After a few months of working on my thesis, I started to think [I know, I should have started to think before...]
"What would happen if the building and computer burned down? My thesis on the hard drive would be lost and with it months of work! I would have to do this same damn thing all over again!"
So I.tar.Z'd it up and ftp'd it (on a typical state of the internet then 56k line) to a computer 400 miles away, just in case.
It relieved a little of the anxiety. [OTOH, if any of your data causes you that much worry, a redundant backup will still not reduce your anxiety to zero.]
Just to restate the obvious, but if you donate some of your own money to a qualified 501(c)3 organization such as the Free Software Foundation, then, at least in the USA, you may deduct it on your tax return from your gross income.
So in that sense, the government is subsidizing open source software at whatever your marginal tax rate happens to be.
They're subsidizing a lot of other organizations that way, too, such as mortgage creditors, but I feel that the public investment in more and improved free software contributes more to the overall productivity of the economy [I'm sure realtors and home builders would dispute me].
This talk of distribution curves reminds me of an experience when I was a T.A. for a graduate level course.
The professor gave a problem on a test that was pretty damn hard (in fact, years earlier the solution to the exam problem had been an entire journal article!).
Needless to say, the poor students didn't make too much progress on the problem.
We had to do a "rescaling" of what "A", "B", etc. meant since the typical score was between 11 and 20 percent on the test.
I suffered a couple of tests like that myself, where the problems were ridiculously difficult for an exam lasting only a couple of hours.
All in all, I think it's reasonable to give students good grades as the level of education increases. After high school, most of the less intelligent students have been weeded out. Having the median grade be 3.2 is not unreasonable.
Likewise in graduate school, as even more of the less able students call it quits (although some very good ones also decide they've just had enough).
If you try to reverse the grade inflation abruptly by centering a Gaussian on 2.00, you're going to hurt a lot of students that are being evaluated by people that are unaware of the new curve baseline.
Of course now at the workplace it's a similar quandry. Much is made of the policy that we hire only the best and the brightest - the top ten percent. Well, then how come is it that we only get paid within a few percent of the industry average salary, eh?
"Ah, that's because those other companies are hiring the top 10 percent, too!"
Right....
It might be more illuminating if university transcripts for courses also showed a distribution curve and where the student sits on it.
Re:Closed could mean disciplined
on
Using the FOIA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
there is no doubt that things have tightened up since 9-11,
Absolutely. But I think the argument is valid that much of the tightening up of information has been done rapidly in a knee-jerk fashion (which, albeit, is the way the government typically operates).
I'd like to see some rational analysis applied to those policies because I believe that open sources of information are vital to the functioning of a well-informed citizenry as a democracy.
The alternative is to migrate completely to the model used in the People's Republic of China, where various bits of information on AIDS cases, suicide rates, stock ownership by the Red Army commanders, etc. are considered "state secrets".
Everyone can gleefully gloat over them eating their own dogfood; enjoy it while it lasts.
Microsoft did release a patch long ago, and I give them credit for that.
But by not installing their own patches, the credibility of the argument that lazy sysadmins are to blame for Slammer is weakened. MS gives credence to other arguments: either their patches hose up other things unnecessarily, or else take too much time and effort to install properly.
In the end, this whole episode will be spun to promomte TCPA.
I am constantly impressed and impressed again with the progress of the KDE desktop. I think the only thing I pine for is more low level interoperability with a few Gnome based apps that I like using: Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice.
But I'm curious if the KDE developers are finding the limits of X11.
Would KDE motivate X12 or something even more radical that fits under Qt (even win32 fits underneath Qt)?
"Ahhh, I see you are using Mono on your servers. You do realise this Open Source stuff is totally unsupportable. Of course, Microsoft have the solution, you can switch to our.Net architecture which is 100% compatible, and we will support you with any problems."
You forget a few important selling points.
"Our "MS Mono" implementation is:
fully compliant with the existing ECMA standard,
works fully with all your old win32 applications,
is TCPA secured from bad historical events like Slammer,
works will your legacy apps on Linux that conform to the ECMA Mono standard
incorporates exciting new features that will be part of the ECMA standard 3 years from now and which Mono doesn't have now, and they will always be 3 years behind."
Middle Manager: "Sounds good, who do I make the cheque out to?"
"Not necessary! You remember how much you complained about how much you're paying for your Software Assurance 7.0 subscription? We heard your complaints! Now it's all bundled in there with Windows/Explorer/Office/Exchange/Access!"
That they're using ultrasound technology like this.
The alternative might be the adaption of seismic imaging technology (looking for oil bearing strata, etc.) into the medical arena using explosive charges to send a seismic wave through the patient:)
I'd be really curious to get the answer to this question from one of the "walking wounded" Corel developers that climbed on the client side Java bandwagon half a decade ago (in the Cowpland era), attempting to write an Office suite application.
As I recall, the bandwagon was bumping over a rough dirt road at the time and the project died.
With all the seasoning that's happened to Java, with the new possibility that the courts will make MS bundle a reasonable Java, I'd be curious if the speed, robustness, and cross platform issues have been sufficiently solved from the perspective of developers that hit all 3 of these issues back in 1996.
While the main story here is Bitstream's magnanmous gesture to the open source community, I could not help but notice Jim Gettys comments that showed how he viewed the action as important, too, to KDE, despite being on the GNOME board.
"...Freetype, XFT2 and X
Render extensions of the XFree86 project, Pango, KDE
and Trolltechs QT, among many others." said Jim
Gettys of HP and GNOME Foundation board member.
I like to see the 2 desktop projects recognize their mutual needs and their mutual strengths.
And I'm hoping that someday there will be a bridge between Bonobo and KParts, too.
I found the last comment in his interview interesting:
Q: What's the potential risk for Microsoft in all of this?
A: The challenge will come if customers start rejecting the proposition that there is value in integration.
"Integration" is the lever that MS uses to generate revenue. Customers are becoming increasingly aware of this and are assessing its value as best they can (given that they've lived in the MS Matrix monoculture for so long.)
Quoting from the Financial Times article that is another Slashdot story, too,
For many users the software question simply comes down to money. To Paul Friday, head of IT for the West Yorkshire Police, using Linux is not a statement against Microsoft but a way to save money.
."No one has ever worked out what it really costs [to run Windows]. There was never a real alternative; you just did it."
In terms of trust, I think that an even more fundamental level than $NAME, is $MONEY. The latter even gives you a variable measure of trustworthiness where the name is usually just a Boolean.
If any and every bank could tie an escrow account of some amount to guarantee identity to that level of funds, then maybe we'd get somewhere.
I'm not sure what monetary damages Verisign guarantees you if they've certified a fraud. Maybe someone in the know could enlighten me.
As a data point, my org has purchased about 200 HP workstations in the last year for desktop Linux deployment, running RH 7.3, displacing Sun desktops.
Anyway, it represents somewhat over a million dollars in Linux hardware purchases from HP.
IIRC, the government had confiscated some hard disks of yours.
Rumour was that it was gibberish, that it was encrypted, that they wouldn't give them back to you unless you provided them with a passphrase that would eliminate the gibberish.
Any substance to these rumours that you wouldn't mind answering?
When people are willing to pay more to get the scientific talent, there will be more incentive for new students to pursue the sciences which are in demand.
As the owner of a corporation with a research department, when will I determine that I should fund basic research?
Scientific research suffers from the tragedy of the commons. America learned the same lesson that Japan learned before them:
"Let someone else do the basic research. We'll do the applied research for commercialization."
There is little incentive for corporations to do basic research. There is not too much incentive for influential lobbying groups to pressure the government into funding basic research.
This might change a little if you required upper management to hold onto their stock for more than 10 years.
Otherwise, eliminating basic research budgets will always be a better financial decision in the time frame that matters to decisionmakers(about 10 quarters, maximum, these days).
Well, for scientific and technical use, Linux is missing nothing and is used extensively in the government sites I'm familiar with.
AFAICT, the only "key" components possibly missing in Linux revolve around Windows compatibility features: file formats, APIs, network protocols and the like that Microsoft generally hides behind a veil of proprietary information but which users rely upon to get their jobs done. The missing feature set is rapidly diminishing as open source programmers attempt to reverse engineer the old stuff before MS comes out with new stuff (.NET, C#) to keep their lock safe.
You're absolutely correct that governments and companies are using the specter of Linux to wring out price and other concessions from Microsoft.
I sometimes wonder how much IT owes recent drops in TCO to Linux, even when they've been purchasing MS software! They should consider contributing 10% of their cost savings towards open source code software development so they have a similarly useful lever in negotiations several years from now.
Well, for the cases where identity needs to be unambiguously established for an individual, I'm happy to see technology available to support it.
And if the technology is open, I like it more.
But I'd really feel a lot more comfortable if there were fundamental changes in identity policy to permit anonymity and privacy of varying degrees.
There are far too many circumstances today where I have to establish my individual identity as a person, where it would suffice to identify me as "an individual capable of giving X amount of money for this particular transaction".
I've grown to like the Slashdot model where you can create your own identity and it stands only for the cumulative comments you make, nothing more.
But governments and corporations don't want to lose any bit of control, so we probably won't see this model extended into public life. By the time average citizens become cognizant that their every action, speech and deed is instantly and perfectly recognized by the authorities, it will be too late to change the policy.
Slashdot Mirror
After a few months of working on my thesis, I started to think [I know, I should have started to think before...]
So IIt relieved a little of the anxiety. [OTOH, if any of your data causes you that much worry, a redundant backup will still not reduce your anxiety to zero.]
Just to restate the obvious, but if you donate some of your own money to a qualified 501(c)3 organization such as the Free Software Foundation, then, at least in the USA, you may deduct it on your tax return from your gross income.
So in that sense, the government is subsidizing open source software at whatever your marginal tax rate happens to be.
They're subsidizing a lot of other organizations that way, too, such as mortgage creditors, but I feel that the public investment in more and improved free software contributes more to the overall productivity of the economy [I'm sure realtors and home builders would dispute me].
This talk of distribution curves reminds me of an experience when I was a T.A. for a graduate level course.
The professor gave a problem on a test that was pretty damn hard (in fact, years earlier the solution to the exam problem had been an entire journal article!).
Needless to say, the poor students didn't make too much progress on the problem.
We had to do a "rescaling" of what "A", "B", etc. meant since the typical score was between 11 and 20 percent on the test.
I suffered a couple of tests like that myself, where the problems were ridiculously difficult for an exam lasting only a couple of hours.
All in all, I think it's reasonable to give students good grades as the level of education increases. After high school, most of the less intelligent students have been weeded out. Having the median grade be 3.2 is not unreasonable.
Likewise in graduate school, as even more of the less able students call it quits (although some very good ones also decide they've just had enough).
If you try to reverse the grade inflation abruptly by centering a Gaussian on 2.00, you're going to hurt a lot of students that are being evaluated by people that are unaware of the new curve baseline.
Of course now at the workplace it's a similar quandry. Much is made of the policy that we hire only the best and the brightest - the top ten percent. Well, then how come is it that we only get paid within a few percent of the industry average salary, eh?
"Ah, that's because those other companies are hiring the top 10 percent, too!"
Right....
It might be more illuminating if university transcripts for courses also showed a distribution curve and where the student sits on it.
there is no doubt that things have tightened up since 9-11,
Absolutely. But I think the argument is valid that much of the tightening up of information has been done rapidly in a knee-jerk fashion (which, albeit, is the way the government typically operates).
I'd like to see some rational analysis applied to those policies because I believe that open sources of information are vital to the functioning of a well-informed citizenry as a democracy.
The alternative is to migrate completely to the model used in the People's Republic of China, where various bits of information on AIDS cases, suicide rates, stock ownership by the Red Army commanders, etc. are considered "state secrets".
I am constantly impressed and impressed again with the progress of the KDE desktop. I think the only thing I pine for is more low level interoperability with a few Gnome based apps that I like using: Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice.
But I'm curious if the KDE developers are finding the limits of X11.
Would KDE motivate X12 or something even more radical that fits under Qt (even win32 fits underneath Qt)?
Microsoft Sales Rep to Middle Manager:
You forget a few important selling points.
"Our "MS Mono" implementation is:
Middle Manager: "Sounds good, who do I make the cheque out to?"
"Not necessary! You remember how much you complained about how much you're paying for your Software Assurance 7.0 subscription? We heard your complaints! Now it's all bundled in there with Windows/Explorer/Office/Exchange/Access!"
That they're using ultrasound technology like this.
The alternative might be the adaption of seismic imaging technology (looking for oil bearing strata, etc.) into the medical arena using explosive charges to send a seismic wave through the patient:)
I'd be really curious to get the answer to this question from one of the "walking wounded" Corel developers that climbed on the client side Java bandwagon half a decade ago (in the Cowpland era), attempting to write an Office suite application.
As I recall, the bandwagon was bumping over a rough dirt road at the time and the project died.
With all the seasoning that's happened to Java, with the new possibility that the courts will make MS bundle a reasonable Java, I'd be curious if the speed, robustness, and cross platform issues have been sufficiently solved from the perspective of developers that hit all 3 of these issues back in 1996.
Would be that ICANN could be split into ICANN.com, ICANN.edu, ICANN.org, ICANN.ca, ... without much difficulty from a purely technical perspective.
Just in case you're not familiar with PEAR and what it might be useful for, look at IMP and Horde, a cool web-based IMAP interface.
While the main story here is Bitstream's magnanmous gesture to the open source community, I could not help but notice Jim Gettys comments that showed how he viewed the action as important, too, to KDE, despite being on the GNOME board.
I like to see the 2 desktop projects recognize their mutual needs and their mutual strengths.And I'm hoping that someday there will be a bridge between Bonobo and KParts, too.
there so many MS trolls here. Not only that but thel also mod each up like hell.
Quick!
Somebody mod this guy up!
I'm glad they didn't have this editorial review in process when a famous Finn, Linus Torvalds, came out with source code commentary on Minix.
IIRC, Tanenbaum didn't think too highly of Linus' initial work.
Were Tanenbaum the editor of comp.os.minix, maybe the work of Finland's most famous author in the last decade would have been quashed.
I found the last comment in his interview interesting:
"Integration" is the lever that MS uses to generate revenue. Customers are becoming increasingly aware of this and are assessing its value as best they can (given that they've lived in the MS Matrix monoculture for so long.)
Quoting from the Financial Times article that is another Slashdot story, too,
Reminds me of recent stories of special forces personnel returning from Afghanistan to the States and harming/murdering their spouses and families.
That's a good idea.
In terms of trust, I think that an even more fundamental level than $NAME, is $MONEY. The latter even gives you a variable measure of trustworthiness where the name is usually just a Boolean.
If any and every bank could tie an escrow account of some amount to guarantee identity to that level of funds, then maybe we'd get somewhere.
I'm not sure what monetary damages Verisign guarantees you if they've certified a fraud. Maybe someone in the know could enlighten me.
What's the app and why didn't you upgrade the Suns?
No single app, but lots of in-house and commercial engineering codes that will basically run on any flavor of *NIX.
Comparably performing Sun desktop, based on UltraSPARC III, cost too much compared to the HP Intel offering.
We still have big Sun servers, with their own SAN, which then provide NFS to the desktops.
According to this article, IBM is providing iNotes web access this quarter, with client technology "next quarter".
As a data point, my org has purchased about 200 HP workstations in the last year for desktop Linux deployment, running RH 7.3, displacing Sun desktops.
Anyway, it represents somewhat over a million dollars in Linux hardware purchases from HP.
We considered IBM seriously, too.
IIRC, the government had confiscated some hard disks of yours.
Rumour was that it was gibberish, that it was encrypted, that they wouldn't give them back to you unless you provided them with a passphrase that would eliminate the gibberish.
Any substance to these rumours that you wouldn't mind answering?
...looks kind of suspicious.
He's bloated, gosh, I think he's actually dead!!
Who wheeled him in here? Is he a victim of anthrax, smallpox sent to infect the crowd?
No, wait. He's just an Oakland Raiders fan.
When people are willing to pay more to get the scientific talent, there will be more incentive for new students to pursue the sciences which are in demand.
As the owner of a corporation with a research department, when will I determine that I should fund basic research?
Scientific research suffers from the tragedy of the commons. America learned the same lesson that Japan learned before them:
There is little incentive for corporations to do basic research. There is not too much incentive for influential lobbying groups to pressure the government into funding basic research.
This might change a little if you required upper management to hold onto their stock for more than 10 years.
Otherwise, eliminating basic research budgets will always be a better financial decision in the time frame that matters to decisionmakers(about 10 quarters, maximum, these days).
Linux is still missing key components.
Well, for scientific and technical use, Linux is missing nothing and is used extensively in the government sites I'm familiar with.
AFAICT, the only "key" components possibly missing in Linux revolve around Windows compatibility features: file formats, APIs, network protocols and the like that Microsoft generally hides behind a veil of proprietary information but which users rely upon to get their jobs done. The missing feature set is rapidly diminishing as open source programmers attempt to reverse engineer the old stuff before MS comes out with new stuff (.NET, C#) to keep their lock safe.
You're absolutely correct that governments and companies are using the specter of Linux to wring out price and other concessions from Microsoft.
I sometimes wonder how much IT owes recent drops in TCO to Linux, even when they've been purchasing MS software! They should consider contributing 10% of their cost savings towards open source code software development so they have a similarly useful lever in negotiations several years from now.
Well, for the cases where identity needs to be unambiguously established for an individual, I'm happy to see technology available to support it.
And if the technology is open, I like it more.
But I'd really feel a lot more comfortable if there were fundamental changes in identity policy to permit anonymity and privacy of varying degrees.
There are far too many circumstances today where I have to establish my individual identity as a person, where it would suffice to identify me as "an individual capable of giving X amount of money for this particular transaction".
I've grown to like the Slashdot model where you can create your own identity and it stands only for the cumulative comments you make, nothing more.
But governments and corporations don't want to lose any bit of control, so we probably won't see this model extended into public life. By the time average citizens become cognizant that their every action, speech and deed is instantly and perfectly recognized by the authorities, it will be too late to change the policy.