Actually, that was a typo (thinko?). What I meant was, *software which is free even for commercial users*.
The thinking being that if they can leach off the enthusiasts, they'll fork the open CLI movement sufficiently to prevent it from reaching a critical mass, without risking revenue/control by accelerating developement of a product that commercial organizations could potentially use.
Obviously, a plan to get ahead of and preempt commercial support for any shared-source implementations that might have liberal non-commercial licenses (ie, Mono).
The thinking seems to be, give the hobbyists something they can dink around with and they won't be worried about 'software freedom'; they want neat toys, not free software!
He should just hack his relay so that it's extreeeemly slow; nobody will much care if they're using it on the road, but this will make it next to useless for spammers.
There is a fine line between exercising your rihts and being an asshole; right now he's straddling it.
it tends to be the young postgrads who are loudest and most confident in defending the current thinking. Older academics are (on average, of course) a little less sure of themselves: could it possibly be that they have learned something?
Or only the established ones can dare afford to challenge the orthodoxy... even if they many realize its bogus.
No doubt. My point was just that if 80% of your costs are more-or-less unrelated to page views (userid tracking, etc) those users only cost you 6X as much as a normal user. Maybe less, it's sticky math.
You have to distinguish between actual profit (which is fuzzy) and marginal profit.
Suppose you have a fixed overhead of $500k/year, and a billion pages views a year by a hundred thousand users that cost you another $500k.
A flat rate of $10/year, or a per-page rate of.1 cent, will break-even overall.
However, for any given user (consider a new one, but it doesn't really matter), you break even incrementally at an average of $5, or.05 cent per page. You come out ahead at.06 per page. Very similar economics to software.
And psychologically, people prefer flat-rate pricing, even when it's obviously more expensive.
I guess my point is that at a fixed rate, the heavy users will end up paying for a disproportionate share of overhead. Maybe some kind of volume discount as a happy middle ground between flat and per-page rate?
But are those users a serious extra expense, or is your fixed overhead so high it doesn't matter? I would have thought salaries, not bandwidth, was the bulk of the cost of slashdot...?
I dunno about pay-per-page on slashdot, but I'd certainly be willing to pay for sourceforge.
If you added something to user info showing us how many pages we've viewed recently, it would help us decide. (And yes, I'm not a paypal fan either...)
their device can't tell the difference between video of your kids and a bootleg copy of Snow Dogs
Most VCDs today aren't ripped, they're filmed by some fool in a theater with a camcorder. How the heck is that going to be detected? Camcorders will have to have constantly updated AI code to verify that they aren't taping anything copyrighted, and will cover it with little black bars if so? WTF?
Ye Gods... this makes me want to go find my Senator, and smack him upside his fool head.
If they allowed bnetd to pass-through authentication to battle.net, they might have a better point. They've specifically ruled that out. (Presumably because their crypto is lousy.)
And it isn't the bnetd group that even enabled Warcraft III support.
How is your firewall going to protect from a new Outlook virus, or the IE bug-of-the-month?
And if I'm running RFC3093 IP over HTTP, with SSL, your proxy is almost certain to be clueless. Even assuming I'm not using steganography... and SOAP might count.;)
Sure, proxies are more secure; but they can't be perfectly secure... and now you need a new proxy for each new application, which is the mess I was complaining about.
I'm not calling for running every service known to man on Internet-connected machines, shutting stuff down is great. No argument.
What I do think is that ideally we should have honest-to-god IP to every desktop. No, I don't think this is 100% realistic, but I think it is the ideal.
It's all well and good for the central firewalls to block certain ports, but nothing is enforcing what's really running over those ports. (PPP over DNS, anyone?) Securing the desktop is key; once you've done that, you can open it the network as far as possible so you don't have to deal with this everything-over-HTTP b*&#%&#.
Until you end up reimplementing half of it on top of UDP. Badly. And yes, I've seen this multiple times.
Enough with the NIH, please? There are many years of effort in the common TCP stacks, and many subtle things they do right that you'll miss the first dozen implementations.
For the love of god, if you need a substancial subset of TCP's features, and can live with the overhead, use TCP!
If you don't have a real, static IP, no, you aren't really on the internet.
If you are behind a firewall that only allows HTTP, no. If it only allows outgoing connections, not really. All you can do is what HTTP can do, which is much less than IP can.
It would be really sad if the net were reduced to the web. "You say you need IP connectivity? Are you some kind of hacker?"
The problem is, most machines aren't even really *on* the internet anymore, just on the Web. Which is not as powerful, so you end up with these godawful kludges trying to run applications over HTTP.
The Right Thing would be to get IPv6 out, make local client firewalls and sandboxing standard, and ditch NAT and central firewalls.
Yeah, right.
Instead we have SOAP, a RPC-over-HTTP kludge. We may as well run PPP-over-HTTP and have done with it...
Certainly the zergling rush is the easiest good strategy, but it isn't the only valid one, or even the best. If the zerg don't win early, they're in a lot of trouble - it's hard for them to match up with the powerful late-game units other races have.
(Also remember your workers can attack if ordered; this is surprisingly useful in thwarting the early zergling rush!)
The map makes a big difference; in a highly constricted map, the rush is a lot harder. On an island map they're in deep trouble.
If you sell cars in the USA, and their average fuel economy is below X (about 25mpg, I think?), you have to pay a huge fine.
As a result, the automakers stopped development and manufacturing of the big station wagons people used to buy. (Wagons which, by the way, didn't easily roll over).
SUVs, however, are *trucks*, and thus exempt from CAFE. Thus these are pushed to anybody who wants a big car, even though they're worse for the environment and user than a big-old Caprice wagon would have been.
Certainly, you can build safer cars. But the most obvious way to make a fuel effecient car (make it tiny) makes it more dangerous, and CAFE, pervesely, encourages trucks with poor, dangerous handling.
It shouldn't take a lot of deep thinking to realize that if we retrofit buildings and build more efficient cars it HELPS the economy.
Fair enough. But does it help more than it hurts? If the increased productivity by itself is enough to justify it, people will do it without regulation.
Mostly, though the regulations requiring more efficient cars have caused the SUV boom and gotten thousands killed driving tiny subcompacts that crumple like tinfoil in a serious crash.
Given these choices, in the absence of information, isn't it more logical to bet on the second?
If it's free, sure. It isn't. As the greens are fond of pointing out, we have limited resources. It follows we should spend them where it's most likely to help - I suspect 3rd world debt relief is a better buy for humanity than radical emmisions reductions of the same cost.
Blizzard can decide how they want to administer their property.
Bzzzzt. Wrong. It's not their property, it's mine. They still hold the copyright, but that doesn't mean I can't use my single copy pretty much any damn way I please.
The EULA may say something else, but probably isn't enforcable.
I heard MacOS X has some wacky 'services' thing similar to cut-and-paste that involves passing mime-ified data around between apps. ANybody know details on this?
The hot water tap here at work isn't quite hot enough to make decent tea; I was thinking it would be nice if there were something you could just add to heat the water with no waste product.
Sodium was all I could think of, and obviously a bad idea for several reasons, but some anti-water ought to work nicely!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that was a typo (thinko?). What I meant was, *software which is free even for commercial users*.
The thinking being that if they can leach off the enthusiasts, they'll fork the open CLI movement sufficiently to prevent it from reaching a critical mass, without risking revenue/control by accelerating developement of a product that commercial organizations could potentially use.
Obviously, a plan to get ahead of and preempt commercial support for any shared-source implementations that might have liberal non-commercial licenses (ie, Mono).
The thinking seems to be, give the hobbyists something they can dink around with and they won't be worried about 'software freedom'; they want neat toys, not free software!
He should just hack his relay so that it's extreeeemly slow; nobody will much care if they're using it on the road, but this will make it next to useless for spammers.
There is a fine line between exercising your rihts and being an asshole; right now he's straddling it.
it tends to be the young postgrads who are loudest and most confident in defending the current thinking. Older academics are (on average, of course) a little less sure of themselves: could it possibly be that they have learned something?
Or only the established ones can dare afford to challenge the orthodoxy... even if they many realize its bogus.
It would be impossible if it weren't for all the darn classes...
No doubt. My point was just that if 80% of your costs are more-or-less unrelated to page views (userid tracking, etc) those users only cost you 6X as much as a normal user. Maybe less, it's sticky math.
.1 cent, will break-even overall.
.05 cent per page. You come out ahead at .06 per page. Very similar economics to software.
You have to distinguish between actual profit (which is fuzzy) and marginal profit.
Suppose you have a fixed overhead of $500k/year, and a billion pages views a year by a hundred thousand users that cost you another $500k.
A flat rate of $10/year, or a per-page rate of
However, for any given user (consider a new one, but it doesn't really matter), you break even incrementally at an average of $5, or
And psychologically, people prefer flat-rate pricing, even when it's obviously more expensive.
I guess my point is that at a fixed rate, the heavy users will end up paying for a disproportionate share of overhead. Maybe some kind of volume discount as a happy middle ground between flat and per-page rate?
Wonder if I'm one of them? I really don't know.
But are those users a serious extra expense, or is your fixed overhead so high it doesn't matter? I would have thought salaries, not bandwidth, was the bulk of the cost of slashdot...?
I dunno about pay-per-page on slashdot, but I'd certainly be willing to pay for sourceforge.
If you added something to user info showing us how many pages we've viewed recently, it would help us decide. (And yes, I'm not a paypal fan either...)
their device can't tell the difference between video of your kids and a bootleg copy of Snow Dogs
Most VCDs today aren't ripped, they're filmed by some fool in a theater with a camcorder. How the heck is that going to be detected? Camcorders will have to have constantly updated AI code to verify that they aren't taping anything copyrighted, and will cover it with little black bars if so? WTF?
Ye Gods... this makes me want to go find my Senator, and smack him upside his fool head.
September 11th. Microsoft uses that grizzly act
The hijackers were Islamic fundamentalist bears? No wonder they only needed box cutters!
If they allowed bnetd to pass-through authentication to battle.net, they might have a better point. They've specifically ruled that out. (Presumably because their crypto is lousy.)
And it isn't the bnetd group that even enabled Warcraft III support.
I've read C&B.
;)
How is your firewall going to protect from a new Outlook virus, or the IE bug-of-the-month?
And if I'm running RFC3093 IP over HTTP, with SSL, your proxy is almost certain to be clueless. Even assuming I'm not using steganography... and SOAP might count.
Sure, proxies are more secure; but they can't be perfectly secure... and now you need a new proxy for each new application, which is the mess I was complaining about.
I'm not calling for running every service known to man on Internet-connected machines, shutting stuff down is great. No argument.
What I do think is that ideally we should have honest-to-god IP to every desktop. No, I don't think this is 100% realistic, but I think it is the ideal.
It's all well and good for the central firewalls to block certain ports, but nothing is enforcing what's really running over those ports. (PPP over DNS, anyone?) Securing the desktop is key; once you've done that, you can open it the network as far as possible so you don't have to deal with this everything-over-HTTP b*&#%&#.
UDP-style transmission like email and some online games
Huh? SMTP, POP, and IMAP all use TCP.
Using TCP is a shortcut, and lazy.
Until you end up reimplementing half of it on top of UDP. Badly. And yes, I've seen this multiple times.
Enough with the NIH, please? There are many years of effort in the common TCP stacks, and many subtle things they do right that you'll miss the first dozen implementations.
For the love of god, if you need a substancial subset of TCP's features, and can live with the overhead, use TCP!
If you don't have a real, static IP, no, you aren't really on the internet.
If you are behind a firewall that only allows HTTP, no. If it only allows outgoing connections, not really. All you can do is what HTTP can do, which is much less than IP can.
It would be really sad if the net were reduced to the web. "You say you need IP connectivity? Are you some kind of hacker?"
The problem is, most machines aren't even really *on* the internet anymore, just on the Web. Which is not as powerful, so you end up with these godawful kludges trying to run applications over HTTP.
The Right Thing would be to get IPv6 out, make local client firewalls and sandboxing standard, and ditch NAT and central firewalls.
Yeah, right.
Instead we have SOAP, a RPC-over-HTTP kludge. We may as well run PPP-over-HTTP and have done with it...
Certainly the zergling rush is the easiest good strategy, but it isn't the only valid one, or even the best. If the zerg don't win early, they're in a lot of trouble - it's hard for them to match up with the powerful late-game units other races have.
(Also remember your workers can attack if ordered; this is surprisingly useful in thwarting the early zergling rush!)
The map makes a big difference; in a highly constricted map, the rush is a lot harder. On an island map they're in deep trouble.
If you sell cars in the USA, and their average fuel economy is below X (about 25mpg, I think?), you have to pay a huge fine.
As a result, the automakers stopped development and manufacturing of the big station wagons people used to buy. (Wagons which, by the way, didn't easily roll over).
SUVs, however, are *trucks*, and thus exempt from CAFE. Thus these are pushed to anybody who wants a big car, even though they're worse for the environment and user than a big-old Caprice wagon would have been.
Certainly, you can build safer cars. But the most obvious way to make a fuel effecient car (make it tiny) makes it more dangerous, and CAFE, pervesely, encourages trucks with poor, dangerous handling.
It shouldn't take a lot of deep thinking to realize that if we retrofit buildings and build more efficient cars it HELPS the economy.
Fair enough. But does it help more than it hurts? If the increased productivity by itself is enough to justify it, people will do it without regulation.
Mostly, though the regulations requiring more efficient cars have caused the SUV boom and gotten thousands killed driving tiny subcompacts that crumple like tinfoil in a serious crash.
Given these choices, in the absence of information, isn't it more logical to bet on the second?
If it's free, sure. It isn't. As the greens are fond of pointing out, we have limited resources. It follows we should spend them where it's most likely to help - I suspect 3rd world debt relief is a better buy for humanity than radical emmisions reductions of the same cost.
Of course people who pirate a game are breaking the law.
But people who buy the game can legally use it with bnet if they want to, and if Blizzard doesn't like it, that's tough.
Now, if bnetd was designed to make piracy easier, you might have a case for contributary infringement, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
So where's the beef?
Blizzard can decide how they want to administer
their property.
Bzzzzt. Wrong. It's not their property, it's mine. They still hold the copyright, but that doesn't mean I can't use my single copy pretty much any damn way I please.
The EULA may say something else, but probably isn't enforcable.
I heard MacOS X has some wacky 'services' thing similar to cut-and-paste that involves passing mime-ified data around between apps. ANybody know details on this?
The hot water tap here at work isn't quite hot enough to make decent tea; I was thinking it would be nice if there were something you could just add to heat the water with no waste product.
Sodium was all I could think of, and obviously a bad idea for several reasons, but some anti-water ought to work nicely!