Sapere Aude
Tag: opensource
The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is the first forum to not only explore the role of open source in shaping the future of embedded, server, and desktop markets, but also to explore new opportunities OSS presents for both startup and established technology vendors, and how to capitalize on them.
microsoft is a sponsor. huh?
Wyona is participating in an IBM promo event for open source. Why they thought that the audience would appreciate a stupid flash site is beyond me. Try too hard to be hip with not enough clue, and you look like an idiot.
one of the OSDN editors has a little piece on moving from desktop Linux to desktop Windows.
interesting, i thought, maybe it is a piece that ventures outside the conventional wisdom of OSDN. the next 2 sentences read: I have now used Windows for an entire week. This story marks the end of that week, and I’m glad it’s over.
uh-oh.
consider this gem:
First, a question: What’s up with all this “Ctrl C” and Ctrl V” copy/paste stuff? In almost all Linux programs, when I want to copy a block of text (or a graphic or whatever) I just highlight the original, then click both mouse buttons (or the middle button if I have a 3-button mouse) where I want to paste it. This is fast, easy, and takes little hand motion on my laptop keyboard. All this Ctrl key action slows me down. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I need to work quickly if I want to earn a living, and I don’t see why Windows wants me to go through all those extra hand motions just to paste a URL into a story. Geh.
never mind that there is no global clipboard on linux that can deal with non-text content.
mr miller goes then on to complain about the security updates windows strongly suggests you install. at the same time, OSDN complains about users not applying security updates. which one is it?
“roblimo” complains about the sorry state of certain windows shareware applications. you would assume that someone using linux is well prepared to do his research and locate the best application for a job. but no, zealotry prevails, and mr miller insists on using internet explorer, only to eventually install mozilla.
it goes on like this. intellectual dishonesty, as displayed in this article, puts people on my shit list. i am sure mr miller has some interesting ideas i’d like to hear, but my crap filter will probably prevent it.
just to be clear here: i switched back to windows in 2001 after 2 years of compiling, messing with the system fun. a very nice learning experience i do not want to miss. at some point, i was getting bored with setting up the obvious stuff all over again, and thus went back to windows, where stuff just works, including my peripherals. in the meantime, i have found a nice balance between my operating system layer (strictly windows on the desktop, linux on the server) and my application stack, which is mostly open source by now.
In addition, i run freely available software like Trillian and Acrobat Reader. I pay for only 1 program, the excellent Mindmanager.
Humans and higher primates share 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects.
but..
What are the issues regarding open source programming?
Hominids will not share source code and can be very territorial when programming. For this reason we do not recommend Primate Programming for open source projects.
unfortunately, neither university of zurich nor st. gallen are yet blog-enabled, and thus failed to spread word about a very interesting seminar that took place today. michi attended, and we think collaboration between the theorists and the open source practitioners will continue.
next time, i will try to be there, and blog the session.
my thesis made it to NEC citeseer. very cool.
as part of my presentation on open source software engineering, i pondered the benefits and pitfalls of the open source method. it occurred to me that the main advantages accrue in the long run, while the main problems are apparent in the short term. the challenge thus becomes how to breed the open source method with other methods, like agile methods, for the desired outcomes.
short-term issues
long-term benefits
in a nutshell: in the long run, darwinian pressures will guarantee an adequate solution. in the short term, agile methods achieve some of the same effects while satisfying budgetary and time constraints.
wyona tackles these issues by:
uh, the last few items reek of consultese. fix them with the bullfighter.
im speaking about open source software engineering at university of st. gallen tomorrow. the main tenet of my slides is that the agile methods and open source camps can learn from each other as they share many concepts.
btw, you can tell that i converted the slides to pdf with a unixy program (openoffice): they are all pixelated. i only see this with latex docs and unix output, really a pity.
it is amazing to contemplate how some shit storms coincide with business announcements.. some are indeed more equal than others.
sun is waking up to communities.
java.net is a place to meet and work. “This site was designed from scratch to set a new standard for what’s possible in online collaborative software development”. It has been primed to thrive as a dynamic, live, international, 24×7, real-time community for hands-on Java software development.
with considerable luck they may be able to attract enough interest in the widely dispersed java blog / open source community. i went ahead and registered apache lenya, although the project will of course not move there. the site will point to its official home. maybe it will help to attract some more attention from the general, java-using population. we shall see.
they even let mr. gosling out to play with the other kids, although what good is a blog without rss.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 