In the end, I do not believe that it's realistic for there to be a good quality open source tax program. The big problem is that a huge amount of the work that goes into something like TurboTax is done by professional tax accountants and attorneys. This is not the sort of thing that could be rolled together by a small independent effort.
I could see it as a possibility as a collective effort by a few companies. If there were enough organizations that saw a benefit in having an open source development effort, then they could put together the resources to do it. Having said that, who would benefit from free tax software? Certainly not intuit, or H&R block, or pretty much any tax accountant on earth.
Maybe the IRS could sponsor something like this, but realistically it's far more efficient for them to let TurboTax be the de facto standard. The price for TurboTax is very reasonable compared to the cost of an accountant, especially if you use the web version of their software.
One huge problem that any IPod competitor will face is the natural lock-in of ITunes. If I bought an IPod and bought a few albums through the music store, I'm pretty much stuck with my IPod unless I want to buy the music over again. Sony can't even get away with providing some sort of import tool because it would violate the DMCA.
Sure, there are tools to decrypt these files, but many of the average ipod users don't have a clue about that stuff. If they consider an IPod competitor, they'll be informed that their music won't carry over and they'll get another IPod.
It's the same game Microsoft plays if on a different scale. Everybody needs windows to run the software they bought and it's too expensive to change to a different operating system because you have to get all new software.
One major problem with NTFS is the fact that it's still prone to fragmenting. Every so often I have to run a defragmenter or my system just starts churning when I need to do any disk access. I've never had to do this on a Linux box becaue the filesystem is designed to avoid that.
So, will WinFS finally get this figured out or are they just going to make something more complex and bug prone without fixing a fundamental design issue from their previous filesystem?
Diplomacy is a game of pure neogtiating skill and strategy. It's really a unique game because your success is entirely based on your effectiveness at manipulating your friends:).
I remember a game I played where one of the people involved was completely honest and open with everybody. However, when he talked to them, he always sounded like he was just about to stab them in the back. So of course people would betray him before he got the chance.
Of the tabletop style games, this is the only game that my wife will actually play. She can't stand Axis and Allies, etc, but with this game she has had quite a bit of fun.
One word of caution: NEVER EVER DRINK WHILE PLAYING DIPLOMACY. A game that is primarily based on back stabbing can get people really cranky when they've had a few.
First of all, I suspect that most shows would offer you a taste of a show for free to hook you. So you could readily go around and try different shows.
Another possibility would be to do trailers like they do at the movies. I mean throw two minutes worth of ads for other shows before my program starts. Honestly the only ads I don't skip now are ads for other programming.
They can advertise on the Internet. They can release their shows to critics, and we can use them to measure whether they are good.
Honestly, I don't find good TV by skimming what's out there. I see ads for them when watching shows I already watch. I hear about them from friends or on the net. I'm fairly certain I found out about Battlestar Galactica on Slashdot and that's one of my favorite shows now.
Another possibility I could see would be an HBO like model. You could pay a monthly fee to get all of SciFi's shows for example. You could download however much you wanted whenever you wanted. Essentially allow me to do my television a la carte rather than getting a bunch of channels I'd never watch (FoxNews, for example:)
Even if he was a lawyer, his conclusion is specious given the fact that Internet providers are not government agencies. If free speech was not subject to contract law, then there'd be no such thing as non-disclosure agreements. If you pick an Internet provider the prevents you from using VOIP, then that's what you get. If you don't like it pick somebody else.
The exception to my statement is situations where there is monopoly power in a given market. If your only option for high speed internet is one company, then I think that company may have a higher obligation to open up to competitors for VOIP traffic.
In the end, I suspect companies that make a habit of forcing people to use their VOIP will simply drive customers to other Internet providers.
As you point out, "MOST" is pure crap. Having said that, thanks to Tivo, I can pick out the maybe 10 shows that are actually worth watching. So let's se, between 12 and 24 episodes for a given show per year. Let's say $2/episode.
That'd be 18 episode average times $2/episode or $36/year for a given show. Somewhat less than they'd make on a DVD box set, but that's assuming I wouldn't end up buying that anyhow. Furthermore, that $36 has very low distribution costs, especially if the download software incorporates some P2P technology.
Now, Like I said, maybe 10 shows at $36/show. So $360/year. I'm paying roughly $80/month for comshlock cable, so that's $960/year. So I could double the number of shows I watch and still save a huge amount of money. Furthermore, all that money that Comcast would normally get would go right to the production studios who actually make the stuff.
Now, think about it, if everybody was going out and selectively buying TV shows, they'd actually have to be good to compete for money. Why go download that one episode that's nothing but cuts from previous episodes. Give that new reality show a try and if it doesn't pique your interest after a few episodes, just stop downloading it.
Now, broadcasters have to think in terms of, ratings, which means getting either a large audience, or a very well defined niche. One thing that hurts enterprise is that it's a pretty broad audience, but not a big one. If you got all the trekkies to pay $2/episode, that would solve that problem nicely.
The other nice thing is that this opens up the possibility for small independent producers to make small and more creative shows. You have to be able to guarantee delivery of a fairly large audience to cost justify making a television show. That's why reality TV is so popular, it gets good ratings and it's cheap to produce. But if you could make a 12 episode television show for say $120K, or $10K/episode, then if you get 5000 people interested, you at least broke even. Plus, if you aren't sure about the appeal, you can do a pilot, and give it away to see how it goes.
I'm a developer as well, and I find that Linux is the best for efficiency. Part of this is simply that over time I have built scripts to simplify repetitive tasks, etc, that would be much more trouble to do in windows.
The other part of this is simply that I'm really familiar with all the tools on Linux and so I know how to get done what I need to do with what's there. For example, I use cervisia to deal with more complex CVS tasks (browsing the revisions of a given file, etc). There's probably a similarly capable tool under Windows, but I don't know what it is. Even then, for the most part I use some shortcut scripts for dealing with CVS (a command "updatecvs" that does a cvs update and greps out only the stuff I care to see).
Finally a more subtle benefit of Linux is that everything is loosely coupled. It's easy for me to use a bunch of different tools for what they are best suited to. So, I use a combination of an IDE, a dedicated tool like Cervisia, and the command line to handle my CVS tasks.
When you develop your code, go through the first time and write it from the perspective of simplifying maintenance and development. If you need to speed up performance of some aspect of the code, you can go through and do optimizations later.
The issue is that if a representative is going to vote on a hundred different issues, people are going to vote based on whatever is most important to them. No matter how well you research the issue, if you are going to vote for a candidate, are you going to vote based on their position on health care, or their position on the FCC flag?
The problem here is that, though it appears the court would be favorable to shutting down the broadcast flag, the ALA may not have legal standing. So, the question is: who would?
They are arguing that they are consumers and as consumers they are harmed. They go on the theory that this action will increase costs, etc, which I'm not sure there's a legitimate basis for.
Really where the costs come in is in vendors who develop software/hardware that would be required to implement recognition of this flag. So you'd have to find a hardware manufacturer that was willing to fight it out. The problem is that a lot of the hardware manufacturers have ties to media, so they have a strong disincentive to mess with it.
The problem with this logic is that congress critters do not get elected or rejected based on their positions on obscure issues like the FCC broadcast flag. I am very concious of problems like this, the DMCA, etc, and I can say with certainty that I have never voted for or against a candidate because of these issues.
Things like health care, the war in iraq, social security, etc, are infinitely more important than whether I can back up a copy of the Matrix. So it's going to be difficult to convince a candidate that their re-election is dependent on such an issue because, realistically, it isn't.
There are two forces that work in politics, one is the ability to mobilize people, and the other is money (used to mobilize people to vote for you). It seems that, with an issue like this, there's neither the ability to mobilize enough voters, nor enough money to reasonablly counteract the efforts of the broadcasters. So while you may be able to convince a few individual congressman with letters, it's very very unlikely to reach a critical mass such that the broadcasters cannot stop it.
They were reporting California because they had absolutely no choice in the matter because of legal requirements in California. It's a very good thing for all people who have information at Choicepoint that California has that law. Otherwise I have little doubt any of us would know about it.
I do wonder if it would be beneficial to indentity thieves to expressly avoid stealing information about California residents to limit knowledge of their efforts. If those 100K people weren't notified by Choicepoint, it'd give them a lot more freedom to exploit that pile of information.
If you want no restrictions on your work at all, you put it in the public domain. Doing so would allow anybody to do anything with your work. It wouldn't allow them to claim copyright on your work because you were the creator.
What they are doing is branding the term "Open Source" and this will not change the meaning of "open source" (note small "o" and small "s"). One of the big problems in software licensing in general is that every license is different in subtle or sometimes huge ways. If you want to do any sort of development that involves integration of pieces of other software, it can get quite complicated quickly.
Does this mean that you can't make your own license? Of course not. What it means is that if you want their official seal of approval, you likely won't get it.
I think 3 licenses might pass as a sort of Platonic ideal, but I can't really see that covering all needs in the real world. However, establishing a base line of a few simple licenses could make life much easier for smaller developers that don't really have an interest in paying a lawyer to craft them something more complex.
I'd bet that this all stems from a design flaw in their database. The CD key is almost certainly a Unique non-nullable value in their database. Their policy is not to remove users from the system and therfore it probably isn't designed in such a way to make that simple (i.e. no relational integrity with cascading deletes, etc). So if you try to register with the new key, they don't know what to do with the key for the previously existing and undeleteable account.
So what happened in the end is that their lawyers and their developers didn't actually talk about the EULA in any depth. The clause, while perfectly reasonable, doesn't seem to have any meand of implementation in their real world system.
I suspect if enough people complain they'll put some hack in place for customer service to resolve these problems. But they'll probably create a few cranky people in the mean time.
Seems to me that a good way to avoid this mess in the first place is to give away the software in stores, and then have an activation cost for the first month. Then who cares who has what CD. To create a new account, you still have to pay them for it when you activate the account.
Me, I think it is fine to attach tracking devices to convicted felons, although I'd rather prefer putting them in prison. But be under no illusions that this will just be used on wife-beaters.
All things considered, this is really best for all involved. If the tracker keeps them from breaching the restraining order, it serves the intended purpose of the law. Furthermore, rather than this person being a burden on the tax payer, gathering dust in a jail cell, they can still have a job, etc.
Not only are we talking about people who violate restraining orders, we're talking about an alternative to incarceration. I don't see it as particularly bigbrotheresque to put a GPS tracker on somebody instead of throwing them in prison.
Instead of your world being confined to a cell, you can go anywhere in the world EXCEPT a well defined area. Seems rather considerate in the grand scheme of things when they could just put them in a dark hole instead.
Go back and watch the trailer again. His second head appears briefly in like the last 10 seconds of the trailer, popping up from underneath his regular head.
This would arguably be opening themselves up to some huge legal problems. Sites that rely on advertising revenue would get rather cranky if the default browser on the monopoly desktop operating systems was blocking the ads.
It doesn't matter how many people play their PS1 or PS2 games on a PS3. What matters is how many consider that as one factor of upgrading. I mean there's something really appealing to simply replacing my PS2 entirely with a PS3 instead of having multiple boxes connected to my TV.
I may never play those old PS2 games, but at least I don't have to have another lump of plastic in my living room if I do.
True. But the thing is there's no innate advantage to sticking with the same system like there is with a PS3. I'm starting from scratch if I get an XBox2, whether I had an XBox, a PS2, or an Atari 2600.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end, I do not believe that it's realistic for there to be a good quality open source tax program. The big problem is that a huge amount of the work that goes into something like TurboTax is done by professional tax accountants and attorneys. This is not the sort of thing that could be rolled together by a small independent effort.
I could see it as a possibility as a collective effort by a few companies. If there were enough organizations that saw a benefit in having an open source development effort, then they could put together the resources to do it. Having said that, who would benefit from free tax software? Certainly not intuit, or H&R block, or pretty much any tax accountant on earth.
Maybe the IRS could sponsor something like this, but realistically it's far more efficient for them to let TurboTax be the de facto standard. The price for TurboTax is very reasonable compared to the cost of an accountant, especially if you use the web version of their software.
One huge problem that any IPod competitor will face is the natural lock-in of ITunes. If I bought an IPod and bought a few albums through the music store, I'm pretty much stuck with my IPod unless I want to buy the music over again. Sony can't even get away with providing some sort of import tool because it would violate the DMCA.
Sure, there are tools to decrypt these files, but many of the average ipod users don't have a clue about that stuff. If they consider an IPod competitor, they'll be informed that their music won't carry over and they'll get another IPod.
It's the same game Microsoft plays if on a different scale. Everybody needs windows to run the software they bought and it's too expensive to change to a different operating system because you have to get all new software.
One major problem with NTFS is the fact that it's still prone to fragmenting. Every so often I have to run a defragmenter or my system just starts churning when I need to do any disk access. I've never had to do this on a Linux box becaue the filesystem is designed to avoid that.
So, will WinFS finally get this figured out or are they just going to make something more complex and bug prone without fixing a fundamental design issue from their previous filesystem?
Diplomacy is a game of pure neogtiating skill and strategy. It's really a unique game because your success is entirely based on your effectiveness at manipulating your friends :).
I remember a game I played where one of the people involved was completely honest and open with everybody. However, when he talked to them, he always sounded like he was just about to stab them in the back. So of course people would betray him before he got the chance.
Of the tabletop style games, this is the only game that my wife will actually play. She can't stand Axis and Allies, etc, but with this game she has had quite a bit of fun.
One word of caution: NEVER EVER DRINK WHILE PLAYING DIPLOMACY. A game that is primarily based on back stabbing can get people really cranky when they've had a few.
First of all, I suspect that most shows would offer you a taste of a show for free to hook you. So you could readily go around and try different shows.
:)
Another possibility would be to do trailers like they do at the movies. I mean throw two minutes worth of ads for other shows before my program starts. Honestly the only ads I don't skip now are ads for other programming.
They can advertise on the Internet. They can release their shows to critics, and we can use them to measure whether they are good.
Honestly, I don't find good TV by skimming what's out there. I see ads for them when watching shows I already watch. I hear about them from friends or on the net. I'm fairly certain I found out about Battlestar Galactica on Slashdot and that's one of my favorite shows now.
Another possibility I could see would be an HBO like model. You could pay a monthly fee to get all of SciFi's shows for example. You could download however much you wanted whenever you wanted. Essentially allow me to do my television a la carte rather than getting a bunch of channels I'd never watch (FoxNews, for example
Even if he was a lawyer, his conclusion is specious given the fact that Internet providers are not government agencies. If free speech was not subject to contract law, then there'd be no such thing as non-disclosure agreements. If you pick an Internet provider the prevents you from using VOIP, then that's what you get. If you don't like it pick somebody else.
The exception to my statement is situations where there is monopoly power in a given market. If your only option for high speed internet is one company, then I think that company may have a higher obligation to open up to competitors for VOIP traffic.
In the end, I suspect companies that make a habit of forcing people to use their VOIP will simply drive customers to other Internet providers.
As you point out, "MOST" is pure crap. Having said that, thanks to Tivo, I can pick out the maybe 10 shows that are actually worth watching. So let's se, between 12 and 24 episodes for a given show per year. Let's say $2/episode.
That'd be 18 episode average times $2/episode or $36/year for a given show. Somewhat less than they'd make on a DVD box set, but that's assuming I wouldn't end up buying that anyhow. Furthermore, that $36 has very low distribution costs, especially if the download software incorporates some P2P technology.
Now, Like I said, maybe 10 shows at $36/show. So $360/year. I'm paying roughly $80/month for comshlock cable, so that's $960/year. So I could double the number of shows I watch and still save a huge amount of money. Furthermore, all that money that Comcast would normally get would go right to the production studios who actually make the stuff.
Now, think about it, if everybody was going out and selectively buying TV shows, they'd actually have to be good to compete for money. Why go download that one episode that's nothing but cuts from previous episodes. Give that new reality show a try and if it doesn't pique your interest after a few episodes, just stop downloading it.
Now, broadcasters have to think in terms of, ratings, which means getting either a large audience, or a very well defined niche. One thing that hurts enterprise is that it's a pretty broad audience, but not a big one. If you got all the trekkies to pay $2/episode, that would solve that problem nicely.
The other nice thing is that this opens up the possibility for small independent producers to make small and more creative shows. You have to be able to guarantee delivery of a fairly large audience to cost justify making a television show. That's why reality TV is so popular, it gets good ratings and it's cheap to produce. But if you could make a 12 episode television show for say $120K, or $10K/episode, then if you get 5000 people interested, you at least broke even. Plus, if you aren't sure about the appeal, you can do a pilot, and give it away to see how it goes.
I'm a developer as well, and I find that Linux is the best for efficiency. Part of this is simply that over time I have built scripts to simplify repetitive tasks, etc, that would be much more trouble to do in windows.
The other part of this is simply that I'm really familiar with all the tools on Linux and so I know how to get done what I need to do with what's there. For example, I use cervisia to deal with more complex CVS tasks (browsing the revisions of a given file, etc). There's probably a similarly capable tool under Windows, but I don't know what it is. Even then, for the most part I use some shortcut scripts for dealing with CVS (a command "updatecvs" that does a cvs update and greps out only the stuff I care to see).
Finally a more subtle benefit of Linux is that everything is loosely coupled. It's easy for me to use a bunch of different tools for what they are best suited to. So, I use a combination of an IDE, a dedicated tool like Cervisia, and the command line to handle my CVS tasks.
When you develop your code, go through the first time and write it from the perspective of simplifying maintenance and development. If you need to speed up performance of some aspect of the code, you can go through and do optimizations later.
The issue is that if a representative is going to vote on a hundred different issues, people are going to vote based on whatever is most important to them. No matter how well you research the issue, if you are going to vote for a candidate, are you going to vote based on their position on health care, or their position on the FCC flag?
The problem here is that, though it appears the court would be favorable to shutting down the broadcast flag, the ALA may not have legal standing. So, the question is: who would?
They are arguing that they are consumers and as consumers they are harmed. They go on the theory that this action will increase costs, etc, which I'm not sure there's a legitimate basis for.
Really where the costs come in is in vendors who develop software/hardware that would be required to implement recognition of this flag. So you'd have to find a hardware manufacturer that was willing to fight it out. The problem is that a lot of the hardware manufacturers have ties to media, so they have a strong disincentive to mess with it.
The problem with this logic is that congress critters do not get elected or rejected based on their positions on obscure issues like the FCC broadcast flag. I am very concious of problems like this, the DMCA, etc, and I can say with certainty that I have never voted for or against a candidate because of these issues.
Things like health care, the war in iraq, social security, etc, are infinitely more important than whether I can back up a copy of the Matrix. So it's going to be difficult to convince a candidate that their re-election is dependent on such an issue because, realistically, it isn't.
There are two forces that work in politics, one is the ability to mobilize people, and the other is money (used to mobilize people to vote for you). It seems that, with an issue like this, there's neither the ability to mobilize enough voters, nor enough money to reasonablly counteract the efforts of the broadcasters. So while you may be able to convince a few individual congressman with letters, it's very very unlikely to reach a critical mass such that the broadcasters cannot stop it.
They were reporting California because they had absolutely no choice in the matter because of legal requirements in California. It's a very good thing for all people who have information at Choicepoint that California has that law. Otherwise I have little doubt any of us would know about it.
I do wonder if it would be beneficial to indentity thieves to expressly avoid stealing information about California residents to limit knowledge of their efforts. If those 100K people weren't notified by Choicepoint, it'd give them a lot more freedom to exploit that pile of information.
If you want no restrictions on your work at all, you put it in the public domain. Doing so would allow anybody to do anything with your work. It wouldn't allow them to claim copyright on your work because you were the creator.
What they are doing is branding the term "Open Source" and this will not change the meaning of "open source" (note small "o" and small "s"). One of the big problems in software licensing in general is that every license is different in subtle or sometimes huge ways. If you want to do any sort of development that involves integration of pieces of other software, it can get quite complicated quickly.
Does this mean that you can't make your own license? Of course not. What it means is that if you want their official seal of approval, you likely won't get it.
I think 3 licenses might pass as a sort of Platonic ideal, but I can't really see that covering all needs in the real world. However, establishing a base line of a few simple licenses could make life much easier for smaller developers that don't really have an interest in paying a lawyer to craft them something more complex.
I'd bet that this all stems from a design flaw in their database. The CD key is almost certainly a Unique non-nullable value in their database. Their policy is not to remove users from the system and therfore it probably isn't designed in such a way to make that simple (i.e. no relational integrity with cascading deletes, etc). So if you try to register with the new key, they don't know what to do with the key for the previously existing and undeleteable account.
So what happened in the end is that their lawyers and their developers didn't actually talk about the EULA in any depth. The clause, while perfectly reasonable, doesn't seem to have any meand of implementation in their real world system.
I suspect if enough people complain they'll put some hack in place for customer service to resolve these problems. But they'll probably create a few cranky people in the mean time.
Seems to me that a good way to avoid this mess in the first place is to give away the software in stores, and then have an activation cost for the first month. Then who cares who has what CD. To create a new account, you still have to pay them for it when you activate the account.
Me, I think it is fine to attach tracking devices to convicted felons, although I'd rather prefer putting them in prison. But be under no illusions that this will just be used on wife-beaters.
All things considered, this is really best for all involved. If the tracker keeps them from breaching the restraining order, it serves the intended purpose of the law. Furthermore, rather than this person being a burden on the tax payer, gathering dust in a jail cell, they can still have a job, etc.
Not only are we talking about people who violate restraining orders, we're talking about an alternative to incarceration. I don't see it as particularly bigbrotheresque to put a GPS tracker on somebody instead of throwing them in prison.
Instead of your world being confined to a cell, you can go anywhere in the world EXCEPT a well defined area. Seems rather considerate in the grand scheme of things when they could just put them in a dark hole instead.
Go back and watch the trailer again. His second head appears briefly in like the last 10 seconds of the trailer, popping up from underneath his regular head.
Okay. Hire Rove and you stand a chance :)
Nope. Google has them all. Your career in politics is toast.
This would arguably be opening themselves up to some huge legal problems. Sites that rely on advertising revenue would get rather cranky if the default browser on the monopoly desktop operating systems was blocking the ads.
It doesn't matter how many people play their PS1 or PS2 games on a PS3. What matters is how many consider that as one factor of upgrading. I mean there's something really appealing to simply replacing my PS2 entirely with a PS3 instead of having multiple boxes connected to my TV.
I may never play those old PS2 games, but at least I don't have to have another lump of plastic in my living room if I do.
True. But the thing is there's no innate advantage to sticking with the same system like there is with a PS3. I'm starting from scratch if I get an XBox2, whether I had an XBox, a PS2, or an Atari 2600.
So, other than your initial bad experience with the PS2, it seems that PS3 may offer all the advantages of an XBox for you. If the PS3 provides:
1) HD output
2) Networking
Then the XBox2 isn't looking to be any better than the PS3 (assuming it doesn't ruin your discs, etc).