If you've written good APIs for your product (you have done that, right?) then it should be no problem. If you haven't, then you probably have no business dealing with companies big enough to have their own intranet programming teams. If you have a well written and documented API that gives them access to all the functionality of your web app without needing to use the web app, they should have no need for your source code; they can modify the output of your application in whatever way they need.
If you didn't think ahead enough to design your app for this kind of scenario, then yes, you have a tough business decision and your software may not be up to snuff for the big boys. Either redesign your app and target it at the enterprise market or go after small businesses who won't need to modify it much. Or take your chances that these larger companies won't take the source code and run, leaving you with a legal bill your young company may not be able to survive pending the 2 or 3 years corporate law suits usually take. Even if you win, the legal fees alone can bankrupt you.
The whole point of SaaS (salesforce, google, et al) is that the customer pays a subscription fee and gets the service in return. If you're selling them a closed box application, keep it closed box. Google would be a good role model here (for intranet search, they sell you a cheap 1U server with their software loaded on it and some APIs to tell the thing what to do.)
In other words, don't do it. Re-evaluate your application design and your business goals and adjust one to fit the other.
Right. But Jack Thompson is not a police officer, nor have his past comments led me to think he is even remotely experienced with the subject, or even really a good lawyer (if he were, he would recognize the fallacy of correlation and provide some evidence to back up his claims.) The police will often sieze anything they can get their hands on, whether it is useful or not.
I'm willing to bet the only reason they bothered talking to Jack about this was to get him to say something outrageous so that Slashdot and every videogame website on the net would link to the original article, thus turning a routine story about an open-and-shut murder case into a net scandal which generates pageviews for the author's site. They used him as much as they used sites like Slashdot.
Gaming rags, whether online or dead-tree, have always been promotional tools for game publishers. And the truth is, there really are very few truly 'bad' games. Pretty much every game that makes it to release appeals to someone. There are no 'grass roots' in video games, because the price of entry into the industry is so high (if I recall, the average game development cost is around $10 million.) Anyone who can afford to be in the game industry can afford their own astroturf and viral advertising. It's all just a carefully crafted marketing plan, much more so than most people probably realize.
Ever since the invention of money, there have been con-men who want to take it from you. Nothing will stop the spammers, though BlueFrog was a good method of introducing a monetary cost to spam. The reason spam is so prevalent is that it costs nothing to send.
There's a fool born every minute; the internet just makes it easier for con-men to find them.
If they aren't interested in actually making drugs, what exactly is it that they do?
Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in drugs that cure diseases, nor have they been for quite some time.
They are more interested in "maintenance drugs," which do nothing to cure the ailment, but merely treat the symptoms. This way you have to keep taking the drug (and paying for it) for the duration of the ailment (which could be the rest of your life.) It's generally left up to academia to find the cure.
I think the bigger worry is not that China is going to steal weaponizable nuclear waste; but rather that Al-Qaeda or some other well organizied terrorist group du-jour will somehow get their hands on it
No, the bigger worry is if a dictator with a grudge and a hefty dose of sociopathy gains control in an unstable country with a nuclear arsenal. All it will take is one nuke launched by a real military and we will have WW3 on our hands. If some lunatic gains power in a nuclear Iran or Pakistan, he could decide "Consequences be damned, I'm nuking Israel." Al-Qaeda could never hope to achieve such results.
I purchased the 2GB Ram upgrade (not from Apple at 600 USD, 280USD from Crucial) and I noticed such a difference, that I couldn't understand WHY they would even consider shipping that little silver wonder with less then 1GB of RAM.
And this is exactly what you should have done. Apple ships their consumer boxes with way too little RAM (they always have,) but the upside to that is you can just go elsewhere and buy it cheaper than Apple is willing to sell it for.
I wouldn't fully judge ANY computer's speed unless it's got 2 gigs of RAM. That's about the minimum you need these days if you want to avoid swapping. Including that much in a consumer level PC just doesn't make sense though.
Yeah, this is total open source FUD, but it's not as much nonsense as slashdotters make it out to be.
The big difference between Open Source and proprietary software is accountability. If you have a problem, who do you turn to? A vendor who you paid a lot of money to for support, or a mailing list that may or may not get back to you? Most businesses won't accept that kind of uncertainty.
Now, this is not as important for a lot of small/home businesses without an IT department. But once you get into the "medium" size businesses, fuzzy support options are unacceptable, and your IT management has two choices: Hire a bunch of expert Linux gurus to set up a great FOSS environment, or hire a bunch of MCSE monkeys at half the cost and spend the rest on software and support.
You know the software company is gonna be there in 5 years, and have documented knowledge of your environment, where your IT guru sysadmins may have moved on to other jobs. The training is standardized, so you can expect anyone you hire with an MCSE to be moderately familiar with the environment. It's probably ultimately easier on IT management to go the proprietary software route, because if there is an emergency, there is always a company who can be held directly accountable.
There is no cut and dry rule for whether or not you should use Open Source. But if your IT operations are not part of your core business, it may ultimately be easier to just pay for support. The reliability of Open Source largely depends on the skill of your administrators, and good admins cost more money than MCSEs and can be hard to replace because sysadmin skillsets vary widely.
Hey, they did make a hydrogen car by hooking the business end of a hydrogen tank hose directly into the carbureator of an unmodified diesel sedan... No fabricating at all, they just kinda stuck the hose in there till it worked. Er, and exploded in a giant fireball...
HDDs are far too fragile to whip around in a robot like you do with tapes. They weigh more, the connectors are much more fragile, and most importantly the read/write heads would have to be flung around as well (they exist in the tape drive in a tape loader.) Tapes are designed with autoloaders in mind. HDDs also are really not conducive or cost effective for the kinds of jobs tape loaders are used for.
The point is, yeah, you could, but you wouldn't want to. The other advantages of tapes outweigh any advantage hard drives have in this situation. Don't get me wrong, I back up all my data directly to a big RAID array, but after that I write to tape.
Yeah, but by the time we see $75 500GB hard drives, we will have 1TB tapes available for $75 and 1TB hard drives will still be $200 and still weigh 10 times as much as a tape.
Hard drives are great for every day stuff, and even backups. But when transporting your data off-site, or even just archiving it, hard disks have nothing on tapes.
Optical media is also terrible for backup.. It's way too fragile and the dyes they use on recordable optical media degrade very fast (under 5 years for really cheap ones.)
When a 500 GB hard drive costs $75, can be thrown across the room and have a chance of working, weighs the same as a tape and can be easily inserted/removed in bulk with software management and barcode readers to keep track of it all for you.
Until then, tape will stick around. I have a feeling it might be a while.
Yum is often used by free RHEL-alike distros to replace RedHat's up2date. CentOS and Fedora use yum. RedHat EL uses up2date, which requires a subscription to access the RedHat repositories.
Unless everyone else buys an XBox 360, which does HD-DVD, and craps all over Blu-ray. In which case, sony's entire corporate strategy for this decade is in the toilet and I doubt we see sony make another console.
They won't get the numbers at a $599 buy in. All Microsoft has to do is lower the price on the 360 to $300 for the holiday season and Sony is toast.
If the heirarchical file view hadn't been an application of an interface that Apple already owned through their purchase of NeXT.
The iPod interface was wholly consistent with Apple's interface guidelines from the past ten years. Creative may have filed the patent, but Apple had been using the same style of interface for years. Just because they don't have "MP3 player" slapped on them doesn't mean they're not a logical evolutionary step.
Motorola could probably claim prior art as well; their cell phones have used a similar navigation system since the Digital StarTAC. This is a bad patent, and I encourage Apple's lawyers to dig up as much dirt on Creative as possible and run them into the ground. You'd be doing those of us who ever purchased a Creative product a favor.
Right, but the traditional anti-Apple argument has been about expandability and price. Of course there is a price point, that's the way it is with any product. Macs have, traditionally, been priced out of the consumer market.
The size of the box is very much an issue. You can actually put a mac mini *underneath* most monitors. That clears up a lot of desk space.
Also, the monitors Dell bundles are crappy 15" CRTs, and the keyboard is worth $5, tops (Dell's bundled keyboards have been especially awful recently.) If you already own a computer you no doubt have better. If you don't own a computer, then Apple's whole 'digital lifestyle' pitch probably doesn't appeal to you (if it did, you would have bought a computer before now.)
Note to developers: Guns mean everything in FPS games, powerful is better, and the more variation the better.:)
So true. The weapons put into many FPS games feel way too wimpy. Doom 3 is a perfect example of this; the plasma cannon should have killed the fuck out of most of the stuff in front of you; instead it was basically a slightly better MP5 that fired too fast and didn't hold enough ammo to be genuinely useful. Half the time I ran around with the pistol in that game because all of the guns sucked.
There's a reason that half the UT servers out there run InstaGib rules. Big guns are fun.
Seriously, they made the same mistake Sony is making now with the N64. The GameCube never got that critical mass until the end of this last generation, but there are some spectacular GameCube games out there. They learned their lesson; the graphics are already good enough for most people, so make fun games and you will do well. This is why they're making money and Sony and MS are not.
The XBox 360 is *still* too expensive. I'm betting the Wii comes in around $200 and the launch titles are by far the best of the next generation. Sony and Microsoft have spent the last 3 years designing a console, while Nintendo has spent the last 3 years making games.
There's a good reason for this: Home PCs are commodity equipment. Unless you are a gamer (which means you're not part of Apple's target market anyway,) you will probably buy a $500 HP or Dell. All the $500 Dells I've ever worked with don't have more than 3 32-bit PCI slots anyway. No AGP, no PCIe. Usually only 1 SATA connector and 2 EIDE connectors.
The point is, you're not going to be upgrading your economy PC from Dell or HP anyway. If something faster comes out, you just buy a new PC because they're $500. Apple is now in this price sphere though, and the Mac mini looks sexy and small compared to a $500 Dell in a mid-tower case. Home PCs are commodity hardware, and this fits Apple's business model a whole lot better. Who cares if it's expandable if you're just going to replace it anyway?
The Mac mini is Apple's $500 box, and when you compare it spec wise to a comparably priced Dell or HP, it stands up. Of course, a $500 Dell comes bundled with Google Desktop and MusicMatch Jukebox, and the Mac comes with the whole iApp suite, which is more powerful and easier to use for a home user than anything even available on Windows.
Which would you choose? The $500 Dell or the $550 Mac Mini?
Slashdot Mirror
If you've written good APIs for your product (you have done that, right?) then it should be no problem. If you haven't, then you probably have no business dealing with companies big enough to have their own intranet programming teams. If you have a well written and documented API that gives them access to all the functionality of your web app without needing to use the web app, they should have no need for your source code; they can modify the output of your application in whatever way they need.
If you didn't think ahead enough to design your app for this kind of scenario, then yes, you have a tough business decision and your software may not be up to snuff for the big boys. Either redesign your app and target it at the enterprise market or go after small businesses who won't need to modify it much. Or take your chances that these larger companies won't take the source code and run, leaving you with a legal bill your young company may not be able to survive pending the 2 or 3 years corporate law suits usually take. Even if you win, the legal fees alone can bankrupt you.
The whole point of SaaS (salesforce, google, et al) is that the customer pays a subscription fee and gets the service in return. If you're selling them a closed box application, keep it closed box. Google would be a good role model here (for intranet search, they sell you a cheap 1U server with their software loaded on it and some APIs to tell the thing what to do.)
In other words, don't do it. Re-evaluate your application design and your business goals and adjust one to fit the other.
Right. But Jack Thompson is not a police officer, nor have his past comments led me to think he is even remotely experienced with the subject, or even really a good lawyer (if he were, he would recognize the fallacy of correlation and provide some evidence to back up his claims.) The police will often sieze anything they can get their hands on, whether it is useful or not.
I'm willing to bet the only reason they bothered talking to Jack about this was to get him to say something outrageous so that Slashdot and every videogame website on the net would link to the original article, thus turning a routine story about an open-and-shut murder case into a net scandal which generates pageviews for the author's site. They used him as much as they used sites like Slashdot.
Gaming rags, whether online or dead-tree, have always been promotional tools for game publishers. And the truth is, there really are very few truly 'bad' games. Pretty much every game that makes it to release appeals to someone. There are no 'grass roots' in video games, because the price of entry into the industry is so high (if I recall, the average game development cost is around $10 million.) Anyone who can afford to be in the game industry can afford their own astroturf and viral advertising. It's all just a carefully crafted marketing plan, much more so than most people probably realize.
Ever since the invention of money, there have been con-men who want to take it from you. Nothing will stop the spammers, though BlueFrog was a good method of introducing a monetary cost to spam. The reason spam is so prevalent is that it costs nothing to send.
There's a fool born every minute; the internet just makes it easier for con-men to find them.
Please.
A low slashdot id just means you've been heaping shit on the pile longer than anyone else.
Moral of the story? We're all in the wrong profession.
Maybe. But only if she eats hot grits off ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
Do not anger the Karma Whores, for they don't bathe often, and might decide to come visit you in person.
If they aren't interested in actually making drugs, what exactly is it that they do?
Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in drugs that cure diseases, nor have they been for quite some time.
They are more interested in "maintenance drugs," which do nothing to cure the ailment, but merely treat the symptoms. This way you have to keep taking the drug (and paying for it) for the duration of the ailment (which could be the rest of your life.) It's generally left up to academia to find the cure.
People have to take a simple, elegant concept, and butcher it; it's the new way of IT.
New?
Since when was that new? : )
I think the bigger worry is not that China is going to steal weaponizable nuclear waste; but rather that Al-Qaeda or some other well organizied terrorist group du-jour will somehow get their hands on it
No, the bigger worry is if a dictator with a grudge and a hefty dose of sociopathy gains control in an unstable country with a nuclear arsenal. All it will take is one nuke launched by a real military and we will have WW3 on our hands. If some lunatic gains power in a nuclear Iran or Pakistan, he could decide "Consequences be damned, I'm nuking Israel." Al-Qaeda could never hope to achieve such results.
I purchased the 2GB Ram upgrade (not from Apple at 600 USD, 280USD from Crucial) and I noticed such a difference, that I couldn't understand WHY they would even consider shipping that little silver wonder with less then 1GB of RAM.
And this is exactly what you should have done. Apple ships their consumer boxes with way too little RAM (they always have,) but the upside to that is you can just go elsewhere and buy it cheaper than Apple is willing to sell it for.
I wouldn't fully judge ANY computer's speed unless it's got 2 gigs of RAM. That's about the minimum you need these days if you want to avoid swapping. Including that much in a consumer level PC just doesn't make sense though.
Yeah, this is total open source FUD, but it's not as much nonsense as slashdotters make it out to be.
The big difference between Open Source and proprietary software is accountability. If you have a problem, who do you turn to? A vendor who you paid a lot of money to for support, or a mailing list that may or may not get back to you? Most businesses won't accept that kind of uncertainty.
Now, this is not as important for a lot of small/home businesses without an IT department. But once you get into the "medium" size businesses, fuzzy support options are unacceptable, and your IT management has two choices: Hire a bunch of expert Linux gurus to set up a great FOSS environment, or hire a bunch of MCSE monkeys at half the cost and spend the rest on software and support.
You know the software company is gonna be there in 5 years, and have documented knowledge of your environment, where your IT guru sysadmins may have moved on to other jobs. The training is standardized, so you can expect anyone you hire with an MCSE to be moderately familiar with the environment. It's probably ultimately easier on IT management to go the proprietary software route, because if there is an emergency, there is always a company who can be held directly accountable.
There is no cut and dry rule for whether or not you should use Open Source. But if your IT operations are not part of your core business, it may ultimately be easier to just pay for support. The reliability of Open Source largely depends on the skill of your administrators, and good admins cost more money than MCSEs and can be hard to replace because sysadmin skillsets vary widely.
Hey, they did make a hydrogen car by hooking the business end of a hydrogen tank hose directly into the carbureator of an unmodified diesel sedan... No fabricating at all, they just kinda stuck the hose in there till it worked. Er, and exploded in a giant fireball...
HDDs are far too fragile to whip around in a robot like you do with tapes. They weigh more, the connectors are much more fragile, and most importantly the read/write heads would have to be flung around as well (they exist in the tape drive in a tape loader.) Tapes are designed with autoloaders in mind. HDDs also are really not conducive or cost effective for the kinds of jobs tape loaders are used for.
The point is, yeah, you could, but you wouldn't want to. The other advantages of tapes outweigh any advantage hard drives have in this situation. Don't get me wrong, I back up all my data directly to a big RAID array, but after that I write to tape.
Yeah, but by the time we see $75 500GB hard drives, we will have 1TB tapes available for $75 and 1TB hard drives will still be $200 and still weigh 10 times as much as a tape.
Hard drives are great for every day stuff, and even backups. But when transporting your data off-site, or even just archiving it, hard disks have nothing on tapes.
Optical media is also terrible for backup.. It's way too fragile and the dyes they use on recordable optical media degrade very fast (under 5 years for really cheap ones.)
When a 500 GB hard drive costs $75, can be thrown across the room and have a chance of working, weighs the same as a tape and can be easily inserted/removed in bulk with software management and barcode readers to keep track of it all for you.
Until then, tape will stick around. I have a feeling it might be a while.
RedHat has nothing to do with Yum.
Yum is often used by free RHEL-alike distros to replace RedHat's up2date. CentOS and Fedora use yum. RedHat EL uses up2date, which requires a subscription to access the RedHat repositories.
Unless everyone else buys an XBox 360, which does HD-DVD, and craps all over Blu-ray. In which case, sony's entire corporate strategy for this decade is in the toilet and I doubt we see sony make another console.
They won't get the numbers at a $599 buy in. All Microsoft has to do is lower the price on the 360 to $300 for the holiday season and Sony is toast.
Which would be nice.
If the heirarchical file view hadn't been an application of an interface that Apple already owned through their purchase of NeXT.
The iPod interface was wholly consistent with Apple's interface guidelines from the past ten years. Creative may have filed the patent, but Apple had been using the same style of interface for years. Just because they don't have "MP3 player" slapped on them doesn't mean they're not a logical evolutionary step.
Motorola could probably claim prior art as well; their cell phones have used a similar navigation system since the Digital StarTAC. This is a bad patent, and I encourage Apple's lawyers to dig up as much dirt on Creative as possible and run them into the ground. You'd be doing those of us who ever purchased a Creative product a favor.
Right, but the traditional anti-Apple argument has been about expandability and price. Of course there is a price point, that's the way it is with any product. Macs have, traditionally, been priced out of the consumer market.
The size of the box is very much an issue. You can actually put a mac mini *underneath* most monitors. That clears up a lot of desk space.
Also, the monitors Dell bundles are crappy 15" CRTs, and the keyboard is worth $5, tops (Dell's bundled keyboards have been especially awful recently.) If you already own a computer you no doubt have better. If you don't own a computer, then Apple's whole 'digital lifestyle' pitch probably doesn't appeal to you (if it did, you would have bought a computer before now.)
Note to developers: Guns mean everything in FPS games, powerful is better, and the more variation the better. :)
So true. The weapons put into many FPS games feel way too wimpy. Doom 3 is a perfect example of this; the plasma cannon should have killed the fuck out of most of the stuff in front of you; instead it was basically a slightly better MP5 that fired too fast and didn't hold enough ammo to be genuinely useful. Half the time I ran around with the pistol in that game because all of the guns sucked.
There's a reason that half the UT servers out there run InstaGib rules. Big guns are fun.
Bet on Nintendo.
Seriously, they made the same mistake Sony is making now with the N64. The GameCube never got that critical mass until the end of this last generation, but there are some spectacular GameCube games out there. They learned their lesson; the graphics are already good enough for most people, so make fun games and you will do well. This is why they're making money and Sony and MS are not.
The XBox 360 is *still* too expensive. I'm betting the Wii comes in around $200 and the launch titles are by far the best of the next generation. Sony and Microsoft have spent the last 3 years designing a console, while Nintendo has spent the last 3 years making games.
There's a good reason for this: Home PCs are commodity equipment. Unless you are a gamer (which means you're not part of Apple's target market anyway,) you will probably buy a $500 HP or Dell. All the $500 Dells I've ever worked with don't have more than 3 32-bit PCI slots anyway. No AGP, no PCIe. Usually only 1 SATA connector and 2 EIDE connectors.
The point is, you're not going to be upgrading your economy PC from Dell or HP anyway. If something faster comes out, you just buy a new PC because they're $500. Apple is now in this price sphere though, and the Mac mini looks sexy and small compared to a $500 Dell in a mid-tower case. Home PCs are commodity hardware, and this fits Apple's business model a whole lot better. Who cares if it's expandable if you're just going to replace it anyway?
The Mac mini is Apple's $500 box, and when you compare it spec wise to a comparably priced Dell or HP, it stands up. Of course, a $500 Dell comes bundled with Google Desktop and MusicMatch Jukebox, and the Mac comes with the whole iApp suite, which is more powerful and easier to use for a home user than anything even available on Windows.
Which would you choose? The $500 Dell or the $550 Mac Mini?