While Nielsen households are not a completely random sample of the viewing audience, they are accurate enough to represent the viewership audience per show within an acceptable margin of error.
Most of us call "acceptable margin of error" College Students.
You think I'm kidding. How many college students are there in the US? They ALL watch TV. I've never even heard of a college kid with a neilson box. It doesn't happen. They say our tastes are too eclectic. What they don't realize is that, while we don't have all the money in the world, most of us are very impressionable, and would respond to targeted advertising.
Neilson ratings are why shows like Farscape and The Family Guy get the axe. Everyone assumes no one watches them because sophisticated baby boomers and pretentious 30-somethings don't watch cheezy-looking sci-fi channel shows or raunchy cartoons on fox. But I'm not above potty humor, and I'm certainly not above looking through the non-star-trek-budget cast and set to see the genious plotlines.
It's a lost cause. I hate to say it, and I'm still going to watch, but I think it's over.
I'd say the hardest part is actually making a fun, interesting game, while still maintaining a shiny patina of graphical goodness.
Tell it to Neverwinter Nights. I'd imagine they spent significantly more time on the building tools and engine than the single player game.
Not taking anything away from the single player game, it was amazing, and took me damn near 100 hours. I think NWN is a good example (and there are few) of a game which spent far-too-long in development, and still came out as a fantastic success, i.e. worth the wait. It's certainly the only game I've bought in recent memory, and that's after using a cracked copy for a while. All 4 roommates in my apartment own a legit copy of NWN. It's that damn good.
Amazing. That's just about the same specs that Maximum PC put in their Dream Machine 2002.
Of course, that was dead tree form, and 2 months ago, so Slashdot is amazed by this computer because it's advertised online.
All these componants are available, and have been for a while. If you want to make one of these, go for it. Grab a ThermalTake case or a VapoChill, an Intel board and 1GB of PC1066 with a 2.8/2.whatever, and go to town. Overclock your 9700 pro.
It's not special. It's just special to slashdot. Or, if you prefer:
Unless you have a raid controller on your motherboard.
Oh, and it looks like a sweaty set of nuts under links.
Oh, and it's not a linux gaming platform, cause, you know, it's a windows game, ported to linux.
Jesus. Stop bitching about "no games for linux" and buy a gaming machine and put windows on it. Get over your need to run linux. Clue-by-four: If you're opposed to running windows cause it's not free (speech), if you're running linux to get around that, most games ported to linux aren't free either. You think they're going to GPL the NWN linux port?
No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.
Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.
Hi-Ho, a trolling we go, eh?
Look, I'll make this very simple. Plain text webpages are ugly. XHTML compatable pages are ugly. HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly. Leaving the border around your image link is ugly. Not using tables is ugly.
Why do you think people hire webdesigners? Because they know how to create an eye catching site. Why do you think magazines look like they look? Because, through trial and error, they have found what works.
People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic. Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.
I don't care what this loser says, he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact. You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.
Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like". Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.
For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck. Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.
Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.
This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.
Heh. It's running Red Hat 7.2. Because the customer wanted to run Plesk. Which, on that machine, is administoring something like 8500 domains. Don't get me wrong, the box rocks... and most problems we have with it are poor programming in plesk... but yeah. The Solaris box is running Solaris 7, and the other box (the P-III) is running RH7.2 with a 2.4.19 kernel, with a bunch of patches (low-latency, pre-emptive, etc.).
What I was refering to was "if you would like an SVR4-ish OS on an x86 platform". Trying not to say Linux. Trying to say if you wanted an SVR4 on x86, I don't know of anything other than Solaris, and I thought BSD had been forked from an SVR4 tree somewhere along the line. Solaris is def. not anything like a posix system.
Suppose you believe a 1Ghz G4 outdoes a pentium IV 4Ghz too?
It is almost as fast in Distributed.net calculations.
No, what I'm saying is: our 4x300 Mhz UltraSparc II system w/ 1 GB of ram compiles things faster than a dual p-3 1.4 w/ 3 GB of ram. Just as I stated in the origional post.
We have some old 4m's (LX/Classics) that still work great. Basically, something i've noticed about Sparc chips is that they don't ever give up. I'm not sure how to quantify this... On an x86 chip, if you slam it with processes, usage, whatever, sometimes they choke. Sparc chips just keep chugging. They may be working slower than they are getting requests for CPU time, but they just keep chugging along.
I don't know, i've never used anything but Sun and x86 for hosting, and, while I'd always buy an x86 because of the fact that I prefer linux and am cheap, I can say that the Sparc hardware, in my personal expierence, is higher quality.
Agreed. Very few people run sun software on x86 hardware in a production environment. Most of it is for testing, and/or just checking it out to see what it's about.
Don't run solaris on x86 arch because it's supposedly better. On x86, there are much better OS's. If you really want an SVR4-ish nix, use a bsd or something. I don't know of any popular ones other than solaris. Whatever.
Solaris hardware - I don't know about it being stable - it is as much as anything else, but it lasts forever and is hard working as crap. We still use Sun IPC's at my job, they're 12 mhz, late 80's or early 90's I think, and they still work great. Some of them the batteries have gone out - imagine that - the (soldered in) cmos battery goes out before the motherboard/proc/ethernet controler, etc fail. They're great for console access - if they don't detect a keyboard and monitor, output straight out the serial port. Solaris hardware doesn't run D.net fast, but it sure does compile things fast. Startelingly so. We have a Dual-Pentium III 1.4 Tualtin with 3 gigs of ram, and it compiles things significantly slower than our 4x300Mhz Ultra II with 1GB of ram, despite being "twice as fast".
This is the advantage of sun. The hardware rocks. The software is built to match the hardware. I think it was more of them saying "yeah, well, if you guys want it on x86, here you go, but be aware it sucks." It might have actually made them money in that people would buy sun hardware after trying it on x86 and giving up on the crappy hardware.
Their market is small, their niche is narrow, and their execution is bush.
... and their enterprise computers are just about the best in the business. If you want a powerful mainframe type computer, Sun is your go-to guy. They offer superrior hardware (Ultra III risc chips, etc), great service, and a fantastic operating system. I've heard people claim that solaris sucks because it's so archaic. This is exactly why it works so well - it's been around for a long time, and it's tried and tested.
There's an age-old balance, people. It's called ease-of-use versus power-and-stability. Solaris is not easy to use. It's harder to use than linux. But compare solars 7 to linux... solaris scales well down to the 12 Mhz sun 4c IPC range, while the same OS works great for enterprise servers with 64 Ultra III 500Mhz risc chips. That's scalability. It wasn't until solaris 8 that they gave up on the 4c arch. The 4m still scales well (50-110 mhz range, etc).
If you're looking to buy a 1.3 million dollar computer, you look at sun. The small-computer market isn't the majority of their business dollars. It's the top dogs. Yet, they still listen to the people who like solaris enough to want to use it on x86. How can you fault them for this?
Granted, 1.3 million dollar computers make up a small "niche" of the market. But someone has to fill it, and there is a lot of cash in 1.3 million.
You should really think about just installing solaris 7 or 8 on that. We have a few IPC/IPx's and Classics/LX's at work, (4c / 4m arch), and Linux runs like a turtle on uphill glass. It's aweful. Yet, it's either solaris 5.5.7 or solaris 7 runs smooth as can be, on everything from the IPC 12 mhz 4c's to our quad-proc 4X300 Ultra II.
I don't particularly like solaris (or any SVR4), but for sun hardware, you'll be pleased with the performance gain.
Of course, this is all contingent on it being used as a server. I hate openwindows. For a desktop, I'd rather run.. well anything but openwindows.
Plus, what about Johnny Gifted-teen in his basement. What happens when he writes a brilliant piece of code that MegaCorp snatches up and puts in their BigSoftware? Johnny sues them? With what resources? Do you know what it costs to sue a fortune 500 company? Hell, the government can't even do it successfully.
You don't think that happens today with open source software?
Oh, i imagine it happens. I'm just suggesting that distributing all source code everywhere is not the answer to the problem. Knowing it is happening isn't necessacarily going to change the practice.
You realize you're suggesting security through obscurity?
Yes.
Yes, I am suggesting security through obscurity.
Security software should not depend on a secret algorithm. Someone will find out eventually.
Yes, but with the source code, someone would be given a map. Without the source, someone would have to fly over and do their own reconnissance, have someone on the inside, and try a number of things.
Also keep in mind that by making it a uniform requirement for copyright protection, no one has an advantage over another and no one can "steal" another's code without it being quickly found out.
Don't hide under the pretense of the protection of the law. If I write a wham-bam piece of software, and some big software company steals it, what recourse do I have? Sue them? With what time and money. Remember, I write software, my time is money. If they throw a team of $400/hr lawyers at me, and I have only myself to wade through the mountain of paperwork, then I'm farked.
It's probably a discount, or a rebate. You know, your site licence for 100 computers costs 240,000 dollars. Now, we have a special promotion that's 50% off. Or, you get a good customer discount. Or something.
That's not what this author is proposing. He is proposing the source be available for inspection, just like bridge blueprints are available for inspection, but they still can't be copied, because they are still copyrighted...
Not all blueprints are available. Bridges are (usually) public works. Try and get me the blueprints for the wing on a 747. What? Not available? I wonder why that is? Oh, *trade secret*.
Lawsuits don't solve everything. Yes, if everyone's code was open, you could spot similar pieces of code. But, come on, code plagarism isn't hard. Also, what if several people accidentally wrote the same code at roughly the same time and sued each other.
Plus, what about Johnny Gifted-teen in his basement. What happens when he writes a brilliant piece of code that MegaCorp snatches up and puts in their BigSoftware? Johnny sues them? With what resources? Do you know what it costs to sue a fortune 500 company? Hell, the government can't even do it successfully.
If all source is open but copyrighted, in theory it would all be a happy world. In practice, it's a simple way to screw the little guy and for the lawyers to make a mint.
Think before you kick in the automated slashdot responder, please.
If I pay for something you spend 400 hours writing, I want the source to that as well. The source is part of the product.
This is completely wrong, and I hope everyone realizes this.
If you pay for a program, you pay for the binary. You now own a program that will perform to the specified dimensions. You do NOT own the source. Presumably, you would want the source to make modifications to it. Well, depending on the licence that the program is released with, too bad. You may not get to tinker with the source. Not everything is GPL'd, and for a good reason, folks.
Like the other reply to this post, if you want to see the source, come talk to me, we'll sign a non-disclosure agreement, and then we can negotiate a price for a source licence.
Think security software - say, your intranet system. You don't want your customers to have the source to that, because 1.) they probably wouldn't know what to do with it, 2.) it might fall into the wrong hands, or 3.) if they do manage to muck through it and change things, and somehow make their secure data hackable, there's a liability issue.
There are only two other reasons you would want the source - to steal the program or to just sit and stare at it.
With a binary, or a CD, or whatever, you can add copy protection. Source code is just text. Cut, Copy, Paste, Compile. Now your friend has a working copy of a program he didn't pay for.
No, the grandparent is right. If someone spends months developing an application, they shouldn't have to release their source code. I can't think of a better way to shoot yourself in the foot.
Think the airplane business. When you buy a 757, you don't get the blueprints for the wing. That's a trade secret.
Note to new slashdot readers: This is typical thinking on slashdot. I want EVERYTHING for free. If it's not free, it's wrong. I want the source code to everything, because I feel that I could do a better job writing this software by mucking it up. What they mean is that they want to steal it if it isn't free. Don't fall into this trap. Some software should be closed source, and some people have to put food on the table.
Microsoft probably won't put in any significant look and feel changes until much later in the testing program, probably someplace around beta 3.
Not true. I had a time release copy of codename whistler early in 2000, and it later became XP. The interface was virtually identical to the final XP release, well over a year before it came out.
Unlike you I make a 6 figure income, and so can afford CDs. I also don't have a taste for the mainstream music that you find overrepresented on P2P networks. So in the last month I spent over $200 on CDs.
Yeah, I make a six figure income, to two decimal precision. I can't afford CD's. However, I do find a lot of the stuff i'm looking for on P2P - indie punk has a fairly large representation on kazaa. ~Unlike you I make a 6 figure income, and so can afford CDs. I also don't have a taste for the mainstream music that you find overrepresented on P2P networks. So in the last month I spent over $200 on CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
While Nielsen households are not a completely random sample of the viewing audience, they are accurate enough to represent the viewership audience per show within an acceptable margin of error.
Most of us call "acceptable margin of error" College Students.
You think I'm kidding. How many college students are there in the US? They ALL watch TV. I've never even heard of a college kid with a neilson box. It doesn't happen. They say our tastes are too eclectic. What they don't realize is that, while we don't have all the money in the world, most of us are very impressionable, and would respond to targeted advertising.
Neilson ratings are why shows like Farscape and The Family Guy get the axe. Everyone assumes no one watches them because sophisticated baby boomers and pretentious 30-somethings don't watch cheezy-looking sci-fi channel shows or raunchy cartoons on fox. But I'm not above potty humor, and I'm certainly not above looking through the non-star-trek-budget cast and set to see the genious plotlines.
It's a lost cause. I hate to say it, and I'm still going to watch, but I think it's over.
~Wx
I'd say the hardest part is actually making a fun, interesting game, while still maintaining a shiny patina of graphical goodness.
Tell it to Neverwinter Nights. I'd imagine they spent significantly more time on the building tools and engine than the single player game.
Not taking anything away from the single player game, it was amazing, and took me damn near 100 hours. I think NWN is a good example (and there are few) of a game which spent far-too-long in development, and still came out as a fantastic success, i.e. worth the wait. It's certainly the only game I've bought in recent memory, and that's after using a cracked copy for a while. All 4 roommates in my apartment own a legit copy of NWN. It's that damn good.
Amazing. That's just about the same specs that Maximum PC put in their Dream Machine 2002.
Of course, that was dead tree form, and 2 months ago, so Slashdot is amazed by this computer because it's advertised online.
All these componants are available, and have been for a while. If you want to make one of these, go for it. Grab a ThermalTake case or a VapoChill, an Intel board and 1GB of PC1066 with a 2.8/2.whatever, and go to town. Overclock your 9700 pro.
It's not special. It's just special to slashdot.
Or, if you prefer:
Old and busted... New hotness.
Unless you have a raid controller on your motherboard.
Oh, and it looks like a sweaty set of nuts under links.
Oh, and it's not a linux gaming platform, cause, you know, it's a windows game, ported to linux.
Jesus. Stop bitching about "no games for linux" and buy a gaming machine and put windows on it. Get over your need to run linux. Clue-by-four: If you're opposed to running windows cause it's not free (speech), if you're running linux to get around that, most games ported to linux aren't free either. You think they're going to GPL the NWN linux port?
Hey.
How about this?
Green screen of death.
~Will
No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.
Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.
Hi-Ho, a trolling we go, eh?
Look, I'll make this very simple. Plain text webpages are ugly. XHTML compatable pages are ugly. HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly. Leaving the border around your image link is ugly. Not using tables is ugly.
Why do you think people hire webdesigners? Because they know how to create an eye catching site. Why do you think magazines look like they look? Because, through trial and error, they have found what works.
People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic. Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.
I don't care what this loser says, he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact. You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.
Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying. Or, take a look at some of the work they've done.
Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like". Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.
For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck. Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.
Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.
This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.
~Will
See also fark.com, which turned the Soviet Russia thing into a cliche. As well as the domo-kun, cliche kitty, admiral ackbar, etc.
Heh.
It's running Red Hat 7.2. Because the customer wanted to run Plesk. Which, on that machine, is administoring something like 8500 domains. Don't get me wrong, the box rocks... and most problems we have with it are poor programming in plesk... but yeah. The Solaris box is running Solaris 7, and the other box (the P-III) is running RH7.2 with a 2.4.19 kernel, with a bunch of patches (low-latency, pre-emptive, etc.).
Linux on a Sparc box sux, by the way.
What I was refering to was "if you would like an SVR4-ish OS on an x86 platform". Trying not to say Linux. Trying to say if you wanted an SVR4 on x86, I don't know of anything other than Solaris, and I thought BSD had been forked from an SVR4 tree somewhere along the line. Solaris is def. not anything like a posix system.
Suppose you believe a 1Ghz G4 outdoes a pentium IV 4Ghz too?
It is almost as fast in Distributed.net calculations.
No, what I'm saying is:
our 4x300 Mhz UltraSparc II system w/ 1 GB of ram compiles things faster than a dual p-3 1.4 w/ 3 GB of ram. Just as I stated in the origional post.
We have some old 4m's (LX/Classics) that still work great. Basically, something i've noticed about Sparc chips is that they don't ever give up. I'm not sure how to quantify this... On an x86 chip, if you slam it with processes, usage, whatever, sometimes they choke. Sparc chips just keep chugging. They may be working slower than they are getting requests for CPU time, but they just keep chugging along.
I don't know, i've never used anything but Sun and x86 for hosting, and, while I'd always buy an x86 because of the fact that I prefer linux and am cheap, I can say that the Sparc hardware, in my personal expierence, is higher quality.
Agreed. Very few people run sun software on x86 hardware in a production environment. Most of it is for testing, and/or just checking it out to see what it's about.
Don't run solaris on x86 arch because it's supposedly better. On x86, there are much better OS's. If you really want an SVR4-ish nix, use a bsd or something. I don't know of any popular ones other than solaris. Whatever.
Solaris hardware - I don't know about it being stable - it is as much as anything else, but it lasts forever and is hard working as crap. We still use Sun IPC's at my job, they're 12 mhz, late 80's or early 90's I think, and they still work great. Some of them the batteries have gone out - imagine that - the (soldered in) cmos battery goes out before the motherboard/proc/ethernet controler, etc fail. They're great for console access - if they don't detect a keyboard and monitor, output straight out the serial port.
Solaris hardware doesn't run D.net fast, but it sure does compile things fast. Startelingly so. We have a Dual-Pentium III 1.4 Tualtin with 3 gigs of ram, and it compiles things significantly slower than our 4x300Mhz Ultra II with 1GB of ram, despite being "twice as fast".
This is the advantage of sun. The hardware rocks. The software is built to match the hardware. I think it was more of them saying "yeah, well, if you guys want it on x86, here you go, but be aware it sucks." It might have actually made them money in that people would buy sun hardware after trying it on x86 and giving up on the crappy hardware.
Their market is small, their niche is narrow, and their execution is bush.
... and their enterprise computers are just about the best in the business. If you want a powerful mainframe type computer, Sun is your go-to guy. They offer superrior hardware (Ultra III risc chips, etc), great service, and a fantastic operating system. I've heard people claim that solaris sucks because it's so archaic. This is exactly why it works so well - it's been around for a long time, and it's tried and tested.
There's an age-old balance, people. It's called ease-of-use versus power-and-stability. Solaris is not easy to use. It's harder to use than linux. But compare solars 7 to linux... solaris scales well down to the 12 Mhz sun 4c IPC range, while the same OS works great for enterprise servers with 64 Ultra III 500Mhz risc chips. That's scalability. It wasn't until solaris 8 that they gave up on the 4c arch. The 4m still scales well (50-110 mhz range, etc).
If you're looking to buy a 1.3 million dollar computer, you look at sun. The small-computer market isn't the majority of their business dollars. It's the top dogs. Yet, they still listen to the people who like solaris enough to want to use it on x86. How can you fault them for this?
Granted, 1.3 million dollar computers make up a small "niche" of the market. But someone has to fill it, and there is a lot of cash in 1.3 million.
Is EQ beatable yet?
You should really think about just installing solaris 7 or 8 on that. We have a few IPC/IPx's and Classics/LX's at work, (4c / 4m arch), and Linux runs like a turtle on uphill glass. It's aweful. Yet, it's either solaris 5.5.7 or solaris 7 runs smooth as can be, on everything from the IPC 12 mhz 4c's to our quad-proc 4X300 Ultra II.
.. well anything but openwindows.
I don't particularly like solaris (or any SVR4), but for sun hardware, you'll be pleased with the performance gain.
Of course, this is all contingent on it being used as a server. I hate openwindows. For a desktop, I'd rather run
Plus, what about Johnny Gifted-teen in his basement. What happens when he writes a brilliant piece of code that MegaCorp snatches up and puts in their BigSoftware? Johnny sues them? With what resources? Do you know what it costs to sue a fortune 500 company? Hell, the government can't even do it successfully.
You don't think that happens today with open source software?
Oh, i imagine it happens. I'm just suggesting that distributing all source code everywhere is not the answer to the problem. Knowing it is happening isn't necessacarily going to change the practice.
You realize you're suggesting security through obscurity?
Yes.
Yes, I am suggesting security through obscurity.
Security software should not depend on a secret algorithm. Someone will find out eventually.
Yes, but with the source code, someone would be given a map. Without the source, someone would have to fly over and do their own reconnissance, have someone on the inside, and try a number of things.
Also keep in mind that by making it a uniform requirement for copyright protection, no one has an advantage over another and no one can "steal" another's code without it being quickly found out.
Don't hide under the pretense of the protection of the law. If I write a wham-bam piece of software, and some big software company steals it, what recourse do I have? Sue them? With what time and money. Remember, I write software, my time is money. If they throw a team of $400/hr lawyers at me, and I have only myself to wade through the mountain of paperwork, then I'm farked.
It's probably a discount, or a rebate. You know, your site licence for 100 computers costs 240,000 dollars. Now, we have a special promotion that's 50% off. Or, you get a good customer discount. Or something.
That's not what this author is proposing. He is proposing the source be available for inspection, just like bridge blueprints are available for inspection, but they still can't be copied, because they are still copyrighted...
Not all blueprints are available. Bridges are (usually) public works. Try and get me the blueprints for the wing on a 747. What? Not available? I wonder why that is? Oh, *trade secret*.
Lawsuits don't solve everything. Yes, if everyone's code was open, you could spot similar pieces of code. But, come on, code plagarism isn't hard. Also, what if several people accidentally wrote the same code at roughly the same time and sued each other.
Plus, what about Johnny Gifted-teen in his basement. What happens when he writes a brilliant piece of code that MegaCorp snatches up and puts in their BigSoftware? Johnny sues them? With what resources? Do you know what it costs to sue a fortune 500 company? Hell, the government can't even do it successfully.
If all source is open but copyrighted, in theory it would all be a happy world. In practice, it's a simple way to screw the little guy and for the lawyers to make a mint.
Think before you kick in the automated slashdot responder, please.
If I pay for something you spend 400 hours writing, I want the source to that as well. The source is part of the product.
This is completely wrong, and I hope everyone realizes this.
If you pay for a program, you pay for the binary. You now own a program that will perform to the specified dimensions. You do NOT own the source. Presumably, you would want the source to make modifications to it. Well, depending on the licence that the program is released with, too bad. You may not get to tinker with the source. Not everything is GPL'd, and for a good reason, folks.
Like the other reply to this post, if you want to see the source, come talk to me, we'll sign a non-disclosure agreement, and then we can negotiate a price for a source licence.
Think security software - say, your intranet system. You don't want your customers to have the source to that, because 1.) they probably wouldn't know what to do with it, 2.) it might fall into the wrong hands, or 3.) if they do manage to muck through it and change things, and somehow make their secure data hackable, there's a liability issue.
There are only two other reasons you would want the source - to steal the program or to just sit and stare at it.
With a binary, or a CD, or whatever, you can add copy protection. Source code is just text. Cut, Copy, Paste, Compile. Now your friend has a working copy of a program he didn't pay for.
No, the grandparent is right. If someone spends months developing an application, they shouldn't have to release their source code. I can't think of a better way to shoot yourself in the foot.
Think the airplane business. When you buy a 757, you don't get the blueprints for the wing. That's a trade secret.
Note to new slashdot readers: This is typical thinking on slashdot. I want EVERYTHING for free. If it's not free, it's wrong. I want the source code to everything, because I feel that I could do a better job writing this software by mucking it up. What they mean is that they want to steal it if it isn't free. Don't fall into this trap. Some software should be closed source, and some people have to put food on the table.
Is anyone else noticing that 9 times of 10, when you refresh this page, you get an intel ad?
or, is anyone else with IE 6 having the problem of the browser thinks the entire page is a link to ads.doubleclick.com/jump/bunchofcrap438934?
I'm not saying conspiracy, i'm just saying conspicouos product placement.
you fuck will dunn goats.
Microsoft probably won't put in any significant look and feel changes until much later in the testing program, probably someplace around beta 3.
Not true. I had a time release copy of codename whistler early in 2000, and it later became XP. The interface was virtually identical to the final XP release, well over a year before it came out.
Unlike you I make a 6 figure income, and so can afford CDs. I also don't have a taste for the mainstream music that you find overrepresented on P2P networks. So in the last month I spent over $200 on CDs.
Yeah, I make a six figure income, to two decimal precision. I can't afford CD's. However, I do find a lot of the stuff i'm looking for on P2P - indie punk has a fairly large representation on kazaa.
~Unlike you I make a 6 figure income, and so can afford CDs. I also don't have a taste for the mainstream music that you find overrepresented on P2P networks. So in the last month I spent over $200 on CDs.
~W