From my reading of GPL, there is no way in hell to charge more for a program than the cost to distribute--otherwise someone will simply take it and undercut your price
Most code written has no market value after the first sale. Most is written to solve a specific problem, for a specific business. It just isn't mass marketable.
You can charge anything you want. The greatest volume of written software is for custom applications. If I write an interface to take data from your legacy b-trieve database, and integrate it to SAP, nothing stops me from selling it to you for $30,000. You gain a functioning data set, and the ability to fix the code without me.
Yes, GPL'ing my code means that you can re-sell it. So what? You're probably not in the business of selling code in the first place, or you wouldn't have hired me.
Meanwhile, I'm away on a Geek Cruise and the code crashes and burns. You can't find me and your business is down. Since you demanded GPL'd code, I wasn't able to restrict you (and more importantly, the replacement programming consultant) from looking at the source, and fixing it.
That's an example of GPL'd code helping the little guy. Another example is when you decide to modify the code I already wrote for a better gee-whiz gismo. The next guy doesn't have to start at zero.
You cannot even reuse what you have already developed for new proprietary projects.
Sure I can. If it's my code, I can release it under every license I want to. Remember, it's my code. Now, if I took somebody else's GPL'd code and used it, I'm bummed for proprietary stuff, unless I look up the original author and get him to license it to me another way. Which he can certainly do. He'll probably want some money, but then, so do I (from customers)
Is there ever an economic rational for a large company to use GPL?
Yes. Ever heard of IBM? Their heavy iron is now available with GPL'd Linux. IBM wrote drivers, and they're GPL'd too. You can go to 3com.com and download GPL'd drivers.
I think your reasoning might be backwards. I suspect the reason that amateur scope makers grind their own mirrors (starting from spherical), is because it's mucho cheaper than purchasing parabolics.
They're doing the hard stuff themselves, because they can't afford the huge bucks to get them pre-made.
Looks pretty much like a flat sheet would cause divergent rays to be straightened toward parallel. That would be quite useful, since it's loads easier to make something perfectly flat than perfectly curved
Acutally, you have a pretty good idea. Just modify it slightly. I cook a lot of microwave rice, and I finally worked out a good program for my own cooker. 8 minutes on power level 10, then 12 minutes on 3.
I would love to be able to throw my food in, and hit one button.
3Com isn't ditching R&D, they just realized that nobody was buying the stuff because it is way too expensive, and they can't make any money at acceptible price points.
R&D on wireless connectivity, for example, is continuing hardcore. What R&D is in Audrey or Kerbango? About zip. They're just linux boxen running limited, dedicated apps.
The reason you can't uplink fast is transmitter power.
Geosynch is 22,500 miles away
This will be 10 miles away.
At 1/2500 the distance, you can get faster speeds because you require a LOT less power per bit. Basically, we're talking about a flying wireless transciver.
I believe that the 760 chipset will handle SMP, and you may rest assured that Abit will supply this need.
Also, the venerable BP6 has been updated to the VP6
Being one of those disenfranchised many who can only get about 20K on a really good day with the lights out and the gods smiling...
Starband is offering high latency, high bandwidth 2-way satellite access, and a bird should be in geosynch over europe fairly soon. This means no modem connection, true 2-way to satellite communication.
The problem is that all packets have to travel 44,600 miles one way. At 186,000 miles/sec that means a.24 second delay one way, and a half second is added to any ping.
Internet gaming is out, but e-mail and surfing will rock.
I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a very clueful guy who runs their tech support. He said that they dont mind linux (he runs it himself) or server hosting. The upstream bandwidth is limited to about 50K, and a popular server would probably be frowned upon, but a personal website wouldn't be any problem.
Also, since this is mostly owned by Gilat (an Israeli company) there should be European coverage pretty quickly. According to my source, Gilat has planned on 3,000,000 people in the US using the service.
Actually, much more than my feet feel the extra weight. My center of gravity is up a little higher, so I'm confident that a fit person could walk around at 2G's with little training.
Though my organs don't feel double weight, they do have double duty to support my double weight. I'd guess that the arterial clogging would simulate the additional stress of 2G's.
By the way, for one brief shining moment, at 19, I lost all the excess weight, and was in extremely good shape. 1/2 G felt very good for that year.
I'll volunteer for mars, I think it's about 1/3G.
Of course, I'll have far too many similarities to Baron Harkonnen to even think about...
I weigh 330 lbs. About 150 lbs is fat. If I can walk, run, jump and do martial arts, someone in good shape should have absolutely no problem.
Not only am I disabled by the excess weight, but my arteries are no doubt heavily clogged, I have high blood pressure and look forward to lots of health problems as I get older.
The structural load is no problem, I take 1.2 grams of glucosamine sulfate and about.5g of Chrondroitin sulfate daily. My joint pain has ended. Oh yeah, I also wear nothing but New Balance running shoes, 11 and a half quadrouple D's.
Computer controlled sewing machines are extremely expensive. The one-of-a-kind hardware is a pain in the butt, and big bucks all around.
I'd bet they wanted to plug it into a windows95 pc at first, (usb or serial) until they thought about unlicensed software sharing. From there it was a short step to a cheap, proprietary hardware only solution.
I doubt if there's enough interest to reverse engineer this to hack it to a PC, but you never know.
Even if reverse-engineering happened, though, I'm sure singer would still be happy to sell the sewing machines.
Crusoe: Not the fastest one, but economically
[ 11,10,2000 17:13 ]
For some days the c't laboratory measures the efficiency of the TM5600-Prozessor von Transmeta[1 ] . After the first results to the Speicher-Performance[2 ] now further results of bench mark are certain.
The Crusoe is 12 GByte fixed disk, ATI in the Sony Notebook Vaio PCG-C1VE[3 ] with 128 MByte primary storages, rises up Mobility and a 9-Zoll-Display with 1024 x 480 points dissolution. The processor runs alternatively with 300 mc/s with 1.2 V of core voltage or 600 mc/s with 1.6 V and can be switched during operation between both frequencies. It does not have 128 KByte Level-1 and 256 KByte Level-2-Cache. x86-Code can it execute directly, but translates it beforehand into its internal VLIW instruction set (very long INSTRUCTION word). In order not to repeat this process continuously, the Crusoe stores the translated code in a code Morphing memory. In addition it zwackt itself 16 MByte from the primary storage, so that for the operating system and applications only 112 MByte remain remaining.
In the case of 300 mc/s the c't Akkubenchmark results in a run time of approximately two hours. Sony indicates the Akku capacity as approximately 20 Wh. Therefore the Notebook takes up altogether only about 10 Watts of performance - quite considerably, most Notebooks between 15 and 22 Watts goennen itself nevertheless. In the efficiency comparison the Crusoe remains certainly behind one fast clocked mobile Pentium III clearly:
Processor
Clock
[ mc/s ] BAPCo
SYSMark 2000 PovRay 3.1
chess2.pov 3DMark 2000
CCU Marks UT
[ fps ] Cinema
4d
Crusoe 300 31 124 PPS 33 8,4 1,8
Crusoe 600 50 257 PPS 56 11,8 3,7
Pentium III 500 86 347 PPS 78 14,9 5,5
Pentium III 600 92 417 PPS 81 15,4 6,6
Comparative measurements on Acer TravelMate 522 TXV with Pentium III-600 (with speed steps), 128 MByte primary storages and likewise the ATI rise up Mobility.
Some bench mark we let run several times consecutively, in order to observe the influence code of the Morphing (translate of x86-Maschinencode into Crusoe instruction). In the theory a bench mark should run with the second time faster, since the processor can fall back to the Morphing memory and again not translate the code must. In practice this effect actually shows up with some bench mark: Thus the Frame rate of Quake III of 13,5 rose fps by 10 per cent to 14,9 fps in the second run. PovRay calculated " desk.pov " in the first passage in 20 seconds and needed with the repetitions only 16 seconds. (both measured with 300 mc/s.)
However the results remained by the 3DMark 2000, unreal Tournament or the " chess2.pov"-Berechnung von PovRay constantly and also most individual values of the BAPCo Suite varied only around the two per cent usual with all systems. This bench mark execute obviously most program sections anyway already several times, so that the rate advantage enters with the repeated passing through of a code paragraph bench mark result also. For example the BAPCo Einzeltest " Elastic Reality " consists mainly of calculating 150 frames. According to the first picture the code should be situated completely in the Morphing memory, so that the Crusoe can calculate the further 149 pictures with max. rate. Code the Morphing would have to go already extremely slowly, in order to measure an influence here.
Further results follow in the c't output 22/00 (starting from 23 October in the trade). ( jow[4 ] / c't)
If you tap the forward momentum of a car to generate energy, you're going to slow the car down in the process. Unfortunately, so much energy needs to be bled off that current technology can't absorb all the energy, so it's bled off as heat -- ever notice how brakes don't work so well on LONG slowdowns? That's because you've just melted your asbestos brake pads.
Apparently TheDullBlade feels the ultra fast chargability of these batteries enables them to absorb much of the energy that would otherwise be bled off as heat. Using the power motor as a generator would be the obvious way.
Dell didn't start off as an internet seller. Dell had a dealer organization, and then started demanding customer information before providing any quotes for quantity purchases.
Then they would call the prospective purchaser, and offer the same equipment at a lower price than they offered their dealership.
The dealerships quickly got sick of this and bailed, leaving Dell to market directly, and later use the web.
I think somebody at Motorola woke up and caught a clue. The independent dealers should do the same, and bail on Motorola.
The handwriting is there on the wall, it's time to get off the boat.
Just a few years ago, Mainland China was very isolated from itself. Outside the cities, people didn't get around much. The isolation was so great that dialects diverged enough that a 30km hike from your home could easily put you in territory where you couldn't be understood.
TV and cultrual revolutions have added a new second dialect that everybody pretty much now understands. --Kind of ironic that the boob tube is largely responsible for the unification of the PRC--
As technologically advanced as Hong Kong is, it will supply the dream fodder for the mainland. The kids see all the beautiful techno gadgets on TV and see them in the hands of kids just like themselves.
THAT will drive change in Mainland China more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd think that running up a mountain side in equador would be your best shot. You don't have to go vertical. The longer your run, the better.
Do it well enough, and you can hit escape velocity without rockets at all. For further info, see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, R. A. Heinlein.
Should the sun blow up, we would have no lack of solar power. In fact, we would have rather too much.
I agree with you on the completely fucked part, though.
Most code written has no market value after the first sale. Most is written to solve a specific problem, for a specific business. It just isn't mass marketable.
You can charge anything you want. The greatest volume of written software is for custom applications. If I write an interface to take data from your legacy b-trieve database, and integrate it to SAP, nothing stops me from selling it to you for $30,000. You gain a functioning data set, and the ability to fix the code without me.
Yes, GPL'ing my code means that you can re-sell it. So what? You're probably not in the business of selling code in the first place, or you wouldn't have hired me.
Meanwhile, I'm away on a Geek Cruise and the code crashes and burns. You can't find me and your business is down. Since you demanded GPL'd code, I wasn't able to restrict you (and more importantly, the replacement programming consultant) from looking at the source, and fixing it.
That's an example of GPL'd code helping the little guy. Another example is when you decide to modify the code I already wrote for a better gee-whiz gismo. The next guy doesn't have to start at zero.
Sure I can. If it's my code, I can release it under every license I want to. Remember, it's my code. Now, if I took somebody else's GPL'd code and used it, I'm bummed for proprietary stuff, unless I look up the original author and get him to license it to me another way. Which he can certainly do. He'll probably want some money, but then, so do I (from customers)
Yes. Ever heard of IBM? Their heavy iron is now available with GPL'd Linux. IBM wrote drivers, and they're GPL'd too. You can go to 3com.com and download GPL'd drivers.
You have to click to agree to the GPL, however :)
I think your reasoning might be backwards. I suspect the reason that amateur scope makers grind their own mirrors (starting from spherical), is because it's mucho cheaper than purchasing parabolics.
They're doing the hard stuff themselves, because they can't afford the huge bucks to get them pre-made.
IMHO.
Looks pretty much like a flat sheet would cause divergent rays to be straightened toward parallel. That would be quite useful, since it's loads easier to make something perfectly flat than perfectly curved
Acutally, you have a pretty good idea. Just modify it slightly. I cook a lot of microwave rice, and I finally worked out a good program for my own cooker. 8 minutes on power level 10, then 12 minutes on 3.
I would love to be able to throw my food in, and hit one button.
3Com isn't ditching R&D, they just realized that nobody was buying the stuff because it is way too expensive, and they can't make any money at acceptible price points.
R&D on wireless connectivity, for example, is continuing hardcore. What R&D is in Audrey or Kerbango? About zip. They're just linux boxen running limited, dedicated apps.
With expensive build components.
3Com can't discontinue Palm, because Palm has already left 3Com.
Palm could discontinue Palm, but I doubt it. Palm is still a moneymaker.
The reason you can't uplink fast is transmitter power.
Geosynch is 22,500 miles away
This will be 10 miles away.
At 1/2500 the distance, you can get faster speeds because you require a LOT less power per bit. Basically, we're talking about a flying wireless transciver.
Your connection speed will be fine.
The distance will only add about .1 ms to your ping.
I can live with an extra 1/10 millisecond ping.
51K feet = 9.66 miles
9.66mi/c = 5.19e-5 seconds
2way = 1.02 x10^-4
Depressingly enough, your friends are right.
You would be shot, or worse. Probably much worse.
Please don't try it, unless you really want a non-boring suicide. Even the more intelligent folk here hate gays. Hate really is the right word.
Don't even think about southern Idaho.
I bought a used system a couple of years ago, and it's been sitting unused, ever since.
And yes, it has an H card, and it's for sale, since I'm a legal and paying subscriber to Dish Networks/Gilat.
I love slashdot.
Moulton probably could have avoided the problems by asking permission to do a port scan first.
It's interesting that he's still in trouble over the port scan in the first place, this ruling just says that V3 can't claim damages from it.
Sorry about the delay.
Down is about 500K
I seem to recall that a static IP was available for extra bucks.
I'm scheduled for installation on 30 dec. I'll know more then.
hanzie
I believe that the 760 chipset will handle SMP, and you may rest assured that Abit will supply this need. Also, the venerable BP6 has been updated to the VP6
Starband is offering high latency, high bandwidth 2-way satellite access, and a bird should be in geosynch over europe fairly soon. This means no modem connection, true 2-way to satellite communication.
The problem is that all packets have to travel 44,600 miles one way. At 186,000 miles/sec that means a .24 second delay one way, and a half second is added to any ping.
Internet gaming is out, but e-mail and surfing will rock.
I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a very clueful guy who runs their tech support. He said that they dont mind linux (he runs it himself) or server hosting. The upstream bandwidth is limited to about 50K, and a popular server would probably be frowned upon, but a personal website wouldn't be any problem.
Also, since this is mostly owned by Gilat (an Israeli company) there should be European coverage pretty quickly. According to my source, Gilat has planned on 3,000,000 people in the US using the service.
Anyway, there are 3 options.
Ownership will be whomever can get there and keep it.
Same as always.
Actually, much more than my feet feel the extra weight. My center of gravity is up a little higher, so I'm confident that a fit person could walk around at 2G's with little training.
Though my organs don't feel double weight, they do have double duty to support my double weight. I'd guess that the arterial clogging would simulate the additional stress of 2G's.
By the way, for one brief shining moment, at 19, I lost all the excess weight, and was in extremely good shape. 1/2 G felt very good for that year.
I'll volunteer for mars, I think it's about 1/3G.
Of course, I'll have far too many similarities to Baron Harkonnen to even think about...
Remember all the ROM sites?
A really cool new pattern, or new functionality could be distributed for profit in another cartrige.
Think Microsoft and win95 beta, 95, 95 osr2, 98, 98se, Me (aka win98 third edition)
Or better, office95, 97, 2000
Not trying to Hammer MS, just showing how insignificant changes can inspire sales.
Hey, I LIVE at 2 G's.
.5g of Chrondroitin sulfate daily. My joint pain has ended. Oh yeah, I also wear nothing but New Balance running shoes, 11 and a half quadrouple D's.
I weigh 330 lbs. About 150 lbs is fat. If I can walk, run, jump and do martial arts, someone in good shape should have absolutely no problem.
Not only am I disabled by the excess weight, but my arteries are no doubt heavily clogged, I have high blood pressure and look forward to lots of health problems as I get older.
The structural load is no problem, I take 1.2 grams of glucosamine sulfate and about
In short, 2 G's is no problemo for humans.
Computer controlled sewing machines are extremely expensive. The one-of-a-kind hardware is a pain in the butt, and big bucks all around.
I'd bet they wanted to plug it into a windows95 pc at first, (usb or serial) until they thought about unlicensed software sharing. From there it was a short step to a cheap, proprietary hardware only solution.
I doubt if there's enough interest to reverse engineer this to hack it to a PC, but you never know.
Even if reverse-engineering happened, though, I'm sure singer would still be happy to sell the sewing machines.
Crusoe: Not the fastest one, but economically
[ 11,10,2000 17:13 ]
For some days the c't laboratory measures the efficiency of the TM5600-Prozessor von Transmeta[1 ] . After the first results to the Speicher-Performance[2 ] now further results of bench mark are certain.
The Crusoe is 12 GByte fixed disk, ATI in the Sony Notebook Vaio PCG-C1VE[3 ] with 128 MByte primary storages, rises up Mobility and a 9-Zoll-Display with 1024 x 480 points dissolution. The processor runs alternatively with 300 mc/s with 1.2 V of core voltage or 600 mc/s with 1.6 V and can be switched during operation between both frequencies. It does not have 128 KByte Level-1 and 256 KByte Level-2-Cache. x86-Code can it execute directly, but translates it beforehand into its internal VLIW instruction set (very long INSTRUCTION word). In order not to repeat this process continuously, the Crusoe stores the translated code in a code Morphing memory. In addition it zwackt itself 16 MByte from the primary storage, so that for the operating system and applications only 112 MByte remain remaining.
In the case of 300 mc/s the c't Akkubenchmark results in a run time of approximately two hours. Sony indicates the Akku capacity as approximately 20 Wh. Therefore the Notebook takes up altogether only about 10 Watts of performance - quite considerably, most Notebooks between 15 and 22 Watts goennen itself nevertheless. In the efficiency comparison the Crusoe remains certainly behind one fast clocked mobile Pentium III clearly:
Processor
Clock
[ mc/s ] BAPCo
SYSMark 2000 PovRay 3.1
chess2.pov 3DMark 2000
CCU Marks UT
[ fps ] Cinema
4d
Crusoe 300 31 124 PPS 33 8,4 1,8
Crusoe 600 50 257 PPS 56 11,8 3,7
Pentium III 500 86 347 PPS 78 14,9 5,5
Pentium III 600 92 417 PPS 81 15,4 6,6
Comparative measurements on Acer TravelMate 522 TXV with Pentium III-600 (with speed steps), 128 MByte primary storages and likewise the ATI rise up Mobility.
Some bench mark we let run several times consecutively, in order to observe the influence code of the Morphing (translate of x86-Maschinencode into Crusoe instruction). In the theory a bench mark should run with the second time faster, since the processor can fall back to the Morphing memory and again not translate the code must. In practice this effect actually shows up with some bench mark: Thus the Frame rate of Quake III of 13,5 rose fps by 10 per cent to 14,9 fps in the second run. PovRay calculated " desk.pov " in the first passage in 20 seconds and needed with the repetitions only 16 seconds. (both measured with 300 mc/s.)
However the results remained by the 3DMark 2000, unreal Tournament or the " chess2.pov"-Berechnung von PovRay constantly and also most individual values of the BAPCo Suite varied only around the two per cent usual with all systems. This bench mark execute obviously most program sections anyway already several times, so that the rate advantage enters with the repeated passing through of a code paragraph bench mark result also. For example the BAPCo Einzeltest " Elastic Reality " consists mainly of calculating 150 frames. According to the first picture the code should be situated completely in the Morphing memory, so that the Crusoe can calculate the further 149 pictures with max. rate. Code the Morphing would have to go already extremely slowly, in order to measure an influence here.
Further results follow in the c't output 22/00 (starting from 23 October in the trade). ( jow[4 ] / c't)
If you tap the forward momentum of a car to generate energy, you're going to slow the car down in the process. Unfortunately, so much energy needs to be bled off that current technology can't absorb all the energy, so it's bled off as heat -- ever notice how brakes don't work so well on LONG slowdowns? That's because you've just melted your asbestos brake pads.
Apparently TheDullBlade feels the ultra fast chargability of these batteries enables them to absorb much of the energy that would otherwise be bled off as heat. Using the power motor as a generator would be the obvious way.
I agree with TheDullBlade.
Dell didn't start off as an internet seller. Dell had a dealer organization, and then started demanding customer information before providing any quotes for quantity purchases.
Then they would call the prospective purchaser, and offer the same equipment at a lower price than they offered their dealership.
The dealerships quickly got sick of this and bailed, leaving Dell to market directly, and later use the web.
I think somebody at Motorola woke up and caught a clue. The independent dealers should do the same, and bail on Motorola.
The handwriting is there on the wall, it's time to get off the boat.
Just a few years ago, Mainland China was very isolated from itself. Outside the cities, people didn't get around much. The isolation was so great that dialects diverged enough that a 30km hike from your home could easily put you in territory where you couldn't be understood.
TV and cultrual revolutions have added a new second dialect that everybody pretty much now understands. --Kind of ironic that the boob tube is largely responsible for the unification of the PRC--
As technologically advanced as Hong Kong is, it will supply the dream fodder for the mainland. The kids see all the beautiful techno gadgets on TV and see them in the hands of kids just like themselves.
THAT will drive change in Mainland China more than anything else.