We only have a limited number of volcanoes on earth, and only of limited variety in type and structure. Seeing a few more of them, maybe of types we haven't seen here, might give us better insight on how such things work. Long time down the road, we might even get better in controlling, or at least predicting the behavior of the local ones.
Besides, active volcanoes indicate a planet has an active hot core, which would be interesting to know. Same argument as above, just substitute "planet" for "volcano"...
I am lucky enough to work for an OS company. We use different licenses for different products.
One of our core products is the YAZ toolkit for Z39.50 communications. That is under a BSD-style license, since it is in our interest to increase the use of Z39.50, and with it our potential market. In that we have succeeded well, we guess that about half of world's Z39.50 products are based on our tools, and we have made ourselves a name in the community of Z39.50 users.
Another core product, the Zebra search engine is licensed under GPL, because we don't mind small businesses and universities playing with it, but we don't want to see it absorbed into a competing product. We also sell commercial licenses for it, should someone want one.
Of course, we also do some custom work that remains closed source.
The difference for us is not the amount of patches we receive - that is about equal, and small in any case - but the different licenses serve different purposes.
The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals
Not all of us - I get paid to write (mostly) open source software by a small Danish company. Although it is "multinational" too - we have one man in England and two in USA.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So, what happens to all the programmers in the world when everything goes open source and free?
I probably continue at my work, getting paid to write Open Source software. And some customized stuff based on our OS tools.
No, it is not a way to make millions. But an all right living, and some extra job satisfaction.
When the entire industry in the USA grinds to a halt, but all is well in Europe, that's when the US will repent.
Could happen a bit earlier, already when there is a huge software market in the rest of the world, but most companies refuse to sell their stuff to the USA for fear of silly litigation. This might not be too far away.
I suspect this would fall foul on the European data protection laws. If I have no business relationship with (say) Amazon, they have no right to collect my personal information. The fact that someone else buys a thing for me does no give *my* consent to keep info on me, to spam me, or to inform other people about my private life, like anniversaries.
The branching factor is one serious difference: Some people claim that chess has about 10^120 different possible games. Some people estimate the number of different possible go games to be 10^720. Some people jokingly conclude that go is 10^600 times harder than chess.
Of course, the branching factor and game-space size are not the only relevant considerations. In chess there is a simple and fast evaluation function (just count the pieces). Granted, it may not be perfect, but it is possible to write a decent chess program with just it, and a deep enough search.
Un(?)fortunately in go there is no such simple evaluation function. just moving one stone a bit can change a huge group from being an asset into being a liability. Estimating the status of a group is in itself a hugely complex problem. And there can be many groups on the board...
As they say, if chess can be compared to a battle, go can be compared to a war.
Of course, since it is an intersting game, and one that no computer plays all too well, there is some interest in writing a better go program. The (one of the??) Open Source alternative is http://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/gnugo.html
This isn't going to be a popular sentiment here, but I'd say that the GPL and P2P generally make it tougher to make a living.
I don't know - I make a decent living writing GPL'd software. (To be honest, I must admit that I am not a Lone Coder doing this, but employed in a small company started by two Lone Coders.) The catch is the same as with other software: Find a niche where the customers want it badly enough to be willing to pay for it to be written.
GPL may kill the simplistic dream of writing a great piece of software, and getting rich from selling copies/licenses for ever. But in real life, that dream has not worked for very many people, especially not the Lone Coders...
If anything, GPL has made it easier for the Lone Coder to take a piece of software and improve and customize it, and make a living on consulting, installing, and supporting it. He no longer has to write everything from scratch, but can build on the work of others.
The T1000 doesn't look quite right. Especially the battery, it was a flat packet under the whole bottom of the laptop, weighing more than the rest together. The carrying handle was in the battery pack, not in the laptop itself! btw, I am not sure I remember the memory size right, it has been years since I tried to boot that thing.
I have an old Toshiba laptop: 256K RAM (yes, that's kilobytes!), 2 floppy drives of (one of them bad). 4.77MHz CPU. 8-level greyscale display of (at most) 640x480, without a backlight, but with many broken pixels. One serial and one parallel port. Heavy lead-acid battery, permanently flat. Missing power supply. No hard disk. No network interfaces. The original DOS diskette (2.0 I think) has gone missing.
Any idea what kind of server I could possibly make of that???
Of course you pay taxes when you buy inside EU. Actually, Denmark has one of the highest VATs in the world, at 25%. But you only pay taxes once, probably by the rate in the receiving country, and the seller will have to collect those taxes, so there is much less hazzle about paying them... And no customs or duties, and again no paperwork to clear those
"but anything that hurts spammers must be good"
That's not really a bright philosophy to follow in general.
Admittedly not. But some times I feel that way. Let me rephrase it: Anything that makes spamming operations less profitable or more difficult to run, must be good for the rest of us.
If this can motivate people to report spammers, especially people with inside knowledge, then it is a good thing. True, it won't stop all spam, but anything that hurts spammers must be good.
Although spam looks like a very international problem, I believe that a good number of spammers are based in the USA, they just use machines outside USA to do the dirty work. If this helps FTC to get to those spammers, and make their charges hold in court, all the better.
If they only found a good law to throw at those who hire the services of spammers, sell access to compromised machines, sell address lists for fraudulent purposes, then we might get somewhere.
Several posters here have expressed an opinion that going to space would be the only way to find "freedom", what ever they mean with it. In my humble opinion, things would not be very much different out there for a long time. We would be bringing our earthly culture with us, with even more strict rules and regulations. For a long time any possible habitat would be owned by large corporations, and/or by earthly nations. In any case, they would be sure to insist on their red tape everywhere.
Of course at some point said colonies would get their independence, and presumably could offer some "freedom" for newcomers. Of course, acquiring independence has traditionally been a bloody mess, and as often as not has lead to a very unfree dictatorship...
Once independent, the new colonies would be kindly requested to sign trade treaties etc, and as a condition to doing so, promise protection for intellectual property etc. Until and unless they'd be totally self-sufficient, the colonies would have to agree to limit music downloads and software piracy and everything else the earthlings demand...
All in all, going to space will happen, it will be exciting, dangerous, and rewarding, but it will not provide much "freedom" in any way. That's my prediction.
I have received numerous email messages with your company standard disclaimer on the bottom. I hereby notify you that to my best knowledge, I have not signed any non-disclosure agreements with you. Therefore I am free to publish, disseminate, discuss, and use the information in said mails as I damn well please.
As a reasonable person, I am willing to find a compromise. If you compensate for my time and trouble, I am willing to send you copies of said emails. Let's say $100 a piece, or $20000 for the whole pile. After that you can make me an offer for a non-disclosure agreement, and if I find the terms agreeable, I may even sign it.
As a courtesy, I will remain relatively quiet about those mails and about this correspondance, for the next seven days. After that, I make no promises.
Way back, probably in the early 80's, I saw a guy tweak the Tiny Basic on our RCA-based computers, so that all the words were in Finnish. All 12 of them. He called if AKVOK, which was a direct translation of the "Beginners All-purpose Simple Instruction Code" into Finnish "Aloittelijan KaikkiValtias Ohjaus Koodi". For some reason nobody took him very seriously - but we all had great fun!
Please explain how pocket, portable computing would have been possible even ten years ago. The hardware was the limiting factor. Microsoft had nothing to do with it - the state of the semiconductor industry did. We didn't have CPUs that worked without sucking *lots* of juice. NMOS CPUs were very power hungry.
Low-power 8-bit Cmos processors have been available since the 1970's. I sold software for the RCA-1802 in 1979, and had been playing with it for some years before that.
The 1802 may not be nearly as powerfull as the chip in a modern Palm, but it certainly was enough to write a small calendar and phonebook application, if hand-coded in assembler. Battery-backed Cmos memory would have been possible too, at least to tens or hundreds of kb. Not sure of the input devices (pens etc) and displays, but even they were certainly available long before your "ten years ago".
The fine is a "cost of doing business" to Microsoft. The WMP/free OS is hitting MS where it hurts.
This fine does not hurt M$ too much. But it opens the door for many more fines, when (if?) M$ fails to comply with the ruling, or is found guilty of continued use of its usual business practices.
Remember that this verdict took 5 years to prepare. Meanwhile M$ has been doing business as usual, and I suppose competitors and users have been complaining to EU about various things, which may take a few years more to investigate.
In short, stay tuned for more fines! May they grow exponentially!
P.S. I love the idea of EU spending a good part of the fine money for improving and promoting Open Source Software!
On one hand we have SCO, who has no case, and needs all the publicity it can get to keep its stock afloat. On the other hand we have a large but not world famous hosting service that is just about to open a new data center, and could use more publicity. Both need the publicity, and what better way to announce a slightly controversial deal?
Yes, but that is only when you browse the web. When you mistype the address into anything else than a web browser (email address, ssh connection, ftp, vpn, ntp, Z39.50, any private protocol), the program is supposed to receive an error message, and handle it in some meaningful way. Instead the broken DNS gives you a sitefinder address, and your program tries to contact that. Most likely it will time out (in a few seconds), and report to the user that the server he wanted to contact is down. This causes lots of frustration among users, and lots of unnecessary support calls.
The analysis of the address lists is interesting enough, but what about the "helpful" software on the CDs? Probably some stuff to send mails, locate open proxies, forge this and that. Obviously stuff that was intended for criminal activity, and for which it would be hard to find legal excuses.
How about faking such software. It shouldn't be too hard to rewrite some of that so that it sends mail to abuse@(local.isp) informing them that this spamming program is running on this address, attempting to send this spam to so many addresses, through these open proxies... Cc to local law enforcement, press, and politicians. The program would have to send enough spam to make sure the culprit has committed the crime, but those could include the full path the mail has taken, and other interesting info.
Sell these doctored CDs over the net, just like the real McCoy. Custom code them to include all available information on the buyer, his address, and credit card number.
I have once installed Debian over ssh, after I got the owner of the box to boot Knoppix. I guess DeadRat might work as well - except that you need to be careful not to mess with the partition(s) where the system is living. The Knoppix CD contained Debian's install software, and Debians website had a guide (somewhere - lost the link ) on how to a very manual install. I had to do all the disk partitioning etc from the command line, but that should not scare a slashdot reader...
only thing is that if you get a manual-everything camera, even with a lot of practice, quickly getting a picture is nigh impossible
On the contrary, I find it nearly impossible to get a quick shot with all this automatics. If it takes 0.1 seconds to focus, it is too slow to catch a good shot from the car window.
The trick with all-manual cameras is to set everything up in advance. At normal daylight you can set it up to a decent speed, low enough aperture to have a deep enough area in focus. With a bit of practice (burn film!) you can shoot almost as fast as you can see a good picture. Train the reflex to lift the camera to your eye when ever you see something promising, and not to press the button more than every second time.
Slashdot Mirror
We only have a limited number of volcanoes on earth, and only of limited variety in type and structure. Seeing a few more of them, maybe of types we haven't seen here, might give us better insight on how such things work. Long time down the road, we might even get better in controlling, or at least predicting the behavior of the local ones.
Besides, active volcanoes indicate a planet has an active hot core, which would be interesting to know. Same argument as above, just substitute "planet" for "volcano"...
One of our core products is the YAZ toolkit for Z39.50 communications. That is under a BSD-style license, since it is in our interest to increase the use of Z39.50, and with it our potential market. In that we have succeeded well, we guess that about half of world's Z39.50 products are based on our tools, and we have made ourselves a name in the community of Z39.50 users.
Another core product, the Zebra search engine is licensed under GPL, because we don't mind small businesses and universities playing with it, but we don't want to see it absorbed into a competing product. We also sell commercial licenses for it, should someone want one.
Of course, we also do some custom work that remains closed source.
The difference for us is not the amount of patches we receive - that is about equal, and small in any case - but the different licenses serve different purposes.
Not all of us - I get paid to write (mostly) open source software by a small Danish company. Although it is "multinational" too - we have one man in England and two in USA.
I probably continue at my work, getting paid to write Open Source software. And some customized stuff based on our OS tools.
No, it is not a way to make millions. But an all right living, and some extra job satisfaction.
Could happen a bit earlier, already when there is a huge software market in the rest of the world, but most companies refuse to sell their stuff to the USA for fear of silly litigation. This might not be too far away.
I suspect this would fall foul on the European data protection laws. If I have no business relationship with (say) Amazon, they have no right to collect my personal information. The fact that someone else buys a thing for me does no give *my* consent to keep info on me, to spam me, or to inform other people about my private life, like anniversaries.
Of course, the branching factor and game-space size are not the only relevant considerations. In chess there is a simple and fast evaluation function (just count the pieces). Granted, it may not be perfect, but it is possible to write a decent chess program with just it, and a deep enough search.
Un(?)fortunately in go there is no such simple evaluation function. just moving one stone a bit can change a huge group from being an asset into being a liability. Estimating the status of a group is in itself a hugely complex problem. And there can be many groups on the board...
As they say, if chess can be compared to a battle, go can be compared to a war.
Of course, since it is an intersting game, and one that no computer plays all too well, there is some interest in writing a better go program. The (one of the??) Open Source alternative is http://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/gnugo.html
I don't know - I make a decent living writing GPL'd software. (To be honest, I must admit that I am not a Lone Coder doing this, but employed in a small company started by two Lone Coders.) The catch is the same as with other software: Find a niche where the customers want it badly enough to be willing to pay for it to be written.
GPL may kill the simplistic dream of writing a great piece of software, and getting rich from selling copies/licenses for ever. But in real life, that dream has not worked for very many people, especially not the Lone Coders...
If anything, GPL has made it easier for the Lone Coder to take a piece of software and improve and customize it, and make a living on consulting, installing, and supporting it. He no longer has to write everything from scratch, but can build on the work of others.
The T1000 doesn't look quite right. Especially the battery, it was a flat packet under the whole bottom of the laptop, weighing more than the rest together. The carrying handle was in the battery pack, not in the laptop itself! btw, I am not sure I remember the memory size right, it has been years since I tried to boot that thing.
Any idea what kind of server I could possibly make of that???
Of course you pay taxes when you buy inside EU. Actually, Denmark has one of the highest VATs in the world, at 25%. But you only pay taxes once, probably by the rate in the receiving country, and the seller will have to collect those taxes, so there is much less hazzle about paying them... And no customs or duties, and again no paperwork to clear those
It is a support contract. By buying one of those, you support the nice guy who wrote the program, and enable him to write more good and useful stuff.
That's not really a bright philosophy to follow in general.
Admittedly not. But some times I feel that way. Let me rephrase it: Anything that makes spamming operations less profitable or more difficult to run, must be good for the rest of us.
Although spam looks like a very international problem, I believe that a good number of spammers are based in the USA, they just use machines outside USA to do the dirty work. If this helps FTC to get to those spammers, and make their charges hold in court, all the better.
If they only found a good law to throw at those who hire the services of spammers, sell access to compromised machines, sell address lists for fraudulent purposes, then we might get somewhere.
Of course at some point said colonies would get their independence, and presumably could offer some "freedom" for newcomers. Of course, acquiring independence has traditionally been a bloody mess, and as often as not has lead to a very unfree dictatorship...
Once independent, the new colonies would be kindly requested to sign trade treaties etc, and as a condition to doing so, promise protection for intellectual property etc. Until and unless they'd be totally self-sufficient, the colonies would have to agree to limit music downloads and software piracy and everything else the earthlings demand...
All in all, going to space will happen, it will be exciting, dangerous, and rewarding, but it will not provide much "freedom" in any way. That's my prediction.
I have received numerous email messages with your company standard disclaimer on the bottom. I hereby notify you that to my best knowledge, I have not signed any non-disclosure agreements with you. Therefore I am free to publish, disseminate, discuss, and use the information in said mails as I damn well please.
As a reasonable person, I am willing to find a compromise. If you compensate for my time and trouble, I am willing to send you copies of said emails. Let's say $100 a piece, or $20000 for the whole pile. After that you can make me an offer for a non-disclosure agreement, and if I find the terms agreeable, I may even sign it.
As a courtesy, I will remain relatively quiet about those mails and about this correspondance, for the next seven days. After that, I make no promises.
Yours sincerely
J.Random Luser
Way back, probably in the early 80's, I saw a guy tweak the Tiny Basic on our RCA-based computers, so that all the words were in Finnish. All 12 of them. He called if AKVOK, which was a direct translation of the "Beginners All-purpose Simple Instruction Code" into Finnish "Aloittelijan KaikkiValtias Ohjaus Koodi". For some reason nobody took him very seriously - but we all had great fun!
Low-power 8-bit Cmos processors have been available since the 1970's. I sold software for the RCA-1802 in 1979, and had been playing with it for some years before that.
The 1802 may not be nearly as powerfull as the chip in a modern Palm, but it certainly was enough to write a small calendar and phonebook application, if hand-coded in assembler. Battery-backed Cmos memory would have been possible too, at least to tens or hundreds of kb. Not sure of the input devices (pens etc) and displays, but even they were certainly available long before your "ten years ago".
This fine does not hurt M$ too much. But it opens the door for many more fines, when (if?) M$ fails to comply with the ruling, or is found guilty of continued use of its usual business practices.
Remember that this verdict took 5 years to prepare. Meanwhile M$ has been doing business as usual, and I suppose competitors and users have been complaining to EU about various things, which may take a few years more to investigate.
In short, stay tuned for more fines! May they grow exponentially!
P.S. I love the idea of EU spending a good part of the fine money for improving and promoting Open Source Software!
Something like this: robots.txt
On one hand we have SCO, who has no case, and needs all the publicity it can get to keep its stock afloat. On the other hand we have a large but not world famous hosting service that is just about to open a new data center, and could use more publicity. Both need the publicity, and what better way to announce a slightly controversial deal?
Yes, but that is only when you browse the web. When you mistype the address into anything else than a web browser (email address, ssh connection, ftp, vpn, ntp, Z39.50, any private protocol), the program is supposed to receive an error message, and handle it in some meaningful way. Instead the broken DNS gives you a sitefinder address, and your program tries to contact that. Most likely it will time out (in a few seconds), and report to the user that the server he wanted to contact is down. This causes lots of frustration among users, and lots of unnecessary support calls.
How about faking such software. It shouldn't be too hard to rewrite some of that so that it sends mail to abuse@(local.isp) informing them that this spamming program is running on this address, attempting to send this spam to so many addresses, through these open proxies... Cc to local law enforcement, press, and politicians. The program would have to send enough spam to make sure the culprit has committed the crime, but those could include the full path the mail has taken, and other interesting info.
Sell these doctored CDs over the net, just like the real McCoy. Custom code them to include all available information on the buyer, his address, and credit card number.
I have once installed Debian over ssh, after I got the owner of the box to boot Knoppix. I guess DeadRat might work as well - except that you need to be careful not to mess with the partition(s) where the system is living. The Knoppix CD contained Debian's install software, and Debians website had a guide (somewhere - lost the link ) on how to a very manual install. I had to do all the disk partitioning etc from the command line, but that should not scare a slashdot reader...
On the contrary, I find it nearly impossible to get a quick shot with all this automatics. If it takes 0.1 seconds to focus, it is too slow to catch a good shot from the car window.
The trick with all-manual cameras is to set everything up in advance. At normal daylight you can set it up to a decent speed, low enough aperture to have a deep enough area in focus. With a bit of practice (burn film!) you can shoot almost as fast as you can see a good picture. Train the reflex to lift the camera to your eye when ever you see something promising, and not to press the button more than every second time.