When you lift a joke for use as a tag line, it is proper to give the author credit. If you do not know the identity of the author, please refrain from using it and try to come up with something clever all on your own.
You must be new here. Let me introduce you to OpenBSD.
Re:Three quick easy ways for TIVO to Dominate...
on
The Trouble With TiVo
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· Score: 1
The first company to release such a device will dominate the market as this is what the consumer wants, not what Hollywood wants. Remember we are a capitalist society, which means the consumer is in charge of what they want, not the corporations (even though the corporations do not want to admit this, their income is directly tied to the consumers purchasing their products).
Oh, how stupid of us. As a consumer I always get exactly what I want! No rootkits in Sony DVDs. No DMCA. No RIAA. No MPA. No DRM. No FairPlay. Wow. Have you got an extra lawn chair in your garden in Never Never Land? I could sure go for a Lemonade and watching a pretty sunset.
Getting started. Period. Microsoft has always been very good at getting a new user up and running with their software. And as long as the user stayed within the perdescribed road map, they would probably be in decent shape. Once the user had to do real work with the product, however, they were fucked. But, by then, the user was already hooked. Anyone who has worked corporate knows this story. Your team and your management have a dozen or so meetings about which tools will be applied for a certain project; the asshole in the team who is an idiot, but has management's ear, begins their pontification on the wonderous joys of using the latest version of MS PRODUCT because he has a beta copy of it and lookie how easy it is to do this TRIVIAL TASK. At which point management claps their hands, grunts and exchange nods of approval. The PO is signed and everyone on the team gets a copy of MS PRODUCT. Sure, not everyone can install it right away because not everyone is at the same patch level as the alpha dork who recommended the crap (and who is now, by the way, taking training classes on THE NEXT BIG THING. And why not? His job here is done, he got you into this mess). So, you struggle with it for a while, finally get something simple to work by following the tutorials, start to feel pretty good about the situation, confer with your colleagues that "Hey, maybe this isn't so bad." Then, management comes to you with the requirements document and you immediately realize that you've been had. But, it's too late.
Contrast that with open source. Sure, there are a great number of projects out there that have great documentation, and some do have tutorials. Wonderful. Those are the projects that succeed (ie. Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc). But, let's face it, those are in the minority. How many projects consist of only source code? That's not to knock the developers; but, honestly, documentation is boring work and by the time it's done, it's already out of date. It takes a great deal of time to keep the implementation in sync with the documentation. If the developer is in it for the glory (how world reknown would Torvalds be if he would have wrote great documentation about Minix back in '91 and released it as open source?), the code is what matters, not informing the user on how to get started with the software.
As for the IIRC comment, sure that works when the project is large enough that there is a (and I hate using this word) community built up around it where there are users knowledgable enough to answer your questions that make themselves available and take the time to answer questions. Of course, the other side of the coin is the poor newbie who gets flamed to shit the first time they ask a question. The common response is RTFM, dumbass! Which I can not disagree with if there is an FM to begin with. I have learned over the years that no matter how unpalatable documentation is, it perfectly serves its purpose when the user of your software does not contact you when they are installing it, learning it or pushing it to an extreme, making it do shit you hadn't thought of; rather, they contact you to show off what they did or to inform you of a bug that they have found and they are forwarding their idea for the fix.
Again, really, it comes down to the percieved start up cost (as in time and effort, not money). Microsoft has always been very good at that part of the game. There are a huge number of open source efforts that could be more relevant if they learned this lesson.
I don't usually jump on this band wagon, but this statement:
Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing
just adds to the idea that all of these people are so brain washed that they are actually doing something that will benefit users, that they can not but help spouting the virtues of the company line at every opportunity.
I would appreciate someone just being honest with themselves for a change. Something like "That brouhaha in Massachusetts gave us a scare and we think that we had better support this ODF format or we might loose alot of government business. Geez, an open file format, why didn't we think of that?"
If you are running on comodity x86 hardware, look into eCos. You can go open source of commercial (with someone like http://www.ecoscentric.com/ eCosCentric). Full source code. Lots of drivers. Easy to understand API. I have worked with nearly 2 dozen RTOS's, and this one is one of my favorites.
I also strongly agree that you never, ever consider kernel upgrades to a shipping product (any more that you would replace the CPU or whatever in the hardware design). What you really need to think about is how to carry expertise from project to project. One solution is to stick with the same set of tools to create the product.
I make sure that every new technical hire to our company reads this book by Kerninghan and Pike. Then, I give them a copy of our coding standards which really just outline the syntatic sugar. If the person was bright enough to get hired, they are more than capable of understanding and applying the concepts presented to them through these two sources.
how the American economy, fat off the progress and profit made over the previous 120 year span, became so selfish and greedy that it ate itself in the early periods of the 21st century. At which time, it labouriously rolled over, farted, then died.
If you are reading this from any part of the world aside from the United States, you already know this history. Hell, you're living it. That's why you hate us. That's why you either shake your head in disbelief or merely point your finger and chuckle. You see the black muck that is the personification of the stereotypical American. From outside the bubble, man, that is one ugly sight.
No one can argue that it is sickening how members of a rich society are able to chuck their conscience and morality out the window and shamelessly take advantage of a hampered and flawed system. All this without a hint of concern on how their actions may be affecting the lives of millions of unwitting countrymen. But, what is often overlooked is the long term detrement these actions have on the American economy.
Based on this kind of crap, who in their right mind would ever consider basing a business, of any type or any size, in the United States anymore? Even the stallwarts of the ecomony are picking up and moving. Offshoring is a big a problem as most folks think it is, regardless of what the "industry insiders" have to say about it.
If asshole "business executives" and their brigades of lawyers are further allowed to get away with this type of behaviour, who is going to be left? Folks in the service industries, that's it. And they'll be catering to people from other countries who stopped by for a visit to see all the carnage. And where do you think these idiots who are causing all the problems will be? Not here, that's for damn sure. They'll be at their beach house on some remote island far, far away from the garbage they left on the curb.
This isn't about being conservative or liberal, black or white, rich or poor to us normal folks. This is about a few talentless nasty bottom feeders ruining the most powerful economy in modern history.
Well, gee, thanks. Maybe I can have a slice of apple pie with the dung heap you're feeding us. That should make it all better.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this puts your theories to rest.
If you have the pull of Harry Potter, I guess you can. Story here.
Hey Pal,
When you lift a joke for use as a tag line, it is proper to give the author credit. If you do not know the identity of the author, please refrain from using it and try to come up with something clever all on your own.
You must be new here. Let me introduce you to OpenBSD.
Oh, how stupid of us. As a consumer I always get exactly what I want! No rootkits in Sony DVDs. No DMCA. No RIAA. No MPA. No DRM. No FairPlay. Wow. Have you got an extra lawn chair in your garden in Never Never Land? I could sure go for a Lemonade and watching a pretty sunset.
Contrast that with open source. Sure, there are a great number of projects out there that have great documentation, and some do have tutorials. Wonderful. Those are the projects that succeed (ie. Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc). But, let's face it, those are in the minority. How many projects consist of only source code? That's not to knock the developers; but, honestly, documentation is boring work and by the time it's done, it's already out of date. It takes a great deal of time to keep the implementation in sync with the documentation. If the developer is in it for the glory (how world reknown would Torvalds be if he would have wrote great documentation about Minix back in '91 and released it as open source?), the code is what matters, not informing the user on how to get started with the software.
As for the IIRC comment, sure that works when the project is large enough that there is a (and I hate using this word) community built up around it where there are users knowledgable enough to answer your questions that make themselves available and take the time to answer questions. Of course, the other side of the coin is the poor newbie who gets flamed to shit the first time they ask a question. The common response is RTFM, dumbass! Which I can not disagree with if there is an FM to begin with. I have learned over the years that no matter how unpalatable documentation is, it perfectly serves its purpose when the user of your software does not contact you when they are installing it, learning it or pushing it to an extreme, making it do shit you hadn't thought of; rather, they contact you to show off what they did or to inform you of a bug that they have found and they are forwarding their idea for the fix.
Again, really, it comes down to the percieved start up cost (as in time and effort, not money). Microsoft has always been very good at that part of the game. There are a huge number of open source efforts that could be more relevant if they learned this lesson.
- orbitor
Nobody wants a format that's constantly changing
just adds to the idea that all of these people are so brain washed that they are actually doing something that will benefit users, that they can not but help spouting the virtues of the company line at every opportunity.
I would appreciate someone just being honest with themselves for a change. Something like "That brouhaha in Massachusetts gave us a scare and we think that we had better support this ODF format or we might loose alot of government business. Geez, an open file format, why didn't we think of that?"
I also strongly agree that you never, ever consider kernel upgrades to a shipping product (any more that you would replace the CPU or whatever in the hardware design). What you really need to think about is how to carry expertise from project to project. One solution is to stick with the same set of tools to create the product.
Incorrect. uC/OS II is not free. Did you even look at the site you posted?
I make sure that every new technical hire to our company reads this book by Kerninghan and Pike. Then, I give them a copy of our coding standards which really just outline the syntatic sugar. If the person was bright enough to get hired, they are more than capable of understanding and applying the concepts presented to them through these two sources.
I mean, holy shit, this is the magazine my grandpa collected...that ain't right!
You can use the RMS SDK to build a shared document library that can protect and deliver RMS-protected documents on demand.
I was unaware that Mr. Stallman had contributed such a thing to Microsoft. Funny that I couldn't find a link at gnu.org.
Where would any of us be without Vim? And the one of best Unix like, zealot neutral, Linux distribution on the planet?
How can we get this goodness in every piece of software on the planet?
If you are reading this from any part of the world aside from the United States, you already know this history. Hell, you're living it. That's why you hate us. That's why you either shake your head in disbelief or merely point your finger and chuckle. You see the black muck that is the personification of the stereotypical American. From outside the bubble, man, that is one ugly sight.
No one can argue that it is sickening how members of a rich society are able to chuck their conscience and morality out the window and shamelessly take advantage of a hampered and flawed system. All this without a hint of concern on how their actions may be affecting the lives of millions of unwitting countrymen. But, what is often overlooked is the long term detrement these actions have on the American economy.
Based on this kind of crap, who in their right mind would ever consider basing a business, of any type or any size, in the United States anymore? Even the stallwarts of the ecomony are picking up and moving. Offshoring is a big a problem as most folks think it is, regardless of what the "industry insiders" have to say about it.
If asshole "business executives" and their brigades of lawyers are further allowed to get away with this type of behaviour, who is going to be left? Folks in the service industries, that's it. And they'll be catering to people from other countries who stopped by for a visit to see all the carnage. And where do you think these idiots who are causing all the problems will be? Not here, that's for damn sure. They'll be at their beach house on some remote island far, far away from the garbage they left on the curb.
This isn't about being conservative or liberal, black or white, rich or poor to us normal folks. This is about a few talentless nasty bottom feeders ruining the most powerful economy in modern history.
Well, gee, thanks. Maybe I can have a slice of apple pie with the dung heap you're feeding us. That should make it all better.
Just to complete the list: Marlboro. The most recognized brand name on the planet.
Don't forget...HAL, I mean, IBM, used to be evil, too.