Depends on your priorities in life I guess, but IMO two hours of my time is worth much more to me than $20.
Another thing that amazes me is how many people put a price on their time as a general rule. It is as if they can't do something in life without consciously or unconsciously keeping a running tab of how much it is all going to cost someone in the end. Sad, really.
Amazes me sometimes that someone will spend hours of time to save $20,
Did it ever occur to you that saving money had nothing to do with it? I did it out of principle... to prove to myself just how trivial the product was. I did it to learn a new type of programmimng (Cocoa/Objective-C). I did it for fun.
This is Slashdot! You'd think more people would UNDERSTAND the spirit of open source!
I don't know about you, but I bill at $89/hour for software development. At "a few hours to get it working the way I wanted", it would be a far more rational for me to just throw the guy a $20 and use my time more productively.
So when you do some programming on your own time, for fun and/or learning, do you think to yourself "Damn, I'm losing $89/hour!"
I know I don't. My time does not == money. There might be some people who will pay money for my time in certain situation, but my time does not have a price as a general rule.
I'd also say that the idea that "polish" isn't worth paying for, and is something optional and unnecessary is one of the biggest problems remaining problems with the FOSS software development community.
Meh. There is no such "problem" in the FOSS development community. The only problem is with your expectations. It is free, damn it. Take it or leave it. But whatever you do, you don't complain when it doesn't live up to your expectations. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.
So how much do you normally get paid an hour? Unless its $10 or less, you've spent more money writing it yourself than if you just paid $20.
On the other hand, I can download Firefox for free, for example, where I would probably charge millions of dollars to write it myself. I'm just saying that the software market is fucked up. That's all.
How much would you charge someone else for a few hours of programming? How much did that RDC Menu program cost?
If you want to look at it that way, I didn't get a good deal. I could have easily charged in excess of $200 for the time working on my alternative. Paying $19 would have been a much better deal. But I guess I'm just not one to think of my time as money. I did it out of principle. I also wanted a real project so I could practice programming in Objective-C and RubyObjC.
Sure, if you're doing it for funzies, coding it up yourself makes sense. If you just want something to get the job done, and you've got actual productive work you can be doing, it makes more sense to spend the $24.95. Honestly though, in the case of RDC Menu, I'd rather just use rdesktop from the command line.
Ah, but there's the twist. rdesktop is free, right? You get the remote desktop application for free but have to pay for some trivial program that acts as a front-end. I bet a LOT more work went into the rdesktop program.
No real point here, I'm just ranting about how strange it is to sell software at all. It isn't like hard goods where you have a cost for the physical production of an item. With software you can essentially make unlimited copies for free and sell each copy. It isn't quite like a service either. You can't reproduce a service for free and resell it to many people. You usually have to work your service for each client individually.
They have to charge $20 since not many people (relatively speaking) will purchase it. If they knew 50 million people were going to purchase, then they could charge a lot less.
That's just it, they don't "have to" charge anything. Some of the utilities that people sell are downright trivial when you really get down to it. Like they took some example out of a "how to program" book and slapped a pretty interface on it.
It is wierd, you can get a full web brower completely free but to bookmark a few Remote Desktop connection profiles... $10 (or whatever it was, I don't remember).
It is amazing what developers can sell in the Windows world. $20 for a pretty interface to features that are already in the OS? WTF? Have I just been spoiled by using Linux for 11 years, or what?
Not that things are much better on the Mac (which I use mostly now on the desktop). I downloaded this program, RDC Menu, to launch multiple instance of Windows Remote Desktop Client. There's the standard "trial" and "paid" versions. The author wanted money just to enable the "bookmarks" feature so you could save your connection profiles and select them from a list in the statusbar. I said screw that and I just wrote my own damn program to do it. Took me all of a few hours to get it working the way I wanted. Only functional difference between the two programs is that RDC Menu is more polished (graphics, icons, language translations, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I think programmers should get paid for their work if they want and they're certainly free to charge whatever they want, but how much are we paying of "polish?" Doesn't it seem strange that a simple GUI front end for standard OS features is like 1/5th the cost of the entire OS itself (depending on the version you buy) which probably has 1,000 times the man-hours behind it?
I dunno, when you look at the trivial utilities that people pay $20 or more for, it makes Microsoft products seem pretty damn cheap! That is, if you compare lines of code...
The problem in this case in patent law, not science.
I was talking about the trouble patenting the device in that particular quote, not the probability of the device being authentic. That is, *if* they can't patent it because perpetual motion machines are unpatentable, that is a problem with patent law, not the scientific process.
If the cost of software isn't a barrier, then what's the compelling reason for using linux for a mainstream user?
Less worry about viruses and malware would be a big one. Learning to use Linux woudl probably be easier than learning to keep a clean, well running Windows. I usually recommend a Mac as an alternative to Windows for most "mainstream" users.
Surely there is much more software available on windows, and if windows is implemented with some basic level of skill (likely equal or less than the amount of skill required for implementing linux) it can surely be adequately secure and stable enough for a mainstream users needs.
Linux would most likely have to ship with the computer or be installed by a geeky family member for people to start using it. Installing a new OS, even a new version of Windows, just isn't near the top of most people's TODO lists....
I preferably would not want to reboot and lose all current work on my linux desktop just for a game.
That's why most application have this feature called "save." It is so you don't have to lose your work.;-)
Anyway, as I suggested to an AC on this thread, try hibernating instead of shutting down. It can be a little work to setup properly in Linux, but it works.
That means closing all my applications down. Usually I've got a dozen or so browser tabs open, an IDE, a text editor, a couple of terminal windows, email, newsreader, etc... It's a pain to have to close them all down and open them up again, especially when things like terminal windows don't save their state.
Would you leave all the running if you were going to start up a major game? I probably wouldn't.
But if you're really worried about saving the state, try hibernating instead of shutting down.
It's sad that theres no globally accepted library etc, that all devs use. I mean some apps are mac / windows. why not mac/windows / linux? Since mac runs on a version of *nix. And don't give me that wine / cedega bs. Sadly, until I give up gaming on PC I will have at least one windows box. I hope that Linux continues to offer more and more people an alternative though. Competition is good!
The way I see it, it doesn't matter that there aren't games on Linux (and to a lesser extent, Macs) It isn't just that I'm not a big gamer, it is that I don't mind booting into Windows to play a game. Most games have a bit of a time commitment to them. At least an hour. If I'm going to be playing for that long or more, what's 2 minutes to reboot? Of course, that mean maintaining a copy of Windows... drivers and all, which is a bit annoying in and of itself, but not a deal killer for Linux.
Of course, I've never paid for a copy of Windows in my life, so maybe things would be different if I was legit and had to shell out extra money just to play games.
Another thing is that a lot of the really cool games are coming out on console first these days, so maybe the whole Windows/game issue will be moot. GTA IV, anyone?
What gave you the idea that I "believe in perpetual energy?" I believe that there are some pretty well tested laws in physics which perpetual energy would violate. I believe there is a scientific process that new discoveries generally go through, in which Steorn is not participating. In fact, their claims and behavior have all the signs of either a hoax or a fraud. The boldness of the claims, the secrecy, the staged public demonstration (which didn't even happen), the hype...
Wake me up when they release their "discovery" to the public so anyone can try to reproduce the results. This hand selected "jury," private evaluation, and NDA stuff is bullshit.
That would make it disassembled code, decompiled typically implies a higher level abstraction/language.
OK, but converting it to C with no meaningful function or variable names isn't a whole lot more useful for non-trivial code. Especially if it wasn't written in C in the first place. If it was C++ with heavy use of objects, I can imagine the C version would be particularly illegible unless you're intimately familiar with how C++ is compiled.
You know, the obfuscation only "works" because none of these teams want to decompile the Microsoft binaries, instead trying to guess by looking at the output, for fear of hypothetic lawsuits. If these teams did decompile the Microsoft binaries, it would get done much faster.
Have you ever SEEN decompiled code? It is assembly language, for one thing. Assembly with no variable or function names... *shudder*
Not that decompiled binaries can't be useful, but I think you're overestimating the usefulness. It is probably just as productive to reverse engineer the network communications.
Next you're going to tell me there isn't an up in space. It's been what 50 years that we've understood that? Almost like finding out the world is round.
Ideally, yes. But it takes a lot more than just 'someone' to give it credibility. It takes consensus (real or imagined). And unless that majority making up this consensus has some motivation to accept that these findings are possible, forget about it. There will always be enough doubt to keep it in the dark.
That just isn't true. A theory or hypothesis does not require a majority consensus. There's lots of theories out there that enjoy only small followings. Or maybe they're just not terribly exciting. Take medicine, for example. Someone thinks they have a cure or treatment for a certain kind of cancer. They publish, some think they're onto something, others don't. But all they need is enough funding from their university, hospital, or pharmaceutical company to continue. It may be "in the dark" but if it really pans out after research and it is valuable, it WILL come into the light.
You seem to think that theories are all or nothing deals. Either they universally accepted as fact or it is completely ignored. That that just isn't how science works.
Edgy, exciting, frontier science just isn't modern anymore. For some reason, humanity has decided that we've mastered knowledge, or at least crossed the tipping point. Science is now so mainstream that the 'unlikely' now equates to 'impossible'.
You're just romanticizing science. It is easy to look back on the few seemingly overnight breakthroughs that have happened and forget about all the slow, tedious, research that was behind it all. Don't. Look at archeology, for example. Once in a great while they find something like King Tut's tomb, but 99% of it is really f'ing boring work if you ask me. That is the way good science has always been.
They haven't even been identified yet? WTF? That is another red flag.
So far they have carried themselves well. I am not sold either; I am waiting for the jury process to end, and then, and only then I will be able to afford skepticism.
I'm waiting for the theory and blueprints to be published publicly. Until then, there is not only room for skepticism, but outright suspicion. The secrecy is a huge red flag. This isn't how science works.
1) there is no doubt that there are landmark discoveries to be made in the future that will challenge current conservative, scientific dogma. There is no mechanism in place to protect/encourage the future Einsteins. Indeed it took one of the greatest scientists of Einstein's time to realize the brilliance of his relativity work before other physicists stopped laughing at his suppositions.
Thousands of scientists volunteered to examine Steorn's work. Only 22 were hand selected and probably put under NDA. Scientists aren't just laughing at this, they've already dismissed it due to the secrecy. Just put the damn research out there for EVERYONE to review. All this hype and secrecy is a mockery of the scientific process.
Steorn has selected their unorthodox approach because they are trying to avoid the Pons and Fleischman witch-hunt of the 80s. The DOE outright rejected Cold Fusion then and decades later has softened its view because of the intriguing CF work of U.S. Naval Research (among many others).
So you're saying that Steorn is trying to avoid being outed as a fraud? Nobody could reproduce Pons and Fleischmann's work. Is Steorn afraid that other's wouldn't be able to reproduce his?
But we owe it to ourselves to be patient
We don't have much of a choice, do we?
otherwise we are stating that there is no place for ANY breakthrough innovation which would radically change our understanding of physics. We already know that there are problems in current models of the universe. With global warming at our heels, we cannot afford to toss out ideas.
Sorry, but we've been burned by far too many crackpots with very similar veils of secrecy surrounding such "amazing" breakthroughs. This whole thing just screams "crackpot" to me. Ever little bit of it.
Wake me up when the theory and blueprints are public and someone (preferably many people) has actually reproduced the device(s). Until then, this just another crackpot with a perpetual motion machine. Sorry.
There has not been a SINGLE attempt to solicit or call for investors since they began this process in August of last year. In fact, they have made a point that they are not accepting any money until the jury has accepted and publish their results. These are not small-time labs. These are well-known and respected scientists and labs who are under contractual obligation to publish their results. I have been in contact with a respected scientist (since before this Steorn thing) who has confirmed to me that he has colleagues who compose one of the jurors. They are no small operation and they simply want a piece of history if this is real.
From TFA: "...22 [scientists] were appointed to test Steorn's claims. The review process began in January 2007 and is still ongoing. Steorn will publish the results of the process following its completion."
Doesn't sound like he's going to let the "jury" publish their results. Sounds like Steorn has them under NDA and is going to filter the results... possibly misrepresenting them. Sorry, but that smells mighty fishy to me. If you're so confident of you work, just put it all out there. Blueprints, equations, theory, everything. This elaborate scheduled demonstration... picking scientists to review the device... it reeks.
When you combine the two statements you effectively use your own attitude to prove the GP's (aka my) point.
It was a tongue in cheek.
There is no accepted course of action that would lead respected individuals to consider this invention seriously even if it were legitimate. It is sad that this is the farse the passes for science these days but it is.
The problem in this case in patent law, not science.
Anyway, I'm of the opinion thatt a potential breakthrough like this is too important to be owned by any one person. Just release the damn blueprints for the device and spread the love!
There are no laws in physics, only theories that await the next breakthrough that completely revolutionizes our view of the physical world.
On the other hand, there are a load of hucksters, charlatans, and crackpots out there just waiting to sucker a few investors into giving them some money.
..22 were appointed to test Steorn's claims. The review process began in January 2007 and is still ongoing. Steorn will publish the results of the process following its completion.
And there's the huge red flag right there: *Steorn* will publish the results. Not the scientists who review it. The reviewers are probably under some kind of NDA. This isn't peer review, this is a hoax.
Youtube demonstrations and internet articles would likely be the only way you would be able to stir up enough of a buzz to get someone to take you half seriously in the first place.
It is the wrong kind of attention (buzz). It is the kind of attention that confirms to the people who matter that you're just another crackpot. If this were for real, he'd be going though a university or trying to get published in respected journal directly. But it isn't for real. So he just shrouds the device in secrecy in order to avoid the direct analysis that would expose the device for the hoax it most likely is.
Bottom line is, if you've patented your idea, there is absolutely no reason to keep things secret and arrange for elaborate public "demonstrations." You just put the whole idea out there, drawings, equations, theory and all.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing that amazes me is how many people put a price on their time as a general rule. It is as if they can't do something in life without consciously or unconsciously keeping a running tab of how much it is all going to cost someone in the end. Sad, really.
Did it ever occur to you that saving money had nothing to do with it? I did it out of principle... to prove to myself just how trivial the product was. I did it to learn a new type of programmimng (Cocoa/Objective-C). I did it for fun.
This is Slashdot! You'd think more people would UNDERSTAND the spirit of open source!
-matthew
So when you do some programming on your own time, for fun and/or learning, do you think to yourself "Damn, I'm losing $89/hour!"
I know I don't. My time does not == money. There might be some people who will pay money for my time in certain situation, but my time does not have a price as a general rule.
Meh. There is no such "problem" in the FOSS development community. The only problem is with your expectations. It is free, damn it. Take it or leave it. But whatever you do, you don't complain when it doesn't live up to your expectations. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.
-matthew
On the other hand, I can download Firefox for free, for example, where I would probably charge millions of dollars to write it myself. I'm just saying that the software market is fucked up. That's all.
-matthew
If you want to look at it that way, I didn't get a good deal. I could have easily charged in excess of $200 for the time working on my alternative. Paying $19 would have been a much better deal. But I guess I'm just not one to think of my time as money. I did it out of principle. I also wanted a real project so I could practice programming in Objective-C and RubyObjC.
Ah, but there's the twist. rdesktop is free, right? You get the remote desktop application for free but have to pay for some trivial program that acts as a front-end. I bet a LOT more work went into the rdesktop program.
No real point here, I'm just ranting about how strange it is to sell software at all. It isn't like hard goods where you have a cost for the physical production of an item. With software you can essentially make unlimited copies for free and sell each copy. It isn't quite like a service either. You can't reproduce a service for free and resell it to many people. You usually have to work your service for each client individually.
-matthew
That's just it, they don't "have to" charge anything. Some of the utilities that people sell are downright trivial when you really get down to it. Like they took some example out of a "how to program" book and slapped a pretty interface on it.
It is wierd, you can get a full web brower completely free but to bookmark a few Remote Desktop connection profiles... $10 (or whatever it was, I don't remember).
I'm willing to admit that I'm just spoiled.
-matthew
It is amazing what developers can sell in the Windows world. $20 for a pretty interface to features that are already in the OS? WTF? Have I just been spoiled by using Linux for 11 years, or what?
Not that things are much better on the Mac (which I use mostly now on the desktop). I downloaded this program, RDC Menu, to launch multiple instance of Windows Remote Desktop Client. There's the standard "trial" and "paid" versions. The author wanted money just to enable the "bookmarks" feature so you could save your connection profiles and select them from a list in the statusbar. I said screw that and I just wrote my own damn program to do it. Took me all of a few hours to get it working the way I wanted. Only functional difference between the two programs is that RDC Menu is more polished (graphics, icons, language translations, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I think programmers should get paid for their work if they want and they're certainly free to charge whatever they want, but how much are we paying of "polish?" Doesn't it seem strange that a simple GUI front end for standard OS features is like 1/5th the cost of the entire OS itself (depending on the version you buy) which probably has 1,000 times the man-hours behind it?
I dunno, when you look at the trivial utilities that people pay $20 or more for, it makes Microsoft products seem pretty damn cheap! That is, if you compare lines of code...
-matthew
Make that one. I stopped (mostly) using Linux about 2 years ago and started using OS X.
:(
2 + -1 = 1
World domination failed.
-matthew
What the point of that post was I'll never know. I'm off to reboot and play Civ IV...
I was talking about the trouble patenting the device in that particular quote, not the probability of the device being authentic. That is, *if* they can't patent it because perpetual motion machines are unpatentable, that is a problem with patent law, not the scientific process.
Context, context, context.
-matthew
Less worry about viruses and malware would be a big one. Learning to use Linux woudl probably be easier than learning to keep a clean, well running Windows. I usually recommend a Mac as an alternative to Windows for most "mainstream" users.
Linux would most likely have to ship with the computer or be installed by a geeky family member for people to start using it. Installing a new OS, even a new version of Windows, just isn't near the top of most people's TODO lists....
-matthew
That's why most application have this feature called "save." It is so you don't have to lose your work.
Anyway, as I suggested to an AC on this thread, try hibernating instead of shutting down. It can be a little work to setup properly in Linux, but it works.
-matthew
Would you leave all the running if you were going to start up a major game? I probably wouldn't.
But if you're really worried about saving the state, try hibernating instead of shutting down.
-matthew
The way I see it, it doesn't matter that there aren't games on Linux (and to a lesser extent, Macs) It isn't just that I'm not a big gamer, it is that I don't mind booting into Windows to play a game. Most games have a bit of a time commitment to them. At least an hour. If I'm going to be playing for that long or more, what's 2 minutes to reboot? Of course, that mean maintaining a copy of Windows... drivers and all, which is a bit annoying in and of itself, but not a deal killer for Linux.
Of course, I've never paid for a copy of Windows in my life, so maybe things would be different if I was legit and had to shell out extra money just to play games.
Another thing is that a lot of the really cool games are coming out on console first these days, so maybe the whole Windows/game issue will be moot. GTA IV, anyone?
-matthew
What gave you the idea that I "believe in perpetual energy?" I believe that there are some pretty well tested laws in physics which perpetual energy would violate. I believe there is a scientific process that new discoveries generally go through, in which Steorn is not participating. In fact, their claims and behavior have all the signs of either a hoax or a fraud. The boldness of the claims, the secrecy, the staged public demonstration (which didn't even happen), the hype...
Wake me up when they release their "discovery" to the public so anyone can try to reproduce the results. This hand selected "jury," private evaluation, and NDA stuff is bullshit.
-matthew
OK, but converting it to C with no meaningful function or variable names isn't a whole lot more useful for non-trivial code. Especially if it wasn't written in C in the first place. If it was C++ with heavy use of objects, I can imagine the C version would be particularly illegible unless you're intimately familiar with how C++ is compiled.
-matthew
Have you ever SEEN decompiled code? It is assembly language, for one thing. Assembly with no variable or function names... *shudder*
Not that decompiled binaries can't be useful, but I think you're overestimating the usefulness. It is probably just as productive to reverse engineer the network communications.
-matthew
What are you talking about?
-matthew
That just isn't true. A theory or hypothesis does not require a majority consensus. There's lots of theories out there that enjoy only small followings. Or maybe they're just not terribly exciting. Take medicine, for example. Someone thinks they have a cure or treatment for a certain kind of cancer. They publish, some think they're onto something, others don't. But all they need is enough funding from their university, hospital, or pharmaceutical company to continue. It may be "in the dark" but if it really pans out after research and it is valuable, it WILL come into the light.
You seem to think that theories are all or nothing deals. Either they universally accepted as fact or it is completely ignored. That that just isn't how science works.
You're just romanticizing science. It is easy to look back on the few seemingly overnight breakthroughs that have happened and forget about all the slow, tedious, research that was behind it all. Don't. Look at archeology, for example. Once in a great while they find something like King Tut's tomb, but 99% of it is really f'ing boring work if you ask me. That is the way good science has always been.
-matthew
Not just old tech, but an old dupe. I'm too lazy to search for it, but I'm certain I read about this same device last year on Slashdot.
-matthew
They haven't even been identified yet? WTF? That is another red flag.
I'm waiting for the theory and blueprints to be published publicly. Until then, there is not only room for skepticism, but outright suspicion. The secrecy is a huge red flag. This isn't how science works.
Thousands of scientists volunteered to examine Steorn's work. Only 22 were hand selected and probably put under NDA. Scientists aren't just laughing at this, they've already dismissed it due to the secrecy. Just put the damn research out there for EVERYONE to review. All this hype and secrecy is a mockery of the scientific process.
So you're saying that Steorn is trying to avoid being outed as a fraud? Nobody could reproduce Pons and Fleischmann's work. Is Steorn afraid that other's wouldn't be able to reproduce his?
We don't have much of a choice, do we?
Sorry, but we've been burned by far too many crackpots with very similar veils of secrecy surrounding such "amazing" breakthroughs. This whole thing just screams "crackpot" to me. Ever little bit of it.
Wake me up when the theory and blueprints are public and someone (preferably many people) has actually reproduced the device(s). Until then, this just another crackpot with a perpetual motion machine. Sorry.
-matthew
From TFA: "...22 [scientists] were appointed to test Steorn's claims. The review process began in January 2007 and is still ongoing. Steorn will publish the results of the process following its completion."
Doesn't sound like he's going to let the "jury" publish their results. Sounds like Steorn has them under NDA and is going to filter the results... possibly misrepresenting them. Sorry, but that smells mighty fishy to me. If you're so confident of you work, just put it all out there. Blueprints, equations, theory, everything. This elaborate scheduled demonstration... picking scientists to review the device... it reeks.
-matthew
-matthew
It was a tongue in cheek.
The problem in this case in patent law, not science.
Anyway, I'm of the opinion thatt a potential breakthrough like this is too important to be owned by any one person. Just release the damn blueprints for the device and spread the love!
On the other hand, there are a load of hucksters, charlatans, and crackpots out there just waiting to sucker a few investors into giving them some money.
-matthew
If you have no trouble breaking the laws of physics, how are a few patent laws going to stand in your way?
-matthew
And there's the huge red flag right there: *Steorn* will publish the results. Not the scientists who review it. The reviewers are probably under some kind of NDA. This isn't peer review, this is a hoax.
-matthew
It is the wrong kind of attention (buzz). It is the kind of attention that confirms to the people who matter that you're just another crackpot. If this were for real, he'd be going though a university or trying to get published in respected journal directly. But it isn't for real. So he just shrouds the device in secrecy in order to avoid the direct analysis that would expose the device for the hoax it most likely is.
Bottom line is, if you've patented your idea, there is absolutely no reason to keep things secret and arrange for elaborate public "demonstrations." You just put the whole idea out there, drawings, equations, theory and all.
-matthew