I get the feeling that most people with the knowlege & skill requried to write a firewall for windows would much rather put up a linux/bsd machine, with an already tested, robust firewall, to do the job, unless they plan on selling it.
That's the catch with open source; people only work on projects they're interested in, and things (such as windows firewalls) that capable people aren't interested in, get passed up....and nobody looks forward to doing win32 API (or lower level) interactions with windows.
THe predictions weren't too bad, but his self-evaluation of several of them was overly generous. His prediction of electric cars was in no way worth an A; a C+ would be more accurate, considering the price premiums they fetch. The portable TV satelite is, again, another joke; While the portable 10" screen is easily doable, the portable satelite is non-existant.
His grading scale seems overly generous, giving A's for seeing things possible without regard for their market penetration. Even based on the (inflated) scores he gives himself, his overall average is more like a C+, rather than the B he gives himself.
Of course the examples are biased; look at the website. It looks more like a press-release or an advertisement than a community site. It's more in the vein of this, this, and this than it resembles this, this, or this. Water is clearly being developed & marketed from "dazzle the PHB with buzzwords" angle. The big difference is that Clear Methods doesn't really have the size, reputation, or money to stuff something like this down everyone's throats. It's an even harder sell when you have tojustify the cost in comparison to the competition, which is free.
I think the whole entertainment industry is going the same direction. The music industry is also going for flash in the pan one hit wonders, ignoring the artist development aspect of things. Why wouldn't they? An unknown artist, or even just a pretty-face w/ good dance moves, is going to get a lousy contract on their first record. After the first record they're in a better bargaining position, since they have a fan-base. The record company is just concerned about the bottom line & sticks to the high-margin stuff where they are completely in control.
I'd have to assume that TV shows are similar. It's easier to hype new shows & the producers don't have much leverage in contracting. Barring a major hit, it's easier to get people to watch a new show than it is to build up a loyal fanbase.
Something inside of me wants to start killing the people responsible for the way things are getting, but I don't know who to blame and I don't know what would help. All I know is that something needs to be done before it gets much worse and I...
I don't even know. Somewhere along the line the American Dream became the American Nightamre. Growing up, I used to hope I'd be able to live better than my parents; these days I just hope I'll be able to pay back my student loans. Yet still, at every corner somebody is trying to sell me something and somebody else is making money by telling them about my cock size so that they know how to actually get me to buy it.
My ancestors came here looking for streets of gold & rivers of cream; a chance at a fresh start; the land of Golden Opportunity. I look arround me and I see the land of greed, where I'm stuck paying for the mistakes of those that came before me, of living my life so that Corporations can thrive.
At least the French knew who to execute when they had their revolution.
There's a difference between the right to earn money by providing goods & services and the right to lie to & manipulate people and fuck them over for a profit.
I agree with you; I'm getting sick of modern life. I'm a fucking human being, not a consumer that exists for the sole purpose of being marketed to. I'm beginning to think that technology does nothing to help me unless somebody else is making a significantly larger profit off of me. Maybe moving to the 3rd world isn't such a bad idea.
Actually, the monorail is just part of a plan to reduce traffic in the region. The idea is to simultaniously come up with an ass-load of new taxes to cover stupid, useless, projects while also driving out major employers and cutting funding for education. The net result will be to force people to move to other states, reducing the population to pre-1990 levels, returning traffic to a somewhat sane level.
Sound transit has at least accomplished something tangible, like providing a _workable_ system for those wanting to get to Seattle from up here in Snohomish county. Before ST, if you wanted to get to downtown Seattle from Everett, you were looking at a bus-ride of some 3-hr (to travel a distace of about 45 miles) and 3-4 transfers (with the exception of the 2-3 runs per day, each way, of the CT commuter busses). ST's express busses make the trip in an hour.
Decent mass-transit is an idea that's come too late. I know, up here in Snohomish county, other than during rush-hour, it's EMBARRASING to ride the bus anywhere; the only people riding it are kids w/o cars, the poor, the crippled and insane. Building the monorail out to Ballard would have been a good idea FOURTY YEARS AGO, but today? Why don't we extend the tracks on the roller-coaster at the center out to Bellevue, too?
Seattle's gone far too long without decent transit; everywhere BUT the city core has shitty connectivity. The monorail (or the other light-rail line) are little more than gold-plated band-aids to cover up the big, gaping wound that is the transit system around. For the three billion dollars that a monorail is going to cover, we could service a lot more people in a lot better ways.
Transit inside of the city limits is already good enought, what really needs to be done is get decent connectivity from the outlying areas TO the city. (no, park-and-rides don't count; they're a joke & nobody trusts their cars there). Imagine what could be done if that $3B was given to outlying transit agencies to expand their services and actually _promote_ transit ridership to the suburbanites (the people who can choose NOT to take the bus, not those who have no other choices)...
This news has only caused a stir in small communities, such as Slashdot. The Sims is a massively popular game, easily one of the top-10, targeted at the general population.
The online version of the Sims is almost guaranteed to be a major commercial success; Even if every slashdotter refused to buy a copy, it'll still make a mint. The rest of the population is likely to only find out about the McD's thing after they purchase the game.
And since Sims Online is almost guaranteed to be a massive success, marketing types & beancounters at game dev houses will see a massively successful game with advertising and think nothing of further product placement, eventually having it in EVERY game. Unless the Sims flops or developers see that the public won't tolerate advertising in their games, we'll see more adverts down the line.
Doing LFS is a _very_bad_ idea, unless he's got a faster, more modern machine to do the compiling on. Doing kernel/X/libc/etc compiles on a 486 w/ 16MB of ram is not something to be undertaken lightly.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs--x86, UNIX-like operating systems, C++, gcc, etc--for something simpler and cooler running, whose blatant wrongness doesn't eat away at your soul every time you use it. The whole Windows vs. Linux nonsense is a complete red herring in that regard
Umm, what kind of world are you living in? For starters, you seem too lump unix, C++ and the x86 desktops into a single category. Unix is traditionally C land, and until recently was primarily on non-Intel workstations & high-end servers not x86 PCs (unless you consider DOS a Unix-like OS). C++ is, for the most part, architecture independant.
As far as the windows/linux thing being a red herring is concered, I see it differently. Getting more people & software written for the (highly portable and relatively standardized) Unix-based operating systems is going to facilitate moving to this new computing platform as long as your 'quantum leap' in computing technology doesn't completely obsolete current ideas of OS design.
Umm... The Atari Jaguar which came out in late 1993, the PSX was officially released in December of 1994 and the Sega Saturn which came out some time in between, possibly including the late-coming N64 (last to market, but it did have the best 3D hardware), were the first generation of consoles that had anything resembling 'real' graphics power, and that was highly limited by modern standards. If you have a calendar, you'll see that the release date of the Jag was less than 10yr ago, nowhere near 'decades'
Before them, console graphics hardware was nowhere near the power of their main CPUs. The next(current) generation of console hardware was the first to really push the graphics hardware; starting with the Dreamcast in '99, and including our Game Cube, PS2 and XBox, we started getting graphics hardware that was at least as powerful, if not moreso than the main processor.
You obviously have a lawyer already, since you managed to reach a settlment with the GPL violator, why not continue to use his services? Slashdot can't really give you good legal advice, what we -can- help you with is comming up with the technical solutions to actually achieve what your lawyers decides is the best course of action.
In general, I'd avoid any solution that relies on NDAs. There are too many ways that too many people could get hamstrung and/or tied up in court for too long by them, especially if any of the commercial developers consider themselves in competition, not to mention what they could do to you in the future (of course your future work is ALWAYS going to be suspect, if you ever venture into any of the areas covered by stolen code).
At first thought, I'd say expect the developers of the commercial add-ons to follow your site, and stand up and go over the code, identifying their code. The problem being that you'd potentially be giving competetors eachother's code, potentially allowing both of them to steal the competitor's code AND sue you for giving their code to their competitor. Of course, any halfway decent lawyer should easily spot things like this.
Perhaps what you need to do is pull out sections of code that you would like to add to the main codebase and then post small sections, which should be enough for the owner to identify the code, but not enough to give away any significant functionality. If a developer can send you the code that follows it, throw that module away. To me, a 90 day period would seem sensible since, as I mentioned earlier, any commercial developer that fails to check your site/release-notes/mailing-list in that long isn't serious. Again, the lawyer can figure out the finer points here.
You obviously have a lawyer already, since you managed to reach a settlment with the GPL violator, why not continue to use his services? Slashdot can't really give you good legal advice, what we -can- help you with is comming up with the technical solutions to actually achieve what your lawyers decides is the best course of action.
In general, I'd avoid any solution that relies on NDAs. There are too many ways that too many people could get hamstrung and/or tied up in court for too long by them, especially if any of the commercial developers consider themselves in competition, not to mention what they could do to you in the future (of course your future work is ALWAYS going to be suspect, if you ever venture into any of the areas covered by stolen code).
At first thought, I'd say expect the developers of the commercial add-ons to follow your site, and stand up and go over the code, identifying their code. The problem being that you'd potentially be giving competetors eachother's code, potentially allowing both of them to steal the competitor's code AND sue you for giving their code to their competitor. Of course, any halfway decent lawyer should easily spot things like this.
Perhaps what you need to do is pull out sections of code that you would like to add to the main codebase and then post small sections, which should be enough for the owner to identify the code, but not enough to give away any significant functionality. If a developer can send you the code that follows it, throw that module away. To me, a 90 day period would seem sensible since, as I mentioned earlier, any commercial developer that fails to check your site/release-notes/mailing-list in that long isn't serious. Again, the lawyer can figure out the finer points here.
sounds like a great idea. I should go into MSFT some time with my friend, steal the Windows source code & integrate it with a GPLed project. When the lawyers come to my door, I'll tell them that it's MSFT's job to keep their code safe.
The big problem here is that, unlike physical property, which can potentially be returned when stolen, once somebody's code gets out in the wild there's virtually no chance of them preventing it from circulating to all who want it, destroying whatever competetive advantage the code may have given them.
A while back, I had a system running on an old 486DX2-50 and 24MB of RAM. To squeeze everything needed onto it, I ended up going with an old (pre-GNOME/KDE) Slackware distro. One of the more interesting bits of software I ran into was a suite called TkDesk. It provides a desktop, app launching bar, file mangler & a number of small utilities (like the emacs-clone text editor), all written in TCL/Tk, and it ran like a dream on that anemic old beastie.
It reminds me of the AR world in Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup (essentially a VR MMORPG), where every time you turn arround to do anything, the system pops up mentioning something about aditional charges, and billable time. At first it seemed a little extreme, but the more I look around, the more I realize just how much like real life it actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the feeling that most people with the knowlege & skill requried to write a firewall for windows would much rather put up a linux/bsd machine, with an already tested, robust firewall, to do the job, unless they plan on selling it.
...and nobody looks forward to doing win32 API (or lower level) interactions with windows.
That's the catch with open source; people only work on projects they're interested in, and things (such as windows firewalls) that capable people aren't interested in, get passed up.
If spyware is your problem, a firewall is simply a bandaid over the fact that STUPID USERS INSTALLED THE CRAP.
THe predictions weren't too bad, but his self-evaluation of several of them was overly generous. His prediction of electric cars was in no way worth an A; a C+ would be more accurate, considering the price premiums they fetch. The portable TV satelite is, again, another joke; While the portable 10" screen is easily doable, the portable satelite is non-existant.
His grading scale seems overly generous, giving A's for seeing things possible without regard for their market penetration. Even based on the (inflated) scores he gives himself, his overall average is more like a C+, rather than the B he gives himself.
When anything is possible, inefficiency becomes stylish.
Of course the examples are biased; look at the website. It looks more like a press-release or an advertisement than a community site. It's more in the vein of this, this, and this than it resembles this, this, or this. Water is clearly being developed & marketed from "dazzle the PHB with buzzwords" angle. The big difference is that Clear Methods doesn't really have the size, reputation, or money to stuff something like this down everyone's throats. It's an even harder sell when you have tojustify the cost in comparison to the competition, which is free.
There's only one obvious way to measure the size of a developer community; ask google.
...but just because one is more widely used doesn't mean that it's liked
Linux v. PalmOS
I think the whole entertainment industry is going the same direction. The music industry is also going for flash in the pan one hit wonders, ignoring the artist development aspect of things. Why wouldn't they? An unknown artist, or even just a pretty-face w/ good dance moves, is going to get a lousy contract on their first record. After the first record they're in a better bargaining position, since they have a fan-base. The record company is just concerned about the bottom line & sticks to the high-margin stuff where they are completely in control.
I'd have to assume that TV shows are similar. It's easier to hype new shows & the producers don't have much leverage in contracting. Barring a major hit, it's easier to get people to watch a new show than it is to build up a loyal fanbase.
Don't forget Threads Considered Harmful
Great, so now we have BOTH Microsoft _and_ Visa suing the state department for diluting their trademarks.
Something inside of me wants to start killing the people responsible for the way things are getting, but I don't know who to blame and I don't know what would help. All I know is that something needs to be done before it gets much worse and I...
I don't even know. Somewhere along the line the American Dream became the American Nightamre. Growing up, I used to hope I'd be able to live better than my parents; these days I just hope I'll be able to pay back my student loans. Yet still, at every corner somebody is trying to sell me something and somebody else is making money by telling them about my cock size so that they know how to actually get me to buy it.
My ancestors came here looking for streets of gold & rivers of cream; a chance at a fresh start; the land of Golden Opportunity. I look arround me and I see the land of greed, where I'm stuck paying for the mistakes of those that came before me, of living my life so that Corporations can thrive.
At least the French knew who to execute when they had their revolution.
There's a difference between the right to earn money by providing goods & services and the right to lie to & manipulate people and fuck them over for a profit.
I agree with you; I'm getting sick of modern life. I'm a fucking human being, not a consumer that exists for the sole purpose of being marketed to. I'm beginning to think that technology does nothing to help me unless somebody else is making a significantly larger profit off of me. Maybe moving to the 3rd world isn't such a bad idea.
Actually, the monorail is just part of a plan to reduce traffic in the region. The idea is to simultaniously come up with an ass-load of new taxes to cover stupid, useless, projects while also driving out major employers and cutting funding for education. The net result will be to force people to move to other states, reducing the population to pre-1990 levels, returning traffic to a somewhat sane level.
Sound transit has at least accomplished something tangible, like providing a _workable_ system for those wanting to get to Seattle from up here in Snohomish county. Before ST, if you wanted to get to downtown Seattle from Everett, you were looking at a bus-ride of some 3-hr (to travel a distace of about 45 miles) and 3-4 transfers (with the exception of the 2-3 runs per day, each way, of the CT commuter busses). ST's express busses make the trip in an hour.
Decent mass-transit is an idea that's come too late. I know, up here in Snohomish county, other than during rush-hour, it's EMBARRASING to ride the bus anywhere; the only people riding it are kids w/o cars, the poor, the crippled and insane. Building the monorail out to Ballard would have been a good idea FOURTY YEARS AGO, but today? Why don't we extend the tracks on the roller-coaster at the center out to Bellevue, too?
Seattle's gone far too long without decent transit; everywhere BUT the city core has shitty connectivity. The monorail (or the other light-rail line) are little more than gold-plated band-aids to cover up the big, gaping wound that is the transit system around. For the three billion dollars that a monorail is going to cover, we could service a lot more people in a lot better ways.
Transit inside of the city limits is already good enought, what really needs to be done is get decent connectivity from the outlying areas TO the city. (no, park-and-rides don't count; they're a joke & nobody trusts their cars there). Imagine what could be done if that $3B was given to outlying transit agencies to expand their services and actually _promote_ transit ridership to the suburbanites (the people who can choose NOT to take the bus, not those who have no other choices)...
One slight problem...
This news has only caused a stir in small communities, such as Slashdot. The Sims is a massively popular game, easily one of the top-10, targeted at the general population.
The online version of the Sims is almost guaranteed to be a major commercial success; Even if every slashdotter refused to buy a copy, it'll still make a mint. The rest of the population is likely to only find out about the McD's thing after they purchase the game.
And since Sims Online is almost guaranteed to be a massive success, marketing types & beancounters at game dev houses will see a massively successful game with advertising and think nothing of further product placement, eventually having it in EVERY game. Unless the Sims flops or developers see that the public won't tolerate advertising in their games, we'll see more adverts down the line.
You've obviously never talked to any Sims/MMORPG junkies, have you?
Doing LFS is a _very_bad_ idea, unless he's got a faster, more modern machine to do the compiling on. Doing kernel/X/libc/etc compiles on a 486 w/ 16MB of ram is not something to be undertaken lightly.
'decades'?
Umm... The Atari Jaguar which came out in late 1993, the PSX was officially released in December of 1994 and the Sega Saturn which came out some time in between, possibly including the late-coming N64 (last to market, but it did have the best 3D hardware), were the first generation of consoles that had anything resembling 'real' graphics power, and that was highly limited by modern standards. If you have a calendar, you'll see that the release date of the Jag was less than 10yr ago, nowhere near 'decades'
Before them, console graphics hardware was nowhere near the power of their main CPUs. The next(current) generation of console hardware was the first to really push the graphics hardware; starting with the Dreamcast in '99, and including our Game Cube, PS2 and XBox, we started getting graphics hardware that was at least as powerful, if not moreso than the main processor.
You obviously have a lawyer already, since you managed to reach a settlment with the GPL violator, why not continue to use his services? Slashdot can't really give you good legal advice, what we -can- help you with is comming up with the technical solutions to actually achieve what your lawyers decides is the best course of action.
In general, I'd avoid any solution that relies on NDAs. There are too many ways that too many people could get hamstrung and/or tied up in court for too long by them, especially if any of the commercial developers consider themselves in competition, not to mention what they could do to you in the future (of course your future work is ALWAYS going to be suspect, if you ever venture into any of the areas covered by stolen code).
At first thought, I'd say expect the developers of the commercial add-ons to follow your site, and stand up and go over the code, identifying their code. The problem being that you'd potentially be giving competetors eachother's code, potentially allowing both of them to steal the competitor's code AND sue you for giving their code to their competitor. Of course, any halfway decent lawyer should easily spot things like this.
Perhaps what you need to do is pull out sections of code that you would like to add to the main codebase and then post small sections, which should be enough for the owner to identify the code, but not enough to give away any significant functionality. If a developer can send you the code that follows it, throw that module away. To me, a 90 day period would seem sensible since, as I mentioned earlier, any commercial developer that fails to check your site/release-notes/mailing-list in that long isn't serious. Again, the lawyer can figure out the finer points here.
GAHAHAHH!!!
wrong thread. I wish I could mod myself down before somebody else gives me a -1 : WTF?
You obviously have a lawyer already, since you managed to reach a settlment with the GPL violator, why not continue to use his services? Slashdot can't really give you good legal advice, what we -can- help you with is comming up with the technical solutions to actually achieve what your lawyers decides is the best course of action.
In general, I'd avoid any solution that relies on NDAs. There are too many ways that too many people could get hamstrung and/or tied up in court for too long by them, especially if any of the commercial developers consider themselves in competition, not to mention what they could do to you in the future (of course your future work is ALWAYS going to be suspect, if you ever venture into any of the areas covered by stolen code).
At first thought, I'd say expect the developers of the commercial add-ons to follow your site, and stand up and go over the code, identifying their code. The problem being that you'd potentially be giving competetors eachother's code, potentially allowing both of them to steal the competitor's code AND sue you for giving their code to their competitor. Of course, any halfway decent lawyer should easily spot things like this.
Perhaps what you need to do is pull out sections of code that you would like to add to the main codebase and then post small sections, which should be enough for the owner to identify the code, but not enough to give away any significant functionality. If a developer can send you the code that follows it, throw that module away. To me, a 90 day period would seem sensible since, as I mentioned earlier, any commercial developer that fails to check your site/release-notes/mailing-list in that long isn't serious. Again, the lawyer can figure out the finer points here.
sounds like a great idea. I should go into MSFT some time with my friend, steal the Windows source code & integrate it with a GPLed project. When the lawyers come to my door, I'll tell them that it's MSFT's job to keep their code safe.
The big problem here is that, unlike physical property, which can potentially be returned when stolen, once somebody's code gets out in the wild there's virtually no chance of them preventing it from circulating to all who want it, destroying whatever competetive advantage the code may have given them.
A while back, I had a system running on an old 486DX2-50 and 24MB of RAM. To squeeze everything needed onto it, I ended up going with an old (pre-GNOME/KDE) Slackware distro. One of the more interesting bits of software I ran into was a suite called TkDesk. It provides a desktop, app launching bar, file mangler & a number of small utilities (like the emacs-clone text editor), all written in TCL/Tk, and it ran like a dream on that anemic old beastie.
It reminds me of the AR world in Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup (essentially a VR MMORPG), where every time you turn arround to do anything, the system pops up mentioning something about aditional charges, and billable time. At first it seemed a little extreme, but the more I look around, the more I realize just how much like real life it actually is.