I met my wife on good old IRC. Yesterday was our second anniversary. And she was the THIRD real girlfriend I met in a chatroom (which goes to show that IRC creates relationships that are neither more nor less stable than the much-vaunted Real World - the outside thing, not the TV show).
Why do we always get rants like this? Can't you comprehend the concept that many people who read this site have opinions that differ from one another? If we all thought the same way, we'd have some sort of hive brain and we wouldn't need this site.
BTW, I for one agree with him posting the report on a 47-year-old event, because information wants to be free. So there.
I don't really care that they obtained the patent legitimately. I don't even care whether it leads to patent reform. Survival of the fittest - they didn't enforce it 10 years ago, and now they don't get to cry foul. The other jungle denizens took their stuff, but screw it - if you left your car unlocked in the bad part of town for TWENTY YEARS would anyone shed a tear if it wasn't still there when you got back? Hell, if they had even been HALFWAY on the ball they could have said something 2-3 years ago when all this stuff was starting to make money.
Ignoring for the moment the strong evidence that this will not actually make a Linux port any easier, I don't believe anyone switched to Linux to get away from OFFICE. We switched to Linux mostly to get away from WINDOWS. Office, while bloated, is pretty darn useful software. Windows, while bloated, is pretty and darned useless.
It's worth pointing out that given today's hardware, and today's encryption algorithms, 3DES and Blowfish are both fast enough and secure enough for just about any application. Neither one is likely to be cracked by brute force within the next couple of decades, except possibly by d.net (unless quantum computers suddenly become cheap, in which case, all mathematical encryption schemes will be rendered useless and we'll have to use quantum tunneling encryption).
They're both pretty fast already, and improving hardware technology can only make them faster. Why improve on a good thing, particularly when you're opening yourself up to the potential for errors in an untested algorithm?
Approximations, of course, but yes, I do equally use NT, Linux and Windows 2000. I work for an enterprise applications software company and we support all three operating systems. I must and do code to, admin for and work on these and other operating systems. But I wouldn't have to explain these numbers to anyone else who has worked on all three as much as I have.
You lost me when you claimed Linux has lost the stability advantage. Time between blue-screen crashes in Windows NT: approx. 2 days. Time between blue-screen crashes in Windows 2000: approx 2 weeks. Time between OS crashes/any kind of instability in Linux:... still waiting for one . . . .
Why stop there? If it prevents the prevention of heart attacks, it causes heart attacks. Just among my coworkers I can think of at least three people who would benefit from undergoing this procedure . . .
Does this add value to our company?If so, what are the specific benefits? Yes, if the project has appeal outside the scope of your commercial enterprise. (This may include other commercial enterprises, including your competitors, especially if they have a similar product in the same status as yours: not sold, but maintained internally.) Open source projects benefit from free contributions and maintenance from the outside community, if they are maintained. That means bugfixes and new features to code you're using. In effect, instead of paying all the cost of maintaining the product yourself, you're deferring some of it to the world at large.
Can the value of these benefits be measured? Buggy software is anything but cheap. It is possible to measure the cost of a bug in terms of both manhours spent working around it and manhours spent fixing it, and from there, you can calculate a dollar value if you're so inclined. Adding new features is also not free. If you can get the community to shoulder any fraction of these efforts, in return for being allowed to see and use your code, you've got a quantifiable win.
How much is it likely to cost? Well, open sourcing the product won't be free, unless you unleash it on the world and refuse to maintain it, which trashes both the creditibility of the product and the likelihood that anything comes of releasing it. (This is known as abandonware.) If you do choose to dedicate personnel to maintaining the open source product, you will need people in charge of building it, incorporating contributed code, and packaging new releases, as always, plus as many people as you care to keep contributing actual code (optional). The number of people in each category depends on the size of the project, but it is likely to be a smaller number of people than were required to maintain the software entirely in-house. At some point in the future, if the project is especially popular, someone else may be willing to take over these maintenance tasks for you, but for the near-term, plan on having a few maintenance people. There will be one-time costs associated with switching the software from closed to open. Finally, if you physically host the source as a service to the new community of developers, there will be the cost of the webserver/CVS server. Except for the one-time costs, all of these costs will scale up with the popularity of the project, but you will derive more benefit from having opensourced as it gets more popular (to a maximum benefit of however much it would have cost to maintain it in-house). As a bonus, if you choose a standard license for the open-sourced product such as the GPL, you effectively outsource most of the legal costs to the FSF.
Are the potential benefits likely to justify the trouble? This one, at least, is difficult to answer without knowing the product. Open sourcing something is neither difficult nor costly, but as I already mentioned, it isn't free if you ever want to realize any benefits. It depends on how big a project it is, how much you depend on it, and how popular it is to the outside world. Open sourcing software that has no relevence outside your corporation is likely to cost money and benefit you nothing. Open sourcing software that is difficult to maintain internally and would be well-received by the outside world is likely to cost you a little and benefit you a lot.
I'm so sick of proposed legislation that clutters up our legislative process and confuses our enforcement process because it contains political buzzwords. This seems to me to be like passing a law that says "It's illegal to murder someone . . . with a gun."
I couldn't ask for a more stable machine. Shhhh...it even makes Windows pretty stable. I was a little surprised that i586-optimized Mandrake runs on it without batting an eyelash.
Just make a list of all Microsoft employees and assets, create three different companies, and start selecting resources at random to distribute amongst the companies. Then let them decide on their own what they want to make. With any luck, all the lawyers and marketers will end up in one company by themselves:P
My point, such as it was, was that he didn't even seem to be AWARE of the "Back problem". As I mentioned, there is at least one (however nefarious) reason to use an entry page - to keep stupid users from leaving, and generate extra page views. (BTW, those banner ads reload every time you get redirected into the site -- extra moolah!) But even the nefarious users at least seem to be aware of what they're doing.
How is that a web designer, even one who does not profess to be a hotshot, does not get this? I was prepared to take him at his word that zeldman.com is just a personal sandbox, until I read his statement that he doesn't understand what about an entry page makes it difficult to "Back out" (hit the back button on a browser) of a site. I'll explain it in diagram form.
[Orig] ===> [Entry] *redirect* ===> [Main page]
When you first navigate to the site, you land on Entry. After n seconds, you get redirected to Main page. While on main page, you wish to visit the last site you navigated to, [Orig]. So you hit Back, perhaps having forgotten [Entry], perhaps simply expecting that page not to be "in the way". "Back" works by taking you to the last URL the BROWSER requested, not the last URL YOU requested, so you go from right to left and land on Entry, and then get redirected back to Main, the page you were trying to BACK OUT OF.
This is nothing short of painful for those of us who actually KNOW how to use our browsers (and know, for example, that the Back button can take you back more than one site at once if you know how to use the dropdown list). For naive users it's dumbfounding. I believe some commercial sites use this fact intentionally to keep people on their page. And that's why it's TERRIBLE web design. If you aren't at least aware of this effect, I don't see how how can be much of a web designer.
Let's take a worst-case scenario. It's 2035, and machines have finally surpassed today's humans in their ability to do everything that humans do. Furthermore, they think like humans, they act like humans, and they're taking over the earth.
Why? Because WE ARE THE MACHINES. Every single one of us is already a machine, and has been since the first RNA strand found a mate. The only difference is what our bodies are made up of -- but the truth is, we've been changing our bodies since the dawn of man. Our ancestors were short and strong. Modern man is tall and weak. Our ancestors were dark-skinned. Today we have many skin colors.
See, here's the kicker - we don't have to surrender to our machine masters. While it is nearly inevitable that machines will surpass human brains in complexity and even problem-solving ability, it is foolish to think that we will fail to incorporate these attributes into ourselves. Our future is in machines, because our future selves will be machines - just different machines than we are now. We are destined to remake our own bodies, and become, ourselves, the machine masters. Which means we will depend on the silicon and relays and software that we have created, yes -- in the same way that increased complexity of the genome required us to depend on our lungs, and our spinal cords, and finding complex proteins to use as food. Increased complexity in our brains, and our technology, will necessitate this further step up the ladder.
We'll probably continue to look the same because sex sells and big metal faceplates aren't sexy. But we'll move better, think better, be better. Is that so bad?
Slashdot Mirror
The only remote admin tool you need. Well, except for an SSH tunnel to encrypt it.
I met my wife on good old IRC. Yesterday was our second anniversary. And she was the THIRD real girlfriend I met in a chatroom (which goes to show that IRC creates relationships that are neither more nor less stable than the much-vaunted Real World - the outside thing, not the TV show).
I'm sure Corel is only laying off those employees because they wanted a nice, round 1000.
BTW, I for one agree with him posting the report on a 47-year-old event, because information wants to be free. So there.
cuz nobody will ever read this.
I don't know about you, but I have no desire to be MORE fragrant. Less is more like it.
Are you kidding me? NINJA!! Ninja Is not JAva
I don't really care that they obtained the patent legitimately. I don't even care whether it leads to patent reform. Survival of the fittest - they didn't enforce it 10 years ago, and now they don't get to cry foul. The other jungle denizens took their stuff, but screw it - if you left your car unlocked in the bad part of town for TWENTY YEARS would anyone shed a tear if it wasn't still there when you got back? Hell, if they had even been HALFWAY on the ball they could have said something 2-3 years ago when all this stuff was starting to make money.
Ignoring for the moment the strong evidence that this will not actually make a Linux port any easier, I don't believe anyone switched to Linux to get away from OFFICE. We switched to Linux mostly to get away from WINDOWS. Office, while bloated, is pretty darn useful software. Windows, while bloated, is pretty and darned useless.
They're both pretty fast already, and improving hardware technology can only make them faster. Why improve on a good thing, particularly when you're opening yourself up to the potential for errors in an untested algorithm?
Heh, when I read the first line of your post I thought you were gonna go off on KDE. I second your motion, though. Fsck Apple.
If the manufacturers of guns were truly selling weapons that are only useful for killing people, they wouldn't be able to sell any automatic weapons.
If the legal community was truly ripping off the nation by encouraging lawsuits, they wouldn't be able to charge any lawyer fees.
If prostitutes truly had STDs, they wouldn't be able to sell any poontang.
Pick your favorite. There's plenty more where that came from.
Approximations, of course, but yes, I do equally use NT, Linux and Windows 2000. I work for an enterprise applications software company and we support all three operating systems. I must and do code to, admin for and work on these and other operating systems. But I wouldn't have to explain these numbers to anyone else who has worked on all three as much as I have.
You lost me when you claimed Linux has lost the stability advantage. Time between blue-screen crashes in Windows NT: approx. 2 days. Time between blue-screen crashes in Windows 2000: approx 2 weeks. Time between OS crashes/any kind of instability in Linux: ... still waiting for one . . . .
Why stop there? If it prevents the prevention of heart attacks, it causes heart attacks. Just among my coworkers I can think of at least three people who would benefit from undergoing this procedure . . .
Yes, if the project has appeal outside the scope of your commercial enterprise. (This may include other commercial enterprises, including your competitors, especially if they have a similar product in the same status as yours: not sold, but maintained internally.) Open source projects benefit from free contributions and maintenance from the outside community, if they are maintained. That means bugfixes and new features to code you're using. In effect, instead of paying all the cost of maintaining the product yourself, you're deferring some of it to the world at large.
Can the value of these benefits be measured?
Buggy software is anything but cheap. It is possible to measure the cost of a bug in terms of both manhours spent working around it and manhours spent fixing it, and from there, you can calculate a dollar value if you're so inclined. Adding new features is also not free. If you can get the community to shoulder any fraction of these efforts, in return for being allowed to see and use your code, you've got a quantifiable win.
How much is it likely to cost?
Well, open sourcing the product won't be free, unless you unleash it on the world and refuse to maintain it, which trashes both the creditibility of the product and the likelihood that anything comes of releasing it. (This is known as abandonware.) If you do choose to dedicate personnel to maintaining the open source product, you will need people in charge of building it, incorporating contributed code, and packaging new releases, as always, plus as many people as you care to keep contributing actual code (optional). The number of people in each category depends on the size of the project, but it is likely to be a smaller number of people than were required to maintain the software entirely in-house. At some point in the future, if the project is especially popular, someone else may be willing to take over these maintenance tasks for you, but for the near-term, plan on having a few maintenance people. There will be one-time costs associated with switching the software from closed to open. Finally, if you physically host the source as a service to the new community of developers, there will be the cost of the webserver/CVS server. Except for the one-time costs, all of these costs will scale up with the popularity of the project, but you will derive more benefit from having opensourced as it gets more popular (to a maximum benefit of however much it would have cost to maintain it in-house). As a bonus, if you choose a standard license for the open-sourced product such as the GPL, you effectively outsource most of the legal costs to the FSF.
Are the potential benefits likely to justify the trouble?
This one, at least, is difficult to answer without knowing the product. Open sourcing something is neither difficult nor costly, but as I already mentioned, it isn't free if you ever want to realize any benefits. It depends on how big a project it is, how much you depend on it, and how popular it is to the outside world. Open sourcing software that has no relevence outside your corporation is likely to cost money and benefit you nothing. Open sourcing software that is difficult to maintain internally and would be well-received by the outside world is likely to cost you a little and benefit you a lot.
I'm so sick of proposed legislation that clutters up our legislative process and confuses our enforcement process because it contains political buzzwords. This seems to me to be like passing a law that says "It's illegal to murder someone . . . with a gun."
I couldn't ask for a more stable machine. Shhhh...it even makes Windows pretty stable. I was a little surprised that i586-optimized Mandrake runs on it without batting an eyelash.
Just make a list of all Microsoft employees and assets, create three different companies, and start selecting resources at random to distribute amongst the companies. Then let them decide on their own what they want to make. With any luck, all the lawyers and marketers will end up in one company by themselves :P
My point, such as it was, was that he didn't even seem to be AWARE of the "Back problem". As I mentioned, there is at least one (however nefarious) reason to use an entry page - to keep stupid users from leaving, and generate extra page views. (BTW, those banner ads reload every time you get redirected into the site -- extra moolah!) But even the nefarious users at least seem to be aware of what they're doing.
[Orig] ===> [Entry] *redirect* ===> [Main page]
When you first navigate to the site, you land on Entry. After n seconds, you get redirected to Main page. While on main page, you wish to visit the last site you navigated to, [Orig]. So you hit Back, perhaps having forgotten [Entry], perhaps simply expecting that page not to be "in the way". "Back" works by taking you to the last URL the BROWSER requested, not the last URL YOU requested, so you go from right to left and land on Entry, and then get redirected back to Main, the page you were trying to BACK OUT OF.
This is nothing short of painful for those of us who actually KNOW how to use our browsers (and know, for example, that the Back button can take you back more than one site at once if you know how to use the dropdown list). For naive users it's dumbfounding. I believe some commercial sites use this fact intentionally to keep people on their page. And that's why it's TERRIBLE web design. If you aren't at least aware of this effect, I don't see how how can be much of a web designer.
Why? Because WE ARE THE MACHINES. Every single one of us is already a machine, and has been since the first RNA strand found a mate. The only difference is what our bodies are made up of -- but the truth is, we've been changing our bodies since the dawn of man. Our ancestors were short and strong. Modern man is tall and weak. Our ancestors were dark-skinned. Today we have many skin colors.
See, here's the kicker - we don't have to surrender to our machine masters. While it is nearly inevitable that machines will surpass human brains in complexity and even problem-solving ability, it is foolish to think that we will fail to incorporate these attributes into ourselves. Our future is in machines, because our future selves will be machines - just different machines than we are now. We are destined to remake our own bodies, and become, ourselves, the machine masters. Which means we will depend on the silicon and relays and software that we have created, yes -- in the same way that increased complexity of the genome required us to depend on our lungs, and our spinal cords, and finding complex proteins to use as food. Increased complexity in our brains, and our technology, will necessitate this further step up the ladder.
We'll probably continue to look the same because sex sells and big metal faceplates aren't sexy. But we'll move better, think better, be better. Is that so bad?
Enjoy.
unix guru n. See John "maddog" Hall.