldn't see the engine working.
Well, I'm not going to defend American food. But, as bad it is, it can't compare with the fare I tried to eat once at a British motorway overpass "restaurant".
IMHO, French and Chinese cuisine leave most of world back in the ranks of amateurs...
I'll leave with a quote I saw once, full of stereotypes, but here it is:
Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French,
the lovers Swiss, the police German, and it is all organised by the Italians.
A good thing (the introduction of open source software) is happening.
I hope that the decision making process that led to the decision was deliberate, fair and considered all of the options carefully.
Because I am uncomfortable with executive fiats whether they are issued by the government of Vietnam for open source or whether they are issued by a local government's IT management for single-sourcing wholescale parts of their business to Microsoft.
Since software is becoming more and more of a utility and commodity, I would hope the market would be more competitive than it is.
I don't see posting boards (like the stock exchange) where you can see what the bid and ask price is for 10^n (n=0,..,5) copies of WinXP Pro, who offers them, and prices for software that some people might decide to stop using, such as DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, Win 95, etc.
Yes, I know full well that all the resellers get their supply of Windows from the same one single source. But seeing the prices, fluctuations, etc. would make the inelasticity more apparent.
Slashdot Mirror
The bed scene, after the lovin' is done...
"Marinara sauce?"
So is it just not possible for a group of Free Software programmers to be non-political?
That's correct.
The best path is to be as rational and non-judgemental as possible. If you want to further technical development of free and open source software, then you aren't required to spend time ranting against the DMCA (even though you know it's not good legislation). In the words of a recent talk, "You don't have to drink the Kool-aid". Not that it isn't a good cause, and something to be done, just don't burn so much of your emotional energy railing against The Machine that you aren't able to do anything positive.
Inevitably, no matter how carefully you avoid arguments or making inflammatory remarks, etc., others may want to define you as having a "political" agenda. That's because success of free and open source software can have a significant impact on the economy, where those harvesting certain existing money streams are in jeopardy of losing revenue because of the impact of free and open source software. Then, anyone working on free and open source software gets a label thrown at them.
Windows IIS to Windows Apache, you lose nothing.
For now.
Once more desktop Windows applications start using XML services over the network via .NET, that could change.
customer knows what they want
A quaint, outdated model.
In today's mass production world we already know what the customer wants.
Target your pitch that way and you'll get the sheep coming in to be sheared, as you praise them for being adventurious, vigorous, attractive, and knowledgeable sheep (or wolves, if they like being called wolves better)....
Pretend to listen to your customer, because if they think you're listening to them and care about them, then they feel good about themselves and you are achieving an important objective.
Sheesh, I thought everyone knew this stuff...
Third parties have allows represented minority interests from their inception.
Yeah, I've noticed that the majority of the dollars predominantly flow into the coffers of the two parties in the US.
Incumbents keep get re-elected like clockwork, affirming the correctness of the Majority of the Money.
The free market rules politics very well.
oil spill,
Actually, we kind of want some evaporation from salt water, where the oil supertankers ply.
It's the fresh water we want to keep around.
it is more difficult to understand/develop a kernel with a modular approach as opposed to the standard kernel.
So Linus' opinion is that it is difficult.
Implicitly, he allows that it is possible.
And all the Mac OS X and *BSD developers are constantly striving to prove that such a possibility can be realized.
"Ain't skeered o' no difficulties, no sirree."
I believe that a diet rich in sugar is at least as hard on your kidneys as a diet rich in protein.
Good advice in any event is to drink plenty of water.
And, having done the related Protein Power diet myself a couple of years ago, I'd say that it's very important to eat plenty of vegetables and to get plenty of potassium.
Considering how easy it is for potassium imbalances to occur during this diet, I'd not recommend it for anyone with a weak heart.
Practically, BTW, the diet works, is a bitch to keep on for very long. The only thing you can eat from the convenience store is water and beef jerky.
Also, at the 3 day point into the macronutrient switch I felt like I'd been hit with a killer hangover.
After everything is said and done, though, I'm going more towards a balanced diet, trying to mimic foods that were eaten 20K years ago; I'll have some complex carbs and avoid refined sugar, refined flour, high starch potatoes. But I'm not crazy about trying to get my total carbs under 100g/day anymore.
Finally, protein rich diets are more like underclocking IMO. A high sugar diet is a sure way to burn out fast.
I take it that Hungarian notation has been left by the waysideon the road to less complexity:)
I agree wholeheartedly with the complexity issue.
I measure my success as a programmer by whether or not another programmer (or myself far in the future) can throw my work onto the screen and understand very quickly what the code is trying to do.
Bugs can be fixed, features can be added and performance can be enhanced later. But not very easily if the code is too complex or, equivalently, has too much abstraction.
IMO, that's not the greatest engineering feat associated with the pipeline.
I'd reserve that honor for the resilience of the pipeline to a much slower amplitude shaking.
Namely, frost heaves from permafrost, ground that is normally frozen year-round. Scrape off a little ground cover to build a house, a road, or plant a utility pole and suddenly there's a difference freeze/thaw cycle that will do real Bad Things.
You have to either keep all frozen all the time, or largely unfrozen and fairly dry soil.
There's a reason that roads have 6 ft of gravel on them for insulation to protect the underlying permafrost.
While I've looked to LDP for Howto's and information about specific Linux setup issues, there's another entirely different reason I keep tabs on them:
They're interested in being able to automatically generate high quality documents in a variety of formats, including both LaTeX and HTML.I've been interested in authoring options using DocBook that would enable me to produce highly flexible document sources based on open standards that would be useful long into the future.
MS has never had the concept of seperating O/S functions from application functions.
Not quite.
Earlier public statements by Microsoft executives indicated a "Chinese wall" [11,2] that separated the application developers and operating system developers. Professing such a separation was meant to allay fears of unfair early access to vital API's by Windows application developers.
It seems their public statements can be at odds with reality; certainly it was the case in the context that particular "firewall" policy.
Take heart: maybe Bill's lying again and really thinks code should be perfect, in which case we'd be better off than we are with "acceptably imperfect" code.
Three parties are responsible for providing a secure computing environment:
- The software creator or vendor: needs to code carefully, to test exhaustively, to debug, and to audit.
- The exploit writer, releaser: ought to publicize the vulnerability by describing it and illustrating protection measures before hammering the world with a working exploit to illustrate the deficiencies of the other two parties.
- The user hooking up his purchased system to the net. Should be listening to the other two parties about what's vulnerable, how to mitigate it in the short term and patch for the long term.
I see all three parties not wanting to fulfill their responsibilities and trying to shift blame on to the other two parties.Until Bill Gates starts to act more like Theo de Raadt, I don't belive he's upholding his part.
So what I'm hearing about this lawsuit is that by watching The Simpsons on Fox Entertainment I'm really being exposed to what is essentially a news item.
I guess this is balanced, since what comes on Fox News, I'm fairly confident, is aimed at entertaining audiences.
Definitely, though, I'd pay to see a WWF-style smackdown between Krusty the Clown and Brit Hume.
So I still use bash, despite all it's deficiencies.
It would be nice for a next generation shell to look more like Python, IMHO.
But, has anyone been brave enough to spend 100% of their command line time in python instead of /bin/sh? Some of the syntax needed to get hold of files and doing grep inside python is still verbose compared to sh.
The idea of a super pipe with more powerful communications between seems intriguing, something using say XML-RPC between the parts instead of just a byte stream.
It's clear that Microsoft recognizes the value of Google's technology.
I don't know about you, but my web browsing relies heavily on Google to find sites that I will look at. I mean, that level of reliance is almost like how I rely on libc . And any businesses that I might find on the other end probably consider high Google rank worth a lot of money.
Microsoft, of course, loves to be in a position where people and businesses have to rely upon them heavily. It's potentially quite profitable.
Until now, people have relied on Google's goodwill not to use their powerful position unfairly. Since there are monetary incentives for Googles business to "manage" those searches differently, I'm alway apprehensive and would be appalled if a company with Microsoft's track record were to gain that additional power (as if they aren't sufficiently powerful now).
classic' Mac OS users may not want to move
Yep.
I have a relative who has been using his Mac happily for about a decade, but when I queried him about whether he was running OS X he said no, that it was "too different".
Meanwhile, having lived in UNIX land myself for a long time, I'm intrigued about getting a laptop that can simultaneously serve as a native UNIX development platform (using command line, config files) as well as handling the ubiquitous .doc and .ppt files.
Up until Mac OS X, I was leery of Mac's because they seemed to wrap stuff up in GUI's to where you couldn't see the engine working.
Hmmm, make a note for Human Species 2.0 design specs:
I don't think this is the first time this concept has appeared in the market [1,2].
Frankly, I'm holding out for something with more public, standard, interoperable interfaces, based on WebDAV.
Well, I'm not going to defend American food. But, as bad it is, it can't compare with the fare I tried to eat once at a British motorway overpass "restaurant".
IMHO, French and Chinese cuisine leave most of world back in the ranks of amateurs...
I'll leave with a quote I saw once, full of stereotypes, but here it is:
A good thing (the introduction of open source software) is happening.
I hope that the decision making process that led to the decision was deliberate, fair and considered all of the options carefully.
Because I am uncomfortable with executive fiats whether they are issued by the government of Vietnam for open source or whether they are issued by a local government's IT management for single-sourcing wholescale parts of their business to Microsoft.
I'd boast of our "less likely being a random occurence", like this
that as you are posting on Slashdot, the lawyers for the parent corporation are quaking, thinking about the fate of the lawyer in Jurassic Park...
I worked where Christmas bonuses were distributed.
Then, they were typically about a month's salary, maybe a little less.
Obviously, YMMV.
But definitely go with cash distributions.
Keep it secret until the end for maximum impact.
More than a few folks get themselves into financial jams around Christmas, your bonus distribution will help keep them cheery.
Kudoes for being a good boss.
Since software is becoming more and more of a utility and commodity, I would hope the market would be more competitive than it is.
I don't see posting boards (like the stock exchange) where you can see what the bid and ask price is for 10^n (n=0,..,5) copies of WinXP Pro, who offers them, and prices for software that some people might decide to stop using, such as DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, Win 95, etc.
Yes, I know full well that all the resellers get their supply of Windows from the same one single source. But seeing the prices, fluctuations, etc. would make the inelasticity more apparent.