Has any pure software company ever made money by releasing all its software under GPL? (and selling support?)
I don't know if my place of work qualifies, but it is getting close. We have a small handful of products. Some have always been free (mostly on BSD-style licences). We have just decided to drop commercial licences for our last product, and go with GPL. We sell support for the stuff, and also custom development. We may still sell licences of the big product for customers who rather pay us than accept GPL, although I expect that to be a rare thing.
This company, Index Data, has survived with this business model for 5 years now, and grown from 2 people to 8. Not big enough to rival Microsoft, but a well established company in its own right.
Since she got her MBA, she has lost or quit most of her tech duties and now manages projects, works on software budgets, etc...
Note those lines, and read them carefully! They warn you the very essense of MBA's - You end up as a manager. We all know how horrible mannagers are - they were not (all) born that way, the education and work experience turned them into assholes! It takes an unusually sever case of masochism to knowingly choose that road, especially if you already are moving in a better technical direction!
Should be easy to add the following warning to any page when viewed on IE6
This page should not contain any pink squiggly lines. If you see any, someone modified the page in transit, or more likely in your browser. You are reading a forgery and should not trust any links on this page, they may be added by third parties without the consent of the author, and are likely to add bias or misinformation to the page.
If this happens on a new computer you have just purchased, return it to the shop, and demand one that can show web pages without forgeries!
If this happens just after you "upgrade" your web browser or operating system, remove that "upgrade", or upgrade again to a more trustworthy system.
If this happens on a publicly accessible computer, complain to the owner of the computer that it is falsifying web pages, and have him read this notice!
In any case, do not trust any web pages this computer shows you.
You have a very limited time. Concentrate on the essentials! Skip the use of various programs - by the time your students want to use them, it is too late, they are out of date.
What is it that computers do? They follow instructions, fast, effecitvely, and literally. Instructions that are difficult to write - that is why we have highly paid professionals to write them - and that can go wrong. When they do go wrong, they do so fast, effectively, and literally.
Think of your classroom. Not necessarly the middle of it, but the fringes. You should be able to give something to the top 10% and the bottom 10% - at every lesson. If you get those 20% interested, the rest will follow without problems!
Most of all, do not teach practice, teach theory. For there is nothing as practical as a good theory!
Do not make the same mistake as the students are supposed to make - do not aim at the next test, or the yearly grades. Try to find something those kids will find valuable in ten years - and still be interesting today.
If I only had two teachers who grasped half of all this... May your students fare better than me...
As before, reproduction tech influenced the character of the music. Could a player piano reproduce a slow, soft Beethoven movement? It could try, but because the paper rolls allowed for no dynamic subtlety, every key would have been banged out exactly as loud as the next. If anyone tried selling a Beethoven piano roll, they lost their shirts -- evolution in action.
Well, the player piano - or organ - rolls had been known long before Beethoven. True, the "modern" gallant style did not fit well for such scrolls, but organ or harpsichord music of Scarlatti, Couperin, Handel, or Bach was composed for instruments that were not supposed to be capable of "Beethovenian" dynamics - and still more than well suited for seriously good music!
From Bach's popularization of the well-tempered scale (exchanging a small harmonic sweetness for huge harmonic flexibility)
One should be careful not to translate the "well-temperiert clavier" as the "equally tempered piano". The discussion of what Bach actually meant with the title is still going strong in the academic circles, but it is not at all sure that he meant an equal temperament as we know it now (for one thing, they had no electronic meter at Bach's time, so every temperament was set by hand and gut feeling - hardly equal by modern standards).
Also, it is blatantly wrong to credit Bach for the invention - or popularizing - of the equal temperament, it was known to theorists amd lute/guitar builders at least in early 1500's, but practicing musicians were not (at all) willing to make that compromise - they valued the pure intervals too high.
- Heikki
who actually owns a harpsichord
and can tune it, with only a tuning
fork and a keen ear!
If Microsoft has not got further, it must be beacuse of all the giants standing on its shoulders: DoJ, Linux, IBM, Gnu, Netscape, Word Perfect, Lotus, Borlans, Apple, Corel,
2. What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in its most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form?
Academic study of any small detail of the film. Music history depends a lot on studies of the papers and inks used in making original manuscripts. No photocopy, how ever good, will suffice for this sort of academic research.
Classical studies tabulate the frequencies and distributions of individual letters, words, phrases, and constructs in old texts, and gain useful insight into questions of authorship, for example which roles Shakespeare himself played in his plays, and how repeating those lines had a subtle effect to his language in following plays...
I would expect future studies of film history want to make similar studies on various technical details of different films. For example, studying westerns, one researcher might need to get a slowed-down close-up view of every time a gun was drawn in various films... Or similar close-ups on various film tricks (digital and others) to show and appreciate the craftmanship of the makers.
Invita Koekkener is an old player on the Danish market for kichen furniture. The addresses and names mentioned above seem legitimate enough for a Danish company. www.invita.com seems to talk about their stuff.
The evaluation functions for Go are not so bad, actually. The biggest problem is branching - the huge number of possible moves from any given position in the opening and middlegame
I beg to disagree. In order to evaluate a position, you need to have some idea which groups are alive, strong, uncertain, weak, or dead. There are some simple heuristics for this, but they are pretty bad. The only way to be sure (at least of the extreme cases, dead or alive), is to read the positions out. This sort of tactical reading may require quite deep local reading, and isolating the borders of each tactical situation is far from trivial. A mistake in any of this may throw the evaluation off by a hundred points, making it worse than useless.
I think GnuGo is typical in that it does no global reading at all, only the local tactical stuff, and from that it estimates the value of several promising-looking moves, and chooses the best. On a fast machine it can do this in 10-60 seconds. Doing global read-ahead for the most promising moves, and their most obvious responses would slow this by a factor of 10 at least. And, not having a good positional evaluation function, might not give us anything at all. I do not see GnuGo going this way in the foreseeable future.
Go endgames are entirely deterministic. A good go player (say 3 dan or better) can read out endgames pretty much flawlessly, as can a computer.
Sorry, it isn't quite that simple. There is a matemathical endgame theory that covers the last point on the board (Berlekamp). It has been demonstrated that even professional players occasionally miss the last point in complex situations. unfortunately the theory does not generalize well for earlier positions...
Not true scientific evidence, but at least a one-nation experience: Pornography was decriminalized in Denmark many years ago (1969?), and the crime rates seem to have been on level with our neighbours. Porn is freely available, also "alternative" styles like gay, S/M, and so on. Pedophilia was recently criminalized, mostly to protect the models used in the production of such. Even when that discussion was on its hottest, the small minority that wants to limit pornography did not manage to come up with conclusive studies showing much ill effects of porn.
Knowing how many clueless users there is in any organization, can a responsible sysadmin allow any sort of traffic from a corporate firewall to any sites "associated" with this "Passport" "service" ?
"Your mail to manager@bigcompany.com" had a delivery failure because of the following reason: Due to legal and ethical considerations we can not engage in communications with organizations that violate elementary privacy rules. If you wish to contact us, please do so through a reputable service provider"
If yahoo had an option where you could submit a site that you think had off-topic keywords [...] and they wouldc ompletely remove all occurances of an offending site from their database [...]
This would require a lot of human verification, for there are many possibilities for abuse. I could always report my competitors for false keywords, just to keep them out of the listings.
And as soon as we get to more exotic topics, who can say if a keyword is relevant or not? And how relevant is relevant anyway - if a porn site does have many pictures of women getting out of girl-scout uniforms, is "girl-scout" a valid keyword?
There are simple ranking algorithms, that weigh uncommon keywords more, and take into consideration how many keywords the site claims to relate to. These might be more effective.
To land near the MPL, locate it, and find out *how* the Martians shot it down. This without suffering the same fate... For that they will be needing more support from the.mil guys.
Sad thing, that the first contact had to be so hostile.
The prohibition on standard subjects (Rule 4) is especially absurd. [...] These rules would force game developers to reinvent the wheel each time they start development. They would not only have to hire programmers and artists, but also a team of writers, and about a dozen designers.
Yes, this is the whole point of the exercise. To "force" those game-developers who wish to do things this way, to create new kind of games, with fresh ideas everywhere.
Note that not all games have to be done this way. There has been a few Dogme-films around, and meanwhile Hollywood et al. have turnet out a great number of traditional flicks. But most of the dogme films have been quite successfull, and many non-dogme film makers have got inspiration of them.
I welcome this idea, and look forward to seeing the results, also in other games...
Three-step proposal: 1) Urge all ISP's to add a clause that in their policy that sending mail with forged headers will cause termination of service and a fine of $25 per mail sent. 2) Invest 10% of the income from these fines in rewards for catching elusive spammers and providing evidence against them. 3) Tighten the laws in various countries so that sending mail with forged headers counts as fraud, mail fraud, or something similar, and is punishable by a hefty fine or even jail time. If possible criminalize the sending of forged mail from anywhere to within the jurisdiction, as well as from the jurisdction to anywhere in the world.
This still leaves those spammers who actually use their own name in the neaders, but they are a minority, and knowing who they are, we can organize boycotts, mail campaigns, and other forms of civil disobedience to make them see the errors of their ways.
Second systems are typically easier to write because the hard part is already done: transforming the mental model of the system into real, working code
True, but on one serious condition: The rewrite is done by the same person(s) as the original. When rewriting someone else's code, you are will have to map the other guys mental model from his source, form your own map of how things should be, and transform that into code. Much less effective than rewriting your own code, where you can reuse the mental map you built the first time, especially the parts you realized when it was too late to change, and had to kludge your code to work anyway.
I don't really understand all this US politics, but to me it sounds like they are saying that last year a top notch PC could have been used to design a bomb that was a real danger to the U.S. This year, everyone can buy those computers from te far east, so there is no point in regulating them. Now they try to regulate some unspecified software that may allow the nasty guys to develop even nastier bombs that are an even greater threat to the U.S.
The thing I do not understand is this: Has the U.S. defence system get so much better that the dangerous bomb of yesteryear is no threat today?
If (say) Southern Swahililand could have developed a serious weapon last year with last years computers, how come today this is not worth worrying about, but a theoretical possibility of developing double as big bomb is?
if anyone wanted to take out Washington DC, they'd just ship in an old-fashioned bomb in a container. If anyone wanted to defend against an US invasion, they'd just bury the same old-fashioned bomb in the ground, retreat, and let it detonate when US troops were over it. No high-tech required!
To rephrase: What is USA afraid of? There has been enough serious weapons to worry about for at least 30 years. So far none have been used against USA or its allies.
I admit freely that I do not understand the technicalities of this, but there seems to be a large are reserved for various encryption keys. Where do they come from, how do they get to the disk, and most of all, who controls them? How long before Napster Inc, Gnutella.Org, and EFF have their own keys that just happen to be identical over all machines?
How can it work, anyway? Data goes to the disk, Data comes out of the disk, and can be grabbed. Encrypted data goes to the disk, comes out decrypted, and can be grabbed. If nothing else, someone can simulate a display/sound card on a virtual machine, and grab the data at that point. Once *one* person has extracted the data, it can be shared like any other data. They can not seriously hope to stop all email and file transfers, can they?
Judging from the fact that the monolith appears on various locations and checks on various life forms, it must be on the first part of its mission. If it succeeds, we may see intelligent life on this planet in a few million years.
Cracking and defacing web sites may be exciting and a thrill to youngsters, but how many of them are really to have the patience to do a serious security audit? That is (should be) lot of paper work, and boring checklists.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if my place of work qualifies, but it is getting close. We have a small handful of products. Some have always been free (mostly on BSD-style licences). We have just decided to drop commercial licences for our last product, and go with GPL. We sell support for the stuff, and also custom development. We may still sell licences of the big product for customers who rather pay us than accept GPL, although I expect that to be a rare thing.
This company, Index Data, has survived with this business model for 5 years now, and grown from 2 people to 8. Not big enough to rival Microsoft, but a well established company in its own right.
Note those lines, and read them carefully! They warn you the very essense of MBA's - You end up as a manager. We all know how horrible mannagers are - they were not (all) born that way, the education and work experience turned them into assholes! It takes an unusually sever case of masochism to knowingly choose that road, especially if you already are moving in a better technical direction!
This page should not contain any pink squiggly lines. If you see any, someone modified the page in transit, or more likely in your browser. You are reading a forgery and should not trust any links on this page, they may be added by third parties without the consent of the author, and are likely to add bias or misinformation to the page.
If this happens on a new computer you have just purchased, return it to the shop, and demand one that can show web pages without forgeries!
If this happens just after you "upgrade" your web browser or operating system, remove that "upgrade", or upgrade again to a more trustworthy system.
If this happens on a publicly accessible computer, complain to the owner of the computer that it is falsifying web pages, and have him read this notice!
In any case, do not trust any web pages this computer shows you.
What is it that computers do? They follow instructions, fast, effecitvely, and literally. Instructions that are difficult to write - that is why we have highly paid professionals to write them - and that can go wrong. When they do go wrong, they do so fast, effectively, and literally.
Think of your classroom. Not necessarly the middle of it, but the fringes. You should be able to give something to the top 10% and the bottom 10% - at every lesson. If you get those 20% interested, the rest will follow without problems!
Most of all, do not teach practice, teach theory. For there is nothing as practical as a good theory!
Do not make the same mistake as the students are supposed to make - do not aim at the next test, or the yearly grades. Try to find something those kids will find valuable in ten years - and still be interesting today.
If I only had two teachers who grasped half of all this... May your students fare better than me...
I think some Handel's followers recorded his music on organ rolls that sounded "just like the Maestro himself", soon after his death, 1759.
Well, the player piano - or organ - rolls had been known long before Beethoven. True, the "modern" gallant style did not fit well for such scrolls, but organ or harpsichord music of Scarlatti, Couperin, Handel, or Bach was composed for instruments that were not supposed to be capable of "Beethovenian" dynamics - and still more than well suited for seriously good music!
One should be careful not to translate the "well-temperiert clavier" as the "equally tempered piano". The discussion of what Bach actually meant with the title is still going strong in the academic circles, but it is not at all sure that he meant an equal temperament as we know it now (for one thing, they had no electronic meter at Bach's time, so every temperament was set by hand and gut feeling - hardly equal by modern standards).
Also, it is blatantly wrong to credit Bach for the invention - or popularizing - of the equal temperament, it was known to theorists amd lute/guitar builders at least in early 1500's, but practicing musicians were not (at all) willing to make that compromise - they valued the pure intervals too high.
- Heikki
who actually owns a harpsichord and can tune it, with only a tuning fork and a keen ear!
If Microsoft has not got further, it must be beacuse of all the giants standing on its shoulders: DoJ, Linux, IBM, Gnu, Netscape, Word Perfect, Lotus, Borlans, Apple, Corel,
Academic study of any small detail of the film. Music history depends a lot on studies of the papers and inks used in making original manuscripts. No photocopy, how ever good, will suffice for this sort of academic research.
Classical studies tabulate the frequencies and distributions of individual letters, words, phrases, and constructs in old texts, and gain useful insight into questions of authorship, for example which roles Shakespeare himself played in his plays, and how repeating those lines had a subtle effect to his language in following plays...
I would expect future studies of film history want to make similar studies on various technical details of different films. For example, studying westerns, one researcher might need to get a slowed-down close-up view of every time a gun was drawn in various films... Or similar close-ups on various film tricks (digital and others) to show and appreciate the craftmanship of the makers.
Invita Koekkener is an old player on the Danish market for kichen furniture. The addresses and names mentioned above seem legitimate enough for a Danish company. www.invita.com seems to talk about their stuff.
I beg to disagree. In order to evaluate a position, you need to have some idea which groups are alive, strong, uncertain, weak, or dead. There are some simple heuristics for this, but they are pretty bad. The only way to be sure (at least of the extreme cases, dead or alive), is to read the positions out. This sort of tactical reading may require quite deep local reading, and isolating the borders of each tactical situation is far from trivial. A mistake in any of this may throw the evaluation off by a hundred points, making it worse than useless.
I think GnuGo is typical in that it does no global reading at all, only the local tactical stuff, and from that it estimates the value of several promising-looking moves, and chooses the best. On a fast machine it can do this in 10-60 seconds. Doing global read-ahead for the most promising moves, and their most obvious responses would slow this by a factor of 10 at least. And, not having a good positional evaluation function, might not give us anything at all. I do not see GnuGo going this way in the foreseeable future.
Sorry, it isn't quite that simple. There is a matemathical endgame theory that covers the last point on the board (Berlekamp). It has been demonstrated that even professional players occasionally miss the last point in complex situations. unfortunately the theory does not generalize well for earlier positions...
Not true scientific evidence, but at least a one-nation experience: Pornography was decriminalized in Denmark many years ago (1969?), and the crime rates seem to have been on level with our neighbours. Porn is freely available, also "alternative" styles like gay, S/M, and so on. Pedophilia was recently criminalized, mostly to protect the models used in the production of such. Even when that discussion was on its hottest, the small minority that wants to limit pornography did not manage to come up with conclusive studies showing much ill effects of porn.
So, you want me to believe there are 200 free sites for every commercial sex site. This must be some new definition of free that I am not aware of...
"Your mail to manager@bigcompany.com" had a delivery failure because of the following reason: Due to legal and ethical considerations we can not engage in communications with organizations that violate elementary privacy rules. If you wish to contact us, please do so through a reputable service provider"
This would require a lot of human verification, for there are many possibilities for abuse. I could always report my competitors for false keywords, just to keep them out of the listings. And as soon as we get to more exotic topics, who can say if a keyword is relevant or not? And how relevant is relevant anyway - if a porn site does have many pictures of women getting out of girl-scout uniforms, is "girl-scout" a valid keyword?
There are simple ranking algorithms, that weigh uncommon keywords more, and take into consideration how many keywords the site claims to relate to. These might be more effective.
Sad thing, that the first contact had to be so hostile.
Yes, this is the whole point of the exercise. To "force" those game-developers who wish to do things this way, to create new kind of games, with fresh ideas everywhere.
Note that not all games have to be done this way. There has been a few Dogme-films around, and meanwhile Hollywood et al. have turnet out a great number of traditional flicks. But most of the dogme films have been quite successfull, and many non-dogme film makers have got inspiration of them.
I welcome this idea, and look forward to seeing the results, also in other games...
Tactical guess: 2000-02-20 01:01:01 At least I'll know soon that I did not win ;-)
1) Urge all ISP's to add a clause that in their policy that sending mail with forged headers will cause termination of service and a fine of $25 per mail sent.
2) Invest 10% of the income from these fines in rewards for catching elusive spammers and providing evidence against them.
3) Tighten the laws in various countries so that sending mail with forged headers counts as fraud, mail fraud, or something similar, and is punishable by a hefty fine or even jail time. If possible criminalize the sending of forged mail from anywhere to within the jurisdiction, as well as from the jurisdction to anywhere in the world.
This still leaves those spammers who actually use their own name in the neaders, but they are a minority, and knowing who they are, we can organize boycotts, mail campaigns, and other forms of civil disobedience to make them see the errors of their ways.
True, but on one serious condition: The rewrite is done by the same person(s) as the original. When rewriting someone else's code, you are will have to map the other guys mental model from his source, form your own map of how things should be, and transform that into code. Much less effective than rewriting your own code, where you can reuse the mental map you built the first time, especially the parts you realized when it was too late to change, and had to kludge your code to work anyway.
The thing I do not understand is this: Has the U.S. defence system get so much better that the dangerous bomb of yesteryear is no threat today?
If (say) Southern Swahililand could have developed a serious weapon last year with last years computers, how come today this is not worth worrying about, but a theoretical possibility of developing double as big bomb is?
if anyone wanted to take out Washington DC, they'd just ship in an old-fashioned bomb in a container. If anyone wanted to defend against an US invasion, they'd just bury the same old-fashioned bomb in the ground, retreat, and let it detonate when US troops were over it. No high-tech required! To rephrase: What is USA afraid of? There has been enough serious weapons to worry about for at least 30 years. So far none have been used against USA or its allies.
How can it work, anyway? Data goes to the disk, Data comes out of the disk, and can be grabbed. Encrypted data goes to the disk, comes out decrypted, and can be grabbed. If nothing else, someone can simulate a display/sound card on a virtual machine, and grab the data at that point. Once *one* person has extracted the data, it can be shared like any other data. They can not seriously hope to stop all email and file transfers, can they?
Judging from the fact that the monolith appears on various locations and checks on various life forms, it must be on the first part of its mission. If it succeeds, we may see intelligent life on this planet in a few million years.
Cracking and defacing web sites may be exciting and a thrill to youngsters, but how many of them are really to have the patience to do a serious security audit? That is (should be) lot of paper work, and boring checklists.