Not every movie is original in every respect. This movie has no original plot or dialogue (if you're an anime fan, you'll feel right at home). However, it is worth $5 just to see the CGI, which is always good, and sometimes awesome. In fact, there were several 'bonus' moments of true brilliance in this otherwise entertaining flick.
If you judge this movie compared to (better) Hollywood films, it comes up short. If you compare it to other anime films, it's brilliant. Half full or half empty? It's your choice.
Actually it's more often used to justify tax cuts, arguing that the trickle-down effects of a tax cut putting more money into circulation will
result in a larger economy and hence the government will actually collect more money in taxes at the lower tax rate.
That's nice in theory. But if my taxes were cut, that extra money would not go into the economy, it would go into my retirement investments. And that is advice you can take to the bank.
Since you got me started on trickle-down, let's see where all that money goes.
If I pay it in taxes, most of it goes to debt service (read: social security, or non-producers who have to spend every penny to live), defense (underpaid service(wo)men and overpaid defense contractors), funding the operation of government (waste), and various public works and social programs (benefits everyone, in spite of themselves).
If you give me a tax cut, most of the savings goes into the bank, as already established. But suppose it didn't; suppose instead I spent it on luxuries (which I wouldn't). Most (75%) of that money will cover the cost the seller paid for them. Some will go to laborers who probably make less than I do. More will go to the owners, who probably make more than I do. Now go back to that 75% and iterate for the wholesaler, and so on back up the line.
What you will find is a whole lot of low-level workers all getting a little bit of money, and a few people who are already rich getting more. And, going back to my original point, most people who have a financial surplus do not spend 100% of that surplus. It's foolish. And rich people by definition (by construction at least) do not spend their surplus. The more money gets spent, the more accumulates at the top of the economic pyramid. Tax cuts increase the flow of money into the pockets of the rich.
If the size of the economy is what turns you on -- if you really want 100% of the money to stay in the economy -- give it all to the people who don't have enough; they are the ones achieving 100% utilization. Think about it.
It's not just graphic designers; artists, musicians and writers of all kinds prefer the Mac. MacOS is also the platform of choice in some serious scientific circles such as top universities and federal research labs.
Seymour Cray, while he lived, used Macs to design the world's fastest supercomputers. If Macs are good enough for the man who invented vector supercomputing, they're certainly good enough for the rest of us.
You need to study your history, too. The GUI was not invented at PARC (all of the key pieces were invented before PARC was founded), and the original Mac (not 'MAC'; it is not an acronym) was not a blatant copy of STAR, unless you define every GUI that uses a mouse, overlapping windows, and icons as such. Apart from these superficial similarities, there is a lot of genuine innovation in the Macintosh GUI for which you wrongly deny Apple credit.
"Besides, the GUI makes so much sense that someone would stumble upon it eventually as
computing power became more abundant."
Not even. Those who invented the basic principles of the GUI back in the 50s (Kay and Sutherland) and 60s (Englebart and Raskin) pushed hard throughout the 70s to get their ideas implemented (at PARC, SRI, and other places).
Far from anyone stumbling upon it, it was only a matter of time before these visionaries finally succeeded in forcing it upon us waiting masses by convincing some company (Apple) to actually run with it.
Wouldn't you just love to be able to collect damages from all those stupid sweepstakes promoters, and other barely-legal-at-best junk mail advertisers?
I suppose we already have it, actually. We call it 'class action lawsuits', and the lawyers who win can collect $100M instead of $1K. Never mind; keep your 'Abmahnung' and pray your lawyers don't decide to gang up on you.
Some of us were there at the time, sonny. The way you tell it isn't how it happened. For starters, let's just remember that MS-DOS came with the MOST expensive personal computers, not the least. From the mid-'80s through the early '90s, it was possible to buy a new computer (with no MS software at all) for under $200. Where are the sub-$200 new systems today?
But OS/2 Warp came out at the end of 1994 and there was (supposedly) a big showdown between
it an Windows 95 at that time. The main reason Windows 95 won (easily) is because it supported
Windows 3.1 16-bit apps much better. Plus, let's face it, Windows 95 was one of the first
non-crap products that MS ever produced.
I have to disagree on a couple of points. First, there was no showdown between OS/2 Warp and Windows 95. No-Show is more like it. Second, OS/2 was better at running 16-bit apps, not Win95. However, OS/2 could not run (at all) Win32 programs. Finally, the mid-'80s versions of MS Word and Excel for Mac were not crap. Not only that, but they were also the best products in their field at the time. No surprise that they provided the foundation for their Windows counterparts. And calling Win95 non-crap may be going a bit too far.:-)
The real reason Win95 succeeded is the obvious one: It inherited the OS monopoly from Win 3.1, which inherited the OS monopoly from MS-DOS. MS forced the succession of each new product by forcing all new systems to ship with it while also cutting off support for the old one. End of story.
If you had asked if MS programmers write better code, I wouldn't know. But there is little doubt in my mind that MS products are more professional. By this, I mean that they are slickly packaged and show a high degree of consistency (although some real standouts remain).
On the other hand, all of the products you mention (BIND, LaTEX, SENDMAIL, TEX EMACS) bear what I consider to be the hallmarks of hacker software: They work extremely well; are terrifically configurable; are very difficult to learn to use effectively; are quirky and not well polished; (apart from EMACS) lack well-integrated user documentation (source code is not user documentation); and are often used in combination with modules of wildly varying quality contributed by the user community, many of which basically don't work.
Don't get me wrong; I love free software in general, and several of the titles cited above in particular. It's the best at what it does. But it's not professional.
Which corporations are taking the lead in publicly supporting free software? No big surprise: It's companies like IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, and Apple - all of which traditionally make most of their money from selling hardware and services. It is very much to their benefit to give customers added incentive to keep buying their boxes, so they'll lower the price of their software if that's what it takes.
And this is the way it should be.
Hardware has significant material cost. The cost of making hardware scales with the number of units produced. The marginal cost of producing additional units includes a significant amount of labor and parts. This is not the case with software. The marginal cost of producing additional units of software is approaches zero.
It makes sense that, over time, certain classes of software cease to have any commercial value, whereas hardware continues to have a cost. This is natural. For a company to insist on charging the same price for the same software in perpetuity or, even worse, compel customers to purchase their copy over and over again, is distinctly unnatural.
Eventually, that method will fail. It's not nice to mess with Mother Nature.
IBM, et al. have figured this out. They are positioning themselves to be able to prosper in a marketplace where many classes of software are free. They have decided not to waste their energy trying to paddle upstream. Certain other companies have figured this out, and are doing their best to fight the inevitable. They will emit a lot of heat before they collapse.
FORTRAN continues to be a valuable language in science and engineering. It's worth knowing if you're a scientist, although an interactive system such as MATLAB or Mathematica is probably better suited for exploratory use. For heavy-duty number crunching, FORTRAN is still an excellent choice.
One can understand how a journalist could get confused about the place of origin of Linux, seeing as how Linus wrote it because he was dissatisfied with Minix, which _is_ from Holland.
The open source product will presumably be or become the subject of published benchmark
reports and reviews, while the closed source product will not. Educated consumers may be less likely to purchase the closed source product because they have no
available information regarding its performance or quality. Further, even if there are published benchmarks and reviews for the closed source software, educated
consumers may recognize that those reports and reviews were only published with the consent of the closed source company. This fact will detract from the reliability
and value of the report or review to the consumer. So at least in theory, the anti-publication provisions may actually hinder the closed source product's ability to compete
with open source products in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, not only will the closed/proprietary software product only be the subject of glowing reviews and benchmarks (probably ones that don't even compare it to the Free product), but the public won't know that the benchmark was rigged. The maker of the non-Free product will refuse to allow publication of any review that mentions the no-bad-reviews-or-benchmarks restriction. Any magazine or web site that wants to be allowed to publish tests in the future will know better even than to push their luck by trying to get such language past the cens^H^H^H^Hpropag^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing people. Only the very savviest (and most cynical) market-watchers will ever be the wiser.
It is true that CGI is less good and more expensive than most human actors - today. The first steam locomotives weren't as fast, pretty, or graceful as horses, either. That's the nature of emerging technologies. Even today, locomotives cost more than horses to the degree that any one individual uses them. With automation comes leverage. When you mechanize, making 10 of something does not cost 10 times as much as making the first one, and more people have access to the resource.
The time will come (in 2 years? five? ten?) when photorealistic CGI animation will look just as good as actors. Not that the public's apetite for actors will ever go away - just as movies and television didn't kill off the stage, CGI won't kill off acting. The superstars will still make $6 million per film. However, CGI will inevitably both take a chunk out of the middle of the market, and grow the market by making it possible (or just cheaper) to show things that live actors can't (ordinarily) do.
Whether an individual CGI costs more or less create than an actor (I'd guess it'll stabilize in the middle) is irrelevant, because the CGI will be able to go places the actor can't. Even to the point of something trivially simple like appearing in many feature films in one year. Even before taking into account the new things it makes possible, even for traditional roles the investment will be amortized over many more uses.
It's the little things that matter
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What I enjoyed most about Shreck was the little things. Footprints. Leaves suspended in air during the Matrix scene. The obvious allusions to Disney movies. (Snow White sure looks familiar, doesn't she?) Waving blades of grass. And of course the prince, although his name always sounded vaguely obscene to me. I dunno... if I mull it over for a while, I'm sure it'll come to me.
Shreck is an Ogre, not a Scot.
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Movies that include kids of single-digit age as one of their primary target audiences rarely last more than 90 minutes. Sadly, this category necessarily includes almost every Hollywood animated feature. You can blame Disney for that.
There exist many nonprofit and mom'n'pop organizations that operate informational websites under names with wide national or international recognition, but that lack the wherewithal to actually go to the trouble to register the trademark. Those people will almost certainly be screwed by this proces, as it will be the nature of informational sites to want.info domain names that are very broad in scope and are virtually guaranteed to be snapped up by businesses that are probably less deserving of the domain.
This process could be made much more fair if it were made clear that for-profit companies could only claim.info domains that *exactly* match their trademark, *and* that they not use any.info domain as a mercantile outlet. And if pigs could fly, we'd carry umbrellas.
Nokia is half as big as Sony, or 3/4 big as Intel. Nokia has 60,000 employees, $6B in profits, $4B in the bank, and a popular, well-liked consumer brand. They are capable of pulling it off if anyone is.
Linux has more than enough users to create a critical mass of demand for applications, including games.
When I first started using Linux a few years ago, the number of installations was estimated at around 5-10 million and doubling every year. If we take that number at face value, then the Linux installed base may be comparable in size to MacOS (20 to 30 million).
Conventional wisdom holds that most Linux boxen are servers, and that most Linux desktops dual-boot some other OS. If one generously assumes that all dual-boot desktop installations would run Linux whenever the situation allows it, there could still be easily 5 million or so users (especially when counting multi-user workstations).
The percentage is probably higher among gamers (WAG).
5 million users is more than enough to keep a small number of full-time software houses in business indefinitely. It's way more than there were when PCs were getting started in the late 1970s and early 80s.
If you can sell one program for $10 to 1% of those users each year, that's $500,000. That's enough to keep 5-10 people employed.
That's why people still write software for the Mac.:-)
On top of that, because Linux is Free and free, it has tremendous potential for growth, especially in emerging markets. The biggest factors holding it back now are the somewhat lacking quality of user experience, and the economic network effect.
So there's no question that there are enough potential customers to keep a few Linux game companies in business. The question is, will Linux users pay for software? That's a mighty big question. It'll be interesting to see what the answer turns out to be.
You ask the right question, of the wrong party
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MS VP Speech Online
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Adapt to *what*?
To the new market reality, of course.
RH (and other linux companies that release GPL programs) doesn't makes money, MS makes billions a year.
They're rich, so they must be right. What about the closed-source-proprietary software companies that went up against MS and went out of business. I'd say it's proof of the viability of Free software that it can actually go head to head against a convicted anti-competitive monopolist and survive, where so many "traditional" software companies could not.
*Why* should I pay for something I get for free?
That's a good question. You should ask Bill Gates why you should pony up $100 for his crappy, second-rate OS and another $250 for his office suite, when you can get Linux and Star Office for free. Several years ago, you couldn't ask that question. Today, you can.
So RH has to work much harder for their money, and they *still* don't make a profit.
MS makes a lot of dimes.
They're rich, so they must be right. Nobody's going to disagree with you that it's pretty sweet to own the monopoly franchise. Most companies have to work a lot harder than MS for less reward.
Explain to me the bussiness model of selling GPL software, please. And how you can profit from it.
Support doesn't count, BTW, commercial software makes money from support as well.
I really didn't want to, but okay, here goes.
A significant amount of software is developed for custom ("vertial market") applications. If I can re-use components, I can write your application faster and cheaper than if I have to write it from scratch. Sure, I can license third-party VBXes or OCXes or ActiveX components and leverage somebody else's work, but I'm going pass that cost on to you. If I used free (beer) parts, you'd save a few $thousand. Not that big a deal when you're paying a half $million for an application, but it doesn't hurt.
Of course, Free (speech) software is not necessarily free (beer). Don't forget that. So you might not save any money there, after all. Incidentally, returning for a moment to your previous argument, Free software need not be free. Sometimes the Eskimos don't have a supply of free ice.
The problem with using non-Free components is that they often don't work exactly as you need them to. Sometimes their vendor will work with you to extend or fix their functionality, and sometimes they won't. From personal experience, I can tell you that it can be exceedingly costly to hack a given tool to meet an inflexible customer's requirement when you have to use it in its shrinkwrapped form. With Free software, you get the source. If you need the tool to work a little differently, you hack it yourself. You still pay the provider, if they require it.
What about support? In a vertical market, your customer is going to direct all their support questions to you. If you trace the problem to a part you bought, you can try to pass the request down the line. Every step further from your client diminishes the urgency of the issue. Sometimes your supplier may go out of business or cease to support an old product. You're SOL. If you had the source, you could fix it yourself. Free software comes with source, and the right to use it. With the source, if you go out of business, your client can support the product themselves. You'd never have to worry about "source code escrow" or other silly mechanisms that were invented to CYA in case the owner of "secret stuff" disappears.
If you use Free software, then you can give your client a rebate on the cost of code you write to support their app, because you can reuse it in other projects. And, although they could hire someone else to provide ongoing support, unless you really messed up they probably won't, because you as the author of their application can support it more effectively and less expensively than somebody new.
What about non-vertical market ("shrink-wrap") software?
Because of the terrific economies of scale, the marginal cost of producing shrinkwrapped software is exceedingly low. I've heard that the gross profit margin (sales price less cost to fabricate) on a copy of MS Office is about 85%. MS has some pretty high SG&A and engineering expenses, but they still make a ton of cash, even if not 85%.
There's nothing magical about Office. It's just some basic productivity apps. Basic economics should tell you that, for a high-volume, commodity item, the sales price shouldn't be all that much higher than the marignal cost of production. Why isn't it? Because MS has everyone locked into their proprietary file formats. No, wait, my friend Bill is telling me it's because MS software really is better than the other stuff. Please, don't make me laugh. I might spurt milk out my nose, and then I'd have to sue you. Okay, fine, we'll compromise. Most people don't even know they have a choice.
I know you told me not to count support, but I have to. Because when the marginal cost of production of a commodity item approaches zero, you'll see that it really doesn't make sense to try to make too much money on the original sale. The genie is bound to get out of the bottle sooner or later, as indeed it has. People have figured out that they can give away the software and still make some money selling support. If you knew that you could choose between paying $250 for the inital purchase plus $2/minute or $50/incident for support, or $0 initial purchase plus, say, $25 per incident for support, for otherwise similar products, which would you choose? It sure sounds like a reasonable value proposition to me.
So, bottom line, why should anyone try to make money on Free software? Because they think they can offer a better value proposition to the customer. Whether or not you think GPL software is a good idea, you and Microsoft and everyone else have to accept that GPL software does exist, and react accordingly. You can wish for it to go away (futile), or you can run with it. MS can safely ignore some GPL products (e.g., Star Office) for many years to come, because (a) it's not quite as good, (b) most people don't know it exists, (c) FUD, and (d) proprietary file format lock-in. With others (e.g., operating systems), they can't be so complacent.
So how do you deal with the reality of Free (and/or free) software, since it quite clearly does exist? It's a little late to base your argument on the premise that the world not have free software at all, so any arguments in that direction are only wishful thinking or straw man arguments.
One way is, differentiate yourself. Take a good thing and make it better, and see if people will give you money for doing a good thing. Another way is, sell services. Assemble bundles; perform QA validation; integrate systems and support them. A third way is, do something special that nobody else is doing. Sell a proprietary app that runs on a Free foundation, or take contracts from people with special needs who are willing to pay for something that everyone can have, just so that they can have it too. The $100 million that Red Hat made last year had to come from somebody.
If you're feeling defeatist, you can also just recognize that the rules have changed; stuff that used to be exclusive is now common; you can't think of a way to profit under the new rules; so you quit while you're ahead, give all your employees and stockholders a big bonus; liquidate your business; and retire rich and happy. Once upon a time, you could make a pretty good living just selling DRAM memory, when it took $2000 to max out a personal computer. Today, I can max out my machine for $200. That SIMM merchant can find something new to sell, or retire knowing (s)he did a good business while it lasted.
Then, of course, there's all the dirty, underhanded tricks we all know about, manipulating society, laws, and the marketplace to try to snuff out this quaint little movement that has the audacity to try to give the little guy a fair shake. Why anyone would want to take this low road through the slime and mud, I can't imagine. I suppose a select few could benefit from this, even if it harms society as a whole.
You know, people are pretty smart. Give them a sandbox, and they'll figure out a way to build a sand castle. Give them some free tools, and they'll still find a way to make a buck; they'll be happy because the cost of their tools won't break their wallet, and their customers will be happy that their product will cost less and carry less risk, and everybody will be better off.
I can't for the life of me imagine how it can be bad to start everybody off with a better sandbox. And that's what Free software is all about.
They're NOT in the custom
software business, so while companies like RedHat can make a tiny bit of money (and I do mean Tiny) from doing some custom
projects, Microsoft is not structured like this.
This is true. However, no where are Microsoft, the members of the RIAA, the members of the MPAA, or any other enterprise ever given the guarantee that the business model that they have freely chosen will always be profitable. Times change. Technologies change. Markets change. Adapt or die.
Change and progress are good. They wash away the dead wood institutions in our society, while vital ones adapt and prosper.
No amount of preparation will help you to be a game creator as well as creating a game. So the first step is to make a game or few.
Writing an extension (e.g., a mod) to an existing game is a great way to focus on gameplay without getting lost in technical details.
But definitely get out there and make a game!
Rule Number Two: Design
Learn how to design a good game.
Rule Number Three: Self-management
Motivation and organizational skills are paramout.
Rule Number Four: Nail the technical fundamentals
If you're going to write computer games, a CS degree will certainly help you be a better programmer. You'll learn about algorithms, data structures, order of complexity, etc. This is the least important ingredient.
Any time you have an interpretation environment, you have the potential for programs that write parts of themselves. It happens in Perl all the time. In environments such as Hypercard, you can even have GUIs that write GUIs (click a button that creates new pages, populates them with scripted buttons or other controls, and presents them to the user). How's that for a kick in the head? I wonder if anyone has programmed a VM system to programmatically generate custom VMs to run new jobs on... wouldn't that be fun? David Boyes, are you listening?;-)
The battle is lost. The general public will always think of hackers as vandals. So don't be a hacker. Be a coding wizard. The public will probably never think of a wizard as an intrinsically bad person, and it conveys exactly the connotation that you want. "You ordinary people, don't even try to understand what I'm doing. I'm a wizard." (Or is that 'W1X0Rd'?)
Down with nasty, evil hackers! Up with beneficent code wizards!
Slashdot Mirror
Not every movie is original in every respect. This movie has no original plot or dialogue (if you're an anime fan, you'll feel right at home). However, it is worth $5 just to see the CGI, which is always good, and sometimes awesome. In fact, there were several 'bonus' moments of true brilliance in this otherwise entertaining flick.
If you judge this movie compared to (better) Hollywood films, it comes up short. If you compare it to other anime films, it's brilliant. Half full or half empty? It's your choice.
Actually it's more often used to justify tax cuts, arguing that the trickle-down effects of a tax cut putting more money into circulation will result in a larger economy and hence the government will actually collect more money in taxes at the lower tax rate.
That's nice in theory. But if my taxes were cut, that extra money would not go into the economy, it would go into my retirement investments. And that is advice you can take to the bank.
Since you got me started on trickle-down, let's see where all that money goes.
If I pay it in taxes, most of it goes to debt service (read: social security, or non-producers who have to spend every penny to live), defense (underpaid service(wo)men and overpaid defense contractors), funding the operation of government (waste), and various public works and social programs (benefits everyone, in spite of themselves).
If you give me a tax cut, most of the savings goes into the bank, as already established. But suppose it didn't; suppose instead I spent it on luxuries (which I wouldn't). Most (75%) of that money will cover the cost the seller paid for them. Some will go to laborers who probably make less than I do. More will go to the owners, who probably make more than I do. Now go back to that 75% and iterate for the wholesaler, and so on back up the line.
What you will find is a whole lot of low-level workers all getting a little bit of money, and a few people who are already rich getting more. And, going back to my original point, most people who have a financial surplus do not spend 100% of that surplus. It's foolish. And rich people by definition (by construction at least) do not spend their surplus. The more money gets spent, the more accumulates at the top of the economic pyramid. Tax cuts increase the flow of money into the pockets of the rich.
If the size of the economy is what turns you on -- if you really want 100% of the money to stay in the economy -- give it all to the people who don't have enough; they are the ones achieving 100% utilization. Think about it.
Money does not trickle down, it trickles up.
It's not just graphic designers; artists, musicians and writers of all kinds prefer the Mac. MacOS is also the platform of choice in some serious scientific circles such as top universities and federal research labs.
Seymour Cray, while he lived, used Macs to design the world's fastest supercomputers. If Macs are good enough for the man who invented vector supercomputing, they're certainly good enough for the rest of us.
You need to study your history, too. The GUI was not invented at PARC (all of the key pieces were invented before PARC was founded), and the original Mac (not 'MAC'; it is not an acronym) was not a blatant copy of STAR, unless you define every GUI that uses a mouse, overlapping windows, and icons as such. Apart from these superficial similarities, there is a lot of genuine innovation in the Macintosh GUI for which you wrongly deny Apple credit.
"Besides, the GUI makes so much sense that someone would stumble upon it eventually as
computing power became more abundant."
Not even. Those who invented the basic principles of the GUI back in the 50s (Kay and Sutherland) and 60s (Englebart and Raskin) pushed hard throughout the 70s to get their ideas implemented (at PARC, SRI, and other places).
Far from anyone stumbling upon it, it was only a matter of time before these visionaries finally succeeded in forcing it upon us waiting masses by convincing some company (Apple) to actually run with it.
Wouldn't you just love to be able to collect damages from all those stupid sweepstakes promoters, and other barely-legal-at-best junk mail advertisers?
I suppose we already have it, actually. We call it 'class action lawsuits', and the lawyers who win can collect $100M instead of $1K. Never mind; keep your 'Abmahnung' and pray your lawyers don't decide to gang up on you.
Some of us were there at the time, sonny. The way you tell it isn't how it happened. For starters, let's just remember that MS-DOS came with the MOST expensive personal computers, not the least. From the mid-'80s through the early '90s, it was possible to buy a new computer (with no MS software at all) for under $200. Where are the sub-$200 new systems today?
But OS/2 Warp came out at the end of 1994 and there was (supposedly) a big showdown between it an Windows 95 at that time. The main reason Windows 95 won (easily) is because it supported Windows 3.1 16-bit apps much better. Plus, let's face it, Windows 95 was one of the first non-crap products that MS ever produced.
I have to disagree on a couple of points. First, there was no showdown between OS/2 Warp and Windows 95. No-Show is more like it. Second, OS/2 was better at running 16-bit apps, not Win95. However, OS/2 could not run (at all) Win32 programs. Finally, the mid-'80s versions of MS Word and Excel for Mac were not crap. Not only that, but they were also the best products in their field at the time. No surprise that they provided the foundation for their Windows counterparts. And calling Win95 non-crap may be going a bit too far. :-)
The real reason Win95 succeeded is the obvious one: It inherited the OS monopoly from Win 3.1, which inherited the OS monopoly from MS-DOS. MS forced the succession of each new product by forcing all new systems to ship with it while also cutting off support for the old one. End of story.
If you had asked if MS programmers write better code, I wouldn't know. But there is little doubt in my mind that MS products are more professional. By this, I mean that they are slickly packaged and show a high degree of consistency (although some real standouts remain).
On the other hand, all of the products you mention (BIND, LaTEX, SENDMAIL, TEX EMACS) bear what I consider to be the hallmarks of hacker software: They work extremely well; are terrifically configurable; are very difficult to learn to use effectively; are quirky and not well polished; (apart from EMACS) lack well-integrated user documentation (source code is not user documentation); and are often used in combination with modules of wildly varying quality contributed by the user community, many of which basically don't work.
Don't get me wrong; I love free software in general, and several of the titles cited above in particular. It's the best at what it does. But it's not professional.
Which corporations are taking the lead in publicly supporting free software? No big surprise: It's companies like IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, and Apple - all of which traditionally make most of their money from selling hardware and services. It is very much to their benefit to give customers added incentive to keep buying their boxes, so they'll lower the price of their software if that's what it takes.
And this is the way it should be.
Hardware has significant material cost. The cost of making hardware scales with the number of units produced. The marginal cost of producing additional units includes a significant amount of labor and parts. This is not the case with software. The marginal cost of producing additional units of software is approaches zero.
It makes sense that, over time, certain classes of software cease to have any commercial value, whereas hardware continues to have a cost. This is natural. For a company to insist on charging the same price for the same software in perpetuity or, even worse, compel customers to purchase their copy over and over again, is distinctly unnatural.
Eventually, that method will fail. It's not nice to mess with Mother Nature.
IBM, et al. have figured this out. They are positioning themselves to be able to prosper in a marketplace where many classes of software are free. They have decided not to waste their energy trying to paddle upstream. Certain other companies have figured this out, and are doing their best to fight the inevitable. They will emit a lot of heat before they collapse.
FORTRAN continues to be a valuable language in science and engineering. It's worth knowing if you're a scientist, although an interactive system such as MATLAB or Mathematica is probably better suited for exploratory use. For heavy-duty number crunching, FORTRAN is still an excellent choice.
One can understand how a journalist could get confused about the place of origin of Linux, seeing as how Linus wrote it because he was dissatisfied with Minix, which _is_ from Holland.
The open source product will presumably be or become the subject of published benchmark reports and reviews, while the closed source product will not. Educated consumers may be less likely to purchase the closed source product because they have no available information regarding its performance or quality. Further, even if there are published benchmarks and reviews for the closed source software, educated consumers may recognize that those reports and reviews were only published with the consent of the closed source company. This fact will detract from the reliability and value of the report or review to the consumer. So at least in theory, the anti-publication provisions may actually hinder the closed source product's ability to compete with open source products in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, not only will the closed/proprietary software product only be the subject of glowing reviews and benchmarks (probably ones that don't even compare it to the Free product), but the public won't know that the benchmark was rigged. The maker of the non-Free product will refuse to allow publication of any review that mentions the no-bad-reviews-or-benchmarks restriction. Any magazine or web site that wants to be allowed to publish tests in the future will know better even than to push their luck by trying to get such language past the cens^H^H^H^Hpropag^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing people. Only the very savviest (and most cynical) market-watchers will ever be the wiser.
It is true that CGI is less good and more expensive than most human actors - today. The first steam locomotives weren't as fast, pretty, or graceful as horses, either. That's the nature of emerging technologies. Even today, locomotives cost more than horses to the degree that any one individual uses them. With automation comes leverage. When you mechanize, making 10 of something does not cost 10 times as much as making the first one, and more people have access to the resource.
The time will come (in 2 years? five? ten?) when photorealistic CGI animation will look just as good as actors. Not that the public's apetite for actors will ever go away - just as movies and television didn't kill off the stage, CGI won't kill off acting. The superstars will still make $6 million per film. However, CGI will inevitably both take a chunk out of the middle of the market, and grow the market by making it possible (or just cheaper) to show things that live actors can't (ordinarily) do.
Whether an individual CGI costs more or less create than an actor (I'd guess it'll stabilize in the middle) is irrelevant, because the CGI will be able to go places the actor can't. Even to the point of something trivially simple like appearing in many feature films in one year. Even before taking into account the new things it makes possible, even for traditional roles the investment will be amortized over many more uses.
What I enjoyed most about Shreck was the little things. Footprints. Leaves suspended in air during the Matrix scene. The obvious allusions to Disney movies. (Snow White sure looks familiar, doesn't she?) Waving blades of grass. And of course the prince, although his name always sounded vaguely obscene to me. I dunno... if I mull it over for a while, I'm sure it'll come to me.
I know it's hard to tell the difference.
Movies that include kids of single-digit age as one of their primary target audiences rarely last more than 90 minutes. Sadly, this category necessarily includes almost every Hollywood animated feature. You can blame Disney for that.
There exist many nonprofit and mom'n'pop organizations that operate informational websites under names with wide national or international recognition, but that lack the wherewithal to actually go to the trouble to register the trademark. Those people will almost certainly be screwed by this proces, as it will be the nature of informational sites to want .info domain names that are very broad in scope and are virtually guaranteed to be snapped up by businesses that are probably less deserving of the domain.
.info domains that *exactly* match their trademark, *and* that they not use any .info domain as a mercantile outlet. And if pigs could fly, we'd carry umbrellas.
This process could be made much more fair if it were made clear that for-profit companies could only claim
Nokia is half as big as Sony, or 3/4 big as Intel. Nokia has 60,000 employees, $6B in profits, $4B in the bank, and a popular, well-liked consumer brand. They are capable of pulling it off if anyone is.
Linux has more than enough users to create a critical mass of demand for applications, including games.
:-)
When I first started using Linux a few years ago, the number of installations was estimated at around 5-10 million and doubling every year. If we take that number at face value, then the Linux installed base may be comparable in size to MacOS (20 to 30 million).
Conventional wisdom holds that most Linux boxen are servers, and that most Linux desktops dual-boot some other OS. If one generously assumes that all dual-boot desktop installations would run Linux whenever the situation allows it, there could still be easily 5 million or so users (especially when counting multi-user workstations).
The percentage is probably higher among gamers (WAG).
5 million users is more than enough to keep a small number of full-time software houses in business indefinitely. It's way more than there were when PCs were getting started in the late 1970s and early 80s.
If you can sell one program for $10 to 1% of those users each year, that's $500,000. That's enough to keep 5-10 people employed.
That's why people still write software for the Mac.
On top of that, because Linux is Free and free, it has tremendous potential for growth, especially in emerging markets. The biggest factors holding it back now are the somewhat lacking quality of user experience, and the economic network effect.
So there's no question that there are enough potential customers to keep a few Linux game companies in business. The question is, will Linux users pay for software? That's a mighty big question. It'll be interesting to see what the answer turns out to be.
Adapt to *what*?
To the new market reality, of course.
RH (and other linux companies that release GPL programs) doesn't makes money, MS makes billions a year.
They're rich, so they must be right. What about the closed-source-proprietary software companies that went up against MS and went out of business. I'd say it's proof of the viability of Free software that it can actually go head to head against a convicted anti-competitive monopolist and survive, where so many "traditional" software companies could not.
*Why* should I pay for something I get for free?
That's a good question. You should ask Bill Gates why you should pony up $100 for his crappy, second-rate OS and another $250 for his office suite, when you can get Linux and Star Office for free. Several years ago, you couldn't ask that question. Today, you can.
So RH has to work much harder for their money, and they *still* don't make a profit.
MS makes a lot of dimes.
They're rich, so they must be right. Nobody's going to disagree with you that it's pretty sweet to own the monopoly franchise. Most companies have to work a lot harder than MS for less reward.
Explain to me the bussiness model of selling GPL software, please. And how you can profit from it. Support doesn't count, BTW, commercial software makes money from support as well.
I really didn't want to, but okay, here goes.
A significant amount of software is developed for custom ("vertial market") applications. If I can re-use components, I can write your application faster and cheaper than if I have to write it from scratch. Sure, I can license third-party VBXes or OCXes or ActiveX components and leverage somebody else's work, but I'm going pass that cost on to you. If I used free (beer) parts, you'd save a few $thousand. Not that big a deal when you're paying a half $million for an application, but it doesn't hurt.
Of course, Free (speech) software is not necessarily free (beer). Don't forget that. So you might not save any money there, after all. Incidentally, returning for a moment to your previous argument, Free software need not be free. Sometimes the Eskimos don't have a supply of free ice.
The problem with using non-Free components is that they often don't work exactly as you need them to. Sometimes their vendor will work with you to extend or fix their functionality, and sometimes they won't. From personal experience, I can tell you that it can be exceedingly costly to hack a given tool to meet an inflexible customer's requirement when you have to use it in its shrinkwrapped form. With Free software, you get the source. If you need the tool to work a little differently, you hack it yourself. You still pay the provider, if they require it.
What about support? In a vertical market, your customer is going to direct all their support questions to you. If you trace the problem to a part you bought, you can try to pass the request down the line. Every step further from your client diminishes the urgency of the issue. Sometimes your supplier may go out of business or cease to support an old product. You're SOL. If you had the source, you could fix it yourself. Free software comes with source, and the right to use it. With the source, if you go out of business, your client can support the product themselves. You'd never have to worry about "source code escrow" or other silly mechanisms that were invented to CYA in case the owner of "secret stuff" disappears.
If you use Free software, then you can give your client a rebate on the cost of code you write to support their app, because you can reuse it in other projects. And, although they could hire someone else to provide ongoing support, unless you really messed up they probably won't, because you as the author of their application can support it more effectively and less expensively than somebody new.
What about non-vertical market ("shrink-wrap") software?
Because of the terrific economies of scale, the marginal cost of producing shrinkwrapped software is exceedingly low. I've heard that the gross profit margin (sales price less cost to fabricate) on a copy of MS Office is about 85%. MS has some pretty high SG&A and engineering expenses, but they still make a ton of cash, even if not 85%.
There's nothing magical about Office. It's just some basic productivity apps. Basic economics should tell you that, for a high-volume, commodity item, the sales price shouldn't be all that much higher than the marignal cost of production. Why isn't it? Because MS has everyone locked into their proprietary file formats. No, wait, my friend Bill is telling me it's because MS software really is better than the other stuff. Please, don't make me laugh. I might spurt milk out my nose, and then I'd have to sue you. Okay, fine, we'll compromise. Most people don't even know they have a choice.
I know you told me not to count support, but I have to. Because when the marginal cost of production of a commodity item approaches zero, you'll see that it really doesn't make sense to try to make too much money on the original sale. The genie is bound to get out of the bottle sooner or later, as indeed it has. People have figured out that they can give away the software and still make some money selling support. If you knew that you could choose between paying $250 for the inital purchase plus $2/minute or $50/incident for support, or $0 initial purchase plus, say, $25 per incident for support, for otherwise similar products, which would you choose? It sure sounds like a reasonable value proposition to me.
So, bottom line, why should anyone try to make money on Free software? Because they think they can offer a better value proposition to the customer. Whether or not you think GPL software is a good idea, you and Microsoft and everyone else have to accept that GPL software does exist , and react accordingly. You can wish for it to go away (futile), or you can run with it. MS can safely ignore some GPL products (e.g., Star Office) for many years to come, because (a) it's not quite as good, (b) most people don't know it exists, (c) FUD, and (d) proprietary file format lock-in. With others (e.g., operating systems), they can't be so complacent.
So how do you deal with the reality of Free (and/or free) software, since it quite clearly does exist? It's a little late to base your argument on the premise that the world not have free software at all, so any arguments in that direction are only wishful thinking or straw man arguments.
One way is, differentiate yourself. Take a good thing and make it better, and see if people will give you money for doing a good thing. Another way is, sell services. Assemble bundles; perform QA validation; integrate systems and support them. A third way is, do something special that nobody else is doing. Sell a proprietary app that runs on a Free foundation, or take contracts from people with special needs who are willing to pay for something that everyone can have, just so that they can have it too. The $100 million that Red Hat made last year had to come from somebody.
If you're feeling defeatist, you can also just recognize that the rules have changed; stuff that used to be exclusive is now common; you can't think of a way to profit under the new rules; so you quit while you're ahead, give all your employees and stockholders a big bonus; liquidate your business; and retire rich and happy. Once upon a time, you could make a pretty good living just selling DRAM memory, when it took $2000 to max out a personal computer. Today, I can max out my machine for $200. That SIMM merchant can find something new to sell, or retire knowing (s)he did a good business while it lasted.
Then, of course, there's all the dirty, underhanded tricks we all know about, manipulating society, laws, and the marketplace to try to snuff out this quaint little movement that has the audacity to try to give the little guy a fair shake. Why anyone would want to take this low road through the slime and mud, I can't imagine. I suppose a select few could benefit from this, even if it harms society as a whole.
You know, people are pretty smart. Give them a sandbox, and they'll figure out a way to build a sand castle. Give them some free tools, and they'll still find a way to make a buck; they'll be happy because the cost of their tools won't break their wallet, and their customers will be happy that their product will cost less and carry less risk, and everybody will be better off.
I can't for the life of me imagine how it can be bad to start everybody off with a better sandbox. And that's what Free software is all about.
They're NOT in the custom software business, so while companies like RedHat can make a tiny bit of money (and I do mean Tiny) from doing some custom projects, Microsoft is not structured like this.
This is true. However, no where are Microsoft, the members of the RIAA, the members of the MPAA, or any other enterprise ever given the guarantee that the business model that they have freely chosen will always be profitable. Times change. Technologies change. Markets change. Adapt or die.
Change and progress are good. They wash away the dead wood institutions in our society, while vital ones adapt and prosper.
No amount of preparation will help you to be a game creator as well as creating a game. So the first step is to make a game or few.
Writing an extension (e.g., a mod) to an existing game is a great way to focus on gameplay without getting lost in technical details.
But definitely get out there and make a game!
Rule Number Two: Design
Learn how to design a good game.
Rule Number Three: Self-management
Motivation and organizational skills are paramout.
Rule Number Four: Nail the technical fundamentals
If you're going to write computer games, a CS degree will certainly help you be a better programmer. You'll learn about algorithms, data structures, order of complexity, etc. This is the least important ingredient.
Any time you have an interpretation environment, you have the potential for programs that write parts of themselves. It happens in Perl all the time. In environments such as Hypercard, you can even have GUIs that write GUIs (click a button that creates new pages, populates them with scripted buttons or other controls, and presents them to the user). How's that for a kick in the head? I wonder if anyone has programmed a VM system to programmatically generate custom VMs to run new jobs on... wouldn't that be fun? David Boyes, are you listening? ;-)
The battle is lost. The general public will always think of hackers as vandals. So don't be a hacker. Be a coding wizard. The public will probably never think of a wizard as an intrinsically bad person, and it conveys exactly the connotation that you want. "You ordinary people, don't even try to understand what I'm doing. I'm a wizard." (Or is that 'W1X0Rd'?)
Down with nasty, evil hackers! Up with beneficent code wizards!