Bounties. Communities can offer money to developers to develop and developers can offer to write stuff if given the funding.
And where does this money come from? Do people donate it in the hope that somebody will eventually take it up and deliver? It could be an applicable idea in theory, where is it actually working?
Re:Yea- we need the GPL or we won't get sources
on
On Being Pro-GPL
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· Score: 1
Don't be so patronizing, you're not that more smart or special in comparison to the "people" you refer to.
Actually the "people" I refer to include me, when I buy a smartphone I don't expect it to come with no operating system for example. In fact you'll find many people buy a phone based on the operating system it comes with.
Contrary to your claim, people have no problem with installing software
I'm talking about software to get the device working, baseline system software or key applications for the device's usage.
What do you mean "locked in"? You can easily download files from OneDrive and save documents from Office 365...it would be pretty useless if you couldn't do that.
Re:Yea- we need the GPL or we won't get sources
on
On Being Pro-GPL
·
· Score: 2
Just look at whats happened in the hardware arena.
The problem facing free software these days is the expectation from people to have computing devices integrated, people don't want to buy hardware and then have to choose and install software to get a product running. So the situation for free software users is to wait until a company develops a product then try and shoehorn free software into it as a replacement for the fully or partially proprietary non-free software it shipped with.
That is what needs to change, products need to be designed from the ground up with that particular software in mind instead of it being an after-the-fact addition by 3rd parties. There is too much noise from the free software camp about "you should run free software" with very little thought about what the user is supposed to run that free software on. Even when there is eventually a free software solution it usually ends up being something along the lines of "works but with no sound or network" and once it's usable the proprietary shipping product is already incumbent.
RedHat, SuSE, Oracle, IBM, O'Reilly, etc. would disagree with you.
That's fine for enterprise and corporate businesses that are happy to sign up for ongoing support contracts and to contract companies to do development for them, but what about the home user/consumer market? What's the monetization strategy for products that aren't targeted at corporations?
Let the person writing the code decide how she or he wants to license it.
.
Why all the angst and false drama?
Ultimately it's up to the code author but whenever you're dealing with an ideology you are going to end up with religious and philosophical discussions. As you say - the author should decide - and in reality software is used predominantly based on its capability, not its license.
Meaning, no more free development for.NET 4.6 with visual studio.
But that's rubbish, it's only "no more free development" if you are a company turning over more than $1 million dollars a year (assuming you're also not using it for academic research/teaching or OSS).
And like *I* said in the post you responded to, if you do forget you charge it while in the shower and that's enough to last the day easily.
In my experience 15 minutes of charging doesn't get it through the day, it isn't a magical battery that only need a few minutes charge a day.
But since all they do is track fitness they are inherently a niche market. There are many, many people who don't want to wear something that ONLY tracks fitness.
Actually most do more than that.
What's it's "killer app"?
You are someone who cannot see the forest for the trees. The killer app is metaphorically the forest.
No I'm just asking what you think its "killer app" is and you're trying to spin it off as a "the killer app is whatever you think it is" to avoid the question.
Or think of it this way - what is the "killer app" for the Computer?
In the business case it was spreadsheets, for the home user it was mostly web browsing and email.
The Smartphone?
Predominantly mobile web browsing and social networking. But the early ones it was mobile email.
So my point is the Apple Watch has no killer feature, it's a poor fitness tracker (heart-rate is often way off when I've compared it at the gym, sometimes it's pretty close though), step count is about as accurate as any other wrist-based pedometer (which is to say, not very) and aside from that the benefits are mostly around just not having to take the phone - that you have to have with you anyway - out of your pocket.
You don't have to justify yourself, if you like it then great. But I'm trying to work out what people are using it for that think it's so fantastic, having not spent money for mine I'm not subject to that bias of justifying it. It was a neat gimmick at first with the notifications and the extremely sappy "heartbeat sharing" but it doesn't seem to be particularly useful.
This is a standard practice in the industry and has been for many years. Hand-optimized shaders are usually done in the development phase, the changes that are included in the driver are usually around optimizing memory allocation and management on a per-application basis rather than the generic solution that makes (often incorrect) assumptions about resource usage, something the application developer knows about but the driver developer does not. This is all changing in the next generation of graphics APIs that reduces the driver overhead by shifting the responsibility of resource maintenance to the application developer, it means less assumptions and more optimized performance without having to include application-specific optimizations in the driver package.
The driver has a set of generic operations that it does when it comes to allocating memory and moving that memory around, this is something that can have a dramatic impact on performance yet the developer has no control over it. Developers often work with the GPU manufacturer's driver department to optimize the driver for their specific use case which is done on a per-application basis. This is part of the reason that drivers these days are so large.
This is one thing that is improving as part of the DirectX12 and Vulkan (glNext)/Mantle efforts going forward, the responsibility for things like pinning memory blocks in fast cache and determining what is allowed to be moved and copied (or rather strongly hinting at it) falls to the developer rather than the driver's generic solution or application-specific optimizations made by the vendor in the driver itself.
From real-life experience, that's not been an issue at all. You just charge it at night when you go to sleep, or if you forget while you take a shower, and that is enough.
Like I said, if you forget to charge it overnight. Worse is the fact that if you want to track sleep you can't charge it overnight.
Just like there are better cameras than an iPhone, but the iPhone takes more photos than any of them because the REAL better camera/fitness tracker is the one you have with you.
Right, a fitness tracker is designed to always be with you, a camera is not. That's the difference.
The biggest issue it has is battery life. If you forget to charge your phone and it's dead the next morning that's a significant issue, if you forget to charge your watch - or stayed away from home and didn't take your special charger - and it's dead the next morning that's a minor inconvenience. The more often this happens the more you realize how unnecessary it really is. Sure for fitness tracking it's good but there are better fitness trackers out there and you don't need to remember to charge them so often.
The iPod, iPhone and the iPad were real game changers, naturally they had a lot of critics upon release but once you used them and saw their applicability their usefulness and potential use-cases became obvious. Whereas the Apple Watch is just more of a gimmick, unlike the other iDevices it doesn't have that "killer app" that takes some existing task and makes it significantly better on the watch.
That's a huge benefit! The Apple Watch and Android smartwatches all serve to keep you locked in to those ecosystems by being unnecessarily tied to those operating systems. There's no reason most of the functionality couldn't be platform agnostic and indeed the MS band demonstrates that. Decided you want to change phones? Well you have to change your watch as well!
I think you will find a lot of people here just want somebody to hate. MS has dropped proprietary platform-specific extensions in favor of chasing standards compliance, their big-ticket product MS Office is now available on Linux with Office365 (and native apps on OS X, iOS and Android), they're soliciting and responding to feedback from the community (Windows Insider and XBox kinect, back compat and internet connectivity) and they are releasing a lot of open source software along with the patent promise.
They're doing exactly the sort of things you would want a company like that to do because these days MS is a different company run by different people operating in a different environment. And when you consider that despite the 20-odd years of Windows hate it is still the dominant desktop operating system by a very wide margin, the last few years of change are a good thing.
Because a constant interactive connection is a tad bit obvious?
Oh and thrashing resources recording the screen and encoding the giant video file isn't of course.
But sending some recordings while you're, let's say, downloading updates...
If you're going to notice remote desktop running in the background then you're going to notice uploading a huge video file. The conspiracy theories are getting a bit ridiculous now.
Except that DOESN'T make me happy precisely because then I'm not longer able to support the content I like
Then approach the content producer directly.
Works great, so long as the site/TV/radio station has that option.
And if it doesn't then you need to do something to effect change.
And if you're argument boils down to, "well, if you're so against how the system works, don't be a part of it", I agree.
Well it kind of does or of course do something about it. But just saying "i don't like it" isn't going to do much.
But that doesn't delegitimize complaints about the system or a desire for the system to change so more desired content is supported and less undesired content is not or for there to be more a more equitable/fair* system of pay
You'd have to objectively define what is and is not desirable content. Such a thing doesn't work so well in a broadcast environment for obvious reasons.
It WILL happen. With microsoft's track record, this is not a question of IF but WHEN
They've had remote access tools built into the operating system for years, heard of Remote Desktop? Why would they need a screen recording tool if they already had remote desktop?
Then be happy that the cost is amortized across people who aren't you. And if you don't want ads then pay/support the sites/TV/radio stations that don't have them.
Do we really want the advertising revenue stream to disappear for content developers and for all internet content to be behind paywalls?
If we view advertising as a net negative burden on cognition and productivity (there's scientific literature to support this view), and explicit, informed choice as a net human asset (there's virulent ideology to support this view), I'd have to say "yes".
That would certainly limit the accessibility of the information to those privileged enough to be able to afford it. But then again you can have both and allow the free market to decide.
Or, create expensive content, again, now you need funding. But that would be a choice.
But radio and TV would be just fine without advertisers. Content would almost certainly change. Likely much for the better, IMHO.
Couldn't you already do that and save a shitload of money not paying for content then? I mean you would need a relatively tiny amount of advertising to cover your costs if you didn't need to pay for any content. And if it's a change for the better then why isn't anybody doing it?
The problem is that most people that are complaining about advertising are doing so because the free content (that doesn't need advertising) sucks, they want the ad-supported content but don't want to have to support it.
And increasingly there are free mobile applications that have advertising in them or you can choose the alternative funding model and pay for the version that does not have advertising. Do we really want the advertising revenue stream to disappear for content developers and for all internet content to be behind paywalls?
That's not surprising. It costs thousands of dollars for an MSDN subscription to get the IDE for the Microsoft platform. How many young girls have that kind of cash laying around?
But you dont need an MSDN subscription to get the IDE.
If we want more CS graduates, we need more kids learning computing on Commodore 64s where your operating system is BASIC.
These days the Commodore 64 has been replaced with the substantially cheaper Raspberry Pi and Arduino as well as the Linux desktop and Android devices, experimenting with computing has become easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before. But just because the technology sector has expanded doesn't mean the number of people interested in computing has expanded at the same rate.
It goes further than that. It's the difference between "free" (as in speech) and "free" (as in beer). Its been increasingly the case that you don't own software you paid for, you merely license it.
That's the same with Free Software, it is licensed to you.
At least with Linux you are free to do whatever you want with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Bounties. Communities can offer money to developers to develop and developers can offer to write stuff if given the funding.
And where does this money come from? Do people donate it in the hope that somebody will eventually take it up and deliver? It could be an applicable idea in theory, where is it actually working?
Don't be so patronizing, you're not that more smart or special in comparison to the "people" you refer to.
Actually the "people" I refer to include me, when I buy a smartphone I don't expect it to come with no operating system for example. In fact you'll find many people buy a phone based on the operating system it comes with.
Contrary to your claim, people have no problem with installing software
I'm talking about software to get the device working, baseline system software or key applications for the device's usage.
What do you mean "locked in"? You can easily download files from OneDrive and save documents from Office 365...it would be pretty useless if you couldn't do that.
Just look at whats happened in the hardware arena.
The problem facing free software these days is the expectation from people to have computing devices integrated, people don't want to buy hardware and then have to choose and install software to get a product running. So the situation for free software users is to wait until a company develops a product then try and shoehorn free software into it as a replacement for the fully or partially proprietary non-free software it shipped with.
That is what needs to change, products need to be designed from the ground up with that particular software in mind instead of it being an after-the-fact addition by 3rd parties. There is too much noise from the free software camp about "you should run free software" with very little thought about what the user is supposed to run that free software on. Even when there is eventually a free software solution it usually ends up being something along the lines of "works but with no sound or network" and once it's usable the proprietary shipping product is already incumbent.
I there are too few ways to monetize GPL code.
RedHat, SuSE, Oracle, IBM, O'Reilly, etc. would disagree with you.
That's fine for enterprise and corporate businesses that are happy to sign up for ongoing support contracts and to contract companies to do development for them, but what about the home user/consumer market? What's the monetization strategy for products that aren't targeted at corporations?
Let the person writing the code decide how she or he wants to license it.
.
Why all the angst and false drama?
Ultimately it's up to the code author but whenever you're dealing with an ideology you are going to end up with religious and philosophical discussions. As you say - the author should decide - and in reality software is used predominantly based on its capability, not its license.
copyright != license. The term "pro-copyleft" is with respect to the license - copyright is not involved.
What category of law(s) do you suppose you use to enforce that license? You don't think it might be copyright law?
Meaning, no more free development for .NET 4.6 with visual studio.
But that's rubbish, it's only "no more free development" if you are a company turning over more than $1 million dollars a year (assuming you're also not using it for academic research/teaching or OSS).
And like *I* said in the post you responded to, if you do forget you charge it while in the shower and that's enough to last the day easily.
In my experience 15 minutes of charging doesn't get it through the day, it isn't a magical battery that only need a few minutes charge a day.
But since all they do is track fitness they are inherently a niche market. There are many, many people who don't want to wear something that ONLY tracks fitness.
Actually most do more than that.
What's it's "killer app"?
You are someone who cannot see the forest for the trees. The killer app is metaphorically the forest.
No I'm just asking what you think its "killer app" is and you're trying to spin it off as a "the killer app is whatever you think it is" to avoid the question.
Or think of it this way - what is the "killer app" for the Computer?
In the business case it was spreadsheets, for the home user it was mostly web browsing and email.
The Smartphone?
Predominantly mobile web browsing and social networking. But the early ones it was mobile email.
So my point is the Apple Watch has no killer feature, it's a poor fitness tracker (heart-rate is often way off when I've compared it at the gym, sometimes it's pretty close though), step count is about as accurate as any other wrist-based pedometer (which is to say, not very) and aside from that the benefits are mostly around just not having to take the phone - that you have to have with you anyway - out of your pocket.
You don't have to justify yourself, if you like it then great. But I'm trying to work out what people are using it for that think it's so fantastic, having not spent money for mine I'm not subject to that bias of justifying it. It was a neat gimmick at first with the notifications and the extremely sappy "heartbeat sharing" but it doesn't seem to be particularly useful.
This is a standard practice in the industry and has been for many years. Hand-optimized shaders are usually done in the development phase, the changes that are included in the driver are usually around optimizing memory allocation and management on a per-application basis rather than the generic solution that makes (often incorrect) assumptions about resource usage, something the application developer knows about but the driver developer does not. This is all changing in the next generation of graphics APIs that reduces the driver overhead by shifting the responsibility of resource maintenance to the application developer, it means less assumptions and more optimized performance without having to include application-specific optimizations in the driver package.
The driver has a set of generic operations that it does when it comes to allocating memory and moving that memory around, this is something that can have a dramatic impact on performance yet the developer has no control over it. Developers often work with the GPU manufacturer's driver department to optimize the driver for their specific use case which is done on a per-application basis. This is part of the reason that drivers these days are so large.
This is one thing that is improving as part of the DirectX12 and Vulkan (glNext)/Mantle efforts going forward, the responsibility for things like pinning memory blocks in fast cache and determining what is allowed to be moved and copied (or rather strongly hinting at it) falls to the developer rather than the driver's generic solution or application-specific optimizations made by the vendor in the driver itself.
From real-life experience, that's not been an issue at all. You just charge it at night when you go to sleep, or if you forget while you take a shower, and that is enough.
Like I said, if you forget to charge it overnight. Worse is the fact that if you want to track sleep you can't charge it overnight.
Just like there are better cameras than an iPhone, but the iPhone takes more photos than any of them because the REAL better camera/fitness tracker is the one you have with you.
Right, a fitness tracker is designed to always be with you, a camera is not. That's the difference.
However, there's no way it's a gimmick.
What's it's "killer app"?
The biggest issue it has is battery life. If you forget to charge your phone and it's dead the next morning that's a significant issue, if you forget to charge your watch - or stayed away from home and didn't take your special charger - and it's dead the next morning that's a minor inconvenience. The more often this happens the more you realize how unnecessary it really is. Sure for fitness tracking it's good but there are better fitness trackers out there and you don't need to remember to charge them so often.
The iPod, iPhone and the iPad were real game changers, naturally they had a lot of critics upon release but once you used them and saw their applicability their usefulness and potential use-cases became obvious. Whereas the Apple Watch is just more of a gimmick, unlike the other iDevices it doesn't have that "killer app" that takes some existing task and makes it significantly better on the watch.
and works on all platforms
That's a huge benefit! The Apple Watch and Android smartwatches all serve to keep you locked in to those ecosystems by being unnecessarily tied to those operating systems. There's no reason most of the functionality couldn't be platform agnostic and indeed the MS band demonstrates that. Decided you want to change phones? Well you have to change your watch as well!
I think you will find a lot of people here just want somebody to hate. MS has dropped proprietary platform-specific extensions in favor of chasing standards compliance, their big-ticket product MS Office is now available on Linux with Office365 (and native apps on OS X, iOS and Android), they're soliciting and responding to feedback from the community (Windows Insider and XBox kinect, back compat and internet connectivity) and they are releasing a lot of open source software along with the patent promise.
They're doing exactly the sort of things you would want a company like that to do because these days MS is a different company run by different people operating in a different environment. And when you consider that despite the 20-odd years of Windows hate it is still the dominant desktop operating system by a very wide margin, the last few years of change are a good thing.
Because a constant interactive connection is a tad bit obvious?
Oh and thrashing resources recording the screen and encoding the giant video file isn't of course.
But sending some recordings while you're, let's say, downloading updates...
If you're going to notice remote desktop running in the background then you're going to notice uploading a huge video file. The conspiracy theories are getting a bit ridiculous now.
Except that DOESN'T make me happy precisely because then I'm not longer able to support the content I like
Then approach the content producer directly.
Works great, so long as the site/TV/radio station has that option.
And if it doesn't then you need to do something to effect change.
And if you're argument boils down to, "well, if you're so against how the system works, don't be a part of it", I agree.
Well it kind of does or of course do something about it. But just saying "i don't like it" isn't going to do much.
But that doesn't delegitimize complaints about the system or a desire for the system to change so more desired content is supported and less undesired content is not or for there to be more a more equitable/fair* system of pay
You'd have to objectively define what is and is not desirable content. Such a thing doesn't work so well in a broadcast environment for obvious reasons.
It WILL happen. With microsoft's track record, this is not a question of IF but WHEN
They've had remote access tools built into the operating system for years, heard of Remote Desktop? Why would they need a screen recording tool if they already had remote desktop?
Then be happy that the cost is amortized across people who aren't you. And if you don't want ads then pay/support the sites/TV/radio stations that don't have them.
If we view advertising as a net negative burden on cognition and productivity (there's scientific literature to support this view), and explicit, informed choice as a net human asset (there's virulent ideology to support this view), I'd have to say "yes".
That would certainly limit the accessibility of the information to those privileged enough to be able to afford it. But then again you can have both and allow the free market to decide.
Or, create expensive content, again, now you need funding. But that would be a choice.
But radio and TV would be just fine without advertisers. Content would almost certainly change. Likely much for the better, IMHO.
Couldn't you already do that and save a shitload of money not paying for content then? I mean you would need a relatively tiny amount of advertising to cover your costs if you didn't need to pay for any content. And if it's a change for the better then why isn't anybody doing it?
The problem is that most people that are complaining about advertising are doing so because the free content (that doesn't need advertising) sucks, they want the ad-supported content but don't want to have to support it.
And increasingly there are free mobile applications that have advertising in them or you can choose the alternative funding model and pay for the version that does not have advertising. Do we really want the advertising revenue stream to disappear for content developers and for all internet content to be behind paywalls?
That's not surprising. It costs thousands of dollars for an MSDN subscription to get the IDE for the Microsoft platform. How many young girls have that kind of cash laying around?
But you dont need an MSDN subscription to get the IDE.
Visual Studio Community 2013
A full-featured IDE – Free for students, open source contributors, and small teams. Start coding the app of your dreams for Windows, Android, and iOS.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx
If we want more CS graduates, we need more kids learning computing on Commodore 64s where your operating system is BASIC.
These days the Commodore 64 has been replaced with the substantially cheaper Raspberry Pi and Arduino as well as the Linux desktop and Android devices, experimenting with computing has become easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before. But just because the technology sector has expanded doesn't mean the number of people interested in computing has expanded at the same rate.
It goes further than that. It's the difference between "free" (as in speech) and "free" (as in beer). Its been increasingly the case that you don't own software you paid for, you merely license it.
That's the same with Free Software, it is licensed to you.
At least with Linux you are free to do whatever you want with it.
Within the terms of the Gnu Public License v2.0.