Aren't sales from MS to Iowa residents interstate commerce and thus a matter for Federal antitrust law?
Yes, they are. They are also subject to state law where they sell their products. Being an interstate transaction adds federal jurisdiction to an already existing state jurisdiction, it does not in any way negate the state's jurisdiction.
In other words, it adds regulations Microsoft must follow, it doesn't supercede any. Just as California emissions standards apply to automobiles built in Detroit (but sold in California), so to Iowa's antitrust regulations apply to Microsoft's sales in Iowa, regardless of where Micrsoft is headquartered, or the floppies and CDs their shabby OS is distributed on happen to have been printed.
two - if the recruiter gets burned (she or he will lose their commision [likely 30% of your new salary if they're an independent headhunter] if you take the counter-offer) you lose an ally if and when you really do want to switch jobs (you can bet they'll put a black mark in your file, and it will affect the service you get next time around.
By this argument, you should never deny a door-to-door salesman. Most salespeople (and make no mistake, that is what a headhunter is), do not take offense if you refuse their service after their pitch, they will see it as their own failing, not yours. Any headhunter who feels burned (unless you abused them [see below]) is a moron.
No, it isn't anything like denying business to a door-to-door salesman, and the comparison in this context is profoundly deceptive. The questioner has been offered a job, and negotiations have progressed to the counter-offer stage. If this person walks away at this point and takes the counter offer the liklihood of any future opportunity with the potential employer that made the offer is virtually nil.
A more proper analogy would be having used a real estate agent to search for properties, and then walking away from a deal right before the closing because you've gotten cold feet. It doesn't mean you'll never be able to find a house, or get another real estate agent, but it does mean you are very unlikely to get the same quality of service out of the agent you just left hanging if you ever need them again, and that is a relevant, if minor, factor in making such a decision.
It most emphatically is in no way comparable to doing business with a door-to-door salesman.
I agree with you that a short bidding war can be useful, but it is a tactic one must be very careful in employing, and not a hand you want to overplay.
As for valuing longtime service, that cuts both ways. Stay much longer than 5 years and things can begin working against you, depending on how aggressively you are trying to further your career. Should the unfortunate thing happen and you become unemployed, having been at firm A 15 years won't look nearly as good as having been at firm A three years, firm B five years, firm C four years, and firm D three years, everything else being equal.
[ the following command shows packages available on a Gentoo source based installation. It is somewhat analogous to 'rpm -q -a |grep quicktime' on a Suse/Red Hat/Mandrake box, or 'dpkg -l |grep quicktime' on a Debian box]
# emerge -s quicktime [ Results for search key : quicktime ] [ Applications found : 2 ]
* media-libs/openquicktime
Latest version Available: 1.0
Latest version Installed: [ Not Installed ]
Homepage: http://openquicktime.sourceforge.net/
Description:
OpenQuicktime library for linux
* media-libs/quicktime4linux
Latest version Available: 1.5.5
Latest version Installed: 1.3
Homepage: http://heroinewarrior.com/quicktime.php3
Description:
quicktime library for linux
As you can see, there are at least two quicktime libraries available for GNU/Linux (mplayer will play quicktime videos, as will xine IIRC). In addition, codeweavers have a wine-based quicktime plugin project as well, so Linux support is covered pretty well.
Apple may not be bothered to produce a GNU/Linux version (hardly suprising since GNU/Linux relegated Apple to 3rd place ranking in PC OS marketshare), but free software developers are quietly going about supporting the format under GNU/Linux and *BSD, sans the usual press release fanfare that accompanies Microsoft and Apple products.
Recruiters are pimps. They could give a damn about how you treat them, usually, and will just go for the commission.
That sounds reasonable, but if they know that spending x amount of time finding you a position nets them $0, because you just use it as leverage to get your current employer to up your salary, would they really be willing to invest x amount of time the next time around? I suspect (though I don't know with certainty) that the amount of time spent find a new position for you the second or third time around would be a lot less, meaning that the choice of opportunities, and hence the quality, would be diminished accordingly.
After all, wouldn't they be better off spending that time looking to match up people with employers who don't waste their time, instead? Especially if those hours are worth $20k-$30k...
If they gave a damn about you, why didn't they pay you more before? Will you need to get a new job offer every time you want a raise?
This is an excellent point. Furthermore, are they willing to give you back pay at the new rate, to make up for having underpaid you all that time?
There are several problems with taking such a counter-offer:
one - you can only do this once or twice before they stop giving you pay raises, and each iteration burns a bridge at a potentially new and exciting job, with new and better opportunities for you.
two - if the recruiter gets burned (she or he will lose their commision [likely 30% of your new salary if they're an independent headhunter] if you take the counter-offer) you lose an ally if and when you really do want to switch jobs (you can bet they'll put a black mark in your file, and it will affect the service you get next time around.
three - you'll still be in the same position you were before. No new opportunities, no new challenges, just more money (for now).
four - you're in the same position for which your employer knows they can get people to fill at your old rate. Your days at your new pay level are likely numbered, and your odds of further pay raises are tiny. Your odds of further pay raises at your new position after six months or a year, provided you are doing a good job, are much better.
five - your employer will, at some level, feel they've been strongarmed by you. This will adversely affect your long-term relationship with them regardless.
six - you should go to the recruiter, tell them about the counter offer, and see if they can't give you a little more. I wouldn't necessarilly get the two sides in a bidding war (that might well leave your new employer with a bad taste in their mouth), but if they can outdo the counter-offer by a little bit, it might go a long way toward making your decision easier.
IMHO if all things are equal, take the new job. The disadvantages I listed above are signficant, and there really would need to be a compelling reason to ignore them and take the counter offer, and having equal pay and the (quite possibly faux) comfort of not changing jobs isn't nearly enough IMHO.
Of course, this advice is worth every penny you paid for it.
I'd heard briefly about the Mozilla bug, and I understand why it's X's fault, but I'm curious... how is it that X is able to crash the system this hard? Because it's got direct access to hardware?
There's an interesting historical footnote that underscores how developer egos and stubborness (on both sides of the argument) can lead to disagreements and very sub-optinmal solutions. The folks working on the GGI project tried to fix this back in the 2.0 kernel days (and possibly earlier) and were poo-pooed by Linus Torvalds. Their argument was that the kernel's job is to abstract the hardware layer from userspace software, so that applications like X don't have to talk to the graphics card directly, they simply make functions calls to the kernel code, which are handled by the appropriate device drivers. Similiar to the way just about every other piece of hardware on your GNU/Linux system works.
This was an argument that, at the time, I felt Linus was completely wrong on, and the GGI folks were completely right on. But of course, as a mere user and developer on GNU/Linux, and not a kernel developer, my opinion counts for little (even less since I chose not to get involved in that particular argument at the time).
Ironically, the kernel developers backpedaled a little on this with 2.2, and moreso with 2.4, in which they implimented the rudiments of a framebuffer system that does precisely what GGI advocated, though not nearly as well, and not for as much diverse hardware.
The GGI project is still very much alive, and doing very intersting work, for any who are interested. I haven't had time to play with it for a while, but it is on my list to get back to at some point. Imagine how much cleaner graphics usage would be under GNU/Linux (and perhaps other *nixes) if, instead of having to tack on hardware specific tasks onto X, it were being done in hardware device drivers instead. They argued, quite compellingly IMHO, that X crashes should never be able to take down the operating system, regardless, and that with proper hardware abstraction done via kernel device drivers, as is done with every other piece of hardware in the system, it would be impossible for X to do so (barring, of course, bugs in the kernel code itself).
[the counter argument was that 3d acceleration and other graphics primitives were too bloated to go into the kernel. The GGI folks didn't design their stuff this way... the hardware access routines go into the device driver, the rest of the logic resides in user-space libraries. You get the complete hardware abstraction via the kernel features, including accelerated 3d support, without the kernel bloat Linus and others so feared. It is really quite elegant, and might have spared us the whole GLX/DRM/DRI mess anyone wanting to do 3d acceleration under X has to suffer through these days, had anyone listened at the time].
So instead, today, we have X talking directly to the video hardware with little or no kernel involvement (unless you're using framebuffer support and the fb-dev X driver), and when X goes south, there's a good chance your entire hardware and operating system are heading south along with it. It is the only situation in which GNU/Linux performance approaches that of Microsoft Windows, and it is due to a design flaw in how grafics cards are accessed from within GNU/Linux -- directly from the userspace program instead of via a standard, hardware device driver like everything else.
If your a PC user and you want to test the Apple waters, you have the iMac, the eMac and the iBooks, all cheap, all powerful and all useable machines.
This epitomizes the Apple mindset, and why they have had to be bailed out by their principle competitor (Microsoft) once already in order to even remain in business, and why they are likely to need such bailing out again (though I wouldn't count on their actually getting any help the next time around).
They think if they make their peripherals cool enough (and proprietary enough) people will flock to their iMacs and G4s in droves. A few perhaps, most not. Instead, they lose far more sales they could have made, resulting in a net loss of income. Worse, they reveal to any potential customers just how proprietary they are, and one thing even clueless users are learning is to hate proprietary equipment, whether it is the AOL account that is filtering their porn, the Microsoft operating system that is logging their mp3 usage, or the Apple hardware that costs twice as much and does half as little as the commodity hardware all their friends are using.
You may not like it, but hey, I don't like the way M$ does business. Oh well.
Neither do I, although I think one should point out that Apple, and Sun, are both Microsoft wannabe's, as evidenced by their proprietary mindset (and shrinking marketshare), so I wouldn't be too eager to sing their praises if I were you.
In any event, it isn't a matter of what I like, or what you like. The fact is Apple is losing real money with a boneheaded strategy that failed them in the eighties, failed them again in the nineties, and will fail them yet again in the naughties.
As for me, I ended up with a much better monitor because of Apple's stupidity and a little more digging, but the fact of the matter is if they are in the business of selling hardware then, if they would like to stay in business (without future Microsoft financed bailouts), they need to adhere to standards. My particular case is a real world example of how boneheaded Apple is, and can be multiplied by many other people as well (just do a google search on Apple 22" Linux to see how many).
I don't doubt Apple is doing exactly what they want to do, but that doesn't make it any less boneheaded.
There was absolutely no reason to make a new, proprietary digital interface to their monitors, when an exiting, widespread, and very successful standard already exists (DVI). Worse, their proprietary interface causes signalling problems on their own equipment (which resulted in some delays in their 23" monitors shipping at all).
There is absolutely no reason to make their ipod proprietary either. NO ONE is going out and buying iMacs, G3s, or G4s just because they want to have an iPod. Instead, people are simply waiting a few months for the PC equivelent to come out.
Apple should have learned this lesson with the DVD Superdrive (Pioneer DVD-RW). The vast majority of people simply waited for the PC version... almost no one switched to Apple simply because that was the only platform you could get DVD-RWs on (which was true... for about 6 months). Instead people simply waited for the PC version to come out, by which time prices of the drives and media had dropped significantly as well.
I'll say it again: limiting their peripherals to Apple only equipment through proprietary interfaces and/or software doesn't increase their iMacs, G3, or G4 sales, it merely decreases their peripheral sales. In other words, it is an idiotic, boneheaded strategy they are persuing, one which nearly put them out of business before and will likely do so again if they keep it up.
SGI, Sun, HP, Dec, and IBM have already demonstrated (and painfully learned) that proprietary hardware is a dying business model. Even at the high-end server level it is difficult to maintain (witness the emergence of commodity-based clustering technology), at the consumer end it is impossible to maintain. How many more third party bailouts Apple is going to need before they learn that lesson (or go under once and for all) would make a great office betting pool. In the meantime, making more work for themselves in order to avoid selling their products to 90% of the potential market in the hopes of getting some percentage of that market to buy their iMacs and G4s is profoundly stupid, and their stockholders are going to end up paying the price. Then too shall their customers, unfortunately.
Make sure something important was there, that wasn't properly placed onto the fileserver.
That's not testing a disaster recovery plan, that's deliberately destroying user data so you can say "See, I'm right, neener."
Well, not if he just unplugs the drive and puts a scare into the user. Let 'em sweat for a couple of hours, then manage to fix the problem and let them know how incredibly lucky they are the power cord just worked its way loose and it wasn't a real hard drive crash that would have wiped out their data, something that is a lot more common.
It'll drive the point home in a non-destructive manner, which may be the best thing one can do. It is human nature not to learn such lessons until they blow up in your face... so make it a controlled explosion that just singes the user a little, rather than scattering body parts over a couple of city blocks. (ok, maybe in today's world the explosion metaphore wasn't the best one to use...)
In other words, our creative freedom requires that we respect and defend the creative freedoms of others, even those with whome we vehemently agree.
*sigh*
That should, of course, read "vehemently disagree." So much for proofreading.
Freedom Means People Can Choose Wrongly
on
What Is Public Domain?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
putting a creative work like a song in the public domain can be dangerous. When I first started releasing my music, I wanted to make it free for people to listen to, copy and change. But I realised: what if the KKK made a propaganda video and wanted to use a song of mine in the soundtrack? If my work was PD, or even released under the EFF's Open Audio License [eff.org], they'd be able to.
Freedom means people can choose wrongly. I sympathise with how you feel... I would hate to see one of my novels taken and used to promote religion, particularly montheistic religions like judaism, christianity, and islam (all of which I truly loathe equally). Nevertheless, giving up exactly that kind of control is precisely what we as artists have to do if we are to create a public commins in which our creativity can flourish. In other words, our creative freedom requires that we respect and defend the creative freedoms of others, even those with whome we vehemently agree.
So how do we handle this? I think the best approach isn't to control or restrict how people can use our work (what if I wanted to use your work in the anti-IP move adaptation of my novel? Your fear of the KKK has also made you restrict my ability to use your work as well, something you perhaps neither intended nor wanted), but rather to protect our reputations. My first stab at this is a Free Media License based loosely on both the GPL and the FDL. It needs some more work and certainly isn't ready for use just yet, but the entire license is designed with four goals in mind:
Protect the freedom of the content (the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation refers to, applied to content and media)
Insure the freedom of derivative works (no BSD-style loopholes to allow the MPAA, RIAA, or Microsofts of the world to lock down derivative works and thereby deny their use by future generations of artists)
Insure that creative credit is given the original artist(s) ["enforced citation"]
Protect the good name of the author by requiring derivative works to clearly differentiate themselves from the original work
My license is currently too complex IMHO... I hope to have that corrected in the next draft soon. As it is an ongoing work in progress, I welcome any and all constructive criticism and in particular would welcome yours, as you have also grappled with many of these concepts in your license.
In any event, the result I am trying to achieve is that, yes, the KKK could use my material in a propoganda video, but while they would be required to note that they had taken my material (and credit me as the original creator of that material), they would have to make even more clear the fact that their use, while legal, is unauthorized and unendorsed by me (the original artist, and of course any intermediate artist who have contributed/modified the material in the meantime). Furthermore, any changes they may have made they must take responsibility for, by applying their name to the current incarnation.
Its ugly to have people like the KKK and Al Q'aida around, but so long as they are prevented from beshmirching your reputation you should be able to release your content with confidence. It is insuring that protection that is IMHO the most important aspect of any Free Media License.
It sounds to me like they're opening up the market for new competition.
That would be true, were it not for the fact that these companies own a monopoly on the 'last mile' of cable coming into your house.
Were fibre and copper treated like a public highway, to which all of the various ISP competitors enjoyed equal and unbiased access under the same terms, you would indeed have competition.
Unfortunately, in the case of telecommunications the highway is privately owned, and competition all but impossible (remember all the DSL providers going belly up? You have companies like Ameritech to thank for that. Hell, I had Ameritech cut my wire just to create a trouble ticket that would make their competition look bad and ultimately line their own pockets. Luckilly I had my own toner and butt set and was able to punch down new wire myself, cheating the telco monopoly of the profits they would have otherwise made on their vandalism. Now there is a hidden camera present, one which will hopefully document this behavior sufficiently to allow for legal action if and when it should happen again).
Do you watch movies by any chance? Or TV? If so, then shut up, because you're helping to fund these guys...
This fallacy has been rebutted numerous times.
The long and short of it is: just because circumstances constrain you to operate within particular boundries, doesn't mean you are in any way wrong or hypocritical in criticizing those boundries, or anything unjust or wrong you find within those boundries. Many of the folk, black and white alike, who criticized apartheid in the United States and South Africa still paid taxes to those governments, watched the television and listened to the radio put out by those governments (or the private corporations profiting from those apartheid systems). Those who advocated communism or socialism still had jobs within those systems, and bought their food, clothing, and housing within those very same systems they so disapproved of. This did not in any way make their criticisms less valid, or make them hyporcrits for having the courage and moxy to stand up and criticize those systems. Quite the contrary.
Indeed, had reformers throughout history been required to operate within the parameters your troll implies ('you cannot legitimately criticize anything that is a part of your lifestyle!') we would be living no differently from people a thousand years ago. In other words, no reform would have been possible, because no criticism would have been possible.
I suspect that, were someone who doesn't watch television or movies to criticize the Hollywood Copyright and Media Cartels, you would be the first to say something to the effect of "That's easy for you to say, you don't use their product anyway!" which is, of course, the flipside of the very same logical fallacy you've indulged in here.
So it is you, not the person you responded to, who really ought to shut up.
Apple Has Emptied Several Clips into their Foot
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iPod for Windows (again)
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I am not mistaken, Apple is primarily a computer hardware company, right? Which means that they want to sell their own computers, right? Which means that if other cool products they release work only with their computers by default, then their computers just might look a little more attractive to the potential computer buyer, right?
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
Apple isn't just shooting themselves in the foot anymore with their proprietary hardware nonsense, they've now moved on to taking a fully loaded automatic and emptying the clip into both of their feet, lathering, rinsing, and repeating the procedure until nothing is left below the knees other than a vaguely red mass of shredded flesh and shattered bone.
Case in point:
I recently purchased a large and very expensive monitor. Apple's marketing of their 22" 1600x1024 monitor was what initially sparked my interest in such a monitor, but having used SGI's 17" 1600x1024 offering, I found the notion of simply having bigger pixels at the same resolution vaguely disatisfying. So I looked around and was delighted to see Apple's 23", 1920x1200 HD capable monitor.
Only to discover that the idiots had decided to use a proprietary, nonstandard interace to their monitor, such that it will only work with an Apple computer (unless you buy an external, likely trouble-prone dongle remeniscent of what SGI's 1600SW required, and which has a reputation for adding noise to the digital (!!) signal because power is transmitted on the same cord). I called the Apple store and was informed that they wouldn't guarantee it would work with a standard DVI interface, and that if it didn't I would be left wearing the $3600 door stop.
I was ready to buy the monitor then and there. Apple lost a $3600 sale as a direct result of their proprietary mindset. And no, there was never a remote chance of my spending another $4k on an Apple G4 system just for the privelege of spending $3.6k on an expensive monitor. Bill Gates is far more likely to learn a modicum of business ethics than I am to spend $8k on Apple equipment when, for $4500, I was able to go out and buy an excellent Samsung 24" LCD monitor that does the same 1920x1200 resolution and will not only work with standard PC DVI interfaces, but will also work with analog cards, and has two video inputs as well (composit and s-video). Had there been no such monitor available I would have opted to wait, knowing that a PC capable device would only have been a question of time. I would not, ever, in a million years, have gone out and spent $6k - $8k for the privelege of having a working 23" LCD with Apple's logo (and ugly frame).
Had Apple's 23" monitor used a standard DVI interace, they would have made an immediate $3600 on a non-apple, PC user (despite the ugly frame). Instead they made $0.
The same is true of the iPod. I'm not about to go out and spend a thousand or more bucks on a platform I have no interest in simply in order to be able to use a several-hundred dollar iPod. So instead of making a few hundred bucks on a non-Apple user, they make $0, yet again.
People will only opt to use Apple computers because they like Apple, or prefer the applications available on Apple, or have a specific reason to use Apple. No one in their right mind would choose a particular platform because this or that peripheral (iPod, big LCD monitor) has been crippled to only to work with that hardware, particularly in an age where you can wait for 6 months (maximum) and have it availabel for whatever platform you prefer.
In other words, Apple's obsolete proprietary mindset isn't making them any more sales, and thus any more money... all it is doing is costing them sales they would have otherwise had in other market segments.
I've tried the Linux demo version abt two years ago. It was rather nice even then.
I've used MainActor (I paid the $99 license fee), and it will turn your GNU/Linux box into a Microsoft Windows box... the program is very unstable, and the one rule of thumb was 'save early, save often' (and you still will probably lose some of your work).
Worse, GNU/Linux bugs seemed to get fixed last... support was much better for Windows users than GNU/Linux users.
I have since switched to using kino for my NLE needs (which are quite simple: cut, rearrange, export into a form transcode can manipulate), and while it isn't perfect, it is a heck of a lot better than MainActor. I don't need fancy star wipes (hey Homer) or text overlays... I just need to be able to snip commercials out of my Max Headroom recordings, to edit out the dead space in my home videos, and rearrange some of the takes in my home movies. For that, kino is sufficient.
I do hope Cinelerra is good, works, and actually remains supported by the authors for a time, but as another noted, the authors do seem pretty 'flighty', particularly in the context of the bizarr removal of Broadcast/2000 off the web a while back. One hopes it is, as another noted, just a quirky sense of humor on the authors' part and not a sign of deeper waffling on the whole software freedom thing, as even a buggy (and discontinued) GPLed product can at least be improved upon... something I waited quite a while in vain for with Main Actor.
If this works you won't be able to create antigravity fields.
Correct. But it may still have some potentially very useful applications. Artificial gravity, for one, which could make the health risks due to microgravity of a long trip to Mars, or an extended stay in orbit, a thing of the past. No need for big spinning metal canisters (which have their own navigational and structural challenges)... just keep your superconductor in the shade and gravity will simply point 'down.' It could also be used for propulsion in space... generate a gravitational field and let your ship 'fall' into it. Repeat as necessary until desired vector is achieved, then reverse when needed.
No, it won't get you off the surface of the earth, but once in space it could be very useful.
Actually, wrong. Static linking vs. dynamic linking is all the same to the GPL. You still have to publish the source code for the users of the application, because according to the terms of the GPL
I stand corrected. Nevertheless, my main point stands. The artistic work (sets, characters, etc.) for a game are not part of the GPLed code, regardless, any more than an xvid video is a part of mplayer, or a png file a part of the GIMP.
So, while a game engine based upon OGRE or Crystal Sphere would have to be GPLed, the game itself (i.e. what is analogous to a WAD file) is not required to be GPLed, any more than Applixware is required to be GPLed simply because it runs under (the GPLed) GNU/Linux operating system.
section 2b of the GPL [gnu.org]: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof,to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. [emphesis added]
This clearly refers to the source code, not add-on graphics, etc. Dynamic libraries are not "getting around" the GPL, the GPL is specifically designed to limit itself to the project(s) in question and its derivatives, not every usage of the project that doesn't directly incorporate its source code.
Furthermore, your artistic work is no more a part of the GPLed code that a word document you write with Open Office is a part of that GPLed project (and thus GPLed itself). You are propogating a Microsoft myth that has been debunked by numerous third parties, and by the Free Software Foundation itself.
If you were writing a game based on a GPLed game, then yes, your game would have to be GPLed. If, however, you are writing a game that uses a GPLed library (like Ogre or Crystal Space) the GPL does not extend beyond the boundries of the GPLed library unless you statically link it to your code, and then distribute that statically linked binary (something no one in their right mind would do in this day and age regardless of the GPL).
The GPL foists no trap upon developers, it protects the freedom of their projects from poachers like Microsoft, and it in no way coerces your project external to it into using the GPL, your protestations and denials notwithstanding.
Calm down, I wasn't trolling. I think copyrights and intellectual property are anachronisms, too, but I just thought it was awfully funny, that his book about the evils of copyrights, intellectual property, and corporate profiteering on such works was copyrighted...
I was responding not to your post, but to the followup that basically extended your post from a humorous poke at the author's publisher to a broader accusation of hypocracy which implied the author should essentially have kept his/her mouth shut, or at least remained unpublished (which in today's world amounts to much the same thing):
It's obvious - if he provided the book in electronic format, then no one would buy the print copy.
Oh, wait...isn't that EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS US SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS TO DO?
Fuck him.
Perhaps you were browsing at +2 and didn't notice the reply? In any event, despite the fact that the aforementioned post was a troll, it expresses a far too common assumption and very widespread meme that, unless your lifestyle or methods exclude all aspects of whatever it is you are criticizing, you somehow should have no right to criticize that thing, should keep your mouth shut, and/or are a hypocrite of the lowest kind. This is nonsense, and indeed if every reformer in history had been constrained in such a fashion no reform would ever have happened and our lifestyle would likely be little different from that of our ancesters 1000 years ago.
That particularly destructive and disempowering meme needs to be debunked whenever it rears its ugly head, or we as a society will dismiss efforts at reform we should not, and suffer accordingly. So, even though the post I responded to (not yours!) almost certainly was a troll, it needed rebutting nevertheless.
Oh, wait...isn't that EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS US SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS TO DO?
And so what if he does? Unless you use PGP[1], I doubt you've ever, even once in your entire life, made use of a hard copy of some software package.
Saying that an economic model doesn't work for certain conditions isn't the same as demanding one give away one's work for free. Although, as free software's superiority over its commercial competitors by most objective criteria indicates, perhaps that is the most effecient economic model for situations in which there is an initial fixed cost, but no ongoing cost. Or perhaps there is something even more effecient than the free software model, but if their is, it has been demonstrated clearly to not be capitalism, particularly not capitalism in the form of government sponsored and enforced monopoly priveleges.
So the guy isn't giving his book away for free. So what? He has to operate in the same government sponsored monopolistic environment as everyone else, just as Richard Stallman (who opposed copyright, at least in the beginning) was forced to come up with a license that used copyright to insure the very freedoms it is designed to destroy. Just as numerous books calling for the use of hemp instead of trees for making paper have been published on dead trees... because that is all they had to work with, and the alternative (that clowns like you seem to be advocating) is to never speak out at all, to in effect be silenced by the very circumstances one is trying to fix. Not a very reasonable, or desireable, option.
I wish we would move away from oil to cleaner, more sustainable energy that wouldn't put millions of dollars in the pockets of a culture that sponsors hatred of and terrorism against my culture. Does that mean I'm going to start living without electricity or transportation until such a belated move is finally made (if ever). Hardly. But it doesn't mean I'm going to shut up about it either, nor does it make my a hypocrit for refusing to do so, because circumstances beyond my control leave me with no other viable choice, at least for the moment.
[1]To get around US export restrictions, PGP was published in book form and shipped overseas, then transcribed by hand back into electronic format and distributed electronically from outside of the United States. No fees were charged or, to my knowledge, ever paid for that arduous bit of tedium.
Cool, at what level do I get to roll a D30 for my attack rolls?
I haven't kept up on all the latest AD&D rule changes (its been several years since I last campaigned), but IIRC D30s weren't used by AD&D at all. They are used by other RPG games, however, so I picked several up a while back. They came in handy for rolling things like "how many minutes (between 2 and 60) you'll be stuck in this sticky mass, rolling 1D6 damage for each minute.":-) Besides, for dice geeks like myself they just look cool... though I still want to get that D100 I saw a long time ago.
But to say they had no choice other than 28.8 is probably a bit of hyperbole...
In most discussions of this sort the term "cost effective" or "acceptable" is implied, i.e. "they had no other cost effective (or acceptable) choice other than 28.8" is probably not hyperbole. Remember, satelites work for download, upload is still limited to what the phone line can carry, ie. 28.8kb, so satelite wasn't really a choice that would have addressed the problem of speed to their satisfaction (read their website for specifics of why when they systematically investigated the satelite option they rejected it).
Re:Produce more energy than it uses?
on
Cradle to Cradle
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· Score: 2
See? All he wants is for us to invent a perpetual motion machine. It's not so much to ask, we're just thinking about it wrong.
"The Earth is not a closed system, it is powered by the sun. So fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun."
Any random building you find you will discover is wasting much of the energy that strikes it each day, in the form of sunlight, wind, and rainwater washing down its surface, to name just three.
Building buildings that produce more (presumably electrical) energy than they use doesn't require a violation of the 2nd law... just a little attention to detail.
I'm fully aware of the Cathedral and Bazar idealogy, but when there is no-one in the Cathedral and you're the only person giving in the Bazar, GPL suddenly doesn't seem to be this wonderful solution to bugs, features and support.
It depends on the amount of interest the project generates, how well you get the word out, etc. It sounds like people do report bugs and while, ideally, they would submit patches with the reports, the are reporting bugs you might never have known about and hence never been able to fix, so the quality of your software has benefited directly as a result (even if you have done all the work actually fixing it yourself).
The kind folks at Blender misunderstood the entire software freedom paradigm, as well as the dynamics of free software and open source projects. People have to be interested and excited to spend their valuable (and ever shrinking) free time contributing. They GPLed a skeletal distributed rendering arbiter daemon, then sat back and waited for the community to finish writing the project. When that didn't happen (after all, it was usable in its current form to those of us who knew how to use it, so we used it, reported bugs, and submitted the occasional patch), they concluded that they would have had not gain had they GPLed Blender itself.
Perhaps not, but there are other GPLed 3d modelling and rendering projects that suggest otherwise. It is much more exciting for a programmer/animator/film hobbiest to work on sexy new special effects modules and features for a project than a back-end, distributed rendering daemon that most people don't have the equipment (read: more than one computer) to use anyway.
So they got bad data, made what IMHO was a very bad strategic decision as a result (to not GPL Blender and concentrate on business approaches to leverage that) and now Blender the product and NaN the company are dead, and the community of enthusiasts that grew around it is dying alongs side it. A loss to the animation community, to the Linux community, and quite probably a loss to NaN (the makers of Blender) as well.
Another way they didn't understand software freedom was their insistence that "no one will ever have to pay to use blender" (a very kind goal, but NOT what free software is about). There were any number of approaches they could have used in giving out software gratis (charge for documentation, charge for the current version and keep the gratis/libre version a few months behind the pay-to-use version, etc.), that would have been obvious had they understood the philosophy, mindset, and implications of free software and the (software) freedom it represents.
Hmm, I didn't really mean for this to become a requiem for Blender, but in any event I don't blame you at all for being put off by 50 greedy (and likely ungrateful) wretches demanding your code, but remember that this is about freedom, yours as much as those 50 ungrateful wretches (some of whome are, quite likely, deliberate trolls or perhaps even MS astroturf-style agent provoceteurs who want you to become disillusioned. The latter would sound utterly paranoid to me, had I not seen it firsthand in action in another context [unrelated to Microsoft]). The bottom line is do you benefit, and are the benefits worth it to you for you to free your code? If the bug reports and community that grows around your tool is beneficial to you, and the quality of your code, then perhaps it is. If not, then obviously it isn't (though perhaps being able to hand-off your code to someone else when you grow weary, or bored, with the project so that it can continue to develop and grow may make it worth your while anyway).
In any event, its your code to do with as you please, and while effusive gratitude for your doing what many thousands of others think nothing of doing (freeing your code) may not be a realistic thing to expect, I sympathise greatly with your disgust at the ungratefulness many users of free software seem all to eager to display.
BTW - If you're running GNU/Linux, X, KDE/gnome, etc. you aren't the only person going to the bizar and helping out... you're just the only person who happens to be managing your stall in the bizar at the moment.:-)
I would guess you would not be able to watch TV without having it hooked up the internet reporting all you are doing. Big-brotherish future.
Until and unless Big Brother Hollywood is going to pay for my internet connection, they'd better not even think about imposing that kind of draconian supervision over my viewing habits. If they should try to do so I will either organize a class action suit against them, or sue them on my own. Whether it is 2 bytes or 2 gigabytes, I'm the one paying for the bandwidth and their use of my resources against my will constitutes tresspess of chattles and arguably theft in precisely the same way junk faxes and SPAM do.
Now, if Hollywood is going to offer me free 100Mbit bandwidth to the internet, I might briefly consider making a Faustian bargain with them, exchanging my privacy for faster pr0n downloads, but I suspect even then I would consider it only briefly before rejecting it. Some things, like individual privacy and freedom, aren't for sale at any price (at least by me, though it seems the masses of mindless drones that populate our western democracies, indeed perhaps the entire planet, aren't as discriminating as one might wish).
Forget that. I'm waiting for Star Wars - The Broadway Play. I'll be limited only by my own eyes and ears!
Just go watch your local high school thespians.
You'll get infinitely better acting at resolution limited only by the acuity of your eyes, more than enough to make up for the cardboard models and visible strings in the special effects.
I'm only half joking: such BBC greats as Dr. Who, Blakes7, Red Dwarf, and Goodnight Sweetheart had special effects quality that wouldn't challenge a preteen child with a slow computer, but their excellent story lines and average to good acting more than made up for it. The cheesiest episode of Dr. Who beats the last two Star Wars movies hands down in terms of overall enjoyable viewing experience, and the MPAA's efforts at pushing digital distribution to squeeze out indie filmmakers nothwithstanding, the market for quality over shiny dreck will only increase with time, and find new channels for its expression as the 'official' distribution channels are closed off.
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Aren't sales from MS to Iowa residents interstate commerce and thus a matter for Federal antitrust law?
Yes, they are. They are also subject to state law where they sell their products. Being an interstate transaction adds federal jurisdiction to an already existing state jurisdiction, it does not in any way negate the state's jurisdiction.
In other words, it adds regulations Microsoft must follow, it doesn't supercede any. Just as California emissions standards apply to automobiles built in Detroit (but sold in California), so to Iowa's antitrust regulations apply to Microsoft's sales in Iowa, regardless of where Micrsoft is headquartered, or the floppies and CDs their shabby OS is distributed on happen to have been printed.
two - if the recruiter gets burned (she or he will lose their commision [likely 30% of your new salary if they're an independent headhunter] if you take the counter-offer) you lose an ally if and when you really do want to switch jobs (you can bet they'll put a black mark in your file, and it will affect the service you get next time around.
By this argument, you should never deny a door-to-door salesman. Most salespeople (and make no mistake, that is what a headhunter is), do not take offense if you refuse their service after their pitch, they will see it as their own failing, not yours. Any headhunter who feels burned (unless you abused them [see below]) is a moron.
No, it isn't anything like denying business to a door-to-door salesman, and the comparison in this context is profoundly deceptive. The questioner has been offered a job, and negotiations have progressed to the counter-offer stage. If this person walks away at this point and takes the counter offer the liklihood of any future opportunity with the potential employer that made the offer is virtually nil.
A more proper analogy would be having used a real estate agent to search for properties, and then walking away from a deal right before the closing because you've gotten cold feet. It doesn't mean you'll never be able to find a house, or get another real estate agent, but it does mean you are very unlikely to get the same quality of service out of the agent you just left hanging if you ever need them again, and that is a relevant, if minor, factor in making such a decision.
It most emphatically is in no way comparable to doing business with a door-to-door salesman.
I agree with you that a short bidding war can be useful, but it is a tactic one must be very careful in employing, and not a hand you want to overplay.
As for valuing longtime service, that cuts both ways. Stay much longer than 5 years and things can begin working against you, depending on how aggressively you are trying to further your career. Should the unfortunate thing happen and you become unemployed, having been at firm A 15 years won't look nearly as good as having been at firm A three years, firm B five years, firm C four years, and firm D three years, everything else being equal.
There is no Quicktime for Linux.
[ the following command shows packages available on a Gentoo source based installation. It is somewhat analogous to 'rpm -q -a |grep quicktime' on a Suse/Red Hat/Mandrake box, or 'dpkg -l |grep quicktime' on a Debian box]
# emerge -s quicktime
[ Results for search key : quicktime ]
[ Applications found : 2 ]
* media-libs/openquicktime
Latest version Available: 1.0
Latest version Installed: [ Not Installed ]
Homepage: http://openquicktime.sourceforge.net/
Description:
OpenQuicktime library for linux
* media-libs/quicktime4linux
Latest version Available: 1.5.5
Latest version Installed: 1.3
Homepage: http://heroinewarrior.com/quicktime.php3
Description:
quicktime library for linux
As you can see, there are at least two quicktime libraries available for GNU/Linux (mplayer will play quicktime videos, as will xine IIRC). In addition, codeweavers have a wine-based quicktime plugin project as well, so Linux support is covered pretty well.
Apple may not be bothered to produce a GNU/Linux version (hardly suprising since GNU/Linux relegated Apple to 3rd place ranking in PC OS marketshare), but free software developers are quietly going about supporting the format under GNU/Linux and *BSD, sans the usual press release fanfare that accompanies Microsoft and Apple products.
Recruiters are pimps. They could give a damn about how you treat them, usually, and will just go for the commission.
That sounds reasonable, but if they know that spending x amount of time finding you a position nets them $0, because you just use it as leverage to get your current employer to up your salary, would they really be willing to invest x amount of time the next time around? I suspect (though I don't know with certainty) that the amount of time spent find a new position for you the second or third time around would be a lot less, meaning that the choice of opportunities, and hence the quality, would be diminished accordingly.
After all, wouldn't they be better off spending that time looking to match up people with employers who don't waste their time, instead? Especially if those hours are worth $20k-$30k...
If they gave a damn about you, why didn't they pay you more before? Will you need to get a new job offer every time you want a raise?
This is an excellent point. Furthermore, are they willing to give you back pay at the new rate, to make up for having underpaid you all that time?
There are several problems with taking such a counter-offer:
one - you can only do this once or twice before they stop giving you pay raises, and each iteration burns a bridge at a potentially new and exciting job, with new and better opportunities for you.
two - if the recruiter gets burned (she or he will lose their commision [likely 30% of your new salary if they're an independent headhunter] if you take the counter-offer) you lose an ally if and when you really do want to switch jobs (you can bet they'll put a black mark in your file, and it will affect the service you get next time around.
three - you'll still be in the same position you were before. No new opportunities, no new challenges, just more money (for now).
four - you're in the same position for which your employer knows they can get people to fill at your old rate. Your days at your new pay level are likely numbered, and your odds of further pay raises are tiny. Your odds of further pay raises at your new position after six months or a year, provided you are doing a good job, are much better.
five - your employer will, at some level, feel they've been strongarmed by you. This will adversely affect your long-term relationship with them regardless.
six - you should go to the recruiter, tell them about the counter offer, and see if they can't give you a little more. I wouldn't necessarilly get the two sides in a bidding war (that might well leave your new employer with a bad taste in their mouth), but if they can outdo the counter-offer by a little bit, it might go a long way toward making your decision easier.
IMHO if all things are equal, take the new job. The disadvantages I listed above are signficant, and there really would need to be a compelling reason to ignore them and take the counter offer, and having equal pay and the (quite possibly faux) comfort of not changing jobs isn't nearly enough IMHO.
Of course, this advice is worth every penny you paid for it.
I'd heard briefly about the Mozilla bug, and I understand why it's X's fault, but I'm curious... how is it that X is able to crash the system this hard? Because it's got direct access to hardware?
... the hardware access routines go into the device driver, the rest of the logic resides in user-space libraries. You get the complete hardware abstraction via the kernel features, including accelerated 3d support, without the kernel bloat Linus and others so feared. It is really quite elegant, and might have spared us the whole GLX/DRM/DRI mess anyone wanting to do 3d acceleration under X has to suffer through these days, had anyone listened at the time].
There's an interesting historical footnote that underscores how developer egos and stubborness (on both sides of the argument) can lead to disagreements and very sub-optinmal solutions. The folks working on the GGI project tried to fix this back in the 2.0 kernel days (and possibly earlier) and were poo-pooed by Linus Torvalds. Their argument was that the kernel's job is to abstract the hardware layer from userspace software, so that applications like X don't have to talk to the graphics card directly, they simply make functions calls to the kernel code, which are handled by the appropriate device drivers. Similiar to the way just about every other piece of hardware on your GNU/Linux system works.
This was an argument that, at the time, I felt Linus was completely wrong on, and the GGI folks were completely right on. But of course, as a mere user and developer on GNU/Linux, and not a kernel developer, my opinion counts for little (even less since I chose not to get involved in that particular argument at the time).
Ironically, the kernel developers backpedaled a little on this with 2.2, and moreso with 2.4, in which they implimented the rudiments of a framebuffer system that does precisely what GGI advocated, though not nearly as well, and not for as much diverse hardware.
The GGI project is still very much alive, and doing very intersting work, for any who are interested. I haven't had time to play with it for a while, but it is on my list to get back to at some point. Imagine how much cleaner graphics usage would be under GNU/Linux (and perhaps other *nixes) if, instead of having to tack on hardware specific tasks onto X, it were being done in hardware device drivers instead. They argued, quite compellingly IMHO, that X crashes should never be able to take down the operating system, regardless, and that with proper hardware abstraction done via kernel device drivers, as is done with every other piece of hardware in the system, it would be impossible for X to do so (barring, of course, bugs in the kernel code itself).
[the counter argument was that 3d acceleration and other graphics primitives were too bloated to go into the kernel. The GGI folks didn't design their stuff this way
So instead, today, we have X talking directly to the video hardware with little or no kernel involvement (unless you're using framebuffer support and the fb-dev X driver), and when X goes south, there's a good chance your entire hardware and operating system are heading south along with it. It is the only situation in which GNU/Linux performance approaches that of Microsoft Windows, and it is due to a design flaw in how grafics cards are accessed from within GNU/Linux -- directly from the userspace program instead of via a standard, hardware device driver like everything else.
If your a PC user and you want to test the Apple waters, you have the iMac, the eMac and the iBooks, all cheap, all powerful and all useable machines.
... almost no one switched to Apple simply because that was the only platform you could get DVD-RWs on (which was true ... for about 6 months). Instead people simply waited for the PC version to come out, by which time prices of the drives and media had dropped significantly as well.
This epitomizes the Apple mindset, and why they have had to be bailed out by their principle competitor (Microsoft) once already in order to even remain in business, and why they are likely to need such bailing out again (though I wouldn't count on their actually getting any help the next time around).
They think if they make their peripherals cool enough (and proprietary enough) people will flock to their iMacs and G4s in droves. A few perhaps, most not. Instead, they lose far more sales they could have made, resulting in a net loss of income. Worse, they reveal to any potential customers just how proprietary they are, and one thing even clueless users are learning is to hate proprietary equipment, whether it is the AOL account that is filtering their porn, the Microsoft operating system that is logging their mp3 usage, or the Apple hardware that costs twice as much and does half as little as the commodity hardware all their friends are using.
You may not like it, but hey, I don't like the way M$ does business. Oh well.
Neither do I, although I think one should point out that Apple, and Sun, are both Microsoft wannabe's, as evidenced by their proprietary mindset (and shrinking marketshare), so I wouldn't be too eager to sing their praises if I were you.
In any event, it isn't a matter of what I like, or what you like. The fact is Apple is losing real money with a boneheaded strategy that failed them in the eighties, failed them again in the nineties, and will fail them yet again in the naughties.
As for me, I ended up with a much better monitor because of Apple's stupidity and a little more digging, but the fact of the matter is if they are in the business of selling hardware then, if they would like to stay in business (without future Microsoft financed bailouts), they need to adhere to standards. My particular case is a real world example of how boneheaded Apple is, and can be multiplied by many other people as well (just do a google search on Apple 22" Linux to see how many).
I don't doubt Apple is doing exactly what they want to do, but that doesn't make it any less boneheaded.
There was absolutely no reason to make a new, proprietary digital interface to their monitors, when an exiting, widespread, and very successful standard already exists (DVI). Worse, their proprietary interface causes signalling problems on their own equipment (which resulted in some delays in their 23" monitors shipping at all).
There is absolutely no reason to make their ipod proprietary either. NO ONE is going out and buying iMacs, G3s, or G4s just because they want to have an iPod. Instead, people are simply waiting a few months for the PC equivelent to come out.
Apple should have learned this lesson with the DVD Superdrive (Pioneer DVD-RW). The vast majority of people simply waited for the PC version
I'll say it again: limiting their peripherals to Apple only equipment through proprietary interfaces and/or software doesn't increase their iMacs, G3, or G4 sales, it merely decreases their peripheral sales. In other words, it is an idiotic, boneheaded strategy they are persuing, one which nearly put them out of business before and will likely do so again if they keep it up.
SGI, Sun, HP, Dec, and IBM have already demonstrated (and painfully learned) that proprietary hardware is a dying business model. Even at the high-end server level it is difficult to maintain (witness the emergence of commodity-based clustering technology), at the consumer end it is impossible to maintain. How many more third party bailouts Apple is going to need before they learn that lesson (or go under once and for all) would make a great office betting pool. In the meantime, making more work for themselves in order to avoid selling their products to 90% of the potential market in the hopes of getting some percentage of that market to buy their iMacs and G4s is profoundly stupid, and their stockholders are going to end up paying the price. Then too shall their customers, unfortunately.
Make sure something important was there, that wasn't properly placed onto the fileserver.
... so make it a controlled explosion that just singes the user a little, rather than scattering body parts over a couple of city blocks. (ok, maybe in today's world the explosion metaphore wasn't the best one to use...)
That's not testing a disaster recovery plan, that's deliberately destroying user data so you can say "See, I'm right, neener."
Well, not if he just unplugs the drive and puts a scare into the user. Let 'em sweat for a couple of hours, then manage to fix the problem and let them know how incredibly lucky they are the power cord just worked its way loose and it wasn't a real hard drive crash that would have wiped out their data, something that is a lot more common.
It'll drive the point home in a non-destructive manner, which may be the best thing one can do. It is human nature not to learn such lessons until they blow up in your face
In other words, our creative freedom requires that we respect and defend the creative freedoms of others, even those with whome we vehemently agree.
*sigh*
That should, of course, read "vehemently disagree." So much for proofreading.
Freedom means people can choose wrongly. I sympathise with how you feel
So how do we handle this? I think the best approach isn't to control or restrict how people can use our work (what if I wanted to use your work in the anti-IP move adaptation of my novel? Your fear of the KKK has also made you restrict my ability to use your work as well, something you perhaps neither intended nor wanted), but rather to protect our reputations. My first stab at this is a Free Media License based loosely on both the GPL and the FDL. It needs some more work and certainly isn't ready for use just yet, but the entire license is designed with four goals in mind:
My license is currently too complex IMHO
In any event, the result I am trying to achieve is that, yes, the KKK could use my material in a propoganda video, but while they would be required to note that they had taken my material (and credit me as the original creator of that material), they would have to make even more clear the fact that their use, while legal, is unauthorized and unendorsed by me (the original artist, and of course any intermediate artist who have contributed/modified the material in the meantime). Furthermore, any changes they may have made they must take responsibility for, by applying their name to the current incarnation.
Its ugly to have people like the KKK and Al Q'aida around, but so long as they are prevented from beshmirching your reputation you should be able to release your content with confidence. It is insuring that protection that is IMHO the most important aspect of any Free Media License.
It sounds to me like they're opening up the market for new competition.
That would be true, were it not for the fact that these companies own a monopoly on the 'last mile' of cable coming into your house.
Were fibre and copper treated like a public highway, to which all of the various ISP competitors enjoyed equal and unbiased access under the same terms, you would indeed have competition.
Unfortunately, in the case of telecommunications the highway is privately owned, and competition all but impossible (remember all the DSL providers going belly up? You have companies like Ameritech to thank for that. Hell, I had Ameritech cut my wire just to create a trouble ticket that would make their competition look bad and ultimately line their own pockets. Luckilly I had my own toner and butt set and was able to punch down new wire myself, cheating the telco monopoly of the profits they would have otherwise made on their vandalism. Now there is a hidden camera present, one which will hopefully document this behavior sufficiently to allow for legal action if and when it should happen again).
Do you watch movies by any chance? Or TV? If so, then shut up, because you're helping to fund these guys...
This fallacy has been rebutted numerous times.
The long and short of it is: just because circumstances constrain you to operate within particular boundries, doesn't mean you are in any way wrong or hypocritical in criticizing those boundries, or anything unjust or wrong you find within those boundries. Many of the folk, black and white alike, who criticized apartheid in the United States and South Africa still paid taxes to those governments, watched the television and listened to the radio put out by those governments (or the private corporations profiting from those apartheid systems). Those who advocated communism or socialism still had jobs within those systems, and bought their food, clothing, and housing within those very same systems they so disapproved of. This did not in any way make their criticisms less valid, or make them hyporcrits for having the courage and moxy to stand up and criticize those systems. Quite the contrary.
Indeed, had reformers throughout history been required to operate within the parameters your troll implies ('you cannot legitimately criticize anything that is a part of your lifestyle!') we would be living no differently from people a thousand years ago. In other words, no reform would have been possible, because no criticism would have been possible.
I suspect that, were someone who doesn't watch television or movies to criticize the Hollywood Copyright and Media Cartels, you would be the first to say something to the effect of "That's easy for you to say, you don't use their product anyway!" which is, of course, the flipside of the very same logical fallacy you've indulged in here.
So it is you, not the person you responded to, who really ought to shut up.
If I am not mistaken, Apple is primarily a computer hardware company, right? Which means that they want to sell their own computers, right? Which means that if other cool products they release work only with their computers by default, then their computers just might look a little more attractive to the potential computer buyer, right?
... all it is doing is costing them sales they would have otherwise had in other market segments.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
Apple isn't just shooting themselves in the foot anymore with their proprietary hardware nonsense, they've now moved on to taking a fully loaded automatic and emptying the clip into both of their feet, lathering, rinsing, and repeating the procedure until nothing is left below the knees other than a vaguely red mass of shredded flesh and shattered bone.
Case in point:
I recently purchased a large and very expensive monitor. Apple's marketing of their 22" 1600x1024 monitor was what initially sparked my interest in such a monitor, but having used SGI's 17" 1600x1024 offering, I found the notion of simply having bigger pixels at the same resolution vaguely disatisfying. So I looked around and was delighted to see Apple's 23", 1920x1200 HD capable monitor.
Only to discover that the idiots had decided to use a proprietary, nonstandard interace to their monitor, such that it will only work with an Apple computer (unless you buy an external, likely trouble-prone dongle remeniscent of what SGI's 1600SW required, and which has a reputation for adding noise to the digital (!!) signal because power is transmitted on the same cord). I called the Apple store and was informed that they wouldn't guarantee it would work with a standard DVI interface, and that if it didn't I would be left wearing the $3600 door stop.
I was ready to buy the monitor then and there. Apple lost a $3600 sale as a direct result of their proprietary mindset. And no, there was never a remote chance of my spending another $4k on an Apple G4 system just for the privelege of spending $3.6k on an expensive monitor. Bill Gates is far more likely to learn a modicum of business ethics than I am to spend $8k on Apple equipment when, for $4500, I was able to go out and buy an excellent Samsung 24" LCD monitor that does the same 1920x1200 resolution and will not only work with standard PC DVI interfaces, but will also work with analog cards, and has two video inputs as well (composit and s-video). Had there been no such monitor available I would have opted to wait, knowing that a PC capable device would only have been a question of time. I would not, ever, in a million years, have gone out and spent $6k - $8k for the privelege of having a working 23" LCD with Apple's logo (and ugly frame).
Had Apple's 23" monitor used a standard DVI interace, they would have made an immediate $3600 on a non-apple, PC user (despite the ugly frame). Instead they made $0.
The same is true of the iPod. I'm not about to go out and spend a thousand or more bucks on a platform I have no interest in simply in order to be able to use a several-hundred dollar iPod. So instead of making a few hundred bucks on a non-Apple user, they make $0, yet again.
People will only opt to use Apple computers because they like Apple, or prefer the applications available on Apple, or have a specific reason to use Apple. No one in their right mind would choose a particular platform because this or that peripheral (iPod, big LCD monitor) has been crippled to only to work with that hardware, particularly in an age where you can wait for 6 months (maximum) and have it availabel for whatever platform you prefer.
In other words, Apple's obsolete proprietary mindset isn't making them any more sales, and thus any more money
I've tried the Linux demo version abt two years ago. It was rather nice even then.
... the program is very unstable, and the one rule of thumb was 'save early, save often' (and you still will probably lose some of your work).
... support was much better for Windows users than GNU/Linux users.
... I just need to be able to snip commercials out of my Max Headroom recordings, to edit out the dead space in my home videos, and rearrange some of the takes in my home movies. For that, kino is sufficient.
... something I waited quite a while in vain for with Main Actor.
I've used MainActor (I paid the $99 license fee), and it will turn your GNU/Linux box into a Microsoft Windows box
Worse, GNU/Linux bugs seemed to get fixed last
I have since switched to using kino for my NLE needs (which are quite simple: cut, rearrange, export into a form transcode can manipulate), and while it isn't perfect, it is a heck of a lot better than MainActor. I don't need fancy star wipes (hey Homer) or text overlays
I do hope Cinelerra is good, works, and actually remains supported by the authors for a time, but as another noted, the authors do seem pretty 'flighty', particularly in the context of the bizarr removal of Broadcast/2000 off the web a while back. One hopes it is, as another noted, just a quirky sense of humor on the authors' part and not a sign of deeper waffling on the whole software freedom thing, as even a buggy (and discontinued) GPLed product can at least be improved upon
If this works you won't be able to create antigravity fields.
... just keep your superconductor in the shade and gravity will simply point 'down.' It could also be used for propulsion in space ... generate a gravitational field and let your ship 'fall' into it. Repeat as necessary until desired vector is achieved, then reverse when needed.
Correct. But it may still have some potentially very useful applications. Artificial gravity, for one, which could make the health risks due to microgravity of a long trip to Mars, or an extended stay in orbit, a thing of the past. No need for big spinning metal canisters (which have their own navigational and structural challenges)
No, it won't get you off the surface of the earth, but once in space it could be very useful.
Actually, wrong. Static linking vs. dynamic linking is all the same to the GPL. You still have to publish the source code for the users of the application, because according to the terms of the GPL
I stand corrected. Nevertheless, my main point stands. The artistic work (sets, characters, etc.) for a game are not part of the GPLed code, regardless, any more than an xvid video is a part of mplayer, or a png file a part of the GIMP.
So, while a game engine based upon OGRE or Crystal Sphere would have to be GPLed, the game itself (i.e. what is analogous to a WAD file) is not required to be GPLed, any more than Applixware is required to be GPLed simply because it runs under (the GPLed) GNU/Linux operating system.
section 2b of the GPL [gnu.org]: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof,to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. [emphesis added]
This clearly refers to the source code, not add-on graphics, etc. Dynamic libraries are not "getting around" the GPL, the GPL is specifically designed to limit itself to the project(s) in question and its derivatives, not every usage of the project that doesn't directly incorporate its source code.
Furthermore, your artistic work is no more a part of the GPLed code that a word document you write with Open Office is a part of that GPLed project (and thus GPLed itself). You are propogating a Microsoft myth that has been debunked by numerous third parties, and by the Free Software Foundation itself.
If you were writing a game based on a GPLed game, then yes, your game would have to be GPLed. If, however, you are writing a game that uses a GPLed library (like Ogre or Crystal Space) the GPL does not extend beyond the boundries of the GPLed library unless you statically link it to your code, and then distribute that statically linked binary (something no one in their right mind would do in this day and age regardless of the GPL).
The GPL foists no trap upon developers, it protects the freedom of their projects from poachers like Microsoft, and it in no way coerces your project external to it into using the GPL, your protestations and denials notwithstanding.
Calm down, I wasn't trolling. I think copyrights and intellectual property are anachronisms, too, but I just thought it was awfully funny, that his book about the evils of copyrights, intellectual property, and corporate profiteering on such works was copyrighted...
I was responding not to your post, but to the followup that basically extended your post from a humorous poke at the author's publisher to a broader accusation of hypocracy which implied the author should essentially have kept his/her mouth shut, or at least remained unpublished (which in today's world amounts to much the same thing):
It's obvious - if he provided the book in electronic format, then no one would buy the print copy.
Oh, wait...isn't that EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS US SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS TO DO?
Fuck him.
Perhaps you were browsing at +2 and didn't notice the reply? In any event, despite the fact that the aforementioned post was a troll, it expresses a far too common assumption and very widespread meme that, unless your lifestyle or methods exclude all aspects of whatever it is you are criticizing, you somehow should have no right to criticize that thing, should keep your mouth shut, and/or are a hypocrite of the lowest kind. This is nonsense, and indeed if every reformer in history had been constrained in such a fashion no reform would ever have happened and our lifestyle would likely be little different from that of our ancesters 1000 years ago.
That particularly destructive and disempowering meme needs to be debunked whenever it rears its ugly head, or we as a society will dismiss efforts at reform we should not, and suffer accordingly. So, even though the post I responded to (not yours!) almost certainly was a troll, it needed rebutting nevertheless.
Oh, wait...isn't that EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS US SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS TO DO?
... because that is all they had to work with, and the alternative (that clowns like you seem to be advocating) is to never speak out at all, to in effect be silenced by the very circumstances one is trying to fix. Not a very reasonable, or desireable, option.
And so what if he does? Unless you use PGP[1], I doubt you've ever, even once in your entire life, made use of a hard copy of some software package.
Saying that an economic model doesn't work for certain conditions isn't the same as demanding one give away one's work for free. Although, as free software's superiority over its commercial competitors by most objective criteria indicates, perhaps that is the most effecient economic model for situations in which there is an initial fixed cost, but no ongoing cost. Or perhaps there is something even more effecient than the free software model, but if their is, it has been demonstrated clearly to not be capitalism, particularly not capitalism in the form of government sponsored and enforced monopoly priveleges.
So the guy isn't giving his book away for free. So what? He has to operate in the same government sponsored monopolistic environment as everyone else, just as Richard Stallman (who opposed copyright, at least in the beginning) was forced to come up with a license that used copyright to insure the very freedoms it is designed to destroy. Just as numerous books calling for the use of hemp instead of trees for making paper have been published on dead trees
I wish we would move away from oil to cleaner, more sustainable energy that wouldn't put millions of dollars in the pockets of a culture that sponsors hatred of and terrorism against my culture. Does that mean I'm going to start living without electricity or transportation until such a belated move is finally made (if ever). Hardly. But it doesn't mean I'm going to shut up about it either, nor does it make my a hypocrit for refusing to do so, because circumstances beyond my control leave me with no other viable choice, at least for the moment.
[1]To get around US export restrictions, PGP was published in book form and shipped overseas, then transcribed by hand back into electronic format and distributed electronically from outside of the United States. No fees were charged or, to my knowledge, ever paid for that arduous bit of tedium.
Cool, at what level do I get to roll a D30 for my attack rolls?
:-) Besides, for dice geeks like myself they just look cool ... though I still want to get that D100 I saw a long time ago.
I haven't kept up on all the latest AD&D rule changes (its been several years since I last campaigned), but IIRC D30s weren't used by AD&D at all. They are used by other RPG games, however, so I picked several up a while back. They came in handy for rolling things like "how many minutes (between 2 and 60) you'll be stuck in this sticky mass, rolling 1D6 damage for each minute."
But to say they had no choice other than 28.8 is probably a bit of hyperbole...
In most discussions of this sort the term "cost effective" or "acceptable" is implied, i.e. "they had no other cost effective (or acceptable) choice other than 28.8" is probably not hyperbole. Remember, satelites work for download, upload is still limited to what the phone line can carry, ie. 28.8kb, so satelite wasn't really a choice that would have addressed the problem of speed to their satisfaction (read their website for specifics of why when they systematically investigated the satelite option they rejected it).
See? All he wants is for us to invent a perpetual motion machine. It's not so much to ask, we're just thinking about it wrong.
... just a little attention to detail.
"The Earth is not a closed system, it is powered by the sun. So fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun."
Any random building you find you will discover is wasting much of the energy that strikes it each day, in the form of sunlight, wind, and rainwater washing down its surface, to name just three.
Building buildings that produce more (presumably electrical) energy than they use doesn't require a violation of the 2nd law
I'm fully aware of the Cathedral and Bazar idealogy, but when there is no-one in the Cathedral and you're the only person giving in the Bazar, GPL suddenly doesn't seem to be this wonderful solution to bugs, features and support.
... you're just the only person who happens to be managing your stall in the bizar at the moment. :-)
It depends on the amount of interest the project generates, how well you get the word out, etc. It sounds like people do report bugs and while, ideally, they would submit patches with the reports, the are reporting bugs you might never have known about and hence never been able to fix, so the quality of your software has benefited directly as a result (even if you have done all the work actually fixing it yourself).
The kind folks at Blender misunderstood the entire software freedom paradigm, as well as the dynamics of free software and open source projects. People have to be interested and excited to spend their valuable (and ever shrinking) free time contributing. They GPLed a skeletal distributed rendering arbiter daemon, then sat back and waited for the community to finish writing the project. When that didn't happen (after all, it was usable in its current form to those of us who knew how to use it, so we used it, reported bugs, and submitted the occasional patch), they concluded that they would have had not gain had they GPLed Blender itself.
Perhaps not, but there are other GPLed 3d modelling and rendering projects that suggest otherwise. It is much more exciting for a programmer/animator/film hobbiest to work on sexy new special effects modules and features for a project than a back-end, distributed rendering daemon that most people don't have the equipment (read: more than one computer) to use anyway.
So they got bad data, made what IMHO was a very bad strategic decision as a result (to not GPL Blender and concentrate on business approaches to leverage that) and now Blender the product and NaN the company are dead, and the community of enthusiasts that grew around it is dying alongs side it. A loss to the animation community, to the Linux community, and quite probably a loss to NaN (the makers of Blender) as well.
Another way they didn't understand software freedom was their insistence that "no one will ever have to pay to use blender" (a very kind goal, but NOT what free software is about). There were any number of approaches they could have used in giving out software gratis (charge for documentation, charge for the current version and keep the gratis/libre version a few months behind the pay-to-use version, etc.), that would have been obvious had they understood the philosophy, mindset, and implications of free software and the (software) freedom it represents.
Hmm, I didn't really mean for this to become a requiem for Blender, but in any event I don't blame you at all for being put off by 50 greedy (and likely ungrateful) wretches demanding your code, but remember that this is about freedom, yours as much as those 50 ungrateful wretches (some of whome are, quite likely, deliberate trolls or perhaps even MS astroturf-style agent provoceteurs who want you to become disillusioned. The latter would sound utterly paranoid to me, had I not seen it firsthand in action in another context [unrelated to Microsoft]). The bottom line is do you benefit, and are the benefits worth it to you for you to free your code? If the bug reports and community that grows around your tool is beneficial to you, and the quality of your code, then perhaps it is. If not, then obviously it isn't (though perhaps being able to hand-off your code to someone else when you grow weary, or bored, with the project so that it can continue to develop and grow may make it worth your while anyway).
In any event, its your code to do with as you please, and while effusive gratitude for your doing what many thousands of others think nothing of doing (freeing your code) may not be a realistic thing to expect, I sympathise greatly with your disgust at the ungratefulness many users of free software seem all to eager to display.
BTW - If you're running GNU/Linux, X, KDE/gnome, etc. you aren't the only person going to the bizar and helping out
I would guess you would not be able to watch TV without having it hooked up the internet reporting all you are doing. Big-brotherish future.
Until and unless Big Brother Hollywood is going to pay for my internet connection, they'd better not even think about imposing that kind of draconian supervision over my viewing habits. If they should try to do so I will either organize a class action suit against them, or sue them on my own. Whether it is 2 bytes or 2 gigabytes, I'm the one paying for the bandwidth and their use of my resources against my will constitutes tresspess of chattles and arguably theft in precisely the same way junk faxes and SPAM do.
Now, if Hollywood is going to offer me free 100Mbit bandwidth to the internet, I might briefly consider making a Faustian bargain with them, exchanging my privacy for faster pr0n downloads, but I suspect even then I would consider it only briefly before rejecting it. Some things, like individual privacy and freedom, aren't for sale at any price (at least by me, though it seems the masses of mindless drones that populate our western democracies, indeed perhaps the entire planet, aren't as discriminating as one might wish).
Forget that. I'm waiting for Star Wars - The Broadway Play. I'll be limited only by my own eyes and ears!
Just go watch your local high school thespians.
You'll get infinitely better acting at resolution limited only by the acuity of your eyes, more than enough to make up for the cardboard models and visible strings in the special effects.
I'm only half joking: such BBC greats as Dr. Who, Blakes7, Red Dwarf, and Goodnight Sweetheart had special effects quality that wouldn't challenge a preteen child with a slow computer, but their excellent story lines and average to good acting more than made up for it. The cheesiest episode of Dr. Who beats the last two Star Wars movies hands down in terms of overall enjoyable viewing experience, and the MPAA's efforts at pushing digital distribution to squeeze out indie filmmakers nothwithstanding, the market for quality over shiny dreck will only increase with time, and find new channels for its expression as the 'official' distribution channels are closed off.