Centuries ago, cosmic-ray concentrations grew to be as much as 200 percent more intense than they are now, yet humankind survived.
How do we know this? Who was measuring cosmic-ray concentrations centuries ago, and how did they measure them? How accurate were the measurements, and how certain are we of that accuracy?
According to wikipedia, "In 1910 Theodor Wulf developed an electrometer (a device to measure the rate of ion production inside a hermetically sealed container) and used it to show higher levels of radiation at the top of the Eiffel Tower than at its base." That sounds like a bit less than "centuries ago".
I agree the charts are poor. What about the fact that the axes don't necessarily start at 0? This can be misleading, in that a small difference can be made to look much more significant. Broadsheets in the UK do this all the time.
That's one of the first tricks I learned from How to Lie with Statistics. The other is that log scales should be used much more than they actually are. (Google finanace gets this right, although it's not always obvious.)
One point... red-green colour blindness is quite common, so if we're being pedantic you'd probably want to avoid using them for contrast. Problem with colour-coding is also deciding what is "good" and "bad", which is making a subjective judgement.
Have you ever seen the Map of the Market? It's a Java applet that gives you the choice of red-vs-green (the traditional subjective value judgment, at least in the West) or blue-vs-yellow (especially useful if you have red-green colorblindness, its high contrast is probably useful for lots of other forms as well).
Eight pages of bar charts, each gray-on-gray. On half of them, shorter bars mean better performance, on the other half, longer is better; the only way to know which is which is in a legend, written in a small font.
Here's a suggestion: color-code the bars! Green is good, red is bad, yellow is in the middle of the road. For bonus points, choose the saturation based on magnitude of the differences. If the numbers are close, go with grayer bars, if the differences are dramatic, use dramatic colors.
Finally, how about a line chart at the end showing all of the numbers in one place? Yeah, you'd need to convert everything to be consistent if longer or shorter is better, but that's a good idea anyway.
I have spent quite a bit reading on the subject, and I'm one of the people who belive that the "water ape" hypothesis is correct. I also think that the article linked to in this slashdot story is correct.
Ditto. Unfortunately, the aquatic ape hypothesis apparently needs a future ice age to drop oceanic water levels if we want to find any fossil evidence, and that seems unlikely right now.
An aquatic existence would have forced our ancestors to become meat-eaters. Great apes eat insects when they can, so a group could have discovered a taste for crayfish and other shallow water arthropods. Once they started living in the shallows, their diet would have quickly switched from fruit-based to protein-based. Later, when they "decided" that a water-based lifestyle wasn't really that great, they'd have started looking for new sources of meat. Scraping the meat off the bones of large animals would be one way of making it more "sushi"-like.
I think that we should start putting ficticious information (something blob-like, like a customer name) into sensitive databases that matches one or more virus signatures. This would cause email filters to block the content before it leaves the premises. (Yes, I realize that we'd need to be filtering out-going mail, but unless you're a spam generator, that's a small fractgion of your incoming email. Some of use are already doing this, although not for this reason.)
Any woman who had my children would get $1e6 for themselves and each child would get a $1e6 trust fund. The remaining money would fund a medical team that would receive $1e6 every year that I lived, but when I died my remaining estate would go to support Linux or stray cats or something. That way, the doctors would have an incentive to keep me alive as long as possible.
I don't think you've quite understood the problem described. You can have an infinite number of parity disks, but it does you no good if recovering one data disk causes another data disk to fail.
Imagine a disk fails on every 100TB of reads (10^14). You have ten 1TB data disks. Imagine you keep them in perfect rotation so they've spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100% of their lifetime. The last disk dies and you replace it with a new drive (0%). To rebuild the drive you read 1TB from each data disk and use whatever parity you need. They've now spent 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91 and 1% (your new disk) of their lifetime and you can read another 9TB before you need a new disk.
Now we try doing the same with ten 10TB disks and the same reliability. The last disk dies and you replace it, only now you must read 10TB from each disk. Instead of adding 1% to the lifetime it adds 10% so that they've spent 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 and 10% (your new disk) of their lifetime. But now another disk fails, you can recover that but then another will fail and another and another and another.
This is more of a proof of concept, but imagine if your RAID-5 array is composed of mirrored pairs. You are still protected against double disk failures, but (if you spread your reads across the pair) you'll only see half the degradation when you rebuild. If that seems too expensive, then use RAID-5 (2+1), where a clever rebuild algorithm will only cost you 2/3s of the degradation. Now that you've wrapped your head around that idea, imagine an NxN set of disks, where each row and each column forms an independent parity set. Now you're protected against triple failures at the same cost as RAID-6. (You'd need to lose four drives on the corners of a rectangle to lose data.) Adjust your value of N to suit your needs; larger values cost you less overhead, but smaller values can improve write performance and potentially reduce rebuild degradation.
Basically, parity does not solve that issue. If you had a mirror, you would instead copy the mirrored disk with significantly less wear on the disks. RAID is very nice as a high-level check that the data isn't corrupted but it's a very inefficient way of rebuilding a whole disk.
No one I know of uses RAID parity to check data integrity; it's way too expensive it terms of drive bandwidth. To check a sector, you have to read all the corresponding sectors on all of the drives in the parity set. If you're truly worried about this (and some people are!), it's much cheaper to add more error checking to your drive, either by custom microcode or in your device drivers (see, for example http://www.google.com/search?q=EMC+Double+Checksum and http://www.google.com/search?q=Oracle+HARD+Initiative).
Actually, storing data in a multiple data center / high availability environment is a completely related issue. The summary above talks of "entirely different paradigms." Cloud storage would be multiple data center based, which is entirely different from keeping the only copy on your local drives. In this concept, your machine would have enough OS to boot, and enough hard drive space to download the current version of whatever software you are leasing. Your personal info would always be maintained in the data centers, and only mirrored locally. Have a home failure? Drop in a new part or even a new PC, (possibly with an entirely different operating system, such as Chrome,) connect to the service, and you're 100% back.
Unfortunately, that's just moving the issue to the cloud, which (since it is storing great gobs of data) is likely to be using the highest capacity drives available in some sort of RAID configuration.
The Zune HD utilizes the Nvidia Tegra 600 chip [3], allowing it to play 720p video through the optional HDMI Zune dock on a high-definition television. Otherwise, content will be scaled down to 480x272 pixels on the player's OLED screen.
You've gotta wonder who is going to spring for that dock; I know that I've never seen a big market for video adaptors for other hand-held gaming platforms. But what do I know, I hardly ever use the external iPod speakers I got for Christmas last year.
A bit further down the same page you can find these nuggets:
The specifications as listed by the official web page of the Zune HD[...]:
HD radio tuner
Video support: [...]
720p HD resolution and up to 14 Mbps bit rate, CBR or VBR for above supported video profiles
I just bought a new DLP TV, and when I got it home, I noticed that it was "2D Ready". Apparently every DLP television set made in the past year or two has had this built-in, and it is relatively simple to translate most other 3-D formats into this one. The immediate problem that I encountered is that consumer-grade shutter glasses cost from $100 to $500 per pair.
The good news is that just about every CGI animated move of the past 15 years (assuming that the models were preserved) could be redone quickly in 3D. Pixar is already doing this for Toy Story and Toy Story 2, and it that does well, I fully expect to see the rest of their catalog follow suit.
For your average datacenter, primary storage needs to be on a major vendor's hardware, because you need the extras that the major vendor's supply. However, Backblaze is in the business of providing off-site storage for their customers. Their data is the secondary copy, so it can be as cheap as they can make it. No one is going to be running their data center off of this copy, so it can be low performance. And while I'm not saying that they should, they could probably get away with running non-protected storage for everything. Even if they lose a drive every day, it's unlikely to hold the data needed for that day's requested restores. That means they can almost always rebuild a failed drive's contents the next time the affected customers sync up.
Weâ(TM)re a backup service, so our datacenter contains a complete copy of all of our customersâ(TM) data, plus multiple versions of files that change. In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive.
Data deduplication (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication) drastically reduce the storage requirements for backups. While email attachments are the classic example, it's doubtful that every one of their customer's is using a unique build of their OS. Ditto for third-party software. A lot of media also gets duplicated between people: vendor's whitepapers, video, even porn gets downloaded by lost of people. Rsync uses de-dup techniques to reduce bandwidth requirements; there's no reason why a clever storage node couldn't use that de-dup meta data to keep its own storage costs down.
I personally don't consider the AGPL as free (because I may wish to run it on my publicly accessible web-server and modify it)
Excuse me, but you don't run a license on a web server, you run code. The entire article is riddled with errors like this, making me distrust the author's ability to reason about things.
Plus, the web page is badly formatted. On my 1280x1024 monitor, over half the width of the screen is filled by a fat blue bar on each side. I feel like I'm reading a narrow newspaper column or something. A main article should occupy well over half the width of the display. I had to spend so much time scrolling, I couldn't concentrate on the article.
Overall, I made it about halfway through before I had to give up. Maybe this guy has an important point to make, but I sure couldn't see it.
Liskula Cohen obtained the information by asking a court to get it, and the court forced the release. Which means the person who should be sued is... the court. Which doesn't happen.
Going forward, the courts should require that a substantial bond be posted by the plaintiff. If the case is dropped, the bond is forfeited to the defendant. And by substantial, I mean that *at a minimum* it should be 25 times the defendant's annual income so that the defendant doesn't have to worry about loss of income due to the exposure. Yes, this means that the bond would be set between the time that the defendant's identity is discovered by the court and the time it is released. This is a good thing, because it would also allow the defendant to argue for a higher bond, if they were a full-time student or something.
No space craft has ever been aimed accurately. At various times during the mission, you look at where you are and where you're supposed to be, and make a correction to your trajectory. Is there some reason why this won't work with a solar sail?
http://tinytimetracker.sourceforge.net/php/ "Tiny Time Tracker is an unobtrusive personal time tracker that fits nicely at the bottom of your screen. Switching between tasks is made easy with auto-complete and a "task history" dropdown. Times may be viewed in an Excel spread sheet."
I only discovered this app a month ago, and I've fallen in love. It doesn't really integrate itself into your task bar, it's just a very small window you can drag anywhere. I keep it near the top of my screen, because it can get lost as I dock and undock my laptop all day. I'm only using three tasks, not the dozen they show in the screen shots: Personal, Non-billable, and Client. I've discovered that I was actually working more hours than I thought, about 50 hours per week. I'd already figured out the "send emails as you start and stop work from home" so everyone knows what I'm doing. Now I'm taking a four-day weekend every other week or so just to burn my comp time. It does help that the client bought a fixed number of my hours, and really doesn't want my contract to expire 25% sooner than planned.
'Over time, talent is a fixed cost,' says Marty Moe, Senior Vice-President of AOL Media.
I have to call "Bullshit!" on this statement. Over time, talent is a recurring cost, unless you plan to fire everyone after a year (which might be part of their plan).
A fixed cost item is something that you buy and then use (more or less) forever. Acquiring a story is a fixed cost, because you can keep using it after the author is gone. Of course, the value of a story tends to depreciate over time, so you want to keep the good authors around, to produce fresh content, but I'm not sure if AOL media grasps that idea.
When I went to the Themes page, I got this message: "We're sorry, but themes are available for Google Chrome 3.0.195.3 and above only.: The funny thing is, the about box says I'm running 3.0.195.4!
"Even if you could sell it" - I was being hypthetical. If you try to sell GPL software you really open up a can of worms in terms of ethical problems. I have no intention of making money off XPilot.
Go look at my posting history. I've sold lots of GPL'ed software in my career. You may not want to make money from "your" software, but I like to occasionally buy nice things for my wife and kids. And I used quotes back there because it appears that at least one of the other developers has fewer problems with this than you do: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1322797&cid=28910091
The reason XPilot even exists is that there was a thriving community of (probably) hundreds of developers contributing. I doubt that would happen if anyone was trying to sell it. I'm not complaining about the work he did, I'm complaining about him trying to sell software that he has built a mere fraction of.
Why would you think that? There are thriving communities of (probably) thousands of developers contributing maps and mods to closed source games. There are thriving communities of (probably) tens of thousands of writers creating fan-fiction for works owned by people and/or corporations who don't share well with others. People like to give back to things they like, and licensing (or the lack thereof) rarely stops them from doing so.
True, though I'm sure you agree they are trading off a bigger user base for bigger profits.
If you feel so strongly about it, take the provided code and compile your own app. The source is right there, so it won't take much work. Publish it in the App Store with a Tolkienesque message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."
I have no intentions of making money off XPilot. (Read the "even if you could sell it" paragraph above.) I've had lots of benefits from being involved in the project, though.
So after you get back the $99 you spent getting into the App Store, send the rest to the FSF.
I think people get confused because, in general, GPL implies zero cost software. The reason is that it is hard to sell something when others can give it away for free.
Actually, it's easy. I post about this every time a GPL thread gets out of control here. I've written tons of software that I've sold using a very slightly modified version of the GPL: my changes were to remove the word "Gnu" and replace it with my name, and remove "Public" and replace it with "Joint Ownership". My customers received full source code with the rights to do with it whatever they pleased, including giving it away for free. Of course, they paid me by the hour to write code which they felt gave them an advantage over their competitors; as a result, they felt no urge to give it away even it they didn't like my price. The moral is, don't sell your app for $50, sell it for $50,000.
Slashdot Mirror
Centuries ago, cosmic-ray concentrations grew to be as much as 200 percent more intense than they are now, yet humankind survived.
How do we know this? Who was measuring cosmic-ray concentrations centuries ago, and how did they measure them? How accurate were the measurements, and how certain are we of that accuracy?
According to wikipedia, "In 1910 Theodor Wulf developed an electrometer (a device to measure the rate of ion production inside a hermetically sealed container) and used it to show higher levels of radiation at the top of the Eiffel Tower than at its base." That sounds like a bit less than "centuries ago".
The WINE and ReactOS projects don't provide MS Office, IE or Media Player. FPGB (http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/09/29/0516251/Gameboy-Color-Boot-ROM-Dumped-After-10-Years) doesn't provide GameBoy cartridges. MAME makes you responsible for finding your own ROMs. Et cetera, etc.
That's *my* credit union!
I agree the charts are poor. What about the fact that the axes don't necessarily start at 0? This can be misleading, in that a small difference can be made to look much more significant. Broadsheets in the UK do this all the time.
That's one of the first tricks I learned from How to Lie with Statistics. The other is that log scales should be used much more than they actually are. (Google finanace gets this right, although it's not always obvious.)
One point... red-green colour blindness is quite common, so if we're being pedantic you'd probably want to avoid using them for contrast. Problem with colour-coding is also deciding what is "good" and "bad", which is making a subjective judgement.
Have you ever seen the Map of the Market? It's a Java applet that gives you the choice of red-vs-green (the traditional subjective value judgment, at least in the West) or blue-vs-yellow (especially useful if you have red-green colorblindness, its high contrast is probably useful for lots of other forms as well).
Eight pages of bar charts, each gray-on-gray. On half of them, shorter bars mean better performance, on the other half, longer is better; the only way to know which is which is in a legend, written in a small font.
Here's a suggestion: color-code the bars! Green is good, red is bad, yellow is in the middle of the road. For bonus points, choose the saturation based on magnitude of the differences. If the numbers are close, go with grayer bars, if the differences are dramatic, use dramatic colors.
Finally, how about a line chart at the end showing all of the numbers in one place? Yeah, you'd need to convert everything to be consistent if longer or shorter is better, but that's a good idea anyway.
I have spent quite a bit reading on the subject, and I'm one of the people who belive that the "water ape" hypothesis is correct. I also think that the article linked to in this slashdot story is correct.
Ditto. Unfortunately, the aquatic ape hypothesis apparently needs a future ice age to drop oceanic water levels if we want to find any fossil evidence, and that seems unlikely right now.
An aquatic existence would have forced our ancestors to become meat-eaters. Great apes eat insects when they can, so a group could have discovered a taste for crayfish and other shallow water arthropods. Once they started living in the shallows, their diet would have quickly switched from fruit-based to protein-based. Later, when they "decided" that a water-based lifestyle wasn't really that great, they'd have started looking for new sources of meat. Scraping the meat off the bones of large animals would be one way of making it more "sushi"-like.
How would our ancestors been able to cook while cavorting with the dolphins?
I think that we should start putting ficticious information (something blob-like, like a customer name) into sensitive databases that matches one or more virus signatures. This would cause email filters to block the content before it leaves the premises. (Yes, I realize that we'd need to be filtering out-going mail, but unless you're a spam generator, that's a small fractgion of your incoming email. Some of use are already doing this, although not for this reason.)
Any woman who had my children would get $1e6 for themselves and each child would get a $1e6 trust fund. The remaining money would fund a medical team that would receive $1e6 every year that I lived, but when I died my remaining estate would go to support Linux or stray cats or something. That way, the doctors would have an incentive to keep me alive as long as possible.
I don't think you've quite understood the problem described. You can have an infinite number of parity disks, but it does you no good if recovering one data disk causes another data disk to fail.
Imagine a disk fails on every 100TB of reads (10^14). You have ten 1TB data disks. Imagine you keep them in perfect rotation so they've spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100% of their lifetime. The last disk dies and you replace it with a new drive (0%). To rebuild the drive you read 1TB from each data disk and use whatever parity you need. They've now spent 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91 and 1% (your new disk) of their lifetime and you can read another 9TB before you need a new disk.
Now we try doing the same with ten 10TB disks and the same reliability. The last disk dies and you replace it, only now you must read 10TB from each disk. Instead of adding 1% to the lifetime it adds 10% so that they've spent 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 and 10% (your new disk) of their lifetime. But now another disk fails, you can recover that but then another will fail and another and another and another.
This is more of a proof of concept, but imagine if your RAID-5 array is composed of mirrored pairs. You are still protected against double disk failures, but (if you spread your reads across the pair) you'll only see half the degradation when you rebuild. If that seems too expensive, then use RAID-5 (2+1), where a clever rebuild algorithm will only cost you 2/3s of the degradation. Now that you've wrapped your head around that idea, imagine an NxN set of disks, where each row and each column forms an independent parity set. Now you're protected against triple failures at the same cost as RAID-6. (You'd need to lose four drives on the corners of a rectangle to lose data.) Adjust your value of N to suit your needs; larger values cost you less overhead, but smaller values can improve write performance and potentially reduce rebuild degradation.
Basically, parity does not solve that issue. If you had a mirror, you would instead copy the mirrored disk with significantly less wear on the disks. RAID is very nice as a high-level check that the data isn't corrupted but it's a very inefficient way of rebuilding a whole disk.
No one I know of uses RAID parity to check data integrity; it's way too expensive it terms of drive bandwidth. To check a sector, you have to read all the corresponding sectors on all of the drives in the parity set. If you're truly worried about this (and some people are!), it's much cheaper to add more error checking to your drive, either by custom microcode or in your device drivers (see, for example http://www.google.com/search?q=EMC+Double+Checksum and http://www.google.com/search?q=Oracle+HARD+Initiative).
Actually, storing data in a multiple data center / high availability environment is a completely related issue. The summary above talks of "entirely different paradigms." Cloud storage would be multiple data center based, which is entirely different from keeping the only copy on your local drives. In this concept, your machine would have enough OS to boot, and enough hard drive space to download the current version of whatever software you are leasing. Your personal info would always be maintained in the data centers, and only mirrored locally. Have a home failure? Drop in a new part or even a new PC, (possibly with an entirely different operating system, such as Chrome,) connect to the service, and you're 100% back.
Unfortunately, that's just moving the issue to the cloud, which (since it is storing great gobs of data) is likely to be using the highest capacity drives available in some sort of RAID configuration.
The Zune HD supports both an HD radio tuner and (just barely) HD video.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_HD:
The Zune HD utilizes the Nvidia Tegra 600 chip [3], allowing it to play 720p video through the optional HDMI Zune dock on a high-definition television. Otherwise, content will be scaled down to 480x272 pixels on the player's OLED screen.
You've gotta wonder who is going to spring for that dock; I know that I've never seen a big market for video adaptors for other hand-held gaming platforms. But what do I know, I hardly ever use the external iPod speakers I got for Christmas last year.
A bit further down the same page you can find these nuggets:
The specifications as listed by the official web page of the Zune HD[...]:
I just bought a new DLP TV, and when I got it home, I noticed that it was "2D Ready". Apparently every DLP television set made in the past year or two has had this built-in, and it is relatively simple to translate most other 3-D formats into this one. The immediate problem that I encountered is that consumer-grade shutter glasses cost from $100 to $500 per pair.
The good news is that just about every CGI animated move of the past 15 years (assuming that the models were preserved) could be redone quickly in 3D. Pixar is already doing this for Toy Story and Toy Story 2, and it that does well, I fully expect to see the rest of their catalog follow suit.
For your average datacenter, primary storage needs to be on a major vendor's hardware, because you need the extras that the major vendor's supply. However, Backblaze is in the business of providing off-site storage for their customers. Their data is the secondary copy, so it can be as cheap as they can make it. No one is going to be running their data center off of this copy, so it can be low performance. And while I'm not saying that they should, they could probably get away with running non-protected storage for everything. Even if they lose a drive every day, it's unlikely to hold the data needed for that day's requested restores. That means they can almost always rebuild a failed drive's contents the next time the affected customers sync up.
Weâ(TM)re a backup service, so our datacenter contains a complete copy of all of our customersâ(TM) data, plus multiple versions of files that change. In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive.
Data deduplication (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication) drastically reduce the storage requirements for backups. While email attachments are the classic example, it's doubtful that every one of their customer's is using a unique build of their OS. Ditto for third-party software. A lot of media also gets duplicated between people: vendor's whitepapers, video, even porn gets downloaded by lost of people. Rsync uses de-dup techniques to reduce bandwidth requirements; there's no reason why a clever storage node couldn't use that de-dup meta data to keep its own storage costs down.
I personally don't consider the AGPL as free (because I may wish to run it on my publicly accessible web-server and modify it)
Excuse me, but you don't run a license on a web server, you run code. The entire article is riddled with errors like this, making me distrust the author's ability to reason about things.
Plus, the web page is badly formatted. On my 1280x1024 monitor, over half the width of the screen is filled by a fat blue bar on each side. I feel like I'm reading a narrow newspaper column or something. A main article should occupy well over half the width of the display. I had to spend so much time scrolling, I couldn't concentrate on the article.
Overall, I made it about halfway through before I had to give up. Maybe this guy has an important point to make, but I sure couldn't see it.
Liskula Cohen obtained the information by asking a court to get it, and the court forced the release. Which means the person who should be sued is... the court. Which doesn't happen.
Going forward, the courts should require that a substantial bond be posted by the plaintiff. If the case is dropped, the bond is forfeited to the defendant. And by substantial, I mean that *at a minimum* it should be 25 times the defendant's annual income so that the defendant doesn't have to worry about loss of income due to the exposure. Yes, this means that the bond would be set between the time that the defendant's identity is discovered by the court and the time it is released. This is a good thing, because it would also allow the defendant to argue for a higher bond, if they were a full-time student or something.
With most probes they're pretty compact, small thruster bursts will do a lot.
How do you tack a solar sail though?
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails/intro/tacking.html
No space craft has ever been aimed accurately. At various times during the mission, you look at where you are and where you're supposed to be, and make a correction to your trajectory. Is there some reason why this won't work with a solar sail?
Because subverting the will of the judiciary always turns out well.
http://tinytimetracker.sourceforge.net/php/ "Tiny Time Tracker is an unobtrusive personal time tracker that fits nicely at the bottom of your screen. Switching between tasks is made easy with auto-complete and a "task history" dropdown. Times may be viewed in an Excel spread sheet."
I only discovered this app a month ago, and I've fallen in love. It doesn't really integrate itself into your task bar, it's just a very small window you can drag anywhere. I keep it near the top of my screen, because it can get lost as I dock and undock my laptop all day. I'm only using three tasks, not the dozen they show in the screen shots: Personal, Non-billable, and Client. I've discovered that I was actually working more hours than I thought, about 50 hours per week. I'd already figured out the "send emails as you start and stop work from home" so everyone knows what I'm doing. Now I'm taking a four-day weekend every other week or so just to burn my comp time. It does help that the client bought a fixed number of my hours, and really doesn't want my contract to expire 25% sooner than planned.
'Over time, talent is a fixed cost,' says Marty Moe, Senior Vice-President of AOL Media.
I have to call "Bullshit!" on this statement. Over time, talent is a recurring cost, unless you plan to fire everyone after a year (which might be part of their plan).
A fixed cost item is something that you buy and then use (more or less) forever. Acquiring a story is a fixed cost, because you can keep using it after the author is gone. Of course, the value of a story tends to depreciate over time, so you want to keep the good authors around, to produce fresh content, but I'm not sure if AOL media grasps that idea.
When I went to the Themes page, I got this message: "We're sorry, but themes are available for Google Chrome 3.0.195.3 and above only.: The funny thing is, the about box says I'm running 3.0.195.4!
"Even if you could sell it" - I was being hypthetical. If you try to sell GPL software you really open up a can of worms in terms of ethical problems. I have no intention of making money off XPilot.
Go look at my posting history. I've sold lots of GPL'ed software in my career. You may not want to make money from "your" software, but I like to occasionally buy nice things for my wife and kids. And I used quotes back there because it appears that at least one of the other developers has fewer problems with this than you do: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1322797&cid=28910091
The reason XPilot even exists is that there was a thriving community of (probably) hundreds of developers contributing. I doubt that would happen if anyone was trying to sell it. I'm not complaining about the work he did, I'm complaining about him trying to sell software that he has built a mere fraction of.
Why would you think that? There are thriving communities of (probably) thousands of developers contributing maps and mods to closed source games. There are thriving communities of (probably) tens of thousands of writers creating fan-fiction for works owned by people and/or corporations who don't share well with others. People like to give back to things they like, and licensing (or the lack thereof) rarely stops them from doing so.
True, though I'm sure you agree they are trading off a bigger user base for bigger profits.
If you feel so strongly about it, take the provided code and compile your own app. The source is right there, so it won't take much work. Publish it in the App Store with a Tolkienesque message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."
I have no intentions of making money off XPilot. (Read the "even if you could sell it" paragraph above.) I've had lots of benefits from being involved in the project, though.
So after you get back the $99 you spent getting into the App Store, send the rest to the FSF.
I think people get confused because, in general, GPL implies zero cost software. The reason is that it is hard to sell something when others can give it away for free.
Actually, it's easy. I post about this every time a GPL thread gets out of control here. I've written tons of software that I've sold using a very slightly modified version of the GPL: my changes were to remove the word "Gnu" and replace it with my name, and remove "Public" and replace it with "Joint Ownership". My customers received full source code with the rights to do with it whatever they pleased, including giving it away for free. Of course, they paid me by the hour to write code which they felt gave them an advantage over their competitors; as a result, they felt no urge to give it away even it they didn't like my price. The moral is, don't sell your app for $50, sell it for $50,000.