You can make perfect copies at zero cost; therefore, the true economic worth is zero.
Not true. The economic value of any piece of property that is used as a tool is the Net Present Value of the cash flow made possible by that item. This is often not what's charged for it, for example, a hammer costs the same whether you're putting up some shelves, or you're a professional full-time carpenter. I would say that renting tools is actually a *better* way of getting a true price than a one-off sale. The only problem is that you're moving it from capital to operational expenditure, but the accountants can worry about that.
Maybe -- it's not clear why, other than some vague moral sense, you have a "right" to profit from your intellectual exertions.
Because if you don't pay, you don't get, it's a simple as that. The true creators of economic value are far too smart to offer their product - ideas - to you at no cost, particularly if you intend to use those ideas to profit yourself.
Presumably the subscription will continue to be source of assets that somone will be interested in.
This is called "securitizing revenue" and it's fairly common. For example, there are theatre productions that are funded by borrowing money using the revenue from ticket sales of other shows as collateral. Salomon Brothers's pretty much invented the mechanism by which banks can use the revenue from retail mortgages as tradeable assets.
Basically, if you have a contract that lasts for a period of time and involves you making regular payments, it's unlikely that you'll find yourself abandoned if your vendor goes out of business.
In addition, if you're a big customer, you can get clauses written into the contract to protect you, for example getting a copy of the source code of your application held in escrow by a law firm.
In summary, this is something that's not new just because it's a software company doing it, and there are plenty of techniques available. IANAL.
4 years is very impressive for the uptime of any server on any platform
Actually, it's par for the course on real operating systems (OS/400, VMS and suchlike). Netware is rock solid, Linux could learn a thing or two from it.
Then you can call it "illegal search and siezure."
To paraphrase JWZ, the NSA have the r00t password to the constitution. There is no legal defence against the national interest.
On the other hand, if Microsoft finds something they don't like (anything that violates their liscencing agreements)
Ah, there we differ. I pay for all the commercial software I use (actually, that's not true; it would be more accurate to say that I only use commercial software that someone has paid for, for example a company). If you get caught for it, you just pay up and it's settled.
No, what I'm worried about is information that may be politically or socially unacceptable to the government. What would Thoreau have done?
I've yet to hear a really lucid explanation of why I should want my apps and personal data floating in an amorphous cloud, but maybe that's just me.
Really, it's nothing conceptually different from having your home directory and local applications mounted over NFS, and using daemons like sendmail and httpd to provide protocol services, and using X11 to display on your workstation an application running on a big Unix box, and using CORBA or even rsh to control software on other machines. We all use at least a subset of these technologies every day.
Why not take all those services that were developed independently and re-architect them to make them work within a unified framework? That's all.NET is, really.
Re:Dissappointed to hear it is biased.
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Fact A majority of the US electorate voted for Gore, hardly a sign that the election can be taken as demonstrating Republican hegenemony
it is the right that is ideological and the left that has become the natural party of government in most of the democratic world
Assuming you can tell them apart any more. In the UK, for example, Blair is far more a child of Thatcher than Hague. And I'm thankful for it. Can you imagine the Winter of Discontent if socialist dinosaurs like Prescott ran the country?
Back on topic, remember that neither the Daily Mail nor the Guardian are in the business of news, they're in the business of supporting the existing opinions of the right and left respectively.
Re:So how biased is discussion on /.?
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the fact that a Russian MIG landed in Hong Kong a few decades ago and was dismantled by the Brits
We shipped it back, tho'. In packing crates.
Re:not only Public.Net
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I've always liked the idea of a Govt. supplied open source distribution of some kind of referance model operating system
KDE or Gnome?:0) Seriously, the government has no business interfering in this way. You want a law passed saying that you have to use different software every day of the week to prevent bias? Ridiculous.
it is not customary in a free market for sellers to dictate terms to buyers
Uh, yes it is. The seller quotes a price and the buyer decides whether or not to pay it. If the seller doesn't sell enough to make a profit, the price has to be adjusted if the seller wishes to remain in that business. This is called "price discovery" and it's one of the things that a free market does.
Gcc is a nice tool; it's free, and it works well. Unfortunately, even with -O3 -funroll-loops, it can't optimize for beans.
Aye. I know you want SuSE, but I'd recommend at least benchmarking your code with Watcom C/C++ compiler on Windows NT or 2000. Great numerical code generation, and this really can make a big difference.
well gee, maybe unions aren't the terrible monsters people thought they were
Unions typically exist to prevent non-members working. That makes them half protection racket, half cartel. In effect, they're enforcing a non-compete which you didn't sign.
The most obvious use of cookies is to enable one click features such as that of Amazon's
So where's the "prior art"? Because without it, you've got no case. Everything's obvious once you've seen someone else do it. Being first is what's valuable.
You're sick of whiny 20 somethings? I'm sick of being told that I'm 'too young' for a job I do as well as most others, and better than some. I'm sick of adults who raised the current generation to be the way they are, including the minority of slackers
When the 386 came out, it was supposed to be a supercomputer on a chip, capable of delivering mainframe performance at a desktop price.
I can remember my first 386 computer. That memory still goes "ohmygod". At the time, it was unbelievable what you could make these do, on your desktop. I'd never seen such compile speeds for my Pascal (yeah, it was a long time ago:0) ), the speed at which it ran my numerical code with the FP unit was amazing. I thought I'd never fill that 20M hard drive.
I'm a web developer at a company that concentrates on Coldfusion and Javascript for our applications. I've managed to subvert my workstation to the point where I'm using Linux 80% of the time, yet I'm still stuck with windows
You did know they were a Cold Fusion shop when you were hired, right? Which means NT or maybe Solaris. So what's the problem here?
So W2k has two orders of magnitude more code, at least one order of magnitude
Linux is just the kernel. If you want to make a fair comparison, you need to count the rest of a Linux distribution too, for example XFree86, since Windows is tightly integrated with it's GUI. Is PWS counted as part of Win32? Better add the source for Apache and WU-FTPD as well. Does Notepad count as part of the windows source? Add the count for lines of jove. And so forth... as far as I am aware, the lines-of-code quoted for Windows is for the whole thing, the entire CD distribution.
magnitude (if not two or even three) fewer eyeballs
Many eyes make bugs shallow if they're all qualified and more importantly, if they're all looking. On that metric, a far higher percentage of the people who have the code (MS staff and third parties) are useful "lookers".
Why don't public companies do the 'right' thing all too often? Because. The board has a mandate to maximize shareholder value
It's not just a mandate, it's a legal obligation. All these class-action suits currently pending against public corporations are precisely because of this: the lawyers do not believe that the companies have acted in the shareholder's best interests.
This is why a corporation is structured as it is. You have the "officers", the CEO, CFO, CIO and suchlike who run the company from day to day. Then you have the board, run by the Chairman (who may or may not also be the CEO). The board members are usually senior executives (sometimes from other non-competing but broadly similar companies, sometimes retired, sometimes industry experts like professors) who have a stake in the company, and are responsible for advising the officers. The board are there to ensure that the shareholders are represented in decisions. Board members are meant to be elected by shareholders, but in reality they're often appointed, particularly in young companies, or those in which significant equity is held by the founders or the VCs.
In theory, this gives you the best of both worlds, but only if the board is staffed with people who have enough presence not to roll over and just let the CEO (who may be young and inexperienced) do as he pleases. You see lots of companies who have appointed the CEO's friends and relatives to the board, but this is very, very stupid.
Re:The real sexism: Where are the woman CEO's?
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That's almost 40 years ago, plenty of time for women to work their way up the corporate ladders, yes, the number of women CEO's in tech companies could probably be counted on one hand. Why?
Well, it's actually a male conspiracy. See, a bunch of male professors got together and created "Womens Studies" programmes at liberal arts colleges, and a bunch of co-eds went and majored in those courses. While the men were studying Finance, Engineering, Law et al. So now, there aren't many women around with the background or education for senior level management, and them good ol' boys are running the show. Heh, heh, heh, they never saw it coming.
I understand why the NetBSD team would want to do this. I don't understand why people would want Unix on a palmtop in the first place. You don't need the process management, security, reliability of a Unix, and you do need PDA style applications, if you're a consumer. NetBSD or Linux doesn't have, for example, the database functionality that PocketPC does, so it doesn't give you an advantage for things like stock control or sales force/field representative automation, which is what businesses use PDAs for.
So, if you have a palmtop running a Unix variant, what do you use it for?
Interesting...I've worked at companies like TRW, IBM, and Raytheon, and I think 95% of the professional programmers I worked with had CS degrees.
In my experience, engineering and math graduates make better programmers than computer science graduates. The problem is that CS types know a lot about "using a computer to solve a problem", but not so much about "solving a problem, then implementing that solution with a computer". It's the latter that's valuable in the industrial/commercial world.
Look, big picture overview: artists are people who create.
"All work is creative work if it's done by a thinking mind" said Ayn Rand. I'm reminded of the scene in Atlas Shrugged in which Halley explains to Dagny why he left public life, and goes on to explain why it's foolish for an artist to think that a businessman is the enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. The economic value of any piece of property that is used as a tool is the Net Present Value of the cash flow made possible by that item. This is often not what's charged for it, for example, a hammer costs the same whether you're putting up some shelves, or you're a professional full-time carpenter. I would say that renting tools is actually a *better* way of getting a true price than a one-off sale. The only problem is that you're moving it from capital to operational expenditure, but the accountants can worry about that.
Maybe -- it's not clear why, other than some vague moral sense, you have a "right" to profit from your intellectual exertions.
Because if you don't pay, you don't get, it's a simple as that. The true creators of economic value are far too smart to offer their product - ideas - to you at no cost, particularly if you intend to use those ideas to profit yourself.
This is called "securitizing revenue" and it's fairly common. For example, there are theatre productions that are funded by borrowing money using the revenue from ticket sales of other shows as collateral. Salomon Brothers's pretty much invented the mechanism by which banks can use the revenue from retail mortgages as tradeable assets.
Basically, if you have a contract that lasts for a period of time and involves you making regular payments, it's unlikely that you'll find yourself abandoned if your vendor goes out of business. In addition, if you're a big customer, you can get clauses written into the contract to protect you, for example getting a copy of the source code of your application held in escrow by a law firm.
In summary, this is something that's not new just because it's a software company doing it, and there are plenty of techniques available. IANAL.
Actually, it's par for the course on real operating systems (OS/400, VMS and suchlike). Netware is rock solid, Linux could learn a thing or two from it.
To paraphrase JWZ, the NSA have the r00t password to the constitution. There is no legal defence against the national interest.
On the other hand, if Microsoft finds something they don't like (anything that violates their liscencing agreements)
Ah, there we differ. I pay for all the commercial software I use (actually, that's not true; it would be more accurate to say that I only use commercial software that someone has paid for, for example a company). If you get caught for it, you just pay up and it's settled.
No, what I'm worried about is information that may be politically or socially unacceptable to the government. What would Thoreau have done?
Actually, of the two I'd rather have Microsoft. Why? Because if the NSA don't like your information, you're going to jail, it's as simple as that.
Really, it's nothing conceptually different from having your home directory and local applications mounted over NFS, and using daemons like sendmail and httpd to provide protocol services, and using X11 to display on your workstation an application running on a big Unix box, and using CORBA or even rsh to control software on other machines. We all use at least a subset of these technologies every day.
Why not take all those services that were developed independently and re-architect them to make them work within a unified framework? That's all .NET is, really.
Umm, not a fact. Even Salon says so.
it is the right that is ideological and the left that has become the natural party of government in most of the democratic world
Assuming you can tell them apart any more. In the UK, for example, Blair is far more a child of Thatcher than Hague. And I'm thankful for it. Can you imagine the Winter of Discontent if socialist dinosaurs like Prescott ran the country?
Back on topic, remember that neither the Daily Mail nor the Guardian are in the business of news, they're in the business of supporting the existing opinions of the right and left respectively.
We shipped it back, tho'. In packing crates.
KDE or Gnome? :0) Seriously, the government has no business interfering in this way. You want a law passed saying that you have to use different software every day of the week to prevent bias? Ridiculous.
Uh, yes it is. The seller quotes a price and the buyer decides whether or not to pay it. If the seller doesn't sell enough to make a profit, the price has to be adjusted if the seller wishes to remain in that business. This is called "price discovery" and it's one of the things that a free market does.
Well in that case, Linux isn't an OS either. And neither is NT.
Me too. They misspelled my name on the cover and still haven't paid me!
Aye. I know you want SuSE, but I'd recommend at least benchmarking your code with Watcom C/C++ compiler on Windows NT or 2000. Great numerical code generation, and this really can make a big difference.
Unions typically exist to prevent non-members working. That makes them half protection racket, half cartel. In effect, they're enforcing a non-compete which you didn't sign.
So where's the "prior art"? Because without it, you've got no case. Everything's obvious once you've seen someone else do it. Being first is what's valuable.
You'll understand it when you're a bit older :0)
I can remember my first 386 computer. That memory still goes "ohmygod". At the time, it was unbelievable what you could make these do, on your desktop. I'd never seen such compile speeds for my Pascal (yeah, it was a long time ago :0) ), the speed at which it ran my numerical code with the FP unit was amazing. I thought I'd never fill that 20M hard drive.
The crap they spew never seems to change.
Moore's law is where it's at, kid.
You did know they were a Cold Fusion shop when you were hired, right? Which means NT or maybe Solaris. So what's the problem here?
Linux is just the kernel. If you want to make a fair comparison, you need to count the rest of a Linux distribution too, for example XFree86, since Windows is tightly integrated with it's GUI. Is PWS counted as part of Win32? Better add the source for Apache and WU-FTPD as well. Does Notepad count as part of the windows source? Add the count for lines of jove. And so forth... as far as I am aware, the lines-of-code quoted for Windows is for the whole thing, the entire CD distribution.
magnitude (if not two or even three) fewer eyeballs
Many eyes make bugs shallow if they're all qualified and more importantly, if they're all looking. On that metric, a far higher percentage of the people who have the code (MS staff and third parties) are useful "lookers".
It's not just a mandate, it's a legal obligation. All these class-action suits currently pending against public corporations are precisely because of this: the lawyers do not believe that the companies have acted in the shareholder's best interests.
This is why a corporation is structured as it is. You have the "officers", the CEO, CFO, CIO and suchlike who run the company from day to day. Then you have the board, run by the Chairman (who may or may not also be the CEO). The board members are usually senior executives (sometimes from other non-competing but broadly similar companies, sometimes retired, sometimes industry experts like professors) who have a stake in the company, and are responsible for advising the officers. The board are there to ensure that the shareholders are represented in decisions. Board members are meant to be elected by shareholders, but in reality they're often appointed, particularly in young companies, or those in which significant equity is held by the founders or the VCs.
In theory, this gives you the best of both worlds, but only if the board is staffed with people who have enough presence not to roll over and just let the CEO (who may be young and inexperienced) do as he pleases. You see lots of companies who have appointed the CEO's friends and relatives to the board, but this is very, very stupid.
Well, it's actually a male conspiracy. See, a bunch of male professors got together and created "Womens Studies" programmes at liberal arts colleges, and a bunch of co-eds went and majored in those courses. While the men were studying Finance, Engineering, Law et al. So now, there aren't many women around with the background or education for senior level management, and them good ol' boys are running the show. Heh, heh, heh, they never saw it coming.
(Note for the subtlety impaired: this is a joke).
The word "Sterling" is a corruption of the word "Starling" meaning "small star", which was the symbol on the most reliable of medæval currencies.
So, if you have a palmtop running a Unix variant, what do you use it for?
In my experience, engineering and math graduates make better programmers than computer science graduates. The problem is that CS types know a lot about "using a computer to solve a problem", but not so much about "solving a problem, then implementing that solution with a computer". It's the latter that's valuable in the industrial/commercial world.
My $0.02, and YMMV.
"All work is creative work if it's done by a thinking mind" said Ayn Rand. I'm reminded of the scene in Atlas Shrugged in which Halley explains to Dagny why he left public life, and goes on to explain why it's foolish for an artist to think that a businessman is the enemy.